Afterword: History, empire, resistance

Here we will not respond to the individual essays but rather try to situate the contribution of this book in relation to the postcolonial field generally, in terms of the transition from the anti-colonial paradigm to the postcolonial paradigms; the importance of expanding the temporal frame of discussion back to 1492; and one filmic trend-the revisionist postcolonial adaptations of classic novels. Postcolonial Film is a specifically filmic contribution to the larger field of postcolonial studies, which can be defined as an interdisciplinary domain of inquiry-embracing and synthesizing such disciplines as literature, geography, history, and media studies, among others-that explores the colonial archive and postcolonial identity, often in work inflected by poststructuralism. The postcolonial field, in Brett Christophers’s succinct summary, offers a “wide-ranging critique of the political-economic conditions and the ways of thinking, seeing and representing that empire instilled, and which. . . continue to persist to one degree or another after the formal dismantling of empire” (285). Indeed, many of the essays in the book treat the persistence of imperial thinking even in films, such as Peut-être, that intend to be anti-imperial.