Introduction: Keywords for Postcolonial Thought

Describing his unsettling return to Cambridge in 1945 after World War II, Raymond Williams ponders the "new and strange world around us" where people "just don't speak the same language."1 Rightly deducing that any talk of "culture" in the post-war era at the University of Cambridge refers to a perceived way of life and a notion of value, Williams connects such dialogue about culture to questions of class and art, industry and democracy.2 Recognizing that "academic subjects are not eternal categories" and that words and concepts at once carry specialized meaning and more expansive valence, Williams explains that his Keywords is intended neither as dictionary nor glossary, but rather as "the record of an inquiry into a vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions, in English, of the practices and institutions which we group as culture and society."3 Reading such keywords not only helps us trace changing usages across time, it also challenges the very idea of a stable or "sacral" meaning, inviting improper, promiscuous, and audacious resonances and connections.4 In tracking the language of cultural transformation, Williams makes available a method for assessing both change and continuity across time. He concedes that such discussions may not yield immediate effect; that is to say, he knows full well that "to understand the complexities of the meanings of class contributes very little to the resolution of actual class disputes and class struggles." And yet, he insists, what it achieves is "that extra edge of consciousness."5 We modestly hope for a similar edge with this cluster of keywords for postcolonial thought. That is to say, as recent projects in a similar vein have noted, we are fully aware that the following discussion of keywords functions neither as solution nor cipher to a code. Rather, we hope to unsettle our collective orientation toward each keyword, "to map the fissures and fault lines of the past, present, and future."6

Our cluster emerges from the second annual meeting of the Association of Postcolonial Thought — a revisionist endeavor to revitalize postcolonial analysis in response to the urgency of the present. We aim to correct the absence of infrastructure in the US academy for the field of postcolonial studies and to provide a space for cross-disciplinary dialogue. We understand postcoloniality in its most expansive sense — in terms of the field's institutional history, its current manifestations and mutations, as well as a view to fostering its robust future. While moving away from stalemates of the past, the Association takes as one of its central goals the preservation of cultural memory, and the transmission of knowledge across generations, disciplines, and ranks.

Rejecting any hasty narrative of the demise of postcolonial studies and arguing for its continued relevance is only our opening gambit. We are committed to participating in a collective intellectual conversation that prizes comparative literacy and rejects a free-floating globalism insensitive to the demands of local, national, and regional scales. Our conferences challenge the academic star system, highlighting new, rigorous work in a convivial and generous climate where the necessity of such knowledge production does not need to be justified endlessly but may be taken for granted. We recognize that the rubric of the postcolonial by no means carries a monopoly on concerns of relevance of academic study in an era of sustained and propulsive crisis, a catastrophic present that not only bears the weight of historical violence long unresolved but also dread about a future that turns its back on post-decolonization dreams of liberation. We draw energy from a range of vital existing debates about decolonization, violence, disposability, the possibility of redress and repair, and the role of culture in helping us understand and survive this era of genocidal capitalism, rising fascisms, and ecological collapse. We hope to do so without relitigating (albeit not overlooking) moribund debates.

Postcolonial theory has already added numerous key concepts to our lexicon — subalternity, hybridity, belatedness, interstitiality, contrapuntalism, late style, violence, strategic essentialism, diaspora, and national allegory. This cluster is an humble effort toward beginning to think about where we go from here, as we try and discern new keywords not just for a new scholarly association, but for a new era that demands more supple political concepts for reckoning with permanent crisis. Our proposed keywords are deliberately open-ended and often elastic, inviting further study of concepts still in formation: agitation, autonomy, charisma, failure, Latin-Africa, marriage hygiene, and reparation.

We convened at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in September 2023, to discuss the idea of crisis, which suffuses current imaginings of past, present, and future.7 We could not have known, perhaps, how apposite the sense of crisis and catastrophe would seem in hindsight, given the devastation being wrought in Gaza since last October. Thus far, the goals of the association have been perhaps somewhat modest — simply to provide a space for intellectual exchange on the subject of the postcolony for North American academics. These goals will naturally evolve in response to the urgency of the present moment. As I've noted in "Anticolonialism as Theory," 9/11 changed the field in ways we could not then predict.8 Something similar is likely afoot, as widespread repression, chilling of free speech, and vicious attacks on students, staff, and faculty supporting the end of genocide in Palestine seem to have no end. The geopolitical crisis has also wrought another crisis in the already fraught university.

Spring 2023 saw a historic student movement across North American campuses, as solidarity encampments sprung up to protest Israel's violence in Gaza. Students refused to sanction genocide in Gaza, pointed out the complicity of US universities, and called for divestment from weapons manufacturers and corporations profiting from the war. Widespread administrative repression and brutality revealed a particularly dystopian vocabulary: the sickening euphemism of "less-lethal weapons" used on student protestors; kettling, doxxing, and expulsion; the censorship of critics of Israeli and US policies; and the pervasive weaponization of charges of antisemitism. The resulting damage to academic freedom as campuses are militarized and students harassed (arrested, denied degrees and access to their dorms and dining halls, subjected to investigations and conduct hearings, called pro-Hamas simply for asking for accountability from leadership) will likely occupy all of us for a long time, as we cannot know what this coming Fall term will yield. But the keywords that history will remember from this era will remain intifada, revolution.

In what follows, Tanya Agathocleous examines how "marriage hygiene" functioned as a euphemism for birth control in the 1930s, while exploring how such concerns around sex and sexuality continue to govern contemporary discussions of intimacy and eugenics. Comfort Azubuko-Udah takes up "charisma" to ask us to think about attention and hypervisibility, especially in relation to ecology and conservation. Leah Feldman argues for the importance of "agitation" in the present, recalling a corporeal and emotional history of internationalism to reactivate comparative practices of reading. I ask us to push back on common conceptions of postcolonial "failure" by returning to the revolutionary horizons of anticolonial thought. Peter Kalliney reminds us of the literary and political intricacies of "autonomy" as a concept, across postcolonial and modernist studies. Sarah Quesada urges us to be mindful of the ongoing afterlives of solidarity by insisting on a "Latin-Africa" nexus. Finally, Sonali Thakkar considers the possibilities of "reparation" in the twenty-first century, both as an analytic that summons a moral force and as an alibi for liberalism's penchant for symbols over tangible action.

---

Yogita Goyal (she/her), (Twitter: @pocothought), is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek and Perkins Prizes. She has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature, and served as President of A.S.A.P. and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature. She is writing a book called "Anticolonialism, Lost and Found" and recently joined the editorial team of American Literary History.

---

References