The Crisis of Imagination: Postcolonial Studies and Migrant Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2008.12.2.17
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
-
This article investigates the contemporary relationship between postcolonial theory and postcolonial literature, arguing that a problematic “agreement” between criticism and writing in recent years has emerged, which has marginalized and repressed a series of critical issues, thus compromising the utopian and radical potential of postcolonial thought. Tracing the developments of postcolonial criticism and writing, the article argues that whereas postcolonial literature has undergone a change from nationalist-based toward a migrant aesthetic, postcolonial theory was from the beginning orientated toward a cosmopolitan language– precisely because of its opposition to an earlier, nationalist-orientated postcolonial discourse. Postcolonial studies emerged as an academic discipline during a period of disillusionment–as a response to the unfulfilled or broken promises that had been bred by the event of independence. The academic field distanced itself from the dreams and hopes that had flourished–and failed–in the years after independence, by developing an alternative, more theoretical, set of imperatives. The current agreement between theory and literature constitutes an “ideological trap” in the sense that it represses the “original” failure, from which postcolonial studies initially emerged; a failure, the after-effects of which still constitute many of the critical issues crucial to contemporary postcolonial thought. The article finally argues for a critical rethinking of the relationship between criticism and writing, in order to reignite and reaffirm the dialectical tensions between them; and thus continue the radical and utopian potential of postcolonial thought.
-
[book] Adorno, Theodor / 2006 / Philosophy of New Music. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor / University of Minnesota Press
[book] Appadurai, Arjun / 1996 / Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization / University of Minnesota Press
[book] Bartolovich, Crystal / 2000 / Global Capitalism and Transnationalism in : A Companion to Postcolonial Studies / Blackwell Publishers : 126~161
[journal] Bewes, Timothy / 2006 / Shame, Ventriloquy, and the Problem of the Cliche in Caryl Phillips / Cultural Critique 63 : 33~60
[book] Bewes, Timothy / 2006 / Late Style in Naipaul: Adorno’s Aesthetic and the Post-Colonial Novel in : Adorno and Literature / Continuum : 171~187
[book] Boehmer, Elleke / 2005 / Colonial and Postcolonial Literature / Oxford University Press
[book] Buchanan, Ian / 2006 / Fredric Jameson: Live Theory / Continuum
[book] Chow, Rey / 1993 / Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies / Indiana University Press
[book] Clifford, James / 1992 / Traveling Cultures, in Cultural Studies : 96~116
[book] Currie, Mark / 2007 / About Time / Edinburgh University Press
[book] Fanon, Frantz / 1974 / The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington / Penguin Books
[book] Gilroy, Paul / 1993 / The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness / Harvard University Press
[other] Gunning, Dave / Anti-Racism, the Nation-State and Contemporary Black British
[journal] / 2004 / Literature / The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 39(2) : 29~43
[book] Jameson, Fredric / 1971 / Marxism and Form / Princeton University Press
[book] Jameson, Fredric / 1990 / Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture in : Signatures of the Visible / Routledge : 9~34
[book] Jameson, Fredric / 1988 / Cognitive Mapping in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture / Macmillan Education : 347~357
[book] Jameson, Fredric / 1998 / End of Art’ or ‘End of History' in : The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern / Verso : 73~92
[book] Jameson,Fredric / 1999 / Postmodernism,or,The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism / Verso
[journal] Jameson, Fredric / 2003 / The End of Temporality / Critical Inquiry 29 : 695~718
[book] Jameson, Fredric / 2007 / Archaeologies of the Future / Verso
[journal] Jessop, Bob / 2002 / Time and Space in the Globalization of Capital and Their Implications for State Power / Rethinking Marxism 14(1) : 97~117
[journal] Krishnaswamy, Revathi / 1995 / Mythologies of Migrancy: Postcolonialism, Postmodernism and the Politics of (Dis)location / A Review of International English Literature 26(1) : 125~146
[book] Lazarus, Neil / 1990 / Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction / Yale University Press
[journal] Ledent, Benedicte / 2004 / Of, and Not of, This Place’: Attachment and Detachment in Caryl Phillips’ A Distant Shore / Journal of Postcolonial Writing 26(1) : 152~160
-
KCI Citation (0)
97 Viewed
Print this page
Download PDF