Things Fall Together: Reflections on the Popular Postcolonial Imagination
Michael Lambek

Achebe's Things Fail Apart beautifully epitomizes the postcolonial. Witness to the falling apart that opened colonialism, in its literary construction it is obviously a coming together. In one form, then, postcolonialism has comprised the grasp by originally non-European intellectuals of the modern condition and of modernity in the form of specific literary devices and genres and critical disciplines. Postcolonialism constitutes new readings of European works and new writing that moves by means of appropriating and transcending that tradition. It suggests a kind of benign reverse colonialism. But it also marks new kinds of distinctions between 'high' and 'popular' culture in the postcolonies themselves. What are the parallels and differences between cosmopolitan (intellectual) and vernacular (popular) forms of hybridity, polyphony, and quotation? I argue that the postcolonial condition is inherently ironic; the question is, then, how and by whom is this irony best realized and recognized?

I turn in particular to the imaginative practice of Malagasy speakers from Mayotte and Madagascar. Those in Mayotte now feel entitled as French citizens to French culture; they form part of a society that moved deliberately and directly, as it were, from colonialism to postcolonialism without the distracting detour of independence. In Madagascar, by contrast, the postcolonial condition is inevitably entwined with the meaning, history, and limits of the independent nation in a field of global forces.