Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century

Literature for Our Times: Postcolonial Studies in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Bill Ashcroft, Ranjini Mendis, Julie McGonegal, and Arun Mukherjee (Rodopi, 2012)It is tempting to approach this volume as a companion piece to earlier works that bear Bill Ashcroft's name. The Empire Writes Back, for example, is mentioned in the opening line of Ashcroft's Introduction. At 665 pages, Literature for Our Times has the heftof The Postcolonial Studies Reader. Yet the present volume seeks less to define a field or the innovations within it than to chronicle the various directions in which the terms 'postcolonial' and 'Commonwealth' are interpreted and deployed.Perhaps the diversity of the selections can be attributed to their origins: all were essays given at the 2007 conference of the Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. The editors selected thirty-five revised and updated essays and loosely organised them based on themes of concern to postcolonial studies. Some sections of the book, such as 'Gendered Bodies', would be very familiar to those within the field. Others - like 'Dalit Literature and Its Criticism' - touch upon newly emerging disciplines.The first section, 'The Idea of (Postcolonial) Literature: Conceptual and Methodological Issues', is the standout portion of the entire book. It is here that some of the more pressing issues of how the field itself has been theorised and re-theorised are put into conversation. Particularly important for the authors featured in this section are questions of national space and literary articulations of modernity that come from a postcolonial world. Frank Schulze-Engler and Debjani Ganguly both take issue with Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters for its insistence on the nation-state and European history as benchmarks for her model of internationalism. Both essays are notable for the ways that they use this criticism to ask questions about how literature functions outside of the global marketplace; both also move to put forth ideas of transnationalism that can account for and emphasise cultural complexity.There are several such intriguing entries throughout Literature for Our Times. John Clement Ball's reading of Jamaica Kincaid's Mr Potter negotiates a Caribbean space that accommodates both national and international affiliations in ways that can help to rethink some of the critical boundaries in Caribbean literary studies. Cheryl Stobie's gender-driven analysis of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus reveals some of the complexities of a text that is often read simply as a Bildungsroman. Susan Spearey puts forth an informed and thought-provoking study of post-conflict memoirs by Antjie Krog and Philip Gourevitch, staking a claim for an ethical reading that can accurately understand the density of witnessing and testifying to atrocity.The sheer amount of material in the collection is enough to ensure a variety of perspectives, texts, and issues at play here, but this volume almost insists upon including more of everything. …