Postcolonial studies, like many politically progressive academic fields, is struggling to locate its purpose in an increasingly globalized culture and curriculum. With age and institutionalization, it finds itself wondering aloud about its relevance and even its own demise. In this paper, I will argue that postcoloniality has the blues—reveling in and lamenting its transience, and wondering about the mixed possibilities for its academic future. It is not alone in this global feeling: Postcolonial, Gender, and Ethnic studies are all suffering from their political identifications as “interdisciplines,” though all three arrive at this freedom from disciplinary mastery from very different histories of critical formation. This presentation will locate the intersections of these three fields in contemporary transnational theorists such as Sara Ahmed and Rachel Lee, as well as cultural practitioners Zoë Wicomb and Harryette Mullen, mapping the ways that they embody the mutually dependant metaphor of the “Postcolonial Blues”—a simultaneously melancholy and joyful attachment to other fields that disciplinary failure can enact. It is this impossibility of isolated methodology which articulates the “need” for other disciplines, the debt to various contributing institutional and cultural structures that produce uncomfortable but necessary recognitions of our own critical interdependence, and our own ambivalent relationships to political and academic freedom.