Abstract
Chapter 7, ‘Concepts of exchange—poetics in postcolonial, world, and world-system literatures’, considers the interrelationship of postcolonial literary studies with world literature and world-system studies in the context of early 21st-century globalization. The chapter’s main question concerns the extent to which a postcolonial poetics may be impacted by these changes in the wider field. While always taking postcolonial literary study as the primary avenue through which writing from the world’s various margins (cultural, geographical, racial) has been approached since the 1980s, I ask whether and how the new rise of comparative and world literature study, and, as a further development, the emergence of world-systems or world-literature studies, might have challenged or alternatively developed and honed postcolonial tools of critique. Pushing towards the suggestion that no approach has been as effective as a heterogeneously constituted postcolonial criticism in resonating with the local yet global perspectives of postcolonial texts, the chapter closes with a discussion of British-Somali writer Nadifa Mohamed’s Black Mamba Boy (2010), a travelogue novel whose transnational and migratory energies invite world-literature yet also postcolonial readings.
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Notes
- 1.
Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 145.
- 2.
Nadifa Mohamed, Black Mamba Boy (London: HarperCollins, 2010), p. 277.
- 3.
Simon Gikandi, ‘Globalization and the Claims of Postcoloniality’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 100.3 (2001): 627–53.
- 4.
Pheng Cheah, What Is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), pp. 151, 153, 193–4, 212–15.
- 5.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature’, Comparative Literature: The Early Years (University of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature), eds. Hans-Joachim Schultz and Phillip H. Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), pp. 1–11.
- 6.
David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 1, 5–6, 299–300.
- 7.
Damrosch , What Is World Literature?, pp. 3, 279.
- 8.
Emily Apter, Against World Literature (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 2, 6–7. See also: James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1997); Maria Tymocsko, Translation in a Postcolonial Context (Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2003).
- 9.
Derived from the work of Michael Löwy, the term designates a marvellous aesthetic that observes the logic of a dream, and that, I would add, therefore bears comparison with an Okri-esque spiritual realism, as we saw outlined in the discussion in chapter 5. See Michael Löwy, ‘The Current of Critical Irrealism’, in Adventures in Realism, ed. Matthew Beaumont (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 193–206.
- 10.
See, in particular, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. Debevoise (1999; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and, for the Anglophone world, Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic (London: Routledge, 2001).
- 11.
Edward Said, ‘Globalizing Literary Study’, PMLA 116.1 (January 2001): 64–8. The quotation is from p. 66.
- 12.
Damrosch , What Is World Literature?, pp. 24, 299–300.
- 13.
Damrosch , What Is World Literature?, pp. 5–6, 213. Despite its title, Damrosch’s later trade book How to Read World Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), does not go very far into the hermeneutics of world reading.
- 14.
Gayatri Spivak , Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 71–2, and elsewhere.
- 15.
In order, the quotations are from Spivak , Death of a Discipline, pp. xii, 4, 15–16, 3.
- 16.
David Damrosch and Gayatri Spivak, ‘Comparative Literature/World Literature: A Discussion’, Comparative Literature Studies 48.4 (2011): 469–72; pp. 455–85 in particular; Spivak , Death of a Discipline, pp. 53 and 92.
- 17.
Spivak , Death of a Discipline, p. 92.
- 18.
Debjani Ganguly , This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). The quotations that follow are from pp. 1–4, 24, 20, and 17, respectively.
- 19.
Ganguly , This Thing Called the World, pp. 20–4.
- 20.
Ganguly , This Thing Called the World, p. 17.
- 21.
Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), here pp. 4–6 in particular. At the time of publication the collective comprised: Sharae Deckard, Nicholas Lawrence, Neil Lazarus , Graeme Macdonald, Pablo Mukherjee, Benita Parry, and Stephen Shapiro (who are all named as copyright authors).
- 22.
Aamir Mufti, Forget English!, p. 145.
- 23.
Mohamed , Black Mamba Boy, as above; Tayeb Salih , Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (1969; London: Heinemann, 2003).
- 24.
Robert J.C. Young , ‘World Literature and Postcolonialism’, The Routledge Companion to World Literature, eds. Theo D’Haen, David Damrosch , and Djelal Kadir (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 213.
- 25.
Robert J.C. Young , Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).
- 26.
See Anna Rutherford and Kirsten H. Petersen, eds., From Commonwealth to Post-Colonial: Critical Essays (Sydney and Coventry: Dangaroo, 1992).
- 27.
A wide array of readers and primers followed in the wake of The Empire Writes Back as the field was institutionalized. These included: Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman’s edited Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory (1993), Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (1995), Patrick Williams and Peter Child’s An Introduction to Post-Colonial Theory (1996), Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory (1997), Denis Walder’s Post-Colonial Literatures in English (1998), Ania Loomba’s more retrospective Colonialism/Postcolonialism (1998), and Leela Gandhi’s M.K. Gandhi-inflected Postcolonial Theory (1999). Important studies of, specifically, black writing and representation included work by: Abdul JanMohamed (1983), Henry Louis Gates and Kwame A. Appiah (1986), and Paul Gilroy (1993). As for other postcolonial works listed in this chapter, full bibliographic citations appear in Works Cited at the end of the book.
- 28.
Full references to these postcolonial classics also appear in Works Cited for this chapter.
- 29.
Work indebted to Said’s interest in contrapuntal readings of the canon includes: Mary Louise Pratt’s Imperial Eyes (1992), Sara Suleri’s The Rhetoric of English India (1992), and Jenny Sharpe’s Allegories of Empire (1993), amongst many other studies.
- 30.
See Homi Bhabha , The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 171.
- 31.
They had recourse to Jameson’s massively influential essay: ‘Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism’, Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. See also Timothy Brennan’s Jameson-inflected reading of Rushdie: Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myths of the Nation (London: Macmillan, 1989).
- 32.
As well as Parry and Lazarus , among the more prominent of these critical voices were Arif Dirlik in ‘The Postcolonial Aura’ (1994), see footnote 50 below, Ella Shohat (1992), and Aijaz Ahmad in his influential In Theory (London: Verso, 1994). See also: Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, eds., The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons (London: Routledge, 1995).
- 33.
Benita Parry, Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (London: Routledge, 2004). The critique that Lazarus and others level at Bhabha was explored in more detail in chapter 3.
- 34.
We might think here of such work as Carole Boyce Davies’s Black Women, Writing and Identity (1994), Anne McClintock’s Imperial Leather (1995), Trinh Minh-Ha’s Woman, Native, Other (1989), and bell hooks’s Yearning (1990). My own work on gendered African nationalism was brought together in Stories of Women (2005). For further discussion of the contribution of feminist thought to postcolonial critique, and of 1990s postcolonialism, see Elleke Boehmer and Alex Tickell, ‘The 1990s: An Increasingly Postcolonial Decade’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature 50.1 (2015): 325–52.
- 35.
To take just the past two decades as a representative cross-section, postcolonial literary studies has in this period embraced such issues as disability, environmental crises, and questions of war trauma , genocide, and reconciliation, as in South Africa, Rwanda, or East Timor.
- 36.
See Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilization (London: Verso, 1996).
- 37.
See Damrosch , What Is World literature?, pp. 144, 169, 279, 6.
- 38.
This is my coinage, based on terms such as ‘world novel’, from Ganguly , and ‘world form’, from Eric Bulson, cited in chapter 2.
- 39.
These and other of Moretti’s influential essays are collected in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013). See, in particular, pp. 43–62, and 107–20, and, of these, pp. 56 and 60.
- 40.
Moretti , Distant Reading, pp. 117–19.
- 41.
WReC, Combined and Uneven Development, pp. xi, 7–8.
- 42.
Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 13–14.
- 43.
Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 16–17.
- 44.
See New Literary History 43.1 and 2 (2012).
- 45.
Young , ‘World Literature and Postcolonialism’, p. 214.
- 46.
Deepika Bahri , Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003).
- 47.
See John J. Su, ‘Amitav Ghosh and the Aesthetic Turn in Postcolonial Studies’, Journal of Modern Literature 34.3 (2011): 65–86, which quotes from Young (1998) on pp. 65–6.
- 48.
Mary Lou Emery, Modernism, the Visual and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- 49.
As brilliantly mapped, for example, in Jahan Ramazani, A Transnational Poetics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).
- 50.
In the view of Arif Dirlik, however, postcolonialism’s self-reflexive agility may still not have generated a sufficiently thoroughgoing criticism of the ‘global capitalis[t] … system of which it is a product’. See Arif Dirlik, ‘The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism’, Critical Inquiry 20.2 (1994): 328–56. For the quotation, see pp. 353 and 356.
- 51.
See Elleke Boehmer , Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial: Resistance in Interaction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 52.
Spivak , Death of a Discipline, pp. 54–66.
- 53.
Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 81–95, in particular pp. 84 and 95.
- 54.
Combined and Uneven Development, pp. 84–7. There is also a powerful reading of Salih’s novel as exposing the all-imprisoning hegemony of ‘global postcolonial culture’ in Mufti , Forget English!, pp. 149–52.
- 55.
Mohamed , Black Mamba Boy, pp. 1–2. Page references will henceforth be included in the text, along with the abbreviation BMB.
- 56.
Furthermore, on the streets of Aden , Arabic words and references to the Bible and the Arabian Nights weave together with Hebrew curses, Parsee names, and Somali terms of endearment (BMB 6, 23, 32, 57, 73). On the road Jama will also first learn to read and write in Italian, in his job as signaller, spelling out in white rocks on the ground messages to Italian fighter planes during action over the Horn of Africa in the Second World War (BMB 158).
- 57.
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (1901; London: Penguin, 1986).
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Boehmer, E. (2018). Concepts of Exchange—Poetics in Postcolonial, World, and World-Systems Literatures. In: Postcolonial Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90341-5_7
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