Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse by Jaime Hanneken (review)

The challenging task of the comparatist is to select texts for analysis that shed more light on literature or the human condition when discussed together than either would if considered in isolation. To be both interesting and instructive, comparative analyses must provide sufficient historical context about each object of study so that its contribution to the overall argument is balanced across difference. Having set such dynamics in motion, the comparatist should get out of the way and let a dialog develop between the ideas contained in each primary source. When comparisons go wrong, it is often due to a lack of sufficient intellectual connective tissue linking one topic to the next. While Jaime Hanneken's Imagining the Postcolonial: Discipline, Poetics, Practice in Latin American and Francophone Discourse contains several provocative and insightful readings and insights about individual texts, it never quite to meets the promises implied in its title.

Hanneken's book seeks to reorient critical discussions of academic post-colonial studies away from India and Africa as privileged sites of the production of knowledge about European imperialism and its aftermath. Instead, he suggests that a comparative consideration of discourses of Francophone globalism and Latin American autochthony offer new opportunities for a fresh consideration of the aesthetic dimensions of postcolonial studies. Hanneken sees his project as not only broadening the scope of established postcolonial inquiry, but also radically reimagining the methodology of comparative analysis itself. He sees the latter as, "a transformative approach to comparative postcolonial practice must refigure scholarly commitment as an exercise in negativity" (16) that affirms "the priority of the postcolonial object, the task of preparing for the moment when it may speak without prematurely breaking the existing restraints of subjective thought" (17). This is a tall order indeed, and one Hanneken tackles explicitly twice.

He does so first in the book's opening chapter, which is a thorough rehearsal of the genealogy of postcoloniality and postcolonial studies in contradistinction to deconstruction and postmodernism. There, he brings together Adorno's concept of "wishful thinking" from Negative Dialectics and Alberto Moreiras' notion of "double articulation of hybridity" (22) as elaborated in The Exhaustion of Difference to constitute the framework he will use to engage in aesthetic analysis in later chapters. The primary problem with this pairing is that it privileges the Latin American half of the comparative equation, a problem that persists throughout the text. The second time the book explicitly sets out to articulate its critical methodology is in the "Excursus," situated after the separate and distinct analyses of Caribbean "postcolonial object[s]" in Chapters 2 (Lezama Lima) and 3 (Glissant). The introduction explains the explicit purpose of this inter-chapter as "extrapolat[ing] from their conclusions to suggest some wider consequences these may hold for approaches to the theorization of a postcolonial locality" (15). The purposeful dispersal of the book's theoretical framework across its first half diffuses the impact of its challenge to standard literary criticism and/or close reading as suitable methodological approaches with which to engage and analyze the aesthetics of acclaimed works of literature, both fiction and creative nonfiction. The effect of treating the Cuban and Martinican case studies in isolation rather than contrast their engagement with "the image" and "locality" is to displace the payoff of the comparison unnecessarily. The first half of the book illustrates how the internal architecture of the argument put forward by Imagining the Postcolonial severely undermines the total impact of its isolated claims.

The chapter on Glissant is by far the book's best. It is the most historically grounded and balanced; it offers the most profound and interesting analysis of any one writer's work. The wide-ranging scope of Glissant's fictive experimentation and philosophical musings lends itself to such a detailed and dedicated excavation of its impact and implications. Fans of his works will not be disappointed by...