NEVER THE TWAIN SHALL MEET? AMBIVALENCE, PEDAGOGY, AND THE POSTCOLONIAL CANON

Abstract

This paper argues that the East–West dichotomy which Kipling's ballad made proverbial is untenable not only as a description of the postcolonial present but as a description of colonial writing itself. Reading Forster's A Passage to India, Kipling's Kim, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy, Adichie's Americanah, and Chaudhuri's The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, it contends that the curricular division between a "Literature of Empire" and a "Literature of the Empire Writing Back" is a convenience of syllabus design that the texts themselves repeatedly embarrass. The argument proceeds by way of a qualified critique of Edward Said and Gauri Viswanathan, whose accounts of colonial discourse and colonial pedagogy are insufficiently attentive both to the ambivalence internal to imperial writing and to the interpretive agency of the colonised reader. Homi Bhabha's vocabulary of mimicry and hybridity is offered as a corrective, itself qualified by the materialist objections of Aijaz Ahmad and Benita Parry. The essay closes by asking what a postcolonial English department, having relinquished the binary, would in practice teach.