Satire & the Postcolonial Novel. V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie by John Clement Ball (review)

Works Cited Linda Hutcheon and Michael Hutcheon. Opera: The Art of Dying. Cam­ bridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Miller, D. A. Placefor Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998. Wilde, Oscar. The Importance of Being Earnest. 1895. The Complete Illus­ trated Stories, Plays, and Poems of Oscar Wilde. London: Chancellor, 1986. 488-534. Zizek, Slavoj, and Mladen Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. John Clement Ball, Satire & the Postcolonial Novel. V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, Salman Rushdie. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 213. Cloth, u.s. $74.95". Satire & the Postcolonial Novel makes an important and highly original con­ tribution to the field of postcolonial studies, for it offers the first sustained critique of satire in comparative postcolonial literature. The two outstand­ ing achievements of Ball’ s study consist in, first, a critical reexamination of satire theories in light of culturally different traditions of writing, and, second, interventive close readings of a wide range of texts by three of the most canonized writers in postcolonial studies: V.S. Naipaul, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie. Written as a dissertation between 1992 and 1994 and published in Routledge’ s Outstanding Dissertation series, the book includes a new Afterword with updated research material and sets out to theorize “the generic, rhetorical, and political strategies ofsatire”(ix), while interrogating “Western formulations of satire” to outline “their uses and limitations for postcolonial texts” (1). Were it only for its unfailingly selfcritical perspective and its sound research, the study would be worth cel­ ebrating for its scholarly integrity alone. But the study accomplishes more than this. To use Dipesh Chakrabarty’ s apt term, it “provincializes” satire and the practice of literary criticism. In other words, Ball’ s study employs postcolonial literary and non-literary texts not only to write a postcolonial genealogy of satire, but, by conceptualizing satire in terms of hybridity, syncretism, multidirectionality, and anti-colonial dissent, it helps both 222 IHarting destabilize received Western notions of satire and reorient them within a culturally heterogeneous and less Eurocentric field of English studies. In his “Introduction,” Ball argues that satire theory and postcolonial texts rely on and often operate through modes of “oppositionality and referentiality ” (2). The latter term, Ball observes, signifies “a localized cultural grounding responsible for the claims of ‘ difference’” made by postcolonial and satirical texts, while the former broadly designates "resistance, subver­ sion, counter-discourse, contestatory narrative, writing back, and critique” (2). Although Ball’ s insistence on “oppositionality” as the defining feature of postcolonial texts and, specifically, postcolonialism, understood as academic discipline, seems problematic at best, his suggestion to impose restrictions on the “potentially enormous”critical and theoretical embrace” (3) of postcolonialism still proves productive. Following Sylvia Soderlind, Ball considers texts that come from former colonies and engage in an explicit “resistance to the metropolis” as postcolonial, while, along with Donna Bennett, he reserves the term postcolonial for those reading strate­ gies that stress difference rather than similarities and engage in a critique of colonial “dynamics of power” (4). What is of interest in this approach, then, are not so much the particular restrictions—which are contentious today—but, on the one hand, the acknowledgement that postcolonialism is grounded in national discourses of literary criticism and, second, Ball’ s ethical reminder that “postcolonialism should be used selectively, care­ fully and non-hegemonically” (4). This ethical imperative recognizes that neither the postcolonial subject nor satire, understood as a genre that (de)constructs subjectivities, can be given the “status of transparent sign” (5), but must be treated with “a certain suspicion” (5) in order to prevent satire from reinscribing “condescending colonial discourse” (23). Method­ ologically, therefore, Ball advocates an ethics of reading satiric postcolonial texts through a “careful investigation on a case-by-case basis of the gaps that structure their judgments” (23). The first chapter develops the study’ s concept of postcolonial satire. In contrast to those conventional forms of satire that conjure an ideal past against which to measure the flawed present, postcolonial satire refrains from nostalgically evoking an uncontaminated pre-colonial past. Instead, Ball suggests, postcolonial satire takes “imperial intervention”as its master target and counters satire’s detached gaze, namely its capacity of “Othering ” (13) through “satiric...