Cultural clashes as writers of the 'late imperial' world grapple with the new global order

The empire never died; it just got privatised," quipped the travel writer and Time essayist Pico Iyer. Given the current political temper, with its reckoning of Africa's colossal debts to the West, accrued since political independence through lavish offers of foreign aid lent on unreasonable terms, and of the multimillion-dollar contracts handed out in the name of rebuilding the disaster created by the US invasion of Iraq, one sees the truth of Iyer's statement. Nowhere are these issues better addressed than in Neil Lazarus's excellent introductory chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies .

Departing from the usual jaded arguments about centres and margins or the aftermath of British imperialism, Lazarus examines the "reimposition of an actively interventionist 'New World Order', headquartered in Washington DC". From summing up the sub-Saharan situation, in which foreign aid has become one of the major obstacles to Africa's development, to dealing with America's attempts to reinvent the imperial tradition, Lazarus marks a shift in postcolonial studies. Where once the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe declared that the problem with post-independence Africa had primarily to do with a "failure of leadership", Lazarus is more cautious; he looks at the larger picture, at the terms of African nations' insertion into the global economy.

The 13 chapters are organised into three sections: social and historical context, the shape of the field and sites of engagement. This avoids some of the more common rubrics, such as representation and resistance, diaspora and identity, race and colonial discourse analysis. However, the standard set by Lazarus is one not easily met, and the chapters that follow, while not altogether obfuscatory, are sometimes guilty of that sin of postcolonial studies - jargon.

Lazarus begins by taking on the slightly uncomfortable question of the gap between postcolonial theorists and the people they theorise about. He does not simplify the issue by defending one or the other but instead asks what postcolonial theorists should do about the gap. The book goes beyond the cultural studies/humanities aspect of postcolonial studies by looking at pioneering work in sociology, political economy and development from the 1960s that has gone largely unmentioned. Most importantly, it is not confined to the usual suspects - such as Arundhati Roy and Michael Ondaatje - but is a fuller study, opening with a 29-page chronology of key events and publication dates, catholic in its selection. Lazarus tempers Roy's glib pronouncements on post-independence India by reading it in the light of the Nobel laureate Rabindranath Tagore's more measured concern for his people, expressed just before independence.

Coming to the key question of whether anti-colonial nationalism was an elitist phenomenon by virtue of being a borrowed Eurocentric one, Tamara Sivanandan reveals how flawed a reading this notion of derivation is. She reminds us, as did the late Edward Said, that the history of all cultures is one of cultural borrowing. Benita Parry, looking at the institutionalisation of the field, gives us a sense of its multiplicity.

She elaborates on Lazarus's refreshing recognition of present-day bullies and goes a step further, insisting that "postcolonial" is a label that obscures the contemporary situation, which is marked by an international stratification of labour and resources and should therefore be called "late imperialist".

In the second section, John Marx's lucid reading of postcolonial literary texts alongside the Western canon gives us an understanding of the double-edged relationship between the two, in which postcolonial texts define themselves through their difference from the Western canon and their appropriation of its techniques. Reflecting on the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o's decision to abandon English in favour of his mother tongue in an attempt to convey a more visceral sense of his culture, Marx problematises this by showing us how the Indian writer R.K. Narayan, who wrote only in English, taught Graham Greene "what it was like to be an Indian". This literary chapter is followed by four theoretical chapters, on poststructuralism, globalisation theory, temporality and subaltern history.

The final section looks at the field within the contexts of feminism, nationalism, Latin American studies and hybridity. Deepika Bahri emphasises the centrality of feminist perspectives within postcolonial studies. The oriental/native was often characterised in feminised terms. There was the eternal politics of interracial rape and its consequences; the status of women was used to justify the colonial project as a civilising mission, with British intervention in sati practice (the immolation of widows) famously described by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in a rare moment of lucidity, as "white men saving brown women from brown men"; this figure of the Indian woman thus became a sign of the unfree nature of the entire cultural tradition of a country; and finally, women's subordination in India was used as a stick to beat back India's demand for political equality. As Bahri rightly points out, despite resorting to cliches, feminist theory and postcolonialism are occupied with similar questions of representation, voice, marginalisation and the relation between politics and literature.

It was precisely the desire to recover a voice that gave rise to postcolonial studies. The narrator of the novel Zenzele by the Zimbabwean writer J. Nozipo Maraire reminds her daughter that "until the lions learn to write, tales of hunting will always glorify the hunter". Said, to whom Lazarus's book is dedicated, initiated this recovery. In bringing the postcolonial narrative up to date with the present geopolitical role of the US, Lazarus has achieved a first.

Dipli Saikia holds a PhD in literature from Bristol University, and now works in book publishing.