Poetics and the geopolitics of knowledge: From colonial to global

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article examines the critical operation proposed in the “Diaspolinks” project (supported by a number of institutions including the University of Edinburgh), and attempts to assess its original contribution, and the general conditions for critique, in the context of the globalized epistemic regime now governing contemporary academia. The concern is the praxis of scholarship required if a new modality of critique is to be re-imagined – especially in the case of the humanities, largely singled out for devitalization in the global university. The study argues for a powerful rehistoricization of “literature”, one of the humanities’ key objects, and helps to develop a new critical edge to the “normal science” of literary study, including the dominant paradigm of postcolonial studies. Taking its cue from the translational quality of colonial history, the argument suggests a comparative critique of postcolonial theory, and a reassessment of the prevalent analysis of power which postcolonial studies have provided in the humanities since the 1980s.