The Institutional Cultures of Postcolonial Studies

Abstract

This essay identifies an emerging body of cultural production created in the wake of the late twentieth-century consolidation of postcolonial literary studies, and reads this work as an engagement with the paradox of institutionalizing anti-imperial thought in the imperial metropoles. These novels and songs (including work from Teju Cole, Minoli Salgado, and Das Racist) admiringly cite the field’s most famous intellectuals and transformative reading practices, yet are also critical of its standardized jargon and clichés. Through close readings of two case studies, Minoli Salgado’s A Little Dust on the Eyes and Das Racist’s music, the essay argues these texts enact revisions of the field’s reading practices. Deployed as terminology and as reading list, both enact the revision of the institutionalized field through juxtaposition with non-institutional others: survivor accounts of the Sri Lankan civil war, and the aesthetics of African American hip hop. These texts can therefore be read as public-facing expressions of a literary training, and as the transformation of that training in the context of non-academic spaces.

• Academic novel
• Das Racist
• hip hop
• institutionalization
• postcolonial studies
• Salgado, Minoli

Notes

1 While this essay deals primarily with the trajectory of postcolonial studies within the Anglo-American academy, it should be noted that the field is a globally, though unevenly, dispersed field of study, with institutional locations in East Asia, Europe, North America, South Asia, and beyond (Quayson 2012, 3); with this in mind, there is significant room for exploration of the field’s representation in other cultural production, as, for example, the work of visual artists like Emily Jacir and Yinka Shonibare, or A. B. Yehoshua’s The Liberated Bride (2003), which includes a lecture on Robert Young’s Colonial Desire (1995).

2 By no means are these the only figures that fit within this generational constellation. In a 2016 MLA panel on “The Postcolonial Studies Generation”, Nasia Anam analyzed Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know (2014), and Kasim Husain focused on Tabish Khair’s How to Fight Islamist Terror from the Missionary Position (2014). One might also consider The Kominas, who refer to themselves as a “Post-Colonial punk band” (Dave 2016), and US musician Saraswati Jones, who calls her music “postcolonial pop rock” and mentions that one of her songs was “supposed to be a dissertation” (Vikaas 2013).

3 As many critics have noted, Said’s relationship with the disciplinary formation of postcolonial studies was more of imposition than willed affiliation. Yet one can observe this tension while still registering Said’s popular association with the field and its critical reading practices.

4 Rather than mistaking Antigua (the Caribbean island invoked in Mansfield Park) for Haiti, the lyrics instead centre the Haitian Revolution.

5 For a fascinating material history of the field, see Raja and Bahri (2012). Other histories critically read the field’s imbrication within larger ideological formations, such as a conciliatory First World multiculturalism (Sharpe 2005), and the linguistic turn away from political economy (Parry 2004).

6 Despite much discussion of the field’s decline, there are numerous signs of its increasing institutional pervasiveness, such as the publication of The Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies (2013), and the multi-volume editions of The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature (2011) and The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (2016). Importantly, these publications signal a turn away from the foregrounding of theory, and instead highlight a literary concentration or the more inclusive term “studies”.

7 Recent materialist histories indicate it is only since the late 1990s that postcolonial studies became recognizable as an academic institution. As Raja and Bahri put it, “if dedicated journals and discussion groups explicitly using the term ‘postcolonial’ signal the institutionalization of a field, postcolonial studies has only recently achieved this status” (2012, 1178). For another account of this period, see Boehmer and Tickell (2015).

8 This cultural production participates in a wider contemporaneous interrogation of the field, indicated by collaborative evaluations such as the PMLA forum “The End of Postcolonial Theory?” (Agnani 2007) and the anthology Postcolonial Studies and Beyond (Loomba et al. 2005), both of which stress the need for renewed attention to the political function of postcolonial studies during the War on Terror.

9 In one passage, Savi’s cousin smiles wryly at the “impressive terms” in her books (135); some of this language – “disjunctive temporalities” (Homi Bhabha) and “metropolitan hybridities” (R. Radhakrishnan) – is distinctive to an institutional postcolonial vocabulary, and actually appears in Salgado’s (2007) monograph Writing Sri Lanka, giving proof to her suggestion that the novel is a kind of “self-critique” (2016a, 172).

10 Sri Lankan writer Ediriweera Sarachchandra’s most famous play.

11 This moment is paralleled in Adichie’s Americanah (2013) when the protagonist, Ifemelu, meets a young Yale professor of comparative politics who asks her if she is a graduate student or has thought of becoming one. She wryly retorts: “Yes, but I’m worried I will leave grad school and no longer be able to speak English” (220).

12 The novel hints at a longer collaboration between the two, but their partnership is tragically cut short by the catastrophic intervention of the tsunami, in which Savi is drowned. Salgado thus stymies easy solutions, reaffirming the tragic nature of recent Sri Lankan history and the further need to read these overlapping silences carefully.

13 Das Racist receive a brief mention in Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (2015), in which a photo of the band appears on a comic artist’s bedroom wall (67). Rushdie’s reference to Das Racist completes a circuit between literature and popular music, one routed through the academy.

14 Ahmed’s reference here is part of a wider interest in Fanon in the arts; recent films on Fanon, in English alone, include Isaac Julien’s Black Skin, White Mask (1995), Göran Olsson’s Concerning Violence (2014), and Larry Achiampong and David Blandy’s Finding Fanon trilogy (2015–17).