Showing papers in "Journal of Postcolonial Writing in 2014"
TL;DR: Chibber as mentioned in this paper provides the most comprehensive critique to date of subaltern theory in post-colonization theory and provides an important and timely intervention in the domain of postcolonial theorization.
Abstract: This book is an important and timely intervention in the domain of postcolonial theorization that offers the most comprehensive critique to date of subaltern theory. Vivek Chibber provides an alter...
66 citations
TL;DR: Munro's African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality, and Globalization as discussed by the authors is a cultural history work of cultural history that has been endorsed on its cover by Neville Hoad.
Abstract: This bold and affecting work of cultural history by Brenna M. Munro has deservedly been endorsed on its cover by Neville Hoad, author of African Intimacies: Race, Homosexuality and Globalization, a...
35 citations
TL;DR: In the post-9/11 era, it is common to talk of a "national security state" marked by increasingly sophisticated technologies of border control, surveillance, identity verification and biological profiling as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In our post-9/11 era, it is common to talk of a “national security state” marked by increasingly sophisticated technologies of border control, surveillance, identity verification and biological profiling. Objectively intended to guard against the threats of terrorism, illegal immigration and the trafficking of illicit goods, such measures also have the effect, as Edward Snowden’s recent leaks about the US National Security Agency’s PRISM program reveal, of policing the very domestic population they were designed to protect. It is becoming evident, though, that security can no longer be understood as the exclusive domain of the nation state. In an interconnected world, states depend on international cooperation – administering crossing points, sharing information, coordinating militaries, etc. – for their security needs. The US–Mexico Mérida Initiative (signed into law in 2008) and the Israel–PLO Oslo I Accord (1993) are just two examples, ones to which we return throughout this special issue, of such cooperation. In both cases, the weaker partner appears to have succumbed to the pressures and interests of the powerful at the cost of sovereignty, thus to the detriment of their own population. How do we globalize our understanding of security? What do the technologies of what might be considered the “global security state” tell us about the evolving forms of globalization, neo-liberalism and neo-imperialism? What are the human costs of the contemporary passion for wall-building and omnipresent monitoring, from our electronic communications down to our DNA? And how do we, as scholars of the postcolonial, come to critical and theoretical terms with these processes of global securitization? In this special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, the guest editors propose the checkpoint as a pivotal material site where the local/global dialectic is mediated and reshaped by the problematic of security. Following Wendy Brown (2010), we interpret the emergence of a contemporary architecture of walls, barriers, barricades, fences, enclosures and checkpoints as a product of the dual pressures of globalization and geopolitics. Best exemplified by the US–Mexico “border fence”, wall-building, on one hand, suggests a reactionary local response to waning state sovereignty in the face of transnational flows of labour and capital, and thus gives the lie to neo-liberal fantasies of “a world without borders” (Brown 2010). On the other hand, wall-building, as in Israel’s so-called “separation fence”, suggests an ongoing project of neocolonial expansion with the barbarism of “others” – their lack of political accountability, their primitive culture, their insurgency/terrorism, etc. – used as justification. In other words, the global checkpoint is where what Edward Said calls the “imaginative geography” of designating boundaries between “a familiar space which is ‘ours’
22 citations
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TL;DR: The title "Where is Palestine?" is the title of Shannee Marks's short book published in 1... as discussed by the authors, where it states that "Of course we all know where Palestine is, don't we?"
Abstract: Where is Palestine? is the title – apparently provocative in its counterfactual obviousness, since of course we all know where Palestine is, don’t we? – of Shannee Marks’s short book published in 1...
22 citations
TL;DR: The authors argue that poetry is a powerful national form due to its capacity as a vehicle for the performance of collective expression (nation-language) and the ritualized remembrance of collective trauma and offer three examples of how this is undertaken, through the creation of a national sublime, the mobilization of patriarchal gender roles, and through self-reflexive poetic calls to action.
Abstract: This article aims to unsettle the now accepted correlation of novel/nation within postcolonial studies by demonstrating that poetry can be a “national” form in societies with limited literacy such as East Pakistan/Bangladesh, due to its capacity for oral dissemination Drawing my examples from the poetry and songs of the East Pakistani resistance to state oppression that eventually led to secession and the creation of Bangladesh, I argue that poetry is a powerful national form due to its capacity as a vehicle for the performance of collective expression (“nation-language”) and the ritualized remembrance of collective trauma I then offer three examples of how this is undertaken, through the creation of a national sublime, the mobilization of patriarchal gender roles, and through self-reflexive poetic calls to action In doing so, I suggest that examinations of genres other than fiction and languages/literatures beyond English can destabilize claims within postcolonial studies that are derived from angloph
20 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the possibility of using Bakhtin's chronotope as a useful tool in representing Palestinian postcoloniality has been explored, with the aim of challenging settler colonialism and reconstructing Palestinian history and geography.
Abstract: This article responds to the relative neglect of Palestinian literature in postcolonial studies by exploring the possibility of Bakhtin’s chronotope as a useful tool in representing Palestinian postcoloniality. The chronotopes of walking and retuning in Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks (2008) and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin (2011) respectively sketch ways of challenging settler colonialism and reconstructing Palestinian history and geography.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment is offered, addressing the settler logic of criminalization and identifying how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance.
Abstract: This article offers a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment. It begins by addressing the settler logic of criminalization and goes on to identify how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance. In engaging with different kinds of prison writing and art, it further explores the relationship between the literality of imprisonment and the imagination as a question of collective consciousness.
14 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, an overview of the contemporary theoretical and artistic landscape related to the material borders of state sovereignty is provided, with reference to the aesthetic refunctioning in Jarrar's work of such sites of control.
Abstract: This article provides an overview of the contemporary theoretical and artistic landscape related to the material borders of state sovereignty. It opens by exploring Palestinian multimedia artist Khaled Jarrar’s At the Checkpoint (2007, 2009), an exhibition of photographs physically installed at the Howarra and Qalandia checkpoints in the West Bank. With reference to the aesthetic refunctioning in Jarrar’s work of such sites of control, the article draws a distinction between the “harder borders” that literary cartography often ignores in favour of the “soft, hospitable border” of flows, migrations and hybridity. Assessing Antoni Muntadas’s conceptual art projects On Translation: Warning (1999) and On Translation: Die Stadt (1999–2004), Claire Denis’s films Nenette et Boni (1996), Beau Travail (1999) and L’Intrus (2004), and various Palestinian cultural texts, I argue that by foregrounding the laws of linguistic circulation and mobility, such works also inscribe the possibility of a multilingual, translati...
13 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explore how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to "de-normalize" the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of a "law" that it represents.
Abstract: The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that “checkpoint narratives” have arguably come to assume a dangerously “normalized” status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to “de-normalize” the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the “law” that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the “state of exception” and “homo sacer” drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of “spatio-cide”, “...
13 citations
TL;DR: This paper read South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes's first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner's notion of "citiness", asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them.
Abstract: This article reads South African science-fiction writer Lauren Beukes’s first novel, Moxyland (2008), set in a futuristic Cape Town, from the perspective of Lindsay Bremner’s notion of “citiness”, asking how cities produce the modernity of the subjects who inhabit them. The novel is remarkable for its dependence on the social geography of the South African city. The article charts Beukes’s resolutely mobile characters as they negotiate the spatial itineraries and technologies of governance in which they are embedded. It explores how Beukes’s futuristic urban setting fuses punitive forms of digital technology with the biopolitical regulation of social relations in an unsettling reprise of the apartheid groundplan. The analysis relates Moxyland to discussions of African city textualities – a critical rubric introduced by Ranka Primorac in this journal to signal the interplay of urban and textual networks in constituting the African city.
12 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the role of the reader-as-judge in Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist is considered. But the reader is not called upon to make active decisions in the second-person address that is directed beyond the pages.
Abstract: This article considers the role of the reader-as-judge in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. It builds upon and extends the idea of the cathartic function of authorship as a response to trauma by alternatively considering the activation and empowerment of the reader that is enabled by the dramatic monologue style of Hamid’s novella. Indications that the reader is called upon to make active decisions can be found in the second-person address that is directed beyond the pages. The layering of different genres also means that readers have to choose what they believe to be the most suitable generic framework for understanding the novella. Marking a new intervention into the study of this novella, the article argues that The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an example of a contemporary dramatic monologue that encourages a more active way of reading by calling for readers’ discernment and judgement, while resisting comfortable closure. The article considers how and why the novella functions as a dramatic m...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors address questions of solidarity in South African literature before and after the confluent endings of apartheid and the Cold War, and highlight how solidarity as a theme has emerged in different forms and narrative settings, often tied to related considerations of utopia and dystopia.
Abstract: This article addresses questions of solidarity in South African literature before and after the confluent endings of apartheid and the Cold War. Examining works by J. M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer and Alex La Guma, it highlights how solidarity as a theme has emerged in different forms and narrative settings, often tied to related considerations of utopia and dystopia. Alex La Guma’s travel memoir, A Soviet Journey (1978), is foregrounded in particular as a literary work examining this theme as well as symbolizing it through the Soviet Union’s support for the anti-apartheid struggle. The article concludes with a consideration of decolonial thought in Latin American studies as a contemporary set of conversations providing a potential intercontinental solidarity of the future.
TL;DR: This article explored the complex relationships between textual form, time/temporality/history and oppressive structures of patriarchy and colonialism as they are manifested in Palestinian women's life-writing and argued that questions of "the political" cannot be divorced from aesthetic issues in a context where national cultures are in the process of being (re)formed.
Abstract: This article explores the complex relationships between textual form, time/temporality/history and oppressive structures of patriarchy and colonialism as they are manifested in Palestinian women’s life-writing. It argues that questions of “the political” cannot be divorced from aesthetic issues in a context where national cultures are in the process of being (re)formed. Further, it argues that a focus on gender can produce more nuanced understandings of national(ist) narratives, helping to prevent their homogenization. Finally, it seeks to establish some commonalities and differences between this branch of Palestinian cultural production and both western (women’s) life-writing and what has come to be defined as postcolonial literature. In suggesting that greater attention should be paid to Palestine within postcolonial studies, it also seeks to respect the important differences – historical, political and cultural – between Palestine and other regions more commonly addressed by the field.
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the function of refugee narratives in Cockroach and interpreted the narrator as complicit with those he criticizes and read the novel's violent ending as a duplication of western modes of intervention through narratives of security and rescue rather than as a tool that allows the protagonist to overcome his guilt complex.
Abstract: Since its publication in 2008, Rawi Hage’s Cockroach has generated two forms of criticism, one which focuses on Hage’s unnamed narrator’s experiences in Montreal, and another which pays attention to his diasporic condition and trauma complex. Both critical methodologies face specific conceptual challenges, as neither can reconcile the national and local context of Cockroach with its global and diasporic affiliations. For that reason, this article connects these two methodologies by analysing the function of refugee narratives in Cockroach. This article interprets the narrator as complicit with those he criticizes and reads the novel’s violent ending as a duplication of western modes of intervention through narratives of security and rescue rather than as a tool that allows the protagonist to overcome his guilt complex.
TL;DR: This article analyzed the play written five years later by Martinican politician and poet Aime Cesaire about Patrice Lumumba's short political life and sudden death, focusing on the ways in which Cesaire recuperated the figure of the assassinated leader from hostile discourse and transformed him into a martyr, a poet of action.
Abstract: In February 1961, Patrice Lumumba, first prime minister of the independent Congo, was assassinated. This article analyzes the play written five years later by Martinican politician and poet Aime Cesaire about Lumumba’s short political life and sudden death, focusing on the ways in which Cesaire recuperated the figure of Lumumba from hostile discourse and transformed him into a martyr, a “poet of action”. Cesaire’s gesture, the article argues, is one of transnational anti-colonial solidarity.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors trace the foundations of the struggle for international recognition at the level of cultural production within the Palestinian movement for self-determination and present two films, The Palestinian Right and Declaration of World War, which argue for the international status of the Palestinian struggle.
Abstract: This article traces the foundations of the struggle for international recognition at the level of cultural production within the Palestinian movement for self-determination. Both the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) used innovative rhetorical strategies in documentary film-making to argue for the international status of the Palestinian struggle, in the process revealing themselves intellectually capable of the challenges of leadership. The two films examined in this article, The Palestinian Right and Declaration of World War, participate in the construction of differing visions of Palestinian statehood. Where Declaration of World War insists on the obligation of the international community to respond to the demands of propaganda, The Palestinian Right stages an intervention into debates on the worth of international bodies and transnational legal frameworks. Both films rigorously investigate the connections between colonialism, imperialis...
TL;DR: In this article, the intriguing frequency of "proxy crossings" by British and American protagonists in international cultural advocacy that seeks to represent the West Bank checkpoint is considered. But they are also reminded of the limits of this form of empathetic identification.
Abstract: This article considers the intriguing frequency of “proxy crossings” by British and American protagonists in international cultural advocacy that seeks to represent the West Bank checkpoint. This highly visible instance of the global checkpoint is the site of a spectacular confrontation between opposing notions of safety, embodied in the encounter between the Israeli soldier guarding the checkpoint and the Palestinian who seeks to pass through it. The narratives I am interested in prompt their readers or viewers to imagine themselves as the person requesting passage by placing a metropolitan protagonist at the checkpoint. Through this act of substitution, metropolitan audiences are asked not simply to side with Palestinians, but to share in their sense of fear and endangerment, and to recognize their common yet unequal implication in the global security order. At the same time, however, audiences are also reminded of the limits of this form of empathetic identification. When the intermediary figures in th...
TL;DR: There were few food riots during the Bengal famine of 1943; the reason for this passivity has often been the subject of scholarly debate, and is the central dilemma in many literary representations of the famine as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: There were few food riots during the Bengal famine of 1943; the reason for this passivity has often been the subject of scholarly debate, and is the central dilemma in many literary representations of the famine. Despite the radical sensibility of many of the writers of the Progressive Writers’ Association, their representation of peasant resistance is ambivalent, and muted by the competing allegiances within nationalist discourse at the time. At a time of explosive radical protest, which might have mobilized against an “artificial famine” in which millions starved to death, attention was focused, instead, on anti-colonial critique. The famine was held up as one more instance of British colonial misrule, rather than as an event that exposed inequitable fault lines within class, caste, gender and metropolitan or rural locations. Indeed, Bengal famine texts gesture towards a utopian post-independence horizon, where hunger and social injustice will not exist.
TL;DR: In this paper, Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People has been overshadowed by its seemingly prophetic announcement of military intervention in Nigeria's politics, and it explores the problematic project of an African nation state riven by political alliances sponsored by dominant cold war powers, and explores the possibility of a plebeian politics outside the vying east-west cold war constellation.
Abstract: Since its publication, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People has been overshadowed by its seemingly prophetic announcement of military intervention in Nigerian politics. In this article I suggest that the novel participates in a circuit of mid-century novels critiquing prevalent cold war rhetoric. It explores the problematic project of an African nation state riven by political alliances sponsored by dominant cold war powers. Within this context of sponsorship competitions, Achebe explores the possibility of a plebeian politics outside the vying east–west cold war constellation.
TL;DR: The political and documentary turn in Anglophone metropolitan theatre in the new millennium has generated a number of plays that address the question of Palestine, including My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Caryl Churchill's Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: The political and documentary turn in Anglophone metropolitan theatre in the new millennium has generated a number of plays that address the question of Palestine. Israel/Palestine presents itself as a site in which fundamental social change is still possible, making it an especially productive setting for political theatre. This article focuses on two of the most high-profile plays of the last ten years: Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). It examines not only the controversies that each of these plays engendered, but also the ways in which they negotiate the tensions that are inherent in the very notion of advocacy in theatre, which connotes two distinct forms of address: on the one hand, the effort to generate empathy and humanitarian feeling without specifying a political commitment; on the other, the attempt to persuade a viewer to affiliate with a particular struggle or set of beliefs, and to commit h...
TL;DR: A recent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910-1940 highlighted a juxtaposition of past and present that fascinated intellectuals, novelists and artists from around the world.
Abstract: A recent exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, Mexico: A Revolution in Art 1910–1940, highlighted a juxtaposition of past and present that fascinated intellectuals, novelists and artists from around the world Against this background, this article explores how tensions between what Adam Marrows describes as “the cosmic time of empire” and the more fluid senses of local, historical Mexican time in the modernist novels of DH Lawrence (The Plumed Serpent, 1926) and Aldous Huxley (Island, 1962) challenged the prevailing western concept of modernity Their work deeply affected the next generation of Mexican writers including Carlos Fuentes, whose extensive experimentation with temporal dislocations in novels such as Terra Nostra (1975) incorporates features of utopianism and magical realism – foreshadowed by Huxley and Lawrence – that question the horizons of local and global histories and gesture towards “decolonial options” identified by Walter D Mignolo as “roads towards the future”
TL;DR: The title of Chadwick Allen's book "Trans-Indigenous" creates impossible expectations as mentioned in this paper : could any "methodologies" truly be trans-indigenous, able to compare cultures of which the only link is that they coul...
Abstract: The title of Chadwick Allen’s book no doubt creates impossible expectations. Could any “methodologies” truly be “trans-indigenous”, able to compare cultures of which the only link is that they coul...
TL;DR: Sacco's second comic book, Footnotes in Gaza (2009) as discussed by the authors, employs what is here termed "circular visuality": the visual and narrative device of locating images from the past alongside images of the present such that history appears circular and doomed to repetition.
Abstract: This article considers Joe Sacco’s second ethnographic comic book on the Palestinian territories, Footnotes in Gaza (2009), and its preoccupation with excavating unofficial and unrecorded histories in the Gaza Strip through archival research and oral testimony. Borrowing from Johannes Fabian’s theories on anthropological time, it argues that Sacco’s particular stylistics recuperate forgotten Palestinian histories by evoking time as simultaneous and continuous, and the refugee memory as perpetually regressive. In presenting survivors’ oral accounts surrounding two events taking place in Gaza in 1956, Sacco’s graphic narrative employs what is here termed “circular visuality”: the visual and narrative device of locating images of the past alongside images of the present such that history appears circular and doomed to repetition. The past and the present are conflated, experienced simultaneously as intersubjective time, and denied a progress narrative. This device is Sacco’s material and visual response to o...
TL;DR: For example, after independence, when Sinhala became the official language, there was no opposition between the Sri Lankan Tamils and Sinhalese, but after independence and the "Sinhala Only" policy.
Abstract: Until the colonial period there had been no opposition between the Sri Lankan Tamils and Sinhalese, but after independence and the “Sinhala Only” policy, when Sinhala became the official language, ...
TL;DR: The authors focused on the various levels at which the global conflict is reflected in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o's work and its reception, highlighting the absence of the Cold War from studies of postcolonial literature.
Abstract: Highlighting the absence of the Cold War from studies of postcolonial literature, this article focuses on the various levels at which the global conflict is reflected in Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s work and its reception. Beyond direct and oblique references to the Cold War, Ngũgĩ’s choice of genre in Petals of Blood (historical novel in the socialist realist vein, at the expense of a discredited detective style of novel) speaks to the cultural solidarities Ngũgĩ forged across the Iron Curtain fault lines.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors demonstrate a post-Saidian theory of Palestinian exile via a close reading of Mourid Barghouti's memoirs I Saw Ramallah (1997; trans. 2000) and I Was Born There, I was Born Here (2009, trans. 2011).
Abstract: The article seeks to demonstrate a post-Saidian theory of Palestinian exile via a close reading of Mourid Barghouti’s memoirs I Saw Ramallah (1997; trans. 2000) and I Was Born There, I Was Born Here (2009; trans. 2011). After outlining Anna Bernard’s objections to Said, it then traces Barghouti’s development of a more fluid, encompassing notion of exile that resists idealization while remaining faithful to the core postcolonial issues of colonial history and the Nakba. By carefully attending to Barghouti’s experiences at Allenby Bridge, it argues that the national checkpoint is a pivotal site where the dynamic of post-Saidian exile is defined. These experiences suggest temporal and generational modes of exile that, supplementing Patrick Williams’s delineation of the various “modes of dispossession experienced by Palestinians”, are central to a wider theorization. I conclude that post-Saidian exile comprises an important new direction for a postcolonial studies attuned to Palestine’s colonial history.
TL;DR: The authors discusses the evolution of magical realism in relation to the postcolonial by looking at three contemporary Australian women authors originating from Southeast Asia, and they show the contours of the literary mode to be flexible, as magical realism has moved from being a localized Latin American trend to assuming a significant status on the international market.
Abstract: This article discusses the evolution of magical realism in relation to the postcolonial by looking at three contemporary Australian women authors originating from Southeast Asia. Besides extending magical realism to the Australian and Southeast Asian regions, these authors show the contours of the literary mode to be flexible, as magical realism has moved from being a localized Latin American trend to assuming a significant status on the international market. Concomitantly, their fiction develops various forms of a postcolonial aesthetics of “home” – forms that are neither pure nor authentic, but always-already partial and complicit with orientalist practices, in particular in light of new fault lines opened up in the wake of decolonization. This is one reason why their fiction embraces magical realist modes of representation: as an ambivalent literary mode, straddling the “actual” and the “imaginary”, and situated in-between resistance to, and collaboration with, Eurocentric modes of representation, magi...
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that the temporalities of the checkpoint correspond to the spatial configurations of these sites, labeling these compound spatio-temporal relationships as chronotopes.
Abstract: This article articulates a concept of sovereign time and aims to demonstrate how the checkpoint generates this time. After briefly discussing how the checkpoint system in the West Bank radically alters the tempos of daily life, It then works through the understanding of messianic time developed by Walter Benjamin and Giorgio Agamben in order to distinguish sovereign time as a unique concept. It argues that the temporalities of the checkpoint correspond to the spatial configurations of these sites, labeling these compound spatio-temporal relationships as chronotopes. The second half of the article examines how the checkpoint functions as a film set where a theological understanding of sovereignty is performed and filmed, and also explores how critical cinema exposes the checkpoint as a location that brings different kinds of chronotopes to crisis. It analyzes scenes at the checkpoint in Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966), Tawfiq Saleh’s The Dupes (1972), Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention (20...
TL;DR: The authors examines the possibility of a distinct aesthetic in postcolonial writing as influenced not only by language and culture, but also by the experiences that constitute the postcolonial: hybridity, trauma, dislocation and the experience of the third space.
Abstract: In an interview at Monash University on 15 September, 2011, Professor Robert Young discusses questions surrounding the possibility of a “postcolonial aesthetic”, as originally put forward by Elleke Boehmer, and taken up by various other critics, including Chandani Lokuge. Young highlights the danger of ignoring questions of aesthetics within critical literary studies. He examines the notion of a distinct aesthetic in postcolonial writing as influenced not only by language and culture, but also by the experiences that constitute the postcolonial: hybridity, trauma, dislocation and the experience of the third space. While he rejects the notion of a “unified aesthetic” within postcolonial texts, Young explores the nature of this experience and the possibility of writing subjectively from within it. He expands in particular upon his work on the third space, and anxieties of language in postcolonial writing, to illustrate the manner in which critical studies of the postcolonial can (and should) involve creativ...