Postcolonial Theory

A field of critical analysis that examines the cultural, psychological, spatial and political legacies of colonialism and their persistence after formal independence. Emerging from mid-twentieth-century decolonisation, it is most associated with Frantz Fanon's analysis of the psychology of colonisation, Edward Said's account of 'Orientalism' as a discourse of power, and Homi Bhabha's concepts of hybridity, mimicry and ambivalence. In architecture and urbanism it underpins critiques of colonial planning, imaginative geographies and the politics of representation.