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Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon.
Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon, ed. Deborah L. Madsen. London: Pluto, 1999. vii + 237 pp. ISBN 0-7453-1510-0.
In his contribution--"Including America"--to a special issue of Ariel: A Review of International English Literature on postcolonial studies/scholarship (vol. 26, no. 1), Peter Hulme urges the inclusion of America in a field that has thus far restricted itself to "some clear geo-cultural reference point"--Africa, Asia, and, to some extent, the Caribbean (117-18). Post-Colonial Literatures urges something similar, though its understanding of what constitutes postcolonial and how America might be made to figure within it is much different from Hulme's. In her introduction, "Beyond the Commonwealth: Post-Colonialism and American Literature," Deborah Madsen remarks on the "privileged texts and [...] national and regional literatures" (her list, more extensive than Hulme's, includes Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) that comprise "the post-colonial canon" from which America (actually the United States) is excluded, which, exclusion, then, Post-Colonial Literatures seeks to redress (1). Unlike Hulme who views "post-colonial" as a "useful word" that "refers to the process of disengagement from the colonial syndrome, which takes many forms and probably is inescapable for all those whose worlds have been marked by that set of phenomena" (120), Madsen confines the usefulness of the term "post-colonial" to "the ethnic literatures of the United States." In so doing, she confines its deployment in the case of America to comparisons that can be drawn (based on their putative "colonized" status) between "writers of colour, publishing in America" and "post-colonial writers of Africa and the Caribbean, and indigenous post-colonial writers of Canada and Australia and New Zealand" as they negotiate "the problems of marginalization and cultural erasure" in dominant (white?) society (5).
Madsen remarks that she has organized the collection such that the "post-colonial literatures of North America" ...
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