‘FORM,’ WE ARE TOLD, is an abstraction, a ‘mischievous’ concept. ‘Formalism’ – the practice of reading and critical discourse that ‘form’ spawns – registers as much a ‘desire for form’ as an identification or analysis thereof. It says as much about the investments (or fetishes) of the reader as about the text in which she locates formal work, or beauty, or accomplishment. To the literary historian, ‘form’ becomes operative at moments when the discourse of formalism feeds into the self-understanding, and eventually the practice, of writers themselves. One such moment – in this case, a rather extended one – encompassed those mid- to late-twentieth-century writers and critics born into restive British colonies, or during the first years of independence. For many writers of the decolonizing world, and for the theorists of ‘postcolonialism’ who followed them, ‘form’ took on historical and spatial concreteness. It is often now posited that 'formalism' might be applied to these colonial, anti- or postcolonial texts, but it is not generally suggested that questions of form and formalism helped define the emergence of 'postcolonialism' as a mode of critique. I contend, in what follows, that they did.
