A writer-editor-teacher’s quote of the week 212

I teach at a university, so I know all about the enthusiasm for creating social change through intellectual and artistic activity, especially within what we ironically call the “humanities.” And while we have had our fair share of literary critics who have believed in the potential of literature – Sir Philip Sidney, Matthew Arnold, FR and Queenie Leavis – it goes without saying, I think, that, apart from recent feminist and Marxist critics who seek to engage literature in the enterprise of social and political transformation, the study of literature, especially in the wake of New Criticism, has not had a sustained political component.

So I was, in many ways, delighted to see postcolonial studies arrive on campus, not only because it expanded the canon by insisting that we read consider and teach the literatures of colonized people, but because it promised to give Native people a place at the table. I know that postcolonial studies is not a panacea for much of anything. I know that it never promised explicitly to make the colonized world a better place for colonized peoples. It did, however, carry with it the implicit expectation that, through exposure to new literatures and cultures and challenges to hegemonic assumptions and power structures, lives would be made by better.

At least the lives of the theorists.

– from the chapter “You’re Not the Indian I Had in Mind” in The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative by Thomas King

Read more: The Quotes