Do we still have postcolonialism

About a year ago Biodun Jeyifo told me of a conversation he had with one of his Ph.D. students. She had come to his office in a panic, informing him that her advisor had told her that retaining postcolonialism in her project would only hinder her job search, and that it ought not to play a significant role in her dissertation. We were in the throes of asking where the profession was going, how global studies have now become sine qua non for those seeking to teach non-Western literatures. The fragile place of African literary studies was once again called into question: what would it belong to now? And for those wishing to study and teach it, where would it figure in a job application? BJ straightened out the student and her advisor, but we remain confronted with the issue as "World Literature" has become widely adopted as the rubric under which the students of non-Western literatures are asked to become "expert."The study of African literature within the academy has moved from an original Areas Studies approach to a contemporary World Literature approach. We should begin by asserting that both approaches are so seriously flawed as to call into question the very inclusion of African literature in the curriculum,; if that is the only way it is to be taught.For Area Studies, the risk lies in imposing a vision of Africa created by an underlying anthropology of the early 20th century. It called for understandings generated by experts in indigenous cultures and languages, and which identified native values which informed cultural texts and gave them meaning. This is the true curse not only of Orientalism in African dress, but of authenticity detectives who prescribe the attributes of what is essentially frozen cultural truths for people viewed as natives, that is, objects for experts, rather than as subjects with subjectivity.For Global Studies, the notion is equally pernicious. World Literature flattens out all cultures in the quest to find universal patterns of thought and creativity, and even more, to accept as representative texts those whose self-reflexive, postmodern postcolonial markers are highlighted within the stylistics of the current Creative Writing University Curriculum.The former approach dignifies its knowledge under that heading of Objec- tivity as the quality that provides it with its claims to truth. The latter dignifies its value under the heading of Subjectivity as the value that enhances its aesthetic claims to universal worth. The former can be said to sell the value of education; the latter to sell books and movies. Both ultimately displace a global south perspective by privileging the dominant flows of global north ethnoscapes and financescapes.Figures that give us access to the issues involved in moving toward our contemporary situation might be seen in the cell phone of Pius Adesanmi's palm winner tapper. In Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir it is his use of the term kimay and a disk of benga music.Wainaina ends his recent, hot memoir, One Day I Will Write about This Place (2011) by referring to the creation of a new Anglo-Kenyan culture, and to a noteworthy CD and documentary on benga music. He evokes how it corresponds to what he calls the sounds of languages without the languages; how it relates to a new world context for Kenyans of today, one without the past.World literature and world music are now manifestations of Jameson's definition of postmodernism as a cultural moment so fixated on the present as to erase any grounding in the past, occluding history from our readings, and resulting in what he calls pastiche.2 It is a view of culture as reduced to the bits and tracks of a video and cd.Wainaina speaks English, and sees Anglo-Kenyan as the new identity being created at independence. He also speaks Swahili, and thus fits with the audiences of the two Kenyan radio stations he had when growing up. General Service is anglicized, like the Muslim singer Abdul Kadir Mohammed who changes his name to Kelly Brown and sings world pop. …