Frank Schulze-Engler

Once Were Internationalists? Postcolonialism, Disenchanted Solidarity and the Right to Belong in a World of Globalized Modernity

From at least the late 2000s onwards, postcolonial studies has moved into a phase of disciplinary revisionism — a wider trend towards introspection, self-reflexivity and self-transformation that in recent years has produced calls for ‘Reframing Postcolonial Studies’ (Gopal and Lazarus), for ‘Revisioning Post-colonial Studies’ (Mayer), for ‘Rerouting the Postcolonial’ (Wilson, Şandru and Welsh) and for thinking of new directions in ‘Postcolonial Studies and Beyond’ (Loomba et al.) as well as musings on ‘Postcolonial Remains’ (Young) and ‘What Is Left in Postcolonial Studies?’ (Parry). Such a flurry of revisionist activity can be taken as a sign of uneasiness, discontent or possibly even crisis within a field that can look back on an amazing institutional success story of moving from the margins of neglect into the centre of attention in a wide number of academic disciplines and discourses over the last two decades.

The New Literatures in English

The New Literatures in English are not that new altogether. They have emerged from processes of colonization that transformed large tracts of the world from the late fifteenth century onwards, and some of them can trace their beginnings to the nineteenth or even late eighteenth century, when English, Irish or Scottish settlers in the Caribbean, Canada or South Africa first began to create an ‘overseas literature,’ and enslaved or colonized people first began to reflect on their current situation and future perspectives utilizing the medium of what was then ‘the colonizer’s tongue.’ Other literatures in English are indeed new, sometimes startlingly so: as distinct literary fields, West African literature in English emerged in the 1950s, East African literature in English in the 1960s, indigenous writing in Canada, Australia and New Zealand in the 1970s, and Black and Asian British Literature in the 1980s.

Exceptionalist Temptations -- Disciplinary Constraints: Postcolonial Theory and Criticism

The ‘postcolonial’ – whether as ‘postcolonial literature(s)’, ‘postcolonial theory’, or ‘postcolonial studies’ – undoubtedly marks the site of one of the most spectacular and fastest-growing regions of international academia. No longer confined to literary and cultural studies, where ‘postcolonialism’ made its first appearance in the mid-1980s, postcolonial questions, themes and theories are today explored in a wide variety of disciplines, ranging from history, anthropology and geography to psychology, architecture and the visual arts,1 and the list of subjects and disciplines deemed suitable for ‘postcolonial’ investigations continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Given this explosive expansion of the postcolonial, it is hardly surprising that queries, irritations and anxieties about its delimitation, meaning and significance have multiplied in recent years. In 1995, Stephen Slemon, one of the pioneers of postcolonial literary theory, had the following to say on the current state of the art: