Extravagant Postcolonialism: Ethics and Individualism in Anglophonic, Anglocentric Postcolonial Fiction; or, “What Was (This) Postcolonialism?”

Abstract

“Extravagant Postcolonialism” takes up the issue of postcolonial individualism, the larger claim being that postcolonial fiction by and large distinguishes the rare, imaginative, “extravagant” individual as uniquely capable of ethical apprehension and action. I begin by considering a question of postcolonial justice, the “economic” version of which postcolonial fiction tends to eschew as unethical. Having demonstrated how these fictions associate ethical intuition with something a little less business-like--what Gayatri Spivak calls, adapting Freud, “postcolonial nostalgia”--I go on (in the final section) to show how postcolonial nostalgia may be regarded as a fundamentally imaginative, private, and authoritative mode of consciousness. This last section of the essay also shows how nostalgia at times takes the form of a recognizably “modernist” epiphany. Postcolonialism of the extravagant variety, I conclude, has more in common with modernism than with the kind of avowedly transcendent contemporaneity that now goes by the name “postmodernism.”

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