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Concerned by the eclipse of concerted discussion of literary technique in the postcolonial field, this article outlines a critical practice which would restore questions of technique to the centre ground. Proceeding from the assumption that technique is the agent of art's thinking, it proposes that the literary craft practised in any given work or authorship needs to be thought through in its context of intelligibility: a conception which synthesizes insights of Pierre Bourdieu and Theodor Adorno; particularly their respective notions of field and material. Then, in two short studies, on the critical reception of Louise Bennett in the Caribbean and J. M. Coetzee in South Africa, these concepts are put into motion to illuminate the truth-content of field-defining developments of the literary material.

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This essay argues that Jean-Paul Sartre's notion of "dialectical reason", as elaborated in his Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), had a decisive impact on the composition of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961). The relationship between the two works has not before received a thorough textual exposition. Such an exposition, it is suggested, also entails revising the view of the nature of Fanon's work that has become entrenched in anglophone scholarship. Instead of a self-grounding theorist who more resembles the postcolonialists who would succeed him, this essay presents a view of Fanon as a situated theorist, drawing on those resources that could best help him to articulate the task at hand. The notion of "dialectical reason" allowed him to break from his previous understanding of decolonization as the attainment of reason through struggle, and see the "praxis" of revolution as, itself, self-realizing reason. To perceive this allows us better to seize on the thinking that guides his discussions of objectification under colonialism, anticolonial violence, and the role of the national bourgeoisie, and, thus, to clear up a number of controversies.

Early in 2012 we called for papers that would acknowledge the challenges of thinking about craft and of seeing craft itself as a kind of thinking. These aims could be meaningfully pursued only if craft and technique were understood to be the fundamental grounds for critical interpretation rather than subsidiary concerns for cultural critique and "textual analysis". Such an understanding, we suggested, had been missing as much from recent conversations about world literature as from older conversations about Commonwealth and postcolonial literatures, and this to their detriment, since it is in craft that works are oriented towards and have knowledge of the world.The enthusiasm of the response confirmed that others in the field shared our misgivings about the eclipse of craft and technique, though it soon emerged that each participant understood the reasons and remedies for this eclipse somewhat differently. This was not wholly unexpected, since we had asked for a range of approaches: formalist, stylistic, narratological, but also sociological, book historical, bibliographic; and we had hoped for the kind of geographic range that was in the end represented: Africa, the Caribbean, South Asia, the Middle East, China, Eastern Europe, Western Europe; ground which postcolonial criticism could hardly pretend to cover, even if we did choose to prioritize the context of decolonization in the call for papers. But over and beyond the divergence