Introduction

Postcolonial Studies in the twenty-first century has moved with the decentralisation of narratives born out of contemporary conflicts, migration, climate precarity, and new technology, among a host of other, and older questions around the monopolies of power, on resources, and on articulations of reality. The field seeks to address how representations of postcolonial realities for millions of people around the world operate alongside or against emerging categories such as the postfactual, the posthuman, and the global, thus destabilising theoretical frames characteristic of Postcolonial Studies in the twentieth century, including the binary of centre and periphery. This introduction, which works to frame a book of fifteen critical chapters and reflective essays, addresses several themes: language, modernity, archival praxis, precarity, and interdisciplinarity. These impulses weave through the volume and allow scholars working in contemporary Postcolonial Studies to detect continuities and discontinuities in the field, now well over half a century old. Postcolonial Studies has become increasingly interdisciplinary, embracing, among other areas, infrastructural discourse, memory studies, ecocriticism, and the digital humanities, to name just a few. In this sense, the multifarious “homelands” of Postcolonial Studies can be found in a broad array of disciplines, which affords it analytical flexibility, and opportunities for collaboration. Ultimately this introduction, like the volume itself, is designed to foreground both proliferation and practice.