Postcolonialism 2010–2014

Introduction

The word “post-colonialism” (hyphenated) did not make it into the OED until the third edition (2006). The most useful of the references in this OED entry is to a Wasafiri article, in which the following usage of the term is given: “[s]etting these texts within an intentional discourse on postcolonialism affords them a political and historical context” (2006: n.p.). The definition captures what can only be termed the register of a proactive cultural logic aimed at the creation of “postcolonialism” as an intentional object. While acknowledging its source, what the OED does not tell us is that the quotation is from Sandra Ponzanesi’s (2000) essay “The Past Holds No Terror? Colonial Memories and Afro-Italian Narratives”. Re-reading Ponzanesi’s essay, we note that the OED quotation is incomplete as the rest of the sentence after a comma reads, “but it also helps open up an Italian literary tradition that many consider stifling” (2000: 19).

Although Ponzanesi’s usage predates the historical period of this survey (2010–2014) by 10 years, it establishes a crucial shift in the use of the term signposted some years before in Homi Bhabha’s signature essay “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism” (1992, in Bhabha, 1994). With a difference though: in the body of Bhabha’s essay Ponzanesi’s “an intentional discourse on postcolonialism” is replaced by “postcolonial discourse”, which is defined as “a theoretical and cultural intervention in our contemporary moment” (Bhabha, 1994: 74). In Ponzanesi’s usage — which is why the OED cites it — “postcolonialism” (no longer hyphenated) is an “intentional discourse”, not simply an interventionist or agonistic or even a writing back to the metropolitan centre discourse, but an act of will in the phenomenological sense. This opening up is an “intentional act” with an “intentional object” in mind. An intentional discourse of postcolonialism therefore encompasses precisely the contradictions of Being (in the Heideggerian formulation, where texts, although the product of an intentional act of Being, in turn originate an other “epiphany” of Being) and its ambiguities so that the discourse of postcolonialism acquires new energies, including vernacular energies, that acknowledge “voices often excluded by the invisible rehegemonising power of ex-colonial languages such as French and English” (Ponzanesi, 2000: 19).

By 2010 (in any survey, dates only have pedagogic value) the discourse of postcolonialism had become an intentional discourse with specific affects. These affects part company from those texts associated with a hyphenated “post-colonialism” where literary discourse had a self-consciously radical anti-colonial agenda. The intentional discourse of postcolonialism now has as its intentional object knowledge capital as diverse as the economic, the political, the sociological, as well as the literary.

For ease of reference in this critical retrospective these issues have been brought together under the following, not necessarily exclusive, subheadings: Rethinking the field; Postcolonial melancholia and the spectre of shame; Creolization, the vernacular, and de-provincializing democracy; The cosmopolitan turn; The subaltern challenge; Postcolonialism and global warming; Postcolonial modernity; Traumatized bodies, traumatic readers; World-literary system; and Re-reading The Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Rethinking the field

In his classic The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), Albert Memmi had argued that the condition of the colonized writer was “emblematic of the colonized subject in general”, incarnating as he, the colonized writer, does “a magnified vision of all the ambiguity and impossibilities of the colonized” (Brozgal, 2013: 2). For Memmi, the colonized was the product of a specific period of colonization and his idea of postcolonial writing was located in the idea of an anti-colonial discourse. The “post” was not available to him as a theoretical problematic. Almost six decades on, Sanjay Seth (2012) summarizes for us the shift from the “anti” to the “post”. He writes, “The ‘post’ in postcolonial theory does not signify the period or era ‘after’ colonialism came to an end, but rather signifies the entire historical period after the beginnings of colonialism” (2012: 1). Its heuristic value (i.e. as applied theory) is not limited to the impact of the European encounter, the moment in postcolonial theory captured in Caliban’s memorable complaint to Prospero, but is redefined as an epistemological issue which Seth reads as postcolonialism’s rejection of all kinds of “essentialisms”, a definition which leaves postcolonial theory with a very wide archive and targets.

To begin a critical narrative for the period 2010–2014, Julie Mullaney’s deceptively simple Postcolonial Literatures in Context (2010) is as good a place to start as any other. Although the terrain covered is readily recognizable (the “recentness of their histories”, the rise of English as a global language, the place of vernacular writing, the use of “post” to imply “continuities and departures”, the transformative potential of the writing, and so on), the value of Mullaney’s short handbook is in its engagement with a diverse range of socio-political and literary practices that now inform postcolonial theory. In an increasingly globalized world where literary production is influenced by forces both local and international, by languages both formal and demotic, and by quotidian lives in diaspora, postcolonial texts are increasingly being read and located in a larger world-literary system. The latter makes for a complex location of cultural production and complicates what began primarily as an oppositional system of self-empowerment — oppositional in the sense that the writings of the metropolitan centre and their canonical accomplishments were read as an enclosed and exclusive system to which entry was denied if one did not have the right sensibility. In Mullaney’s useful summary the latter self-consciousness (the other as the metropolitan reader over one’s shoulder) is now replaced by writing that locates issues both local and global, both unicultural and intercultural, and which may not necessarily be the product of colonized peoples alone. In this understanding of the postcolonial, where we become conscious of a different kind of literary and ethical responsibility and show a willingness to “denaturalize” our reading processes, to arrive at a postcolonial analytic we can engage as productively with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Nigerian study of patriarchy in Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Patricia Grace’s negotiation of “Maoriness” within intergenerational conflict in Dogside Story (2001), as with Andrew McGahan’s study of settler guilt in The White Earth (2004) or the location of the diasporic imaginary in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003).

A second useful conspectus is Jenni Ramone’s Postcolonial Theories (2011) which is more than a simple retrospective annotated bibliography of the field. It is in fact a creative rethinking of postcolonialism which offers both a critique of it as well as possibilities for new and proactive engagements with it. The “proof texts” are primarily literary texts which she uses to “critique the assumptions and representations on which colonialism is based” (2011: 1). The strength of the book lies in the way in which it constructs an original narrative out of terrain covered by so many. The chapter on anticolonial resistance (Chapter 1), for instance, uses the well-known reference to Caliban (going back to Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile, 1960) but connects it as well with the little known Barbados slave uprising of April 1816. Similarly, the work of lesser known activists such as Claudia Jones and Una Marson, the former a member of the Communist Party who was imprisoned in the US for her politics and later migrated to Britain, the latter a key figure in establishing Caribbean Voices at the BBC, is used to advance an alternative view of resistance that offers another narrative alongside those of Achebe (on the demonization of the African by Joyce Cary), Glissant (on belonging via the metaphor of lateral roots), Césaire (on his anticolonial retelling of The Tempest, called A Tempest), Fanon, and Memmi (on the fractured nature of the colonized body). In this alternative narrative “Aboriginal responses” must be factored in as well. Elsewhere too one finds original insights: the chapter on the postcolonial moment looks at the cruel fate of abducted Hindu and Sikh women after partition and their recovery by the nation-state (drawing on the important work of Urvashi Butalia). The defining narrative of purity had no place for them and they led lives of beggars and prostitutes. This chapter also has a brilliant few sentences on Sadat Hasan Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” in which an asylum inmate, Bishan Singh, has no sense of borders and simply repeats a gibberish which Rushdie too recalls in The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995: 174), and a valuable engagement with laws about sexuality in “independent” Hong Kong where anti-gay laws were read as an “imperial hangover” (Ramone, 2011: 56).

Throughout Ramone is concerned with notions of otherness (with reference to the works of Said, Trinh Minh-ha, and Rey Chow), the postcolonial migrant (with reference to the studies of Fanon, Leela Gandhi, and Gilroy) and the native informant (with reference to Spivak and the problematic case of the Australian writer Mudrooroo). Her interest in vernacular energies takes us back to the now neglected field of socio-linguistics and especially to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis on language structuring reality. In a subtle move Ramone situates this thesis in the midst of the colonial enterprise and points to the occlusion of the native’s mastery of colonial reality even when she had internalized English. The slippage here relates to a colonial disavowal of its own linguistic hypothesis (as seen in Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education) aimed precisely at creating a citizen who would view reality as the colonizer did. It becomes important to examine, intertextually, those “postcolonial counter texts” that challenge a prior, ur- or proto- text. Hence the twinning of Shakespeare and Césaire (via The Tempest and A Tempest), of Brontë and Rhys (via Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea) and of Dickens and Carey (via Great Expectations and Jack Maggs) suggestively points to creative works that have postcolonial theory and practice embedded in them. What of the future? Beyond the obvious ones — terrorism, neocolonialism, globalization — she specifically isolates postcolonial ecocriticism, global and local voices, the digital, the queer and global sponsorship of literary prizes. Latha Varadarajan had introduced the concept of the “domestic abroad” to “capture this new, widespread form of transnationalism, produced through state policies and initiatives aimed at institutionalizing the relationship between nation-states and their diasporas” (2010: 6).

In the period under discussion the postcolonial enterprise as outlined by Mullaney and Ramone has also led to a dehistoricizing of the postcolonial or, in the words of Gabrielle Spiegel, the superimposition of postcolonial theory “on periods and persons for which they were never designed and to which they simply do not apply”. The quotation is from Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies (2010: 19). Lampert-Weissig, however, challenges, as Raman (2011) does too with reference to Renaissance literature, Spiegel’s supposition — that postcolonial theory has a quite specific historical framework — by making the case, largely with reference to al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula), and to the presence of the Moors and Islam generally in Europe. The Moors, together with the Jews, had undergone in medieval times precisely the kinds of (mis)representations that Said raised in his work on Orientalism. From Dante to medieval lays, tales such as Guilluame de Palerne, Parzifal, and Chanson de Roland remind us of the linkages between colour, race, religion, and cultural difference in medieval times, which were not uniformly Christian times. Medieval texts were arguably postcolonial because the anxieties, the traumas, of difference, were built into their art forms. Al-Andalus under the Moors was both conservative and liberal, both enlightened and reactionary, facts which Lampert-Weissig (2010: 136−43) deploys in her reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, a work which has as its subtext the contrast between Boabdil, the last Sultan of Granada, and the rising fundamentalism in Bombay, once, like the Sultan’s Granada, a liberal multicultural city. In A Postcolonial Reading of the Acts of the Apostles (2012), Rubén Muñoz-Larrondo takes postcolonial theory even further, this time to the gates of a hallowed text to show the subaltern, silenced, counter-narratives embedded in Luke’s treatise to Theophilus on Christ’s afterlife and the work of the apostles. In this, the fifth book of the New Testament, the Kingdom of God struggles against the powerful forces of Roman imperialism and the Judaic thought police.

Postcolonial melancholia and the spectre of shame

The overarching generic system that Mullaney found especially useful in her readings of postcolonial texts was the bildungsroman (with its concern with the education of its protagonist), which she read as a cultural form “where the promises and disappointments of the nation as a political and social ideal across the globe can be productively illustrated” (Sorensen, 2010: 33). Implicit in the choice of this German genre is the role of the aesthetic in our understanding of the postcolonial and its mediating power, especially the power and legacy of the European novel. However, the aesthetics of the form, and engagement with it, are being devalued because of readings of texts primarily as a “legitimizing device” (Sorensen, 2010: xi) for the representation of minority experiences and the politics of resistance. The result, as Eli Park Sorensen argues in Postcolonial Studies and the Literary (2010), is a corresponding devaluation of serious engagement with the literary, which in turn has created “an emergent sense of ‘melancholia’ in the field” (2010: xi). For Sorensen, versions of postcolonial theory in their prioritization of the literary as a source of social activism reinforce what he reads as the instrumentalization of postcolonial literature. Hence a sense of melancholia which, following Freud, is an incomplete mourning leading to schizophrenia (2010: 19). The novel’s formal elements are noted even as it is reduced to the level of a source text for the purposes of a sociology of postcolonial writing, as an instrument for “consciousness-raising”. And since realism is read as a “compromised postcolonial literary form” (2010: 40) there is this impassable failure on the part of postcolonial critics to read realist texts in an “aesthetically sensitive way” (2010: 41) because the dominant postcolonial argument is that literary realism, even as it gives the illusion of an unmediated and “original” experience of postcolonial otherness, in fact promotes a “false consciousness” hiding as it does “the ideological underpinnings of an imperialist discourse” (2010: 42).

For Sorensen an engagement with the aesthetics of the realist novel is essential before postcolonial melancholia can be adequately addressed. Sorensen had noted (quoting Neil Lazarus) that postcolonial studies emerged “the mourning after” the period of “widespread disillusionment” (2010: 141) in the wake of the post-colonial world’s own independence movements. Around 60 nations gained independence between 1947 and 1967; the mourning set in soon after. What we now have is an incomplete mourning signalled by a postcolonial melancholia. A turn to the realist text is Sorensen’s solution, but what postcolonial melancholy implies is in fact an incommensurability between two kinds of postcolonial responsibilities: is one’s duty to be sincere to the conventions of the form, its aesthetic design, or to its ethical imperatives? Timothy Bewes in The Event of Postcolonial Shame (2011) presents this as a conflict that leads, in a variation on melancholy, to the affect of shame. In the writers that Bewes subjects to a careful reading — Joseph Conrad, T. E. Lawrence, V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, J. M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, and Zoë Wicomb — “that incommensurability is frequently apparent as a chronic anxiety toward writing itself” (2011: 97). The literary after all emerges out of the “shamefulness of the colonial enterprise” (2011: 7), which is true as well of literary criticism and theory and these in themselves are sobering facts. In its unqualified adherence to the “monolingualism of the Other”, in spite of some sheepish obeisance to the vernacular (where in most cases the postcolonial theorist invariably becomes less nuanced), the postcolonial forgets the bourgeois origins of its own imperialist genre, the novel. How indeed to write without “contributing to the material inscription of inequality?” (Bewes, 2011: 11). Shame is a complex that arises out of this reflexive reading, as there is a mismatch between my own experience as a postcolonial subject and the writing persona I have created. Bewes may have something else in mind — his sentences at this juncture remain complex — but his reference to the post-colonial figure as a post-Auschwitz one (Adorno had warned of the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz) clarifies the argument that shame “appears in the gap between the impossibility of speaking and the impossibility of not speaking” (2011: 42). Eli Park Sorensen had used György Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel to refer to a postcolonial melancholia; Bewes, in a more philosophically astute fashion, uses Lukács to explore an unease between ethics and aesthetics in the novel form itself. For the novel yearns for a world of epic completeness no longer available in the materiality of lived experience since the world had gone “out of joint” (2011: 44). The novel thinks in terms of totality but lived experience is fractured, the “immanence of meaning in life has become a problem” (2011: 44). Summarizing Lukács, Bewes writes, “The novel is constituted out of the very incommensurability — of form and content, of idea and reality, of vehicle and tenor, of ethics and aesthetics, of subject and object — that, I am arguing, is behind every experience of shame” (2011: 44).

I turn to Bewes’ treatment of V. S. Naipaul, one of his paradigmatic authors of shame. Bewes cites an anecdote from Patrick French’s biography of Naipaul The World Is What It Is (2008). It deals with Naipaul recounting a phrase he had used in an undergraduate essay on Paradise Lost for J. R. R. Tolkien at Oxford. Naipaul had captured something original in the use of the word “incenséd” in the sentence “Prayer, the incense of the incenséd God”, knowing full well that incenséd (an adjectival participle from the word’s verb form) meant “angry”. Impressed, Tolkien asked him, “It’s good, did you intend it?” to which Naipaul replied, in his recalled narrative, “And I was ashamed and I said no” (quoted in Bewes, 2011: 76). It is a revealing moment that goes to the heart of the colonizer–colonized dialectic. Here, in the case of Naipaul, mastery of the language has to be hidden; there is something shameful in having gained control of the master’s language. And this control was brilliantly achieved by the colonial machinery: to write in the master’s language is a confession of shame. The shame is extended to the postcolonial writer’s belated entry into the form, here the novel, which carries within it a structure of shame because the outside world and the ideas of the individual are no longer commensurable (Bewes, 2011: 87). The novel can only capture what Lukács called a “transcendental homelessness” (quoted in Bewes, 2011: 88). By the time the writer of the colonial world begins writing belatedly, “the inherited cultural form is played out, exhausted” (Bewes, 2011: 189). The imported metropolitan novel is “incapable of rendering the ‘terrible essence’ of the colonial world” (2011: 189). How then to “escape the tendency of writing to flatter us, to reflect our own vanities back to us” (2011: 190)? And this is at the crux of Bewes’ notion of writing as encapsulating the event of a postcolonial shame. One should not, indeed one cannot, extract oneself “ethically or methodologically from the situation of postcolonial shame” (2011: 166) from which it follows that the work of art has to address the relationship between the world represented and the writing persona representing it differently. As in the case of Naipaul, the challenge facing the writer is to “escape the tendency of writing to flatter us, to reflect our own vanities back to us” (2011: 190), because the novel (in Lukács’s theorization of it), can no longer capture a fractured world. What the postcolonial captures then is a problematic and not an elegiac, alternative, authentic postcolonial representation against the misrepresentations say of a Joyce Cary or even a Conrad. The writing alerts us to metaphysical questions; it does not offer a solution to these questions. Reformulated, the questions frame the relationship that postcolonial writing has to postcolonial experience. They are not to be avoided but addressed, even if it means developing counterfactual scenarios. What would a literary work be like when colonial residues have totally disappeared from the scene? What literary form can disentangle the relay of shame from the intended voice and the author? In the end, and one suspects this has been Bewes’ argument all along, there is no escape from the shadow of the “colonial relation” in postcolonial writing. The legacy of that great form of literary modernity, the European bourgeois novel, bears testimony to this fact.

Creolization, the vernacular, and de-provincializing democracy

Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih ask the reason behind the “increasingly melancholic tone adopted in the past decade by the aging field of Euro-American Theory” generally (2011: 2). In reply, Lionnet and Shih put forward “creolization” as a way of energizing the jejune field of theory. They see it as a hypothesis with which to map out patterns of contact, migration, and linguistic differences in an “uneven but interdependent world” (2011: 2). Creolization, therefore, is seen in this light as the freedom of circulation, a point made with considerable force in Étienne Balibar’s chapter in their volume. One needs to be a little cautious as Creolization may not have been entirely positive in its historical effects — Kelly Baker Josephs links it to madness in her study of Anglophone Caribbean literature (2013) — even as it offers the vernacular as an alternative space for the articulation of “difference”.

Creole, after all, is a vernacular and its theoretical value lies precisely in its direct links to the felt experiences of people above and beyond formal colonial accounts. To capture these one has to go to the vernacular, to subaltern archives silenced by the formal accounts of labour and history. Three further books may be cited as examples of an engagement with alternative ways in which life-worlds could be made part of postcolonial writing. In the first of these three books Rashmi Sadana (2012) looks at the function of the vernacular even in Indian English fiction. Here, the body, the world of immediate experience, the world of sounds not heard in the English “monolanguage”, make their way, via internal translation, into English. The second book is Gaiutra Bahadur’s phenomenal Coolie Woman (2014), which is a narrative recreation of the lives of indentured women sent to work on sugar plantations in British Guiana (Guyana). Colonial policy had dictated that a certain percentage (as high as 40% in the latter part of the nineteenth century) of indentured labourers should be women. In leaving India indentured men (except for the few who came as a family unit) had lost “more than the hope of stable sexual partners” (2014: 128), they had lost a whole range of institutions (family, friends, village network) that gave meaning and status to their lives. Dislocation explained the high number of suicides, but it also explained why women were subjected to such violence and sexual abuse. Women copped it from their fellow indentured men, but also from the planters and their functionaries. Bahadur’s is a painful postcolonial narrative that uses archives, oral and written, standard English as well as demotic Hindi and Creole, to great effect, and is among the very best of its kind.

The third work is Leela Gandhi’s impressive The Common Cause, a work which “deprovincializes the history of democracy” (2014: 2). Referring to the turn to a via negativa in Indian postcolonial thought, including that of the Mahatma, Leela Gandhi suggests that an alternative ethical democracy has to be located in a non-dualistic episteme of religion where it is through the concept of the self as non-being, the self-seeking unity in samādhi, absolute, universal otherness, in “descent”, that one finds another form of ethical responsibility, and one that is based on a larger abstract principle where the good is not reduced to verifiable deeds alone. Here both the Mahatma’s swaraj [svarāj] (self-reliance, independence) document as well as the denial of the self found in Ramakrishna and Vivekananda, with the latter’s reformulation of the tat tvam asi ethic after Schopenhauer and Paul Deussen (Mishra, 2014), are important. A metaphysical truth (where the self and being actually disappears) becomes the foundation for a democratic ethics of responsibility. Leela Gandhi’s study, in effect, de-provincializes a major presumption about democracy — a Western precept that could only function if a dualistic idea of self and God were in place in the first instance — by positing a theory of non-being which provides other means of refashioning democratic values.

The cosmopolitan turn

Although cosmopolitanism historically has had an idealist connotation — multicultural hospitality, international peace, and so on — in much of postcolonial theory it functions as a tainted concept that eschews cultural difference and identity formation. Robert Spencer (2011) makes the case that the evils of imperialism notwithstanding, one of its consequences was the mixing of cultures. He distinguishes between cosmopolitanism and globalization, and makes the case that cosmopolitanism in fact has ethical and moral principles that work towards cross-cultural solidarity and unlike globalization, which is impersonal and functions as an instrument of capitalism, critiques the movement of capital and its exploitative character. There is then a cosmopolitan world view informed by human rights and liberal democratic values, by a sense of a critical Enlightenment, which asks us to challenge and dare to know (after Kant). There are postcolonial texts that “realize” the cosmopolitan moment, texts that are informed by cosmopolitanism’s ethical principles, that in fact engender those cosmopolitan sentiments, sentiments which examine the inequalities “and difficulties that plague the postcolonial world” (2011: 12). Spencer points to cosmopolitanism not as the “flattening out” of difference but as a proactive engagement with what has been called multicultural recognition. For what one finds in the controversy surrounding The Satanic Verses (1988), argues Spencer, is a transnational protest, a protest not grounded in any one culture but one that finds both one’s own and that of the other equally objectionable in certain ways.

In postcolonial theory “hybridity”, a term most often associated with Salman Rushdie, is now shadowed by, if not incorporated into, cosmopolitanism. The contributors to Janet Wilson, Cristina Şandru, and Sarah Lawson Welsh’s edited volume (2010) find in the tropes of routes and rerouting a useful avenue for the exploration of cosmopolitanism and hybridity. Thus Simon Gikandi’s essay problematizes the question of the cosmopolitan by examining the case of Somali refugees who recreate exclusive enclaves even when cosmopolitanism would suggest otherwise. Using routes and reroutes Diana Brydon thinks through a “glocal” sensibility where the global and the local co-exist. In a variation on this sensibility Patrick Williams in the same volume puts forward the “Palestinian” as the absolute Other that pushes to the edge our own sense of ethical responsibility. Picking up on Emmanuel Lévinas’s “refusal to accord Palestinians the status of neighbor” on the grounds of Jewish “exceptionalism” (an exceptionalism powerfully critiqued in both Sami Shalom Chetrit [2010] and As’ad Ghanem [2010], and examined in terms of a Semitic secular discourse in Brian Cheyette [2013]), Williams’ essay asks us to foreground the Palestinian as the paradigmatic case of a materialist postcolonial analytic. Although Williams does not mention it, the proposition now requires us to rethink Lyotard’s reference to the “jew” (in lower case) that inheres all discourses of absolute rejection in terms of the “palestinian”, in lower case, who is now the absolute “condition” of the postcolonial and therefore the new, postcolonial “object of dismissal” (Lyotard, 1997: 3).

“Hybridity” itself is subjected to a wider “cosmopolitan” reading by Amar Acheraïou (2011) who offers a diachronic reading of “hybridity” to establish its historical, cosmopolitan, usage and its radical deployment towards change. It is the non-synchronic engagement with the term (so common in postcolonial theory) that convinces him that what is necessary in postcolonial theory is a global or planetary “hybridity of dissent and resistance” (2011: 196), fully aware of its ethical responsibilities, which can then be deployed (without fear of trivialization) against the “hybridities of domination” that are part of global capital (2011: 8). In Britain, it is suggested, any theorization of hybridity collides with the sense of “Englishness”, which is neither a theory nor an entity, nor even “cosmopolitan”, but a lived mode of being. In this context Enoch Powell could distinguish between the state and the nation, where the nation thrives on a reassuring but empirically elusive sense of an English moral conformity (its “Englishness”) while the state must come to terms with the post SS Empire Windrush shift in migration (MacPhee, 2011) and with its own real and lived cosmopolitanism.

The subaltern challenge

In her highly influential essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak had raised the condition of the subaltern woman, who in a later formulation (Spivak, 1999) came to be read as the foreclosed subaltern female, the Absolute Other of the Kantian Law of Reason. Many seminars and conferences have been held on Spivak’s (1988) original essay. The published version of one such seminar, the proceedings of a Columbia University conference on the subject collected by Rosalind C. Morris (2010), had in fact noted the extent to which the essay had set off “profound transformations in the disciplines adjacent to subaltern studies”, notably postcolonial studies (2010: 12). The role of the subaltern subject as she passes through the state and in the process modifies it, and indeed Spivak’s take on postcolonialism generally, gets a useful summary in Taoufiq Sakhkhane’s (2012) book. Against these celebratory rhetorics may be placed Vivek Chibber’s unease towards subaltern studies in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013).

The trouble, as Chibber continues, is that subaltern theory offers the untenable proposition that universal Enlightenment principles, with their grounding in a self-evident grand narrative of progress, cannot work in the particular conditions of the postcolonial, where development has been discrepant, fragmentary, non-linear, sometimes even irrational. The argument here being that there are local, indigenous concepts of the citizen, of labour, of justice and indeed, in the literary domain, of genre that challenge Enlightenment universalism. Like Lazarus’s work, Chibber too turns to the “universalization of capital” in the contemporary world and uses Marxist categories to make the counter case that capital is indeed a hegemonic, universal category with global force and that the ideas of labour and class, even when discrepantly deployed or defined (religious labour such as that of the Indian gurus for instance), nevertheless are serious categories with which to understand the political economy of postcolonial nations.

However, the underlying debate as presented here is whether the universalization of capital (the achievement of the European bourgeoisie that established capital as the hegemonic mode) was replicated under colonialism. And it seems that the doyen of subaltern studies, Ranajit Guha, felt otherwise when he declared that in India (or in colonial societies generally) the bourgeoisie failed to establish a consensual liberal order under the sign of capital. Hence there are two modernities: one, Western, dominated by a class with its own political dynamics; the other, Eastern, where there is no bourgeois hegemony. To Chibber this dualism is based on a monumental fallacy that gives agency to the bourgeoisie that was never there; the fact that it fought against a consensual culture which was achieved not out of middle-class goodwill but working-class struggle and was not a gift bequeathed by the bourgeoisie. Political rights have to be fought for and these rights, like the universal nature of capital and of resistance, are not denied by postcolonial insistence on local cultural forms, which postcolonial critics see as ways of resisting the hegemony of capital and its Eurocentric bias. There are particularisms in the postcolonial that must be acknowledged, but there are universal principles, a modified legacy of the Enlightenment, that inform all global resistance. And so in a sense one has to be careful about postcolonial essentialism (against its own anti-essentialist credo) in the name of anti-Eurocentrism in favour of subaltern particularisms. And this essentialism is a legacy of a postcolonial theory that has forgotten the universal theories of class and capital.

Postcolonialism and global warming

In “The Climate of History: Four Theses”, Dipesh Chakrabarty problematizes the discipline of history, which until now had existed “on the assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain continuity of human experience” (2009: 197). But even as we factor globalization and the market economy into any discussion of postcolonialism, we find ourselves located in a disturbing planetary conjuncture in the wake of global warming. If indeed climate change is human-induced, then are we not agents of geological change ourselves and not mere onlookers of a process which hitherto could be grasped only through ahistorical or even ante-historical timeframes? Do “anthropogenic explanations of climate change (humans as agents) spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history” (2009: 201)? After all, aesthetics and, in the context of postcolonialism, the literary, presuppose a stable natural order, while ethics is primarily linked to what we do to ourselves within a humanist narrative of time and history. Since human acts now affect geological time (and not simply historical time), do we now enter what Paul J. Crutzen has called the “Anthropocene” age bringing the Holocene itself to an end? Freedom and justice, the foundations of postcolonial thought, now require “species” thinking, which is different from thinking within a Hegelian history of teleology (the Spirit of History enacting its own pre-ordained end) or of the history of capital (which is somehow responsible for the Anthropocene). It requires a different mode of thinking which would also have far-reaching effect on our ideas about our larger, transcendental ethical responsibilities. In a subsequent essay in New Literary History, Chakrabarty raises this as a postcolonial imperative: “postcolonial thinking may need to be stretched to adjust itself to the reality of global warming” (2012: 1), because human agents have now become instruments of geological change. History itself, as he had argued, now requires agents where the human subject is also a geological subject.

Although the anthropocene is not taken up, Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’s valuable account of postcolonial ecocriticism (which also lays bare Western and non-Western engagements with animals and nature) alerts to the urgency of “ravaged geographies” (2010: 113), animal cruelty, and trauma as consequences of colonial territorialization. At around the same time, Laura Wright too examined a wide range of environmental issues from a postcolonial perspective in her book Wilderness into Civilized Shapes (2010). Two years on one finds biocultural approaches inserted into questions of literary theory and interpretation in Nancy Easterlin’s (2012) challenging work.

Postcolonial modernity

Postcolonialism’s own place in the legacy of modernism has not been given the attention it deserves. Partha Chatterjee (2011) had noted an exclusive modernity in the dominant systems of Western political thought (and to this there had been no effective challenge, not even in the received tradition of Marxism). Walter D. Mignolo, on the other hand, showed that there have been three types of critiques of Western modernity, a number from within Europe (Marxism, poststructuralism, postmodernity, and the like) and two from outside of Europe. These two have either focused on what the Iranian intellectual Jalal Ale-e Ahmad called “Westoxifcation” (gharb-zadegi) or on the colonial enterprise. It is the latter that informs postcolonial theory (Mignolo, 2011). Underlying postcolonial critique is the role of the Enlightenment in imperialist and post-imperialist thought, its “gaps and suppressions”. This phrase is from Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa’s edited volume Postcolonial Enlightenment (2013: 5). The contributors to this volume explore a problematic that has shadowed much postcolonial writing: the curious phenomenon of the colonizer preaching Enlightenment modernity and at the same time failing to put it into practice. Are we to demonize it or place it as a body of thought that has been instrumental in establishing universal values into which globally we are embedded? In the context of these debates and positions, Peter J. Kalliney’s study Commonwealth of Letters (2013), requires a close look.

The subtitle of the book, “British Literary Culture and the Emergence of Postcolonial Aesthetics” effectively says that at least in Anglophone postcolonial writing, the writing itself cannot be fully explained as part of an archaeology of knowledge without a very serious examination of British cultural practices generally. And these cultural practices are not just limited to an understanding of the English intertext as a system but also the role of institutions such as the BBC (and especially its Caribbean Voices programme) as significant agencies in advancing a specific ideology of the aesthetic. That postcolonial writers like the very influential Kamau Brathwaite in the end argued for a national language and wrote about a little tradition against what he felt was a growing English modernist hegemony does not of itself provide grounds for a total exclusion of modernism.

Kalliney’s (2013) book opens (on its third page) with a photograph of writers in a BBC recording studio taken quite possibly on 1 December 1942. Sitting or standing around Uma Marson, the Jamaican poet who had been invited by George Orwell on his BBC Voice programme, are some of the major literary figures of the period. Apart from George Orwell we see in the photograph Mulk Raj Anand, T. S. Eliot, and the great critic William Empson. What the photograph suggests is that “metropolitan modernists sought out allies and supporters among late colonial and postcolonial intellectuals” (2013: 4) who “for their part were strongly attracted to the modernist idea of aesthetic autonomy” and were “willing to overlook or downplay their political disagreements” (2013: 5). The need for creative autonomy is evident in the early work of so many postcolonial writers, including Chinua Achebe, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, all of whom fell under the spell of T. S. Eliot’s pronouncement on the value of the escape from personality. Naipaul’s own sense of aesthetic autonomy, his art of the impersonal writer, the writer who distances himself from “personality”, his reworking of the metropolitan and modernist principles that governed the construction of the portrait of an artist — the idea of artistic failure haunts both writer and his characters — links the postcolonial writer directly to the modernist English novel, and confirms that the legacy of modernism was a “global property” (2013: 145). Soon, of course, and Brathwaite was influential here, separate postcolonial modernist traditions were instituted (one says “instituted” because quite divergent “black”, “Asian”, and setter colonial modernist traditions were artificially created) and the place of literacy on postcolonial literature became a factor (Kortenaar, 2011). The discourse of aesthetic autonomy, however, remained strong:

white, metropolitan intellectuals began using it as a way to recruit new collaborators from the decolonizing world, while black, colonial writers could use it to renegotiate the terms of cultural trade … black writers were as anxious as their white colleagues to protect and enhance the autonomy of the cultural sphere. (Kalliney, 2013: 31)

That legacy of modernism meets its challenge in poststructuralism, a theoretical framework which has supplied many of the terms currently in use in postcolonial theory and a framework that is hugely indebted to dominant French theoretical discourses even when postcolonial theory is largely absent from them (Stam and Shohat 2012: 244). The relationship of the two – poststructuralism and postcolonial theory – is at the heart of Jane Hiddleston’s closely argued work Poststructuralism and Postcoloniality (2010). Although “virulently denounced” in many quarters because of its — poststructuralism’s — failure to countenance the “material, empirical reality of colonialism and its aftermath” (2010: 2), Hiddleston argues that, on the contrary, poststructuralist thinkers have been aware of the pernicious power of colonialism and understand full well that an instrumental version of the Enlightenment project had paired imperialism with the idea of the Western rational subject. Seemingly universalist as it is, poststructuralism, nevertheless foregrounds its own condition of being, its historical moment, and its anxiety of influence. When appropriating it postcolonial theorists like Homi Bhabha, argues Hiddleston, likewise are conscious of this anxiety and the role of cultural difference. The anxiety — an unease about poststructuralism’s consciousness of “the discursive traps and lures of Western philosophy” (Hiddleston, 2010: 17) — is what necessitates postcolonial self-reflection and the use of the autobiographical as an answer to erstwhile Enlightenment ideas of the universal subject (Huddart 2014), the kind of shift found in postcolonial ethnographic studies such as that of Kamala Visweswaran (2010) and in the use of Deleuze’s methodical orientation towards mobility, mutation and experimentation addressed in Chow (2012), Bignell and Patton (2010) and Burns and Kaiser (2012).

Traumatized bodies, traumatic readers

Two books on trauma and the postcolonial appeared in 2013, both published by Palgrave Macmillan, a publishing house which has entered the field with a vengeance and as a direct challenge to the ever-increasing, and often repetitive, titles and themes published by Routledge. Of the two, Stef Craps’ Postcolonial Witnessing (2013) is the more accomplished work, theoretically sophisticated and challenging. The challenge posed here is in respect to trauma theory’s own Eurocentric bias, and its use of the Holocaust as the defining, even “limit”, situation. What is necessary is a postcolonial cross-cultural engagement that brings the affects of trauma, as an ethical issue, to events and experiences not readily present in studies of trauma. Trauma, as Cathy Caruth (a key theorist used by Craps) acknowledges, is an event or an experience triggered by its familiar recurrence in another later event or experience. There are a number of colonial examples of this — the Middle Passage being one of the more gruesome and traumatically powerful. If, as trauma theorists (creatively reworking Freud’s repetition compulsion) have argued, history itself is a history of trauma, then devastating parallel histories within the grand European history may be read as being even more traumatic. Postcolonial history is self-evidently one such parallel history whose literary texts carry that trauma often in the language itself, the sort of language use found in David Dabydeen’s long narrative poem “Turner”. Although Frantz Fanon and Édouard Glissant’s works are noted by Craps, the second Palgrave Macmillan book on trauma postcolonialism, Ogaga Ifowodo’s History, Trauma, and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives (2013), takes them up more extensively. The book’s more valuable parts deal with readings of classic postcolonial writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, whose works reinforce the “view of colonialism as a shattering historical trauma” (2013: xiii). Although this is a self-evident fact, Ifowodo’s engagement with it emphasizes the importance of acknowledging it and using it as an analytic in one’s reading of postcolonial writing.

Placed against Craps and Ifowodo’s readings of trauma as a postcolonial “event”, Donna McCormack’s Queer Postcolonial Narratives (2014) does something very original and exciting. Written in a powerful and accomplished theoretical style, McCormack’s book carefully examines witnessing the traumatized body. Two arguments are of value here. The first deals with the complex politics of the sacrificial body, that of the suicide bomber, who in the name of righteous postcolonial rebellion simply helps reconstruct, for the thought police behind the bomber, precolonial ideals of nationalism with its emphasis on ethnic, religious, and familial purities. The second, and clearly of real value to the queer postcolonial, is McCormack’s impressive reconstruction of the witness to trauma. Where postcolonial trauma theory had so far defined the witness as a professional listener who could then reenact the testimony of the victim, and theorize it, McCormack’s book focuses on the ways in which traumatic histories are shared and internalized by non-experts, primarily friends, lovers, family members, and the like. To listen is to reciprocate, to be part of the experience and as such participate precisely in those bodily affects that trauma theorists (notably Caruth, Felman, and Laub for instance) have relegated to “linguistic narrativization”. “Indeed”, writes McCormack, “what we witness in queer postcolonial narrative is the willingness of listeners to take on the responsibility for an endless narrative that they must translate from embodied exchanges into a comprehensible language that is still largely incoherent in form” (2014: 36).

McCormack’s brilliant book takes one to another form of witnessing: witnessing as postcolonial reading. Are there in fact postcolonial audiences, readers and viewers who “receive” books in particular ways? The problematic is addressed in Bethan Benwell, James Procter, and Gemma Robinson’s edited volume, Postcolonial Audiences (2012). The issue here, as Graham Huggan explores in a neat Preface to the book, is that a given reading may not be recognized as a postcolonial reading which, of course, means that one could not simply pick up an Ingarden or an Iser and begin a phenomenological reading of a postcolonial text. In the absence of a readily identifiable postcolonial reading, the contributors to the volume draw upon sociological principles (quantitative responses to films and books), bibliographical research following on from the work of D. F. McKenzie (the contrastive ways in which a foundational document in two languages may be read), nationalist reading, and generally undecidable or even parasitic readings. This is a productive and largely undertheorized field which would require a return to the kinds of mastery of languages that the old area experts had. In this mastery, the postcolonial texts would also be in the vernaculars and the readings would begin with “nativist” modes of reception. Although a number of Indian texts are examined in this volume, India’s dominant theory of reception — rasa theory — remains completely unacknowledged. Now it would have made great sense if someone had attempted a radical rethinking of this highly formal mode of reception (linked originally to drama) in the context of a postcolonial reading of texts.

World-literary system

Postcolonialism’s engagement with the paradigms examined above leads one to the location of postcolonial writing in a world-literary system. No longer the domain of a Eurocentric comparative literature, world literature, as Franco Moretti has argued, is not a deified, definable and closed object but a problem in need of a critical negotiation different from the manner in which comparative literature has been addressed (Connell and Marsh, 2011). This negotiation is not simply a general reading through selected key terms (resistance writing, cosmopolitan writing, and so on), but the subjection of literature (including postcolonial) to world-system analysis (Palumbo-Liu et al., 2011). The claim made here is that world literature is the product of a convergence of forces (capitalist tradition and individual talent) that produces an amalgamation of different traditions. The great modernist texts of our time — Ulysses, The Waste Land, and Pound’s Cantos — were in this respect products of “world-systems”.

Because “the event of postcolonialism is not historically settled”, in The Long Space, Peter Hitchcock too has argued that postcolonial texts must be thought through world literature itself (2010: 2). In the context of transnationalism, globalism, the institutionalization of literature, the fluid definitions of the nation state and related matters, one needs to explore not only the place where “the knots of narrative are tied and untied” but also the “fraught space” in the world-literary system “through which postcoloniality can be expressed” (2010: 5). This “fraught space” as Russell West-Pavlov (2010) has carefully argued necessitates the location of the means by which spaces are fictively anchored. The anchoring would require a model of reciprocity between language and space for which both deixis and chiasmus (linguistic sign plus rhetorical figuration) are essential.

There should be no easing off in the location of postcolonial writing in a world-literary system, an issue more extensively debated by Neil Lazarus in his powerfully written The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011b). Although some versions of postcolonial studies are now being informed by materialist critiques of history and society, the “foundational” assumptions of postcolonial theory, discussed in a number of books mentioned so far, remain strong. Lazarus summarizes the key “assumptions and investments” as follows:

a constitutive anti-Marxism; an undifferentiating disavowal of all forms of nationalism and a corresponding exaltation of migrancy, liminality, hybridity, and multiculturality; an hostility towards “holistic forms of social explanation” (towards totality and systemic analysis); an aversion to dialectics; and a refusal of an antagonistic or struggle-based model of politics. (2011b: 21)

Lazarus systematically critiques these assumptions in a book that reminds us of the continued nature of imperialist domination even after the “event” of decolonization. The domination referred to here accentuates an ongoing conflict between labour and capital which constitutes the basic reality of the contemporary “world-system”. This is the reality of the postcolonial unconscious, a term that echoes Fredric Jameson’s influential 1981 study The Political Unconscious in which he had categorically declared, “only Marxism offers a philosophically coherent and ideologically compelling resolution to the dilemma of historicism” (2011b: 19). A certain coherence is needed against a dominant postcolonial theorization that stresses heterogeneity and unevenness, “disavows nationalism as such and refuses an antagonistic or struggle based model of politics in favour of one that emphasizes ‘cultural difference’ [and] ‘ambivalence’” (2011b: 12). These moves eclipse the powerful narrative of anti-colonial struggles that played such a key role in an earlier hyphenated understanding of “post-colonialism”. Further, and as a consequence, a class-based materialist critique is made irrelevant (because identities are always in flux, nations are purely imaginary and grand narratives a relic of the past) from which it follows that the celebrated texts are those that explore “in-betweenness”, “hybridity”, “migrancy”, “newness”, “ a little of this, a little of that”, and related ideas. The postcolonial literary canon celebrates works that run with these ideas, the exemplary text being Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981). For Lazarus, two modes of critical inquiry become urgent: first, a turn to the spectres of Marx and a critical revaluation of class in postcolonial studies and second, a turn to “minor” works and works in the vernacular. After all, the incorporation of peasant, village, and even feudal economies of colonized peoples into a “capitalist world-system” was one of colonialism’s grand achievements.

The turn to minor works and especially the vernacular becomes important and Lazarus’s literary archive turns to these with incisive analyses of a number of lesser known texts including a fascinating reading of Nirala’s Hindi poem “Beggar” (2011b: 47−52), except that he gets the spelling of Chakravyuha wrong and misreads the meaning of the name “Abhimanyu”. The reference to the vernacular by Lazarus takes one back to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s address at the University of Sofia in Bulgaria, subsequently published as Nationalism and the Imagination (2010), where she had declared that a comparativist approach to postcolonial literature would welcome

a consideration of textual analyses of cultural work in the various languages of Africa and India. The tendency should now […] [be] to re-open what was closed by colonialism: linguistic diversity. (2010: 34)

It would also tell prospective research students who want to work on Indian literature in English, “Don’t kill us” (2010: 36).

Re-reading The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL)

In its fiftieth volume, JCL continues to be the flagship journal of Commonwealth/postcolonial literatures. To show the dynamic nature of the publications in JCL I have selected four essays that between them capture the journal’s special strengths as well as the quality of publications. The first essay is by Neil Lazarus (2011a) whose book was examined in the previous sub-section. Lazarus works through four terms in common use in the postcolonial bibliography: modernity, cosmopolitanism, universalism, and world literature. All four may be readily collected under the sign of colonialism/imperialism because modernity is post-Enlightenment Western; cosmopolitanism, like Orientalism, is really a levelling out of the difference principle; universalism again is linked to the idea of a rational, universal, subject; and world literature (against comparative literature) is one way of classifying non-Western writing in a principle of transnational ordering. All these are European models; in short they are Eurocentric. Not that they have not been subjected to critique. Said’s last work — Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004) — attempted to prise all these terms out of their European nomenclatures by suggesting that a radical humanism was local as well as universal. To get around the quagmire, in fact to replace all these concepts, Lazarus writes about local universalism which also implies that one can speak of a local modernity, a local cosmopolitanism, or even a local world literature. Since capital has produced unequal systems it would follow that within a regime of inequality, modernity too must take different forms, as its global appearance has therefore been at different times and in different places. A look at a number of texts written in the vernacular clearly shows that capitalist urbanization, for instance, informs consciousness and representation. In this reading it is the local that mediates the universal world system, and thus provides a theory of world literature linked to the unequal and historically disturbing encounters with capital on the part of people.

The second essay is by Nicholas Wright (2011), which deals with the Polynesian (here, specifically Samoan) reading of the writer, the tusitala, as translator. Samoa had figured strongly in the American 1960s culture largely due to Margaret Mead’s ethnographic work on Samoan sexuality, in which she had argued that Samoan culture does not suffer from repressed sexuality, because sex is ritualized as part of a person’s rite of passage. Mead’s findings have fallen into disrepute with the discovery that her informants were sly mimics who provided her with the answers she wanted, and thereby acted as self-translators. Translation, as Margaret Mead would have known, is one way in which the culture of an informant may be anthropologically classified. And in this respect, translation, since anthropology is a colonial discipline to begin with, functions as a process of control: translation is an aesthetics that enables settlement to take place. As a postcolonial analytic, translation (not forgetting that the translator is a traitor [traduttore/traditore] and an interpreter) then has to be theorized as poetic, as immanent within discourse and not outside of it. Samoan poetry (the example given is that of Tusiata Avia’s poetry collection Wild Dogs Under My Skirt) works on the indefinable Samoan term va, which Wright translates as simultaneous spatial and temporal relation and difference. In Avia’s poems (since the va is a dividing space within the void itself) translation is embedded within the verse because verse itself is translation. This poetic of verse therefore challenges the imposition of alien tropes, alien figures of speech, taken from the language into which the original is being translated. What Avia’s poems reveal, as one would expect, is not the untranslatability of culture but the creation of an other in an act of translation that parts company from its source. In an ironic replay, Samoan culture, through the gap of the va, makes the writer, the tusitala, herself a translator, and her poetry a translation.

The case for translation as a mode of self-representation and counter-correction finds another articulation (in the context of the essays in JCL) in my third selected essay. This essay by Sheshalatha Reddy (2012) looks at one of the most influential translations of the two pan-Indian epics, the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana, undertaken by Romesh Chunder Dutt towards the end of the nineteenth century. Reddy is interested in the political value of translation at a time when translations of the Sanskrit epics and high literary texts of Hinduism generally were very much an Orientalist prerogative. Through an act of sly appropriation of the colonial “monolanguage” and its oppressive and exclusive powers, Dutt insinuates that Indian modernity can be realized only through a reclamation of her antiquity. “No work in Europe”, he had noted, “is the national property of the nations to the same extent as the Epics of India are to the Hindus” (quoted in Reddy, 2012: 249). A product of the Empire, an Indian Civil Servant, Dutt was also an accomplished Sanskritist, who upon retirement as a civil servant taught Indology at University College, London. And he was a Hindu nationalist, which explains the Hindu bias in the ownership of the Sanskrit epics. In opting for an octametric rendition of Sanskrit ślokas (verses) the kind of epic metre that Matthew Arnold would have approved (Arnold had written about epic hexametres) Dutt, notes Reddy, “self-consciously placed himself within a tradition of translations by Orientalist scholars such as William Jones, H. H. Wilson, Max Müller, and Edwin Arnold” (2012: 248). If Dutt’s translations are a much earlier echo of Lazarus’s position on postcolonial modernity, their publication in the “Temple Classics” series may be read as the first moment in English literary publication when a non-Western text entered “the canon of World (read: Western) literature” (2012: 249). Where Orientalist scholarship had closed off these epics as signs of an ancient Aryan history no longer directly available to a colonized, and largely decadent race, Dutt’s translations were aimed at excavating the past to re-energize the present and de-link contemporary Indian history from its current colonial historiography where history began very much with a Western “discovery of India”. To do this Dutt read the epics as fully formed and absolute texts, uncontaminated by later accretions or commentaries. A national identity could be claimed only if a singular and stable text — the ideal of Western textual bibliography — could be given as an answer to the West’s own monolithic construction of its past.

The fourth essay is by Timothy Brennan on irony (2014). There is nothing specifically postcolonial or “Commonwealth” in this dense but immensely productive essay. Its publication in the journal is a sign of the unease that many postcolonial writers and theorists have felt towards the trope of irony. To them irony is a legacy of a fundamentally modernist (and implicitly racist) world view where irony, the ultimate Western literary trope, is seen as a marker of aesthetic value, the concept seen as possessing, after Kierkegaard, “world historical” value because “no true philosophy”, he had suggested, “is possible without doubt” (2014: 380). Kierkegaard’s deference to Hegel, however, creates an asymmetry in the definition of irony, because for Hegel irony and dialectics were mutually exclusive, which clearly was not the case for Socrates, the “founding father” of irony, for whom it functioned within a dialogic discourse and hence was part of any dialectic. Brennan’s point is that the resultant asymmetry comes about because the relationship between irony and dialectics is presented as being always antagonistic. From Vico to Hegel to Gramsci irony is decried for its lack of candour (although Gramsci [2000] himself prefers “passionate sarcasm” over irony). The postcolonial unease with irony is based on the presumption that a postcolonial (as an oppositional historiography in the context of the colonial experience) dialectics, after Hegel or Gramsci, though quite possibly not Marx, will have to reject irony as a principle of interpretation and reading. After all, as György Lukács had noted, irony is the self-correction of a world’s fragility and would make literature as a didactic order untenable. Irony then “misprisons” (though Harold Bloom had used the term differently as “misprision”) the postcolonial political. Although not made explicit, postcolonial irony could be read as a “standpoint” and not a purely literary mode. In this way it creates the condition of ethical freedom from the prison house of language. Moreover it also gets around a reading of world literature, which is read as the literature of the non-West but which nevertheless is subjected to the protocols of irony derived from Western aesthetics. If irony itself is a politics (that acknowledges the ongoing tension between trope and dialectics) as well as a literary figure, then irony as a Western theory does not undermine one’s reading of world literature and Naipaul and Rushdie therefore should not be condemned for praising R. K. Narayan for his use of irony. What world or postcolonial literature (depending upon one’s starting point here) needs is a critique of irony as a concept, acknowledging its inner tensions and historical contestations, and not its rejection as the sign of imperial and racist high modernism from whose iron tentacles postcolonial theory wishes to free itself.

And without concluding

In 2001 Blackwell published Robert J. C. Young’s encyclopaedic introduction to postcolonialism. Twelve years later Oxford followed suit by publishing an even larger handbook on postcolonialism, edited by Graham Huggan (2013). The book has contributions from most people one would associate with postcolonial criticism and theory. It is a vast, engaging, if uneven, work that is both a retrospective and a search for what Agamben refers to as potentiality, the “yet-to-be-realized paradigm” (2013: 256). Stephen Slemon, who wrote a valuable afterword to the volume, sums up the handbook’s use-value and its theoretical premise on postcolonialism as one of critical refusal, after Ann Laura Stoler, of any kind of “unquestioned identification” (2013: 697). So in any postcolonial conspectus there can be no declared route, no definable field, no overriding theory, but only a turn to endless questioning. The postcolonial therefore eschews any kind of institutional disciplining or control. The volume, says Slemon, is a critical turning away from orthodoxies, perhaps a turning away even from its own established practices, its flagship journals, its “postcolonial canons”, its confinement to units and courses taught in universities. Echoing Robert Young’s essay in New Literary History (2012), Slemon concedes that postcolonial theory has no centre, but since “there is no single motor of historical causality, no organizing master narrative” (2013: 700) the challenge will be to achieve a pluralism attuned to those multiple oppressions that continue to be part of the world. Slemon could have also added another of Young’s insights in that essay: the notion of the other has to be dispensed with because the other is always within, because the idea of being always involves, after Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben, and Emmanuel Lévinas, “being singular plural” (2012: 39). Hence, if anything, postcolonial theory has to be forever vigilant, so that the lived experiences of people generally are not reduced to abstractions or to some kind of absolute “gaze”, the camera eye, fixed and unchanging, through which the other is given meaning and form.