Slemon picks out some of the major debates in the field of post-colonial literary criticism, a field that emerged out of initiatives taken under the aegis of Commonwealth literary studies and/or New Literatures in English. He focuses on the manner in which a number of theoretical strands have been debated within the field. These strands include 'reading for resistance', the work produced by the Subaltern Studies collective, Orientalism and colonial discourse analysis and 'the new cultural politics of difference'.