Post-Colonial Theory and English Literature: A Reader

454 Pages·1999·50.612 MB·English

by  Peter Childs

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EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY PETER CHILDS
Post-Colonial Theory and
English Literature

POST-COLONIAL THEORY AND
ENGLISH LITERATURE
-
A READER
Edited and with an introduction by
Peter Childs
EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS
To Edith Mary Bowery and Robert William Childs
© Selection and editorial material
Peter Childs, 1999
Edinburgh University Press
22 George Square, Edinburgh
Typeset in Gill Sans and Sabon
by Bibliocraft Ltd, Dundee, and
printed and bound in Great Britain
by CPI Antony Rowe, Eastbourne
Transferred to digital print 2008
A CIP record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN O 7486 10693 (hardback)
ISBN O 7486 10685 (paperback)
The right of the contributors to be
identified as authors of this work has
been asserted in accordance with the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Vlll
Introduction: Colonial History, National Identity and
'English' Literature 1
1. William Shakespeare: The Tempest 33
Introduction 35
1.1 From Trevor R. Griffiths, "'This Island's Mine":
Caliban and Colonialism' 39
1.2 From Rob Nixon, 'Caribbean and African Appropriations of
The Tempest' 57
1.3 From Meredith Anne Skura, 'Discourse and the Individual:
The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest' 75
1.4 From Sylvia Wynter, 'Beyond Miranda's Meanings:
Un/silencing the "Demonic Ground" of Caliban's
"Woman"' 93
2. Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe 99
Introduction 101
2.1 From David Dabydeen, 'Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe
(1719)' 104
2.2 From Peter Hulme, 'Robinson Crusoe and Friday' 108
2.3 From Richard Phillips, 'The Geography of Robinson Crusoe' 120
2.4 From Roxann Wheeler, "'My Savage", "My Man":
Racial Multiplicity in Robinson Crusoe' 128
3. Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre 143
Introduction 145
3.1 From Susan L. Meyer, 'Colonialism and the Figurative
Strategy of Jane Eyre' 149
3.2 From Inderpal Grewal, 'Empire and the Movement for
Women's Suffrage in Britain' 164
3.3 From Joyce Zonana, 'The Sultan and the Slave:
Feminist Orientalism and the Structure of Jane Eyre' 168
CONTENTS
4. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 185
Introduction 187
4.1 From Patrick Brantlinger, 'Kurtz's "Darkness" and
Heart of Darkness' 191
4.2 Robert Hampson, 'Heart of Darkness and
"The Speech that Cannot be Silenced"' 201
4.3 From Sally Ledger, 'In Darkest England:
The Terror of Degeneration in Fin-de-Siecle Britain' 216
4.4 Wilson Harris, 'The Frontier on which Heart of Darkness
Stands' 227
5. Rudyard Kipling: Kim 235
Introduction 23 7
5.1 From S. P. Mohanty, 'Kipling's Children and the Colour Line' 241
5.2 From Sara Suleri, 'The Adolescence of Kim' 251
5.3 Ian Adam, 'Oral/Literate/Transcendent:
The Politics of Language Modes in Kim' 264
6. James Joyce: Ulysses 277
Introduction 2 79
6.1 Carol Schloss, 'Molly's Resistance to the Union:
Marriage and Colonialism in Dublin, 1904' 282
6.2 From David Lloyd, Anomalous States:
Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment 294
6.3 From Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire 315
6.4 From Declan Kiberd 'James Joyce and Mythic Realism' 329
7. E. M. Forster: A Passage to India 345
Introduction 34 7
7.1 From Teresa Hubel, 'Liberal Imperialism as a Passage to India' 351
7.2 From Brenda R. Silver, 'Periphrasis, Power and Rape in
A Passage to India' 363
7.3 From Zakia Pathak et al., 'The Prisonhouse of Orientalism' 377
7.4 From Homi Bhabha, 'Articulating the Archaic' 387
vi
CONTENTS
8. Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses 395
Introduction 397
8.1 Amin Malak, 'Reading the Crisis:
The Polemics of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses' 401
8.2 Timothy Brennan, 'Rebirth, Dissent and the Theory of
Acquired Characteristics' 410
8.3 Michael Gorra, 'Burn the Books and Trust the Book:
The Satanic Verses, February 1989' 423
8.4 From Vijay Mishra, 'Postcolonial Differend:
Diasporic Narratives of Salman Rushdie' 429
Copyright Acknowledgements 439
Name Index 441
vii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For suggesting that I embark on this project, I would like to thank Jackie Jones
at Edinburgh University Press. For assistance and advice, I would like to thank
Ross Dawson, Patrick Williams and Gerry Smyth.
viii
INTRODUCTION:
Colonial History, National Identity and
'English' -Literature
Peter Childs
Basic truth about the colonies, Heaslop. Any time there's trouble, you can
put it down to books.-The Resident, in Shashi Tharoor's The Great Indian
Novel
I
One of the chief difficulties of Edward Said's seminal study of Orienta/ism,
which marks the Western academy's late entry into an awareness of post
colonial theorising in 1978, is the fact that it does not adequately break up or
stratify its subject. Orientalist discourse begins for Said - with all the attendant
problems of beginnings - with Homer, Euripides and Aeschylus, and continues
into the present. To say, as Said does, that Europe's imaginative geography has
'essential motifs' which persist from antiquity is insufficient and unsatisfactory
in terms of geographical and historical particularities.1 An introduction to post
colonial theory and 'English' literature has similar attendant problems, and it is
one of the advantages of an assembly of essays such as this that, by concentrating
on eight texts, it can retain many of the specificities of different colonial contact
zones, in terms of literature, history and textual analysis, even though the focus
on so few books limits the identification of crosstextual discourses. In this
introduction, I do not propose to survey British Imperialism, 'English' literature
or post-colonial theory, but to review aspects to the narrative of colonialism
from 1600 to the present day, by examining some literary discourses of national
and cultural identity in relation to the British Empire and particularly India - a
genealogy of colonial attitudes that have consistently sought to fix Englishness
as much as other identities. Sometimes these constructions of identity are in