And yet it has also been argued that Naipaul’s controversial writings both anticipated and sympathetically thematized many of the problems that have since become central to contemporary cultural and political discourse. Awarding him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001, the Nobel committee praised Naipaul “for having united perceptive narrative and incorruptible scrutiny in works that compel us to see the presence of suppressed histories.” Among the themes Naipaul has explored in this regard are the contradictions of postcolonial modernity, the mythology of national identity, the failures of national liberation, exile, migration, and displacement. His writings pay close attention to the fate of refugees, the xenophobia faced by minorities and vulnerable individuals, and the Global South as the site of resource extraction. These thematic resonances with our historical moment—one characterized by the “return” of nationalism and the most recent manifestation of the refugee crisis—can also be understood in relation to his experiments with realist and modernist literary strategies in short stories, novels, histories, travelogues, essays, and autobiographical fictions. Naipaul drew on these genres to variously narrate the lives of individuals who grew up in postcolonial spaces, thereby at once grasping and reflecting on the crisis of the nation-state in the former metropoles and colonies in the post-WW2 era. Edward Said once asserted that “The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing oneself’ as a product of historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” Naipaul’s own oeuvre can in this respect also be read as an effort to compile an inventory of his own formation, as someone born in the colonial periphery and yet whose origins are intimately tied to a metropolitan story of empire.
Our panel seeks to bring together writers who will explore the diversity and contradictions of Naipaul’s work. Naipaul’s death in August 2018 provides us an opportunity to reflect on his writings with greater distance and equanimity. Our hope is to examine, from different perspectives, which aspects of Naipaul’s writings resonate most fruitfully for our political present? What aspects of his work are likely to endure and how does it work speak to twenty-first century readers? What is at stake in recuperating these vexed texts for the purposes of postcolonial critique?
Sanjay Krishnan’s paper, “V. S. Naipaul: On the Origins and Obsessions of a Controversial Writer,” will set up the difficulty of approaching Naipaul as a thinker today. Krishnan will analyze three discomfiting scenes in Naipaul’s writings (A Bend in the River [1979], The Enigma of Arrival [1987], and A Way in the World [1993]) in order to argue that his aim was not so much to denigrate as illuminate broader, if more discomfiting, aspects of postcolonial life. Krishnan shows how Naipaul’s ability to explore the darker aspects of postcolonial and peripheral life, results in the probing of what the novelist Amitav Ghosh has described as “truths too painful to acknowledge.” Once the controversies around his work are set up, Nasser Mufti will further examine Naipaul as a critic of modernity by drawing out the resonances between Naipaul’s negativity about failures of postcolonial modernity and Theodor Adorno’s critique of the enlightenment in Minima Moralia. Both thinkers view modernity as at once unavoidable and regressive, enlightenment and myth. For Adorno and Naipaul alike, these contradictions manifest in the everyday (for example, in gift-giving, the misuse of sidewalks, or the postures of the petty bourgeoisie), and it is only in and through sketching these miniature scenes of postcolonial modernity that Naipaul can make the contradictions of postcolonial modernity visible—what Mufti calls “Colonia Moralia.” Much of Naipaul’s dismay about modernity stems from his own sense of displacement and vexed national identity. Anna Thomas’s paper, “The Other Race of Indians: Naipaul and Indigeneity” attends to how difference is deployed and redeployed in inter- and intra- group dynamics as they travel and change through the (post)colony, particularly in Naipaul’s writings. Thomas’s paper achieves this by examining the fraught identifications with indigeneity in Naipaul’s diasporic writing to show how indigeneity emerges as a site for negotiating entwined histories within World Literature/ Postcolonial writing, often with ambivalent effect. To conclude, Rhonda Cobham-Sander’s paper, "Naipaul's Aunts and the Creole Imagination,” recuperates Naipaul’s early-writings to show how they are part of a broader creole aesthetic. Turning to A House for Mr. Biswas (1961), Cobham-Sander examines how Caribbean writers use the dizzying range of relationships signified by the word, “Aunt,” in Caribbean culture – biological consanguinity, fictive kinship, honorific status, patron/client distance; sexual intimacy, gay male identity – to map out a poetics of relation, which destabilizes the naturalized categories that ground family, nation, sex, and gender in genealogical fictions of consanguinity.
In the interest of maximizing discussion with the audience, we will minimize the length of introductions to the panelists and limit each paper to 12-15 minutes. These constraints will leave ample time for a broader discussion of the ways in which Naipaul’s work, which spans half a century, remains insightful, if in painful ways, about the age of decolonization and our political present.