The editors assert that the “injunction ‘always historicise’ reverberates like a mantra in postcolonial literary criticism” and their belief in this statement shapes this densely packed new volume from Edinburgh University Press's Postcolonial Studies series. The Companion (thus called as it goes beyond the work of a dictionary or encyclopedia to refer readers on to new avenues of thought and reading in the bibliographies given for each subject entry) is dizzying in its scope and detail: the index of literary works referenced runs for 22 pages in very small font and the 220 entries by 160 contributors are a testament to a very significant editorial endeavour. Definitions are always problematic in this subject area, and Poddar and Johnson provide their own definition that is true to the historically and culturally specific rigour of their editorial vision:
The Companion focuses principally on the histories of postcolonial literatures in the Anglophone world – Africa (East, Southern and West), Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, New Zealand, the Pacific, South Asia, and South‐east Asia. … There are also long entries discussing the literatures and histories of those further areas that have claimed the title “postcolonial”, notably Britain, East Asia, Ireland, Latin America and the United States.
To complement the British Empire focus in this volume, there is a companion volume underway on the postcolonial literatures of Continental Europe.
Due to its range, this is a reference work of value both to the undergraduate and to the advanced scholar. Each entry, which may run for anything from a couple of paragraphs to several pages, is arranged alphabetically and provides a summary of the topic (historical event, idea, movement or figure) as well as references to further readings of literary and historical texts. Though the titles of the entries and the alphabetical arrangements makes for odd page‐fellows (“Cattle killing” by the Xhosa in the Cape Colony alongside the significance of “The Chauri Chauri incident” in Gandhi's adoption of civil disobedience), the seriousness and scholarly authority of the entries is never in any doubt.
Whether Poddar and Johnson have spent hours editing and revising or whether their contributors have shown rare brevity and succinctness in the face of a strict word limit, the entries are uniformly to the point and each entry stands alone as a mini‐essay on its subject. Nor do the editors take shortcuts; rather than one generic entry on multiculturalism, for instance, there are two, one on Australia and one for Canada, both places where the multicultural ideal was formally integrated into official government policy.
Although the clarity of the entries will be useful to history students with an interest in postcoloniality, the Companion is primarily targeted at literary students and scholars. There is rarely time in the academic year for literary students to read all the prescribed books and to search out the relevant background history as well, so this Companion provides immediate and authoritative descriptions of the relevant historical subjects with enough background to historicise the subject, and it will also lead extended essay and dissertation students on towards full histories and literary texts that explore their chosen theme further.
The Companion succeeds because of the authority of its well‐written entries and because it does not assume that its readers will come to it with a pre‐existing level of knowledge, be it about the East India Company or the Hong Kong handover. As a result, everyone who picks it up will learn something. Even if you think you know all about the Raj or the Rushdie Affair, do you know who the Thomasites were (1,000 teachers who were sent on a ship named Thomas to the Philippines to educate and “civilize” their Filipino students after the Spanish‐American war in 1898) or what was Engmalchin (an artificial language which took its name from English, Malayan, and Chinese)? This is a significant publication worthy of its categorisation as a reference work and it should be promoted to and on hand in the library for all students and scholars of postcolonial literature.
