(Post)Colonial Passages

Book excerpt: While entailing a subversive re-vision of colonial histories, geographies, and subjectivities, the (post)colonial condition has unleashed a chain of movements, relocations, and re-writings that interrogate the globalized and neoliberal society. Ethnic, “racial”, religious, gendered, and sexual identities have been called into question, and requested to (re)define, name, and re-name themselves, to find new ways to tell their stories/histories. The very term “postcolonial” has triggered well-known controversial debates: its adoption is significant of a cultural politics involving the colonial past, controversial crisis in the present, and an open perspective toward alternative futures. Confronting literature and the arts from a postcolonial perspective is a critical and political task involving theories and cultural productions crossing barriers amongst fields of knowledge. The essays gathered here discuss postcolonialism as a transdisciplinary field of passages that negotiate among diverse yet interrelated cultural fields.