Amitav Ghosh and the aesthetic turn in postcolonial studies

The World and the Postcolonial

“…If it is true that, as Robert Young said some time ago, postcolonial studies ‘first acquired disciplinary legitimacy’, ‘by devaluing the “aesthetic qualities” of a work and focusing instead on its depiction of “representative minority experience”’ (Ref. 12, p. 1, quoting Young 13 ), then world literary studies might well be seen as a revaluing of these. With its antecedents in comparatism, a ‘world literature’ approach offers substantial critical tools to deal with questions of form, or what Said called the aesthetic integrity of a text.…”