Neil Lazarus

Migrancy, hybridity, and postcolonial literary studies

Introduction: damning the vessel This chapter deals with the relationship between migration and postcolonial literary studies. It seems appropriate, therefore, to begin with an incident from a story that is about exile and travel in the colonial world. This event occurs in February 1767, on board a ship sailing from Montserrat, in the east Caribbean, towards Savannah, Georgia, passing the Bahamas en route . The cargo of the vessel in question includes “above twenty” slaves. Our narrator, by his own account, had been born in West Africa, captured as a child, and sold to white slave-traders. Unlike many others he had survived both the horror of the middle passage and the brutalities of plantation life and had managed, a year previously, to buy himself back from his owner as a formally, if precariously, free individual. His name is Olaudah Equiano and he writes: [T]he next evening, it being my watch below, I was pumping the vessel a little after eight o’clock, just before I went off the deck, as is the custom; and being weary with the duty of the day, and tired at the pump, (for we made a good deal of water) I began to express my impatience, and I uttered with an oath, “Damn the vessel’s bottom out.” But my conscience instantly smote me for the expression. (Edwards 1988: 106)

What postcolonial theory doesn’t say

This article proposes that there is a category error at the heart of ‘postcolonial studies’ as an academic field. There has been a notable failure in the field to situate the historical projects of colonialism and imperialism in the determinant contexts of the inception, consolidation and development of the modern world system, whose developmental logic is that of combined and uneven development. Even on the best postcolonialist accounts, imperialism is typically situated in civilisational terms and refers to ‘the West’ rather than to capitalism. The social and temporal power identified through this means is a euphemism. The idea of ‘the West’, as it is deployed in postcolonial studies, inevitably issues in a dematerialised — and, for that matter, unhistorical — understanding of the forces powering the world system over the course of the past 500 years. This case is argued through reviewing work by Edward Said, Andre Gunder Frank, Benita Parry, Fredric Jameson, Susan Bassnett, V. Y. Mudimbe, Rey Chow and novelists such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Ousmane Sembène,inter alia.

The institutionalization of postcolonial studies

Beginnings: colonial discourse analysis Those wanting to understand the beginnings and development of postcolonial studies will readily find numerous Introductions, Readers, Companions, monographs, and journal articles offering a variety of definitions and genealogies, advising further reading, and proposing new objects of study. If the scale of publications testifies to the rapid assimilation of a disparate interdisciplinary undertaking within academic curricula, then the range of analytic strategies suggests a volatile and contested discussion. Yet despite a project in which poststructuralists vie with Marxists, culturalists with materialists, textualists with realists, postcolonial criticism has come to be identified as postmodernist in its orientation - an alignment promoted more or less actively by prominent critics in the field. One consequence of this is that there has been a fluid, polysemic, and ambiguous usage of the term “postcolonial” within and beyond specialist circles. The plenitude of signification is such that “postcolonial” can indicate a historical transition, an achieved epoch, a cultural location, a theoretical stance - indeed, in the spirit of mastery favored by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean.2 As a result it is not uncommon to find the term used in connection with any discursive contest against oppression or marginalization - such as feminist or queer or disability studies.

Cosmopolitanism and the Specificity of the Local in World Literature

Taking its cue from recent scholarship de-linking the idea of “modernity” from the idea of “the West”, this article advocates the notion of “world literature” as the body of literature that has, in the last 150 to 200 years, registered and encoded the social logic of modernity. Building on Franco Moretti’s postulation of a single world-literary system (structured not merely by difference but also by inequality) and on the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson, the article traces some of the ways in which the local detail of peripheral modernity is represented in literary texts by Thomas Mofolo, Patrick Chamoiseau, Lao She, Rohinton Mistry, Ivan Vladislavic and others, demonstrating that there is no necessary contradiction between the ideas of the “universal” and the “local” or the “national”, but that, on the contrary, there are only local universalisms (and, for that matter, only “local cosmopolitanisms”), which it becomes the task of readers to situate as completely as they can.

Nationalism and postcolonial studies

Postcolonial studies emerged in the 1980s. By this time, the great era of Third-World anticolonial nationalism was at an end, and violent ethnic communalism was beginning to assume global dimensions. Such political shifts fed the tendency of postcolonial studies to regard nationalism as inherently dominatory, absolutist, essentialist, and destructive. The 1980s additionally witnessed the global expansion and intensification of capitalism. This led to the popular academic view that the era of nation-states was itself nearing a close and that nationalism was therefore redundant (Hobsbawm 1993). These tendencies were further fueled by developments in critical theory. The culturalist turn of social and literary theory, poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment rationality and modernity - these encouraged postcolonial studies to view nationalism as a primarily cultural and epistemological, rather than socio-political, formation. This accompanied the view that nationalism was, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak suggested, “a reverse or displaced legitimation of colonialism,” doomed to repeat the “epistemic violence” of the colonialism it had rejected (1999: 62). Less antagonistic are the approaches associated with Benedict Andersons Imagined Communities (1991, first published 1983). In these, nationalism is construed as Janus-faced, paradoxical in its cultural, temporal modernity and simultaneous reliance on the past to define and legitimate itself.

Spectres haunting: Postcommunism and postcolonialism

In this essay, I attempt to take stock of recent suggestions that the literatures and cultures of the former Soviet bloc countries be considered “postcolonial”. I begin by asking what is intended by this suggestion. While it is necessary to recognize that the Russian imperium and the Soviet order that succeeded it were clearly colonial in character, there are some good reasons to wonder whether the assimilation of “post-Soviet” criticism to “the postcolonial” is a good idea. Concerning postcolonial studies itself, I argue that the enterprise has hitherto been animated by a species of third worldism that has retarded understanding of the contemporary world-system; in particular, the postcolonialist idea of “the west” as the super-agent of domination in the modern global order strikes me as being deeply misconceived. On the “post-Soviet” side of the ledger, I worry both about a premature (if understandable) anti-Marxism and a tendency to insist precisely on that narrative of “the west” that postcolonial studies, in its indispensable critique of Eurocentrism, has managed to dislodge.

Representations of the Intellectual in Representations of the Intellectual

In this essay, I offer a reading of Edward W. Saids intellectual politics and of his understanding of intellectualism. I begin by discussing the debate over the status and value of Saids most celebrated and influential book, Orientalism, situating this debate in the context both of the reassertion of imperial dominance that began in the 1970s and is still very much in train and—within the academy—of the rise of postcolonial studies. Saids politics were left-wing, liberationist, and nationalitarian; as such, they were always decidedly different from those of most of his postcolonialist readers and interlocutors. I explain why I regard Orientalism as atypical of Saids work as a whole, and move on to consider his various commentaries (most notably in Representations of the Intellectual), on the social role of intellectuals. These commentaries make abundantly clear that Said wrote from premises and on behalf of principles quite different from those generally prevailing in postcolonial studies. Particularly brilliant in Saids representation of the intellectual, I suggest, is his clear-sighted awareness of what might be specific to intellectual work, that is, his grasp of what it is that intellectuals do that might be both socially valuable and also not within the remit of any other group of social agents. In closing, I use Pierre Bourdieu (who has also written superbly on intellectual labor) to pinpoint some potential weaknesses in Saids account of intellectuals.

Poststructuralism and postcolonial discourse

Perhaps the most useful way to begin a discussion of the relationship between poststructuralist theory and postcolonial discourse is to call attention to the controversies and debates that have accompanied their rise as significant intellectual movements from the late 1960s and 1980s respectively. For one of the things these two movements have in common is that they have always generated heated questions about their political efficacy, their location within intellectual traditions informed by unequal relations of power, and their validity as theoretical categories that can provide us with useful knowledge about the cultures and literatures of previously colonized countries in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. These issues often divide scholars and critiques of formerly colonized societies into two broad groups: on one hand there are those critics who would like postcolonial theory to account for the specific conditions in which colonialism emerged and functioned and the role of decolonization as a specific narrative of liberation. For these critics, the pitfall of postcolonial theory inheres in its inability to periodize and historicize the colonial experience and to account for the role of colonized subjects as active agents in the making of culture and history. Aijaz Ahmad, for example, argues that the primary failure of postcolonial theory is to be found in its eagerness to foreground a set of questions - on historical agency, the production of colonial subjects, and even the history of modernity - or to consider “the question of cultural domination exercised by countries of advanced capital over imperialized countries” (Ahmad 1992: 2; see also Dirlik 1994; Bartolovich and Lazarus 2002). For such critics of postcolonial theory, its primary failure - its inability to account for the history and process of decolonization - arises from its close affinity to poststructural theory.

Fredric Jameson on "Third-World literature" : a qualified defence

In 1986, Fredric Jameson published an essay entitled ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’ in Social Text, a left-identified, New York-based journal of cultural politics. In retrospect, I am sure he wishes that he had not. For the essay has brought him nothing but brickbats.

The pitch of the world: cricket and Chris Searle

Part of Chris Searle’s wide-ranging contribution to Race & Class — and the subject of this article — is a body of cricket writing that exposes the crippling imperial legacies of the game but still insists on its potential for the future, particularly in England; a future Searle understands as emerging from the country’s working-class, multi-ethnic, inner-city communities. Searle is indebted to C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963) and, like James, sees cricket as a site for the expression, playing out and (sometimes) the imaginary resolution of social relations. Searle also follows James in arguing that, because of the game’s sociality, the politics of cricketing performance must be assessed in terms of the relationship between players and their communities. In this context, he has analysed the significance of figures like Devon Malcolm, England’s Jamaican-born fast bowler, and Brian Lara, the world-record holding West Indies batsman. Notably, Searle’s academic and personal contribution has been ‘Towards a cricket of the future’, as one of his own pieces is entitled. He has also helped lay the ground for a critique of the globalised televisual spectacle that is, increasingly, the international game of cricket.