Book Review: What Postcolonial Theory Doesn't Say (Routledge, 2016) (original) (raw)

The Colonizing Impulse of Postcolonial Theory

2010

What some see as the ongoing collapse of English as a discrete discipline has been hastened along by postcolonial studies, but many have argued that this deconstruction has been true from the start, that literary studies in general "has speculated continually about the intellectual foundations within which its key questions are framed and which make it possible, and how things might be otherwise" (Moran 46). Robert Miklitsch for example, suggests that "literature . . . was once implicitly interdisciplinary, encompassing, as Hazlitt indicates, science as well as philosophy" (Miklitsch et al. 258). Nonetheless, writes David Glover, "whatever criteria one uses to identify the literary, it is clear that in recent years its semiotic destinations have become ever more uncertain. Enter cultural studies, stage left" (Miklitsch et al. 284). On cue, David Lloyd argues that "cultural studies represents the fulfillment rather than the displacement of literary ...

"Postcolonial Studies and World Literature"

A spectre is haunting the discipline of postcolonial literary studies --the spectre of "world literature." If the materialist strand of postcolonial studies developed from a political grounding in the anti-colonial liberation movements of the late twentieth century (cf.

The Empire Writes Back - Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literature

The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up the debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language.

Introduction: The Genres of Postcolonialism

Social Text, 2004

This issue gathers recent work in postcolonial criticism and theory. The perspectives represented and contexts considered (South Africa, Canada, the United States, India, Pakistan) are the result of an especial-and still all-too-uncommon-effort to attend to scholarship produced in the global South, rather than simply entrenching further the association of postcolonial studies with a relatively narrow coterie of metropolitan migrants. At the same time, in bringing together work engaged with subaltern studies historiography in India (particularly the contributions of Sanjay Seth and Rosinka Chaudhuri) and work explicitly concerned with U.S. imperialism and contemporary globalization (particularly the contributions of Pius Adesanmi and Mark Driscoll), the issue poses once more a question raised by the last Social Text special issue on this topic-published in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War-around the theorization of the postcolonial itself. 1 Vigorously questioned in that setting in now-classic essays by Ella Shohat and Anne McClintock, the term postcolonial may have proven itself to be most useful precisely when it is placed under severe pressure, angled to highlight the necessarily uneasy relationship between colonial past and neocolonial present, history writing and current critique, cultural studies and political economy, as a task or problematic rather than a method or map. 2 In 1992 Shohat noted what she termed the "puzzling" absence of the term postcolonial in the rhetoric of the academic opposition to the Gulf War (in contrast to commonly invoked terms such as imperialism and even neocolonialism). She wondered in response whether something about the rubric of the postcolonial "does not lend itself to a geopolitical critique"; in the open-ended present of the "war on terror," the relative invisibility of explicitly postcolonial analysis must beg the same question. 3 Instead of rehearsing those definitional debates or simply offering overviews of the essays that follow, I will comment briefly on an issue that has long haunted methodological concerns in postcolonial studies: the politics of interdisciplinarity. The following essays raise this issue in disparate arenas and different ways (whether Sarah Nuttall's recourse to ethnography and feminist critique; Rosinka Chaudhuri's conjoining of poetics, translation studies, and historiography; Kamran Asdar Ali's attending to reader-response criticism as well as the sociology of religion; or Mark

World Literature, Critical Approaches: Reading Postcolonial Environments

Course Syllabus, 2023

Course Description: In this course, we will travel through historical moments guided by the stories that map our worlds and our political imaginations. We will seek to unsettle conventional categories of “world” as we carefully reorient ourselves in relation to the texts under study—novels, stories, and poems that demand a rearticulation of the so-called “archetype.” As we travel across continents, guided by Imbolo Mbue or Helena María Viramontes, we will consider the trajectories of power that they map and the aesthetic forms that are neither universal nor derivative, but persistently and indignantly local—that is, materially and historically situated. We will begin with a consideration of the political stakes of “worlding” literature before embarking on a three-pronged journey: texts that map empire; stories that illuminate the sacrifice zones of our contemporary petrosphere; and narratives that demand a consideration of the role of energy in the construction, dissemination, and interpretation of aesthetic form. Required texts: Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, ISBN-13: 978-1583670255 Patrick Chamoiseau, Slave Old Man, ISBN-13: 978-1-62097-588-6 Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies, ISBN-13: 978-0312428594 Shailja Patel, Migritude, ISBN-13: 978-1885030054 Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus ISBN-13: 978-0452273870 *All readings appended with an asterisk (*) will be made available on Canvas.