Postcolonial, Still

This series on the Global Anglophone grapples with what it might mean to shift from the object of inquiry named by the postcolonial to something more nebulous and still in formation. Does this purported shift signal a rethinking from within the field or an imposition from without? Might it indicate the weakening power of frames of reference from the era of the culture wars? And even more simply, is this shift really happening? The five contributors, along with a detailed Introduction by Nasia Anam, approach the question in variable ways, and the differences among them, I think, point to the uncertainty surrounding this seemingly new vocabulary. The essays express distinct positions in relation to the Global Anglophone: melancholic resignation, earnest engagement (often through abstraction and semantic stretching), caution and concern, and passionate rage and rejection. We may thus view them as a precise snapshot of current academic ambivalence about the apparent turn to the Global Anglophone.

As Anam cogently explains in her Introduction, Global Anglophone names neither an aesthetic form nor a genre, nor does it come out of scholarship in the field. Its sole reason for existence, ostensibly, is a series of job descriptions advertised by the MLA since 2010. As Anam clarifies, while only a single position was advertised as Global Anglophone in 2010, from 2015 to 2017, we have between seven and nine positions. The early-career scholars who write here were often hired for these jobs and they choose this occasion to reflect on the disconnect between how they were trained — as postcolonialists — and what they now must claim as their professional identity.

If the study of the postcolonial — the history and culture of colonialism and its aftermath — is disappearing into that of the Global Anglophone, as some of these essays claim, I think the first question this shift prompts is whether it portends an erasure of colonial history, urging us in the direction of a dehistoricized or depoliticized analysis. In recent years, debates about the valence of the global have proliferated. Whereas "tacking on Global before Anglophone" might make a job description sound "inclusive and cutting edge" (as Anam speculates), it may also portend a return to an old-fashioned and politically regressive agenda. Similar contradictions abound in relation to the question of representation in the U.S. academy. While Anam wonders if the term signals the need to satisfy requirements for underrepresented literatures, most diversity requirements in the US focus on underrepresented populations, and aren't in fact often fulfilled by postcolonial candidates (who may not even be US citizens). Even if we agree, as Anam suggests, that the sub-heading of "Global Anglophone" is now "approximating ubiquity," it remains unclear what kind of substantive shift in scholarship it should prompt. Anam hopes to "subvert the Global Anglophone" wishing, after some internal debate, to transform it into "a politically and intellectually vanguard mode of critical inquiry," but I think the essays collected here advocate a more circumspect relation to the term, which in turn, helps clarify some of the urgent issues at stake for the analysis of colonialism and its afterlife in the world today.

Only two essays embrace the term. Amanda Waugh Lagji considers various such categories as postcolonial, decolonial, neocolonial, and world literature before settling on Global Anglophone as an apt descriptor for Bilal Tanweer's fiction while Arthur Rose attempts to fuse concerns about public health with Global Anglophone novels. In contrast, the other three essays urge caution and ultimately reject the term, all in favor of what we may call the political exigency of our moment. Marina Bilbija reminds us of the alt-right politics of the Anglosphere, showing how assumptions about English-speaking peoples can easily shade into demands for a xenophobic monolingualism. J. Daniel Elam marshals a powerful metaphor to house postcolonial literature in Grenfell Tower, calling "Global Anglophone" the low-cost cladding that helped the tower burn. Finally, Hadji Bakara doesn't take on the term directly but carefully tracks how metaphors of entanglement in relation to the literature of globalization recreate a sense of the global that is outside cause and effect. "Seeing the world always already as an entanglement," he explains, "risks naturalizing processes that remain the terrain of ongoing political struggle and contestation."

A key point that thus emerges from this discussion is that reports of the death of the postcolonial may have been greatly exaggerated. For a market-driven category like the Global Anglophone to fully emerge as a legitimate rubric, we would, of course, need more than 4-8 jobs per year, to represent a statistically significant number. And widespread exceptions abound. As Anam explains, these same years also saw several job advertisements that did use the term "postcolonial." I won't belabor the point — describing practices of hiring via MLA job descriptions only codifies them further, presenting as a fait accompli something far more uncertain, and certainly unplanned. There is also no real reason why scholarship in the field should reiterate the categories of an MLA advertisement, or why scholars should plan their books or syllabi in concert with such ads.

Moreover, in relation to the two essays here which do draw on the term "Global Anglophone," I would submit that the nomenclature makes little difference to their analysis. When Lagji says that The Scatter Here Is Too Great is global rather than postcolonial because of its sense of time that ranges beyond the colonial aftermath, we may point to a large body of work on postcolonial temporality that explicitly reiterates this very point without resorting to the vocabulary of the global. The invocation of apocalypse may also be said to characterize all contemporary fiction, not just the work coming out of places like Pakistan. Certainly, the novel provokes questions about the specificity of Karachi as a place, as well as the causes of the terrorist bombing at its center. A consideration of the politics of language, translation, and representation, or a deeper embedding within the geopolitical specificity of past and present colonialisms would only enhance our inquiry into the novel's exploration of time. Similarly, Rose's discussion of health turns to abstraction to fit the discussion of mood or atmosphere to various descriptions of accidents and disease in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. While such questions may certainly speak to the operations of global capital, Arundhati Roy also has a much more specific target in view — the Indian state and its various depredations. I suspect it makes little difference to Rose's argument if we call a novel by Roy postcolonial or "Global Anglophone," and the author herself may well reject both designations.

The powerful critiques forwarded in the remaining three essays, however, insist that these distinctions matter a great deal, and taken together should serve as a check on the embrace of the "Global Anglophone," at least demanding further clarification of its scope, relevance, and critical possibility. This should require an assessment above all of the valence of the nation, which remains the missing term in too many accounts of the global. The danger of the global turn, as is well established, is that it refers to everything and nothing at once, making more difficult the critical task of striating and comparing across difference. If we were to try and imagine the benefits that the category of the global might bring, one clear consequence of the shift from postcolonial to global is that the latter can encompass literatures and nations beyond the ones once colonized by Britain. The ongoing question in postcolonial studies of what to do with U.S. literature by minority populations — often deeply in synchrony with issues of decolonization and cultural resistance — becomes easier to embrace. And the traditional purview of the field (most often referring to the literature of Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia) can expand to include such novels as Tash Aw's Five Star Billionaire, which speaks directly to the dreams and fantasies occasioned by globalization. It is worth recalling that postcolonial studies as established in the Anglo-American academy was always a comparative project, and releasing new possibilities of relation across time and space would only bolster the critical purchase of our frames of analysis.

The other specter haunting all such discussions is the question of language, as concerns about cementing the hegemony of English linger across many of the essays. Given the success of webzines like Asymptote, the buzz around books like Jennifer Makumbi's Kintu or Vivek Shanbagh's Ghachar Ghochar, or even the fact that the National Book Awards just added a prize for literature in translation, any claim about the inevitable dominance of English should be taken with a few grains of salt. Comparing the fortunes of Anglophone and Francophone — with differing legacies of colonial projects of cultivating cultural post-imperial sensibilities — may further help nuance the issue. Because so few of these essays address questions of form and formalism, it may also help to review the status of aesthetic criticism under the aegis of the postcolonial. Another path for probing these useful questions is to think about migration, especially forced migration, from the perspective of the global. Since migration is a core concern of the field from its very inception (for instance, the focus on exile in apartheid South Africa or the displacement caused by the Partition in South Asia), it would be worth debating whether the current refugee "crisis" might benefit from a Global Anglophone lens. The burden of proof is on the advocates of the Global Anglophone to show that it helps us reckon with the fact that we are living in a moment of massive and widening inequality, amid closing borders, ecological catastrophe, and a retrenching of unexamined extreme nationalisms and racisms, as the brutal consequences of decades of amnesia about the reality of colonialism manifest in horrific fashion.

Does this then mean that all postcolonial analysis must take up the politics of these critical times? When I put together a syllabus for a postcolonial class, I often try to resist this prescription by including novels like Americanah or Crazy Rich Asians, to enable a conversation about ordinary life or the question of class outside the language of trauma. But I must confess that what draws me to the field is precisely the fact that postcolonialism often names that uncertain, volatile place in the US academy where concerns about social justice meet the literary text, albeit as an aspiration, a fantasy, or an impossible attempt. I remember my discovery of the potential of postcolonial studies as an undergraduate in Delhi when a professor sought to wake us from our usual stupor by saying, do you get it? This is an attempt to imagine what that guy outside who's painting that sign on the road thinks. For someone who had only read British novels from the nineteenth century, the thought that an ordinary person outside could be the subject of what we read in the classroom prompted a tectonic shift. These dynamics are not unique: I see this moment of discovery in my students at UCLA every year. Postcolonial studies as a field most often attracts those scholars and students who want to think about the forces that enable the "entanglement" (to use the term Bakara so elegantly eviscerates) of the world, the text, and the critic, as Edward Said posited so many years ago. This is why so many scholars like me remain committed to the postcolonial, despite the persistent critiques and counterarguments about the inadequacy of the term.

I will end with noting that since this conversation is explicitly situated as generational, it might be useful for me to situate my disciplinary training. A very conservative "great books" curriculum at Delhi University in the 1990s with an exclusive focus on British literature, a stint in Tokyo where I was exposed to modern Japanese and Chinese literature in translation, a PhD in the US during the Marxism vs. poststructuralism standoff, and a subsequent turn toward the Atlantic prepared me for a commitment to the Black Atlantic. If I were to write a narrative about how the academic job market discovered me, I would note that I went on the market thinking of myself as a postcolonial scholar, but only found a reception in jobs advertised as African American or Black Diaspora. Thinking about the variable motivations and practices that characterize the transnational turn in relation to African American studies and postcolonial studies has been instructive, given the differential status of anti-colonial and black cultural nationalism (the former a material nation-building project, the latter often symbolic and metaphysical in nature). As we grapple with the seeming shift from Postcolonial to Global, recalling the historical valence of a similar shift from Atlantic to Global provides useful texture. Consider, for instance, the gap between a taxonomic attempt like Bernard Bailyn's Atlantic History: Concepts and Contours and what William Boelhower termed the new Atlantic Studies matrix (citing the scholarship of such scholars as Paul Gilroy, Joseph Roach, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker).1 Bailyn locates the original impulse for an Atlantic history in an entirely self-contained Eurocentric frame of the World Wars, the Cold War, and internal dynamics of journalism and scholarship in the US and Britain, rather than in the forces of history that yoke four continents together in a ring of fire. As David Armitage explains, artfully noting that "we are all Atlanticists now," "the genealogical approach to Atlantic history exposes a white Atlantic with Cold War roots, a black Atlantic with post-Civil War origins in the United States, and a red Atlantic reaching back to the cosmopolitanism of Marx."2 In contrast to this refusal to discuss African experiences as part of the Atlantic world except as commodities or slave labor to be forcibly moved, Gilroy's focus on cultural practices rooted in displacement and death necessarily appears as an important corrective in The Black Atlantic. The new Atlantic Studies (which may also be termed Black Atlantic Studies) consists squarely of an examination of the slave trade and the African diaspora, in synchrony with postcolonial interrogations of the archive and its will to power. In Atlantic Studies, the shift from Atlantic to Global has returned to earlier explorations of transatlantic journeys of British and American figures, often replacing the core conversation about slavery and its afterlife as the engine of the Atlantic world with aesthetic forms of transnational contact. Such a shift also re-centers canonical writers and texts, and it seems clear to me that it is a shift that we should resist.

I have suggested elsewhere that the field of postcolonial literary studies would benefit from placing a text like Guantánamo Diary at its center instead of the late 20^th century critical darling, Midnight's Children.3 The point is not to replace one text with another, the politics of the nation's formation with the proof of the unraveling of postcolonial sovereignty. But to assess the world we live in — the place of the US as inheritor of previous European empires, the tangle of endless war, practices of indefinite detention, and the formalization of extralegal modes of dispossession — we will need to stage the question of the relation between aesthetic and political formations as a live concern. Such matters — the place of nation and migration, the opacity or the legibility of the subaltern, the uneven and heterogeneous temporalities of the post-colony, the search for coevalness, the quest to get out of the waiting room of history — remain urgent. This does not mean returning to familiar debates or texts. In fact, de-canonizing should remain our goal, given that the field was founded on the promise of un-disciplining knowledge. (Ngugi, for example, asked for the abolition of the English Department in 1972.)4 But it does mean that those of us who identify as postcolonial scholars should strive in our research and teaching to explore the meaning of nationalism today, the dynamics of global capital and humanitarianism, the decline of the multicultural state and the attack on old and new migrants, endless war and resource extraction amid nostalgia for empire, alongside the possibility of dissent or utopia. We also need to do so without returning to a universalist humanism that searches for a time before the culture wars.

The irony of desires to institutionalize a field built on un-disciplining knowledge is not lost on me — despite the alleged currency of the postcolonial, I can't think of, for instance, a prominent postcolonial book prize, an annual flagship conference, or a book series with a leading press. All this suggests that postcolonial scholars should perhaps worry less about job descriptions and the unconscious desires of the institutions where we work. So many of us have had to fight for the space we occupy, which has always been tenuous (as our "Advance Parole" or J-visa regulations remind us). We have fought for the right to teach English literature to American students despite our foreign accents, dealt with visa troubles and employment authorization debacles, suffered the paternalism of senior scholars and administrators who greet us at receptions with stories about their honeymoons on their "Passage to India" or tell us about their maid or au pair who comes from the countries we call home. And yet, we continue to read and teach this literature, we have changed curricula, transformed the boundaries of what English literature means, and moved across disciplines to create new objects. Postcolonialism names, for me, at its best, an insurgent project. Such fear about pleasing administrators or hiring committees suggests that the lessons of decolonizing the mind have yet to fully sink in. As Robin Kelley eloquently reminds us in "Black Study, Black Struggle," we need to establish some mental distance from the institutions we work at, especially in the era of the neoliberal university's triumph, imagining ourselves as subversives in the academy — almost but not quite belonging to it.5

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Yogita Goyal is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA, editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature, and President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). Her study of the revival of the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery, is forthcoming from NYU Press in 2019.

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