At this point we leave Africa never to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the world; it has no movement of development to exhibit … The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia is the beginning. (Hegel 1900: 99)

Our sense of critique is too thoroughly determined by Kant, Hegel and Marx for us to be able to reject them as ‘motivated imperialists’ … A deconstructive politics of reading would acknowledge the determination as well as the imperialism and see if the magisterial texts can now be our servants, as the new magisterium constructs itself in the name of the Other' (Spivak 1999: 7; emphasis added).

Like other postcolonial theories, this work is concerned with the legacy of colonial dominance in the social relations and institutions of the present. Postcolonial theory has in fact developed in response to this basic problem, and might best be characterised as aiming to find an appropriate solution by conceptualising and evaluating methods for the transformation of societies and cultures shaped by colonialism. An important aspect of this project is the critical destabilisation and deconstruction of the cultural authority of the colonising subject. A second aspect is the conceptualisation of social transformation in terms of the political agency of the ‘subaltern’ classes, repressed by colonial rule and the imposition of colonial culture. Resistance to colonialism and continuing cultural imperialism is enabled by the identification of a collective, self-conscious and oppositional subjectivity.