After the postcolonial: spatial injustice, micro-texts and epistemic re-territorialisation

The diagnosis of the postcolonial predicament (Samaddar, Ranabir. 2012. “What is the Postcolonial Predicament.” Economic and Political Weekly 47 (9): 41–50; Breckenridge, Carol A., and Peter van der Veer. 1993. Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press; Dirks, Nicholas B. 2002. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Quayson, Ato. 2016. “The Predicaments of Postcolonial Thinking: Ato Quayson Interviews Amir R Mufti.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3 (1): 143–156; Mami, Fouad. 2022. “Postcolonial Predicaments: Encumbering the Emancipatory Potential in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 63 (1): 14–27; Roohi, Sanam. 2023. “Unbelonging as a Postcolonial Predicament: My Tryst with European Academia.” In Migrant Academics’ Narratives of Precarity and Resilience in Europe, edited by Olga Burlyuk and Ladan Rahbari, 9–20. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers) has consistently overlooked the dominance of the metropolitan imagination in the formerly colonised countries that has resulted in continued sidelining of the epistemic, literary and cultural perspectives beyond the metropolitan centres. This paper questions this spatial injustice and calls for an epistemic and cognitive re-territorialisation. The paper provocatively proposes an ‘after’ of the postcolonial, a critical gesture beyond the aporias of existing postcolonial theorisation and cultural critique, and makes a case for the vernacular, the ‘margin of the margin’, for envisioning epistemic justice.