Postcolonial status denotes structural state shifts, not mere birth after decolonization

Evidence

In political thought, these categories have a precise meaning because they refer not to the date of decolonization but to identifiable structural shifts in state and society, and in the hierarchy of systemic determinations which structure the relations between the imperialist bourgeoisie and the direct producers of the imperialized but sovereign nation-state of what was previously a colony. To describe, on the other hand, a critic as ‘post-colonial’ simply because he/she came of age after decolonization is a tautology; to ascribe a shared cultural attitude towards Western dominance to all intellectuals who begin writing after decolonization, and a structurally different attitude to all those whose intellectual formation was completed under colonial rule, regardless of their individual social and political locations, is the most arrant idealism and facilitates a very peculiar kind of ahistorical levelling. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 384

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘colonial’ vs ‘post-colonial’ as structural-political categories, not generation markers.
• XREF: Connects to postcolonial theory debates (Said, Spivak, Bhabha) about the politics of the term.

Related

• Colonial and post-colonial categories mask divergent intellectual trajectories spanning both eras (similarity 0.84)
• Theory’s ideological shifts track the real fortunes of decolonized states (similarity 0.84)
• Postcolonial theory recasts decolonization as a literary-critical rather than political contest (similarity 0.83)
• The postcolonial begins with colonization, not after it ends (similarity 0.82)
• Poststructuralism’s rise in colonial literary theory conceals rather than explains its material-economic context (similarity 0.82)
• Postcolonial theory’s turn to representation displaced study of imperialist political economy (similarity 0.80)
• Postcolonial literary theory obscures the political and economic materialities determining it (similarity 0.80)
• Postcolonial theory lacks a systematic periodization of its own practices. (similarity 0.80)
• Coloniality is defined by where the ruling class sits, not by dependency (similarity 0.80)
• Colonial status means an external ruling class, not mere dependence (similarity 0.80)
• The category of the colonial subject collapses if colonialism is not fully constitutive. (similarity 0.79)
• Postcolonial categories like hybridity apply to all social organization (similarity 0.78)
• Postcolonial literary theory’s rapid shift from nationalism to poststructuralism concealed material world dynamics (similarity 0.78)
• Culturalist postcolonial labeling is arrant idealism that levels history (similarity 0.78)
• Postcolonial liberation means building a new society, not reviving or prolonging old ones. (similarity 0.78)