By Kelly O’Toole
Prepared for the Friends of Rutgers English Newsletter

Professor Sonali Perera admits that "postcolonialism," one of the most important terms in literary studies today, is not easy to define. To help her students, she points out that there are two different forms of the word in circulation: "post-colonial" (with a hyphen) and "postcolonial" (without a hyphen). This minor discrepancy, often overlooked by students, reveals two variations of the basic definition. One is easy to explain, and Professor Perera defines post-colonial with a hyphen as "simply a descriptive word, marking literature by people of formerly colonized countries."

However, postcolonialism without a hyphen becomes a much broader term, she says, suggesting a period and a body of literature, "but also describing a 'knowledge-politics' - a lens for viewing the world and a theoretical tool for understanding it." Professor Perera also notes that the postcolonial period is "not a clear-cut terrain, because it's still developing now." The study of colonialism and its after-effects is not new, but the new historical situations that require it are not safely in the past either. Postcolonialism thus offers us ways of understanding the "history of the present."

Professor Perera's work in postcolonial studies began when she was an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her personal history was part of her interest: born in Sri Lanka, Professor Perera visited there often, spending time with her extended family and with her grandmother, an important figure in her life. After graduating from college, she returned to Sri Lanka to research working-class periodicals produced by garment factory workers. She also taught English literature to high school students preparing to sit for London examinations. These two very different experiences - teaching English literature while researching vernacular literature and oral history in a once-colonized country - gave her a rich sense of the field to add to her undergraduate study.

After returning to the United States and earning her Ph.D. from Columbia, Professor Perera spent two years at Duke University, where she taught a variation of the senior seminar on postcolonialism that she currently teaches at Rutgers. Many of the books Professor Perera teaches are less concerned with celebrating a nation's transition to independence than they are with exploring how people must redefine themselves as "postcolonial subjects," and how these redefinitions can try to extend social justice. In this context, simple political positions are difficult to maintain. Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost, for example, tells the story of a human rights expert who returns to her homeland, Sri Lanka, hoping to speak for victims of the civil war, but who then unwittingly becomes part of the crisis she is flown in to manage. Professor Perera encourages her students "to embrace the political complexity of these texts," she says, but also "to engage with the ethical dilemmas they present."

To her delight, Professor Perera notices that her students at Rutgers tend to have already read many of the challenging works she assigns. Because so many Rutgers students bring both knowledge and personal interest to the classroom, they "ask very different sets of questions, with a real intellectual enthusiasm behind them." Rutgers students are "interested in questions of social justice," she says, "and can think about politics in a way that is not completely separate from them."

Professor Perera believes that part of the difference at Rutgers lies in the structure of the English Department, which she describes as "very open to interdisciplinary work, which allows people to pursue a wide range of scholarship." She finds that students in her classes are often working in fields in addition to English, such as history and political science, giving them a broader sense of postcolonialism. "At Rutgers, there is such a sense that interdisciplinary approaches are part of the future of literary studies," she says, "it's exciting to be a part of it."

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