The Late Postcolonial Condition

Introduction

[C]‌ritics are not merely the alchemical translators of texts into circumstantial reality or worldliness; they too are subject to and producers of circumstances, which are felt regardless of whatever objectivity the critic’s methods possess. The point is that texts have ways of existing that even in their most rarified form are always enmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society – in short they are in the world, and hence worldly. . . . The same implications are undoubtedly true of critics in their capacities as readers and writers in the world.

– Edward W. Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (1983: 35)

This book engages with the literatures of Portuguese-speaking Africa from a worldly perspective, which entails a diverse range of coordinates in space and time. While its corpus takes us to Angola, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, and São Tomé and Príncipe, its critical analysis dialogues with an international community of scholars whose organisation within literary studies takes forms ranging from Portuguese, Lusophone and Luso-Afro-Brazilian Studies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Portugal and Brazil. In terms of discipline, this work’s embedding in the field of postcolonial studies conjugates intellectual perspectives of the Global North and South. Time is compressed into a palimpsestic contemporaneity that amalgamates traces of over five centuries of history, the last of which has seen developments as radically opposite as the armed Marxist revolutionary liberation movements and the adoption of neoliberal capitalism. Coupled with the methodological tools of comparative literature, an appreciation of the intersecting nature of these coordinates in time and space is essential for the proposition at the heart of this book that seeks to reinstate the crucial relevance of the concept of postcoloniality in the twenty-first century.

At a time when postcolonial studies face yet another epistemological crisis, a proposition to review one of its central features may well put off some of the trendiest readers. Since its revival at the beginning of the new century, the paradigm of world literature has been growing in Global North academia as a more up-to-date replacement of the postcolonial paradigm, now increasingly seen as démodé. From both sides of the political spectrum, theoreticians shape their definitions of world literature from the remains of a body of work in postcolonial theory that, they say, is no longer capable of accounting either for today’s unbridled cosmopolitanism or for the current stage of late capitalism. For David Damrosch, world literature is a way to approximate a hypercanon of European works and a postcolonial countercanon of ‘subaltern and “contestatory” voices of writers in languages less commonly taught and in minor literatures within great-power languages’ (2006: 45). In their introduction to the issue of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing on ‘Postcolonial Studies and World Literature’, scholars James Graham, Michael Niblett and Sharae Deckard have attributed the materialist turn away from postcolonial literary studies to the field’s ‘failure to address the historical changes in the world-system characteristic of late capitalism’ (2012: 465). Further on, evidence compels the editors to backtrack. They point out in their introduction that in addition to the fact that the essays ‘exemplify and demonstrate the interpretative possibilities opened up by world-literary criticism’,

[w]‌hat also unites [these essays’] different approaches is a conviction that the ‘postcolonial’ remains vital to the critique of the capitalist world-system precisely because it names the particular configurations of social experience and traumatic historical legacies in those once-colonized peripheries which continue to exist in asymmetrical relationship to the older imperialist centres … . The historical particularity of the violence of formal imperialism and colonization clearly differentiates postcolonies from other kinds of peripheries, such as those within Europe. (Graham, Niblett and Deckard 2012:468)

Despite their professed ideological differences, a commonality emerges between the positions of Damrosch, and Graham, Niblett and Deckard. Both sides attempt to pose world literature as the next step in comparative literary studies by setting its novelty value against the scrapping of the postcolonial paradigm. What they fail to realise, however, is that this opposition is neither necessary nor true as their views of world literature do not constitute a replacement for the postcolonial approach, as they quite simply just set out to do something else. At stake for Damrosch is the desire to read the literary works of Europe and its Others comparatively, without having to bother with the aesthetic or historical consequences of the colonial difference between them. On the other hand, Graham, Niblett and Deckard may well claim that they want to read works comparatively that reveal the systemic nature of the modern capitalist world-system in a way that postcolonial studies to date has failed to do. Yet, as their piece introduces their contributors’ essays, concentrated mainly on the cultures of Africa and the Caribbean, the editors are forced to recognise that the postcolonial paradigm still retains its systemic critical potential. At the end of the day – and as any materialist will know – colonialism is not only part and parcel of the history of the modern capitalist world-system, but it should also not be completely disregarded in an analysis of the development of late capitalism in peripheral societies. What becomes difficult under the postcolonial paradigm is, as the team of editors rightfully recognises, to develop an adequate set of conceptual tools to approach the formal nuances of literary registration of systemic unevenness in semi-peripheral settings located in Europe or in other places without a history of exploitation common under classic forms of colonialism. That is the kind of material whose understanding demands alternative approaches, such as the concept of world-literature coined by the Warwick Research Collective, or WReC (2015).

The decoupling of the new rise of world literature from the presumed obsolescence of the postcolonial as a critical paradigm touches on just one of the issues within the field. Even though the postcolonial should not be discarded just because several scholars from the Global North are no longer interested in the ways postcolonial aesthetics registers coloniality at a societal level, whether because they are no longer interested in these phenomena or those societies, it is true that the field’s theoretical apparatus requires periodical revision. In fact, the capacity for self-critique is one of the most distinctive features of postcolonial studies as a field of enquiry. With a dialogical tradition that inherits from both its poststructuralist and materialist roots, as well as the many fruitful clashes between them, the field has grown what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have termed a ‘jiujitsu-like capacity to transform critique into renewal’ (2012: 43). At every step of the way since the field’s establishment, interrogations from insiders and outsiders alike have brought its body of theories forward by continuously pointing to its blind spots. Essential topics that were far from the field’s theoretical constructs in the 1990s – such as settler colonialism in Palestine, indigeneity, US imperialism, the environment, gender and sexuality – today constitute solid directions of enquiry, as demonstrated by the contributors of important volumes like What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say? (2018).

Embedded in the tradition of writing ‘in the necessary mode of perpetual autocritique’ (Young 2012: 22) that is distinctive of postcolonial studies, this book expands the field’s body of theories into one of its main epistemological, temporal and geographical blind spots: the non-anglophone contemporary postcolony. Its focus on literary works by authors speaking from Angolan, Cape Verdean, Bissau-Guinean, Mozambican and Santomean settings contributes to decentre the field’s anglophone predisposition as it argues for postcolonial theory’s urgent need to enlarge its analytical range in order to account for the wide array of inherited colonial practices experienced in postcolonial societies today. Moreover, the attention to the transition of the African postcolony into the twenty-first century compels a careful reconsideration of the multifaceted impact of capitalism in these societies in the longue dureé of modernity, something at the core of postcolonial theory whose roots lay in the anti-colonial reason. This not only allows for the much-needed historically grounded assessment of the twenty-first century postcolony but also enables a coherent assessment of cultural colonial legacies, seen in relation to its material and societal conditions of production.