Where Signifiers “Dance Forever”

Abstract

Where Signifiers “Dance Forever” Uzoma Esonwanne, Associate Professor More than three decades ago criticism began to concede, rather reluctantly, that texts “are worldly” phenomena. To ascribe this welcome development to any individual scholarly work, idea, or event would be to misrepresent the history of postcolonial criticism. Nonetheless, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that works like Orientalism (1978) and, especially, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1982) cleared the space out of which they could emerge. In the latter work, Edward W. Said made a seminal contribution to the discipline by demonstrating precisely how texts are worldly and why criticism that overlooks this impoverishes rather than ennobles texts. Thanks to such timely interventions, memories of the pall that an agnostic poststructuralism cast over criticism have faded. However, they have not died. It is unlikely that the discipline will ever again inter texts in a linguistic echo chamber where signifiers, like mythic sands, “dance forever” (Things Fall Apart 27). Ensuring this requires that we always use seminal interventions such as Said’s as reference points by which we can keep our concern over all threats to the literary aesthetic in perspective. [End Page 9] Uzoma Esonwanne, Associate Professor Department of English and the Centre for Comparative Literature University of Toronto Copyright © 2015 Association of Canadian College and University Teachers