About the Book
Interdisciplinary Measures makes the case for a cross-disciplinary, but literature-centred, approach to postcolonial studies. Despite the anxieties that interdisciplinarity brings with it, a combination of different, discontinuously structured disciplinary knowledges is arguably best suited to address the tangled concerns of both the globalised present and the colonial past. The book looks specifically at the intersections between literary criticism, history, anthropology, geography and environmental studies, while arguing more specifically for a postcolonialism across the disciplines in the service of informed (cross-) cultural critique. Bringing together a wide range of literary material from Africa, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, New Zealand and South Asia, the book also considers the different, but sometimes related, cultural contexts within which the key debates in postcolonial studies – e.g. those around globalisation, North-South relations and the new imperialism – are currently taking place. These debates suggest the need for a multi-sited, multilinguistic and, not least, multidisciplinary appraoch to postcolonial studies that consolidates its status as a comparative field.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section I. Literature, Geography, Environment
1 Decolonizing the Map: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism and the Cartographic Connection
2 Unsettled Settlers: Postcolonialism, Travelling Theory and the New Migrant Aesthetics
3 Postcolonial Geography, Travel Writing and the Myth of Wild Africa
4 ‘Greening’ Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives
Section II. Literature, Culture, Anthropology
5 Anthropologists and Other Frauds
6 African Literature and the Anthropological Exotic
7 (Post)Colonialism, Anthropology and the Magic of Mimesis
8 Maps, Dreams and the Presentation of Ethnographic Narrative
Section III. Literature, History, Memory
9 Philomela’s Retold Story: Silence, Music and the Postcolonial Text
10 Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Counter-memory
11 Cultural Memory in Postcolonial Fiction: The Uses and Abuses of Ned Kelly
12 (Not) Reading Orientalism
Index
About the Author :
Graham Huggan is Professor of Postcolonial and Commonwealth Literatures at the University of Leeds. He is author of the influential volume The Postcolonial Exotic (Routledge, 2001) among many previous books.
Review :
The book is published by Liverpool University Press, which has come from nowhere in recent years to being one of the leading publishers of postcolonial studies in the United Kingdom. At first glance Graham Huggan's Interdisciplinary Measures appears hostile to the book-bound approach of Fraser et al. Indeed, the text explicitly names Fraser as representative of a more conservative literary criticism. However, Huggan's is not a simple abandonment of English Studies, and his take on interdisciplinary is more 'measured' than first appears. The book is published by Liverpool University Press, which has come from nowhere in recent years to being one of the leading publishers of postcolonial studies in the United Kingdom. In addition to strong representations under the headings of slavery, Latin American Studies and Francophone Studies, 2008 sees the Press launch a new series edited by Graham Huggan and Andrew Thompson: 'Postcolonialism Across the Disciplines'. As this title suggests, the series harnesses the recent interest in cross-disciplinary postcolonial research, and opens with two publications, including Huggan's. (The other, Chris Bongie's Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature was not, unfortunately, received in time for review.) Interdisciplinary Measures is a collection of essays, most of which were written between 1990 and 2005. The book raises interesting and important questions around the 'generalisability' of postcolonial studies, and what emerging interests in trans disciplinary, and multilingual research mean for the 'enveloped' discipline of literary studies. His lively and informed introduction retains a healthy skepticism around interdisciplinarity, which he notes can imply 'an ideal form of institutionalized co-operation that is belied both by the "textual excesses" of humanities studies and by the "continuing inhibitions" of the social sciences towards an analysis of cultural forms' (p. 5). At the same time he takes seriously the possibilities of combining what the series editors call 'different, discontinuously structured disciplinary knowledges'. He goes on to argue that if first-wave postcolonialism (by which he means the literature-led discipline of the 1980s and early 1990s) has been overly anxious about roaming beyond the field 'Eng Lit', 'second-wave' postcolonialism (by which he means the more politically motivated interdisciplinary studies of the present), has not been concerned enough about disciplinary differences, a fact which has led to 'symptomatic' literary readings: 'Postcolonialism's more immediate future surely lies in a patient, mutually transformative dialogue between the disciplines rather than in triumphalist announcements of the imminent end of disciplinarity tout court' (p. 13). Within this context, Huggan argues for the value of a literature-centred approach to cross-disciplinary postcolonial studies. Literary studies, he suggests, provides self-reflexivity and subtlety, helping to illuminate the complexities and contradictions of colonialism, even if it can no longer do this on its own.
