The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

Rating:
Summary: Jargon-ridden and boring
Review: Boring academic jargon at its worst. I have PhD so should be used to this sort of thing, but found it useless. Save your money for a readable book!

Rating:
Summary: Why is Russia excluded?
Review: This is a useful and comprehensive book, and it gives one a good insight into what was being discussed in postcolonial theory at the turn of the millenium. But why is there no mention of Russia in this volume (except for Thomas Macaulay's silly comments)? Russia colonies, while not separated from ethnic Russia by a body of salt water, were and are among the most exploited and least heard from. Russian colonialism is alive and kicking, and the so-called 'second world' (a.k.a. the communist-transformed Russian empire) is still only beginning the process of decolonization. A great many issues discussed in this book (hybridity, re-colonization, nationalism, language, education, history) beg to be applied to the Russian context. If it were not for this omission, I would have given this book five stars. It persuasively argues for the 'right to speak' of nations and territories that have been prevented from doing so by economic greed and desire for dominance originating in first world countries.

Rating:
Summary: A superb (if expensive) college teaching resource
Review: This is one of the best cultural-theoretical "readers" on the marketplace today, and should be indispensable addition to course syllabi for those wanting to teach postcolonial culture. All of the big names are here (Said, Anderson, Spivak, Bhabha, Fanon), and they've been helpfully redacted down to facilitate their accessibility--Spivak's and Bhabha's notoriously pompous and prolix styles have been edited to the point where students can actually discover the important points hidden away in the mire of verbiage.

My only disappointment with this reader is that so much has been included into it that it's price is somewhat steep--I think Ashcroft et. al. could've kept the price down by being a little less inclusive. But this is a terrific resource for anyone who wants to bring postcolonial theory into a class.

Rating:
Summary: an able collection marred by jargon
Review: This large collection of excerpts spans the field and contains writings from authors and theorists dealing with "The Occasion for Speaking" (Lamming), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (Spivak), Colonialist Criticism (Achebe), "Figures of Colonial Resistance" (Sharpe), and other topics in this burgeoning field--or rather, in these fields and their multiple perspectives.

However, some of the essays are so packed with the usual postmodern and post-colonial jargon that they sound alike in both style and turgidity. After a Preface and an Intro full of apologies for the selection itself, we come to sentences like this: "Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alerity, the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity or difference." Or this: "The process of describing the colonized [in Ireland] and inscribing them in the discourse as second-order citizens in comparison with the colonizers commenced with the invocation of the judicial and military power of the State...." Can you tell the difference between these sentences, written by authors of different cultural backgrounds? Me neither.

It would be nice to see a collection in which the authors speak in their own voices without inscribing, discoursing, deconstructing, alerity-ing, or counter-hegemonying themselves--and us--into numbness. The field is really too promising, too important, to leave to yet another jargonized and specialized vocabulary that does the authors' obviously thoughtful experience no justice and some harm.

Rating:
Summary: an able collection marred by jargon
Review: This large collection of excerpts spans the field and contains writings from authors and theorists dealing with "The Occasion for Speaking" (Lamming), "Can the Subaltern Speak?" (Spivak), Colonialist Criticism (Achebe), "Figures of Colonial Resistance" (Sharpe), and other topics in this burgeoning field--or rather, in these fields and their multiple perspectives.

However, some of the essays are so packed with the usual postmodern and post-colonial jargon that they sound alike in both style and turgidity. After a Preface and an Intro full of apologies for the selection itself, we come to sentences like this: "Faced with an incomprehensible and multifaceted alerity, the European theoretically has the option of responding to the Other in terms of identity or difference." Or this: "The process of describing the colonized [in Ireland] and inscribing them in the discourse as second-order citizens in comparison with the colonizers commenced with the invocation of the judicial and military power of the State...." Can you tell the difference between these sentences, written by authors of different cultural backgrounds? Me neither.

It would be nice to see a collection in which the authors speak in their own voices without inscribing, discoursing, deconstructing, alerity-ing, or counter-hegemonying themselves--and us--into numbness. The field is really too promising, too important, to leave to yet another jargonized and specialized vocabulary that does the authors' obviously thoughtful experience no justice and some harm.