The Postcolonial Ghetto: Seeing Her Shape and His Hand

This article maps the ghostly outlines of urban postcolonial subjectivities by hinging together several moving parts/frontiers: connotations of postcolonial; applications and implications of ghettoed places and lives; a telling of the closure of a vibrant, innovative urban community high school; and literary depictions of the subtleties and macro-aggressions of historical and ahistorical domination. Theoretical contributions include the construct of post+colonial; elaborations on the space and place of the ghetto; a mapping of colonial-metropole-nation relations and provisions for a cartographic discourse of urban postcolonial subjectivites; and a discussion of the colonizer’s constructions of the postcolonial subject as dispossessed, murderable, and still haunting.