The Whole Field of Postcolonial Literature

Abstract

Neil Lazarus describes a field of postcolonial literature that is both too big and too small. Too big, in that this “vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus” contains too many works published in too many places and circulating in too many ways to be neatly summed up (35). The field is too small, however, in that few postcolonial works actually garner anything like meaningful scholarly attention. Saying he is “tempted to overstate the case,” Lazarus declares “that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie, whose novels—especially Midnight’s Children, Shame, and The Satanic Verses—are endlessly, not to say catechistically, cited in the critical literature” (22). The point remains even if one is inclined to supplement this canon with another likely suspect or two—J.M. Coetzee, say, or Arundhati Roy.