Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/002198940504000207
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Pub Date : 2005-06-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405054306
J. Eustace
Some fifteen years after the publication of The Empire Writes Back (1989) announced the arrival of postcolonial studies, the legitimacy of a postcolonial critical practice seems beyond question. The healthy state of our relatively young practice can be quantified by the increasing number of scholarly journals and monographs directly and indirectly engaged with postcolonial subjects, and by the corresponding number of similarly engaged courses offered each year at tertiary institutions around the world. Often working in concert with other overtly politicized disciplines, we have helped to change the critical purview of commercial publishing houses, academic presses and universities, mostly for the better I like to think. For our part, we have extended the boundaries of academic and public discourse by engaging with and frequently advocating for those marginalized by colonial history. And we have done so, in general, while attending to the weaknesses inherent in any academic practice that also involves advocacy: trenchant debates over agency, over who can speak for whom and who can speak at all, have legitimized our practice more than undermined it, signalling a healthy level of self-reflexivity and a tendency to discern our discursive positions in relation to our various subjects. The great irony of our measurable success, one not lost on any selfreflexive postcolonial scholar, is that we are now a valuable part of the institutions we began by resisting from within. While we have helped to change the critical purview of commercial and academic presses, they have changed at least in part because there is profit in postcolonial studies; universities have filled seats and quotas with those drawn by our particular brand of institutionalized radicalism; and we have made alliances and careers for ourselves in those institutions. They now have An Unsettling Affair
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050666
I. Raja
Hindu literature and ideals, especially the model of life stages or ashramadharma, recommend renunciation of worldly pursuits in old age. According to Manu Smriti,1 when the householder, or the mature, economically active adult male on whom all others in society depend for sustenance, “sees his skin wrinkled and his hair white and the sons of his sons”, he should turn over the management of household affairs to his heir and retreat to a forest where, in order to disentangle himself from physical and emotional bonds of interdependence developed during the previous life stages, he will devote himself to contemplation, the performance of sacred rites and bodily self-mortification. If he succeeds in this, he is ready to enter the last stage, which involves the complete renunciation of the material world and its pleasures and ties. This is the manner in which ideally he should end his days, fully absorbed in the quest for spiritual perfection.2 Although Hindus in contemporary India may not subscribe to the idealized, four-stage life cycle in literal detail, they are nonetheless guided by the belief that life is made up of distinct developmental stages, each with its own normative code of conduct. Irrespective of the degree of direct familiarity with the classical texts, the idea that it is appropriate for old people to withdraw from active economic, productive or managerial involvement with household affairs and to renounce sensual in favour of Ageing Subjects, Agentic Bodies
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050663
J. Majeed
Two years before the publication of A Passage to India (1924), Forster wrote in a letter to G.L. Dickinson, “I am bored not only by my creative impotence, but by the tiresomeness and conventionalities of the fictionform”.2 In many ways, A Passage to India articulated Forster’s dissatisfaction with the genre of the novel as a whole. Stephen K. Land reads Forster’s novels in terms of the ways in which their protagonists either embody or challenge social conventions.3 The aesthetic form and subjectmatter of A Passage to India can also be read in similar terms as a set of challenges to novelistic conventions. This is evident in the way the novel self-consciously plays with conventional literary expectations on a variety of levels. The key here is the deliberate uncertainty of what happens in the caves, which is the open question that structures the novel as a whole. Famously, Forster refused to clarify this, suggesting that neither the narrator nor the protagonists, and so neither the readers also, can ever know what happened in the Marabar caves. It is clear that the notion that a novel with a supposedly third-person omniscient narrator who can inform the reader of what happens within the world of the text is undermined by the absent centre of A Passage to India, in which the status of its central event, and even the nature of what constitutes an event, is left ambiguous and uncertain. But Forster argued that this uncertainty was linked to his theme of India itself. In a letter of June 1924 he wrote: Bathos, Architecture and Knowing India
在《印度之行》(1924)出版前两年，福斯特在给G.L.狄金森的一封信中写道:“我感到厌烦的不仅是我创作上的无能，还有小说形式的乏味和传统。在很多方面，《印度之行》从整体上表达了福斯特对小说类型的不满。Stephen K. Land读福斯特的小说是根据小说主人公体现或挑战社会习俗的方式《印度之行》的美学形式和主题也可以被解读为对小说传统的一系列挑战。这一点在小说自觉地在不同层面上与传统文学期望进行博弈的方式中显而易见。这里的关键是对洞穴中发生的事情故意不确定，这是构成整部小说的开放性问题。著名的是，福斯特拒绝澄清这一点，暗示叙述者和主人公，以及读者，都不可能知道在马拉巴尔洞穴里发生了什么。很明显，一部小说应该有一个无所不知的第三人称叙述者，他可以告诉读者文本世界里发生了什么，这种观念被《印度之行》的缺席中心破坏了，在这里，它的中心事件的地位，甚至是构成事件的本质，都是模棱两可和不确定的。但福斯特认为，这种不确定性与他的印度主题本身有关。在1924年6月的一封信中，他写道:巴托斯、建筑和了解印度
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050662
J. Cronin
Although short-listed twice within her lifetime for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and universally lauded upon her death as New Zealand’s greatest writer, Janet Frame inspires a surprising degree of reticence in literary scholars. Despite the inroads made by recent monographs,1 much of Frame’s work retains the status of a critical conundrum. The problem, it seems, revolves around contexts, both without and within Frame’s novels. Her later texts, those that are most recognizably postcolonial or postmodern in orientation, receive the most critical attention; yet criticism of them has a tendency to be more concerned with contested critical classifications than with textual elucidation.2 Equally problematic is the preponderance of marginalized individuals and flawed societies within Frame’s early novels. This recurring theme earned Frame the status of New Zealand’s national “Cassandra”,3 a role that continues to foster reductive conceptions of her work. Context, where Janet Frame’s novels are concerned, is a more complex affair than either the postcolonial and postmodern theorizations or the social realist accounts of place allow.4 The tendency for Frame’s texts to be other than they appear is wellknown. However, this “otherness” goes beyond Frame’s notorious shifts in reality and revelations of ventriloquism, to involve multiple manifestations of context within any given text. Before the critic can consider contextualizing Frame’s work in terms of established categories, the status of context within the text – as the norm from which the substance of the novel deviates, as the theoretical terrain of the text, and oftentimes as the philosophical or ontological subject of the work – must be negotiated. The two-fold challenge lies then in determining and elucidating the manifold internal context of each novel, and in turn describing and thereby contextualizing the external significance of that particular work. Contexts of Exploration
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050665
J. Hiddleston
Monica Ali’s Brick Lane burst into the public domain in the summer of 2003, generating both enthusiastic critical acclaim and defensive anger. Praised by some for providing a much needed and so far unprecedented portrait of the Bangladeshi community of London’s East End, the novel also irritated some members of that community, who saw its portrayal of their lives as inaccurate and derogatory. While some readers congratulated Ali for pulling back the curtains of the residences of Tower Hamlets and depicting the injustices and dissatisfactions suffered by their inhabitants, others were shocked by her boldness and offended by what they considered to be a gross misrepresentation of Bengali culture in London. Included in Granta’s list of best young authors, nominated for the US Award of the National Book Critics’ Circle, and short-listed for the Booker Prize, Ali at the same time received a letter from the Greater Sylhet Development and Welfare council condemning her depiction of Bangladeshis as backward and uneducated. This divided response to Ali’s work reveals not only differences in readerly expectations and preconceptions regarding the community in hand, but also a mire of uncertainties concerning the nature of literary representation, in this particular case and more generally. This article will try to elucidate these uncertainties and establish more clearly the nature and implications of Ali’s fictional experimentation in Brick Lane. Both the responses cited above seem still to rely on some notion of literature as realist documentation, but an alternative approach might focus instead on the difficulties of such a construction, on the deceptive effects of the text’s rhetoric. The Shapes and Shadows
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050668
Sue Thomas
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050669
Sarah Brouillette
The development of literary fiction as a popular niche for the publishing industry has been accompanied and encouraged by the increasing presence of writers of non-European origins, often from formerly colonized nations, writing in English for the Anglo-American market. The literature championed by postcolonial scholarship develops largely out of this matrix, and Salman Rushdie is one of its definitive lead authors. Rushdie has built a career on fictions set in locales foreign to many of those who read them, having taken up the task of exploring some of the most topical and contentious political phenomena of the late twentieth century, from anti-capitalist, anti-American revolutions in Central America to religious fundamentalisms in South Asia, from racism in England to the increasing presence of corporate influence in cultural production. Though his first novel Grimus (1979) sold a dismal 800 copies in hardcover,1 since Midnight’s Children was published in 1981 by Jonathan Cape, then the “most prestigious house for literary fiction”, Rushdie has been a lead author.2 The initial printing of Midnight’s Children in England was 1,750 copies, but it eventually sold 40,000 copies in hardcover.3 Marketing the book in the United States was more difficult, perhaps due to the lack of American attachment to India, the novel’s major setting and subject. Eventually Alfred P. Knopf did acquire it and they marketed it aggressively. A review by V.S. Pritchett was slated to appear in the New Yorker to coincide with the US release. It went on to sell very well in hardcover in the US, where the paperback rights went Authorship as Crisis
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050667
O. Okùnoyè
This article estimates the debt of Kofi Anyidoho, a leading Ghanaian poet, to the poetic traditions of the Ewe people of West Africa. It proceeds from situating the work of the poet within his immediate cultural environment, clarifying the dynamism of Ewe literary traditions and the possibilities of perpetuating, extending and subverting them. It suggests that received traditions in this context often prove amenable to functional manipulation and that practices of this nature are increasingly enriching the distinctive literary practices of other postcolonial societies. But the article denies any simplistic transference of values from the Ewe practices that provide the enabling base for Anyidoho’s creative project, suggesting, instead, that a proper evaluation of his work must take his own outlook and the circumstances that necessitate his appropriation of aspects of indigenous poetic practices into consideration. The Ewe traditions of dirge and the Halo (song of abuse) are recognized as the particular Ewe poetic practices that shape Kofi Anyidoho’s creative project. The Ewe people are believed to have migrated from Oyo in Southwestern Nigeria, through Ketu in the present Republic of Benin, to Notse in Togo, where they eventually dispersed. In the political geography of contemporary Africa, they are found in three West African states – Benin, Togo and Ghana. The people still maintain a reasonable measure of cultural unity in spite of the failure of their moves toward political unification. Their main unifying factors include a common language and shared beliefs and practices, especially in their traditions of poetry. Of the many Ewe sub-groups – Anlo, Some, Be, Ge, Peki, Adaklu, Ave, “We Too Sing”
本文估计了加纳著名诗人Kofi Anyidoho对西非Ewe族诗歌传统的贡献。它将诗人的作品置于其直接的文化环境中，阐明了Ewe文学传统的活力以及延续，扩展和颠覆它们的可能性。它表明，在这种情况下，公认的传统往往被证明是可以接受功能操纵的，这种性质的做法正日益丰富其他后殖民社会的独特文学实践。但是这篇文章否认了任何简单的从Ewe实践中转移价值的做法，这些实践为Anyidoho的创造性项目提供了有利的基础，相反，建议对他的作品进行适当的评估必须考虑到他自己的观点和环境，这些观点和环境要求他考虑到土著诗歌实践的各个方面。Ewe传统的挽歌和Halo(虐待之歌)被认为是特殊的Ewe诗歌实践，塑造了Kofi Anyidoho的创作项目。据信，Ewe人是从尼日利亚西南部的Oyo，经过现在贝宁共和国的Ketu，迁移到多哥的Notse，最终分散在那里。在当代非洲的政治地理中，他们分布在三个西非国家——贝宁、多哥和加纳。尽管走向政治统一的努力失败了，但人们仍然保持着一定程度的文化统一。他们的主要统一因素包括共同的语言和共同的信仰和习俗，特别是他们的诗歌传统。在众多的Ewe分支中——Anlo, Some, Be, Ge, Peki, Adaklu, Ave，“我们也唱歌”
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Pub Date : 2005-03-01DOI: 10.1177/0021989405050664
J. Andrews
In The Navigator of New York, Wayne Johnston explores the discourse of risk through a fictional account of the famously heated competition between Dr. Frederick Cook and Lt. Robert Peary to reach the North Pole. Narrated primarily through the voice of Devlin Stead, Cook’s illegitimate son, the novel examines how personal and professional risks have shaped the life of these explorers, their lovers and their offspring. As Johnston’s version of Cook, wrestling retrospectively with the consequences of having abandoned his pregnant lover, Amelia, explains in the second epigraph above, the trust she invested in him as an engaged woman from Newfoundland who visits New York City shortly before her wedding and his inability to economically and emotionally reciprocate have changed the direction of their lives forever. Amelia, in particular, pays for the risks she takes; she and her son, Devlin Stead, are ostracized by the St. John’s community, and she is eventually mysteriously murdered by her husband, Francis Stead. Cook, in the meantime, encounters Francis, who has become a fellow explorer, eventually learns of his crime and kills him in an act of revenge. To bond with the son he did not know existed, Cook then seeks out Devlin, writing him a series of lengthy letters that outline his parentage and share Cook’s obsessive passion for exploration. These letters spur the young man to risk it all by coming to New York and participating, with his father, in the race for the Pole; the results are physically and emotionally perilous, provoking Devlin to re-examine how he understands himself, his family, and his identity as a Newfoundlander. Reading Risk
在《纽约航海家》(The Navigator of New York)一书中，韦恩·约翰斯顿(Wayne Johnston)虚构了弗雷德里克·库克博士(Dr. Frederick Cook)和罗伯特·皮尔里中尉(Lt. Robert Peary)为到达北极而展开的那场著名的激烈竞争，探讨了关于风险的话语。这部小说主要通过库克的私生子德夫林·斯特德(Devlin Stead)的声音讲述，探讨了个人和职业风险如何塑造了这些探险家、他们的爱人和他们的后代的生活。正如约翰斯顿版本的库克在上文第二段铭文中所解释的那样，库克在与抛弃怀孕的情人阿米莉亚(Amelia)的后果作回顾时，她对他的信任——作为一个来自纽芬兰的订婚女子，他在婚礼前不久访问了纽约市——以及他在经济和情感上的无力回报——永远改变了他们的生活方向。尤其是阿米莉亚，她为自己所冒的风险付出了代价;她和儿子德夫林·斯特德(Devlin Stead)受到圣约翰社区的排斥，最终被丈夫弗朗西斯·斯特德(Francis Stead)神秘谋杀。与此同时，库克遇到了弗朗西斯，他已经成为一名探险家，最终得知了他的罪行，并在报复中杀死了他。为了与他不知道的儿子建立联系，库克找到了德夫林，给他写了一系列长信，概述了他的身世，并分享了库克对探索的痴迷热情。这些信件激励着这个年轻人冒着一切危险来到纽约，和他的父亲一起参加南极的比赛;结果是身体和情感上的危险，促使德夫林重新审视他如何理解自己，他的家庭，以及他作为纽芬兰人的身份。阅读风险
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