Abstract

This article rethinks “triviality” as a serious analytical lens within postcolonial critique. Drawing on philosophical lineages from Aristotle’s ideas on the “banal” to Lefebvre’s theory of everyday life, it argues that the marginal, the minor, and the apparently banal have long been centers of resistance in postcolonial contexts. The review traces how key theorists—including Spivak, Bhabha, Mbembe, and Glissant—implicitly attend to the everyday and subaltern “little things,” and how recent debates in affect and minor theory, such as Ngai’s “ugly feelings”, Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, Tsing’s “arts of noticing”, have renewed scholarly attention to ordinary life. In the digital age, cultural micro-forms—memes, TikTok reels, fanfiction, and webcomics—have emerged as significant sites through which postcolonial subjects articulate dissent and negotiate identity. Such trivial cultural forms blend global pop references with local commentary. Synthesizing these threads, the article proposes a “postcolonial triviality” framework, highlighting how everyday aesthetics and viral ephemera challenge dominant power by enabling micro-resistance. However, these banal forms can be co-opted or dismissed. The article calls for future work in vernacular digital humanities and transnational micro-cultural analysis. Altogether, the trivial lens expands postcolonial critique to include mundane, digital, and vernacular voices, arguing that studying minor, everyday forms is essential for decolonial scholarship.

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