Postcolonial theory is built in large part around the concept of otherness. There are however problems with or complexities to the concept of otherness, for instance:

1. Otherness includes doubleness, both identity and difference, so that every 'other', every 'different than' and 'excluded by' is dialectically created and includes the values and meaning of the colonizing culture - even as it rejects its power to define.
2. The western concept of the oriental is based, as Abdul Jan Mohamed argues, on the Manichean allegory (seeing the world as divided into mutually excluding opposites): if the west is ordered, rational, masculine, good, then the orient is chaotic, irrational, feminine, evil. Simply to reverse this polarizing is to be complicit in its totalizing and identity-destroying power (all is reduced to a set of dichotomies, black or white, etc.)
3. Colonized peoples are highly diverse in their nature and in their traditions, and as beings in cultures they are both constructed and changing, so that while they may be 'other' from the colonizers, they are also different one from another and from their own pasts, and should not be totalized or essentialized - through such concepts as a black consciousness, Indian soul, aboriginal culture and so forth. This totalization and essentialization is often a form of nostalgia which has its inspiration more in the thought of the colonizers than of the colonized, and it serves to give the colonizer a sense of the unity of his culture while mystifying that of others; as John Frow remarks, it is a making of a mythical One out of many...
4. The colonized peoples will also be other than their pasts, which can be reclaimed but never reconstituted, and so must be revisited and realized in partial, fragmented ways. You can't go home again.

Postcolonial theory is also built around the concept of resistance, of resistance as subversion, or opposition, or mimicry - but with the haunting problem that resistance always inscribes the resisted into the texture of the resisting: it is a double-edged sword. The concept of resistance can also carry with it ideas about human freedom, liberty, identity, and individuality. These ideas may not have been held in the same way, in the colonized culture's view of humankind.

On a simple political/cultural level, there are problems with the fact that to produce a literature which helps to reconstitute the identity of the colonized - one may have to function in the means of production of the colonizers - the writing, publishing, advertising and production industries for instance. These may well require a centralized economic and cultural system which is ultimately either a western import or a hybrid form, uniting local conceptions with western conceptions.

The concept of producing a national or cultural literature is in most cases a concept foreign to the traditions of the colonized peoples, who:

1. Had no literature as it is conceived in the western traditions (or in fact no literature or writing at all).
2. Did not see art as having the same function as constructing and defining cultural identity.
3. Were, like the peoples of the West Indies, transported into a wholly different geographical/ political/ economic/ cultural world. (India, a partial exception, had a long-established tradition of letters; on the other hand it was a highly balkanized sub-continent with little if any common identity and with many divergent sub-cultures).

It is always a changed, a reclaimed but hybrid identity, which is created or called forth by the colonizeds' attempts to constitute and represent identity.

The very concepts of nationality and identity may be difficult to conceive or convey in the cultural traditions of colonized peoples.

There are complexities and perplexities around the difficulty of conceiving how a colonized country can reclaim or reconstitute its identity in a language that was not originally its own - and in genres which were the genres of the colonized. One result is that the literature may be written in the style of speech of the inhabitants of a particular colonized people or area. The language used may not 'read' like Standard English and the literary allusions and common metaphors and symbols of the work may be replaced by allusions and tropes which are alien to British culture and usage (e.g. the Hindu gods and Midnight's Children. It can become very difficult then for others to recognize or respect the work as 'good' literature.

There are times when the violation of the aesthetic norms of western literature are inevitable: when colonized writers search for their culture's ancient but transformed heritage and when they attempt to deal with problems of social order and meaning so pressing that the normal aesthetic transformations of western high literature are not relevant or make no sense.

The idea of good or high literature may be irrelevant and misplaced in a culture's history. The notion of a particular culture with no notion of 'good' literature, is difficult for us who are raised in a culture with strong aesthetic ideals.

The development (development itself may be an entirely western concept) of hybrid and reclaimed cultures in colonized countries is uneven, disparate. They may defy the notions of order and common sense which are central not only to western thinking but to many literary forms and traditions produced through western thought.

The term 'hybrid' used above refers to the concept of hybridity, an important concept in post-colonial theory. It refers to the integration (or, mingling) of cultural signs and practices from the colonizing and the colonized cultures. ("integration" may be too orderly a word to represent the variety of stratagems, desparate, cunning, good-willed, by which people adapt themselves to the necessities and the opportunities of more or less oppressive or invasive cultural impositions). Thus they produce something familiar but new. The assimilation and adaptation of cultural practices, the 'cross-fertilization' of cultures, can be seen as positive, enriching, and dynamic, as well as oppressive. "Hybridity" is also a useful concept for helping to break down the false sense that colonized cultures - or colonizing cultures for that matter - are monolithic, or have essential, unchanging features.

The representation of these uneven and often hybrid, polyglot, multivalent cultural sites (reclaimed or discovered colonized cultures searching for identity and meaning in a complex and partially alien past) may not look very much like the representations of bourgeois culture in western art, ideologically shaped as western art is to represent its own truths (that is, guiding fictions) about itself.

To quote Homi Bhabha on the complex issue of representation and meaning from his article in Greenblatt and Gun's Redrawing the Boundaries:

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the middle passage of slaver and indenture, the voyage out of the civilizing mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is translational because such spatial histories of displacement - now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of global media technologies - make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue. It becomes crucial to distinguish between the semblance and similitude of the symbols across diverse cultural experiences - literature, art, music, ritual, life, death - and the social specificity of each of these productions of meaning as they circulate as signs within specific contextual locations and social systems of value. The transnational dimension of cultural transformation - migration, diaspora, displacement, relocation - makes the process of cultural translation a complex form of signification. the natural(ized), unifying discourse of nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of cultures particularity, cannot be readily referenced. The great, though unsettling, advantage of this position is that it makes you increasingly aware of the construction of culture and the invention of tradition.