The postcolonial begins with colonization, not after it ends

Evidence

First let us be clear that “postcolonial” does not mean “after colonialism.” The postcolonial is the discourse of the colonized. It begins when the colonizers arrive and doesn’t finish when they go home. In that sense, postcolonial analysis examines the full range of responses to colonialism, from absolute complicity to violent rebellion and all variations in between. All of these may exist in a single society, so the term “postcolonial society” does not mean an historical leftover of colonialism, but a society continuously responding in all its myriad ways to the experience of colonial contact. There is no monolithic “postcolonialism” except the one you don’t like; the one you need to invent if you want to attack the notion of postcoloniality. There are many ways of theorizing and analyzing the range of subject positions stimulated by the colonial experience, so there are many postcolonial responses and many postcolonialisms. But what characterizes most postcolonial points of view is a simple conviction of the continuing material and discursive impact of colonialism on the millions of lives it has affected. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 3428

Categorization

• DEFINE: Reframes ‘postcolonial’ as the colonized subject’s ongoing discourse rather than a chronological after-period.
• XREF: Connects to Edward Said’s Orientalism and the larger discourse-analysis tradition; also to Stuart Hall’s work on cultural identity and diaspora. — connects to: Colonialism’s legacies persist long after colonial rule ends. — Nick Couldry & Ulises A. Mejias, The Costs of Connection: How Data Is…, 257; Postcolonial inheritances constitute a violent but enabling starting position rather than a clean break — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 174