Post-colonial bad jokes

The whole history of the West is — to confound the simplicities of the woke — one gigantic act of “cultural appropriation”

HAVE YOU NOTICED post-colonial literature? It’s everywhere these days, and I don’t mean in bookshops. Instead it’s the academic specialism du jour. Priyamvada Gopal, the shrill-voiced, foul-mouthed (read her tweets) high priestess of woke, who memorably proclaimed that “white lives don’t matter” and got promoted for it, is Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Cambridge; while the more fragrant Corinne Fowler, who masqueraded as an historian to compile the ahistorical and error-laden National Trust “Report on the Colonial Countryside”, which I anatomised in the last issue, is likewise Associate Professor of Postcolonial Literature at Leicester.

Clearly there’s something in the water. To find out what, I turned to the once-impeccable source of the