Postcolonialism: My Living by Arun Mukherjee (review)

humanities 555 where Amelia Howe Kritzer details how Churchill effects a catharsis of dangerous toxins in the systems represented in her plays. The scepticism of Icecream and Churchill’s denial of the `pleasure of knowing’ are addressed by Robert Gross, resonating with Joylynn Wing’s application of Donna Haraway’s `infidel heteroglossia’ to Churchill’s `languaging strategies’ in Mad Forest. One of Churchill’s more recent and more difficult plays receives much attention. Ann Wilson suggests a psychoanalytic paradigm for managing the opacity of The Skriker. Geraldine Cousin sees the shape-shifting Skriker on a continuum of disowned figures in Churchill’s plays, whereas Alice Rayner suggests a contextualizing for the figure and the play with other ghostlike presences in Churchill’s works. The essays in this book complement each other in such a way that a wider context for exploration is provided, inviting readers into a critical dialogue that extends beyond Churchill’s plays. In the end, Essays on Caryl Churchill affords several pleasures. New ways of reading Churchill are offered, in the light of several different critical approaches. Essays that are more anecdotal, or address the material conditions of production and different reading practices, balance the more challenging essays. Above all, the scholars convey the urgency and compelling nature of Churchill’s plays. You’ll want to return to Top Girls for a reread and tackle The Skriker if you haven’t already. Ultimately, this is the best testament to the power of these essays: their passion for Churchill’s work is infectious. (MARLENE MOSER) Arun Mukherjee. Postcolonialism: My Living TSAR 1998. xx, 242. $21.95 Practitioners in the field of postcolonialism will welcome this collection because it sets out cogently and graphically the institutional absurdities which traditionally define and structure this field of study. Those hired to teach in postcolonial studies discover, as did Mukherjee herself, that they are inserted into a preordained institutional space where, in contrast to their colleagues, they are asked to be expert in the cultures of five different global regions whose precise parameters remain somewhat ill defined but whose reach is impossibly vast. As Mukherjee demonstrates, the pedagogical implications of this institutional positioning mean that postcolonialism 's ostensive raison d'être is successfully undermined by these structures. In other words, what follows if one is supposed to teach a survey course on South Asia, the Caribbean, Canada, and AustraliaBNew Zealand? In fact the regions are not even as clearly defined as this and what is generally indicated are `Third World' or `other' writings, meaning literatures outside British literature and even more vaguely from those areas of the world which formed part of the former British Empire. Faced 556 letters in canada 1999 by this situation, how can one help but essentialize a culture or deliver other than token texts, whether canonical or not? And it is that very essentializing gesture which postcolonialism in its theoretical formulations attempts to question as a way to provoke awareness of unequal geopolitical power relationships between the `First' and `Third' world, between those traditionally colonized and those who perpetrated colonialism. But of course as Mukherjee points out, those kinds of oppositions don't quite work either because of, for example, the vexed relationship between settler colonies such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand and places such as India, Africa, and the Caribbean. And what about the indigenous populations within the various countries designated ? Some of the most engrossing essays deal, for example, with Mukherjee's own discovery of Indian Dalit (`Untouchable') literature. What is particularly welcome about Mukherjee's collection is its consistent anchorage in decades of a scrupulously self-conscious pedagogical practice. Every theoretical dilemma arises out of specific classroom situations. This attention to material contexts structures and supports the many dilemmas Mukherjee lays out for us. What is the point, she queries, of posing abstract questions when the real strengths of postcolonialism are to interrogate closely and constantly the ethical ways in which literary and cultural studies either help sustain or help to question unequal global relations? What does it mean to posit a `shared colonial experience' as the dominant reference point for defining a culture? As Mukherjee puts it: `This kind of theorizing constructs...