Post-colonial literature

i really should read hugh kenner. i wonder what he made of the idea of postcolonial literature.

"Colonialism and post-colonialism are not geographical, or chronologically historical factors. Colonialism and post-colonialism are ideas, perspectives that could exist at any age, any time, in any country. Colonialism works like patriarchy, it is not an event, it is a discourse. "

that wasn't hugh kenner

I feel a bit colonialised this morning. I might try to subvert the discourse.

'the caribbean afterlives of t.s. eliot.'

haha wait i think i know the dude who's running this one, iirc it's pretty walcott-tastic.

xpost to thomp, yeah I came to Beckett as a novelist principally and still adore all of them - would happily pluck Murphy from the shelf if I needed a light-feeling commute read even.

Fizzles - if you don't like going to the theatre then I suppose reading plays is for you. But in general I feel that this is like saying "I hate watching films but I love reading scripts". That said, there are plays that were written primarily to be read, with no realistic expectation that they would ever be staged, so reading them is alright.

On post-colonial literature - it does seem like a bit of an umbrella category, as in "these guys are from somewhere that used to be a colony, therefore they are writing post-colonial literature". I suppose you can say "But look, in their work they do X, Y, and Z, which indicates that they are to some extent all about post-colonial stuff", though someone else can say "I think you will find that X, Y and Z often appear in books by people who are not from colonies, so UR FULE". And thus the cycle of academia continues, perhaps with someone talking about how the post-colonial discourse has infected even writers who are not from former colonies (like, eh, Hanif Kureishi).

It strikes me as well that post-colonialism is like musical genres discovered by critics.

actually that quote from Thomp above is great... it is a handy excuse to say that everything is, in its way, postcolonial. Kind of like the way you get people saying that all music is jazz.

c sharp major: j4r4d z1mbl3r?

to be fair i probably shouldn't be making fun of a one-week seminar taught by a guy i never met, partic. when the description in the course booklet actually avoids the term 'postcolonial' -- it's just the first phrase in there that i opened the booklet and went "ayup this is definitely an english department"

scripts:plays::scripts:films is a bit broken imo

i mean, war of the worlds with tom cruise exists in a definitive version, it's the film with tom cruise. whereas if i see tom cruise as hamlet there's an argument that studying the first folio is actually closer to having some 'definitive' or 'authentic' idea of what the play hamlet is about

this is probably all a bit 101 tbf

yeah yeah, I was just using the analogy to make clear that I AM RIGHT.

fair enough

thomp: yes! he is a friend of my bro's, nice dude. not sure the seminar was originally his idea tbh (his specialism is post-colonial tho).

just to keep 101ing postcolonial lit, I guess there's an identifiable core that's, yes, about life (& specifically interactions between diff cultures, hybrid cultures forming) in places that used to be colonies; and rewritings of things from colonising cultures by or from the POV of the colonised (which I think what poco studies loves loves loves more than anything else). But it's a dull critical toolkit when overextended, everyone ends up subverting or inverting hegemonic discourse.

I dunno, as I've said before, I'm theory-dumb.

But it's a dull critical toolkit when overextended,

This is key –- isolated study of post-colonial lit reinforces notions of nation and border, and largely ends up reifying the conceit of largesse in the dominant nationality represented, kind of paternalistically allowing entry to the underclass/ colonial class. Good books I've read that fit into this category, even if unoriginal:

Wole Soyinka - The Interpreters
Russell Banks - Continental Drift
Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea
Ousmane Sembane - God's Bits of Wood

Hawthorne

washington irving

huh, good call

what threads on ILX would count as post-colonial?

Irish Home Rule

Do you get the inverse kind of book, i.e. one written in a former coloniser country that is all "Oh woe us, we used to be able to boss foreign people around, and now our identity is so confused".

I'm guessing the answer is yes.

Yes

niall ferguson? philip larkin?

You get academic books about that phenomenon.

I am not terribly sympathetic to them, as I think alleged phenomena like 'post-colonial melancholy' have been immensely exaggerated.

Putting my Merlot where my mouth is, I have tried to argue this at some length to would-be academics, noting, for instance, that in too many years of living in the UK I have virtually never met anyone who has expressed any regret or anger, let alone melancholy, at the end of the British Empire. I have suggested, and I would suggest again, that if there ever was any post-colonial melancholy, it would be something limited to a very specific group at a particular time (eg: people who served the Empire in India and were sent back to England at the end of the 1940s), and has, frankly, almost no pertinence to British life as I have witnessed it in the last decades.

On the whole I don't even think 'confused identity' is a great theme, probably because I am not sure I believe in 'national identity' when it comes down to it. Maybe national identity is a thing (Irish, English, Palestinians) believe or want to believe when they are under siege from a military aggressor. But then maybe 'identity' is a red herring and what they want is just to be free in their own place, which seems a good enough aspiration.

I hate this shit

there are great authors that are taught in schools under the banner of being "post-colonial" (like coetzee I guess) so in a way its alright w/ me

probably my favorite book ever, Palm Wine Drinkard, I haven't read it in a really long time, is post colonial tho

"I have virtually never met anyone who has expressed any regret or anger, let alone melancholy, at the end of the British Empire."

c'mon son

I haven't thought about this too hard but maybe the thing about this category that really triggers me is that it contextualizes the work in a way that makes life all about the colonizer when the works are much richer

rk narayan is really worth your time in the post-col deal

I think it's fair enough to group the literatures of places whose authors wouldn't be writing in the languages they right is as "post-colonial" & find all the "what a bogus designation" stuff on this thread kinda weird

nah that makes sense

I prob have all this anger because I was an english major tbh

It's not a bogus designation.

Lots of writers have been postcolonial and some of them have written about that historical or geographical situation.

writing in the languages they right is

man oh man I knew I was sleep-deprived but this is next-level

Hey my annoyingly titled thread worked! (or at leat it generated posts)

From the Beckett discussion above - is it another way of saying that a writer writes from a position of exile - now many writers in Latin America were quicked out from dictatorships in the 70s and 80s and had to write and publish abroad but this can also be widened to others who were alienated and yet lived inside (because they couldn't exist on the outside). Thinking of Genet, Mishima or Bernhard.

yeah yeah, I was just using the analogy to make clear that I AM RIGHT.

― The New Dirty Vicar, Thursday, 1 September 2011 12:29 (2 days ago)

I know you know you're not.

It so annoys me that Beckett is considered primarily a playwright when his fiction is so good. Same w/Chekhov. Was reading White's Genet biog this week and was further annoyed by how successful his plays seemed to be in comparison to his fiction. Count me as a play reader, for the most part. Seems this favouring of plays is part of the culture, which should be annihilated.

What's Soyinka's The Interpreters like?

Seems this favouring of plays is part of the culture

I'm not sure what culture you live in but almost nobody reads plays

agree

Favouring of plays over novels that leads to people dismissing Beckett's novels or Chehkhov's stories.

I feel that theatre, drama, plays are a marginalized area that cries out for sympathy and support

which is one reason I can't bring myself to point out that Beckett is not primarily a dramatist

really enjoyed this

https://thepointmag.com/criticism/beyond-the-guilt-tax/

Excellent, should read Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s novels

i enjoyed that article and am currently teaching a seminar on postcolonial lit to my students, so it's relevant to my interests. the way she describes the instrumentalization of indian literature to make a moral critique does not match how i use texts in my classroom, but i have noticed in recent years my students are more and more inclined to read all literature (white literature, too!) to determine the "moral" or to figure out how it illustrates racism or sexism or homophobia (never capitalist wealth inequality, though!) when they write analytically about these topics, they never have an argument! just "this is misogynist," like, okay, and? it's depressing, and i try to fight as much as possible the tendency to read literature as though it's a fable. i am actually not teaching any indians in this course; in my experience indian lit is overrepresented in postcolonial classes and india is maybe the least representative colonial situation i can think of? also i will admit i feel weird about teaching indian lit to mostly non-indian american students as an indian american.

a book i was never exposed to in college or grad school, but which i now teach and think is great is tayeb salih's season of migration to the north. it helps to have read heart of darkness, but it's not necessary.

regarding the discussion upthread about the potentially bogus nature of the category "post-colonial lit," i am agnostic on that question. i inherited this class from a colleague who, like me, was educated in the late 90s and early 2000s and found postcolonial studies revelatory. on the one hand, it strikes me as kind of a dated concept; on the other, it also feels timely inasmuch as we're living in an era of declining American imperialism. infusing history and politics into literary studies is tricky, and if it's done crudely, as critiqued in the article k3vin posted, inadequate, but my approach in this class is to teach some rich texts written by writers in nations that have been colonized--the texts themselves determine what we discuss, rather than some preconceived historical agenda.

was educated in the late 90s and early 2000s and found postcolonial studies revelatory

ha same. I was taken aback on entering grad school in the mid-10s to find the term and theory were now scorned, at least here in Canada where the "post" was viewed exclusively as an erasure of the realities of a never-ceased settler colonialism. It is admittedly weird to read some of the opening posts itt and see Australia and Ireland mentioned without any acknowledgement of continuing occupation.

that said, over-correcting to "nothing/nowhere is post-colonial" is pretty offensive imo

i mean the difficulty of the term is kind of that everything is ongoingly colonial and it's hard to be specific. also have to say fanon, said, clr james...i still find that stuff relevant and useful in the classroom.

Yes, to be more precise it was more the, let's say, second-wave theorists that had become unfashionable. The three you listed are all very much still discussed; James and maybe even Fanon seem, if anything, more prominent to me now. I've also been assigned "Can the subaltern speak?" multiple times. And of course coloniality/decolonization are huge topics.

lol i do not find spivak useful in the classroom because i do not want to inflict her prose on high school students. she is correct about the subaltern, though.

haha assigning that to high schoolers might technically be unconstitutional

It's a senior seminar, to be clear, and i find fanon, said, and james digestible in excerpted form, but spivak is too far.

that's really cool to hear. I think the closest I got to reading anything like that in high school was Achebe's essay on Heart of Darkness, which we only read in conjunction with HOD.

i felt weird teaching season of migration to the north without teaching heart of darkness, but i can't quite wrap my head around teaching heart of darkness tbh. i was taught it in high school, and it blew my mind, but...it's tough.

everybody should read season of migration to the north btw so i have someone to discuss it with who is not a high school student (love my students, but it would also be nice to discuss it with adults!)

never heard of it until you posted -- noted!

i will read it, sounds great! but it may be in a year. i just started going from the top corner of my bookshelf and HOD is close by. i read it a while ago already. then i read king leopold's ghost this year which made me want to read it again.

King leopold’s ghost is such a great book! One of the best history books I’ve ever read? I am too frivolous to make it through most history books.

harbl, I hope you enjoy season of migration whenever you get to it!

it's been 15 years but yes King Leopold's Ghost is really amazing

i have never read a non-fiction book faster!

i felt weird teaching season of migration to the north without teaching heart of darkness, but i can't quite wrap my head around teaching heart of darkness tbh. i was taught it in high school, and it blew my mind, but...it's tough.

― horseshoe, Thursday, 18 February 2021 bookmarkflaglink

Reason season but not Heart of Darkness. Should correct.

There are a few things I think of post-colonial that I want to read:

Driss Chraïbi - The Distant Past

(A few others I have that I want to make more of a list)

It does seem, from the global south, that only Latin American Literature gets to be anything other than post-colonial. And that's possibly because a lot of it's writers are from European ancestry.

*Read 'Season...' that should say, above

As an American, my favorite post-colonial alternative storyline is that if only we'd failed at Revolution, there would have been no Civil War.

"On weekend mornings, between 6 a.m. and whenever the kids woke up, she wrote, and then typed up her ideas at the kitchen table, ‘with the noise of children coming in and out and banging the doors’. She sent her stories out on a Tuesday and received her rejections by Friday for years, until Richard Crossman, who had become editor of the New Statesman in 1970 after six years in Harold Wilson’s cabinet, liked one of them enough to buy several in 1972"

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n05/joanna-biggs/lady-this-and-princess-that

That quote rather underplays her struggle! Good piece, definitely will check out her writing.