Anne McClintock -"post-colonialism" an evanescent concept

Reading the article on post colonialism by Anne McClintock an obvious question surfaces, and that is, when is post colonialism situated. An even more commonsense understanding would state that post colonialism follows colonialism. But McClintock constructs her argument around this concept seen rather as a paradox. Why paradox? Because, for her any concept that includes “post” is rather a period of crisis, where progress is questionable. Any “post” word assumes a certain prevalence of a futile movement where everything becomes relative. For McClintock the term becomes almost irrelevant, because it is first hard to define colonialism. It seems that colonialism is an ongoing process and what means post colonial for some countries in respect to their European influence, may be interpreted as simply colonial with respect to the new colonizing neighbors. If the classical binary axis of power seems dated, McClintock doesn’t trust the binary axis of time either, but rather tries to say that the concept of post colonialism “occurs in an entranced suspension of history” (McClintock 1186). The assonance that McClintock perceives in this term is when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period. The concept becomes even more abstract when she refers to the definition given by the book The Empire Writes Back where post colonial literature is defended on a few different aspects. The very last of them states that post-colonialism should be understood as everything that happened from the very beginning of colonialism which means from 1492 on. In that respect every nation would have some grasp of colonialism in its roots. She goes on saying that the term received value on marketing the success of the term post- modernism, but she can not perceive the notion of progress within the concept itself.