Sometime between the moment, say, of Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory: An Introduction (Columbia UP, 1998) and Neil Lazarus’s Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies (Cambridge UP, 2004), the self-evident attachment of postcolonial critique to “theory” apparently vanished. In 1994, in the introduction to Colonial Discourse/Postcolonial Theory (Manchester UP), a collection of papers from the 1991 Essex conference of the same name, Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen interrogated the first three terms of their title in exemplary and extensive fashion, but left the fourth, “theory,” to speak for itself. (A year earlier, by contrast, the 1990 Wayne State conference on “The Ends of Theory” had already grappled with, and contested, the decline of “theory” in the North American academy.) While “postcolonial theory” had been the operative term in all the early readers and anthologies of the field, beginning with Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams’ Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), by 2001 this “theory” was hard to find in the moment of Robert Young’s Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001) and a burgeoning number of advertisements for faculty positions in “postcolonial studies,” “postcolonial literature,” “anglophone literature,” “world literature,” and the like.
This list of book and conference titles is suggestive, but perhaps misleading in some ways. For some, like Lazarus and Young, the erasure of “theory” marks a proper appreciation for the historical importance of Marxist and anticolonial thought and practice in the field of postcolonial criticism. Moreover, Young argues convincingly that “French theory” was itself most saliently a product of the transition from colony to post-colony in Algeria in the 1950s. For others, the absence of “theory” paradoxically announces its success and fulfillment rather than its disappearance: the assimilation of its protocols and procedures into the very fabric of academic and intellectual life, the final displacement of the Great Works model of literary and cultural education, in which postcolonial theory has played the major role in recent years.
Is this the promised end of (postcolonial) theory? Has the disappearance of “theory” in the North American academy allowed the institutionalization of a postcolonial studies that cannot “resist mere appropriation by the dominant,” as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak puts it in Death of a Discipline (Columbia UP, 2003, p. 11). Is there an opening here for the emergence of a new postcolonial theory? Or is (was?) the “theory” in “postcolonial theory” always too close to that metropolitan cultural studies Spivak speaks of that is “monolingual, presentist, narcissistic, not practiced enough in close reading” (p. 20)? Can we square this pedagogical imperative in favour of close reading with the contention that the “primary failure” of postcolonial theory has been to “privilege the act of reading over politics,” as Simon Gikandi summarizes one critique of postcolonial theory in his contribution to Neil Lazarus’s anthology (p. 97). Or is it a question of the location of theory? Carolyn Cooper, in Noises in the Blood, rejects the practice of “imposing polysyllabic, imported theories … on these localised Jamaican texts,” but does so in the name of a “theorising project” that “begin[s] with primary texts,” with “close readings of the texts themselves” (Macmillan Caribbean, 1993, p. 174, emphasis added). This conference seeks to start a conversation on these questions, among others.
If by “theory” we mean the self-reflexive analysis of the rules and procedures of our discourse, then postcolonial studies — always remarkably attentive to its own genealogy and practice — ought to be well situated to sustain and develop this theorizing project. It is easy to lament the losses and compromises incurred in the process of institutionalizing postcolonial studies in English departments, and conversely easy to miss therefore the fact that this insertion of “poco” into the academy has coincided with, and helped to produce, new interdisciplinary connections and conversations, with francophone studies, area studies, and comparative literature, in particular. This is, once more, a theoretical turn. To return to book titles, for a moment, it seems to us to be no coincidence that the most recent anthology announcing the intersection of francophone and postcolonial studies does so in the name of Postcolonial Theory and Francophone Literary Studies (UP of Florida, 2005, eds. H. Adlai Murdoch and Anne Donadey). This is no belated entry of the postcolonial into francophone studies, but rather perhaps a return to the francophone and Caribbean roots of postcolonial criticism, in the figures of Barthes, Fanon, Cixous, Derrida, Césaire, and Glissant, among others. This conference will try to theorize the relationship between francophone and anglophone postcolonial studies in particular, while drawing on developments in other regional and area studies (Caribbean, Latin American, African, and African American studies, for example).
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