'Gaging the Postcolonial Hegemonic: Three Contributions to Rethinking the Norms at Play

Abstract

Bewes, Timothy. The Event of Postcolonial Shame. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. x + 224 pp. $29.95. Moslund, Sten Pultz. Migration Literature and Hybridity: The Different Speeds of Transcultural Change. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. viii + 257. 50.00 [pounds sterling]. Sorensen, Eli Park. Postcolonial Studies and Literary: Theory, Interpretation and Novel. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xiv + 189. 50.00 [pounds sterling]. The three that make up this review--Eli Park Sorensen's Postcolonial Studies and Literary, Sten Pultz Moslund's Migration Literature and Hybridity, and Timothy Bewes's The Event of Postcolonial Shame--explicitly intervene in reading practices. Each book agrees that there is theoretico-critical hegemony play in field of literary studies. However, this consensus does not effect any simple overlap in approach and content as three books stage their interventions from different positions and around different sets of concerns. While Sorensen seeks to overturn ruling verities of criticism in order to re-garner attention for literary, especially, for realist narratives traduced by what he calls postcolonialism's ethos, Moslund strives to moderate and dynamize hypostasizing polarities that typify and impair discursivity on migration literature and hybridity. Bewes, on other hand, does not so much take issue with theoretical predilections of studies as work through them to inaugurate heuristic that reorients structure of studies by reading literary as so many event[s] of shame. The central thesis of Sorensen's Postcolonial Studies and Literary is pretty straightforward: studies promotes skewed on literatures it theorizes and needs rethinking. Sorensen's point of departure is apparent turn away from questions of literary form in studies. Given by now well-documented instrumentality of western aesthetic paradigms in furthering colonial-imperial dominion, postcolonialism's disinclination for old-style formalist inquiries, of course, is understandable. This much and more Sorensen concedes as he notes postcolonialism's important role in recoding literary worth by subordinating aesthetic criteria to ideological and political considerations (x). The thrust of Sorensen's argument, though, is different. Postcolonial Studies contends that while repudiation of literary as worthwhile exegetical concern is commonplace of studies, a tacit set of aesthetic values and norms remain at work in readings of that legitimise ways in which critics use literary texts (x). Sorensen terms this self-authorizing subtext of postcolonialism the modernist ethos, which designates formulaic acceptance of 'correspondence' between vocabulary of political concepts and modernist aesthetic techniques, such as, for example, excessive formal disruptions, meta-fictive strategies and complex language games (x). Largely uncritical of its own assumptions, modernist ethos is also, according to Sorensen, legislative and pedagogic. In fact, it has been key factor in homogenization and institutionalization of schizophrenic discourse that usually adopts a textual approach to allegedly 'experimental' works and a thematic, content-based approach to so-called 'conventional' texts (10). Postcolonialism's move from margin to center of academe, however, has problematized its soi-disant presentation as discourse par excellence and induced a melancholic awareness of loss of an identity that is genuinely critical and radical (xi) among contemporary critics. While intensifying (and not always usefully) self-reflexivity that, for instance Bhabhaian postcolonial perspective claims as its raison d'etre, this melancholia is not merely symptomatic of discourse's consolidation as teachable discipline. …