Postcolonial World Literature: Forster-Roy-Morrison

In the last fifty years or so, we have seen the emergence of new discursive formations, among them, certain “new” literatures, some even finding homes in new programs like African American Studies, Women’s Studies, and others. During the same time, we have also seen the emergence of theory, literary theory, as continuous but also discontinuous to literary criticism. Among these new discursive formations is postcolonial literature and postcolonial theory, which are, however, fortunately or unfortunately, unhoused in any particular department or program. It is at least partially in response to this last that there has, more recently, been a (mainly) Western articulation of “world literature” which can be seen as the cultural, and more specifically, literary or artistic organ of Western (economic and political) globalization.

The emergence of world literature, spurred by the publication of Pascale Casanova’s World Republic of Letters, has produced an interesting discussion, sympathetic or otherwise. These discussions have offered alternative methods for reading literature, or perhaps developed and foregrounded methods that were previously not as prominent, alternative, for example, to close reading or close textual analysis, a method well established in literary study and perhaps to some extent even fetishized. These methods for the study of world literature include a careful consideration of publication sites, distribution networks, circulation rates. They pay attention to the intricacies of translation, already problematized in postcolonial studies. And quite predictably, they direct our attention to the matter of “influence,” often in the vocabulary of derivation and appropriation, in a context of invariably asymmetrical power relations.

As useful and interesting as the category of world literature has been, as a sort of cultural superstructure to the base of globalization, some critics, like Mohanty for example who speaks of the globalization of feminist studies, find the exploration and discussion of globalization to be peculiarly ungendered and deracialized—peculiar particularly given the fairly recent history of colonialism and slavery.¹ What I find attractive in these articulations of a world literature, however, is the possibility of a metrics for literary study, with its computations of sites, networks, rates, and so on in a “world system” of cultures. In the interest of such a computational syntax, I will offer an algorithm of sorts, marking the spatio-temporal coordinates for a reading of world literature but without removing it from the historical realities of race, gender, and other markers of differential power relations. My reading is also a close reading, a close textual analysis that reinstates the literariness of literature as one of its important qualities.

I focus on Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and some of Toni Morrison’s novels, particularly The Bluest Eye and Beloved. To demonstrate that there is a conceptual cohesion in the framework I am using, that of the vertical-lateral/historical-geographical coordinates embedded in literary texts produced by these Indian writers, I will be citing other Indian writers like Hari Kunzru, Aravind Adiga, and Salman Rushdie, all recent recipients of prestigious literary recognition. These writers also cite other English, American, and Indian writers. Such citational practices, after all, constitute a tradition, in this case, an emergent tradition of world literature, even if these practices are not necessarily motivated by authorial intention or by what Harold Bloom articulates as an “anxiety of influence” or a “map of misreading.”

The postcolonial text executes a double articulation or a dual spatio-temporality, a vertical and temporal articulation on one hand and a horizontal and spatial articulation on the other. The former maps the text’s relation with the past, the Indian, the British, and African American past, although here the primary coordinates are the history of British colonialism in India and specially the literary representations of it, as in Forster and Orwell. The latter maps its relation to the present, and here the primary coordinates are African American, specially the literary representations and techniques of contemporary writers like Toni Morrison. But, here too, I will refer to work on the African American past, of slavery, Reconstruction, and Civil Rights.

In mapping the spatio-temporal coordinates of this version of world literature, I suggest a supplementary proposition...