In her discussion of postcolonial aesthetics, Deepika Bahri observed a “remarkable lack of a suffi ciently developed critical framework for addressing ‘the aesthetic dimension’ (in Herbert Marcuse’s words) of post-colonial literature” (Bahri 2003: 1). Invoking the aesthetic in postcolonial literature is an enterprise with an inherent predicament. Arguably, “aesthetics” as a discipline was founded on orientalism and the dialectics of East and West.1 And yet, postcolonial studies seems currently to be preoccupied with a recalibration of the ‘aesthetic,’ in which a sustained interest in ‘genre’ is observable.With some scepticism, invocations of the aesthetic may be traceable to disciplinary concerns —as if raising postcolonial studies to the ranks of the philosophy of art.