The rhetoric of Sara Suleri: Life writing and postcolonial theory

Abstract

This article reads Sara Suleri's memoirs Meatless Days (1989) and Boys Will Be Boys (2003) in dialogue with The Rhetoric of English India (1992), her influential work of postcolonial theory. It argues that Suleri's life writing and scholarship respond to the same fundamental questions about writing and description, and foreground visual metaphors to show how the memoirist distorts or imaginatively invents her absent subjects as a critic distorts or invents the text they read. Like memoir, Suleri understands criticism to be an act of creative, and distorting, remembrance. Reading Suleri's work in this way prompts us to re-read the postcolonial theory of the 1980s and 1990s as a body of literature, a register of and a meditation on a history of 20th-century migration and cultural encounter.Through the 1980s and 1990s, Sara Suleri Goodyear (b.1953) was an "academic postcolonial star" (Seyhan 2013, 197). Her father was a scion of Pakistani journalism, and a supporter of Jinnah and Pakistani nationalism. Her mother, born in Wales, was a professor of English literature in Lahore. Suleri is a Professor Emeritus at Yale, where she was teaching when her memoir Meatless Days was published.in 1989. She subsequently wrote The Rhetoric of English India, a book of criticism, in 1992, and Boys Will Be Boys, a second memoir, in 2003. Azade Seyhan (2013) remembers how Meatless Days was a popular text "on the syllabi of exile literature courses" in American universities in the 1990s, "because of its elegant and accessible theoretical musings and its focus on the questions that these courses emphasize". But it "disappeared relatively fast from college syllabi", perhaps due to "a certain fatigue with the plenitude of postcolonial discourses"