Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political by Eli Park Sorensen Ashwin Bajaj SORENSEN, ELI PARK. Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political. New York: Routledge, 2021. 204 pp. $160.00 hardback; $48.95 paperback; $48.95 e-book. Eli Park Sorensen opens his new book, Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (2021), with the damning assessment that postcolonial studies emerged at an historical moment in which the "specifically political" in much of the West had become "anachronistic, irrelevant, dangerous, [and] politically incorrect" (4). As he elaborates in the book's first chapter, the enfeebled political horizon surrounding the rise of postcolonial literary studies—which, in Sorensen's view, the field has not vigorously challenged—meant that the radical political ambitions of a genre such as literary realism were either ignored in toto or dismissed as literary mouthpieces for a reified and politically defunct nationalism. Within the field, the failure of the political aspirations of nationalism led invariably to the conclusion that realism too was a thoroughly compromised genre. At best, this twin disillusionment with nationalism and realism was dispelled by postcolonial studies by recourse to "textual strategies of dismantling, subverting, disconnecting, and deconstructing" (7) and an avowal of tropes of plurality, hybridity, parody, carnival, and pastiche. Sorensen attributes the field's "anti-realist" impulse to its tendency to conflate the critique of representation with what Neil Lazarus calls postcolonialism's "struggle against representation itself." Lazarus's formulation signals how the critique of both colonialist (mis-)representation and the nationalist evasion of internal difference gradually devolved within the field into a blanket suspicion of any kind of representational practice, be it political or literary. As the latest counter-point to this field-wide equation of radical politics with anti-realism, Sorensen's book argues that postcolonial studies had actually failed to appreciate the political nuance of realist literature and even goes as far as to suggest that this deep-seated trend has inadvertently ensured the field's "exclusion of an engagement with the specifically political" (15). In his attempt to rescue literary realism from its marginalization within postcolonial studies, Sorensen traces its political impulse back to Lukács's account of the form's heyday [End Page 122] in nineteenth-century Europe amidst the revolutions of 1848. Chapter Three affirms the genre's significance by returning to the Hungarian Marxist's contentious though oft-cited theorizations and suggests that, for Lukács, realism is "a literary style that appears in those moments during which the political is at stake in a very fundamental sense, [and] when the discourse of the national has not yet been fully consolidated" (109). The return to Lukács rests on a complex move made in the preceding chapter wherein Sorensen invokes Foucault's concept of "historico-political discourse" to explicate the key elements which for him constitute the political stakes of the genre. For Sorensen, Foucault's coinage mobilizes both Carl Schmitt's concept of the specifically political, based on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy, as well as Benedict Anderson's notion of imagined community. The historico-political discourse serves to establish "a direct connection between force and truth, and...interprets force as a way of articulating a one-sided notion of truth, or a correction of the enemy's alleged falsifications of history" (63). According to Sorensen's reading of Foucault, the historico-political discourse enjoins us to think terms such as "I" or "we" as "perspectival voice[s]" not as neutral or reified but as open-ended and always-already in a process of being defined (63). Foucault's coinage is relevant since Sorensen proposes that the realist novel is able to put the historico-political discourse into literary practice. As a result, this literary form finds particularly fertile ground in worlds whose "ontological coordinates have not yet been fixed" (117). In this sense, Sorensen's study could be read as a contrastive parallel to Fredric Jameson's The Antinomies of Realism (2013) insofar as the latter claims that classical European realism is often said to have "a vested interest, an ontological stake, in the solidity of [bourgeois] social reality" (5). However, if we are...