Label given to Cultural forms since the 1960s that display the following qualities:

• Self reflexivity: this involves the seemingly paradoxical combination of self-consciousness and some sort of historical grounding

• Irony: Post modernism uses irony as a primary mode of expression, but it also abuses, installs, and subverts conventions and usually negotiates contradictions through irony

• Boundaries: Post modernism challenges the boundaries between genres, art forms, theory and art, high art and the mass media

• Constructs: Post modernism is actively involved in examining the constructs society creates including, but not exclusively, the following:

Nation: Post modernism examines the construction of nations/nationality and questions such constructions

Gender: Post modernism reassesses gender, the construction of gender, and the role of gender in cultural formations

Race: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of race

Sexuality: Post modernism questions and reassesses constructs of sexuality

Centre/Margin: gained theoretical prominence due to Derrida

• definition:

constructs are limited by binary and hierarchical oppositions

against the notion of margin as a fixed space outside a main text

says it is impossible to define a centre without reference to the margin

Self/Other:

at the centre of personal experience is a subjective self which constructs everything alien to it is other

the self is constructed by its place in the culture and that place is determined by a number of complex interactions

the work of writers from colonized countries or marginalized groups often involves the rediscovery of the self or at least the development of a self that is not so dependent on the other for construction

• A term for a collection of theoretical strategies used to examine the culture of former colonies of the European empires and their relation to the rest of the world

• Frantz Fannon - Black Skin, White Masks (1967) one of the first studies to deal with the subject

• Edward Said - Orientalism (1978) cited as the beginning of theoretical work about post colonialism

• Said's thesis was that while the portraits of the culture did not represent reality, their contours were a product of real conditions of imperialism

• in other words, the literary product of a colonized nation, which uses the language of the colonizer, does not represent the reality of the indigenous people rather it reflects the influence and power of the colonizer

• Current post colonial theorists - Spivak and Bhabha, for instance - bring to the study of post colonial literature theoretical techniques ranging from feminism, Marxism, cultural materialism, deconstruction

• Post colonialism is a meeting place for a number of contemporary concerns

• Uses history to present an imaginative reconstruction of events using either fictional or historical personages or both

• Writer generally attempts to recreate the pageantry and drama of the event he/she deals with

• Linda Hutcheon: "historical fiction is that which is modelled on historiography to the extent that it is motivated and made operative by a notion of history as a shaping force" (A Poetics of Postmodernism 113)

• Historiographic Metafiction

Linda Hutcheon: "Historiographic metafiction shows fiction to be historically conditioned and history to be discursively structured" (A Poetics of Postmodernism120)