Dr. Muhammad Saeed Akhter,
Department of English, Faculty of Social Sciences, Riphah International University, Faisalabad, Pakistan
Having emerged in later half of the twentieth century, Postcolonialism is a relatively new discipline. It was a welcome discourse in the formerly colonized countries as such voices were silenced in a variety of ways. The discipline was envisaged to provide a channel to enlighten the minds of contemporary people with the history of resistance and articulate the ideology of decolonization. But the aspirations were mutilated. The discipline was chained with postcolonial theories. These theories were institutionalized in these countries. The researchers are bound to adopt these theories as a framework for postcolonial literary research. The present researcher is concerned that most of these theories are ostensibly misrepresentations of colonialism and that the findings of theory-bound postcolonial research may not be that credible. His concern evolved into his research objectives: (1) to examine the validity of postcolonial theories injected into the research, and (2) to evaluate the reliability of theory-bound postcolonial research. The researcher attempted to establish the meanings of colonialism based on the concepts of political thinkers of the past and present, as well as the practices of the colonial powers. In the wake of that, he ventured to spotlight the distortion of concepts propounded in most of the institutionalized postcolonial theories. Along with that, he appealed to academia’s intellect to identify flaws in postcolonial research. He concluded with recommendations.
Keywords: Postcolonial Theories, Theoretical Framework, Misrepresentation of Colonialism, Decolonization, Theory-Bound Postcolonial Researches
The above abstract is a part of the article which was accepted at The Eighth International Conference on Languages, Linguistics, Translation and Literature (WWW.LLLD.IR), 14-15 February 2023, Ahwaz.
