Postcolonizing the Commonwealth: Studies in Literature and Culture

Thomas M.F. Gerry is a professor of English at Laurentian University and
the editor of Arachne, Laurentian University’s bilingual
interdisciplinary journal of language and literature.

As Rowland Smith, editor of this collection of papers from the 1997
“Commonwealth in Canada” conference, observes, readers of the book
will probably be struck by its lack of unity: “What do cowboy songs,
Iranian feminists, fetal alcohol syndrome, the ascent of Everest, Natal
women settlers, and Afrikaans exile-poets have in common with
discussions of the development of syllabus and teaching practice in
French or Caribbean universities?” he asks. All of this diversity,
Smith says, involves “the representation of attitude, value and belief
in fiction, ‘life-writing’ such as journals, teaching and public
events (including the public reaction to public events).” The essays
often do, very interestingly, concern themselves with representation;
and they go further too.

By means of focusing on particularities, the essays reveal much about
fundamental issues facing people who live in places once colonized by
Europeans, such as Canada. For example, in a discussion of texts by
Edward K. Braithwaite, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Salman Rushdie, writers
from the Caribbean, Africa, and India, respectively, Mac Fenwick strives
for a definition of “authenticity.” Rather than resting in such
dualities as local/global, centre/margin, powerful/powerless,
settler/indigene, and so on, Fenwick proposes (as do other essayists in
this collection) that we look at the similarities in apparent
differences; he calls this a “perspectival approach.”

The first thing shared by Fenwick’s exemplary writers is “that they
are each interested in raising to consciousness authentically local
forms.” They create these forms “by rejecting the iconoclasm of
absolute terms and raising to consciousness the very processes of
cross-cultural exchange that are the genesis of local tradition.”
“Cross-cultural exchange” is the combining of perspectives through
communicating them. As Fenwick concludes, the concepts of local and
global are not so much contraries as reciprocals: postcolonial literary
study “does not end with the elucidation or evaluation of the truths
that inhere to various local traditions, but to a never-ending
exploration of the global process from which individual cultures derive
their perspectival meaning.” Such an insight is certainly useful in
coming to terms with the authenticity of particular identities.

Another advantage to the diversity of this collection is that readers
interested in a variety of literatures will find relevant and timely
discussions in their areas, and ways to understand wider connections
with other literatures.