The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies

The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies offers a lucid introduction and overview of one of the most important strands in recent literary theory and cultural studies. The volume aims to introduce readers to key concepts, methods, theories, thematic concerns, and contemporary debates in the field. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, contributors explain the impact of history, sociology, and philosophy on the study of postcolonial literatures and cultures. Topics examined include everything from anticolonial nationalism and decolonization to globalization, migration flows, and the “brain drain” which constitute the past and present of “the postcolonial condition.” The volume also pays attention to the sociological and ideological conditions surrounding the emergence of postcolonial literary studies as an academic field in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Companion turns an authoritative, engaged, and discriminating lens on postcolonial literary studies.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
POSTCOLONIAL LITERARY STUDIES

EDITED BY
NEIL LAZARUS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press, 2004

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no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Sabon 10/13 pt.   System LATEX 2_e   [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
The Cambridge companion to postcolonial literary studies / [edited by] Neil Lazarus.
p.   cm. – (Cambridge companions to literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 82694 2 (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 53418 6 (paperback)
1. Postcolonialism in literature.   2. Decolonization in literature.   3. Postcolonialism.   4. Criticism – History – 20th century.   I. Lazarus, Neil, 1953–   II. Series.
PN56.C63C36   2004
809′.93358 – dc22   2004040754

ISBN 0 521 82694 2 hardback
ISBN 0 521 53418 6 paperback

The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

For Edward Said (1935–2003), who taught all of us

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

DEEPIKA BAHRI is Associate Professor of English at Emory University. She has published Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics, and Postcolonial Literature (2003), numerous essays in journals and collections, and co-edited Realms of Rhetoric (2003) and Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality (1996).

TIMOTHY BRENNAN is Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, and English, at the University of Minnesota, and the Director of the Humanities Institute there. He has published widely on postcolonial studies, social and cultural theory, comparative literature, and the problem of intellectuals. He is the author of At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997), Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (1989), and has edited and introduced Alejo Carpentier’s Music in Cuba (2001). He has just completed a book titled Cultures of Belief.

LAURA CHRISMAN has published in the fields of postcolonial cultural theory, black Atlantic cultural studies, South African literature, and British imperial literature and ideology. She is the author of Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Empire and Transnationalism (2003) and Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner and Plaatje (2000).

FERNANDO CORONIL teaches in the Departments of History and Anthropology, and directs the Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program, at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Magical State: Nation, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997), and has published widely in such journals as Public Culture and Cultural Anthropology. His research interests include historical anthropology, capitalism, state formation, gender, and popular culture in Latin America.

KEYA GANGULY is Associate Professor in the Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of States of Exception: Everyday Life and Postcolonial Identity (2001) and a senior editor of Cultural Critique. Her interests are in the social philosophy of the Frankfurt School, postcolonial studies, film theory, cultural studies, and the intellectual history of modernism/modernity. She has published essays on critical theory, Indian cinema, popular culture, and the politics of ethnography, and is currently writing a book on the films of Satyajit Ray.

SIMON GIKANDI is Robert Hayden Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is author and editor of numerous works on postcolonial theory and the postcolonial literatures of Africa, the Caribbean, and the black Atlantic, including Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature (1992); Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (1997); and Ngugi wa Thiong’o (2001). He is the editor of the Routledge Encyclopedia of African Literature (2002), and co-editor (with Abiola Irele) of the Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature (2004).

PRIYAMVADA GOPAL is a University Lecturer at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University, and a Fellow of Churchill College. Her book on the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence, will be published in 2004.

NEIL LAZARUS is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He has published widely on postcolonial studies, social and cultural theory, and is the author of Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction (1990) and Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999), and co-editor, with Crystal Bartolovich, of Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2001).

JOHN MARX is completing a book manuscript entitled “Modernist English” and beginning another called “Skepticism and the Arts of Global Administration." His work has appeared in Modernism/Modernity, Diaspora, and Novel. He teaches modernist and contemporary literature and culture at the University of Richmond.

BENITA PARRY is currently Honorary Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (1972, republished 1998) and Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (1983). A collection of essays, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique, will be published in 2004.

TAMARA SIVANANDAN is Principal Lecturer in the Sociology and Criminology group, School of Health and Social Sciences, at Middlesex University. Her research interests are in race and representation, education, black British and Third-World politics and culture. She has written on postcolonial literatures and on issues of race in education.

ANDREW SMITH is currently the Sociological Review Fellow at the University of Keele, and was previously an honorary research fellow of the Department of Sociology, University of Glasgow. His doctoral research focused on migration and the Nigerian expatriate community in Scotland, and he has published articles dealing with postcolonial theory and with popular culture in West Africa.

INDICATIVE CHRONOLOGY

Compiling a chronology for a volume such as this is a fraught undertaking. The more inclusive and comprehensive one tries to be, the greater becomes the risk that the whole exercise will end up a baggy monster, shapeless and undiscriminating. Criteria for inclusion and exclusion are always relatively difficult to justify and must, obviously, remain open to challenge. In drawing up the list that follows, I did not want merely to re-present in tabular form the material presented in the various chapters that make up this volume. Rather, my intention was to construct a list that gestures towards the multiplicity and huge diversity, both of the literary works actually or potentially implicated by the term “postcolonial literary studies,” and of the social and political events that provide the overarching contexts for these works. As a field of academic specialization, postcolonial studies has tended (as several of the chapters in this volume suggest) to be overly schematic, restricted – not to say attenuated – in its coverage, range of reference, and field of vision. What follows is intended, therefore, in a rather utopian sense, as the outline of what scholars in the field might – or ought to – consider within their purview.

   This chronology takes 1898 as its cut-off date. It would have been possible to begin earlier, of course – in 1870, say, or 1776, depending on what one chose to emphasize; perhaps even much earlier, in 1492. To have done so would have enabled one to reference some of the key historical events relating to colonial conquest and resistance to it, to slavery, maroonage, and emancipation, and to the emergence of creole republicanism, anticolonial revolution, and decolonization in the “New World” of the Americas. However, while an expanded chronology of this kind would obviously have been more encyclopedic in its scope, and perhaps more fully representative of the work done in the field of postcolonial studies, it would also have been much bulkier, more unwieldy, and, arguably, less reader-friendly than the one that follows. Moreover, 1898 does at least make a plausible cut-off date, inasmuch as it is often taken to mark the emergence of the United States as an imperialist power onto the world stage, and therefore to look forward to the developments of the second half of the twentieth century – developments that would leave the United States, by the end of that century, as the world’s only hegemon and superpower.

   With respect to the historical events itemized, I have obviously referenced those that might be said to be world-historical in their significance, as well as those whose significance has resonated far beyond their specific location in time and place. Uncontroversial examples of the first category would include the American destruction of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in 1898, the Japanese sacking of Nanking (1937), the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945), the partition of India (1947), the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, the Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the ethno-genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s, and the events of 11 September 2001. Similarly uncontroversial examples of the second category would include the massacre at Jallianwallagh Bagh in Amritsar (1919), Abd al-Krim’s armed resistance to colonial domination in Morocco (1921–26), the massacre of Palestinian villagers by Zionist extremists at Dair Yasin (1948), the events at Sharpeville and Soweto in South Africa (1960 and 1976, respectively), the American-assisted ouster and assassination of elected President Salvador Allende in Chile (1973), the Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor (1975), and the military crackdown on student demonstrators at Tiananmen Square in Beijing (1989).

   In addition to events of these kinds, however, I have also chosen to include references to events that might not themselves be world-historical, but that are nevertheless epochal or otherwise decisive for those involved in them. It seems particularly important to register events of this kind inasmuch as critiques of Eurocentrism and of elitist or top-down historiography have been among the foundational gestures of postcolonial studies from the outset. So while it might be conceded that such events as the uprising against the French in Madagascar (1898–1904), the 1926 riots in Java and Sumatra, and the 1964 overthrow of Cheddi Jagan’s government in Guyana did not in themselves change the map of the world, they were nevertheless deeply consequential for those impacted by them, and they remain deeply consequential for contemporary researchers in postcolonial studies. Indeed, even if such events are deemed relatively inconsequential when considered on their own, their accumulative significance, as individual events in a sequence of events of a similar kind, is salutary. Thus if, between Madagascar in 1898 and the East Indies in 1926, one inserts such events as the Ashanti Rebellion of 1900 in the Gold Coast, the 1904 uprisings by the Nama and Herero peoples in South West Africa and the Acehnese in Sumatra, the Maji Maji revolt of 1905–7 in Tanganyika, the Bambatha Rebellion of 1906 in South Africa, insurrections in Cuba (1906) and Nicaragua (1909), the onset of the Mexican revolution in 1910, and the overthrow of the empire and the establishment of a republic in China (1911), one comes very quickly to an understanding of how ubiquitous and how continuous has been the resistance to colonial rule and imperialist domination.

   By the same token, let us think of the ouster of Cheddi Jagan in 1964 not on its own but alongside such other more or less contemporaneous events as the following: the military coup in Thailand (1959) that served to usher in Sarit Thanarat’s dictatorship; the crisis in the Congo (1960) occasioned by the overthrow and then subsequently the murder of Patrice Lumumba; the toppling of the US-sponsored dictatorship of Syngman Rhee in the April 19 revolution of 1960, followed, all too soon, by General Park Chung-hee’s military coup and the restoration of dictatorship in South Korea; the US-sponsored Bay of Pigs episode (1961); the massive clamp-down on leftists in Peru (1963); the escalation of the US military campaign against Vietnam throughout the mid-1960s; the US-backed military coup against a left-wing government in Brazil (1964); the Western-assisted military coups of Bokassa in the Central African Republic, Mobutu in the Congo, Suharto in Indonesia, and Boumedienne in Algeria (all 1965); the intervention of US troops in the Dominican Republic and the installation there of a puppet regime (1965); the assassination of Mozambican liberation struggle leader Eduardo Mondlane (1965); and the ousting of Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana in a military coup (1966). To consider these events together is to understand that if it has, self-evidently, been hideously difficult to construct democracy in the postcolonial world, one of the primary reasons for this has been the continuous and active subversion of democracy and the “will of the people” by imperialist intrigue and military might, deriving invariably (in the post-1945 world) from the United States.

   The Chronology includes dates for the acquisition of political independence in numerous former colonial territories, from Syria and Lebanon in 1945, the Philippines in 1946, and India in 1947 to Namibia in 1990 and Eritrea in 1993. It does not, however, detail the formation of the myriad parties, organizations, fronts, and alliances that fought for independence in all these territories. The one exception to this is the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), formed in 1920, which warrants special mention both because it grew to become the largest such party outside the Soviet Union, and because it was so brutally crushed, with the physical liquidation of hundreds of thousands of its members, by the police and military of Suharto’s “New Order” regime in 1965–66.

   Also not included in the Chronology are details relating to the “white” Anglophone settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. There has been some debate in postcolonial studies over the status of these societies as erstwhile colonies and therefore contemporary “post-colonies.” Without going into this debate, however, it seems to me that little would be gained by treating twentieth-century developments in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and, for that matter, the United States in analogy with developments in such societies as Cuba, East Timor, Mali, Malaysia, and Mexico.

   The left-hand column in the Chronology is devoted to “Political/Historical Events,” in terms of the criteria specified above. The right-hand column is then devoted to writings of various kinds. These writings can be categorized under the following rubrics:

1. instances of colonial discourse (fictional or non-fictional) – examples include Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Albert Sarraut’s The Economic Development of the French Colonies;

2. writings by Western authors that have proved valuable to the general cause of anticolonialism or anti-imperialism – examples include E. D. Morel’s The Congo Slave State and Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism;

3. important political writings by representatives of “colonial” peoples – examples include M. N. Roy’s India in Transition and Sun Yat-sen’s The Three Principles of the People;

4. works of literature by colonial and postcolonial writers – examples include Rabindranath Tagore’s Home and the World and Nizar Qabbani’s On Entering the Sea;

5. important critical and/or scholarly writings by colonial and postcolonial authors: examples include José Enrique Rodó’s Ariel and Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery;

6. key texts in the academic field of postcolonial studies: examples include Edward W. Said’s Culture and Imperialism and Declan Kiberd’s Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation.

I have used the following abbreviations to signal the status of the writings cited:

In most cases, writers are cited only once – to signal their entry into prominence or else their most significant work. Thus the Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah is listed under 1968, the date of publication of his first, and still his best-known, novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In some limited cases, however, writers are cited more than once, to signal their writing of a second (or even third) especially significant work. Thus Gabriel García Márquez is listed under 1967 (the date of publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude) but also 1985 (the date of publication of Love in the Time of Cholera, which many consider to be an even greater work); and the same is true of Nadine Gordimer, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Salman Rushdie, among others. Still other writers receive double (or multiple) citations because their work has been important in different contexts: thus Wole Soyinka appears as the author of the drama The Road in 1965, the volume of poetry, Idanre in 1967, the critical volume Myth, Literature and the African World in 1976, and of course as the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986.

   In almost every case, I have listed the work cited under an English title, even where (as in the case of Yi Kwang-su’s 1917 novel, Heartlessness, or Hafiz Ibrahim’s 1937 Diwan, for example) no translation exists as yet. Where translations into English exist, I have used the available title, but indexed to the date of original publication of the work in question: Edouard Glissant’s La lézarde was translated into English under the title of The Ripening only in 1985, for instance, but it appears in the Chronology as The Ripening (1958) – the date of original publication of La lézarde.

   Finally, it needs to be said that the list of works of creative literature provided here is not intended to serve as a “postcolonial canon” in any sense. Rather it is meant to testify to the vast range and sheer diversity of the literary works that might be said to fall within the compass of “postcolonial studies” as a field of academic specialization.

Neil Lazarus