Re-imagining postcolonial studies: a discussion of Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious *

Abstract

Neil Lazarus’s The Postcolonial Unconscious proposes a new literary comparatism based on a sociology of representational types rather than on modernist literary form. In this highly successful counter-text, he blasts postcolonial theory for its unacknowledged reliance on tropes and terms very alien or indifferent to the actual corpus of non-western literature. Heralding a still vibrant peripheral modernism, Lazarus pores over an extraordinarily wide range of non-western novels and poems to map an actually existing Third World aesthetic, whose political dimensions re-orient our understanding of what the postcolonial actually is.