Postcolonial theory is a large and contested arena, and its perimeters are difficult to define: which societies count as postcolonial? Are they just those in which the colonised populations have gained power or do they include Canada, for instance? How sharply can ‘postcolonial’ be distinguished from ‘colonial’ or ‘anti-colonial’? But its central focus is, in contrast, very clear: the dynamic of the colonial encounter and its aftermath – that is, the cultural, psychological, and political repercussions of the contact between colonisers and colonised.

The theory developed largely in the English and Comparative Literature departments of universities in the United States and Australia; this has resulted in an emphasis on literature that has led to its being accused of neglecting the material, economic determinants of postcolonial societies in favour of the textual, the subjective, and the cultural. Within the literary sphere itself, moreover, it has resulted in a strong anglophone bias: despite the significant influence of French theorists such as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida on some strands of postcolonial theory, its major works have all, with the exception of Frantz Fanon's Peau noire, masques blancs (1952), been produced in English; and whereas a large corpus of what might be regarded as postcolonial literature has been written in French, its analysis in these terms has largely been carried out in universities outside France. Conversely, French scholars who specialise in studying francophone literature have tended to distance themselves from postcolonial theory.