Justin D Edwards. 2008. Postcolonial Literature: A Reader S Guide to Essential Criticism.

Chapman, Michael

Justin D Edwards. 2008. Postcolonial Literature: A Reader S Guide to Essential Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan. 204pp.

As part of the series entitled "Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism", this book offers postgraduate students as well as lecturers who are preparing relevant modules a succinct introduction to the "unstable and contested critical category" (Edwards's opening words) of postcolonial literature. An opening chapter outlines current debates and subsequent chapters explore what have begun to be formulated as key concepts in a particular field of literary study: difference, language, orality, rewriting, violence, travel, maps, gender, queer, haunting, memory, hybridity, diaspora, and globalisation. The conclusion suggests possible future directions for postcolonial criticism and theory. A bibliography identifies readings on each of the listed concepts.

The chapters are sufficiently descriptive to introduce students to representative texts while summarising debates in the field. The chapter on hybridity, for example, ends:

   Some critics and writers celebrate hybridity as a challenge to
   essentialism and problematic ideas about purity or authenticity.
   Others, however, see theories of hybridity as potentially
   apolitical and monolithic. Still others argue that discourses of
   hybridity are voiced from the privileged metropolitan centres of
   the West and, as such, are detached from the rural communities of
   India, South Africa, Jamaica and elsewhere. (149)

As this extract suggests, Edwards is not out to impose a diagram on postcolonial literature (is it reflective of material circumstance or preoccupied with discourses of power, etc?). His book offers valuable secondary reading for courses on postcolonialism or world literature. Courses aimed at which students? Despite a few cursory references, South Africa hardly enters Edwards's grid (the only South African writer to be mentioned is J M Coetzee). The field is delineated as high art in English; its paradigm remains broadly the Empire writing back to the centre, where a field is being consolidated as a branch of metropolitan Eng. Lit.

The book presents the critic in South Africa, therefore, not only with a handy study guide, but also with a challenge to the mapping of a field that is becoming somewhat tangential to the habitation of 'postcolonies'.