The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature

Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this "vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus" contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is "tempted to overstate the case," Lazarus declares "that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight's Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature" (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy.

Many literary fields combine sublime abundance with restrictive canonicity, which means the situation Lazarus describes is hardly unique. As it might for any other field, furthermore, Lazarus believes that in postcolonial studies shuttling between too big and too small has produced intellectual stasis. The field's band of privileged authors and works has become so stock as to breed boredom, if not outright contempt. At the same time, the idea that a much larger range of works might be included in the postcolonial canon can only appear as a threat to supporters of the curriculum's current composition. Given that postcolonial literary studies has historically embraced its reputation as a scholarly insurgency, it is noteworthy to find Lazarus arguing that the field has transformed into yet another subdiscipline interested more than anything else in policing its own boundaries. The goal of The Postcolonial Unconscious is to figure out how and why this has happened and what to do about it. After his Introduction frames the project with a telling history of the field, Lazarus's two most substantial chapters tackle the prospects for revising scholarship's relationship to postcolonial literature. The remaining three chapters of The Postcolonial Unconscious consider how the field might revisit three major theorists: Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Fredric Jameson.

When he distinguishes between postcolonial literature in all of its incipient variety and postcolonial studies in its increasingly narrow institutional form, Lazarus makes clear that he is not against institutionalization per se. To the contrary, what he would like is to build a postcolonial studies that is adequate to its literary objects. Adequacy is a key term in The Postcolonial Unconscious, and captures the ideal of a "vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works" (115). Adequacy will only be achieved, Lazarus supposes, by opposing "the ideological and epistemological assumptions that have tended to frame postcolonial studies" while avoiding the pitfall of replacing one programmatic set of assumptions with another (36).

It also means specifying what a postcolonial studies informed not only by literary criticism but also by philosophy, art history, sociology, anthropology, and various area studies has to learn from such a diverse, but "systematisable" body of literary works. "There is a clear discrepancy or disjunction," Lazarus explains, "between what a very large amount of this literature has tended to show and what most postcolonialist critics have tended to register as significant. My proposal is that where the two forms of discourse (that is, '"postcolonial" literature' and 'postcolonial criticism') diverge, we would do well to think hard about the understandings in play in the former before moving to ratify those prevailing in the latter" (115). The task at hand, he argues, is figuring out the best method for discovering what literature can show scholars across the interdisciplinary range of postcolonial studies. Developing a cultural materialist perspective, Lazarus tests the limits of what postcolonial studies has been able to think about its foundational theoretical texts as well as its literary ones.

The notion that postcolonial studies should have conceptual limits to test is not necessarily intuitive. Even though postcolonial in...