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'Postcolonialism'has come to name a certain kind of interdisciplinary political, theoretical and historical academic work that sets out to serve as a transnational forum for studies grounded in the historical context of colonialism, as well as in the political context of contemporary problems of globalization. The major criticism of postcolonial work, despite this, is that it has transmuted the long history of anti-colonial and anti-imperialistic activism via a range of theories sometimes extraneous to that history, into a form of academic critical analysis. However, in naming this journal Interventions we do not intend to challenge contemporary postcolonial work in terms of an opposition between textualism and political activism. A more complex process has been at work: gender issues in postcolonial theory, for example, are not just theoretical, but are also directed towards inequalities and strategic material needs; at the same time …