Literature, Politics, and Postcolonial Studies

One of the most vexed questions in the debates about literary form is its relation to politics. For many critics, to take a strong interest in form is to turn one's back on the overriding goal of contributing to the betterment of society; if literature is to serve political goals, such critics believe, content must be at the forefront of the critical process, since it's there that the writer's engagement with the concrete political issues of the day is to be found. And it's characteristic of recent literary theorists who do argue for the importance of an engagement with formal questions that they feel obliged to make a direct connection between these questions and political effectiveness.

As I suggested in the Introduction, any consideration of the contribution literature may make to political causes needs to take account of one simple fact: only through the experience of readers engaging with literary works can this contribution occur, and then only if that experience effects a significant and lasting change in the reading consciousness. Such a change can happen only if the encounter with the work is also an encounter with a previously unacknowledged way of seeing the world or of experiencing feelings about it. Examining a literary work for the political sympathies it betrays, the political events it charts, or the material conditions it exposes as if it were a static object whose properties are to be investigated may be a valuable exercise in literary criticism but cannot in itself demonstrate the work's effectiveness in this domain; a political analysis needs to be undertaken with an awareness that only as an event experienced by readers can a work have any purchase on the outside world – and only if readers are different after that event from what they were before it. If the experience of a work leaves the reader unaffected, they will not act in the world. A further requirement for political change, of course, is either that a large number of readers are moved to act in the service of some kind of popular movement – a requirement rarely met by the literary works most highly regarded by the critical establishment – or, even less likely, that a small number of highly influential figures, inspired by a book they have read, proceed to bring about a transformation in their environment.