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Sourit Bhattacharya, "Postcolonialism Now: Literature, Reading, Decolonising" (Orient BlackSwan, 2024)
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How many discounts does USAA Auto Insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi vehicle discount Safe driver discount New vehicle discount Storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodiscounts restrictions apply welcome to the New Books.
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Network welcome to New Books in Literary Studies, a podcast channel for the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Arnab Dutta Roy, an assistant professor of World Literature and Postcolonial Theory at Florida Gulf Coast University. Today I have the great honor of welcoming Professor Shorid Bhattacharya, who will be speaking to us about his fascinating book Postcolonialism Literature Reading, Decolonizing orient Black Swan, 2024. But before we begin the interview, I would like to briefly introduce Professor Bhattacharya to our audience. Professor Shorid Bhattacharya is a lecturer in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Edinburgh. His research and teaching interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, food and famine studies, South Asian literatures, and literary form. He is the author of two monographs, Postcolonial Modernity and the Indian Novel, on catastrophic realism and postcolonialism Now Literature Reading, Decolonizing that we'll be talking about today. And he has also co edited an anthology of translations and critical essays on the Indian Bengali writer Nabarun Bhattacharya. Bloomsbury, 2020. Shorit is currently editing two special issues, one on Mahashata Devi for Literature Critique and Empire, formerly the Journal of Commonwealth Literature Sage, and another on co Evil Global Modernisms for Modernist Cultures, Edinburgh University Press. Shorit is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and a founding co editor of Sanglap Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry. Welcome to this podcast. Shoret thank you so much for agreeing to speak with me.
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Yes, thank you so much for inviting me, Arnav. It's a pleasure to be with you here today and thanks so much for reading my book.
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B
Of course, it was a pleasure. I love the book and I'm so excited about getting into this interview. So let's just start with the general bio question. Tell us a little bit about your academic journey. What inspires you to do what you do as a scholar, as an academic and an educator?
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A
Yeah, so that's a trick question, but at the same time I thought like I'd just think about my academic journey as, you know, something that has evolved from the past, especially when I was a school student. But I'll try to be brief. I'll not go wallowing in sentiments and nostalgia of the past time. And yeah, I mean, you might know it probably that I grew up in Alipur Duar, which is in North Bengal, which is in far away from the metropolis of Calcutta. And I did my schooling there. And then I came to Calcutta. And this is a massive city, as you know. And this, the college I went to, Presidency, is really very focused on certain things about learning, has amazing students, but it also gives you a fair bit of sort of thinking about what you have learned growing up in your provincial town and what, how you're seeing things. And especially it kind of gave me the idea that what is it that I'm missing out? How am I missing out on these things, especially around, you know, culture, especially around reading practices, experiences, the vastness of experience that I don't have probably that some of my friends had the focus so much. It also gave me the idea that probably it comes from a bit of a stability around family, stability around home and rootedness. So I think like from the undergraduate third year onwards, I was more interested into finding who I was. Like an identity question, right? And then I kept asking my parents, like, you know, what happened? Why don't you ever talk about how you came to Alipurtu? Or they had come from Bangladesh. And slowly I was getting a sense of identity, migration, refugee, all these questions that I realized that the primary school I went to, RR Primary School, stood for Refugee Rehabilitation Primary School. So I was just thinking like, wow, this is never. See, this is the thing we don't ever give it thought to the names and how they abbreviated to rr. Maybe refugee rehabilitation was too tough, too difficult a term for primary school. So they kept it to rr. But then when you elongate it, you realize that you're actually coming from a part of the world that had its home entirely damaged and ruined by partition. So I was interested in these questions going forward. And clearly I was specializing in post colonial studies and then moving forward from Calcutta to the uk, you specialize more. So I believe, like my. If you go back to the question of academic journey, I think like, I'm very conscious of who I am and how I came to this part of the world, be it Calcutta or be it the uk. And when I write, when I teach these ideas, that your identity is always fractured and there is always a tremendous desire to understand where you came from is very strong, especially to people who are migrants in many senses of the term. Be it like my parents coming as migrants to Alipudu, or be it me migrating to other places. It's an inevitable and never Ending sort of a journey. So I think, like, I take very care in terms of utmost care. I think in terms of teaching my students to be always be very keen on understanding these complexities of navigating one's life and identity.
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B
That is awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, you're right. Like, both my, like, parents have, like, I like both in my family. We've also like, have the history of moving from Bangladesh to India and then. Yeah. I myself for the longest time have felt a big distance from that. You know, like, I don't necessarily connect myself to that legacy. But yeah, like gradually over time. I hear what you mean. It did have an impact and probably it has determined how I have grown up to be. So I really appreciate you bringing that up. So let's begin talking about your book Postcolonialism Now, Literature, reading, decolonizing. If you were to identify, say, two important interventions of this book, what would they be?
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A
Yeah, yeah, it's a bit of a backstory to the book I started. I mean, when I was doing my PhD, I was thinking about maybe it'll be really useful for writing, for my own interest, something out of how I read texts and how close reading or comparative readings have gone out a little bit out of fashion these days for a more heavier theoretical sort of readings, which is nothing wrong. It's just that I believe that in some ways theory has a tendency to relegate literature to the margin sometimes. So in. In one way I was interested in a project like that. Then Professor Sumit Chakraborty, who is at Presidency University, he edits a series for Orion Blackswan which is called Literary Slash Cultural Theory. And he wanted me to write on postcolonialism as a topic, introducing students and the kind of specialist, what it is as a field. So I thought like, yes, I had a few ideas in mind and probably there are too many books already on post colonialism and introducing postcolonialism as a topic. And I was thinking about writing another primer or an introductory book. Doesn't make sense to me as much as a project in terms of a project because there are already like cheaply cheaper versions, cheaper editions available in India from different publishers. So I was just thinking about how rather to introduce reading as a practice in the field of postcolonialism. And what does reading do in terms of, let's say, reading as a practice of reading novels or reading poetry, but at the same time, how reading prepares you for something which is extra literary. Going beyond the classroom, going beyond your private comfort and kind of going probably in the public. And I'll give you how why I thought that was happening when I, when I started writing the book. As I said, I was just back. I was, I was in India as an assistant professor at IIT Roorkee. I was just back from my PhD in the UK. And this is also the time a little later, I would think, where Black Lives Matter as a movement was unfolding, especially in the uk. Roads Must Fall as a movement had a significant impact when I was as a student. And then I also noticed in India, Dalit Lives Matter and different kind of other kind of social and sort of political movements on campus. And if you remember the movements that were happening, social movements, student movements in different campuses in India, around caste, around nation, they had an impact as to.
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B
How.
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Does reading as a practice actually encourage and activate sort of people to go out and people to voice both their opinions and make an intro into the political, so to say. And I was very interested, very keen on thinking how we read is some way how we politicize ourselves. So that was, that was, that was more of like my sort of the starting point of thinking about the book. And I was just also being very conventional with some of the conventional ideas within postcolonialism being migration or ecology or sort of nationhood or minorities. So you would notice that in the book there are these rubrics within which there are very specific topics that I deal with. But the most important, I mean, if you mention two things, I would say that post colonialism as a topic or post colonial as a topic is every day alive with us, even as the examples I gave to you. As for my own evolution or development as an academic, there is so much of consciousness you bear every day about your own identity, not only in Calcutta maybe, or in Alipurtuar or in the uk, but also as a theoretical individual. So to see if I can use a phrase like that, somebody who thinks about things and theorizes. The other thing would be the practice of reading. I think, as I said, reading has not been taken into consideration quite often in post colonial studies. I think we read a poem not only to just understand its content and form, but often these poems are used as slogans or read before like a political gathering has taken place. So what role does literature or art, I was thinking, play in terms of. Is it like a passive role of only energizing a crowd? Or is it something where you, you read about something, you go out in the public to practice something, you come back with a knowledge that the practice is given to you and Then you revisit and revise your theory or the reading. So the reading and the practice is an evolving, spiraling, sort of a. Sort of an element. I thought so. In that way, I would say that both these things are very alive thing postcolonialism. And it gets more alive by reading as an interventionist practice.
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B
That is excellent. And I do have like, more questions where we will have the opportunity to dive deeper into these things that you have introduced. But I do want to ask you about the idea of the post colonial here. Since your book is primarily about mapping the current landscape of postcolonial theory, can you first talk about how you define the term postcolonial in your book, especially in drawing attention to its distinction, but also interconnectedness with the two other terms that come up quite frequently in your book that is like decolonial and anti colonial. So how are you defining postcolonial in relation to these two other terms?
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A
Well, that's a great question actually, because I think I just give it quite a lot of thought about how to make sure that these terms are distinctly defined. Because this book was devised as something which students would read, undergraduate and postgraduate students, because this is more of an introductory series to literary theories. But at the same time this book is also written as a way to bring quite a lot of specialism from within the field. So I had to be very cautious about using my language for clarity and transparency throughout. So in the very first chapter I was very clear about how to. To use some of these terms, of course, like in postcolonial, the way that it has been defined. As you would know very yourself very well that the term talks about as much about an after which is post post as in after which is post colonial, hyphen colonial as the term came to be in the field in the way that the field uses this term or used it in the 1980s and 90s, that it is historically an identity or a way of living and being that came after Independence for India, 1947. But at the same time, quite a lot of postcolonial theory has managed to tell us that colonialism doesn't go away because there was independence from colonial rule in 1947, that we are speaking in English right at. Right at this point, almost all of us, very interestingly, in every state in India, the way we communicate between this language conundrum that we have in the country, the diversity that we have in the country, is by bringing us together the language of English, the language given to us by the British colonial rule, is itself an ironic reminder to us that we continue to live in a life that is, that has been given to us after 1757 onward or until 1947, how we borrowed from it. But at the same time there is quite a lot of strong resistance to using English in every field, as you know, in India. So people would be very keen on using pedagogy through Libby Bangla. I mean, I went to a school which is Bangla media, which was Bangla medium. So there are plenty of things like that where language, the fight between languages is real. Like it's very, I mean especially from Bangla or from Bengali or from Bangladesh, we would know about even language movements, even Tamil. In the southern states there is language movements and we know how strongly Hindi language oriented people feel about not implementing English as the only language of dominance. So clearly these are the things we noticed on our everyday basis. Our rule, rule of law, our big markers, cricket or kind of national festival sometimes would also take, you know, advantage to refer to terms or ideologies or even events that may not be entirely native, so to say, quote unquote, native to India. So I thought like postcolonial in that sense is a term that is a term of the past, of our colonial rule, but the term that we also live with every day. Everything from the railways to our schooling to our laws, to our constitution. But at the same time we also thought so postcolonial in that sense to me was a cultural term and sort of a term of living every day the life that you live. The colonial markers of life that we also carry in our everyday life. Post colonial to decolonial I thought was a completely different term in the sense that it has been implemented, implemented in the Latin American field. In the Latin American field. Walter Mulolo and a host of other thinkers have used the term as delinking with modernity as a hegemonic term. So for them, modernity was something when Europe or Spanish America had arrived in South America and kind of how the settlement itself was marked as a rupture, as an, as a foray into modernity and to delink from that modernity would be. So they consider modernity as equating with colonialism the way that colonialism and modernity go hand in hand. So delinking with modernity would be delinking with colonialism. There's a lot of history to that term. I didn't want to go to that, but I thought that the post colonial actually existing post colonial countries, especially the global post colonial conditions, do not resonate that kind of A theoretical condition that Myololo and others were devising, especially in relation to South America. There were certain things that resonated, but not entirely. There was a strong pre colonial in many of these countries that we talk about. Like for India, we know already that there was a very strong Mughal empire, the wastages of which we carried. There were multiple empires in India before the British Empire came even to take just South Asia as an example. The same could happen for many places in the Caribbean, many places in south. In Africa, especially in southern parts of Africa. So I thought especially the maritime empire. So we don't talk about that quite a lot, sort of non European maritime empires. So I thought that decolonial wouldn't be justified too. So what, what I was using is decolonizing as a verb, as a transitive verb that when you read, you decolonize. And I can come back to this point later on because it need a little bit of an explanation. And anti colonial is something that I was using more as a resistance movement that if colonialism continues in the post colonial, then there are many ways that resistance to this form of the colonial happened through workers resistance through peasants, resistance to Dalit resistance, through tribal resistance, and through kind of feminist resistance too. It ha. It doesn't stop because colonialism ended. If by post colonial we carry strong markers of colonialism, then of course that anti colonial will also has to continue sort of the movements by. By default, by that logic. So I just wanted to make sure that that point about resistance to colonialism also happen in the postcolonial and they can be read as moments of anti colonialism.
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B
That is excellent. Thank you so much. So let us talk about that decolonizing impulse that you were mentioning. Right. Because in your introduction you discuss something called the decolonizing impulse of postcolonial studies. So do you want to talk a little bit about that?
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A
Yes, thanks very much for pointing that out because I thought this needed a little bit of an explanation of the decolonial and decolonizing. I wouldn't go into the decolonial again about decolonizing. I thought this was not only a term, but it's an impulse, as I say, in postcolonial studies, but also in post colonial countries, as I mentioned. If by that logic that postcolonial is a continuation of the colonial in many senses of the term by the way that the country is run by the way even resistances to the language happens, then anti colonial has to happen as well in terms of the resistant movements that stand against, that operate against the strictures of colonialism that are there within markers of post colonial domination. I mean, if the state of nation state of India, and they go back to the example of India, because it's something which I have more lived experience of, everyday experience of. By the nation state of India, we mean a particular nation state that has derived its working operation from a colonial state as to how its parties would work, how the parliament would work, how the laws would work, then resistance to a colonial state would also have resistance to a nation state that has vestiges of colonialism going within. So in that sense, anti colonialism continues. To me, anti colonialism and decolonization are not two different things. To me, decolonization is a continuing thing and the movements that provide energy to it are anti colonial movements. So while we have been decolonized in the Indian context, again in 1947, any resistance to a nation state that identifies or it's any. I'm just thinking that any way that anybody who is against certain strictures or certain rules or laws from the nation state that they find dominating or even colonialist, any movement against that would be a movement of decolonization, if that by decolonization, through whom? Through France, Fanon, through Ngogi, Wa Thongo, through in some way Ambedkar and others in their various different means, how they have kind of rebelled against how the vestiges and everyday presence of colonialism remain. And now if the fight was to liberate the nation out of colonial rule in 1940s, then there were caste operations that caste groups wanted to liberate itself out of. In the Indian context, again, there was feminist resistances about patriarchy and sometimes religion oriented or sort of caste oriented patriarchy. There was also Adivasi and Dalit movements in India against both class and caste, sort of using the, the, the, the methods of colonialism to rule them. So anything that goes on in, in the context of standing against a particular form of power or oppression that identifies itself or that can have relation or resonances of the colonialist power will be considered a decolonizing movement or an anti colonial movement. So to me these two terms are not very different. One is actually providing energy to the other and one draws from the other. Then so decolonizing as a verb to me is something where you and I as educators and teachers and middle class intellectuals, maybe when we are reading about something happening, we also educate ourselves. We try to think about how this is related with the longer history of colonial and anti colonial Indian movements. And then we also probably sometimes would teach about that we write about that and sometimes in these ways you're educating ourselves. I was very keen on a particular example that I read that there was a. I think this was. This probably could be from Ramadanath Tagore's Ghorebaide home and the world where a character is looking out and there is a march happening outside. And the character is not entirely convinced that this is the way to go out and you know, kind of engage in anti colonial movement. But the march happening outside is actually making this character think whether to participate or not, whether this character is losing out, not participating or whether the march doesn't. Doesn't make any sense against as massive a power as British Empire. But at the same time this debate itself is educating this character as to what to have, what to do, what not to do. And then if 20 years later or 10 years later, in five years later, they participate in any kind of conversation re educating another person, if not going to the march, just re educating another person in participating in a debate, then there is, there is a practice outside that educated this person's thought theory and then it kind of re educated another person in practice. I thought that is itself a long term decolonizing practice. And the reading then becomes a method of decolonizing yourself. When you are kind of engaged into that kind of a conversation or that kind of a practice. It doesn't have to be that every day you go out and you become. You decolonize. You can also think about these things and you never know how you're educating yourself. So for me, this always, this is the, this is the practical and most foundational mark. The decolonizing impulse, as I say, in post colonial nations that we always have to rethink for is happening elsewhere and then rethink our own practices, our own ideas around that. That is what I thought was foundational to anything that is to do with postcolonialism as a practice or as a field of debate and thinking.
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B
Fascinating. Can you talk a little bit about like what distinguishes your book from other theory books on postcolonial studies? What is the novelty of your approach? Does this book address any gap in our understanding of postcolonial theory? And if so, how?
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Right. Yeah. Again, that's a question that I had to give quite a lot of thought when writing the book that why write another book that already has been on a topic that has already been quite discussed, quite engaged with, quite written about? One of the most hot topics as we grew up in the field of post colonialism was, or even English literature was post Colonialism. So again, I thought, I thought about the fact that maybe I wouldn't be writing again, as I mentioned, primers or introductions in the sense that people actually talk about theory. Postcolonialism means theory, postcolonial theory, it never means, or it hardly means reading post colonial literature in order to understand how actual postcolonial nations, especially in their language, in their ethnic or in their, let's say, social lives, how they live on a daily basis in an everyday life, and how they these everydayness, the ethnic or the localness also converge in a global framework. So I was very keen on seeing could a South African text and a Bangladeshi text be brought together and if we could, what should be the things we find as broadly resonances or similarities and broadly as absences or differences. So one thing that really. And I would also like to mention that the other important thing for me was my own vantage point of writing. By vantage point, I mean, I had an experience of growing up in a provincial town, as I mentioned in the beginning, and the sort of experiences in the family, of growing up in a family which I had considered home elsewhere. But also it is the home here right now and then moving ahead, going to having the more sort of established vantage point in Calcutta and then in the uk. So what happened is I was also interested in reading, let's say, a text that is written in Bangla and from maybe North Bengal as a region. And I see so many resonances of the text in a text written in Nigeria, maybe North Bengal, Bangla text could be brought in conversation with a Nigerian text or even a sort of, let's say an Angolan text was very interesting to me. I mean, of course there were these resonances there, but it's just that how do you bring them together? So for me, the book had to have a comparative agenda at the heart that. And then it was very clear that the book is going to be about reading practices. So how do I bring reading and politics together? I mean, if I bring, let's say, Pepe Tella, who is a Angolan author who writes in this, in the vein that is quite similar to Navarun Bhattacharju in Bengal. And I do not really think any, I mean, Pepetla or Navarun know each other. It's just that strange things about writing and reading, isn't it, Arnav? That we read these things and we realize that, oh, there are resonances elsewhere that we know of. And then that's the beautiful thing about reading and then thinking about them and Comparing them and bringing them into some form of a written form, some form of analysis, something that we do in terms of teaching, but also in research. So at the same time, I was very keen on making sure that of course, Navarro's local politics is very different from Pepetalers local politics in Angola. And I haven't written on. But at the same time I was thinking about it because I presented a paper on our own paper at some point. But there was no way that I could bring Pepetla, even in the scope of the book, which already has 17 texts read or taught in some way read or kind of discussed. So what I was trying to do here is to give you an example from, let's say, the minorities chapter about was thinking about how Jackie K. In the context of sort of a black woman growing up in overwhelmingly white Scotland and then kind of going back to a Nigerian rootedness or descent, what does she feel about sort of race and gender growing up in Scotland? And I was thinking about, could it be, could it have any resonance with Bama as a Dalit identity growing up and having similar issues as a woman in India? And then bringing it with Diane Brand and the Grenadian Canadian context? How do we bring these resonances of them, you know, kind of writing from the perspective of women doubly marginalized by class and also by gender, especially the nationhood class and gender. I was thinking like, okay, there would be resonances, but they're also Scottish, they're also India, they're also Canadian Grenadian. So that those distinctions have to be very carefully crafted, and the distinctions need to make sure that their politics, their nation's politics, their local politics have to be engaged with. So I guess, like the main thing I was doing in this book, which I didn't find many other books doing, is how do you bring the scope of these global post colonial writers together in a comparative framework without compromising on their individual local politics or local tendencies or even esthetic tendencies which have been drawn locally from their sort of influences. And I thought that it needed more work in terms of reading Dan Brand comparative scale both with, but at the same time with people who Diane Brand was writing with along the same time, around the same time in Canada or Canada. So it of course demands quite a lot of reading, a lot of knowledge, but that also fine tunes your project and doesn't make it look like an oversimplified, uncritical sort of framework. It looks more like a framework through reading as a practice where you're trying to intervene into the politics but also trying to see how that politics resonates with your politics, which you know about, like Indian politics resonating with the Grenadian politics brought together through social marginalization. So that these two things, I would think the comparative framework and the sort of the ability to, to read locally but also broadly, supranationally is something I would consider as something I've achieved in the book. I guess I hope it helps students and specialists to read more widely and use reading as a practice which brings together, I believe, the other frameworks of margins and nationality and minorities and ecologies in a much more critical framework where language, because you don't know Spanish, you don't know Portuguese, doesn't then become a problem. The problem is can you actually read the aesthetics of the language and analyze the text comparatively?
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B
That's brilliant.
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C
Ever since I started serving cut water canned cocktails to my guests.
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A
Hey.
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C
Hi, how are you? Yeah, go on through. I've gone from host to hero thanks to Cutwater. I can make real perfectly mixed cocktails in seconds. It's as simple as garnishing a glass, cracking my can of cut water open and pouring it over ice. Cut water, real cocktails, perfectly mixed. Copyright 2025 Cutwater Spirits, San Diego, CA Enjoy responsibly.
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B
I do have a follow up question considering your comparative framework. So I mean, and this I've found in your book addressed as well. Right. Because the theorization of post colonial has been done differently by different camps of theory.
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A
Right.
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B
Like post structuralists have done it in a particular way, subalternists have done it in a way. Then like Marxists have done it in a particular way, then they're like the liberation theorists who have done, theorized colonialism in a different way. And I've seen a confluence of that coming through in your work. You have references to Ajaz Ahmed, to Homi Bhabha, to Mignolo, to so many people who have defined postcolonialism and the post colonial agenda in such contradictory ways. So my question is, how do you now, how have you navigated that to kind of write your own particular approach on the subject? You know?
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A
Yeah, so yeah, no, that's great because this was, this is, I believe you also understand in your own undertaking as, as a tutor, as a scholar, as a researcher is a massively complex issue. Right. How do you navigate these various paths established for yourself as a budding post colonialist or a thinker in that field? Right. I believe like one thing that I have always tried to follow in my own learning capacity is how do you use literary text as a medium to speak for itself rather than using a particular theory in the first instance? Right. These are things that we have been taught, close reading, comparative reading, textual reading, formalist reading, something like that. So I wanted that to be the first sort of illuminator for me going forward. And then I was thinking, can we bring as. Because at the heart of my reading practice is such a comparative framework, I was thinking, can we bring this reading in conversation with another reading that I've had? And in what way then? Literature is a comparative, universalizing and yet non essentializing factor. So that's something which is. Which is always a sort of an energizer for me that how do I read Lila Abulela's short story the Museum? And how do I see it? As in the way that museum curation happens today in India or in the uk? Could that story be a breaking ground or an icebreaker for me to have a conversation both in the classroom and going out in the museum or in the public space? So I believe, like there are two things here that I had to deal with in the book. One was what Marxist would say that a text read for itself that is sometimes pejoratively called art for art's sake in some way. Right. That we're just reading the text for itself. We're not reading out the context for it, or the historical or the ideological sort of aspects coming out from the text. It's more of a formalist reading. Then you also have a historical reading of the text that post structuralists would say Marxists always do without looking at the fineries of the text. So to say the text doesn't have to be history is a different thing. A text can be its history. The path that I have chosen for myself in the book is more of a Benjaminian historical materialist path. Benjamin was never a very simplified or simple, transparent sort of an author or a writer. Right. He writes something always very cryptically here and there. And even when he's mentioning a historical materialist path, he's saying that the job of the historical material is to see that in the crystallization of ideas there is a monad, and the monad is sedimented in the crystallization. My job, or your job as a historical material is then to dissect or take out the monad from the sedimentation and see within itself there are vestiges, there are ideas, as he mentions the continuous theological metaphor of sedimentation. And you have to see how they have been sedimented. And. And I thought that my job As a. And he was a. He was a. He was an amazing critic and thinker, but also literary critic, so to say. Right? I mean, cultural critic, of course. So I was just thinking, like, as somebody who does deal with literary texts as objects or as monads, then my job would be then to use it as a monad. That is the final result that it has been, but also how the final result includes those sedimentations. So I just wanted to make sure that if I'm reading a short story by a Scottish Sudanese writer written from Aberdeen, then this is. This is what includes the historical, sociological and cultural elements sedimented into the text that somebody uses as a method of saying that, look, this is my experience and I've given it a literary form of all the experiences together. And if I then bring it in conversation with another story written from India or South Africa or the Caribbean islands, then there are possibilities that you can bring them together, as I mentioned, by not always sort of effacing out the local peculiarities or tendencies in a text. Right. So I believe, like I try to in some way bridge the aesthetic and the political ideas that through the Benjaminian historical materialist route, that you read the text for its aesthetics, you don't lose out on the aesthetic, the formal, the stylistic side of it, because you have to take a historical, materialist stance. But at the same time, you don't stop historicizing the text, periodizing the text, because the text is of course, a product of its history, of its periodization, of the way the author has decided to write the text. A filmmaker has decided to build that cinema. So both of these things need to be brought together.
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B
I love the idea you don't stop periodizing. We should do a follow up after Jamison. Always periodize. So going back to your discussion about social movements, in your book, you discuss the influence of popular social movements, including the Black Lives Matter movement, the Dalit Lives Matter movement. Roads must fall in the impact of these on academic endeavors of decolonization. Acknowledging that your book takes its cue from these transformative social movements in framing its vision of the decolonizing impulse. Can you speak a little more about this connection between social activism and academic work and its importance to your project?
- [41:15]
A
Yes, absolutely. That's a fascinating question. I think that that's a question especially for people like us who are interested in postcolonial studies. It's a question that we come across, and it's a question that we also have to answer in many ways of the term, inside the classroom, outside the classroom, etc. As an individual, I think, especially those trained in arts and humanities and social sciences. I believe when, as I mentioned when I was writing the book, some of these movements were happening across universities and they're coming out into the public. Some of these movements, including such as Black Lives Matter, would come from the public towards the university. Some of them, like Roads Must Fall, would be starting from the university and would have many different vantages, many different strands in different other parts. I remember in India there was a Fees Must Fall movement as well, which was related, but an offshoot of Roots Must Fall. So in some way these are social movements, academic movements. They're both illuminating each other in their own ways and at the same time transforming, I thought, in their own ways. Um, what I was keen about and because I was teaching back then, the museum, as a short story, there was a lot of the museum decolonizing the museum, museum curation sort of events were happening back then in the uk. I was thinking this was during the last years of my PhD, before I went back to India. This is 2018 and 19 I talk about. And then when I came back again to teach in the uk, I saw that some of these movements, especially during COVID also had their different meanings. Black Lives Matter, the movement in the US then had tremendous impact in the UK in terms of, you know, the statues Must fall, sort of say when I was thinking about these and I. You could hardly. Because these are. These are monuments and statues that represent culture. Culture and literature. Literature being part of culture, is what we teach in the classroom. You can't shut down the classroom of the things that are happening outside. Especially if you are teaching ideas that are enshrined in literary texts. Right? Ideas that are often resistant, radical and in many cases emancipatory in their own ways. Even Jane Austen may have some emancipatory ideas. Reading Jane Austen from the perspective of Empire, as Edward Said has done, can be quite emancipatory for another group of readers and writers. So that's the thing we do essentially in literature reading and teaching. So I thought that is impossible for me to write on a topic such as post colonialism and just write about books at the same time. It will be quite an injustice done to literary texts and cinema. Some the two modes that have used in the. In the book, that if we just shut out the literary text itself and say everything happens in the world of theory and practice and outside of the classroom. So the difficulty, I think the complexity lies in how you read the text for itself in the classroom. Teaching your students that this is exactly what the text says. The text doesn't say go out and participate in a march. The text says that these are the things that happened in a text. Now what you can take from the text and how it educates you, what you do afterwards is exactly what the text doesn't say. And these are things through which we educate ourselves. So I would just only show what Lila Abu Leyla's text could do and how the museum activisms around 20 years later would be filling out the gap that Abu Leillela's text might suggest that this is that the atmosphere is not ready for the protagonist, Shadia, to teach the other protagonist, Brian, that museums can be different. Twenty years later, people were thinking about museum curation very differently. So those atmosphere, the grounds were ready for that kind of an activism to happen through Black Lives Matter, through Roads Must Fall, through other social movement, Arab Spring included. So the point here that I was making is this is how you read the text in a classroom. The classroom is not matter of activism. Right? We all do that. The classroom is when you teach the text, you take ideas from your students and you discuss how far you can push those ideas. You don't turn the classroom into a social activism because that's not what you are training your students in literature. They ought to be giving respect to the text and to its tools at hand, such as, you know, thinking through symbols, through metaphors, through ideas. And then if they can take it out, including us, if we can take it out and if we can actually educate ourselves by reading a text, that this is also the other thing that was sedimented in the text that we didn't do back, that we didn't realize back then. This is exactly the kind of job the text has done for us. It has educated us to then take it out, out of the classroom, and then make it as a moment of entering into politics outside of the classroom. So I thought this had to be very clearly pointed out in the book as well, that you are reading a text for itself, but you're also trying to sort of extend your ideas from outside of the classroom to a world of happening practice politics. But these two are as different from each other as they are connected. I think that's a very complex task, and that's something that we do all our life as tutors and scholars.
- [46:50]
B
That's beautiful. Thank you so much. So our concluding question then. And this book is definitely a very important resource for anyone interested in the study of postcolonial theory, especially students and educators. I would say so Keeping this fact in mind, what is your recommendation and advice to your audience, our audience and readers of your book? What is the value of postcolonial theory? How must one read it? What must one prioritize? What pitfalls should one be mindful of?
- [47:39]
A
Well, it's a massive question. I'd like to bring them together in some form of sort of conveyable utterance that I was thinking about. The irony of course, like having written this book and published with a publisher that I really respect for the wonderful work that they do, the Indian oriented publisher, Orient Black Swan. The irony that I was thinking about is that the book is not very widely available in the uk. This is also because the power structures involved in the publishing world. I was very clear that I would publish with Orion Blackswan because this book is written primarily for an Indian audience, not because of these examples. The examples are very global. But I wanted to write the book as, as a resource, as a teaching guide. But at the same time I would also notice how it becomes a struggle for an Indian publisher to even publish with UK based or US based publishers to make sure the book is available. So I'm not very sure how available the book will be in times to come because I don't see myself very energized right now to deal with, to talk with publishers and get a distributor copy, etc. But one thing I've also noticed beyond this sort of echoes of power structures that are always going to be strongly present. If you are conscious and aware of these structures you would notice that how even us as young early care academics, how pre pressured we feel to publish with certain big presses because our books must travel. But at the same time that means that people on texts or people or regions that we write about, those people that we write about, they may not be able to buy those books because these books will be priced at a very high price unless there is a specific region based edition out of your book. If you're lucky enough to have those kind of presses you that are there. So clearly there is a power structure there that's always going to be very important for as an educating tool for yourself as you grow up. You realize that who are you writing for? I think that's a very important thing that postcolonialism as a field teaches you. I think the couple of things the field teaches you very strongly is that you have to listen. And by you I don't mean you or nobody know you. I know already that we as readers have to listen to voices that have been routinely silenced and These voices do not stop. Over history we might have seen probably some foundational post colonial thinkers such as Saeed or Spivak, or someone else might telling us that these are the voices silenced 20 years, 30 years down the line. We see three different rounds of people coming and telling us that these were the voices. Further silence, we need to think about them. Further silence, we need to restore them. That restorative agenda, that project goes on. I think that is something. If there is one particular thing post colonialism as a field has taught us over a period of time, that is we ought to be listening to people that have not been brought at all in some form of conversation anywhere in be it academic or non academic. Second thing, I would think how the project of post colonialism lives on is more, as I've been kind of suggesting, a self educating element that I understand that a lot of my friends who we went to school with, and often because of jobs, because of other interests, we kind of take the streams of science and engineering and management and you know, the streams that are more sort of connected with profession straight away after, after your education, BA or MA education. I remember like my friends or my parents telling me, you'll not get jobs, you know, who like English literature. I mean, yeah, maybe like a school teacher or if you're lucky enough, like a college teacher. So I mean arts and humanities have not been connected with jobs. So to say from there, from the moment go. But at the same time it's ironic because many of my friends I see nowadays reading and sharing pieces that are very much about ideas, be it on nationhood, on caste, on religion, on economy. And our streams, our disciplines have routinely dehistoricized, ahistoricized these fields. That science and engineering have nothing to do with ideas of nationhood, of race. I think this is what I mean by re educating. I think a lot of us as we grew up, we're educating ourselves that ideas are connected and we continue to live a very strongly post colonial life. If you come from that part of the world and by default, if the British Empire had 85% of the world under its ages at one point and other parts were kind of colonized by other empires, then of course the whole world was colonized at some point. So I think everybody lives a post colonial life, including the metropolis of the empire. So I believe that re educating agenda should also be at the heart that we continue to see how these ideas from the past are evoked by our sort of contemporary practices, but also continue to sort of inform us and our practices Every time we do something, be it in education or be it in any other field.
- [52:59]
B
Thank you so much, Sharit. This was a fantastic session. I have learned a lot about postcolonial theory from your book and from this interview, and I'm certain that our audience and your readers have learned or will learn a lot too, from your book. So we are all very grateful. Thank you so much and I really appreciate your time.
- [53:28]
A
Thank you so much, Arnold, for again, for inviting me, for giving me this opportunity to talk about my book, but at the same time, just to go back to the book. Because, you know, it's something in the profession of book writing is that it's also a term, I'm sure, like you are in a. In a term teaching. We hardly have time to go back to our books sometimes. There's also this sort of strong sense of reluctance to go back to our own books that gave me an opportunity to go back to my book and discuss ideas that I really value so much about. I'm sure all of us do.
- [53:57]
B
Yeah, this was like a really, like. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I read a lot of postcolonial theory and I'm always on the lookout for, like, new approaches to the field. And I was just like, this is such a refreshing experience. Experience for me, especially because one of my main reasons for doing this podcast, as I have already told you, is trying to find ways of making complex academic discussions more accessible to students. And I feel like this conversation that we've had, I mean, it's going to be very useful in my courses for sure, because students are always confused about, okay, how does post colonial. How is that different from these other terms? So now I can, like, bring the podcast in. Like, you don't have to listen to me. Just listen to, like this episode, you know, that's amazing.
- [54:54]
A
Yes. I've also found your sort of the resources you're building very useful and especially immensely teachable. I'm also going to look forward to the podcast that you're going to do in the future and keep growing, keep adding to that and keep making sure it remains open access for all of us to use in our teaching resource, for sure.