Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies Magdalena Pfalzgraf 1 Introduction In this chapter, I will sketch some current points of friction in the study of Anglophone postcolonial literatures. While some are specific to this field, I argue that postcolonial studies shares matters of concern which have been identified with a larger “Crisis in the Humanities” (Perloff 2004) that has defined the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and more precisely, the study of (English) literature. These are, among other things, a crisis of legitimacy, which, as argued in this volume’s introduction, does not solely originate from external factors but also arises from within the field itself. In the case of postcolonial studies, these are very specifically connected to the field’s relation to its moment of origin - literary studies - and its contemporary development and public perception. This chapter is written at a specific point in the field’s history, when postcolonialism is no longer merely an academic field of inquiry unknown and irrelevant outside of the academe, but increasingly discussed as a political force in society, in particular in relation to the surge in antisemitic rhetoric and violence following the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023. Taking this critical moment as a starting point, the present chapter enquires into how, as a subfield of English literary studies, postcolonial studies could become susceptible to and associated with such goals and standpoints. One of the problems identified is that the rather sweeping umbrella term ‘postcolonial’ and the resulting disciplinary uncertainty have enabled a shift in focus from scholarship to worldview, ideology, and activism. The other is the distance to literary studies, which was once the core of postcolonial studies but has been relegated to the background in the course of an increasing ambition to become politically effective. A further concern is the primacy of critique, which is directly related to this dilemma: One of the problems is that for Anglophone literature emerging outside of Europe or North America, the analytical framework is automatically postcolonialism. However, postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 studies is perceived not merely as an academic discipline and mode of inquiry but as inherently intertwined with a political standpoint and agenda. This includes expectations regarding the field’s analytical tools, teaching styles, and political standpoint. Moreover, it comes with expectations on how one approaches and teaches literary texts: namely, always with a primary interest in uncovering - and dismantling - power structures and lingering imperial legacies. In short, we are thoroughly attuned to critique and ‘suspicious reading’. My argument, following on from that, is that much of postcolonial studies’ practice, steeped in deconstruction and ideological critique, enforces a mimetic and utilitarian perspective on ‘textual work’, which includes the neglect of literary reception as aesthetic experience and of the literary text’s poietic potential, not to mention its capacity for expressing universal aspects of the human experience. I also argue that this development has gone even further, to the point where the hermeneutics of suspicion, originally intended as a mode of critical reading applied to the literary text, is now performed by the text itself, and that readers adopt a gesture of alignment and allyship, positioning themselves alongside the text against a common adversary. Building on arguments by Latour (2004), Perloff (2004), and Felski (2015; 2020), and in a post-critique spirit, this chapter identifies a persistent tendency in postcolonial studies to neglect literary studies as well as the positive uses of literature which go beyond its role of interrogating and exposing power structures. Affection, pleasure, and the question of the literary - what makes a literary text different from another form of expression - is too often an overlooked dimension in this field. In following this line of thought I am also aligning myself with Nünning, Nünning, and Scherr (2021), who ask “why literature is still worth bothering with in the 21 st century, and how literary studies could be reconfigured in ways that would enhance its chances of coping with its current legitimation crisis and securing a blossoming future” (4). They join the voices of those who argue that the prevalent mode of critique in the humanities needs to be expanded and “complemented by a problemsolving paradigm as one of the main purposes of research and teaching” (5) to reinvigorate the field’s relevance for a twenty-first century world. The need to put the question of value on the agenda is all the more urgent in the study and teaching of the so-called Postcolonial Literatures in English, where the value of literature and the question why reading literature is important and valuable - what makes literature meaningful - has too long been sidelined in favour of what Felski calls, borrowing from Ricœur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (2015). In our field, literature is frequently seen as a discursive construct ‘like any other’ - that interrogates, critiques, exposes or is complicit with ideologies and power 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 56 Magdalena Pfalzgraf structures from which it emerges. In their “zeal to unmask the hidden ideologies of these and related novels, critics seem to have forgotten what brought them to Ulysses or Heart of Darkness in the first place - namely, the uniqueness of these novels as works of art” (Perloff 2004: 12). 2 A Disciplinary Impasse and the Umbrella-Term Problem: Postcolonial Studies as a Field Locked in Perpetual Crisis Since the 2000s, postcolonial studies has been shaped by two contradictory dynamics. Once a marginal phenomenon and niche interest, it has become one of the core disciplines of English studies, at least in Western Europe and the United States, where hardly any BA program today is without a postcolonial studies component. Furthermore, postcolonial concepts and concerns have proven particularly prone to ‘travelling’ across disciplinary borders and are part of the critical vocabulary beyond English studies and even beyond the humanities. This “amazing institutional success story” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22) is, however, accompanied by internal uncertainty and a sense of discomfort: “From at least the late 2000s onwards, postcolonial studies has moved into a phase of disciplinary revisionism - a wider trend towards introspection, selfreflexivity and self-transformation”, which “can be taken as a sign of uneasiness, discontent or possibly even crisis” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22). Criticism of postcolonial studies from within the field is nothing new, and postcolonialism’s revisionist navel-gazing has arguably become a genre of its own. Few other fields engage in comparable forms of self-critical metadiscourse; in fact, an emphatic distance from ‘the postcolonial’ has almost become good form among those who practice it. In his review of Spivak’s A Critique of Post- Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), Terry Eagleton famously wrote: There must exist somewhere a secret handbook for post-colonial critics, the first rule of which reads: ‘Begin by rejecting the whole notion of post-colonialism.’ It is remarkable how hard it is to find an unabashed enthusiast for the concept among those who promote it. The idea of the post-colonial has taken such a battering from post-colonial theorists that to use the word unreservedly of oneself would be rather like calling oneself Fatso, or confessing to a furtive interest in coprophilia. (1999: n.p.) Eagleton’s diagnosis has continued to resonate throughout the first quarter of the new millennium alongside the consistent intra-field disputes regarding the label’s value: Postcolonialism has been pronounced ‘dead’ and ‘over’ as many times as it has been endorsed; affirmation and reflections of the ‘quo vadis’ and ‘whither, 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 57 1 See e.g. Yaeger’s “The End of Postcolonial Theory? ” (2007) and Young’s famous affirmation of the field’s values and endurance “Postcolonial Remains” (2012). 2 See the following discussions in leading German quality newspapers across the political spectrum: Malinowski S. (2024) ‘Der Holocaust ist überall. Postkolonialer Antisemitismus’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung https: / / www.faz.net/ aktuell/ feuillet on/ debatten/ der-antisemitismus-hat-im-antikolonialismus-geschichte-19428640.html; Nur-Cheema, S. and Mendel, M. (2020) ‘Leerstelle Antisemitismus’, TAZ. https: / / taz.de/ P ostkoloniale-Theoretiker/ ! 5678482/ ; Wertmann, J. (2023). ‘Eine Theorie unter Anklage’. Die Zeit. https: / / www.zeit.de/ kultur/ 2023-11/ postkolonialismus-antisemitismus-gaza -israel-theorie; Heinze, R. (2024). Der Spiegel. ‘Postkolonialismus unter Druck’ ht tps: / / www.spiegel.de/ geschichte/ debatte-um-israel-postkolonialismus-ist-nicht-per-se -antisemitisch-a-bead427a-6c5c-4b2d-a108-26927894edd7. See also Konrad Adenauer Stiftung’s online essay collection: https: / / www.kas.de/ de/ web/ geschichtsbewusst/ post‐ kolonialismus. postcolonial studies’ (or should it be ‘wither’? ) variety have been reliably followed by swansong and resurrection as the “aspiring morticians of the postcolonial” (Young 2012: 19) were assailed by defenders. 1 Perhaps this is simply ‘what we do’. After all, “it seems hard to identify a point in time in which postcolonialism was not, in fact, heavily contested and in some sort of crisis” (Schulze-Engler 2015: 22), and there is perhaps an argument to be made that, in light of the immense heterogeneity of the field, discord and introspection are a consolidating factor. However, as the first quarter of the new millennium is coming to an end, there is new cause for crisis, for which “uneasiness and discontent” mentioned by Schulze-Engler are too weak. While before, our academic disputes and selfreflections, our turf wars and Schulstreits were taking place within the field and did not play any role outside the academe, postcolonial studies are now publicly discussed, and the call for revision is driven by serious external criticism. Since the atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists on Israel, postcolonialism has entered public parlance, and attention has been drawn to connections between antisemitic violence, support for Hamas, and decolonial activism that uses postcolonial thought and critique to justify this. Perhaps postcolonial critique is one of the rare cases where an intellectual tradition and a branch of academic teaching faces a serious legitimisation crisis in the very moment when it gains visibility beyond its scholarly community, when it enters mainstream discourse and is perceived as politically relevant. 2 What is notably different from the previous ‘postcolonial crises’ is that this time, the self-critical metadiscourse and introspection that has characterised the field for so long is absent. To my knowledge, there is no prominent reflection from within the field concerning the responsibility postcolonial studies takes for the recent surges in antidemocratic and radical ideology and violence. The important and uncomfortable questions have instead been asked in feuilleton sections and opinion pages and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 58 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 3 Noteworthy is that in a context where many encourage confronting one’s own implication (see Rothberg 2019) and privileges especially regarding the histories and legacies of colonialism, such reflection is (largely) missing from current (meta)discourse within the field (one example is the ‘check your privilege’ discourse, which insists that individuals should critically examine how they, both on a personal level and as members of an ethnic group, nation, or gender, benefit from enduring colonial injustices and hence sustain them). by scholars from outside the field and critical towards it - Ingo Elbe’s recent Antisemitismus und postkoloniale Theorie: Der »progressive« Angriff auf Israel, Judentum und Holocausterinnerung (2024), for instance, offers an extensive discussion of how postcolonial theory is used in demonisation discourses against Israel, to justify antisemitism, undermine the singularity of the Holocaust, and to equate Zionism with ‘white settler colonialism’ and Western hegemony. For a field so attuned to self-criticism and introspection, this silence is strange. 3 Does this mean that antisemitism, trivialisation of violence and its justification as an act of decolonisation, and even the bizarre portrayal of the Hamas attack as an act of anticolonial resistance - views which have been expressed on our own campuses and by our own students - have nothing to do with postcolonial studies and teaching? I do not think so. I agree with Christoph Hesse that the loud and embarrassed silence following 7 October has been at least partly connected to the fact that “this massacre of Israelis has quickly been proven incompatible with the latest postcolonial master narrative” (2024: 67-68). Referencing Horkheimer and Adorno, he continues, People who otherwise claim the highest level of social sensitivity exhibit an equal degree of ‘bourgeois coldness’ when it comes to Jewish suffering. […] They downplay or deny Jewish suffering and blame the victims in order to redescribe the perpetrators as the true victims. Unperturbed by Hamas officials openly declaring that their goal is to destroy Israel and to rid the entire world (not only the Middle East) of Jews, their sympathetic supporters […] in the West put things the other way round. (2024: 67-68) Does this then mean that our field is morally bankrupt, that downplaying (or even sympathising with) terrorism that frames itself as anti-Western are considered good form for a postcolonial scholar, and that engagement with postcolonial theory inevitably leads to this attitude? Of course not. Wolfgang Stender, who has engaged this question in a highly nuanced manner, comes to the following conclusion: There exists, as the anti-Israeli protests following 7 October 2023 amply demonstrate, antisemitism in the postcolonial-antiracist guise. It continues the ‘honorable antisem‐ itism’ of which Jean Améry spoke with regard to the anti-imperialist left of the 1960s 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 59 4 The German original reads: “Unbestreitbar gibt es, wie die antiisraelischen Proteste nach dem 7. Oktober 2023 zur Genüge zeigen, Antisemitismus im postkolonialantirassistischen Kostüm. Er setzt den ‘ehrbaren Antisemitismus’, von dem Jean Améry mit Blick auf die antiimperialistische Linke der 1960er Jahre sprach, unter den veränderten politischen Bedingungen des 21. Jahrhunderts fort. Judenhass kann eine postkoloniale Form annehmen, aber die postkoloniale Form bringt nicht notwendig den Judenhass hervor” (2024: 479). 5 I am referring in the German context to two prominent postcolonial scholars who shared on their social media profiles, respectively, the slogan “free Palestine from German guilt” and Chicago Black Lives Matter’s pro-Palestinian meme which depicts a parachuting terrorist waving a Palestinian flag and reads “I stand with Palestine”, and hence seems to celebrate the Hamas attack. This scholar defended this Black Lives Matter meme by writing that Black Lives Matter is “a decolonial movement”. Such standpoints and gestures represent a strand within the field that equates postcolonial studies with taking a one-sided stance against Israel and support for the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS)-movement, and that is far more openly vocal outside of Germany. This strand is represented, for instance, by Robin Yassin-Kassab and Claire Chambers, who criticised Amitav Gosh and Margaret Atwood for accepting the Dan David prize at Tel Aviv University (“What has happened to [Amitav Gosh’s] anti-colonial and postcolonial credentials? ”) and lashed out at both novelists in a rather harsh manner: “Of course it would be a mistake to expect writers to attain to higher moral standards or to display more political intelligence than anyone else. […] [W]hen writers who sell books on the basis of their opposition to oppression visit [Israel], the resultant hypocrisy is quite nauseating” (2010: n.p.). under the altered political conditions of the 21st century. Hatred of Jews can take on a postcolonial form, but the postcolonial form does not necessarily produce hatred of Jews. (2024: 479; my translation) 4 Nonetheless, even if one ignores occasional excesses and concedes that they by now means represent postcolonial studies as a whole, 5 I find it impossible not to feel appalled by the fact that the field I have been working in has a gravitational pull for such perspectives and that many postcolonial frameworks have been seamlessly integrated into them and helped their proliferation. How has it come to this, and where do we go from here? The context for the present reflections is, after all, a volume which sets itself the task of charting current trends and concerns in literary and cultural studies, with the gaze directed towards the future: What do we offer twenty-first-century realities, how can we maintain our relevance, and what futures, in turn, can be imagined for our scholarly practice? In the context of this chapter, these questions need to be focussed on English literary studies: What is the value of the postcolonial, both as denomination of a field and as a conceptual frame for the study of Anglophone literatures and cultures? In the following, I aim to examine a few key aspects of why and how postcolonial studies, a discipline originally rooted in literary scholarship, developed in such a way 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 60 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 6 See also Anna Sophia Tabouratzidis’ contribution to this volume, whom I thank for pointing me in this direction. 7 See Pfalzgraf and Teichler 2024: 4-5. 8 At least in Germany, the reasons for this are probably more structural and institutional than conceptual, since departments are usually called “English and American Studies”, reflecting a tradition of treating English/ British and American studies as separate areas within the larger Anglophone philological discipline (in which Irish literature is often covered by the ‘Kernanglistik’). Postcolonial Studies is most often part of Anglistik, and there are very few specialised ‘postcolonial’ chairs. Recently, the division of philological subdisciplines is becoming more difficult, as English is on the rise as a literary language in regions and nations not connected to the British imperial past (see the growing body of Arab literature in English, or the work of the Kurdish writer Kae Bahar). In this context, the recent development of World Anglophone studies as a conceptual and institutional frame is gaining more importance (see Anastasijevic et al. 2024; Malreddy and Schulze-Engler 2024). that it became susceptible to and associated with radical, anti-democratic political positions and forms of activism that have little to do with academic inquiry and scholarship. I borrow the term impasse 6 to examine how the field’s preoccupation with critique has led to a disciplinary and imaginative deadlock. The second part of this chapter introduces the notion of reading for alignment and reading for allyship, which, I argue, represent a further development of the primacy of critique and deconstruction within postcolonial frameworks. Most points of critique of postcolonial studies are probably well-known, 7 so I will focus on two which are directly relevant to this question of future trajectories: One can be described as the umbrella-term problem, while the second concerns the field’s preoccupation with the past. 2.1 Disciplinary Uncertainty and the Umbrella-Term Problem Let us start with the first problem, namely postcolonialism’s disciplinary and conceptual sprawl, which also includes the field’s fragmentation. In regard to what is studied, it has frequently been criticised that postcolonial studies as an umbrella term is too broad, capturing literatures and cultures from India, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the Caribbean and their diasporas. Given the vast disparity of these contexts (and their internal heterogeneities and divisions), it seems increasingly implausible that the shared past of the British Empire should provide a common frame of reference and justify study and teaching under the same umbrella (see also Pfalzgraf and Teichler 2024: 4-5). A discrepancy is also that the literatures of Ireland and the USA are generally not considered postcolonial - but Indigenous Australian, Canadian First Nations, and Native American literatures often are. 8 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 61 The how of research is even more difficult to define. There are a few foundational concepts: hybridity, the Third Space, Orientalism, subalternity, the centre-margin model and the related writing-back paradigm, and, a little less prominently: contrapuntal reading. There are a few names that are easily recognised as postcolonial: Bhabha, Said, Spivak, and, a little less prominently: Young, Huggan, Ashcroft, Tiffin. However, postcolonial studies has produced no Theoriegebäude, no methodology or analytical framework that clearly defines research as postcolonial in the way we can recognise a formalist approach. Instead, the field has borrowed from other theoretical traditions, in particular poststructuralist critique, discourse analysis, and deconstruction (which are so prevalent that they are often identified with postcolonial scholarship). Postcolonial studies is hence a very heterogenous field of academic practitioners who share a critical perspective on the historical intertwinement of colonial power and culture and on imperial legacies and neo-colonial tendencies in the present. Some scholars see this disciplinary indeterminacy as a root cause for the protracted period of self-doubt and unease in the twenty-first century: One of the reasons for the discontent and disenchantment that seem to surface in so many current self-reflexive postcolonial debates arguably lies in the fact that postcolonialism today means too many things to too many people and that there is little agreement on what the ‘postcolonial’ actually stands for. While some people believe that postcolonialism is primarily a mode of reading texts or discourse analysis, others think that it is about the study of a so-called postcolonial world, while yet others are convinced that it is (or ought to be) a form of political activism. (Schulze- Engler 2015: 20) Can this conceptual openness also be a strength? Perhaps the lack of consensus of what we should teach and study under the label ‘postcolonial’ and how we do it is not a problem, and the intuitive understanding of what makes scholarship postcolonial should not be dismissed. In The Event of Literature (2012), Terry Eagleton considers Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances in his approach to the question of what is literature: A “tangled web of affinities” (2012: 20) rather than a fixed set of shared features allows us to identify people as members of a family - and pieces of writing as literature. It may be difficult to pinpoint to definite features as necessary conditions, but we know what literature is - and we know what postcolonialism is - when we see it. Here, “indeterminacy” is not “where things come unstuck”, but “what makes things work” (Eagleton 2012: 29). Eagleton formulates an intriguing and mobilising idea: “Is a field without an exact boundary not a field at all? And isn’t conceptual fuzziness sometimes exactly what we require? ” (2012: 29). Just 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 62 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 9 McLeod, for instance, points to the enabling and mobilising potential of this openness: “There is no singular postcolonialism. But […] ‘postcolonialism’ can be articulated in different ways as an enabling concept”, that can “help us with our beginnings” (2000: 2-3). as there is no “exact definition of literature” (32), there is no exact definition for the postcolonial - and this is very likely a main reason for the success and firm institutional anchoring of postcolonial critique and its easy ‘travelling’ across disciplinary boundaries mentioned earlier in this chapter. 9 However, as Eagleton also insists, family resemblance means the opposite of opening the gates to the arbitrary and all-encompassing: “Anything-goes-ism” is “objectionable” (33). While the immense adaptability of ‘the postcolonial’ and the field’s heterogeneity are a strength which allow the encompassing of a wide range of research under its umbrella, we are perhaps at a point of ‘anythinggoes-ism’, where lack of disciplinary clarity and the intuitive understanding becomes a problem. The academic field has been expanded so extensively as to include ecocriticism, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, critical race theory, the critique of global capitalism. Increasingly, ‘postcolonial’ is equated with decolonial approaches and decolonisation - not as historical development, but as a conceptual perspective and political activism in the present. This lack of a sharply defined intellectual enquiry, and the dilution of concepts and goals has opened the door wide to a weight shift from scholarship to worldview, from a pursuit of knowledge toward ideology and activism. This goes hand in glove with a vague and lazy anti-Westernism, an ahistorical idealisation of anticolonial resistance movements, trivialisation and even glorification of acts of alleged ‘anti-colonial’ violence, as well as partisan thinking and antiintellectualism. “What did y’all think decolonization meant? ” tweeted Najma Sharif on 7 October, “Vibes? Papers? Essays? Losers”. 2.2 How Postcolonial Studies Lost Poetics: A Shift from Literary Studies to the Primacy of Critique A further development relevant in this situation is that the field has moved further away from one where (Anglophone) literature occupies the central place to one where a critical perspective has gained primacy. Roughly speaking, the disciplinary concern and self-understanding has shifted from the object of study (postcolonial literature) to the perspective (postcolonialism as a critical framework). It is not the case, of course, that literary studies no longer matters, but English-language literature is no longer the central and primary focus of a field which has become so diversified. This is remarkable, since it was really 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 63 10 This doyen academic outlet has recently been renamed Literature, Critique, and Empire Today. Among the reasons given for the change of title is “in keeping with the liberal humanist tradition in which it was anchored, Commonwealth literary studies read for shared, so-called universal experiences rather than for inequality, cultural difference, and the violence of colonial extractivism. We see in Literature, Critique, and Empire Today an occasion for the journal to reaffirm its commitment to the study of literature’s ability to shape, recast, and negotiate the complexities of imperial and postimperial imaginaries” (https: / / journals.sagepub.com/ home/ jcl). literature, more specifically, the interest in the study of Anglophone literature, that stood at the beginning of the field’s formation. The historical root of postcolonial studies is, of course, the expansion of the English language under imperialism and the emergence of Anglophone literature in (former) colonies. A genealogy of postcolonial studies hence always has the Empire as a starting point and usually names two predecessors of the field: 1) the study of ‘Commonwealth literature’ and 2) the analysis or critique of colonial discourse (see also McLeod 2000). Commonwealth literature emerged in the 1950s as a term used by scholars for Anglophone writing emerging from the newly independent countries that formerly belonged to the British Empire and were part of what is now the Commonwealth of Nations. It flourished as a field of enquiry amid the wave of decolonisation in the mid-twentieth century (the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, for instance, was founded in 1966). 10 Characteristic to this early field was a scholarly perspective heavily indebted to the values of liberal humanism and universalism. Critics treated these ‘new English literatures’ as part of English literature, assuming that they “dealt fundamentally with the same preoccupations with the human condition as did Jane Austen or George Eliot” (McLeod 2000: 15). They were hence interested in the literal “common wealth” (McLeod 2000: 14, original emphasis) these younger texts shared with the traditional English canon: Many critics were primarily preoccupied with identifying a common goal shared among writers from many different nations that went beyond more ‘local’ affairs. Just as the idea of a Commonwealth of Nations suggested a diverse community with a common set of concerns, Commonwealth literature - whether produced in India, Australia or the Caribbean - was assumed to reach across national borders and deal with universal concerns. Commonwealth literature certainly dealt with national and cultural issues, but the best writing possessed the mysterious power to transcend them too. (McLeod 2000: 13) It is no surprise that ‘Commonwealth literature’ has been accused of being Eurocentric and is often seen today with some embarrassment “as a somewhat antediluvian phase of academic activity characterized by political naivety and 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 64 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 11 Some of the field’s early confusions appear driven by a zeal for bureaucratic precision and seem mildly amusing today: “In its early years, ‘Commonwealth literature’ was quite literally equated with the literature of the member countries of the Common‐ wealth, which soon produced acute embarrassments - for example, when South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1961 (or Pakistan in 1972), and prompted The Journal of Commonwealth Literature to add an “Appendix” to its annual regional bibliographies” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 5). theoretical unsophistication” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 4). 11 However, these early scholars deserve the utmost credit for taking the idea of universalism seriously and opening departments, curricula, and scholarship up to newer and emergent literatures in English, which they saw as equally valuable and important as the established canon. Their approach to these texts was also less characterised by crude Eurocentrism and superiority than they are accused of today. Schulze- Engler reminds us of some of the merits of this founding period of our field, arguing that “the practice of ‘Commonwealth literature studies’ often rested on a genuine interest in newly emerging life-worlds that had come into existence in the aftermath of colonialism and in the role of English-language literatures in exploring” them. He also stresses the “principle of dialogicity” guiding intense exchange between academics and writers “who often shared an acute sense of critical participation in momentous literary, cultural, and social changes in an increasingly globalized world” (Schulze-Engler 2012: 4-5). The second pillar on which postcolonial studies rests is the analysis and theory of colonial discourse, i.e. the critique of how imperialist ideology shaped Western scholarship, literature, art, culture, and how colonialism as a concrete practice of taking control of people, territory, and resources also involved colonising the minds of the subjects. Of particular interest were the ways in which literary “representation and modes of perception” (McLeod 2000: 17) have been used as means of oppression. Those who pioneered this interest, in particular Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, brought poststructuralist modes of critique to the study of Anglophone literature, did away with some of the more naïve celebratory gestures of Commonwealth literature, and questioned the practice of reading new English-language writing through the lens of the English canon. While Commonwealth literature studies had been seen as unpolitical, the focus was now directed to a literary text’s political implications and (inadvertent) complicities with reigning and past imperial ideologies. Critique, deconstruction, and discourse analysis emerged as central methods and paradigms. The zeal to interrogate power structures also allowed scholars to extend the scope to older canonical English texts, revealing how imperial ideology and the colonial experiences constitute an 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 65 easily overlooked but important presence. These scholars sounded in the transition from Commonwealth literature to postcolonial studies, which came to full fruition in the 1980s and largely relegated the other predecessor of the field to obscurity: Note how the scholars mentioned above have achieved celebrity status beyond English studies and are probably known to most firstyear students. It is much more difficult to name one influential ‘Commonwealth literature’ scholar. I conclude this section by pointing to selected voices which illustrate the shift from English-language literature as the central focus of postcolonial studies to a more conceptual approach where critique and political outlook come to play an increasingly dominant role. In their famous study The Empire Writes Back (1989), Ashcroft et al. use the term post-colonial to cover all cultures affected by British imperialism; their interest was very specifically in literatures in English that emerged of these places and cultures, and in the question of what these writers did with English: We use the term ‘post-colonial’ […] to cover all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. […] So the literatures of African countries, Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Caribbean countries, India, Malaysia, Malta, New Zealand, Pakistan, Singapore, South Pacific Island countries, and Sri Lanka are all post-colonial literatures. The literature of the USA should also be placed in this category. Perhaps because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized. But its relationship with the metropolitan centre as it evolved over the last two centuries has been paradigmatic for post-colonial literatures everywhere. ([1989] 1991: 2) For Ashcroft et al. the term ‘post-colonial’ does not simply denote a class or canon of literatures, they also use it to describe a particular type of perspective taken by both the literary works and the critic: These literatures are defined by their shared experience of British colonisation and by their assertion of difference to the former colonial power, captured by the famous and enduring centre-margin model and the related writing-back paradigm: What each of these literatures has in common beyond their special and distinctive regional characteristics is that they emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumption of the imperial centre. It is this which makes them distinctively post-colonial. ([1989] 1991: 2) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 66 Magdalena Pfalzgraf The notion of critique is central to the concept of ‘post-colonial’ as defined by Ashcroft et al. Nonetheless, the English language and literature are still the foundation from which they develop their notion of ‘post-colonial’. Robert Young, by contrast, is exemplary for a disciplinary strand that accentuates acti‐ vism. According to Young, the aim of postcolonial scholarship is to interrogate histories of oppression in order to help us understand and - fight - present inequalities: ‘Postcolonialism’ is not just a disciplinary field, nor is it a theory which has or has not come to an end. Rather, its objectives have always involved a wide-ranging political project - to reconstruct Western formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below. The postcolonial has always been concerned with interrogating the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice, with addressing the fact that, and the reasons why, millions of people in this world still live without things that most of those in the West take for granted. Clean water, for example. (2012: 20) ‘Postcolonial’ is here completely disjointed from literature and the role of English as a global medium of literary expression. ‘Postcolonial’ thus ceases to be connected to literary studies and becomes primarily a political term, directed at social realities with the intent of changing them. Thus, it is made at once more precise - as it is turned into a political project and given a clear agenda - and more arbitrary, as it is stretched to include any form of inequality and injustice in the contemporary world. The inevitable effect is that the concerns of literature and philology pale and seem trivial compared to such lofty goals. This very broad understanding, in which the postcolonial is primarily a critical perspective, a political standpoint, and activist agenda has prevailed and become dominant. Note how, for instance, Bartels et al. propose a similarly comprehensive understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as ‘moving against and beyond’ Eurocentric ways of seeing the world. Here, ‘postcolonial’ is a political attitude and an epistemological framework, with ‘post’ meaning ‘beyond’ colonialism and a colonial perception: In our reading, the ‘post’ in postcolonial marks a critical perspective and forms of ideological positioning which are ‘post’ colonial, by way of challenging, critiquing, refracting, subverting, or offering alternatives to colonial trajectories of ordering the world. In simplified terms, postcolonial literatures ‘move beyond’ a Eurocentric perspective on the planet shaped by colonialism and its legacies. (2019: 2-3) There are strengths to this viewpoint: It allows Bartles et al. to include older texts such as Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789) into a postcolonial 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 67 framework although it precedes the end of the British Empire by two centuries. But their approach also has a double bind, as it is based on the idea of a bifurcated world. According to their reasoning, there are only two perspectives: a postcolonial one and a colonial or Eurocentric one. Hence, everything that is not postcolonial is automatically colonial. This also implies that literatures and other forms of cultural expression from former colonies always share an anti-colonial, anti-Western, non-Eurocentric outlook, which is, of course, not the case. 2.3 Locked in Critique and Imagining the Future: Postcolonialism’s Disciplinary Chronotope It was, of course, important to shift the focus to power structures and critically analyse the role of language and literature in the construction of Empire and its discourses. However, this focus became so successful that it has ultimately rendered marginal all other views on literature. It ushered in what Felski (2015) called, with reference to Ricoeur, the “hermeneutics of suspicion” as the prevalent mode of reading literature. Felski sees the arts and humanities in general as suffering from this spirit. However, critique and suspicious reading are particularly dominant in postcolonial studies, where the “postcolonial scholar” becomes a “sleuth” who is “intent on excavating the anxieties of empire” (2015: 99), and where often “‘criticality’ is hailed as the sole metric of literary value” (2015: 16). The centrality of critique in postcolonial studies has also led to the devalua‐ tion of our core practice as literary scholars - “poetics” (Perloff 2004: 5) - and of literature itself. Perloff, anticipating Felski’s intervention by more than ten years, argued that the politicised and critical humanities take the literary text to “be no different in kind from other social or cultural practices” and discuss it primarily “for its political role, its exposure of the state of a given society” (Perloff 2004: 9). In this climate, “formalism becomes a dirty word, a smokescreen for ignoring the ideology and political ethos of a given work” (2004: 9). What has taken hold is a surprisingly mimetic perspective and a utilitarian understanding of ‘textual work’, which led to the neglect of literary reception as aesthetic experience and of the literary text’s poietic potential, not to mention its capacity for expressing universal aspects of the human experience. This has consequences for the contemporary legitimation crisis discussed in this volume’s introduction. The prevalent postcolonial view on literature can unin‐ tentionally pour water onto the mill of the current threat to arts and humanities under an academic neoliberal regime of utility (‘Ist das Literatur? Das kann 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 68 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 12 For a discussion of the notion of impasse, see also Anna Tabouratzidis’ contribution to this volume. weg.’). Perloff has, twenty years back, alerted scholars of the consequences of this practice: It is, I would argue, the contemporary fear of the pleasures of representation and recognition - the pleasures of the fictive, the what might happen - and its subordi‐ nation to the what has happened - the historical/ cultural - that has trivialized the status of literary study in the contemporary academy and shrunk the corresponding departments. Indeed, the neo-Puritan notion that literature and the other arts must be somehow “useful,” and only useful, that the Ciceronian triad - docere, movere, delectare - should renounce its third element (“delight”) and even the original meaning of its second element, so that to move means only to move readers to some kind of specific action, has produced a climate in which it has become increasingly difficult to justify the study of English or Comparative Literature at all. (2004: 17) Within postcolonial studies, this state of being locked in critique results in what could be termed ‘postcolonialism’s disciplinary chronotope’: a sense of impasse which concerns the imagination and disciplinary identity and has a temporal dimension. 12 It affects the core of the field’s logic and its vision of the future. If postcolonial studies sees its role primarily as outside of literary studies, and even outside of the ‘ivory tower’, then it faces a challenge when it comes to imagining its own value in the future. The field’s political ambition is steeped in a rhetoric of liberation which refers back to the colonial past and its enduring effects in the present. This backward-looking orientation means that postcolonial thought often frames the present as a continuation of colonial structures. There is hence a marked circularity inherent to many postcolonial approaches, in particular where they link with decolonial approaches and appear as radical critique of lingering legacies of colonialism and set on dismantling them. There is a fixation on the colonial moment both as the field’s point of departure and its raison d’être, which results in an ongoing preoccupation with the colonial past, locking former coloniser and colonised in opposition. The idea of a world and future after colonialism is postcolonialism’s declared goal, but remains deferred. Hanna Teichler and I identify this as the “central paradox” (2024: 4) of postcolonialism’s politico-cultural programme: Postcolonialism’s political agenda aims at a decentred view of literature, politics, art; however, these cornerstones of postcolonial criticism are built on the belief that the West still constitutes the centre against which the postcolonial periphery defines itself. (Teichler and Pfalzgraf 2024: 4-5) 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 69 This is perhaps not just a central paradox, but an existential dilemma for postcolonial scholars: When the goals of this literary policy have been achieved, the field will have made itself superfluous. In other words, if we see our intel‐ lectual contribution and conceptual value primarily in exposing and dismantling colonial legacies, achieving decolonisation will also mean laying the axe on our own field’s foundation. And if we treat literature as texts like any other, when we treat the notion of the literary as inconsequential because “the only real justification for literary study is the concession that poems and novels can do ‘cultural work’” (Perloff 2004: 9) - and political work - then as scholars of literature, we risk making ourselves also superfluous. 3 From the Hermeneutics of Suspicion to Reading for Alignment and Allyship Felski (2015; 2020) has repeatedly argued that the hegemony of critique has narrowed literary scholars’ affective modes (2015: 3), has created a dogma of ‘againstness’ (2015: 129; 198), and, if stripped of its spirited language and purportedly high-minded goals, is simply small-hearted and mean. When we scholars become inspectors and sleuths, she argues, we are largely passing negative judgement and are all too adept at documenting the insufficiencies of meanings, values, and norms; like tenacious bloodhounds, we sniff out coercion, collusion, or exclusion at every turn. The result can be a regrettable arrogance of intellect, where the smartest thing you can do is to see through the deep-seated convictions and heartfelt attachments of others. (2015: 16-17) Felski echoes a sentiment central to Bruno Latour’s famous intervention (2004), which seems as valid today as it was twenty years ago: “What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their useful‐ ness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique? ” (229-230). To Latour’s diagnosis that ‘critique has run out of steam’, she adds a further concern, namely that critique has become lazy and boring because literature itself has long picked up on the critical spirit. While earlier postcolonial scholars needed to dig deep to unearth a text’s buried power structures or colonial entanglements (think of Said’s counterpuntal reading of canonical novels, or Eagleton’s famous reading of Heathcliff as Irish), us contemporary postcolonial scholars can simply skim these notions off the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 70 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 13 In his essay from 2004, Latour formulates this concern: “Or maybe it is that critique has been miniaturized like computers have. I have always fancied that what took great effort, occupied huge rooms, cost a lot of sweat and money, for people like Nietzsche and Benjamin, can be had for nothing, much like the supercomputers of the 1950s, which used to fill large halls and expend a vast amount of electricity and heat, but now are accessible for a dime and no bigger than a fingernail” (230). 14 A transcript of her text, from which I am taking these quotes, is available at: https: / / sing jupost.com/ danger-single-story-chimamanda-adichie-transcript/ (Accessed: 19 August 2024). text’s surface with our metaphorical critical ladle. 13 Hence, we do “not need to be suspicious of the text […] because it [is] already doing the work of suspicion for us. Critic and work [are] bound together in an alliance of mutual mistrust” (Felski 2015: 16). By now, the postcolonial penchant for critique has turned into a reading practice that I call reading for alignment, and in its more extreme forms: reading for allyship. This text-reader relationship subsumes the grievances expressed above: an expectation that literature should do cultural work and serve a political purpose, an expectation of mimetic representation of extratextual realities and identities, as well as an offer of alignment. It is also often expected that the text take a definitive political and moral position and identify an opposition, so that the reader can join the text in its metaphorical trench and face the common adversary. And, in the Western academe, this mechanism works well by appealing to the readership’s belief in their own complicity or even identity with the adversary and by eliciting feelings of guilt and shame (‘Check your privilege! ’). In the following, I would like to turn to two examples by way of illustration: “The Danger of A Single Story” (2009), a TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and the play AlterNatives (2000[1999]) by Drew Hayden Taylor. Adichie’s much-circulated TED Talk, in which she considers the danger of stereotypes (‘single stories’) and the role of literature in perpetuating or dismantling them, includes a personal story. A child-prodigy of sorts, she recalls having written stories at the age of seven, which reflected her reading fare: “And what I read were British and American children’s books” (n.p.). She does not mention authors or titles but describes the selection of children’s literature she was exposed to as a narrow one, which, in turn, limited her range of expression and imagination: “I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed. They played in the snow. They ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out” (2009: n.p.). 14 This anecdote is amusing and related in an ironic tone and with a smile. Yet, Adichie’s smile is really a raised eyebrow, and her talk is a stern rebuke, for she quickly makes it clear that her concern is no light matter: 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 71 15 Adichie touches on a central concern of contemporary discourse on literature, not just so-called postcolonial literature, and not just children’s literature: that what we read is potentially harmful and dangerous, and that readers are impressionable, vulnerable absorbers of literature, wide-eyed and defenceless at the authority of the text. There is certainly the message that reading can be harmful, unless stories feature characters who look and live exactly how and where their readers do. In How to Read Literature, Eagleton devotes a chapter to the question of value and puts under scrutiny the claim “that the finest poems, plays and novels are those which recreate the world around us with incomparable truth and immediacy” (2013: 181). It takes no more than a small exercise in witty rhetoric to reveal how dubious this notion is: “On this theory, the only good literary texts are realist ones. Everything from the Odyssey and the Gothic novel to expressionist drama and science fiction would have to be written off as inferior. Lifelikeness, however, is a ridiculously inadequate yardstick for measuring literary value. Shakespeare’s Cordelia, Milton’s Satan and Dickens’s Fagin are fascinating precisely because we are unlikely to encounter them in Walmart’s” (2013: 181). He further reminds us that realist and realistic are not the same thing, just as being true to life does not necessarily mean being true to everyday appearances (2013: 182); a literary text may faithfully represent a familiar world without convincing us or enabling us to suspend our disbelief, whereas we can recognise a sense of self and shared humanity in texts depicting worlds far removed from what we personally know. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. (2009: n.p.) It was only when she discovered literature by Nigerians such as Chinua Achebe, but also by other African writers, that her horizons broadened and she felt invited to recognise herself in and identify with the protagonists and the stories she read: I realized that people like me, girls with skin the colour of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. (2009: n.p.) 15 I am not disputing the validity of Adichie’s concern, argument, or personal experience. Her view on literature, however, is exemplary for a postcolonial one which sees literature primarily as an instrument that can be used for good or for ill: “Stories matter. […] Stories have been used to dispossess and to 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 72 Magdalena Pfalzgraf malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity” (n.p.), and which, furthermore, is focussed on literature’s mimetic function. It also exemplifies an approach grounded in moral admonition, yet one which is primarily directed at an audience already sympathetic to the message and does not need to be convinced - after all, who else would choose to watch this TED Talk? It is Adichie’s programmatic aim to speak and write against the dangers of a single story: Being gullible to a single story leads to Othering, so the argument: “the problem with stereotypes is not that they are not true”, she argues, but that “they are not the only story” (n.p.). However, her argument only works by building another single story, one in which the audience can both recognise themselves and align themselves against in allyship with Adichie. Adichie first self-critically recalls how she had once believed in a single story and, as a result, harboured prejudice against her family’s ‘houseboy’ and his family. She then goes on to describe her arrival at an American campus, when her roommate “was shocked” (n.p.) by her: She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my ‘tribal music,’ and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. [Laughter] She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her, in any way. No possibility of feelings more complex than pity. No possibility of a connection as human equals. (n.p.) We do not know whether this actually happened or whether it is fictional. Yet, as a story, it is true enough, for the type this roommate represents is real and endures as a stereotype (and single story) of the gullible, bigoted Westerner. We never learn what became of the roommate, as she has served her purpose in Adichie’s story. Her identity, her national, ethnic, regional, or class background are not revealed by Adichie, but these aspects do not matter, for she appears vividly before our eyes, and we have all met her before, in different texts and stories. In Adichie’s anecdote, she is most probably a white, middle-class American girl, possibly suburban, mid- Western, complete with all the ignorance and prejudice these girls come with, and who is now confronted with her own ethnocentric biases by the Nigerian author- 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 73 to-be, who, in postcolonial fashion, turns the tables on existing power structures and writes back to the presumed centre occupied by this girl. Audiences to this TED Talk are invited to see themselves in this girl, to feel exposed, and if this anecdote is drawing laughter, it is laughter to create distance, for who would want to be associated with such as stupid girl? If we speculate for a moment about this girl’s future, we can imagine a range of stereotypes and single stories that fit well into the scene set by Adichie. Perhaps the roommate has grown up to become a so-called ‘Karen’, a social media stock type seen as bigoted, entitled, often racist and hence shamed by more enlightened users. Or we might have encountered her in one of the texts we read in a postcolonial seminar at university, for instance, in the character of Colleen Birk in Drew Hayden Taylor’s play alterNatives, a humorous Kammerspiel about identity, authenticity, cultural appropriation, genre, and the (im)possibility of friendship and love between white and First Nations Canadians (at least on equal terms). Colleen is a well-meaning but ultimately patronising English professor in a Canadian liberal arts university who specialises in First Nations literatures and cultures. Colleen is Jewish, middle class, and attempts to include more Canadian indigenous writing into the syllabus and makes an effort at learning an indigenous language (Ojibwe). Her limitations are soon exposed, however: She dates Angel, a young, aspiring writer with a First Nations background who wishes to write science fiction. Claiming that she is concerned about Angel’s professional future and wants “him to be taken seriously by the literary establishment” (66), she denigrates his genre of choice, thereby revealing not only her ethnocentric bias but also her professional shortcomings: A literature professor who dismisses science fiction, after all, lays open her elitism and outdated and incomplete understanding of literature, which reflects poorly on her literary knowledge and expertise: What a waste. […] It’s like writing comic books. […] Write about the Native commun‐ ity. […] You could create the great Canadian aboriginal novel, but instead you want to squander it away on this silly genre [science fiction]. […]. You can be a window through which the rest of Canada can see your community. (66) She is duly assailed by the other First Nations Canadians: “[L]et him write what the fuck he wants. I didn’t realize you were the literary police”, says one character. The other joins in: “So you, as a white university Native Lit professor, want our Angel, a Native writer to write specifically about Native people and the Native community. Sounds a bit like ghettoizing. Do you think Jewish people should only write about Jewish things? ” (67). 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 74 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 16 See: https: / / www.drewhaydentaylor.com/ book/ alternatives/ , last accessed 06.02.2025. On Drew Hayden Taylor’s website, we read: Like all of Drew Hayden Taylor’s work, alterNatives manages to say things about ‘Whites and Indians’ that one is not supposed to talk about - it digs up the carefully buried, raw and pulsing nerve-endings of the unspeakable and exposes them to the hot bright lights of the stage. That he does so with a humour that the politically correct among his audiences continue to miss entirely beneath the sound and fury of their own self-righteous indignation is a measure of his immense talent as a dramatist. 16 The play contains hilarious moments, but it does not teach the implied audience anything they did not know before. It spells out the very basics of postcolonial critique taught in lecture halls and casts the catechism of critique into the drama form. It confirms what the critically minded want to hear and see, replacing one stereotype with another: The white college professor who denies science fiction its value as a genre is found out, reprimanded, and revealed as deluded in the play’s anagnorisis moment. Her attempt at mastering Ojibwe and at acquiring expertise in First Nations literature are portrayed as patronising and shallow, and duly deconstructed. Like Adichie’s roommate, she can only be exposed and ridiculed, but she can never learn. The play offers alignment to those already convinced of the message, it invites the allyship of those who are interested in the critical discourses it presents. Contrary to what the webpage suggests, there is no message or humour to be missed but, on the contrary, it is all spelled out. The humour of this play is entirely meant for the politically correct audienceas-allies, and very possibly shared. To the hermeneutics of suspicion comes the burning slap of shame. Adichie’s talk starts with the promise to add and expand, to shed light on multipolarities of complex realities, and on the power of stories to bring them to attention and together. But what she delivers is also a story of lack, where the failure to look beyond a single story can only be cured by adding another single story, where it cannot be overcome but only exposed, and where the only chance of overcoming it is by replacing one single story with another, which is built on shame: ‘There! ’. Value is created in making the Other look stupid and exposing their limitations. In many interventions of this kind there is a keenness to call out, to shame, a structural causticism that evokes Felski’s lament of the “regrettable arrogance of intellect” caused by the pervasive “mentality of critique” (2015: 16-17). Eagleton’s critique of Spivak in 1999 echoes: “Nothing is more voguish in guilt-ridden US academia than to point to the inevitable bad faith of 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 Critique, Suspicion, and Reading for Allyship in Postcolonial Studies 75 one’s position. It is the nearest a Post-Modernist can come to authenticity” (n.p.) - and here, the ‘post’ in postmodern really is the ‘post’ in postcolonial. A sense of exhaustion sets in: Twenty-six years on, is this really why we should read postcolonial literature, or any literature at all? 4 Conclusion Of course, it is not. I am convinced that there is not a single first-year student who takes up a course in English literature with the aim of dismantling the world’s injustices, to ‘refashion it from below’, turn the tables on the powersthat-be, liberate the wretched of the earth by … studying literature. This is meant less cynically than it may come across, for I am convinced that most scholars first decided on their path out of a sentiment and experience that I would rate much higher: that of love. Love of the literary text as a piece of art, love of reading as a unique aesthetic experience, love of language as a creative force, fascination with the endless possibilities of the human imagination and the boundless storyworlds it allows us to create. And then, on the journey from the first postcolonial seminar to scholarly career planning, the spirit of critique takes over. In light of contemporary global political and environmental threats, scholars might sometimes feel, as my co-editors and I write in the introduction, that they are fiddling while Rome burns. Or while the planet burns. The urge to prove that what we do has immediate political relevance is hence somehow understandable, but it is a choice that will lead to eroding our relevance, not strengthening it, and it is built on shaky grounds: “the question of the larger political payoff of critique is posed, if anything, even more poignantly in literary studies, where it is often far from evident how a postcolonial reading of Jane Austen published in an undersubscribed academic journal has much bearing on the global struggles to which it alludes” (Felski 2015: 143). So what are we to do with the ‘postcolonial’ label and its value for the study of English literatures and cultures in the future? Simply dropping it is not an option. As Eagleton insinuates (1999, n.p.), proclaiming one’s distance to ‘postcolonialism’ is no way out, as this gesture, ironically, doubles as a Postcolonial-Membership-ID. Furthermore, it is simply a fact that, by now, the field has become institutionalised under this denomination. But what if we do not look for new turns and directions, but return to some of the skills that are already there, that have been discredited and partly forgotten? I argue that the way out of our circular chronotope might lie in looking towards the past and rediscover and weld into our practice some of the 10.24053/ REAL-2024-0003 76 Magdalena Pfalzgraf 17 Díaz ends The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by performing a subtle intertextual nod to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the famous “the horror! ”-exclamation, thereby writing back to a foundational text of Empire and a canonised work of English literature in order to deconstruct … Ah! There we go again! notions guiding the early phase of our field. Not discard politics altogether, but place more emphasis on the aesthetic, and most importantly, centre poetics. As postcolonial scholars, perhaps turning to literature might be our saving grace, because after picking up the spirit of critique, there are also postcolonial literary texts that appear to be tired of this gesture and critique critique - for instance, Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, which seems to contain deliberate expressions of exasperation with postcolonial guilt, as when the Nigerian protagonist observes that “Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish” (2014: 65), or when a Nigerian character, a novelist who writes about romance in Paris is overlooked by African literature prize committees and African colleagues because he refuses to write “the same postcolonial crap the rest of them write” and loses patience with their “inane discussion” about “being marginalized and pigeonholed” (47). As postcolonial scholars, it is time to remember that we are philologists. We are one of two disciplines that carry the word ‘love’ in their denomination. 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