The present paper derives from the premise that any criticism of colonial or post-colonial literature depends for its force on the recognition of its self-definition. During the last two decades, Literary Studies in the United States have been revitalized by an extension of "minority" writing beyond African-American literature into other national contexts. The influx of these specifically non-western texts into the American University curriculum and the emergence of Western critical discourse on the subject provide examples of effective challenges to the canon. The acceptance of these vast and diverse literatures, now studied under the somewhat generalized title "postcolonial texts", has been aided by exemplary work done by current theorists of marginalized literature such as Homi Bhabha, Henry Louis Gates, Abdul JanMohamed, David Lloyd, Joyce Cary, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak. This paper attempts to analyze the question of the grounds of postcolonial discourse and looks at the `Fanonian' tradition of postcolonial critique and its implications for contemporary cultural politics.

One set of approaches to the question of postcoloniality may be identified by their claim to represent a continuation of Frantz Fanon's thinking. As illustrative texts in this tradition, I will examine Edward Said's writings on postcoloniality (which I would distinguish from his Orientalism, whose object is the disciplinary/ideological basis of imperialism, although there are aspects of this text which anticipate the later treatment of postcoloniality), Benita Parry's "Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse", Abdul JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics as well as his programmatic essay, co-authored with David Lloyd, on "minority discourse".

JanMohamed, in his attempt to develop a theoretical framework for reading African fiction, started with Fanon's idea of `Manicheism,' which he said, governed colonial discourse. According to Fanon, the space of colonial politics and culture was represented in terms of a Manichean division along the binary axes of white/black, good/evil, primitive/civilized, etc. While this `primary Manicheism' was an ideological weapon of the colonizer, Fanon envisaged that the anti-colonial struggle would reciprocate the gesture in an initial necessary reversal of the terms of the binary (Fanon, 1968, pp. 37, 50). This very model depended on Fanon's sense that the colonial space was the site of an irreconcilable antagonism: "Decolonization is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature" (Fanon, 1968, pp.36). On the basis of empirical categories, there are texts written by the colonizers, and those written by the colonized.

colonial literature, African-American literature, Postcolonial texts, Cultural politics, Theoretical frameworks, Colonial politics, Socio-political formations, Economic systems, Material deracination, Autonomous development, Politico-economic destruction, Antagonistic politics, Anti-colonial discourse, Social transformation.