Mongia on McLeod

Reviewed by: Beginning Postcolonialism Padmini Mongia John McLeod, Beginning Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000) The third volume in Manchester University Press’s promising new Beginnings series, Beginning Postcolonialism, admirably achieves the goals laid out by the editors of the series. One of these is that “each volume will focus uncompromisingly upon the needs of its readers, who have a right to expect lucidity and clarity to be the distinctive feature of a book which includes the word ‘beginning’ in its title.” Indeed, the greatest strength of McLeod’s book is its attentiveness to its audience and its needs; readers as wide-ranging as beginning undergraduates to faculty interested in learning the terms and issues of a new mode of intellectual inquiry will be well-served by reading this volume. Coupled with one of the Readers on the market, this book would make an excellent addition to courses on contemporary postcolonial studies. Beginning Postcolonialism is by no means the only work of its kind. The last few years have seen virtually all major publishers issuing works which provide an overview of the field. However, unlike Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Theory, Leela Gandhi’s Postcolonial Theory, or Ania Loomba’s Colonialism/ Postcolonialism, McLeod’s volume is conceived and written with the student consistently in mind. While all the other works also offer clear introductions laying out a historical understanding of the emergence of postcolonial studies, McLeod’s is the only one which seems attentive to helping its readers through the numerous issues and debates which have attended postcolonialism. As a pedagogical tool, I would recommend the volume highly. Students would be able to use it to develop an excellent “beginning” understanding of postcolonialism. It has become commonplace that books devoted to contemporary postcolonial issues attend carefully to problematizing their field. McLeod’s volume also devotes a section to summarizing the major critiques and addressing what the future of postcolonial studies might be. One of the strongest sections in his book is the one called “Nationalist Representations.” Along with addressing “nationalist representations in literary and other writings” (67) from the 50s and 60s, McLeod begins his section with a discussion of the “nation in more general, abstract terms” (68). As a result, students get a chance to learn of the work of Anderson, Gellner, and Hobsbawn as preparatory work culminating in the discussions of Senghor and Fanon. Like other sections throughout this volume, this one also has segments titled “Stop and Think.” These sections operate as “time outs,” when the reader is forced to pause and consider the issues previously raised. While at first a bit annoyed by these sections, I began to value them pedagogically. Even if an instructor wasn’t willing to assign these segments for students to consider, the linearity of the reading process would demand that attention be paid to them. Students could only benefit from having pause and consider, from having to stop and think. If an instructor so chose, the selections could operate as excellent assignments. Another positive aspect of Beginning Postcolonialism is its annotated bibliography. First, McLeod does well to separate citations by the subjects they cover. His Suggestions for Further Reading include the following: General Introductions, Reference Books, General Readers, Postcolonial Theory: Some Key Texts, Collections of Essays, and Journals. Brief annotations aid the reader in deciding what to pursue and why. While by no means exhaustive, this section is useful and continues in the “beginning” spirit of the volume as a whole. McLeod’s volume covers the necessary bases for students beginning their inquiry into postcolonial studies. However, like many other similar volumes (Moore-Gilbert, for example), this one is also heavily directed towards postcolonial literary studies. Given the development of postcolonialism and given the disciplinary training of many of its main practitioners, perhaps this tendency is no surprise. Yet, people from disciplines other than English or Literary Studies would find themselves frustrated and would be less inclined to view this volume as positively as I do. Were historians to turn to the Journals section of the Suggestions for Further Reading, they would find none listed which spoke directly to them. Searching for collections devoted to postcolonialism, they would find none addressing

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