The concept of emancipation has an increasingly ambivalent status in postcolonial criticism. Under the influence of poststructuralism, the idea that the subaltern subject might overcome colonial relations of cultural domination through acts of self-representation has been thrown into disrepute. If there is to be emancipation, according to this view, it will not come through the recovery of an authentic speaking subject, but through strategies of ‘strategic essentialism’. Here it is argued that this postructuralist approach leaves the subaltern in a politically pre carious position and should be exchanged for the kind of hermeneutic approach that makes possible a genuine politics of recognition.