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The postcolonial seems to have become ubiquitous. Today postcolonial theory has been taken up in almost every discipline in the humanities and social sciences, from anthropology to medieval studies to theology. It is not only about migration: intellectually it has taken the form of transdisciplinary migration. It knows no boundaries, whether of discipline, nation, or peoples. After the disciplinary dispersion of the postcolonial, what if anything, we might ask, remains of the postcolonial as such? Has it scattered itself so widely and so successfully that it no longer exists as a separate intellectual field with a distinct political identity? In order to answer this question, we might start by asking what we mean by the postcolonial or postcoloniality. People define and use these words in many different ways: even what might seem to be the obvious core meaning for postcolonial, that is, coming after the colonial, cannot be taken for granted. For some writers have tried to redefine the postcolonial anachronistically to mean resistance to the colonial at any time—literally in the case of decolonized societies, and ideologically for still colonized societies. Although the term postcolonial will certainly always involve the idea of resistance, I prefer to preserve the historical specificity of the term, and to think of the postcolonial as involving what we might simply refer to as the aftermath of the colonial. The situations and problems that have followed decolonization—whether in the formerly colonizing or colonized country—are then encompassed in the term postcoloniality. What, then, would the term postcolonialism mean? Whereas postcoloniality describes the condition of the …