Re: placement: Commonwealth, postcolonial, and the politics of positioning

Abstract

This essay explores the politics of positioning as it has shifted from the paradigms of “Commonwealth literature” to postcolonial studies, and asks if older mechanisms of placing literary and critical endeavours may be emerging refurbished in the present day. It recognizes the ways in which early enthusiasts of Commonwealth literature often tethered texts to firm nation-based foundations while also promoting a transcendentalist vision of literariness. This modus operandi gave way, I argue, to a much more agile and dimensional cognisance of the politics of positioning, for both literature and its critique, which hallmarks postcolonial studies in general. By briefly discussing the work of the writers Zadie Smith and Bernardine Evaristo, the essay calls for the sustaining of postcolonialism’s often sophisticated engagement with positionality at a moment when a less interrogative approach to matters of place, identity, literature, and critique may be circulating — so that the important wisdom of postcolonial studies is not overwritten by newly emergent approaches which seem familiar from old.