In his book The Postcolonial Unconscious, Neil Lazarus writes that postcolonial scholars today

It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that postcolonial studies – as an academic field based mainly in literary departments – has generally demonstrated a lack of interest in the formal complexities of literary realism. To many postcolonial critics, realism as a literary form fits poorly with the field's dogmas and values – the established theoretical concepts that characterize the orthodox postcolonial text analysis. The theoretical vocabulary – mainly derived from poststructuralist theory, as Lazarus points out – has on the one hand been crucial in terms of the formation of postcolonial studies as an academic field; on the other hand, the at times exaggerated use of concepts such as hybridity, mimicry, catachresis, the in-between, and so on means that many postcolonial literary readings have tended to say more about postcolonial studies as an academic institution and as a theoretical orientation than about the texts themselves. Often, postcolonial critics have focused on anti-realist literary forms – that is, forms seen as corresponding to the institutionalized postcolonial vocabulary – whereas literary forms belonging to the so-called realist tradition have typically been read along a thematic register or labeled inherently Eurocentric, essentialist, and homogenizing. Realism as a literary form constitutes, in other words, a kind of blind spot in postcolonial studies, despite the fact that a considerable amount of postcolonial literature belongs to this tradition.