Postcolonial Thresholds: Thresholds, Gateways and Borders

Postcolonial Thresholds A special issue of JPW edited by Janet Wilson and Daria Tunca This proposed collection is based around the examination of the threshold or gateway in postcolonial writing, photography and film. The essays acknowledge the ubiquitousness in postcolonial discourse of generic ‘threshold’ terms like the liminal and the interstitial, as well as scepticism about their ability to assert resistance in an increasingly globalised world in which postcolonial studies often serves the interests of metropolitan centres, the western academy and neoliberal policy-making. The nine essays (of which abstracts are presented below) examine these interrelated concepts from the various perspectives provided by genre, genealogy, geography, and metaphysics. They offer theorisations of liminality and ideas of inbetweenness, the threshold discourses of East–West encounters, the spatiogeography of inner London, the metaphoric threshold between the spiritual and the civic, enactments and performances of thresholds/gateways on the dynamic space of the stage, the play text with its concepts of performativity as threshold for new fiction, text and image as gateways to alternative constructions of the human. The works of writers and film-makers including Orhan Pamuk, Edward Said, Nadine Gordimer, Caryl Phillips, Amitav Ghosh, Chris Abani and Anthony Minghella are ‘reoriented’ through the use of comparative, cross cultural approaches that show them as defining a variety of literal and conceptual spaces – outer and inner, public and private – in which thresholds and gateways offer points of transition and in these ways ‘postcolonising’ them. The collection aims to continue the postcolonial project of revising dialectical thinking and binaristic processes through a scrutiny of the discipline’s core discourse based around concepts of ambivalence and in-betweenness, minoritarianism and subalternity.