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Victorian Studies 45.2 (2003) 217-246



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Preface for a Post-Postcolonial Criticism

Erin O'Connor


This essay takes as its point of departure the double valence of its subject, "globalizing literary studies." In common critical parlance, to speak of the "globalization" of literary study is to speak of criticism that displays an awareness of literature's contingent, historically specific relations to geography; such criticism aims to account for the global relations embodied in the production, dissemination, and consumption of literature. Gayatri Spivak calls this type of critical approach "worlding"; Edward Said calls it "contrapuntal reading"; whatever the name, the project involves articulating the roles of history, politics, and empire in the creation, publication, and study of literature. In what follows, I will explore a less obvious but equally significant aspect of this project: the tendency, in efforts to expand our understanding of literature, to make that expansion contingent on a corresponding expansion of analytical focus. "Globalizing literature" frequently goes hand in hand with globalizing commentary about literature; indeed, much of the project of postcolonial literary history depends on a set of globalizing statements about literature's theoretical relation to imperialism.

Some of the more famous of these statements have run like this: Edward Said has written that "texts are worldly" (World 4); Abdul JanMohamed that "colonialist fiction is generated predominantly by the ideological machinery of the Manichean allegory" (102); Fredric Jameson that "all third world texts are necessarily [...] to be read as [...] national allegories" (78); and Homi Bhabha that "Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind's eye" (1). Paraphrasing Bhabha, Said has written that "Nations themselves are narrations" (Culture xiii). There are two things to notice about these formulations. The first is that they are formulas: globalizing, read formally, is here synonymous with generalizing. The second is that the idea of narrative licenses these generalizations about narrative. Whether invoking "fiction," "allegory," "narration," or the "text," each formula explains literature's extra- literary [End Page 217] dimensions as a literary process—a move that simultaneously reifies the literary (as a signal mode of apprehension) and makes literature as such peculiarly inaccessible (as narrative becomes a metaphor for ideological process, it ceases to be accessible as a particular form of writing with its own unique, irreducible ways and means). Such maneuvers are embedded in postcolonial literary theory, which routinely makes "narrative" into a figure for the textual dimension of nation- building, even as it takes individual narratives for exemplary allegories of narrative's role in nation-building. 1 The upshot is a globalization of literature (of the literariness of literature), one accomplished by making literary texts into allegories for non-literary processes (imperialism, nation-building, and so on), while metaphorizing those processes as literary forms in their own right (allegory, narration). Making literature into a small but paradigmatic aspect of a far larger system of narration has thus been one of the central tasks of postcolonial literary history.

Nowhere is the tautological quality of this logic more problematic than in postcolonial treatments of nineteenth-century British literature, which has been a primary subject for such globalizing ever since Gayatri Spivak's 1985 essay "Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism" established a paradigm for treating the Victorian novel as a local instance of widespread imperialist sentiment. Announcing that "it should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English," Spivak set the tone for subsequent postcolonial approaches to Victorian culture, which tend to read the novel as a cipher for imperialist ideology (262). As Said puts it in Culture and Imperialism (1993), "the novel [is] the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study" (xii). The nineteenth-century British novel has been taken as both a prime example of the "imperialist narrativization of history" (Spivak 263) and as an originary moment in the production of that...

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