Coda: Futures of the Postcolonial

In 1999, leading postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published a book titled A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. The obvious allusion to the philosophical legacy of the European Enlightenment (see ch. 7) – especially to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Pure Reason – appear to signal Spivak’s ambition to continue, complement and probably rectify that tradition by introducing a further variant of ‘reason’ that, unlike Kant’s transcendental universals, is clearly situated in time and space, namely in the postcolonial. Following this paratextual cue, any reader has good reason to expect from Spivak’s book a deconstruction of the Eurocentrism that underpins Enlightenment universalism through the application of postcolonial critique; and, to be sure, to some extent this is what Spivak offers: postcolonial reason operating as critique.