Postcolonial Author Research Articles

Marketing secular anxieties: Mohsin Hamid’s planetary turn

ABSTRACT This article unpacks Mohsin Hamid’s position as a global novelist invested in translating the world view of Muslim characters for a secular, western audience. Its approach to Hamid’s secularism combines materialist with textualist frames of reference, seeing the circulation and reception of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) and Exit West (2017) as entangled with the novelist’s aesthetic strategies. The materialist approach, based on Graham Huggan’s and Sarah Brouillette’s work, questions how western audiences’ anxieties about religiously driven “Others” are marketed by the publishing industry, thus reinforcing the figure of the postcolonial author as a problematic interpreter of marginalized communities. The textualist approach argues that Hamid’s writing participates in the diffusion of global literature, and close reading will question how authors like him propose ways of reconsidering and rewriting hegemony through positioning themselves as “embedded with the world”, and by forging geocentred fictions which, paradoxically, trace lines of flight from the global marketplace.

BİYOGRAFİ ÜSTÜNE “SON SÖZ”: KUREISHI’NIN OTOKRİTOGRAFİSİ

Hanif Kureishi is an author of multicultural origin with multi-layered cultural accumulations. He takes up various identity issues in his works through a kind of hybrid storytelling mingled with numerous autobiographical references. His fictional characters bear great similarities not only to himself but also to his family members. This characteristic of his fiction is observed in his latest work The Last Word (2013) as well. In this novel, some specific events and memories can be related to his individual experiences. However, these are in disguise either as the memories of Harry, a would-be biographer who pins his hopes on a biographical work, or Mamoon, an eminent postcolonial author who is losing his fame. Kureishi cryptically confesses his own experiences in his novel, which makes this novel autocritographic in nature. Autocritography is briefly defined as a self-reflexive discursive strategy. There is a general sense of autobiographical references in such works, and thus it has a crucial narrative potential, especially for those marginalized and cast out of the society. It allows Others to narrate their stories. They voice out their stance and identity in society. This study will analyse Kureishi’s specific tale-telling as an autocritography by which he voices out his concerns, which will also contribute to our understanding of the novel.

Reconstruction of Female Identity Through Unattainable Beauty Standards in Zadie Smith's White Teeth

Reconstruction of female identity is one of the important issues in modern times. The majority of the females who descent from the countries of the third world confront lots of problems because of their race and gender. Black females or colored skin females because of the oppression of the white society upon them, try hard to cope with society in order to get some relief and feel that they are part of this cruel white society. One of the solutions for these black females is to reconstruct their identity by mimicry to the English beauty standards. Zadie Smith is a postcolonial author. She deals with third- world women and how they are treated in a minority and in a racist way. She strives to empower the subaltern black females who have African roots. In addition, to change the universal stereotypical dominated image about them. Smith focuses in her novel White Teeth on the marginalized female and how she is treated as shadow in her society. This article shows the impact of beauty standards on the reconstruction of female identity.

Paul Sharrad, Thomas Keneally and the Literary Machine

Paul Sharrad has established a reputation as a first-rate, archivally-oriented literary scholar, and this book adds considerably to that repute. It is a quite stunningly detailed case and career study of a major postcolonial author, Thomas Keneally, and of his hard journey as a talented young writer emerging improbably from a plebeian Sydney suburb and somehow re-inventing and sustaining himself as a professional author for fifty years, writing classics such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith ...

Immigration as a Recuperative Process in The Emigrants

George Lamming is a postcolonial author who has his roots in the Caribbean islands in which he could witness harmful impacts of colonialism on the native population. Instead of losing his hope to resist the colonial legacy, he attempts to develop his anti-colonialist discourse through producing literary texts in which he aims to raise awareness of the native peoples concerning their cultural and psychological destruction that emerged because of a long history of colonialism in the native land. His fiction underscores the demographic diversity of the Caribbean islands which points to a variety of cultures, races and ethnic descent exists as a result of immigration from other countries. Lamming believes that these various groups in the Caribbean can establish their political order by concentrating on their common and identical experiences as well as sufferings in the colonial period since all of these native people occupy the same inferior status in the eyes of the white colonisers. His novel The Emigrants places the experiences, plight and psychological restructuring of the Caribbean immigrants in the European metropolis at its centre. The aim of this paper is to prove that being an immigrant in London and experiencing oppression and racism strengthen the immigrants’ sense of identification with the Caribbean. Thus, this process prompts them to rescue themselves from the colonial domination by returning to their native land where they think they belong to.

Post-Colonial Theory and Literature: Sources and Problems of Development (a New Identity of a Post-Colonial Subject and Author)

The main aim of the article is to consider major works related to the development of post-colonial theories as well as literary sources. The term “post” is considered together with main vectors in the development of Anglophone, Francophone post-colonial literature. In relation to the historic view of colonies existence main tendencies in the development of imperial and anti-imperial theories are considered including those of Fanon, his view of the three-level development of the identity of the colonized and psychic problems that are encountered in the process of this development. F. Fanon looks at the first level of colonial assimilation, which inevitably brings to the second phase, the phase of change and distruction which then is followed by the stage of the author’s identity restoration by means of coming back to the cultural traditions and struggle during which the subject of the colony starts his struggle against the oppressed. Main views of E. Said and his views on orientalism are discussed which aim at striking at the roots of the binary opposition the west and the east proposed by white male critics. Instead a more subtle view is suggested. The views of G. Spivak and a more feminist approach are considered as well as the works by Homi Bhabha applying a more lacanian approach to hermeneutics, the views that form a new identity pattern observed in post-colonial literature thus maintaining a completely different view of post-colonial fiction.

‘Cultural Memory and Resistance in Assia Djebar’s Vaste est la prison’

ABSTRACTThis article examines the concept of cultural memory and Resistance in Vaste est la prison by the Francophone and postcolonial Maghrebi author Assia Djebar. It also attempts to highlight the link(s) between memory and literature; and how literature engages in individual and collective memory when considering that resistance is determined by the practices of remembering and of writing. The article draws attention to the processes by which Djebar challenges and reconstructs cultural memory as a form of communal meaning in modern Algeria. Djebar embraces the Gramscian model which brings together ‘theoretical ingenuity and local knowledge’ while highlighting culture in the nationalist struggle for emancipation. Engaging with the works of revolutionary theoreticians such as Amilcar Cabral and Frantz Fanon, who both recognize the significance of the past in colonial and anti-colonial processes, Djebar revisits official/traditional history in the novel. She also uses a postcolonial approach that successfully de-centres the official version of history and makes space for the contribution of ‘the freed and silenced’. In underlining the dialectical relationship between the novel and history, Djebar not only acknowledges Pierre Nora’s pioneering work in linking memory to tangible concrete sites, identified as lieux de mémoire, but she also takes this a step further. She brings in, first, the vital importance of language (Tamazight) as the incarnation of the community’s collective memory, and, second, the interconnectedness of identity, cultural memory, colonial legacies, and postcolonial studies.

National and Diasporic Identity in Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s <i>Among the White Moon Faces</i> and Tash Aw’s <i>Five Star Billionaire</i>

Anglophone Chinese diasporic literature has historically focused on the sociocultural and political implications of the movement of Chinese subjects from the Middle Kingdom to the West, in particular the United States. In this representation of the Chinese diasporic experience, China symbolises political and economic “lack,” compelling many Chinese to consider looking overseas for a better life.
 Malaysia-born author Shirley Lim contributes to the corpus of Anglophone Chinese diasporic literature by highlighting the significance of Southeast Asia in literary representations of the Chinese diasporic experience. In Among the White Moon Face, Lim emphasises the importance of the postcolonial experience in shaping the Southeast-Asian immigrant’s choice of alternative national homelands. Choosing the United States instead of Great Britain as Shirley Lim’s adopted homeland carries ideological implications for the postcolonial author.
 Like Shirley Lim, Taipei-born Chinese-Malaysian author Tash Aw represents Malaysia as the starting point for transnational crossings. Unlike Lim, however, Aw portrays China instead of the West as the land of promise. In Five Star Billionaire, Aw imagines the possibilities of Shanghai as a city representing China’s economic prosperity with all the problems that attend the pursuit of capital and dreams. Malaysian subjects of Chinese descent make their way to Shanghai in pursuit of their dreams. While courage and tenacity are valorised as attributes necessary for success, they do not always produce the desired result. Five Star Billionaire represents the fragmented and alienated nature of individual and social being fashioned by Asian capital.

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain: W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero

Reviving and Revising Cuchulain:W B. Yeats's Struggle to Create a Postcolonial Culture Hero Heather McCracken (bio) W.B. Yeats is perhaps more often remembered as a poet than a playwright, but his work in the theater was a central part of his artistic identity during his lifetime. The form, style, and accessibility of his plays varied over his career, but the theme was consistent: Irish mythology. The myths to which he frequently returned dealt with the Ulster cycle hero Cuchulain. In addition to several poems, Yeats wrote five plays addressing different episodes in the hero's life with the purpose of shaping Cuchulain as a new culture hero for Ireland. These play's—On Bailes Strand (1904), The Green Helmet (1910), At the Hawk's Well (1917), The Only Jealousy of Emer (1919), and The Death of Cuchulain (1939)—are imaginative revisions promoting an Irish culture separate from that of England's, and they reflect the struggles of an author and a nation fighting for independence. Irish decolonization was not a simple, unitary effort, and Yeats believed that he could be a voice to guide the nation, whether the nation wanted his guidance or not. These struggles—defining Irish identity, moving toward independence, and Yeats's role in the formation of a postcolonial Ireland—are all on display in the Cuchulain plays. That Yeats wanted to create an Irish national identity from precolonial myths and legends is not a new discovery,1 but [End Page 147] his deliberate shaping of Cuchulain as an Irish culture hero warrants more exploration. My analysis provides a deeper reading of Yeats's plays by focusing on the shifting, uncertain relations between Yeats, Cuchulain, and postcolonial Ireland, where Cuchulain is a cultural "superhero" stand-in for Irish national identity and a metonymical representation of Yeats's political frustrations. Because Yeats authored his public identity in these plays in unique and complicated ways—raising questions about his role as an artist/citizen—examining Cuchulain as a culture hero and role model for the nation illuminates the personal and political struggles that Yeats faced as a postcolonial author. Postcolonial theorists have suggested that culture heroes such as Cuchulain function as significant metonymic figures for colonized nations struggling for a sense of identity. In Calibrations, Ato Quayson explains how culture heroes contribute to national identities as an invaluable part of cultural decolonization. "How," Quayson asks, "do we isolate a particular social, cultural, or political phenomenon for analysis while retaining a view of its relationship to complex and contradictory historical processes that allow it to be perceived as an object or objective field in the first place?" (31). His solution centers on the culture hero. Quayson defines the trope of cultural heroism as a "mode of characterization of agency." whose typology involves some of the heroic associations of priests, traditional rulers, medicine men, hunters, politicians, and even thieves and popular rogues" (36). In other words, a culture hero emerges as a socially recognizable figure capable of exhibiting some degree of agency. In the case of a colonized nation, Quayson explains that the native population looks to these culture heroes as models for the formation of an anticolonial national identity because culture heroism "is a threshold that reveals important structural ideas about the nation-state form" (33). I believe it is important to attend to this threshold by examining heroic characterizations of agency for Irish decolonization efforts. As Quayson notes, culture heroism "provides a peculiar intersection of the discourses of literature, politics and civil society" (Postcolonialism 76). Examining culture heroes such as Cuchulain in Ireland—a nation with a well-documented unique relationship between art and politics—can help to shape an understanding of the kinds of anticolonial resistance narratives used by the Irish and to expand our understanding of postcolonial culture heroes generally. Although Quayson drew his examples of culture heroes from [End Page 148] what he called "the everyday genres" of West Africa, I believe that this critical apparatus has great value in colonial settings like Ireland because of the shared concern with shaping a national identity. Understanding the image of the culture hero metonymically, we can see that this figure would serve as a valuable...

Re-discovering Alessandro Spina’s Transculture/ality in The Young Maronite

Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the “unsung” writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina’s oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell’ombra. In terra d’oltremare (Morcelliana)—charts the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the Ottoman province, to 1966, when the country witnessed the economic boom sparked by the petrodollars. The cycle was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s highest literary accolade. In 2015, Darf Press published in English the first instalment of Spina’s opus with the title The Confines of the Shadows. In Lands Overseas. Spina always refused to be pigeonholed in some literary category and to be labeled as a colonial or postcolonial author. As a matter of fact, his works go beyond the spatial and imaginary boundaries of a given state or genre, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, identities, and forms of writing. Reading and re-discovering Spina in a transcultural mode brings to light the striking newness of his literary efforts, in which transnational lived life, creative imagination, and transcultural sensibility are inextricably interlaced.

‘Ze wilden van de feministen af!’

Abstract This article discusses the global campaign against female genital mutilation/cutting (fgm/c) within the context of Egypt and questions the marginalisation of certain forms of activism. Against the background of the development of transnational feminism, it argues that the ‘global campaign against fgm/c’ was successful and reached institutionalisation in the years 2000. The transition from early grassroots feminist activism toward a state-guided campaign was characterized by a more pragmatic and diplomatic approach. The article thus focuses on the political and social conditions that frame local activism and discusses the personal experiences and narratives of activists. The reception of the work of feminist icon Nawal El-Saadawi in the West, shows the obstacles a postcolonial author and activist encounters when wanting to be heard. Fieldwork interviews with prominent Egyptian activists against fgm/c in the 1990s point at similar difficulties. When attempting to express their vision, they found that the scope for challenging dominant gender ideologies narrowed down. The article concludes by arguing that a critical anthropology of development work and the transnational feminist movement offers methodological answers to the question of how marginalized postcolonial voices can be heard or represented.

Liberation and Commodification of a Postcolonial Author: The Case of Alain Mabanckou: Mabanckou’s Road to Fame

Liberation and Commodification of a Postcolonial Author: The Case of Alain Mabanckou: Mabanckou’s Road to Fame

How to “rise above mere nationality”: Coetzee’s Novels Youth and Slow Man in the World Republic of Letters

J. M. Coetzee's work presents critical reflections on literature that circulate beyond their culture of origin. Roughly coinciding with publication of Coetzee's novel Youth in 2001, Goethe's concept of Weltliteratur, introduced in 1827 (Eckermann 198), reentered literary scene, demanding new approaches and definitions for circulation of literature in a global sphere. (1) In this article, I read Youth and Slow Man, published in 2005, as works engaged in a dialogue with literary criticism of world literature. This dialogue highlights Coetzee's reflections on national identity within novels. Moreover, it reflects back on literary theory, and contributes to our understanding of certain Eurocentric tendencies within these recent theoretical developments. Of many critics who have commented on relationship between Coetzee's literature and his politics, one of more intriguing is Sarah Brouillette. In her study Postcolonial Writers in Global Literary Marketplace, she appropriates Pierre Bourdieu's insight that all authors produce literature that integrates and responds to their experiences of being authors in a market, in order specifically to explore dynamics between postcolonial and literary field. The author's life and moment in an author's marketing (2) become key constraints and become part of what she--following Gerard Genette--calls the for subsequent reception of author's works. She argues that, for postcolonial author, author's anxiety towards market appears in form of an uneasy relation, with diverse audiences of her works, as well as in multiple ways politics of her country, pinned by her nationality or ethnicity, will be interpreted by her readers. Brouillette's conflation of the postcolonial author (8-9) with the internationally distributed and widely read non-Western author (112- 43) is not unproblematic. But if we leave that aside and redefine her concept accordingly, her theorizations do pinpoint a variety of anxiety towards market, or idea of market, which she is right to associate with Coetzee. Brouillette curiously leaves out Boyhood, Youth and Slow Man from her investigation of Coetzee's post-apartheid work. In following I will present a reading of Youth that sheds light upon strategies at work in novel Slow Man, as there are relations between these novels that have so far largely been ignored. A probable reason for this is that protagonists in each have been introduced in other, earlier, novels. Youth is sequel to memoir-novel Boyhood (1997), while re-emergence of character Elizabeth Costello in Slow Man activates a strong inter-textual relationship first and foremost with Elizabeth Costello. But both Youth and Slow Man explore themes of migration, transnationalism, and authorship and challenge notion of national as a fixed and valuable category. Acknowledging connections between works makes us aware of a development in Coetzee's fiction of twenty-first century in which author's work seems insistent on constructing a literary world peculiar to name J. M. Coetzee. The many intertextual traces of Coetzee's earlier novels in his more recent ones, create, I suggest, a paratext for his readers to judge his work by, to rival paratext of nationality--South Africanness--which has until this moment been most influential way of reading and evaluating Coetzee's novels. The epigraph of Youth marks it as a novel concerned with world literature. A quote of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduces novel in one of Coetzee's rare epigraphs, emphasizing importance of traveling to reading: Wer den Dichter will verstehen/Muss in Dichters Lande gehen (Who wants to understand poet/must go to poet's land).This quote is from Goethe's opening of Noten und Abhandlungen zti Besseren Verstandnis zu West-Ostlichen Divan, 1819 (219). …

THE MANY VOICES OF THINGS FALL APART

If a postcolonial author chooses to write in the English language – the language of the colonizer – he or she must use original strategies in order to give the narrative a truly postcolonial spirit...

The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth Century French Studies

The recent bicentenary of Haitian independence has stimulated scholarly interest not only in contemporary Haiti, but also, as this volume shows, in the largely neglected area of nineteenth century Franco–Haitian relationships. As Nick Nesbitt's engaging opening essay reminds us, the failure to apply the rights of man to the colonial context compromised the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment ideals that underpinned it. According to Nesbitt, the unique contribution of the Haitian Revolution was to redress the imbalance between equality and liberty that had characterized the French, English, and American revolutions. Nesbitt's laudable desire to integrate Haiti into these debates slips at times into a glorification of ‘these African slaves’ that borders on romantic idealization. It is perhaps because of this tendency to idealize ‘the slaves’ and Haitians in general that the essay's most promising and pertinent question — that of the ‘utility of a revolution that paved the way’ for Haiti's two centuries of injustice and dysfunction — remains tantalizingly unanswered. In his lively reading of Baron Roger's novel Kélédor (1828), Christopher L. Miller offers a more Atlanticist interpretation of nineteenth-century French attitudes towards slavery, and argues that, in proposing that France end the slave trade, abolish slavery, and use Africa (not the Caribbean) as the site of a more benign plantation system, Roger offers one means of achieving a common nineteenth century aim: that of erasing the memory of Haiti. Doris Y. Kadish's close readings of the abolitionist novels of Sophie Doin constitute an attempt to rescue Doin from the oblivion to which French literary history has condemned her. As Kadish argues, Doin offered sympathetic representations of Haiti, in a way that ‘gave a voice’ to both women, and ‘persons of color’. In his original piece, Daniel Désormeaux interprets Toussaint Louverture as the ‘first of the black memorialists,’ and reads Toussaint's memoirs with reference to other such writing in France in the nineteenth century. Albert Valdman reflects on the forms and status of Creole language at the time of the revolution, and for all his skill concludes with many unanswered questions on language change and difference in the nineteenth century, his analyses frustrated by a lack of reliable textual sources. Deborah Jenson provides an extremely well-researched essay on the trope of kidnapping in Haitian history, starting with a detailed account of the events leading up to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's departure from Haiti in February 2004, and then flashing back in history to the 1802 exiles of Toussaint Louverture and his family. Of all the essays in this volume, Jenson's makes the connections between the past and present most tellingly, and in her conclusion she admirably resists the temptation to place Aristide unequivocally as one more victim of negative foreign influence in Haiti. The most contentious of all the articles is Chris Bongie's lengthy, skilfully composed critique of Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy of plays. Bongie's critique is based on what he sees as the progressive marginalization of the Haitian revolutionary figure Baron de Vastey in Walcott's plays, which according to Bongie is evidence of Walcott's collusion with the ‘mulatto legend’ in Haitian historiography. Because, Bongie says, Walcott focuses his critique on black Haitian despots like Christophe and Dessalines, the playwright subscribes to a view of Haitian history that favours and promotes the more ‘civilized’ values of the lighter-skinned elite. In this essay, Bongie seems to lay bare his own disappointment with Walcott as a ‘black man’ who is not black enough, a postcolonial author who will not play the game of the postcolonial public intellectual. Although he never quite admits it, Bongie's entire argument is founded on his awareness of Walcott's skin tone, and a reductivist idea of its related complexes. The Haitian Revolution was about demolishing myths of race, not perpetuating them.

Still beating the drum: critical perspectives on Lewis Nkosi

Lindy Stiebel and Liz Gunner, eds. Still Beating the Drum: Critical on Lewis Nkosi. Cross/Cultures 81. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005. xxxv + 375 pp. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. No price reported. Cloth. Critics and avid readers of South literature will welcome this wideranging collection of works by and on Lewis Nkosi, the eminent playwright, novelist, poet, and literary critic. Erudite, well-researched essays plumb the depths of the diverse achievements of this complex writer, whom casey Motsisi once deemed angriest Angry Young Man. Those not already aware of Nkosi's contribution to literature, who may know him only as a writer cursorily discussed by WoIe Soyinka in 1976 in terms of a Salvationist ethic, will read in this volume about the nuanced perspectives of a postcolonial author who is both a and a committed South thinker. First encountered in Africa during his brief work with the legendary journal Drum in the late fifties, Nkosi remains today a prolific writer of articles and reviews for publications such as Contact, New African, Transition, the Guardian, and The London Review of Books. He is most recognized, however, for his fiction, having burst on the literary scene with the play The Rhythm of Violence in 1964, and having drawn extensive critical attention with his 1983 novel, Mating Birds. Nkosi's oeuvre is indeed impressive, from his contributions to literature to his projects in radio, television, and film, and he has had a distinguished career as a professor of literature in the United States and England. Part 3 of Still Beating the Drum, A Retrospective Selection, includes some of Nkosi's own essays representing a cross-section of his views on literature and culture. His essay Negritude: New and Old Perspectives is a good place for readers of Nkosi's criticism to start, as the essay reflects the complexity of history and of postcolonial perspectives on literature. Nkosi's view of the Francophone literary and cultural movement (analogous in some ways to the Anglophone African Personality perspective of Kwame Nkrumah) reflects his position as migrant intellectual and engage writer. Granting the movement's history an essential place in the study of literature at the outset, the essay traces negritude's intellectual influences, concluding with the genealogical metaphor of the Negritude family tree, which includes apart from the living heritage, Freudianism, Marxism, surrealism, and Romanticism (290). He looks closely at the commentaries of Abiola Irele and Jean-Paul Sartre, whose seminal Orphee noir (1948) Nkosi believes to be still among the most subtle commentaries written on negritude. Nkosi dismisses the idea that negritude thought has outlived its role, asserting its importance to black literature on a global scale, its significance as a set of cultural, philosophical, and literary concerns that remain debated today, and its relevance to intellectual history and to anyone committed to Africa and the diaspora. Leopold Senghor, Aime Cesaire, Alioune Diop, and Leon-Gontran Damas remain the most famous names. The intellectual branch of twentieth-century pan-Africanism since the twenties and thirties, when the movement coalesced in Parisian Francophone and Caribbean intellectual circles, negritude was harshly criticized as a form of reverse racism by Nkosi's countryman Ezekiel Mphahlele in The Image (1962). Denounced by writers such as Frantz Fanon, Remy Medou Mvomo, and WoIe Soyinka, the movement suffered a resounding blow at literary conferences in Dakar and Freetown in 1963 when it was dismissed by many other great writers, among them Tchicaya U Tam'si and Ousmane Sembene, who proclaimed it outmoded and superfluous. …

Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature

Exiles on Main Stream: Valuing the Popularity of Postcolonial Literature Chris Bongie (bio) Abstract This essay explores the problematic (lack of a) relation between postcolonial and cultural studies. It argues that the commitment to mass popular culture characteristic of so much work in cultural studies is one that is largely absent from postcolonial literary studies. If Jamaica Kincaid has nothing but contempt for the media star Roseanne (as related in the introductory pages of the essay), this hostility is not simply a sport of her querulous nature: counterintuitive as it might sound, her dismissive attitude exemplifies the “foundational bias” of postcolonial studies. The essay attempts to tease out this modernist bias against the “inauthentically popular” through several case studies, the first of which involves Tony Delsham, the most popular writer in the French Caribbean and yet one who is completely ignored by academic critics. The reason why this is so has much to do with the surreptitious elitism of postcolonial literary studies. In the second section, the essay introduces the concept of the “postcolonial middlebrow,” arguing that the consecration of a novelist like Maryse Condé has gone hand-in-glove with a dogged refusal on the part of her academic readers to engage in any discussion of the middlebrow qualities of her work—qualities that help account for her popular appeal. The essay concludes by asserting a paradoxical double imperative for the postcolonial (literary) critic that entails both a concerted turn to cultural studies and a self-conscious return to literary studies, a thorough assimilation of the former’s positive assumptions about the value of the popular and a cautious reassertion of the latter’s necessarily doubtful, and doubtfully necessary, claims about the value of the aesthetic.—cb Put me in a room with a great writer, I grovel. Put me in with Roseanne, I throw up. —Jamaica Kincaid1 When Tina Brown asked Roseanne Barr to serve as guest consultant for a special women’s issue of The New Yorker in 1995, Antiguan-American novelist Jamaica Kincaid made her negative feelings crystal clear. She trashed Brown’s protégé in the most emphatic of terms—as my epigraph demonstrates—and eventually severed her decades-long ties with The New Yorker, accusing Brown of transforming that once venerable journal into “a version of People magazine.” In the following pages, I argue that Kincaid’s hostile reaction represents something more than an individual fit of pique on the part of a notoriously irascible and opinionated writer; rather, her nausea at the thought of being forced to occupy the same physical and textual space as Roseanne has much to tell us about the vexed, and very under-theorized, relations between postcolonial cultural producers (be they creative writers or academic theorists) and what is still often condescendingly referred to as mass culture. Kincaid’s testy comments direct us toward the surprisingly uncharted territory in which postcolonial and cultural studies (don’t yet) meet. The one-sided confrontation between Kincaid and Roseanne can be read as emblematic of a failed dialogue between postcolonial and cultural studies. In Kincaid, we have a respected author of such postcolonial (or Afro-diasporic) “classics” as Annie John and In a Small Place, someone frequently lionized by critics as a writer who “speaks to and from the position of the other” (Ferguson 238). In Roseanne, we have a U.S. TV icon, someone who has also accumulated her fair share of academic plaudits from critics in disciplines such as women’s and cultural studies who have lauded “her subversive potential as a source of resistance and inspiration for feminist change” (Lee 96) or the way her show “potentially helps restore class visibility to the overwhelmingly middle-class world of television” (Bettie 142). While Roseanne may never have read Kincaid, the postcolonial author obviously feels that she has ingested enough of this media icon to pass definitive judgment on the degraded form of culture she represents: only those with “coarse and vulgar” taste, like Tina Brown, could possibly be drawn to such a nauseating figure as Roseanne.2 Revealingly, in voicing this negative evaluation of Roseanne, Kincaid seems compelled to preface it with the positive counterweight of groveling at the...

Wild Thing: Noble Savages, Exoticisms and Postcolonial Space in Jacques-Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres Musiciens

This paper analyses occurrences of exoticism, firstly in European culture, and notably in Surrealist discourse, scientific racism, and in the work of Gobineau. This theoretical framework is then used to discuss an example of a wild man/noble savage figure in Jacques‐Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres musiciens. The apparent incongruity of a postcolonial author reproducing a figure so charged with Eurocentric, exoticist impulses is examined in detail. Through a comparison with instances of European exoticism, I show how the wild man figure is invariably evoked in periods of social and political change. The novel describes historical events of American neo‐colonialism in Haiti, in particular the clearing of the land for new sugar plantations, and the Church‐ and government‐led campagne anti‐superstitieuse. The paper argues that it is this moment of modernity that creates the sense of crisis which in turn leads to the invocation of the exotic. Importantly, I do not see this as a case of a postcolonial author self‐exoticizing, but show that the society described is one built on internal divisions (of race and class), and that from Alexis's position as an urban bourgeois, the Haitian peasantry, and especially the wild man figure must be seen as internal ‘others’. The paper ultimately calls for a reinterpretation of dualistic visions of postcolonial space; the classic inside/outside dichotomy is shown to be untenable as processes of exclusion and inclusion, and gradations of ‘authenticity’ and belonging are exposed within Haitian society.

The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience

In the last fifty years, since India's independence from England in 1947, the writings of the Indian diaspora have proliferated and are now a popular focus of literary studies. Along with such acclaimed authors as Salman Rushdie and Bharati Mukherjee, Meena Alexander is a prolific, postcolonial author who has written two novels (Nampally Road and Manhattan Music), several books of poetry (I Root My Name, River and Bridge, and Night-Scene, The Garden, to name a few), an autobiography (Fault Lines), and several scholarly publications, all of which have earned critical praise. The Shock of Arrival: Reflections on Postcolonial Experience, a collection of prose and poetry and a combination of the real and imaginary, is one of her recent works. With The Shock of Arrival, Alexander, who has lived in India, Sudan, England, and the United States, offers a poetic expression of postcolonial aftermaths and the diasporic experience, a revision of memory and history, and a perceptive examination of women's writing and contemporary Asian American art. The Shock of Arrival is Alexander's second work that combines poetry and prose. The first, of a Thousand (1988), deals with similar immigrant themes, but the highlight of the earlier book is Alexander's rendering of her maternal grandmother's poignant letters to Alexander's grandfather. While the House of Thousand Doors alludes to Alexander's ancestral home and familial heritage, the volume is also Alexander's preliminary look at the diasporic experience. In a later work, Fault Lines, Alexander explains how her ancestral home, with its teak and brass fixtures, was torn down to construct a new residence with modern conveniences. In many ways, Alexander does her own rebuilding, though of the literary type, in The Shock of Arrival, which focuses on writing, relocation, and habitation in the United States.

A Postcolonial Child: Achebe's Chike at the Crossroads

A Postcolonial Child:Achebe's Chike at the Crossroads Miriam Dow (bio) In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the French-trained Antillean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon finds the locus of European neuroses, in orthodox psychoanalytic fashion, in familial relationships. The neuroses of the colonized subject, however, do not have their source in the family: "A normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world" (143). This abnormality occurs before actual contact with Europeans, Fanon continues, and assumes complex forms. The Antillean child, for example, was taught to refer to "his" early antecedents as "our ancestors the Gauls" and to identify totally with France. Such a child read children's books and comic books "put together by white men for little white men" and in which the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; since there is always identification with the victor, the little Negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes. (146) Fanon calls such texts an aspect of collective catharsis, which works as a release for collective aggression. According to Fanon, the solution to the problem of such a destructive influence is not the equal distribution of evil between black and white but "the establishment of children's magazines especially for Negroes, the creation of songs for Negro children, and, ultimately, the publication of history texts especially for them, at least through the grammar school grades" (148).1 Chinua Achebe clearly participates in Fanon's project by writing African stories for African children; by offering them a "utopianized" space (the term is Simon Gikandi's) in which to create themselves; by modeling physical courage, integrity, and imagination. Achebe's work also suggests that children flourish when they see themselves and others in works of art that offer them not only satisfying, rounded images but also the gift of language itself. Language, in the work of this postcolonial author, integrates the colonial and colonized cultures in a specifically Igbo spirit.2 In this article, I propose to examine Achebe's Chike and the River (1966) within the context of Achebe's articulation of the Igbo aesthetic and his personal responses to colonialism and its legacy. Ideologically, Achebe is not of the party of African cultural nationalism, whose most radical representatives are Chinweizu, Onwuchekwa Jemie, and Ihechukwu Madubuike. These three Nigerian academics declare that "African literature is an autonomous entity separate and apart from all other literature. It has its own traditions, modes and norms" (4). In his approach to language, Achebe also differs from another cultural nationalist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, an artist and critic who began writing in Gĩkũyũ while in prison (without being charged, under the post-independence government of Kenya), and continues to do so, but who either translates his own work into English or has it translated.3 One cannot deny the validity of Ngũgĩ's famous question: "Where would English Literature be now if Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton had written in Latin?" (Address). He believes that the responsibility of African writers is to develop African languages and African cultures; if they want a larger audience, let them translate their works into other languages. Ngũgĩ calls the writing of Africans using European languages "Euro-African" literature.4 But as Achebe makes clear throughout his work, his position (and Kwame Anthony Appiah's a bit later) is that both African and European literatures are always already entwined as a result of the centuries-old Euro-African embrace. By his own account, his first novel is a response to the representation of Africa and Africans in the work of Joyce Cary and Joseph Conrad. That novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), the most widely read book of African fiction, is written in English, like all of Achebe's fiction; uses part of a line from Yeats for its title; and contains a buried allusion to Tennyson. Indeed, the modern genre of fiction itself is a Western, middle-class construct. In addition to establishing...