| Sumario: | This article focuses on decolonizing postcolonial theory. The author examines several disconcerting trends in the recent production and consumption of postcolonial theory in general in order to decolonize this terrain and then to propose a historically situated method of approaching the work of women writers. One finds--little theoretical production of postcolonial writers given the serious attention it deserves, or that it is dismissed as not theoretical enough by Western standards; the increasing phenomenon of using postcolonial texts as raw material for the theory producers and consumers of Western academia; theoretical production as an end in itself, confined to the consumption of other theorists who speak the same privileged language in which obscurity is regularly mistaken for profundity. The result is thus situations that inevitably assert an intellectual and political domination. Often, with the best intentions, Western intellectuals are unconsciously complicit in an endeavor that ironically ends up validating the dominant power structure, even when they ideologically oppose such hegemonic power.
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