This. 👇
"Choosing what books to read becomes itself a moralistic enterprise, a form of atonement. One must read postcolonial literatures to pay the guilt tax. It is a reading toll that the student of the White Literature syllabus is not asked to pay."
thepointmag.com/criticism/beyo…
"Of all the literature courses students take, the texts they study are supposed to be illustrative: they are used to critique some kind of -ism that is being scolded or praised by the course instructor."
"Postcolonial texts in English literature seem to have two jobs in these syllabi: they either negatively illustrate some form of moral or social misconduct, or they positively represent a “marginalized” culture or geography."
"The Indian writer’s responsibility to represent their nation had metamorphosed, here, into the “marginalized” writer’s responsibility to represent their “local culture.”
Kiran Manral, an Indian writer of several novels in a genre that the snootiness of publishing calls “commercial fiction,” once asked this question in a Facebook post: “Why am I unable to enjoy or finish any of these books that are on long lists and shortlists of literary prizes?”
"What I am seeking is for the postcolonial literature reading list to be liberated from its current status as “minor literature", where it is not studied merely as "ur-manifestos and histories of repression and suffering".
"Looking at the syllabus of the postcolonial literatures, I feel the need, as a postcolonial citizen and subject, for our literatures to be read for more reasons than the Guilt Rasa."
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