Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature

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Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature

Also By Françoise Král RE-PRESENTING OTHERNESS: Mapping the Colonial ‘Self’/Mapping the Indigenous ‘Other’ in the Literatures of Australia and New Zealand (editor)

Critical Identities in Contemporary Anglophone Diasporic Literature

Françoise Král Senior Lecturer in English Université Paris 10, Nanterre, France

© Françoise Král 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–22041–6 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–22041–X hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of my father Miloslav Král

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Introduction

1

1. Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in Diasporic Studies: Mapping the Site of Intervention Liminality as metaperspective The (a)politicalness of liminality Aesthetics and the politics of liminality The diasporic imaginary 2.

Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora Identity and interstitiality: postcolonial perspectives Interstitiality in a diasporic perspective The semiotics of interstitiality

3. Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity Rethinking the continuity land/race/language/culture and the temptation of authenticity in Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy The melting pot definition in crisis: Mona in The Promised Land by Gish Jen Double diasporas and identity: The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji 4. Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and the Diasporic Subject From colonialism to heritage culture: the paradigm of the snowglobe From the Promised Land to homecoming narratives: interrogating Western myths and doxa Interrogating postcolonial paradigms Language and new territorialities 5. Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject Conflicting ethoses: of discontinuities in the diasporic experience

vii

11 14 17 20 23 26 31 37 42 50

57 63 68 75 79 84 87 92 99 102

viii

Contents

Deterritorialization and the sheer ‘nakedness of human rights’ Reterritorializing the ethical subject From the ‘local tribe’ to the ‘global tribe’

109 113 119

6. Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject Mother tongue, father tongue and stepmother tongue: rethinking the genealogy of postcolonial linguistic legacies Of bilingualism and bilanguaging: being at home in two different languages Of the cultural domination of the English language National languages and transnationalism

125

Notes

161

Bibliography

174

Index

187

131 136 149 157

Acknowledgements The research for this book has been supported by a number of institutions. I am particularly grateful for a study leave awarded by the CNU (the French National Committee of Universities) and a grant awarded by the SAES (the French Society for English Studies). My research has also benefited from the time I spent at the University of Texas at Austin where I taught postcolonial literature. I have also received the support of the CREA (Centre for Research in English Studies) in my current department at the Université Paris 10 Nanterre, and in particular of Wilfrid Rotgé and Emily Eells. I would like to express my thanks to Claire Bazin, my onetime supervisor for her support and encouragement. I am also grateful to the late Michel Fabre, as well as to Gérard Celli who played such a decisive role, at an early stage, in the direction which my research projects have taken and whose guidance over the years has been immensely valuable. I would like to express my very warm thanks to Meredene Hill, Crystal Webster, Clare MacManus and Simone Rinzler, for their support and friendship, to Delphine Reffet who provided a most convenient writing retreat, as well as to Matthieu Guillot for his patience and encouragement. Two people in particular have been especially helpful in seeing this book through to publication; Jean-Jacques Lecercle who encouraged and nurtured the first impetus to write and Sam Coombes, who made sure that the manuscript actually made it out of the drawer. I am grateful to both of them for their careful rereadings and the rigorous eye which they have cast over my manuscript. My very warm thanks to Sam for the gift of patience, time and accuracy. A special thought goes to wee Juliet who faithfully accompanied me to the library whilst the maunscript was still in preparation and was born shortly after its completion. My deepest thanks go to Geneviève Král for years of unwavering support. Some of the material included in Chapter 2 appeared in Philip Roth Studies whose editors have kindly granted permission to reproduce these extracts.

ix

x

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of the numerous journals in which articles of mine have been published, and in particular Marc Delrez, William Hughes, Derek Parker Royal and Janet Wilson. Many thanks to the staff at the National Library of Scotland for their efficiency, their warmth and the perseverance with which they have hunted down books for me on numerous occasions.

Introduction

The chronicles of diasporas – those of the black Atlantic, of the Metropolitan Jewry, of mass rural displacement – constitute the ground swell of modernity. These historical testimonies interrogate and undermine any simple or uncomplicated sense of origins, traditions and linear movement. Considering the violent dispersal of people, cultures and lives, we are inevitably confronted with mixed histories, cultural mingling, composite languages and creole arts that are central to our history. (Chambers, 1994, 16–17) Le monde moderne est hanté par le spectre d’un effacement des différences. (Bayart, 1996, 23) The world is haunted by the spectre of a waning of differences. (My translation) This reflection on identity takes place at a time when identity continues to occupy centre stage not only in literary and cultural studies but also in the humanities in general, while being subjected to various critical as well as contextual assaults. The same situational impact of history and politics which had propelled issues of national and regional identity to the forefront of postcolonial studies is now starting to undermine the pertinence, if not the validity of such categories in diasporic studies, as new phenomena such as transnationalism, the formation of international communities and globalism have appeared. Arjun Appadurai in particular has made a significant breakthrough in intuiting the role of transnational communities and their impact on identity definition 1

2 Critical Identities

at both an individual and a national level as well as their role in the formation of new models of identification. Conversely, the multiplication of contact zones and the broad spectrum of situations resulting from migrations have forced theorists to make room for new categories and increasingly pay attention to hybridity (Bhabha), mestizaje (Anzaldua), interstitiality and hyphenation (Mishra). This contextual shift has been paralleled with a critical reappraisal of the notion of identity. Not only has the essentialist conception of identity come under criticism with deconstructionism, the link between identity and authenticity has also been the object of much speculation and has been interrogated to such an extent that today, it has become difficult to apprehend identity independently of identity construction and the mechanisms it involves; in other words, identity has gradually come to be apprehended in its artificiality rather than per se. The turn of the twenty-first century is thus a paradoxical time when identity still occupies pride of place while being on shaky ground; its unreconstructed parts continue to haunt the field of literary studies with the recurrence and perseverance of a spectre to the point where it almost seems that the more identity is under threat, the more it resurfaces. The same paradox is mirrored in the diversity of literary production. While new voices have emerged, which have become more visible thanks to the appearance of new labels like Black British literature and the literature of the South Asian diaspora, to name only two, the genre of the global novel points in the opposite direction. With its deterritorialized characters who not only roam the world at their ease but who sometimes seem to have jettisoned all cultural moorings, the global novel not only offers new models of togetherness and citizenship, it also reflects an actual change in the way some diasporians negotiate their double belonging and cope with the de facto in-betweenness of their condition. The starting point of this book is an interest in the disjunctive phenomena inherent in the diasporic experience as well as a concern relating to the fact that the figure of the migrant has been presented as emblematic of the postmodern, post-industrial condition, a sort of epiphenomenon and heightened version of the consequences of postmodernity. Much as it is tempting to subscribe to this correlation, the canonization of the migrant as an emblematic figure of the twenty-first century is problematic. Not only does this view constitute a romanticized vision of immigration, one that is far from being representative of all im/migrants but more clearly associated with those whom Appadurai (1996) has called the diaspora of hope, it also betrays a certain political

Introduction 3

agenda and impacts on notions such as communities, nations, and the ethos of the social fabric. Whether it be the celebration of individuality through a focus on the personal trajectory of migrants, the absence of political involvement which goes hand in hand with the peripheral position often occupied by im/migrant figures in the host country, or the ethical repositioning of the diasporic subject generated by the forced amnesia of the homeland, all these features of diasporic literature need to be interrogated, especially when they are co-opted by the West and presented as the demise of postmodernity or the inevitable future of contemporary man in an increasingly ‘liquid world’ to take up the expression used by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman to refer to the postmodern condition. This book is concerned with the prismatic value of diasporic literature which, though problematic when presented as an iconic representation of postmodernity, is nonetheless a unique vantage point, a privileged outlook on emerging issues which loom large at the turn of the twentyfirst century. Hence the title of this book which not only implies that diasporic identities are in a critical position, nor only that they need to be critically reassessed, but also that they constitute a most valuable category for both political and epistemological reasons, a theme which I shall develop in Chapter 1. There is indeed an intrinsic value to literary representations of these changing and hybrid identities, which lies in the emphasis they put not so much on analysis and critical appraisal as on self-representation. Indeed, unlike identity, which can be approached rather scientifically and quantified in terms of markers of integration, self-representation, which is acknowledged as an essential parameter of identity definition, is more subjective and therefore difficult to grasp. The difficulty is even more acute when one tries to apprehend it from within the critical apparatus of other disciplines of the humanities modelled on the exact sciences (like some branches of sociology which are still trying to break away from the Durkheimian postulate which consists in dealing with human facts as if they were things). Literature on the other hand leaves more room for the grammar of identity to express itself in all its complexities, in the jarring polarities of its fragmented nature, and for the divide between objective markers of integration and one’s sense of belonging to widen to unexpected proportions. The diverging methodologies of literary studies and sociology or anthropology can however converge around specific nexuses involving the pivotal part played by language and myths – whether they be canonical myths or the more popular doxa of our era – in the coming together


of new types of communities. The interest of an anthropologist like Marc Augé or a sociologist like Zygmunt Bauman in language have inspired me to engage in a transdisciplinary dialogue. The idea is not so much to import concepts from sociology and show how they are illustrated in literary texts. Such an approach would run the risk of instrumentalizing the literary texts, and potentially reduce them to mere testimonies on immigration. It consists more in showing how these texts either explicitly interrogate or invite us to interrogate the conflicting patterns of identity constructions and understand issues which are only starting to emerge and have been left out of existing theoretical paradigms. Both the scope and the interdisciplinary nature of such an undertaking have forced me to narrow down a very broad field to specific questions which to me lie at the heart of the diasporic novel and constitute the specificity of its understanding of identity. In my investigation I have therefore followed two axes. The first one consists in an investigation of the new world geography presented in diasporic works and the redefinition of today’s geopolitical landscape. Indeed, contemporary texts often mirror the redefinition of the contours of former partnerships and zones of influence, as well as point to the underlying logics of international exchanges. In doing so, they sketch a new world geography where the transnational is threatening the local and where new forms of interaction are starting to take shape. The second axis touches upon one of the bones of contention today in geopolitical sciences and certain branches of the humanities which is the extent to which globalization has affected or is affecting social practices and national communities through the spread of a world language, English. A pessimistic commentator like Hagège (2006) laments the death of languages, while others study the progress of English as an international vector of communication but remain attentive to the changes brought to the language by such an extended use (Crystal, 2003 [1997]). While some argue that linguistic globalization leads to an erosion of the world’s linguistic mosaic, others argue that the English language itself is at threat, reduced to an instrument of communication, severed from its historical context of origin (Lecercle, 2004) and from a social fabric whose diversity it no longer mirrors or echoes because of standardization (Glissant). The corpus of diasporic fiction offers a wealth of situations involving bilingualism or polyglossia and reveals a whole new series of understudied phenomena inherent in the specificities of the contemporary diasporic experience and its double belonging, such as disjunctive approaches to the two languages or linguistic compartmentalization.

Introduction 5

The double focus of this study has led me to adopt a selective approach to the broad and ever-expanding corpus of contemporary diasporic literature. In Chapter 1, I shall come back to the definition of the term diaspora, which is still a controversial term used by some as a mere metaphor while others remain attached to a strict definition of the term. The criterion I have used to select my corpus of literary texts is that these texts by diasporic writers or writers from diasporic traditions should explicitly engage with issues related to displacement, migration and relocation and address the issues of imaginary geography or language. Such a prerequisite, added to the sheer volume of diasporic texts has led me to leave aside some illustrious authors among whom V.S. Naipaul, Anita Desai or Amitav Ghosh and include emerging voices who have not yet been studied in book-length studies such as Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri or Hari Kunzru. Most of the writers are from three main diasporic traditions: the south Asian diaspora (represented by Monica Ali and Jhumpa Lahiri), the Caribbean diaspora (Andrea Levy) and the African diaspora (Abdulrazak Gurnah). But the focus of my book has also led me to include other diasporic writers such as Marina Lewycka or Cristina Garcia. The very nature of my project implies the adoption of a long-sighted perspective on the experience of diaspora. The main difficulty and potential pitfall of such an undertaking is to go one step too far in the direction of abstraction and somehow overgeneralize rather than theorize, to the point of uprooting the texts from their specific context and related issues. This difficulty goes beyond issues of methodology and ties in with the way one conceives of diasporic studies. Some critics like Vijay Mishra consider the history of a diaspora to be fundamental so as to pre-empt any theorization of diasporas in general. Such a view of diasporic studies is both very different from that of authors who have focused on theoretical approaches, while being complementary. It must be said that projects like mine owe a lot to studies of specific migrations like Susheila Nasta’s Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Mark Stein’s Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004) or Vijay Mishra’s The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary (2007), to name only a few. But to return to the agenda I have set myself when writing this book, I have tried to pay particular attention not only to the cultural or historical context of the diasporic authors discussed but also to the socio- economic situations and types of migration they are referring to. Authors of studies on diasporic literature are often reproached with dealing with migrants as belonging to a homogeneous group and


sometimes of drawing too much on a corpus of texts from an international middle-class of privileged migrants. It has been a constant preoccupation in my choice of texts and authors to bear witness as much as possible not only to the socio-economic diversity of diasporic voices, but also to the dissonant polyphony which characterizes Anglophone diasporic literature at the turn of the twenty-first century. A polyphony which originates not only in the intricate mosaic of its components as in the complex positioning defined in terms of gender, social category, cultural background but also in terms of the philosophy of immigration and national identity of the host country which in my book involves three main English-speaking countries: England, the United States and Canada. Chapter 1 serves a double purpose. It recontextualizes the book in the field of diasporic literature and its criticism and seeks to define the term diaspora, used in critical literature either as metaphor (Bhabha, Gilroy, Hall) or in a more rigorous sense, distinguishing between migrants, refugees and exiles. This chapter also defines the theoretical stakes of the book and in particular the epistemological interest of the category of the in-between space of migration as providing a de facto metaperspective, that is a double consciousness which is not an essential category but an existential one. In Chapter 2 I discuss the notion of interstitiality (Bhabha, 1996; Chambers, 1994), its timeliness and its relevance in contemporary discussions of identity. Although identity is by definition always necessarily interstitial, there is a sense in which the complexity inherent in identity today is pushed to a radical point by the diversification of identity definitions in a world whose human geography is constantly redefined by mass migrations. This phenomenon and the epistemological crisis it has triggered have been rendered more acute by the fact that the theoretical framework itself is in crisis; indeed, the grand narrative of identity construction is experiencing difficulty recovering from the assault of deconstructionism. The first two sections of the chapter trace the process of identity reconfiguration in a postcolonial and in a diasporic context, paying particular attention to individual/collective memory, topography and the mapping of a new identity, and temporality or the genealogy of the postcolonial/diasporic other. The last section is centred on issues of semiotics and taxonomy. While the radical polarities of diasporic lives pose interpretative problems, the kaleidoscopic character of immigrants and their multiple positioning in society invite to question the pertinence of interpretative paradigms centred on monolithic categories.

Introduction 7

Chapter 3 positions itself in contemporary debates and discusses the two poles around which debates on identity have crystallized: authenticity versus the postmodern take on identity and critical reassessment of identity. In the past forty years or so, the notion of authenticity has come in for harsh criticism. The appearance of a more critical approach to the issue of authenticity coincided, both chronologically and logically, with a general reassessment of the question of identity in the wake of deconstructionism, which posited that identity is not an already existing category but a construct, generated by and developed through discourse in collusion with the interests, goals and desires of dominant cultures (Spurr, 1993; Clifford, 1986; Lowe, 1991; Young, 1995). Yet authenticity has not disappeared altogether, any more than have race or ethnicity; they have sometimes resurfaced in cultural studies. A problem with the deconstructionist take on identity is that by dissociating categories it also empties them of their ontological depth. One of the consequences of studies focusing on counter-discursive strategies is that self and other become two poles, two abstract signifiers, interrelated and interdependent. Instead of being envisaged as mere signifiers, the self and the other need to be apprehended in their ontological depth, a depth made of various layers, of an intricate geology. In order to move away from theoretical abstractions I propose to start from a close analysis of the genesis of identity in a corpus of texts dealing with second generation immigrants, who are precisely at the point of juncture or maybe disjuncture between the national definition of identity in the host country, the would-be identity fantasized by their parents and their own room for reinvention (Andrea Levy, Gish Jen and Moyez Vassanji). Chapter 3 allows me to illustrate the workings of identity formation in relation to the conceptions of national identity of the host countries concerned (in particular the difference between assimilationist policies and the theory of the melting pot). In Chapter 4 I propose to analyse representations of the world geography in contemporary diasporic fiction. Diasporic texts are by their very nature tales of nostalgia whose function is to re-member the fragments of the motherland in a situation of either temporary displacement or permanent exile. Yet the fact that diasporic literature is characterized by a strong emotional charge and a certain nostalgia does not imply that it is necessarily a deforming lens skewed by subjectivity. In this chapter I work on the proposition that it can even prove to be a reliable prism, a sharp lens – though at times a magnifying one. Indeed, because they have experienced displacement and mobility, but also the disjunction between a discourse on geographical mobility and the


harsher reality of economic stagnation, immigrants occupy a perfect locus to assess the validity – or lack of validity – of postmodern myths relating to space and territoriality, in particular fluidity and mobility and the belief that the world has become a global village (McLuhan). My focus is more specifically on discourse and language and on their various modi operandi. In the first section I propose to analyse how the representation of the homeland and of the host country are not only shaped by nostalgia and affected by the haunting presence of the home country, but are also caught in a convergence of discourses which do not necessarily clash but rather merge into a pattern of confluence. Hence the colonial representation of India as exotic and pristine is taken up by the discourse of heritage culture (Harvey) and rechannelled, producing a new India tailored for the West. Another pattern is the disjunctive one which brings into tension myths and narratives of failed integration. Such texts, among which many homecoming narratives, like that by Hari Kunzru or Kiran Desai, expose the disjunction and dissonance between Western discourse and the actual experience of the diasporic subject. The last section of the chapter, which takes its cue from anthropologist Marc Augé’s analysis of the places of supermodernity, focuses on the role of language in the reconfiguration of space and the coming together of new communities which do not originate in geographic continuity and physical proximity. Chapter 5 addresses one of the underlying themes of the book, namely an interest in the disjunctive phenomena inherent in the diasporic experience. I argue that the double belonging (rather than the in-betweenness) of the diasporic subject generates a disjunctive process which not only threatens selfhood and identity but also the diasporic subject as an ethical and political being. Bilingualism, for example, can create a disjunction between words and their meaning but also between one’s discourse and its effects in a situation of communication. This is what is suggested in several passages from Rushdie’s novel Fury, a position which sharply contrasts with the postmodern style of earlier works by Rushdie. Rather than playing with language, Rushdie reasserts the rights and responsibilities of anyone using a language to use it not only to express himself/herself but also with a certain degree of social awareness of the potential consequences. This chapter therefore seeks to engage with issues linked to ethics and the repositioning of the diasporic subject, not only as deterritorialized and uprooted, but as rerooted, ethically and politically. This implies looking at the process of social reterritorialization and social validation (Emmanuel Renault) but also at the emergence of the global community of im/migrants as

Introduction 9

a potential political entity (Hardt and Negri). A large part of this chapter draws on the findings of the Frankfurt school (Axel Honneth but also the second generation with figures like Emmanuel Renault) and proposes close readings of certain texts, in particular Zadie Smith, in the light of their ideas. This chapter also engages with the revival of an interest in the ethics of cosmopolitanism (Appiah, 2007) and discusses the pertinence of this largely Western concept in relation to the diasporic subject. Chapter 6 focuses on the role and representation of languages – more specifically the mother tongue and English, the language of the host country. Because immigration often involves a move to a new linguistic context, the role played by language in the experience of immigration and in the shaping of a new identity is of paramount importance. Language proficiency is thus the first aspect, both chronologically and in terms of importance, not only because it plays a key role in the actual integration of the immigrant, but also because it affects the sense of belonging he might or might not develop, independently of objective markers of integration. The question of language, bilingualism and ‘bilanguaging’ in English-speaking diasporic populations needs to be recontextualized on various levels, among which: the way diasporic subjects relate to both their mother tongue and the language of the host country; the postcolonial situation and the use of English to write back at the centre; the current status of English at the turn of the twentyfirst century, and the question of the function and future of national languages in an increasingly transnational world. In the first section, I analyse how the redefinition of the balance of power between Britain and its colonies has affected and is affecting the way diasporic populations relate to the English language, no longer seen as a tool of domination. This forces us to rethink the genealogy of linguistic postcolonial legacies and in particular the status of English as a ‘stepmother tongue’ (Skinner, 1998). This situation is best reflected in the works of female writers from the south Asian diaspora like Monica Ali or Jhumpa Lahiri who often suggest the liberating function of the English language as an instrument of social reinvention which allows women to emancipate themselves from the yoke of patriarchal societies. This change however does not solve the problem of the incapacity of the English language to become more than a conveyor of meaning and bear the burden of the diasporic experience. In the second section, on bilingualism and bilanguaging, I discuss the way the two or more languages coexist and in particular the de facto compartmentalization which assigns the mother tongue and English, the adopted language, distinct


functions. The second half of the chapter approaches the issue of the hybridization and ‘créolisation’ of the English language in a diasporic context from a radically different perspective from that of postcolonial studies and examines the changes brought to the English language by the diffraction of the site of enunciation and the growing number of non-native speakers of the language but also of people who use it only in a work context, as is more and more often the case with the development of transnationalism and corporate capitalism. While the latter contribute to what linguists like Jean-Jacques Lecercle have called the instrumentalization of the English language, diasporic writers no longer reappropriate and abrogate it, but take an active part in a process of encyclopaedic cross-fertilization of the language in a manner close to what Edouard Glissant has referred to as ‘créolisation.’

1 Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in Diasporic Studies: Mapping the Site of Intervention

This reflection on identity in diasporic literature takes place at a time of major mutations and paradigmatic shifts which affect both the object under scrutiny – diasporic texts – as well as the critical apparatus dealing with it. Any take on diaspora therefore needs to be clearly defined methodologically and critically but also epistemologically and politically in relation to the vexed terrain of diasporic studies in order for its true implications to be revealed. In recent years it has been argued that the nature of the diasporic text has changed dramatically, thus reflecting a larger change in the experience of diasporas at the turn of the twenty-first century. The genre has supposedly moved away from a certain tragic mode linked to the experience of diaspora as loss, nostalgia and a longing for the past, to embrace the more alluring theme of positive immigration and self-reinvention abroad; in so doing, the diasporic experience has become increasingly divorced from the notion of exile and closer to that of residence in a foreign country1 if we are to believe Levi and Weingrod: The tone and meaning of ‘diaspora’ are also transformed. According to the old usage ‘diasporas’ were commonly depicted as melancholy places of exile and oppression that restricted social and cultural fruition. [...] In sharp contrast, in the current view ‘diasporas’ are enthusiastically embraced as arenas for the creative melding of cultures and the formation of new ‘hybridic’, mixed identities. To be part of a diaspora is presumably, to be ‘on the cutting edge’ of new cultural and other formations. (Levi and Weingrod, 2005, 45) 11

12

Critical Identities

One should nonetheless be wary and weary of the fact that this mutation, which seems to have affected the genre as a whole, is partly the result of a redefinition of the genre’s outlines, or as some would argue a blurring of its contours, which have been made to embrace, sometimes quite opportunistically, an ever-increasing body of texts, whether it be novels written by first or second generation immigrants, or novels by writers who only have a distant connection to the diasporic experience. The centripetal inclusion of an ever-growing number of new categories into the diasporic corpus and of texts which seem to have been absorbed into a terminological vortex2 pre-empts any serious claim that the genre as such has dramatically evolved, while reviving the long-lasting debate of how to define diaspora. The initial issue of how one defines ‘diaspora’ and of the extent to which the term should be stretched has always been a bone of some contention and the controversy lies in its etymological ambiguity. When used in the etymological sense (from the Greek dia meaning ‘through’ and speirein meaning ‘to scatter’) it can apply to virtually any form of immigration, to any context and runs the risk of becoming an empty shell, a concept devoid of real pertinence and which may even lead to gross overgeneralizations. 3 Today one can still distinguish between two trends in critical literature dealing with issues related to diasporic populations, those which use the term diaspora in a strict sense and distinguish between migrants, exiles, expatriates, refugees (Cohen, 1971; Safran, 1991; Tölölyan, 1991) and those who use the term diaspora as a metaphor (Appadurai, 1996; Bhabha, 1990, 1994 and Hall, 1990).4 This taxonomic divide does not only link up with methodological issues but with a more profound divergence as to the meaning of diaspora and its very nature, as contextual rather than essential, as well as to its potential paradigmatic nature. The spread of the idea of diaspora as metaphor, which came to the forefront with theorists like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy (first with There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack and then with The Black Atlantic) or Homi Bhabha, corresponds both to the decline of the Jewish or Armenian paradigms of diaspora and their emphasis on the return journey, as well as to a parallel move from the bipolar model featuring home country and host country to a tripolar one, which no longer foregrounds the point of origin or return but the middle ground, as in Bhabha’s theorization of the third space. In previous models, like that put forward by Safran in the first issue of Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies (1991), the experience of diaspora revolves mainly around the point of origin. Safran tendered the following definition as a reaction against the framework devised by the Scheffer-led school,

Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations 13

which to him lacked specificity and left the term diaspora open to metaphoric interpretations: The concept of the diaspora [can] be applied to expatriate minority communities whose members share several of the following characteristics: 1) they, or their ancestors, have been dispersed from a specific original ‘center’ to two or more ‘peripheral’, or foreign, regions; 2) they retain a collective memory, vision or myth about their original homeland – its physical location, history and achievements; 3) they believe that they are not – and perhaps cannot be – fully accepted by their host society and therefore feel partly alienated and insulated from it; 4) they regard their ancestral homeland as their true, ideal home and the place to which they or their descendants would (or should) eventually return – when conditions are appropriate; 5) they believe they should collectively, be committed to the maintenance or restoration of their homeland and to its safety and prosperity; and 6) they continue to relate, personally or vicariously to that homeland in one way or another, and their ethnocommunal consciousness and solidarity are importantly defined by the existence of such a relationship. (IX–X) There is much merit in Gilroy’s or Bhabha’s resistance to the bipolar model, not only because of their subsequent redeployment of a more complex cartography of influences which takes account of the liminal component, nor only because their frameworks depart from Safran’s dogged focus on identity formation, but also because – and this is particularly true of Gilroy – his exploration of black culture from the vantage point of diaspora interrogates, destabilizes and ultimately debunks what Sudesh Mishra refers to as ‘the three discrete columns’ (Mishra, 2006, 57), the homeland, the hostland and the ‘ethno-national cluster’, since Africa ceases to be the one and only referent while Britain is envisaged as a fractured category, stratified according to social class. The move away from the bipolar framework, which in Sudesh Mishra’s view began in 19965 (the year Brah’s Cartographies of Diaspora and Radhakrishnan’s Diasporic Mediations were published, alongside Gayatri Spivak’s article ‘Diasporas old and new: Women in the transnational world’) has opened up the path for an exploration of the middle ground and has somehow rescued diasporic studies from the pitfall of archaeology and fossilization to reveal its potential for reinvention as a site of hybridic and metamorphic identity redefinitions. In other disciplines of the humanities, like in sociology for example, a similar shift


in focus and move away from the polarities to the in-between space has been the cornerstone of many studies focusing on phenomena linked to cross-fertilization and the re-encoding of certain cultural practices.6 But, to restrict our scope to the field of literary studies, this move has paved the way for a better understanding of the condition of liminality, whether it be on an existential, epistemological or political level. In the passage by Levi and Weingrod I referred to at the beginning of this chapter, the diasporic condition is redefined in positive if not (over) optimistic terms as a privileged vantage point of cutting edge experience. This view of diaspora, whose supposed iconicity should not mask the fact that it is mainly applicable to certain categories of privileged diasporians only rather than to the bulk of exiled migrants unable to return to the homeland, mimics the vibrancy of a certain type of diasporic condition – envisaged as an interstice brimming with new possibilities – which constitutes a heightened form of the postmodern condition. In the following sections I propose to discuss both the epistemological and political implications of this reading of diaspora as well as discuss the a-politicalness of liminality.

Liminality as metaperspective That liminality should be associated with a certain critical vibrancy and insight, as in Levi and Weingrod’s heuristic interpretation of diaspora as ‘arenas for the creative melding of cultures’, ‘ “on the cutting edge” of new cultural and other formations’ is hardly surprising. Proponents of the liminal paradigm have not only stressed the dual nature of the diasporic perspective, but also the dynamic potential of its porosity and in particular its potential for interaction, exchange and redefinition. Whether it be Mishra’s idea of the hyphen, which suggests articulation rather than frozen rigidity or Bhabha’s redefinition of interstitiality as on-going negotiation, these new models have showed the way towards an exploration of the diasporic as hermeneutic category. This position, which has more recently been largely taken up by Avtar Brah and Radhakrishnan owes a lot to Stuart Hall’s redefinition of inbetweenness as something not to be experienced in the passive mode, but as something to be embraced as a more empowering theoretical positioning. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual ‘past’, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the mother, is always already ‘after the break.’ It is always


constituted through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the point of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental law of origin. (Hall, 1990, 226) The multi-situatedness of diaspora implies a duplication of patterns of referentialities, whereby a ‘multi-consciousness’ becomes not only possible but highly probable. Hence Gilroy’s idea of ‘a double consciousness’, an idea which he borrows from W.E.B. Du Bois but which is also quite close to Radhakrishnan’s definition of diasporic subjectivity as ‘a mode of interpretative in-betweenness’.7 The advantage of such positioning is not only that it allows the immigrant to embrace a metaperspective, but that it also frees the subject position of its natural correlative, namely subjectivity. What makes double subjectivity a useful concept is that it is not a theoretical construct but a de facto metaperspective rooted in the locus of in-betweenness. It is not an imaginary category but an existential one which is both a blessing and a curse – a curse in the sense that the diasporic writer is doomed to a life of in-betweenness, but a blessing in the sense that s/he enjoys a double outlook, and this constitutes an ironic reversal of the initial situation and some sort of revenge for him being a subaltern in an East/West world picture. As such, it can be argued, in the vein of Levi and Weingrod’s celebration of the ‘cutting edge’ quality of diaspora, that the diasporic constitutes a unique locus from which to observe the predicament of identity construction at the turn of the twenty-first century, in a context where traditional definitions of identity inherited from the nation state are being challenged by the ever-growing fluxes of diasporic populations worldwide, even if theoretical enthusiasm needs to be balanced up with the politicalness or a-politicalness of liminality as we shall see in the next section. But to go back to this double positioning, its hermeneutic potential is linked to its contextual specificity. Unlike the category of objectivity which emerged in a specific context (that of the development of the European sciences in the nineteenth century, alongside imperialism and international trade), and which has been repeatedly questioned by recent studies (Imperial Eyes by Marie-Louise Pratt for example8) and in particular by New Historicism, the double perspective of the diasporic writer is well and truly free of the determinism of mono-referentiality.


While the sedentary man, rooted in a given culture, is necessarily determined by one set of pre-existing representations, the diasporic enjoys a multiplicity of referentialities which impact directly on his outlook on things. As such the vantage point of diasporic writing proves to be a key dimension in a new hermeneutics of contemporary issues in which the gaze of the in-betweener has the potential to transform into a prism or magnifying glass rather than a deforming lens. It is not my intention to romanticize the position of the in-betweener nor to overlook the difficulties – to say the least – of the situation, but rather to unveil the following paradox: immigrants as in-betweeners may find themselves better equipped to understand postmodernity than people whose identity seems less difficult to come to terms with and are up to what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman considers to be the real challenge of the twenty-first century. This challenge consists in conceiving of identity no longer as fixed, but to keep the options open (‘the modern “problem of identity” is primarily how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern “problem of identity” is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open’, Bauman, 1996, 38). At the same time it must be said that while multi-situatedness can be epistemologically empowering, the politics of liminality are not as simple as it may seem and the prismatic role of the third space needs to be balanced up against the risk of a-politicalness to which liminality is often associated. As for the iconic vision of liminality as emblematic of the condition of postmodernity, which has become widely popular in the last decade, it needs to be critically reassessed. One of the most incisive developments against the third space and its depoliticised projection of liminal subject position is that put forward by Radhakrishnan in Diasporic Mediations, in which he cautions against ‘the temptation to read the diaspora as a convenient metaphorical/tropological code for the unpacking of certain elitist intellectual agendas’ (Radhakrishnan, 1996, 173). This is where the line needs to be drawn between the potential of the diasporic – whether it be as hermeneutic category or site of intervention – and its actual implementation, where its limitations need to be reappraised and where any deterministic tendency needs to be toned down. That the diasporic can act as a site of political interrogation is a fact, as we shall see in the next section, but its potential needs to be actuated and is far from being self-generated by the position of liminality. Indeed, there is even a sense in which the porosity of the diasporic can generate the opposite of hybridic identities and lead to a resurgence


of bounded identities as critics like Sudesh Mishra are only too aware: Many diasporists, to their credit, are aware that while the border promotes democratic porosity and fusion, it also facilitates reactionary identity formations, identifications, dangerous disavowals of otherness (the anti-hybrid values of the Muslim patriarch married to an English woman, as depicted in the film East is East, comes to mind) and nostalgia for racially pure domains. (Mishra, 2006, 87) For Sudesh Mishra there is always a risk of reverting to ‘identity as essence’ before embracing ‘identity as conjuncture’ and it is not enough to inhabit the diasporic locus; there is also a need to embrace the diasporic attitude as a critical posture. Vijay Mishra harbours similar doubts and goes as far as to say that ‘contrary to idealist formulations about diasporas as symbolizing the future of nation-state, diasporas are also bastions of reactionary thinking and fascist rememorations’ (Mishra, 2007, 17) and ‘exemplary as well as reactionary sites of late modernity’ (2).

The (a)politicalness of liminality Discussing the politicalness or a-politicalness of liminality necessitates interrogating several received ideas, among which the slightly romantic yet appealing view that margins are always necessarily politically situated and that their marginality endows them with an almost inane potential for subversive interrogation and political action. Indeed, it is tempting to argue in the vein of Mouffe and Laclau that the radicalism of liminality constitutes a privileged point of access to the truth. The discourse of radical democracy is no longer the discourse of the universal; the epistemological niche from which the ‘universal’ classes and subjects spoke has been eradicated, and it has been replaced by a polyphony of voices, each of which constructs its own irreducible ... identity. This point is decisive: there is no radical and plural democracy without renouncing the discourse of the universal and its implicit assumption of a privileged point of access to ‘the truth.’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, 191–2) Yet the subversive potential of liminality as vantage point does not systematically materialize into powerful political agency as Laclau and Mouffe are only too aware, and in the same way the situatedness of diasporic margins does not confer them a supplement of political efficacy.


In fact, if we are to judge by recent developments in the field of diasporic studies, we may even think that so far, the locus of the diasporic has failed to become the boisterous arena of political demands one might have expected it would become. Theories of inbetweenness like Bhabha’s theory of the third space, have come in for harsh criticism – Bhabha’s concept of hybridity in particular has been accused of serving the agenda of neo-liberalism. Critics have, more wrongly than rightly in my view, picked on the fact that the diasporas in question are part of an international middle-class of privileged im/ migrants. Yet, much as I disagree with such harsh criticism and misleading readings of Bhabha’s, the fact remains that if such criticisms have been voiced, it may well be that his underlying political agenda has been insufficiently spelled out. If we are to look at the larger panorama of postcolonial and diasporic studies in the last decade, it has been characterized by a waning of the radical stance, a toning down of the critical voice, and a general move away from paradigms foregrounding strong confrontational positionings. If we take the example of the centre and periphery paradigm, whose validity and timeliness has been widely discussed in the last decade, it has led some critics to move completely away from paradigms involving confrontational strategies to the extent of leaving power struggle out altogether, as if the world had become one big fairyland of international exchanges (as I shall discuss in later chapters). Such views of mass migrations and international exchanges fail to provide a valid, timely and useful framework for understanding political mutations and reconfigurations at the turn of the twenty-first century and one of the issues at stake in the current state of diasporic studies is the resuscitation of a strong political agenda in particular by reinscribing the confrontational component. There is more than one reason why the diasporic may fail to fulfil the promising agenda some, including myself, like to think possible. One of them is the gradual complexification of the larger map of diasporic exchanges, which has not only become more elaborate but is plagued by constant shifts and redefinitions which undoubtedly make it more difficult to read the whole picture. The spread of transnationalism and the redefinition of the geopolitical landscape as well as a change in the balance of power between colonizing nations and their former colonies have not made the process any easier. On the contrary, as power struggles have not disappeared but have mutated and taken on new forms, sometimes becoming less visible or at least more difficult to apprehend, it has become easy to mistake what Hannerz calls ‘the


organization of diversity’ for a ‘replication of uniformity.’ There is now a world culture, but we had better make sure that we understand what this means. It is marked by an organisation of diversity rather than by a replication of uniformity. No total homogenisation of systems of meaning and expression has occurred, nor does it appear that there will be one any time soon. But the world has become one network of social relationships, and between its different regions there is a flow of meanings as well as people and goods. (Hannerz, 1990, 237) Another difficulty lies in the multi-directionality of migratory fluxes and the criss-crossing of several types of networks, on both a vertical and a lateral plane. I am referring here to Tambiah’s analysis of transnational movements, and in particular the criss-crossing of ‘vertical networks’ and ‘lateral networks’ (for him there are two levels of lateral networks, one which aims at extending relationships with communities of origin, and another which ‘maps the networking that transcends the borders of both the countries and states of origin and resettlement’, Tambiah, 2000, 170). As a result it has become easy to lose track of the ‘oppositional cut that interrupts the tidal flow of supplementarity’ as Sudesh Mishra elegantly puts it in his critique of Avtar Brah’s Cartography of Diaspora (Mishra, 2006, 189). Sudesh Mishra remarks that unlike Hall, Brah fails to take the disequilibrium of power relations into account. Mishra goes on to notice about the following passage that ‘the second part of the excerpt negates the perspicacity of the first’: A multi-axial performative conception of power highlights the ways in which a group constituted as a ‘minority’ along one dimension of differentiation may be constructed as a ‘majority’ along another. And since all these markers of ‘difference’ represent articulating and performative facets of power, the ‘fixing’ of collectivities along any singular axis is called seriously into question. (Brah, 1996, 189) What is really at stake in Mishra’s critique of Avtar Brah’s analysis (at least on this particular point) is the sense that she has failed to identify the game of social redistribution in the transfer from one hierarchy to another, and that this failure betrays a lack of understanding of the balance of power between the different poles of the global map. This is indeed one of the difficulties of paradigms dealing with transnationalism

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Critical Identities

and transnational communities as I argue in Chapter 4 in relation to Arjun Appadurai’s scapes, in the sense that such global frameworks often lose track of agency, directionality and the location of inputs and outputs. But it seems to me that the real difficulty is not so much the complex exegesis of an ever-changing map of diasporas, as a more general problem which has to do with the depoliticization of postcolonial studies, and maybe of literary studies in general. The depoliticization of the postcolonial field has been commented upon by Terry Eagleton and linked to the larger problem of the erosion of the concept of nation. There is much merit in Eagleton’s analysis for it sees beyond the logical erosion of the concept of nation as a result of the spread of transnationalism, to denounce the complicity of theorists or at least their failure to see that the current emphasis on categories such as ethnicity has had serious political consequences. In his view, the postcolonial has dissociated itself from a discourse based on the nation and has embraced the more alluring and open field of cosmopolitanism. But by doing so, it has dropped the notion of class and has subsequently become depoliticized. This has had serious consequences at a time when globalization has become more predatory.9 This concern for the revival of the political agenda of diasporic studies has led me to adopt a critical view of transnationalism and reintroduce categories which some would all too easily consider as outdated, such as those of class or nation. It also explains why, from a purely methodological point of view, the literary analyses of this book foreground not so much the historical and cultural backgrounds of the various texts, as the material contexts in which the experience of diaspora is undertaken, in an attempt not only to sketch a mosaic of cultural diversity but also to give a forum to a jarring polyphony of conflicting voices.10

Aesthetics and the politics of liminality Advocating the importance of a politics of liminality requires that one specifies how one conceives of the diasporic text and how one positions oneself in relation to its politics, but also ultimately how one envisages the role and status – if any – of aesthetics. This question has been abundantly discussed in relation to postcolonial texts, and in recent years the debates have often revolved around the pressure sometimes felt by postcolonial writers to engage with political issues and to write about their experience as postcolonial writers. This has led to heated debates, some arguing that aesthetics is not a valid category when it comes to


dealing with postcolonial texts, for it implies a conception of art for art’s sake and consequently a projection of Western categories onto the postcolonial text, whereas others have argued that the expectation that postcolonial writers should privilege form over content was a condescending gesture leading to a de facto exclusion of postcolonial writers from formalist concerns. Rosemary Marangoly George’s discussion of these issues in her book The Politics of Home provides some interesting examples of a ghettoization which has often resulted from an emphasis on the political at the expense of aesthetics, and from a failure to see that aesthetics is never about aesthetics alone but also about politics and the inclusion or exclusion of postcolonial writers into the canon. George gives the example of South African writer Agnes Sam, who writes of the difficulty of getting her experimental novel What Passing Bells published in the West: The original draft was impressionistic, its form suggestive of a fractured society, of people in an apartheid system isolated from each other. It combined poetry with prose. Its purpose was to frustrate the reader’s need for continuity because this is precisely how we are frustrated in our understanding of the South African situation. I’ve seen other works published which are experimental and this reinforces my view that it isn’t simply that publishers determine what is acceptable for some prescribed market, but they have a stereotype of how one should write if belonging to a specific group. One publisher’s representative asserted very firmly that Black women write autobiographically. A black woman experimenting with language and form has no business writing. In the new Commonwealth, those writers who do not conform to these stereotypes are said to have been influenced by Western tradition, to have had an ‘English’ as opposed to a ‘Bantu’ or ‘Third World’ education, or they are said not to be writing for the ‘people’[...] But the crunch comes when we disregard Western tradition and publishers’ stereotypes, and attempt to experiment – this isn’t tolerated. (Sam in Petersen and Rutherford, 1986, 92–6) Another aspect of this ghettoization of the postcolonial text is thematic ghettoization. Interestingly, it is based on Western representations of what postcolonial writers are interested in, which is a form of dispossession of those writers’ autonomous choice with respect to aesthetic matters. Not only does this prejudice linger, it continues to exert a certain determinism upon the production of literary texts by

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Critical Identities

forcing writers to conform in order to fit into the mould. In a recent panel discussion with three Indian writers, a revealing anecdote was recited by one of the speakers, Githa Hariharan11. Hariharan remarked that one of her novels was initially rejected by a publishing house on the grounds that although her book was interesting and dealt with issues like otherness, her ‘other’ was not an ‘identifiable other.’ In other words, as a woman of Asian origin, she was expected to write about her difficulties as a young Asian in the West. This anecdote, which clearly highlights the danger of ghettoizing postcolonial writers itself constitutes a plea in favour of equal rights to creativity and poetic licence for postcolonial and non-postcolonial writers alike, for diasporic ones and non-diasporic ones and is probably more eloquent than any further comment I might make.12 The final and maybe least apparent form of underlying racism in postcolonial or diasporic critique has to do with the resurgence of the notion of authenticity and its instrumentalization. In recent years, a growing divide has appeared amongst writers from South Asia, in particular between those who have remained in their home countries, and those who have migrated. This divide has become difficult to ignore. Two of the most well known figures, Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy have often been reproached with not being Indian enough and with writing books tailored for the West; Rushdie himself has often been said to be out of touch with India. The antagonism between Rushdie and those who reproach him with his lack of authenticity points to a key problem: the survival of authenticity as a criterion to assess the work of a writer. Of course, one could argue that because this criticism of Rushdie was originally voiced by Indian writers, the argument should be settled in favour of the advocates of ‘authentic Indian voices.’ This solution would have the advantage of solving the problem of the critic’s Eurocentric perspective and of his potentially biased view. Another way of looking at this dilemma, which has also become a theoretical quagmire, is to question the persistence or rather revival of the category of the authentic which is not only an emanation of the writers’ own wishes but also meets the requirements of the market and of an evergrowing readership eager to read exotic tales of authentic cultures. The collusion between the two is precisely what needs to be interrogated (Huggan, 2001). The approach I propose to adopt in this book therefore foregrounds the form and the aesthetics of the diasporic text, not in the interest of any sort of aesthetic purism but for political reasons which lie in the defence of the inclusion of such writers into the canon.


The diasporic imaginary An important feature of the diasporic novel, and one which I have chosen to emphasize in this book, is the role and place of the imaginary. It could sound like a truism to say that the imaginary is central to the diasporic text, since nostalgia and the sense of loss immediately come to mind when one thinks of the diasporic experience; yet the imaginary itself is a broad enough notion to lend itself to multiple interpretations and therefore needs to be clearly defined. In recent years and in the wake of Salman Rushdie’s book Imaginary Homelands, it has become associated with the cognitive gap which forms between the homeland and the diasporic subject after the break and which the subject tries to bridge by resorting to his imagination.13 Recent studies and in particular Vijay Mishra’s Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary: Literature of the Indian Diaspora, draw largely on the notion of the imaginary. Yet the implications of the term cut two ways. Vijay Mishra’s use of the term ‘to refer to any ethnic enclave in a nation-state that defines itself, consciously, unconsciously or through self-evident or implied political coercion, as a group that lives in displacement’ is owing to the Lacanian idea of stage of the mirror of the ego as well as to the sense in which Žižek uses it, the imaginary being ‘the state of identification with the image representing “what we would like to be” ’ (Žižek, 1989, 105). As such the imaginary can be construed as offering room for reinvention and fabulation, which would have a direct impact on the reading of diasporic texts as necessarily warped testimonies and deforming lenses on the diasporic experience. But there is also an intrinsic cognitive quality in the very looseness of the imaginary and a certain adequacy which Rushdie had already anticipated, and which has to do with its suitability to apprehend the specificity of the diasporic experience. For Rushdie, rather than distort reality and act as a deforming lens, the distance introduced between the writer and the imaginary homeland he is trying to recreate in his or her prose makes the recreation both more vivid and sometimes more pertinent. In the same way that standing too close to something prevents one from gaining an understanding of the whole picture, and can blur the more general design, being too close to the homeland sometimes impairs a more in-depth and accurate knowledge which can only be gained when a certain distance between the observer and the object of his observation is maintained. It can also be argued, and this is the line of argumentation I propose to follow, that the imaginary provides a privileged access to the ill-defined


and hard to grasp frontier between identity and self-representation and as such constitutes a valuable hermeneutic tool. This dichotomy has been theorized by sociologists to distinguish between objective parameters defining an individual’s identity (such as his/her ethnic group, age, sex, level of education, socio-economic background, etc.) and his/ her self-representation of his identity, which often differs from the way the subject himself would define his identity and level of integration.14 This dichotomy touches upon one of the key problematics of identityrelated issues. What I propose to argue is that this specificity is also what makes the stance of the diasporic writer with respect to questions of identity incredibly rich and complex. Rather than being caught in the strictures of a given discipline, the genre of the diasporic novel provides room for expression of this diasporic imaginary and is best apprehended precisely because literature deals with representations but does not seek either to quantify or rationalize them. Moreover, these representations of diasporic experiences do not have to fit into pre-existing, mutually exclusive categories but can afford to be less clear-cut, to straddle divides and thus testify to an in-betweenness which would never find its way through the questionnaires devised for a census or for certain types of sociological studies. A second argument is that while the categories available on a questionnaire are invented by the author of the questionnaire himself, and are not only moulded by his own pre-conceived view on the subject but also influence the respondent, the diasporic take offers a unique approach, one that is not determined by predefined categories. Indeed, without venturing too far into these issues one can even suspect that some unconscious longing for normalcy may even drive the respondent to tick the box corresponding to what he thinks the good migrant would tick. Last but not least, the imaginary links up with the idea of the unconscious, and this is precisely why literature is such a valuable entry point into issues of identity in a diasporic context. When exploring certain areas of the diasporic experience, a writer seldom aims at comprehensiveness. On the contrary, the writer foregrounds certain aspects, sometimes blowing them out of proportion, sometimes minimizing them, but this warped perspective draws our attention to issues which otherwise would have remained hidden. The role and position of this concept is all the more important as it has a specific resonance in the current context and at a time when certain disciplines of the humanities are tempted to imitate the methodology of the exact sciences and go in the direction of more formalism and scientificity. The imaginary is par excellence a notion which shows the limits of the Durkheimian postulate that advocates the study


of social facts as if they were things, when it comes to identity-related issues and shows all the pertinence and insight of Clifford Geertz’s influential statement that the experience of understanding other cultures is ‘more like grasping a proverb, catching an illusion, seeing a joke [...] than it is like achieving communion’ (Geertz, 1983, 70). Geertz’s statement dismisses the very idea of exhaustivity and defines understanding a foreign culture as the identification of areas of difference, where the idiosyncrasy of a culture expresses itself, at the point of disjunction with other cultures. It is precisely when a culture cannot be compared to others, when its singularity and difference asserts themselves more powerfully than the similarities with our own culture that we are on to something, that we start to grasp cultural differences, not the essence but the actual existence of cultural diversity.

2 Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora

There is a sense in which the current interest in questions of identity and in particular interstitial identities, though timely, has been blown out of proportion, or rather has become somewhat pleonastic since identity is by definition always necessarily interstitial. This paradox originates in the very etymology of the term ‘identity’ which, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out, refers to both the constitutive kaleidoscopic character of identity (the fact that something is ‘one’ as opposed to multiple) and to its transience and mutability (Ricoeur, 1990, 12–13). The very capacities in which one is defined on various levels, or within various circles such as family structure, local life, the workplace, and the nation, make one necessarily multiple and not fully congruent with only one identity definition. As for the notion of sameness, it is challenged by the contextual transience of situations and categories. From which it results that identity cannot be anything but interstitial, in the sense of not being fully aligned with abstract definitions with which it is bound to clash. However, the complexity inherent in identity today is somehow pushed to a radical point by the diversification of identity definitions in a world whose human geography is constantly redefined by mass migrations, which have an impact on definitions of national identity within nation states, not to mention the fact that the nation state as a valid category is itself increasingly challenged by transnationalism and the development of other forms of group identity like the communities of sentiment or the new forms of imagined communities which transgress the borders of national states (Appadurai, 1996).1 The everchanging contours of human geography are a constant reminder of the fluidity of identity definitions, of their inadequacy; they are always either too rigid or too monolithic and unable to keep pace with the 26

Identity, Interstitiality and Diaspora

27

complex patterns of reconfiguration of human geography. If there is a certain timeliness of the issue of interstitiality, it therefore lies in our capacity today, to interrogate the validity and adequacy of existing definitions of identity – inherited from the nation state – and to stress its artificiality. Despite the revival of the notion of authenticity in certain fields of study, as a notion which seems to have been salvaged from the radical reassessment which started with deconstructionism, and which I shall discuss in the next chapter, there is a general consensus in the humanities about the need to foster debate regarding the rhetoric of nation building and to expose the artificiality of the idea of the nation, whether it be by exposing the rhetoric of its discourse or by spelling out the tension between the recourse to natural metaphors and the composite nature of nations. In Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Race, Culture, Robert Young points out the symptomatic nature of such recourse to natural metaphors which to him aims at covering up a prevailing sense of fragmentation: The need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter-sense of fragmentation and dispersion. There is a story behind the way in which the organic paradigm so beloved of the nineteenth century quickly developed alongside one of hybridity, of forcing incompatible entities to grow together (or not). (Young, 2002 [1995] 4) In the same book, Young traces the historical development of notions like culture and race, and debunks the widespread idea of the past purity of nations as opposed to the hybridity of postmodern times. The notion of hybridity, which Young recontextualizes in a historical perspective – paying particular attention to the role it was made to play in nineteenth-century debates on the unity of the human race2 – points to the link between identity and self-representation and the fact that some cultures decide to either stress their heterogeneity or on the contrary their sameness as a political statement and in reaction to other countries’ definitions of their national identity. Young reminds us that in Defoe’s time, hybridity was then already claimed as one of the key features of Englishness and that this emphasis on hybridity was back in fashion in the nineteenth century and in reaction to the Germans’ definition of themselves as pure Teutons: Whether merged or fused, the English did not transform themselves so easily into the imagined community of a homogeneous national

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Critical Identities

identity. In fact, it became increasingly common in the later nineteenth century for the English to invoke Defoe’s account of ‘that Het’rogeneous Thing, An Englishman’, and to define themselves as hybrid or ‘Mongrel half-bred Race’, often, after the unification of Germany in 1871, in a spirit of oppositional rivalry to the Germans, who regarded themselves as pure Teutons. (Young, 2002 [1995] 17) The critical reassessment of the workings of identity formation in the last two decades and in particular that of group identity not only exposed the artificiality of identity and questioned its authenticity; it also established the fact that identity originates in a statement; it is not self-evident and does not pre-exist individuals but comes into existence in/through discourse and as such requires a grand narrative to sustain itself. The question which is prompted by this theoretical shift is thus: how can it survive the postmodern examination and general reassessment of key notions into the twenty-first century? As a consequence, it seems to me that if the turn of the twenty-first century is such an apt moment to interrogate the notion of identity, it is not so only because the contours of human geography are changing at an unprecedented speed and that these changes are known to the rest of the world thanks to modern communication technologies; it is also because the theoretical framework itself is in crisis and the grand narrative of identity construction has difficulty recovering from the assault of deconstructionism, which has left cracks in the epistemological framework. Our conception of identity at the turn of the twenty-first century has developed in the wake of three main moves: the rise of the individual in the nineteenth century, the subsequent end of this long-standing tradition of identity seen in an essentialist perspective and the development of identity politics in the twentieth century, which some have interpreted as the expression of ‘some misplaced nostalgia for wholeness,’ as Denise Riley argues (Riley, 2000, 8) in the sense that people often turn to ‘collectivised personal identities’ (Riley, 2000, 8). Today, the conception of identity is somehow caught in a double bind. We would like to believe that man is no longer a cog in a machine or a slot in the beehive as the Elizabethans used to say. We like to think that s/he is an individual – a being gifted with specificities of his/her own – encouraged to develop them and assert their distinctness, like the archetypal hero of the nineteenth century Bildungsroman who undergoes an identity crisis and wanders away from the family unit to develop his skills and fulfil his personal ambitions before returning and serving the community. But at the same time, this optimistic vision of


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identity, as the legitimate object of a quest undertaken by the individual has come under strong criticism from many schools of philosophy, among which phenomenology, which criticized the essentialist stance inherent in the idea of the ‘I’ as a monad, detached from the rest of the world and untouched by it. The redefinition of identity which started with phenomenology and culminated with postmodernism crystallized around two main issues, the first being the articulation of individual identity and group identity. The determinism exerted by the latter over the former was clearly spelled out by Merleau-Ponty who wrote that ‘nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but on the contrary because I am, from the start outside myself and open to the world’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, 434) thereby reasserting the primacy of the group and its determinism on the individual, while doing away with the notion of the solipsistic ‘I’. Indeed, self-representation is always preceded by presentation, the presentation by society of a given identity which the citizen may want to amend, reject or condone, depending on his aspirations, and depending also on the political context in which he lives (in the sense that it is always easier to exert one’s free-will in a democracy rather than in a dictatorship). The etymology of both identity and identification provides an insightful entry point into the logics at work in the relation between groups and individuals – and in particular the instrumentalization of identity in the context of identification of individuals by the state – as Denise Riley remarks in Words of Selves. The second counter-argument to the essentialist definition of identity has to do with its transience, which originates both in temporality as an overarching framework and in the temporality of discourse (the fact that identity is tied to the temporality of discourse and its shifting signifiers). In Am I that Name?, Denise Riley insists on the contextual nature of categories which define and label individuals,3 as well as the fact that they can choose to foreground certain aspects of their personality according to context: The impermanence of collective identities in general is a pressing problem for any emancipating movement which launches itself on the appeal to solidarity, to the common cause of a new group being, or an ignored group identity. This will afflict racial, national, occupational, class, religious, and other consolidations. While you might choose to take on being a disabled person or a lesbian, for instance, as a political position, you might not elect to make a politics out of other designations. As you do not live your life fully defined as a shop


assistant, nor do you as a Greek Cypriot, for example, and you can always refute such identifications in the name of another description which, because it is more individuated, may ring more truthfully to you. Or most commonly, you will skate across the several identities which will take your weight, relying on the most useful for your purposes of the moment; like Hanif Kureishi’s suave character in the film My Beautiful Launderette, who says impatiently, ‘I’m a professional businessman, not a professional Pakistani.’ (Riley, 2000, 16) Riley’s analysis of the complex dynamics of identity definition and the strategies underlying certain choices made by individuals on a personal level is particularly valuable when it comes to analysing the complex paradigms which underlie the redefinitions of power struggle within multicultural communities. Not only does it offer a pertinent alternative to existing polarities such as inside/outside, minority/majority, home country/host country, it takes account of the complex tectonics of identity definition and the relabelling of disenfranchised minorities as they are absorbed into the magma of mainstream culture and cease to be conspicuous as minorities, a phenomenon which has been described most eloquently by Philip Roth. In an interview published in Reading Philip Roth, a collection of essays edited by Milbauer and Watson, Roth expressed his awareness of the change in the status and image of Jews in American society and commented on the fact that they were now less conspicuous than in the days when he started writing: American Jews are less intimidated by Gentiles than they were when I began publishing in 1950s, they are more sophisticated about antiSemitism and its causes, and altogether less hedged-in by suffocating concepts of normalcy. This isn’t because they have been socially blinded by the illusory gains of assimilation, but because they are not so preoccupied as they once were with the problematical nature of assimilation, and are justifiably less troubled by ethnic disparities in the new American society of the last fifteen years – a society created by a massive influx of over twenty million people far less assimilable than themselves, about eighty-five per cent of them nonEuropeans, whose visible presence has re-established polygenesis as a glaring and unalterable fact of our national life. When the cream of Miami is the Cuban bourgeoisie, and the best students at MIT are Chinese, and not a candidate can stand before a democratic presidential convention without flashing his racial or ethnic credentials – when everybody sticks out and doesn’t seem to mind, perhaps Jews


31

are less likely to worry too much about their sticking out; less likely in fact to stick out. (Roth in Milbauer and Watson, 1988, 4) This passage points to the redefinition of the contours of the American melting pot which comes to include a formerly marginalized group in mainstream American culture.4 What is interesting is that the signified referred to has not changed as such; it is the massive arrival of other ethnic groups into the country which has shifted the boundaries and made the Jewish community less ‘conspicuous.’ The importance of temporality in playing a pivotal role in the reconfiguration of both individual and group identity is a crucial parameter, largely overlooked when the essentialist view of identity still had the upper hand, but which has come to the forefront of such fields as postcolonial studies or ethnic studies. So is that of the absence of congruence between group identity and individual identity. Indeed, one of the specificities of diasporic literature as we shall see is its capacity to pinpoint the zones of disjunction between definitions of identity – which somehow never seem nuanced enough – and identity definitions as they are spelled out by countries. Understanding identity, and not only diasporic identity but also shifting contemporary identities, is therefore as much about the zones of congruence between given models and actual situations as it is about interstices and zones of non-conformity with existing models. Hence my claim that diasporas constitute a perfect vantage point from which to observe the mechanisms at play in identity formation, self-representation and contextual redefinitions, as well as the need to discuss the paradigmatic value of diasporic identities today. In this chapter I propose to look at the way diasporic texts not only define diasporic identity as interstitial,5 on the margins of established categories, but also how they pose a more general problem of semiotics linked to the fact that the interpretative patterns need to be amended. In other words, my interest in this chapter is not so much how new definitions of identity have emerged in the post-war years, which will be my focus in the next chapter, but rather what the reinventions of identities in the colonial and in the diasporic context tell us about identity, and how they offer us an insight into contemporary issues of identity.

Identity and interstitiality: postcolonial perspectives Understanding identity and interstitiality in a diasporic context not only requires that we understand the workings of identity formation


and definition in general terms; it also necessitates some historical recontextualization so as to pinpoint the various mechanisms of identity redefinition which have exerted their influence since postcolonial times. Rather than sketching a typology of the different ways in which identity has been redefined in a postcolonial context and contrast it to the diasporic condition, or trace the reconfiguration of the colonized self in a diachronic perspective, I have chosen to concentrate on key stages in the redefinition of the self in a colonial context: memory and the imposition of a new cultural heritage, topography and the mapping of a new identity, and temporality or the new genealogy of the postcolonial other, in order to see how the ‘step-self’6 imposed by the colonist is integrated or fails to be integrated into the diasporic psyche. The fact that my focus in this chapter is on the continuity and somehow on the legacies of colonialism and its lingering influence on the diasporic imaginary also means that from a methodological point of view I will be dealing with texts by and about first generation immigrants. In the case of colonized populations, who are literally redefined by the colonial encounter, colonization results in the imposition of a new identity, a sort of ‘step-self’ which is created by a reassignment of previous parameters in three key areas: memory, place and time. As Ng˜ug˜i Wa Thiong’o wrote in Decolonising The Mind, imperialism is like a ‘cultural bomb’ whose function is to ‘annihilate people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves’ (Wa Thiong’o, 1986, 3). In other words, everything which constitutes the memory of the individual, ties him to his country and his former self is erased, as if the colonial mind was reconfigured into a blank slate wiped clean and written over. The importance of memory as playing a pivotal part in the reassignment of the postcolonial other was analysed in detail by Derrida. In his book Monolingualism of the other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin, in which he summons some of his memories of colonial Algeria, Derrida describes the way the memory of the colonial child is erased in ‘an amnesia without recourse under the guise of pathological destructuring’ (Derrida, 1996, 44) and describes the total loss of bearings of the colonial child as well as the fact that he is forced to relinquish his memories, his past, his knowledge, in other words the fundamental components of his identity. Not a word about Algeria, not a single one concerning its history and its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany, and the Gironde Estuary with our closed eyes. (Derrida, 1996, 44)


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The scene which he describes in order to explain the idea of cultural amnesia, that of a classroom situation, is common to many writers who have experienced colonialism as one of the most striking memories. Wa Thiong’o (1986), Memmi (2003 [1957]) and others, all mention memories of the palimpsestual superimposition7 of the colonist’s culture on the colonized child. The contours of the new culture, which is forced upon the child, are not only spelled out in the syntax and grammatical structures of a new language, or framed by the historical landmarks of the colonist’s country. They are also mapped in/through the outlines of a new country and its geography, which the child has to learn although he has never been there, a process which generates a form of symbolic deterritorialization. The destructuring amnesia which Derrida describes, this willing suspension of memory, is therefore paralleled by another movement of hypermnesia, as the child has to learn, memorize and appropriate the whereabouts of the colonist’s country and culture. The madness of hypermnesia, a supplement of loyalty, a surfeit, or even excrescence of memory, to commit oneself, at the limit of the two other possibilities to traces – traces of writing language, experience – which carry anamnesis beyond the mere reconstruction of a given heritage, beyond an available past. Beyond any cartography, and beyond any knowledge that can be taught. At stake there is an entirely other anamnesis, and, if one may say so, even an anamnesis of the entirely other. (Derrida, 1996, 60) For a child growing up in a colonial context, learning the contours of a new country does not constitute a mere addition of knowledge; it forces him to remap his identity and project himself into a new spatial framework which displaces the polarities home/not home, self/other. In the last two decades and following the publication of Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, humanist geographers have studied the interactions between space and identity, whether it be individual identity or group identity and in particular the implications of the representation of a country on the individual’s psyche (Sopher, 1979; Tuan, 1977).8 This idea has not only been addressed in a critical perspective but also amply represented in postcolonial fiction. One of the most eloquent examples to my knowledge is the reference to Eduard Kremer’s map of Africa in Nuruddin Farah’s novel Maps: And did you know that Eduard Kremer, who was the drawer of the 1567 map, introduced numerous distortions, thereby altering our

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Critical Identities

notion of the world and its size, did you? Africa, in Kremer’s map, is smaller than Greenland. These maps, which bear in mind the European’s prejudices, are the maps we used at school when I was young and, I am afraid to say, are still being reprinted year after year and used in schools in Africa. Arno Peter’s map, drawn four hundred years later, gives more accurate proportions of the continents: Europe is smaller, Africa larger. (Farah, 1986, 229) This example points to the fact that the mapping of a new identity (in the actual and metaphorical senses of the term) forces the child to redefine home versus non-home; but it also leads him to reposition his former self and his nation in relation to the new map of the world imposed by colonialism. This repositioning of the colonized subject therefore takes place on two levels: the personal level of individual colonial subjects; but also on that of national identity and the way it is unsettled and destabilized in a colonial context (even if the second level reflects back on the first one). This repositioning is not only instantiated by the didactic discourse of school books but also finds its way into the colonized’s psyche through the imaginary, and in particular through colonial literature, which reaches beyond the confines of the classroom and follows the child into the social sphere of home. The notion of ‘social sphere,’ which I borrow from Denise Riley,9 proves a useful conceptual tool showing how the dichotomy home/school, native culture/colonial culture, home education/formal education, vernacular languages/English, described by Ng˜ug˜i Wa Thiong’o in Decolonising the Mind, is not as watertight as it may seem, but allows for a certain form of permeability between the two spheres of home and colonial culture. In The Politics of Home, Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, Rosemary Marangoly George remarks on the function of the home as part of a politics of self-definition and as instrumental in articulating group identity. She also analyses how the blending of colonized populations into a crowd without homes and without a topographical inscription of their presence or individuality can work as a strategy of desubjectification. In colonial novels such as the incipit of E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, the fact that Indians are presented as part of a mob and as homeless can be seen as biased and as instrumental in the shaping of an imagery of the native as already deterritorialized and not fully rooted into the land. In the colonial text, the ‘native subject’ as manifest in the representation of the native home is either a ‘lack’ or an ‘excess.’ Hence we are


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led to believe that the absence of a ‘self/home’ that resembles the ‘self/ home’ born of western individualism signals the absence of alternative notions of subjecthood. There are no ‘ordinary’ subjects; just faceless, outhoused ‘boys’ or excessively bejewelled or painted rajahs and chiefs. It is significant that the novels written by Indian sub-continentals and Africans in the postcolonial era, often establish as their protagonist, the ordinary citizen with his/her sometimes modest, but nevertheless potent notions of home. (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 24) And of course, the fact that the concept of terra nullius10 played a crucial part in legitimating the colonization of Australia at the expense of the indigenous population is an apt reminder of the importance of representations of the occupation of the land by the colonizer (Reynolds).11 If memory and territoriality are key elements in the process of cultural reassignment brought about by colonization, they culminate in the redefinition of a lineage and a genealogy which brings about a forced inclusion of the colonial other. The history of colonialism is replete with episodes in which the land was renamed and native place names were replaced by Western names, testifying to the presence of the colonists. Natives themselves were sometimes renamed, as if renaming them was the first step towards a conversion to Western values and lifestyle (Goldie, 198912). This issue has also figured abundantly in literary works. In his 1983 novel Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World, Colin Johnson (who later took the name Mudrooroo13) wrote about the first contacts between natives and settlers in Tasmania. One of the key moments in the novel is the renaming of the natives by Robinson, the missionary figure inspired from George Augustus Robinson.14 The ceremony, which is recounted with a good deal of irony satirizes the assimilationist drive of missionary discourse which culminates in the reinvention of a mythical genealogy which includes the natives: He marched his short, plump body to the end of the line and stared into the face of Wooreddy. ‘You were the first to follow me’, he murmured and then declared: ‘I name you Count Alpha!’ ‘Count Alpha, good Commandant Robinson, good’, fawned Wooreddy. In his numbness he did not care if he was renamed Mister Brown. (Mudrooroo, 1983, 139) Mudrooroo tackled this theme in another novel Long Live Sandawara, in which a group of young urban Aborigines try to reconnect with


their cultural heritage and revive the past by giving themselves the names of Aboriginal warriors who tried to put up resistance to the colonists: I’ve decided that we should drop our white fellow names and have Nungar names. [...] From now on I’ll be known as Sandawara. I’ve told you about him and how he fought the white man to a standstill up north. We’re just like him and his men and women. His struggle is now our struggle. [...] You Greg, you’ll be called Ellewara. He was a great man, the one who came before Sandawara. It was him that got the tracker to take up arms against the invaders. You are like him in lots of ways. (Mudrooroo, 1987 [1979] 117–18) What is conceived of as a liberating gesture by the group leader is presented as rather ambiguous by Mudrooroo who questions not so much the ‘authenticity’ of this indigenous heritage as its relevance in the current context. Mudrooroo suggests that it is a deceptive move which fails to conceal the fact that contemporary identity has not been erased but combined and renegotiated with elements imported by colonization. It is impossible to return to indigenous identity as it existed before colonization. The only thing which is possible is to negotiate the articulation between the old self and the step-self. When the indigenous characters of Long Live Sandawara decide to take traditional names, they opt for an identity radically different to their own. As young people brought up in an urban environment, they slip into a second skin which has no connection with their own experience and which is a fantasized representation of a glorious past owing both to the legends of the oral tradition and to the myths created by the settlers of Aborigines as unspoilt creatures who lived before history started. Rather than foregrounding the idea of an authentic identity, the novel, which questions the validity of the notion of authenticity, evidences the process of mythological cross-fertilization between colonizers, colonists, East and West and the way the myths feed off one another in a specular perspective. Putting to one side consideration of the notion of authenticity, which I am leaving until the next chapter, I would like to examine in the following section the consequences of the de facto doubleness of the postcolonial experience which survives into the diasporic journey. Indeed, as Wa Thiong’o argues in Decolonising the Mind, native culture survives colonization, which is not so much an erasure as a superimposition.15


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Interstitiality in a diasporic perspective In this section I propose to concentrate on key moments in the reassignment of the postcolonial self which survive into the diasporic journey while taking on new meanings. Whether it be through the disruption of spatial continuity, the awareness of the jarring polarities of im/migrant life (the former self versus the reinvented self of the im/migrant), or the interrogation of the authenticity of home(s), diasporic literature not only revisits key motifs of postcolonial literature which it follows down the line, several years into the life of im/migrants from former colonies, but also makes extensive use of the vantage point provided by the diasporic experience as a metaperspective which brings together radically opposed contexts and systems of values. Not only does it show chameleon-like characters or janus-type figures who fit – more or less easily – into two worlds, it constantly displaces Western discourse from within and interrogates its categories. The territorial remapping of identity, which we discussed in relation to postcolonial literature has its equivalent in diasporic fiction where it is best embodied by the motif of the journey to the host country, which introduces spatial discontinuity. This motif has been a leitmotiv in diasporic fiction, from such seminal texts as George Lamming’s The Emigrants (1954) or Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956). In recent years it has been revisited in a creative way by Salman Rushdie, who has moved away from the realistic mode, to describe the brutality of the immigrant’s arrival with more surrealist overtones. In The Satanic Verses, Rushdie imagines the arrival of Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha, as two men who have miraculously survived a plane crash and landed in London. Yet if Rushdie describes a series of unlikely events in the surrealistic mode characteristic of magic realism, the diasporic journey of Farishta and Chamcha rings true, as some critics have remarked (Nasta, 2002) in the sense that Rushdie captures the brutality of the process of uprooting and relocation inherent in the diasporic experience. Rushdie’s novel, often praised for its daringness and originality, in particular in terms of form and aesthetics, is thematically rather close to many contemporary novels which shift the focus from the hardships of immigration to the immense liberty of immigrants to reinvent their identity abroad. I am referring more specifically to novels of the diaspora of hope and this point cannot be generalized to those of the diaspora of terror or despair, like some novels by Abdulrazak Gurnah or A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips. Indeed, the corpus of diasporic literature spans a spectrum of reinventions of identity with radically opposed

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Critical Identities

connotations and draws on two interpretations of the diasporic experience which can be traced back to the etymology of the term itself. As Brian Cheyette reminds us, this etymology suggests the radically opposed experiences of diaspora as a blessing or as a curse: The experience of diaspora can be a blessing or a curse, more commonly, an uneasy amalgam of the two states. It is not a coincidence that the Hebrew root for exile or diaspora has two distinct connotations. ‘Golah’ implies residence in a foreign country (where the migrant is in charge of his or her destiny), whereas ‘Galut’ denotes a tragic sense of displacement (where the migrant is [...] the passive object of an impersonal history). (Cheyette, 1996, 295) In the following discussion I will examine the motif of the journey away from home and the spatial discontinuity it involves in relation to a less known text which pushes the reinvention of the self to a radical point, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel Middlesex. This text does not deal with the journey of immigrants from formerly colonized nations, but is set in a politically disturbed context, that of a borderland territory between Greece and Turkey, which is marked by the competing influences of the two rival nations. The narrative, which chronicles the life of a family from Greece who decide to emigrate to the US, hinges on the moment when two of the characters, a young woman and her brother, seize the opportunity of the long boat journey and of the change of place to reinvent a new life for themselves, becoming fiancés instead of brother and sister. Not only do they transgress the taboo of incest, they also symbolically redefine the genealogy and the imposed lineage. Immigration, and the change of context it involves, thus provides the necessary space for reinvention and becomes a key moment as well as the condition of possibility for a sort of re-birth. The end of the novel somehow qualifies this radical reinvention of the self since the transgression of the taboo of incest backlashes several generations down the line when young Callie has to come to terms with a disrupted sexual identity – she is in fact a hermaphrodite – a feature which in the novel is explicitly put down to her ancestors’ transgression of the ban on incest. The theme of reality catching up with the individual’s assertion of his will-power and freedom to reinvent himself is dealt with in the tragiccomic mode and with tragic undertones which remind the reader of the handling of fate in a Greek tragedy.16 This novel, whose plot and writing venture into the surreal, explores the possibilities of spatial discontinuity and moves away from a description of migration as traumatic to one


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which foregrounds the potentialities of the no man’s land of this boat journey. The in-betweenness of im/migrants, not yet here and yet no longer there, is an apt metaphor for the gap, the interstice where the migrant can slip through the net, but where he is also free to reinvent himself. The novel thus stresses the role of agency in the definition of identity and the capacity of the self to flee the overlapping pressures exerted upon identity definition to explore new horizons in the spatial and metaphorical senses of the term. In the previous section on postcolonial legacies I have discussed the fragility of the link which unites the former self to the new one, the immigrant’s past to his present life. This fragility is a leitmotiv in contemporary diasporic writing, in particular in novels of the past decade which envisage im/migration in the light of recent changes. The improvement in means of transport and communication have dramatically altered our perception of distances; they have to a certain extent made im/migration easier, maybe less radical, but probably also more destabilizing, creating the de facto possibility of being in between places and in between worlds, of being one day at the centre of hypermodernity and the next to be locked up in an Indian house without air conditioning or modern facilities like the children of first generation immigrants in Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake. More importantly, it has allowed the im/migrant not to sever the cord with the home country, which has had the consequence of challenging the dichotomy home country/host country even further (Appadurai, 1996). This new trend in contemporary diasporic fiction which includes writers like Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri, Hari Kunzru and Kiran Desai interrogates the lack of substantiality in the diasporic experience. This reflects on the way diasporic subjects who find themselves in a permanent state of uprootedness are condemned to a de facto deterritorialization. Some of them even stress the disturbing coming together of two worlds that have very little in common. The episode of Biju’s telephone call to his father in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, stresses the fragility of the link between the two worlds as the telephone cord is rocked by the birds, as well as the disturbing discrepancy between Biju’s two lives – his safe though unglamorous environment in the US and Nepal where violent riots are taking place. Rather than emphasize the magic of communication or the shrinking of distances in the global village, this novel suggests the absurdity at the root of migrant experience, where radically different contexts are brought into contact in radically opposed polarities.


This absurdity, which almost makes immigration artificial and difficult to articulate is suggested in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake. With its emphasis on the glitches of communication (through lost letters and telephone calls which bring back to life the dormant self in the other country) The Namesake debunks the would-be smoothness of the global village and stresses the immateriality of the migrant experience. At the end of the novel, as she is about to leave the country where she had migrated as a young woman to share her time between India and the US, where she is to stay six months a year with her children, the newly widowed Ashima realizes that she has become ‘a resident everywhere and nowhere’ (276). The episode of her son Gogol holding the camera whose weight reassures him as he is looking at the now empty room where he has grown up epitomizes the immateriality of im/migrant experience, like lives hanging by a thread. This motif is also present in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane, in which the heroine Nazneen contemplates the tickets bought by her husband in preparation for their return to Bangladesh, thinking that they are so flimsy, ‘so lacking in substance’ (355). The fragility of the articulation between the two halves of a life accounts for the prevalence of the home motif, which is as in the case of the postcolonial politics of home assigned to a specific function and made to play a crucial part in the migrant’s experience. To a certain extent, the home marks the inscription of the diasporic self into the new land, but it also allows him to shelter his other half and keep the home country alive. In The Namesake, the assertion of im/migrant identity through a territorial inscription onto the land is brought up several times in the novel, whether it be when a group of children shorten the name Ganguli written on the mailbox to GANG (67) or when Gogol desperately looks for streets bearing his name or for namesakes on the stone slabs of cemeteries. To a certain extent, the home becomes the reflection of the immigrant’s life abroad; it can either bear witness to a successful journey to the promised land or expose his failure to make good, like the home in Small Island. Not to forget Biju’s accommodation in The Inheritance of Loss, in a Harlem basement where he camps with a ‘shifting population of men’. Beyond the social dimension of the house as a sign of success or failure, the house which fails to become a home is emblematic of the im/migrant’s inability to become rooted and reterritorialized. The home either becomes a place of confinement where the old self of the im/migrant becomes locked up, as the descriptions of Chanu’s and Nazneen’s flat at the beginning of the text seem to suggest (Ali, 2003) – a flat packed with furniture, as if the immigrants were trying


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to facilitate their rerooting through material grounding and settling of the land in an ironical replay of colonial episodes. Or it can act as an interface, a locus of interaction with the outside world, for example when Nazneen observes Karim to try and learn how to integrate. The difference in attitudes between Chanu and Nazneen is conveyed in the difference in the way they articulate inside/outside, home country and host country. Any attempt made by Chanu at reterritorializing himself in the UK is doomed to failure; even the computer he buys with a view to getting on the internet fails to act as an efficient interface and ends up covered in cobwebs, a useless object of modernity which fails in its role as a tool of integration, leaving Chanu neither here nor there. Not to mention the home one plans to have built in the homeland and which is one of the key motifs of homecoming narratives. Nazneen stays in the UK while her husband Chanu returns to Bangladesh and one of his dreams is to have a house built. The current questioning of the home motif in diasporic texts reflects a certain awareness of the evanescence of the diasporic experience. In The Politics of Home, Rosemary Marangoly George remarks that ‘the sentiment accompanying the absence of home – homesickness – can cut two ways: it could be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the inauthenticity or the created aura of all homes’ (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 74). This duality in the treatment of the home motif is to be paralleled with the development of the theme of luggage17 – either actual or metaphorical ones in recent contemporary fiction. Marangoly George sketches the development of the luggage motif from an early immigration novel, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) – in which Oliver leaves Jamaica and settles in London without any luggage and reckons that there is ‘no sense to load up myself with a set of things’ (18) – to a more recent novel, Vassanji’s The Gunny Sack. She suggests a distinction between two types of immigrants, those who travel light like Oliver and those who come loaded with all their belongings; this second category could include a recent novel like Andrea Levy’s Small Island in which the Jamaican fiancée turns up on her fiancé’s doorstep with a trunk which he has to carry up the stairs (and as one might imagine, characters who travel light sometimes have less difficulties integrating). The luggage motif as opposed to the home opens onto an interesting reflection on the link between home and identity. To a certain extent, luggage as a transportable set of belongings takes on a paradigmatic status facilitating a better understanding of how identity can be conceived of independently of territorialization and root identity.18 It reasserts


the importance of the past, of one’s experience and memories, but a past which is not frozen in time or place, a past which is transportable, mobile and can be reconfigured so as to make sense in a new context. In Ali’s novel Brick Lane, Chanu’s conception of identity as frozen in time and impervious to change is not only challenged by the experience of immigration, but it also prevents him from relocating himself psychologically in England. His wife Nazneen on the other hand, who is a lot more rooted in traditional identity and even described as the typical Bengali wife, has a more open and centrifugal conception of identity which makes room for reinvention. The development of the luggage motif somehow contrasts, at least in appearance with another motif, that of the homecoming journey. The increasing importance of the homecoming journey in many novels from the South Asian Diaspora coincides with a contextual change in the representation of national identity in Indian literature and in the arts in general – the Bollywood film industry plays an active role in revamping the homeland, its newly established modernity which has none of the failings of the West. It also coincides with a change in the status of the diaspora. The Indian government has created a new category (‘non resident Indians’) to take account of the existence of its diaspora. But more importantly, the homecoming theme bears witness to some unresolved crisis centred on the need for roots, for bearings, and ultimately the wish to belong. It seems almost paradoxical that diasporic texts which deal with mobility, displacement and reinvention should express such a longing for roots and bearings. Rather than a critique of the very idea of im/migration and displacement, they question contemporary myths of mobility. Biju’s narrative of a failed success story or Chanu’s return to Bangladesh point as much to a celebration of home, roots and past identity as at the bitter realization of the lures of Western myths. In other words and by a way of conclusion to this section, these contemporary texts do not constitute a general indictment of the diasporic experience as a whole, but mark a radical departure from Western mythology relating to immigration and displacement.

The semiotics of interstitiality In the previous sections I have brushed in broad brushstrokes the different landmarks in the process of identity reassignment as they have been analysed in relation to postcoloniality and as they have been represented in contemporary diasporic literature. Whether the diasporic subject succeeds in articulating the two sides of his diasporic life – his


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two selves – or not, and manages to ‘negotiate’19 between them, his dual nature lingers on as a constitutive feature inscribed at the heart of the diasporic subject. As Linda Hutcheon aptly puts it: Doubleness is the essence of migrant experience. Caught between two worlds, the immigrant negotiates a new social space; caught between two cultures and often two languages, the writer negotiates a new literary space. (Hutcheon, 1990, 9) This doubleness has also been described by Edward Said in a passage which points at the constitutive disjuncture of the diasporic subject and the diasporic experience. ALL FAMILIES INVENT THEIR PARENTS AND CHILDREN, GIVE each of them a story, character, fate, and even a language. There was always something wrong with how I was invented and meant to fit in with the world of my parents and four sisters. Whether this was because I constantly misread my part or because of some deep flaw in my being I could not tell for most of my early life. Sometimes I was intransigent, and proud of it. At other times I seemed to myself to be nearly devoid of any character at all, timid, uncertain, without will. Yet the overriding sensation I had was of always being out of place. Thus it took me about fifty years to become accustomed to, or, more exactly, to feel less uncomfortable with, ‘Edward’, a foolishly English name yoked forcibly to the unmistakably Arabic family name Said. True my mother told me that I had been named Edward after the Prince of Wales, who cut so fine a figure in 1935, the year of my birth, and Said was the name of various uncles and cousins. But the rationale of my name broke down both when I discovered no grandparents called Said and when I tried to connect my fancy English name with its Arabic partner. (Said, 1999, 3) In this passage drawn from his autobiography Out of Place Edward Said points out two key features of diasporic identity. The first, which is not specific to diasporic identity, but could apply to identity in general, is the link between identity and representation, and the fact that identity exists not only in pre-designated definitions but also in relation to a process of self-definition and representation. This idea links up with Stuart Hall’s definition of identity as ‘a “production”, which is never complete, always in the process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation’ (Hall, 1990, 223).20 But Said also stresses the

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Critical Identities

disjuncture at the heart of the diasporic experience which almost borders on schizophrenia. His name, which he sees as the ultimate marker of this duality is a collage of two elements taken from two cultural continua which are juxtaposed and the very jarringness of this incongruous juxtaposition points to the discrepancy at the heart of the diasporic experience. The jarringness of the diasporic experience and to a certain extent of the diasporic subject is a theme often brought up not only in literary texts but also in essays by diasporic writers or in more theoretical texts addressing the issue of diasporic experience. In an essay called ‘Bradford’ (Kureishi, 1986), Hanif Kureishi described the duality at the root of migrant experience and points to the jarring polarities of young Asians born and raised in Britain and who seem to embrace the values and fashions of the West such as pop music or Western films, while retaining their traditional values and religion. This duality creates interpretative difficulties, not only because the diasporic subject seldom fits into established categories, but also because certain cultural signifiers are stripped of their traditional meaning and re-encoded. In Brick Lane, Monica Ali imagines a character of Bangladeshi origin, who was born and bred in the UK, and whose rootlessness leads him to crave bearings. At the end of the novel, he takes to wearing traditional clothes instead of jeans, in an attempt at finding a more solid identity in authenticity. Despite his efforts to integrate the markers of traditional identity, the discrepancy of his transmongrified self resurfaces and is expressed through metaphors like the quilt on which the stitches are visible. But more interestingly, this character poses a real problem of interpretation, precisely because his whole persona juxtaposes signs taken from different cultural continua. When Nazneen first sees him, she thinks that he is a perfectly integrated immigrant. He speaks perfect English and has a cell phone, which to her is a symbol of modernity. Only later does she realize that the cell phone is used to remind him of prayer time, in a kind of postmodern irony which juxtaposes what the West would consider a marker of modernity with longstanding traditions. What is perplexing is not so much this duality, as the fact that the codes are telescoped and the signs re-encoded, which poses interpretative difficulties and prompts a more general reflection on semiotics and the nature and status of signs, their transience, their capacity to be detached from existing signifieds and yoked to new ones, in other words their fundamentally contextual nature. Understanding interstitial identities therefore requires a move from traditional categories as well as a reassessment of theoretical paradigms


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dealing with identity. By bringing together signifieds from different cultural continua, telescoping codes, the migrant evidences the need for new categories which move away from the singularities of existing ones. It is in this sense that the hybrid as it is defined by Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture calls for new interpretative patterns, theoretical paradigms and taxonomies. The move away from the singularities of ‘class’ or ‘gender’ as primary conceptual and organizational categories, has resulted in an awareness of the subject positions – of race, gender, generation, institutional location, geopolitical locale, sexual orientation – that inhabit any claim to identity in the modern world. What is theoretically innovative, and politically crucial, is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between’ spaces provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood – singular or communal – that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, in the act of defining the idea of society itself. (Bhabha, 1996 [1994] 1) In this redefinition of identity, Bhabha dismisses a definition of identity as monolithic and one-dimensional and rejects the identity of block identities. He shows how categories interact on a vertical axis (gender, class, etc.). This vertical axis is also subjected to time and potential changes, so much so that identity has to be redefined. It is not the sum of ‘pre-given ethnic or cultural traits set in the fixed tablet or tradition’ but must be defined as ‘social articulation’ and ‘on-going negotiation’ (Bhabha, 1994, [1996] 2). The consequence of such a rejection of identity as monolithic and uni-faceted is that it calls for a new theory of identity which makes room for new identities based on a combination of other categories. What is interesting is that this redefinition of the semiotics of the interstice does not foreground a principle of the blurring of codes. The term hybridity as used by Bhabha is not synonymous with mixture; it is more a quilt than magma. As Bhabha also points out, the paradigmatic shift not only applies to im/migrants, but to societies, which are nowadays increasingly multicultural – hence the timeliness of the notion of interstitiality. The migrant figure, the everywhere man is not only the spearhead of diasporic fiction as an emerging genre; it is also present in other types of diasporic novels, whereby I mean novels written by authors emanating from former diasporas who choose to engage with diasporic issues

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instead of moving away from them. In recent years I have been struck by the broadening of the scope of the novelist Philip Roth for example, who, as some critics have remarked, has moved away from a focus on identity as exclusively linked to that of the Jewish community in the US to embrace diverse issues related to other diasporas.21 In the following discussion of his novel The Human Stain, I propose to discuss the articulation between novels written by diasporic subjects and issues of interstitiality and in particular to show how this type of novel addresses the issue of the semiotics of interstitiality which is raised in contemporary diasporic texts. The Human Stain can be read as an indictment of existing identity definitions and in particular the constraints of monolithic categories denounced by Homi Bhabha. This novel spans a broad spectrum of characters of various ages and origins – both ethnic and social – who all struggle through an identity crisis. The story of the protagonist, Coleman Silk, takes us back to the days of the colour bar in a segregated community in America and chronicles the life of a child of AfroAmerican descent, whose white skin allows him to pass for white but forces him to relinquish every aspect of it and to sever all ties with his family. The other characters who stem from various cultural and economic backgrounds, raise other issues linked to identity. Among them is Delphine Roux, a French-born academic who comes to realize that despite her theoretical and practical knowledge of American culture, her mastery of the language and her academic credentials, she will always remain an outsider, the ‘poor misunderstood foreigner’ (Roth, 2001 [2000] 277), unable to relate to people at a personal level. On closer analysis, despite the complexities of the characters’ personalities, each one of them seems to represent a certain definition of identity in the sense that each character has a specific way of defining not only his/her identity but also the way identity should be established. Mark, Coleman Silk’s son, voices his need to know where he comes from in order to understand who he is. In a passage recounting Mark’s childhood, the narrator insists on his longing for origins and on his need to know the story of his family. This was the story he told Iris as well. All of it was invented for Iris. [...] And the only one never satisfied was Mark. ‘Where did our greatgrandparents come from?’ Russia. ‘But what city?’ I asked my father and mother, but they never seemed to know for sure. One time it was one place, one time another. There was a whole generation of Jews like that. They never really knew. The old people didn’t talk about


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it much, and the American children weren’t that curious, they were het up on being Americans, and so, in my family as in many families, there was a general Jewish geographical amnesia. All I got when I asked, Coleman told them, was the answer ‘Russia.’ But Markie said, ‘Russia is gigantic, Dad. Where in Russia? Markie would not be still.’ (Roth, 2001 [2000] 176) This myth of origins, fabricated by Coleman for the benefit of his son Mark, points to the importance of geographical roots as a prerequisite for identity. Unlike his father, who has severed all links with the past and whose fake identity has forced him to reject his family and to commit a matricide – at least symbolically – Mark craves roots. This example allows Roth to suggest a first definition of identity as tethered to a place, a conception which involves a clear topographical mapping of one’s origins. A more problematic definition of identity as involving a complex negotiation between existing definitions – and antagonistic ones – is introduced into the novel through the character of Delphine Roux. Although the novel is replete with references to her exotic Frenchness, which seems to set her off as a cultural stereotype, her identity gradually emerges as slightly more complex and brings into tension three different definitions of identity. But because these three definitions foreground monolithic identities, they fail to apprehend the complexities of her multi-layered self, which combines her cultural heritage (the ‘given’) and what I shall refer to as ‘the chosen.’ For example we learn that her mother became for her: the shadow of her accomplishments but, even worse, of her family, the shadow of the Walincourts, named after the place given to them in the thirteenth century by the King Saint Louis and conforming still to the family ideals as they were set in the thirteenth century. How Delphine hated all those families, the pure and ancient aristocracy of the provinces, all of them thinking the same, looking the same, sharing the same stifling values and the same stifling religious obedience. (Roth, 2001 [2000] 274–5) Through this reference to Delphine’s roots, in both the geographical and genealogical sense of the term, Roth suggests that Delphine’s identity combines time and space. It is derived from the land and a sense of territorial belonging, cemented by habitus and elevated to the realm of the sacred through the mediation of the King, who in the days before

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the French Revolution, was considered to be the representative of God on earth. At the same time, Delphine is a former student of the École Normale Supérieure, which not only sets her off as an elite scholar but as an heiress to the principles of the French republic, since the École Normale Supérieure was founded after the revolution to select the best and most promising students from any social class to give them the best possible education. In other words, its aim was to break away from what Bourdieu calls the cycle of ‘social reproduction’, with a view to promoting social mobility. Delphine thus embodies the difficult negotiation between two strictly opposed conceptions of identity, a traditional and outdated definition of identity as ‘the given’, and the modern definition inherited from the revolution, of identity as shaped by the individual with the help of society. This situation is further complicated by her departure for America, the nation of the melting pot, based on the theory of an acceptance of cultural diversity rather than homogeneity, thus opting for a third definition of identity. In La République coloniale, Françoise Vergès suggests that although France and the United States seem to share the same idea of national identity, France is a nation of immigrants which denies this heterogeneous component and foregrounds a principle of sameness and unity hinging on the acceptance of similar principles. On the contrary, the American theory of the melting pot accepts and prides itself on the diversity of its population. In light of all this, Delphine Roux emerges as a lot more than a onedimensional character. Her complex identity becomes a paradigm for the complexities of contemporary identity, at the crossroads between various conceptions. The representation of identities sketched by Roth could be compared to tectonic plates, each one bearing a certain definition of identity; when coming into contact, these plates generate a sort of overdetermination of identities, since the individual finds himself caught between different frameworks, while striving to find an interstice where s/he could freely determine his/her own self, independently of existing definitions. One of the consequences of Roth’s emphasis on the complexity of identity definition in The Human Stain, is the relevance or lack of relevance of labels when it comes to identity. In a sense, the novel can be read as an indictment of existing theories of identity, whose limits it repeatedly shows. Each character is defined by society in a fixed, monolithic and limiting way. Yet the personalities of Roth’s characters show that none of these definitions – taken on their own – fully applies to the characters. It is more a case of combining the different definitions and accepting that an individual is the result of a negotiation between


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several of them, which in turn form a new one and contribute to an infinite spectrum of identities, thus calling for new interpretative patterns which should prove able to take account of the fluidity, the complexity and the provisionality of identity. There is more to Delphine Roux’s failure to see through Coleman’s fiction of a WASP identity than an indictment of her academic remoteness and her inability to engage in human matters. The irony directed at Delphine Roux is underpinned by a more serious issue. In his portrayal of Delphine Roux and in particular her lack of clairvoyance when it comes to grasping the complexities of Coleman Silk, Roth calls for an indictment of theory, not only of structuralism but all theories based on one-dimensional categories, and in particular theories that essentialize human beings and uproot them from a context and potential changes. Delphine Roux’s mistake does not only originate in her inability to read signs but also in her inability to articulate categories and to situate others at the crossroads between several categories. The following example points at the way she completely misreads the situation between Coleman and Faunia which she mistakes for a tale of oppression. What her lack of judgment points at is the temptation to reduce the complexity of interstitial identities to predefined patterns and existing narratives such as that of the oppressed woman exploited by a bourgeois male, in Roux’s not very successful attempt at a Marxian and feminist discourse. She was still seething at the thought of the viciousness that could make of this dreadfully disadvantaged woman who had already lost everything a toy, that could capriciously turn a suffering human being like Faunia Farley into a plaything so as to revenge himself on her. (Roth, 2001 [2000] 195) Delphine thus allows Roth to foreground here the complexity of identity as provisional and multi-layered, not as something that can be pinned down but as a fragile balance. The mindset of this character prompts a larger reflection on the need to rethink contextual frameworks in a context of shifting identities. The following chapter seeks to analyse the ways in which diasporic texts undo existing patterns and propose new models.

3 Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity

Groups have fallen back on the idea of cultural nationalism, on the overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable, ethnic differences as an absolute break in the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people. Against this choice stands another, more difficult opposition: the theorisation of creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity. From the viewpoint of ethnic absolutism, this would be a litany of pollution and impurity. (Gilroy, 1993, 2) The current popularity of post-colonial discourse that implicates solely the West often obscures the colonizing relationship of the East in relation to Africa and other parts of the Third World. We often forget that many Third World nationals bring to this country the same kind of contempt and disrespect for blackness that is most frequently associated with white western imperialism [...] Within feminist movements Third World nationals often assume the role of mediator or interpreter, explaining the ‘bad’ black people to understand whiteness ... Unwittingly assuming the role of go-between, of mediator, she reinscribes a colonial paradigm. (hooks, 1990, 93–4) In the previous chapter I have discussed the ways in which interstitial identities resulting from diasporic contexts pose several challenges in terms of semiotics and taxonomy. I now propose to turn to another consequence of the existence of interstitial identities: the fact that they have recently emerged as forces which redefine national identity in 50

Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity

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the countries where they are to be found. In recent years, their nonconformity with existing definitions of national identity has become hard to ignore; so have the dissenting voices which have started to challenge openly the limits and parameters of Englishness, such as that of Andrea Levy and her rather daring claim that ‘[i]f Englishness doesn’t define me, then redefine Englishness’1 (Levy in Jaggi, 1996, 64). Writers like Levy or Kureishi have not only voiced the claims of disenfranchised minorities to become integrated into the national definition of identity. They have also stressed the need to interrogate the very definitions of identity inherited from the nation state and to rethink the way land/ race/language/culture have been aligned. It is in this sense that Kureishi calls for ‘fresh ways of seeing Britain’: It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing, involving new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time. (Kureishi, 1986, 38) This need has been widely reflected in the literatures from the diasporas where diasporic characters have started not only to come centre stage but also to challenge and destabilize white middle-class ones, ultimately prompting them to reconsider the boundary between self and other. Mark Stein has remarked that ‘[t]he black British novel of transformation [...] has a dual function: it is about the formation of its protagonists as well as the transformation of British society and cultural institutions’ (Stein, 2004, 22). This issue needs to be recontextualized in various ways. Specific answers to the development of diversity need to be taken into account, but the question also calls for a more in-depth discussion of the two poles around which debates on identity have crystallized in the last decades: postmodernity and its questioning of fixed and monolithic patterns of identity, but also authenticity. Indeed, one of the questions that have emerged in recent decades is how these new identities, ever in the making and evolving as they are, link up with postmodern identities. Iain Chambers conceives of postmodern identities as decomposed and recomposed,2 as engaged in a process of definition which resembles ‘an open-journey without a goal’ involving ‘a continual fabulation, an invention, a construction in which there is no fixed identity or final destination’ (Chambers, 1994, 25). The link between these new identities in the making, corresponding to de facto new ethnicities in

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search of an official definition, and postmodernity, has been repeatedly stressed, to the point of suggesting that the complexity inherent in the various reconfigurations of personal identity through diasporic experience can be read as an epiphenomenon of postmodernity. This question extends beyond the scope of this chapter and perhaps even beyond that of this book; I have decided however to venture some hypotheses in later chapters (Chapter 5). For the time being, I would like to concentrate on another aspect of the link between postmodern identities and diasporic ones, which is the redefinition of the power struggle between centre and margins. In a famous text, Stuart Hall has described not without a hint of humour what he has called the ‘de-centering of the centre,’ a phenomenon he has accounted for by citing the fact that the margins have not become more centred; it is the centre itself that has become decentred: Now that, in the postmodern age, you all feel so dispersed, I become centred. What I’ve thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience! This is ‘coming home with a vengeance!’ ... I’ve been puzzled by the fact that young black people in London today are marginalized, fragmented, unenfranchised, disadvantaged and dispersed. And yet, they look as if they own the territory. Somehow, they too, in spite of everything are centred, in place: without much material support, it’s true, but nevertheless they occupy a new kind of space at the centre. (Hall in Appignanesi, 1987, 44) But the link between identity and postmodernity also needs to be interrogated in relation to the way identity constructions have been affected by what I have called in the previous chapter the crisis of the grand narrative of identity, a crisis which has shaken the foundations of the notion of authenticity, even if, as I shall argue in the following discussion, things are not as simple as they seem. In a famous passage quoted by Iain Chambers in his Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Chicano novelist Arturo Islas suggests that ‘the increasing nomadism of modern thought’ and ‘the loss of roots’ have generated a ‘waning of the grammar of authenticity’ (Islas in Chambers, 1994, 18–19): To the forcibly induced migrations of slaves, peasants, the poor, and the ex-colonial world that make up so many of the hidden histories of modernity, we can also add the increasing nomadism of modern


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thought. [...] Faced with a loss of roots, and the subsequent weakening in the grammar of ‘authenticity,’ we move into a vaster landscape. Our sense of belonging, our language and the myths we carry in us remain, but no longer as ‘origins’ or signs of ‘authenticity’ capable of guaranteeing the sense of our lives. They now linger on as traces, voices, memories and murmurs that are mixed in with other histories, episodes encounters. (Islas in Chambers, 1994, 18–19) This observation, which is extremely pertinent, requires to be qualified somehow, not so much in terms of its validity as in terms of the extent to which the debunking of authenticity has been fully taken on board outside the field of theory. In the following discussion, I propose to examine how the notion of authenticity has resisted waves of deconstructionist criticism to resurface in areas where theoretical daringness and radicalism have found their limits. These fields of persisting tension are, to say the least, politically vexed terrains where authenticity has become the spearhead of political resistance. As I briefly pointed out in the previous chapter, the appearance of a more critical approach to the issue of authenticity coincided, both chronologically and logically with a general reassessment of the question of identity in the wake of deconstructionism, which posited that identity is not an already existing category but a construct, generated by and developed through discourse in collusion with the interests, goals and desires3 of dominant cultures (Spurr, 1993; Clifford and Marcus, 1986; Lowe, 1991; Young, 1995) – in other words the West. Identity and more specifically the making of identity – whether it be personal identity or group identity – aroused interest in a range of disciplines ranging from ethnology (Gladney, 1998) to sociology (Bauman, 2004) or history (Hobsbawm, 1990). Ernest Gellner’s influential statement that ‘[n]ationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations where they do not exist’ (Gellner, 1964) aptly sums up the departure from an essentialist stance and the general consensus about the deconstructionist outlook often found in these various fields. Yet authenticity has not disappeared altogether, any more than race or ethnicity have. The two passages I have quoted at the beginning of the chapter represent the two poles between which critics and theorists dealing with identity issues have situated themselves in the last fifty years. bell hooks’s voice represents the counter-discursive approach which asserts blackness in a radical way while Gilroy’s sets out to understand the interaction between Western discourse and its others, white modernism and the Black Atlantic. When opposing Gilroy’s position

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to that of hooks, I mean to suggest that this issue has led to the development of two radically opposed views, but also that this debate goes beyond the black/white Eastern/Western divide. The approach advocated by Gilroy is not the product of a Western theorist engrossed in abstractions but that of a black theorist attempting to understand the construction of blackness by whites, to trace its historical development and examine various answers provided by black artists and writers who have succeeded in undermining White discourse (Gilroy, 2000b). This allows Gilroy to evidence the role played by blacks in modernism (Gilroy, 1993). What interests me is that Gilroy refuses Afrocentrism as much as he rejects Eurocentrism when he examines the use of the concept of authenticity in movements of vindication of black identity (Gilroy, chapter 3). For him, the root of the problem is the rigidity of the ‘pseudo-biological definition of national cultures,’ a rigidity which is not only to be found in the discourse of the West but also in other forms of ethnic absolutism, such as Afrocentrism. Rather than fighting the rhetoric of Western absolutism or merely inverting this category, Gilroy interrogates the workings and construction of such definitions. The unifying notion of an open blackness has been largely rejected and replaced by more particularistic conceptions of cultural difference. This retreat from a politically constructed notion of racial solidarity has initiated a compensatory recovery of narrowly ethnic culture and identity. Indeed, the aura of authentic ethnicity supplies a special form of comfort in a situation where the very historicity of black experience is constantly undermined. These political and historical shifts are registered in the cultural realm. The growth of religious fundamentalism among some Asian-descended populations is an obvious sign of their significance, and there may be similar processes at work in the experience of the peoples of Caribbean descent for whom an equivalent retreat into pure ethnicity has acquired pronounced generational features. Their desire to anchor themselves in racial particularity is not dominated by the longing to return to the Victorian certainties and virtues of Caribbean cultural life. However, in conjunction with the pressures of economic recession and populist racism, this yearning has driven many older settlers to return to the lands in which they were born. Among their descendants, the same desire to withdraw has achieved a very different form of expression. It has moved towards an overarching Africentrism which can be read as inventing its own totalising conception of black culture. This new ethnicity is all the more powerful because it corresponds to no actually


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existing black communities. Its radical utopianism, often anchored in the ethical bedrock provided by the history of the Nile Valley civilisations, transcends the parochialism of Caribbean memories in favour of a heavily mythologised Africanity that is itself stamped by its origins not in Africa but in a variety of pan-African ideology produced more recently by black America. (Gilroy, 1993, 86–7) Gilroy’s scepticism also has the merit of refusing any form of radicalism, even when radicalism seems like a politically valid answer to centuries of oppression. In this respect, his interrogation of the cluster nation/culture/race goes further than bell hooks’s strong positioning against the ethnic absolutism of the West which fails to undermine the faulty logic of imperialist discourse, and can be reproached with fighting colonial and imperial discourse with the same tools they used, a shortcoming other critics have noted. Suleiri for example has written that: ‘[r]ather than extending an inquiry into the discursive possibilities represented by the intersection of gender and race, feminist intellectuals like hooks misuse their status as minority voices by enacting strategies of belligerence that at this time are more divisive than informative’ (Suleiri, 1995, 142). But the issue is not as simple as it may seem and we are immediately faced with a major difficulty, namely that the limits of postcolonial theoretical discourse become apparent when politically vexed terrains are its focus. In order to illustrate this point I would like briefly to discuss a case of resurgence of the notion of authenticity which to me illustrates the idea that if the linearity of narratives has been disrupted and the notion of authenticity questioned, it tends to resurface in certain areas where this gesture is legitimized – or at least thought to be legitimate – because of the political situation. In Australia, in the years that followed the Mabo Treaty, which called into question the notion of terra nullius, which had justified – to some at least – the colonization of Australia by the white settlers and the subsequent appropriation of native territory, a most interesting case came to the notice of theorists not only in Australia but also abroad. In 1996, an article published in The Australian Magazine (Laurie, 1996) threw into question the identity of leading Aboriginal writer Mudrooroo4 on the grounds that recent genealogical research carried out by his sister seemed to indicate that he was not ‘truly’ Aboriginal.5 What could have remained a trivial story was thrown into the spotlight and triggered off a heated debate among critics and indigenous writers alike as well as among political activists. Although some indigenous writers supported Mudrooroo, the bulk of indigenous


writers did not side with him. One of the reasons given has to do with traditional conceptions of the transmission of the indigenous cultural heritage: in traditional Aboriginal culture, which is oral, only indigenous people are allowed to pass stories and legends down to others, and they are only permitted to do so within the community. The fact that Mudrooroo was not a true Aborigine made him unfit for this task. This case fosters debate and prompts a great deal of questions on various planes: ethical, political, theoretical, to mention only a few and also questions the role and responsibility of Western critics. In other words, should the Western critic argue against the blood-based definition of identity which resurfaced in the course of the debates, when aboriginality was defined in terms of blood quantum, or let the indigenous population, already weakened if not decimated by colonization, decide on their own issues. A good understanding of what is at stake in this debate requires that the incident be recontextualized in the broader context of the land claims of the 1990s. In the years that followed the Mabo treaty, many indigenous communities started to lay claim to lands to such an extent that many white Australians became afraid of losing their lands. We can easily imagine what doubts the existence of ‘untrue’ Aborigines could have introduced into the minds of both white Australians and Black Australians. To the latter, the controversy over a ‘pass for native’ writer was embarrassing since the Mudrooroo episode could be used as an excuse to undermine certain land claims under the pretext that all Aborigines were not true Aborigines. This may explain why, independently of ancestral beliefs, Aborigines were more or less forced to draw the line between true Aborigines and those who pass for Aborigines, therefore brandishing the argument of authenticity and reviving a fatal definition of race based on blood. What this case points to, and the reasons why I find it so interesting is precisely because it seems to lead to the following paradox: it is right for the oppressed to argue his case in any way he chooses, preferably in his own terms, even if this implies resorting to a category of race reduced to the lowest common denominator. The Western critic therefore finds himself in a difficult position which results in the following dilemma: condemning authenticity when it is used as an argument by the oppressor but condoning it when it is employed by the oppressed to bolster up their case. The predicament theorists are faced with today is therefore to rethink identity independently of the notion of authenticity, but without reducing it to abstract polarities as the more radical post-structuralist approaches have tended to do. As Homi Bhabha has noticed, one of the consequences of studies focusing on counter-discursive strategies is


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that self and other have become two poles, two abstract signifiers, interrelated, interdependent (the self needs the other in order to be truly himself). In the process, self and other have been stripped of their ontological depth. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha writes that What is profoundly unresolved, even erased, in the discourses of poststructuralism is that perspective of depth through which the authenticity of identity comes to be reflected in the glassy metaphorics of the mirror and its mimetic or realist narratives. Shifting the frame of identity from the field of vision to the space of writing interrogates the third dimension that gives profundity to the representation of self and Other. (Bhabha, 1994, 48) This chapter therefore seeks to examine how literature by second generation immigrants prompts us to rethink national definitions of identity, but also how it allows us to gain a better understanding of the resurgence of the problem of identity in second generation immigrants, which is posed in a different way from in the case of first generation immigrants. The three sections of this chapter will examine the way national identity is questioned by diasporas in the UK, but also in the US where the American melting pot model itself seems to be in crisis, before concentrating on the case of double diasporas.

Rethinking the continuity land/race/language/culture and the temptation of authenticity in Fruit of the Lemon by Andrea Levy This section and the following one deal with texts by and about second generation immigrants. Although the term ‘second generation immigrants’ exists in many languages as a way of referring to children born in contexts of immigration, it nonetheless remains problematic and ambiguous because of the gesture it implies and which introduces doubts as to the child’s belonging. As Hanif Kureishi remarks in his essay entitled ‘Bradford’, the term introduces a discontinuity in the child’s representation of his identity and doubts as to the continuity between the country of his birth and his sense of belonging. When I was in my teens, in the mid-1960s, there was much talk of the ‘problems’ that kids of my colour and generation faced in Britain because of our racial mix or because our parents were immigrants. We didn’t know where we belonged it was said, we were neither fish


nor fowl. I remember reading that kind of thing in the newspaper. We were frequently referred to as ‘second-generation immigrants’ just so there was no mistake about our not belonging in Britain. (Kureishi, 2002, 70) Not only does the term ‘second generation immigrants’ cast doubts over the second generation immigrants’ sense of belonging, it also confronts them, rather violently with the idea of im/migration and displacement in a rather ironic way since these people may not have been outside the national frontiers of their country of birth. The label itself, through its epistemic violence, generates a form of alienation as well as a more profound sense of destabilization and ‘un-settlement’. In this section I propose to discuss some of the mechanisms at play in the shaping of identity in the case of second generation immigrants and focus on the difference between first and second generation immigrants through an analysis of Andrea Levy’s novel Fruit of the Lemon.6 The following discussion will focus respectively on the questioning of the alignment land/race/language/culture in the novel, and on the strategies of reinvention of the self. The issue of identity is first introduced through Faith, the protagonist, a black girl born into a family of immigrants from Jamaica. Faith’s case provides a good illustration of Kureishi’s reference to the way second generation immigrants find their sense of belonging in Britain questioned by the fact that they are constantly labelled as ‘second generation immigrants’. The identity crisis undergone by Faith is all the more unexpected as she grew up in London, in a rather cosmopolitan environment, and seems a perfectly happy Black Briton. There are however a series of proleptic events which cast a shadow over her integration and which point to the emergence of racial issues, like her being turned down for a job with the BBC, or witnessing a scene of racial violence. But the real event which constitutes a turning point in her quiet life as a young Brit, is when she is asked by a friend of a friend, in the countryside, where she is from. When she gathers that ‘London’ is not the expected answer, she then hears herself say ‘Jamaica,’ a place she has never been to, a place which her parents keep referring to as ‘the homeland’ without sparking the faintest interest in their daughter. What the question of her origins and the friend of a friend’s reaction to her first answer (London) actually imply is a continuity between land/ race/language/culture. This definition has its origins in the definition of the nation state; yet this theoretical alignment of notions, which have become increasingly hard to define, let alone pin down, persists


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in the imaginary of national identity, at least in the minds of white Britons, as Faith finds out much to her dismay. The fact that Faith is not of the ‘right’ colour immediately excludes her from this rigid alignment which seems to leave little room for redefinitions. The identity crisis undergone by Faith in the days that follow this event, and which manifests itself through a bout of depression which leaves her prostrate at home, her mirrors covered so as to hide the reflection of a black self she has now learnt to consider as ‘other’, is a good illustration of Fanon’s idea that the black man integrates the discourse on blackness and comes to regard himself as a black ‘other’. Fanon refers to this phenomenon as the ‘third person consciousness’ (Fanon, 1952, 110). If Levy points to the emergence of the question of identity, which forces the ‘Brit of foreign origins’ to reinterpret his/her life in light of the parents’ move to a new country, she also interrogates the various ways of dealing with racial otherness and the tactics of self-redefinition which in the novel range from ‘whitening’ to seeking certain forms of authenticity. The concept of ‘whitening’ comes from Frantz Fanon, who used it to analyse the workings of race hierarchy in Martinique,7 the island where he was born and spent the first years of his life and refers to the attempt made by black people to become more white through marriages with lighter-skin people. Fanon’s work is contextually interesting in so far as Black Skin, White Masks was written in 1952 and draws on Fanon’s experience after the Second World War, which is precisely the context of first generation immigrants of Andrea Levy’s novels, whose discourse influences the outlook of their children, the second generation immigrants we are dealing with here. There is something specific to the situation of immigrants from the West Indies after the Second World War. Their hesitations, oscillations and vacillations between a wish to assert their difference and their tendency to let colonial discourse determine them is very specific to this period, when Blackness was only starting to emerge as a powerful voice, as Gilroy explains in the following passage. Unlike their parents who did not have an identity already available as part of the Black diaspora in the UK, their children could rely on a newly constituted discourse. The issue of identity and non-identity of black cultures has acquired a special historical and political significance in Britain. Black settlement in that country goes back many centuries, and affirming its continuity has become an important part of the politics that strive to answer contemporary British racism. However, the bulk of today’s black communities are of relatively recent origin, dating only from

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the post-World War II period. If these populations are unified at all, it is more by the experience of migration than by the memory of slavery and the residues of plantation society. Until recently, this very newness and conspicuous lack of rootedness in the ‘indigenous’ cultures of Britain’s inner cities conditioned the formation of racial subcultures which drew heavily from a range of ‘raw materials’ supplied by the Caribbean and black America. (Gilroy, 1993, 81) And as Stuart Hall explains, this Caribbean diaspora manufactured an identity for itself, an identity made of bits and pieces, of fragments of history and long-forgotten traditions so as to share not only some sense of common identity derived from the experience of immigration, but a deeper sense of identity, which could be mapped and had its roots in Africa and emerged as the process of a cross-fertilization between Africa, the United States and the Caribbean, which is very similar to what Stuart Hall describes: When I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s as a child in Kingston, I was surrounded by the signs, music and rhythms of this Africa of the diaspora, which only existed as a result of a long and discontinuous series of transformations. But, although almost everyone around me was some shade of dark or brown or black, [...] I never once heard a single person refer to themselves or to others as, in some way, or as having been at some time in the past ‘African.’ It was only in the 1970s that this Afro-Caribbean identity became historically available to the great majority of Jamaican people, at home and abroad. In this historic moment, Jamaicans discovered themselves to be ‘black’ – just as, in the same moment, they discovered themselves to be the sons and daughters of slavery. (Hall, 1990, 231) Although she is not technically a second generation immigrant, since her mother never left Jamaica, Constance in Fruit of the Lemon provides an interesting case in point illustrating how children find themselves caught in the power struggle fought by their parents and are instrumentalized to carry on their parents’ identity struggle. Born into a mixed marriage, Constance is dearly loved by her mother because, with her white sandy hair and her light-coloured skin, she is a ‘pass-for-white child’ (307). In other words, her whiteness corresponds to what her mother has always dreamt of. In a context dominated by British supremacy, her mother did not choose to rebel but accepted all forms of colonial domination and the way she raised her child, in complete compliance


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with the principles of British culture, is proof of her complete denial of her own culture and acceptance of Western discourse on blackness. As a child, Constance is sent to England to acquire a proper English education and to learn to do things ‘the way the English do them’. Over the years, Constance learns to speak with a perfect RP accent and the irony is that the more English her accent becomes, the more difficulties her mother has to understand what her daughter is saying (315). Yet if her mother has reached her goal and has managed to ‘whiten’ her lineage, Constance suffers from a loss of bearings and longs to reconnect with the country of her birth. After finishing school, she returns to Jamaica where she hopes to settle. Constance’s life story is marked by a long series of rejections. Because she feels too white, Constance decides to become a Rastafarian and quits her job to go and live in a Rastafarian community. By having a child with a Rastafarian, she symbolically tries to undo the ‘whitening process’ undertaken by her mother. Yet to her dismay, the child is caramel-coloured with sandy hair and his father rejects both of them because the child is not black enough. Constance’s desperate attempt to find somewhere to fit in leads her all the way to Africa where she travels with a group of tourists from Jamaica. But as expected, they call her ‘the white woman’ behind her back. To cut a long story short, Constance’s life is one long series of desperate attempts to be a black woman despite her white skin. The more she feels alienated from what she considers her culture, the more markers of identity she tries to acquire, resorting to a reconstructed authenticity which she hopes can free her of her in-betweenness. For example, she takes to wearing African dresses and hairdos and even changes her name to Afria, a name evidently very close to Africa. In a way, Constance tries to ‘blacken’ herself, in a manner similar to the way some blacks attempt to whiten themselves. The diachronic perspective on identity redefinition through three generations points to the contextual change from a generation of Jamaicans who looked up to England, to one which vindicates the right to be black. The novel provides a very good illustration of Fanon’s idea that race is never only about race but about a balance of power and that the same discursive category ‘black’ is submitted to a temporality which connotes it differently, slightly displacing the frontier between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ ‘Black’ at the beginning of the novel has a different meaning from the same signifier at the end, after it has been redefined in more positive terms by the Rastafarians. The last point I would like to discuss is the way in which Levy also describes the predicament of second generation immigrants as


characterized by what could be called ‘second-hand colonization.’ In Fruit of the Lemon, Faith’s itinerary leads her from a total absence of race awareness to a delayed discovery of colonial domination, which impacts on her all the more violently as she had no knowledge of her family’s history. When she first sets foot in Jamaica, Faith is prejudiced against Jamaicans and seems to have endorsed the superior and condescending discourse of the West. At the end of the novel however, her transformation process and her diaspora-ization (Hall, 1988, 30) result in her identification with the subaltern status of Jamaicans as a colonized people. This identification becomes obvious in the episode when Faith learns about the unknown history of Nelson’s other wife, the black wife ‘who nursed and tended him in ill health’ (323), ‘not the wife of [my] English history lessons’ (323). Andrea Levy unearths this erased layer of past history, which the colonists have scrubbed out in order to write their own version, and revives it, for example when Faith recounts her visit to the fort and when a relative shares her memories of the paternalistic discourse of the ‘Mother Country.’ When I was a girl – a little girl – I used to be so proud that we were part of the British Empire. England was our Mother Country. That’s what we called it. My teacher at school used to say, ‘England is the Mother Country and we ...’ and she would run her finger round the room pointing at every one us ... ‘we are all the Mother Country’s children.’ (326) Unlike colonized people, who have experienced the propaganda of colonial discourse first hand, like her relatives in Jamaica, Faith simultaneously finds new bearings in the discovery of her family’s history while being almost immediately dispossessed of them on learning of the colonial past.8 It is in this sense that Faith’s quest for identity as a ‘second generation immigrant’ leads her to experience a form of ‘second hand colonization.’9 Through the opening up of the focus to the heroine’s Jamaican relatives as well as through the introduction of a chronological perspective on the redefinition of race relations, Andrea Levy’s novel not only maps the reconfiguration of race relations between Britain and its others, it also opens onto a larger reflection on the rigidity of such fixed paradigms as the bipolar one we discussed in Chapter 1. Indeed, Levy explores the complexities of the middle ground, where the frontier between ‘self’ and ‘other’ is constantly displaced, but also where these


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reconfigurations challenge the stability of the poles themselves, question their supremacy as sole referents and their authenticity. Another novel which questions such rigid polarities through a focus on the availability of ethnic role models and of a set of references through which in-betweeners can express their interstitiality is Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land. Set in a different context, that of the United States ‘at the dawn of the civil rights movement’, the novel poses the question of interstitiality in very different terms. Among the reasons for such different approaches is not only the fact that the minorities involved are different. The site of reinvention and legitimization of mixed identities is also different since the novel is not set in the UK but in the American melting pot.

The melting pot definition in crisis: Mona in The Promised Land by Gish Jen In Gish Jen’s novel Mona in the Promised Land10 it becomes apparent at an early stage that the values of the ‘promised land,’ namely the United States, are not fully endorsed and that the title is to be read as ironic. Indeed, the term ‘promised land’ is multi-referential and refers not only to the biblical episode, but also to the staging of American identity as almost mythical. The protagonist’s quest for identity is constantly present at two levels, that of the parody, as well as more serious undertones. Although it revolves around the theme of a young Chinese American girl’s crisis of adolescence and her quest for identity, it is set against the background of the American melting pot and its complex metamorphosis at the dawn of the civil rights movement (the novel actually starts in 1968, when Mona’s family settle in Scarshill) in the days of ‘the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness’ (3). The two poles in the debates around identity we discussed in the previous section are reassessed in a critical way. Authenticity is dismissed as a construct created by the West to exoticize China, and all the stereotypes linked to China and Asian immigrants are immediately rejected, for example when Jen underlines that Mona does not drink Ginseng tea but prefers milkshakes. Besides, unlike Constance in Fruit of the Lemon who sought comfort in the Rastafarian ethos and subculture, Mona is aware of the lack of Asian American role models. Neither the pure nor the authentic are here to provide some sense of belonging, any more than the combining of identities. As Michael Fischer has put it, ‘to be Chinese-American is not the same thing as being Chinese in America. In this sense there is no role model for becoming Chinese-American. It

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is a matter of finding a voice or style that does not violate one’s several components of identity’ (Fischer in Clifford and Marcus, 1986, 196). Despite the light tone of the narrative, there is more to Mona’s identity crisis than a tale of a teenager who witnesses the first signs of puberty. Mona’s problem is precisely the opposite; she does not witness any change in her body when those of her friends start changing dramatically, thereby stressing the racial difference between her Asian body and that of her friend Barbara: But she doesn’t look like, say, Barbara.[...] Barbara’s is the body Mona is still waiting to grow into. Her breasts, for example, are veritable colonies of herself, with a distinct tendency toward independence. Whereas Mona’s, in contrast, are anything but wayward. A scant handful of each, hers are smooth and innocent – the result, you might think, of eating too much ice cream. They meld into the fat under her arms. [...] How can she let her legs go natural when they already are natural? [...] She feels condemned to be straight and narrow. [...] She will one day discover that it is great to be nonhairy. [...] Plus that she is yellow and beautiful – baby boobs, hammy calves, and all. (75–6) The lexical field of colonization and power struggle hence points to an underlying crisis which has its roots in racial difference and a lack of Asian American role models. Gish Jen’s narrative treatment of Mona’s identity is one of the most interesting and complex aspects of the novel and invites us to reflect on the possibility of apprehending identity independently of an embodied form of identity and of a racially constructed identity. The collusion between these categories is all the more paradoxical as Mona advocates a conception of identity as chosen, changeable rather than as fixed and given once and for all. As she had explained to her 8th grade crush, Sherman Matsumoto, her friend from Japan, it is possible to switch and take on a new identity. Jewish identity hence enters the picture, although it does not receive the treatment it deserves as I shall argue later: ‘Of course I like it here, I was born here,’ Mona says. ‘Is Mona Jewish?’ She laughs. ‘Oy!’ ‘Is she American?’ ‘Sure I’m American,’ Mona says. ‘Everybody who’s born here is American, and also some people who convert from what they were before. You could become American.’ But he says no, he could never. ‘Sure you could,’ Mona says. ‘You only have to learn some rules and speeches.’ ‘But I Japanese.’ (14)


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Yet if Mona envisages identity independently of race, the passage recounting her work for the temple hotline offers another perspective on the way she relates to identity and in particular to that of others. One of the callers reminds Mona of Sherman Matsumoto. Mona, who is intrigued by this disembodied voice feels the need to reconstruct the body around the voice. But as she starts to interpret the hints he gives her, she reconstructs a body which is racialized. Moreover, her interpretation is based on clichés and stereotypes borrowed from race-based and even racist discourse: Japanese (?) male calling for (is this prejudiced?) somewhat inscrutable but probably profound reasons. Although who knows, maybe also/just for language practice (English) [...] Given caller’s depressed state of mind, probably ought also to have explored caller attitude toward hari-kiri, even if that’s a stereotype. (70) (Italics in the text) In a stimulating article entitled ‘Mona on the phone: the performative body and racial identity in Mona in the Promised Land’ Erika T. Lin analyses the double movement which consists in resorting to stereotypes and at the same time undermining the racist discourse that underpins them, using the notion of hyperbolic citation,11 which she borrows from Judith Butler (Butler, 1993, 232). The passage I have quoted shows how Mona cannot help resorting to constructed racialized representations of the body and at the same time the discourse these representations originate in is presented as racist. By overdoing them, to the point where they almost self-parody, Gish Jen also undermines them. Gish Jen thus foregrounds the paradox of identity construction and shows how difficult it is to envisage and shape one’s identity independently of the category of race – race as socially constructed through discourse. This difficulty is hinted at in the contradiction between Mona’s discourse – which posits the possibility for everyone to choose a new identity independently of their race or place of birth – and her need to reconstruct the disembodied other so as to interact with him in the codified realm of clearly established identity definitions. The novel does not only deal with the identity crises of teenagers craving bearings in the American melting pot but raises the broader issue of race relations, of the image each community has of other ethnic groups and of their place in what is perceived as a hierarchy of the different communities. The very first page of the novel introduces this issue when we read that the Chinese are ‘the New Jews [...] a model minority and Great American Success’ (3). This statement, which is later

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qualified, points to the complex balance of power between the different components of the American melting pot presented here as a pyramid rather than as a continuum where all the communities enjoy the same status and living conditions, a situation the Changs are probably not aware of: They know they belong in the promised land. Or do they? In fact, it’s only 1968; the blushing dawn of ethnic awareness has yet to pink up their inky suburban night. They have an idea about the blacks because of poor Martin Luther King. More distantly perceived is that the Jews have become the Jews on account of the Six Day War; much less that they, the Changs, are The New Jews. (3) This passage points at the specificity of the American context which is not a case of mainstream culture versus diasporic communities but rather of a loose mosaic of communities framed by or lost in the larger mainstream society. Incidentally, the layout of the city of New York, as it is presented in the opening passage of the novel clearly expresses the idea that as you become more successful and climb up the social ladder you move to a new neighbourhood, and this move is described in terms of a progress similar to the frontier. They are just smitten with the educational opportunity before them – that golden student-teacher ratio – and also with the dumb majesty of the landscaping. Three giant azaleas they have now, not to say a rhododendron the size of their old bathroom, and in addition, a topographical feature of forsythia. Two foothills of the forsythia, they are moved to address immediately with hedge clippers (feeling quite hardy and pioneering, Westward ho! And all that), only to discover that to render your forsythia into little can shapes in this town is considered gauche. (3–4) This passage, which describes the Changs’ promised plot of land, combines references to several founding myths of America like the garden of Eden, the land of plenty, the frontier and the settlement. It is as if the Changs, who are successful in the race for success, had become more American by appropriating the dreams of the host country and being part of its mythology in the making. It is in this context, when Chinese immigrants start to weigh heavier in the scales that the novel is set, which leads Mona’s parents to disagree on an important issue: should they mark their difference or try


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and blend in, for it may well be that one day they will be less conspicuous than other, more visible minorities. ‘This is Mona’s theory about her parents: that Ralph thought they should live in their own little world, whereas Helen thought they should be a minority, though, and especially an outspoken one.’ (52). Interestingly enough, this idea that minorities eventually blend into the American melting pot is not unlike what Philip Roth said in an interview I cited in Chapter 2. And in the case of the Chinese community, it turned out to be true. Another point I would like to raise concerns Mona’s original solution to her identity crisis, which is to convert to Judaism. Gish Jen herself has suggested that the book has gone too far in some respects but not far enough in others (Jen in Hanis, 1996). It seems to me that the question of Jewish identity could have been developed in a more convincing way, not as one of Mona’s whimsical ideas but as a paradigm of identity definition. The question of the Jewish experience defined as paradigm for identity has been a moot point for a number of years and has led to heated debates between those who think that the Jewish condition is an interesting prism through which to articulate and transcend race, culture, and languages (Bloom, 1999), and those who criticize it (Steiner, 1998)12 for fear that it may lead to an instrumentalization of Jewish identity. However, for Mona and her friends, becoming Jewish is seen more in terms of freedom, the freedom to take on an identity which you may choose to hide or claim, which is less ‘marked’ (racially speaking) and yet which allows you to assert your right to be different. Naive though it may seem – and actually is – Mona’s definition of identity is a distorted representation of the agenda of the American dream where one can supposedly become whatever one chooses and where ‘consent’ prevails over ‘descent,’ to draw on the terminological distinction advanced by Werner Sollors (Sollors, 1986). But for Mona, being Jewish is also synonymous with an inclusive identity rather than an exclusive one: ‘Jewish is American,’ Mona says. ‘American means being whatever you want and I happen to pick being Jewish.’ (49) Despite the novel’s optimism, Gish Jen suggests a rather pessimistic vision of the American melting pot, for in Mona communities follow different agendas and interaction between them is superficial and illusory. Prior to closing this discussion of Mona, I would like to return to Gish Jen’s critical stance with respect to the American melting pot. Mona touches upon one of the great paradoxes of the American context and shows that the vindication of identity has crystallized around the notion of ethnicity, and has been strengthened by identity politics. At the same time, identity politics has contributed to a sort of

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lapse back to community-oriented politics and a sort of ghettoization of identities, a phenomenon which has started to come under criticism.13 At the end of the novel, Mona, who sees more clearly into the power structures and race relations than in her early teens realizes that whereas she believes that all communities are on an equal footing, her parents are community-oriented and would rather hire an Asian employee than a black one. She also understands that they have fired Alfred because he is black, which validates the discourse on black oppression. The squad has helped Alfred find a new place; they’ve helped him find a new car. He doesn’t have to stay with some white folk like a charity case. ‘We shall have our manhood’, quotes the Estimator. ‘We shall have it or the earth will be levelled by our attempts to gain it.’ ‘What’s this ‘we?’ says Seth. (205) The Estimator’s speech (Alfred’s Black friend) takes up the agenda of the Black panthers and gives a new meaning to the personal pronoun ‘we’: it no longer refers to the collective ‘we’ implied by multiculturalism, in which Mona and her friends believe – but to the members of specific communities who chose to cater for themselves. If the novel ends on a rather positive note, with an image of mixity suggested by Mona’s marriage with Seth and their having a child, the situation is far from satisfactory and suggests a bitter acknowledgement of the failure of the American melting pot which threatens to become a salad bowl.

Double diasporas and identity: The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M.G. Vassanji Another complex example of how national identity and the very notion of nation are challenged by diasporic populations is the case of double diasporas or in other words of second generation immigrants who become im/migrants themselves. Their case combines the tension between their parents’ experience of immigration often lived as exile and their own in-betweenness, divided as they are between three countries – the country of origin which is also that of their ethnicity, the country of their birth and first belonging, in which they may have already felt alienated, and the host country, divorced from ethnicity and sometimes from a deeper sense of belonging.


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The case of Moyez Vassanji14 provides an interesting example which points to the difficulty involved in mapping the diasporas of the Anglophone world and apprehending interstitiality in situations as complex as double diasporas. Born into a family of Indian origin and raised in Tanzania, Vassanji later moved to Canada where he still lives. As such, he is a good example of the twice displaced. Although he has spent most of his adult life in Canada, Kenya remains a powerful presence for him psychologically, and to some extent his reason for writing as he explained in an interview with Susheila Nasta. I live in Canada and at some point I felt a tremendous sense of loss at being away from the place I grew up in, and what I did was try to recreate the life that we lived. But I think a more important motive perhaps is that that life has never been lived ... I mean never been written about. It’s something that is slowly being wiped out, and as the people who’ve experienced that life die off, then there’s no more record of that life. (Vassanji in Nasta, 2004, 70) Despite his parents’ attachment to Indian culture and the fact that he was brought up as an Indian boy with close links with the Asian community, Vassanji considers Kenya home. In other words, his idea of home is neither where he now lives nor where his family originally came from, but where he grew up. Moreover, for him, there seems to be no contradiction between being of Indian origin and considering Kenya as home, which suggests the possibility of double belonging as well as the idea that identity is not exclusive and rooted only in one culture. Unlike his grandfather who grew up in India and experienced the unsettling experience of immigration and displacement with the knowledge that there is a place where he belongs, Vassanji, like Vikram, the protagonist of The In-Between World of Vikram Lall does not have a place he can go back to, hence his need to create such a place of origin in writing. For him writing is a way of immortalizing the life of the twice displaced who grew up as foreigners in the country of their birth and found themselves uprooted before they even had a chance to cast their roots in East Africa. It is also a way of giving some kind of official existence to a hyphenated population, the Asian immigrants, who did not find their place in the grand narrative of colonialism any more than they did in the anti-colonial struggle and whose twice peripheral life in Africa was likely to be forgotten after they left the country.15 Much of the interest of the novel lies in the handling of the character of Vikram Lall and his kaleidoscopic identity torn between his cultural


heritage and his experience in Africa. His case invites a profound interrogation of what exactly constitutes identity; is it ethnicity, origins or experience? Although he was born into a family of Asian immigrants who try to cling to their traditions and habits and remain Indians away from India, Vikram grew up in Kenya and has never been to India. To him the very thought of having to go visit his parents’ home country is awe-inspiring and his childhood memories include gruesome anecdotes of life in India like his father’s story of sitting in a cab whose back seat was covered in excrement. There is a fundamental difference between the way Vikram and the way his parents relate to Kenya, in particular his mother who thinks of her life away from her home country as exile rather than immigration. Born and bred in Peshawar, which became a Pakistani town after the partition, Mrs Lall knows that she cannot go back to her home city and lives her life in Kenya as if it were some kind of exile. When Rama’s exile was the subject of the stories, it was never far from our consciousness that Mother and her brother shared a deep sense of exile from their birthplace, Peshawar, a city they would never be able to see again because it had been lost to Pakistan. And since Peshawar was the ancestral home also of my dada Anand Lall, the rest of our family could somehow share in that exile, though not with the same intensity. (93) While the experience of Vikram’s parents is rendered painful by the sense of exile, that of Vikram is traumatic because of the absence of bearings, both affective and intellectual. Unlike his mother who feels as though she had lost her homeland, Vic does not know where he belongs. The narrative of his childhood years is interspersed with references to his sense of unbelonging and his awareness of the importance of ethnicity. For Vic, his friend Njoroge will always be ‘more African than him,’ as if his child’s perspective on issues of identity had already taken on board the fact that there is a continuity between country, ethnicity and identity. Vic’s sense of difference is exacerbated by the context – he grows up in the days leading up to the independence of Kenya – at a time when the definition of identity crystallizes around ethnicity. I do recall that being different, in features, in status, was not far from my consciousness. I was also aware that he was more from Africa than I was. He was African, I was Asian. I was smaller, with pointed


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elvish ears, my skin annoyingly ‘medium’ as I described it then, neither one (white) nor the other (black). (27) This awareness of the importance of ethnicity as one of the components of identity is also expressed rather explicitly through references to Vic’s fantasy of being related to an African woman. At the age when children fancy themselves as the illegitimate children of other parents, Vic reinvents a more African identity and starts fabulating over his father’s potential affair with an African woman. In other words, he tries to make up for his absence of African origins by inventing an imagined lineage which ‘blackens’ him. Because of my dada and dadi’s close connection to the Molabuxes, I have often seen an affinity between myself and the Masai. I have even fantasized that Dada, perhaps sought comfort with a woman of that people, perhaps she had his child and I have cousins in some of the manyattas of the plains. There is no proof anything like this ever happened – and my fantasy has partly to do with desperate need to belong to the land I was born in – but it’s not impossible either. (67) Another reason for Vic’s existential interrogations is the sense that as a child of Indian origin, he is not part of a grand narrative, whether it be the narrative of colonization or that of resistance and nationalist struggle against colonization. While both his friends William and Njoroge have narratives they can relate to, Vikram laments the lack of heroes he can use as role models. Although his mother points out that they do have heroes, the heroes of the Ramayan, Vic remains sceptical. Hence the importance of the episode of his discovery of pictures representing members of his family. The fact that they are visual signifiers without a written narrative provides room for invention and even a certain poetic licence; they are fragments of an unwritten narrative waiting for a competent narrator which he ventures to become. The following extract shows how Vic produces an epic in which Asians are the heroes, a narrative of life on the frontier which celebrates the courage of these men and exaggerates the hardships they have been through. Our people had sweated on it, had died on it; they had been carried away in their weary sleep or even wide awake by man-eating lions of magical ferocity and cunning, crushed under avalanches of blasted rock, speared and macheted as proxies of the whites by angry Kamba, Kikuyu, and Nandi warriors, infected with malaria,


sleeping sickness, elephantiasis, cholera; bitten by jiggers, scorpions, snakes, and chameleons; and wounded in vicious fights with each other. (17) The fact that his family helped build railway lines in itself is noteworthy for it is a form of settlement which is not rooted in the land and yet allows the land to be explored, while at the same time symbolizing their relation to the British Empire and their role as instruments in the expansion of their territories. Although Vikram delights in the contemplation of the picture of his grandfather, he has some awareness that some of the things he was told by his parents may well be untrue (‘I don’t know if such rails ever existed, with the Punjabi signatures upon them, but myth is more powerful than factual evidence, and in its way surely far truer’, 16). Yet whether or not they actually existed, these signatures have become part of a collective imaginary and as such have become as real as reality itself for they have become instrumental in the shaping of their collective identity as Asian immigrants. In this sense we can say that although Vassanji often stresses the need to write history, his books are not limited to a factual rendering of established episodes; much of their interest lies in their understanding of the role of self-representation. Vikram even imagines a second photograph, an imaginary one which emerges as the first one – the real photograph – recedes to the background. This second photograph which is obviously a materialization of Vic’s fantasies represents his grandfather, no longer as a reserved character, a frail man in an awkward posture, but as a settler who contemplates the landscape as if he owned the land, and as if this land had become his new home. I imagine him six years later, at the end of his second contract, seated atop a small pyramid of steel sleepers at the Nakuru railway yard, with a companion or two perhaps, chewing on a blade of grass or lunching on daal and rice from the canteen. [...] I see this turbaned young Indian who would be my dada saying to himself, This valley has a beauty to surpass even the god Shivji’s Kashmir, and the cool weather in May is so akin to the winters of Peshawar... (18) Unlike the imaginary tale of his imaginary African mother, this narrative of successful settlement allows Vic to find some sense of belonging, as well as providing a paradigm for identity construction in the case of double diasporas, one which lies in the ability to bear witness to their presence in a new land and to the family’s imprint upon the land.


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The role of the narratives, which is stressed by Vassanji through his descriptions of Vic’s imaginative reconstruction of the past, points at the intentionality of identity in the case of diasporas, and especially in that of double diasporas, as well as the need to recreate a certain sense of continuity in writing. But his novel also prompts certain questions as to the writing of national narratives of identity and of official history. Indeed, the fact that the Gikuyus are always referred to as ‘traitors’ poses the question of the complicity between the narrative voice and Britain’s take on the history of Kenya. Despite the breadth of the contextual spectrum encompassed by such diverse novels as Fruit of the Lemon, Mona in the Promised Land and The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, the literary triptych which has served as a cornerstone to this chapter provides a case in point and shows the limitations of the mutually exclusive polarities we discussed in the introductory section, such as authenticity and the postmodern take on identity as construction. There is even a sense in which they provide very good illustrations of liminality as a multipolar site and somehow flesh out some of the arguments we discussed in Chapter 1, in particular in relation to the necessary move away from bipolar paradigms to an emphasis on the middle ground. This shift in focus, which has to a large extent been initiated by Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, has paved the way for further explorations and investigations into the rhizomorphic structure of international formation and the intricacies of the lines of segmentarity. This recentering in from the poles themselves to the intermediate locus invalidates the rigidity of binaries and dichotomies, and to a certain extent of frameworks based on such fixed dual positions, which as Deleuze and Guattari have eloquently argued have become untenable: Every rhizome contains lines of segmentarity according to which it is stratified, territorialised, organised, signified, attributed, etc., as well as lines of deterritorialisation down which it constantly flees. There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome. These lines always tie back to one another. That is why one can never posit a dualism or a dichotomy, even in the rudimentary form of good and bad. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980 [1987] 9) Another consequence of this interrogation and indictment of the alignment land/race/culture, which Gilroy has rejected independently of the political situatedness of such clusters – jettisoning Afrocentrism


along with Eurocentrism – is the move away from originary referents, such as Britain or Africa. There is a sense in which his emphasis on transnational subjectivity has somehow paved the way for more recent transnational models. However, if his approach has undeniably unlocked the ethno-racial foundations of the nation, it would appear that he has lost the verticality inherent to national grounding and consequently the political dimension implied by social stratification.

4 Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and the Diasporic Subject

Diasporic literature is a literature of remembering, not only in the usual sense of the term – a literature geared towards the past, haunted by the lost country and pervaded with a general sense of nostalgia. It is also a literature of re-membering which unearths fragments of the past, pieces them together, or fails to do so, altering the perspective, exaggerating the importance of certain events or, on the other hand, toning them down, thus creating an ‘imaginary homeland’ (Rushdie, 1991). It is in this sense that in his book Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie has defined the specificity of the diasporic writer as someone who recaptures the homeland after the break and from an outside perspective; the diasporic writer’s perception may be fragmentary, but this fragmentation makes the process of recollection more intense and the fragment excavated from the past more meaningful and emblematic. And because he is not too close to the scene he is describing, the diasporic writer may gain a better perspective on things: It may be that writers in my position, exiles or emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt. But if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge – which gives rise to profound uncertainties – that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. Writing my book in North London, looking out through my window on to a city scene totally unlike the ones I was imagining on to paper, I was constantly plagued by this problem, until I felt obliged 75


to face it in the text, to make clear that (in spite of my original and I suppose somewhat Proustian ambition to unlock the gates of lost time so that the past reappeared as it actually had been unaffected by the distortions of memory), so that my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative truth is simultaneously honourable and suspect, and I knew that my India may only have been one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by quitting Bombay never became what perhaps I was meant to be) was, let us say, willing to admit I belonged. This is why I made my narrator, Saleem, suspect in his narration; his mistakes are the mistakes of a fallible memory compounded by quirks of character and circumstance, and his vision is fragmentary. It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost. (Rushdie, 1991, 10) Rushdie’s idea of diasporic literature does not imply that diasporic literature should be considered as merely fictional and severed from reality; after all, ‘the broken mirror may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed’, Rushdie adds (Rushdie, 1991, 11). But it shows a certain awareness of the limitations of the diasporic perspective, at once less up-to-date but still accurate, a ‘long geographical perspective’ (Rushdie, 15). Rushdie’s definition offers an interesting alternative to existing definitions stressing the archaeological dimension of diasporic literature as unearthing and preserving fragments of the past. Among them is Vijay Mishra’s notion of the ‘fossilization’ of the mother country (to him, diasporic literature is a ‘fossilized’ fragment of an original nation that seeks renewal through a ‘refossilization’ of itself (Mishra in Nelson 1992, 4)). We can also think of Emmanuel Nelson’s idea of an ‘aesthetics of reworlding’: At the core of all diasporic fictions, is the haunting presence of India – and the anguish of personal loss it represents. It is precisely this shared experience of absence that engenders an aesthetics of reworlding that informs and unites the literature of the Indian diaspora. (Nelson, 1992, XV–XVI)

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Such definitions of diasporic literature pose two kinds of problems. The first has to do with their inappropriateness when it comes to discussing contemporary texts in which the ‘subtext of home’ (Brah, 1996, 190) is still present, albeit sometimes less vividly than in earlier novels, and where the host country emerges in more forceful contours. Equally problematic is the notion of ossification underlying the concept of ‘fossilization,’ which suggests that the motherland has remained the same, pristine and unchanged, as if removed from history. Although the last years have seen the development of homecoming narratives (Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Abdulrazak Gurnah, M.G. Vassanji),1 which seem to confirm Mishra’s idea of fossilization and longing for the past, such texts also engage with contemporary issues; they are not pastoriented but incredibly timely in the concerns they voice as well as in the representations they sketch of the new world geography. Not only do they reflect changes in the contemporary world, which the im/migrant, as an embodiment of mobility, is among the first to notice, they also interrogate the validity of postmodern myths linked to mobility and migration, as well as the more popular doxa derived from notions developed by sociologists or geographers, like the idea that the world has become a global village (McLuhan, 1964), increasingly characterized by a ‘compression of time and space’ (Harvey, 2000). As literary texts, they are particularly sensitive to the role and power of language to influence im/migrants, as well as to the impact of representations. In other words, the imaginary geography of changing territorialities they sketch, not only provides room for nostalgic recollections but works as an incentive to interrogate postmodern myths linked to territoriality and mobility, precisely because the vantage point of diasporic literature works as an epistemological node where myths converge, clash and sometimes selfdestroy, thereby laying bare their underlying strategies. The question of the diasporic subject and the contemporary world geography needs to be recontextualized in various ways. If language and discourse are central to it, there are several patterns of interaction. In the first section of this chapter I propose to analyse how the representation of the homeland and of the host country are not only shaped by nostalgia and affected by the haunting presence of the home country but are also caught in a convergence of discourses which not necessarily clash but merge into a pattern of confluence. Hence the colonial representation of India as exotic and pristine is taken up by the discourse of heritage culture (Harvey) and rechannelled, producing a new India tailored for the West and often debunked by diasporic writers.

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Another pattern is the disjunctive one which brings into tension myths and narratives of failed integration. Such myths and narratives expose the disjunction and dissonance between Western discourse and the actual experience of the diasporic subject. The role of language, which I propose to concentrate on in the last section of this chapter, is all the more important as in recent years, some anthropologists and sociologists have resorted to metaphors to describe recent changes in the new world geography, like Zygmunt Bauman who has devoted a large part of his work to studying the workings of the ‘liquid modern times’ we live in. They have also openly addressed the role and impact of language in the shaping of new territorialities, bringing physical geography and human geography closer together. This move does not originate in the idiosyncrasy of language-loving sociologists, but reflects a new fact of contemporary life: that our experience is less and less original – in the sense of first hand – and is increasingly supplanted by previous knowledge conveyed though discourse and disseminated thanks to the growth of communication technologies (Appadurai, 1996). The last section of this chapter will focus on two aspects of these developments, the role of language in the reconfiguration of space and the coming together of new communities, and the process of re-encoding at work in language and its political implications. The first part of the discussion draws on the analysis of ‘non-places’ by Marc Augé, which I propose to use as an entry point to analyse Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission, and in particular the forming of virtual communities which do not originate in geographic continuity and physical proximity but in language. In Non-Places, Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, Marc Augé has analysed the role of language in the creation of the transitional places of supermodernity where language is omnipresent and takes the place of human beings, but where it also creates a parallel world made of virtual places, which operate independently of actual geography, in and through language. This discussion of the role of language will then lead me to focus more specifically on the political role played by languages in terms of re-encoding. This particular point, which draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis of deterritorialization and the fluxes of capitalism aims at showing how language operates along similar lines, in particular when notions such as mobility are being redefined by the logic of global capitalism. In recent years for example, the notion of mobility has increasingly become equated with geographic mobility rather than with social mobility.


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From colonialism to heritage culture: the paradigm of the snowglobe In the introduction to this section I have referred to Vijay Mishra’s idea of the ‘fossilization’ of the nation, which to him is a constitutive feature of a large body of texts from the South Asian diaspora. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of motifs evoking fossilization in the sense meant by Mishra: a need to preserve and protect India, which originates in a sense of loss and nostalgia for the lost country. Images like chutney or pickle jars for example, in Arundhati Roy’s prize-winning novel The God of Small Things (1997), express the need to preserve Indian flavours. But these images are more ambiguous than they seem as the carefully packaged pickles also suggest that India is ready to be consumed. In this section I propose to address the issues of preservation, fossilization and nostalgia in slightly different terms and with the help of a different critical framework, shifting the emphasis from the diasporic subject as the sole producer of representations of the lost country, to the country itself, which is represented in these imaginary geographies as being at the centre of a cluster of influences. Among them is colonialism, or rather its avatars, for as some critics have rightly pointed out, the East is still preyed upon by the West, as the Indo-chic fashion described by Padmini Mongia seems to indicate (Mongia, 1997). Mongia herself has accused Arundhati Roy of surfing the Indo-chic wave and producing an India tailored for the West. But beyond this ‘marketing of the margins’ (Huggan, 2001), there is also a certain form of what Marxist geographer David Harvey has termed ‘Heritage Culture’ (Harvey, 1989) after Hewinson’s notion of ‘heritage industry’ (Hewinson, 1987)2 – a sort of profit-oriented recreation of a culture swallowed and erased by colonialism or capitalism. As Graham Huggan has remarked in his book Marketing the Margins, ‘Indo-chic’, and Roy’s contribution to it, are not simply to be seen as naive Western constructs; they are products of the globalization of Western-capitalist consumer culture, in which ‘India’ functions not just as ‘a polyvalent cultural sign but as a highly mobile capital good’ (Huggan, 2001, 67). The idea of a postmodern, post-industrial3 recreation of authenticity with a view to making profit has proved quite insightful and beneficial to discussion of how space is reinvented by postmodernity, which produces simulacra of what it has destroyed. An eloquent example of this phenomenon is provided by Gottdiener’s analysis (Gottdiener, 1995) of American shopping malls and their recreation of heritage scenes which exude a certain sense of authenticity in order to boost sales and

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contribute to the success of consumer society. In the same way that the spaces of postmodernity are the product of a convergence of discourses and a rechannelling of images – authenticity becoming a marketable good or an incentive to buy – their representations in diasporic literature are also the product of several influences, which they represent and denounce. There is a lot more to them than nostalgic recreations of the past; they are at a crossroads of influences, ranging from the immigrant’s wish to appropriate or reclaim his country, to a description of how the West is still preying on it, exploiting it even further. The following discussion seeks to examine how the representation of places in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – not only the homeland but also the host country – is not just the expression of some misplaced nostalgia and longing for the past, but is part and parcel of a strategy of packaging and marketing, not only of the margins but also of the centre, which is derived from the re-creation of space in postmodernity. Rather than constituting distinct discourses, the avatars of colonial discourse are recycled and rechannelled, as is the nostalgia of the migrant, the two converging in a sort of postmodern reinvention of space which Ali hints at through the image of the snowglobe, an image which stresses the artificiality and mock authenticity of postmodern simulacra of spatiality. The image of the snowglobe is introduced into the novel through the character of doctor Azad, who appreciates the soothing effect that these objects have on him ‘It’s calming,’ he remarks, ‘everything settle[s] back down’ after the storm (361). What seems to matter is not so much the specificity of the landscapes featured, and which are not described, as the paradigmatic meaning of a world immune to change, as well as the idea of preserving a place the way it used to be. In this sense, the snowglobe becomes endowed with several meanings throughout the novel. The idea of preservation evokes the nostalgia of the immigrant, an idea which is hammered home through various other objects like the Bengali objects Chanu keeps in a showcase, as if to isolate them from their London surroundings and preserve them from the passing of time. It is also evoked through the references to the way Chanu still thinks of his country, as a place which ‘ranks Number One in the World happiest survey’ (290). This statement, which he found on the internet, is debunked by Hasina’s letters in which she tells her sister Nazneen of women beaten, raped, exploited and disfigured by their husbands who throw acid at them. Fossilizing the country is therefore presented as a natural strategy of survival for the immigrant, even though it may get in the way of a successful integration into the host


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country. In the case of Chanu, the idealized Bangladesh he has kept intact in the corner of his mind and to which he will eventually return, comforts him in the illusion that his stay in the UK is only temporary and that it is merely a form of inverted colonization (‘when the English went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally’ 174). But the snowglobe also evokes another discourse, that of colonialism, in which the native land is frozen in time, and described as belonging to a distant past, before history even started. As such, the snowglobe is also reminiscent of colonial discourse and its representation of foreign territories as unspoilt and ready to be settled, as if they belonged to a time before modernity and progress (Said, 1978). In Orientalism, Edward Said reminds us that one of the main tropes of colonial discourse is the use of the present tense to describe native people, which he interprets as a way of representing them outside of history: Rather than listing all the figures of speech associated with the Orient – its strangeness, its difference, its exotic sensuousness, and so forth – we can generalize about them as they were handed down through the Renaissance. They are all declarative and self-evident; the tense they employ is the timeless eternal; they convey an impression of repetition and strength; they are always symmetrical to, and yet diametrically inferior to, a European equivalent, which is sometimes specified, sometimes not. For all these functions it is frequently enough to use the simple copula is. (Said, 1995 [1978] 72) But the snowglobe also links up with postmodernity in more ways than one. First, its solidity and the permanence it evokes work as an antidote to the chronic lack of bearings experienced by the diasporic subject, and which can be seen as emblematic of the postmodern condition. Azad is not the only character to suffer from the destabilizing experience of being between places; at the end of the novel, Nazneen herself looks at the plane tickets, perplexed at the realization that these flimsy bits of paper represent a return to her former life in Bangladesh. Indeed, these characters who experience a form of mobility pushed to its radical limit, who still lead two lives in two countries and who are given the possibility not to sever the cord with the homeland by communication technologies and improvements in means of transport, experience the thrilling everywhereness of postmodernity, the feeling of ubiquity given by the possibility of leading two lives


in one. And yet, because they straddle two cultures, they sometimes find themselves ‘fall(ing) between two stools’ as Rushdie puts it in Imaginary Homelands (15). As such they like the reassuring quality of a world immune to change, which is what the snowglobe ultimately represents. As Hewinson has argued, this preservation of the past is crucial to preserve the self: The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. Without knowing where we have been, it is difficult to know where we are going. The past is the foundation of individual and collective identity, objects from the past are the source of significance as cultural symbols. Continuity between past and present creates a sense of sequence out of aleatory chaos and, since change is inevitable, a stable system of ordered meaning enables us to cope with both innovation and decay. The nostalgic impulse is an important agency in adjustment to crisis, it is a social emollient and reinforces national identity when confidence is weakened or threatened. (Hewinson, 1989 [1987] 86) But the postmodern repackaging which produces a simulacrum of place also works in a specific way and according to certain rules. To follow up on the image of the snowglobe, this recreation of space operates within a certain format. It picks and chooses, selects places according to their potential in terms of appeal and sales, and redefines the real geography, wiping whole areas off the map. If we take the example of a snowglobe featuring London, the chances are that Brick Lane will not be represented – although it might be in the years to come if the area capitalizes on the Indo-chic fashion. On the other hand, Big Ben, the Tower of London, St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster and Buckingham Palace will be present, together with a couple of double deckers and telephone boxes. To a certain extent, this newly designed, repackaged London, would be emblematic of the way postmodernity operates in relation to geography, bringing places together, operating a certain compression of space, and redefining the contours of the city independently of natural geography, creating an ‘authentic’ image which is anything but authentic. In the last part of this discussion I propose to focus on the way Ali brings side by side the real England, which she tries to conjure up through her depiction of Brick Lane, and the pseudo authentic England marketed by the tourism industry. By ‘the real England’ I do not wish to imply that Ali sets out to write a detailed, accurate and realistic account


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of life in Brick Lane,4 but rather to expose the workings of the simulacra of touristy London Nazneen herself falls prey to. Brick Lane juxtaposes two ‘Englands’: that of Brick Lane and its immigrants who sometimes have never ventured beyond the confines of the Asian district, and the ‘sights’, Buckingham Palace and Covent Garden, where tourists go. Ali’s characters seldom get to see what they have never ceased to consider to be the ‘real England’, England as it is marketed and advertised – no longer by the propaganda of colonialism but by the tourism industry. At the end of the novel, when Chanu starts planning the family’s return to Bangladesh, Nazneen stares nostalgically at a mug whose picture features an English country house. Although she has been in England for several years, she has never seen a house like the one on her mug and still entertains the idea that the ‘real England’ is out there somewhere: A cracked mug bearing a picture of a thatch-roofed cottage and a mouse in trousers leaning on the gatepost. It was a picture of England. Roses around the door. Nazneen had never seen this England but now, idly, the idea formed that she would visit it. (367) Another passage evokes the family’s trip to central London, which Chanu, the father, discovers after thirty years in the UK. After all these years, and although he knows that England is not only Buckingham Palace but also Brick Lane, Chanu feels that he has to take his family to see the sights, and the careful preparations he makes beforehand show how important the outing is. Yet its meaning is ambiguous: it can be read as a rite of passage which seems to mean ‘we have seen the real England, the centre, and now we belong here’; but it can also mean ‘we have seen the England everyone wants to see and we can all go home’, which is what Chanu eventually does. Ironically enough, the journey to the centre pushes him further back to the periphery and makes him feel more foreign, which undermines the interpretation of the rite of passage. Clad in a brand new outfit he has bought especially for the excursion, Chanu looks like a perfect tourist. He has loaded his numerous pockets with ‘a compass, guidebooks, binoculars, bottled water, maps, and two types of disposable camera’ (238), so much so that people end up taking pictures of him and his family. The long-awaited trip to the centre only reveals that there is no centre, no real England, except on Nazneen’s cracked mug, an image which hammers home the fake and brittle quality of the simulacrum. It is just as fake as the Hindu


paraphernalia used as an emblem to attract Westerners to the Days of the Raj restaurant: Days of the Raj restaurant had a new statue in the window: Ganesh seated against a rising sun, his trunk curling playfully on his breast. The Lancer already displayed Radha-Krishna; Popadum went with Saraswati; and Sweet Lassi covered all the options with a blacktongued, evil-eyed Kali and a torpid soapstone Buddha. ‘Hindus?’ said Nazneen when the trend first started. ‘Here?’ Chanu patted his stomach. ‘Not Hindus. Marketing. Biggest god of all.’ The white people liked to see the gods. ‘For authenticity’, said Chanu. (375) In this extract, the marketing of the margins works in a slightly ironic mode since the owners of Days of the Raj are willing to revive the nostalgia of colonial India in order to make some profit with Western consumers. In this section we have seen how there is a lot more to the exotic or nostalgic recollections of the Indian subcontinent than a mere narrative of nostalgia. Ali’s novel suggests a much larger reflection on the artificiality of places and their repackaging. In Brick Lane, these various discourses – the nostalgia of the im/migrant, the avatars of colonialism and the strategies of postmodernity seem to merge, maintaining for a time some kind of illusion which is later dispelled. Interestingly enough, it even seems that the nostalgia of the migrant, as evoked through Azad, is complicit with the recreation of a would-be authenticity. Nazneen herself is ‘consumed’ by Karim because she represents ‘the real’ Bengali woman and as such provides him with an affective locus standi which allows him to forget for a time the fact that he has never been to Bangladesh and is without a country he can call his own.

From the Promised Land to homecoming narratives: interrogating Western myths and doxa Diasporic novels dealing with immigration are not melodramatic chronicles of the immigrants’ thwarted hopes and great expectations. Rather, they probe much further than the locus of individual trajectories and serve as a springboard for more daring hypotheses as to the workings of the world the characters set out to explore. A salient feature of these novels is their emphasis on the disjunction between representations of


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immigration internalized by im/migrants, which haunts them when they set foot in the Promised Land, and the less glamorous and more brutal actual experience of immigration. It is precisely because their efforts do not always meet with success that diasporic people illustrate the ruggedness of the global village. Characters like Chanu in Brick Lane or Professor Vadhera in Bharati Mukherjee’s novel Jasmine – who tries to keep up the pretence that he has an academic job when he doesn’t – draw our attention to the point where myths metamorphose – or fail to metamorphose – into reality. That is, the point where they either materialize or recede into the realm of fiction. Needless to say, discourse, in the broad sense of the term, is not only part and parcel of this process, but occupies a central position. As such, diasporic literature invites us to interrogate discursive constructs and representations, discourse in general as well as myths. My interest in this section is both in myths such as the Promised Land as well as what we could call the new myths of supermodernity, the doxa5 of such popular images as Marshall McLuhan’s idea that the world has become a global village. When, in Ali’s novel, Chanu realizes that buying a computer will not be the end of his problems and will not get him a job, he experiences the limitations of contemporary myths which turn out to be lures and unfulfilled promises, like the ubiquity of new technologies. The image of the computer, which was meant to give him access to the web and which is now covered in cobwebs, goes against the optimistic view that new technologies enable us to belong to virtual communities and escape the determinism of the local. Chanu’s tragic story from moderate success to a far from glorious return to his homeland points to a key feature of the experience of im/migration: the clash between myth and reality, between representations and the actual experience of im/migrants. In Kunzru’s6 novel Transmission, the disjunction between discourse and reality is of a different nature from that discussed in relation to Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane. Arjun is not lured by the propaganda of colonialism and the supremacy of the colonial centre, but is under the spell of the idea of American economic supremacy which converges with more traditional myths at the heart of American identity like the Promised Land, the land of plenty, or even the frontier, as well as more popular beliefs like the global village. One of the first instances of disjunction between myth and reality and of the subsequent undermining of discursive representations, appears very early in the novel when Arjun visits the office of Databodies, an agency which has promised him a job in the US. Arjun catches a glimpse of a row of clocks on the wall, which indicate the time in several countries. The juxtaposition of

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different times fails to give him an impression of ubiquity, the feeling of being in all these places at the same time, of being able to go easily from one to the other and use the time difference to get to a place before having actually left the previous one. Arjun knows better: he knows that the world has not shrunk. The optimistic juxtaposition of the different clocks, which somehow recalls McLuhan’s idea of the global village is soon replaced by a less glorious image, that of the globe contracting like ‘a deflating beach globe.’ This image somehow de-mythifies the illusionary metaperspective of contemporary man who thinks he can be anywhere any time and suggests that it is not unlike the fantasy of a child playing with a beach globe. Behind the desk sat the receptionist. Above her a row of clocks, relics of the optimistic 1960s, displayed the time in key world cities. New Delhi seemed to be only two hours ahead of New York, and one behind Tokyo. Automatically Arjun found himself calculating the shrinkage in the world implied by this error, but, lacking even a best estimate for certain of the variables, his thoughts trailed away. For a moment or two the image hung around ominously in his brain, the globe contracting like a deflating beach globe. (Kunzru, 2004, 6) Arjun is soon to realize that the world has not become a global village; distances may have been reduced, but this has not solved the problem of mobility altogether. There is a similar image in Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss and it serves a similar purpose. The character of Sai, Jemumbhai’s granddaughter, has ordered an inflatable globe from the national geographic society. Yet the letter never gets to her remote Nepali village and the promise of the globe – and metaphorically of holding the globe in her hands – is fulfilled much later, once she has forgotten about it. When Arjun finally arrives in the US, the first contact with the Promised Land is not really up to his expectations. After he has found out that there is no job lined up for him, he is in for another shock when he realizes that he has been exiled to a distant city suburb. As he does not own a car in a country whose urban geography has been redefined according to the principle of ‘deconcentration’ (Gottdiener, 1995) he finds himself miles away from downtown, with a sense of alienation. In other words, the fact that he does not own a car in a country where mobility is both an organizing principle and a founding myth causes Arjun to experience a second frontier beyond the official one, an invisible line which separates immigrant workers who barely make a living


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from the happy few, those who have ‘made it big’ and have found a place in the centre, either in the city itself or in a more glamorous suburban area. This confrontation of postmodern myths, or more generally of the doxa of postmodernity with the actual experience of immigrants, is a common trope of homecoming narratives. These narratives often deal with characters whose experience of immigration is not entirely successful, not to say entirely disastrous, which leads the characters to make the impossible decision to return home to their family and friends, admitting to the fact that they have not succeeded. Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, is a good example of such texts. At the end of the novel, Biju, the protagonist of the contemporary narrative of immigration7 finds himself destitute. He returns to India with less money than he had, and has to face his father dressed in a frilly yellow dress he has nicked from a clothes line after some thieves have deprived him of his belongings. Kiran Desai thus literally rewrites the rags-to-riches narrative into a riches-to-rags one, thereby exposing the hidden part of the triumphalist rhetoric of earlier texts which, because they celebrate the im/migrants’ capacity to adapt, often forget to question the actual values of the West. Indeed, such novels do not limit themselves to interrogate the feasibility of migration or the validity of postmodern myths. They sometimes go so far as to interrogate the Western ethos, as we shall see in the next chapter.

Interrogating postcolonial paradigms In the previous section we have seen how diasporic narratives work as indictments of postmodern myths and in particular myths linked to mobility and territoriality. In this section I propose to discuss how the geography they sketch of postmodernity also opens up to an interrogation of postcolonial paradigms. Indeed, because they operate not only in a passive mode, as testimonies and reflections of diasporic life, but actively question certain tensions and expose certain clashes, their writers add their own contribution to the body of texts seeking to understand contemporary transformations of global geography. One of the first paradigms which need to be interrogated is the centre and periphery model, which has been a major landmark in studies of international relations and global exchanges ever since the 1990s. The paradigm was initially developed by Wallerstein and applied to postcolonial theory by the authors of The Empire Writes Back, a study of the global colonial situation. When the book came out in the late eighties,


it was hailed as a groundbreaking analysis of the mechanisms of political, economic and cultural domination and as such it has constituted a valuable tool of analysis for anyone working in the field of postcolonial studies ever since. Some fifteen years later, the model probably needs to be questioned and amended. Among the criticisms generally made to this model is the idea that the opposition centre/periphery, colonizers/ colonized is no longer valid. Indeed, former centres have moved or have been shifted and not only have former colonies overthrown the yoke of colonization, they have sometimes become influential countries in their own right (Appadurai8 1996, 32; Punter, 2000). Among the new models which have emerged in recent years is that developed by Arjun Appadurai in Modernity at Large. This ambitious model not only seeks to account for the forming of transnational networks and zones of influence on a global scale, it also seeks to account for the role and consequences of information technologies on local and global communities, while leaving room for future reconfigurations as new centres emerge and former ones become less influential. Indeed, one of the parameters which Appadurai successfully takes on board when elaborating his global framework is the transitoriness of political centres and the fact that they are constantly challenged, as he knows from first-hand experience, having grown up in India and witnessed the influence of British culture being gradually replaced by that of America, through the growing influence of popular culture, movies and fashion. I begged my brother at Stanford (in the early 1960s) to bring me back blue jeans and smelled America in his Right Guard when he returned. I gradually lost the England that I had earlier imbibed in my Victorian schoolbooks [...]. Such are the little defeats that explain how England lost the Empire in postcolonial Bombay. (Appadurai, 1996, 1–2) The theory put forward by Appadurai in this book revolves around the notion of ‘scape.’ His starting point is the observation that in the last decades of the twentieth century, new technologies – in particular communication technologies – have come to play a central role in the lives of millions of people throughout the world and have evolved from their initial instrumental function in the workplace to make their way into millions of households, thereby blurring the frontier between the public sphere and the private sphere, the workplace and the sphere of domesticity. The fact that the internet – perhaps the paradigmatic example


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of this phenomenon – has made an immense breakthrough in a very short time poses the question of its long-term consequences and potential effects on existing communities. The starting point of Appadurai’s analysis is the realization that communication technologies have facilitated the development of new types of communities which transcend geographical borders. Among them are the scientific colleges, which exchange information on an international scale or the ‘communities of sentiment’, like that which formed after the Rushdie case when many people throughout the globe felt the need to express their opinion and defend freedom of expression. On an individual level, one of the main consequences of the development not only of the internet but also of other media like cable TV, which has broadened the choice of available channels, is the multiplication of sets of references to which people are exposed. Instead of sharing the encyclopaedia9 of their immediate context, people have gained increased access to other contexts, including ‘virtual’ ones. And as Appadurai explains, it has therefore become possible for individuals to project themselves beyond regional or national boundaries: More people than ever before seem to imagine routinely the possibility that they or their children will live and work in places other than where they were born: this is the wellspring of the increased rates of migration at every level of social, national, and global life. [...] Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who wish to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space. (Appadurai, 1996, 6) Central to Appadurai’s theory are therefore the idea of imagination and ‘imagined communities’ which he borrows from Benedict Anderson10 and transposes to the current context where new technologies and new media have generated new types of networks defined by common interests and shared activities which may take place in separate loci. Appadurai identifies several international communities which he refers to as ‘technoscape’, ‘financescape’, ‘mediascape’ ‘ethnoscape’ and ‘ideoscape’. His theory posits the possibility of transcending regional and national boundaries and gaining access to other contexts. To a certain extent, it reflects the actual situation where the nation state is


increasingly challenged by the development of transnational activities and the ‘scapes’ which he imagines bear witness to the new world geography which bends the rigid boundaries between the nation states. These terms with the common suffix – scape also indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but, rather that they are deeply perspectival constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors: nation-states, multinationals, diasporic communities, as well as subnational groupings and movements [...]. These landscapes thus are the building blocks of what (extending Benedict Anderson) I would like to call imagined worlds, that is the multiple worlds that are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the globe. (Appadurai, 1996, 33) Much as I appreciate Appadurai’s efforts to theorize the changes of the contemporary world, I would like to express certain doubts and reservations concerning his theory of the scapes, but also interrogate the political position which underpins his theory. My main concern is that when circling new zones of commonality in different parts of the globe, Appadurai sketches zones which group people together according to their interests but level out and omit their status, both economic and social. In other words, Appadurai seems to forget about hierarchies, inequities and power struggles. What in my view is lacking in his theory is a sense of participation and agency, a sense of direction (who receives the input/where the input is given). Indeed, in his ambitious attempt to map zones of influence and commonality on a global level, Appadurai positions his scapes on a horizontal plane, which leaves no room for the verticality of both local and global hierarchies to enter the picture. The question of the redistribution of individuals on a global level and the impact of power struggle on their repositioning in the hierarchical system of the host country is altogether left out. In my view, this feature is one of the main failings of transnational frameworks as a whole, and not only of Appadurai’s, and can be explained by the fact that such frameworks do not take account of the category of nation and its subcategories, in particular that of class. In this sense, Appadurai is probably more guilty of ‘meeting the agenda of neoliberalism,’ as it has often been said of Homi Bhabha, than Bhabha himself, since his global map represents the third space as one large middle-class of immigrants.


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If we try to visualize his scapes and the way they spread throughout the globe, we find ourselves faced with a map where everything revolves around major cities and world capitals, to the detriment of less influential areas. Each scape originates in one of the main cities of the world, and reaches out to other regions, not on the basis of geographical continuity, but on the basis of economic opulence and influence. The fact that the scapes seem to extend far into remote areas of the globe, like the mediascape, and reflect the culture and representations of the wealthy and influential participants, is bound to generate ironical juxtapositions. Let us imagine a group of girls in Tamil Nadu watching an American soap opera and trying to understand the predicament of Western girls with eating disorders. The gap which separates the two worlds not only challenges the view that the world has become one global village where people all share in the same cultural representations thanks to the mediascape, but clearly points to the limitations of communication technologies and the supposed transparency of images. Another aspect which is left out of Appadurai’s global map is the differential mobility which results from one’s access or lack of access to modern technologies or means of transport, an idea which is present in several contemporary novels, like Kunzru’s Transmission or Desai’s Inheritance of Loss. In Transmission, the idea of differential mobility is evidenced in the tension between ‘the sublime mobility of those who travel without ever touching the ground’ and ‘the forced motion of the shopping-cart pushers, the collectors of cardboard boxes.’ (45).11 Such differential mobility not only generates a divide between those who follow the land and those who literally hop from one city to another, it also leads to an erosion and virtual disappearance of in-between spaces which are no longer on the global map of international exchanges. This idea is also present in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, where it is expressed through a topography in two layers which reflects the asymmetry of power relations.12 The question which is raised, ultimately, is that of the impact of these virtual communities on real ones. The example of Chanu in Brick Lane, who hopes to bypass the rules of the local by surfing the internet, shows not only the illusory quality of the virtual world but also points to the potentially harmful consequences of these technologies and of the virtual communities they help generate. Not only do they fail to be fully empowering, they may also encourage individuals to be less involved in the local fabric. Monica Ali’s novel seems to suggest that new technologies give us access to other contexts but do not change our daily lives and that as such, virtual communities are not valid substitutes

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for real ones. At best, they may generate a fleeting and transitory sense of kinship but in the long run they do not have what it takes to be real communities. As Bauman observes, the main difference between real communities and the would-be communities of the liquid modern world comes from the reciprocity or lack of reciprocity between members of a community, and the idea of commitment. While real communities are based on the principle of reciprocity between individuals, the virtual communities which characterize postmodernity result from a fleeting convergence of desires and a confluence of interests. This convergence is limited to a certain temporality and is based on the fact that one can discontinue at any time. What makes them appealing is precisely the fact that they seem to have the advantages of existing communities without their shortcomings; one can feel part of them without feeling tied down: Synchronization of focuses of attention and topics of conversation is not, of course, tantamount to a shared identity, but the focuses and the topics drift on so rapidly that there is hardly time to grasp that truth. They tend to disappear from view and be forgotten before their bluff has had time to be called. (Bauman, 2004, 97)

Language and new territorialities In this fourth and final section I wish to discuss the role of language in the reconfiguration of space. The following discussion draws on the work of anthropologist Marc Augé and on his reflections on the role of language in the creation of the non-places of supermodernity. In his book, Augé distinguishes between traditional places, which were defined according to a pattern of continuity between land, communities and individuals (land = society = nation = culture = religion) and what he calls the new places of supermodernity. These places are not real places where people come into contact naturally, but places in between, transitional places like airports or train stations where people come into contact, or seem to do so only superficially. the word ‘non-place’ designates two complementary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. Although the two sets of relations overlap to a large extent, and in any case officially (individuals travel, make purchases, relax), they are still not confused with one another; for non-places mediate


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a whole mass of relations, with the self and with others, which are only indirectly connected with their purposes. As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractuality. Try to imagine a Durkheimian analysis of a transit lounge at Roissy! (Augé, 1995, 94) According to Augé, language is a constitutive feature of non-places (‘The link between individuals and their surroundings in the space of nonplace is established through the mediation of words.’(94)). Augé gives the example of French highways, which reconfigure space, either by bringing cities closer together or by adding distances between towns situated off the highway line. He also points out how language is omnipresent, whether it be on road signs, which indicate sights you drive by but cannot see, or in the instructions which tell you to drive safely, check your tyres or stop for a bit of a rest. Augé points to the paradox of a place which seems to have been deserted by human beings, and where those who have remained are sometimes less talkative than the metallic voice of automated machines, a world saturated with language, but a language which operates within the limits of a highly codified type of communication which only works one way. In such places, the role of language no longer seems to be that of a vector of communication; language it seems has been reassigned a new task which consists in creating simulacra of reality. This analysis of how language can redefine space and places13 seems to me to provide an interesting entry point to understand the redefinition of common space in Hari Kunzru’s novel Transmission. The world depicted by Kunzru is not unlike the postmodern cities described by Gottdiener in Postmodern Semiotics, in which he analyses the gradual disappearance of common space in suburban areas and the creation of substitute places of sociability like shopping malls which take up the function traditionally played by markets or city centres. The community Kunzru describes of Virugenix employees is characterized by a fragmentation of space whereby places become islands and the community a sort of archipelago formed of separate entities which come into contact at regular intervals, thereby generating an erosion of the social fabric. Arjun’s experience, at the heart of the Silicon Valley is that of an environment where people no longer interact on a personal basis and where it soon becomes obvious that if frontiers have been brought down by new technologies, they have been replaced by new strategies of division and fragmentation, by partitions and cubicles but also by new habits introduced into the workplace, for example a


systematic use of e-mails to get in touch with people who work in the adjoining cubicle. Every attempt made by Arjun to get in touch with someone directly is taken as an intrusion into their private sphere. Isolation and an overall absence of contact have become the norm: Everyone left their phones on voice mail and most wore headsets while they worked, creating a private space that was, according to custom, violated only in an emergency. Interaction was via e-mail, even if the participants occupied neighboring cubicles. This made sense to Arjun. Personal space is valuable. [...] Interrupting someone to talk to them is a way of pushing your query to the top of their stack. It overrides someone’s access controls and objectively lessens their functionality, which was as close to an engineering definition of rudeness as he felt he was ever likely to come. (54) The aim of the questionnaire, which each and every employee of Virugenix is supposed to fill out, is not so much to evaluate people as to create an artificial sense of togetherness and introduce a new form of virtual bonding. By giving this population of workaholics the illusion that they share similarities with other employees in spite of their isolation, the questionnaire constitutes an artificial bond whose aim is to unify – at least superficially – a group of individuals who have never been involved in any form of social life outside work and create ‘an imagined community’ of Virugenix employees. I am deliberately extending the meaning of the term ‘imagined community’ (used by Benedict Anderson to refer to the imagined community of the nation) to refer to the changes inherent in the current context and the formation of new communities. Week by week, Arjun learned more about himself. His Dungeons & Dragons alignment turned out to be Lawful Good. His penis was of average size. He was not a secret Mac user, though his lack of familiarity with sex toys and his inability to recall an occasion where he dressed up in leather or rubber clothing to please his man rated him ‘an old-fashioned gal.’ His twelve lattes and nine Cokes a day habit also bracketed him a ‘high-level caffeine addict.’ Worried, he sent an e-mail to a support group, who mailed back suggesting he drink fewer caffeine-containing beverages. (55) In this virtual world where everything is mediated by technologies, direct interaction between individuals seems to have disappeared.


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Bonds and relationships do not depend on spatial proximity, nor are they left to chance; there seems to be no determinism of the local since the local fabric itself has vanished. Even when spatial proximity could facilitate direct communication, it is still mediated by the questionnaire whose function is to create an artificial sense of sameness in lieu of real communication between individuals. The communication pattern described by Kunzru is not only artificial and indirect, generated, oriented and monitored from the outside as it is, it is also reminiscent of dystopian novels like 1984, in which the telescreens not only show Big Brother, they also allow him to spy on people. The irony of the title of the novel soon becomes clear. The idea of ‘transmission’ has been reduced to a sheer minimum, to the transmission of data. In other words, the act of transmitting has been cut down to what is strictly necessary for information to circulate. Another aspect of the use of language in the sketching of new territorialities lies in the process of semantic re-encoding of words according to dominant discourse. In the following discussion I propose to turn to the work of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. Central to Bauman’s work is the notion of liquidity. This metaphor, which negotiates two registers, the figurative and the abstract is, he argues, a key element in the capitalist’s strategy of undermining the existing world order. Indeed, the term liquidity conjures up several positive notions, including freedom of movement versus rigidity, change versus stasis, and so on. Yet when Bauman uses the term fluidity he means the strategy of destabilization which has generated the loss of bearings that affects postmodernity in a world where all solid structures (among which the state) have been challenged and whose actual existence is under threat. Bauman’s concept of liquidity draws our attention to the potential effects of a trickster discourse which plays on language the better to achieve its aim. The concept of fluidity, which Bauman borrows from Lyotard,14 underpins his work and is analysed in great detail in his major books Liquid Modernity, The Human Cost of Globalization, Life in Pieces, Identity, and so on. It is not just an elegant metaphor, but also a concept pregnant with meaning which allows him to pinpoint the specificities of contemporary life. We could imagine that under the pen of Bauman, fluidity would have had rather positive connotations. Indeed, throughout his life, Bauman has experienced the predicament of minority groups threatened by totalitarian regimes. Born into a Jewish family in Poland, he experienced anti-Semitism at a very young age, and the situation only got worse with time when, as an adult he lost his job and decided to flee Poland and live in Israel. Now resident in England, where he has

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lived for the past twenty-three years, Bauman has experienced political fluidity, the freedom to move to a country whose political orientations one feels comfortable with. Yet the fluidity he refers to in his works is not political fluidity but that promoted by capitalism: that of free trade and anti-protectionist rules. For Bauman, this fluidity is manifold and generates a series of consequences for society but also for the individual: loss of bearings, disintegration of the family unit, of social ties and local networks, to list just a few. Bauman’s starting point is his observation of the changes in people’s living conditions which took place in the twentieth century and in particular the way globalization has had a negative effect on many aspects of people’s lives. Bauman is interested in the way precarious conditions have affected and continue to affect the family unit and the social structure of given societies.15 In The Human Cost of Globalization, he argues that human beings have become commodified and that capitalism has led them to see their lives as a series of episodes rather than a progression towards a goal; they have become used to the idea that things are constantly changing, that nothing is solid anymore and that they should cease to yearn for stability in a world where the motto is no longer to settle down but ‘always to adapt’. All the things that used to act as bearings for the individual (his job, his family unit and his role in society, etc.) have become fleeting and unreliable, hence the metaphor of fluidity. As Bauman explains, a fluid needs to be contained; it is not enough to give it a shape, it needs to be held in place, which requires continuous effort. This analysis leads Bauman to conclude that in a context of constant mutability of forms, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep track of changes and understand the forces at stake. In the long run, continues Bauman, solidity is bound to become an obsolete word, a signifier without a signified and when it no longer refers to something, people will naturally forget what it meant. This scenario is not unlike the ‘natural’ disappearance of words in Orwell’s dystopia 1984, in which words no longer referring to concepts or notions in existence fall into oblivion and then totally disappear. Bauman himself refers to Orwell’s famous dystopia when he explains that what is truly striking is that this state of utter precariousness has not been imposed by a totalitarian regime but has been chosen freely in the name of freedom (freedom to travel, freedom of trade, etc.). Contrary to most dystopian scenarios, this effect has not yet been achieved through dictatorial rule, subordination, oppression, or


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enslavement; nor through the ‘colonization’ of the private sphere by the ‘system’. Quite the opposite: the present-day situation emerged out of the radical melting of the fetters and manacles rightly or wrongly suspected of limiting the individual freedom to choose and to act. Rigidity of order is the artefact and sediment of the human agents’ freedom. That rigidity is the overall product of ‘releasing the brakes’: of deregulation, liberalization, ‘flexibilization’, increased fluidity, unbridling the financial, real estate and labour markets, easing the tax burden, etc. (5) To return to the main thread of my argumentation, language plays an important part in the spread and influence of global capitalism as it is described in contemporary diasporic texts like those by Kunzru or Kiran Desai, by using the imaginary and playing with people’s unconscious. For example, the term fluidity aptly sums up the game of double coding and the way language is used as an instrument of persuasion. This idea of double coding draws on the analysis of the workings of capitalism in Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari show that one of the strengths of capitalism is its capacity to rechannel deterritorialized fluxes and make them converge. Capitalism, they argue, has the capacity to incorporate everything, which includes redirecting its own failings and glitches in such a way that they contribute to the strength of the system. I would argue that this notion of re-encoding provides a useful entry point to understanding the way discourse operates as a veil of opacity suggesting as it does appealing notions such as mobility, fluidity and liquidity whilst concealing the bleaker reality of economic stasis or decline. When people are seduced by the fluidity of modernity, what entices them is the idea of change as opposed to stasis, not the loss of bearings which can result from it. But the role of discourse in this process is all the more worrying in a world in which it reigns supreme (Eagleton,16 2004 [2003]). It is my belief that the discourse about geographical mobility often conceals the decline of economic mobility in many industrialized countries. When trying to analyse the workings of the discourse on mobility and its consequences, it is necessary to distinguish between different types of mobility and trace their interactions. Some thirty years ago, mobility was often used in the sense of economic mobility – in other words the fact of climbing the social ladder. Nowadays, when many industrialized countries experience structural difficulties linked to globalization, among which the increased competition created by cheap labour and the subsequent delocalization


of firms to other countries, mobility has progressively lost some of its meaning and thereby has been divested of its positive connotations. It is increasingly used to refer to the short-term mobility of the tourism industry or the forced geographic mobility of workers who would otherwise be deprived of social mobility. This strategy, which operates through language and is opaque to the migrant, is precisely what the novels I have based my analysis on invite us to interrogate.

5 Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject

Amongst the issues which have emerged from recent studies on transnationalism, globalism and the new world order is the idea that globalization has potentially made us all denizens if not citizens of the world in a way eighteenth-century theorists of cosmopolitanism could never have anticipated (Appiah, 2006). Not only are our mental horizons considerably broader (Appadurai, 1996), our deeds and decisions have an impact which reaches far beyond our national frontiers, as the current debates about global warming and starvation seem to indicate. And yet the passage from ‘the local tribe’ to what Anthony Appiah (2007) calls ‘the global tribe’ is far from being an altogether smooth one. If we have undeniably gone more global – at least the privileged fringes of our societies have – and can now project ourselves beyond the closed circle of family and locally contracted ties, the phenomenon has shown its limits. The rise of nationalist voices and the revival of regional customs and ways of life are symptomatic of the limits and difficulties of such dramatic tension between the local and the global which characterizes life today (Bayart, 1996) in a world where local solidarities often outshine global ties and where the global community sometimes seems more like fiction than reality, a matrix of potential encounters, a network of randomly constructed links, episodic and fleeting, noncommittal and changing, than real relations that bind members of a community together.1 Theorists of postmodernity and Bauman in particular have evidenced the changes brought in a liquid modern world where relationships are affected by the dissolving framework of sites of encounter, leading to a casualization of ties and solidarities. The forming of new vectors of sociability and in particular of networks – a term no longer connoted negatively as tantamount to the modus operandi of secret organizations but restored to a more positive sense – has not only 99


generated the formation of parallel sites of interaction, and of virtual loci of sociability, it has also profoundly modified the way we conceive of relationships, no longer as real, solid and involving commitment but as temporary encounters and short-term associations which can be discontinued at any time. For Bauman, these relations can only be fragmentary and episodic – fragmentary because only one side of our multi-sided selves is involved and episodic because the threads of individual lives may be woven but these new patterns do not necessarily last very long (Bauman, 1995, 46–8). In this context, the very notion of community has become problematic. Without totally subscribing to Eric Hobsbawm’s pessimistic view that ‘never was the word “community” used more indiscriminately and emptily than in the decades when communities in the sociological sense of the term became hard to find in real life’ (Hobsbawm, 1994, 40) we have to admit that the community as a solid overarching framework which precedes individuals and offers them a sense of stability and certainty is on shaky ground. For Hobsbawm, the current emphasis on identity and on identity politics is linked precisely to the fact that communities as they used to be no longer exist and the revived interest in society as a common denominator is symptomatic of the dissolution of the social fabric and of the loosening of tightly-knit threads. ‘Men and women’, he writes, ‘look for groups to which they can belong certainly and forever, in a world in which all else is moving and shifting, in which nothing else is certain’ (Hobsbawm, 1996, 51). The redefinition of the power struggle between intraterritorial instances and extraterritorial powers has also had serious consequences for the way we conceive of rights but also of obligations and duties, in particular in the larger context of the extended community of the nation. When the state fails to guarantee basic rights, how are we to uphold the ideal of rule of law? In other words, how can the rule of law survive the rat race of rampant capitalism? To be more rigorous with regard to the way this question poses itself in the current context, a few distinctions need to be made. This issue is not only situational, and the very concept of the Rights of Man as an abstraction has always been problematic. Though we all as citizens of a country conceive of our rights without difficulty, the concept of Rights of Man in a more general sense is more hazy and difficult to grasp; it is an abstraction removed from the concrete reality of our lives in a given society. To some extent, Hannah Arendt had anticipated the difficulty of this paradigmatic shift when recalling Edmund Burke’s prophetic statement that ‘being nothing but human’ was humanity’s greatest danger (Burke, 1790; quoted by

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Arendt, 1967 [1951] 299). Following up on the more sceptical and realistic path opened by Burke and Hobbes, Arendt denounced the unenforceable quality of human rights and their provisionality: the rights of man, she argues ‘supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable [...] whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign states’ (Arendt, 1967 [1951] 293). This chapter is concerned with issues of ethics in the meta-society of today’s transnational world. Indeed, one of the key questions raised by such a radical redefinition of man’s relation to others within and outside a given community is the question of the ethos of the global community. What is the ethos of a world where locally contracted ties seem to be dissolving, whereby affecting our bearings, the way we stand but also our sense of duty to others? All these issues crystallize around a central one: the question of whether twenty-first century man will remain local or turn global, whether he will manage to translate his ethical self into the broader context and reinvent an ethics for the global world or simply become a-moral, unethical and detached. In the case of diasporic people, the question cuts two ways. One of the key issues of course is how their rights can be guaranteed outside the national frontiers of their homelands. Another aspect involves their redefinition as political and ethical subjects in the host country away from the community they were born into, when confronted with other values and political systems. How can they take an active part in the shaping of a social network, find their place in a new polis so that they do not become global citizens, unattached, deterritorialized and uprooted, but also without any political role or impact? In my introduction to this book I briefly referred to the genre of the global novel whose permanently uprooted characters seem to buttress the idea that we are all going to become citizens of a liquid world and roam the world, free of all ties and responsibilities. However in recent years, an increasingly large number of authors have started to raise the issue of the im/migrant’s political role and of his ethical involvement towards both the home and the host country. Novels by Ali, Gurnah, Rushdie and Smith are not only about the self-centred reinvention of an identity abroad or the personal fulfilment linked to immigration; they also address, sometimes quite explicitly, the question of what migrants can do for the home and host country; they intuit the potential danger inherent in the thrilling rebirth of a new self, without a past but also without a family or community they are accountable to and who can afford to freely enjoy the newly gained freedom of a slightly surreal life in a different country and in a different language in which things never sound exactly the same.

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This chapter takes up what has emerged as a recurring theme in this book, namely the disjunctive phenomena inherent in the diasporic experience, whether it be the forced amnesia entailed by the diasporic experience, the schizophrenic ego which results from a split self which lives no longer in the past and is still not rooted in the community of the present, or the disjunction introduced by the coexistence of two languages and sometimes of a mother tongue which has become out of place and removed from its linguistic community. I propose to approach these issues not only from the angle of transnationalism and globalism but also with reference to cosmopolitanism. Indeed, cosmopolitanism raises the issue of the transition from a locally defined ethos to that of the meta-community. The implications of the term itself are worth putting in perspective since long before it was used by eighteenthcentury thinkers like Kant, ‘cosmopolitanism’ was coined by the cynics of fourth century BC for whom a citizen belonged first and foremost to a community. In other words, civilization implied belonging to a community among communities, and it would be interesting to know what they would have thought of today’s global citizens, uprooted diasporians and of the deterritorialized communities which sometimes straddle divides but often ‘fall between two stools’ (Rushdie, 1991). This line of inquiry therefore needs to extend beyond the issue of ethics versus morality and the question of the erosion of morality, although it is a timely issue (Eagleton, 2003; Badiou, 2003) to embrace the question of rights in a transnational context; how rights are guaranteed, how they are translated into another country even though they are tied to citizenship, but also how the rights of displaced populations and diasporic communities are redefined and reterritorialized by the rules of global capitalism. This discussion ultimately opens onto the irreducibility of ethoses in a transnational world and its articulation with a global political project (Hardt and Negri) which not only needs a common goal but also a common language (Laclau).

Conflicting ethoses: of discontinuities in the diasporic experience In his book Cosmopolitanism, Ethics in a World of Strangers, Anthony Appiah writes that ‘people who complain about the homogeneity produced by globalization often fail to notice that globalization is equally a threat to homogeneity’ (Appiah, 2007 [2006] 101). And indeed, the homogeneity normally associated with the global village is challenged on different levels; one of them is the persistence of the values and


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principles societies have set for themselves and which have acted as a cornerstone from time immemorial. Naturally enough these values resist the homogenizing varnish of globalism to reveal deeply ingrained specificities. They resurface in situations of temporary but also longterm if not permanent displacement and sometimes clash violently with those of the immigrant’s host country. This clash of conflicting world-views which come into contact in the diasporic experience is an important motif of the emerging trend of homecoming narratives to which I have referred in previous chapters. These novels go one step further than earlier immigration novels in their representation of the flaws of the West, insisting on the discrepancy between its discourse and the reality of everyday life. Not only do they confront myths of rebirth and regeneration in the new land to the bleak reality of immigration, they also offer a critical and sometimes scathing reassessment of its core values which they oppose to that of the homeland. In so doing, they often point to the dramatic erosion of values, in particular of family values which they contrast with the persistence of traditional bonds and solidarities between members of an extended family in their home country. Abdulrazak Gurnah’s2 novel Admiring Silence, for example, addresses the issue of the responsibilities of diasporic subjects towards their fellow countrymen.3 When leaving home and family behind, keeping his new life and ties in England a secret from his family back home, the protagonist decides to relinquish the duties he had towards his relatives in the home country and embrace the self-oriented ethos of the West. Yet, this novel which recounts the story of a reasonably well-integrated immigrant, concludes with a rather unexpected twist, the protagonist returning to the home country not so much out of some sense of nostalgia as from a sense of ethical commitment and belief in long-lasting ties. His break-up with his partner, who is also the mother of their child makes him realize the extent to which his life in the UK was superficial, precisely because he did not have any strong commitment outside this limited family circle, nor any real place in society despite the number of years he had spent there. Caryl Phillips’ novel A Distant Shore expresses a similar concern for ethical issues which manifests itself in a duty to remember the forgotten victims of illegal immigration. The novel, which opens on a graphic description of the protagonist’s cellmate’s painful death in an atmosphere of total indifference throws into relief the plight of asylum seekers who are deprived of the most basic of human rights and left to rot away on the prison floor. But Phillips also dramatizes the ethical breach

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which inhabits the diasporic subject as the protagonist wilfully tries to forget his life back home to settle into a more comfortable routine. The radical divide in the character’s life – yesterday an asylum seeker without rights and today a respectable citizen living under a new name and a new identity – is evidenced in the episode of the mirror scene, which symbolizes a sort of mirror stage experience in adulthood when the character learns to appropriate an identity and make it his own. I washed out my mouth and then I looked at myself in the mirror. A tired man’s face stared back at me. This was not the face of a thirtyyear-old man. England had changed me, but was this not the very reason that I had come to England? I desired change. (275) This radical divide, which runs throughout the narrative – a narrative which juxtaposes or rather places side by side episodes of Solomon’s past life and fragments of his life in the UK – constantly underlines the tragic ironies of the protagonist’s story; he is killed by a gang of racist young men years after he narrowly missed a near-death experience in his home country. But more importantly, the novel lays emphasis on the need to remember and to make sense of this fragmentation, which not only threatens the sense of selfhood and identity, but the coherence of the subject as an ethical subject. Hence the role of Dorothy, another outcast living on the margins of society. A retired music teacher who is sinking into depression and madness, Dorothy plays a crucial part in the novel, not only because she echoes in the minor mode Solomon’s life as an outcast, but also because she bears witness to a past no one knows about and without which the protagonist has ‘only this one year to his [my] life’ and is ‘burdened with hidden history’ (300). Far from being the passive recipient of an eventful narrative or a sympathetic listener, Dorothy is entrusted with a function: that of registering the life of this man prior to his change of identity. Her function is spelled out very clearly at the end of the novel in Solomon’s eloquent description of the migrant as ‘a coward trained to forget’: Each time I opened my eyes I heard Mum crying. I was a coward who had trained himself to forget. I accepted from people. From Mr and Mrs Anderson. I was no longer ‘Hawk’. I was no longer my mother’s Gabriel. It was Solomon who learned of Mike’s death. It was Solomon who was lying in a warm bed in a strange room among these kind people. It was Solomon. I was Solomon. (297)


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Caryl Phillips’ novel offers a good example of diasporic texts which approach the ethical question in two distinct ways, by stressing the clash of ethoses which occupies centre stage in the diasporic experience, but also by intuiting the potentially serious consequences of this experience which is linked to the discontinuity it introduces into the ethical subject, as if the almost schizophrenic nature of his life posed a threat to his ethical integrity. I propose to pursue this line of inquiry with a discussion of Salman Rushdie’s novel Fury, which brings to the forefront the role played by the discontinuity introduced into the alignment subject/language/society. Indeed, one of the key features of the nation state, one which is disrupted in a context of migration and influx of diasporic populations, as we saw in Chapter 3, is the continuity between individuals and the community, a continuity achieved through language and common values. In a diasporic context, these elements are realigned and complicated by the coexistence of two languages but also by that of two sets of values deeply linked to the languages of the communities they originate in. Of course, in the case of immigrants whose life in the home country was spent between two languages, as is often the case in India for example, where it is not rare to see people switching from one language to another or from a dialect to a language, the situation is slightly different (Skinner, 1998).4 Yet it does not invalidate our hypothesis since the two or three languages spoken in the home country all tie the immigrant to the same community of speakers and to the same ethos. From which it results that the real breach in the continuity between value systems is that which exists between home and host cultures. The split self of the immigrant and the diffraction of the ethical subject: Fury by Salman Rushdie In this post-fatwa novel, Rushdie takes a radically distinct stance from earlier novels in which he liked to experiment with a postmodern use of language, its ambiguities and arbitrariness, to pose key questions linked to the consequences of the disruption of the pattern of linearity between the subject and the larger community of the nation. Among them: what happens to the use one makes of one’s mother tongue outside the community and the values it was initially rooted in? Do one’s intrinsic values translate into another language one masters without necessarily having the same proximity as with one’s mother tongue? What happens when one’s mother tongue is spoken outside its linguistic community and in front of others who cannot understand it, when everything and anything can be said, when words cease to be understood and to

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have consequences? Can language become a responsibility-free zone, where one can say anything independently of consequences? The first pages of the novel set the tone, as Rushdie offers a vivid and original depiction of New York as a boisterous city, a multi-ethnic, multicultural and multilingual place. From the Polish cleaner to the Pakistani taxi driver, the German Jewish plumber and the Punjabi construction worker, Rushdie gives an auditory as much as a visual rendering of New York. This auditory melting pot forms a jarring polyphony of voices which resonate from every street corner. The protagonist, Malik Solanka is a Brit of Indian origin, who has left his family behind and has fled to the US. As a foreigner himself, Solanka is interested in people who are not typically American. When wandering down the streets, he picks up fragments of conversations, sometimes telephone conversations between someone he can actually see and an absent and mysterious addressee whose cues can be reconstructed from the answers uttered by the first speaker. The result is a flourish of voices disconnected from a broader context – from given speakers and their utterances. The novel thus raises the question of language in the broader context of communication and society. On an optimistic reading, the novel can be seen as a celebration of a linguistic and cultural melting pot. Another, slightly more sceptical reading might consist in interpreting it as an invitation to reflect on the fragmentation of the self and the lack of continuity between oneself and the verbal enactment of one’s personality through language. What I am interested in here is not the disjunction between language and praxis as a result of social conventions, but the disjunction between what one actually says in an adopted language and what one thinks, and would actually say in his mother tongue. This idea is suggested in the episode of the taxi driver which offers what is probably the most blatant instance of language running amok. Stuck in peak hour traffic, the cab driver bursts into anger and starts cursing in his mother tongue: ‘Islam will cleanse this street of godless motherfucker bad drivers,’ the taxi driver screamed at a rival motorist. ‘Islam will purify this whole city of Jew pimp assholes like you and your whore roadhog of a Jew wife too’. All the way up Tenth Avenue the curses continued. ‘Infidel fucker of your underage sister, the inferno of Allah awaits you and your unholy wreck of a motorcar as well.’ ‘Unclean offspring of a shit-eating pig, try that again and the victorious jihad will crush your balls in its unforgiving fist.’ Malik Solanka, listening in


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to the explosive, village-accented Urdu, was briefly distracted from his inner turmoil by the driver’s venom. ALI MANJU said the card. Manju meant beloved. [...] In between curses, he spoke to his mother’s brother on the radio –‘yes Uncle. Yes, courteously, always, Uncle, trust me. Yes, best policy’ [...] – and also asked Solanka sheepishly for directions. (65–6) After this outburst, Malik Solanka lets Ali know that Urdu is his mother tongue and that he has understood everything the cab driver has said. First, the driver refuses to admit that his words were actually insults, before acknowledging that they indeed were. He ends up excusing himself before finally agreeing that he did not really mean what he said: ‘Sahib, if you heard it, then it must be so. But sir, you see, I am not aware.’ Solanka lost patience, turned to go. ‘It doesn’t matter’, he said. [...] As he walked off along Broadway, Beloved Ali shouted after him, needily, asking him to be understood. [...] ‘it means nothing, sahib. Me, I don’t even go to the mosque. God bless America, okay? It’s just words.’ Yes, and words are not deeds, Solanka allowed, moving off fretfully. Though words can become deeds. If said in the right place and at the right time, they can move mountains and change the world. Also, uh-huh, not knowing what you’re doing – separating deeds from the words that define them – was apparently becoming an acceptable excuse. To say ‘I didn’t mean it’ was to erase meaning from your misdeeds, at least in the opinion of the Beloved Alis of the world. (66–7) One of the most noticeable aspects of this passage, apart from the linguistic creativity of Ali Manju, is the implication of speech and the disjunctive process obviously at work in this warped discursive situation. When he thinks that Solanka cannot understand him, Ali utters an impressive list of insults in Urdu. But when he realizes that Solanka has actually grasped the meaning of what he said, Manju apologizes and almost begs Solanka not to retain such a bad impression of him. It is as if there were two Alis, the aggressive one who advocates racism and fundamentalism, and the nice village boy who can be obedient and respectful when speaking to members of his community on the radio. In a way it is also as if there were two Urdus, the Urdu spoken with friends and family and which is still meaningful, and loaded with affective connotations, and the Urdu spoken in front of foreigners, which provides Ali with a sphere of linguistic freedom and uncensored


private expression. This example shows how in this specific context the mother tongue can become a responsibility-free zone where the immigrant can express himself but where he can also say literally anything without being accountable for it (1). Not only is this situation completely artificial, it is one seldom encountered in real life where words are necessarily part of a communication scheme. They are uttered and received as such, and met with certain reactions at the receiving end.5 What happens when Solanka speaks to Ali in Urdu is that he revitalizes the mother tongue, reinscribing it into a context where it actually makes sense and triggers reactions. In other words, Solanka restores a real situation of communication rather than an artificial one like that in which the immigrant may find himself when he speaks in front of people who cannot understand his language. (2) (1) S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L2) (2) S (L1) – Message (L1) – Receiver (L1)

Solanka’s comment (‘words can become deeds’), whose solemn undertones are powerful reminders of the Rushdie case, pinpoints the disjunction between words and meaning. The taxi driver, who is in-between cultures and languages, not quite American and yet not quite Pakistani, inhabits an in-between locus or rather sees himself probably as a lot more foreign than he really is. In his one-page-long outburst of insults, he seems to revert to his former identity, trying to trick others and himself into thinking that he is from somewhere else. However, when he confesses that he never goes to the mosque and that his speech about the jihad is but a game, he admits that he is not so much out of place as out of language and that whatever he says is disconnected from deeper meaning. This passage thus invites us to reflect on the consequences of the disjunction between verbal utterances and meaning, and potentially between language and ethics. Interestingly enough, what happens to the Urdu language in this passage is even more likely to happen to English. In a context of spatial and cultural displacement, language – whether it be the new language in the case of a newly arrived immigrant or the second language in the case of the cab driver who comes from a country where English is an official language – has an ambiguous status. Because it is not the language of affect and deep cultural and traditional roots, and is not considered in the same way as the mother tongue, it can potentially become a tool


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severed from affects and ethics. In other words, it can become merely instrumental and devoid of depth so that words can circulate on the surface and convey meaning without striking an emotional chord in the speaker.6 It can remain at the outer limits of consciousness to such an extent that it can easily say almost anything since the emotional and moral implications seem to belong to another realm, as I shall discuss further in the next chapter on language and the diasporic subject. To return to my initial question, ‘what happens to the immigrant as an ethical and political subject?’, the example of Fury provides one of the more enlightening examples of the disjunctive process generated by bilingualism. In this novel, rather than focusing on the incredible fluidity of meaning which is self-produced and multi-faceted like in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Rushdie imagines the potential incoherence of individuals whose words become divorced from their thoughts and sense of ethics. Fury thus expresses the necessity of reconnecting words and meaning, signifiers with affect and ethics, and to revitalize languages which, when severed from their initial context can cease to make sense and cease to appeal to the full humanness in each of us. Although English is represented as some sort of lingua franca, what is stressed is not so much the commonality between speakers as the differences. The verbal vignettes and the fragments of conversations that are interspersed throughout the novel form a kind of auditory quilt which evokes the ruggedness of linguistic clashes through the widespread use of English; they emanate from split selves who say one thing and think another, and this constitutes a heightened form of linguistic schizophrenia (Deleuze, 1998).7

Deterritorialization and the sheer ‘nakedness of human rights’ If they pinpoint the clash between two sets of ethical values and raise the alarm as to the diffraction of in-betweeners as ethical subjects, such novels also address the key difficulty and probably main challenge facing the meta-community of today’s transnational world, that of trying to come up with an ethics for this meta-community and conceive of rights as human rights rather than merely as the rights endowed by citizenship or residence in a given country. In the introduction to this chapter I have briefly referred to the recurrence of this issue ever since the eighteenth century; its timeliness in the twentieth century was largely demonstrated by Hannah Arendt in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) in which she historicizes

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the question of minorities and rights. Her focus, which is mainly on Jews, reaches beyond the scope of a specific community to show how the rights of individuals and of groups of individuals are dependent on a site of validation, and acknowledgement, which guarantees their enforcement. It is in this sense that Arendt writes that ‘the world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.’ Arendt’s position takes its cue from the pragmatic approach of Edmund Burke and his insistence on a conception of rights as grounded in and tied to citizenship. Burke’s scepticism about the French revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man stemmed not so much from a rejection of the concept of human rights as such, as from a firm belief that such abstractions are not needed whenever the rights are guaranteed by the state. To a certain extent Arendt’s thinking with respect to rights draws our attention to a key issue: the interdependence of rights and the state. Hence her famous statement: ‘we are not born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’ (Arendt, 1951, 301). From which it results that minorities need to be given rights – as opposed to priv ileges – within the national framework in which they live. The absence of any guarantee may cause minorities to slip through the net when international agreements and treaties of reciprocity which allow for the reterritorialization of national rights in a context of migration are being drawn up. Arendt contends that one of the symptoms of the degradation of the status of displaced populations is precisely the terminological shift from ‘stateless’ (which implied that as such these minorities did not enjoy the protection of a state and had to be looked after by international instances) to ‘displaced’, which does not entail the same call for responsibility. Arendt historicizes this debate from the birth to the erosion of the nation state. Such a line of argument could easily be extended to today’s context of increased transnationalism. To a certain extent, the idea that rights need to be grounded and determined locally is an interesting entry point into understanding the way rights of diasporic populations are redistributed and redefined in today’s context of global capitalism. Deleuze’s idea of a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the fluxes of capitalism may well be applied to the way the rights of individuals become negotiated and converted or not in the global order which rules mass migrations. Not only is the continuity individuals/citizen/ rights/nation realigned, this is done in such a way that the individual finds himself with conditional rights often given on a temporary basis, for as long as the system has an interest in using him/her. I propose to


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discuss this idea in relation to Kunzru’s novel Transmission, to which I have already referred in the previous chapter. In Transmission, the question of rights crops up on several occasions as the protagonist cannot help but compare his situation to that of American citizens who have ‘a natural right to the labour market.’ The expression ‘natural rights’ is interesting in that it points to the abysmal divide between a conception of society where laws are meant to guarantee, or at least get as close as possible to the perfection of ‘natural rights,’ and the casualization of rights described by Kunzru in his novel. In the context of international migrations which goes hand in hand with global capitalism, rights are made and unmade, deterritorialized and reterritorialized according to the rules of the market. Because Indians constitute cheap labour on the American job market, Arjun the protagonist, is given a work visa to work in the United States as a computer analyst, but soon finds himself obliged to work for a very small wage and is turned into a sort of modern slave by the provisionality of his rights. His work visa ties him to an employer without which he loses his right to even be in the United States. In other words, he his only granted temporary rights which make him officially a second-class citizen who can be disposed of at any time and who is used in a specific context to generate profit. What is also significant is the impact of power struggle on a global and worldwide level in the redistribution of rights since Arjun would rather be a second-class citizen in what he considers as a first-class country, than a first-class citizen in a second-class country. Kiran Desai addresses a similar theme in her novel The Inheritance of Loss which also deals with the difficulties of immigration. Contrary to Arjun, who was given a visa before entering the United States, Biju enters the United States on a tourist visa, hoping to get a job and one day to be entitled to a green card. Biju is a good example of im/migrants who slip through the net of administrative systems and are denied basic rights to decent accommodation and medical care. The following extract narrates in the tragic-comic mode the character’s fall – in both the literal and metaphorical sense of the term – as he skids on some rotten spinach in the kitchen of the restaurant where he works and finds himself obliged to take unpaid leave and nurse his broken leg without medical care: In the Gandhi Café, a little after three years from the day he’d received his visa, the luckiest boy in the whole world skidded on some rotten spinach in Harish-Harry’s kitchen, streaked forward in a

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slime green track and fell with a loud popping sound. It was his knee. He couldn’t get up. ‘Can’t you get a doctor?’ He said to Harish-Harry after Saran and Jeev had helped him to his mattress between the vegetables. ‘Doctor!! Do you know what is medical expense in this country?!’ ‘It happened here. Your responsibility.’ ‘My responsibility!’ Harish-Harry stood over Biju, enraged. ‘You slip in the kitchen. If you slip on the road, then who would you ask, hm?’ [...] ‘Without us living like pigs,’ said, Biju, ‘what business would you have? This is how you make your money, paying us nothing because you know we can’t do anything, making us work day and night because we are illegal. Why don’t you sponsor us for our green card?’ (187–8) The interest of Desai’s approach lies in her scathing criticism of diasporians and of Westerners alike. Indeed, rather than putting the blame on imperialism or on capitalism alone, Desai adopts a much more nuanced approach which pinpoints the complicity of diasporians like Harish Harry, who is only too happy to embrace the values of the capitalist system. If Harish takes advantage of Biju’s lack of legal status and rights, she also describes Biju as giving in to this system and embracing the egocentric ethos of the West, refusing to help some friends of his father sent to him from Kalimpong. Desai’s approach to the question of the rights of im/migrants is very much tied to the community or rather the erosion of the community as a site of enforcement of rights. What she points at more generally is the dissolution of all ties into a liquid matrix of pseudo-relations which dissolve as soon as they are formed. Her description of ‘the shadow class condemned to movement’ (102) and doomed to a life of forced fluidity and dotted trajectories is very similar to Bauman’s ‘liquid world.’ It is a semi-existing community of loosely-knit links which are made and unmade and which as such cannot be a site for collective political action. As for her depiction of post-independence India, she describes the insurmountable heterogeneity of a society divided by caste struggle and in which the centrifugal tendencies towards particular interests, whether they be ethnic or personal, cannot be overridden. Her depiction of Jemumbhai, who became a judge not so much for the sake of justice as from some desire to get his own back on society, exemplifies the instrumentalization of justice but also of values in general. This


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character also allows her to denounce the absence of rights in a more eloquent way since Jemumbhai treats his dog Mutt a lot better than his wife or his cook. The Rights of Man are a totally empty concept in the society she describes, where the rights you have are either those granted by your caste, your ethnic origin or whatever rights you have managed to acquire for yourself. Regarding the notion of community and collective interest, Desai depicts a country where ‘the nation has taken over the state’ as Arendt would put it and where the extended community of the nation is threatened by nationalist struggle. One of the two main plots is set in the 1960s and recounts the struggle of the GNLF for the rights of the Nepali who have become a minority in Nepal. Desai’s critical stance therefore goes beyond an indictment of imperialism and capitalism to depict a society where violence breeds violence and where rights are always conditional and frail, constantly challenged by the epistemic violence generated by the caste system or by the inequities in gender relations. Both the main plot of the novel and the subplots, like that of Gayan’s romance with Sai, show the inevitability of violence and suggests that the lex talionis is the main operating principle.

Reterritorializing the ethical subject In my introduction to this chapter I have tied the question of ethics to the ethics of cosmopolitanism as some ultimate principle and political ideal, as if the ‘global tribe’ ultimately had to achieve this ideal of togetherness and mutual respect. This theoretical positioning poses two types of problems however. The first one, which has emerged in the course of our discussion, is the utopian, if not obsolete and unrealistic quality of the project, which has showed its limits in the twentieth century with the League of Nations and which the modus operandi of relations in the global village has proven wrong, if we are to believe Bauman’s pessimistic account of life in the liquid contemporary world. Another difficulty lies in the paradigmatic shift from a theory which has its origins in the West to a projection worldwide, where it may clash with other, non-Western conceptions of togetherness in a larger community. There is a sense in which the universalistic stance implied by cosmopolitanism reflects the tendency towards a homogenization of the context in which it was revived and theorized. Indeed, the nation state presents an unprecedented emphasis on sameness and similarity which is not applicable to other political contexts and certainly not to that of countries like India, where the univocity of the word India

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is itself constantly proven wrong by the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and historical mosaic which constitutes the country, and from which it results that ‘India does not have one voice – the voice of Englishspeaking liberal secularists, or of Hindu fundamentalists, for example – but countless voices.’ (Sardar, 2008, 47) The same thing can be said of the mosaic of British Asian communities, where the multiple identities of individuals have been further complicated by their interaction with regional specificities which they have taken on board and adopted, thereby generating what Ziauddin Sardar calls ‘compound identities’ (Sardar, 2008, 45). Yet I am not sure that the argument concerning the diffraction of voices within the larger community of the nation constitutes as such a valid case against the idea of a common political ethos based on common values which transcend ethnic and cultural divisions and which we may avoid calling cosmopolitanism for the time being. If it is true that British Asians tend to be involved in a community-based structure, it is nonetheless a stereotype to say that for Asians political involvement is necessarily limited to community-related issues. Their participation in the collective political ground may sometimes be less apparent due to the mosaic of smaller entities, but it does exist. In his comprehensive account of a journey into the different Asian communities of England to which I have referred in passing in the opening paragraphs of this section, Ziauddin Sardar describes the situation in Leicester, which to him is the best example of integration and multiculturalism in England, if not in the UK.8 A third of Leicester’s inhabitants are Asian, it is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in Britain, but it is also a city where the political involvement of British Asians takes place on various levels, ranging from community issues to local politics and national politics (in 2006, 20 per cent of City Council employees were from ethnic minorities, not to mention the fact that Leicester produced the first Asian MP in Britain). In other words, Sardar’s analysis of the situation in Leicester points to the compatibility of different types of involvements in politics, ranging from the local community to the nation. To return to literature, the question of how one redefines not only one’s role as a citizen but also one’s place in the world has emerged as a key question in contemporary diasporic fiction. In Kunzru’s novel Transmission, Arjun’s desperate deed which consists in releasing a computer virus which blocks a whole array of systems worldwide can be read not only as some desperate attempt on the part of a madman, but as a cry from the heart which betrays the character’s sense of his lack of substance and consequence, his lack of a voice that can be heard locally


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but also more broadly. Or in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, Chanu’s disappointment with the internet and the promise it seemed to offer of belonging to a broader community leads him to invest himself in a more modest project, that of building up a collection of books in Bengali; in other words, his involvement in local projects promoting the home culture is more symptomatic of a failure to find his place in a broader structure than a statement in favour of particularism and communitarianism. In both cases, what comes out is not so much the helplessness of the characters, as the expression of the difficulties they have in translating whatever social and political voice they might have into a new context. This question, which is ultimately linked principally to the semiotics of the social fabric, connects up with that of their social status and the difficulties they might have in translating that status into a new system where the codes of social validation and recognition are different. From which it follows that before envisaging the global level of the world citizen, the question of reterritorialization needs to be addressed according to several stages, the first one being how one reterritorializes oneself in the host culture, not only solving whatever identity issues one might have but asserting one’s existence as a citizen, with a social status and a voice. Indeed, there is no point in imagining oneself a citizen of a global village when one does not even feel like a full member of a given community. Only then, when this political grounding is achieved can the second stage take place. In other words, the idea of a ‘global tribe’ is neither an obsolete question nor a utopia, but it requires a political reterritorialization as a prerequisite. The question of social reterritorialization also implies two prerequisites: first, that the migrant should understand the core values of the society he is trying to become part of. By the term ‘core values’ (Smolicz)9 I am referring to studies which have tackled the issue of the specificity of the ethos of a given society and analysed it in terms of a combination of values essential to it (Driedger, 1975). Interestingly enough, the fact that the core values are so deeply ingrained in the im/ migrants makes the grammar of integration opaque if not unreadable, and the perfect integration of the immigrant a lot more difficult than it might seem, and not only tied to language skills or professional skills. The second parameter involved is the translation of one’s social value into the host culture, a process which, because of the irreducibility of the core values of both cultures involved (that of the im/migrant and that of the host country), requires that one not only acts the way one used to in one’s home culture but succeeds in translating one’s social

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status in accordance with the process of validation of the host culture, a process I propose to refer to as transvalence. The difficulties of this social in-depth rerooting have crystallized into an emerging theme in contemporary diasporic literature. The following discussion proposes to analyse Zadie Smith’s representation of the complex grammar of transvalence in her novel White Teeth10 in the light of Emmanuel Renault’s theory of what he calls ‘mépris social,’ which could be translated as ‘social devaluation’ or ‘lack of social esteem’. In his analysis of the origins and workings of what he terms ‘la reconnaissance sociale’ (recognition and validation by society) and which draws on the findings and methodology of the Frankfurt School, Renault identifies three spheres of recognition. The first one is that of peers (like friends and family), whose role is to validate the existence of an individual within a network or group to which he belongs. The second sphere is the workplace, where an individual, by doing a certain job, receives confirmation that he is useful to society and actually contributes to something. And the third and last sphere is that of the nation, an even larger group of citizens who all share the same principles and have the same rights, and who therefore constitute another type of peer group of sorts.11 Interestingly enough, in the case of immigrants the level of social validation granted by peers, and in particular those belonging to the first circle (family and friends) is made slightly more complicated by the fact that peers belonging to the first category often occupy a peripheral position. The episode of Samad’s affair with his son’s music teacher points to the importance of social recognition and it gradually emerges that what is at stake is not only a game of seduction between a middle-aged Asian man and a young English woman but a more complex process of validation and recognition through a relationship with a peer from the host country. Postcolonial critics have often stressed the trope of physical pairing as a metaphor for integration into a country. The case of Samad combines such elements with a more social dimension which goes beyond the simple trope of possessing the white woman. If the narrative of his encounter with Poppy lays emphasis on her physical appearance and more precisely on the fact that she is white, with red hair and freckles, almost stereotypically English (131), Smith insists on her status and on the importance it has in Samad’s eyes. She is also a school teacher, and as such is obviously educated and with professional skills which have been acknowledged by the educational system. The question of social status is omnipresent and constantly interferes with the unfolding love story. For example, when the two lovers finally


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arrange to meet up at her place, Samad is surprised to hear that she lives in Harlesden, as he had imagined that she had a flat in a nice area like ‘ “West Hampstead” or at least “Swiss Cottage” ’ (164). The second level of social recognition identified by Renault is that of work, since one’s professional status testifies to one’s role and position in society. Like so many characters in diasporic fiction, Samad experiences the cruel discrepancy between his self-image and his social status and feels that what he believes to be his intrinsic value has not been recognized as it should. Unable to verbalize his frustration, he starts daydreaming at the restaurant where he works, imagining himself bearing a placard that says: I AM NOT A WAITER. I HAVE BEEN A STUDENT, A SCIENTIST, A SOLDIER, MY WIFE IS CALLED ALSANA, WE LIVE IN EAST LONDON BUT WE WOULD LIKE TO MOVE NORTH. I AM A MUSLIM BUT ALLAH HAS FORSAKEN ME OR I HAVE FORSAKEN ALLAH, I’M NOT SURE. I HAVE A FRIEND – ARCHIE – AND OTHERS. I AM FORTY-NINE BUT WOMEN STILL TURN IN THE STREET. SOMETIMES. (58) This silent outburst, which expresses the complexity of identity and the frustrations linked to the fact that certain facets of it have been effaced by the experience of immigration, combines various time-frames: the past as the tense of nostalgic remembrance, which provides some comfort to the frustrated soul, and the future with its yet unfulfilled ambitions, whose role is to balance off the mediocre quality of the present moment. It also combines the different spheres of recognition we have mentioned: family and friends but also work, and establishes a correspondence between them. Last but not least, there is the sphere of national recognition, where Samad fails to find himself on an equal footing with British-born citizens. Samad, who fought during the war and defended the host country suffers from having been written out of history. The episode of the children’s visit to Mr Hamilton, an ex-army man is quite revealing since Hamilton refuses to believe that Samad (Millat’s father) fought in the war: ‘I’m afraid you must be mistaken,’ said Mr Hamilton, genteel as ever. ‘There were certainly no wogs I remember [...] what would we have fed them?’ (172). Samad’s role during the war is therefore erased twice: first by his son, who accidentally uses the verb ‘play’ instead of ‘fought’, as if war was some kind of game, and then by Mr Hamilton. This explains why Samad, in a desperate attempt at leaving some mark

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on the pages of history despite ‘the English goldfish-memory of history’ (87) carves his name into a bench at Piccadilly Circus. Samad does not only suffer from a lack of recognition on a personal level, but also from a lack of visibility as a representative of a group that has been erased from the pages of official history. This theme of the writing of history is evoked on several occasions, in particular when Samad finds himself in a library, desperately looking for a book which does justice to the memory of one of his ancestors, Mangal Pande, who had started the Indian mutiny and whose name came to mean ‘coward.’ For Samad, by contrast, the fact that Pande refused to give up his friends, proves that he was anything but a coward. The passage narrating Samad’s trip to the library questions the objectivity of history and the production of official discourse: When Rajnu passed the book to his uncle, Samad felt his fingers tingle and, looking at its cover, shape and colour, saw that it was all he had dreamt of. It was heavy, many paged, bound in a tan leather and covered in the light dust that denotes something incredibly precious, something rarely touched. [...] Mangal Pande fired the first bullet of the 1857 movement. His self-sacrifice gave the siren to the nation to take up arms against an alien ruler, culminating in a mass-uprising with no parallel in world history. Though the effort failed in its immediate consequences, it succeeded in laying the foundations of the Independence to be won in 1947. For his patriotism he paid with his life. But until his last breath he refused to disclose the names of those who were preparing for, and instigating, the great uprising. (258–9) (Italics in the text) In his analysis, Renault also draws our attention to what he calls the crisis of the patriarchal model, by which he means that when immigrants from traditional societies fail to achieve a certain degree of social recognition, or when they simply fail to do very well for themselves, this ultimately undermines their role as patriarchs. In Zadie Smith’s novel, Samad’s authority is challenged on several occasions, but what comes across as the most telling example of the loss of his patriarchal aura, is expressed through his son’s rejection of the name his father gave him and symbolically of his lineage and cultural heritage (‘I GIVE YOU A GLORIOUS NAME LIKE MAGID MAHFOOZ MURSHED MUBTASIMIQBAL!’ [...] ‘AND YOU WANT TO BE CALLED MARK SMITH!’ (151)). This crisis is presented by Smith as one of the origins of the quest for new solidarities second generation immigrants often turn


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to so as to compensate for both a lack of a locus standi of their own, and for their difficulty in articulating their Asian origins in conjunction with their Britishness. The novel shows them becoming part of a group from which they derive a sense of empowerment. People had fucked with Ranil, when he sat at the back of the class and carefully copied all teacher’s comments into his book. People had fucked with Dipesh and Hifan when they wore traditional dress in the playground. [...] But no one fucked with any of them any more because they looked like trouble. They looked like trouble in stereo. (232) As a group, they are no longer isolated youths harassed by others but eventually pluck up the courage to go to demonstrations. The newly formed community therefore allows them to find a basis for political action, even if the real challenge remains to convert their action from that of a counter-force to that of a positive one.

From the ‘local tribe’ to the ‘global tribe’ In the previous sections I have mainly posed the question of ethics and diasporas with regard to the ethical subject as an individual, leaving aside the broader issue of diasporas as potentially forming a global community and acting as a political force, an idea I briefly touched upon in my introduction. Yet this shift in focus from the individual to the group does not only imply a change in scope, but a paradigmatic shift which requires that we define the nature of the collective aggregation of diasporic individuals, whereby I mean: Are they a people (Laclau, 2005), a network, the masses, or a multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2005)? This question has been the object of several studies in recent years, whose conclusions vary mainly due to the perspective adopted as well as the definition of the nature of this aggregate of deterritorialized individuals. At this point, and before venturing into this area which is also a bone of some contention amongst contemporary political theorists, I would like to set out a few goals, or rather specify the focus I propose to limit myself to in the course of this chapter. Rather than pretend to offer a comprehensive reflection on how the collectivity of diasporic subjects could become the site of formation of a global ethics and attempt to spell out some of its principles, I propose to limit myself to two questions: what are we to think of this aggregation of collective subjects


and does it necessarily constitute a political force? The second question, which derives from the first, is: how can this aggregation of diasporic subjects devise a common language and define a common ethical and political agenda which would act as a unifying principle and help unite the diverging forces at play? Hardt and Negri’s book Multitude, which takes up the conclusions they reached in Empire and focuses on the possibility of democracy on a global scale, rests on an almost unshakeable belief in the subversive and transgressive potential of the multitude. For them, the multitude differs from ‘the people’ in the sense that ‘the people has traditionally been a unitary conception. [...] the people is one. The multitude, in contrast, is many.’ In other words, while the individuality of each component of the people seems to dissolve in the overarching framework, the multitude is closer to what I have described as an aggregate of individuals, since ‘in the multitude, social differences remain different’ and do not merge in ‘the masses’. (XIV) The multitude is composed of innumerable internal differences that can never be reduced to a unity or a single identity – different cultures, races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations; different forms of labor; different ways of living; different views of the world; and different desires. The multitude is a multiplicity of all these singular differences. The masses are also contrasted with the people because they too cannot be reduced to a unity or an identity. The masses certainly are composed of all types and sorts, but really one should not say that different social subjects make up the masses. The essence of the masses is indifference: all differences are submerged and drowned in the masses. (Hardt and Negri, 2006 [2005] XIV) One of the consequences of the indissoluble differences which characterize the multitude12 as opposed to the masses is that rather than moving in one direction and as a body of collected individualities, the multitude remains a jarring polyphony of dissonant voices, which in itself constitutes a certain potential for political action. However, one wonders if this force which they describe as a counter-force rather than a positive one can be considered a valid cornerstone on which to rest the political project of a global community. In the concluding remarks to his book On Populist Reason, Ernesto Laclau expresses in a few scathing remarks his scepticism as to the potentiality of the ‘being against’: ‘it is a matter of being against everything, everywhere. The aim is universal desertion [...]’ (Laclau, 2005, 240). Laclau’s main


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problem with Hardt and Negri’s thesis is not so much what he sees as the superficiality of their line of argumentation which to him does not make sense, since one is never against everything, all the time. It is also the fact that the heterogeneous components which Hardt and Negri see in the multitude as a category leave little if no room for common ground which is necessary for political action to take place. This question of the common language occupies centre stage in Laclau’s political paradigm and in his understanding of populism. Laclau stresses the importance of having a collective language which leaves room enough for mutual understanding and acceptance. In his analysis of the logics of the formation of collective identities in On Populist Reason, Laclau focuses on how the smaller unities which he calls the ‘demands’ can gather or unite into the group. A crucial role is played by what he calls the system of ‘equivalential links’ and the ‘floating signifiers’ whose function is to make the apparition of a common language and of a common voice possible. ‘The transition from individual to popular demands operates [...] through the construction of equivalential links. [...] This plurality of links becomes a singularity through its condensation around a popular identity’(Laclau, 2005, 94). For Laclau, all the demands are subsumed by an overarching demand which can only act as the emergent overarching one precisely because of a line of antagonism (‘the dichotomic frontier’) which helps the demands develop some awareness of their commonality. Without this line of demarcation, the demands would remain isolated and fail to coalesce into a whole. Laclau’s thesis not only identifies a key mechanism in the construction of group identity, it also points – in the negative – to one of the reasons why the global class of immigrants has failed to materialize as a group so far. Not only is the line of equivalences difficult to find in such a culturally diverse mosaic of people, the dichotomic frontier has become blurred and hazy. The circulation of a global culture everyone shares in but which represents different degrees of proximity to centres of power tends to blur the boundaries between rich and poor countries in the global world order and tone down the differences in terms of hierarchy. The illusion of belonging to an imaginary community and of sharing in with a supranational culture, which we discussed in the previous chapter in relation to Arjun Appadurai’s scapes, and in particular the ‘mediascape,’ is precisely what is problematic since it renders the whole picture difficult to read and neutralizes the impetus to fight for greater political and economic rights.


But there is also a difficulty surrounding Hardt and Negri’s optimism about the political potential of the multitude, and more specifically with their conception of what they call ‘biopolitical production.’ For them, ‘biopolitical production not only involves the production of material goods in a strictly economic sense but also touches on and produces all facets of social life, economic, cultural, and political. This biopolitical production and its expansion of the common is one strong pillar on which stands the possibility of global democracy today’ (Hardt and Negri, 2005 [2006] XI). Yet if the development of information and the accessibility enabled by communication technologies contribute to a democratization of information, the production of a global cultural and political life does not necessarily offer the sort of locus which would be required for the formation of a global polis. The more pessimistic observers of the present global conjuncture may even argue that one easily becomes drowned in a sea of information and data where one easily loses one’s footing and that the democratization of information is far from being synonymous with political empowerment. But what constitutes maybe the main obstacle to the formation of a terrain bringing together diverse diasporic populations is the paradox hinted at several times in the course of this chapter. On the one hand, rerooting implies a political and ethical reterritorialization which is first achieved at the level of the nation, as one does not become a global citizen without having been a reterritorialized one. This rerooting implies obtaining certain rights which are granted by a nation, given the fact that abstract rights are not enough. However, within the larger community of the nation, there are other platforms which grant certain rights (Baumann),13 which implies a structure comprised of two levels. What is problematic is when these two levels clash; for example in the weeks that followed 11 September 2001, British Asians found themselves targeted as Muslims and the rights they had as Muslims were soon outstripped by the suspicion brought on by their belonging to a certain religious community. The difficulty some of them had in articulating their Britishness with their being Asian did not originate in some ontological predicament but in the fact that the community of Muslims they were part of within the larger community of the nation was viewed with suspicion by some. While showing the limits of the double belonging of diasporic subjects, which is too often reduced to one component, either British or Asian, this example also offers another insight into the reasons for communitarianism. Communitarianism is too often said to be the result of a desire for a locus standi and a need for bearings, when in actual fact it originates in the essentially conflictual


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nature of a double belonging and the condition of being a racial and cultural minority within a nation. But to return to the impediments to the constituting of a global site of political intervention, and to end on a less abstract note, I propose to discuss the resurgence of the community prism and the ways in which it may clash with the interests of the nation at large, drawing by way of example on the scene of the family watching the news in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane and discovering, aghast, the first pictures of 9/11. This episode provides a telling illustration of the limitations of what Appadurai calls the ‘communities of sentiment’ (Appadurai, 1996) supposedly generated by communication technologies, and points out the importance of the community prism through which every piece of information is filtered. In this particular case, the power of representation of images is foregrounded at the expense of words, since Nazneen does not speak English and as such is not able to understand what is being said. But interestingly, the supposed transparency of images which make sense independently of language is questioned as Ali shows that whatever is decoded is interpreted according to the filter of the values of one’s community, in this case the religious community. Because the event narrated has to do with 9/11, Ali can play on both the intratextual and extratextual resonances of this episode. This episode brings the Western reader face to face with the reaction of a Muslim family in front of the television and sheds light on the reception of the event outside the West. The focal point is Nazneen who cannot understand what is said on television and merely stares blankly at the scene played over and over again and whose apocalyptic quality makes it almost unreal, as if it were a scene from a film. Her rather indifferent response to what is almost too horrible to be true is contrasted with Chanu’s worried look, as he has anticipated the consequences of this episode for Muslim immigrants in Western nations all over the world. But on an extratextual level, this episode also reminds the reader of images of kids dancing away on the streets of certain cities in Muslim countries, rejoicing at what they have seen, having been told to think of the attacks on the World Trade Center as a victory against the West. In so doing, it points to the divisive potential of communication technologies. It is not that these technologies are intrinsically divisive but rather that their effects show the limits of the idea of the would-be global community, a community whose only real source of unity is the fact that people are watching the same television images all around the world. The now legendary images of the World Trade Center triggered radically different responses precisely because of the specificity of cultural


moorings; the images of kids rejoicing on the streets sharply contrasted with those of grieving Americans, and in the middle were British Asians like Chanu, dumbfounded at the atrocity of what they were witnessing and at the same time aware of what it would mean for Asians in the West. As such it acts as a qualifier to the belief that because cable television reaches out to most places worldwide, we necessarily belong to a global community. In other words, and to take up Hardt and Negri’s claim that what is needed is a political project (‘The multitude needs a political project to bring it into existence’ (212)), we are at the stage where what could potentially emerge as the vectors of this project are in place, but the project in itself is still to be defined.

6 Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject

The question of language, bilingualism and ‘bilanguaging’ in Englishspeaking diasporic populations is a complex issue which needs to be recontextualized on various levels among which: the way diasporic subjects relate to both their mother tongue and the language of the host country; the postcolonial situation and the use of English to write back at the centre; the current status of English at the turn of the twentyfirst century and the question of the function and future of national languages in an increasingly transnational world. Let me start with the postcolonial situation as it is, from a historical point of view at least, the most obvious starting point. The fact that English was an instrument of cultural domination and colonization and was perceived as such by colonized peoples is beyond debate. Both the violence of the terms used to refer to its effects on the culture of colonized populations (Ng˜ug˜i Wa Thiong’o used the expression ‘cultural bomb’ (Wa Thiong’o, 1981)) and the strategies of linguistic ‘abrogation’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 19891) used to neutralize this tool of domination speak for themselves. Nigerian writer Ken Saro-Wiva’s novel Sozaboy, whose subtitle is ‘a novel in rotten English’ is a telling example of the length to which certain postcolonial writers felt they had to go when writing back at the centre. Saro-Wiva’s writing in ‘rotten English’, which bends the rules of English grammar and crushes basic syntactic principles is only too indicative of the force with which colonialism had crushed colonized cultures and clearly spells out the agenda of the postcolonial writer. Another question which poses itself in the colonial context, and which continues to be crucial in that of diasporic literature, is the capacity of the English language to bear the burden of the colonial experience. Indeed, even in contexts where English was chosen by writers to 125


become a lingua franca in the absence of a common language, as was the case in some African countries, doubts were raised as to its capacity to be an adequate vehicle to bear the burden of the postcolonial experience. The case of Ng˜ug˜i Wa Thiong’o is quite telling. In Decolonising the Mind, he explains how, when he started writing, the question of the choice of the language (English or the native tongue) was a much debated subject, in particular at the 1962 Makere University College conference of African writers in Uganda.2 To him, the writer who best embodies the dilemma inherent in the choice of the English language by African writers is Gabriel Okara who spelled out very clearly the conditions under which English could become a tool of communication in Africa, while anticipating the birth and subsequent role of the new Englishes.3 But one question remained: how could this imported language, which was also the language of the colonist, brought in by force, become something more than a lingua franca to bear the burden of the African experience and play an active role in the creation of a postcolonial imaginary? Even those who decided to write in English, like Chinua Achebe in Nigeria, were aware of the fact that they would have to use a different sort of English, an English whose contours had to be redefined in order to be ‘in full communion with its ancestral home, but altered to suit new African surroundings’ and thus ‘carry the weight of their [my] African experience’ (Achebe, 1975, 62).4 Like Achebe, Wa Thiong’o set out to write in English, but later reverted to his mother tongue and wrote a novel in Gı˜ku ˜ yu ˜ . There are two main reasons to Wa Thiong’o’s change of mind which he theorized in Decolonising the Mind: one has to do with the fact that English cannot bear the burden of collective memory. As he explains: Languages in their particular forms arise historically as social needs. Over a time, a particular system of verbal signposts comes to reflect a given people’s historical consciousness of their own struggles with nature and with one another. Their language becomes the memory bank of their collective struggles. Such a language comes to embody both continuity and change in their historical consciousness. [...] To so annihilate a language is tantamount to destroying that people’s collective memory bank in their past achievements and failures, say their experience over time, which forms the basis of their identity as a people. (Wa Thiong’o, 1997 [1981] 57) Another reason has to do with the fact that because Nigerian children were taught English at school, Gı˜ku ˜ yu ˜ remained the language spoken at

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home. This created a situation of de facto compartmentalization which reflected back on the function each language came to fulfill for the Nigerian child. English became the language of intellectual achievement, while Gı˜ku ˜ yu ˜ remained the language of affect. Ng˜ug˜i tells an interesting anecdote about the way certain words come to have their full meaning in the mother tongue, as if the adopted language only conveyed some vague impression of the signified while keeping it at a distance: Since the new language as a means of communication was a product of and was reflecting the ‘real language of life’ elsewhere, it could never as spoken or written properly reflect or imitate the real life of that community. This may in part explain why technology always appears to us as slightly external, their product and not ours. The word ‘missile’ used to hold an alien far away sound until I recently learnt its equivalent in Gı˜ku ˜ yu ˜ , ngurukuhı˜, and it made me apprehend it differently. Learning, for a colonial child, became a cerebral activity and not an emotionally felt experience. (Wa Thiong’o, 1986, 16–17) This awareness of the limitations of the English language as an apt vehicle to convey the substance of the African experience, provides an insightful entry point into some of the issues raised in diasporic literatures as to languages and the way the diasporic subject relates to them. Yet there are marked differences. For diasporic subjects, bilingualism is not the result of a choice: it is a fact, a constitutive element, which has led critics like Linda Hutcheon to write that this ‘doubleness’ is ‘the essence of migrant experience’ (Hutcheon, 1990, 9). Even among diasporic subjects who come from former British colonies, English has ceased to be seen as an instrument of colonial domination and has gradually become regarded as a tool of redefinition – whether it be on a social or on a more personal level. For example, in novels of the South Asian diaspora, which I will be discussing in more detail in this chapter, learning the English language is not seen as a loss of one’s native culture and language, but as a liberating experience and a way of bypassing some of the constraints of the home culture, like the patriarchal system for example. In other words, it seems that the immigrants’ attitude to what John Skinner has called the ‘stepmother tongue’ (Skinner, 1998)5 has become increasingly ambiguous for various reasons which have to do with the personal situations of diasporic subjects but also with the fact that England has ceased to embody the colonial power.


As a consequence, the very notions of mother tongue, father tongue and stepmother tongue need to be reassessed in relation to the current context. But one problem remains, which has clearly been understudied and which is the capacity of the two languages – the mother tongue and the adopted language – not so much to express what Wa Thiong’o refers to as ‘the real’, as its capacity to express affect. The very possibility of being in two languages at the same time, not only in terms of the mastery of the language but the way one relates to the world through this language needs to be reassessed. This issue calls for a clearer distinction between bilingualism and bilanguaging. Indeed, speaking two languages is different from experiencing what Gloria Anzaldua has called border experience in the sense that the latter implies a merging of languages (Anzaldua, 1997). This issue is all the more interesting as it ties up with two major concerns at the turn of the twenty-first century. The first one is the position of the English language. The issue of the cultural domination of the English language, which was already a moot point in postcolonial studies, takes on a new turn as English has eclipsed other formerly colonial languages and is now enjoying a position of unprecedented supremacy worldwide. For some years now, linguists, critics and theorists have raised the alarm about what some see as a death of languages (Derrida, 1998 [1996] 301; Glissant, 1996, 42; Hagège, 2006; Hassner, 1995, 309) which may in some cases foreshadow a death of cultures and a triumph of a global culture which would go hand in hand with a waning and disappearance of local ones (Crystal, 2000; Nettle and Romaine, 2000). This situation does not only generate theoretical debates about the strategies of survival of local cultures but also fears – fears of the disappearance of other languages, fears of a culturally globalized world where local languages and cultures have disappeared6 – and is as such a timely issue. If today’s situation may appear as the natural consequence of the spread of the English language since the colonial era, the situation is more complicated since the English spoken worldwide is not only queen’s English and its regional variations, but another form of English used as means rather than as an end in itself, in the context of the globalized capitalist economy. The whole concept of Anglophone culture thus needs to be put in perspective, both historically and theoretically, and tied to the problematics of official languages and vernacular ones. But this concept, one could argue, also needs to be appraised in relation to dead languages and living ones. Indeed, the case of English at the turn of the


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twenty-first century is far from being simple. Historically speaking, it took years for the English language to become accepted in England as a language imported into the country by Saxon invaders, so much so that in the sixteenth century, Latin was still considered as a noble language, that is the language spoken by the social elite (Talib, 2002). The introduction of English as the language of jurisdiction was gradual (the 1536 Act of Union was delivered in English) and points to the dichotomy between an official language and a vernacular one,7 in so far as the bulk of the population would speak English at a time when important texts where written in Latin, generating a de facto exclusion of uneducated people.8 Only in relatively recent times has English become the instrument of colonization we have discussed. But at the turn of the twentyfirst century, it seems that two contrary movements are operating in and around this language. On a global scale, English is, to differing degrees, the language of four groups of people: native speakers; speakers of former British colonies (in this group we can distinguish between people of Anglo-Saxon descent and people who have received a formal education in English and who have grown up in two languages, English being sometimes the official language of these former colonies); a third group which includes diasporas in the English-speaking world, for whom English has become the language of everyday life; finally, the ever-increasing group of speakers outside the English-speaking world who use this language in the workplace, in the context of international corporate capitalism. This diffraction of English implies two things: English is and has become the language of groups 1, 2 and 3 and is linked to a reality lived and articulated in English. But in the case of the fourth group, we can wonder to what extent English has not become gradually severed from its historical context and culture of origin to serve as mere instrument of communication, as a glorified ‘carrier of meaning.’ Interestingly enough, while the first trend which includes groups 1, 2 and 3 has added to the wealth of the English language through hybridization and ‘créolisation’ (Glissant), we can wonder if the increasingly important phenomenon linked to the use of English in multinational firms does not have the opposite effect in the sense that because it is meant to be an instrument of communication, the opacity of the language as well as everything that could impede communication is erased and English is reduced to its bare bones (Lecercle, 2004). In other words, it seems to me that one of the questions today is no longer how to curb the rules of the English language and fight its cultural supremacy but rather, what exactly has happened to the English language in the process?


The third area of reflection I propose to examine in this chapter is the more general context in which this renegotiation of the status, role and nature of the English language is happening. Not only has the English language become deterritorialized and redistributed between Anglophones and English-speaking populations; this very movement takes place in a larger context of gradual erosion of national languages in an increasingly transnational world. In an essay with a provocative title ‘What are languages good for in a transnational world?’ Florian Coulmas raised one of the key issues we are faced with today, which is that of the need for national languages in an increasingly transnational world and the fact that not only have national languages lost their sovereignty, they are the cause and bone of contention in many identity claims throughout the world. Stressing the identity of language and nation is one thing, but demanding political autonomy for a linguistically defined group is, of course, something quite different. Languages have always been used to establish or claim a sphere of influence. As imperial languages they have been imposed on dominated ethnic groups by whoever had the power to do so. A uniform code has more often than not been regarded as a matter of administrative convenience for governing a country of empire. However, ideologizing language is a different matter; and if language can be employed as a symbol of nationality by a dominant group, dominated groups may, of course, exert the same logic and make political claims based on their linguistic identity. Thus, while the idea of a national language and its political enforcement may be said to function as a cohesive force, the reverse is also true. Language may be a disruptive a force as any culture marker, and it is clear that the national language-ideology has bred intra-communal strife and, in a sense, created minorities in many countries that have established themselves as states in modern times. (Coulmas, 1988, 11) In this passage, Coulmas takes another angle on the question of language and identity which departs from the perspective often advocated in postcolonial debates that reclaiming one’s language and linguistic sovereignty is the alpha and omega of emancipation from the colonial yoke. Coulmas’s reflections open up to a recentering of the question around the idea that language is a destructive force as much as it helps create communities. This question, which Coulmas asks from the vantage point of politics and international relations at the turn of the twenty-first


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century therefore calls for a more theoretical approach as to the question of language and identity. This question is at the heart of Derrida’s reflections on language – and in particular the way he uncouples language and nation in Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin – but also runs throughout the works of Gilles Deleuze as well as those of theorists of hybridity such as Gloria Anzaldua, Edouard Glissant or Walter Mignolo and opens onto the question of how to envisage identity outside a centripetal mode, in a rhizomatic mode rather than one rooted in territory (Deleuze) and outside a pattern of congruence between individuals, language and the nation (Deleuze).

Mother tongue, father tongue and stepmother tongue: rethinking the genealogy of postcolonial linguistic legacies The way a diasporic subject relates to both mother tongue and father tongue9 is a complex matter which does not involve personal criteria only (such as gender or social status), even if the importance of these criteria should not be played down but is constantly determined by the political situation and the balance of power between the two countries the immigrant is related to. In this sense, the redefinition of the relation between Britain and its colonies in the postcolonial era and the way the two countries are perceived by the diasporas plays a crucial role. This redefinition of the ‘lignes de force’ between Britain and its former colonies has had a direct impact on the way immigrants situate themselves in relation to the two languages they inhabit. More generally, it prompts a reassessment of the dichotomy mother tongue/father tongue. One of the most eloquent definitions of a father tongue to my knowledge is that given by Marlene Nourbese Philip in her poem ‘Discourse on the Logic of Language’ (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136). A Canadian writer of Caribbean origin, who now lives in Canada, in a country whose status was comparable to that of a colony, Nourbese refers to English as a father tongue, a language whose function is to carry a symbolic order but not to express affect, generating in the bilingual subject a tension between the language of affect, the mother tongue and the language imposed on him/her, in a situation of domination: the father tongue. English is my mother tongue.


A mother tongue is not not a foreign lan lan lang Language l/anguish anguish – a foreign anguish. English is my father tongue. A father tongue is a foreign language, therefore English is a foreign language not a mother tongue [...]. (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 136) The style and structure of this poem suggest the extremely painful process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue and make it resurface from beneath the father tongue. In the accompanying journal she kept when working on ‘She Tries Her Tongue’, Nourbese Philip describes the process which consists in unearthing the mother tongue from beneath the father tongue which will ultimately allow her to get to what she calls the ‘essence’: I am laying claims to two heritages – one very accessible, the other hidden. The apparent accessibility of European culture is dangerous and misleading especially what has been allowed to surface and become de rigueur. To get anything of value out of it, one has to mine, very, very deeply and only after that does one begin to see the connections and linkages with other cultures. (M. Nourbese Philip in Morrell, 1994, 103) For M Nourbese Philip, English is not only a father tongue which has imposed a new signifying system and fails to express affect; it also bars access to the mother tongue which one has to literally dig up and ‘mine for,’ a metaphor which not only suggests erasure and oblivion but also burial and links up with the history of slavery which underpins Nourbese’s work on both a thematic and a formal level. The expression ‘mother tongue’ is to be taken at face value,10 and this continuity mother/tongue/language inscribes language at the heart of the body as both a physical and a cognitive activity.


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In the same way that power relations between colonizing nations and their colonies have evolved, the status, role and representation of the English language have changed and the whole genealogy of linguistic legacies needs to be re-evaluated. In the next section I propose to discuss how English has not only ceased to be a father tongue but is increasingly seen as a stepmother tongue, an outside element added without it threatening the organic whole and whose relation to the speaker is potentially more distant. The case of the stepmother tongue in Brick Lane by Monica Ali Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane,11 to which I have already referred, offers an interesting example of the way the linguistic genealogy is redefined in a diasporic context. To a certain extent, Nazneen, the heroine, and her husband Chanu embody the difference between the diasporic subject and the postcolonial one in the sense that while Chanu constantly situates himself in a postcolonial perspective and continues to think of England in terms of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ some thirty-seven years after he has left Bangladesh, Nazneen is rather neutral and has no misgivings towards the culture or language of the host country, which she sees more as a stepmother tongue, a language which has no claim over her and which, as such, does not pose a threat to her identity and self-representation. This difference in attitudes is not only to be explained in a diachronic perspective, as the consequence of the age difference between Chanu and his wife, and the larger context of the redefinition of the relationship between Britain and its former colonies in post-independence years; it also has to do with the possibilities in store for Nazneen in a country where she feels less pressurized by the patriarchal society she comes from. In this novel, not only does Monica Ali describe and chronicle the development of the ties Nazneen gradually forms with the English language, it also foregrounds the role of cross-cultural representations and of the imaginary in matters related to language. In other words, what matters is not so much what the English language does or does not do for Nazneen as the way it is perceived and invested with new possibilities. Because she does not actually speak English when she settles in England, and has never had to learn it at school, she has never experienced the ‘cultural bomb’ I referred to in the introduction to this chapter, or at least has never been aware of it. Chanu, on the other hand, is a perfect example of the colonial child who has had to learn English literature, which he still likes to quote, as a way of showing that he is educated and even sometimes to comfort himself when he feels disempowered and frustrated by the experience of immigration.


In this context, Nazneen’s relation to the English language is presented as neutral. At the outset of the novel, she even suspects the English language of being disempowering, probably because she projects her husband’s own frustrations onto it,12 as well as her own lack of confidence as a young uneducated girl married to an older man who bars her access to education in the UK. Indeed, even in her own language, Nazneen is said to lack confidence and to be self-conscious. The first stage of her relation to the English language is best embodied in the episode which describes her looking at signs on the streets. Wherever she looks, Nazneen sees signs which only tell her what not to do: ‘The notice said: No Smoking, No Eating, No Drinking. All the signs, thought Nazneen, only tell you what not to do’ (46). Another point which needs to be mentioned before turning to the discussion of the way Nazneen comes to fantasize over the English language, is her relation to other languages like Arabic, which she does not speak, but which remind her of home. Although she does not actually speak Arabic, she knows some surats and is fascinated by the physical appearance of the Qur’an in Arabic which to her verges on the sacred. What is more, she relates differently to the Bengali and to the Arabic versions of the Qur’an. In this context, the English language, which has no claim over her whatsoever and which she does not even resent for being the language of the colonists soon appears to her to offer a wealth of new possibilities. She soon starts to envy the facility with which other immigrants, more articulate than her have appropriated the language of the host country. She overestimates their skills and fantasizes over the power given by the adopted tongue. A good example of that is Karim, the middle man who provides her with some work and acts as an intermediary between the garment factory and herself. This young man, also from Bangladesh, was born in England. With his jeans and his cell phone, he represents a perfect hybrid of both worlds, which leads her to overestimate his mastery of the English language. One day, she notices that for some reason he stammers in Bengali, which is something he never does in English, and she consequently forms a theory according to which the new language one speaks in one’s country of adoption is a language in which one is more confident and a lot more fluent. Only at the end of the book does Nazneen realize that despite all the markers of integration, Karim stammered because he was in love with her and was consequently very shy. When he confesses to her that he stammered in both languages, but that Nazneen did not notice that he stammered in English, she is surprised. What is interesting is that as a woman,


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trapped in the conventions of a traditional Bangladeshi community, she projects a whole world of repressed desires and mad fantasies onto the English language. The language of the adopted country, which she does not speak but would like to learn and in which some of her fellow countrymen seem so at ease, is romanticized and becomes more than an instrument of communication or a conveyor of meaning. It becomes literally a tool of liberation. As she learns British codes of behaviour, the English language, and as she grows more confident, Nazneen also develops her hermeneutic skills and becomes able to recontextualize markers of identity from various contexts and assess the degree to which the hybrid is a successful one. In the case of Karim, she realizes that his recent passion for traditional clothes, is a sign of the cultural void which inhabits him: she, who had always thought of herself as an uninteresting, uneducated foreigner realizes that unlike Karim, she has a locus standi, a place she can call her own and can cling to, a set of fixed bearings which can accompany her in her diasporic journey. She also understands that the reason why he needs her is because she represents ‘the real thing’, a woman from Bangladesh, a kind of living substitute for the motherland which he has never seen. The way English is represented in Brick Lane, and which departs as we have seen from the more traditional postcolonial perspective of English as a tool of linguistic domination, is emblematic of a certain type of diasporic novel written by women which envisages language learning as the first step towards integration. Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel The Namesake, which also features several rather independent and adventurous female characters, belongs to the same vein and explores the way women can find a way out of the predefined role models imposed by traditional societies by embracing English or other languages as tools of reinvention. In other words, the question of the liberating power of the English language should always be recontextualized in relation to issues of gender and not only dealt with in abstracto. Moreover, what is foregrounded is the function of English as a carrier of a new symbolic order, rather than its potential affective dimension. In Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia, which I shall discuss in the next section, its absence of predisposition for intimacy is repeatedly stressed as one of its main characteristics. In other words, English is seldom presented as a mother tongue with a strong affective potential, which may be a long-term effect of its colonial legacy, but rather as a stepmother tongue, more distant and less threatening.


Of bilingualism and bilanguaging: being at home in two different languages In the introduction to this chapter I have put forward the idea that the question of bilingualism and what it implies in the diasporic subject has been greatly overlooked in the existing critical literature, for reasons I shall discuss in more detail in the next section. One such reason which I would like to mention in passing, however, is the spread of a conception of language as an instrument of communication, which has become prevalent even among linguists as Jean-Jacques Lecercle has argued (Lecercle, 2004). One thing that strikes me is that if postcolonial debates have focused on the epistemological and ontological consequences of the imposition of a new language, which suggests that the importance of languages and languaging has been fully taken on board, the widespread use of the term ‘code-switching’ in relation not only to diasporic populations but also to Westernized populations like the Indian middleclass is quite disturbing and to a certain extent bars access to what I consider to be one of the keys to understanding the way hybrid identities survive in two cultures and are renegotiated by them in a diasporic context. There is a lot more to this renegotiation than a mere blurring of languages and cultures. The following discussion of bilingualism and bilanguaging hinges on this hypothesis: in the process of renegotiation, cultures and languages are not mixed, they do not blend, but are accommodated in different capacities. In other words, the diasporic condition shows the limits of bilingualism in the classical sense of the term, not because equal mastery of two languages is impossible, nor because the asymmetry of the bilingual subject is the reflection or a more general asymmetry linked to the power struggle of the two countries whose languages are spoken by the diasporic subject (Mignolo, 2000) but because the diasporic subject, for personal or historical reasons, assigns each language to a specific task for the simple reason that he cannot relate to the two languages in the same way. It is in this sense that although the postcolonial framework has lost some of its validity in the context of diasporic studies, the conception of language which underpins theories such as that of Wa Thiong’o remains not only valid but needs to be reasserted or else there is a risk of lapsing into thinking that language is but an instrument. As Alton Becker put it in an essay on languaging, there is a lot more to languaging than simply learning a new code: Entering another culture, another history of interactions, we face what is basically a problem of memory. Learning a new way of


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languaging is not learning a new code, into which the units of my own domain of discourse are re-encoded, although the process may begin that way; and if the new way of languaging shares a history of my own, the exuberances and deficiencies may not get in the way of simple interactions. However, at some point the silences do get in the way and the wording out gets slow and hard. A new code would not be so hard and painful; a new way of being in the world is. (Becker, 1991, 227) And if there is more to languaging than simply learning a new code, the next question is: can we be fully bilingual, not in the sense of proficient in two languages, or with a working knowledge of two languages, but bilingual in the sense of having the exact same capacities to feel, to express and to articulate things in two languages? In Monolingualism of the Other or the Prosthesis of Origin, to which I have already referred in Chapter 2, Jacques Derrida discusses the nature of the link between individuals and their mother tongue. As we have seen, his approach is both theoretical and biographical in the sense that on various occasions, he refers to his childhood in Algeria in colonial times and to the way French culture and language were imposed on the population. The burden of past experience and of a history heavy with affect is important if we are to understand his claim that ‘I only have one language’ (Derrida, 1996, 2). The use of the verb ‘have’ itself is interesting, for if Derrida could not deny the fact that people sometimes speak different languages, they only ‘have’ one, which is their own. But Derrida quickly qualifies his assertion, adding that this language ‘is not mine’, meaning ‘I do not own’ it. In Chapter 2 we have seen how the idea of not owning the language was linked to his view of how the colonist, precisely because he does not own the language, has to create a mythology so as to convince himself and others that he does. And as we shall see, later on in this chapter, this paradoxical statement also opens onto an uncoupling of the continuity individuals/language/nation. For the time being, I would like to concentrate on the ambiguous position put forward by Derrida which is that even though I do not own my language, in the sense that it is not my language but the language through which I cannot help but speak, this language continues to exert a certain form of determinism upon me. Because I was brought up in this language and it has become the receptacle of my memories, and because I grew up and became whole, psychologically speaking, in this language and in the context where it was spoken, I cannot fully express myself, to the same degree of precision and intensity in another language. This


other language somehow does not carry the same emotional charge; its words do not resonate in the same way as their equivalent in my mother tongue. Hence Derrida’s claim that It is on the shores of the French language, uniquely, and never inside nor ever outside of it, on the unplaccable line of its coast that, since forever, and lastlingly [à demeure], I wonder if one can love, enjoy oneself [jouir], pray, die from pain, or just die, plain and simple, in another language or without telling anyone about it, without even speaking at all. (Derrida, 1996, 2) As a result, the process of translation can only result in a loss of affect and of intensity. Drawing on Derrida’s claim that we are first and foremost monolingual and speak our mother tongue, or rather that the mother tongue continues to speak through us – even though Derrida’s position is more complex than that as we shall see – I would like to discuss the representation of the mother tongue, the stepmother tongue and other languages spoken in diasporic situations and raise the question of the possibility of bilingualism in the diasporic subject. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri or ‘the silence of the polyglot’ The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri chronicles the lives of two generations of immigrants from India to the US. However, for some of the characters, the experience of bilingualism and that of polyglossia is more linked to the children than to the parents, which slightly alters the perspective. Instead of looking at the new language from outside in, that is to say from the exterior perspective of the freshly arrived immigrants who do not always master the new language, which was Nazneen’s case in the novel by Monica Ali, Jhumpa Lahiri tackles the issue of language in relation to second generation immigrants for whom bilingualism is a constitutive element. It should also be said that the fact that the novel is set in the US introduces another major difference since English is more remotely associated – if it is at all – with colonial domination in the US context than in former British colonies. The question of language crops up at a very early stage in the life of Ashima’s son Gogol, who soon realizes that his name is nowhere to be found in his immediate context, neither at school nor in town.13 It does not seem to be inscribed in the geography of the place nor be part of its symbolic heritage. The idea of geographical inscription has been abundantly


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discussed in studies dealing with colonization. The need to appropriate a place symbolically by renaming it has frequently been highlighted. In his book Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literature, Terry Goldie studies a double phenomenon linked to the renaming of places in colonized countries. The best-known strategy is for settlers to change indigenous place names to European ones, so as to assert their presence on the lands they have colonized. But there are other instances of settlers using indigenous place names (for their companies for example, like Mohawk Motors). Goldie shows that it is part of a strategy of legitimization which he calls ‘indigenization’ (Goldie, 1989, 13), as if by taking an indigenous name the settler symbolically became heir to the cultural heritage of the first nation. Both strategies are of course artificial but their persistence in colonized countries shows the importance of the idea of lineage and natural inheritance and suggests that it actually plays an important role in the process of the shaping of either individual or group identity. This idea of symbolic filiation is clearly instantiated in several episodes of The Namesake, in particular in the cemetery episode. One day, Gogol and his friends from the art class are taken to a cemetery where they are asked by the teacher to reproduce the inscriptions written on tombstones. As was expected, no tombstone bears the name Gogol, while the other children revel in the discovery of their names which are engraved on an ancient stone slab. The metaphorical meaning of this episode is quite obvious: not only is Gogol alienated from everyday life, he is also alienated from the world of the ancestors and the cultural heritage of the country where he was born. Yet as Gogol grows older, he seems less alienated and almost plans integration as a conscious choice. One of the main steps towards integration consists in a change of name from Gogol to Nikhil, a name which does not brand him as a foreigner. The chapters recounting his teenage years show a character definitely more American than Indian, who can afford to forget about his roots for a while, one who has stored up many years of cultural representations linked to the US. By the time Gogol starts going to university, the question of identity seems irrelevant and artificial. One day, Gogol is invited to attend a lecture given by his cousin, in which the question of identity in Asian American communities is discussed. The following quotation, which mocks the dogmatism of postcolonial theories of identity and the obsession of scholars with the question of marginality, stresses Gogol’s new-found Americanness. It also implicitly calls for a theory of identity which distinguishes between first generation immigrants


and their children. One day he attends a panel discussion about Indian novels written in English. [...] Gogol is bored by the panelists, who keep referring to something called ‘marginality,’ as if it were some sort of medical condition. [...] “Teleogically speaking, ABCDs are unable to answer the question ‘Where are you from?’ ” the sociologist on the panel declares. Gogol has never heard the term ABCD. He eventually gathers that it stands for ‘Americanborn confused deshi.’ In other words, him. [...] all their friends always refer to India simply as desh. But Gogol never thinks of India as desh. He thinks of it as Americans do, as India. (Lahiri, 2003, 118) As was to be expected, the in-betweenness he fails to come to terms with as a teenager catches up with him as a young adult. Moushumi, the girl whom he marries, has gone further than him in her denial of her roots and culture to what could be termed a willing suspension of memory. Because she neither wants to be tied to a context, determined by her origins, nor to adopt the identity of the mother country, Moushumi decides to go and live in France for a few years. There she finds a third place, an adopted country that has no claim on her. This no man’s land, lacking a real bond or emotional connection allows her to express her personality fully. At her parents’ insistence, she’d majored in chemistry, for they were hopeful she would follow in her father’s footsteps. Without telling them, she’s pursued a double major in French. Immersing herself in a third language, a third culture, had been her refuge – she approached French, unlike things American or Indian, without guilt, or misgiving, or expectation of any kind. It was easier to turn her back on the two countries that could claim her in favour of one that had no claim whatsoever. (Lahiri, 2003, 214) This extract implies that because she has no personal connection to France, this adopted third space becomes a place where she can reinvent herself and where being foreign ceases to be traumatic and becomes empowering. The end of the novel, however, suggests that things are more complex than they seem and that bilingualism generates a certain alienation which is not unlike what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the silence of the polyglot’ (Kristeva, 1991, 16). This expression, ‘silence of the polyglot’, goes against the grain14 and questions the assumption that the mastery of several languages is an asset. Kristeva’s position seems to imply a certain idealism, in the sense that she


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seems to consider identity as a unified whole. Yet Kristeva’s position is interesting in so far as she considers the mother tongue as cementing personal identity. As a consequence, instead of being empowering, the ability to speak several languages constitutes a breach in this unity and prevents the polyglot from being truly at home in any one language. Not speaking in one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child – cherished and useless – that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you. You improve your ability with another instrument, as one expresses oneself with algebra or the violin. You can become a virtuoso with this new device that moreover gives you a new body, just as artificial and sublimated – some say sublime. You have a feeling that the new language is a resurrection: new skin, new sex. But the illusion bursts when you hear, upon listening to a recording for instance, that the melody of your voice comes back to you as a peculiar sound, out of nowhere [...]. Thus, between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one ends up no longer saying them. (Kristeva, 1991, 16) Like Kristeva’s silent polyglot, who bears his mother tongue within himself like a handicapped child, Moushumi gradually realizes that a third space and a third language cannot make up for the void left by the denial of her cultural heritage and that the empowering phase is soon followed by the bitter realization that the new language cannot allow her to reach a stage of ontological plenitude. To a certain extent, the example of Lahiri’s novel is a good illustration of the first part of Derrida’s position on language, namely the determinism exerted by the mother tongue and its role as a constitutive element. Another point which needs to be discussed is the locus of the idiosyncrasy of the mother tongue. Is the message delivered in the mother tongue different because of one’s ability or lack of ability to convey it in another language, or does this difference have to do with the idiosyncrasy of languages? Derrida’s reflections on translation and the fact that something is necessarily lost along the way in the passage from one language to another, suggests that languages are by essence untranslatable, although the word ‘essence’ falls short of expressing the contingent element constitutive of this idiosyncrasy and linked to the fact that languages are different also because they are rooted in different histories and contexts and have borne


different collective memories. Derrida’s position also invites us to reflect on the fact that a language always resonates in relation to the context it is rooted in. It does not operate in a context-free realm and on the level of fluxes of signifiers and signifieds, but develops and expands around a given socio-historical nexus which is constitutive of its idiosyncrasy and gives it a specific resonance. I propose to illustrate this idea of ‘resonance’ of a language with an example from Marina Lewycka’s15 first novel16 A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. This also implies that the initial dichotomy – the mother tongue as the language of affect as opposed to the father tongue, as the language of cognitive development – needs to be questioned and redefined in the context of diasporic experience, maybe as the language one lives in as opposed to the language one works in. Of the idiosyncrasy of languages: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka The tragic-comic mode of the passage I propose to discuss will I hope provide a short digression as well as an illustration of what I have approached from a theoretical angle in the last paragraph and in particular the idea of a specific resonance of a language. The novel recounts the story of the protagonist’s father who decides to remarry after his wife’s death. His new fiancée, a gorgeous-looking Ukrainian divorcée, is a great deal younger than him, which leads his daughter to harbour doubts as to the true motivations of the Ukrainian fiancée for marrying her rather unglamorous father. Predictably, the father’s Ukrainian protégée soon turns out to be a passport seeker and a social climber who takes advantage of the old man and eventually bullies him. One day, the father confesses to his daughter that his new wife has insulted him and even threatened him, before adding, as if this were the last straw, that she had done so in Russian. Of course, for him, Russian epitomizes the oppressor, the Russian enemy and as such it crystallizes fears and anguish. Although it is uttered in a radically different context – that of England, a safe haven – this comment in the language of the oppressor is enough to bring back traumatic memories and conjure up a world of past sufferings. The evocative power of language is thus hinted at and dealt with in the comic mode. For example, in the following extract, the father phones his daughter and lets her know that he suspects that his young wife wants to kill him. His fear does not emanate so much from the fact that she has uttered a threat as from the fact that the threat was uttered in Russian. Then he phones me. His voice is shrill and breathy. ‘I think she means to kill me, Nadia.’ ‘She really said that, about returning to the graveyard.’


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‘In Russian. Said all in Russian.’ ‘Pappa, the language doesn’t matter ...’ ‘No, on contrary, language is supremely important. In language are encapsulated not only thoughts but cultural values ...’ (Lewycka, 2005, 139) There are at least two levels of interpretation possible when reading this passage. The first level plays on its comic tone and could be paraphrased as follows: the clucky old father is losing his marbles and starts confusing things. He is no longer able to distinguish between first and second degree and is taking his wife’s mock threat seriously. Yet there is a second level of understanding, more serious and almost tragic: this poor old man who has known oppression and has lived in a traumatic context where Russian has become closely associated with it, is brought back to these painful memories by the mere resonance of words uttered in Russian. Interestingly, the second interpretation counts as much as the first one and highlights the affective dimension of language in a tragic-comic mode. It could be summed up as follows: any utterance retains an affective charge linked to the language it is uttered in, and this affective charge goes far beyond the signifier. The affective load of the country of origin is carried to another country, even if the context is radically different. In the first movement of this section, we have established the supremacy of the mother tongue and discussed Derrida’s assertion that we are first and foremost monolingual, even though there is a certain form of polyglossia which I have decided to leave aside for the time being. Indeed, at this stage, the question which needs to be answered is how to articulate this position, taking into account the fact that some of us live in two languages. In other words, the question which needs to be addressed is that of the distinction between bilingualism and bilanguaging. The difference between bilingualism and bilanguaging is a matter of both location and degree, in the sense that individuals may be said to be bilingual, when they ‘have’ two languages, but the idea of real bilingualism, as we have seen, is something more and refers to the possibility of being at home in two languages, immersed in their culture and history. And since one can only have one home, bilanguaging is by necessity linked to the situation of individuals who live what Mignolo or Anzaldua refer to as the border experience. In her preface to La Frontera, Gloria Anzaldua describes the situation and the language of the frontera [border] in the following terms: The switching of ‘codes’ in this book from English to Castilian Spanish to the North Mexican dialect to Tex-Mex to a sprinkling


of Nahuatl to a mixture of all these, reflects my language, a new language – the language of the Borderlands. There, at the juncture of cultures, languages cross-pollinate and are revitalized; they die and are born. Presently this infant language, this bastard language, Chicano Spanish, is not approved by any society. But we Chicanos no longer feel that we need to beg entrance, that we need always to make the first overture – to translate to Anglo, Mexicans and Latinos, apology blurting out of our mouths with every step. (Anzaldua, 1989, 55) In this description, Anzaldua points at the fact that the difference between bilingualism and bilanguaging is not only situational but that there is a real difference in the way languages interact or do not interact in a situation of bilanguaging. The language of border living is essentially hybrid; it mixes languages and has a subversive potential in the sense that it telescopes high forms with lower forms: Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language, for a people who are neither Spanish nor live in a country in which Spanish is the first language; for a people who live in a country in which English is the reigning tongue but who are not Anglo; for a people who cannot entirely identify with either standard (formal, Castilian) Spanish nor standard English, what recourse is left to them but to create their language? A language to which they can connect their identity, one capable of communicating the realities and values to themselves – a language with terms that are neither espagnol ni ingles, but both. We speak, a patois, a forked tongue, a variation of two languages. (Anzaldua, 1989, 55) However, if the language of borderliving is a forked tongue which displaces the borders between languages so as to create zones of overlap and congruence, bilingualism involves a different process. To me, it seems that this process is closer to what Deleuze has described in his works on writers writing in a foreign language. In his Essays Critical and Clinical, Gilles Deleuze focuses on a set of texts written by writers whose mother tongue is not English and contends that when writers express themselves in a language which is not their mother tongue, they make language ‘stammer.’ Stammering in this context is not to be understood as a failing or shortcoming of the message produced, but rather as a way of pushing language to its limits by inhabiting it from outside, from the outside position of the foreigner.


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This is what Deleuze calls using the language in the minor mode, in the musical sense of the term – bringing it close to imbalance through the use of ‘dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium.’ We can conceive of two languages mixing with each other, with incessant transitions from one to the other; yet each of them nonetheless remains a homogeneous system of equilibrium, and their mixing takes place in speech. But this is not how great authors proceed, even though Kafka is a Czech writing in German, and Beckett an Irishman (often) writing in French, and so on. They do not mix two languages together, not even a minor language and a major language, though many of them are linked to minorities as a sign of their vocation. What they do, rather, is invent a minor use of the major language within which they express themselves entirely; they minorize this language, much as in music, where the minor mode refers to dynamic combinations in perpetual disequilibrium. They are great writers by virtue of this minorization: they make language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation. This exceeds the possibilities of speech and attains the power of the language, or even of language in its entirety. This means that a great writer is always like a foreigner in the language in which he expresses himself, even if this is his native tongue. At the limit, he draws his strength from a mute and unknown minority that belongs only to him. He is a foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a non-preexistent foreign language within his own language. He makes the language itself scream, stutter, stammer or murmur. (Deleuze, 1998, 109–10) This ‘stammering’, Deleuze argues, sends a ripple through language and makes it vibrate. The stammering repeats the language, reiterates it, and takes it to a point of dissolution and fragmentation (the rather enigmatic ‘witch’s line’). Deleuze’s concept of ‘stammering’ is difficult to describe and understand, while at the same time imposing itself as self-evident to anyone who actually experiences life in two languages. Even the most skilled linguist cannot deny the prominence of the mother tongue as the prime mover, the first linguistic site which never deserts the native speaker, even he who has been exiled in a foreign language for a number of years. For him, the second language always speaks in a polyphonic mode, as


if the first degree meaning were heard at the same time as the second degree; it is in this sense that language is ‘reiterated’, meaning that it is given in two modes, the figurative and the abstract. For example, even though our exiled speaker understands the meaning of idioms such as ‘raining cats and dogs’, the actual cats are always more present to him in his mind’s eye, than to the native speaker of the language who no longer sees them. To return to my discussion of bilingualism, now that we have established that the nature of the interaction between languages is not akin to a displacement of the borders of each language but is rather like tuning to another mode, I would like to discuss more specifically what exactly happens in the bilingual experience of diasporic subjects. In the course of this chapter, not only have we established the primacy of the mother tongue, we have also established the importance of the resonance of a language in relation to the context in which it was heard or uttered as well as the fact that what happens in two languages is not exactly similar but different in terms of mode, whether it be in the Deleuzian terminology of major or minor modes or in my analogy with the polyphonic mode. Drawing on Deleuze, in the next section, I propose to discuss the way in which bilingual subjects do not mix languages, although they like the odd cross-linguistic play-on-words or occasionally indulge in games of code-switching. But they assign each language, the mother tongue and the adopted language, different functions, or rather they find themselves using different languages in different areas of their lives and activities. In the example of Jhumpa Lahiri’s novel and our discussion of the case of Moushumi, we have discussed the fact that the affective proximity, or on the other hand the distance a language gives us, can be used to accommodate certain situations, for example by putting emotionally stressful situations at a distance. This aspect of the diasporic experience, which I refer to as the de facto compartmentalization of language, is therefore a constitutive element of diasporic identity and life. Languages and the de facto compartmentalization of the diasporic subject: Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina Garcia With its focus on Cuban exiles in the US, Garcia’s novel turns our attention to a context which is no longer that of former colonies and the colonial power, as in the novels of Ali or Lahiri we have discussed in the previous sections, but one where the potential of English as a tool for reinvention is pushed to a radical point. This issue is tied up with the overall theme of the book, the question of lineage and continuity,


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which is conveyed through the focus on three generations of women, Celia the grandmother, Lourdes her daughter who has migrated to the US, and Pilar, the granddaughter, who tries to reconnect with her Cuban heritage which her mother has turned her back on. This disruption of the continuity mother/motherland/mother tongue is a pivotal point in the novel and bears directly on the way the adopted language is represented. The first point I would like to discuss is the potential of the English language (as the adopted language) to offer room for reinvention. Not only does Lourdes adopt the English language, she also embraces the ideals of the host country, its liberal economy, its patriotism, even its food. Her rejection of her Cuban past has its origins in a wish to distance herself both from her mother and from traumatic memories of her life in Cuba, and in particular the day when she was attacked by soldiers. She was raped and a soldier wrote something on her stomach with a knife – obviously in Spanish – which she could not read. This enigmatic message, written but which cannot be read, generates a form of trauma which she is unable to articulate in language. A few years later, when her father undergoes medical treatment, food becomes a signifier expressing grief. The episodes describing her fits of bulimia clearly hint at the fact that Lourdes stuffs herself with dozens of cakes and buns, not out of sheer greediness but in a desperate gesture which leads her to bar access to the locus of speech and lose herself in folds of fat to the point of seeing the body of her youth disappear. Interestingly, if English later becomes instrumental in the redefinition of the self and allows Lourdes to find her place in American society and set up a small business, its capacity to express affect is constantly questioned. To a certain extent, Lourdes is like the foreigner described by Derrida in Monolingualism of the Other who has no language to grieve in and to die in. She has fled Cuba and turned her back on her motherland, but finds herself without a mother tongue which could allow her to express affect. Another important issue is the way in which Lourdes has compartmentalized her life using two languages (English as her working language as well as the language she uses to socialize, and Spanish as a private language she refrains from using but which comes back to her and imposes itself to her). While Lourdes has broken away from her Cuban heritage and tried to bury the language which is her mother tongue, Pilar who is striving to reconnect with it, is already alienated and is aware of the gap which has widened between her and the language of her culture. It may seem to be anecdotal that Pilar should envy Lourdes her Spanish curses (‘I envy my mother her Spanish curses


sometimes,’ 59). However, this example is interesting in the sense that it shows that Lourdes has retained the capacity to express something in a language which once was the language of affect and which has become the language of frustrated affect, but a language which still retains a stronger emotional charge than the adopted language. However, if Lourdes still speaks Spanish at home, her Spanish has gradually become some other form of Spanish, a different sort of Spanish from that spoken by people who still live in Cuba. As Pilar remarks, when they return to Cuba: ‘the language [my mother] speaks is lost to them. It’s another idiom entirely’ (221). To a certain extent, Lourdes, who has been away for so long has relocated the Spanish language; it no longer corresponds to a socio-historical context, that of Cuba before the revolution, but has been exiled, deterritorialized and rerooted into a new context. And as language is not a mere carrier of words, but a memory bank, it has evolved and changed almost despite Lourdes. This idea follows on from a point I mentioned in the introduction to this chapter concerning the relation between language and the real, and how to articulate the universal potential of languages within a specific context, history and collective memory. At this stage of the discussion I would like to return to Ng˜ug˜i Wa Thiong’o’s conception of language and in particular the way he articulates language/the universal/the particular. For him, languages have a double orientation; they have a universal dimension in the sense that they refer to universal experiences and share universal principles, but they also relate to the particular, which gives each language its specificity. The capacity to speak, the capacity to order sounds in a manner that makes for mutual comprehension between human beings is universal. This is the universality of language; a quality specific to human beings. It corresponds to the universality of the struggle against nature and that between human beings. But the particularity of the sounds, the words, the word order into phrases and sentences, and the specific manner, or laws, of their ordering is what distinguishes one language from another. Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history. (Wa Thiong’o, 1981, 15) Much of this specificity is linked, as we said, to the notion of shared heritage and experience: Language is both a product of that succession of the separate generations, as well as being a bank for the way of life reflecting those


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modifications of collective experience in the production and reproduction of their life. Literature, thinking in images, utilizes language and draws upon the collective experience embodied in the language. In writing, one should hear all the whispering and the shouting and the crying and the laughing and all the loving and hating of the many voices gone and those will never speak to a writer in a foreign language. (Wa Thiong’o, 1997, 58) In the case of Lourdes, it is almost as if in transplanting the Spanish language she grew up with in Cuba to the United States, she had removed it from the socio-historical context where it continues to grow, freezing it in time as it were, as well as divesting it of the particular texture of Cuban Spanish in context.

Of the cultural domination of the English language Discussing bilingualism in the context of diasporic populations also involves examining another issue which is the redefinition of the role and position of English at the turn of the twenty-first century, whereby I do not only mean the redefinition of power struggle between colonial and postcolonial nations, but the changes brought by the widespread and almost global use of English as a lingua franca and as the language of corporate transnationalism. Interestingly enough, in one of the essays he published as part of the book Morning Yet on Creation Day, Nigerian author Chinua Achebe had anticipated the fact that when becoming a world language, and the second language of postcolonial writers as well as that of millions of people from former British colonies, English would have to change and would irremediably be altered. He writes: ‘the price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use’ (Achebe, 1975, 61). There are several dimensions to the changes that have affected the English language and to the way this language stands today, from superficial and situational changes to more profound transformations. I propose to start with the question of its symbolic capital which points to both the transience and commodification of cultural centres in the postcolonial era, as well as to the frailty of English as UK English. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai briefly refers to an anecdote from the days when his brother was a student in the United States and he would ask him to bring him back pairs of jeans. Appadurai concludes that this is how his Victorian England lost the battle in postcolonial Bombay. It has often been suggested that American culture has replaced British culture in the hearts of the denizens of Britain’s former colonies


and that political independence has gone hand in hand with a search for new role models, from which it results that the postcolonial era is no longer haunted by the spectre of colonialism but yearns for that of global culture. Yet if English has thrived and become the global language we all know, it can be argued that this American English ‘overshadows the English’s legacy as the language of the British Empire’ (Mignolo, 2000, 255) and in the process, UK English has lost a lot more than its symbolic capital. The recent changes in the status and nature of the English language are not only linked to the rivalry between UK English and American English but to a larger movement of diffraction of speakers of the English language throughout the world and the subsequent redefinition of the divide between Anglophones and Englishspeaking people, even though this dichotomy needs to be further qualified as we shall see in the course of our discussion. It is a fact that English has ceased to be principally the language of a nation, and it is estimated that the number of those who use it for convenience as a lingua franca now outnumbers by perhaps three to one the total population of all native speakers (Ostler, 2005, 458). As I have mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, English has become the language of at least four groups of people to different extents: the native speakers, speakers of former British colonies where English is the official language – a group which can be subdivided into people of Anglo-Saxon descent and people who have received a formal education in English and who have grown up in two languages – a third group which includes the diasporas to the English-speaking world, for whom English has become the language of everyday life, and a fourth group comprised of people who use it for work purposes. In The Stepmother Tongue, John Skinner offers several paradigms which account for the different combinations of situation to be found in the postcolonial world. An interesting paradox is that if the spread of the English language as the world’s global language has generated fears as to the consequences for other languages and local cultures, the strengthening of its strategic position has taken place over a period of time when its common usage had started to change, whereby I do not mean the new uses introduced by the new Englishes like Singlish but the more profound modifications I shall discuss later on in this section and as a result of which English itself might be the language under threat. The idea of the world’s first language being under threat is not altogether obvious and requires some clarifications. In Le Discours


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Antillais writer and theorist Edouard Glissant wrote the following about the defence of languages: [C]’est par cette défense qu’on s’oppose à la standardisation, standardisation qui proviendrait par exemple d’une universalisation de l’anglo-américain de base. Je dis que si jamais cette standardisation s’établissait au monde, ce n’est pas seulement la langue française ou la langue italienne ou la langue créole que cela menacerait, mais d’abord la langue anglaise, parce que la langue anglaise cesserait d’être une langue avec ses obscurités, ses faiblesses, ses triomphes, ses élans, ses vigueurs, ses reculs et ses diversités, elle cesserait d’être la langue du paysan, la langue de l’écrivain, la langue de l’homme du port, etc. Tout cela disparaîtrait, la langue cesserait d’être vivante et deviendrait une espèce de code international, un espéranto. Si la langue anglaise était ma langue, je serais inquiet de l’universalisation et de la standardisation de l’anglo-américain. (Glissant, 1996 [1987] 42) It is through this defence of the language that one can oppose standardization, a standardization which would come for example, from a global usage of American English in its most basic form. What I am saying is that if ever this standardization were to become the norm worldwide, it isn’t only the French, Italian or Créole languages that would be under threat; the English language itself would be under threat, for English would cease to be a language with its obscurities, its weaknesses, is victories, its flights of fancy, its dynamism, its reversals of fortune and its variety; it would cease to be the language of the rural man, the language of the writer, the language of your average docker. All of this would disappear, the language would cease to be a living language so as to become a sort of international code, an Esperanto. If the English language were my language, I would be worried about the universalization and the standardization of American English. (My translation) In this passage, Glissant suggests a distinction between a language as an instrument of communication – which English runs the risk of becoming since it is increasingly deterritorialized and global – and a language not only as the cement of collective history and memory bank but also as texture and which bears witness to the social fabric of a given society. It is this second type of language which Glissant calls ‘a living language.’ This issue opens up a broader reflection on what exactly is a


living language, which is beyond the scope of this study but which I would like to touch on briefly and discuss in relation to the ‘créolisation’ and hybridization of languages. The notion of ‘living language’ has always been problematic and lent itself to radically different interpretations and definitions which reflect changes in the way culture is envisaged, either as fixed or as diverse and hybrid (Serres). Rather than a rigorous discussion of this broad topic, the following reflection is meant to pinpoint some of the issues at stake and put them into perspective in terms of chronology. In his Letters to the German Nation, Fichte gave his own definition of a dead language, a definition which is radically different from the way we generally oppose living languages and dead ones today, according to the dichotomy: languages still in use/languages no longer in use. For Fichte, a dead language was a language with broken and mixed traditions. The fact that this language was still in use, or had ceased to be used, was not a valid criterion. What mattered was its level of purity and the way it had preserved itself from any interference with other languages. Since French was cut off from its Latin roots before becoming a language in its own right and English became a mixed language following the Norman conquest, German was for him the only language through which a continuous link with the past could be traced back to immemorial times (Fichte, 1808). If we now combine Fichte’s definition of dead languages (as mixed, as opposed to living languages as pure) and the commonly accepted definition (languages which are no longer in use as opposed to languages still in use), we are confronted with the following paradox: despite its vitality and ever-renewed diversity, English would be, in Fichte’s eyes, a dead language. If we now return to Glissant’s conception of a living language as one which is rooted in a given society, which bears witness to its texture and resonates with the multiple voices and accents of its people, we can wonder to what extent English is still one and the same language, whereby I do not mean contextually and with reference to the very types of new Englishes, but structurally, in its very common usage. I thus propose to shift the discussion to the internal changes brought into the workings of the English language by the people who use it as a mere instrument of communication, whereby I do not mean the native speakers of the English language or those for whom English has become one of the constitutive elements of their ‘doubleness’ (Hutcheon) but the ever-expanding group of those who use English professionally. The following discussion seeks to evidence a double movement at work in the redefinition of the linguistic contours of the English language: the erasure of its opacity and of its linguistic


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diversity in the context of professional English, and the opposite multilayering which results from ‘créolisation’. This issue opens up to a larger reflection on the survival and reinvention of cultural practices in a context of cultural globalization which leads to the following paradox: the renewal of the English language comes from its margins, and in particular the postcolonial and diasporic populations, while those who use it professionally, thereby paying tribute to its prominence in global exchanges, contribute to the erosion of its linguistic potential. A few preliminary remarks need to be made in order to elucidate certain terms, and in particular the metaphorical use of the term ‘créolisation’ I make in this section. Although the term was construed in the context of francophone islands in the Caribbean (Glissant, Chamoiseau) some theorists believe in the transferability of the term to other contexts. Glissant himself uses it in the more general sense of cross-fertilization (either linguistic or of cultural practices) on a global level and believes in the paradigmatic function of this phenomenon which, according to him allows us to theorize other phenomena involving cultural exchanges on a global scale. Another advantage of the term is that it allows us to move away from the biological metaphor and the racial undertones of the term hybridity as well as its corollaries in the discourse on miscegenation (Young, 1995). In situations where English is used as a tool of communication, it is understandable that efficacy and transparency should be on the agenda, which leaves little room for opacity, double entendre, irony and other uses of the language which involve not only a certain mastery of the language but also a certain knowledge of the culture this language originates in. This issue has been amply theorized by linguists and philosophers of language and in particular by Jean-Jacques Lecercle in his book A Marxist Philosophy of Language. This study opens with an analysis of a translation mistake, which to him is emblematic of what he considers to be the spread of a general trend to consider language as a mere instrument of communication and cultures as translatable and equivalent. Before the war in Iraq and during the period that the French were arguing against military intervention, The Sun put out a special issue in French whose aim was clearly propagandist. The headline read ‘Chirac est un ver’ (Chirac is a worm). This sentence, whose translation is perfectly intelligible to the Anglophone reader does not make sense to a French reader, for in French the idea of cowardice is suggested by another animal. What Lecercle shows with this example is that the very fact that The Sun did not bother to ask a translator to find an apt translation is proof of a lack of consideration for

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language – not only for the English language or the French language – but also for languages in general. The position rests on the assumption that language is instrumental, that its function is to convey a message, and that everything else comes second. This is not the case, and what The Sun’s translation mistake goes to show is that words cannot be translated independently of the culture they are rooted in. In his analysis, Lecercle shows that English itself falls victim to what amounts to a vast movement of instrumentalization of languages, a movement initiated by the media but also by certain linguists who consider language as an abstract system of words and grammatical rules. Lecercle writes that ‘to attack the history-culture nexus, the cultural past that is inscribed in the English language, out of which the English language is made, presupposes a conception of language as tool and lingua franca, a simple instrument for the transmission of information and knowledge, without depth or past.’ (Lecercle, 2004 [2006] 4–5). As a consequence, the death of languages ultimately amounts to the death of cultures, which is the reason why it is important to fight the disappearance of languages, a process which may go unnoticed if we think that this is just about languages when in actual fact it is about saving the diversity of cultures and protecting them from economic but also political hegemony. Lecercle’s example points to a more general phenomenon which is the gradual loss of the wealth, texture and complexity of the language for communicational purposes, a move which makes Orwell’s novel 1984 almost prophetic, as if English today had become like newspeak,17 a new language reduced to its bare bones and whose opacity has been erased to counteract political subversion. In real life, this opacity does not necessarily serve the same purpose; one of its main functions is to act as the corollary of communication with a view to achieving a certain efficacy. The supremacy of the English language today therefore leads to the following paradox: although English reigns supreme, it has become for many people synonymous with globalization and is used in an almost mechanical way, without evoking the culture it was initially rooted in. Because it has become a universal language, English is used, transformed and restricted to specific areas; in other words, it is instrumentalized and cut off from the affective substratum of the speakers who adopt it and contribute to it spreading. As Mignolo observes: ‘A curious paradox is that as English becomes more detached from its own territory, its grounding is superseded by a transnational dimension’ (Mignolo, 2000, 250).


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Interestingly and paradoxically enough, it would seem that if the English language continues to be a living language, not in the Fichtian sense of the term to which I referred so as to stress the irony of the situation, but in the more prosaic sense of developing and mutating rather than becoming frozen in time, it is thanks to the addition of new layers which originate in what could be called a rhizomatic encyclopaedic growth, a term I propose to elucidate in the following discussion. This rhizomatic growth originates in groups 2 and 3 of the typology of speakers I have sketched at the beginning of this section, speakers who have taken the English language on board but who maintain an outside perspective and revisit it from a peripheral locus. My hypothesis of a rhizomatic growth of the English language draws respectively on the works of Lecercle, Deleuze and Glissant. In his book Interpretation as Pragmatics, Lecercle sheds light on the complex process at work in the understanding of a literary text and takes account of both temporality and the reader’s representations, two dimensions that are contained in the term ‘encyclopaedia’, a term he borrows from Umberto Eco (Eco, 1984). Lecercle’s aim is to account for the process at work when a text is being read and understood by a reader. How does the reader understand the irony of a situation? How does he know which meaning of the word he should choose when a word has several possible meanings, without resorting to the notion of intention on the part of the reader? In other words: how can we account for the decoding of complex messages in a poststructuralist perspective, after the death of the author? There is the temporal dimension to be taken into account: the word can take on new meanings, have new connotations (Lecercle, 1999; Riley,18 1988, 1). And it is always received by the addressee of the message who plays an active part in decoding it, in understanding it in relation to his/her representations (Lecercle). Lecercle sums up his theory in the following diagram in which he has placed language and encyclopaedia on the same level as author, text and reader in order to highlight the active part they take in the decoding of the message: Author→

Language

→Text←

Encyclopaedia←

Reader

My idea is that if we apply this pattern to the situation of diasporic populations, we can formulate the following hypothesis: diasporic English will be increasingly characterized by an encyclopaedic multi-layering which will take the form of a palimpsest of new images and expressions added onto the English language and contributing to its linguistic richness. It

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will have the opposite effect to that of the instrumentalized English of global capitalism where language is reduced to its bare bones. The following diagram points at the superimposition of encyclopaedic layers that are characteristic of the practice of the English language in a diasporic context and evidences the process of telescoping of encyclopaediae in the circulation of meaning from speaker to reader. Encyclopaedia 1 Author

→

Encyclopaedia 2 ↔

←

Reader

Text zone of friction between E1 and E2 Language 1

Language 2

Because the speaker is between languages, he has two sets of representations, and maybe more. He has the representations of his language, and those of the host language. But since he has left his country and is more or less close to his mother tongue, the chances are that his initial representations which he has inherited from his original language have evolved over time. As a consequence, the message circulates in a complex way. If we apply this to our previous example, the memory of the trauma of oppression can make old representations resurface in a context where rationally speaking these representations should have become outdated. This creates a zone of friction in the interstice between the two encyclopaediae as illustrated above in the diagram. The message can be decoded as it should be. But it can also be decoded according to the encyclopaedia of the home country, depending on how close the immigrant has remained to his home culture. The situation is different from one individual to another, which generates a certain unpredictability. One of the specificities of language in a diasporic context is precisely its opacity. In the previous section, I have argued that the would-be smoothness of the English speaking continuum is not as simple as it seems. There are areas of resistance, which survive in situations of apparently perfect integration. This idea, which I find rather reassuring, leads me to formulate the following hypothesis: language is not only an instrument of integration; it is also a tool of resistance, a tool which itself offers a certain resistance, in other words a zone of frictions. These frictions originate in the fact that the immigrant affects the language


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and to a certain extent works on it when using it. Besides, the language used by the immigrant is never used in the exact same way as his mother tongue. From which it results that if communication has become the touchstone of our postmodern era, language is not as transparent as it seems – reassuringly enough – and that there remains a certain opacity of meaning linked to the fact that language – and the English language in particular – has not yet become the detached decontextualized tool some would like it to be. To a certain extent, this phenomenon is quite similar to an implosion of the centre, of a cultural core when it comes into contact and is even partly appropriated by other cultures. The representation of English in diasporic fiction offers a wealth of information which easily disrupts the idea that the language of colonization continues to exert the same form of cultural domination it has exerted for the most part of the twentieth century. Not only has queen’s English ceased to be the only linguistic norm in the Anglophone world, the language itself has been stripped of its cultural substratum and has become endowed with new representations. There are two ways of looking at this phenomenon. The first consists in lamenting the loss of the purity of the English language and in denouncing its bastardization. But another consists in rejoicing at the fact that this rhizomatic development of Englishes is an antidote to homogeneity.

National languages and transnationalism The discussion of the linguistic phenomenon of encyclopaedic multilayering in a diasporic context in the previous section, has led me to leave aside the question of its ‘rhizomatic spread’ which I propose to elucidate in this section. There is another sense in which the ‘créolisation’ of languages (and I am still using Glissant’s term deliberately) plays a pivotal part in the understanding of identity both in a local and in a global perspective. In recent years a new issue has emerged which is the relevance of national languages in a global context (Mignolo, Coulmas). For Mignolo, the current context of mass migration forces us to rethink the relation between national languages and territories. Migratory movements are disarticulating the idea of national languaging and national literacies. Although I would not go as far as him in the belief that local identities can be fully translated into English, as we have seen in previous chapters, there is a sense in which the continuity between individuals/ language/nation needs to be interrogated. As Coulmas has noted in a discussion we mentioned in a previous section (Coulmas, 1988, 11),


languages can be instruments of domination just as much as they can be instruments of cohesion. At this stage in the discussion I propose to return to a matter which I have left so far to one side, namely the necessity of adopting a paradigm which does not rest on a perfect congruence. In previous chapters I have stressed the importance of the diasporic condition as vantage point precisely because it is situated at the point of juncture but also disjuncture between several systems. In my emphasis on a non- congruent paradigm I am indebted to the works of several thinkers. Mignolo, whom I have just quoted, stresses the crucial role played by transculture because it ‘infects the locus of enunciation, and not just as a social phenomenon allowing for the celebration of the “impure” in the social world from a “pure” perspective couched in a national language and in “scientific” epistemology’ (Mignolo, 2000, 220). the celebration of bi or pluri languaging is precisely the celebration of the crack in the global process between local histories and global designs, between ‘mundializacion’ and globalization, from languages to social movements and a critique of the idea that civilization is linked to the ‘purity’ of colonial and national monolanguaging. (Mignolo, 2000, 250) What is ultimately at stake in the way one envisages language is the continuity between the individual/language/nation. In my examination of Derrida’s position on languages I have stressed the emphasis he places on the mother tongue as the primary site of enunciation, in so far as the mother tongue is tied to the socio-historical nexus we are rooted in. However, there is another dimension to his reflections which is the fact that there is always an element of polyglossia in a person’s monolingualism. To a certain extent, this idea runs through the work of Deleuze and of Glissant who develops it in Le Discours Antillais when he writes that L’écrivain contemporain, l’écrivain moderne, n’est pas monolingue, même s’il ne connaît qu’une langue, parce qu’il écrit en présence de toutes les langues du monde (Glissant, 1987, 27) Mais écrire en présence de toutes les langues du monde ne veut pas dire connaître toutes les langues du monde. [...] C’est-à-dire que ma langue, je la déporte et la bouscule non pas dans des synthèses, mais dans des ouvertures linguistiques qui me permettent de concevoir les rapports des langues entre elles aujourd’hui sur la surface de la terre –


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rapports de domination, de connivence, d’absorption, d’oppression, d’érosion [...] (Glissant, 1987, 40) The contemporary writer, the modern writer, is not monolingual even if he only knows one language, because he writes in the presence of all the languages in the world. But to write in the presence of all the languages of the world does not mean to know all the languages in the world. [...] That is to say that I relocate my language and push it not into syntheses but into linguistic openings which allow me to conceive of the relationships between the languages that are spoken around the globe today – relations of domination, of complicity, of absorption, of oppression, of erosion [...] (My translation) Both Derrida and Glissant acknowledge the double orientation of the global subject and the fact that he is necessarily bilingual, in the sense that he has an awareness of the presence of other languages, not as equivalent to his language, but as each bearing a certain world picture. For them, this awareness plays a crucial part in the way identity should be approached at the turn of the twenty-first century, not as bounded but as open and in a never-ending process of self redefinition. This conception of language as rooted in but not entirely congruent with the socio-historical nexus it is rooted into and as branching out ultimately opens onto a definition of identity as rhizomatic. In the Discours Antillais, Glissant takes up the dichotomy established by Deleuze between the ‘root’ (which kills other roots and other plants in order to grow) and the rhizome, which includes other elements in a composite structure. For him, this natural metaphor provides an interesting paradigm to understand the way language operates (at least créolised languages like the diasporic type we have studied in the previous section); but it also applies to identity, which is redefined not as something centripetal and self-contained but as centrifugal and open to alterity. This paradigm is not only useful to understand local phenomena of créolité (although their efficacy has been proved by the fact that it has kept cultural practices in situations of isolation and strategic division, for example when slaves where mixed with other slaves who did not speak the same language). They also account for the way certain languages manage to reinvent themselves in a context of transnationalism. It is probably in its créolisation by diasporic populations rather than through its spread as the global language of corporate


transnationalism that the vitality of the English language lies. And to a certain extent its capacity to integrate variations has contributed to its unchallenged supremacy. Unlike the French language, which is highly codified, with strict rules,19 and has always been reluctant to accept external input, the English language has survived and thrived through successive reterritorializations.

Notes 1 Paradigmatic Shifts and New Orientations in Diasporic Studies: Mapping the Site of Intervention 1. I am referring implicitly to Brian Cheyette on the etymology of the Hebrew words Golah and Galut for diaspora, which I will quote extensively in Chapter 2. Golah simply means residence in a foreign country, while Galut implies a tragic sense of displacement (Cheyette, 1996, 295). 2. In recent years there has been an unprecedented development of new literatures written in English, both in terms of literary production and in terms of the vitality and diversity of the field. Such diversity – thematic as well as generic – has made it increasingly difficult to chart the development and map the contours of an ever-changing literary continuum. The boundaries between postcolonial writers, first and second generation immigrants, and multi-ethnic writers are being constantly blurred, displaced and redefined to such an extent that attempts to chart the various trends and devise taxonomies seem almost doomed to failure (King, 1996; Skinner, 1998). Conversely, new labels – ‘ethnic literature’ in the US, ‘Black British literature’ or ‘literature of the south Asian diaspora’ in the UK – have appeared and been added to an already long list of labels although without solving the taxonomic predicament. Parallel to the appearance of these new labels which emphasize the origin of the writers, is that of the term ‘diasporic’, which has come centre stage and has emerged as a kind of overarching category used to refer to first generation immigrants, second generation immigrants or writers of mixed origins. In the case of contemporary literature in the UK, it could be applied to first generation immigrants like Abdulrazak Gurnah, second generation immigrants like Andrea Levy or even writers of mixed origins like Zadie Smith, not to mention those writers such as Caryl Phillips who left the home country at a very early age to come and live in England. In some cases, like those of Smith or Kureishi, who were born in the UK, the term ‘diasporic’ may seem far-fetched, which prompts the following question: is there some validity in broadening its application so greatly? 3. In Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, Avtar Brah remarks that if diasporic populations have attracted critical attention (many journals have the term diaspora or border in their title) few attempts have been made at theorizing the term, maybe because it is not easy to avoid the slippage between diaspora as a theoretical construct, diasporic discourses and diasporic experiences. 4. For further discussion see Alex Weingrod and André Levi Homelands and Diasporas: Holy Lands and Other Places (2005, 3–26). In their introduction to the volume, Alex Weingrod and André Levi explain that ‘the “typologists” are primarily interested in better understanding why and how different kinds of diasporas have emerged, and they also have a considerable interest in the on-going dynamics of diaspora – homeland relationships. The “diasporists”, on the other hand, are more concerned with showing how the phenomenon 161

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5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

Notes “diaspora” may contradict and ultimately subvert the internal exclusivity of modern nation-states’ (7). In Diaspora Criticism, Sudesh Mishra remarks that ‘by 1996 the dual territorial pillars supporting the ethno-national architrave have collapsed, leaving behind an ungrounded milieu or midpoint. Drawing on Gregory Batson’s work on Balinese culture, Deleuze and Guattari talk of the midpoint as “a plateau” or “a continuous, self-vibrating région of intensities whose development avoid any orientation towards a culmination point” ’. (Mishra, 2006, 83). In an article published in The Times in January 2004 entitled ‘Young, Busy Asian Looking for Love? Your Three-Minute Date starts Now’ (17 January 2004), Patrick Barkham writes about the explosion of speed dating among young Asians in the UK and the favourable reaction of traditional Asian families. In his description of the phenomenon, Barkham points to the fact that when borrowed from the West and used in Asian communities, speed dating is not taken up as such but divested of its usual function in Western societies and reinvented in such a way that not only do families tolerate this new practice, they sometimes welcome and encourage it, viewing it as a way for their career-oriented children to socialize with young people from the same community and maybe settle down with them. Such recodifications of cultural practices have become the object of recent sociological studies. ‘Diasporic subjectivity is thus necessarily double: acknowledging the imperatives of an earlier “elsewhere” in an active and critical relationship with the cultural politics of one’s present home, all within the figurality of a reciprocal displacement. “Home” then becomes a mode of interpretative in-betweenness, as a form of accountability to more than one location’ (Radhakrishnan, 2003, 1–2). In Imperial Eyes, Marie-Louise Pratt studies the context in which scientific objectivity developed and gained legitimacy in the nineteenth century. She decries the fact that the Western model of science became a universal norm in a very specific context, owing to a collusion between the development of overseas trade, colonialism and capitalism. For example, she reminds us of the fact that scientific expeditions were funded by the bourgeoisie. ‘Given the partial failure of national revolution in the so-called Third World, postcolonial theory was wary of all talk of nationhood. Theorists who were either too young or too obtuse to recall that nationalism had been in its time an astonishingly effective anti-colonial force could find nothing in it but a benighted chauvinism or ethnic supremacism. Instead much post-colonial thought focused on the cosmopolitan dimensions of a world in which post-colonial states were being inexorably sucked into the orbit of global capital. [...] But in negating the idea of nationhood, it also tended to jettison the notion of class. (10) [...] Much post-colonial theory shifted the focus from class and nation to ethnicity’ (Eagleton, 2004 [2003] 12). This postulate has led me to draw significantly on Appadurai’s typology of diasporas in Modernity at Large (2003 [1996] 6). Appadurai distinguishes between three types of diasporas: the ‘diaspora of hope’, the ‘diaspora of terror’ and the ‘diaspora of despair’. By the term ‘diaspora of hope’, he refers to the happy few, the migrants whose living conditions are not necessarily good in their home country but who can afford to move to another country,

Notes 163

11.

12.

13.

14.

2

to a promised land where they can start anew. The term diaspora of hope would probably apply to some of the characters of Gish Jen’s novels Mona in the Promised Land or Typical American, who lead comfortable lives in the US, have set up their own businesses, and whose children have access to a good education. It could also apply to the characters of Monica Ali’s book Brick Lane, which portrays migrants who are not particularly well-off but who have more or less found a place in society, and still have the possibility of going back to their home country. The diaspora of terror includes mainly immigrants who leave their country because the political situation has become intolerable, as in Gurnah’s novel Admiring Silence (1996) or Caryl Phillips’s A Distant Shore (2004) which deals with the lesser-known narrative of illegal immigrants. Unlike immigrants of the diaspora of hope, they know that the return to the homeland is almost impossible and live in a state of permanent exile. This panel discussion was organized by the University Paris X, Nanterre on 26 March 2007. Three South Asian writers were invited: Abha Dawesar, Ruchir Joshi and Githa Hariharan. At the last conference of the EACLALS held in Venice (March 2008) Chris Abani, a writer of Nigerian origin who has lived in the United States for the past seven years shared a similar anecdote. He referred to very negative reviews of his writings on the United States while critics praised the authenticity of those dealing with his homeland, which he has left for quite some time. For further reference to Rushdie’s imaginary homelands see Victor Ramraj in Bruce King (ed) New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction. Ramraj writes that ‘It is thus not surprising that Rushdie’s work, and quite often the work of exiled writers, is not realistic. The premises of realism, which have to do with consolidation or metonymy, are inadequate to express the voice of the periphery, of a vision shaped by two ontologies’ (208). Manuel Castells draws a distinction between what sociologists have called role sets and identity. Identity involves self-representation (Castells, 1997).


1. In Modernity at Large, Arjun Appadurai takes up the notion of imagined communities developed by Benedict Anderson to account for the current development of new forms of transnational solidarities which have been made possible by the development of new means of communication and transport. These communities, which I shall discuss in more detail in Chapter 4 not only challenge existing identity definitions, they also call for new paradigms accounting for the formation of group identity at the turn of the twenty-first century. 2. In his chapter ‘Hybridity and Diaspora’ (1–28), Young sketches the larger panorama of the different theories of race in the nineteenth century and discusses in particular the issue of miscegenation (Young, 2002 [1995]). 3. Riley stresses in particular the contextual multivalence of the term ‘black woman’ and the fact that it has been loaded with different connotations, some of which fluctuated with the feminist movement and the representation of women, and others with the identity struggle of black people.

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

Notes As a consequence, the term black woman does not evoke the same thing in twentieth-century America as it does in twenty-first century British society. This idea is also found in contemporary diasporic literature. In the novel Mona in The Promised Land by Gish Jen, the Chinese characters are said to be ‘the new Jews’, on account of their education and success story. ‘For they’re the new Jews after all, a model minority and Great American Success. They belong in the promised land’ (Jen, 1997 [1996] 1). (See Chapter 3) In this chapter as in the rest of the book, I shall use the term ‘interstice’ in a way which differs from its usual acceptance and follows redefinitions of the term by Bhabha (1996) and Chambers (1994). Although the word ‘interstice’ suggests a certain emptiness, a void between two places, the interstice in which the identities of diasporic populations are formed and then develop is not a void, but is too full, as though brimming with overlapping definitions. This coinage refers to the imposition of a new self onto the colonized population. The idea of a ‘palimpsestual’ layering of narratives in the colonial context is developed by Robert Young in Colonial Desire in his discussion of the concept of deterritorialization developed by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. ‘Decoding and recoding are too simplistic a grafting of one culture on to another’, writes Young, who then goes on to suggest that ‘we need to modify the model to a form of palimpsestual inscription and reinscription’ (Young, 2002 [1995] 173). This aspect is studied at length by Rosemary Marangoly George in her book The Politics of Home. Denise Riley uses this notion to analyse the role of women in society beyond the divide of home/political life. The social sphere, which refers to a feminized area of operation which extends into public space, is different from the ‘political’ masculine sphere (Riley, 1988, 51). Until 1993 when the Mabo treaty acknowledged the indigenous occupation of Australia, the settlement of Australia by colonists had been deemed legitimate on account of the fact that the country did not belong to anyone and was not inhabited (in the sense that nothing had been built by the indigenous population). In Dispossession, historian Henry Reynolds traces the development of the various representations of the indigenous population of Australia from the first accounts of the settlement such as the log books of explorers or the notes written by missionaries. In Fear and Temptation, Goldie analyses the issues at stake in the act of naming and renaming colonized land – not only by giving Western names but also by giving native names to new settlements in an attempt at making the presence of colonists legitimate, as if they were part of a natural filiation. It is worth mentioning that Colin Johnson later changed his name, first to Mudrooroo Nyongah then later to Mudrooroo Narogin, and then to Mudrooroo as a protest against white Australia. Other writers, including Kath Walker (who took the name Oodgeroo) made the same choice. (For further reference to Mudrooroo see Chapter 3.)

Notes 165 14. This character is based on George Augustus Robinson, a missionary who was responsible for the ‘black line’ in Tasmania. This partition between the indigenous population and the settlers, which was meant to protect the natives, turned out to have disastrous consequences and led to the death of the entire native population. 15. This idea was also developed by Robert Young and summed up in the paradigmatic redefinition he suggests (the move towards a palimpsestual superimposition of narratives rather than the erasure paradigm) (Young, 2002 [1995]). 16. This novel offers an interesting example of how identity can be a product of a certain context and of the discursive categories that underpin its representations of identity. Callie’s predicament is tied to larger issues which have to do with theories of identity and the fashions in human sciences dealing with identity and in particular psychology. The novel clearly illustrates the fact that Callie’s choice is not a personal one made in abstracto, but that it has been influenced by a certain discourse at a certain point in history. It’s no surprise that Luce’s theory of gender identity was popular in the early seventies. Back then [...] everybody wanted to go unisex. The consensus was that personality was primarily determined by environment, each child a blank slate to be written on. My own medical story was only a reflection of what was happening psychologically to everyone in those years. [...] For a little while in the seventies it seemed that sexual difference might pass away. But then another thing happened. It was called evolutionary biology. Under its sway, the sexes were separated again, men into hunters and women into gatherers. [...] But it is not as simple as that. I don’t fit into any of these theories. Not the evolutionary biologists’ and not Luce’s either. My psychological makeup doesn’t accord with the essentialism popular in the intersex movement, either. Unlike other so-called male pseudo-hermaphrodites who have been written about in the press, I never felt out of place being a girl. (478–9) This quotation points not only at the lack of relevance of theories of sexual identity, whose theoretical stance leads them to radicalized positions which fail to account for more complex situations. It also stresses the fact that discursive categories determine the very choices one makes and that these choices are always tethered to social representations at a given point in history. 17. The recurrence of the motif of luggage as linked to an absence of homesickness is for Rosemary Marangoly George one of the main characteristics of the immigrant genre. She writes that ‘the immigrant genre is marked by a curiously detached reading of the experience of “homelessness” which is compensated for by an excessive use of the metaphor of luggage, both spiritual and material’ (Marangoly George, 1999 [1996] 171). 18. I am referring to Glissant’s opposition between root identity and rhizomatic identity. See Chapter 6. 19. The idea of negotiating has been used by Homi Bhabha but also by Stuart Hall who wrote that writers of post-war diasporas often ‘inhabit two identities’, ‘speak two cultural languages’ and ‘translate and negotiate between

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them’ without ‘simply assimilating to them or losing their identities completely’ (Hall, 1992, 310). 20. In Cultural Identity and Diaspora, Stuart Hall writes that ‘identity is not as transparent or unproblematic as we think. Perhaps instead of thinking of identity as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent, we should think, instead of identity as a “production”, which is never complete, always in the process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation. This view problematises the very authority and authenticity to which the term “cultural identity” lays claim” ’ (Hall, 1990, 222). 21. In an article on Philip Roth, Derek Parker Royal has commented on the centrifugal movement of recent Roth fiction and its gradual opening to new themes and issues which are no longer related to the Jewish question (Royal, 2001).

3 Interstitiality, Authenticity, Postmodernity 1. This sentence spoken by Andrea Levy was quoted by Maya Jaggi in the Waterstone’s Magazine, 1996, 64. 2. Chambers describes them as follows: In the migrant landscapes of contemporary metropolitan cultures, deterritorialized and de-colonised, re-situating, re-citing and re-presenting common signs in the circuits between speech, image and oblivion, a constant struggling into sense and history is pieced together. It is a story that is continually being decomposed and recomposed in the interlacing between what we have inherited and where we are. In the shifting interstices of this world, whether moving to the acoustic patterns of our bodily beat and the techno-surrealist design of computerised simulations, there exists the opening that redeems and reconstitutes our being. (Chambers, 1994, 14–15) 3. In White Myths, Robert Young analyses the fantasies at stake in the construction of the exotic other. This idea is also often dealt with in postcolonial literature. For example, Australian writer Colin Johnson (also known as Mudrooroo) often features missionary figures who view the native population as an exotic tribe from a prelapsarian era (Mudrooroo, 1983; Mudrooroo, 1991). 4. Ever since the late 1960s Colin Johnson, who then took the Aboriginal name Mudrooroo was a prominent figure of the Australian literary stage and a leading figure of the Aboriginal literary movement, as well as a very vocal activist advocating the defence of the rights of the native people of Australia. 5. In this passage I use the two terms Aboriginal and indigenous. Until recently, the native population of Australia was referred to as the Aboriginal population. This term was rejected by the natives themselves who claim that this generic term was imported by the colonists and fails to account for the diversity of the various indigenous cultures. They now prefer to call themselves the indigenous people of Australia. 6. Born in England to Jamaican parents, Andrea Levy has recently come to the forefront of the literary scene when she was awarded the Commonwealth Prize in 2005 for her novel Small Island, which could be described as a

Notes 167

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

modern version of Sam Selvon’s Lonely Londoners, the well-known satirical narrative recounting the life of young Jamaicans settling in the UK and their discovery of the Promised Land. Fruit of the Lemon is a diptych featuring a character who goes to Jamaica after a holiday – and a major identity crisis – where she learns about the history of her family. The fact that the novel oscillates between two historical contexts, that of immigrants in the UK today and that of their parents in the post-Second World War period provides a double perspective on the problem and allows Levy to historicize the issue of identity. It also allows her to evidence how identity is apprehended in slightly different contexts underpinned by different discourses on race, culture and ethnicity. Fanon pays particular attention not only to race but also to the hierarchy of racial differences. In Black Skin, White Masks, he is always careful to distinguish between Africans and Caribbeans and describes the feeling of superiority Caribbeans sometimes have towards Africans. His analysis is also very attentive to the specificities of the various categories of the race spectrum in Martinique, from the full-blooded, the half-caste to the pass-for-white, and he provides interesting views on how identity is articulated. For further discussion, see Mark Stein in Black British Literature (67–80). See also Mark Stein in Black British Literature: ‘The disruption and trauma at the root of a historical experience of diaspora is not remembered first hand by Faith and Lara. It is assimilated and learned rather than self-experienced’ (95). Gish Jen is a writer of Chinese origin. She grew up in Scarsdale, New York and is the author of several short stories and another novel, Typical American. In Bodies That Matter, Judith Butler explains how hyperbolic citations work as a paradoxical reassertion and undermining of a discourse; by reiterating a normative notion in an exaggerated way, the hyperbolic citation works against it (Butler, 1993, 232). There are two trends among theorists dealing with the question of Jewish identity. Bloom for example, contends that the Jewish condition provides a ‘paradigm for humanity’. Others like Steiner argue against such a position and insist on the uniqueness of the Jewish experience; according to him, it is dangerous to uproot Jewish identity from its historical context and there is a specificity and uniqueness of Jewish identity. For further discussion of this issue, see Brauner 2001. In Erasure, Percival Everett directly addresses the issue and shows that it is a direct consequence of ethnic policies. The novel, whose protagonist is a Black American writer forced to stop writing sophisticated novels and write ‘Black literature’ in order to be published, ends up writing the kind of literature that matches his picture on the cover. Everett openly criticizes the hype around ethnic literature. According to him, the creation of a new type of Afro-American literature as ‘the voice of the ghetto’ (Everett) is presented as having two opposite consequences: if it allows Black people to make it out of the ghetto, it also condemns them to write as representatives of their own community and to keep off more traditional literature. Vassanji was born in Kenya in 1950 of parents of Indian origin. His grandfather was part of what Vijay Mishra calls the first wave of Indian diaspora, the diaspora of early capitalism, and came to East Africa to work for a railway company. Vassanji grew up in Tanzania before moving to Canada in

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1978 where he has lived ever since. It comes as no surprise that his novels – in particular Amriika, No New Land and The in-between World of Vikram Lall should deal with alienation, in-betweenness and unbelonging pushed to their radical end. 15. In an article entitled ‘The Migrant Experience in East African Asian Writing’, Peter Simatei explains why the Asian community did not find its place in the grand narrative against colonialism: The framing of the anti-colonial struggle mainly as an African’s rebellion against the colonial regimes may have contributed to discouraging the equally progressive members of the non-African peoples in participating in such struggles. And yet the Asian community were unwilling to take part in the destruction of a system that seemed to favour and even sustain their prized cultural exclusivity. In other words, the Asian tendency towards cultural exclusivism was certainly in harmony with the colonial policy of separate development of different communities. (Simatei, 2004, 18)

4 Shaky Ground, New Territorialities and the Diasporic Subject 1. Homecoming narratives foreground characters who decide to discontinue the experience of immigration to return home. Such trajectories constitute an ever-increasing body of texts in contemporary diasporic literature (Ali’s Brick Lane, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, Hari Kunzru’s Transmission, and many more). 2. In The Heritage Industry Hewinson argues that ‘Post-modernism and the heritage industry are linked’ since ‘both conspire to create a shallow screen that intervenes between our present lives and our history’. History becomes a ‘contemporary creation, more costume drama and re-enactment than critical discourse’. We are ‘condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history which itself remains for ever out of reach’ (Hewinson, 1989 [1987] 135). 3. The link between postmodernism and the post-industrial age has been clearly spelled out and analysed by Jameson in Postmodernity or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. 4. It would be a mistake to overemphasize the realism of Ali’s writing. Ali herself stresses the limitations of her protagonist’s perspective; such limitations are evoked through images like the Chinese shadows at the beginning of the novel. 5. By ‘myths’ and ‘doxa’ I refer to both literary myths and the popularization of findings such as the global village, which has moved from the realm of academic knowledge to that of the doxa. The frontier is however less clearcut than it seems. The Promised Land itself has moved from the realm of religion to that of literature and maybe to that of the doxa. 6. Born in 1969, Hari Kunzru lives in south-east London. His first novel, The Impressionist, recounts the tale of a white child born in India who embarks on a quest to find his family, a quest which eventually takes him to England. His second novel, Transmission (2004), is another quest narrative but of a

Notes 169

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

different nature; it is no longer a quest for the past and for one’s origins, but for a future full of promises, one which takes Arjun Mehta, a young computer programmer to the United States, where he hopes to have his share of the American Dream. It is a novel which constantly brings myth face to face with reality, commonly received ideas with bare facts and as such provides a good example of the diasporic text as a magnifying lens, a mode of ‘interpretative in-betweenness’ (Radhakrishnan, 1996, 1–2). The novel runs two narratives of immigration in parallel, one in the 1980s in the United States, the other one in the 1950s in England. This juxtaposition of two narratives allows Desai to explore different angles and oppose the American situation to that of the United Kingdom. Appadurai writes that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those that might account for multiple centers and peripheries’ (Appadurai, 2003 [1996] 32). The word encyclopaedia, used by Lecercle in Interpretation as Pragmatics is to be understood in the sense of a set of representations. This notion of encyclopaedia comes from Umberto Eco, who uses it in contrast to the term ‘dictionary’, that denotes the system of lexical semantics in a given language. See Eco, 1984. In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson studied the development of print capitalism and evidenced its role as an important parameter in the creation of communities, in particular national communities. Kunzru’s novel revolves around three main characters, Arjun, Leela, a Bollywood star and Guy Swift, a successful English businessman. Their place in the social hierarchy allows them to relate differently to mobility. Guy Swift literally hops from city to city while Arjun is limited to the crawling pace of the less well-off. They sometimes find themselves in the same place without ever coming into contact, and it is as if their lives were on separate tracks. In other words, the world described in the novel is not only divided horizontally between peripheries and centres, but also vertically. Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian. [...] Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience. On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian.

On to the Stars and stripes Diner. All American flag on top, all Guatemalan flag below (Kiran Desai, 21). 13. Augé takes up De Certeau’s distinction between the two. The place being space occupied by human beings and bearing the marks of human settlement. 14. In Liquid Modernity, Bauman refers to the respective definitions of liquids and fluids given by the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but goes on to use the two terms as synonymous, and deploys the idea of fluidity as the leading metaphor for the ‘present stage of the modern era’ (2). 15. I would like to point out that Bauman anticipates the argument that fluidity is not peculiar to postmodern times and that it is also one of the

170 Notes characteristics of modernity. Yet to him it is the essence of postmodern times. It is as if there were a consensus or even an intimate awareness that nothing would be solid anymore. ‘Modern times found the pre-modern solids in a fairly advanced state of disintegration; and one of the most powerful motives behind the urge to melt them was the wish to discover or invent solids of – for a change – lasting solidity, a solidity which one could trust and rely upon and which would make the world predictable and therefore manageable’ (Bauman, Liquid Love, 3). 16. In his book After Theory, Terry Eagleton writes that one of the characteristics of postmodernity is the fact that objects have become less important than discourse, that the discourse around the objects has become more important than the objects themselves.

5 Disjunction, Ethics and the Diasporic Subject 1. This idea has also been developed by Hardt and Negri in Multitude (‘Postmodern society is characterized by the dissolution of traditional social bodies’ (190)). They also refer to Robert Putnam’s account of the decline of civic and community organizations in the United States. ‘Bowling clubs, religious organizations, and the like used to provide a basic means of social aggregation, forming social groups and a cohesive society. The decline of such civic and community groups is a symptom of the general decline of all forms of social aggregation in the United States’, Putnam argues, ‘leaving the population not only bowling alone but living alone in a wide variety of ways’ (Putnam, 2000, 190). 2. Born and bred in Zanzibar, Tanzania, Gurnah moved to England in 1968, at the age of twenty. After getting a degree in education, he started his career as a schoolteacher in Kent, before leaving for Nigeria. Several years later, he moved back to England where he still lives. Gurnah is an acclaimed novelist and is the author of several novels, many of which deal with immigration, displacement and identity, like his first three novels: Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988) and Dottie (1990). More recently he has written Admiring Silence (1996) and By the Sea (2001). 3. The protagonist of Admiring Silence (1996) is an immigrant from Zanzibar who came to England as a young man in order to escape political instability. Several years later, after settling in and overcoming certain prejudices, he undertakes a journey home without his wife and daughter. 4. This point will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. For further reference to code switching, see John Skinner, The Stepmother Tongue, 1998. 5. I am here implicitly referring to the six functions of language described by Jakobson in Essais de Linguistique générale (1966): the referential, the emotive, the poetic, the conative, the phatic and the metalinguistic functions of language. 6. For discussion on this topic, see Chapter 4. 7. For further discussion of bilingualism and schizophrenia, see Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical.

Notes 171 8. A difference needs to be made between integration in England and in the rest of the UK. Sardar shows how the self-representation of regions where people have the sense that they occupy a peripheral position and have suffered from imperialism, makes integration paradoxically easier for British Asians (Sardar, 2008, 72). 9. Smolicz has compared the case of Italian and Jewish communities in Australia and has showed that the core values of the Italian community are family, religion and language, while that of the Jewish community are religion, the cultural inheritance and a sense of their historical origins. 10. Zadie Smith’s novel chronicles the life of two families of immigrants from Bangladesh. Archie belongs to the wave of immigration that came to England after the Second World War, while Samad arrived in 1973 with his young wife Alsana. The novel opens on the tragi–comic narrative of Archie’s failed attempt at committing suicide by smoking himself to death in his car on New Year’s Eve, partly because of a broken marriage. In the rest of the novel, Archie knows better days and marries Clara, a girl of Jamaican origin with whom he has a child Ivie. As for his friend Samad, he has twin boys Majid and Millat who were born in England. The narration constantly shifts perspective, from one family to another, but also from the perspective of the parents to that of their children so that we get the impression of a kaleidoscopic view on some of the issues of the British Asian community. Of course, the scope of the novel is limited to one area, Cricklewood Broadway and one class, immigrants who belong to the working class but who have received some education, which also explains their frustration with the fact that their value is not fully acknowledged in the host country. 11. Rushdie writes about the migrant that he generally suffers a triple disruption: ‘He loses his place, he enters into an alien language, and he finds himself surrounded by beings whose social behaviour and codes are very unlike, and sometimes even offensive to, his own’ (Rushdie, 1991, 277–8). 12. Hardt and Negri’s conception of the multitude is also derived from Spinoza’s conception of the conatus. They see in Spinoza ‘the one who most clearly anticipates this monstrous nature of the multitude by conceiving of life as a tapestry on which the singular passions weave a common capacity of transformation’ (194). 13. Gerd Baumann points out that the question of rights can be situated on several platforms, the civil rights platform, ethnic groups and religious groups.

6 Language(s) and the Diasporic Subject 1. Studies like The Empire Writes Back have stressed the need for writers from former colonies to seize the language of the centre and to replace it ‘in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place’ by ‘remoulding the language to new usages’ (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, 1989, 39). 2. Among the main arguments in favour of choosing the English language was that it would be a lingua franca and would also help writers and their audiences eschew the pitfall of nationalism since the use of another language could help create a common imaginary of African postcolonial experience.

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3. Okara’s position showed great foresight, in the sense that he was able to predict the emergence of an African English, which would have its place among other forms of postcolonial Englishes such as Australian, New Zealand and Canadian English (Okara, 1963; see Wa Thiong’o, 1997 [1981]). 4. This issue is still a bone of contention today. In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie stresses the need to use English (‘to conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free’, (Rushdie, 1991, 17), but this English ‘needs remaking for our own purposes’ (17)). 5. The phrase ‘stepmother tongue’ used as a title and key concept by John Skinner aptly sums up the love/hate relationship that binds the inhabitant of a formerly colonized country to the language of political domination. 6. It is a fact that languages are disappearing at the worryingly fast speed of one language every fortnight. Specialists even calculate that by the end of the twenty-first century, half of the 5000 existing languages will have disappeared (Crystal, 2000; Nettle and Romaine, 2000). This phenomenon, which is linked to the disappearance of cultures absorbed by others, goes almost unnoticed, as if we took it for granted that this was a natural phenomenon. The term ‘glottophagia’ coined by Calvet aptly describes the phenomenon but seems to suggest that there is no way of stopping this linguistic gluttony. 7. In India, the hierarchy elite/non-educated people linked to the use of specific languages was already in existence before the colonial era since a relatively small number of people could master Sanskrit. 8. Nicholas Ostler remarks that by the late fourteenth century, French had been dropped as a medium of education in England ‘as a needless barrier to vernacular understanding’ (Ostler, 2005, 467). 9. In this chapter I shall use the terms ‘mother tongue’ and ‘father tongue’ to designate the language spoken at home, as opposed to the language imported by colonization, a dichotomy which often corresponds to the language of affect as opposed to the language of cognitive activity. However, this dichotomy will be questioned later on in the chapter. 10. Some of her poems describe the tongue of the mother cleaning the child. These very visual passages lay emphasis on the way language is a bodily activity as well as a cognitive one since language is expressed through the body; it is an extension of the body and bears witness to its physicality. 11. Monica Ali has recently published her second novel Alentejo Blue (2006). 12. As for Chanu he clearly reduces the English language to its instrumental function: ‘You see, when the English went to our country, they did not go to stay. They went to make money, and the money they made, they took it out of the country. They never left home. Mentally. Just taking money out. And this is what I am doing now’ (Ali, 2004 [2003] 174). To him English remains the language of cultural domination and represents a form of cultural capital he aspires to. 13. The case of Gogol’s name is even more complex since his name is neither American nor Indian but Russian. For further discussion of the name issue, see Munoz, 2008. 14. Although bilingualism is often seen as something positive, which may even help children develop meta-linguistic abilities, it has for many years been thought to have negative consequences on the intellectual development

Notes 173

15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

of children who were sometimes behind at school (Tsushima and Hogan, 1975). It was also thought to affect their psychological development and lead to a sense of alienation and a loss of bearings caused by the fact that the children could not cope with two systems of values and two sets of representations (McClosky and Schaar, 1965; Diebold, 1968). Born in a refugee camp in Kiel, Germany, at the end of the Second World War, of Ukrainian parents, Marina Lewycka grew up in England where she still lives. Marina Lewycka further explores the theme of illegal immigration and the plight of asylum seekers in her second novel Two Caravans (2007). In Orwell’s 1984, a new language is invented so as to control people and prevent them from rebelling against the regime. It is a simplified version of traditional English; it has no synonyms and cannot be used to express different shades of meaning. As for adjectives and verbs, they are meant to disappear in the ultimate version of Newspeak so that it will become impossible for people to express an opinion or refer to agency. In Am I that Name? Language, Discourse, Society, Denise Riley insists on the temporality of discourse and the shifting meaning of discursive categories which vary with the contexts. She writes that ‘women’ is historically, discursively constructed, and always relatively to other categories which themselves change (Riley, 1988, 1–2). In a recent article published in the Telegraph Review (18 August 2007) Toby Clements observes that ‘unlike the French, who have sought to codify their language with stiff rules governing the words you can use, English speakers have been able to take their pick from wherever they liked’. It is indeed true that an important aspect of the French’s fear of globalization originates in a fear of cultural homogeneity.

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Index Achebe, Chinua, 126, 149 Ali, Monica, 39–44, 77, 79–84, 91, 101, 115, 123, 133, 135, 146 Anderson, Benedict, 94, 163 Anzaldua, Gloria, 128, 143, 144 Appadurai, Arjun, 1, 2, 12, 20, 26, 39, 78, 88–90 passim, 99, 121, 123 Appiah, Anthony, 9, 99, 100–2 Arendt, Hannah, 100, 101, 109, 110, 113 Augé Marc, 8, 78, 92–4 authenticity, 7, 22, 27, 36, 41, 51–6 passim, 61, 63, 73, 79, 80, 82, 84 Bachelard, Gaston, 33 Badiou, Alain, 102 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 16, 78, 92, 95, 96, 99, 100, 112, 113 Bayart, Jean-François, 1, 99 Bhabha, Homi K., 1, 6, 12, 18, 45, 46, 56, 57, 90 bilanguaging, 9, 125, 128, 136, 143, 144 bilingualism, 8, 9, 105–9, 126–8, 133–8, 140–8, 159, 172, 173 Brah, Avtar, 13, 19 Burke, Edmund, 100, 101, 110 Butler, Judith, 65 Chambers, Iain, 1, 51 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 153 Clifford, James, 7, 53 code switching, 136 cosmopolitanism, 20, 100, 101, 102 créolisation, 10, 50, 129, 152, 153 Crystal, David, 4, 128, 172 Deleuze, Gilles, 109, 131, 144, 145, 155 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 73, 97, 110, 146, 158 Derrida Jacques, 32, 60, 128, 131, 137, 141–3 passim, 158

Desai, Kiran, 39, 77, 86, 87, 91, 111–13 passim diaspora concept, 5, 11, 12, 16, 18, 38 diaspora of despair, 163 diaspora of hope, 2, 163 diaspora of terror, 163 diasporic imaginary, 11, 68, 69 experience of diaspora, 37–44 passim, 127, 161, 163 Du Bois, W.E.B., 15 Eagleton, Terry, 20, 97, 100, 102 Eco, Umberto, 55 English language, 128–30 passim, 133–5, 144–54, 157 Englishness, 51 ethnicity, 53, 55, 68, 70, 71 Eugenides, Jeffrey, 38, 39 Fanon, Frantz, 59, 61 Black Skin, White Masks, 51 Farah, Nuruddin, 33, 34 father tongue, 131 Garcia, Cristina, 135, 146–9 Geertz, Clifford, 25 Gellner, Ernest, 53 Gilroy, Paul, 12, 13, 15, 50, 54 Black Atlantic, 53, 60, 73 There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack, 12 Glissant, Edouard, 4, 10, 128, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155, 158, 159 Goldie, Terry, 55, 139 Gottdiener, Mark, 79, 80, 86, 93 Gurnah, Abdulrazak, 77, 101 Admiring Silence, 103 Hagège, Claude, 4, 128 Hall, Stuart, 12, 15, 43, 52, 60, 62 Hardt, Michael, 9, 102, 120, 121, 122, 124

187

188

Index

Harvey, David, 8, 77 Hassner, Pierre, 128 Hewinson, 79, 82 Hobsbawm, Eric, 53, 100 home, concept in diasporic literature, 13, 34, 38, 40–2 homecoming narratives, 41, 42, 77, 84–7 hooks, bell, 50, 53 Huggan, Graham, 22, 79 Hutcheon, Linda, 43, 152, 127 hybridity, 27 hybridization, 152, 129 identity, postcolonial, 20, 30, 31, 33–6, 59, 70 diasporic, 3, 7, 15, 37, 51, 58, 64, 65 imaginary, 23, 24, 25 imagined communities, 163 interstitiality, 6, 14, 15, 17, 18, 26, 31, 39, 42–9, 51, 69, 164 Islas, Antonio, 52 Jen, Gish, 63–8 passim Johnson, Colin, see Mudrooroo Kristeva, Julia, 140, 141 Kunzru, Hari, 39, 78, 85, 86, 93, 94, 110, 111, 115 Kureishi, Hanif, 30, 44, 51, 57, 58 Lacan, Jacques, 23 Laclau, Ernesto, 102, 120, 121 Lahiri, Jhumpa, 39, 40, 135, 146 The Namesake, 138, 139, 140, 141 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques, 4, 129, 136 Interpretation as Pragmatics, 153, 156 A Marxist Philosophy of Language, 153, 154 Lévi, André, 11, 16 Levy, Andrea, 41, 51, 58, 60, 61, 62 Lewycka, Marina, 142, 143 Lowe, Lisa, 7, 53 luggage motif, 41, 42 McLuhan, Marshall, 8, 77, 85, 86 magic realism, 37 Marangoly George, Rosemary, 21, 35, 41 Memmi, Albert, 33

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 29 Mignolo, Walter, 136, 143, 150, 157, 158 miscegenation, 153 Mishra, Sudesh, 17, 19 Mishra, Vijay, 5, 17, 23 mother tongue, 9, 105–8, 126–32, 138, 142, 147 Mouffe, Chantal, 17 Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson), 35, 36, 55, 56, 165, 166 Mukherjee, Bharati, 85 naming, 35, 36, 139 nation, concept, 20, 53, 58, 94, 110, 130 Negri, Antonio, 100 New Historicism, 15 nomadism, 52 nostalgia, 7, 11, 23, 75, 77–80, 82, 84 Nourbese Philip, Marlene, 131, 132 Okara, Gabriel, 126 Orientalism, 81 Orwell, George, 126 Ostler, Nicholas, 150 phenomenology, 29 Phillips, Caryl, 103, 104 polyglossia, 138, 143 postmodernism, 79–84 passim, 92, 93 Pratt, Marie-Louise, 15, 162 Punter, David, 88 race, 53, 65, 68, 70 Radhakrishnan, Rajagopolan, 13, 16 Renault, Emmanuel, 8, 116 Rhizome, 159 Ricoeur, Paul, 26 rights, 100, 101 Riley, Denise, 27–30, 155 Roth, Philip, 30, 102 The Human Stain, 46–9 Roy, Arundhati, 79 Rushdie, Salman, 22, 37, 101, 102 Fury, 8, 105–9 Imaginary Homelands, 23, 75, 76, 82 The Satanic Verses

Index 189 Said, Edward, 43, 81 Sam, Agnes, 21 Saro-Wiva, Ken, 125 Selvon, Sam, 41 Serres, Michel, 152 Skinner, John, 9 Smith, Zadie, 101, 116–19 Spivak, Gayatri, 13 stepmother tongue, concept, 9, 127, 150, 172 Suleiri, Sara, 55

transnationalism, 9, 18–20, 99, 100, 102, 110, 125, 130 Vassanji, Moyez, 41, 68–73 virtual communities, 78, 88–100 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 87 Wa Thiong’o Ngugi, 32, 33, 36, 125, 126, 128, 136, 148, 149 Decolonising the Mind, 36, 126, 127 Young, Robert, 27, 153, 166

Tambiah, Stanley, 19 Tölölyan, Khachig, 12

Žižek, Slavoj, 23

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