Saugata BHADURI « Postcolonialism and its Discontents : Towards Postcoloniality »

Connected to the question of nationalistic and identitarian assertions versus the other-regarding ‘worlding’ of literary-critical praxis is the question of the Global South – questions more specifically connected to colonialism, postcolonial discourse, and new-imperialism. To what extent can postcolonialism offer a suitable methodological toolkit for studying literature today ? Conversely, what are some of the current discontents with postcolonialism, arising particularly from emerging insights into colonialism and literary production from the Global South ? To answer these questions, this lecture will probe into the different strands of recent critiques of postcolonialism as an adequate method of literary criticism. It will also focus on one of the primary research outputs of the current lecturer, which has been in the area of ‘polycoloniality’, or the multiple and productive strands of networked and mutually competitive colonial processes, which have always been multinational rather than mononational – with there being colonial efforts in South Asia, for instance, not just by the English (as is often presumed) but by the Portuguese, Dutch, French, Danish, ‘Germans’, etc, too. This lecture will examine this further, particularly in relation to France’s involvement in colonial projects in South Asia.