Towards Theorization of Postcolonial Literature in the Global Culture of the Integrated Spectacle

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies – Literature, grade: Pass, The University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, course: Comprehensive Doctoral Examination, language: English, abstract: In an attempt “to construct what John Hinkson calls a “social theory of postmodernity” that is adequately global (Hinkson 1990)” (Appadurai 1996), I propose to bring the theorization of postcolonial literature to bear on the treatise on The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord (1994). To forge the connection between two such disparate texts I take recourse to Arjun Appadurai’s book Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (1996) that in important respects touches both on literature as cultural practice and on the global moment in which Debord’s society of integrated spectacle is situated. Debord’s notion of the society of integrated spectacle defines the specificity of the global moment of modernity where “the interlinked diasporas of people and images” (Appadurai 1996) play increasingly decisive role. The postcolonial literature that is intricately connected to multiple landscapes of flow explores their effect upon “the work of the imagination” (Appadurai 1996) as collective social fact. Equally constitutive of the “[d]iasporic public spheres, diverse among themselves” (Appadurai 1996), these flow-scapes produce in the global culture of the society of the spectacle multiple arenas “for conscious choice, justification, and representation” (Appadurai 1996).