Postcolonial Melancholia ELI SORENSEN

Abstract: The article attempts to identify some of the boundaries and limits of postcolonial studies, with a specic focus on its relationship to the literary. Leading critics have argued that the contemporary eld of postcolonial studies has become melancholic, as a consequence of its institutionalization in recent years, and the article suggests reading these signs of melancholia as an expression of the failed attempt to identify with the dimension of the literary in the postcolonial text. Keywords: Postcolonialism; literature; criticism; psychoanalysis

Melancholic Self-Ref lections In the introductory chapter to a collection of critical essays discussing contemporary postcolonial issues, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks notes that the discipline seems to have reached a stage of melancholia induced paradoxically by its new-found authority and incorporation into institutions of higher learning. Contemporary postcolonial melancholia, Seshadri-Crooks argues, relates to a series of problems, such as:
postcolonial scholars apprehension that institutionalizing the critique of imperialism may render it conciliatory (. . .) their criteria for political self-legitimization (i.e., the impossibility of representing the Third world as an anti-imperialist constituency, especially in the face of the retreat of socialism) and their peculiar immobility as an effective oppositional force for curricular change within (American and British) academies.1

In other words, at a time when postcolonial studies is enjoying wide academic success and popularity, there is a mounting sense among practising critics that the discipline has become stereotyped as an acceptable form of academic radicalism (MPS1, 17). One of the reasons underlying this development is what Seshadri-Crooks identies as an inadequately enunciated notion of the margin (4): a margin that is different from multiculturalisms notion of a spatial, subject-positioned margin. The notion of the margin in multiculturalism often constitutes a source of rejuvenation of the centre,
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where knowledge as positive knowing is made possible (MPS1, 8). As Michael Denning argues, It is here we nd the struggles to reassert the dignity of despised cultural identications: the assertion that black is beautiful, that gay and lesbian romance and sexuality are as central to our collective narratives (. . .) as are heterosexual marriage and adultery.2 The uncritical and homogenizing conation of postcolonial studies and multiculturalism has led among postcolonial critics to what Seshadri-Crooks designates as a turf war, induced by an anxiety over the loss of the margin that results in the redrawing of lines and a struggle over the margin itself (18). Postcolonial critics, she argues, have been eager to recuperate the dislocated and authoritative critical position, desperately looking for radicality as such, and thus in effect fetishizing and reifying the margin as the site of struggle for the outermost limit. Opposed to this undifferentiated notion of the margin, Seshadri-Crooks proposes a notion of postcolonial marginality not so much as that which is external to the power structure, but rather its constitutive outside, an intimate alterity that marks the limit of power (13). To Seshadri-Crooks, this negative, ironic, and contingent dimension of marginality as the incommensurable and irreducible remainder, the unthought, nonrecuperable otherness, or, the residue of representation must constitute the foundation of postcolonial materialist critiques of power and how that power or ideology seeks to interpellate subjects within a discourse as subordinate and without agency (19). One of the characteristic aspects of postcolonial studies as a theoretical eld throughout its relatively brief span of history has been its amorphousness or shapelessness. And it is exactly this indenable quality which to Seshadri-Crooks permits it to be simultaneously self-critical and oppositional, since it prevents the discipline from reaching a stagnant and self-complacent level of homogeneity. The continuation of this differentiated margin of postcolonial criticality and opposition is, however, only sustained through what Seshadri-Crooks sees as a constant rehearsal of the conditions for the production of its own discourse (18); a relentless self-scrutiny; a refusal to stay still, to dene itself or defend itself (19). The dimension of consciousness-raising is, according to Michael Denning, a virtue when it means a genuinely reective sense of ones own being, ones own situation in the world, and ones own impact on others, thus an integral part of the emergence of any social movement of subaltern peoples (CATW, 126). As such, institutional and methodological self-criticism and oppositional positioning have

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arguably always been an integrated part of postcolonial studies as an academic eld. It is true that the danger of institutionalization, which haunts the contemporary eld of postcolonial studies in the age of global commodication, would seem to demand even more pronounced calls for a self-critical apporach; but at the same time it may equally be relevant to see this demand in itself as something that has become a fetishized, empty, and self-congratulating gesture, or a theoretical short-circuit or impasse, playing a vital part in the process of contemporary melancholia. In other words, while the dimension of self-criticism or self-reexivity seems to constitute a necessary disciplinary manoeuvre in postcolonial studies, it may simultaneously be conceived as a symptom of a certain methodological narcissism, which legitimizes institutionally an increasingly prescriptive framework that dogmatically maintains its position as the critical position in academia. Seshadri-Crookss critical essay constitutes in many ways an important theoretical symptom. While she accurately addresses some of the most serious, contemporary theoretical problems in the eld, her own proposal of a radicalized notion of a postcolonial margin nevertheless relies on an equally fetishizing idea of self-reexivity, as the ultimately redemptive horizon of postcolonial criticality. But insofar as self-critical and self-reexive approaches have become automatic, self-legitimizing, disciplinary markers of an increasingly institutionalized and dogmatic methodological outlook, which are also attempts to repress the anxiety of reproducing imperialist ideologies and creating a new orientalism, there is at least one important area, I believe, in which this melancholic problematic is noticeable in a very explicit way. Postcolonial Melancholia and Literature This important area is the ambiguous relationship between postcolonial studies as a theoretical and academic eld and postcolonial literary texts. In their hugely inuential book The Empire Writes Back, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths and Helen Tifn suggested that the development of postcolonial literatures urged the eld of literary studies to interrogate the canonical nature and unquestioned status of the works of the English literary tradition and the values they incorporated.3 Pointing toward an aspect in the postcolonial text, similar to what Fredric Jameson has called the different ratio of the political to the personal,4 The Empire Writes Back formulates a view which has had a major impact on the process of demystifying a Western tradition of aestheticism within a worldly perspective; whereas the political

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dimension in many contemporary Western novels is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert (see TWL, 69), the postcolonial texts clearly marked emphasis on a politicized mode of representing marginalized voices within a public-national framework has vitalized the debate of what constitutes literary values and qualities.5 However, the process of rethinking literary values seems, to many postcolonial critics, largely to be a closed chapter by now. After the virulent attacks on the traditional humanist notions of the aesthetic and the literary, there have been very few attempts to resurrect an aestheticformal approach to the literary within the eld of postcolonial studies. Consequently, one of the peculiar things about postcolonial criticism is, as Peter Hallward has observed:
how little it has to say about its own home discipline, about literature proper. Having long since absorbed the boundary-blurring lessons of deconstruction, many postcolonial literary critics seem embarrassed by what remains of their disciplinary afliation. Most postcolonial readings are brief, often insubstantial, sometimes simply anecdotal. Only rarely do such readings engage with a text on its own terms.6

Hallwards comment is a serious indictment against the impetus of postcolonial studies, albeit also a very ambiguous one, since it raises the question as to what extent the dimension of the literary as literary, that is, on its own terms, is supposed to play a role in a eld which, according to Robert Young, has achieved a revolution in aesthetics and the aesthetic criteria of the literary, just at a moment when the literary was most under attack as an outdated category, since it is now valued as much for its depiction of representative minority experience as for its aesthetic qualities.7 In a world after the revolution, the occurrence of melancholia as a symptom in postcolonial studies may be linked to the current status of the literary, given the fact that literature still occupies a substantial part of postcolonialitys objects of study, yet for reasons that are highly ambivalent. Postcolonial literary criticism seems to be characterized by what one may see as a kind of schizophrenia or dissociation. While many postcolonial literary analyses treat the literary work with an emphasis on its extra-literary qualities, the more aesthetically sophisticated postcolonial analyses those taking literary form seriously tend to focus primarily on works displaying heterogeneous narrative styles and extravagant innovation8 whereas more conventional modes of writing, deemed uncongenial to metropolitan taste are un-translated and largely un-discussed within the academies

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(DDE, 712). This would seem to suggest that the gures of the literary per se constitute a problematic within postcolonial studies, a problematic which the discipline in part has responded to through an unbalanced emphasis on radical literary modalities. Simultaneously, there has been a tendency in postcolonial studies to repress or demonize more conventional modes of writing apparently not distanced enough from imperialist ideology in a self-conscious way, such as realism, in so far as this kind of literature has been discussed as realism or realist form, and not treated as historical documents, that is, gures of the extra-literary. In the essay The Spell of Indecision, Franco Moretti has discussed what he sees as a certain loss of distance between interpretative theories, and their favoured literary texts, both belonging to what he sees as a modernist paradigm, and thus together forming a kind of interpretive vicious circle.9 What Moretti calls an interpretive vicious circle in many ways corresponds to what I see as a problematic leap operating in many analyses of postcolonial texts; this leap implies an automatic equation of formal heterogeneity, innovation, and originality with political radicalism, which in this sense provides a set of implicitly valorized aesthetic codes that is simultaneously followed by a more hesitating willingness to engage with the aesthetics of more conventional modes of expression. In a similar line of argument, Arun P. Mukherjee writes;
I am worried by the postmodernist tendency to valorize antirealist ction. When critics like Catherine Belsey and Linda Hutcheon suggest that antirealist ction denaturalizes what we had taken to be real and this warns us against being sucked into the illusionist trap set by realist presentation by constantly drawing attention to its process (. . .) I feel like telling them that after a while, the metactions of postmodernism stop having that effect because of our increasing familiarity with their stylistic manoeuvres. Secondly, for those of us who never experienced realism as a dominant form, the denaturalizing of metaction does not affect us in the same way. Thirdly, I do not believe that there is any necessary link between autoreexive ction and right politics.10

Schizophrenia is one of the aspects of contemporary postcolonial criticism that most distinctly expresses the ambivalent position occupied by the literary: an ambivalence related to the problematic of institutionalization as well as what one may see as a certain repetitiveness and predictability in many postcolonial literary analyses. To read across postcolonial literary studies, Neil Lazarus polemically argues, is to nd, to an extraordinary degree, the same questions asked, the same

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methods, techniques, and conventions used, the same concepts mobilized, the same conclusions drawn.11 In a similar vein, Deepika Bahri talks about a web of professional practices that include publishing, book reviews, syllabus exchange, conferences which produces a pattern of privileging texts more readily responsive to authorized questions and pedagogic imperatives.12 The direct implications of this problematic are partly reected in the remarkably narrow list of postcolonial canonical works being taught in departments of postcolonial studies. As Neil Lazarus has argued, the canonical par excellence must be Rushdies Midnights Children (1981): I am tempted to overstate the case, (. . .) and declare that there is in a strict sense only one author in the postcolonial literary canon. That author is Salman Rushdie (PPM, 424). That many postcolonial critics continuously reread and reiterate their points about this novel, together with a handful of other recurring works, seems to exemplify the discrepancy, or perhaps even to some extent incompatibility, between the norms of many sections within the eld of postcolonial studies, and a large part of what can be labelled as postcolonial literature; that is, an incompatibility which is based on an institutionalized act of exclusion, covered up by a ritualized and formulaic radical practice. All these aspects raise a series of important methodological questions; what literary aspects are valued, directly or indirectly, in terms of the objectives of the postcolonial, and which constituent objectives would have inuence on this process of value-coding? Alison Donnell has observed that, although postcolonial scholarship developed in opposition to prescriptive modes of thought, the consolidation and institutionalization of its works would seem to have generated in some respects an unhelpful homogenization of political intent and a stiing consensus of good practice.13 Some of these aspects involve predictability, self-congratulating canonization of resistant subjects and rebellious discourses, that is, a preference for perfect political credentials (102), while more or less completely neglecting writers whose works are not disengaged from colonial culture in an explicitly self-conscious way. This situation not only condemns writers to dismal and oppressed self-dening narratives but burdens readers with a baggage of unresolved cultural sensitivities, and critics with a tireless round of congratulations and careful critiques (102). If, as many postcolonial critics argue, the aesthetic in its narrow denition no longer plays any determining role in relation to the subversive qualities of postcolonial literary texts (or non-subversive potential in relation

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to canonical texts), would a so-called conventional or unimaginative aesthetic text be regarded as equally valuable in relation to the postcolonial political imperatives? According to Martina Michel, the texts being most often canonized as representative of postcoloniality tend to be texts that satisfy Western (postmodern) criteria of evaluation. They are experimental, make extensive use of irony, resist closure, question traditional boundaries, employ intertextual strategies etc.14 Even a brief glance through many contemporary postcolonial literary analyses would conrm this argument, thus furthermore demonstrating that aesthetic standards still occupy an important position, and that for example realism is indeed not as highly valued as for example magical realism. While this or that author is being praised for employing specic textual strategies that are subversive, representative, or revelatory within a postcolonial situation, other authors are often being ignored, and implicitly deemed less representative of the postcolonial. Although postcolonial literary analyses in most cases decode literary texts against the background of specifically political objectives, these objectives are often mobilized and legitimized according to an implicit and tacit set of aesthetic norms. That postcolonial studies has not paid enough explicit attention to the specicity of literary and aesthetic modes of representation may, however, be seen as a measure of criticisms inadequate resistance of the status quo logic of exchange society (NI, 7). Returning to the Literary For a long time, Deepika Bahri observes, it would have seemed provocatively conservative to agitate for aesthetic considerations (NI, 15), yet nevertheless there are ample reasons to suggest that we need to reengage with the issue of the literary and the aesthetic in contemporary criticism. This issue is one that Gayatri Spivak has addressed in her book Death of a Discipline (2003), which to some extent can be read as a response to what Seshadri-Crooks has designated as the melancholia of contemporary postcolonial literary criticism. Cultural studies and its sub-disciplines, Spivak argues, have not paid enough attention to the specicity of the literary and aesthetic potential, but rather erased the cultural differences as signied through the formal specicity of the gures of the literary, and have thus commodied and instrumentalized the otherness of radically foreign literary texts in the global market. In order for cultural and postcolonial studies to retain their positions as privileged tools of carving out singularity and

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otherness in-between the cultural processes of the commodifying and homogenizing global market forces, Spivak argues that their optics must be polished with the old skills and techniques of studying literature, which thus implies a return to some of the still useful dimensions in comparative literature as well as area studies.15 At the heart of Spivaks argument lies an idea of literature as training the imagination the great inbuilt instrument of othering (DD, 13). She uses the notion teleopoiesis, borrowed from Derridas Politics of Friendship (1997), to combine an idea of imaginative making with the prex tele (distant), in order to support her call for a greater attention toward the specicity of literature. Rather than appropriating the other in our own conceptual framework, the literary imagination enables us to cross borders into the depths of the unknown. The literary imagination opens the possibility of putting ourselves at risk in the process of imaginative othering, transgressing binary cultural models and sensing the strangeness of our own cultural categorizations (DD, 73). The contemporary global promotion and commodication of radically foreign literatures constitute an unprecedented aesthetic problematic. Many anthologies of translated foreign literatures produced within the eld of cultural and postcolonial studies are examples of what Spivak calls failure of teleopoiesis (DD, 50), where the cultural other has become totally domesticated within a Western cultural imagination. In order to avoid the complacent commodication of radically different cultures, teleopoiesis must be used to produce transgressive readings (55) that preserve the undecidable and unknown gures in our systems of categorization, via linguistic attention that allows the particularity of foreign texts to come into play. Spivak seeks a reading strategy that pays attention to the logic of the rhetoric, not the text as cultural information (61) and which avoids using literature as a means to achieve too-quick conclusions about gender, freedom of speech, and modernity (61). Postcolonial studies, after having revolutionized the eld of literary aesthetics through consciousness-raising readings of texts previously situated comfortably within narrow, local frameworks, is haunted by melancholia today because of a loss of critical marginality. This may be seen as an ambiguous expression of both disciplinary success and failure. Success, in the sense that a notion of the literary after the so-called postcolonial aesthetic revolution seems to constitute, as John Brenkman rather hyperbolically has expressed it, little more than the buzzword of those English department sentimentalists who proudly, deantly announce their love of literature.16 But also failure,

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in the Spivakian sense of a failure of teleopoiesis, implying that the contemporary eld of postcolonial studies has lost its identity as a critical margin, that it has become something dangerously close to representing a sales tag for the international commodity culture.17 Legitimization and Repression Postcolonial discourse, Fawsia Afzal-Khan observes, will always be productively split between the assertion of its political convictions and the critique of those very convictions.18 In so far as the radical nature of the political imperatives of postcolonial studies is constantly measured against the margins of this discontinuity, what seems to be one of the problematic consequences is that the reinforcement of this split, which is integral to postcolonial identity-formation as a critical, consciousness-raising discourse under increasing institutional pressure, has led to a displacement of the focus of postcolonial studies. The focus is displaced from the singular representation as congured by its object proper to its own relentlessly suffusing and intervening gures of self-representation, as distinct from other, related elds. It is the negative effects of this displacement, I would argue, which become particularly evident in relation to the gures of the literary. In A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Spivak argues that:
the promise of justice must attend not only to the seduction of power, but also to the anguish that knowledge must suppress difference as well as differance, that a fully just world is impossible, forever deferred and different from our projections, the undecidable in the face of which we must risk the decision that we can hear the other. (199)

In so far as we take this promise of justice as one of the underlying constituents of the postcolonial political imperative, postcolonial literary analyses must necessarily always confront this task of interrogating the possibility of hearing or articulating the experience of the other, the undecidable, as represented within the ambiguous, singular conguration of the literary. It is, however, possible, I believe, that the literary interpretative framework of postcolonial criticism, its incessant, self-reexive analysis (MPS2, 24), may to a certain extent ward off the risk or potency involved in the task of reading literary texts, which thus perhaps rather appear in the form of the already-read.19 I want to argue that a certain act of illegitimate, concealed, or even

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borrowed legitimization takes place within much postcolonial criticism, increasingly stereotyped and institutionalized through a narrow, authoritative vocabulary, frequently consisting of the hybrid, the interstitial, the intercultural, the in-between, the indeterminate, the counter-hegemonic, the contingent, that is, attempts to evoke that which no concept can capture (AP, xi). The sustained attempt to constitute itself conceptually as the discipline no one can capture, may also be seen as a process of legitimizing itself as the (authoritatively de-legitimizing) discipline capturing that margin which no concept can capture. One may see this tautological self-authorization, which is paradoxically revealed in the relationship to the gures of the literary, as an expression of postcolonial studies contradictory, selfclaimed location in-between cultural meta-languages of knowledge.20 It is in this way that excessive self-critique, as an expression of the impossibility of treating the literary that in an obligatory way seems to authorize many postcolonial analyses of literary works, is intimately related to the aspect I stressed earlier, the symptom of a repressed problematic, namely the lack of attention to the specically literary in much postcolonial literary criticism. The specically literary, the literary text on its own terms, across the spectrum of different modes, thus seems to imply a relationship involving an uncanny risk, to which postcolonial literary criticism has responded in a schizophrenic way, either by ignoring this risk through an emphasis on the extraliterary dimension of the literary work or through an emphasis on excessively self-conscious modes of literary expressions that correspond to the radical gures of the postcolonial political imperatives. Here, I believe, we seem to arrive at the centre of what one may see as the dilemma of much postcolonial literary criticism, a dilemma which equally constitutes its potential. I am arguing that postcolonial studies, legitimizing its worldly, methodological strategies through a politically consciousness-raising practice of rereading the cultural gures of the non-conceptual and marginal within already coded material (a rereading consistently returning to itself via a circular process of incessant, self-correcting self-scrutiny) to some extent can be seen as a discourse risking the production of a promise of justice as a rhetorical manoeuvre illegitimately concealing its theoretical blind spots. To occupy a blind spot, Shoshana Felman writes, albeit in a different context, is not only to be blind, but in particular to be blind to ones own blindness; it is to be unaware of the fact that one occupies a spot within the very blindness one seeks to demystify.21 What one may see as anxiously concealed defence mechanisms (that is,

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the excessive self-critique), implemented to prevent falling into this hazardous trap, are revealed through what Hallward saw as the insubstantiality of many postcolonial literary analyses. One may thus argue that the radicalism of a large part of the established postcolonial theoretical vocabulary, with which the postcolonial critic answers the demands of the literary text, is established at the price of the neutralization of the literary singularity, the reduction of critical responses to the brief, often insubstantial, sometimes simply anecdotal answers answering for the text, whose gures thus become answerable to the particular gures of the postcolonial vocabulary.22 What Moretti designates as the loss of distance in modern criticism, and what Lazarus conceives as a certain sameness in postcolonial literary analyses, can be seen as similar to the seamlessness of the correspondence between on the one hand an explicitly self-conscious postcolonial literary modality, and on the other hand the dominating vocabulary of much postcolonial literary criticism. Moreover, this seamlessness can be seen as contributing to the process of what Seshadri-Crooks viewed as the consolidation of an institutionalized, blunted and reied standard of radicalism, that is, a loss of a differentiated, critical margin. It is in this sense that the literary may constitute an important resource simultaneously informing the postcolonial as well as the other way around: a gurative manoeuvre of the chiastic; a paradoxical process of self-blinding; an aporetic bind. Postcolonialitys relationship to the gures of the literary may in part be seen as epitomizing, in all its heterogeneity and complexity, both in a gurative and a literal sense, the uncanny modus operandi of the postcolonial perspective. The gures of the literary can be conceived as the potential revelation of the uncanny, blind spot of postcolonial studies, that which should have remained secret; the gures of the literary may be seen as representing the (im)-possible or uncanny resource of the postcolonial perspective, indicating on the one hand that which supports the postcolonial perspective, what makes it possible, and on the other hand indicating that which necessarily must remain unreadable within the gures of postcolonial criticism. The literary text may in this sense be seen as involving both a potential and a risk. The non-identiable, selfreexive gures of the literary as literary thus constitute the uncanny doppelganger of the postcolonial perspective at one and the same time opening the possibility of responding (ethically) to otherness while risking the dissolution of identiable boundaries through the activation of an uncanny self-reexivity of the other.23

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The Melancholia of Postcolonial Studies I want to return now to Seshadri-Crookss reections on the melancholia of contemporary postcolonial studies. What remains somewhat under-theorized and displaced in Seshadri-Crookss otherwise balanced overview of the impasses in postcolonial discourse is the possibility of conceiving the literary as the margin (the residue of representation) rather than placing the emphasis on literatures of the margin. The relentless self-scrutiny, the fear of becoming a petried, homogeneous critical authority, which has always been a trademark of postcolonial studies as an academic discipline, may be, as Seshadri-Crooks argues, seen as a continual attempt to preserve the margin, its distinct position of otherness, always under threat: The postcolonial margin must be acknowledged as incommensurable and nonrecuperable (MPS1, 13). But I want to open the possibility of reading this trademark rather differently, via a brief detour to Freuds essay on Mourning and Melancholia from 1915. Freud sees the condition of melancholia as belonging to the group of manic-depressive psychoses, specied by its neurotic narcissism.24 One of the preconditions for the possibility of melancholia occurring at some later stage is the narcissistic choice of object while another is the ambivalence or lovehate relationship to the object. Melancholia is triggered by the loss of the object, or the feeling of disappointment, of being let down by the object; melancholia is in some way related to an object-loss which is withdrawn from consciousness, in contradistinction to mourning, in which there is nothing about the loss that is unconscious (MM, 245). The libido is redrawn to the realm of the ego, which in effect leads to the ego-libidos attempt to identify with the object, that is, an attempt to restore the lost object within the ego.25 Freud writes:
On the one hand, a strong xation to the loved object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis must have had little power of resistance. (. . .) The narcissistic identication with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. (MM, 249)

This substitution, as Freud notes a few lines later, is equally an important mechanism in schizophrenia; it represents a regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism. (. . .) The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral

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or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it (24950). The identication of the ego with its lost object at the same time empties its libidinal energy: In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself (246). Trapped within this contaminating or haunting condition of emptiness (that is, haunted by an absent object it can never quite devour, become or replace through identication), the objectied ego develops a pathological distortion of self-understanding. The ego becomes the ghostly object of a helpless self-critique, which, however, as Freud notes, is not primarily directed towards the melancholic self, but rather towards the lost object with which the ego identies, thus resentfully revenging him- or herself on the missing object. The complex of melancholia, Freud writes, behaves like an open wound (253), a cannibalistic and schizophrenic revenge which at the same time implies a sadistic satisfaction; The self-tormenting in melancholia, which is without doubt enjoyable, signies, just like the corresponding phenomenon in obsessional neurosis, a satisfaction of trends of sadism and hate which relate to an object, and which have been turned round upon the subjects own self (251). Nourished by a sadistic, revengeful, yet fundamentally self-deluding and impoverishing fantasy of the restored object, the melancholic ego must at the same time prevent, exclude or repress the possibility of the object actually returning, since this return would lead to an uncanny complication, and ultimately destabilization, of the pleasure-giving process of substitution. The melancholic ego would in that case become the ghostly other of its own fantasy. The melancholic fantasy thus to some extent acts as a mechanism of repression or exclusion. From this brief outline, one may draw a connexion between Seshadri-Crookss description of a relentlessly self-scrutinizing discipline haunted by melancholia, and Freuds thoughts on the process of a ghostly, cannibalistic identication, characteristic of the melancholic ego. As I stressed earlier, the discipline of postcolonial studies has always been, and still is, closely tied to literary and aesthetic modes of representativity a relationship, as we saw earlier, of ambivalence. Seshadri-Crooks notes that Unlike other area studies, postcolonial studies has no identiable object (MPS1, 19), which in the Freudian perspective can be seen as both true and untrue at the same time. This is similar to the way in which the melancholic ego sadistically criticizes him- or herself as the other, that is, as the restored object. The amorphousness of postcolonial studies, that which permits it to be

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simultaneously self-critical and oppositional (19), has in itself become a fetish, a displaced libidinal energy, diverting attention from the object which must not be identied, in order to allow the disciplines critical nexus to remain within a process of constant self-correction. The lack of an identiable object, the amorphousness, can thus be seen as constituting postcolonialitys own fetishized object, or, the attempt to restore the lost object within its own discourse, as its own discourse the incommensurable and nonrecuperable (13) dimension of otherness, that which simultaneously constitutes, but rarely is permitted the status as, the literary. The melancholic self-scrutiny of postcolonial studies, the self-correction, the sustained attempt to preserve within itself its object, as its object, may suggest that postcolonial texts have never quite managed to live up to the expectations of postcolonial studies. They are faulty or outmoded relics, waiting to be converted to the radicalism that postcolonial criticism will enunciate on their behalf, revenging the failures that the literary may represent.26 The continued, albeit ambiguous, centrality of literary texts within the eld of postcolonial studies, combined with the issues that Spivak addressed in Death of a Discipline, would, however, seem to suggest that the contemporary melancholia is perhaps rather triggered by the reverse the dawning, melancholic awareness within much postcolonial criticism of its own failure, to never quite have been able to live up to the critical potential that the literary contains, the constitutive site of negative, contingent marginality; that it has never quite been able to replace it, to identify with it, to speak as the literary, despite all the attempts to silence it, to speak for it, to translate it into its own vocabulary. The current melancholia of postcolonial literary criticism is thus an expression of what one may see as the uncanny return of the literary,27 no longer trapped within a narrow, local framework, but as the negative, homeless, borderless and contingent dimension of marginality which Seshadri-Crooks identies as the critical postcolonial margin: Notwithstanding all the legalistic efforts of literary criticism, literature remains, Spivak observes, the singular and unveriable margin.28 Melancholia follows as a consequence of what Seshadri-Crooks sees as the danger of postcolonial studies, being institutionalized academically, gaining power as the authoritative, critical position, or, the position of the Uber-Ich one that denitively eliminates the illusion of identifying an authentic margin, however much it agellates itself critically, that is, somewhat schizophrenically revenges itself

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on its deceitful, distrustful object, the objectless object, which keeps resurrecting itself as otherness, or, as the literary. The literary thus, as I have argued, can be seen as representing an important problematic in postcolonial studies, registering the dialectic of institutional power and excessive self-critique as a process of legitimizing the loss of a margin. It represents a risk, transgressing the discursive boundaries, but also a potential to move beyond the cul-de-sac of cultural incommensurability. NOTES
1 Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks, At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies: Part I in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2000), 323 (3). Hereafter abbreviated as MPS1. The notion of melancholia has been used in a wide range of contexts and disciplines; what is specic about postcolonial melancholia is the elds extensive incorporation of other disciplinary practices and methodologies, as evident in for example Gayatri Spivaks or Homi Bhabhas theoretical discourses. 2 Michael Denning, Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (New York, Verso, 2004), 164. Hereafter abbreviated as CATW. 3 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Grifths and Helen Tifn, The Empire Writes Back (London, Routledge, 2002), 4. Hereafter abbreviated as EWB. 4 Fredric Jameson, Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism, Social Text 15 (1986), 6588 (69). Hereafter abbreviated as TWL. 5 See also Nicholas Brown, Utopian Generations: The Political Horizons of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 2005), 134. 6 Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing Between the Singular and the Specic (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2001), 335. Hereafter abbreviated as AP. 7 Robert Young, Editorial, Interventions 1:1 (1998), 48 (7). 8 Benita Parry, Directions and Dead Ends in Postcolonial Studies, Relocating Postcolonialism, edited by David Theo Goldberg and Ato Quayson (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002), 6681. Hereafter abbreviated as DDE. 9 Franco Moretti, The Spell of Indecision in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke, Macmillan Education, 1988), 33944 (339). 10 Arun P. Mukherjee, Whose Post-Colonialism and Whose Postmodernism?, World Literature Written in English 30:2 (1990), 19 (4). 11 Neil Lazarus, The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism in Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, edited by Ania Loomba et al. (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2005), 42338 (424). Hereafter abbreviated as PPM.

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12 Deepika Bahri, Native Intelligence: Aesthetics, Politics and Postcolonial Literature (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 10. Hereafter abbreviated as NI. One could of course object that Lazarus and Ahmad (and, by implication, my own position) draw a rather homogenized and monolithic picture of the eld of postcolonial studies. This objection is compatible with my overall argument, which however is concentrated around the notion of postcolonial melancholia as a symptom rather than an investigation of the ways in which this symptom is differentiated in particular practices, traditions and contexts. 13 Alison Donnell, She Ties Her Tongue: The Problems of Cultural Paralysis in Postcolonial Criticism, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 26:1 (1995), 10116 (101). 14 Martina Michel, Positioning the Subject: Locating Postcolonial Studies, Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 26:1 (1995), 8399 (85). 15 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York, Columbia University Press, 2003). Hereafter abbreviated as DD. 16 John Brenkman, Extreme Criticism in Whats Left of Theory?, edited by Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (London, Routledge, 2003), 11436 (116). 17 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Salman Rushdie and the Booker of Bookers, Transition 64 (1994), 229 (24). 18 Fawzia Afzal-Khan, At the Margins of Postcolonial Studies: Part 2 in The Pre-Occupation of Postcolonial Studies, edited by Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks and Fawzia Afzal-Khan (Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 2000) 2434 (24). Hereafter abbreviated as MPS2. 19 Jamesons much-criticized notion of the always-already read-dimension of third-world literary texts questions the possibility of a reading beyond ideologically inected habits. He addresses the appearance of belatedness or non-immediacy of the postcolonial novel in the hands of a reader unfamiliar with its contexts of origins. It is the impossibility of any attempt to move beyond this appearance of belatedness that leads Jameson to stress the futility of evaluating this genre through familiar aesthetics categories, since the third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce (TWL, 65). 20 See also Deepika Bahris discussion of the institutional framework of postcolonial studies and Foucaults notion of will to knowledge in NI, 36. 21 Shoshana Felman, Turning the Screw of Interpretation in Literature and Psychoanalysis, edited by Shoshana Felman (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press 1989), 94207 (199). 22 Timothy Brennan argues that many contemporary, cosmopolitan, postcolonial novels give the impression of having been produced precisely with an eye to their postcolonial reception, in Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1997), 425.

Postcolonial Melancholia 81 23 See Derek Attridges The Singularity of Literature (London, Routledge, 2004) for a recent attempt to rethink the singularity and responsiveness of literary otherness as located in-between institutional and receptive codications. See also Nicholas Harrisons edited collection of critical essays discussing notions of the literary in Paragraph 28:2: The Idea of the Literary (2005). 24 See Sigmund Freud, Mourning and Melancholia in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV, 19141916, translated under the General Editorship of James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud, assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson (London, Hogarth Press, 1968), 243258. Hereafter abbreviated as MM. 25 What Freud in his later meta-psychological writings calls introjection. 26 With the obvious exceptions which prove the rule, such as the works of Salman Rushdie or J.M. Coetzee, to name a few of the canonized postcolonial authors, works which speak in tune with the vocabulary of much postcolonial criticism. In so far as one may see the literary as constituting an important component in the identity-construction of the postcolonial perspective, socalled radical texts conrm the radicality of the postcolonial perspective as an original value, an ideal, while so-called conventional texts can be seen as revealing an uncanny difference or incompatibility. 27 For a discussion of the relationship between literature and the uncanny, see Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003) and Robin Lydenberg, Freuds Uncanny Narratives, PMLA 112 (1997), 107286. 28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1999), 175.