At first glance, the prefix "post" in "postcolonialism"—much as in the case of other "post-isms"—seems to imply a movement backward along the time axis.¹ Jean-François Lyotard and others have, however, pointed out many times that an exclusively temporal notion of "post" drastically oversimplifies the complexity of negation and continuation inherent in concepts such as "postmodernism," "poststructuralism," and so on.²