John McLeod (3) (1969–)

I may or may not have indulged in a lot of skimming while reading this book. The best bits were the three chapters summing up the history of the British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial empires: a lot of useful information concisely related. In the middle were the eight chapters on "postcolonial locations" ranging from north Africa to southern Africa, from Canada to Australasia. Some of these were good histories, others were too focused on pushing the authors' interpretative agendas for the locations' literature. And some were just unfathomable. Even worse were the four chapters on "postcolonial formulations" (poststructuralist, culturalist, materialist, and psychological), all of which seemed to presume you already knew about what they were trying to define, and frequently tried to define each formulation in terms of another one. I had more specific criticisms while reading it (the incredibly poor sourcing in the article on Australia comes to mind), but at this point I don't even see why I should put the effort into digging them up.… (meer)