Introduction

Postcolonial studies turns our attention to time and place in world history. Where national studies, citizenship education studies and Cultural studies may focus on just one country, or just one country at a time, the postcolonial perspective requires that one focuses on (the contemporary significance of) ancient and more recent historical relations between specific dominating (colonialist, imperialist) and dominated states or regions. As all the empires around the world, not only European based, have had different histories, there may be great differences between postcolonial readings of materials for different languages, in our case English, German, French, Spanish and Danish.

It should be noted that the names of these languages are bound to their identities as national languages in the imperial centres: English is the language of England, but it is still called English (or Australian English) in Australia, not Australian. The situation is more or less similar for the other imperial languages.

Postcolonial Studies

Postcolonial studies (or postcolonialism) (Abraham, 2007; McLeod, 2000) was institutionalised in Western academia during the 1980s, particularly after the publication of the influential book Orientalism written by the Palestinian-American literary scholar Said (1978, see below). The field was mainly explored by Indian-American scholars (Bhabha, 1994; Spivak, 1988), and became first and foremost a research interest in the anglophone world. But also the francophone world developed a practice of postcolonial studies drawing on the work of Fanon (1952, 1961) and others (Balandier, 2003). There has also been a growing exchange between postcolonial studies and Cultural studies, not least initiated by Hall in several of his works (Jensen, 2014).

A somewhat different tradition has developed in relation to Latin America, under the name of decolonial studies or the coloniality of power (Bhabra, 2014; Dussel, 1995; Mignolo, 2000; Monasterios, 2008; Quijano, 2007; Suárez-Krabbe, 2008).