The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English (review)

The Cambridge Introductions series now has over twenty-five titles devoted largely to major authors and occasionally to literary periods, genres and fields. The books are designed primarily as an introduction for students but can also be useful to scholars and teachers looking for broad overviews, quick historical references, and general thematic connections for pedagogical purposes. The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English by C. L. Innes provides convenient discussions of conventional postcolonial themes: cultural nationalism preceding and following independence, racial constructions, local and subaltern counternarratives, landscape, language (including orality, nation language and performance poetry), neocolonial failures, and so on. Genres include drama and poetry, usually neglected for the novel in the field, and another productive variation is the discussion of Irish texts and authors, particularly the influence of Irish plays and poetry on writers such as Derek Walcott. Innes ends by locating the empire back in the heart of London with a chapter on black British and other transnational writing.

The book pays considerable attention to the renowned writers of a couple of generations and the most familiar terrain of the postcolonial—thus Chinua Achebe, Kamau Brathwaite, Wilson Harris, George Lamming, V. S. Naipaul, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Raja Rao, Salman Rushdie, Wole Soyinka, and Derek Walcott; Nigeria, the anglophone Caribbean, Kenya, and India form an inevitable cluster. Other geographical territories and works, including those of women and indigenous writers, tend to be unevenly distributed. Innes admits in the preface the impossibility of including all the postcolonial countries and authors and pragmatically focuses for the most part on "just a few former colonies, chosen as examples of particular kinds of colonial and postcolonial structures and traditions" (viii). But the earlyhistory of the field in its comparatively more compact British Commonwealth literary heritage rather than its current unruly, intractable, and multiple incarnations influences the selections. The field's tendency to be dominated in later years by the theory is avoided, constructively highlighting the literary production; however, the selection is not always balanced. While the chronological reading of the "postcolonial" may explain why the twentieth century is emphasized, the younger, more diverse, and emerging late-twentieth and early-twenty-first-century contexts do not figure as much as the "golden greats" of the immediate post-independence period. The chapter on gender revolves around older women writers. Although writers such as Michelle Cliff, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Jamaica Kincaid, Pauline Melville, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, Caryl Phillips, Arundhati Roy, and Zadie Smith are mentioned, more recent issues in diaspora studies, gender and sexuality, or popular culture and the continuing genealogy of literary heritage not just from the Commonwealth era of the British empire but from within postcolonial literary and cultural traditions, for instance, are less visible in the book. This is not altogether to be regretted since I find my students not only unfamiliar with but also unwilling to read the older postindependence generation in favor of the younger writers. Such an introduction takes us back to the writers who were pioneers of the field and gave it international recognition, reshaping the field of English literature and transforming modern political and cultural views. But perhaps one can now speak, like of the early modern, of an early postcolonial literature. The book is a handy reference guide to this literature, concluding its analyses with brief sections on glossary, biography, and history compiled by Kaori Nagai and including a short bibliography.