The rhetoric of Sara Suleri: Life writing and postcolonial theory

This article reads Sara Suleri's memoirs Meatless Days (first published in 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. Suleri understands criticism, like memoir, to be an act of creative, and distorting, remembrance. Reading Suleri's work in this way prompts us to reread 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.