Introduction

Part I: The Project of Comparative (Post)Colonialisms

It is widely acknowledged that the publication of Edward Said's Orientalism, now in its twenty-fifth anniversary year, inaugurated the field of postcolonial studies, which has since become the most dynamic and expanding sector in Anglo-American English departments.² The institutional custodian of what has been considered as the cultural instrument of imperial dominance (from Macaulay's project of English education in India to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's abolition of the English Department at the University of Nairobi and Gauri Viswanathan's uncovering of the colonial roots of the English literature curriculum in Britain itself),³ English studies is almost inconceivable today without postcolonialism: not only has it become impossible to discuss Victorian and modernist writers like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, and others without reference to empire, but writers like Shakespeare, Chaucer, and earlier medieval authors are also being reread from postcolonial perspectives.⁴ The revolutionary curricular and institutional change spearheaded in the late 1960s by Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, whose contribution to this collection throws an unsuspected light on the politics of English in independent Kenya, appears now to have been a bold but ultimately futile act of resistance to the cultural imperialism of English, an imperialism that has reestablished itself all the more firmly—some might argue—by devouring its others in the name of postcolonialism.⁵

This perception has been reinforced by the fact that after Orientalism, the most prominent theoreticians of postcolonialism have been Anglophone academics from former British colonies, teaching in English departments and writing about predominantly English-language texts, and whose theoretical formulations rarely acknowledge the historical and linguistic specificity of their frame of reference. One of the striking ironies of postcolonial studies, for instance, is that colonial discourse analysis began with several theorists who studied colonialism in the Arab world: Albert Memmi (in Tunisia), Frantz Fanon (in Algeria), Said (in the Levant). However, the work of those critics led to the development, in the 1980s and 1990s, of a sophisticated theoretical apparatus that rarely takes Arabic literary and cultural production into account. Rather, the latter has remained largely the province of Middle East studies departments, rooted as they are in the kind of scholarship critiqued in Said's Orientalism. Theorists have since then paid considerable attention to South Asian, African, and Caribbean literatures, debated the postcolonial status of Irish and Scottish literatures, redefined settler colonialism in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as postcolonial, while some have argued that mainstream U.S. literature "is paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere."⁶ Brian Edwards' contribution to this collection proposes a more nuanced postcolonial approach to American studies, and Liam Connell's article intervenes in the debates surrounding Scottish literature. What those widely dispersed "emergent" or "new" literatures have in common is that they are written in English and often designated in ways that either reinscribe colonial relations in terms of neocolonial cultural dependency ("Commonwealth," "New Literatures in English"), or rewrite histories of conquest as narratives of national liberation. This Anglocentric focus of postcolonial studies has, ironically, preserved the primacy of English and established both British colonialism and British literature as a frame of reference, even in areas where the canon has indeed expanded, so that, for instance, only Anglophone African, Caribbean, and Indian writers are studied and taught in English departments, while their compatriots who write in other languages tend to be neglected. Precious little is said about vibrant oral literatures in, for instance, Gikuyu, Hausa, or Wolof, or great literate traditions in Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, or Urdu—all of which have obviously been impacted by European colonialism. As a result, Anglophone postcolonial literature is a highly selective field (imagine a syllabus on postcolonial studies that does not include Chinua Achebe or Salman Rushdie, most often read in reference to writers like Joseph Conrad). Hence the argument that Anglophone postcolonialism has become a mimic canon that functions effectively to reinforce neocolonial hegemony.

Francophone literatures of the Caribbean, West and North Africa, and the eastern Mediterranean have been made to play a similar role to that of Anglophone literatures. [End Page 18...