Post-colonialism (or often postcolonialism) deals with the effects of colonization on cultures and societies. As originally used by historians after the SecondWorldWar in terms such as the post-colonial state, ‘post-colonial’ had a clearly chronological meaning, designating the post-independence period. However, from the late 1970s the term has been used by literary critics to discuss the various cultural effects of colonization. Although the study of the controlling power of representation in colonized societies had begun in the late 1970s with texts such as Said’s Orientalism, and led to the development of what came to be called colonialist discourse theory in the work of critics such as Spivak and Bhabha,the actual term ‘post-colonial’was not employed in these early studies of the power of colonialist discourse to shape and form opinion and policy in the colonies and metropolis. Spivak, for example, first used the term ‘post-colonial’ in the collection of interviews and recollections published in 1990 called The Post-Colonial Critic.Although the study of the effects of colonial representation were central to the work of these critics, the term ‘post-colonial’ per se was first used to refer to cultural interactions within colonial societies in literary circles (e.g. Ashcroft et al. 1977). This was part of an attempt to politicize and focus the concerns of fields such as Commonwealth literature and the study of the so-called New Literatures in English which had been