Writing in his Imaginary Homelands about the importance of hybridity, novelist Salman Rushdie mockingly suggests that “‘Authenticity’ is the respectable child of old-fashioned exoticism. It demands that sources, forms, style, language and symbol all derive from a supposedly homogeneous and unbroken tradition. Or else” (1992: 67). Rushdie is more interested in the vitality of hybrid realities than he is in myths of unbroken tradition. If one thing has undermined such tradition, arguably it is colonialism: by violently thrusting together different traditions, colonialism has produced multiple forms of hybridity – a term which, in this particular context, will be used with reference to the mixed-up qualities of cultures that we now call post-colonial. Accordingly, post-colonialism refers to the politics, art, culture, literature, and thought characteristic of nations that were once colonized and also, insofar as colonialism...
3769 words
Citation: Huddart, David. "Post-colonialism, Postcolonialism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 02 October 2007 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=886, accessed 15 December 2025.]
