SOURCE: Murray, Stuart. “Postcoloniality/Modernity: Wilson Harris and Postcolonial Theory.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 17, no. 2 (summer 1997): 53–58.

In the following essay, Murray discusses the ways Harris's works adapt and confront the methodologies of postcolonial theory.

The continuing theoretical debate over the shape and size, the resonances and the responsibilities, of postcolonialism grows daily more complex. Questions of what might be termed—generalizing—the “local” (an adversarial nationalism, an essentialized concentration on the subject body within postcoloniality, the relationship between the term postcolonial and the praxis of localized politics) are set against the “interstitial” (Homi Bhabha's concept of the “in-between,” the rejection of binary oppositions, a genealogical spectrum for the fracturing and flawed nature of colonial discourse and postcolonial articulation). And this example of the local/interstitial is itself an instance (and only one among many that could have been chosen) of the ways in which presentation of fluid issues...