When was ‘the post-colonial’? What should be included and excluded from its frame? Where is the invisible line between it and its ‘others’ (colonialism, neo-colonialism, Third World, imperialism), in relation to whose termination it ceaselessly, but without final supersession, marks itself? The main purpose of this paper is to explore the interrogation marks which have begun to cluster thick and fast around the question of ‘the post-colonial’ and the notion of post-colonial times. If post-colonial time is the time after colonialism, and colonialism is defined in terms of the binary division between the colonisers and the colonised, why is post-colonial time also a time of ‘difference’? What sort of ‘difference’ is this and what are its implications for the forms of politics and for subject formation in this late-modern moment? These questions increasingly haunt the contested space in which the concept of the ‘post-colonial’ now operates and they cannot be satisfactorily explored until we know more about what the concept means and why it has become the bearer of such powerful unconscious investments – a sign of desire for some, and equally for others, a signifier of danger.
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