Writing Back / Reading Forward: Reconsidering the Postcolonial Approach

Even beyond this Shakespearean approach, however, the field of postcolonial studies has been clearly determined by the endeavour of writing back. Whether this term was taken as a call to actually rework canonised texts, to re-read them in order to decolonise their content, or as an ideological conception redirecting the creative as well as the academic approach within the field – the Empire has indeed been writing back.

There is no doubt that, in the meantime, much has been accomplished in this comparably young field of literary theory. It has, however, also been met with fierce critique and has, even in its beginnings, been never free of query. The limits of the postcolonial concept in its geographical, temporal and ideological meaning have been rigorously disputed, and critics have been accused of forcing homogeneity on countries and regions with entirely different histories of colonisation. And one really has to wonder whether postcolonial nation-states do share more than a common history of oppression. Above all, postcolonial studies is a discipline of constant tension between the claims of a political imperative and that of the arts. If one accepts postcolonialism as “a continuing process of resistance and reconstruction,” as Bill Ashcroft and his colleagues suggest in their Postcolonial Studies Reader, the purpose of this discipline only appears valid as long as colonialism persists to be resisted against. Although, without doubt, colonialism is still around in various guises, it remains disputable whether its lingering level and intensity justify the attention of an entire literary discipline. Although there is an incessant flow of literature that can indeed be traced back to the former colonies, postcolonial studies as literary theory remains challenged on various levels. Lately it seems as if the field’s ideological concern with the process of decolonisation has paralysed it in ‘a politics of blame.’ The endeavour of writing back has, for many, become a continuous looking back to the former coloniser instead of looking forward and, more importantly, writing forward towards a self-determined future – and of course – literature. And, while many postcolonial critics cling to the field’s initial purpose of political resistance, postcolonial literature might quite possibly have already embarked on a journey to newer shores.

Rather than setting out to resolve the many paradoxes of the postcolonial, this study aims to test the persisting value of the discipline as well as enquire into new possibilities of its application to literature. Building upon the dichotomy of writing back and reading forward, I want to challenge received notions of the field’s theoretical conceptions as well as its practical use with regard to literary text. I have chosen a selection of postcolonial fiction, their publication dates ranging from the 1970s to 2012, in order to both explore and challenge the benefits and boundaries of contemporary postcolonial readings. The literary corpus consists of works from India, the Caribbean and South Africa, each in their way prototypical for a country or region that has been ‘touched’ by colonialism. This geographical spread of literature to be discussed here will hopefully make it possible to establish some general tendencies in the academic practice of postcolonial studies, rather than to confine the investigation to specific cases or regions.

Unfortunately, there is no Shakespeare among these selected works, no rewriting or reworking of the greatest of all playwrights have lent the focus for this study. Nevertheless, all texts are, in one way or another, determined by their mixed heritage, Western and non-Western aesthetics have evidently come into play in each of their literary productions.

J. M. Coetzee’s In the Heart of the Country and Robert Antoni’s Divina Trace are both of particular interest because they can indeed be read as ‘realistic’ representations of postcolonial societies. They can, however, also be understood as highly metafictional, testing the narrative genre as much as their respective political surroundings. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger have both become Indian classics for portraying the ills of a society determined by colonial legacy. Nevertheless, in both these texts, the literary trajectory certainly exceeds social criticism and they are replete with formal and textual peculiarities that are not always sufficiently accounted for in conventional readings of the novels. Earl Lovelace’s Is Just a Movie and Nadine Gordimer’s No Time Like the Present have in common that, generally speaking, they were largely overlooked in the critical debate. Though both authors are highly acclaimed in their respective regions, the Caribbean and South Africa, these late works of both authors have received very little scholarly attention. Subsequently, I hope to show that both these texts are not only highly underrated but can equally be read both in a capacity of writing back, of contesting hidden power structures, and also have the potential to create a both empowering and hopeful vision for their respective regions a substance best revealed when reading forward. And most notably, with regard to all these texts, I hope to show that they are the better for precisely this colonial legacy, for the very reason that they are benefitting from a unique hybrid cultural origin which has resulted in an inheritance of literary gain, instead of, as the title of Kiran Desai’s award-winning novel indicates, in an Inheritance of Loss.

These central concerns should not be taken to imply that I intend to resolve any of these contradictions. The postcolonial paradox is inherent to the postcolonial as critical theory and no simple solutions to any of these contradictions can or should be provided. But I do believe that addressing them in order to approach the postcolonial text from both a fresh and original angle will prove not only productive, but also promises to provide a different perspective for applying postcolonial theory. Rather than suggesting a paradigmatic shift, I attempt new modes of reading postcolonial fiction in order to do justice to this rich and creative body of work, which, in my opinion, has certainly surpassed its colonial legacy.

As has been outlined in the introduction, this study sets out to explore and challenge both the benefits and boundaries of the postcolonial as literary theory and aims to place these theoretical considerations in relation to the textual interpretation of six selected novels. In order to provide a solid foundation for the theoretical investigation, in the first chapter, The Pretext of the Postcolonial, a few considerations on terminology and the varying conceptions of the notion of the postcolonial appear necessary. Only then, in Delimitating the Postcolonial, do I want to demarcate the postcolonial in its temporal and geographical capacity. As for the varying assumptions towards the nature of the postcolonial and the numerous activities referred to as such, similar reflections appear useful. Therefore, in the following chapter, Conceptualising the Postcolonial, I will examine its potential as condition, objective and method. In the second part of this chapter, I will also look at the body of postcolonial writing often referred to as ‘postcolonial literature’ in order to examine the usefulness of such a category. These opening sections of the theoretical chapter are not intended to define the extent and the very limits of the postcolonial; instead some general considerations in view of its diverse usage and scale will be offered.

The following section, The Postcolonial Paradox, is dedicated to discussing two central dichotomies of the postcolonial debate. On the one hand, there appears to be a constant tension between the demand for accurate representation and conceptual subversion when writers are depicting postcolonial societies. In this vein, the question will have to be raised of whether a ‘realistic’ representation of social ills is most helpful in order to debunk and mediate the burdens of the colonial legacy, or whether less conventional forms, such as the postmodern, best serve to challenge and dissolve lingering hegemonic structures on both a political as well as an aesthetic level. On the other hand, I will discuss the opposition between both literal and allegorical readings in the context of postcolonial fiction. Within the field, there appears to be a frequent debate on the benefits and dangers of allegory and it remains to be seen whether such a contradiction between the literal and the allegorical is in effect productive. The question of whether this issue is indeed specific to postcolonial texts and not a question of the very nature of the literary in more general terms will also be examined. The final section will then focus on the particular approach of this study, thus compiling the findings of the previous sections in order to arrive at a methodology that can be put into practice in the following textual analysis. Finally, the second part of Narratives of Emancipation will map out the corpus chosen for this study and set forth the reasoning behind the textual selection. Some additional thoughts on the question of race within the postcolonial context will conclude the theoretical approach and thus lead over to the analytical chapters that will then supply contrastive readings of each of the novels.