The Sign of the Cannibal: Melville and the Making of a Postcolonial Reader

Literary study is subject to fashion. Fashions have their guru figures. Currently postcolonial readings are in fashion. The guru of postcolonial readings is Homi Bhabha whose 1994 study published by Routledge, The Location of Culture, is the referential text. Sanborn is fascinated by Bhabha’s concern with “the question of ‘how newness enters the world’”. The “central argument” of Sanborn’s monograph “is that within at least one field and period of colonial discourse, newness became so visible that it was possible for a popular American author to articulate it for a mass audience”. However, Sanborn is not only grounding his...