Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature

In this timely contribution to debates about the future of postcolonial studies, Chris Bongie explores the troubled relationship between postcolonial theory and 'politics', both in the sense of a radical, revolutionary politics associated with anti-colonial struggle, and the increasingly evident implication of literary and academic writers in institutional discourses of power. Bongie explores the commemoration and commodification of the post/colonial using early nineteenth-century Caribbean texts alongside contemporary works. Taking Haiti as a key example he writes cogently about the ways in which Haiti's world -historical revolution has been remembered both in the colonial era and in our own postcolonial age - an age in which it is ever more difficult to separate still vital memories of anti-colonial resistance from the commodifying acts of commemoration through which those memories are now processed.