Posts and Pasts: A Theory of Postcolonialism (review)

I faced the prospect of reviewing this book with considerable wariness, not least because of its aspiration to proffer, as its subtitle indicates, "a theory of postcolonialism [sic]." This wariness turned out to be justified, but only in part: This book's strength does not reside in specifying a (new) theory; it does, however, reside in its close textual readings of the various texts (and writers) that exemplify the often fine uses to which López puts some of the guiding critical assumptions/theoretical formulations of extant postcolonial scholarship. This is why I wish López had, in his introduction, dispensed with his own critique of some recent critiques of postcolonial theory and focused only on those parts of his introduction where he specifies the theoretical framework and concepts (like Homi Bhabha's account of "ambivalence," "hybidity," and "interstitial" or "third" space) that enable his own close readings. Furthermore, he should have let the "theory" emerge through his textual exegeses.

One prominent theoretical idea in extant postcolonial scholarship that López deploys is that of margins or limits not only in their negative valence as "marginal" or "limited" (or "limited by"), but also, and more importantly, in the enabling sense of a threshold or frontier from which (new) possibilities can emerge. (For a comparable account of "margins" see Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, "On the Margins of Postcolonial Studies," Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 26 [1995]: 47-71). Using this framework, López, in chapter 1, offers what I consider a most productive reading of Conrad's Heart of Darkness as a text both implicated in, and critical of, colonialism by virtue of Conrad's "interstitial" position as Polish emigré and English subject. Thus, Conrad's text reveals "less a self-evident truth than the opening of a space or index where such truths may yet be thought" (52). Edward Said has suggested as much about Heart of Darkness ("Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World," Salmagundi 70-71[1986]: 48-50), but López develops this interpretation and makes it resonate with significance.

López's book musters a varied group of writers—Conrad, Harris, Michelle Cliff, J. M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie—to examine that "ambivalent and contested index of the 'post-'" (8). In the process he offers some fine, provocative analyses that focus on: the fate of whiteness "after it loses its colonial privileges" via readings of Cliff and Coetzee (ch. 3); a "new humanism" via an intricate reading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic as it is read by Sartre, Lacan, Fanon, and then López (ch. 4); "so-called magical realism" (39), a nomenclature imposed by the West that signals a "strategic technique of oppositional literature" as deployed by García Márquez and Rushdie, which is implicated as well in their texts' "precarious interstitial position between an indigenous-represented and a western-representing culture" (39). In all instances the idea of limits, or boundaries, as limiting and productive occupies an important epistemological place.

Much as I was taken with some of López's readings of individual writers and works, I was also equally exasperated with the typographical and other errors that dot his book (for example on pp. 2, 9, 47, 60, 73, 74, 115, 170, 172, 177, 186, 191), including end notes that are repeated verbatim, once in the same chapter (note 62 of the introduction is identical to note 2 of ch. 3, and notes 12 and 69 of ch. 5 are identical). A copy editor should have caught these even if López did not. López should, however, have checked the gender of the people he quotes (Rajeswari Mohan, for example, is a "she" not a "he") and I wonder if he knows that "Anglo Indian" references a very specific group...