Postcolonial Canon Research Articles

Re-evaluating the Postcolonial Exotic

This essay explores some of the effects recent developments have had on my earlier notions in The Postcolonial Exotic (2001). I will refer to two postcolonial writers, both of Sikh-Punjabi origin, who have come to prominence recently: the British-based poet Daljit Nagra and the Canadian-based poet Rupi Kaur. Both writers, Kaur especially, owe their popularity in large part to the skilful management of their self-image on social media. Both have attained a form of minor celebrity that they also comment on in their writing, whether this is articulated through an ironic politics of cultural branding (Nagra) or a self-empowering form of strategic exoticism that plays to an international (mainly female) audience while also reaching out to a more specific readership (transnational women of colour) with whose shared experiences of separation and suffering it identifies, and whose intersectional connections to histories of exploitation and marginalization it seeks collectively to represent (Kaur). Both writers are controversial, still one of the defining markers of celebrity; and both are clearly aware of, and indeed have sought to profit from, the mixed reception of their work. Both are attuned, finally, to the country-specific debates that surrounded the late twentieth-century incorporation of “multicultural” and/or “diasporic” writers into a postcolonial canon. More recently, similar debates have informed the emergence of world literature as a locally inflected global project. This exercise also tends to assume the translatability of the one into the other, and the easy digestibility of both cultural knowledge and literary form.

Review of Nirmala Menon's, Remapping the Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate

Review of Nirmala Menon's, Remapping the Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate

The Crisis of Postcolonial Modernity: Queer Adolescence in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy and P. Parivaraj’s

In this essay, I offer a queer reading of two works of the postcolonial canon from South Asia to ask what alternative meanings emerge when ethnic, religious, cultural and national matrices are brought to bear upon queer epistemology. Exploring the interconnections between queer adolescence, revolutions and postcoloniality, I disturb neat narratives of postcolonial modernity to suggest the reorientation of South Asian fiction as a crucial outcome of the crossings.

(Re)Staging the Postcolonial in the World: The Jaipur Literature Festival and the Pakistani Novel

Abstract This article reasons that the Jaipur Literature Festival between 2008 and 2011 attempted to institute via polemics, judgment, and celebration the category of the Pakistani novel in India by importing an alterity industry. By failing to contextualize alterity in a South Asian context, the festival reinforced a national, linguistic, and religious division between India and Pakistan. It produced a category like “Moonlight’s Children” as an “other” to an imagined Indian literature that is confused with a post–Salman Rushdie postcolonial and global anglophone canon. However, this analysis of the discourse produced at the festival by the discussants and the audience shows that a coconstituted South Asian literary history was consistently placed against a regionally competitive model. Importing alterity to produce an Indian or Pakistani literary identity was undermined by an attitude of disavowal toward the literary object and received categories like the global anglophone, postcolonial literature, and world literature. The author argues that this is not postcolonial resistance; rather, it is a trepidation to arrive at a conclusion, because to conclude is also to value, evaluate, and declare the existence of the “other” phantasmagoric literary identity and history.

History as Now: Allegorical (Re)visions of the Slave Experience in Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River (1993)

This paper turns an analytical eye to Caryl Phillips’s novel Crossing the River as an exemplary piece of postcolonial historical fiction, which aims to reconstruct the historical experience of those once deprived of a documented past. It reads the novel through an allegorical realist paradigm and argues that such an approach may open the way towards new readings of the contemporary neo-slave narratives within the postcolonial canon.

Manifestes et programmes littéraires aux Caraïbes francophones : En/jeux idéologiques et poétiques by Michal Obszyński

Manifestes et programmes litteraires aux Caratbesfrancophones: En/jeux ideologiques etpoetiques. By Michal Obszynski. Leiden/ Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016. ISBN 9789004309128. 278 pp. $78 US. Print and E-book.Michal Obszyňski's Manifestes et programmes litteraires aux Caraibesfrancophones: En/jeux ideologiques et poetiques offers an excellent chronological account and analysis of texts whose overt intention has been to seek affirmation and worldly respect (from the Abstract, 259, which is in English, although the rest of the book is in French) by putting forth theories of aesthetics, ethics, and/or identity. Obszynski emphasizes the constant push and pull between the need for European affirmation, on one hand, and the desire to better articulate an ethos that expresses itself aesthetically, and that rids itself of the need for European recognition, on the other. The major contributions of Obszynski's study are: 1) its inventory and analysis of scholarly production in French from university milieus in the Caribbean, France, and Quebec, work that is often ignored by scholars working in the English-based academy; 2) its establishment of criteria to assess the rhetorical devices through which a text asserts an ethical agenda; and 3) its consideration of more contemporary texts, such as the two iterations of Pour une litterature-monde (2007), within a longer French (and in-French but non-Hexagone) tradition of the literary manifesto. As such, the volume resonates with Mary Ann Caws's prolific work on the manifesto and aesthetic practice; Kaiama L. Glover's Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2011), on the postcolonial star system; Richard Watt's Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (2005); the volume Transnational French Studies: Postcolonialism and Litterature-monde (2010), edited by Alec G. Hargreaves, Charles Forsdick, and David Murphy; and, most recently, Chelsea Stieber's work on 1920s Haitian literary journals as well as the special section in Small Axe (vol. 52) titled Eulogizing Creoleness? Rereading Eloge de la creolite and Caribbean Identity, Culture, and Politics (2017), edited by Martin Munro and Celia Britton.1With outstanding clarity, Obszynski articulates the tension between three simultaneous dynamics pertaining to nonfiction and creative nonfiction texts that assert a specifically Antillean and/or Haitian identity: the tension between the aesthetic and the ethical, the conflict between the communal and the individual, and the desire to be part of Europe but also distinct from, if not completely rid of, it. Obszynski writes, Toute ecriture manifestaire a visee esthetique s'avere aussi une prise de position et un projet ethique (41). The volume is divided into three long chapters. The first works through theories around the manifesto; the second and third chapters chronologically take inventory of manifestos, prefaces, journals, and specific essays that proclaim a literary aesthetic or ethico-aesthetic agenda. The chapters are divided into subsections, each of which clearly identifies a given text.The first chapter, titled L'Ecrit manifestaire : Theories et axes d'analyse is dedicated to a review of literary manifestos that engage in the aesthetic and/or the literary, as well as genres related to the manifesto. For the reader who is not familiar with such literature, the chapter offers a clear overview of scholarship on the subject. Obszynski explains that manifestos draw on rhetorical devices that are polemique and even blasphematoire (25), and almost always overly dramatic and performative (23), because their intention is to impose themselves aggressively on their readers. They also follow prescriptive formats: one type denounces a certain social or aesthetic practice and proposes a break with the old but does not propose any alternative (25); a second denounces the old and proposes a new set of alternatives to replace what has been denounced (26). …

Beyond the Postcolonial, but Why Exactly? Ten Steps towards a New Enthusiasm for Postcolonial Studies

AbstractPostcolonial theory has now been evolving for over thirty years and has gone through several changes. My purpose in this article is to explore the question whether ›postcolonialism‹ is still a vital paradigm and how it is applied today. I will thus be participating in the discussion of a theme inherent in postcolonial studies from the very beginning: that of self-reflexive analysis. My purpose here is to give reasons why we still should join the club, and what we see in the current, everyday world that calls for postcolonial literary studies. In the following, I suggest ten current challenges that would benefit from the postcolonial apparatus of concepts and criticism. In this task, I am (critically) leaning on the Anglophone postcolonial scholarship.I first capture some of the criticisms directed at postcolonial theorizing, and suggest some general perspectives on these self-critical debates. My aim is thus to provoke discussion of the new orientations occurring in postcolonial studies following the collapse of the intellectual power of »the narrative of decolonization itself«, as argued by Simon Gikandi in his analysis of contemporary globalization (2001, 637). In the first section, I want therefore to ask whether it is currently enough merely ›to reveal and deconstruct‹ structures of colonial power embedded in fiction, as many literary scholars did in the 1990s, and whether such readings can become paradigmatic standpoints of postcolonial theorizing.Next, I consider the impact of postcolonial studies on contemporary fiction writing. I suggest that the institutionalizing of postcolonial scholarship has also affected contemporary world literatures. The question arises whether literature (or the politics of publishing) has reacted to postcolonial debates, and whether there exists such a thing as ›postcolonial canon formation‹, shaping the idea of the ›proper‹ postcolonial novel. The third section of this article, however, focuses on the new challenges and questions that postcolonial theorizing faces. I try to answer some of the criticisms postcolonial theory has faced, and provide a list of topics and contexts within which postcolonial theorizing is still a vital theoretical tool extending beyond its ›routines‹.My ›ten steps‹ towards a new enthusiasm for postcolonial studies do not constitute a coherent paradigm shift, or a concise view, but suggest some current openings based on the tradition of postcolonial studies. First, I will discuss multi- or interdisciplinarity and claim that such contemporary postcolonial topics as eco­catastrophes, studies on war, peace, and terrorism, or the social media, for example, are far too complicated issues to be studied from the point of view of one discipline only. The second challenge for postcolonial literary studies in this article has to do with the post-occidental turn. I suggest that studies on many kinds of minority literatures may benefit from the ›triangularization‹ of the binary legacy of British Imperialism inherent in Postcolonial literary studies.I call the third challenge ›turning the direction of influences‹. I wonder what if postcolonial theoretical influences would not be borrowed merely from the critical discourse of Commonwealth literary studies: Postcolonial studies have a great deal to learn from other indigenous modes of criticism. The fourth reason not to abandon postcolonial is the question of historicization, providing a context for current (political) rhetorics and actions, particularly media narratives. My fifth new challenge for postcolonial studies concerns the re-politicization of otherness, a theme discussed widely by Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton. What they mean is that ›the other‹ is currently represented in terms of fear rather than of oppression. I suggest that the postcolonial vocabulary has the potential to tackle this new form of fear.Relating to previous challenges, my sixth suggestion for postcolonial studies is more political and leads us more directly towards the emerging field of terrorism studies and analyzing the rhetorics of current world politics. The seventh new application is obviously related to religion and religious identities: Postcolonial terminology has the explanatory power to analyze the way, for example, that the current Islamophobia draws on old racist discourses and imageries. Following from these contemporary political challenges, my eighth proposition for postcolonial studies relates to the new media environment: globalization, the free flow of images in the (social) media, but at the same time the unedited dissemination of hate speech. The remaining two steps for postcolonial studies are related to the emerging field of posthumanism, dislodging the human agent from the position of sole structurer of the surrounding reality. They concern both ecocriticism and new materialism.Like this article too, the postcolonial critical practice has self-analyzed its own problems ever since its zenith. The ten new steps listed above, however, are reasons why I want to join the postcolonial club sometimes represented as old-fashioned. For ethical reasons, I am – and want to be – enthusiastic about postcolonial theorizing.

Italy's Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe

In Italy, like in many other European countries, cultural roots and national identity are currently shifting as the result of contemporary transnational migrations and globalization. This essay analyses how the paradigm emerging from the Italian national case contributes to a redefinition of the postcolonial canon centered on British history and culture and to the notion of a “European” postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, the authors identify in colonial history and contemporary immigration the threads that connect the postcoloniality of Italy to that of other European countries. At the same time, they locate the specificity of the Italian postcolonial in the intersection between these factors and other events in Italian history that have strongly influenced the process of shaping an Italian national identity: the Southern question, intranational and international mass emigrations, new mobilities, the subaltern position of Italy within the European Union, and the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as the Southern frontier of Europe. The authors close their essay by presenting a Mediterranean Southern perspective grounded in new forms of knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities that counteract Europe's sense of encroaching and its politics of border protection.

The Afterlives of Frantz Fanon and the Reconstruction of Postcolonial Studies

This essay mobilizes Fanon as a point of entry into mapping the current state of postcolonial studies, and within that, reflects on what constitutes the postcolonial canon. Over a gradual course of the eighties and nineties, there has come about a transition from the field’s founding moments in which anti-imperialism, tricontinentalism, Third World nationalism and aesthetics of realism and resistance thrived, to the current trends that show a slant toward postmodernist fragmentation, multiculturalism, issues of diaspora, metropolitan narratives as well as a proclivity toward theorizing the field itself. There are many reasons for this: the specific dynamics of the post-Cold War American culture within which these works were received; the compromised relationship between academic and commercial publishing culture, which made a jump from narratives of decolonization and neocolonialism to metropolitan multiculturalism; and the sway of postmodernism over academia as a whole, which led to a disregard for Marxist theories and, more importantly, to a neglect of realism as a mode and aesthetic in postcolonial theory. These factors have worked together to shape how the genealogy of postcolonial studies and its theory have come to be accepted as “obvious.” This has, in turn, had strong repercussions for the kind of literature and theory that have come to be celebrated and canonized within the field. The essay draws on Anthony Alessandrini's Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics: Finding Something Different (2014) and Neil Lazarus' The Postcolonial Unconscious (2011) to offer a reconstructed genealogy of the field of postcolonial studies.

2000s: Expansion and change

In the 2000s, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature (JCL) continued to provide a forum for the expansion, layering and critical self-examination of the transnational Anglophone literary/cultural and scholarly fields. During this period of expansion and growth JCL participated in the formation of an emergent postcolonial canon in which certain authors and texts have served to function as tropes for a certain idea of nations and regions in the postcolonial world. This article tracks those tendencies through a critical assessment of a range of exemplary essays, editorials, and surveys published in the journal during this decade.

Claims of Heritage: Restoring the English Country House in <em>Wide Sargasso Sea</em>

Since the publication of Jean Rhys’s novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), two critical positions have persisted: one that considers the novel in the context of Jane Eyre (1847), ignoring the way it represents English identity and history in its own right; and another that focuses on the novel’s West Indian contexts and divorces it from the English traditions that inform its structure and plot. However, the novel sutures these dual inheritances through a critical representation of the English country house that adopts mid-century preservationists’ nostalgia for such historic sites in order to problematize this nostalgia. Wide Sargasso Sea represents Thornfield Hall as a space in which post-imperial racialization takes place. Examining the text as a country-house novel allows one to rethink its position in both a British and a postcolonial canon, as well as considering the political possibilities and perils of preservation in English fiction.

Колониальные мотивы в английском неовикторианском романе: к постановке проблемы

The article focuses on the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and on the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives. The article explores genre peculiarities of these modifications of the late neo-Victorian novel. The article focuses on the problem of Britishness as a base of an English identity. ‘British’ features are the peculiar characteristics of any Victorian or modern Englishman. Understanding English national character with its Britishness is a key to the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and the late neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives appropriate reading. To achieve the aims of the article the following methods of literary analysis were used: typological, cultural and historical, comparative methods and intertextual analysis. Through the careful analyses of the neo-Victorian novels the author of the article concludes that Victorian colonial novels are the predecessors of the neo-Victorian novels with colonial motives as well as the neo-Victorian postcolonial novels. The basic differences between these varieties of the late neo-Victorian novel are determined by the origin of their author. As the author of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel originates from the former colonies, such novels focuses on the postcolonial problematics and correspond to the postcolonial canon but not to the neo-Victorian one. On the contrary neo-Victorian novel with the colonial pastiches and parodies Victorian fiction. The prospects of the research include the further exploration of the neo-Victorian postcolonial novel and neo-Victorian novel with the colonial motives.

Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Post-Colonial Canon by Kaiama L. Glover (review)

Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Post-Colonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover. Liverpool University Press, 2010. 262 pp. $95 hardback.Review by Moise R, BaptisteMany books have been written about the country of Haiti and her tumultuous past. She is often painted as the dark and mysterious stepchild of the Caribbean Islands that historically has been her own worst enemy. Western and European historians, scholars, and politicians have and continue to imply that Haiti is nothing more than a savage wasteland of inferior people that were doomed the day their enslaved African ancestors committed the ultimate sin of fighting back and winning their freedom from the mighty French over 200 years ago. After the devastating earthquake in January 2010, these same slanted sentiments where further reinforced in the media, as Haiti was put on display during a time of devastation and destruction for the to see. Despite this historically distorted and limited representation of Ayiti, the citizens of Haiti have always created and cultivated more critical counter-narratives than what is portrayed in media and literature. These alternative stories have been passed down from generation to generation and have taken many forms such as written words, skits/plays and oral histories. Some of the stories are non-fiction and autobiographical but the least explored and valued form of storytelling by Western scholars are that of Haitian fiction.The ability to tell a story in a way that captures the multiple layers and complexities of its characters takes skill, courage and imagination. More specifically, fictitious narratives can provide a of endless possibilities for creativity and an avenue for epistemological exploration. Kaiama L. Glover's Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon investigates spiralism as a legitimate and revolutionary writing style to demystify traditional westernized literary norms as the standard while moving beyond recentralized postcolonial sensitivities.The author stresses that spiralism, though scarcely recognized or acknowledged as a viable method of storytelling, is not a movement but a phenomenon. She does this by exploring the works of three Haitian spiralist authors: Franketienne, Jean Claude Fignole, and Rene Philoctete. In the spiralist tradition, Franketienne is considered one of the foremost scholars in this style of writing. Glover points out that Franketienne and Fignole describe the spiral as an ever-changing, endless, complex double helix that is operational on multiple levels, incarnating a precise artistic attitude while evoking essential phenomena at work in every aspect of the natural world (viii). In other words, the spiralist tradition represents the complexity of oral Haitian fictitious narratives that are not linear and static but always changing based on who is telling the story and for what purpose. These three authors are very strategic in not clearly defining spiralism. By doing so, spiralism cannot be placed inside a proverbial box. Franketienne further suggests there is a unique relationship between the reader and the writer and in order for spiralism to be effective, he argues, both must practice the fine art of creativity.Glover attempts to bring spiralism to the forefront in an effort to expose the Westernized centering of postcolonialism as the recognized voice of the colonized within traditional spaces such as the ivory towers. Within the context of marginalized discourses, postcolonialism is a tradition that has become a centered/standard way of thinking, and in being so, it has marginalized writing styles such as the spiralistic impression. Overall, the purpose of this book is to examine the individual contributions of these authors to spiralism and the commonalities they share.In the introduction, the author investigates the marginalization of spiralism within the hegemonic space of the ivory towers and the reluctance of mainstream Western scholars to acknowledge spiralism as a permissible and valuable form of literary expression. …

Authorising a tradition: Theory, criticism and (self-)canonisation in French Caribbean writing

As many critics have noted, Antillean literature has developed in tandem with a strong (self-)critical and theoretical body of work. The various attempts to theorise Antillean identity since the 1930s ( négritude, antillanité, créolité, relation) have hugely enriched the literary scene and have put Antillean writing firmly on the world map. They have also undoubtedly contributed to a field that can be characterised as explosive, incestuous and highly self-referential. This article begins by examining the kinds of writing privileged in the postcolonial canon, both francophone and anglophone, and argues that the French-language field continues to favour writers who are associated with theoretical or speculative writing (Césaire, Glissant, Chamoiseau). From this perspective Maryse Condé appears to offer a particularly interesting counter-example. Undoubtedly a canonical Antillean writer, she is openly dismissive of theory, claiming to operate outside its boundaries. Yet she too is heavily involved in the work of criticism and in shaping readers’ responses, as well as her own self-image, through criticism and theory. I argue that Condé, like Chamoiseau (who is often viewed as the more ‘theoretical’ writer), tends to supply the tools for analysis of her own writing through a strong awareness of, and ongoing contribution to, the critical field in which her work is read. Both authors thus work to consolidate their own, and often in turn each other’s, position as canonical authors.

Theory versus Practice: On the Postcolonial Marginalization of Haitian Literature

This review engages with fundamental questions regarding postcolonial canon formation and the marginalization of the Haitian Spiralist writers, the theory-centrism of postcolonial criticism, and “showing” versus “telling”—issues raised by Kaiama L. Glover's Haiti Unbound. Using as a point of departure Glover's key notions of “not-Paris” and “ex-centricity” regarding the critical reception of the Spiralists, this essay responds, Why only not-Paris? It argues that equally significant for this particular group of Haitian writers is the fact that they are also not-US (not-NYC) and not-Quebec (not-Montreal), as these represent, from a Haitian literary perspective, other crucial centers of publishing. Through analysis of the centrality of Haitian writers—including that most ultravocal Spiralist, Frankétienne—to the whole French Etonnants voyageurs project, the article argues that many Haitian writers are, in fact, what we could call becoming-France/becoming-Paris. Questioning the phenomenon of postcolonial star formations, as delineated by Graham Huggan and Chris Bongie, the essay also examines the inescapability of extra-literary factors, where Haitian literature is concerned, particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.

<em>Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon</em>, by Kamaia L. Glover

Reviewed by: Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon Deborah Jenson Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon BY Kaiama L. Glover Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010. xxiv + 262 pp. ISBN: 1846314992 cloth. How do natural forms influence abstract philosophical and poetic paradigms? In engineering and natural science environments, Haitian "spiralism" would be called a biomimetic movement: a paradigm that imitates the ingenious and complex designs of a construction found in nature. Kaiama Glover's monograph Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon begins with a riveting description of the symbolic identity of the spiralist movement, from the double helix to the contours of the conch shell to the designs on the central pillar of the vodou ounfò or temple. What is at stake in spiralism is nothing less than navigating the painful aesthetics of cycles of misfortune. Spiralism in Haiti began in 1965 with the attempt of three individuals—Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète—to imagine their world—or their "whirl"—within the terms of the spiral. Glover's deeply poetic work opens a myriad of portals onto this largely ignored motif in the postcolonial Caribbean, while also navigating between the aesthetic register and the cultural and historical discourses and debates with which Haiti is most deeply associated through its revolutionary history. Spiralism has many Glissantian echoes. Glover, trained in Lesser Antillean as well as Haitian literary history, rejects the impression that Haiti's "admittedly extraordinary" past made it "incomparable or irreconcilable with its regional neighbors." Glover sees reflections and patterns, and is able to demarcate lines of contestation and mimesis, between Haiti and nearby islands that followed strikingly different destinies. Her work joins that of a select cohort including J. Michael Dash and F. Nick Nesbitt in unifying literary criticism in these different arenas. [End Page 135] In this compelling book, Glover charts the association of Caribbean stories with the performative interpersonal dimensions of krik krak, with the revisiting of epic historical memories in the present or the future, and with figures and fractured revenants like the zonbi, the schizophrenic, or conflictual marasa or twins. The spiral is a chameleon-like form: it can be conceptualized as a literary form or genre, as the hybrid African/New World cultural space of the genesis and reception of creole, or as the evanescence of ideological heroism into a fog of disputed memories. Spiralism is one of several mid to late 20th-century literary movements produced in Haiti, including Houguenikon, plurealism, and surplurealism, all in relation to the anthropological self-study of indigenism. Despite its intertextual philosophical resonance and Caribbean translatability, spiralism has always been particularly oriented toward a Haitian public. It evokes the intricate curves, like the inner folds of an ear, of Haiti's folk culture and lived aesthetics. Glover connects this movement to the isolating experience for its authors of remaining creatively productive in Haiti during the dictatorships of Duvalier père et fils. The "occlusion" of spiralism relates to its refusal to align freedom with migration. Yet the inward orientation of the spiral twists away from the intrusive reach of the Duvalier regimes into spiritual and fantasy life, including the duvalierist appropriation of Vodou for authoritarian purposes. The aesthetics of spiralism are at once symmetrical, dystopian, musical, and dissonant. In its emphasis on cyclical disaster, spiralism delivers the poetic blueprint of a mythical New World morphing into a mythical Developing World. As Glover reminds us in this lyrical and important book, the Haitian revolution, or any revolution, is more associated with the spiral than with hard stop, in its identification with "revolving": and literature, even densely poetic literature, remains a key architecture of the resistance and survival of the imagination in Haitian cultural life. [End Page 136] Deborah Jenson Duke University deborah.jenson@duke.edu Copyright © 2012 Indiana University Press

From Margin to Centre: Postcolonial Identities and Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father

This article considers Barack Obama's autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), as extending a tradition of African-American life writing that is characterised by negotiations of identity. It examines how Obama draws upon the rhetorical and literary strategies evident in nineteenth-century narratives and twentieth-century re-workings of the original African-American autobiographical form. The article suggests ways in which Dreams from My Father can also be viewed in relation to postcolonial theory and postcolonial life writing. Therefore, as well as focusing on the relationship between Obama's memoir and African-American autobiography, I also examine the links between postcolonial life writing and contemporary theory in relation to both Dreams from My Father and Obama's Presidential acceptance speech. The article aims to contribute to contemporary re-theorisations of the meaning of postcolonial that seek to expand the notion of a postcolonial canon to include not only the subject at the ‘periphery' but also those at the ‘centre' in the twenty-first century. Obama articulates a transnational and collective consciousness in his attempt to accommodate difference and the individual.

Re-thinking Nature, Fact and Fiction

In the halcyon days of publishing in Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Queensland Press (UQP) established an innovative series on the Australian Environment edited by Alan Gilpin. The series emerged from the flourishing scientific, environmental and conservation discourses. This was not the only way, or even then the central way, UQP addressed environmental issues. On the one hand, the Press actively supported the emergence of an Australian postcolonial canon in fiction and poetry through (re)publishing the works of Steele Rudd, Vance Palmer and Peter Carey. In the need to develop an international market for their books, however, fiction editors could easily and did edit out descriptions of the Australian environments. On the other hand, the Press published technical studies such as a series on Australian Ecology. With the rupture in the management of the Press in 1983, the Australian Environment series was stopped. By the 1990s with the increasing recognition of the Australian Aboriginal way of thinking about country (and the delineation of Australasian territorial copyright) UQP pulled back from developing a global market in order to establish a successful Black Australian Writers series for, primarily, a national readership. The genre of 'bush realism' and other new writing by non-Indigenous Australians that drew on environmental differences of the 'new world' in contrast to the old, as a result, shifted away from central stage in narratives of the nation.

Surveying the Eighteenth‐Century Anglo‐Indian Canon

AbstractThe canon of eighteenth‐century British literature has productively splintered into many canons, and one that should be added is the Anglo‐Indian canon. This postcolonial canon consists of literature exploring the relationship between Britain and India and performing cultural productions of ‘India’ in the process. The most important works in the Anglo‐Indian canon between about 1750 and 1850 include novels (Hartly House, Calcutta, The Missionary), drama (The Nabob, The Mogul Tale, The Sword of Peace, The Widow of Malabar), poetry (Bedukah, The Curse of Kehama), and travel narratives (by William Hodges, Georg Forster, Lord Valentia, and Bishop Heber). These authors address issues such as the characteristics of Indian religion, government, culture, and economics; the effects India has on British soldiers, administrators, merchants, and artists; the differences in gender roles; and the responsibilities Britain has toward India. The earlier work in the Anglo‐Indian canon (from the eighteenth century) is more open‐minded toward India, allowing for curiosity, engagement, and hybridity. In contrast, the later work (from the nineteenth century) envisions the encounter of cultures as a clash, asserts British superiority, and promotes Orientalism.

The Fate of the Oolichan: Prospects of Eco-Cultural Restoration in Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach

In Monkey Beach Haisla/Heiltsuk-Canadian writer Eden Robinson depicts both the social disintegration and dynamic adaptation that result when the cognitive maps of a traditional culture are compromised by new realities. In the novel, colonization, industrial development, and ecological degradation have irrevocably changed the “old ways” of the Haisla. The oolichan, a smelt-like staple of the traditional Haisla diet, has been all but extirpated in the rivers of the tribe's ancestral territory. Economic and social realities have changed radically as well. These factors result in the growing irrelevance of Haisla traditions, threatening the integrity of their social cognitive maps. Through the topos of “fascinating cannibalism” Robinson frames a canny critique of literary hermeneutics, fabricating an “authentic” account of Haisla subjectivity and creating moments that are fraught with ambiguity and charged with undisclosed cultural significance; she thus urges readers, in the words of Doris Sommer, to “proceed with caution”. Ultimately, Robinson's assertion of cultural difference troubles the novel's easy assimilation into the Canadian postcolonial literary canon.