Michael Harris' "Outsiders and Insiders: Perspectives of Third World Culture in British and Post-Colonial Fiction " (Book Note)

 

In pairing colonial and postcolonial novels that share similar geographies and histories, this study aims to scrutinize the validity of the colonizer-colonized distinction and identify commonalities in various colonial encounters while acknowledging the unique circumstances of each region. The project aligns with two established lines of comparative study from the 1980s: the examination of Manichean aesthetics and the politics of colonial literature, as well as participation in the comparative scholarship of new literatures in English. The timing of this study is particularly noteworthy, coinciding with Aijaz Ahmad's "In Theory," which questions the genealogy and legitimacy of the theoretical assumptions Harris's book relies on, such as postcolonialism and "Third World literature." Unfortunately, "Insiders and Outsiders" falls short of adding substantially to the ongoing debate in comparative postcolonial literary studies or the scholarship on the specific texts under examination.

 

Following Raymond Williams' directive in "The Country and the City," the comparisons in each chapter are intended to provide a "different and necessary perspective" to British representations of colonial experience. The text's architecture, as explained by Harris, reflects the geopolitical evolution of the British Empire. Implicitly, another organizational structure seems to be at play, with each chapter built around a discussion of a specific problem in colonial discourse and the revisionist response of an "insider" born in the formerly colonized territory.

 

While these juxtapositions are occasionally insightful, especially in exploring the links between strategies of representation and ideological work, the danger lies in ratifying binarisms rooted in narrow biological definitions of identity and perspective. The insider/outsider and British/Indian (or South African, Nigerian, Kenyan, Barbadian) dichotomies oversimplify the complexity of cultural and social identity portrayed in the novels and the heterogeneous identity of the writers concerning class, political affiliations, geographic location, and generation. This approach also leads to distortions in characterizing some of the novels, as seen in the attribution of a "different perspective" on West Indian social division to George Lamming's "In the Castle of My Skin," which is reduced to the category of race, neglecting other divisions of education, gender, urban/rural perspective, and especially class in Lamming's portrayal of Creighton's village. Unwittingly, the structure of these chapters implies a colonialist framework that positions Europe and European literatures as the continuing catalyst and reference point for postcolonial life and cultural production, reinforcing an Anglocentric portrayal.

The structure of this study sets up expectations for an additional form of comparison, exploring the affinities and evolution of British colonial texts and the aesthetic, political, and historical grounds for the category of postcolonial literature. A multifaceted argument about the literature of British imperialism gradually takes shape, tracing a historical trajectory from the confidence of Kipling and Haggard to the anxiety and ambivalence of Joyce Cary and Elspeth Huxley, and finally to the pessimism and disillusionment of Alec Waugh. Particularly interesting is the contention that British colonial fiction often served to provide the English reading public with an account of the nation's colonial rule. However, this thread of comparison across chapters is less obvious in the discussions of postcolonial literature.

 

Certain thematic and formal issues tie the concerns of these texts together, such as engagements with history and reimagining, and crises of identity. The commonality of postcolonial literatures emerges near the end of the book, notably in Harris's agreement with Fredric Jameson's argument that third-world texts are to be read as national allegories. However, this claim of affiliation with Jameson comes without acknowledgment that Jameson's position is controversial, subject to rebuttal by Aijaz Ahmad and others.

 

Unfortunately, there is little engagement with contemporary critical debates. The book lacks reference to scholarship on the construction of colonial power, the evolution of colonial knowledge, or reactions against colonizing. Instead, it consists of brief biographical sketches of each author followed immediately by a close reading of their novel. This tendency occasionally narrows the resonance of the analysis, and readings are sometimes informed by colonial contexts rather than indigenous ones.

 

The rationale and agenda for comparative postcolonial studies face a crisis, invoking debates about pedagogy, research, and cultural politics. The ambition of "Outsiders and Insiders" to enter into these discussions and make an empirically grounded argument about colonial and postcolonial formations is admirable. Its mixed success points, in part, to the difficulty of theorizing a basis for such fields and their research enterprise. The positive aspect of this turmoil is the development of new frameworks, such as Arjun Appadurai's modeling of the global cultural economy, which may support productive contemporary comparative cultural studies that account for but are not subsumed by the history of European imperialism.