Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (review)

Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon , ed. Deborah L. Madsen. London: Pluto, 1999. vii + 237 pp. ISBN 0-7453-1510-0.

In his contribution--"Including America"--to a special issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature on postcolonial studies/scholarship (vol. 26, no. 1), Peter Hulme urges the inclusion of America in a field that has thus far restricted itself to "some clear geo-cultural reference point"--Africa, Asia, and, to some extent, the Caribbean (117-18). Post-Colonial Literatures urges something similar, though its understanding of what constitutes postcolonial and how America might be made to figure within it is much different from Hulme's. In her introduction, "Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and American Literature," Deborah Madsen remarks on the "privileged texts and [. . .] national and regional literatures" (her list, more extensive than Hulme's, includes Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) that comprise "the post-colonial canon" from which America (actually the United States) is excluded, which, exclusion, then, Post-Colonial Literatures seeks to redress (1). Unlike Hulme who views "postcolonial" as a "useful word" that "refers to the process of disengagement from the colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and probably is inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena" (120), Madsen confines the usefulness of the term "post-colonial" to "the ethnic literatures of the United States." In so doing, she confines its deployment in the case of America to comparisons that can be drawn (based on their putative "colonized" status) between "writers of colour, publishing in America" and "post-colonial writers of Africa and the Caribbean, and indigenous post-colonial writers of Canada and Australia and New Zealand" as they negotiate "the problems of marginalization and cultural erasure" in dominant (white?) society (5).

Madsen remarks that she has organized the collection such that the "post-colonial literatures of North America" appear "in relation to more familiar (British Commonwealth) post-colonial areas" (3). The implication is that through this organization, where analyses of (ethnic) American texts appear check by jowl with those more conventionally regarded as postcolonial, the necessity for deploying the term postcolonial for the former will become self-evident. That, however, is not the case. What we get instead are discrete readings of individual writers and works from the "more familiar (British Commonwealth)"--Australia, Zimbabwe, for example--and those from the United States--African America, Afro-Hispanic, Chicano/a, Native American. Every once in a while there is an attempt to argue through, as opposed to simply claim, substantive interactions between American and other postcolonial formations (Gail Low's essay, for example), as also there is an attempt, by Karen Piper for instance, to take on board a concept (hybridity) elaborated in postcolonial theory to interrogate what Piper views as the "ethnic essentialism" of American multiculturalism (17). By and large, however, the essays in the collection proceed as if postcolonial and ethnic literatures are either synonymous (Patricia Linton, for example) or that there are such significant continuities between the two as to be self-evident. Despite some fine contributions on interesting subjects (Debra Castillo's essays, "Border Theory and the Canon," for example), there is, in effect, no convincing case being made for the inclusion of America in any of the essays. This brings to my mind a somewhat thorny question: Is the term postcolonial being commandeered here because it is such a fashionable one so that its usefulness for this collection is related to the term's marketability and not to its explanatory power? One hopes not.

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham

 

Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, Associate Professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, specializes in anglophone literatures of the Third World.

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