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In recent years there have been increasing efforts to consider the contemporary relevance of postcolonial theory and its relationship to subaltern studies, Indigenous studies, the fields of world literature and ecocriticism. Nivedita Majumdar’s The World in a Grain of Sand: Postcolonial Literature and Radical Universalism is one such ambitious effort from Verso, which also published Priyamvada Gopal’s ground breaking Insurgent Empire in 2019. Majumdar’s book highlights the larger conceptual pitfalls that pervade postcolonial theory and determines how they may be overcome using the radical political attentiveness that Gopal reintroduced to historicism; it is a timely and useful intervention. Majumdar demonstrates that such radicalism is often missing in prominent postcolonial literary criticism and powerfully redresses this oversight using a distinctly Marxist lens for her sharp literary analyses.
Majumdar opens the monograph by recognizing the evolution and increasingly wide applications of postcolonial theory beyond English studies and considering the central concerns of postcolonial theory and the challenges with which it must contend in the social sciences and cultural studies. The foremost of these challenges, she argues, is the tendency to read postcolonial literature from the global South as local, parochial, and separate from the universal. Instead, she proposes a “radical universalism” which is “rooted in local realities but also capable of unearthing the needs, conflicts, and desires that stretch across cultures and time” (11). By analysing key postcolonial texts and identifying the limitations of renowned critical and theoretical works, she demonstrates how attention to patriarchal and capitalist structures can help resist the exoticized localism that pervades the postcolonial literary and critical canon.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, “A Grain of Sand,” reveals the weaknesses in current postcolonial theory which often obfuscate the complexity of political conflict in the global South and fail to recognize the systemic pervasion of oppressive structures and the agency of those that resist...