Confronting the ambiguous and Westernized terminology, "postcolonial", and the unfocused use of it, this essay tries to examine the problems associated with postcolonial criticism from the historical perspective. When forcing a clarification of the historical claims of postcolonial criticism, this essay analyzes the relationships between postcolonial criticism and history, postcoloniality and capitalism, postcolonialism and revolution. The author argues that "postrevolutionary" in the senses both of "after-" and "anti-" serves better than "postcolonial" in compassing both the premises and the claims of postcolonial arguments. In a spatial sense, post-revolutionary enables a more comprehensive grasp of the intellectual and political implications of a world situation of which the postcolonial idea is a product. Temporally, too, post-revolutionary captures more effectively both the condition described by postcoloniality (in other words, the question of periodization), and its stance toward that condition. The substitution of post-revolutionary for postcolonial also brings into relief the ways in which the postcolonial idea resonates with the claims concerning the past in contemporary culture, which may account for the almost immediate popularity it has acquired in institutions of cultural production over the last decade.