To Emma Bennett of Wiley-Blackwell, I owe the largest quantum of debt: for the enthusiastic reception she accorded the proposal and her sustained engagement with the project through the writing.

To the nearly half-dozen reviewers of the proposal, for their painstaking reading and valuable suggestions, this project owes immeasurable gratitude. I have tried to incorporate, wherever possible, those of their suggestions and recommendations that I found relevant.

Nandana Dutta, with her gently and clearly expressed reservations about the genre, read sections and offered incisive comments. Thank you for your splendid affection, observations and general confidence, ND!

Anna Kurian arched her eyebrows at the idea of a Dictionary (‘is that a genre you really want to try? Oh well, okay, if you say so’) and then plunged wholeheartedly into the project. Thank you, Anna, again, for the loving loyalty you extend (even) after over a decade of reading my manuscripts (and for that crucial tip about the terra nullius discourse).

Nandini, Pranav, parents and parents-in-law, with their bewildered tolerance and unstinting support of my obsessive work schedules, deserve awards for their patience! To them I owe, of course, both gratitude and apologies (but hey all of you, I am just embarking on the next project, so be ready!).

Friends at various stages unwittingly offered bibliographic suggestions – little did they know how I would store these bits and bytes! – and thus contributed to the material in this work: Rita Kothari, Narayana Chandra, Nandana Dutta (again) and Walter Perera.

To others’ solicitous enquiries about my life, health and work (not in that order) I owe a huge debt, they tether me to the rest of the world and life: Ibrahim, Ajeet, Saraswathy Rajagopalan, Neelu (whose Joke Factory runs 24x7), Vasu and Bella, Molly Tarun, Ron (especially noted for her status messages on WhatsApp), Josy Joseph and Premlata.

Postcolonial studies today continues to examine the making of colonies and empires in history but also, more importantly, critiques the continuities of these older empires in the form of neocolonialisms and US imperialisms. It studies the ‘remains’ (Young 2012) of colonialism in the form of the legacies the postcolony (Mbembe 2001) has to deal with. Thus racialized power relations, subjectivity, identity, belonging, the role of the nation-state, cultural imperialism and resistance remain central to postcolonial studies today even as it tracks the genealogy of these structures, domains, concerns and crises from the historical ‘properly’ colonial pasts to the globalized, neo-colonial present.

Postcolonial studies, especially in the literary and cultural academic domains, has since the 1980s focused both extensively and intensively on discourses, whether literary, scientific or philosophical. Studying representations, narrative and rhetoric, the field has remained faithful, one could say, to the poststructuralist-discourse studies methodology, and has thus received considerable criticism from materialist critics. Subjectivity, identity and history in such readings have more or less firmly been located within a discourse studies framework, but often (it has been suspected, and not without cause) at the cost of due attention to questions of political economy and real material practices.

Since the late 1990s and the early decades of the 21st century developments in other fields, most notably natural sciences, philosophy and science studies, have begun to make their impact in the field of cultural theory. The writings of Lynn Margulis (1981, 2000), Scott Gilbert (2002), Pradeu and Carosella (2006), Rosi Braidotti (2010, 2013), Karen Barad (2007), Cary Wolfe (2010), Alphonso Lingis (2003), and collections such as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost’s New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (2010) have resulted in examinations of bodies, things and environment. These (re)turn us to material contexts, conditions and contests, especially to the ways these constitute subjectivity.

For postcolonial studies the impact of the new thinking in materialism is still nascent, although recent work by Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2012, 2014), Kaushik Sunder Rajan (2006) and others suggests an awareness of the ‘return to the material’ in other disciplines. When, for instance, Winifred Poster studies the new credit economy (2013) or Rita Paley the e-Empires of the globalized era (2004) they also study the new configurations of individual identity as cast within affect, labour, social relations, circuits of capital, bodies and biology – material realities, in other words – and thus contribute to a materialist understanding of postcolonial identity. Other lines of inquiry also open up in contemporary postcolonial studies, most notably of the electronic diasporas, globalization, secularism/post-secularism and the question of faith and ‘fundamentalisms’ (especially in the work of Saba Mahmood, 2005, 2009), neo-colonialism and biocolonialism.

It is possible that traditional postcolonial questions of racial discourse may be linked with material practices of torture and embodiment, of the crisis in corporeal and sensorial identity and the resultant crisis of subjectivity. One could for instance think of the Abu Ghraib tortures as inviting such a reading (Rejali 2004, Nayar ‘Body of Abu Ghraib’ [2014], ‘Abu Ghraib@10’ [2014]). Global biopolitics, as seen in studies such as those of Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas (2005), Catherine Waldby and Mitchell (2006), Adriana Petryna (2002), enmeshes the materiality of bodies with the materiality of discourses. Material practices whether in medicine or industry that affect bodies and being bring back the significance of matter into debates about identity and subjectivity. Studies of industrial disaster, pollution, organ trade and politics move away from mere discourse to looking at real bodies, matter (such as poisons), to examine the differential valuing of bodies, and of life itself, across races and geopolitical regions. Contemporary issues of environmental health, animal life and human existence in fields as diverse as environmental studies, politics and medicine call for such a new materialism that refuses to position the human as discrete, arguing instead for its material connections with the material world. Thus in Cary Wolfe’s provocative comparison of human extermination of animals to the Holocaust and genocide (2010) one could argue that we see links between racism and speciesism. By tracing material exchanges across bodies (trans-corporeality), the subsequent affective changes and relations and changing ontologies propel postcolonialism’s concerns with race and discourse toward species and material embodiment: a posthuman turn to postcolonialism, if you will.

This Dictionary seeks to bring together in its explication of the terms and concepts in Postcolonial Studies both its historically inflected analyses and its contemporaneity, the emphasis being on textual analysis and political-materialist concerns, with perhaps a tad heavier weightage toward the former, understandably, given the fact that it relies almost exclusively on literary texts for examples and articulations of the field’s premier themes.