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'Provincializing Europe': The Postcolonial Urban Uncanny in V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River

V. S. Naipaul is somewhat infamous in postcolonial circles. As a world traveler and chronicler of global history, from the American South and Islamic fundamentalism in Iran to Indian diasporic histories on four continents, he is regarded alternately as a leading critic of the colonial condition and as an intellectual collaborator with that same regime. He is praised for the crystalline clarity of his prose and criticized for his skeptical characterizations of nearly every society that he represents in his work; he is read as a Caribbean, Indian, and English writer.1 His biographer Bruce King concludes that Naipaul, who was born and raised in Trinidad, dispenses with geographical identity and “regard[s] himself as a former colonial who became a homeless cosmopolitan” (3). With regard to Naipaul’s African works, though, King identifies Naipaul’s stance as one deeply critical of colonialism and the representational schema of colonial historiography. King goes so far as to class these novels with those of Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe in their shared project of understanding a question—“how, in the complex coming together of the ‘post’ and the ‘colonial’ [do] the present and the past inform one another[?]”—articulated by the editors of an essay collection devoted to the question of postcolonial historiography (Fuchs and Baker 329). Naipaul’s configuration of time through space in A Bend in the River, his allegorical 1979 novel based not-so-loosely on the post-independence period in the Congo (then Zaire),