Book Review: Leela Gandhi, Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction, Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Abstract

The second edition of Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction (2019) updates the 1998 first edition. Routledge Publishers hailed the first edition as “a ground-breaking critical introduction to the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies”. John Hawkes Professor of Humanities and English at Brown University since 2014, Leela Gandhi has been researching the cultural history of the Indo-British colonial encounter. As a renowned scholar on transnational literatures, postcolonial theory and ethics, she is the founding co-editor of the journal Postcolonial Studies and editorial board member of Postcolonial Text. Her position as director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women and her research on intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are part of her varied and important contributions.