Most literary criticism asks what a text means. Postcolonial criticism adds a more specific question on top of that: whose perspective does this text actually centre, and whose does it leave out, flatten, or speak over. Applied especially to works written from within colonising cultures about the places and peoples they colonised, it examines how a text's narrative point of view, its assumptions about whose experience counts as the default, and its portrayal of colonised people can encode a power imbalance the text itself never states directly.
A story can be "about" people without ever really representing them
A recurring concern in postcolonial criticism is how colonised people are frequently present in a text as background, setting, or a source of local colour, while the narrative perspective, interiority, and moral complexity are reserved almost entirely for characters from the coloniser's own culture. A postcolonial reading asks concretely: does this colonised character get an inner life, a name, a coherent motivation of their own, or do they function mainly as a device serving the protagonist's arc — scenery with a pulse, rather than a genuine subject of the story in their own right. The point isn't necessarily that the author intended this imbalance consciously; postcolonial critics are often just as interested in how a text's structure encodes assumptions its author may never have examined.
Who narrates, and from where, shapes what counts as "objective"
Postcolonial criticism also pays close attention to narrative voice and framing — whose account of events a text presents as neutral, factual description, versus whose account gets marked, explicitly or implicitly, as biased, superstitious, or unreliable. A colonial-era travel narrative describing a local custom as "strange" or "primitive," for instance, is making an implicit claim about whose cultural frame of reference counts as the default, normal one against which everything else is measured as a deviation — a framing choice a postcolonial reading treats as worth examining directly, rather than accepting as simply how the world objectively is.
What we're still unsure about
The core methods of postcolonial criticism — examining whose perspective a text centres, how colonised characters are represented, and what narrative framing implies about whose viewpoint counts as neutral — are well established and widely taught in literary studies, building on a substantial body of critical theory. What remains genuinely, actively debated within the field is how postcolonial criticism should be applied to any specific text: critics can reasonably disagree about how much weight to give authorial intent versus a text's broader structural implications, and about where exactly the line falls between a text that's usefully illuminated by this critical lens and one being read anachronistically through concerns its own era and author couldn't have anticipated.
This sits inside Postcolonial Criticism, one of seven topics in Literary Analysis, one of five domains in Literature, one of seventeen subjects the app can quiz you on.