Paul Giles, ‘The Postcolonial Mainstream’, American Literary History 23, 1 (2011).

In a review essay for this journal back in 2004, Malini Johar Schueller declared “that the suitability of postcolonial theory to the study of US culture should no longer be a subject of debate” (162). Arguing that “the period of critical isolationism and exceptionalism in American studies is over” (173), Schueller suggested how “the emergent field of postcolonial American studies” (164) was demonstrating “how US cultural history has always been a contradictory set of narratives with an endless entanglement of imperial and colonial experiences, and native resistances” (171). As she observed, the conceptual lines of battle in this theoretical debate were clear enough, with critics who wished to place more emphasis on American engagement with colonial issues—Peter Hulme, Edward Watts, and others—being countered by those who clung in some form to the old tenets of US exceptionalism, whose ethos of republican freedom claimed a special exemption for the nation from imperialist models. This dynamic was complicated by what Jeanne Boydston has described recently as the “doggedly antitheoretical” mindset of many early American cultural historians, who, even when dealing specifically with the colonial period, “still grumble that postcolonial methods offer little more than an esoteric vocabulary and tortured syntax” (1223). No academic method can ever be a universal panacea, of course, but the task now, six years after Schueller’s review essay, is not so much to justify the idea of postcolonial American studies in abstract terms but, rather, to consider what difference such an approach has made, and might make in the future, to the broader Americanist field. As this theoretical strategy has become more academically mainstream, both the risks and the benefits associated with the rotation of American literary scholarship on a postcolonial axis have come more clearly into view.