Postcolonialism is a critical discourse inscribed in the current of postmodernity, that emerged as a critical challenge to the cultural inheritance of European colonial and imperial rule.
Initially, postcolonialism was born after decolonisation in the mid 40's of the XX century although the first truly anticolonial voices are those of African intellectuals like Leopold sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire and Frantz Fanon, or Jean Paul Sartre in Europe, to name a few. It is the latter's book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, which is unanimously claimed to be the founding text of postcolonialism as it proposed a psychoanalytical approach to the effects of French colonialism in Algeria.
The intellectual force and ambition of these intellectuals was radically universalist. They spoke of a unified humanity freed from the mental slavery of colonialism in the humanist tradition.
But, as Simon Gikandi claims in "Postructuralism and Postcolonial Discourse", postructuralism (a philosophical discourse that was charachterised by a profound skepticism of universal dicourses) ended up embracing the critical perspectives of postcolonial discourse, adding to it a more celebratory attitude to cultural difference yet softening its political and more radically emancipatory ambitions.