Bishnupriya Ghosh

Department of English
Utah State University
bishnu@cc.usu.edu

 

What seems an eternity ago, Kwame Appiah argued that the “post” in post-colonial was a theoretical space-clearing gesture.¹ His critique of the use of neotraditional artifacts in a globalized late capitalist economy has been addressed, extended, and reframed by almost all major postcolonial critics from the early 1990s. Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, among others, suggest that the postmodern emerges as a western strategy of absorbing, organizing, and consuming all “othernesses” (“native,” “ethnic,” “non-western”) that once signaled the fall of modernist epistemologies.² In their view, the postcolonial actually precedesthe postmodern, but functioning within a global cultural economy–a bazaar for non-western artifacts–the category panders to the needs of that global market, producing ever more reified versions of “other” worlds. Amid the clamor of these debates on the correlations and intersections between the postcolonial and the postmodern, departments made way; niches and nests were set up to accommodate the field, and badges of diversity were donned. And then the inevitable: a market for postcolonial texts providing a sampling of a world honed to the fashionable emphases on postmodern hybrids (on the left) and on globalized cultures or villages (on the right).

 

In this essay, I attempt to envision an interventionist postcolonial pedagogy through the advocacy of an international cultural studies, a praxis that would position classroom knowledge and skills within the demands and constraints of transnational cultural economies. While my own position in the First World academy, complete with its institutional and economic ramifications, clearly enables even this occasion to speak, here I am less preoccupied with theorizing the politics of my self-location. My primary focus will be the pedagogic imperative: a teacher’s analysis of the practices and objects that demarcate postcolonial studies, a field well-suited to “preparing” students in the American academy for their future, and almost inevitable, participation in global exchanges. But as a postcolonial critic, given the complex and contentious issues in the field, I feel that it is crucial to first chart out the theoretical space that frames and constitutes the kinds of praxes envisioned here.

 

Certainly, much of the contemporary soul-searching by postcolonial intellectuals living and teaching in First World locations has circulated around the question: does the institutionalization of the postcolonial evacuate it as a form of resistance to continuing western imperialism? Carol Breckenridge and Peter van der Veer, in an anthology devoted to the problem of knowledge-construction in postcolonial studies, characterize the “growing awareness of the role of academic disciplines in the reproduction of patterns of domination” as the central “predicament” of the postcolonial intellectual (1). A more vigorous critique based on a reading of global markets in the postmodern era is undertaken by Arif Dirlik in his attempt to locate the itinerary of the postcolonial in First World epistemologies and institutions.³ Delving into the postmodernity of critical discourse itself, Dirlik suggests that the emergence of the category “postcolonial” should be understood as a First World response to the conceptual needs generated by the rapid transformations of a world capitalist order; in the changing relationships within the world market, “Third World” intellectuals “arrived” in the First World academy, and serviced that First World through their various forms of crisis-management. As early as 1988, Gayatri Spivak had moved toward a similar reading of the economy of postcolonial studies, by suggesting that First World intellectuals do not recognize to what extent the U.S. academy is sustained by the manipulation of Third World labor: “it is possible to suggest to the so-called ‘Third World’ that it produces the wealth and the possibility of cultural self-representation of the ‘First World'” (“Practical Politics” 96). My point here is that these conversations should find articulation beyond scholarly exchanges: that is, the questions of value and labor (raised by Spivak and Dirlik) as they overdetermine epistemological necessities (the very “need” to learn about the postcolonies) should become a crucial part of any course in postcolonial studies, so that students can reflect on the conditions that make possible the very objects they study, the practices they undertake, and their teacher’s position as an authority.

 

But this can only be achieved if postcolonial theorists can bracket their angst and hunker down to make decisions and compromises on what kinds of political responsibilities one can bring into discussion or contention in the classroom. Such pedagogic matters have elicited some critical attention in recent years. For instance, Gauri Viswanathan, best known for her exemplary work on English Studies in India, Masks of Conquest, captures the field of pedagogic problems in postcolonial studies in the following comment:

 

Of course, the easiest way of diluting the radical force of a text is to co-opt it into the mainstream curriculum, and to some extent the steady inclusion of so-called minority literatures in the mainstream English literature curriculum has reduced their oppositional force. But I see no reason to be negative about the inclusion of multicultural literature if it has forced the field of "English" to rethink its accepted parameters. "English literature" is increasingly being rewritten as "Literature in English," and the change is a healthy one. It deterritorializes the national implications of English literature, and it refocuses attention on language rather than the nation as the creative principle of literature. I'm wary of having "postcolonial literature" in English departments without defining what postcolonial literature is in the first place. "Literature in English" is a much more satisfactory term for me, at least if such literature is studied across cultures and territorial boundaries. ("Pedagogical Alternatives" 57-58)

 

Viswanathan’s comments foreground the problematic inherent in choosing representative postcolonial texts, and the choices raise a host of questions: what is the purchase of the “postcolonial” in the American academy? How is literary value assigned to these texts? In my view, such queries dovetail into the larger task of understanding the objects and practices of the classroom in terms of transnational epistemologies and systems of production, consumption and distribution, and then envisioning a transnational public sphere within which one must speak, write, and act. This is suggested in the hope that the insistence on transnationality would imbue students in the First World with a political responsibility not only to their own national public sphere, but to the greater circuits which determine and are determined by their actions.

 

An International Cultural Studies: Public Spheres, Mass Media, Praxis

 

In the following section, I propose an international model of cultural studies that could reinstate the political value of the postcolonial in transnational public spheres. In a seminal moment, Stuart Hall identified cultural studies as a response to “social and cultural change in postwar Britain”:

 

An attempt to address the manifest break-up of traditional culture, especially traditional class cultures, it set about registering the impact of new forms of affluence and consumer society on the very hierarchical and pyramidal structure of British society. Trying to come to terms with the fluidity and undermining impact of mass media and of an emerging mass society on this old European class society, it registered the cultural impact of the long-delayed entry of the United Kingdom into the modern world. (12)

 

Here Hall marks cultural studies as a response to a changing public sphere, a practice committed to examining and charting the ensemble of symbolic practices in that sphere. Tracing a history of cultural studies, Hall locates its beginnings in the Leavisite project of “tending the health” of a “national culture” (13); but cultural studies takes upon itself the task of “unmasking” the “unstated presuppositions of the humanist traditions,” its “regulative” cultural role (15). My arguments in this essay draw on Hall’s vision of demystifying the literary, and of charting the cultural spheres that shape all forms of political praxis. The postcolonial as praxis in a globalizing world can only be theorized in terms of an internationalized cultural studies.< sup>4

 

In an essay that seeks to document a shift in conceptions of civil spheres, from the modernist location of that sphere as a corollary to the nation-state to the postmodern challenge to the territorialization and rationalization of this space, Nicholas Garnham argues for the centrality of the mass media to this debate. The role of formulating cultural and social identities unlinked to nation-states questions the possible co-existence of several democratic polities (255). Garnham argues that the reconceptualization of public spheres within which global citizenships are envisaged is the only democratic option left in the contemporary world. This reconceptualization involves sustained education in the circuits and role of the mass media. Teaching the market and reinstating the relationship of the postcolonial to transnational public spheres depend upon cultural analyses of the mass media.

 

It is not enough, then, to be self-reflexive about the formulation of the literary, but to re-situate literature’s regulative function by placing it in the context of popular public discursive realms. More often than not, the seams and sutures between academic and the public discourses remain hidden, partly to preserve the sacrosanct apolity of academia. In 1992, The Chicago Cultural Studies Group described the clash between the two discursive realms in the following way:

 

Under the weight of such seemingly endless diversity of empirical concerns, multiculturalism as a social movement gets its critical purchase because it intrinsically challenges established norms, and can link together identity struggles with a common rhetoric of difference and resistance. In distinction, cultural studies as a critical movement proposes to reorder the world of expert knowledge, recasting method and pedagogy as elements of public culture. When newspapers and magazines amalgamate multiculturalism and cultural studies as a two-pronged drive to install political correctness, these utopian projects are the sprawling trouble-makers the media describe. (531)

 

Postcolonial discourse, as a part of the larger work of identity politics that opens intellectuals to the non-academic realm, has ever been in danger of being a kind of “academic neocolonialism” that bypasses central public discourses of resistance in the post-colony. Vinay Dharwadker, for instance, has criticized the Subaltern Studies group for failing to include within its corpus any work by the “subalterns” in question; part of this omission lies in the focus on texts in English. Thus the group virtually ignores, for instance, the self-analytic discourse produced by six million Dalit speakers of Marathi who have an independent body of work (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 541-42). The inwardness of academic discourse, then, precisely removes the critical potential of postcolonial theory from public discourses. George Yúdice takes a similar stance in criticizing “multicultural” rhetoric for having little effect on the identity politics of the public sphere:

 

While it is true that identity politics and its dominant ideology--multiculturalism--have achieved a relative democratization of some institutions (some school systems and universities, museums and exhibition spaces, certain foundations, and even certain business settings, as demonstrated by the adoption of "corporate multiculturalism"), the fact is that these openings have not had the slightest impact on the conduct of macropolitics of the economy, foreign relations, the armed forces, scientific research, and so on. Such an impact is made even more difficult by the weak linkages among "identity groups." ("Cultural Studies" 58).

 

In many ways it was the Satanic Verses debacle that shocked postcolonial academics into confronting the strength of popular discourses over cultural productions–particularly, the production of “authors” in conflicting discourses of nationality, citizenship, property, and selfhood. One contemporary example of the “scripting” of postcolonial authors is the case of Taslima Nasreen, a Bangladeshi author whose escape to the West became an international incident in Europe in 1994, and a national embarrassment for Bangladesh. Early in those events, she was nicknamed “the female Rushdie” on an NPR Show, “All Things Considered”; very few of the commentaries on her work in the West (and she has been available in translation) focus on the novel Lajja for which she had a fatwa issued against her. Her status as a victim of Islamic religious intolerance has dominated all conversations on Nasreen. Descriptions of her escape present the West as coolly rational–the free democratic spheres of speech and action–and the Third world as a chaotic tropical realm: for instance, an article in the Financial Times, titled “Safe from Screams of Intolerance,” tells of Nasreen’s escape from the “steamy streets of Dhaka” to her new hideout in “cool Swedish forests” (29). In an essay on the “Nasreen Affair,” I argue that Third World authors are often consumed as “subalterns” in a historical script shared by the reading publics in the First and Third Worlds; authors have becomes free-floating signifiers who are placed within pre-existent Western scripts of freedom, progress and the expression of individuality.⁵

 

In an issue of Socialist Review on South Asian postcolonial theory and writing, Inderpal Grewal (1994) reinforces the argument that the scripting of authors depends on the public discourses that interpellate our interpretation of literary texts.⁶ Grewal criticizes the canonization of authors such as Bharati Mukherjee, whose fiction reiterates the discourse of freedom from (Eastern) oppression so essential for the consolidation of Euro-American feminist liberatory agendas. Mukherjee’s work is typically taught as immigrant literature and women’s literature; her narrative of escape from India, a place of tradition and backwardness, finds reverberations in the American rhetoric of citizenship and the New World. The back cover of Jasmine includes a blurb from The Baltimore Sun that bears witness to the text’s popularity: “Poignant… heart-rending…. This is the story of the transformation of an Indian village girl, whose grandmother wants to marry her off at 11, into an American woman who finally thinks for herself” (59). The spurious connections between Euro-American feminism and colonial modernity makes it possible for such a text, argues Grewal, to gain “literary value” over texts such as Meena Alexander’s Nampally Road, a work trenchant in its criticism of the nightmare of immigrant existence. Perhaps it is important to read authors like Mukherjee–on whom there is a volume of critical essays–in context of her production as author so that her “insider’s knowledge” may be framed by the public sphere in which she is consumed. In the “Introduction” to the essays on Mukherjee, the editor, Emmanuel Nelson, in fact ascribes Mukherjee’s importance in part to her celebration of her new immigrant status: “What is fascinating, however, is Mukherjee’s determined rejection of the emotional paralysis of exile and her enthusiastic affirmation of the immigrant condition…” (x). Such frames for authors reinforce dominant ideologies of freedom and escape scripted in First World-Third World exchanges.

 

In the recent volume dedicated to configuring an international cultural studies, On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, George Yúdice raises some important questions regarding the relationship of cultural analysis to the reconception of an effective public sphere. He suggests the conception of “transnational public spheres” where the needs and dimensions of societies across nations may be discussed together. With reference to Gramsci, Yúdice characterizes the civil sphere as an “ensemble of symbolic practices” where a “discursive consensus” is struck and an image of a socius is constituted therein; but, Yúdice asks, under powerful deterritorializations can a socius be possible (51)? One has to imagine transnational public spheres where issues such as urban violence, poverty, labor forces, and so forth are discussed with the possibility of consensus; cultural studies can contribute to this exchange of symbolic data by recording, analyzing, and criticizing that data (63). Certainly, such a model of transnational analysis and exchange becomes particularly relevant in articulating the practices that constitute the “literary text,” its use and value as postcolonial literature read within the American academy.

 

In the same volume, the editors, Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst, preoccupy themselves with the penetration of public spheres by electronic media and reproduction. A globalizing media creates a mass of cultural transmissions (financial, military, institutional) that cognitively “map” or order the world in a certain way. Others, such as George Yúdice, Kumkum Sangari, and Meenakshi Mukherjee, critique the new political and cultural terrains constituted by the global media: they insist on reading the postcolonial in context of civil spheres completely saturated with mass electronic reproduction, originating in the First World and harnessed to the logics of transnational capital.⁷ Mukherjee notes that, in the case of India, the cultural amnesia generated by the infiltration of STAR TV, MTV, and CNN into homes, obliterates local and regional cultures unless they are brought back as “planned authenticities” (2,608); a globalized media interpenetrating the so-far state-run Doordarshan (television) beams messages of conspicuous consumption to remote villages, and people in the survival sector dream of washing machines and microwaves.

 

But this scenario is not as apocalyptic as it sounds: Dienst and Schwarz, for instance, theorize resistance–a key issue in postcolonial theory–in terms of “countertransmissions” drawn from “diverse imaginary resources” that “interrupt” these “circuits of control”; cross-cultural analysis involves the record and examination of these interruptions and reformulations of mass media transmissions harnessed to dominant political and financial interests. This perception of “countertransmissions” can be deployed to reconstitute the “postcolonial” as resistance, a challenge to dominant ideologies transacted across public spheres; but without looking at the globalizing force and circuits of mass media and electronic reproductions originating in the First World the counteractivity of the postcolonial cannot be harnessed for decolonizing political effects. An international conception of cultural studies is necessary for cultural studies not to be completely removed from notions of political solidarity (its initial impetus)–not to be “Cocacolonized” in Yúdice’s terms (52)–and for postcolonial literature to be politically effective.

 

I emphasize a cultural studies praxis for teaching postcolonial literature because for postcolonial critics, participating in and attempting to resist a homogenizing global cultural economy, mass-produced images that create global imaginaries are a problem. Gauri Viswanathan (1996) points to the fact that communities outside academia–her example consists of South Asian communities in the United States–often collude with Western representations, uncritically Orientalizing themselves in the media and celebrating things that are a part of the history of domination:

 

There is so little communication between these communities, one so critical and the others so complicit. The latter continue to represent themselves through film and journalistic media as the exotic East; one instance of this is travel ads. To what extent does the failure of communication between these groups, in fact, nullify the critical activity South Asian academics are producing? (qtd. in Katrak 157).

 

This failure of communication was earlier noted in Ketu Katrak’s work on postcolonial women’s texts, where she argued that postcolonial theorists and critics, unlike writers, often fail to engage seriously with the “many urgent issues in their societies” (157). In fact the epigraph to her essay is culled from Wole Soyinka’s diatribe against criticism that produces, with “remorseless exclusivity” and “incestuous productivity,” limited “academic, bourgeois-situated literature” (qtd. in Katrak 157). Such allegations are particularly pertinent to my argument for re-locating postcolonial literature in terms of other cultural transmissions in transnational public spheres.

 

One only needs to look at recent films such as Kamasutra or Indian MTV’s version of “Indianess” (marketable ethnic clothes, artifacts, erotic temple architecture, etc.) to know that Indians play a great part in exoticizing themselves. An example to which we can all relate is perhaps the popularity of the goddess Kali in Western countercultures, as the fount of unrestrained female energy and sexuality. A student recently gave me an excerpt from a story by David James Duncan, from River Teeth, titled “Kali Personal.” The narrative frame describes the arrival of a personal ad from an anonymous sender from Calcutta, India, mailed to a Seattle daily; the envelope containing the ad allegedly smelt “funky,” and included fifteen thousand Indian rupees. The rest of the tale recounts the editor’s bizarre experience with the ad (which included barbecuing the rupees); it finally was stolen and ended up on rock concert posters and phone poles. The ad reads something like this: “Single Asian female; ageless; nonprofessional; new to america; searching for virile, confident, ambitious young males of any caste, color or physical description to whom to bare my perfect breasts and shining body and give ecstacies that leave you gasping for more. I never lie. From the moment you see me, you will burn for me…” (A smattering of Sanskrit in the two-page-long erotica lends colorful authenticity.) (39). This is a particularly interesting example because several feminist, and particularly lesbian South Asian communities, actually use Kali’s symbolic value in a very similar way. Advertisements in lesbian popular journals in Britain and Los Angeles that construct female sexual energy in the name of Kali also record such passages. My point here is that we must teach such mass and popular cultural texts alongside our postcolonial novels, prose, and poetry so that the “communication” that Viswanathan talks of–the interchange between the mass-produced transmissions and their concomitant counter-transmissions–can begin at the level of pedagogy. This would reinstate the postcolonial as a counter-hegemonic strategy aimed both at demystification and the historical recording of counter-transmissions.

 

As a prerequisite to a postcolonial cultural studies praxis that prepares the ground for students to locate themselves in a transnational public sphere, I emphasize “teaching the market” (to spin off of Gerald Graff’s exhortation to “teach the debate” in the classroom) in postcolonial objects and practices. In the balance of this essay, I will outline the ways in which the postcolonial critic can situate texts, courses, requirements, and university policies within a larger understanding of transnational exchanges.

 

Teaching the Market: Academia, Pedagogy, Literary Markets, and Value

 

Academia and the publishing industries of both the First and Third Worlds constitute the economy that most directly affects our choice of postcolonial objects and practices. This is a nexus that includes teachers, university administrators, critics, writers, publishers, distributors, advertisers, journal editors, and others who are responsible for regulating academic resources–for publication, research time, conferences, curriculum, and so forth–and for formulating pedagogic policy. As Dirlik and so many others have pointed out, the academy fulfills an economic need: we prepare students to participate/partake in a global economy by introducing them to “better” understanding of contemporary cultures, politics, and history. I attempt to chart the different aspects of the “market” that one can logistically include in discussions stretching over ten to sixteen weeks.

 

In examining Third World publishing and distribution, and its relation to the industrial production and consumption of texts, Philip Altbach notes the centrality of the economic motivations for the continuing dependence on First World publishing and critical facilities (454). Others, such as Ali Mazrui, argue for larger stakes: that the history of this market dependency lies in colonial systems of education, charting for African universities what Viswanathan did for Indian colonial education. Mazrui argues that the impact of colonial education in Africa has created postcolonial universities designed to “transform the African self into a neo-Western other” (334). He details the cultural dependency of postcolonial African universities (such as universities at Ibadan, Ghana at Legon, Dakar, and the old Makerere in Uganda)–their language of instruction, library holdings, faculty, curricular structure, and pedagogic requirements–which perceive themselves often as “extensions” of major European universities (334). Mazrui’s point is that it is not so much academic dependency that is worrisome, but the fact that the “cultural self” is at stake, as it is increasingly organized into a neo-colonial object. Investigations such as these suggest that the category of postcolonial literature should not be operable without adequate attention to the spheres of knowledge transaction (First and Third World universities and publishing industries) and the related questions of cultural dependency. For it is the shared transnational public spheres within which the problems and possibilities of the postcolonial take shape; it is here that postcolonial cultural artifacts are produced, distributed, and consumed.

 

Altbach and Mazrui provide important insights into the transnational structures of publishing industries and education systems; both draw our attention to the historical distributions of economic and cultural power. Certainly, the visibility of certain postcolonial objects in the First World has much to do with the cultural capital of the ex-colonial West. In demystifying systems of rewards and punishments, Graham Huggan examines the neocolonialism of literary prizes–the Booker prize, in particular–that offer symbolic sanctions (he quotes Bourdieu) to postcolonial writers. Huggan’s point is that literature is not the locus of immanent value” but “a site of contestation between different discursive regimes” (412); if one adds po stcoloniality to this, the condition implies a “contradiction between anti-colonial ideologies and neo-colonial market schemes” (413). Offering a history of the Booker McConnell company, a corporation that profited from the harshest of colonial regimes in the 1830s, Huggan goes to lengths to show how the Booker awards still attempt to contain postcolonial resistance or cultural critique by promoting English as a common or shared fund. This liberal view “avoids confronting structural differences in conditions of literary production and consumption across the English-speaking world” (417). Analyses such as Huggan’s work on the assigning of literary value are valuable components of teaching the market for postcolonial texts. In teaching a postcolonial literary text one could start from the point of consumption–the contrasting reception-contexts for a single work, the gaps, tensions and commonalities would prove instructive in understanding the global market structures–and then move to a history of production and distribution.

 

The Booker prize example points to an important dimension to teaching the market: the feedback effect of the “world market” in postcolonial literatures, as most recently evidenced in the hullabaloo over Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things, coinciding as it did with the celebrations of India’s fifty years of independence. In the Indian newspapers and journals, money was the first item of interest: every article that appeared in those first few weeks commented on the 3.5 lakh (88,000) copies worldwide, earning Rs.5 crore ($1,250,000). A blurb in India Today, October 27th, 1997, summed things up well: “Arundhati Roy opens up the global market for Indian writing in English” (23). This was followed by a description: “Slim-hipped Roy, her carelessly curled hair cascading over her face, her nose-ring twinkling with naughtiness, and her language flapping with originality, excited the stodgy English literary establishment” (23). On the one hand, this loaded sentence echoes gestures of exoticization extended to South Asian women in the West, and on the other, reads Roy as a manipulator of the market–someone who triumphs over the “stodgy English establishment.” Other articles gloated: “Where is the British Novel now?” (says a reporter for the Calcutta daily, The Statesman). He continues: “If the Booker is a mirror in which contemporary literary culture may glimpse a reflection of its own worth, then one ought to look elsewhere–to the USA or India. I once again congratulate Roy for winning; but where are the new British writers?” (1). Again, a double-edged sentence in which the anti-colonial nonetheless reflects a culture that continues to look at itself, via satellite as it were, through British and American ratification.

 

The question of constructing the cultural object as literary, or the awarding of literary value, becomes an important part of teaching the market. This has a special valence in context of colonial constructions of other literatures which was the core of many Orientalist projects: for instance, Gauri Viswanathan examines the ideological fabric of such Orientalist constructions in Masks of Conquest, while Vinay Dharwadkar explores the European legacies behind the cataloging of Indian literatures–“Sanskrit literature which has a strong philological base, was characterized as a part of ancient and classical India, in opposition to other “modern vernacular literatures” (168).

 

It is an easy move from including popular discourses on particular postcolonial texts to the subsequent introduction of epistemological debates. Theoretical discourses that are self-reflexive about their own cultural and epistemological dependencies are integral complements to teaching the market. For example, if one’s subject is the global cultural economy, one can fold in George Yúdice’s critiques (1992) of the Western appropriations of Latin American cultural forms as examples of postmodernism. Yúdice advocates a better understanding of postmodernisms operating in postcolonial contexts: he finds the occurrence of the experiences and aesthetics in Latin America that Western critics group under the term postmodern long before the visibility of the Euro-American varieties, arguing that the heterogenous character of Latin American social and cultural formations made it possible for these “discontinuous, alternative, and hybrid forms to emerge” with ease (2). Kumkum Sangari (1987) makes a similar argument, articulating the danger of reading context-specific postcolonial cultural forms as variants of Western postmodernism: for instance, she proposes that, in the hybrid syncretic of Latin American life, “magic realism” must be understood as a “strategy for living” and not a “formal literary reflex”; non-mimetic or marvelous ways of seeing have a social relevance to Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s world, and this non-mimetism is not the same as the anti-mimetism of Western postmodernism (164).

 

In fact, the acknowledged failures of critical theory can be cautionary tales for students learning to map a global cultural economy. Since the mid-eighties, postcolonial theorists have been coming to terms with the postcolonial as a rubric; many seem unified in their commitment to rescuing the category “postcolonial” from becoming a historical abstraction that overlooks contemporary power axes (Mishra & Hodge, 1991; Deepika Bahri, 1996; Anne McClintock, 1992; Ella Shohat, 1992; Arif Dirlik, 1994; Gayatri Spivak, 1993, etc.). Certainly, the “postcolonial” skews temporality by reducing everything that came before the colonial period into the blandly utopian “precolonial”; only artifacts that contain whiffs of colonial contamination are subject to avid scrutiny. Anne McClintock, in cataloging the issues elided in contemporary formulations of the term, writes: “If the theory promises a decentering of history in hybridity, syncreticism, multi-dimensional time, and so forth, the singularity of the term effects a re-centering of global history around the single rubric of European time” (86). Arif Dirlik, citing McClintock, argues in the same vein: that postcolonial studies has generated a “universalizing historicism” that “projects globally what are but local experiences” (345). The temporal and spatial problematics of the term are further emphasized and rethought in Santiago Colás’s work on postcolonialism in the Latin American context: “What can the term postcolonial contribute to an understanding of the culture of Latin America?” Citing Edward Said’s articulation of the “heart” of decolonization as the slow recovery of territory after World War II, Colás notes that “8 million square miles and 29 million inhabitants of Latin America were decolonized by 1826 (with the signal exceptions of Cuba and Puerto Rico). Postcolonial critics and theorists have failed to examine the difference of Latin America” (383); then, using Slavoj Zizek’s theories of ideology and political subjecthood, Colás goes on to demonstrate a different understanding of the term postcolonial in its function of a “self-styled” illusion (392).

 

I categorize these critical narratives as useful cautionary tales because they all draw attention to the easy commodification of the postcolonial or the non-western, often neatly packaged into anthologies that stretch liberal arms toward a post-statist consciousness. The classroom should be a place where the implications of market operations on knowledges and skills acquired can be argued, contested, and understood on different terms by students belonging to varying imagined communities.

 

What are some of these implications that can be addressed in the classroom? Transnational capital, as it transcends nation-states and permeates local corners, generates a perceived intellectual need to comprehend and cognitively “manage” the plenitude of a global culture’s politics and history. Cultural artifacts become commodities that facilitate such comprehension. University programs such as Ethnic Studies, Cultural Studies, English and Comparative Literature departments with multicultural, world, and commonwealth literature courses struggle to contain and represent the “other” within and the “other” outside of the United States. The question posed in the classroom may well be: What purchase does the postcolonial have with these other courses and programs?

 

The most common and dangerous inclusion of the postcolonial into the academy has been its ghettoization in one department (and often a single course). Sometimes one course fills in several needs: for example, a course in postcolonial literature focusing on South Asian female diaspora may fulfill student requirements for courses in Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, Commonwealth, World, and Multicultural literature requirements. This overdetermination of texts give students a token glimpse of the “other,” quickly and deftly managed within the curriculum. Commenting on “minority discourse,” Sylvia Wynter offers an insight that further exposes the issue of crisis-management tied in with curricular structures:

 

[if] the category of minority includes the sub-category "women," then we are here confronted with the anomaly that it is we who constitute the numerical majority. Yet such is the force of the shared semantic charter through which we interdepend, that we all know what we mean when we use the category minority to apply to an empirical majority. (433)

 

The dizzying concept of “special interest” groups who must share one segment of the pie–more concretely thought of as teaching the non-western world’s literature in ten weeks–is seen by Gayatri Spivak as a political strategy of crisis-management in the global economy (“Practical Politics” 111).

 

While efforts such as re-designing requirements on a course-by-course or institutional basis and the emphasis on transmitting discussions of the postcolonial across the curriculum unquestionably comprise the most integral parts of larger ongoing struggles, in the current ghettoized situation, one of the options for postcolonial studies courses is simply to teach the market. To teach the market in such a scenario would be to highlight the “semantic” character of the category under which a particular text is taught, and then to make visible the parameters of the disciplines that govern the inclusion of such as text in the course; one could teach only two or three novels in a semester, but the students would learn about the relationship of, for example, a critical multiculturalism to women’s studies and how these relationships carve out institutional space and the assignment of value.

 

In describing the World Literature and Cultural Studies Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Kristin Ross suggests that we make available our acts of worlding in the course, by identifying the negative or empty spaces around the texts that we teach–“world” should be most of all a “refusal” of a naturalized category (671); she therefore insists on the need to teach the motors of our curricular choices alongside the representative cultures and societies under perusal. I would imagine that this would entail making available to one’s students the political, pragmatic, and personal decisions behind course designs and the choice of texts. In the interview alluded to above, Viswanathan suggests that the “curriculum battle is less about what books to read than how to reflect an increasingly complicated society with different class and ethnic compositions. The language of contemporary curricular restructuring has not changed all that much from the discourse of empire through which English literature was universalized” (60). Ross’s emphasis on revealing the world as absence rather than presence changes the universalizing gestures Viswanathan sees as dangerous; furthermore, such an act refocuses attention wasted on divvying up the pie to the impossibility of full representation in an increasingly complex set of domestic and international relationships.

 

In the same essay, Ross points to another effect of institutional ghettos: the severe disjuncture between domestic (American) and international “multicultural” courses. “Melting-pot” classes in American pluralism encourage a kind of “provincial nesting” that blocks connections between the students’ own particular experiences and those of other people. This leaves “disadvantaged groups eddying in self-referential circles on the periphery of academic life” (669), disconnected from counterpart cultures in world literature courses. The parochialism of American Studies has much to do with this divorce in the sharing of resources and programs. Such institutional divorces further lead to an epistemological gap between philosophically-based courses with a political edge (“postcolonial literature” courses or Ethnic studies) and other programs in the university geared to study other cultures (such as Asian Studies). Referring to marginalizations within Asian studies and Asian literatures, Rey Chow explores how Asian classicists often see culture as a general literacy that comes before periodization and specialization; the farther one is removed from centralized or canonical Asian texts, the more “dubious” one’s claim to the culture. Chow recounts one occasion on which she “told a senior Chinese classicist that [she] was going to a conference on contemporary Hong Kong literature, for instance, [and] the response… was: ‘Oh, is there such a thing?'” (125). It is unlikely that Chow is alone in her experience of being marginalized in Asian Studies programs, often Orientalist in their lack of attention to the historical production of the object of study as an object of study. Asian Studies programs fulfill a requirement of preparing students for participation in a global economy; resistance to this effort calls into question the balances and resources in the university. Certainly, one could hope for more interdisciplinary transmissions of postcolonial debates, not only across English, History, and Anthropology departments, but in disciplines that participate vigorously in the global economy (economics, the languages, and political science) and parley in culture (Folklore programs, Asian Studies, Art History, Music, Language departments, etc.).

 

Besides the structure and resources of American universities, the pedagogies of the postcolonial leave much to be desired. One seldom comes across a sustained reading of the postcolonial in most courses in British and American literature, in the way do we do nowadays with gender. What Said has done with Jane Austen is precisely what Gauri Viswanathan, in her interview with Mary Vasudeva and Deepika Bahri, suggests that we should do with several other canonical texts. In her words:

 

Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, for instance, which is about mass mobilization and the horrific effects of militant Protestantism, shocks someone into the recognition that what seem to be exclusively problems of Third World society are, in fact, problems you could find in English society. That makes us rethink the problems of the Third World and consider that these difficulties have become a part of an international, global history. (59)

 

It is understandable that we choose English and European texts written or translated into English when teaching in the Euro-American academy, but need we be obsessed with texts that refer only to other English texts? One only needs to look at the immense attention paid to writers such as Jean Rhys (revising Brontë), Derek Walcott (rewriting Homer), Coetzee (redoing Defoe), and so forth, in postcolonial studies conferences and seminars, to become aware of this attachment to colonial texts. As a character in Upamanyu Chatterjee’s parodic English, August (1988), puts it with a great deal of irony: “Dr.Prem Krishen of Meerut University has written a book on E.M. Forster, India’s darling Englishman–most of us seem so grateful that he wrote a novel about India. Dr. Prem Krishen holds a Ph.D. on Jane Austen from Meerut University. Have you ever been to Meerut? A vile place, but comfortably Indian. What is Jane Austen doing in Meerut?” (170). The epistemological parameters of the Anglo-American canon seem to have been reexamined, but not sufficiently.

 

Therefore critics such as Hodge and Mishra talk about the need to pay equal importance to vernacular and supplemental knowledges that were also a part of postcolonial resistances. Situated knowledges of the sort that Salman Rushdie’s work demands–Mishra and Hodge unpack the density and importance of the Shri 420 citation in The Satanic Verses to make their point–are essential to prevent complete commodification of the postcolonial into European cultural rubrics.⁸ So instead of simply teaching a canonical nationalist text such as Tagore’s Ghare Baire (with the added convenience of a film version for our visually-inclined generation) with his lectures on “Nationalism” or “Personality,”⁹ which were published in English by Macmillian, one could supplement the novel with the Bengali nationalistic popular verse, folk rhymes, songs, slogans, letters, and so forth, written in the first decades of the 1900s, which fill out the context of production.¹⁰ While there are enough people who have access to Tagore and are interested in translating him, much of this other material will be lost unless postcolonial critics pay attention to small acts of research and translation as everyday pedagogic practice. This everyday practice is perhaps best characterized as the “tactics” that Rey Chow demarcates as the postcolonial gesture of resistance; while a “strategy” involves sustaining and demarcating one’s place or “field” of power, “tactical interventions” are calculated actions that “are determined by the absence of a proper locus”–they are transitory, contingent, and fragmented, but they take over the field by eroding it “slowly” and “tactically (17). This seems to me a particularly good description of what I am suggesting here: the inclusion of vernacular and supplemental materials that are not tied to European colonial texts or frameworks or rubrics, but whose translated presence will “rethink the parameters” (Viswanathan 58) of those fields.

 

The interaction of postcolonial texts written in English with vernacular and popular cultural texts also circumvents the critical aporia that seems to enter any conversation on world literatures in English–the old question of authenticity versus hybridity; a question that leads to part-defensive pompous claims of the sort Rushdie made in his much vilified New Yorker essay–that Indian writing in English far surpasses the vibrancy and innovation of writing in the other eighteen Indian vernaculars (Rushdie 38). His insistence of the importance of Indian writing in English can be seen as a reaction to the modernist polemics in the critical discourses on the Indian novel in English, always pitted against its vernacular–and more authentic–other. As Meenakshi Mukherjee (1993), a veteran critic of the Indian novel in English, observes: there seems to always be an “anxiety of Indianess” in the novel in English, a sensibility not integral to prose fiction in the Indian vernaculars (the bhasha novels). Writers in English always create a unified imaginative topos out of Indian heterogeneity, while bhasha writers are more tuned to local and regional specificities. Perhaps, she concludes, English has fewer registers than the vernaculars which draw on folk tales, films, riddles, nonsense verse, nursery rhymes, slogans, and street corner culture (2608). While it is certainly true that English continues to be the language of power and privilege in India, I would argue that the cultural anxiety that Mukherjee locates in the Indian novel in English, and the essentializing and homogenizing gestures she reads there, describe the genre between 1930-1980–a span that corresponds to the Nehruvian vision of a modern progressive India when there was a dire need to establish common national registers and field of communication. R.K.Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Kamala Markandaya, and Anita Desai all fit Mukherjee’s paradigm. In post-Emergency postmodern India, the new novelists do not even attempt to capture the whole Indian reality. Arundhati Roy, whose recent novel God of Small Things (1997) has received international critical acclaim, claims to dream in English, and her novel intersperses English with untranslated Malayalam, an idiomatic mix that has–to return to Mukherjee–a very specific regional location in India.¹¹ My point here is that new Englishes are increasingly inextricable from their cultural contexts, and a postcolonial praxis must include adequate attention to the kinds of vernacular and supplemental knowledges that Mishra and Hodge theorize in their essay.

 

Of course, this idea of opening up the postcolonial to contextual and supplemental knowledges dovetails into the politics of translation in academia and in the publishing industry. Whenever possible we should address the politics and economics of the translations taught in class insofar as they determine the “literary” worth and “marketability” of a piece; but the concern most central to my project is the way in which the star-system within the academy regulates who gets translated and, therefore, taught. The example that comes most readily to mind is Mahasweta Devi, who has been translated by Gayatri Spivak. Spivak, of course, is eminently aware of such politics, particularly when she cautions us against producing “translatese” in Outside in the Teaching Machine:¹²

 

In the act of wholesale translation into English there can be a betrayal of the democratic ideal into the law of the strongest. This happens when all the literatures of the Third World get translated into a sort of with-it translatese, so that the literature by a woman in Palestine begins to resemble, in the feel of its prose, something by a man in Taiwan. (182)

 

But while the awareness of the “law of the strongest” is necessary, critics such as Rey Chow have cautioned against not translating Third World texts, with special reference to Asian literature:

 

Unlike the teacher of French and German, the Asian literature teacher would almost guarantee her inaudibility if she were to insist on using the original language in a public setting. The problem she faces can be stated in this way: Does she sacrifice the specificities of language in order to generalize, so that she can put Asian literatures in a "cross-cultural" framework, or does she continue to teach untranslated texts with expertise--and remain ghettoized? (128)

 

There are, of course, no easy answers; but a way to address both Spivak’s epistemological problem and Rey Chow’s institutional concerns is to translate performatively, so that a single text may have different variants in different acts of translation. In such a scenario, one could teach “cross culturally” (not that this is not fraught with problems!) and avoid the specialized space of Asian literature or postcolonial literature. Of course, this performative translation presupposes vernacular knowledge, a severe difficulty in teaching national literatures in several vernaculars. The radical step here would be to resist national labels such as “a specialist in Indian literature,” and to begin to understand oneself as–and train oneself to be–a teacher of more local vernaculars. The other option would be to use the translations that are readily available, in which case the translator’s position in the academy or in literary circles (whenever possible), should also be a part of the course. Students then become aware of the market that imparts literary value to a text: thus, Devi’s work is not simply treated as a “window” into the world of Indian subalterns.

 

These issues of pedagogy, then, lead inevitably to the broader questions of ascribing literary value to a text, as well as the value of the literary itself. Rey Chow draws our attention to the status of literature in the age of cultural studies: she argues that one of the most “devastating aspects” of new technological organizations of knowledge is the “marginalization” of literature within cultural studies (132). Literature becomes “information,” and literatures from other cultures stand in the greatest danger of being commodified as reflections of other worlds. Placing literature in context of the discourses that characterize literariness, and also alongside all other cultural transmissions that relativize its value as information or great art, can circumvent some of the problems that Chow alludes to in her analysis.

 

In Conclusion

 

Teaching the politics of the academy, pedagogy, and the publishing industry, the relationship of academia to international public spheres, and the intersections of all kinds of cultural work with critical theory, along with our choice of postcolonial texts, offers ways to recuperate the postcolonial as cultural and political resistance. While as critics we take on an immense task of cultural imagination that charts, analyzes, critiques, and catalogs, as teachers we must hunker down to a set of strategies that combat institutional and market constraints. For instance, one option would be to conceptualize a “deep structure” to a course in which only one or two literary texts are taught, and more attention is paid to the various nodes (vernacular and supplemental knowledges, the position of writer, critic, translator, contrasting reception-contexts, and so forth) that I have outlined above. “Survey” course structures tend to hide acts of worlding. In this information age, rather than be disseminators of information, we need to teach modes of organizing that information by offering a range of tools that students can deploy to map their world. The classroom can remain a local counterpoint to global hegemonies only if we can create a place where students can debate over the cognitive matrices that will regulate their participation in a global economy.

Notes

 

1. See Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?”

 

2. See Mishra and Hodge, “What is Post(-)Colonialism?”

 

3. See Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.”

 

4. Of course, there may be an infinite number of alternative sites of cultural resistance to globalizing economies; furthermore, the classroom may be “used” in many ways other than those suggested here–e.g., outreach programs, performative self-expression, etc.–in order to become a site of resistance. My project here, however, is limited to the exploration of pedagogic imperatives as they govern the choice and inclusion of postcolonial objects and practices.

 

5. In an address to a conference, “Writing and Thinking at the End of an Epoch,” Elke Schmitter makes a similar point in drawing our attention to the postmodern global production of literary publicity; she argues that the worlds that the authors mediate have become less relevant than the author-as-text.

 

6. Others in this collection, Jasbar Puar, Amarpal Dhaliwal, and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham, add to the surge of critical commentary on the politics of location, diaspora, and displacement in the 1990s.

 

7. See George Yúdice, “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America”; Kumkum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible”; and Meenakshi Mukherjee, “The Anxiety of Indianess: Our Novels in English.” For a further analysis of global interpenetration in the Indian context see Bishnupriya Ghosh and Bhaskar Sarkar, “Diaspora and Postmodern Fecundity.”

 

8. Mishra and Hodge cite S. Aravamudan’s analysis of the 420 motif in The Satanic Verses to show how Rushdie deploys that reference to effect a critique of Islam.

 

9. See, for example, material drawn from these lectures in Michael Sprinker’s analysis of the text, “Homeboys: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World.”

 

10. See Sugata Bose, “Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture.” Bose presents an account of nationalist aspirations in Bengali literature–the dominant symbols, myths, motifs, and tropes. He records how Bankimchandra Chattapadhyay’s hymn to the motherland, Bande Mataram, originally written as a filler for his journal Bangadarshan and later inserted into his nationalistic novel Anandamath (1882), was set to music by Tagore and sung at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress in 1896. Such vernacular cultural material fleshes out the nationalist aspirations of the Tagore text.

 

11. For a further development of the vernacular-English debate see my essay, “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Salman Rushdie’s Situated Cultural Hybridity,” forthcoming in Keith Booker, ed., Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie.

 

12. For more on translation and postcolonial cultures see Gordon Collier, Us/Them: Translation, Transcription, and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures.

Works Cited

 

• “All Things Considered.” NPR. 14 June 1994.
• “Arundhati Roy gets Booker for First Novel.” The Statesman 6 Oct. 1997: 1.
• Altbach, Philip. “Education and NeoColonialism.” Teacher’s College Record 72.1 (May 1971): 543-558.
• Appiah, Kwame. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry 17.2 (1991): 41-72.
• Bahri, Deepika. “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial.'” Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality Eds. Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1996. 137-166.
• Bose, Sugata. “Nation as Mother: Representations and Contestations of ‘India’ in Bengali Literature and Culture.” Nationalism, Democracy and Development: State and Politics in India. Eds. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1997. 50-75.
• Breckenridge, Carol A., and Peter van der Veer. “Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament.” Orientalism and the Postcolonial Predicament: Perspectives on South Asia. Eds. Breckenridge & van der Veer. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993. 1-19.
• Chatterjee, Upamanyu. English, August. Calcutta: Rupa & Co., 1989.
• Chicago Cultural Studies Group. “Critical Multiculturalism.” Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992). 530-562.
• Chow, Rey. Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
• Colás, Santiago. “Of Creole Symptoms, Cuban Fantasies, and Other Latin American Postcolonial Ideologies.” PMLA 110.3 (May 1995): 382-396.
• Collier, Gordon. Us/Them: Translation, Transcription, and Identity in Post-Colonial Literary Cultures. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1992.
• Dharwadker, Vinay. “Orientalism and the Study of Indian Literatures.” Breckenridge and Van der Deer 158-188.
• Dirlik, Arif. “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism.” Critical Inquiry 20 (Winter 1994): 328-356.
• Duncan, David James. “Kali Personal.” River Teeth. New York: Doubleday, 1995. 37-42.
• Garnham, Nicholas. “The Mass Media, Cultural Identity, and the Public Sphere in the Modern World.” Public Culture 5 (1993): 251-265.
• Ghosh, Bishnupriya. “An Affair to Remember: Scripted Performances in the ‘Nasreen Affair.” The Politics of Reception: Women in Transnational Frames. Eds. Amal Amireh and Lisa Majaj. New York: Garland Publishing, forthcoming 1999.
• —, and Bhaskar Sarkar. “Diaspora and Postmodern Fecundity.” Communicare 16.1 (June 1997): 19-48.
• —. “An Invitation to Indian Postmodernity: Salman Rushdie’s Situated Cultural Hybridity.” Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. Ed. Keith Booker. New York: Twayne Publishers, forthcoming 1999.
• Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• Grewal, Inderpal. “The Postcolonial, Ethnic Studies and the Diaspora.” Socialist Review 24.4 (1994): 45-74.
• Hall, Stuart. “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities.” October 53 (Summer 1990): 11-23.
• Huggan, Graham. “Prizing “Otherness”: A Short History of the Booker” Studies in the Novel XXIX.3 (Fall 1997): 412-433.
• John, Binoo K. “The New Deity of Prose.” India Today 27 Oct. 1997: 23-25.
• Katrak, Ketu. “Decolonizing Culture: Toward a Theory for Postcolonial Women’s Texts.” Modern Fiction Studies 35.1 (Spring 1989): 157-179.
• Mazrui, Ali. A. “The “Other” as the “Self” under Cultural Dependency: the Impact of the Postcolonial University.” Encountering the Other(s). Ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. 333-362.
• McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: The Pitfalls of the term ‘Post-Colonial.'” Social Text 31-32 (1992) 84-98.
• Mishra, Vijay and Bob Hodge. “Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” Diacritics 19.2 (Summer 1989): 3-20.
• —. “What is Post(-)Colonialism?” Textual Practice 5.3 (1991): 399-414.
• Mukherjee, Meenakshi. “The Anxiety of Indianess: Our Novels in English.” The Economic and Political Weekly 27 Nov. 1993: 2607-2611.
• Nelson, Emmanuel S. Introduction. Bharati Mukherjee: Critical Perspectives. New York: Garland Publishing, 1993. ix-xvii.
• Ross, Kristin. “The World Literature and Cultural Studies Program.” Critical Inquiry (Summer 1993): 666-676.
• Roy, Arundhati. God of Small Things. New Delhi: India Ink, 1997.
• Rushdie, Salman. “Damme, this is the Oriental scene for you!” The New Yorker 23 June 1997: 50.
• Sangari, Kumkum. “The Politics of the Possible.” Cultural Critique. (Fall 1987): 157-186.
• Schmitter, Elke. “Boycott Lufthansa: literature and publicity today–a few ruminations and a suggestion.” Trans. Wilhem Werthern. TriQuarterly 94 (Fall 1995): 155-60.
• Schwarz, Henry, and Richard Dienst. “Introduction: Warning! Cautious Readers!” Schwarz and Dienst 1-14.
• —, eds. Reading the Shape of the World: Towards an International Cultural Studies. Oxford: Westview P, 1996.
• Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the Post-Colonial.” Social Text 31-32 (1992): 93-11.
• Spivak, Gayatri. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• —. “Practical Politics of The Open End.” The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues. Ed. Sarah Harasym. New York: Routledge, 1990. 95-112.
• Sprinker, Michael. “Homeboys: Nationalism, Colonialism, and Gender in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World.” Schwarz and Dienst 202-223.
• Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. New York: Columbia UP, 1989.
• —. “Pedagogical Alternatives: Issues in Postcolonial Studies.” Interview. Between the Lines. Eds. Bahri and Vasudeva. 54-63.
• “Woman in the News: Safe from Screams of Intolerance.” The Financial Times 14 August 1994.
• Wynter, Sylvia. “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minority’ Literary Criticism And Beyond.” The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse. Eds. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd. London: Oxford UP, 1990. 432-469.
• Yúdice, George. “Cultural Studies and Civil Society.” Schwarz and Dienst 50-66.
• —. “Postmodernity and Transnational Capitalism in Latin America.” On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture. Eds. George Yúdice et al. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992. 1-22.