1This paper attempts to present the case that Commonwealth literature refers to a vision and a future art. In this vision, the colonisers shed their cultural arrogance and the colonised overcome the cultural cringe and learn to respect each other’s cultural differences. This mutual respect for differences leads to each allowing the other’s experience to modify their own so that a new community is born. This community is a real synthesis of the racial and cultural differences between the coloniser and the colonised.
2The 1990s debates on the literary studies curriculum envisaged by postcolonial critics, and the debate within postcolonialism on the need for literary theory in postcolonial studies have created the atmosphere in the post-theory phase of the academy for Commonwealth literary studies to deserve a closer look as a serious alternative to the exclusive focus on English literary studies. Those opposed to changing literary studies into cultural studies in order to effectively challenge the cultural hegemony of the former imperium (Narasimhaiah “Prospect”, Tiffin “Post-Colonialism”, Griffith “Post-Colonial Project, Christian “Race for Theory”) assume a new role for Commonwealth literary studies. The unhappiness of scholars and critics over newer categories to understand literature produced outside the developed world such as `New Literature`, `Third World Literature` `World Literatures in English’ (Brian) suggests the need for a category comparable to Commonwealth literature.
3In his “Reading for Resistance in the Post-colonial Literature,” Stephen Slemon attempts to present the Commonwealth literary studies programme as proto-postcolonial criticism. Taking the 1968 conference of the Association of Commonwealth Language and Literary Studies at the University of Queensland as the starting point of the `Commonwealth’ criticism, Slemon attempts to highlight the productive ambivalence about the location of the text by focusing on A.N. Jaffares’ opening address. He seeks to explain the contradiction between Jaffares’ call for `international standards of judgement` and his rejection of `bogus internationalism. `
4Slemon presents this as a double movement of accepting New Criticism’s basic tenets in order to validate literary texts of former colonies, and rejecting them to acknowledge their material grounding and social pressure. Slemon’s Jaffares needs the rhetoric of New Criticism that literary texts are autotelic and interpretation is the individual’s experience of a self-contained work of art in order to make the study of literary texts of other cultures respectable in the eyes of his countrymen. In being presented as a `structural variant` of a universal activity called creative writing, the literatures of former colonies get equated with texts within Macaulay’s tradition. In being considered products partly of this tradition, they might seem less alien and less untouchable. But this does not mean that Jaffares does not appreciate the difference between English literature and the literatures of former colonies. Even as he evokes a shared tradition, structural similarity and universality of response, in cautioning the writer and critic against `bogus internationalism’ he reminds the Commonwealth writer and critic of the struggle ahead to reclaim his/her own cultural space. By dissociating English from the empire, he implicitly challenges the centre-margin hierarchical opposition between English literature and its `other`. In Slemon’s view, Norman Jaffares’ programme is a call for what the present day theorists like Richard Terdiman would call `counter-discursive` critical practice.
5The problem with Slemon’s analysis is his assumption that New Criticism constituted the paradigm for Commonwealth literary studies. The `counter-discursive energy` in Jaffares’ discourse that supposedly buys heavily into the dominant New Critical discourse seems to him both `unconscious` and `incipient` because he sees New Criticism as the horizon of Commonwealth literary criticism (Tiffin “Plato’s Cave” 161, Mukerjee “Interrogating” 4) rather than as the dominant paradigm whose ahistorical tendencies Comlit. Criticism had to resist in order to articulate its critical vision. The critical vision of the humanist criticism of the Commonwealth literary studies programme, its emphasis on historical criticism and comparative focus, was a tradition totally different from and opposed to the tenets of New Criticism.
6Jaffares’ rhetoric draws upon a vision that Mulk Raj Anand attributes to the writers and intellectuals of the 1930s and 40s. To Anand, Commonwealth literature and literary studies is a product of the idealism of the 1930s and 40s, and the experience of English scholars like Boname Dobrée in the colonies that changed their opinion about non-European cultures (“Variety of Ways” 445). E.M. Forster’s memorable epigraph to his Howard’s’ End, “Only connect,” his regret in A Passage to India that in the present circumstances Azziz’s desire to connect with Fielding and the Englishman’s need to relate to the Indian cannot be fulfilled, were born out of the historical experience of the two World Wars.
7Writers like Chinua Achebe and Wilson Harris spell out the ways in which this ideal of creating a community of writers and readers can be achieved. In this definition, the Commonwealth writer works with a double-vision: understanding and articulating the historical experience of his or her society in its concrete specificity, and creating a community of readers across the world that is conscious of its common humanity. This double vision, the major criterion for judging a literary work within the Commonwealth, was perhaps facilitated by the humanist realist conception of literature as a synthesis of the universal and the particular. S.C. Harrex calls this vision an `imaginative realism`, `a humanism of conscience` born out of the humanist need to `only connect`, against the `only destroy` process of historical conquest and colonial imperialism. William Jaffares constantly reminds Commonwealth writers and readers that they have a common heritage, and insists that English is not the language of the imperialists anymore, thereby suggesting the programme for the Commonwealth literary movement. This idealism that the liberal humanist was forced to resort to in the wake of the horror of the holocaust, genocide and devastation was the fountainhead of the Commonwealth literary studies movement.
8Achebe, a bitter critic of the colonist and colonial attitudes, firmly believes that educating the coloniser on the African way of life and teaching them to respect the cultural differences between Africa and Europe are the main aims of his art (Morning Yet 42-45). But this is only the first step. The humility that fills the heart of the Western reader in the wake of shedding cultural arrogance should prepare the ground for creating and appreciating new art forms, new interpretations of reality, and new ways of organizing experience that no single cultural tradition can hope to train a writer or reader in. For Achebe, jazz is the classic example of this opening up of new vistas of experience through the respect that people of a culture show to other cultures (Morning Yet 17). Jazz blossomed into a major art form by putting under erasure the hierarchical opposition between Western culture and its `other`, though this erasure was only local and momentary. The art of Benin is Achebe’s example for the potential that art has for the creation of a community of art-lovers open to new syntheses of experience. It provides the right environment for the evolving possibilities for mankind to become a higher form of life. The art of Benin, which appeared `child-like` and `grotesque` to the Western eye in the 18th century, shed its grotesqueness to the more sensitive European art-lovers, exposed as they were to Picasso’s art. Achebe could be seen to be evoking Eliot’s critical vision to make his own vision more concrete and realizable, and silence criticism that he is contributing to the West’s attempt to deny non-Western societies their right to cultural self-representation. His vision was inspired by the possibility of writers and intellectuals affirming their common human heritage. The total absence of any anxiety of influence in Achebe’s criticism over the encounter he proposes with the coloniser’s culture suggests this. He is not troubled by the power relation between his art and the Western novel and the English language (Morning Yet 57, 62).
9Wilson Harris too attacks the inability to see the potential for progress in the realm of human relation that the destructive process of colonization has unleashed. He calls this a degenerate form of realism that stops at the `behaviouristic and deterministic dead end`. To Harris, colonization that divided man into slaves and masters carries with it the potential for the rediscovery of a community – the emergence of a new man from the ashes of the master and the slave. Harris’s `rediscovery of a scale of community` resembles Hegelian dialectics. The coloniser’s self-image as the bearer of a white-destiny results in his misrepresenting the colonised society’s culture and history, and violently imposing his culture on the colonised society, ` generating an antithesis. The colonised people violently affirm the distinctiveness and validity of their culture and civilization either by working within the colonial paradigm or by positing a parallel system. The monster of “polarization” and “the threat of ceaseless conflict” thus create the necessity for a “self-defensive apparatus” the native acquires (“Author’s Note” 8)
10These two stages are part of the historical process of empire-building. But the third stage is a vision. In this stage, the coloniser and the colonised `rediscover a community’ by losing their history and location in space. The world in this vision is a world without history; it is a timeless eternity of community, where man is reconciled to man, rediscovering their common humanity. But for this to happen, the `monsters` like greed, selfishness, and bias “constellated in the cradle of a civilization” have to be recalled into the psyche. Through “the ceaseless task of creative imagination” these contrasting elements have to be `digested` so that the essential unity of all men is rediscovered. At he heart of the humiliation humanity inflicts upon humanity is the “quest for true human greatness, true human justice” (“Comedy” 138). The role Harris envisages for the European readers and writers and their counterparts in the former colonies is derived from this belief. Both the coloniser and the colonised should be open to originality and change (“Interior” 140). For European writers and readers, this involves suspending their orientation in order to be re-educated on the colonised culture. This process of alienation, of losing one’s values and beliefs and being filled with the beliefs and values of the natives, should prepare European writers and readers to see themselves as part of an eternal community.
11For their part, the writers of the former colonies, having moved beyond the stage of `writing up` their culture and history for the benefit of the coloniser, should concentrate on exploring the dynamics of change and the potential for a shaping a new reality this process has. For Harris this process is at bottom the process of the losses, reverses and gains, deprivation and salvage of the human spirit. Hence, conventional ways of understanding the colonial encounter in terms of agent/victims and agent/aggressor will obscure this process. In order to understand the process the colonised should forge a subconscious alliance with the coloniser so that “the ground of deprivation and salvage – interwoven vessel of loss and gain– the salvage of human resources–continuous creative necessity–continuous striving towards equipoise, internal/external, man and nature, man and man ” (“Interior” 130) is cleared. The counter-discursive energy that Slemon attributes to Harris’s critical practice should be understood in the light of this vision. The figural reading of the colonial history of one’s society that Harris recommends should be understood as part of this effort to create a `new corpus of sensibility’ necessary to move beyond dichotomous relation of `helplessness and the hopeless consolidation of power` – the behaviouristic and deterministic interpretation of colonial relations. The figural reading of the history of the former colony is aimed at creating a new sensibility that will lead to the rediscovery of a `scale of community`. The history of the former colony is a discourse of an empirical foreign tradition; it masks the resistance as well as the connectedness and continuity within colonised culture. Harris finds evidence of this `art of compassion’ (“Interior” 140) in the art and culture of the twentieth century.
12The community that is born out of an understanding of the history of empire-building as the losses and reverses of the human spirit is Harris’ idea of a `commonwealth` (“Interior” 146). But Harris’s rediscovery of the `scale of community` requires nothing less than an understanding on the part of the agents of colonial history, which is like the self-understanding of the human spirit. One sees this vision in Harris’ novel The Palace of the Peacock. Harris’s protagonist Donne, the self-styled arbiter of world destiny, is reduced to the condition of a child as the quest for El Dorado is turned into a spiritual quest. Harris’s conception of the selfish quest for wealth that turns into a spiritual quest, by analogy, outlines the project for commonwealth literary studies. The readers and writers of the metropolitan centres of the former empire are tempted to recognize and read the literatures and understand the cultures of the former colonies for certain selfish reasons. Once initiated into the process, they are compelled to relativize their own belief and value systems and this loss of a fixed position, the humility that this results in leads to a transformation. These readers realize that the cultures of other societies are only different and not inferior to theirs, and eventually see them as expression of the human spirit. The other part of this project is the one concerned with the writers and readers of the former colonies. These readers and writers acknowledge their common heritage with the writers and the readers in the West and attempt to present their culture in its own terms.
13This vision of an eternal community achieved through the transformation of Harris’s `monster polarization` of the historical empire is the inspiration for commonwealth literary studies. For writers of Mulk Raj Anand’s generation – Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield among others, this community appeared to be in the making, the monster of the holocaust and the World Wars making the affirmation of the community of man a felt necessity. This vision was one of the dominant patterns of decolonisation in Canadian, Australian, African and West Indian literature. This pattern seems to have survived, for nearly thirty years, the cynicism in postcolonial societies (Tiffin “Toward Place”).The vision explains the apparent double-think of Commonwealth writers and critics when they spoke of our `common heritage` to an international audience (implying that their art was a joint creation of Western and native cultural traditions) and informed the native audience that English was merely a medium to express a native sensibility in a different light. In the light of this vision, `our common heritage` becomes the end of the quest for the rediscovery of an identity that is obscured by behaviouristic and deterministic interpretations of history. The separation of language and sensibility, culture and its manifestation, becomes the means. This separation of language and sensibility was also used as a strategy to convince the native audience of the authenticity of creative writing in English by writers of their societies. Unproductive differences in identity – differences that do not have the potential to create a new identity as a community, were rejected. Negritude, the defiant projection of the negro as the `other` of the Western man, was rejected as romanticized image of the African people (Soyinka) characteristic of the French colonies in Africa (Lindfors).
14Education of the Western man seems to inform the criteria for selecting works to the Commonwealth canon and the programme for Commonwealth literary studies. Works that give an inside view of the society they deal with as a community with its coherent systems of values and beliefs, different from, but not inferior to (in fact in some ways better than) Western society, where the efforts to understand the culture they represent lead to a reflection on the human condition, are at the centre of this canon. Raja Rao’s The Serpent and the Rope and Patrick White’s Voss are the classic examples. If poetry that captured the rhythm of the drum was considered authentic West Indian poetry, poetry and fiction that presented the rhythm of life in the bush, the adventure and `mateship` of white adventurers in the outback, the classic example which are the works of the Bulletin writers, were considered serious Australian literature. In contradistinction to these, works that highlight superficial differences like those in landscape, climate or customs, like the `scenic poetry` of certain Canadian and Australian writers, are in the periphery. Poetry and fiction that merely attempt to transplant the metropolitan literary traditions in the new world were treated with contempt. In the case of New Zealand, poetry that superficially borrowed from English and American poetry, “substituting kauri and rimu for oak and ash” was regarded as poor poetry (Curnow). Also at the periphery of this canon are works that criticize the culture of their origin. V.S. Naipaul’s An Area of Darkness is the classic case in point. A dialogue with the West is the core of the Commonwealth literary studies project (Philips, Ashcroft et al. 133). The complaint of Canadian and Australian writers and critics that their experience as a settler society had encouraged the transplantation of the Anglo-Saxon tradition bears this out.
15The method of study envisaged for the Commonwealth literary studies programme, the comparative study of Commonwealth writers, too was inspired by this programme. Reading British literature in comparison with creative writings in English by native writers, focusing on their interpretation of the same or similar areas of experience in order to assess the two groups of writers’ grasp of the reality they seek to present is one of the favourite critical practices. Achebe’s reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness criticizing Conrad for his inability to understand the African society in its own terms, C.D. Narasimhaiah’s criticism of E.M. Forster for his misrepresentation of the place of religion in Indian life are some of the examples (Harrex 53) This cultural hubris, the belief that only an Indian can understand Indian reality just as only an African can understand hers, seems out of place in a programme aimed at the rediscovery of the community of man. But it makes sense when it is seen as part of the effort to teach humility to the Commonwealth reader as the basis of his or her response to the literatures of other cultures. Bonamy Dobrée’s recommendation of Anand’s Untouchable as “an extremely interesting book... about things we don’t know anything about, written by someone who obviously does,”(qtd. in Cowasjee 414) is an evaluation born out of his hunch that there are a `variety of ways’ in life as in literature.
16Commonwealth literary and language studies envisaged a socio-cultural agenda to which its pedagogic project was appended. This agenda is the spiritual decolonisation of the colonised society through the struggle for liberation from a history and identity that has been imposed on them by the colonial powers. The different aspects of this programme are: 1) Interpretations of history that recoup the real historical process underlying colonial misrepresentation and nationalistic distortion of it – through the construction of a `usable past,` and 2) Literary criticism that grounds the canons of Western literature and brings the patterns of colonial experience of different societies into comparative focus. The `imaginative realism` that enables its readers to rediscover a scale of community, nurtured by the cross-fertilization of imagination in the twentieth century, is the El Dorado of Commonwealth art and criticism.
17The pedagogic project this movement envisaged can be inferred from the Report of the Working Party on the Study of Commonwealth Literature presented at the ACLALS conference in 1968. The report highlights the tension in teaching English literature between the need for an organized study of an historical tradition and the necessity to make this study relevant for the student as a contemporary individual. Only when the beliefs and values of the English, their interpretation and assessment of the colonised culture are presented together with the critique of these value and belief systems can the study of English literature be made relevant to the students of former colonies. Commonwealth literary pedagogy seems to have planned to achieve this by placing creative writings in English by natives that articulated the colonised society’s values and beliefs alongside the classics in the coloniser’s culture as well as colonial writings. Reading colonial texts juxtaposed to works by native writers in order to point out the failure of the former to understand the culture of the natives is perhaps one of the earlier attempt to dislodge the Anglocentrism of the English department in the former colonies. This exercise often involved elevating the works of native writers as the collective consciousness of their imagined community and reducing the complexity and polyphony of the colonial text.
18This almost gestural attempt at decolonising the native mind by challenging the still dominant system of colonial education is understandable when it is viewed in the context of the need to decolonise the natives, moderated by the more pressing need to gain recognition for the native writers’ creative writings in English as serious literature. This is part of the effort to relativize the English writer’s worldview as one of the ways of looking at the world (Tiffin “Plato’s Cave”). The cross-cultural comparison that covertly, but effectively (Tiffin “Lie Back”), challenged the hegemony of the coloniser’s culture was replaced by a bolder initiative: challenging the rhetoric of `white destiny` in the canonical works in English literature like Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Charles Dicken’s Great Expectations, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by introducing the students to the colonial attitude and then presenting them the corrective view expressed in the works of writers in the former colonies. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, George Lammings’ Water with Berries, J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, and Timothy Findley’s Head Hunter are some of the works that fit this description. To these, the experience of the writers of postcolonial societies, their analyses and assessment of the issue of self-representation were added. Raja Rao’s preface to Kanthapura, Derek Walcott’s poems, the works of Judith Wright, Robert Kroetsch, and Jamaica Kincaid are some of the examples. These changes or addition to the pedagogic project of the 1960s could be inferred from the discussions of the critics of postcolonialism of the Continental/ American variety like Helen Tiffin, Gareth Griffiths, Stephen Slemon and others. This history of the Commonwealth literary studies programme and the pedagogy it envisaged are part of their effort to present their kind of postcolonialism as a genuinely counter-discursive practice that can dislodge the anglocentrism of English departments.
19Yet this pedagogic project failed to achieve its aims. Helen Tiffin acknowledges that the pedagogic project of the Commonwealth literary studies programme has ended up facilitating the study of regional literatures instead of promoting the comparative study of the literatures of the former colonies. She also admits to the anglocentrism of the English literature curriculum. Tiffin, however, attributes it to postcolonialism inspired by Continental theory, which, she claims, has helped sustain this anglocentrism through its programme of reading the English canonical text against the grain providing a new pretext for the exclusion of the literary text of former colonies (Tiffin “Plato’s Cave”). In 1989, after surveying the scene, G.D. Killam expressed his dissatisfaction with the progress of the pedagogic project to transform the English literary studies curriculum into the study of literatures in English. This inability of the academics in the former colonies to challenge the axiomatic and paradigmatic status of British literature can only be understood and explained in relation to the fate of the socio-cultural project of the Commonwealth literature and literary and language studies movement.
20The self-interest of Britain in ensuring the wider circulation of the creative writings of the former colonies and in promoting their study at the universities at home and abroad, the interest of the former colonies in making use of the opportunities for self-representation and recognition for their culture at home and abroad, were not, as it was hoped, dialectically related, the relation being forged by the events of the 1930s and 40s. This is evident from the way the cultural nationalism that undergird the emergence of English literature as a discipline got in the way of the cross-fertilization of imagination and the creation of a new sensibility that writers and critics like Norman Jaffares, Wilson Harris and Chinua Achebe envisaged. According to Terry Eagleton, the cultural nationalism of England, whose effective spokesman is F.R. Leavis, ended up as a model for the former colonies to emulate. The undue emphasis on English literature as the central tradition shaping the sensibilities of the former colonies led to protests against this one-sided relation between the two cultures, inspiring cultural nationalisms of a similar kind. Eagleton’s analysis focuses only on the intention of the English imperialists and the unintended effects. To the Commonwealth writer inspired by the vision of a synthesis, Leavis’ insistence on England as `a senior cultural partner,` was the sign of the victory of the monster polarizations.
21The Commonwealth literature movement ended up as a phase in the emergence of regional literatures (Devy) in English as one of the major cultural productions in these countries. Curiously enough, these literatures presented themselves as the only true expression of a national culture. The cultural nationalism of Arnold, Eliot and Leavis seems to have suggested to the Commonwealth writer, by example, the `bogey of authenticity’. Without the vision that inspired the Commonwealth literature and literary studies movement, the issue of the use of English for creative expression re-emerged as one of the major issues. Without the programme of educating the former coloniser on the culture of the colonised society, which could no longer be visualized in an atmosphere surcharged with the spirit of nationalism, the justification for the use of English as a medium of creative writing sounded hollow.
22It became increasingly difficult to resist the tendency to treat the reader’s understanding, considered as a contemporary individual’s understanding, as limited to his/her own contemporary society and culture. This tendency coexisted with its opposite, the attempt to establish abstract, universal patterns of experience, nourished by the poetics of New Criticism, a popular trend in the academy. The tendency to equate the reader with a contemporary individual led to the fetishizing of English and other literatures, which now could be studied without grounding them in their historical contexts. This closing off of the relation between English literature and the colonial ideology was beneficial to English literature, which now needed no new justification.The opportunities for the study of Commonwealth literature that were provided by the attempt to professionalize teaching at the university in various Commonwealth countries were utilized to promote literature in English by writers of these countries that peacefully co-existed with the English literature, which continued to be the core of the curriculum. Even the official journal of the Commonwealth movement The Journal of Commonwealth Literary Studies, going by one of its own editors’ assessment of its achievements in the two decades of its existence, seems have abandoned its comparative focus, preferring instead to model itself after other metropolis-based journals with an international market. Its focus on writers “who write about their home regions from the central metropolis” rather than on those “who stay in their regions and write only for their region” (Gurr) is a far cry from the editorial policy announced in the first issue of the journal (JCL 1.1 vi)
23The dialectical process in the vision of the Commonwealth writer in which the homelessness of man is the temporary loss of orientation, a productive loss that leads to a rediscovery of a scale of community, was replaced by the celebration of rootlessness of the migrant writer from the former colonies as the postmodern condition, a condition common to the colonised and coloniser alike (Mukherjee “Caliban’s Growth” 226) Literature that dealt with the homelessness of the coloniser and oppressor, a homelessness which potentially led to the rediscovery of a new home, the eternal community of man in Harris’s `art of compassion`, lost the pride of place it enjoyed in the Commonwealth canon. With the vision that inspired the movement during the early part of its history being consumed by national interests, rather than using these interests as the means to its ends, it looked as though there is very little one could say to rescue Commonwealth literary studies from Richard Terdiman’s charge that it is “a fictional entity created by scholars in the provinces and depending on the imaginary coherence of tea time.”(qtd. In Slemon “Teaching” 157) To many, the agonistic space in which Ngugi’s Devil on the Cross found itself situated seemed a poignant reminder of the failure of this vision and the triumph of monster polarisation (Mukherjee “The Centre cannot Hold” 48).
24The successful projection of postcolonialism as the former colonies’ version of the postmodern condition suggests that the difference in the historical experiences of the former empire and former colonies have been cancelled out. The experience of the former colonies has been accommodated as a part of the experience of the post-imperial society in the latter being universalised as the very condition of man (Boehmer 223-50). A new justification for the use of English was attempted by critics and writers who were convinced that the real need for English is the education of the coloniser. In this, the history and culture of the former colonies were presented as bound in by the dominant discourse of the coloniser. `Writing back to the empire’, deconstructing the process of colonial interpellation – the way colonial subjects were constructed, through the historical and cultural texts of the empire, was presented as the only way through which the postcolonial society could rediscover its identity. But this belief brought with it its own problems. It could not help valorising texts like Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Lewis Nkosi’s Mating Birds, Timothy Findley’s Not Wanted on the Voyage, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, J. M. Coetzee’s Foe – works that are read as allegories of colonial interpellation (Ashcroft et al) These works, together with the works of the `Third World cosmopolitans` that deal with universal homelessness of man in an equally homeless language, form the core of the canon in the new field called postcolonial literature. In the absence of the material ground in the form of literary movements that attempted a synthesis of former colonised people and their coloniser’s cultures, the humanist criticism that sought to understand the connection between the experiences of different postcolonial societies without ignoring their moorings in concrete historical traditions degenerated into a superficial clubbing together of experiences of historically distinct situations under the umbrella term of experience in postcolonial societies.
25In the post-theory phase of the academy the vision that inspired the humanism of conscience appears to hald a second chance. The 1996 Symons Report on Commonwealth studies echoes the scholar/critic’s desire to revive the spirit of the Commonwealth literary studies programme at its inception: “Commonwealth studies potentially offer democratic and all-inclusive forms of social analysis, pointing to reconstructed societies and to communities beyond colonialism.”… “post-colonial is far more constrained than ‘commonwealth’ ”… (qtd. In Ako). Commonwealth literary studies are likely to hold special attraction for the generation of scholars and teachers who were witnesses to the pedagogical impasse created by the culture wars in the Anglo-American academy of the 1990s. The dialogue between cultures that commonwealth literary studies envisaged holds the promise of an approach that can reconcile the apparently conflicting claims of the rival camps during the canon and multiculturalism debates. Of course, it takes more than academic collective will to transform boutique multiculturalism into a belief in the community of mankind.
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