In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Postcolonial Mainstream
  • Paul Giles (bio)
Caliban’s Voice: The Transformation of English in Post-Colonial Literatures, Bill Ashcroft. Routledge, 2009.
Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature, Chris Bongie. Liverpool University Press, 2008.
White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, Daniel Coleman. University of Toronto Press, 2006.
Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature, Lawrence Rosenwald. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

In a review essay for this journal back in 2004, Malini Johar Schueller declared “that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate” (162). Arguing that “the period of critical isolationism and exceptionalism in American studies is over” (173), Schueller suggested how “the emergent field of postcolonial American studies” (164) was demonstrating “how US cultural history has always been a contradictory set of narratives with an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences, and native resistances” (171). As she observed, the conceptual lines of battle in this theoretical debate were clear enough, with critics who wished to place more emphasis on American engagement with colonial issues—Peter Hulme, Edward Watts, and others—being countered by those who clung in some form to the old tenets of US exceptionalism, whose ethos of republican freedom claimed a special exemption for the nation from imperialist models. This dynamic was complicated by what Jeanne Boydston has described recently as the “doggedly antitheoretical” mindset of many early American cultural historians, who, even when dealing specifically with the colonial period, “still grumble that postcolonial methods offer little more than an esoteric vocabulary and tortured syntax” (1223). No academic method can ever be a universal panacea, of course, but the task now, six years after Schueller’s review essay, is not so much to justify the idea of postcolonial American studies in abstract terms but, rather, to consider what difference such an approach has made, and might make in the future, to the broader Americanist field. As this theoretical strategy has become more academically mainstream, both the risks and the benefits associated with the rotation of American literary scholarship on a postcolonial axis have come more clearly into view. [End Page 205]

From this perspective, Bill Ashcroft’s Caliban’s Voice (2009) represents in some ways a throwback to the older style of postcolonial criticism, which used to worry away at binary oppositions between oppression and subversion, hegemony and resistance. Kingsley Amis in 1953 wrote a poem called “Sonnet from Orpheus,” in which the Greek hero expresses impatience at becoming a “trade-name / on boxes of assorted junk” and “the mouthpiece of your brash / theories” (qtd. in Morrison 193), and one wonders if Caliban too might not by now be equally weary of his long-standing figurative role in postcolonial debates. Stephen Greenblatt, in his classic essay “Learning to Curse” (1976), drew upon The Tempest for his analysis of “the startling encounter between a lettered and an unlettered culture” (32), while Rob Nixon as long ago as 1987 discussed “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest” in the works of George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, and others.1 For Ashcroft, however, the significance of Caliban’s voice still lies in the way it embodies “the key to post-colonial resistance,” exemplifying how “speakers have agency in the ways they employ language to fashion their identity” (3). Describing English as a “global language . . . with locally produced variations” (6), Ashcroft thus asserts how “colonial languages have been not only instruments of oppression but also instruments of radical resistance and transformation” (3). This is all well and good, and Ashcroft, who has himself recently returned to the University of New South Wales after three years working in Hong Kong, does offer some valuable insights into the variable nature of the English language across a global domain, and in particular how the Caribbean has become a productive site for the re-reading and rewriting of canonical texts in the English literary tradition. The virtue of the postcolonial text for Ashcroft lies in its “continual process of reclamation” from the “appropriating dominance of English” (134), and he shows here a perhaps surprising faith in formalist strategies such as Bakhtinian dialogue as a way of...

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