Postcolonialism: My Living (review)

Postcolonialism: My Living, by Arun Mukherjee. Toronto: TSAR, 1998. Xx + 242 pp. ISBN 0-920661-75-0 paper.

This is a collection of sixteen essays written by Arun Mukherjee during the 1990s, many previously published. It brings together in one place the work of an energetic literary critic who, along with writers like Shyam Selvadurai and Robinton Mistry, has given voice to the cultural space of South Asian/Canadian writing. The essays are very readable, conversational in their tone, and strewn with anecdotes, making it an approachable text for students encountering postcolonial theories and literatures for the first time.

The title of the book indicates the fate of growing up in India as a postcolonial and arriving in Canada as a Commonwealth scholar in 1971, and the professional niche she occupies as a teacher of postcolonial literatures in a Canadian university. Her essays track her struggles with the contradictions of these positions, including the frustration of having to teach in one term the postcolonial literatures of five regions (Australia-New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, and South Asia), two of which were settler-colonies. The essays are grouped into five sections: "Interrogating Postcolonialism"; "Postcolonialism in Canada"; "Postcolonialism and Gender"; "Reading Texts"; and "On Capital T-Theory."

The first essay ("First World Readers, Third World Texts," section 1) lays down some of the central premises of Mukherjee's thought and teaching. The teaching of postcolonial literatures has produced a homogenized third world and institutional premises are responsible for this distortion. The logic of this pedagogy is that colonialism is the unifying thread making nationalism rather than socialist or other resistances an important focus. Colonialism is only one part of the postcolonial identity and postcolonial identities are not only about the loss of the precolonial.

In "Interrogating Postcolonialism" (section 1), Mukherjee addresses the issue of constructing a unitary postcolonial subject to which she returns in several of her essays. In "Canadian Nationalism, Canadian Literature and Racial Minority Women" (section 2), she points out that racial minority and Aboriginal authors like Mary Panegoosho Cousins problematize white, Canadian, postcolonial identity. "The Emergence of Dalit Writing" (section 1) discusses the problem of identifying the postcolonial in Indian literatures, particularly since writers belonging to oppressed lower caste and outcaste groups question the hegemony of upper-caste cultures and literatures. These essays emphasize the cultural and historical conditions that produce different postcolonial literatures and subjects (even in the same region) and the manner in which they are inscribed in unequal relations of power.

The most significant essay is "Bakhtinian Dialogism and Bessie Head's Dialogue with India" (section 4). This is an excursion into her encounters with African literatures after having been immersed in curricula in India and Canada that regularly exclude dialogues between regions like Asia and Africa. And yet, as Vassanji's fiction indicates, India and East Africa traded for centuries even though the history of these exchanges remains neglected. Again, Bessie Head, a South African colored woman, describes her position as a "Sudra" (a term for a lower-caste person in India) in A Question of Power. She identifies herself with India's oppressed Dalits and the Buddha's wife suggesting that social hierarchies and gender produce unusual comrades. Beyond the obsession with empire and the metropole, it seems to me that an urgent area of research for postcolonial theory and literatures and a comparative cultural studies is these histories of migration, exchange, domination, and exploitation, to be sure, but also mutual inspiration and a shared history.