Roland Greene

Colonial Becomes Postcolonial

Now about thirty years along, postcolonial scholarship has been startlingly successful at reorienting our approaches to a range of materials from the early modern period to the present day.1 If such ways of thinking about literature, culture, and society—in spite of their obvious successes—have any liabilities, one is the implicit relation between the colonial and the postcolonial that attends the field. What should that relation be? Linearity? The colonial precedes the postcolonial in history only in the crudest sense, that the establishment of the former is a necessary condition of the latter. One critic has observed that the term postcolonial “is haunted by the very figure of linear ‘development’ that it sets out to dismantle. . . . [The term] re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial.”2 This opposition says nothing of the possibility that the two terms overlap to a substantial degree, or that they are interdependent, or that from a certain point in the development of a colonial society they might be the same. Proximity? Perhaps we can imagine colonial and postcolonial con-

The Post-English English

THE RELATION OF ENGLISH TO OTHER language-oriented departments, though dense with complexity, is rarely talked about in the open. One explanation for the lack of discussion may be the difficulty of framing a relation that is moving in two directions at once: while over the last generation or so English and the so-called foreign languages have come to resemble each other in substance, they have grown apart in material resources and institutional prestige. Many departments of English are more or less thriving, while departments of other languages and literatures in the same places are depleted and struggling. And yet, in the view of many of the people who determine our condition—administrators, legislators, and students—we are largely all of a piece; my problems will soon be yours, yours will be mine, and scholars and teachers of literature will find that they have far more joining than dividing them. To revive one of the rubrics of our New York University conference, foreign language and English departments. What emerged from those discussions, in the words of Paul Reichardt, was “more a matter of ‘reality’ than ‘renewal’—basically, an admission that such collaborations as existed were fundamentally mergers of departments apparently motivated by administrative convenience.” And the collaboration’s “primary purpose” for the faculty was “to nurture and defend language and literature study in a rather indifferent, if not openly hostile, academic environment” (14). The world has truly changed in the past two decades. I regard this conference as a wonderful opportunity to think ourselves into some new educational paradigms that reflect the new epistemological paradigms that, since 11 September, may have quickened their pace but were, in fact, already slouching toward Bethlehem to be born.

Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama

An assessment of recent scholarly work treating the literature of Tudor and Stuart Drama and some general observations on the state of the profession. A full bibliography and price list of works received by SEL for consideration follow.