During the late 1970s a new field of investigation called “postcolonial studies” began to consolidate itself in Western universities, especially those in Britain and the United States. The discourses emerged from influential university chairs held by refugees or sons and daughters of foreigners and immigrants. These individuals were socialized in two worlds differing in language, religion, traditions, and socio‐political organization. They were acquainted with both the world of colonized nations, which they or their parents abandoned for some reason or another, and the world of industrialized countries in which they live and work today as intellectuals or academics. At a time when postmodern, structuralist, and feminist theory enjoyed a privileged position in the intellectual Anglo‐Saxon world, these people considered themselves to be “Third World intellectuals of the First World,” thus defining the form in which they began to reflect on problems relating to colonialism.