This seminar asks how we might integrate context as a formal category of postcolonial literature. We invite submissions that theorize and/or practice modes of criticism that read postcolonial culture, history, politics and economy as formal features in postcolonial literary texts.

Our inquiry emerges out of two previous seminars on postcolonial studies and formalism. At ACLA 2024, we considered the relationship between postcolonial criticism and new formalism. At EACLALS 2023, we developed formalist readings of postcolonial environments. Now, we are shifting our focus to the critical commonplace that context is the antithesis of form. 

Postcolonial critics have been advocating forms of formalism for at least twenty years. For example, Gayatri Spivak (2003), Deepika Bahri (2003), Eli Park Sorenson (2010), and more recently Elleke Boehmer (2018) have each cast the aesthetic as vital to postcolonial studies. While such attempts to construct a “postcolonial formalism”, in Natalie Melas’s words (2007), may have sometimes relied upon tired if not retrograde categories of the 1980s theory wars, they each constitute valuable efforts to reconcile, rather than oppose, sociopolitical context with formal innovation.

Accordingly, we seek contributions that think through the opposition of form and context by exploring the affordances of theorizing and reading context as a formal property and strategy of postcolonial literary articulation. Through such readings, we seek to engage with the concepts, methods and stakes of postcolonial formalist criticism.

Sample questions:

• To what extent can description, setting and reality effects be analysed as formal features, and what is at stake for postcolonial studies?


• What does a method and practice of postcolonial formalism look like?


• How has the increased attention paid to Indigenous and/or popular forms in postcolonial studies made use of, or bypassed, discussions of formalism? How might a sociology of street pamphlet literature, an anthropology of sculptural practice, or other culture-specific genres be brought into dialogue with a formalism that often risks recapitulating restrictive, Western notions of what form is or does?


• What role might aesthetic judgment play in postcolonial literary studies? How might we reimagine canonical instances of postcolonial writers critiquing other postcolonial writers based on the politics of form (e.g., Soyinka vs. Negritude, Gordimer vs. Coetzee, Silko vs. Erdich).