Postcolonial Concepts: Inundation In its military usage, inundation involves the pre-planned flooding of a certain area, as a last-resort defensive measure, to impede the progress of advancing armor. The purpose of this strategy is to ensure that the most potent ground war machine—the tank—cannot move into home territory. Within the context of this essay, inundation suggests a technique of reading texts to allow the critic to add silenced knowledge—historical and theoretical—hence complicating any reductive readings of the texts. This exercise, then, transforms the text from a site of arrival to a point of departure. An inundated text would therefore take us beyond the burden of representation while also ensuring that it can no longer be read to enforce or advance one particular agenda, especially any attempts at making the text speak for empire. Inundation cannot be viewed as an overarching method, but rather as a bricoler technique that draws.
Further Reading: “Salman Rushdie: Reading the Postcolonial Texts in the Era of Empire.” Postcolonial Text [Online], Vol. 5 (2) 2009: 14 pages.
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