Postcolonial romanticisms?

Abstract

"The sublime and negative capability are two aspects of romanticism that might be seen to have postcolonial potential, to be subversive or progressive in ways that speak to interrelated postcolonial concerns about representation, artistic and historical authority, and otherness. The sublime is a manifold and mobile concept, but my interest is in how it might be valued by romanticism and postcolonialism—depending, of course, upon how these categories are constructed—for the ways in which it might allow artists to engage in questions of un-representability, to find a means of representation that somehow does not fix or contain what it represents. And what Keats calls “negative capability,” “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (41-42), might suggest an attitude of similar refusal to master the subject. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians we can see, respectively, the sublime and negative capability at work. Much of the progressiveness of Conrad’s text, much of its “postcolonialism,” consists in its deployment and modification of the romantic sublime, while for Coetzee a Keatsian “negative capability” seems to be a way of moving towards a postcolonial identity for the Magistrate of the novel and, perhaps, for the writer and reader."