Neil Lazarus

"The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism"

Abstract:

In his book, The Politics of Modernism, Raymond Williams offered a revisionary account of modernism, situating it as a specific intervention into the universe of modern culture. Modernism was for him the name of a hegemonising project which, directing its energies against the prevailing and received cultural formations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, not only displaced them but consolidated itself at their expense. In its proselytising zeal, moreover, modernism overreached itself, constructing its own historically, socially, and culturally specific protocols, procedures, and horizons as those of the modern as such. As Williams put it, modernism recast, rewrote, and rearranged cultural history, producing a selective tradition whose selectivity was invisible to it: the authors and "theoretic contours" usually addressed under the rubric of "modernism" constitute "a highly selected version of the modern which then offers to appropriate the whole of modernity". In my paper, I shall propose that Williams' diagnosis, suitably applied, provides an excellent means of understanding what Homi Bhabha has symptomatically labelled "the postcolonial prerogative". Focusing for the most part on literature, I shall argue that in the name of this prerogative, a highly selective tradition of modern "non-Western" writing is constructed, which -- just like modernism on Williams's reading of it -- fails to recognise its own selectivity and remains blind, therefore, to its ideological bearing and logic. I shall argue, to put things crudely, that in postcolonial literary studies, much of the best writing that has been produced is not read at all; while much of what IS read is read programmatically and unreceptively. I shall hope both to demonstrate THAT this is so, and also to address the question of WHY it should be so; that is, I will want to conclude my presentation by examining the standpoint disclosed in postcolonialist literary criticism and the social function of this standpoint in the present conjuncture.