The Practical Discipline

In a verwaltete Welt, a world enmeshed in administration, no cultural product arrives unmediated. The struggle of art to appear autonomous only “call[s] into question a society where nothing is allowed to be itself and everything is subject to the principle of exchange” (Zuidervaart 88). The dwindling of artistic autonomy from the interests of the market is everywhere apparent, even as cultural expression appears to be flourishing globally. Indeed, Graham Huggan has commented on the post-colonial as “sales tag” for “the international commodity culture of late (twentieth-century) capitalism” (24). In his almost poetic explication of Marx’s views on culture and the market in Adventures in Marxism, Marshall Berman explains,

Marx does not expect that great ideas and works will fall stillborn for want of a market: the modern bourgeoisie is remarkably resourceful in wringing profit out of thought. What will happen instead is that creative processes and products will be used and transformed in ways that will dumbfound or horrify their creators. But the creators will be powerless to resist, because they must sell their labor power in order to live. (134)

Within the economy so presciently envisioned by Marx, writers who “wish to strike back against the center,” as Huggan phrases it, nevertheless “write and are marketed for it” (24).

Representation through literature thus emerges as an ethical and political issue with a distinctly economic dimension that interfaces with the educational apparatus. Representations from the periphery are rewarded through institutional prizes like the Booker in England or the Governor General’s in Canada. Mistry’s novel, one may recall, was shortlisted for the former and did win the latter. Rushdie and Roy’s novels too have won a Booker each. Huggan reports that “of the twenty-seven Booker prizewinners to date [1994] . . . , no fewer than seventeen deal with Empire” (26). This sort of support for certain sorts of postcolonial cultural production, virtually tantamount to corporate sponsorship, is not a phenomenon discrete from the increasing financialization of most spheres of activity; it emphasizes, in fact, that the timing has been particularly propitious for the rise of postcolonial studies on account of the explosion in the international book trade in the last quarter of this century and the appetite of this market for novelty. The resistance of the cultural product only reinforces the elasticity and resilience of the market system, constantly satisfying its quest for novelty. An acknowledgment of the existence of the postcolonial text within a managed and administered intellectual sphere is a crucial preliminary to critical analysis. The making of a practical discipline of postcolonial studies, the standardization of expectations and responses, and the normalization of these practices thus constitute the subject of this chapter.

Few topics are likely to clear a room more quickly than a proposed consideration of the rise of postcolonial studies. Old hat, all that, and typically prone to generating more heat than light. There is remarkable consensus by now about the limitations and obfuscations of the term, even if the available criticism on the topic also betrays a surprising capacity for mutual inconsistencies, as Hall, among others, has noted in “When Was the ‘Post-Colonial’?”1 Tracing the footsteps of pioneering worthies, too, is now best treated as footnote material and the complications of the term accepted as inconvenient but by now unremarkable impedimenta that nevertheless do not really impede discussion at all. The field continues to flourish as a practical discipline, in some measure because of the very inconsistencies and obfuscations so long bemoaned. The impatient reader may thus rest assured that those old chestnuts, barring unavoidable exceptions, will remain undisturbed. This chapter is concerned with the unacknowledged and suppressed history of the field in the First World academy, and in the process by which it has come to assume this shape through its determinative elisions and exceptions, thereby suggesting the frame narrative that structures the critical apparatus that has been normalized in the reading of postcolonial literature.

As it comes to enjoy subdisciplinary status within the humanities, and most often in English departments, the field has incurred (un)due respect as well as resentment, a consequence of what Paul de Man once referred to as “magnification or minimalization” in The Resistance to Theory: “If a cat is called a tiger it can easily be dismissed as a paper tiger. . . . The same tactic works in reverse: calling the cat a mouse and then deriding it for its pretense to be mighty” (5). Postcolonial theory and literature are thus simultaneously imbued with unprecedented transformative powers and exaggerated hopes for social change on the one hand and dismissed as overly reductive and excessively institutionalized on the other. These constraints, coupled with a phenomenon economists have theorized as “self-reinforcing mechanism”2 and one Michel Foucault more familiarly describes as disciplinization, account for many of the problems we have come to recognize as the postcolonial predicament.

The deterministic blind spots and problems that have become the stuff of discontent are written into the story of the evolution of the field in the Western academy. The rapid disciplinization of the field could only have taken place through attendant practices of inclusion and exclusion. The discernible phase of reinforcement and repeated inter-textual referencing to build a recognizable, often epigonic, quasicanonical body of texts has been noted by at least one major critic. The hardening—quick-setting in fact—of early practices and assumptions into default foundational elements has by now become an inescapable reality. As in economic systems where “lock-in happens dynamically, as sequential decisions ‘groove’ out an advantage that the system finds hard to escape from,” discursive systems too exert their impersonal tyranny (Arthur 13). The aggregation of what Michel Foucault refers to as “dubious unities” serves as the staple of discursive formation. The discursive practices scattered across the time, genres, and disciplines that constitute an investigation of a particular object of study are not necessarily coextensive with the discipline as such (26). Foucault’s thesis is that “in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected, organised and redistributed according to a certain number of procedures, whose role is to avert its powers and its dangers, to cope with chance events, to evade its ponderous, awesome materiality” (216). Among the rules of “exclusion” are those that establish the “privileged or exclusive right to speak of a particular subject,” the rights accorded, in other words, through the rites of professional passage (216).

The powerful imperative Foucault refers to as the “will to knowledge” is “reliant upon institutional support and distribution” and “tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse” (219). Apart from systems of exclusion, there are, Foucault observes, “internal rules, where discourse exercises its own control; rules concerned with the principles of classification, ordering and distribution” (220). Disciplines, he proposes,

are defined by groups of objects, methods, their corpus of propositions considered to be true, the interplay of rules and definitions, of techniques and tools: all these constitute a sort of anonymous system, freely available to whoever wishes, or whoever is able to make use of them, without there being any question of their meaning or their validity being derived from whoever happened to invent them. (222)

Admission in the form of valid entry into the discipline rests on the ability to seem to be dans le vrai of the discourse at hand: “It is always possible one could speak the truth in a void; one would only be in the true, however, if one obeyed the rules of some discursive ‘policy’” (224). Disciplines serve the purpose of providing a “a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits” (224). A final set of rules concerns “a question of determining the conditions it [discourse] may be employed, of imposing a certain number of rules upon those individuals who employ it, thus denying access to everyone else” (224).

Thanks to efficient disciplinization, the field functions within the logic of what I have earlier referred to, pace Heaney, as the “challenger’s intelligence.” This is the logic responsible for and itself regulated by a regime of noncoercive governmentality, a phenomenon directly associated with the stages of the growth of capital that most Frankfurt School theorists describe as the verwaltete Welt and that Max Weber had earlier described as the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality. Claims about the field’s postdisciplinarity and inherently interrogative nature notwithstanding, a survey of the evolution of the field of postcolonial studies reveals a mounting accretion of disciplinary raiments that give it predictable shape and ensure a degree of foreseeable repetition.

By now, the “understanding” of the term and the field is based not on transcendent realities but in the context of disciplinization within a particular historical moment established on the terms of the challenger’s intelligence. Even more curiously, the tenets of the practical discipline often proceed, not from, but despite the productive complications of these tenets in postcolonial theory. The cultural and intellectual productions of erstwhile European colonies and their modern diaspora are thus being constructed within the potent crucible of a highly institutionalized educational system as “native intelligence.” In the first place, the intelligence provided in the phenomenon of the empire writing back is constructed as an authentic “native” difference that is indigenous by virtue of its particular and by now predictable form and content. Further, it is rendered intelligible through the regularizing mechanisms of the educational institution and its paraphernalia to a primarily First World constituency that supports its production and dissemination by furnishing capital, publishers, readers, and other institutional support. By the same token, certain sorts of postcolonial productions remain unintelligible or discursively and otherwise incapable of being dans le vrai.

As a result of a consensual synecdochic fallacy, by now the term has become naturalized through these disciplinary measures, evolving into an ideological artifact with a phantom reality. Its unruliness and inherent uncontainability effectively disciplined, the field has developed along the groove that has proved most profitable to it. In the first place, it is a literary postcoloniality that now dominates as the preferred mode of postcolonial articulation, although this domination, which occurs seriatim, is not always acknowledged. The field’s obligation to account for particular historical events and their consequences in a current temporal frame, its assumed raison d’être, is still unchallenged, but the limits and potential of literary and cultural expression in meeting these obligations have yet to be soberly evaluated. Individual authors continue to be castigated for failing to provide a revolutionary vision and a program for change while numerous examples of political and ecological activism in the postcolony scarcely register a meaningful presence in metropolitan discourse. Serious analyses of economic and political realities in the postcolony, likewise, are apt to be sidelined. Literary postcoloniality is nevertheless charged with explaining and addressing these realities, and then criticized for doing it unsatisfactorily. The advantages that have accrued to “going along” with the established groove prevent a clear-sighted appraisal of these contradictions.3 The dissociation between this literal sense and the more general notion of postcolonialism as a study of power in a more or less Third World or minority context is exposed in the primacy generally accorded to Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism.4 The usual proviso that accompanies this pronouncement is that the book be considered the primogenitor not necessarily of postcolonial or anticolonial articulations but of the field of postcolonialism in the First World academy. Older histories of postcolonial expression can thus be accommodated even as they are disavowed by this conspicuous marking of disciplinary origin.

It is perhaps our fascination for neat beginnings that accounts for the relative silence about the field’s murkier disciplinary ancestry. Most accounts of the rise of the field fail to acknowledge that in the Anglo-American context, the development and consolidation of programs such as African American, Asian American, and feminist studies provide the crucial background for Said’s text as the official beginning. All these fields predate the formal appearance of postcolonial studies in the curriculum and have served as a necessary space clearing for the advent of the latter. On the tails of these important fields, postcolonialism was able to enter the academy after the prerequisite administrative battles had been won for the most part by these earlier pioneers. The importance of the Critical Inquiry issue on “Race, Writing, and Difference” (edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr.) in the development of postcolonial studies and its showcasing of prominent postcolonial critics is significant when we consider that, in archival terms, the titular themes were first introduced into the academic lexicon by black intellectuals. Customarily, much is made of the intellectual gemütlichkeit between post-colonialism and poststructuralism/postmodernism at the expense of attention to these connections. The nexus between postcolonialism and its unacknowledged predecessors has received scant attention, so thoroughly is the field saturated with this disciplinary and self-reinforcing sense of official and time-bound rather than conceptual and intellectual beginnings.

It is thus that one of the most significant early models for contemporary postcolonial studies is all but forgotten. Such is the duration of public memory that the development of American literary studies and its naturalization in the academy is curiously unacknowledged as a valuable, and instructive, precursor for today’s postcolonial. The authors of The Empire Writes Back suggest that “its [the United States’s] relationship with the metropolitan centre as it has evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere” but they go on to ascribe the dismissal of the U.S.’s “post-colonial nature” to “its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played,” explaining their own omission of a discussion of its texts in the following terms: in the United States, there is “a body of texts far too large even to summarize here” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 2, 133). The vast number of postcolonial productions from the better part of the globe, however, has not posed a problem for their taxonomic purposes. Nor, indeed, does the phenomenon of internal colonization in various postcolonies challenge the sort of differential typology that relies on difference only on a global scale.

A more plausible logistic reason for the exclusion of American literature, the authors imply, is its evolution into a national literature—a trajectory entirely desirable for other postcolonial productions and one that need not obviate the transnational dimension of national literature (133). The scopic difference entailed in studying literature within a national/cultural context may well yield richer readings. The conflation of postcoloniality with marginality has also led to a reluctance to envisage American and other white settler cultures as postcolonial, thus blinding us to the potential for illuminating lessons from the experience and cultural productions of these sites through scrupulous comparative analysis. The question, “Is the United States postcolonial?” is now being answered thus: “When used as a descriptive term for the United States, postcolonial does not name its past as a white settler colony or its emergence as a neocolonial power; rather, it designates the presence of racial minorities and Third World immigrants” (Sharpe 181). Despite post-colonialism’s pretensions to comprehensiveness, the enlightening early history of American literature as resistive and its transformation into a disciplinary entity are issues that play all too small a role in accounts of the rise of postcolonial studies.

A different strand in the development of literary postcolonial studies leads back to the study of commonwealth and ex-colonial literatures in Great Britain and many of its First World postcolonies, excluding the United States till somewhat later. The institution of such inquiry was buttressed by the influx of a steady stream of writers and intellectuals from former colonies that continued a relationship of intellectual and cultural dependency with a country perceived as a mother country, and London as the symbolic capital and metropolitan point of reference. Among the names one could list from the register of influential post-colonial exports would be those of Henry James, T. S. Eliot, V. S. Naipaul, Caryl Philips, Katherine Mansfield, Buchi Emecheta, and Salman Rushdie. A similar influx of writers and critics from erstwhile colonies into the United States in a somewhat later historical period and its impact on the development of the field here has received far greater attention.

Another submerged segment of the history of the field might thus be sought in the vibrant area of what used to be called commonwealth literature. The links between the tradition of study of commonwealth literature and the development of literary postcolonial studies as we now know it might be deduced from the formative role played by critics from settler colonies, the Australians and Canadians most prominent among them, in the rise of postcolonial studies. As is well known, critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, who provided one of the most disciplinarily significant taxonomies of the field, are rooted in a serious and long Australian tradition of the study of commonwealth literature. Their publication in 1989 of The Empire Writes Back was of no small importance in accelerating the currency of the term in the First World academy and then the metropolitan academy worldwide. In the introduction to their book, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin use the term “post-colonial” to “cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization [modern European colonization] to the present day” (2). This early and important definition already suggests that the “post” in “postcolonial” would be nominal as far as the historical events of domination and independence were concerned; it was, one assumes, intended by the authors to signal posteriority to the advent of colonialism and possible resistance to it. The authors suggest that this term is to be preferred over others “because it points a way towards a possible study of the effects of colonialism in and between writing in english [sic] and writing in indigenous languages . . . as well as writing in other language diasporas” (24). Whether or not one is apt to agree with their definitions and classifications, the authors’ encyclopedic range, their important taxonomic work, and its textbook qualities assured The Empire Writes Back a deservedly signal role in the inaugural moments of the discipline of postcolonial studies. Along with a concurrently growing body of texts, their exertions and impressive scholarship provided—perhaps “created” is a more appropriate word— the necessary moment of clarity that must precede an acceptable launching of a field of study.

But moments of clarity come with an epistemological price tag; in this instance, their influential characterization of postcolonial literatures as emerging “in their present form out of the experience of colonization” and being marked by “the tension with the imperial power, and . . . their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” regardless of or at least “beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics” has led to an array of default assumptions about the field as it has since developed. The emphasis on the colonial experience predetermines the selection of texts as well as ways of reading them, although this was not necessarily intended by the authors’ characterization of what makes postcolonial literature “distinctive” (2).

Too, let us note briefly here that although the authors chose the term “post-colonial” over others “because it points a way towards a possible study of the effects of colonialism in and between writing in english [sic] and writing in indigenous languages . . . as well as writing in other language diasporas,” and although it “may well be the case” that vernacular language productions “far outweigh . . . in quantity and quality the work produced in english,” they withhold any consideration of these works on the grounds of their own (and other Western critics’) inability to evaluate their caliber: “Until much more extensive translations into english from these languages have been produced it is difficult for non-speakers of these languages to judge” (24, 122). This more or less reasonable (and one admits, disarmingly frank) admission nevertheless consolidates the dominance of the English-language text, although other developments in the academy that contribute to this phenomenon can also be noted. Because so much of the support for the field comes from the English and Anglo-American academy, productions in English have been more prominent in the field, bolstered by attention from the aforementioned award-granting institutions. This de facto emphasis on anglophone literature might be ascribed in part to the morphing of commonwealth studies into postcolonial studies in such parts of the world as England, Canada, and Australia.

The dwindling currency of the loosely cognate epithets “Third World” and “commonwealth” can be dated back in specific terms to the set of academic “events” beginning with the publication of Said’s Orientalism. More generally speaking, the supercession of earlier terms is entirely consonant with the “aging” to which ideas and intellectual terms are subject alongside the ephemerality of production techniques, labor processes, and other tangible commodities in what Alvin Toffler once dubbed the “throwaway” society. Salman Rushdie’s criticism of the epithet “commonwealth” in his 1983 essay, “Commonwealth Literature Does Not Exist,” might be all too easily leveled at its subsequently triumphant avatar, without threatening its eminence. Rushdie argues that the term effectively ghettoizes non-Western literature, erasing differences and selectively instating the experience of occupation by a foreign nation as the most significant criterion for forcing together disparate non-British literatures under this “new and badly made umbrella.” Dismissing the notion as chimeric, Rushdie nevertheless concludes that such a creature could be conjured up “if you set up enough faculties, if you write enough books and appoint enough research students” (70). Needless to say, similar misgivings haunt postcolonial studies.5

A rather unexpected vintage for some of Rushdie’s objections emerges if we delve into the conflicted history of American literature only a little earlier in the last century. One need only recall Nina Baym’s remarks in “Melodramas of Beset Manhood” to find that the same sort of disciplinary constraints that shaped (and limited) readings of American literature when feminist literary criticism began its forceful interventions are now being replayed with contemporary inflections in the context of postcolonial literature. Baym’s objection to the “going canon of major authors”—“We never read American literature directly or freely, but always through the perspective allowed by theories”—issues from a very similar dissatisfaction with the principle of suppression of those differences that cannot be accommodated by the cultural and sociopolitical preferences of prevalent critical theory (63). Baym concludes that

in pursuit of the uniquely American, they [critics] have arrived at a place where Americanness has vanished into the depths of what is alleged to be the universal male psyche. The theory of American fiction has boiled down to the phrase of my title: a melodrama of beset manhood. What a reduction this is of the enormous variety of fiction written in this country, by both women and men! (79)

Ahmad’s rejection of coherent theories that achieve their tenuous unity through obfuscatory and specious generalities in his response to Jameson’s much publicized essay, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” also recalls Baym’s frustration at the vanishing of the multiplicity and variety of “Americanness” in the relentless quest to manufacture and hypostatize it. A similar process has more successfully occurred in the case of the postcolonial, its pluralities and sometimes productively contradictory articulations effectively managed and regularized in the process of a disciplinization based on practical considerations.

A slew of critics nevertheless continue to defend the use of the earlier terms, even if their use has waned dramatically largely because “post-colonial” is more readily acceptable to the academy for reasons that have been amply exposed by critics such as Ahmad, Brennan, Dirlik, and Shohat. For the purposes of the discussion to follow, it is important to note that the very indeterminacy of the term “postcolonial,” moreover, also elegantly masks the almost invariable connotation of Third Worldliness.6 The cry for comparative analyses, sounded so early in the career of postcolonial studies in Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge’s seminal essay, “What Is Post(-)colonialism?” would have forestalled the euphemistic and obscurantist use of postcolonial thus. The case of mixed race postcolonies like Zimbabwe with a majority population in a sociopolitical minority position or that of Ireland with its contradictory experience of colonialism are only now receiving the sustained analysis each of these cases and many others deserve. The repression of these challenges in the early stages of canon formation was variously evidenced, especially through the growing body of textbooks in the field which recognize certain experiences as paradigmatic and others as anomalous enough to preclude consideration, thereby avoiding productive debate about the nature of the paradigm itself.

Shortly after the appearance of Mishra and Hodge’s important essay, the publication of the first postcolonial reader signaled the term and the field’s growing institutionalization. The preface to Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman’s early, and important, collection of readings in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory acknowledges the need, necessarily, “to proceed on the basis of all sorts of exclusions. . . . areas of current work such as radical geography had to be left out because of space constraints . . . sadly it seemed impossible to us both to give a sense of the debates and to do justice to the wide range of disciplinary areas where post-colonialism is an important or emergent issue” (x). The editors of this historically significant collection understood that exclusions were logistically necessary and the commitment to “Cultural Theory” a consequence both of their “institutional location and the desire to produce a collection with some degree of internal coherence” (x). These authors’ candid acknowledgments nevertheless betray the power and force of disciplinarity and its attendant tyrannies. Since then, several readers, monographs, and edited collections in the field have appeared. In the past two decades, “postcolonial” has more or less overtaken all cognate usages and is being deployed as an apposite adjective for “theory,” “space,” and “condition,” a distinction not accorded to “commonwealth” or “minority” discourse; it has also spawned other impressive neologisms, “postcoloniality” and “postcolonialism,” to name but two.

As noted by numerous critics, one of the most significant reasons for the exponential expansion in postcolonial discourse was the host climate generated by the development of postmodern theory and suspicion of an objective historical consciousness (Ashcroft et al. 162). Postcolonialism thus profited enormously from its appearance alongside “the politics of poststructuralism [which] forces the recognition that all knowledge may be variously contaminated” (Young 11).7 Although the theoretical formulations and vocabulary of poststructuralism have functioned as an intellectual taproot for many a postcolonial critic and have played a considerable role in the status of the field, the particular milieu created in the wake of the success of postmodernism has also been significant in enabling the extraordinary receptivity accorded to postcolonialism in the late seventies and thereafter. Postcolonial articulations, construed in anticolonial terms, are obviously anterior to the rise of the field as a disciplinary reality. Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart, for instance, appeared in 1958 and George Lamming’s The Pleasures of Exile in 1960; Frantz Fanon, who is considered one of the leading lights of postcolonial studies, had produced all his works by 1960. Indeed, The Wretched of the Earth, arguably his most influential postcolonial work, was published in 1961. The recuperation of his work in general and the renewed interest in the 1952 text Black Skin, White Masks in particular bespeak the status of these works as newly incarnated in the context of postmodern and psychoanalytic studies. Other earlier writers such as Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Edouard Glissant, Amos Tutuola, or Rabindranath Tagore continue to be rediscovered as postcolonial in a temporally and ideologically postmodern contemporary context. If the above instantiates the operation of a contemporary frame in the reception of earlier postcolonial work, other examples might be found that attest to an allied cognitive frame that is in operation in the selection of postcolonial texts. Baym’s complaint, “We never read American literature directly or freely, but always through the perspective allowed by theories,” resonates for the study of most postcolonial material (63). As older texts are recuperated within a postmodern cognitive frame, contemporary critical and belletristic productions in postcolonial studies are effectively reread in the act of being read.

Continuing debates on the relationship between postcolonial and postmodern discourse rest on the unfailing persistence of a belief in post hoc ergo propter hoc, a formula that applies in this case with curious inflections. Arif Dirlik suggests this relationship of posteriority explicitly in his accusation that “crucial premises of postcolonial criticism, such as the repudiation of post-Enlightenment metanarratives, were enunciated first in post-structuralist thinking and the various postmodernisms it has informed” (336). Dirlik’s formulation of the crucial premise of postcolonial criticism in the language and terms familiar from the vocabulary of post-structuralism indicate his correct apprehension of the origins of the field as constructed for the First World, but it also constitutes an unwitting capitulation to the fallacy that it is most productively viewed through this selective frame. Dirlik is far from being alone in selecting for attention—and detention—a particular part of the field as it has taken shape in the last quarter of this century. Post-colonial articulations before the onset of post-structuralism and postmodernism, even on the topic of the repudiation of post-Enlightenment metanarratives are usually reworked into the framework of a field defined by a postmodern cognitive frame.

Two largely variant projects, Sara Suleri’s (un)autobiographical memoir, Meatless Days, and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s seminal essay, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” can thus be refracted through the same lens to examine their more or less peaceful coexistence in the registers of postcolonial discourse. Suleri’s disarticulation of the Third World woman and denaturalization of the category of woman, the claim, indeed, that “there are no women in the Third world,” is a gesture very much in keeping with postmodern disavowal of essentialist productions of meaning (Meatless Days 20). Mohanty’s rejection of Western feminism’s treatment of women as an “already constituted, coherent group” and of Third World woman as stereotypical victim, which results in the “suppression—often violent—of the heterogeneity of the subject(s) in question” attempts a similar disarticulation using the strategies of scrupulously researched specific histories rather than post-structuralist textual strategies as a counter to the untenable generalizations that function to shore up extant power structures (333). In both of the important instances cited above, the project of knowledge production about other cultures is under attack, one seen as suspicious in what we might glibly call—to modify our younger students’ argot slightly—“today’s postmodern society.”

Postcolonial credentials typically need to be renewed in the context of a more contemporary scheme that includes, apart from the domestic First World concerns emergent in an era of the financialization of the globe, the force field exerted by the theoretical movements of our time. Thus, whether we are examining contemporary articulations in post-colonial theory and literature or earlier ones, they both seem to suffer a relationship of posteriority with regard to post-structuralism and postmodernism.8 In their introduction to Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory Williams and Chrisman admit that “Even a few years ago, a book of this nature might well have seemed a rather strange proposition— not only because of a general lack of recognition of the importance of the field (or even a scepticism about whether such a field really existed), but also because of the apparent scarcity of texts from which one might construct such a collection. . . . this is not now the case, thanks on the one hand to a greater awareness and on the other to the remarkable output of people working in the post-colonial field in recent years” (ix; emphasis mine). The greater awareness they allude to codes one more instance of the discovery of native intelligence under the optimal conditions provided by contemporary Western theoretical and socioeconomic developments.

The dominance of the contemporary context in practical postcolonialism also explains why postcolonialism, primarily conceived as a discourse concerned with the impact of European colonialism on former colonies, is now being deployed in the discussion of transnational relations. Its impressive discursive vocabulary for the treatment of topics like nation, nationalism, diaspora, and hybridity lends itself, accurately if sometimes too selectively and unfortunately, to a perception of post-colonial theory as the discursive expression, indeed as the language of globalization and globalism. It is not irrelevant, of course, that postcolonialism is a discourse developed partly in response to those processes of modernization set in motion by colonialism that have morphed into the intricate and interwoven economic, social, and cultural relations of today. Given its other mandates and its history, this exclusionist understanding will not do, of course, but it is not difficult to see why this kind of postcolonial discourse captures the contemporary imagination.

More important, there are few contenders for this spot. Pursuant to the collapse of the Soviet empire and to the end of the cold war—to the end of history as Fukuyama would have it—the contemporary period has been widely designated postcommunist, creating yet another niche for postcolonialism as the remaining holdout (arguably, of course) against capitalist hegemony. In a less polemic sense, as far as the rise of post-colonial studies is concerned, timing is everything. The changing ethnic and racial demographics of Anglo-America (already evident for some years in the United Kingdom) since 1965 and the increasing numbers and influence of immigrant communities in general, and in the academy in particular, must therefore be counted as important factors as well. The movement of postcolonial “labor,” however educated or technically skilled, to the centers of capital has had an inevitable impact on the cultural scape of the First World. The increasing production and availability of texts in English by postcolonial authors and the actual presence of “postcolonials” in the West with the ability to teach and discuss those texts while exerting an influence on the educational and cultural ideoscapes in Western countries and their reinforcement by the growing numbers of minority students are related factors.9 An assessment of the reasons for the phenomenal success of postcolonialism must also take into account the cardinal role of technological developments, particularly in the area of communications. People, ideas, and labor have traveled for centuries and entrepreneurial ventures have brought about cultural convergences at unexpected sites. The unprecedented speed and ease of transmission of ideas and transportation of people today, however, is of some significance for a field that has emerged in the information age and is defined by the terms of modernity. The technologically facilitated movement of postcolonial intellectuals in the metropolitan circuits of the world academy, the rapidly multiplying number of journals in the field, and a growing internet academic community with many more fora for the exchange and transmission of information and ideas have provided a virtually limitless audience and a well-spotlighted stage for postcolonial ideas.

The growing visibility of academicians of South Asian origin in the field of cultural criticism and the growing ranks of South Asian academicians resident in Great Britain and Anglo-America have served to consolidate the status and currency of postcolonial literature and theory considerably, although not nearly as prominently or exclusively as Dirlik seems to suggest. Dirlik’s overestimation of the contribution of “Third World intellectuals”—whose arrival in “First World academe” is said to be the point at which the postcolonial “begins”—appears to willfully slight the role of significant Canadian and Australian critics such as Stephen Slemon, Helen Tiffin, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Simon During; South African critics such as Neil Lazarus; or American critics such as Timothy Brennan. The singling out of critics of South Asian origin also constitutes an implicit dismissal of African and Caribbean intellectuals whose work is seminal to contemporary developments in postcolonial theory and is now undergoing substantial and necessary recuperation.10 The hegemonic shape of postcolonialism nevertheless emerges in Dirlik’s essay as one dominated by South Asian intellectuals, and it is one that continues to inflect the usual understanding of post-colonialism. A disavowal of plural origins in the “outline” form of the field need not imply ignorance of a more rounded apprehension of its complexities, but the rush to theory and seizure in the face of an otherwise unmanageable chaos is itself symptomatic of “the condition of the intelligentsia of global capitalism,” and indeed of the condition of a new stage of spatial compression that obscures the “elsewheres” in favor of the readily graspable schematic.

That the “colonial” of “postcolonial” is more or less synonymous with European and/or Western (Atlanticist if one prefers) has interesting implications for intellectual pursuits. Even in a purely modern sense, the conflation of “colonizer” with “European” is a problematic one.11 Without discounting the need for the discursive convenience supplied by shorthand such as “European colonialism” or “European Orientalism,” customary usage is challenged by more than one conflicted case. The plot thickens, for instance, when we consider the case of Ireland, which is both European and postcolonial, a matter I will preview here in the context of this discussion but will elaborate in the next chapter. The conflict is unwittingly revealed in this telling passage from Said’s Culture and Imperialism: “European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean . . . I see as part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples and, therefore, as related to Orientalist descriptions of the Islamic world, as well as to Europe’s special ways of representing the Caribbean islands, Ireland, and the Far East” (quoted in Longley 30; Longley’s emphasis). The power of customary usage is such that we know what is meant. Said is clearly aware of the idea of Europe as a colonial power and of Ireland’s status as an internal, “white colony” (Culture and Imperialism xv); his essay on “Yeats and Decolonization” attests to this understanding of the complexities of the Irish experience. One assumes that Said intends a similarly “discursive” Europe (and West) rather than Europe or the West in their entirety in the following statement:

At the margins of Western society, all the non-European regions, whose inhabitants, societies, histories, and beings represented a non-European essence, were made subservient to Europe, which in turn demonstrably continued to control what was not Europe, and represented the non-European in such a way as to sustain control. (106)

This inference might also be drawn from another passage in which Said clarifies that it would be “too simple and reductive to argue that everything in European or American culture . . . prepares for or consolidates the grand idea of empire” (80). The first two passages nonetheless betray the power of conventional usage. The ambiguities presented by Mitteleuropa, the very heart of Europe, an area pulsating with the contradictions of being between East and West ideologically and otherwise, offer yet another instructive comparative case that adumbrates the extent to which the idea of Europe must necessarily be forcefully imagined both by the imperial European colonizer and his others. The exception may not negate the rule, but it can be a worthwhile stopping point for a critical discourse.12

The general predisposition of postcolonial discourse away from the examination of such locations as Latin America and Cuba—excoriated by critics like Brennan—evolves from a somewhat arbitrary quirk in the usage of an otherwise expansive term, one that is inevitably linked to a cultural politics that continues to privilege a constructed Euro-American center of relatively recent vintage. Brett Levinson offers an alternative explanation for the marginality of Latin America in postcolonial studies: “Latin America,” he suggests, “disrupts most postcolonial discourses because it is not Western and not Other, but the third term, the border, the relation between the two” (156). Although Levinson’s is a persuasive account, the relative absence of Latin America from a postcolonial map might be ascribed at least equally to the primacy of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century phases of colonialism in postcolonial studies as well as a continued, even increasing, emphasis on anglophone literature facilitated by the transnational book trade. A proper consideration of Latin American cultural and intellectual products would, of course, also entail the study of Spanish, if not Brazilian Portuguese, and the need for these languages is poorly matched against others such as French and German, despite the presence of large Hispanic populations in Anglo-America where geographical contiguity would seem to warrant an inclusion of Latin American concerns within the dominant rather than peripheral postcolonial rubric. As J. Jorge Klor de Alva notes in “Colonialism and Postcolonialism as (Latin) American Mirages,” certain meanings of the term “colonial”—“dependency, control—are clearly applicable to the past and present relations between the native communities and non-Indians [in Latin America]” but “in light of today’s insistence on ethnicity and race (over economics and class) as critical components of social cohesion and as determinants of socioeconomic experience, and as a result of our recently heightened awareness of the negotiated nature of ethnoracial identity, neither term [colonial or colonialism], as commonly understood today, seems particularly useful for making sense of the cultural processes that engendered postcontact and post-independence societies,” underscoring the extent to which certain models of colonialism and postcolonialism have become normalized in the discipline (18, 3–4). The capricious selection of a particular season as the season of colonialism with a preordained cast of characters as villains and victims might be explained away on the grounds of disciplinary coherence, if not convenience—for disciplinarity almost always implies boundaries that are not always defensible.

The content of postcolonial identity is implicitly assumed to reside in the economic deprivation and disprivileging associated with Third Worldliness. The internal striation we find in the so-called South these days continues to be invisible in the persistently macroscopic view that defines postcoloniality in metropolitan discourse. In this view, there is little room for considering the complexities wrought by contemporary technologies and the new world order and the new alignments and coalitions that complicate the notion of bipolar or even tripolar power bases. In her debut novel, Zenzele, J. Nozipo Maraire describes the symptoms of “the postcolonial syndrome” thus: “acquisition, imitation, and a paucity of imagination” (17). This syndrome has ensured the perpetuation of a preordained maldevelopment trajectory that maintains the dominance of a certain class and the progressive impoverishment of others. In a short story aptly titled “For Whom Things Did Not Change,” Ama Ata Aidoo emphasizes the emptiness of independence as a meaningful moment in the life of an aging retainer at a government rest house that has registered a change in administration in the complexion of its visitors but not in their attitude toward the old man. Finding a sympathetic listener in an unusual visitor who responds to him as a human being rather than as a servant, Zirigu confesses his secret hope after independence: “But now we are independent,” he remembers thinking, “they are going to make this house new. My own people will give me a closet and an electric light” (31). When Zirigu returns after the renovations are finished, however, this is what he finds in his quarters:

They had put fresh paint on the walls. They had repaired the steps leading to the rooms and they had made us a little verandah. But there were no electric lights and in the lavatory, no water-closet. I discovered they had taken away the old pail and given me a new one. My own people who are big men do not think I should use these good things they use. (32)

Zirigu’s question of his “young master,” “what does ‘Independence’ mean?” echoes throughout a postcolonial world that has failed to bridge the gap between its better and its lesser endowed peoples. In his angry and scatological novelistic diatribe, Aidoo’s fellow Ghanaian Ayi Kwei Armah baldly accuses the sons of the nation of producing the “same old stories of money changing hands and throats getting moistened and palms getting greased” (10). The difference is that “if the old stories aroused any anger, there was nowhere for it to go. The sons of the nation were now in charge, after all. How completely the new thing took after the old” (10). “So much time has gone by,” Armah laments, “and still there is no sweetness here” (67). Aidoo’s story (from a collection titled No Sweetness Here, published two years later, which picks up Armah’s despondent phrase) is a similar plaint at the vacuity of independence as a symbol of emancipation for the majority of the people who will find that they have awaited this moment in vain. The South Asian Urdu poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz would openly declare in his “Subh-e-Azadi (August 1947)”: “Ye dagh dagh ujala, ye shab-ghazida sahar / Vo intizar tha jisk-ka, ye vo sahar to nahin . . . Abhi charag-e-sar-erah ko kuch khabar hi nahin; / Abhi girani-e-shab men kami nahin ai / Chale-chalo ke vo manzil abhi nahin ai” [Freedom’s Dawn (August 1947): This stained daylight, night-blighted dawn / This is not the dawn we longed for. . . The weight of night is still upon us / our mind and spirit not free from ransom set / Go on, for the goal is not yet] (Poems by Faiz 127; my translation).

Fanon anticipates the moment of surprise when “the people find out that the iniquitous fact of exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one” (145). His sober reminder that “the fact of having a national flag and the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the population to give up their interests or privileges,” that “natives like themselves do not lose sight of the main chance, but quite on the contrary seem to make use of the war in order to strengthen their material situation and their growing power” underscores the bitterness of discovery and the loss of moral certainties that follows: “Everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side and the good on the other” (144, 145). A great deal of postcolonial theory and literature thus enjoin upon us the need to encounter difficult realities and to turn away from uncomplicated and unquestioned certainties. A more expansive understanding of colonialism beyond the strictures of modern European colonialism and its Northern avatars and of internal colonialism will follow if we are able to admit these issues within the scope of the “dominant” postcolonial problem, and not merely as anomalous or supplementary to it.13 The expansionist and aggressive invasion of tribal lands, the displacement of millions of indigenous peoples, the persistence of illiteracy and class-determined access to jobs and education are all versions of internal annexation and abuse of indigenous resources in a manner scarcely less opprobrious than that of the colonial project that continues to command metropolitan attention to the exclusion of other concerns. The oppression of Fourth World peoples throughout the postcolonial world, the growing economic disparities, the continuing vulnerability of women, and the oppressions of bureaucratic statist machines are topics deemed worthy of a great deal of postcolonial literature in vernacular languages as well as in English. Owing to the dominance of practical formulae that focus on topics of interest in the metropole, these are not areas that have received serious consideration in a dominant paradigm that assumes that the empire can only write back to First World concerns.14 The implication of pre-European societal and production models in the colonial project, as I have attempted to argue earlier, or “precolonial” colonialism and internal colonialism as relevant and related phenomena thus also remain largely unattended in practice even when they command theoretical attention. Most egregiously, moreover, the paucity of nonliterary representations of resistance seriously belittles the efforts of those who are effectively resisting transnational capitalism, maldevelopment projects, and the heavy hand of the state in the Third World when they threaten the rights and survival of less empowered groups.15

A dramatic symptom of inattention to these complexities is the relatively underdeveloped thread of Marxist criticism in postcolonial work, as Lazarus bemoans in Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Post-colonial World, even as he suggests that “it has today become possible” for the “first time since the field was instituted in the early eighties” for “Marxist scholars to engage postcolonial studies on its own ground” (15). The relative relegation of Marxist doctrine to the fringes of theoretical activity thus far—barring the important interventions of Ahmad and a few other critics—however, has prevented a meaningful reconception of the three or more or fewer worlds in terms other than the geographical.

The above discussion details one symptomatic instance of two interrelated problems, the one discursive and the other an undeniable political reality: that postcolonial discourse betrays its inability to avoid writing back to the center or passing through it in the same way that the post-colonial nation is unavoidably, and often counterproductively, tethered to its founding “parent.” Obliged to resort to self-definition and a future trajectory in terms derived from the structural systems of European modernity in both cases, the “post” of postcolonial is a telling sign of the contradictions and ambiguities that attend both in the quest for “independent” articulation. A structural—rather than individual, it must be emphasized—lack of autonomy fashions the choices accessible to articulation within the “postcolonial” register. In the practical discipline, then, a wide range of definitional and terminological problems collude with a fundamental reliance on the terms set by the challenger’s intelligence, leading to both under and overdeterminative claims.

A final instantiation of “postcolonial” criticism as a practical skill concludes my discussion. Among the six activities listed in Peter Barry’s Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory in the section, “What Postcolonial Critics Do,” is the following:

They develop a perspective, not just applicable to postcolonial literatures, whereby states of marginality, plurality and perceived “Otherness” are seen as sources of energy and potential change. (198)

The tacit goal of social activism implied in this description is joined in the other five activities suggested by Barry with rejection of universalism, examination of colonial literature for its representations of the other or its silences, celebration of hybridity, and the foregrounding of difference. Conspicuous by its absence from this list is the attempt to link these goals with the development of a postcolonial poetics. No less glaring is the upbeat translation of “Otherness” as a source of energy and potential change, given that any number of postcolonial literary texts might be cited as examples of an attempt to call defeat by its proper name and to recognize the increasing sway of totalizing systems. As part of the apparatus by which a discipline is consolidated, introductory texts of this nature contribute to the undue solidification of an area of study in terms that cannot fully represent the plenitude of issues and concerns that belong to it. The “description” of what postcolonial critics do, and the unsaid recommendation that alert students would do well to do the same, imperceptibly slides into a prescription for a postcolonial methodology. The containment of postcolonial literature and theory within this disciplinary structure thus operates through a process that Foucault refers to as “normalization.”

It is beyond the scope and design of the current project to instantiate a redress of all the exclusions and problems addressed above. My purpose in this chapter has been to attempt a composite profile for the practical discipline of postcolonial studies. It is within this context that the texts here studied must be located in order to fathom the tacit administrations to which they are subject. Isolating a select hegemonic group of texts for examination, however, I intend to pursue an investigation of potential value and “truth-content” in the precise context of textual and sometimes even biographical compliance (real and perceived) with many of the dominant tropes associated with the practical discipline. The next chapter explores the evolution of these tropes from the process of worlding that defines (etymologically, “limits”) the practical discipline of postcolonialism.