Critical Survey

The concern of this issue on post-colonial interdisciplinarity is with the apparent need for interdisciplinary approaches in post-colonial analyses: analyses that take textuality as their object but which are framed around wider social or political questions of power. By necessity such analyses take the critic into territories that until the end of the 1960s were not considered the property of literary studies. Yet, however necessary this expansion of the critic’s focus has been in order to allow literary criticism to comment on the social functions of representation, it has exposed post-colonialism to a range of criticisms, many of which seem to arise from a perceived weakness in its interdisciplinary approach. For instance, as the gaze of the critic has been cast increasingly widely, many conservative commentators have come to lament the loss of the text. This concern has perhaps been less hotly contested in Britain than in the U.S., where the socalled ‘Canon Wars’ split departments. Nevertheless it seems especially problematic for post-colonial studies because even its fairly modest project of opening up the canon to writers from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and the Middle East has been predicated on a fundamentally political concern with wider forms of inequality, of which Eurocentric reading practices are only one facet.

Questioned by W. J. T. Mitchell on the importance of theory for postcolonial studies, Homi Bhabha proceeds to distinguish two forms of interdisciplinarity. The first form is familiar in its emphasis on joint degrees and teaching in order to widen the teaching or research base, juxtaposing disciplines which yet maintain their solid foundations. The second form of interdisciplinarity acknowledges disciplinary limits, and marks the shaking of apparently solid foundations; Bhabha argues that it ‘is not an attempt to strengthen one foundation by drawing from another; it is a reaction to the fact that we are living at the real border of our own disciplines, where some of the fundamental ideas of our disciplines are being profoundly shaken. So our interdisciplinary moment is a move of survival – the formulation of knowledges that require our disciplinary scholarship and technique but demand that we abandon disciplinary mastery and surveillance.’ Elsewhere, in ‘DissemiNation’, Bhabha expands his point to argue for the necessity of this second form of interdisciplinarity: ‘To enter into the interdisciplinarity of cultural texts means that we cannot contextualize the emergent cultural form by locating it in terms of some pre-given discursive causality or origin.

How can a novel be both a Harlequin romance (the equivalent of a British Mills and Boon book) and an example of post-colonial counter-discourse? In the same stroke, how can Spivak proclaim herself not learned enough to be interdisciplinary? Surely interdisciplinariness has become an integral part of post-colonial theory and investigation and to proclaim oneself not erudite enough is to put the practice of casual interdisciplinary action into question on ethical and scholarly grounds. And yet post-colonial studies thrives on its interdisciplinary methods and we are certainly not all philosophers, social scientists or professional politicians. In fact, it is possible to argue, as I intend to do here, that postcolonial literary works can also be interdisciplinary, thereby challenging us to reveal the inherent interdisciplinary nature of the field itself. In this case, breaking rules is not difficult and, yes, much can be learned from this action. So, as well as demonstrating a post-colonial textual analysis indebted to an interdisciplinary approach, as this special issue calls for, this article will further reveal how, often, writers themselves are already involved in utilising an interdisciplinary approach in their fiction. This can make it difficult to separate the authors’ intentions; are they writing in their capacity as authors, critics or both?

In recent times, the position of the Indian writer writing in English has undergone something of a transformation. The celebrations of post-colonial marginality have come to be replaced by allegations of what Graham Huggan has termed ‘strategic exoticism’. Even though the publication of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) is hailed as a turning-point, much contemporary criticism has tired of Rushdie’s chutnified histories and East–West fusions. By the time Arundhati Roy won the Booker in 1997, the 1980s era of welcoming post-colonial ‘difference’ had been replaced by an unease that postcolonial writers, rather than being marginal ‘others,’ had become the shrewd profiteers of a global economy. The rhetoric of globalisation since the mid-1990s has increasingly situated the post-colonial writer as beneficiary (and not always an inadvertent one) of the global market-place rather than as the under-represented, under-taught, noncanonical ‘other’ who must be studied if only under the rubric of Fredric Jameson’s well-intentioned ‘national allegories’.

The centrality of the colonial motif in Jane Eyre has been well established. The figure of Bertha Mason Rochester haunting the text has made this centrality undeniable: her confinement at Thornfield Hall drives the plot, her eventual fiery demise both enables and conditions the conclusion, and the oppression of Bertha and other peoples subjected to imperial domination metaphorises Jane’s subjection to the patriarchal authority of various males throughout the narrative. Moreover, the wealth appropriated from the colonies materially sustains the society with which the novel concerns itself.3 The conclusion of Jane Eyre reinforces the preponderance of the colonial motif. The imperial project is foregrounded at the novel’s end in St John’s mission to India, and the characters of the novel are sustained by the wealth obtained from the colonies in the form of Jane’s inheritance. The novel’s ending, however, has been read by many recent critics as an affirmation of St John’s evangelising mission, leading some of them to conclude that Jane Eyre represents Charlotte Bronte’s own colonial appropriation.

One of post-colonialism’s enduring projects has been the attempt to describe or understand the discursive component of Empire. Founding texts such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, argued that a complementary and necessary culture of imperialism existed alongside the economic and political structures of colonisation. The claim of such work was that this culture discursively produced ideas about difference that justified the European subjugation of other races and made possible the political expansion of the European states. The attempts to extend this analysis to describe a current culture of globalisation have been limited and in some ways unsuccessful. Without repudiating the methods of post-colonialism, it is necessary to recognise that changes to the structures of international relations have seen an attendant shift in the accompanying patterns of discourse. While, undoubtedly, many of the discourses that animated colonisation remain in place, the disavowal of a continuity between globalisation and earlier imperialist or colonising phases of modernity is one of globalisation’s characteristic movements. It is, therefore, insufficient to simply identify the persistence of imperialist discourses, ‘without significant challenge’, in ways that are insensitive to new cultural formulations brought about by structural changes in international relations.

Courbet in Sainte-Pélagie Prison MALCOLM CARSON

Red Label People Power TIM THORNE

One Previous Owner Psychiatric Wing MICHAEL BARTHOLOMEW-BIGGS

Nothing’s a Gift Flight Distance SHANTA ACHARYA

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