I Will Start with Two Stories About This Thing Called Literature and the world it claims to name and possess.

The first takes place in Shillong, in the northeast corner of India, a place far removed from the Indian heartland, closer to Bangladesh, Burma, and China than to New Delhi. The setting is the Shillong campus of the English and Foreign Languages University, where I have come to teach a seminar to junior academics and graduate students on decolonization as a theoretical problem. My students and I will embark on a two-week systematic rereading of the philosophical claims made for decolonization in the writings of canonical postcolonial writers, from Mahatma Gandhi's writing on nonviolence to Aimé Césaire's and Léopold Sédar Senghor's on negritude to Frantz Fanon's on the pitfalls of national consciousness to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's and Trinh T. Minh-Ha's on the figure of woman in difference. Although my students are attentive, their relation to these texts is ambivalent: they recognize the importance of these texts to understanding the making of the modern world, yet colonialism, as a world-historical event, occurred too long ago to be part of their lived experience. Their ambivalence is compounded by the fact that the urgency with which the authors of decolonization write, the sense that they are operating at the end of time—the time of Europe—belongs to a moment that no longer resonates with people struggling to survive in a more complex, globalized world. It is hard for my students to make the connection between Senghor's negritude and his incarceration in a Nazi prison camp in Poitiers during World War II or to see that event, the imprisonment of an African fighting for France, as connected to a paradigmatic break in the discourse of empire.