Scottish Literature and Postcolonial Literature: Comparative Texts and Critical Perspectives Edited by Michael Gardiner, Graeme Macdonald and Niall O’Gallagher (review)

Abstract

This is a rich and fascinating collection of essays, engaging with, as the title suggests, an attempt to throw a bridge of dialogue between two areas of investigation that have always shared a number of important thematic and theoretical concerns ^ among these, a critical distance from the cultural practices of the metropolitan centre of the Empire, an anti-imperial and antihegemonic stance, a critical questioning of the ‘English’ canon and a sense of inhabiting a temporal and ideological ‘aftermath’ (whether post-colonial or post-British) ^ and that yet have kept at a guarded (critical) distance from each other. They also share, as Michael Gardiner highlights in the introduction to the volume, a recent de¢nitional crisis, whereby ‘the terms of both the postcolonial and of (stateless) Scottishness indicate tendencies which can be discerned by careful readings, not categories of text’, so that ‘the question of whether a text is or is not postcolonial is misguided, and the question of whether a text is or is not Scottish is not far behind’ (p. 2). Gardiner’s introduction raises a number of important issues and highlights intersections between the two ¢elds, but ^ inevitably, given the vastness and complexity of the ¢eld ^ leaves a few crucial questions untouched or barely touched. To claim, for example, that ‘Anglo-American postcolonial studies . . . has been less able to challenge the discipline of English Literature than has the allegedly ethnic ¢eld of Scottish Literature’ (p. 3) seems to invoke more a potential than a reality, given the relative dearth of Scottish authors that are part of the English canon, as much as the subsequent hint at the fact that there is a ‘natural a⁄nity’ (p. 7) linking the two ¢elds in object may appear as an attempt to bypass a sustained analytical evaluation of disciplinary relations. Also, the call for ‘a more mature internationalism’ (p. 7) seems to be more related to a speci¢cally Marxist approach than in line with recent postcolonial celebrations of £uid transnationalism. The main focus of the introduction, on the history of the development of English Literature as a discipline in relation to both postcolonial and Scottish literature, is however of great interest and certainly opens up new paths of interdisciplinary understanding. The structure of the collection is conventionally chronological and con-