The boundaries of narratology have evoked considerable discussion and no real consensus has obtained. In recent years, there has been an increasingly frequent recourse to "hyphenated" and modified expressions (structuralist narratology, postclassical narratology, postmodern narratology, socionarratology, psychonarratology) or to the adoption of a plural (as in "narratologies'). There are now formalist modulations of narratology but also dialogical or phenomenological ones; there are Aristotelian approaches to it as well as tropological or deconstructive ones; there are cognitivist and constructivist variations on it, historical, ideological, and anthropological views, feminist takes, queer speculations, and corporeal explorations.

In spite of this proliferation of discourses pertaining to (the systematic study of) narrative, there have been few proposals for or elaborations of a postcolonial narratology. Maybe it is because the very domain and boundaries of the postcolonial are at least as problematic as those of narratology: maybe the postcolonial is (always already) everywhere but maybe it is (never yet) anywhere. In any case, I will sketch a postcolonial narratology which would basically adopt and rely on the results of (post)classical narratology but would inflect it and perhaps enrich it by wearing a set of postcolonial lenses to look at narrative. Note that this postcolonial narratology does not aim to identify postcolonial narratives or capture their distinctiveness. Note also that it does not propose to show how categories like identity, ethnicity, or race are (de)constructed. It is not even bound to a specific corpus or primarily constituted through the study of particular texts and it does not chiefly depend on inductive procedures. Rather, it is sensitive to matters commonly, if not uncontroversially, associated with the postcolonial (hybridity, say, migrancy, otherness, fragmentation, diversity); it envisages their possible narratological correspondents; and it incorporates them.