Postcolonial theory : a critical introduction

294 Pages·2019·3.838 MB·English

by  Leela Gandhi

Postcolonial Theory
Interior of Tuncum, Madurai by Edmund David Lyon, Prints and Drawings
Section of the Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (OIOC
photo 1001 [2975])
Postcolonial Theory
A Critical Introduction
Second Edition
Leela Gandhi
Columbia University Press
New York
Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York  Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2019 Columbia University Press
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Gandhi, Leela, 1966-
Title: Postcolonial theory : a critical introduction / Leela Gandhi.
Description: Second Edition. |
New York : Columbia University Press, [2018] |
Previous edition: 1998. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018032553 (print) | LCCN 2018034095 (e-book) |
ISBN 9780231548564 (e-book) | ISBN 9780231178389
(cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231178396 (paperback)
Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism.
Classification: LCC JV51 (e-book) | LCC JV51 .G36 2018 (print) |
DDC 325/.301—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018032553
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent
and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns
Cover image: “Madura. The interior of the Tuncum.” Photograph by
Edmund David Lyon, c. 1868. British Library, London, UK / © British
Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface to the Second Edition ix
Preface to the First Edition xiii
1. After Colonialism 1
2. Thinking Otherwise: A Brief Intellectual History 23
3. Postcolonialism and the New Humanities 42
4. Edward Said and His Critics 64
5. Postcolonialism and Feminism 81
6. Imagining Community: The Question of Nationalism 102
7. One World: The Vision of Postnationalism 122
8. Postcolonial Literatures 141
9. The Limits of Postcolonial Theory 167
Epilogue: If This Were a Manifesto for Postcolonial Thinking 177
Bibliography 215
Index 255
v

Acknowledgments
F
or the first edition of this
book, I thank my former colleagues at La Trobe University
and Elizabeth Weiss at Allen & Unwin. Thanks also to Marion
Campbell, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Joanne Finkelstein, David
Lloyd, Rajyashree Pandey, Sanjay Seth, and Ruth Vanita.
Pauline Nestor and Bronte Adams gave much support and
read through the initial manuscript with care and patience.
For the second edition, I am grateful to my colleagues and
students at Brown University for institutional support and for
conversations that have enriched my understanding of post-
colonial thinking. I thank Philip Leventhal and the editorial
team at Columbia University Press for the opportunity to revisit
the material of this book, as well as the two anonymous readers
of this edition for their generous and generative suggestions.
I presented versions of the new material in lectures at Ohio
State University, Dartmouth College, Stanford University, the
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, and the
University of Oxford. I learned much from audience feedback
on these occasions. I am full of gratitude to Tamara Chin, who
has been a crucial interlocutor and mainstay.
vii

Preface to the Second Edition
I
n the late 1990s, when I began
work on the first edition of this book, postcolonial theory was
the domain of a handful of thinkers. It was very much an emer-
gent field, in Raymond Williams’s sense of emergent, mean-
ing something that is starting to stand apart from the status
quo while being absorbed in the current. Early postcolonial-
ism exposed the limits of academic Eurocentrism, but it did so
as an adjunct to mainstream critical theory. It had a distinct
humanistic idiom and methodology—more value based than
positivist, though always with materialist deference to real
events, people, places, pasts, and so on. Most practicing critics
at the time came out of literature departments (predominantly
comparative and Anglophone) and from conceptual branches
of history and historiography. They used their considerable
skills to speak in speculative rather than practical terms about
the contemporary non-West. Finally, postcolonialism was
party to—indeed, at the helm of—a new philosophical skepti-
cism in some European and American scholarly systems, with
offshoots in counterpart postcolonial settings. This last claim
needs elaboration.
ix