The rhetoric of Sara Suleri: Life writing and postcolonial theory

ABSTRACT

This article reads Sara Suleri’s memoirs Meatless Days (first published in 1989) and Boys Will Be Boys (2003) in dialogue with The Rhetoric of English India (1992), her influential work of postcolonial theory. It argues that Suleri’s life writing and scholarship respond to the same fundamental questions about writing and description, and foreground visual metaphors to show how the memoirist distorts or imaginatively invents her absent subjects as a critic distorts or invents the text they read. Suleri understands criticism, like memoir, to be an act of creative, and distorting, remembrance. Reading Suleri’s work in this way prompts us to reread the postcolonial theory of the 1980s and 1990s as a body of literature, a register of and a meditation on a history of 20th-century migration and cultural encounter.

KEYWORDS:

• Sara Suleri
• life writing
• postcolonial theory
• memoir
• Rhetoric of English India

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Criticism on Suleri tends to discuss Meatless Days alone. Lovesey (1997) discusses Suleri’s work as a model for “postcolonial self-fashioning” whilst Ray (1993), in a less admiring portrait, draws attention to how Suleri’s elite background shapes her vision of Pakistani womanhood.

2. The editors’ introduction in Bernard, Elmarsafy, and Murray (2015) gives a lucid history of the rise and decline of postcolonial theory, and of responses to Lazarus’s work after 2011 (1–10).

3. M.A. Jinnah, the so-called “father of the nation”, was a key advocate for the creation of Pakistan, and the country’s first governor general. The Suleris arrived in Pakistan following Partition in 1947. As a mohajir (an immigrant from India) Z.A. Suleri was vulnerable as well as prominent. Feudal power lay with landowning families, like the Bhuttos.

4. Suleri (1992) reads in Kipling a sense of the “novelty” of “imperial time”, which for Kipling “demand[ed] to be read less as a recognizable chronology of historic events than as a contiguous chain of surprise effects” (113). Both Kim and her father are boyish or “adolescen[t]” in their attraction to these spontaneous, historically deficient narratives. Suleri draws attention to the relation between “novelty” and “the news” in her discussion of Salman Rushdie’s collusion with an “imperial scheme of journalism” in Shame (176–178; see also 112–117).

5. The surname is sometimes spelt, and catalogued, “Parkes”. Suleri spells it without the “e”.

6. The Oxford English Dictionary describes “bevy” as “the proper term for a company of maidens or ladies, of roes, of quails, or of larks”.

7. Linda Hutcheon (1994) notes that, for irony to “happen”, the reader must find meaning in what is not said. “The ‘ironic’ meaning”, however, “is not [ ... ] simply the unsaid meaning, and the unsaid is not always a simple inversion or opposite of the said: it is always different – other than and more than the said” (12–13). Furthermore, “there is an affective ‘charge’ to irony that cannot be ignored and that cannot be separated from its politics of use” (15).

8. “Autobiography as De/facement”, which principally draws on Wordsworth’s Essays on Epitaphs, was first published in Modern Language Notes in 1979. Though de Man himself would have been gravely ill by the time Suleri arrived at Yale, Suleri’s work was shaped by working among colleagues, like Hartman, profoundly influenced by de Man’s ideas. It is also highly likely that Suleri, whose PhD focussed in large part on Wordsworth, knew the essay well.

9. I quote the transliteration given by Suleri and Raza (2017, xv). In Boys Will Be Boys the sher in its entirety is quoted only in Urdu script.

10. Suleri’s transliteration of the single word goyah includes a terminal “h” in Boys Will Be Boys.

11. Young (2001) discusses the historical origins of anglophone postcolonial theory and the centrality of South Asian migrant scholars in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (61–63). In her essay on Sara Suleri, Sangeeta Ray (1993) describes “the reification of India as the postcolonial site” and its “unique status in postcolonial theoretical debates in American institutions of higher learning” (38; my emphasis).

12. A comparison might be drawn here with the work of, say, Amitav Ghosh, whose historically self-conscious fictions emerge from a literary and theoretical ecosystem informed by Subaltern Studies historiography.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

William Ghosh

William Ghosh is a junior fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford. This article is part of a series of essays on the literary history of postcolonial ideas. His new book, V.S. Naipaul, Caribbean Writing, and Caribbean Thought, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2020.