On the Potential of Failure

Abstract

Postcolonial Melancholia. By Paul Gilroy. Wellek Library Lectures. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. 192 pages. $24.50 (cloth). Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. By Michelle Ann Stephens. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. 384 pages. $84.95 (cloth). $23.95 (paperback). In Death of a Discipline Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak raises what she calls the toughest question in the diaspora: How many are we?1 It is a cryptic question that compels us to consider our concept of what is human and why the human is in a state of permanent emergency. The question is doubly difficult and complex because it is also addressed to those of us who profess the humanities in general, and the postcolonial in particular. Indeed the query is important because it implies a sense that the field of postcolonial studies is no longer adequate to the needs of the changing world historical conditions. According to Spivak, not only do we fail because our way of pursuing the interrelated discipline we know as postcolonial studies has proved insufficient, but we also fail because the discipline—conceived as it is—can no longer cope with current historical exigencies. The crisis of postcolonial studies has taken on the force of common sense, and when the obsolescence of the field becomes commonsensical, this condition of banality risks making us all irrelevant. Paul Gilroy's Postcolonial Melancholia and Michelle Ann Stephens's Black Empire are two of the most recent interventions that have emerged from this moment of crisis. On the one hand, Gilroy and Stephens's work grapples with the predicament that Spivak has sounded in her book and thus shares the marks of disciplinary crisis. On the other hand, both Gilroy and Stephens hope to address the same disciplinary inadequacy and, for this reason, both books are timely interventions. These books tackle complementary issues. Gilroy's recent publication was originally conceived and delivered in 2001 as part of the Wellek Library Lectures, a series of events that the Critical Theory Institute holds annually at the [End Page 255] University of California, Irvine. Gilroy's work therefore has all the weight of institutional sponsorship. If Gilroy represents the vantage point of self-reflexive institutionalization, which is a gift and a burden, Stephens's work emerges from a different form of institutional necessity. Her book was originally written as a doctoral dissertation in American studies at Yale University. In a sense, both works are privileged; but they are also works with a felt sense of engagement and challenge. Part of this stems from the authors' relationships with the question of race. Both authors have a personal and political commitment to the transatlantic movement of black peoples and the idea of a transnational Caribbean, respectively. The ambivalence in Gilroy and Stephens's work—the sense of institutional privilege and the desire to look reflexively at the institution itself—is also rooted in the rethinking of postcolonial studies and race on the one hand, and the transnational turn in American studies and the actuality of globalization, on the other. Accordingly, the work of both authors' is a kind of work in progress in which they grapple with the crisis and formulate creative ways of exceeding its limits. Spivak speaks of the fatal exhaustion of postcolonial theory that, according to her, is caught in mere nationalism over colonialism. (Death of a Discipline was also written for the Wellek Library Lectures and presented a year earlier than Gilroy's.) She argues that while cultural studies is generally invested in what she calls the "new immigrant" community, postcolonial studies is stuck with India and "Sartrian Fanon." To break away from this old postcolonial model, Spivak proposes the reinvention of comparative literature into something planetary—a direct response to globalization that puts into effect a unitary system everywhere.2 Indeed Spivak's declaration of a disciplinary crisis is important for two reasons: the statement first calls attention to the inadequacy of the discipline and, second, makes...