In response, our panel brings a wide range of archives to reimagine literary critique and method from the disciplinary subfield of comparative postcolonial studies. We register a methodological dissatisfaction with, on the one hand, often ahistorical, post critical approaches, and on the other, the “strong theory” of orthodox postcolonial studies. We ask: what modes of reading can be cultivated beyond scholarly styles framed as reparative (Sedgwick) surface (Best and Marcus), postcritical (Felski) or weak (St. Amour), that do not merely reinstantiate “suspicion” as the sole guarantor of historically and politically responsible investigation (Stuelke)? Following Sangeeta Ray in her essay MLQ essay “Postcolonially Speaking” (2020) we underscore how post-critical approaches emerge from an (unmarked) Euro-American modernist canon, and reflect on the need to center multimedial, multilingual, and genre-defying archives from beyond that space and time.
Our panelists rethink our disciplinary working conditions (the presidential theme this year) by working through the particular paradoxes created by the mismatch between the fantasies of high theory and the realities of the postcolonial archive. Working across multilingual (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Arabic, French, Spanish) and multimedial archives, they bring a much-needed geopolitical breadth and historical depth to the question of critical method. All have published books that reimagine the field of postcolonial comparativism from the ground up.
Through short provocations of 12-15 minutes, the panel looks for what might be called “emic” theories that emerge from particular texts or archives, but nevertheless function as theory in a reading context that has become increasingly suspicious of suspicion.
Roanne Kantor will preside and launch the session with brief remarks.
The first paper, also by Kantor, “Hau to Read,” notes the ways that a commitment to anthropology as the bad disciplinary other of postcolonial literary scholarship has blocked effective readings of many postcolonial novels which were unironically informed by ethnographic fieldwork. Kantor turns to one of postcolonial Anglophone literature’s most canonical figures: Amitav Ghosh. She excavates the social-scientific commitments in Ghosh’s own return to the colonial archive, the political significance of which – and, in turn, the significance of Ghosh’s pivotal role in our field – cannot be understood until we shift our current reading paradigm.
Next, Madhumita Lahiri’s paper “Hate-Reading” provocatively counters the postcritical call to read with love by excavating the inherited disciplinary rubric of postcolonial scholarship as neither paranoia nor repair, but “hate-reading.” Lahiri argues that Spivak’s excoriation of Jane Eyre (“Three Women’s Texts,” 1985) and Achebe’s takedown of Heart of Darkness (“An Image of Africa,” 1975) both exemplify, not suspicion, but the critic’s hatred of the cultural text that nonetheless receives a scrupulous reading.
Akshya Saxena’s paper “It’s all Text” delves deeper into "reading" through an interrogation of postcolonial studies’ debt to deconstruction that renders the postcolonial world itself as a text that is eminently readable. While the hyper-vigilance and ambivalence of deconstruction as a reading practice has served the field well, Saxena considers what is lost in orthodox postcolonial studies’ attachment to textuality through a discussion of materialist scholarship in reading cultures as well as work on the politics of philological practices. She offers Eritrean-British writer Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence is my Mother Tongue (2018) as a parabolic text that demands the performative, mediated, and physiological location of the reader in her encounter with the intermedial and material lives of the postcolonial as a literary text.
Finally, Michael Allan’s in his paper, “Reading Looks: Archival Stares in Early Cinema" discusses an 1896 45-second Lumière Brothers' market scene in Algiers. He explores a counterarchival practice that centers not the imperial gaze that frames the Arab market, but the subject on those streets who is staring back at the cinematograph. Borrowing the eyes looking back at the camera, Allan argues for a speculative counter-archival reading practice to re-envision the global history of early cinema.
The session will end with 15 minutes for discussion and audience Q&A.