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Research in African Literatures 33.3 (2002) 215-216



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Book Review

Comparing Postcolonial Literatures:
Dislocations


Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations, ed. Ashok Bery and Patricia Murray. Houndsmills, England: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 2000. xi + 283 pp. ISBN 0-312-22781-7 cloth.

At a time when the term postcolonial (and the scholarship associated with it) has become the object of acute (even virulent) critique, one has to wonder about the eagerness with which it is embraced by editors of collections (such as the one under review) and writers of monographs and essay. Perhaps this has to do, as has been suggested, with the perception that anything prefaced by the term postcolonial sells. Perhaps also this has to do with the amorphous uses to which the term can be put so that analyses of literatures from settler colonies like Australia are made to rest cheek by jowl with those from Africa or India. More recently Ireland and, in the collection being review, Scotland as well as Latin America and the US have also been presented as candidates for inclusion. No wonder some scholars associated with postcolonial studies have expressed their wish to give up the term altogether, its critical usefulness having been rendered virtually incoherent.

Deployed often to reference a temporal condition for which "postindependence" (or "negotiated independence,"as Gayatri Spivak puts it) or neocolonialism are considered more accurate designations, postcolonial for some of its best theorists defines more appropriately an epistemological stance and critical practice that signifies knowledges and strategies of representation that accrue "as an aftermath," "after," that is, "being worked over by colonialism" and therefore are imbricated in the technologies of colonial knowledges and representational practices whose "structures" they "seek to undo" even as they "inhabit" these structures" (Gyan Prakash, "Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism," American Historical Review 99.5 [1994]: 1475-76).

Comparing Postcolonial Literatures: Dislocations exhibits several of the tendencies specified above. The collection, which "had its origins in a conference on postcolonial literatures held at University of North London" (1), in attempting to address the lack of attention to "linguistic boundaries and the situation of British isles," colonial formations other than British, and the presence of "cross-cultural influences preced[ing] modern colonialism" (2), casts its net wide incorporating Ireland (4 essays), Scotland (1 essay), the Indian subcontinent (1 essay), Latin America (1 essay), Australia (1 essay), anglophone and francophone Caribbean (4 essays), Africa (1 essay), and the US (3 essays). [End Page 215]

The essays, referencing an eclectic mix of geographical and historical locations, are powered by an often peremptory engagement with the term postcolonial in the two senses specified above, its deployment of the latter meaning focusing almost exclusively on Homi Bhabha's definition of hybrid (and hybridity) as marking the space of ambivalence in colonial discourse, whose displacement by the colonized signals their creative energies and agency. Among some of the concerns of postcolonial studies that appear in these essays are those relating to migrancy/diaspora/(internal) exile—all through its larger focus on border-crossings and/or cross-cultural phenomena.

Despite the editors' assertion about the need for comparative study of different linguistic/cultural formations that follow from different kinds of colonialism, most of the essays in the collection offer only readings of individual works, with only two (by Patricia Murray and Nara Araujo) attempting something close to comparative analysis. Although the collection promises dislocation not only as subject matter and formal strategy of the essays themselves, but also as a way of presenting its difference from how postcolonial studies is presently constituted, in more or less repeating the critical maneuvers through which a larger and larger body of work is deemed postcolonial, this promise remains largely unfulfilled.

 



Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham teaches anglophone literatures of the Third World at Oberlin College in Ohio.

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