What is Left in Postcolonial Studies?

Abstract

This response to “The State of Postcolonial Studies” in New Literary History (Winter 2012) is a critique of the theoretical assumptions and methodologies in essays purporting to provide a genealogy of postcolonial studies and signal its future directions as enhancing the understanding of globalization and its effects. The argument of the rejoinder points to the partiality of accounts of the field's intellectual inspirations, practices, and achievements, and observes the authors' perverse mapping of the contemporary world, this deriving from insubstantial constructions of the causes of ecological degradation and climate change (Chakrabarty) and the arbitrary identification of “indigenous struggle, settler colonialism and Islam” as neglected areas of research (Young). The repudiation of materials and analysis that do advance a total comprehension of the connexions and disjunctions in capitalism's world-system, registers an anti-Marxist stance that extends to the neglect of substantive work on ecology and political Islam, and whose gravitas reveals the flaws in the two essays.

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