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Perspectives on Post-Colonial Literature, is an outstanding volume that emerged from the Tenth Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (ACLALS) conference held in Sri Lanka in 1995. The book brings together a selection of essays from a diverse group of international writers and scholars. Its four sections, "Confrontations', 'Dis/Location', "Place and Placement" - and "Beyond Confrontation", cover a wide range of issues which concern those who are both disturbed and fascinated by the diverse experiences of "past-colonial" encounters and how these experiences manifest themselves as the "post-colonial" pressures of our time.

Part I - Confrontations

Novelist and political journalist Nayantara Saghal, in her essay, Illusion and Reality, finds it unacceptable that the world continues to be understood as divided in binary terms of European or non-European, with Europe remaining the centre of the world. The author advocates a move towards another 'new' world under the banner of 'globalisation'.

Unlike colonisation, she suggests, globalisation is not a one-way process yet, predominantly, discussion of its 'creation' "revolves around the ground rules set by the West." Sahgal urges writers to recognise and respond to the danger of the newly/still colonised living 'within the confines of a provided framework,' that entails local loss and displacement.

Ken Goodwin's essay, Postmodernism Under the Raj? An Investigation of Ironic Sycophancy, acknowledges that words from the imperial past have reproduced the centrality of a British or European view of events.

However, he sees as absurd and ill-informed the ready acceptance by respected critics such as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, H.P. Heseltine, A.D. Hope and Jose Carlos Mariategui, the notion that the literature of imperialism was seen by indigenous cultures as somehow 'divinely ordained'. Echoing Wole Soyinka's words that 'the tiger does not have to proclaim its tigritude', he writes:

The received theory about the colonial writing in the language of the coloniser is steeped in self-importance - an absurdity akin to imagining that the tiger's victims imitates the tiger.

In Goodwin's view, these critics speak with a vocabulary that paints the development of colonial literatures as a 'natural' evolution through and towards the various historical phases of European literary modes of representation. As Goodwin argues (using the work of Indian writers such as Shoshee Chunder Dutt and Behramji Merwanji Malabari), history shows that whilst it may have been adopted for strategic purposes, the literature of the invaders was not treated by the invaded with utter reverence, nor as the indisputable 'word' of the great.

Yasmin Gooneratne's, The Business of a Woman's Life leaves the world of 'dead white males' to venture into the realm of Asian women writers. The title of Gooneratne's essay is taken from a story about Charlotte Bronte', who, having sent her poems to poet laureate Robert Southey, was advised that 'Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life and it ought not to be.' This admonishment speaks similarly of social and cultural limitations imposed on women who are, or wish to be, writers in today's Asia.

Gooneratne is particularly concerned to 'bring into the sphere of English language literature the colloquial idiom of Sri Lanka's non-English speaking women." She points to the use of satire, irony and the invective in their work, strategies that she sees as literary weapons of great power, and observes that 'no one writing about the colonial experience can avoid dealing at some point with racism and racial prejudice,' and that 'nothing not even racism can survive the withering touch of ridicule.'

In Capitals and Provinces, Dan Jacobson considers global media. Jacobson draws on distinctions between city and province, the meanings of which have currency in most parts of a technological world. He suggests that 'a' 'given territory' is nothing less than the entire globe' and that 'the distinction between city and province helps people to make moral and geographical sense of their worlds, it gives form to their ideas of community and nationhood.' He notes, however, that the media global village is not an egalitarian one: literatures in English are never meant to reach sections of populations who do not speak that language, even though they may feature in them. This has had the effect of maintaining the subordinate status of many peoples and provinces of Africa and Asia.

On a positive note, Jacobson suggests that the cultural victory of the imposition of the English language is being eroded by what he calls the 'globalisation of communications' which has created 'an even more unstable array of provinces and their capitals than ever before.'

Part II - Dis/Location

Satendra Nandan's essay, Islands & Continents: Exiles of Paradise invokes Theodore Adorno's dictum that, for the exile, resistance to attachment to place 'is part of the morality not to be at home in one's home' The essay's principal concern is the fate of those twice banished: the 'coolies of colonialism' enticed to and then evicted from Fiji. For Nandan, the experience of the indentured Fijian Indian reflects the extreme position of the diasporic cycle. Fated to travel in a disordered world from one country more than once dismembered to another in which the exiles have become emotionally condemned to live as second class citizens, their inheritance is 'to be strangers in paradise.'

In Managing Migrancy: Narratives of Exile and Diaspora from Aime Cesaire to Bharati Mukherjee, Sohreh T. Sullivan similarly invokes Adorno's edict that being out of harmony with diasporic social conditions is part of the exile's 'earned' detachment from an earlier sense of self and belonging. The sense of rootedness locatable in the voices of Edward Said and Salman Rushdie is contrasted with the absolute lack of it in the voices of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Aime Cesaire.

While the former are shown to locate and confirm their identities within 'lost homelands' which they preserve as their 'true home', the latter on the other hand advocate the abandonment of all the rules of an identity formed out of an 'idea' of the meaning of place and belonging. Sullivan turns to Bharati Mukherjee's contribution to the literature of migration to reflect at length on the pain of migrant self-splitting and the possibilities for new 'travelling identities.'

Part III - Place and Placement

Susan Spearey explores 'the strategic deployment of spatial operations in literary texts' by diasporic writers. She opens her discussion with a quote from Michael de Certeau, which suggests that all stories are travel stories, spatial practices which traverse and organise time and space. Spearey focuses on V.S. Naipaul's 1987 autobiographical novel, The Enigma of Arrival, in which the author self-reflexively addresses the various patterns of upheaval and their effects on identity (re) formation in a new land that is the migrant experience.

Naipaul occupies an in-between space, that of the self as a post-colonial writer in English striving for recognition, and that of the self as historically and socially constructed subject. The ambivalence of the textualised spaces between which the author oscillates debunk the notion of 'place' as the dominant frame of reference for identity formation and sense of belonging.

In 'The Spaces Between: Regionalism and Literary History, Bruce Bennett turns readers' attention towards colonial fiction and verse in Australia where, he suggests, people's identification with place is often complex and multi-layered. In the face of encroaching globalisaiton, and at this point in Australia's history when it looks towards issues of reconciliation and republicanism, writers and editors have felt impelled to stress the importance of connections and attachments to the land, rivers and seascapes of their known country.

Bennett refers to the work of non-Aboriginal writers Thomas Keneally, Judith Wright and Peter Cowan, and Aboriginal writers such as Mudrooroo and Oodgeroo Noonuccal whom he believes, are 'shaping an awareness of regional concerns in Australian literary culture.' For Bennett, the future development of a self-respecting Australian republic depends upon engagements with place, imaginary and real, literary and non-literary. Such engagements must present a picture of an independent Australian nation responsive, not only to international pressures (British and American in particular) but also to those that are regionally and locally based.

Part IV - Beyond Confrontation Itala Vivan's essay, "The Italian Territory of Nuruddin Farah's Fiction, offers a perspective on Farah's trilogy Theme of an African Dictatorship which paints Italy as a colonial power - "one more foreign domination out of imperial Europe." Farah's native Somalia, was an Italian protectorate from 1889 to 1950 when Italian Somali land became a United nations Trust Territory under Italian control. Vivan's interest is to show how Italian material has been inter textualised in Farah's trilogy to signify the paradoxical part played by the colonisers' languages of exclusion in the author's fictional re-constitution of the Somali nation.

The foreign languages (Arabic, Italian, English) spoken by characters with a Somali accent, serve as agents of connection and disconnection, a reminder of an enigmatic colonial past and the ambivalent relationships evident between people who have lived under numerous colonising regimes. In a world of constant transition, there is no common knowledge, only threads of suspicion and conjecture. No one 'knows' anything and the people are at an epistemological dead-end.

The volume's penultimate essay, Frank Schulze-Engler's: Islands of Resistance: 'Postcolonial' Literature and the Politics of Civil Society, questions the legitimacy of the homogenising term 'postcolonial.' He challenges the 'writing back' paradigm set out in Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin's The Empire Writes Back which, in his view, has the potential to strengthen rather than weaken the imperial centre. Schulz-Engler suggests the time is right to go beyond the limitations of a political theory based on the single category term 'postcolonialism' and to move towards one based upon what he calls a 'politics of civil society'.

Such a move would have the effect of pointing to rather than blurring the distinctions between the literatures produced by countries throughout the world that are coming out from under the shadow of colonialism. Such a theory, he claims, would also have the potential to bring to the fore the differing social, economic and political inequalities that exist in very real terms, outside the textual world.

In the words of editor and past-chair of the Association, Professor Goonetilleke, the contributors to Perspectives on Post-colonial Literature "assess the harvest of the post-colonial project", at times complicating but always opening up and enriching approaches to writing in the language of the coloniser. This collection deserves a wide readership. It constitutes an excellent, broad-ranging and yet cohesive combination of the insights of its cross-cultural contributors into what is arguably the most interesting writing in English today.

(Courtesy New Literatures Review, No. 37, 2002)

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