Lest it seem that I discard post-colonial studies, no, it has provided useful frames for literary and social discourse. My problem is with an academic left that is hermetically cocooned in the certainty of its "postmodern" perspectives contra differing (whether competing or actually complementary) perspectives, a kind of fundamentalism. Actually, it's probably very relevant to discussions of American music, as one of many modalities. Here are some links that come from positive perspectives, not some kind of David Horowitz hatchet job, which would be much worse, I'm sure, than what it sought to critique.
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Intro.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/722/10/
Clearly, since we're probably in agreement on most things since your conversion. Of course, political converts, regardless of the direction of the conversion, are often of a fundamentalist intellectual style, so it's an easy shift, replacing one fundamentalism with another.