How did "Postcolonial" do it? On "Third Culture" as an identifying category.

The college at which I teach is not unusual in imagining courses in American Literature, which cover literary texts by "Americans" of various kinds from various eras (contemporary, Black, Queer, Historical), and in British Literature, which likewise teaches texts by "British" authors of various kinds from various eras.  This requires faith in "American" and "British" as legitimate identities.

My college, like many, also offers courses in Postcolonial Literature.

If logic follows, one should be able to argue that "Postcolonial" is a legitimate identity.  Certainly it is a legitimate category for academic analysis.  The term is vexed with critique and the notion of "postcolonial" spans multiple continents. Yet, postcolonial literature, right or wrong, flawed or no, is a viable, and identity-based subject area.  Postcolonial texts are designated according to the biography of their author.

I point this out because I wonder how theoretical writings by authors like Spivak, Bhabha and Said-- reflecting on resistance to colonialism--facilitated a Eurocentric, homogenising discipline in which all formerly colonised nations are lumped together as objects of study in Western Scholarship (I believe Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes about this in her 1986 "Under Western Eyes").

On the one hand: OMG epic problem in which academia perpetuates a "There's the West and the Rest" binary (See Niall Ferguson, 2011).
On the other: Hmn.  Strategic Essentialism, anyone?

In "Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography" Spivak argues for “a strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest” (pg?).  According to Oxford Reference strategic essentialism is "A political tactic employed by a minority group acting on the basis of a shared identity in the public arena in the interests of unity during a struggle for equal rights. The term was coined by Spivak and has been influential in feminism, queer theory, and postcolonial theory." 

An interpretation of "postcolonial" is that its essentialism is strategic: at least it exists in the Western Academy. Flawed, and homogenizing as the term is, students at least get to take the courses (and in them, or in my versions of them at any rate, historical, national and cultural distinctions are carefully drawn and contexts painstakingly taught).  

Enter Third Culture Kids, and Third Culture Authors:

Does everyone critique the terms over and over again?  Yes (as in postcolonial studies).

But do we still use TCK?  Yes, because it is gaining some traction/recognition (as was the case for postcolonialism which gained traction in the 1980s)

Is there a single nation of origin for "Third Culture"?  No (as in postcolonial)

Is a literary-analytical model predicated on author biography a problem?  Goodness yes!  Did Foucault not argue that the author is dead?  (And yet, all our literary disciplines are predicated on a myth of origins: American, British, Postcolonial . . . why shouldn't third culture be added to that list?)

Here's my thought: strategic essentialism is "scrupulously visible", in other words, it has an objective in mind and declares, openly, the short-term elision of nuance in order to achieve that goal.

TCK is "gaining traction": but only a little. 
Any one of you who has recently had a piece of academic work rejected by a journal that has no idea what you are talking about, and/or has had to rehearse ad infinitum a definition of third culture in order to educate your audiences or potential readers, knows there's a long way to go before this term is understood in academe.

Strategically: let's use the term even though it essentializes.  While we do so we can point out its flaws and nuances (as was done in the postcolonial studies of the 1980s and 1990s).

Goal: to be acknowledged as a "thing" in academia?

What is our "goal"?