AustLit

'It is now widely acknowledged that the field of postcolonial studies has been by and large averse to exploring aesthetic matters save for discussions foregrounding postmodern literary features in postcolonial texts – what Eli Park Sorensen  has famously dismissed as the “modernist ethos” of postcolonial scholarship. While this lack of engagement with aesthetic matters might have much to do with postcolonial studies’ subordination of form to political/historical questions, it also manifests itself through a generalized neglect of generic issues. Specifically, much work in postcolonial literary studies has systematically promoted a single body of cultural products only, namely the novel. Problematically constructing this genre as a “dominant” one in postcolonial literatures, this critical trend hardly does justice to the multiplicity of the field. Moreover, it misrepresents certain literary traditions within which the novel occupies a less central position (see Herbillon in this issue about the centrality of the short story in the Australian literary tradition). Also, postcolonial scholarship’s overemphasis on the novel-as-national-narrative has contributed to marginalizing literary traditions and works by writers who delink their novels from issues of modernity and nation formation (see, for instance, Sarah Brouillette’s 2007 discussion of the reasons behind the neglect of Zulfikar Ghose’s work by postcolonial critics). With regard to a Malaysian context, Philip Holden  remarks that the overabundance of postcolonial scholarship devoted to the novel genre obscures the fact that, in “late colonial and post-independence periods”, the short story is “often a more common means of literary expression” (442). In the Caribbean, the earlier critical consensus that the novel developed in conjunction with nationalist movements and that it has been a dominant genre in the region has been problematized by critics such as Alison Donnell  and Evelyn O’Callaghan who, by broadening the terrain of analysis to pre-1940s Caribbean writings, have highlighted the generic diversity of that corpus – and, what is more, have emphasized the “global” dimension of the early Caribbean novel. (Introduction)