Response

Abstract

The five essays gathered here invite us to think through the enduring as well as changing character of postcolonial literary and cultural studies over the past few decades. They do so from a self-identified generationally specific position of recent entrants into the field and they all share a common interest and expertise in South Asian literary studies. As someone who has primarily identified as an Africanist for most of my career and as one who is shockingly reminded that he is no longer one of the younger entrants in the field, I am delighted to be included in this conversation, from which I have had much to learn. I will turn to the individual contributions in due course, but it might be useful to get to what I see as the heart of the collective concerns articulated here. One set of concerns has to do with the ways in which scholarship in the field is named and categorized –what, for instance, are the valences of the terms “postcolonial” as opposed to “global” as opposed to “world” as opposed to “Anglophone”? What kinds of questions and lines of research do they each enable? What avenues might each in turn foreclose? This discussion was prompted, as Monika Bhagat-Kennedy reminds us, over the last three or four years as the Modern Language Association reorganized its former structure of scholarly divisions and discussion groups into fora that were in some cases renamed and reimagined in various ways. It has also arisen in the midst