Some Self-Reflections on Colonialism and Postcolonialism

In the forty years I have been studying, researching, and teaching them, postcolonial literature and theory have undergone many substantial disciplinary and cultural changes, both in the ideological configurations of the subject matter, carrying rubrics such as Commonwealth Literature, World Literature in English, Postcolonial Literature, and, currently, an alternative World Literature with a Comparative Literature accent and an international and multilingual scope, and in its various pedagogical methodologies addressing issues of nationalism, identity, subjectivity, race, ethnicity, culture, alterity, the Diaspora, globalization, transnationalism, and subalternity. Formative designations such as New Literatures in English today may seem more presumptuous even than quaint. Yet categories such as the essentializing commonwealth and world, the divisive postcolonial, and the Eurocentric English imply a degree of complacency among their practitioners, a smug acceptance of here over there, after over before, us over you, along with the valorization of margin over centre. The temporal illogicality of after before is perhaps the most unsettling to me, given that, whereas India gained its independence in 1947 and most other of Britain’s colonies in the 1960s, I work at a university named after a Scottish explorer of Canada and live in a province called British Columbia in a culturally diverse Dominion of Canada, whose Head of State is the sovereign of the nation that colonized the indigenous peoples and my own French ancestors, a paradigm that calls to mind Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s phrase “decolonising the mind.” In addition, favouring after over before discourages direct confrontations of colonialism in contemporaneous records, such as the novels and stories about British women in colonial India by Canadian author and journalist Sara Jeannette Duncan, including Simple Adventures of a Memsahib (1893), Path of a Star (1899), Pool in the Desert (1903), Set in Authority (1906), Burnt Offering (1909), and Consort (1912). Duncan’s imperialist perspectives on colonial experience in India are invaluable to anyone assuming a postcolonial stance today, particularly in that her fiction provides an alternative before to narratives such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883), and Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (1903) as directly documenting colonial perspectives on colonial-indigenous confrontations.

Terminologies and political anachronisms aside, several of the disciplinary and cultural developments in the field of postcolonial studies have been wholly positive. To take an example from my own area of expertise, the study of Polynesian literature has expanded recently into the multi-disciplinary fields of Pacific Studies and Asia-Pacific Studies, which by including Hawaiian, New Zealand, and some Asian literatures along with the literatures of the Pacific Islands subvert the arbitrary literary configurations of both the Commonwealth and the non-contiguous United States. Similarly, Diaspora Studies have helped to free writers from nationalist aspects of citizenship and even call into question the alternative concept of global citizenship as Gayatri Chacravorty Spivac and Judith Butler have done in Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belonging (2007). Thus Diaspora Studies have helped writers to find new forms of expression and new transnational audiences by acknowledging the continuum from migration to personal mobility. Thus, in separate publications, a book and an article, I have recognized Barry Humphries, who was born in Melbourne but has lived in London for fifty years, in the contexts of Australian literature and British literature, only because in a transnational milieu he no longer fits exclusively or even conveniently into national categories.

During the Australian Republic Referendum of 1999, while Humphries’s persona Dame Edna Everage canvassed for the “Yes” side, Humphries as himself endorsed the “No.” Although the referendum narrowly missed achieving the required double majority, the republican debate has continued in Australia into the twenty-first century, whereas in Canada, outside of Quebec...