LAUGHING OUT OF PLACE

This essay looks closely at the rhetorical tools of the postcolonial trade by examining humourous passages from Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land – a work which itself combines scholarship and literary non-fiction – in order to ask how we might read writing that plays with the fixed, static binaries of postcolonial relation we so regularly critique. I apply recent insights in cultural translation regarding the politics of figurative location to offer a more complex understanding of the ways we might read geographical relation in ironic first-person accounts. I consider Neelam Srivastava's suggestion that we read Ghosh's book as ‘a more complex literary genre’ against Gauri Viswanathan's charge that the writing is ‘politically ineffectual’. I argue that the debate reveals something more fundamental about our own interests and strategies in engaging with issues of postcoloniality, and thus should be part of a broader enquiry into the ideological – as rhetorical – positionings of essayists and other cultural critics.