Re-imagining postcolonial studies: a discussion of Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious *

For over two decades, Neil Lazarus has been working to build an alternative tradition in postcolonial studies. In The Postcolonial Unconscious, we find the culmination of this effort – not a mere gathering of earlier work, but an original extension along lines he had earlier established.

The title of the book is an allusion to Fredric Jameson’s influential study of modernist literary form, The Political Unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act (1981). As such, it suggests that, like Jameson, he wishes to locate and describe a system of methodological habits governing a field, but ones that appear natural to those who use them. Despite the surface variety of individual books and authors within it, there is a political logic so ubiquitous that it seems invisible, governing all appearances and, like the unconscious itself, bearing witness to a similarly guilty desire. Never openly declared by the authors themselves, Lazarus calls forth these habits and postures while explaining the political momentum they give to an entire field of knowledge.

He succeeds brilliantly in this effort, and the homage to Jameson implied by the gesture, along with his later demurs, establish a balanced pattern of affiliation and departure that marks the rest of the book. There is a spirit of collectivity here, one that I share (and, in that spirit, I should also mention that I provided an endorsement on the back cover); Lazarus also refers to my work in the book, not always with unqualified approval.

What strikes one about Lazarus’s project is its explicatory force. With ample evidence, he slices through arguments to expose their underlying assumptions with a cogency and command that has few equals. Although he speaks pointedly, neither his temper nor tone can be called polemical. On the contrary, his work is marked by allusions to (and frequently praise for) the writings of others, including those of other persuasions, and, in those cases, he frequently concedes ground. When he does disagree, he does so without the throat clearing one often finds in academic writing. Rather than operate solely in the orbit of the postcolonial conference circuit, he gives us, in the first twenty pages of the manuscript, references to a surprising list of names associated with very different styles and audiences. Because of their unexpected appearance in a discussion of the postcolonial, they are refreshing: Colin Leys, Basil Davidson, Jurgen Habermas, Jorge Larrain, Norman Mailer and Peter Wilkin, to name a few examples.

The matter of delivery is an important aspect of his intervention. What Lazarus brings to the table is a deeply sociological attention to formations and patterns that extend beyond texts to social and political trends in literature. This sociological sensibility informs his readings throughout the book and reflects, in some ways, the emphasis of English studies in the UK, which is much more focused on training its students in literature proper than is the case in the US, where ideas of political theory, continental philosophy, film and cultural studies are often a prominent part of the English department’s literary curriculum. Unsurprisingly, the poetic and the empirical hold equal place in this study, and the attractions of the real represent one of its primary aesthetic virtues.

The Postcolonial Unconscious is a concise book, lucid and economical rather than light or conversational, a theoretically informed vernacular:

Walcott’s poetry takes its distance from pastoralism. My own interest lies in emphasizing the materialist gesture of Walcott’s writing: what is sought is a language alert to the pulse of the Caribbean chose du texte. The world as represented in Walcott’s poetry is the world lived in; the poetry is not cast as a means of remembering – nor, indeed, of re-membering – a unity … that ‘life’ or ‘history’ or ‘society’ has broken or dissolved.

The sensibilities of Raymond Williams in The Country and the City and of Roland Barthes in The Pleasures of the Text seem to be at work here side by side; that is, both the sensible, plain-speaking British language of everyday life and the aesthetically vibrant discourse of textuality, addressing, at the same time, the typical vocabulary of postcolonial theory (‘re-membering’) in order to steer it in a novel direction.

To make evidence elegant (the beauty of the real) might be another way of describing this strategy. In the opening pages, for example, Lazarus lays out in the space of only ten or so pages a history of postcolonial studies, its ‘periodisation’ in his terms, which he defines as a ‘credible sociological account of the relation between the field’s problematic and developments in the wider social world’. In a subsequent temporal mapping, he places the field’s various twists and turns alongside major political and economic developments, allowing us to see how the latter framed the former – not caused it exactly, but affected its outlooks and brought into focus its perceptions.

A ‘creature of and against its time’, postcolonial studies emerged in the 1970s at the tail end of a thirty-year boom following the second world war (what the historian Eric Hobsbawm calls ‘a golden age’). Although, as Lazarus describes it, postcolonialism is a ‘self-consciously progressive or radical initiative and opposed to the dominant forms of anti-liberationist policy’, it absorbed and reflected the era’s many reversals, including a major new phase of the US export of counter-revolution, the end of the late 1960s boom, widespread privatisation, structural adjustment programmes and the sharp turn in political sentiment against anti-colonial national insurgency.

Lazarus’s strategy is to show how deeply the more recent invasion and occupation of Iraq and the ongoing misadventure in Afghanistan ‘have exposed the contradictions of [the] established postcolonialist understanding to stark and unforgiving light’. For the field has certainly not been defined by making visible the long history of empire, or by learning from those who opposed it, or by identifying contemporary sites of resistance. Instead, the field has been ‘premised on a distinctive and conjuncturally determined set of assumptions, concepts, theories and methods that have not only not been adequate to their putative object … but have served fairly systematically to mystify it’.

With an eye to balance, he moves from this opening’s wide-angle perspective to a set of close-ups, zeroing in on single authors (as he puts it, ‘moving between diegesis and sociological analysis [in order to] link concrete to abstract, empirical detail to theoretical generality’). Here, he sets out to reclaim, from the extravagant portraits of postcoloniality, the meaning and outlooks of Frantz Fanon, Fredric Jameson and Edward Said, dedicating a chapter to each. They become synecdoches of the larger problematic, localised variants of this same periodisation. By drawing on biographical studies and intellectual histories that have been ignored in postcolonial studies, he demonstrates what their texts say, what their career trajectories show and, as a consequence, the almost ludicrous tendentiousness and wilful misreading that lie behind the uses to which these figures have been put by various leading lights in the postcolonial firmament.

Reverting again to the wide angle, the two other chapters of the book are, I believe, its most impressive innovation, ‘The politics of postcolonial modernism’ and ‘“A figure glimpsed in a rear-view mirror”: the question of representation in “postcolonial” fiction’. His arguments in each of these chapters are not based on the familiar (short) list of authors explored in postcolonial essays: to take some typical examples, Assia Djebar, Nuruddin Farah, Chinua Achebe or Amitav Ghosh. To this conventional list, Lazarus counterposes something very different, what he describes as ‘the vast, scattered, heterogeneous, but still, in principle, systematisable archive of literary works that, considered in the round, might be taken to constitute the corpus of “postcolonial” literature’; that is, not the narrow selection of the field’s practice, but the actual body of work that is the field’s nominal focus. Here, he takes the time to compile an immense inventory of literary examples. Having read and (it appears clear) enjoyed them, rather than just cited them, Lazarus brings to the fore authors who almost never find mention in the western academy. Examples taken randomly from the book include: Iftikhar Arif, Ismat Chughtai, Mia Couto, Odia Ofeimun, Shu Ting and Lesego Rampolokeng.

It is not too far-fetched to say that probably no one has read as widely or deeply the poetry and fiction of authors from Mozambique, Pakistan, El Salvador, China, Ghana, Indonesia and elsewhere. For this reason alone, one has to acknowledge the book’s significance. Although of modest length, it is obvious that the book took a long time to write for this reason. Upsetting long-held assumptions, Lazarus is saying that if you want to create a postcolonial theory, then you have to pay more attention to what is going on in postcolonial literature: ‘in the identification of social conditions of existence in the (post)colonial world … literature has typically played a vanguardist, not a belated, role’. We should be taking our critical leads from writers other than the all-too-familiar Salman Rushdie or those, like Rushdie, who follow in the same cosmopolitical mould of the western book markets (the well-connected Vikram Seth, for example, or Haitian graduates of the Brown creative writing programme, such as Edwidge Danticat).

Here, one has to register two possible criticisms. First, why should readers of Race & Class (or, for that matter, the New York Times or the Guardian) want to know anything about an academic ‘field’, the book’s explicit target? As Lazarus himself points out in the opening chapter, even if problems of colonialism, cross-cultural conflicts over aesthetic value and the vexed politics of emergence in the global periphery remain vital issues for general audiences, this creature of British, American and commonwealth universities, known as ‘postcolonial studies’, is hardly the only place to find them explored. A number of political studies of state formation in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean existed long before, as did economic and sociological studies of development and historical accounts of anti-colonial nationalism.

To this, Lazarus could well point out that this field – as abstruse as it might appear – has been enormously influential. In fact, it has managed to effect a paradoxical reversal in the word ‘postcolonial’ itself, turning it from a periodising term (the transition to independence, after the end of formal colonial rule) to a philosophical perspective. In the hands of people like Homi Bhabha, it became a ‘project’, exploring sociocultural pathologies based on ‘loss of meaning, conditions of anomie that no longer simply cluster around class antagonisms but break up into widely scattered historical contingencies’.

That is, it became a political ethics that repudiated, on principle, the more radical legacies of anti-colonial independence struggles and sought a language of indeterminacy that required one to speak no longer about foreign domination or the lurid facts of a present imperialism. What Bhabha and others like him never answer, Lazarus observes, is why the term ‘colonial’ is ‘deemed to be implicated in the putative obsolescence of class analysis’. Postcolonial studies, then, without announcing itself this way, is really a form of post-Marxist criticism, a fighting term: ‘Marxism has been obliterated as an enabling political horizon’. By means of university hiring practices, new high-production journals, influential new humanities institutes and key positions on the boards of the Ford and Guggenheim foundations, the postcolonial emphasis has produced a climate of conformity and, at times, intimidation. Lazarus’s apparently modest focus, therefore, is both on target and consequential, although it will undoubtedly provoke those whose careers have been staked on precisely this anti-political move.

Second, and more important, is the challenge from those who will complain that he neglects literary form. To understand this charge, let us begin with a distinction. Even in the more broadly cast, theoretical chapters, Lazarus does not content himself with moving quickly in and out of his literary material, nor reducing the argument to a mere listing of titles. Instead, we get several shot-by-shot analyses in sustained readings of Mahasweta Devi, Ngugi wa-Thiongo, Nirala, Mudimbe and Amitav Ghosh, among others. But his principal point in the wide-angle chapters on postcolonial modernism and representation has to do with identifying and codifying ‘representational schemas that are pervasive … across its vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus’.

The logic of his effort therefore demands that he both develop a principle of unity for the many works composed in so many different places, and also convert the problem of comparative value into a discussion of content rather than (as is typically the case in studies of modernism) experimental form. This is how Lazarus presents the problem: ‘When we survey the vast and hitherto unevenly and indifferently theorized corpus of “postcolonial” literature, our attention is quickly drawn to the fact that, across its full range, certain themes, optics, situations, and kinds of writing are very widely distributed.’ These are, in his rendering, the following: 1) mode of production and class relations; 2) land and environment; 3) state and nation; and, 4) structures of feeling. Using this template of ideological preoccupations, he organises his readings of a broad selection from the ‘systematisable corpus’. Cohesion is implied by avoiding the typical focus on ‘difference’ in postcolonial studies, which always tends towards a rhetoric of incommensurability. In its place, he wants to suggest ‘that the vast majority of “postcolonial” literary writings point us in a quite different direction, towards the idea not of “fundamental alienness” but of deep-seated affinity and community, across and athwart the “international division of labor”’.

Lazarus embarks on this project in the name of a methodological alternative to this current mode of interpretation. Like a number of recent scholars who do not share his outlook in other ways, he insists on ‘modernism’s (ongoing) critical dimension’ and, indeed, sees many of the obscure writers he investigates still employing it. But, instead of dwelling on representational modes like socialist realism, the marvelous-real, meta-fiction, the baroque, or Borgesian fantasy, he draws instead on a footnote from Jameson’s Third World literature essay on the ‘combined unevenness’ of the former colonies, which ‘demand a new type of literary comparativism: namely the comparison, not of the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other, but of the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses’.

Thus, instead of focusing on the experimental density of Third World prose as a way of establishing the artistic bona fides of authors from outside the metropolis, he finds a mentality (disconsolation) to be the thread unifying high modernism with this postcolonial variety. In this way, he escapes questions of influence; for instance, the Eurocentric assumption that Saadat Hasan Manto and Gabriel García Márquez are just belated versions of Franz Kafka. Instead, he focuses on a particular mode of literary study that, once again, directs us to a sociology of literature. My own view is that there should be more attention to the aesthetic in a deliberate intervention into literary modernism, and that the complaint over an absent formal dimension will give some sceptical readers the means of deflecting aspects of the larger critique. But the charge would be unfounded unless it took on, and worked through, his intentions, which involve explicitly leaving behind that approach in favour of a sociological world portrait. And the charge is likely also to overlook the company that Lazarus now enjoys. In his own way, he is part of a return to favour of sociologies of literature, the result of the emergence of the field of ‘world literature’, which tends to use broad statistical charts of trends, mappings of literary content and attention to the taste formation of international book markets.

Let me conclude with a more overarching antinomy. In the lexicon of postcolonial studies, Lazarus is no doubt considered a Marxist scholar and would unofficially (that is, in casual conversation or in corridor talk) be referenced that way, and not without a measure of respect. But what the word connotes for some interlocutors is, of course, shifting, and it can be counted on bringing to mind a set of reflex associations having to do with an alleged downplaying of gender and race; an overweening emphasis on the economic; a militant rhetorical posture; the tendency to pass quickly over lived, tactile singularities of place and experience in favour of sweeping universalist proclamations, and so on.

It is hard, therefore, to get over the paradox that Marxism seems here to be involved in precisely the opposite: an intricate historical recreation and retelling of the lives of everyday people, a sensibility geared to the aspirations of scholarly outliers and one marked by seriousness and a reluctance to use neologisms. His idiom is individual to that degree, in the sense of being writing where the author has, with a certain bravery, gone out and thought for himself.

The Postcolonial Unconscious belongs on the same bookshelf as do works by Marcus Rediker, Samir Amin, Kevin Anderson and Susan Buck-Morss, authors whose ideas make us suspect that there is more to the analysis of postcoloniality than the touting of the ineffable, the inbetween, the ambivalent and other projects that emphasise only the subjective aspects of this form of historical experience. By contrast, Lazarus’s book, like the others mentioned above, embodies the very different, more organic and, ultimately, more enduring spirit of Marxism in the formerly (and still) colonised world itself. In this nuanced body of work, one comes to see that Marxism is not that uninflected and alien European sensibility projected onto the periphery, but rather a philosophy of global interdependence inspired by colonisation that forced its way from the periphery into Europe.

This is why Lazarus can make substantial contact with his subject as adeptly as he does. Despite the associations with Marxism (polemic, ideology, doctrine, anger, economism), it has taken Lazarus and others like him to move the field of postcolonial literary studies back to literature and to do so without being doctrinaire and, in fact, with generosity. At the very moment that the field seems ready to jettison its former self and move on to the next good thing – be it the new comparative studies, world literature or translation studies – it remains the independently minded scholar who is motivated not by the latest fashion, but, indeed, the opposite pole of an unfashionable Marxism, who proves durable and preserves the field’s best emphases.

The irony may be that the very field that has been so contemptuous of the efforts of Marxist critics now increasingly relies on them, as a result of which some prominent figures in the field, under its old dispensation, have lately returned to the fold, often relying on the work of Marxists they previously decried, sometimes using their work extensively without citation or adopting their strategies without marking the radical shift in their previous positions and methods. Lazarus, often the object of these practices, has responded with confidence, and this capacious book will be rightly seen as the roadmap for a future postcolonial studies.