The best of postcolonialism is autocritical. That defining quality is beautifully caught by this Companion. Even in so judicious an account as Rajeswari Sunder Rajan and You-me Park’s “Postcolonial Feminism/Postcolonialism and Feminism,” there is a sense that this peculiar brand of feminism is separated from the vicissitudes of local feminisms. And, indeed, Ipshita Chanda’s “Feminist Theory in Perspective” rounds out that sense, diffident for its distance from metropolitan postcolonialism, located as she is in a “real” postcolony. Upendra Baxi reminds us, from the other side of the same position, that much greater attention to gender is paid in actually existing postcolonial constitutions than is allowed by postcolonial theorists (although his argument for the specifically feminist significance of having female heads of state has always left me less than persuaded). We must keep in mind that nothing similar to what the Companion establishes as “postcolonialism” came up “spontaneously” in the national and regional languages of the world outside the Euro-US. In a sense, Gaurav Desai’s “Rethinking English” exposes the heart of “postcolonial studies.” The worst of postcolonialism, according to some, is its overemphasis upon the South Asian model. This book does not make that mistake. Although the theoretical and historical bits, if grounded, rest in the South Asian model, we do have Africa here–Central, Southern, and Northern–we have the Caribbean, Latin America, Australia, and, straddling two worlds, we have Ireland. The differences in strategy in the treatment of politico-historical spaces is itself instructive. David Theo Goldberg’s substitution of heterogeneity for hybridity by way of a consideration of the legacy of slavery is a case in point. Ato Quayson’s essay brings in Africa’s postmodernity. But it is Tejumola Olaniyan’s magisterial “Africa: Varied Colonial Legacies” that sutures slavery and the colonial state, considers the diversity of colonialisms in Africa, takes us through to literary production, attends to women’s writing, and moves us into a consideration of neocolonialism in Development, an argument distinct from globalization proper.