Intellectual movements have often forged an identity via generational rebellion, positioning their current interventions against their precursors, in both name and stated intention. In recent times, furthermore, the softer ‘neo’ has given way to the radical ‘post’, which implies a starker sense of graduation and progress. Modernism becomes postmodernism, structuralism becomes poststructuralism, and so on. However, the informed observer of these intellectual shifts will know that this prefix rarely marks a clean break. Just as, on a social level, one generation tries to make sense of its parents – on the one hand recoiling from their values and beliefs, and on the other, conditioned into these same commitments (even when the overwhelming need is to reject them) – a ‘post’ school of thought remains mired in, rather than departs from, its inheritance. Postcolonialism, for example, does not arrive in a world without colonialism: it grapples to understand the effects of colonialism as a lingering social force with real and enduring effects. Postcolonial theorists, therefore, are not wholly indoctrinated by imperial ideology, but then neither are they free of its legacy. Although an intellectual regime may seek to radically sever itself from the past in the hope of redefining its future purpose, this history remains vital to its very constitution, legibility, value and political leverage.

There is an agonism, therefore, that drives a corrective, particularly the kind that aims to repair past errors. It is faced with a necessary contradiction: it must exclude those who are condemned for their own practice of previous exclusions. In other words, to qualify as ‘post’, or to chasten the oversights of the past generation, the ‘new’ school must ignore the ways in which its own endeavours are enabled by the very heritage it is defined against. As such, novel interventions often describe the value of the intellectual past, or older methods, as stale and static, when a close reading of this legacy may reveal quite lively and enduring complications. Indeed, it is often the very oversights, provocations and unresolved queries of precedents, already pushed to the point of unravelling or dissemblance, that inspire and inform the present zeitgeist. In a counter-intuitive way, therefore, the next generation can exhibit the very life and potential of old ideas and questions, albeit in a somewhat different guise than is conventionally acknowledged, opening them to new contexts and incarnations.