: the voluntary or enforced migration of peoples from their native homelands.  Diaspora literature is often concerned with questions of maintaining or altering identity, language, and culture while  in another culture or country.

Dominance of one state or group over another.

the quality of cultures that have characteristics of both the colonizers and the colonized. Marked by conflicts and tensions, they are continually changing and evolving. Hybridity challenges traditional identities based on class, race, and gender and offers a release from singular identities.

Imitation of the dress, manners, and language of the dominant culture by an oppressed one.

The term generally represents the actions and effects of certain remnant features and agents of the colonial era in a given society. that is to say, despite achieving independence, the influences of colonialism and its agents are still present in the lives of most former colonies. Practically, every aspect of the ex-colonized society still harbors colonial influences.

: the process (from the late eighteenth century to the present) by which "the Orient" was constructed as an exotic other by European studies and culture. Orientalism is not so much a true study of other cultures as it is broad Western generalization about Oriental, Islamic, and/or Asian cultures that tends to erode and ignore their substantial differences.

The term is used in another sense by postcolonial theorists to refer to the negative view of subjected peoples held by their colonizers. It assumes that those who are different from oneself are inferior beings. The term was taken from Jacques Lacan’s theory of the self. The term is used in another sense to refer to colonized peoples. It carries with it the negative view of them held by their colonizers, who assume that those who are different from themselves are inferior beings.

The study of the global effects of European colonization. It seeks to analyze cultures whose traditional language, laws, religion, and literature have been affected by domination from Europe.

A person of inferior status. The subordinate position of subalterns may be based on gender, class, office, or caste. Subaltern writers seek to make their marginalized cultures, which are largely unrecognized by history, known and valued for their past and present. The term figures largely in postcolonial studies.