Be grateful. Be very, very grateful. I am trying to write an essay about this horse manure and it IS going to turn into a rant. It will quite possibly be the least detached, most passionate essay I've ever submitted because I am so convinced that what post-colonialists write is nothing short of pure junk dressed up in often imprenetrable jargon.
Give this a try, some drivel by Dipesh Chakrabarty, who I'm ashamed to say was once a Melbourne University academic (I believe he's now permanently in Chicago). I'm sure you'll appreciate why I feel like bashing my head against a brick wall right now:
So long as one operates within the discourse of “history” produced at the institutional site of the university, it is not possible simply to walk out of the deep collusion between “history” and the modernizing narrative(s) of citizenship, bourgeois public and private, and the nation state. “History” as a knowledge system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nation state at every step—witness the organization and politics of teaching, recruitment, promotions, and publication in history departments, politics that survive the occasional brave and heroic attempts by individual historians to liberate “history” from the meta-narrative of the nation state. One only has to ask, for instance: Why is history a compulsory part of education of the modern person in all countries today including those that did quite comfortably without it until as late as the eighteenth century? Why should children all over the world today have to come to terms with a subject called “history” when we know that this compulsion is neither natural nor ancient? It does not take much imagination to see that the reason for this lies in what European imperialism and third-world nationalisms have achieved together: the universalization of the nation state as the most desirable form of political community. Nation states have the capacity to enforce their truth games, and universities, their critical distance notwithstanding, are part of the battery of institutions complicit in this process.
Paranoid and grasping at straws much? He then proceeds to go on about how we need to "provincialise Europe" because Europe is presently a silent referent in all history that's being produced. Riiiight.
Incidentally, that quote is some of the clearest post-colonial writing I've read. Homi K. Bhabha is virtually impossible to follow. Run far, far away if his name ever comes up.