Amitava Kumar on Susan Sontag
Bookforum, April/May 2005

Susan Sontag was exemplary in bringing attention to nonAmerican authors who might otherwise have not been translated into English—from Roland Barthes and Danilo Kis to E. M. Cioran and W. G. Sebald. With Sontag's passing, where can interested readers turn to find insightful literary criticism with an eye toward other countries?

Amitava Kumar: I've read Sontag with attention and taught her books, but frankly I've never thought of her as a resource for the discovery of writers from the Third World. My discipline, postcolonial studies, is meant to perform that task—and it has, if unevenly, by including writers from elsewhere in our syllabi and also, of course, by reading canonical works from the viewpoint of the colonized. But there are more sophisticated ways to go about it. My friend Rob Nixon, who was born in South Africa and teaches at the University of Wisconsin, offers a course called "Petrofiction," which looks at resource conflicts—oil and water—through the prism of literature. On the reading list are books like Ken Saro-Wiwa's Month and a Day, Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, and Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco. There are also postcolonial scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak translating and popularizing the fiction of the Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi; Edward Said championing the work of Mahmoud Darwish and Elias Khoury; and Manthia Diawara writing eloquently about the photographs taken by Seydou Keita and rescued from a darkroom in Mali. Having said that, what remains to be acknowledged is that the practitioners of postcolonial studies, academics all, for the most part lack what Sontag had in abundance: a broad reach, a sense of aesthetics to match the avowed politics, a distrust of received opinion, the precision of language, and the ability, or need, to cultivate inwardness.