Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (Cross Cultures 85) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Global Fissures Postcolonial Fusions C ross ultures Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English 85 Seri...

Author: Clara A.B. Joseph | Janet Wilson

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Global Fissures Postcolonial Fusions

C

ross ultures

Readings in the Post / Colonial Literatures in English

85 Series Editors

Gordon Collier (Giessen)

Hena Maes–Jelinek (Liège)

Geoffrey Davis (Aachen)

Global Fissures Postcolonial Fusions

Edited by

Clara A.B. Joseph and Janet Wilson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006

The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”. ISBN-10: 90-420-2018-0 ISBN-13: 978-90-420-2018-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2006 Printed in The Netherlands

IN MEMORIAM Edward W. Said * Jerusalem (British Mandate of Palestine), 1 November 1935 g New York, N Y , 25 September 2003

Contents

Illustrations

ix

INTRODUCTION

Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions

THEORIZING

THE

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SECTION 1 GLOBAL AND THE POSTCOLONIAL

JOHN C. HAWLEY

Theorizing the Diaspora

3

ROBERT SPENCER

The Price of Silence: Intellectual Communication in the Age of Globalization

17

SHAOBO XIE

Is the World Decentred? A Postcolonial Perspective on Globalization

53

SECTION 2 GLOBALIZATION AND LITERATURE CYNTHIA SUGARS

“World Famous Across Canada”: National Identity in the Global Village

79

CHITRA SANKARAN

Ethics, Aesthetics and the Globalized Other in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things

103

A. CLARE BRANDABUR

The Elephant in the Living-Room: A Postcolonial Reading of Waiting for Godot

121

ISABEL HOVING

On Invasions, Weeds, and Wilderness: The Dutch Imagination of Globalization (thrice)

153

C.L. INNES

171

Cosmopolitan Readers and Postcolonial Identities MUSTAPHA MARROUCHI

185

The Fantasy of Home

SECTION 3 GLOBALIZATION, POLITICS

AND

CULTURE

VIJAYASREE CHAGANTI & KANUKOLANUK RAVICHANDRA

Macaulay to Microsoft: Globalization and the Indian Academy

209

JENNIFER LAWN

Creativity Inc. Globalizing the Cultural Imaginary in New Zealand

225

CHRIS PRENTICE

Riding the Whale? Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider

247

MARTIN SPAUL & AMINA MINHAS

Representing Interconnection and Cultural Flow: Towards Reframing Tourist Experiences with New Media

269

PETER D. OSBORNE

anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras: Cultural Hybridity and Latin American Photography

293

Notes on Contributors

323

Illustrations

Figure 1. Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Parábola Optica (1931); reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York City, U S A .

317

Figure 2. Bauer Sá, Dando, from the series Nós Por Exemplo (Us for Example) (Brazil, 1993; reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York City, U S A .

318

Figure 3. Luis González Palma, La Lotería (1990); produced by kind permission of Schneider Gallery, Chicago, U S A .

319

Figure 4. Pedro Meyer, La Tentación del Ángel (The Temptation of the Angel) (1991–92; original in colour); reproduced by kind permission of the photographer.

320

Figure 5. Nelson Garrido, La Sonrisa de Santa Liberata, from the series Todos los Santos Son Muertes (All Saints Are Dead) (1990; original in colour); reproduced by kind permission of the photographer.

321

Figure 6. Gerardo Suter, Coatlicue (Mexico 1990); reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Arts, New York City, U S A .

322

Introduction Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions

T

O D A Y ’ S W O R L D is marked by uncertainty, violence, and haste. It is increasingly shaped by globalization, a term used either pejoratively to signify the overpowering reduction of the earth and its inhabitants to its economic and cultural use by those empowered by capital and technology, or more innocuously to refer to the flows of goods, people, capital, knowledge across borders due to the lowering of barriers and the reduced costs of transport and communication.1 It is also shaped by the conditions of postcolonialism, a term that ought to suggest the demise of colonialism but for all theoretical purposes is ever haunted by its presence; in an era of multinational capitalism it has expanded semantically either in resistance to globalization or in significant ways overlapping with it. The contemporary moment demands re-examination by questions such as: how are literary and cultural representations shaped by the times, specifically of postcolonialism and globalization? What is the role of the creative writer and critic at the intersection of globalization and the postcolonial? How do the postcolonial and globalization interact with and shape each other and other aspects such as nation, identity, or aesthetics? Do postcolonial readings of past and contemporary literary works enable a more historical understanding of globalization and vice versa? How have postcolonialism and globalization contributed to the modes and media of the new technologies? The essays in this collection respond to these queries by exploring perspectives arising from the complex interface between these two theoretical positions and the interlinked historical, political, economic, and ethical developments and conflicts with which they are associated. They

1

Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2002): 9.

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CLARA A.B. JOSEPH & JANET WILSON

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represent responses of theorists and critics from First and Third World nations to the accelerating pace of globalization which the new electronic media and networks mobilize, to new eco-environmental issues that they raise, and to faster communication and increased mobility of peoples. Some draw on theories of globalization which cogently address economic and political issues, while others turn to postcolonial theory for intellectual critique and a countervailing ethic. Among the perceptions offered are that the two theories are collapsing together in significant ways, the global becoming elided with the postcolonial as a theory of cultural difference, resistance and change, through the common denominators of disapora, migration, and identity. Or that postcolonial theory’s promotion of cultural phenomena, cultural difference and Third World agency is impotent in the face of economic and political globalization; despite advocating resistance to globalization’s homogenizing forces, the postcolonial fails to make any substantial impact on ever-encroaching global networks, corporations, N G O s etc. Finally, others discover within metropolitan discourses and their hoped-for theoretical elisions a potential resurgence under a new guise of postcolonial issues such as historical injustice, resistance, and finding a voice. The ‘fissures/fusions’ dichotomy of the collection’s title challenges the reductive stereotypes by which each position and/or theory labels the other: postcolonialism’s view of global forces as homogenizing and commodifying culture, and globalization’s view of postcolonial resistance to such universalisms and First World synthesizing of cultural difference. ‘Fissures/fusions’ suggests alternative categorizations of these positions. It implies that globalization is a deterritorializing force that ‘fissures’ the nation-state because of the increased movements of migrant, exilic and diasporic groups, and the new margins within the nation that they create, even though it ostensibly synthesizes differences between nations through its economic and fiscal policies and cultural commodification. Postcolonialism ‘fuses’ in responding to the challenge of deterritorialization and, drawing on its colonial origins, acknowledging the continued importance of the nation-state and the ‘national imaginary’, even as it interrogates principles and assumptions of national culturalism in demanding increased recognition of ethnic difference, whether it be under the banner of biculturalism, multiculturalism or even the ‘melting pot’, the ‘mosaic’ or the ‘rainbow nation’. These contradictions and polarizations suggest some

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of the tensions that the uneasy conjunction of the postcolonial and the global create, and which these essays address. The question of the artist or intellectual’s political commitment is one that preoccupies many theorists and writers today. Salman Rushdie’s injunction, in his essay “Outside the Whale,” that the artist be politically engaged and swim in the ocean of world affairs, outside the body of the whale, was a defining one in 1981. Rushdie was contesting George Orwell’s ‘quietist’ position for the writer/intellectual, advanced in his essay in 1941, of “remaining passive, accepting”: i.e. of staying within the body of the whale.2 Rushdie would replace the “whale” with a “wail” and would place Orwell’s Jonah outside the whale amidst “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the dialectic of history.” He concludes: “in our whaleless world, in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.”3 This debate provides a point of reference for several essays, and Orwell’s whale-metaphor is variously adapted to refer both to the global and to the postcolonial. John Hawley suggests that Rushdie posits a Noah rather than a Jonah, because the ocean in which we live is global and so capable of bringing the diasporic experience from the margins to the centre of our experience; for there are fewer hiding places today. Chris Prentice, in writing on the New Zealand film Whale Rider, uncovers a further dimension of that metaphor: that of ‘riding the whale’ of globalization. The film’s tenuous elevation of the indigene, she points out, is suggestive of the balancing-act required of a minority culture in order that its voice may intervene in dominant discourses. Edward Said’s 1993 Reith lectures, later published as Representations of the Intellectual, are an even more cogent call to intellectuals in enjoining that they “speak the truth to power.”4 Robert Spencer turns to Said in reminding us that the critic should be actively committed by showing “literature’s entanglement with the world.” The subtitle of Spencer’s essay on silence, “Intellectual Communication in an Age of Globalization,” emphasizes the public role of the intellectual

2 George Orwell, “Inside the Whale” (1940), in Orwell, Essays, sel. & intro. John Carey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002): 243. 3 Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 100. 4 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996): 8.

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in engendering and influencing debate through his “reflection on matters of public concern.” ¹

In the first section, “Theories of the Postcolonial and Globalization,” three theoretical essays expose the uneasily shifting boundaries between the postcolonial and the global, as they address the question of whether any grounds of compatibility might be established. In “Theorizing the Diaspora,” John Hawley asks how influential the nation-state is today when international business is the engine of global culture. Drawing on Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship, he argues that postcolonialism is “weakened by its dependence on an idealized composite image of the diasporic, subaltern and working class subject” and in “celebrating cultural difference and hybridity in resistance to homogenizing trends.” Diminished postcolonial and diasporic discourses in fact fail to recognize the new conditions of enslavement suffered by many migrant workers. By contrast, Hawley finds in the economic and political analyses of globalization an ability to link state power, institutional capitalism and transnational networks to forms of cultural reproduction. Identifying in the diasporic subject – whether migrant intellectuals (Western and non-Western), yuppie internationales or migrant workers (skilled and non-skilled) – a Zeitgeist for our time, he develops R. Radhakrishnan’s suggestion that identity politics should be revalued, particularly as culture becomes more a matter of “conscious choice,” in Arjun Appadurai’s words; such revaluation, Hawley argues, may bring the postcolonial and the global into a more dialectical relationship.5 Hawley perceives that increased international migrancy of the last decade has led to a hurried raising of cultural anchors, pushing us all into “literal or intuited diasporas.” Robert Spencer finds that the crisis of an age of political and economic globalization demands that urgent attention be paid to the rights and wrongs of silence. In “The Price of Silence” he revisits the question of subaltern silence, of whether or not to speak for the Other (crucial in postcolonial theory ever since Spivak’s essay “Can the 5 But Slavoj ŽiÞek, according to Robert Spencer, claims that the politics of identity, in the form of local differences and singular identities, offers only “ideological escape from global capitalism,” which is well able to withstand the challenge they represent.

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Subaltern Speak?”). Turning to postmodern theory and its antecedents – Lyotard, Derrida, Adorno and Nietzsche among others – in which silence is often seen as a logical consequence of the doubts about language’s capacity to express and represent knowledge, Spencer critiques current postcolonial theory for its over-determined response to the historical predicament of subordinated subjects. A generation of critics, he argues, does not speak for the Other, because they are acutely aware (after Edward Said’s Orientalism) of the potential for misrepresentation. Believing they lack any “right to discuss anything beyond themselves,” they reject “the possibility of constructive, willed communication between different societies.” This Orwellian “intellectual withdrawal,” Spencer argues, is paralleled by the postmodern reluctance to speak in place of others, which leads to politically unavailing cultural relativism and an unwillingness to reflect critically and speak out about one’s own country’s malpractice and misdemeanours. Spencer suggests that modernism provides a viable model for postcolonial theorists because of its concern to communicate with others without taking over from them. He advocates two other modes of redress: Said’s “permission to narrate” for Third World subjects, who are encouraged to make known their grievances; and, in the words of Subcomandante Marcos, “respectful silence,” a form of deference towards interlocutors, which allows others the chance to speak. Shaobo Xie, in “Is The World Decentred? A Postcolonial Perspective on Globalization,” also calls for renovation and recuperation of postcolonial theory. Xie takes issue with the claim of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri that empire is over, and he contests their universalizing, synthesizing assertion that “both postcolonialism and global capitalism celebrate and employ protean difference in the varied forms of hybridity, mobility and diversity.” By contrast to Hawley’s scepticism about the continuing influence of the nation-state today, due to globalization’s being driven by international business, Xie asserts that globalization is a new form of imperialism – i.e. Americanism – and that rampant American consumer capitalism is the villain that it spawns. In Xie’s analysis, therefore, the centre/periphery distinction, central to postcolonial theory, still obtains today despite the existence of newly decentred metropolises. Xie draws upon difference for his critique – cultural, ethnic, national – in order to differentiate the postcolonial from the global, and he argues that capitalism, or globalization in its monetary-economist guise, both feeds off and breeds difference. He demands that postcolonialism be mobilized to theor-

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ize global resistance to global capitalism. In advocating greater distance between and separation of the respective positions of the postcolonial and globalization, as a form of political necessity, Xie’s agenda contrasts with that of Hawley, who seeks some degree of reconciliation between the two theories through a renewal of identity politics. It is closer to Spencer’s demand for reassessment of the postcolonial (and postmodern) advocacy of silence, and is, by implication, a renewal of the ethic of intellectual commitment that speaking-out implies. ¹

In the second section, “Literature and Globalization,” the relationship between the two theoretical positions is represented as equally conflicted, with identity politics, based on issues of nationality, migrancy, and marginality, complicating the picture. Essays in this section focus their enquiry through literary texts which both illustrate resistance to global hegemony and power structures and represent alternative ways of manipulating them in order to highlight issues such as environmental loss. Cynthia Sugars examines the situation of Canada’s complex ‘international’ nationalism as its literature becomes newly eminent in a global age; by contrast, Isobel Hoving studies two Dutch migrant writers whose work challenges assumptions of mainstream eco-environmental politics in the Netherlands; while the concept of aesthetic resistance is at the heart of Chitra Sankaran’s discussion of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, a novel which also reveals an ethical concern for the plight of the other; Clare Brandabur, in her postcolonial interpretation of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, suggests that power relations between victim and victimizer are at the heart of his writing. These are merely replayed on a larger scale in the American/British identification of the axis of evil and the wars against terror in Afghanistan and Iraq. Accordingly, the existential phrase “I can’t go on, I’ll go on” acquires new political dimensions within a postcolonial reading that privileges the stubborn resistance of the oppressed. That postcolonial texts usually inscribe the reader as both insider and outsider, thereby encouraging postcolonial readings, is the issue pursued by C.L. Innes as she examines selected works of James Joyce, Chinua Achebe, and Salman Rushdie. Mustapha Marrouchi’s focus is on the outsider as diasporic traveller, on “writers of a half way house” whose quest for home identifies them as dispossessed. He examines the works of the Chinese

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poet Bei Dao, the Palestinan poet Mahmoud Darwish, and Edward Said as responses to their exilic lives, lived “in translation.” Issues of nationhood are at the heart of Cynthia Sugars’ “‘World Famous Across Canada’: National Identity in the Global Village,” and its articulation of a key postcolonial anxiety from the perspective of the national imaginary: the loss of cultural specificity when a culture goes global. Sugars focuses on the recent international success of born-elsewhere ‘Canadian’ writers – Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel, and Rohinton Mistry – to stress the fact that issues of nationhood persist in a global age even though, or perhaps because, diasporic and migrant groups contribute to the ‘deterritorializing’ of the nation. Sugars’ analysis of the meaning for the nation-state of Canada of the conflicted relationship between the postcolonial and the global is premissed on the presence of the multicultural in the nation’s identity. This has historically always undermined claims to uncomplicated national autonomy. In her typology, then, the Canadian postcolonial is already international (hence the title of her essay). Existing somewhere between the national and the global; whereas the global, a resurgence of the cosmopolitan-imperialism debate which dominated Canadian nationalism in the 1940s, is post-national and also nationalcultural. Sugars’ identification of Canadian angst in defining and defending a national essence stands in sharp contrast to Jennifer Lawn’s discussion of the apparently uncontested top-down governmental corporatization of the arts in New Zealand, converting creativity into an export industry, and culture into a commodity. But Sugars, in linking the global with the national-cultural, and repositioning the postcolonial as part of an internationalizing of culture, suggests a new paradigm. Is this culturally specific to Canada or potentially adaptable to the circumstances of other ex-British white settler colonies like New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa? An interesting new area of enquiry offers itself here. Isabel Hoving focuses on contradictory assumptions about nature and the natural found in biological and environmental discourses in the Netherlands, assumptions that are then used to support different positions in debates on multiculturalization and globalization: e.g., the “eco-racist” view that Muslim migrants, like an alien species, constitute a threat, or alternatively, the view that, like a new species or culture, they enhance diversity. Hoving introduces contrasting attitudes to the environmental concept of “diversity” expressed in the work of two migrant writers who undermine current theories based on environmental discourses. Such dis-

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courses present the Netherlands either as a “closed system” which an influx of migrants would threaten, or as a natural community which should develop its fullest potential with minimum interference, according to “systems ecology.” The Dutch–Moroccan Hafid Bouazza feminizes and sexualizes Dutch multicultural society; his minority view is that nature, always transgressive, sexually abundant and dynamic and never a “balanced ecosystem,” is the real source of diversity, not migrants. The Dutch–Surinamese writer Ellen Ombre, by contrast, critiques the dominant Dutch discourse on biodiversity – quality is translated into quantity as natural produce is commodified, leading to scarcity – in the context of global trade and destructive commercial practices. One of Ombre’s characters uses global products to create and manage biodiversity locally because exploitative global economics have frustrated “her effort to create natural diversity.” Hoving argues that Ombre, in her revisionist handling of this eco-environmental theme, also counters stylistically – with an aesthetic of fragmentation drawn from a Caribbean “poetics of diversity”– the ideology of coherence which the dominant Dutch economic discourse on diversity promotes. Chitra Sankaran, in “Ethics, Aesthetics and the Globalized Other in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things,” like Shaobo Xie, Vijayasree Chaganti and Kanukolanuk Ravichandra, points out the negative effects of global cultural values on Third World society, noting the paradox of the international success of Roy’s novel, given its hostility to global corporatization. This contradiction has been reinforced by Roy’s subsequent advocacy of environmental issues and her hostile stand on issues of Indian postcolonialism, leading to her media image as ‘the’ voice of anti-globalization: the big-dam project in the Narmada Valley, the embrace of a nuclear-weapons programme in the hostilities towards Pakistan, and the rise of right-wing Hindu nationalism.6 Sankaran also identifies in the novel a continued, though somewhat symbolically restricted indigenous otherness, hence resistance to globalization, through the truncated space in which the Kathakali, the dance drama of Kerala, is enunciated. The novel’s ethical position – its concern for the Other – is linked to its aes-

6 Julie Mullaney. “‘Globalizing Dissent’? Arundhati Roy, Local and Postcolonial Feminisms in the Transnational Economy,” World Literature Written in English 40.1 (2002–2003): 57.

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thetic, projected in its narrative form through an organic connection to the Kathakali. Modernist texts are also subject to revisionist readings in the light of contemporary issues of the postcolonial and globalization, as Clare Brandabur shows in “The Elephant in the Living Room: A Postcolonial Reading of Waiting for Godot.” Identifying postcolonialism as a politics of resistance, Brandabur, by drawing on biographies and studies of Beckett’s historical contexts, demonstrates that Beckett’s dramaturgy was strongly influenced by his involvement in the French resistance in the Second World War, leading to his flight from Paris with his wife Suzanne. The power-relations in the play between Pozzo and Lucky, as well as their privations, can be mapped onto the biographical facts of Beckett’s life at this time; equally, they are susceptible to an allegorized reading as representative of the unequal power-relations between the Nazis and oppressed French subjects. Brandabur argues, contrary to the time-honoured view of Beckett as a master of the absurd promulgated by Martin Esslin in 1961, that Beckett was essentially driven by political as much as aesthetic motives, but that he expunged references to political and historical events in successive revisions of this and other plays, because of his aim to achieve a minimalist form. She reinforces her thesis with reference to contemporary events in the Gulf and Iraq, and, pointing to Beckett’s last play, Catastrophe (1982), dedicated to Vaclav Havel, argues that Beckett’s work can be read as part of the tradition of resistance writing. In “Cosmopolitan Readers: Postcolonial Identities,” C.L. Innes examines a not often considered aspect of postcolonial literary texts, its readers. She notes, “Where there is diversity or ambiguity of meaning, many critics assume it to be a property of the text rather than a consequence of diverse readerships.” She goes on to explain that many postcolonial texts actually construct hybrid readers, a function often unavailable to modernist and postmodernist writers. The postcolonial text, by contrast, is shaped by the writer’s acute consciousness of “a double audience,” one linked to the colonizer and the other to the colonized. Thus James Joyce’s Ulysses, here read as a postcolonial text, like Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, creates “insiders” and “outsiders” out of readers. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom makes insiders of Irish readers, a category that Joyce extends and defines, so that “a corollary of the multiplicity of voices and the question of the authoritative speaker, is the multiplicity of listeners and the question of the authoritative reader.” Postcolonial texts aim to create corollary out-

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siders not to impose meaninglessness but, rather, to encourage among the insiders “a shared knowledge and history, over which they have authority and mastery,” in which the outsiders must be educated. Failing this education, outsider readers may commit the fallacy of generalization, as Aijaz Ahmad notes about Fredric Jameson’s description of Third World texts as “national allegories.” Nevertheless, as Robert Spencer points out, texts and readers are variously determined by different contexts: “The reader […] is a worldly creature; his judgements or interpretations are not hunches or whimsical private surmises but the result of a dialogue with the text and with the milieux in which it is produced and read.” But not all postcolonial texts, Innes argues, prompt outsider readers to become “more like insiders” and so, in fact, more aware of the resultant double consciousness. For example, Salman Rushdie’s novels often keep the outsider reader as outsider. This section concludes, appropriately enough, on a lyrical note, with Mustapha Marrouchi’s appreciation of the condition of exile, homelessness, and impermanence as experienced and articulated by three exiled writers and intellectuals: the Chinese poet Bei Dao, Darwish Mahmoud, the national poet of dispossession for the Palestinian people, and the influential Palestinian-American writer and theorist, Edward Said. For Marrouchi, the rootlessness of all three is a way of life, for the “dispossessed subject introduces himself as metaphysical foreigner twice displaced” and his work “travesties the idea of a single homeland.” Drawing on Theodor Adorno’s writing on exile, he argues that, for these writers, the text becomes a provisional new homeland, as new territory that the subject uncovers is mapped. Exile in Darwish’s work pushes one’s consciousness “into unforeseen and sometimes almost unbearable shapes”; Dao’s poetry “captures the vastness of what has been lost which makes itself known in unanticipated ways,” and Said’s comment that exile creates a “contrapuntal habit” because “the expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occurs against the memory of those things in another environment” gains heightened validity in Marrouchi’s reassessment. His sympathetic portrayal echoes Spencer’s argument that writers such as Said refused to bow to the postmodernist insistence on silence in the face of oppression of the Other and further suggests, in sympathy with Hawley’s view, that just as diasporas are “exemplary communities of the trans-

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national moment,”7 so the dispossessed writer is an important icon of the early-twenty-first century. ¹

Essays in the “Globalization, Politics, and Culture” section point to the often negative effects of globalization on homogenizing cultures, creating technocrats in the service of the global market-place, as new technologies of production, distribution, and communication usher in such modes of labour as textile sweatshops and outworkers at home. Such conditions are critiqued, for example, in Chaganti and Ravichandra’s essay on globalization and the Indian academy, which argues that under the guise of internationalization, globalization is ‘westernizing’ the academy in India, affecting adversely the culture, ethos and autonomy of the universities, as the Microsoft revolution has led to the growth of “IT coolies,” and similar intellectual colonization is revealed in the way the “tyranny of the market language strangles the voice of the academy.” The essays by Lawn and by Spaul and Minhas, by contrast, suggest that global networks and the technological revolution marginalize or efface postcolonial resistance, as Second World governments translate politics into policy and as the new media provide opportunities for revitalizing niche marketing associated with tourism, one of the most dynamic sectors of the global economy. Chris Prentice looks at both sides of the issue in examining how the New Zealand Mori are re-positioned with reference both to the success of the 2003 film Whale Rider and to its representations of indigeneity. Finally, in a study of Latin American photography, Peter D. Osborne examines the impact of cultural hybridity on the modernist impulse, particularly given the locations of photographs in a postcolonial space. Osborne sees the Latin-American problem as one of “representing multiple ways of seeing in which traditional visualities and epistemologies both combine and conflict with modern, often globalized and technologically transformed ways of seeing and understanding.” Vijayasree Chaganti and Kanukolanuk Ravichandra, in “Macaulay to Microsoft: Globalization and the Indian Academy,” argue that globalization is having an adverse effect on the Indian academy by encouraging the 7

Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York: Routledge, 1996): 186.

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privatization and commercialization of education and the large-scale emigration of Indian students to Western metropolitan centres. The Indian universities, originating as instruments of British colonial rule and inseparable from national development, have now succumbed to the pressure of the world’s funding bodies, trading corporations and other N G O s, which prevent the development of sound policies regarding the internationalization of higher education. The current state of emergency in the Indian academy is manifested in conflicting drives: either to ‘indigenize’ or ‘indianize’ education, although this has a controversial divisive and religious agenda, or, since the 1990s, to reform education into a competitive sector of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society following massive withdrawal of public funding and government subsidies and the introduction of a policy framework for private and foreign investment. Focusing on “Microsoft education” in information technology, which in India has become a handmaiden to capitalist enterprise, they argue that cultural specificity is being erased as “I T coolies” are trained to neutralize their accents, allowing their intellectual potential to be colonized as computer-skilled labour becomes an export commodity. Such homogenizing of opportunity comes at the expense of a liberal education and its traditions of protest and dissent, and serves further to skew the concept of “internationalization of education” between East and West. The general decline in standards they see as reflected in the tyranny of market language, which strangles the voice of the academy. The international distribution networks which the visual media have harnessed and the consequences these new export industries and growth areas have for a national economy are the subject of Jennifer Lawn’s “Creativity Inc.: Globalizing the Cultural Imaginary in New Zealand.” Lawn draws attention to the corporatization of creativity coinciding with the international success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, by means of which the Labour government is providing new incentives to the arts to bring them in line with other export industries; the aim is to rebrand New Zealand as a creative, yet entrepreneurial economy. The ‘network model’ of globalization adapted by the Labour government consists of a two-way traffic of cultural products which offer opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop niche export markets. Chris Prentice, in contrast to Lawn, focuses on the consequences for indigenous peoples of the internationalization of New Zealand culture. She develops the ‘inside/outside the whale’ dichotomy in line with the film Whale Rider’s climactic moments and asks

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whether ‘riding’ (either steering or being carried by) the whale of late global capitalism empowers local Mori communities to participate in the global cultural market or whether it reinforces oppressive power-relations of the past. Prentice argues that despite its mythological story and production of ‘the natural’, including the New Zealand coastline, for tourist consumption, the film knowingly situates the Mori within current local discourses about Mori self-help, parental neglect, health-promotion etc. The fibreglass whale might finally be seen as a symbol of the hyperrealization of Mori culture being inserted into the global economy. Martin Spaul and Amina Minhas, in “Representing Interconnection and Cultural Flow: Towards Reframing Tourist Experiences with New Media,” start by introducing the ethic of transnationalism involved in tourism, which stems from the inequalities between ‘host’ and ‘guest’ nations. They ask: how can a cosmopolitan understanding of tourism be developed in a globalized world? Ecotourism, they claim, involves reframing images of tourist destinations by using the ‘rich media’ of computer technology to provide representations of cultural interconnection and flow. One contemporary model is avant-garde montage, based on the revival of the French ethnographic surrealism of the 1920s and 30s (creating bizarre juxtapositions – “illuminations” – between diverse cultures), and found in multimedia museum displays. This may not be appropriate to represent the hybridization and cultural flows caused by accelerating globalization, because contemporary audiences expect the virtual environments of computer-based representations to display a seamless unity and a navigable order. One solution to the problem of organizing a multi-perspectival ethnography in a hypermedia structure, therefore, is to provide an “ethnographer,” a guide figure “sensitive to the problems of imposing itineraries and interpretations.” This “representational strategy” by which the “fragmented” modernist codes of montage and multivocality may be revised, in its turn furnishes such codes with a similar “dissonant experience” by offering a variety of explanatory frameworks. The ethical questions that Spaul and Minhas raise concerning the use of new media to represent the cross-cultural encounter of tourist experiences and destinations provide another perspective on the complex issue of crossing national boundaries which Hoving identifies with the Dutch immigration authorities’ perception of migrants as disturbing the natural balance of the “closed system.” Spaul and Minhas’s focus on contemporary tourism also intersects with Lawn’s discussion of the globalization of

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the New Zealand cultural sector, through the restructuring of the creative arts as entrepreneurial industries: the international success of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy as a “weightless foreign exchange earner” generating new merchandise and cross-marketing initiatives, such as renaming Aotearoa /New Zealand as Middle Earth, has revitalized the tourist industry (Hobbiton Tours, Red Carpet Tours etc. are now on offer); photographs and computer-generated imagery and special effects developed by creating fantasy locations of Tolkien’s world have been imprinted by the New Zealand Tourism website onto the landscape of New Zealand. Finally, Peter D. Osborne, in “anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras: Cultural Hybridity and Latin American Photography,” considers the formulation of hybridity as an interaction between the modern and the traditional within specific postcolonial spaces in Latin America. He defines this interaction and creativity within the theoretical framework of Aimé Césaire’s concept of “miraculous weapons,” by which is meant the conscious utilization of mythic and poetic language as a cultural and political instrument of resistance and change, and the embracing of Néstor García Canclini’s privileging of “cultural hybridity” as “an objective condition, inherited from history” and a process “to be accepted, celebrated, and mobilized” – hybridity, according to Canclini, having the potential to collapse cultural hierarchies. The photographs Osborne examines as instances of hybridity and resistance are those of the Mexicans Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Pedro Meyer, the Brazilian Bauer Sá, the Guatemalan Luis González Palma, the Venezuelan Nelson Garrido, and the Argentinian Gerardo Suter. Suter’s photography in particular, notes Osborne, in attempting to reintroduce premodern indigenous forms, pushes the boundaries of photography, where “photography does what it is famous for, gives presence to what is absent and yet cruelly confirms its irretrievability.” Yet what is reintroduced is not the past – it is, rather, the affect of allegory in the supplement of the sign and the displacement of verisimilitude, as Craig Owen would define the process. Osborne’s insights into the hybrid forms of Latin American photography link up with Hawley’s arguments on the inherence of hybridity in the phenomenon of globalization. Hawley acknowledges the importance of diaspora and its heterogeneously globalized condition when he argues for the centrality of the hybridized diaspora within “the whale of globalization.” Hybridity as the interaction between traditional and modern elements becomes a presence to be reckoned with in spaces both postcolonial

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and globalized, so that Osborne confers the term “ritual device” on the capacity of Latin American photography to not just ‘resemble’ but to ‘contain’ the object, significantly enhancing the importance of art photography within the study of both postcolonialism and globalization. Osborne’s examination of Pedro Meyer’s 1991 photograph “The Temptation of the Angel” stresses “how a world is experienced by means of how it is imagined,” but, further, points to the message emanating from the photograph: “only when Mexico incorporates its own otherness will it fully develop its own modernity.” The theme has affinities with Sankaran’s detailed analysis of representations of the marginalized Other, where she makes an argument for the priority of the ethical in The God of Small Things on account of the centralizing of the marginalized Other in that novel. If postcolonialism has traditionally been criticized for its insistence on difference and globalization is currently being criticized for its homogenizing tendencies, the concept of hybridity, as a condition and a process that bring together the self and the Other, offers what Homi Bhabha has termed the “Third Space”8 between postcolonialism’s fissures and globalization’s fusions – hence the title of the present collection, “Global Fissures : Postcolonial Fusions.” Such alterities of spaces, processes, and movements variously tempt the agent, Jonah, to step inside or outside the whale.


8

The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994): 36.

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WORKS CITED Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London & New York. Routledge, 1996). Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). Mullaney, Julie. “‘Globalizing Dissent’? Arundhati Roy, Local and Postcolonial Feminisms in the Transnational Economy,” World Literature Written in English 40.1 (2002–2003): 56–70. Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” (1940), in Orwell, Essays, sel. & intro. John Carey (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002): 87–101. Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale” (1984), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 87–101. Said, Edward. Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Vintage, 1996). Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana & Chicago: U of Illinois P , 1988): 271–313. Stiglitz, Joseph. Globalization and its Discontents (London: Allen Lane, 2002).

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S ECTION 1 THE G LOBAL

T HEORIZING AND THE P OSTCOLONIAL

Theorizing the Diaspora J OHN C. H AWLEY

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on the place of the committed writer in contemporary Western society (“Inside the Whale”), George Orwell makes a passing observation about the effects of exile, self-imposed or otherwise, on the scope of a writer’s subject and purpose: N HIS PROVOCATIVE ESSAY

leaving your native land […] means transferring your roots into shallower soil. Exile is probably more damaging to a novelist than to a painter or even a poet, because its effect is to take him out of contact with working life and narrow 1 down his range to the street, the café, the church, the brothel and the studio.

He has in mind Henry Miller in France, and thus one assumes that the felt sense of marginalization has a great deal to do with having to deal in a language other than one’s own. Still, anyone who has travelled abroad, let alone lived there for some time, will acknowledge the central insight that ‘exile’ can shock the sensitivities of most artists and, until they become true cosmopolitans who are equally at home in two or more cultures, arguably shrink their expressive abilities. Orwell is describing a certain sort of expatriate – the ‘artist’ – but there is plenty of evidence that the experience he describes for Henry Miller rings true for migrants of whatever social, educational, or economic class: what is lost in the translation may be one’s self. It is no surprise, therefore, that the quest for a home, a return to one’s native homeland, has been a constant in world literature, but it has taken 1

George Orwell, “Inside the Whale” (1940), in Orwell, A Collection of Essays (San Diego C A : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953): 213–14.

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on a greater sense of urgency in recent decades. After all, in 1990 there were 80 million international migrants, and in 1997 there were 31 million refugees.2 Nikos Papastergiadis notes that this is “the greatest number of stateless people in history,” yet even this high number does not include “the 24 million people displaced by violence and persecution and who have become homeless within their own countries.”3 As the Sri Lankan poet Jean Arasanayagam writes, I have no country now but self I mark my boundaries extend demesnes Even beyond the darkness of those regions Still to be explored.4

The ironies connected with the use of a word such as ‘demesnes’ in this context underscore the narrowing, rather than extension, of one’s world – the willy-nilly regression to an interior search when the world beyond one’s body becomes irretrievably foreign. We should begin by distinguishing between two types of migrants: those who have little or no choice in the matter, and those privileged few who have more agency. We must also distinguish between those whose reasons for moving are principally financial, and those who are what we might call cultural migrants – intellectuals, artists, etc.5 Regarding the financial migrants, a distinction must be made between the unskilled and the skilled. At one end of the spectrum are the manual workers in service 2

For current statistics, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/migration /index.htm 3 Nikos Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Malden M A : Polity, 2000): 54. “It has been estimated that the number of self-defined peoples exceeds the number of nation-states by a proportion of five to one [….] The modern use for the word ‘homeland’ is predicated on the existence of a nation-state [….] However, this overlooks the vast number of people [… whose] homeland was never constituted as a nation-state.” 4 In Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English, ed. Victor Ramraj (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1995): 35. 5 In Of Hospitality, Jacques Derrida lists “exiles, the deported, the expelled, the rootless, the stateless, lawless nomads, absolute foreigners” (87–88) as different kinds of foreigners; in reflecting on this, Gayatri Spivak reflects at some length on “the colonizer as guest” (“Resident,” 54). See John A. Armstrong’s important economic distinctions, in “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” American Political Science Review 70.2 (1976): 393–408.

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industries who are heavily exploited, generally alone, without the benefit of social services and welfare, and forced to live in national or ethnic ghettoes. Such individuals may ‘lapse’ into far more fundamental forms of religion or nationalism as a means of undergirding a sense of self in an indifferent and dehumanizing new world. This is by far the larger of the two groups, its members often leading entire lives in transition, fear, and confusion. The skilled, on the other hand, are often recruited from diverse backgrounds but trained to communicate across national distinctions in favor of corporate identity. As Papastergiadis puts it, The formation of this transnational class is committed to a degree of homogenization among its members and to long-term processes of denationalization through the deregulation and diversification of economic production. Knowing how to speak local is part of the discourse of the new global elites. They perceive of themselves as belonging to a social space whose symbolic repertoire and political sphere do not confine themselves to the boundaries of a particular nation-state.6

Members of this class typically belong to multiple communities that are partially overlapping, sometimes bolstering their sense of new freedoms, sometimes underscoring their consequent rootlessness. Both the unskilled and skilled demonstrate that “the mobility and complex affiliations of people today mean that the dream of a ‘pure race’ or a culture bound to a given territory is no longer possible.”7 In other words, globalization may or may not be setting the stage for a world community, but in any case it has uprooted cultural anchors and, with widely differing urgencies, pushed all of us into literal or intuited diasporas. One of the effects of globalization on postcolonial theory has been a confusion of the borders between the victimizers and the victimized, markedly evident in the often conflicted reflections of migrant intellectuals.8 Referring to W.E.B. Du Bois’ discussion of double consciousness, 6

Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, 88. Papastergiadis, The Turbulence of Migration, 89. 8 Ali Behdad, “Global Disjunctures, Diasporic Differences, and the New World (Dis)Order,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz & Sangeeta Ray (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000): 397–98; Néstor García Canclini, “Cultural Reconversion,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yúdice, Jean Franco & Juan Flores (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1992): 7

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Ali Behdad notes that exile can be used as a form of cultural resistance in which “the voluntary move away from home helps the exilic writer to gain a broader perspective about history and culture, thus allowing him to act as the agent of social transformation.”9 But Behdad ultimately criticizes this valorization of the “oppositional, redemptive, and transformative possibilities of displacement” because it “conflates the privileged experiences of writers and intellectuals with those of the less fortunate immigrants.”10 Behdad also suggests that displacement does not, per se, lead to “originality of vision or the breaking of intellectual and cultural barriers.” Indeed, many immigrants find their new location more enslaving, on several levels, than the one they escaped. The sense of increased agency that comes with the mobility of migrant intellectuals echoes in a minor key in the transnational circuits of migrant labor of whatever economic class (Rouse; Behdad; Knerr) – migrant farm laborers in the southwest USA , oil workers in the Gulf states, computer workers from India in Silicon Valley, etc., but it is obviously naive to simplify their various complex and locally determined experiences. As Behdad notes, “transnational circuits are appearing throughout the world, but their formations are always sociohistorically contingent and culturally specific.”11 The mechanisms for the ‘rewiring’ of this circuitry are controversial, to say the least. In his interesting book Many Globalizations, co-edited with Samuel P. Huntington, Peter L. Berger notes that, “though the United States does have a great deal of power, its culture is not being imposed on others by coercive means.”12 Some might respond that this depends on how one defines coercion; many intellectuals in the U S A , for example, 34; Kenneth Surin, “On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94.4 (1995): 1188; Roger Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” in Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (Spring 1991): 8; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Resident Alien,” in Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg & Ato Quayson (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2002): 47– 65. 9 Behdad, “Global Disjunctures, Diasporic Differences, and the New World (Dis) Order,” 399. 10 Behdad, “Global Disjunctures,” 401–402. 11 Behdad, “Global Disjunctures,” 407. 12 Peter L. Berger, Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford U P , 2002): 3.

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would argue that noxious components of American culture are being inflicted on its own citizens, let alone those beyond its borders who are financially dependent on American commerce. Be that as it may. Berger goes on to agree with Huntington that “the emerging global culture is diffused through both elite and popular vehicles [whose] basic engine is international business.” This expresses itself through “a sort of yuppie internationale, whose members speak English and dress alike and act alike, at work and at play, and up to a point think alike,”13 but who also may lead “personal lives dominated by very different cultural themes.” But there is another elite sector of the emerging global culture dominated by a “Western intelligentsia” who use “academic networks, foundations, nongovernmental organizations.” It too seeks and actively creates markets throughout the world, but the products it promotes are not those of multinational corporations but the ideas and behaviors invented by Western (mostly American) intellectuals, such as the ideologies of human rights, feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism, as 14 well as the politics and lifestyles that embody these ideologies.”

(Are these complex movements American products? How many Americans line up with enthusiasm behind each of them?) As Berger and Huntington see it, whereas the financial engines of globalization have many centres (New York and London, but also Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Bombay, and Shanghai), “the ‘metropolis’ of the globalized intelligentsia is much more exclusively western, indeed American. Thus,” they write, “when the term ‘cultural imperialism’ is used, it is probably more applicable to East 43rd Street, where the impressive headquarters of the Ford Foundation are located, than to the corporate bastions of Wall Street and Madison Avenue.”15 At this point it is appropriate to consider migrant intellectuals who are not Western, but who may well operate in the West – as native informants, if you will. What role are they playing in the negotiation between postcolonial resistance and globalization in their one-time homes? As 13

Berger, Many Globalizations, 4. Berger, Many Globalizations, 4. 15 Berger, Many Globalizations, 5–6. One can only imagine how a francocentric Europeanist like Pascale Casanova might respond to these two americentric theorists. See La République Mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999): 179–281. 14

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various speakers in the “Writing Diasporas – Transnational Imagination Conference” in Swansea (20–23 September 2000) noted, and as B. Chandramohan suggests in a recent article, “these writings [in fact] often operate against a current of assimilation and powerful structures of the monolingual nation-state.”16 But to what effect? Are they perhaps dismissed (or simply not heard) in their countries of origin? In their adopted countries, particularly in the U S A (where any sort of liberal cultural critic must struggle to find a forum), are they relegated to hermetically sealed classrooms? And what of the impact their diasporic status surely has on them and the channelling of the topics they are allowed to address? Judging from the questions that dominate contemporary fiction from India, the countries of Africa and the Caribbean – issues of identity, deracination, the role of heritage, the persistence of historical injustices, the authorization of a voice – ‘the diaspora,’ for all its national particularities, shares a striking family resemblance across cultures. But how these questions are approached, and by whom, does set some theorists apart. In her important discussion of “flexible citizenship,” Aihwa Ong writes: in the United States, the conjuncture of postcolonial theory and diaspora studies seems to produce a bifurcated model of diasporan cultures [… in which] the unified moralism attached to subaltern subjects now also clings to diasporan ones, who are invariably assumed to be members of oppressed 17 classes and therefore constitutionally opposed to capitalism and state power.

This naive liberal reading of migrants overlooks the economic considerations that brought many of them to the West (or to the North). Ong notes: the cultural-studies focus on diasporan cultures and subjectivities then seeks in the off-shore experiences of labor migrants, and in the worldly ruminations of intellectuals, the birth of progressive political subjects who will undermine or 18 challenge oppressive nationalist ideologies (and global capitalism).

16 B. Chandramohan, “Diasporic / Exilic Writing,” in Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, ed. John C. Hawley (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2001): 150. 17 Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999): 13. 18 Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 14.

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But the Republican party has demonstrated in recent years that this “traditional Democratic base” has certain financial and family-based concerns that make rootedness in the American dream very appealing. Similarly, the Hoover Institute and other conservative think-tanks have successfully recruited diasporic intellectuals who may well, in fact, eschew such labels. In Ong’s view, What is missing from these accounts are discussions of how the disciplining structures – of family, community, work, travel, and nation – condition, shape, divert, and transform such subjects and their practices and produce the moralpolitical dilemmas, so eloquently captured in these studies, whose resolutions cannot be so easily predetermined.

This is where theories of globalization appear to have greater cogency than those of postcolonialism: the latter tend to focus too fixedly on cultural phenomena, to the relative exclusion of political and economic issues. Ong characterizes anthropologically inclined critics for too simply “celebrat[ing] cultural difference, hybridity, and the social imaginary, which display ‘native’ inventiveness, and sometimes resistances, to homogenizing trends” without “an attempt to analytically link actual institutions of state power, capitalism, and transnational networks to such forms of cultural reproduction, inventiveness, and possibilities.” In her view, “the diasporan subject is now vested with the agency formerly sought in the working class and more recently in the subaltern subject.”19 For Ong, claims that “diasporas and cosmopolitanisms are liberatory forces against oppressive nationalism, repressive state structures, and capitalism” are vastly overstated: while […] tensions and disjunctures are at work between oppressive structures and border-crossing flows, the nation-state – along with its juridical-legislative systems, bureaucratic apparatuses, economic entities, modes of governmentality, and war-making capacities – continues to define, discipline, control, and regulate all kinds of populations, whether in movement or in residence.20

If Ong is correct in her analysis of the weaknesses of postcolonial idealistic readings of diasporic (or subaltern, or working-class) agency, others 19 20

Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 15. Flexible Citizenship, 15.

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suggest that critical cosmopolitans are on a firmer footing when reflecting on their own experience. R. Radhakrishnan, for example, writes that “the diasporic location is the space of the hyphen that tries to coordinate, within an evolving relationship, the identity politics of one’s place of origin with that of one’s present home.”21 This may sound like a simple celebration of hybridity, but it is analysis from within, rather than from outside. The diasporic subjectivity he reports is, therefore, not necessarily empowering; it is, rather, “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.” Rather than being a cause for liberatory agency, ‘home’ becomes “a mode of interpretive in-betweenness,” “a form of accountability to more than one location.” In fact, Radhakrishnan emphasizes the threat to the “organic solidarity of the postcolonial subject” that this internationalization poses, because in their negotiation of ‘here’ and ‘there’ the diasporic individual encounters the expectations of both audiences. In the West, for example, the very fact that what the postcolonial scholar teaches, rather than how or with what critical perspective she teaches, has taken on an almost fetishistic significance in the academy [… and this] is ample testimony to the reality of the ongoing psychological and internal impact of colonialism. For if one were truly postcolonial, it would not matter what one taught or thought about: Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Chinua Achebe, or Bessie Head.22

From this Janus-like position, the diasporic individual may potentially offer a double-sided critique of the here and the there, but this is a difficult negotiation when the “here” (the West) has already positioned and practically dictated the potential critique (as it had done in its expectations for the supposedly ‘liberatory’ and ‘Marxist’ subaltern consciousness). Even if this were not the situation in which such potential critics find themselves, other disciplinary questions present themselves. Radhakrishnan asks, for example, whether Caliban can and should “use Prospero’s erudition against Prospero.”23 But beyond such questions are others, such as the 21

R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): xiii. 22 Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, xvi. 23 Diasporic Mediations, xx.

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potential for diasporic critics to turn their attention to the ‘there’ from which they have come (one thinks, for example, of the reception given to V.S. Naipaul’s acerbic and apparently mean-spirited assessment of the Caribbean or India, etc., or even of Salman Rushdie’s assessment of Indian literature written in languages other than English). In Radhakrishnan’s words, “the road not taken by postcolonial intellectuals and leaders is that of the indigenous critique, that is, a critique that will not pit belonging and progress as adversarial terms.”24 So, he suggests, the diasporic intellectual has a threefold movement: “away from one’s tradition, the intermediate detour, and the need to return critically to one’s tradition.” Who can do this? Can anyone ‘return’? Radhakrishnan and Ong are arguing for the freedom to accept one’s life and identity as a process rather than a fixed and essentialized donnée. In Radhakrishnan’s view “it is futile and counterfactual to contend that ideas and movements are rooted and monolocational.”25 In a similar vein, Arjun Appadurai suggests that what is new is that this is a world in which both points of departure and points of arrival are in cultural flux […] and the invention of tradition (and of ethnicity, kinship, and other identity-markers) can become slippery […] Culture becomes less what Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious 26 choice, justification, and representation.

Radhakrishnan uses the language of movement; Appadurai speaks of “the configuration of cultural forms in today’s world as fundamentally fractal […] overlapping […] [sharing in] chaos theory” – though one cannot

24

Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, xix. “The hypehenation of identity into Asian–American and African–American points up the reality that India, Asia, and Africa are not unchanging ontological conditions, but politically necessary and accountable inventions. In other words, authentic Kenya, or India, is a matter of contested political acts of representation, and not a mere article of faith to be divinely or immaculately appropriated by any one privileged group. Which India? Which Nigeria? These are rich and resonant questions that cannot be foreclosed in the name of monothetic solidarity” (Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations, xxv). 26 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 44. 25

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overlook Appadurai’s phrase “conscious choice,” which certainly pertains only to a small segment of the diasporic population. The shifting social stability of those who do have the option of choice is surely not the sort that easily undergirds a suasive identity politics, and that is perhaps why such cosmopolitans are sometimes criticized as having forgotten their roots.27 On the other hand, diasporic intellectuals who are truly Janus-faced may demonstrate that globalization can finally be less obsessed with one’s roots, and more creatively focused on one’s full flowering. The question that haunts many such individuals, of course, is how individualistic such an enterprise must remain. Returning to George Orwell’s essay on the role of exile in the life of a writer, we might at this point note the intricate aetiology of its central image. Orwell is writing a retrospective comparative review of Henry Miller, offering the startling assessment of the controversial writer as “the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.”28 The reasons for this judgment are labyrinthine and a bit unlikely, but suggestive enough that they may be worth our patiently following Orwell on his hunt. They have something to do with reasons paralleling Thomas Carlyle’s in his choice of so-called heroes: heroes for Carlyle and writers for Orwell represent a Zeitgeist (even if they are not in all ways admirable). For our purposes, diasporic writers represent such a Zeitgeist. In Henry Miller’s case the spirit being represented is that of Jonah and the whale, interpreted in a rather tendentious way by Orwell. First Orwell notes that the image itself occurred to him from reading Max and the White Phagocytes (1938), in which Miller refers to Aldous Huxley’s comment that the characters in El Greco’s The Dream of Philip the Second “look as though they were in the bellies of whales,” a “‘visceral prison’” that Huxley finds quite horrible.29 Miller apparently finds their condition more attractive, noting that Anaïs Nin, the author of “the only true feminine writing that has ever appeared,” is much like Jonah in the whale’s belly because, in Orwell’s words, she is “evidently a completely subjective, introverted writer.” Orwell notes that this tells us far more about Henry Miller than it does 27

See my “Can the Cosmopolitan Speak: The Question of Authenticity in Indian Novelists,” South Asian Review 24.2 (2003): 1–15. 28 Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 251. 29 “Inside the Whale,” 244.

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about Anaïs Nin (or Huxley or El Greco, for that matter), suggesting that Miller himself valorizes this so-called feminine form of writing – a form both Miller and Orwell identify with varying shades of passivity. Here is where Orwell makes his long-awaited point. Sounding a great deal like Walter Pater and the ‘art for art’s sake’ school of thought, he inveighs against those who seek to reconnect writing to politics. “That does not mean that [the writer] cannot help to bring the new society into being,” he assures us, “but that he can take no part in the process as a writer. For as a writer he is a liberal, and what is happening is the destruction of liberalism”30 – a strange assumption, is it not, this one of the writer as liberal? – but similar to that made nowadays of the diasporic subject and writer. But to return to Orwell: “It seems likely, therefore, that in the remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading [….] will be more consciously passive than before” – more consciously “feminine,” perhaps? Throwing in the towel, Orwell finally offers this advice to the aspiring writer: Get inside the whale – or rather, admit you are inside the whale (for you are, of course). Give yourself over to the world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control it; simply accept it, endure it, record it.

Orwell feels he has demonstrated “the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into its new shape”31 – and that new shape will be well on the other side of 1984 and the totalitarian systems that swirl outside the whale, or that, indeed, are the whale. And, jumping decades ahead to our own day, one wonders if the whale of globalization poses similarly daunting problems for the diasporic writer in the West. This Orwellian cadenza on an image may seem a diversion from the central concerns of this essay, but Salman Rushdie will show us its relevance. In “Outside the Whale” he begins, as Orwell did, by offering a critique of contemporary writing, though in Rushdie’s case the argument is directed against orientalization in recent filmic and novelistic portrayals of India. He turns his attention to Orwell’s essay to provide a context for his assertion that “works of art, even works of entertainment, do not come into being in a social and political vacuum.” For Rushdie, the rise of what 30 31

Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” 250. “Inside the Whale,” 252.

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he calls Raj revisionism (in which Thatcherite England reassures itself that it did a good and generous thing in its colonies), shows itself in the popularity of “the big-budget fantasy double-bill of Gandhi and Octopussy” and the “blackface minstrel-show of The Far Pavilions in its T V serial incarnation,” the “overpraised Jewel in the Crown,” the “alleged ‘documentary’ about Subhas Chandra Bose, Granada Television’s War of the Springing Tiger, and David Lean’s A Passage to India.”32 Rushdie describes these as “the artistic counterpart of the rise of conservative ideologies in modern Britain.”33 It is ironic, intentionally so, that Rushdie writes his own essay in 1984. We need not, here, rehearse Rushdie’s full argument. Let it suffice to say that his contention, against Orwell, is that “politically committed art can actually prove more durable than messages from the stomach of the fish.”34 But the reason for this durability, in Rushdie’s view, is that There is no whale. We live in a world without hiding places; the missiles have made sure of that.35 However much we may wish to return to the womb, we cannot be unborn. So we are left with a fairly straightforward choice. Either we agree to delude ourselves, to lose ourselves in the fantasy of the great fish […] or we can do what all human beings do instinctively when they realize that the womb has been lost for ever–that is, we can make the very devil of a racket [….] Outside the whale the writer is obliged to accept that he (or she) is part of the crowd, part of the ocean, part of the storm, so that objectivity becomes a great dream, like perfection, an unattainable goal for which one must struggle in spite of the impossibility of success.36

32

Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Viking, 1991): 87. 33 Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” 92. 34 “Outside the Whale,” 96. 35 Just twenty years after Rushdie’s essay, missiles have receded as vehicles of globalization (ironic though they may have been) and are replaced far more effectively by such technologies as the internet. An example of the intersection of technology and global identity politics is at the heart of Sandip Roy’s “From Khush List to Gay Bombay: Virtual Webs of Real People.” But Olu Oguibe notes that “as this community broadens in spread and significance, we are effectively implicated in the relativization of the rest who remain on the outside of its borders” (175). 36 Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” 99.

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The image of Jonah is replaced here by something a bit closer to Noah – we’re all in this ocean together, sink or swim. Contentions such as Rushdie’s bring us full circle, for in a world “without hiding places” globalization has rendered diasporic situations less marginalized. In fact, they are central to the contemporary experience. Making “the very devil of a racket” in such a brave though soggy new world suggests the enduring value of identity politics, even their inevitability, since we toss and turn and only rarely catch sight of land.

WORKS CITED Alessandrini, Anthony C. “‘My Heart’s Indian for All That’: Bollywood Film Between Home and Diaspora,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 10.3 (2001): 315–40. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997). Armstrong, John A. “Mobilized and Proletarian Diasporas,” American Political Science Review 70.2 (1976): 393–408. Behdad, Ali. “Global Disjunctures, Diasporic Differences, and the New World (Dis-) Order,” in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies, ed. Henry Schwarz & Sangeeta Ray (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2000): 396–409. Berger, Peter L., & Samuel P. Huntington, ed. Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World (New York: Oxford U P , 2002). Canclini, Néstor García. “Cultural Reconversion,” in On Edge: The Crisis of Contemporary Latin American Culture, ed. George Yúdice, Jean Franco & Juan Flores (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1992). Casanova, Pascale. La R-publique Mondiale des Lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999). Chandramohan, B. “Diasporic / Exilic Writing,” Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, ed. John C. Hawley (Westport C T : Greenwood, 2001): 144–50. Derrida, Jacques, & Anne Dufourmantelle. Of Hospitality, tr. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford C A : Stanford U P , 2000). Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folks (1903; New York: Bantam, 1989). Hawley, John C. “Can the Cosmopolitan Speak: The Question of Authenticity in Indian Novelists,” South Asian Review 24.2 (2003): 1–15. Knerr, Béatrice. “South Asian Countries as Competitors on the World Labour Market,” South Asians Overseas: Migration and Ethnicity, ed. Colin Clarke, Ceri Peach & Steven Vertovec (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1990).

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Oguibe, Olu. “Connectivity and the Fate of the Unconnected,” Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg & Ato Quayson (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2002): 174–83. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1999). Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” (1940), A Collection of Essays (San Diego C A : Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1953): 210–52. Papastergiadis, Nikos. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization and Hybridity (Malden M A : Polity, 2000). Radhakrishnan, R. Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Location (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Ramraj, Victor, ed. Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1995). Rouse, Roger. “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 1.1 (Spring 1991): 8–23. Roy, Sandip. “From Khush List to Gay Bombay: Virtual Webs of Real People,” Mobile Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia, ed. Chris Berry, Fran Martin & Audrey Yue (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2003). Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale” (1984), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 87–101. Singh, Jyotsna G. Colonial Narratives, Cultural Dialogues: “Discoveries” of India in the Language of Colonialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1996). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Resident Alien,” Relocating Postcolonialism, ed. David Theo Goldberg & Ato Quayson (Malden M A : Blackwell, 2002): 47–65. Surin, Kenneth. “On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture,” South Atlantic Quarterly 94.4 (1995): 1179–1200. Urban, Greg. Metaculture: How Culture Moves Through the World (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 2001).

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The Price of Silence Intellectual Communication in the Age of Globalization R OBERT S PENCER

The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express. – Samuel Beckett Silence is what Power offers our pain in order to make us small. When we are silenced, we remain very much alone. Speaking, we heal the pain. Speaking, we accompany one another. Power uses the word to impose his empire of silence. We use the word to renew ourselves. Power uses silence to hide his crimes. We use silence to listen to one another, to touch one another, to know one another. – Subcomandante Marcos

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G L O B A L I Z A T I O N : The Human Consequences, Zygmunt Bauman remarks that “the trouble with the contemporary condition of our modern civilization is that it stopped questioning itself […] The price of silence is paid in the hard currency of human suffering.”1 Why, then, given Bauman’s warnings about the consequences of silence, has it gained so many adherents? Why do some thinkers prefer to hold their tongue and why, moreover, has the imagination succumbed in many instances to what Ihab Hassan has approvingly called a “literature of silence”? It is my contention that many of us have been spooked into 1

N

Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity,

1999): 5.

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silence by the suspicion that, in making seemingly authoritative statements about the world, we actually end up helping to impose power (especially colonial power) over the world. The violent and unjust consequences of speaking over others have caused many esteemed and thinkers to exchange the garrulousness of power for a reticent, risk-free silence. What I wish to emphasize here, however, is that such silence is not without risk or penalty. Bauman is right to claim that by falling silent many thinkers have ceased to investigate and question global capitalism (along with its objectionable human consequences) and in so doing have effectively assented to its continuance. Silence, as the saying goes, implies consent. Taking fright at the coercive powers of speech, postmodern theory has discouraged intellectuals, cultures, and societies from conversing in case they start acrimoniously shouting each other down. Were individuals and social or cultural groups to be permitted the power of speech they would, suspects postmodernism’s chief theorist Jean–François Lyotard, start putting words in each other’s mouths and usurping the prerogative of other groups to articulate their own experiences. They must, Lyotard concludes, never be allowed adequately to know or communicate with each other; their dominion henceforth is curtailed by “the silence imposed on knowledge.”2 The work of Jacques Derrida, in particular his Of Grammatology, which has been extremely influential in poststructuralist and postmodern circles, was crucial in establishing this uncommunicative mood.3 Despite its laudable part in the widespread disparagement of the notion that truth and meaning are essentially unproblematic – that they are the incontestable preserves of scientific and political authorities – Derrida’s work has, in my opinion, deleteriously affected writers’ and intellectuals’ confidence in their entitlement to perform a useful public role. In discrediting the long-established prioritization of speech over writing, he has performed the valuable service of correcting the popular impression that the purportedly foolproof, life-giving and meaning-bestowing powers of speech are always preferable to the cryptic and indeterminate capacities of writing. Yet by denouncing in so sweeping and unforgiving a manner what he 2 Jean–François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, tr. Georges van den Abbeele (Le differend; Paris: Minuit, 1983; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1988): 56. 3 Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie; Paris: Minuit, 1967; Baltimore M D : John Hopkins U P , 1974).

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famously calls the “metaphysics of presence,” Derrida has also disabused many of his readers of their conviction that language in any form can possess an indispensable, albeit imperfect, ability to convey meaning, spread knowledge and represent reality. In order to overcome this enervating scepticism I think we need to rehabilitate the notion that to an important extent discourse takes place in a relationship of presence, in which speaker and listener are involved in a conversation. It is this open-minded parley that we know, in the broadest sense of the word, as politics. “Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake,” as Hannah Arendt remarks in The Human Condition, “matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.”4 “Intellectual communication,” the term coined for my subtitle, is intended to liken the dialogue that often takes place between the thinker and his audience and between the thinker and his subject to the exchange of ideas that, frequently but not invariably, occurs in everyday conversation. Both these forms of interaction (the intellectual and the colloquial) necessitate two aptitudes. The first is simply an ability to listen, to subject one’s presuppositions to the rejoinders and suggestions of circumstances and interlocutors. What the intellectual claims, argues and proposes ought to be influenced, first, by his receptivity to the advice of interlocutors and, secondly, by his attentiveness to reality. The second faculty that makes intellectual communication possible is the capacity (or at least the willingness) to speak persuasively and effectively, to address a sizeable audience rather than a like-minded clique. Ideally, the intellectual’s vocation is a public one. He treats his addressees to a discussion of consequential matters articulated in an intelligible but not simplistic idiom. His purpose is to engender debate and hopefully to sway it with an authority that is born of his extensive knowledge of and reflection on matters of public concern. Many of the defining tenets of postmodern theory are expressly designed to discredit this role. As a result, postmodernism’s proponents have abdicated from the responsibilities of communication, contenting themselves instead with making unhelpful and (appropriately enough) exceedingly esoteric statements about the obsolescence of rationality and the inefficacy of communication. Unwarranted conclusions have been drawn from the by now commonplace observation that intellectuals from colonial societies have habitually talked down to or over other peoples and 4

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1998): 3.

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cultures. Henceforth communication between them is to be both fragmentary and unavailing. I shall try to show why this need not be so and I will suggest, via a close look at the work of Edward W. Said, the instigator of postcolonial studies, that there exists an alternative model for intellectual communication with other cultures and climes. Insofar as it has adopted many of the maxims of postmodernism, a great deal of postcolonial theory has imported these debilitating misgivings about intellectual communication into matters pertaining to cultural coexistence, international political arrangements, scholarly discourse about the non-European world and so on. But I wish to rejuvenate the radical energies of Said’s project by recalling his claim that the challenge offered by the postcolonial project to, for instance, the violent misapprehension of the Orient was “a challenge to the muteness imposed upon the Orient as object […]. The Orient was, therefore, not Europe’s interlocutor, but its silent Other.”5 The most effective solution to this objectionable hierarchy is not to endorse the division between peoples in the name of postmodern plurality, which has the self-defeating effect of re-establishing the inequality and silence which offended us in the first place. I will claim that the postmodern vision of uncommunicative societies, cultures and peoples has utterly failed to get to grips with the current epoch of globalization. I will then claim that modernist, as opposed to postmodernist, literature and the type of thinking that it embodies and engenders provides a model for enlightening and peaceful communication and therefore an alternative to both clamorous acrimony and unrewarding silence.

The Retreat from the Word Said’s groundbreaking Orientalism of 1978, effectively postcolonial studies’ founding text, argued that a great deal of apparently reputable discourse about the non-Western world has been, and indeed continues to be, responsible for actually or effectively imposing silence on colonized peoples. These latter have been forcibly quietened, or else their situations and experiences have been represented in the words and terms of others. Orientalist dogmas cultivate a deliberate deafness to the objects of their scrutiny. They deal in inelastic doctrines unilluminated by unbiased con5

Edward W. Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2000): 202.

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versation with the peoples for and about whom they presume to speak. In the past twenty or so years probably the most heartening development in the study of language and culture in the Western academy and elsewhere has been this increased awareness of the dangers of speaking over colonized peoples and cultures. Ostensibly innocent scholarly investigations of the Middle East, Asia, Africa or Latin America have been seen for what they too often are, deliberate or unwitting rationales for the invasion, conquest and coercive administration of those regions. In Orientalism, Covering Islam, Culture and Imperialism and in a number of informative and impassioned works on his native Palestine such as Peace and its Discontents, The End of the Peace Process, From Oslo to Iraq and especially The Question of Palestine, Said’s work has shown how authors, explorers, ethnologists, Orientalists, anthropologists, colonial administrators, settlers and so on have too often aided the colonial enterprise by defining the colonized in the terms of the colonizer. They have produced belittling and reductive stereotypes of colonized peoples (misrepresenting them as corrupt, sensual, fierce, backward, terroristic and tyrannical) that have had the effect of stealing the words from their mouths. “Such an Orient was silent,” Said writes in Orientalism, “available to Europe for the realization of projects that involved but were never directly responsible to the native inhabitants, and unable to resist the projects, images, or mere descriptions devised for it.”6 Said is justly renowned for fighting against the silence imposed on Palestinians. He contrasts the narrative of Palestinian resistance and woe with the various Zionist myths by which successive Israeli governments and their ideologues have tried to define the Palestinian experience: that Palestine in 1948 was a land without a people for a people without a land, that it was a wilderness diligently improved by European migrants, that the Palestinians now purporting to be refugees had voluntarily fled at the behest of Radio Cairo or else were interlopers tempted by the miracle of Israeli prosperity, that they are still incorrigible malcontents without rights and undeserving of the legitimate trappings of an unconfined national life.7

6

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984): 94. Revisionist Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe have also courageously exploded such myths. See The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994) and The Israel/Palestine Question: Rewriting Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). 7

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In a series of groundbreaking articles in the 1960s, including “The Retreat from the Word” and “Silence and the Poet” (compiled with others in Language and Silence), George Steiner explored these themes from a slightly different perspective. He argues that since the Second World War the sphere of language has dwindled and contracted. The world of words has shrunk because language has come unstuck from the things it purports to name. It is increasingly incapable of facilitating an adequate perception of the unique objects it is called upon to describe and unfit for giving voice to the specific intentions of individual speakers. What is more, the very ideal of precise expression – of le mot juste, hitting the nail on the head and bringing off an exact description of one’s object – has been rendered dubious. Language deals in lumpish generalities no longer attuned to the subtle texture of experience. The idea that one can arrive at a transparent and immediate description of an object therefore risks disregarding its particularity and thus violently compressing it into one or another congested category. In the Third Reich, language was used not to faithfully designate particulars and thus to enhance knowledge, communication, and moral responsibility but instead to reduce human beings to abstract, dogmatic labels. Language, Steiner persuasively contends, was used not to bring reality and one’s fellow human beings closer but to push them away. Millions of individuals were casually despatched partly because language, which had lost its sensitivity to nuance and thus its connection with reality, served to legitimize mass slaughter. Once it had been deliberately degraded, such deeds befell not fellow human beings but a separate and inferior species; clumsy and imprecise, language stood between men and women and the awful consequences of their complicity and inaction. Therefore, Steiner reasons, when there are no words untainted by the justification and sublimation of unspeakable acts, then the muted, tragic eloquence of poetry becomes a salutary counterweight. Precisely because it is the signature of his humanity, because it is that which makes of man a being of striving unrest, the word should have no natural life, no neutral sanctuary, in the places and season of bestiality. When the words in

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the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem.8

In these conditions, that which language enables to take place is not genuine dialogue but manipulation, tyranny and force. For the rebarbative and exceedingly doleful philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno, it is better that art fall silent in such circumstances than that it should risk colluding in this harmful pseudo-communication. By the very fact of their existence, works of art, which communicate with their percipients by seeking to render reality or to promulgate an outlook, become embroiled in the lies, disinformation, and wordy self-assertion that too often pass for genuine interlocution. By their own a priori, or, if one will, according to their idea, artworks become entangled in the nexus of guilt. Whereas each artwork that succeeds transcends this nexus, each must atone for this transcendence, and therefore its language seeks to withdraw into silence: An artwork is, as Beckett wrote, a desecration of silence.9

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory is, among many other things, an extremely (even uncompromisingly) abstruse defence of modernist literature and music as means of engendering self-reflection on the conceit, inflexibility and violence that characterize bourgeois subjectivity. Adorno argues that one way for the artist to shock his public into the self-reflective attitude necessary for dialogue rather than verbose self-assertion is for artworks to forbid that public any affirmative or explicable statement. Modernist music and literature are curt and economical, the work of secretive Trappists who refuse to be drawn by the needy listener into committed or unequivocal exclamation. The poems of Paul Celan constantly fraternize with the inexpressible and the opaque. As Adorno puts it, they “want to speak of the most extreme horror through silence.”10

8

George Steiner, “Silence and the Poet,” Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969): 76. 9 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot–Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann (Ästhetische Theorie; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, tr. 1997; London: Athlone, 1999): 134. 10 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 322.

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However, modernist literature does not abandon its faith in speech. Even though he avers that the German language has been corrupted by its service under Hitler, Celan argues that by rendering it more sober, precise and factual we can still make language capable of effective expression. Only one thing remained unreachable, close and secure amid all losses: language […] But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave no words for what was happening but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.11

The enormous irony in that final verb alerts us to the great deficiencies in language, as though the right word does not exist for the process Celan was trying to articulate. But there is no doubt that he did not consider language redundant. Although he heralds the necessity of silence, Steiner too has none of the postmodernists’ relish for it, for he nostalgically preserves his faith in the possibility of a precise and expressive speech. This is where I think typical modernists like Steiner and Celan have lessons to teach the postmodern scene. Modernism views the condition of speechlessness as a regrettable and hopefully temporary expedient. The works of Joyce, Eliot and Beckett may rebel against the realist assumption that literature can evoke exhaustively a limpid and unproblematic reality, but they nonetheless experience the realization that the world can no longer be adequately encompassed by words as a lamentable misfortune. Prufrock’s anguished cry – “It is impossible to say just what I mean!”12 – is modernism’s perennial plaint. Like the remarks of Beckett that serve as an epigraph to this discussion, it is at once insistent on inarticulateness and exasperated by silence. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, perhaps postmodernism’s most illustrious antecedent, disdains the goal of linguistic precision: “The demand for an adequate mode of expression,” he writes nonchalantly, “is

11

Paul Celan, “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” Collected Prose, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986): 34. 12 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Collected Poems, 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990): 16.

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senseless.”13 Nietzsche declares eloquence obsolete. “We have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems, was devised only for the average, medium, communicable.”14 Following Nietzsche’s lead, postmodern thought embraces silence – which Hassan defines as “the disruption of all connections between language and reality”15 – as an objective in its own right. “We often hear it said,” wrote Roland Barthes, “that it is the task of art to express the inexpressible; it is the contrary which must be said (with no intention of paradox): the whole task of art is to unexpress the expressible.”16 Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous and influential dictum encapsulates this prevalent predilection for silence. “Whereof one cannot speak,” he intones sententiously at the close of the Tractatus, “thereof one must be silent.”17 Adorno is, I think, correct to take great exception to this popular maxim, because philosophy, shorn of the desire, however fraught and difficult, to pronounce and to communicate, becomes indistinguishable from resignation. Although he is, to say the least, suspicious of garrulous political dogmas and philosophical systems that proclaim an unchallengeable dominion over their objects, Adorno nevertheless refuses to forego the attempt to classify and describe what is atypical and unfamiliar. Responsible philosophy endeavours, as he puts it in his magnum opus Negative Dialectics, to “counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable.”18 All philosophy for Adorno is a doomed and desperate, but certainly not unavailing, effort to describe the indescribable. It is wary in equal measure of incomprehension and certainty. It speaks a disconsolate and halting tongue, dissatisfied with silence but distrustful of eloquence. Immanuel Kant’s philo13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (Der Wille zur Macht, 1901; tr. New York: Vintage, 1968): 334. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Götzendammerung, 1888; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 94. 15 Ihab Hassan, “The Literature of Silence,” in Hassan, The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbia: Ohio State U P , 1987): 16. 16 Roland Barthes, “Preface,” Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard (Essais critiques; Paris: Seuil, 1964; Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1972): xvii–xviii. 17 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1985): 189. 18 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (Negative Dialektik; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966; tr. 1973; London: Routledge, 1996): 9.

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sophy, for instance, which tries to impose linguistic and conceptual order on the manifold external world, strives in vain to express the inexpressible, to catalogue what is in fact inexhaustible and ultimately ungovernable. Adorno calls this “the deepest aspect of Kant […] his attempt to say what cannot be said – and his entire philosophy is actually nothing more than a form of stammering, infinitely expanded and elevated.”19 Adorno’s philosophy, too, with its cryptic and convoluted style (which Terry Eagleton has characterized nicely as “a set of guerrilla raids on the inarticulable”20), stutters when confronted with the ineffable, yet it strains nonetheless for articulate expression. “Wittgenstein’s maxim […] is utterly antiphilosophical,” he states in the course of expounding his own method. “If philosophy can be defined at all, it is an effort to express things one cannot speak about, to help express the nonidentical despite the fact that expressing it identifies it at the same time.”21 Philosophy, unnerved by the possibility that it might inadvertently speak for others and rightly deterred by the prospect of claiming an overweening authority over its objects, aims nonetheless to speak about and to its audience. For it is nothing if not an effort to clarify the world and our place in it, to attain knowledge and illumination through reasoned dialogue.

Silence and Globalization Said’s attitude towards silence is a modern rather than a postmodern one. His thesis is that many accounts of the non-Western world are abhorrent and harmful because they are little more than ideological systems, purportedly comprehensive but actually inelastic and parochial structures of explanation that, though they appear to furnish a far-reaching account of the world, are in fact too inward-looking and self-seeking to peer very far beyond their own presuppositions. The fraught but ultimately extremely rewarding endeavour of investigating previously unfamiliar climes and cultures requires attentiveness and moral empathy instead of the deplorable cultural arrogance that assumes that unmindful generalizations are 19

Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1959; Cambridge: Polity, 2001): 178. 20 Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997): 342. 21 Theodor W. Adorno, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” in Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Drei Studien zu Hegel; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963; Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 101–02.

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sufficient to comprehend entire societies and peoples. There is no infallible doctrine or set of ideas that can stand in for the most meticulous scrutiny of our amorphous and mutable world, no divinely sanctioned system of interpretation and exposition that is insusceptible to change and challenge. Gayatri Spivak also argues that to this day colonized peoples have been defamed, misrepresented and spoken over by both colonizing powers and by the social elites that have ruled their countries since independence. Consequently for Spivak, in a hugely influential and controversial phrase, there is no space from which the subaltern subject can speak.22 Colonial and national elites have presented historical events, whether those of colonization or of decolonization, as narratives of their own developing ascendancy, with other social groups confined to a minor, subsidiary role. These latter are mute props for the stage-hogging, soliloquizing protagonists. Metropolitan theories, too, have expected only silence from subaltern groups. Western feminists, for instance, have too often overlooked the circumstances of women in other parts of the world. Spivak famously accuses Julia Kristeva’s About Chinese Women of being “obsessively selfcentred” and uninterested in dialogue with the objects of her academic scrutiny.23 Kristeva’s emphasis on China’s ancient matriarchal structures, Spivak argues, disregards the conditions and struggles of contemporary Chinese women, who, instead of being permitted to educate and inform Kristeva’s views, are left agog and voiceless before their Western percipient. Kristeva treats the crowd of peasants gathered to hear her orate in the village square not as interlocutors but as a “community with which we will never have anything to do.”24 Spivak, meanwhile, unequivocally rejects the suggestion that immovable barriers separate languages, cultures, genders and races, and therefore concludes that putative outsiders can, should and indeed do converse with insiders.25 Given a willingness to communicate, not only do subalterns speak but so do their interlocutors. 22

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988): 307. 23 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987): 137. 24 Julia Kristeva, About Chinese Women, tr. Anita Barrows (Des Chinoises; Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1974; London: Marion Boyars, 1977): 11. 25 Spivak, In Other Worlds, 253.

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It is important to note the great contrast between the emphasis placed by Spivak and Said on the possibility (if not always the practice) of dialogue and the dismissal of it by, say, Valentin Y. Mudimbe, who is typical of those postcolonial theorists who have denied the ability of thinkers to engage with other peoples and cultures in a non-coercive fashion. Mudimbe criticizes Persistent Pastoralists,26 the Marxist anthropologist Peter Rigby’s study of the Ilparakuyo people of East Africa, not because its theses are erroneous (Mudimbe has no criticism on this score) but because he asserts that all representations of other cultures are unavoidably put to tyrannical and unjust use.27 This sort of scepticism about the ability of ostensible outsiders (Rigby is in any case a consecrated cultural insider of the Ilparakuyo) to represent, discuss, learn from, and even counsel other cultures and societies stems, I think, from a too literal reading of Said’s and Spivak’s warnings of the perils that lie in wait for insensitive scholarly work. A strictly historical claim about the imprecise and invidious generalizations of Orientalist scholarship is exaggerated into a grandiose ontological proposition, a debilitating scepticism about the possibility of cultural contact. The wariness of thinkers like Mudimbe about challenging the partition of humanity into segregated units has led to an inability to discharge fully the very mission of postcolonial writing, which is to help humankind see beyond the divisive effects of economic and cultural colonization. Intellectuals who subscribe to the various post- discourses that currently hold sway (but which thankfully are now increasingly subjected to sceptical examination in the postcolonial field by thinkers like Kwame Anthony Appiah, Timothy Brennan, Arif Dirlik, Keya Ganguly, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry and many others) have convinced themselves that they have no right or ability to discuss anything but themselves. I am thinking here not only of Mudimbe’s Parables and Fables but also of Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s claim that feminism should take radically different forms in different regions, of Robert Young’s doubts in White Mythologies about the likelihood of European writers writing informative history from a noneurocentric perspective, of Spivak’s incautious and regrettably influential 26 Peter Rigby, Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition (London: Zed, 1985). 27 V.Y. Mudimbe, Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991): 166–91.

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likening (in The Postcolonial Critic and in her translator’s introduction to Of Grammatology) of the extreme epistemological scepticism of poststructuralist philosophy to the insuperable limits to what Western writers can responsibly say about the Orient, of thinkers like Homi Bhabha and Sara Suleri who discard the notion that intractable differences separate societies in favour of the idea that never-ending but ultimately still unavailing negotiations take place between them, and, finally, of all those thinkers tempted, when surveying the history of harmful mischaracterizations of the non-Western world, to bend the stick too far in the opposite direction and reject the possibility of constructive intellectual communication between different societies.28 Although their criticisms are aimed largely and even at times somewhat unjustly at Spivak, the works of Benita Parry, Asha Varadharajan and Bart Moore–Gilbert alert us to how, in much of the postcolonial field, the incessant exposure of maleficent Western conceptions of the non-West gives rise to a reluctance to countenance epistemological and political alternatives to this unequal relationship.29 Too much work in that field has failed to add a constructive political agenda to its extremely salutary criticisms of those misconceptions. Witness the perverse claims in Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies that belief in the capacity for constructive dialogue, in inviolable human rights and in the potential for democratic and egalitarian political arrangements is nothing but “a hegemonic view of existence by which the experiences, values and expectations of a dominant culture are held to be true for all humanity” and that the “assumption (or assertion) of a common humanity” is “a crucial feature of imperial hegemony.”30

28 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1999); Gayatri Chkravorty Spivak, The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990); Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1993); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold, 1996): 172–92; Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). 29 Bart Moore–Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1998); Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–55; Asha Varadharajan, Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995): 89. 30 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin, Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998): 235.

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In this rarefied atmosphere, the considerable responsibilities and opportunities for constructive intellectual work have been reduced to little more than an embarrassed mea culpa: “these movements,” complains Christopher Norris, an undaunted defender of philosophical rationality, reject the idea that intellectuals (i.e., critical thinkers) could ever claim the right to represent human interests, needs or political aspirations that go beyond 31 their own, necessarily partial and self-interested view of events.

Similarly, Neil Lazarus complains that those who deny that it is possible for European thinkers to speak about and to other peoples and cultures have embraced “a standpoint from which the very idea of speaking for others comes to be viewed as a discredited aspiration, and secretly authoritarian.”32 But as Norris has noted, scepticism about the possibility and even the desirability of communication between societies and cultures, and between groups with shared interests, is ultimately little more than a self-defeating rationale for intellectual withdrawal and for an unadventurous indifference to the world outside one’s immediate locale. It gives way to the quest for an ethics that would either fall silent in the face of absolute alterity, or represent it from the distance of a textual encounter which on principle renounces all claim to understanding beyond what present-day culture provides in the way of discourses, rhetorical strategies, narrative instances, and so forth.33

Cripplingly suspicious of their own legitimacy, postmodern thinkers, in their unwillingness to speak in place of others, are usually led, as Satya P. Mohanty argues, to quit speaking at all in any meaningful sense and to subscribe to a politically unavailing cultural relativism.34 Chariness of speaking about others certainly has the advantage of inducing one to refrain from drowning out their voices with one’s own, but ultimately it 31

Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (London: Harvester, 1990): 29. 32 Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999): 101. 33 Christopher Norris, Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1994): 75. 34 Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1997): 145.

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gives rise to a politically disastrous belief that only I can speak for my group and only you can speak for yours. Such relativism would condemn us all to silence or at least to an absurd cacophony (that would be no better than silence) in which each local group, though it is doomed to proclaim itself loudly to the winds, has no hope of ever reaching the ear of an impressible listener, truly a fate as ingeniously cruel in its futility as any in Dante. As Said points out in “The Politics of Knowledge,” there is a depressing tendency in cultural studies to imagine that the assertion of a previously defamed cultural identity is sufficient to achieve liberation. If you are weak, your affirmation of your identity for its own sake amounts to little more than saying that you want a kind of attention easily and superficially granted, like the attention given an individual in a crowded room at a roll call. Once having such recognition, the subject has only to sit there silently as the proceedings unfold as if in his or her absence.35

Genuine liberation is a far more difficult process than this, not least because powerful interests in formerly colonized societies have often used the assertion of national, racial or cultural identity as a substitute for genuine social reform. The rhetoric of separatism becomes, as Frantz Fanon’s famous warning in the early 1960s about the “pitfalls of national consciousness” foresaw, a diversion from the fact that the economy of the purportedly postcolonial state is still locked into a submissive relationship to what are still, in Europe and North America, effectively colonial states. It is the very bellicosity of nationalist sentiment that ensures that the postcolonial state exists in a condition of silent compliance before the edicts and requirements of these much more powerful parties.36 The militant assertion of identity leads to a vision (and I am convinced it is exactly that, a vision and certainly not an adequate or edifying explanation of the contemporary world) of segregated and self-sufficient groups that is completely unable to understand or effectively combat the vagaries of today’s fully global capitalism.

35

Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” in Reflections on Exile, 379. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre; Paris: Maspéro, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 119–65. 36

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The sort of militant localism exemplified by, say, Lyotard’s characteristically postmodern celebration of “local determinism”37 actually hinders the anticolonial project by ignoring the persistence of an interconnected, albeit unequal and exploitative, world-system. Slavoj ŽiÞek has argued that the proliferation of vociferously guarded but in fact largely manufactured local differences (exclusive national, ethnic and cultural identities) does not disrupt capitalist globalization but ideologically underwrites it. The more capitalism encircles the globe, the more local groupings defend and frequently even invent singular identities in order to compensate for the intrusions of a system that is more than capable of withstanding these largely rhetorical provocations. The politics of identity offers an ideological escape from (rather than an effective political challenge to) global capitalism. It is in fact as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism – since, as we might put it, everybody tacitly accepts that capitalism is here to stay – critical energy has found a substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of the capitalist world-system intact.38

The promotion of minority voices is therefore the precondition, not the goal, of political liberation. Undeniably, it is a salutary corrective to those stentorian voices that usually hog the public sphere. But, as Said suggests, the purpose of this corrective “cannot be simply and obdurately to reaffirm the paramount importance of formerly suppressed or silenced forms of knowledge and leave it at that.”39 It was never the intention of the original anticolonial movements to simply add their voice to an unedifying shouting match. Rather, they sought to transform this profitless cacophony into a more egalitarian communication between equals, a relationship underpinned by political and institutional equality. What I want to make clear, therefore, is that it is precisely in the age of political, cultural and especially economic globalization that the question of the rights 37

Jean–François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (La Condition Postmoderne; Paris: Minuit, 1979; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1987): xxiv. 38 Slavoj ŽiÞek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999): 218. 39 Said, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 380.

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and wrongs of silence becomes an especially urgent one. For to acclaim taciturnity and the cultural relativism that goes with it is either to claim that globalization has not taken place, a position which is of course untenable, or, alternatively, to argue that it can be resisted in a piecemeal, spasmodic and local fashion. I for one do not happen to think that this is the case, primarily because the growth of economic and cultural relationships, communications, and the migration and interaction of peoples on a fully global scale is irreversible, but also because to a large extent that process is desirable as well. I do not wish to be misconstrued: the present arrangement of the global economy is intolerable and unsustainable. It is wasteful, exploitative and both environmentally and, more importantly, humanly destructive. However, the alternative to this state of affairs is not isolation or the jealous, defensive posture habitually assumed by embattled groups. There is nothing wrong with defending one’s cultural distinctiveness or economic well-being against the intrusions of more powerful states, but such acts are not a solution. Resistance must be combined with a cosmopolitan willingness to work for a different sort of globalization, a model of interaction between societies based not on self-interest and competition but on mutuality, equality and communication.40 The conventional rhetoric of globalization, which characterizes it as a benign expansion of trade and wealth, is obviously misleading. As Michael Mann has observed, the extension of social relations across the globe has led not to concord but to division and competition in economic, technological, cultural, political and military matters.41 But the globalizers’ militant rhetoric contains at least a grain of truth. Globalization currently erects far more barriers than it dismantles, but the very notion that regional and material disparities ought to be erased signals an alternative. The ideal of globalization, to which capitalism merely pays lip service, promises, as Fernando Coronil has argued, to catapult us beyond the status quo.42 What is needed, therefore, is what Jeremy Brecher and Timothy

40

See Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Political Strategy,” New Left Review 4 (2000): 49–68. 41 See Michael Mann, “Globalization and September 11,” New Left Review 12 (2001): 51–72. 42 Fernando Coronil, “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” Public Culture 12:2 (2000): 369.

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Costello have called “globalization-from-below,”43 a grassroots cosmopolitanism designed not to facilitate capital accumulation and thus perpetuate inequality but to protect human rights and environmental standards and to enhance the prospects of peace and democracy. Once we are resolved to leave behind both the garrulous presumptions and prejudices of Orientalism and the eccentric, and in my opinion completely self-defeating, advocacy of silence, then we are obliged to explore other ways of communicating with formerly silenced groups that do not speak over those groups but at the same time do not settle for quietude. To my mind, there are two means of achieving this. Both have been adumbrated by Said. The first, for which there ought to be no conceivable substitute, is to pay attention to those groups and individuals that were previously condemned to silence as they make known their grievances and aspirations with their own voices and in their own accents. Said calls this process the “permission to narrate.”44 This useful phrase denotes the leave demanded by peoples, nations, and so on to recount their experiences and give voice to the complaints and aspirations that those experiences entail. To answer the question of why, in this and other similar contexts, individuals and groups prefer writing and speaking to silence, is equivalent to specifying what the intellectual and writer confront in the public sphere. What I mean is that the existence of individuals or groups seeking social justice and economic equality, who understand (in Amartya Sen’s formulation) that freedom must include the right to a whole range of choices affording cultural, political, intellectual, and economic development, ipso facto will lead one to a desire for articulation as opposed to silence.45

Said captures my central contention, which is that, understood as an end in itself, silence is indistinguishable from submission. When peoples, societies and groups are unable or unwilling to argue their corner, they are soon spoken for by the powerful and thus debarred from asserting their 43

Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston M A : South End, 1994): 78. 44 Edward W. Said, “Permission to Narrate” (1984), in Said, The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (London: Vintage, 1995): 247–68. 45 Edward W. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia U P , 2004): 134.

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singular claims and aspirations. Volubility is therefore bound up with volition, empowerment and will. Free speech is the indispensable prerequisite of free thought and action. Another means of achieving communication with dispossessed and marginalized groups is more difficult and fraught, but is also, for that reason, very rewarding and effective as well. To define one’s own meanings, values and ideals is to reclaim the inalienable right to represent oneself and one’s world. But when one’s accounts start to sway and move others, then one also begins to move beyond the necessary but nonetheless intermediate process of regaining control over identity and history. Even in colonial or formerly colonial countries, there are those who, instead of playing the oracle and pretending to know all the answers, will hang on the lips of their new interlocutors and learn from a parley with “other models for history, other efforts, other struggles equally worthy of study and reflection.”46 Respectful silence when learning from interlocutors is what Marcos advocates in the second epigraph that prefaces this discussion.47 His is a highly eloquent and effective voice that for some years has spoken for Mexico’s downtrodden indigenous communities and is thus an excellent example both of the sort of confident narration to which Said refers and of the effort to touch and stir persuadable interlocutors. Marcos claims that silence is justifiable only when it is used to make room for the voices of others in a conversation between equals. It then becomes a courteous deference to fellow speakers, an ethical gesture that gives others an opportunity to speak, to be heard and to sway their listeners. For Said, it is humanism that enables one to speak with and for others. In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, he argues that humanism has usually but wrongly been understood as a clannish faith in the values and beliefs of an exclusive social or national group. To declare oneself a believer in essential human values has hitherto been to set oneself up as an authority over all that one has deemed unqualified to reach that standard. Said, however, understands the term as an ethical concern for all humanity that combines a thirst for liberty with a hatred of segregation, exclusion, inequality and avoidable physical suffering. What such a catholic definition of humanism allows us to do is to esteem and to listen to instead of 46

Edward W. Said, Musical Elaborations (London: Vintage, 1991): 54. Subcomandante Marcos, “The Word and the Silence,” in Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce de León (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001): 84. 47

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haughtily disdaining or disregarding marginal groups. By taking account of their narratives in one’s declarations and actions one can then exercise what Said, after Giambattista Vico, considers to be the distinctive human faculty: the mind’s capacity for critical introspection or, as Said described it elsewhere, “the mind in its double aspect of active conation (or will) and reflective intellect, the mind both acting and observing itself acting.”48 Human intelligence should be not spellbound by the prestige of familiar doctrines but interminably inventing and creatively renovating its precepts in the light of new experience and knowledge, a process constrained only by the mind’s obligation to act according to the dictates of human sympathy and community. To hold to such universalistic notions as human rights is not to acknowledge oneself a partisan of a restrictive and both culturally and regionally specific ideology but, on the contrary, to commit oneself to apply them without exception. Powerful states have, alas, adopted this discourse for their own nefarious ends. But the desirability of the extension of fundamental values, rights and liberties is certainly not called into question by the rarely philanthropic military adventures undertaken by those states for professedly humanitarian reasons. What these destructive campaigns reveal to be at issue is the fitness of states that have, to say the least, seldom been a force for good in the world for the role of triggerhappy sheriffs, claiming a monopoly of legitimate violence and throwing their weight around the globe with unselfconscious zeal. We must uphold humanist values in the face of states and ideologies that have duplicitously appropriated them, while continuing to highlight those areas in which, through expediency and self-interest, those values are ignored. Said urges us to compare the rhetoric of humanism with an often hidden or silent reality in which humanist principles are routinely flouted. For the intellectual, to be ‘for’ human rights means, in effect, to be willing to venture interpretations of those rights in the same place and with the same language employed by the dominant power, to dispute its hierarchy and methods, to elucidate what it has hidden, to pronounce what it has silenced or rendered unpronounceable.49

48

Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975; London: Granta,

1997): 359. 49

Said, “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation,” Reflections on Exile, 430.

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Thus Said was silence’s implacable foe. In The Question of Palestine of 1979, which with Orientalism and Covering Islam comprises a trilogy on the ethics of representation, he complained not that American intellectuals were too willing to speak about Palestine but rather that they were not willing enough to do so. Though commendably quick to condemn abuses of human rights in South Africa and Chile, Said complained that they were unaccountably loath to denounce similar abuses committed in the Occupied Territories that have openly been aided by the USA . Check the disgraceful record and you will find only a small handful – among them Noam Chomsky, Israel Shahak, IF Stone, Elmer Berger, Judah Magnes – who have tried to see what Zionism did to the Palestinians not just once in 1948, but over the years. It is one of the most frightening cultural episodes of the 20th century, this almost total silence about Zionism’s doctrines for and treatment of the native Palestinians.50

Intellectuals, therefore, are negligent when they are less willing than the dissenters enumerated here to reflect critically on their own country’s misdemeanours and complicities. They speak out against and on behalf of others but are unwilling to demonstrate the receptivity to criticism and the penchant for self-analysis that are required of the responsible interlocutor. Despite its superficially radical credentials, the relativist or postmodern vision likewise practises a taciturn contentment with limited horizons, a parochial reluctance to heed other constituencies and interrogate one’s own. It is, in my view, highly irresponsible, prepared as it is to rest easy with discourses that are deaf and dumb before the wide world of interlocutors, experiences and events, but which cannot always (indeed, hardly ever) remain serenely unmolested by external influences. One’s task, then, is not to practise, expect or tolerate silence but, rather, to listen to what the campaigning Australian journalist John Pilger (who has cupped an ear to neglected events in Cambodia, Nicaragua, East Timor, Palestine and Australia’s own unnoticed corners) has called “distant voices,” those faint and usually unheeded noises off that issue from forgotten interlocutors.51

50

Edward W. Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992): 113. John Pilger, Distant Voices (London: Vintage, 1994). Another example in Pilger’s own work of this determination to uncover and attend forgotten voices is his Heroes (London: Pan, 1989). 51

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From Silence to Sound In “From Silence to Sound and Back Again,” Said claims that the operas of Wagner and Fidelio, Beethoven’s sole work in that genre, share a common battle against the inevitable dying away of music’s cadences, an unflagging effort to prolong the sonority of sound beyond the inescapable final note. They contrast the vibrancy and eloquence of sound and especially speech with the omnipresent danger of silence, which lies in wait not just in the inevitable culmination of the musical performance but also in the indeterminacy inherent in musical notation. Since music lacks some easily identifiable worldly referent, Beethoven, according to Said, sought in his operatic venture to add the eloquent directness of human utterance to the loose, unfocused acclamations of mere sound. By enlisting the human voice, Fidelio (and also the Ninth Symphony) seeks to defy music’s intrinsic vulnerability to the stillness, melancholy and bereavement that always ensue at its cessation. Like Scheherazade in the Thousand and One Nights, Beethoven and Wagner forestall silence with their volubility, their endlessly creative weaving of new fables in the face of death’s constant menace. But whereas the struggle that Beethoven and Wagner wage against the encroachment of silence must perforce be unsuccessful (or at least perpetually reconvened), the unceasing ingenuity and continuity of Scheherazade’s voice actually melts the heart of power, winning Shahriar’s mercy and thus ensuring, in their children, the perpetuation of human life. Wagner, Beethoven and Scheherazade all use sound and speech to resist and even overcome death-bringing silence. But music and literature are today, both for Said and, as we have seen, for Adorno, in a more invidious position. Modernist artworks, for Said, are pulled variously between the desire to stand firm against silence and the equally powerful urge not to indulge in the sort of communication that speaks over people and even reality itself. The predicament evident in the works of Wagner and Beethoven as an ineluctable, indeed ontological, one is actually a major political and historical dilemma as well. Said argues convincingly that the experiments of literary modernism in opaque, even inchoate, form and cryptic utterance were in large part engendered by the challenge issued to Orientalist discourses by the insurgencies and intrusions of non-European, colonized peoples. The idea that human subjects can adequately map their external surroundings with an infallible system of ideas and concepts was given a

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rude shock by the experience of war, of economic and social alienation and by the confusions of urban living. It was also, as Said contends, engendered by the realization that the ambitions of Orientalist ‘science’ and of ineluctable historical progress under European colonialism were being challenged by quite different experiences and interpretations of history. Much of modernist literature’s dumb astonishment and horror are products of this novel confrontation. Europe and the West, in short, were being asked to take the Other seriously. This, I think, is the fundamental historical problem of modernism. The subaltern and the constitutively different suddenly achieved disruptive articulation exactly where in European culture silence and compliance could previously be depended on to quiet them down.52

This process is evident in the themes and to some extent the narrative form of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, in which the initially serene European presumptions and ultimately the life of the alternately desiring and fearful, appetent and stringently self-disciplined protagonist succumb to a plague originating in Asia. Too busy with the tasks imposed upon him by his own ego and the European soul, too laden with the care and duty to create, too preoccupied to be an amateur of the gay outer world, he had been content to know as much of the earth’s surface as he could without stirring far outside his own sphere – had, indeed, never even been tempted to leave Europe.53

When European modernism undertakes the voyage at which Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach quailed, it is struck dumb by the encounter. In “An Outpost of Progress” by Joseph Conrad, for whom silence is something of a leitmotif, the beleaguered protagonist finds in Africa “the eloquent silence of mute greatness.”54 This is the same silence that strikes George Orwell in “Shooting an Elephant,” his autobiographical sketch about an experience that to him defined his disreputable stint as an imperial police52

Said, “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” Reflections on Exile, 313. See also Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1995): 225–29. 53 Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, tr. H.T. Lowe–Porter (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912, tr. 1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978): 10. 54 Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” Selected Tales, ed. Nigel Stewart (London: Faber & Faber, 1977): 21.

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man in colonial Burma. The youthful Orwell is unnerved and not a little scornful of the natives by whom he is surrounded, and he remarks dispiritedly upon “the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East,” the silence firstly of his own reluctance at that time to denounce the manifest evils of his position and secondly of his own sheer incomprehension before a world that his unreformed prejudices simply cannot cognize.55 My argument here is certainly not that this attitude of mute bewilderment and fascination with which European writers in the figures of, for instance, the fastidious Aschenbach and the rifle-wielding Orwell experienced colonial climes is admirable or excusable. Rather, what it shows is that one of the primary catalysts of the modernist experiment in form is the waning faith in transparent knowledge and representation; moreover, that this disillusionment was in large part occasioned by the increased volubility of colonized peoples which, one way or another, had to be reckoned with by formerly unchallenged discourses and authorities. Modernist literature is reticent and contemplative, reserved and introspective. It does not presume to encompass the complex and unfamiliar world from some omniscient eyrie. Rather, because it doubts its own capacity for adequate representation and knowledge, it confesses its puzzlement before other peoples and circumstances that cannot be easily and painlessly grasped. What modernism does instead, particularly in Conrad, is to give a highly contentious account of an unfamiliar environment hedged with caveats and confessions of self-doubt, of the kind exemplified by the clearly unreliable and partial narrators of Heart of Darkness. Another example of this fallible but not ineffectual perspective is the innovative narrative method of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Less contentious than the depictions of Africa and Africans in Heart of Darkness, Ulysses gradually forswears an omniscience that it openly associates with imperial power. The novel finds an alternative in the perspective of its protagonist, Leopold Bloom, with his inclusive, cosmopolitan ethos and benign affection for the eccentric minutiae of everyday life. Modernism is perpetually but nonetheless productively torn between sound and silence. The criticism of literature, as well as literature itself, is charged with breaking silences by means of eloquent but not stentorian speech. Said’s 55

George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant,” The Collected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 19.

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important article on “The World, the Text, and the Critic” argues the impossibility of the pianist Glenn Gould’s professed intention to forgo public recitals in order to get free of both the uncertainties of performance and the audience’s unpredictable responses. But though he withdraws from live audiences, the recordings done in Gould’s new private style are subjected nonetheless to a very public world of distribution and reception in which the motives and intentions of listeners cannot be foreseen or, more importantly, controlled. This reveals an important truth about all artistic endeavour: a text in its actually being a text is a being in the world; it therefore addresses anyone who reads, as Gould does throughout the very same record that is supposed to represent both his withdrawal from the world and his ‘new’ silent 56 style of playing without a live audience.

Neither the text nor its interpreters are silently withdrawn from the world, for in fact both are conditioned by the vagaries of their political, social and historical context. The artistic object leaves itself open to (indeed, by its very placement within the world, actively solicits) the uses and abuses of its diverse recipients. The reader, too, is a worldly creature; his judgements or interpretations are not hunches or whimsical private surmises but the result of a dialogue with the text and with the milieux in which it is produced and read. Yet this fact does not say all we need to know about the public, animate existence of literary works. Just as the civic sphere of political and ideological controversy is rarely a polite interchange between well-mannered associates, so the commerce between reader and book is often more a matter of dissension than of dialogue; literary and other texts frequently force their readers into the position of disputants and, of course, astute and sceptical readers should require little invitation to assume that role. To imagine that the engagement with texts takes place in an oasis of conciliatory repartee is to divorce the text from the sort of interchange that actually takes place in the world outside the sheltered enclaves of merely aesthetic controversy. Literary criticism is only initially about the elucidation of artefacts. Since those texts are worldly objects with a worldly genesis and effect, literary criticism is also led to involve itself gladly in

56

Said, “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” 33.

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the testing but stimulating storm of political disputation. It can therefore be employed as an aid in the essential task of exposing unexamined sources of power and authority to the criticism provided by other voices and alternatives. Admiring studies of great artworks lacking in sensitivity to the often brutal and repressive circumstances of their production – or, more specifically, to the kind of inegalitarian societies that endow artists and intellectuals with the leisure, patronage and education to write and create – serve only to conceal an otherwise unpalatable social world. The critic should be prepared to combine strictly literary insights with a broader, frequently disquieting and disconcerting, perspective on the contested social world from which literature springs, in particular on the injustice and dispossession – in short, as Walter Benjamin famously put it, the barbarism – on which all cultural achievement is erected.57 The aim of literary criticism is not just some businesslike explication de texte, but, via such work, the critical illumination of a text’s origins and consequences. The critic’s job is to reveal literature’s voluble entanglement with the world at the same time as he or she refutes the pusillanimous suggestion often heard from more conservative voices that literature ought silently to abstain from it. We tell our students and our general constituency that we defend the classics, the virtues of a liberal education, and the precious pleasures of literature even as we also show ourselves to be silent (perhaps incompetent) about the his58 torical and social world in which all these things take place.

All this is preparatory to saying that the role of critic is, to say the least, one of great responsibility. He or she, as Said makes clear, is not sedentary and free of care, but active and committed. The critic is dedicated not to heaping praise on the aesthetic object or to promulgating his own received ideas but to the rewarding task of submitting both to critical interrogation and in so doing to illuminate the fractious world from which literature springs. The alternative to silence, then, is dialogue. When the voices of the dispossessed and disparaged become too loud for the dominant discourse to 57 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (Schriften; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1955, tr. 1968; London: Fontana, 1992): 248. 58 Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic, 2.

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drown out, they then enter the stage of history speaking in their own accents and from their own scripts, and their eloquent accounts are such that they receive a sympathetic hearing from receptive minds. In place of the narcissistic soliloquies of colonizing powers, there is the healthy commerce of negotiation, conversation and, inevitably and not necessarily regrettably, conflict and disagreement. Intellectual activity, of which literary criticism is a vital part, is a matter of excavating and recollecting hitherto unheeded voices. Dialogue in this case, then, refers less to the liberal panacea of reasoned debate between courteous interlocutors than to the framing of one’s thoughts and actions with as comprehensive an acquaintance as possible with other views and circumstances. In particular, it means, as Said makes clear in his Representations of the Intellectual, taking the preconceptions, orthodoxies and received ideas that legitimize the actions of the powerful and subjecting them to the complaints and alternatives enunciated by their victims. I think the major choice faced by the intellectual is whether to be allied with the stability of the victors and rulers, or – the more difficult path – to consider that stability as a state of emergency threatening the less fortunate with the danger of extinction, and take into account the experience of subordination itself, as well as the memory of forgotten voices and persons.59

The intellectual is not so supercilious as to pontificate to others without adequate empathy and insight, nor so pusillanimous as to fall silent. There are then the alternatives either of silence, exile, cunning, withdrawal into self and solitude, or more to my liking, though deeply flawed and perhaps too marginalized, that of the intellectual whose vocation is to speak the truth to power, to reject the official discourse of orthodoxy and authority, and to exist through irony and skepticism, mixed in with the languages of the media, government, and dissent, trying to articulate the silent testimony of lived suffering and stifled experience. There is no sound, no articulation that is adequate to what injustice and power inflict on the poor, the disadvantaged and the disinherited. But there are approximations to it, not representations of it,

59

Edward W. Said, Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994): 26.

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which have the effect of punctuating discourse with disenchantment and demystifications.60

The cosmopolitan thinker is less than a ventriloquist putting words into the mouths of others but more than a self-absorbed recluse muttering in a state of anxious withdrawal. To listen to such a thinker is, as Raymond Williams has written, to listen to “the sound of that voice which, in speaking as itself, is speaking, necessarily, for more than itself.”61

Terrible, Unquiet Fuss I have argued that there is a readily available alternative to the woeful choice often offered between, on the one hand, expatiating and dictating to a captive audience and, on the other, falling abjectly and uselessly mute. What I have been seeking here is not simply to show that silence is a ubiquitous motif in political and cultural controversies (which one would expect), but also to demonstrate that this is so for a very important reason. We are still driven, even in an age as unaccustomed to cordial communication as our own, by the desire to communicate knowledge and experience. But a great deal of what passes for communication does not achieve these aims, and as a result many intellectuals have ceased to even try. We should certainly seek to silence the bellicose oratory of the powerful, those evangelists who treat others as biddable audiences for their homilies and who shout down reality itself as if it were a governable underling. Their unselfconscious prattle does absolutely nothing to represent reality, share ideas or spread knowledge. But I have been arguing that the best way to oppose such bellicosity is to reject the deathly hush apparently desired by many postmodern and, alas, some postcolonial thinkers, a few of whom I mentioned earlier. If we are to communicate effectively across the social, economic, cultural, political and military barriers that globalization has thrown up, then we must also avoid the temptations of a coy or apathetic quietude. We are all confronted by the depressing willingness of the news media, blustering and trigger-happy politicians, the directors of rapacious corporations, military strategists, area 60 Edward W. Said, “From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History,” Reflections on Exile, 526. 61 Raymond Williams, “The Writer: Commitment and Alignment,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 217–18.

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‘experts’ and the like to pontificate blithely about a complex and variegated world that actually extends far beyond their own limited expertise. Yet the most efficacious response to this state of affairs is not the unsatisfactory tendency of many academics in the arts and humanities, admittedly with the most laudable of motives, to be so tremulously wary of the consequences of speaking in inadvertently derogatory terms about other societies, peoples and cultures that they prefer to fall silent instead. For lurking behind the commendation of speechlessness in much postmodern and postcolonial thought is the indefensible assumption that we cannot communicate with or represent ostensibly dissimilar national, ethnic or cultural constituencies. Seen as a political ideal, this typically postmodern relativism is inauspicious. It tends to laud divisions, enmities and misunderstandings between peoples that are actually the replaceable products of colonialism. I have argued that humanism is the most promising basis of a desirable global polity that would be based on communication rather than conflict, on parity rather than partition. Herein lies the unfulfilled promise of globalization, a global vision based not on discord and competition but on equality, respect, democracy and mutual interdependence. Humanism is a discourse that allows one to speak out about injustice, dispossession and exclusion without dictating to others with a blind, sermonizing faith in one’s own values, precepts and assumptions. By avowing inalienable human rights, we can raise our voices in solidarity with disinherited and marginalized groups that have been forcibly prevented from obtaining a hearing. Hence intellectuals in a European or North American context need not fall silent in penance for the past and current misdeeds of their ilk. They, too, by crying out against the abuse and dereliction of human rights, can add their voices to the chorus that protests against injustice. “Following September 11,” as Pilger has remarked, “the central issue again is silence.”62 Now more than ever, resistance to bellicose simplifications and attention to (and willingness to speak out on behalf of) “distant voices” are urgently necessary. The price exacted by silence about our disputed and questionable civilization is heavy indeed. The toll is exacted in compliance and complacency and, ultimately, in the toleration of a system that manifestly requires radical change. Silence ignores and fails to question the contested process of globalization that has, for both good and ill, connected us all. 62

John Pilger, The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2003): 163.

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Globalization has generated contact between cultures and peoples that has in many cases led to very effective ties of practical global solidarity of the sort evident in cosmopolitan attitudes, increasingly multiracial societies, non-governmental organizations that campaign heroically for the application of human rights, and in movements for fair trade and against war. I am not suggesting that globalization should be rejected or ignored but that, as a first step, it should be seen in all its ambiguity, its incongruous combination of promise and peril. Globalization is and should be here to stay; any theory that claims otherwise is of little worth. We trade, cooperate, learn, congregate, converse, quarrel – in short, communicate – with each other as a matter of course. This fact alone gives the lie to the relativist notion that we ought to confine ourselves to camps gathered under banners that denote exclusive and even warring identities. The second step, which I believe it is essential for us to take, is to agree that a radical alternative to the current global system is to be found in the unfulfilled promise of globalization: that is, in the solidarity and mutual respect of interlocutors rather than in ill-tempered dispute or silent incomprehension. For those who have no such homeland, the intellectual communication that dialogue makes possible provides an image (if not yet an instantiation) of it. Displacement, marginality, division and wasteful misunderstanding are, as the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish beseeches, all potentially corrected by speech: We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on the stone of a stone. We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel.63

Intellectual, political and artistic practice should share Edward Said’s hope that productive dialogue with injured and marginalized groups is both needful and feasible. I hope I have done enough to show that the prevalent scepticism about the intellectual vocation and the regrettably widespread predilection for silence to which it leads both fail to offer any concerted, principled challenge to what Bauman characterizes as our global civilization with all its attendant human calamities. Moreover, not only are 63 Mahmud Darwish, “We Travel Like Other People,” in Mahmud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim & Adonis, Victims of a Map, tr. Abdullah al-Udhari (tr. 1984; London: Al Saqi Books, 1984): 31.

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these positions unwarranted by Said’s work, by which they frequently profess to have been inspired, they are in fact explicitly repudiated by it. In an otherwise moving and informative tribute to his former colleague, Michael Wood recounts his, in my opinion mistaken, realization that Said refrained from speaking explicitly of colonized peoples for fear that to do so was unavoidably to rob them of the right to speak for themselves. For a long time I couldn’t understand why Edward didn’t say more about the actual people living in the so-called East, then I realised it was a matter of scruple, even austerity. He could point to the gap between these people’s lives and what Orientalists have often made of them; but he couldn’t step in and talk for the silenced without becoming an Orientalist himself.64

Said, of course, believed no such thing – particularly in his writings on Palestine, he clearly did step into this breach (and, what is more, was berated for having the temerity to do so from New York by those of Arafat’s hangers-on who feared his exposure of their venality and incompetence). That he refused to speak over others does not mean that he did not dare to speak with, about and even for them as well. He was an advocate of constructive dialogue, not of an uncomprehending stalemate between strangers. Said has called Jean Mohr, for whose illuminating photographs of Palestinian lives he has provided a ruminative commentary, “a listening photographer.”65 Palestinians, in Mohr’s compelling images, are seen to resist and overspill the narratives imposed and enforced by their more powerful interlocutors. The concrete details of their activities and routines make us cup our ears and consequently add to our knowledge of Palestinians’ diverse and recalcitrant existences: multiform, obdurate, and unbowed. This, I think, is what can be achieved by art that resists the temptation to speechify. In an important critical essay Salman Rushdie has taken issue with Orwell’s famous suggestion that novelists ought to clamber inside a metaphoric whale in order to escape the pull and temptation of overt political allegiances. For Rushdie, the artist should not be inside the whale but outside, not aspiring to the dubious consolations of some comfortable sanctuary but embroiling himself in the hubbub of poli64

Michael Wood, “On Edward Said,” London Review of Books 25.20 (2003): 3. Edward W. Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, photographs by Jean Mohr (London: Vintage, 1993): 84. 65

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tical disputation. Leaving aside the, in my opinion rather questionable, justice of his specific criticism (Orwell is reprimanding some of the more didactic English verse of the 1930s rather than prescribing a course of action for all creative writers), Rushdie’s suggestion that the artist should renounce silence in order to remonstrate, enunciate and complain is surely correct. “In our whaleless world,” he writes, “in this world without quiet corners, there can be no easy escapes from history, from hullabaloo, from terrible, unquiet fuss.”66 One of my contentions here has been that the narrative method of modernism and the sort of attitude that it potentially instils in its readers (talkative but thoughtful, curious but self-aware) can help us fulfil a useful role on Rushdie’s whaleless globe. Modernism was brought about by the particular problem of which I have been speaking: how to address and communicate with others without talking over them. If, as Rushdie claims, literature is to kick up a fuss about the world in which we live, then it does so by compelling one to listen, like Mohr, to others, to break the silence about one’s preconceptions and to give voice to the outside world. It articulates what lies beyond one’s immediate environs without unconsidered declamation or expatiation. As such, it combines silence with sound, humility with principled excitation.

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot–Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno & Rolf Tiedemann (Asthetische Theorie; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970, tr. 1997; London: Athlone, 1999). ——. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1959; Cambridge: Polity, 2001). ——. Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (Negative Dialektik; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966, tr. 1973; London: Routledge, 1996). ——, “Skoteinos, or How to Read Hegel,” Hegel: Three Studies, tr. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Drei Studien zu Hegel; Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963; Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999): 89–148. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1998). Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths & Helen Tiffin. Key Concepts in Post-Colonial Studies (London: Routledge, 1998).

66

Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 101.

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Barthes, Roland. “Preface,” Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard (Essais critiques; Paris: Seuil, 1964; Evanston I L : Northwestern U P , 1972): xi–xxi. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Beckett, Samuel. Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: John Calder, 1976). Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, intro. Hannah Arendt, tr. Harry Zohn (Schriften; Frankfurt am Main, 1955, tr. 1968; London: Fontana, 1992): 245–55. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1999). Brecher, Jeremy, & Tim Costello. Global Village or Global Pillage: Economic Reconstruction from the Bottom Up (Boston M A : South End, 1994). Celan, Paul. “Speech on the Occasion of Receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen,” Collected Prose, tr. Rosmarie Waldrop (Manchester: Carcanet, 1986): 33–35. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (1902; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995). ——. “An Outpost of Progress,” Selected Tales, ed. Nigel Stewart (London: Faber & Faber, 1977): 14–42. Coronil, Fernando. “Towards a Critique of Globalcentrism: Speculations on Capitalism’s Nature,” Public Culture 12.2 (2000): 351–70. Darwish, Mahmud, Samih al-Qasim & Adonis. Victims of a Map, tr. Abdullah alUdhari (tr. 1984; London: Al Saqi Books, 1984). Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (De la Grammatologie; Paris: Minuit, 1967; Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1974). Eagleton, Terry. The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems: 1909–1962 (London: Faber & Faber, 1990). Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre; Paris: Maspéro, 1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). Hassan, Ihab. “The Literature of Silence,” in The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State U P , 1987): 3–22. Jameson, Fredric. “Globalization and Political Strategy,” New Left Review 4 (2000): 49–68. Joyce, James. Ulysses, ed. Jeri Johnson (1922; Oxford: Oxford U P , 1998). Kristeva, Julia. About Chinese Women, tr. Anita Barrows (Des Chinoises; Paris: Éditions des femmes, 1974; London: Marion Boyars, 1977). Lazarus, Neil. Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999).

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Lyotard, Jean–François. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, tr. Georges van den Abbeele (Le differend; Paris: Minuit, 1983; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1988). ——. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, tr. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi (La Condition Postmoderne; Paris: Minuit, 1979; Manchester: Manchester U P , 1987). Mann, Michael. “Globalization and September 11,” New Left Review 12 (2001): 51–72. Mann, Thomas. Death in Venice, tr. H.T. Lowe–Porter (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912, tr. 1928; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978). Marcos, Subcomandante. “The Word and the Silence,” in Our Word is Our Weapon: Selected Writings, ed. Juana Ponce de León (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001): 83–85. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold, 1996): 172–92. Mohanty, Satya P. Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1997). Moore–Gilbert, Bart. Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1998). Mudimbe, V.Y. Parables and Fables: Exegesis, Textuality and Politics in Central Africa (Madison: U of Wisconsin P , 1991). Nietzsche, Friedrich. Twilight of the Idols, tr. R.J. Hollingdale (Götzendammerung, 1888; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990) ——. The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann & R.J. Hollingdale (Der Wille zur Macht, 1901; tr. New York: Vintage, 1968). Norris, Christopher. Truth and the Ethics of Criticism (Manchester: Manchester U P , 1994). ——. What’s Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (London: Harvester, 1990). Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant” and “Inside the Whale” (1940), in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 18–25 & 101–32. Pappe, Ilan. The Making of the Arab–Israeli Conflict (London: I.B. Tauris, 1994). ——, ed. Israel/Palestine Question: Rewriting Histories (London: Routledge, 1999). Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 (1987): 27–55. Pilger, John. Distant Voices (London: Vintage, 1994). ——. Heroes (London: Pan, 1989). ——. The New Rulers of the World (London: Verso, 2003). Rigby, Peter. Persistent Pastoralists: Nomadic Societies in Transition (London: Zed, 1985). Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991): 87–101.

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——. Midnight’s Children (1981; London: Vintage, 1995). Said, Edward W. After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives, photographs by Jean Mohr (London: Vintage, 1993). ——. Beginnings: Intention and Method (1975; London: Granta, 1997). ——. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World (London: Vintage, 1997). ——. Culture and Imperialism (1993; London: Vintage, 1995). ——. The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After (London: Granta, 2002). ——. From Oslo to Iraq and the Roadmap (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). ——. Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia U P , 2004). ——. Musical Elaborations (London: Vintage, 1991). ——. Orientalism (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984). ——. Peace and its Discontents: Gaza–Jericho 1993–1995 (London: Vintage, 1995). ——. “Permission to Narrate” (1984), in The Politics of Dispossession: The Struggle for Palestinian Self-Determination 1969–1994 (London: Vintage, 1995): 247–68. ——. The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992). ——. “Representing the Colonized: Anthropology’s Interlocutors,” “The Politics of Knowledge,” “Orientalism Reconsidered,” “Nationalism, Human Rights, and Interpretation,” “From Silence to Sound and Back Again: Music, Literature, and History,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta, 2001): 293–316, 372–85, 198–215, 411–35 & 507–26. ——. Representations of the Intellectual: The 1993 Reith Lectures (London: Vintage, 1994). ——. “Secular Criticism,” in Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1983): 1–30. ——. “The World, the Text, and the Critic,” in Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1983): 31–53. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson & Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988): 271–318. ——. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (London: Methuen, 1987). ——. The Postcolonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (London: Routledge, 1990). Steiner, George. “Silence and the Poet,” Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969): 57–76. Suleri, Sara. The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1993). Varadharajan, Asha. Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said and Spivak (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1995). Williams, Raymond. “The Writer: Commitment and Alignment,” in The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 208–18.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922; New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1985). Wood, Michael. “On Edward Said,” London Review of Books 25.20 (2003): 3, 6. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990). ŽiÞek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999).

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Is the World Decentred? A Postcolonialist Perspective on Globalization S HAOBO X IE

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W A R W O R L D has witnessed many grand narratives of what is called New World Order or global capitalism emerging from both the Right and Left camps. From the Far Right, for example, Francis Fukuyama stands out as the most devout apologist of late capitalism, his Hegelian declaration of Americanist capitalism as the end-stage of history powerfully counterpoised on the far Left by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Hegelian mapping of postmodern capitalism. In some important aspects, these two attempts to define the age of global capitalism are quite comparable, though their parallels ultimately reveal more of their political and ideological divergences than similarities. For, as Étienne Balibar remarks, both Hardt and Negri’s Empire and Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man share “a kojevian notion of global market as post-history,”1 though Hardt and Negri apocalyptically prophesy a global revolution beyond global capitalism. Hardt, Negri and Fukuyama fervently celebrate Americanism, and quote Hegel as an apologist of Americanism. But here their similarities end. For while Hardt and Negri’s Empire has been widely acclaimed as a postmodern version of the Communist Manifesto, Fukuyama’s The End of History can best be read as a postmodern manifesto of capitalism. Fukuyama argues that history has completed its course of evolution in the age of global capitalism – has reached its end-stage with the triumph throughout the world of the political system of democracy. The universal 1

H E P O S T -C O L D

The quotation is from Étienne Balibar’s review of Empire. See Harvard UP Online Reviews of Empire (26 June 2003) www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/HAREMI_R .html

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triumph of democracy ensures the universal institution of democratic societies characterized by universal and equal recognition, which satisfies the individuals’ desire for recognition as equals. Fukuyama’s theory of history is built on two premisses: economic motivation (profit and efficiency) and thymos (desire for recognition), or on two logics: the logic of modern natural sciences which leads to capitalism, and the logic of desire for recognition which leads to democracy. As a champion of capitalist democracy and an advocate of Americanism, Fukuyama, with his declaration of the end of history, aims at subsuming the world’s different nations and societies under the singular orbit of American capitalism, defending freemarket and capitalist democracy as the end-stage of human historical evolution. In their magisterial Empire, Hardt and Negri optimistically forecast an impending collapse of capitalism while fully acknowledging the global order of capital as irresistible and irreversible, “permeat[ing] every pore of our social lives, the most intimate of spheres.”2 Their vision is a supercession of both the devout and unshakably triumphalist celebrations of capitalism from the Right and the bleakly pessimistic diagnoses of capitalism from the Left. From the vantage of a Hegelian–Marxian dialectic, they perceive subversive potential revolutionary agency in the fragmented, hybridized, mobile, violated multitude who prove to be irreconcilably antagonistic and rebellious to Empire. Indeed, Empire brings good news to all those powerless who are struggling for bodily survival in the global system of capital, for, in its geopolitical mapping of a New Global Order, the passage to Empire is also a passage to Revolution. In this sense, Empire stands as an inspiring counterbalance to The End of History. However, despite its profound insights and incisive analysis of the system as a whole, Hardt’s and Negri’s totalizing narrative does not fail to provoke serious doubts and questions. In their theorizing, for example, Empire or global capitalism is “a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule,” which “establishes no territorial center of power.”3 While unabashedly celebrating Americanism, they bluntly defend the U S A against charges of imperialism:

2 3

xii.

Slavoj ŽiÞek, Revolution at the Gates (London: Verso, 2002): 331. Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000):

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The United States does not, and indeed no nation-state can today, form the center of an imperialist project. Imperialism is over. No nation will be world leader in the way modern European nations were. (xiv)

Equally dubious is their argument that postcolonialist theory and criticism are not only “entirely insufficient for theorizing contemporary global power” (146) but also coincide with and reinforce new Empire’s strategies of rule, on the grounds that both postcolonialism and Empire celebrate and deploy difference in the form of hybridity, circulation, mobility, diversity, and mixture. Capitalism feeds on difference; every difference opens an opportunity; postcolonialism helps capitalism because it celebrates difference.4 It is these conclusions that I find unacceptable and contestable. For, if imperialism is a story of the past, then how is one to account for all the recent happenings in the Gulf and Africa? How is one to define the actual processes of globalization or Americanization? If global capitalism establishes or endorses no territorial centre of power, then where do transnational corporations come from and who reaps the lion’s share of market profit? No nation forms the centre of an imperialist project?! Then how did the latest war on Iraq happen? Has capitalism changed apparatuses of rule? Is global capitalism breeding difference or levelling difference? Does post-Fordism or Toyotism really prove postcolonialism deficient and complicitous in reinforcing capitalism? Do global capitalism and postcolonialism embrace or celebrate the same kind of difference? These are the questions I propose to address in investigating the issues of globalization, imperialism, neocolonization, and postcolonial resistance to global capitalism. I will show that, although technological revolution, transnational corporations and global restructuring of capitalism have made the world increasingly interdependent and interconnected, radically altering our concepts of time, space, politics, and relations, this has in no way changed the fundamental fact that the West still poses or imposes itself as the centre of the world. The mythology of a world already decentred politically, culturally, economically, and ideologically papers over the lived global power-relations between the developed West and the underdeveloped Rest. On the one hand, multinational capital with its hegemonic ideology and technology is globally spreading and celebrating 4

Hardt and Negri, Empire, 138, 152.

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Americanism in economics, political institutions, and cultural productions, reinforcing the five-hundred-years-old colonial capitalism that established the West as the world’s geopolitical, economic, cultural, and intellectual centre. On the other hand, the underdeveloped and premodernized of the earth, having hardly broken with old eurocentrism, are all of a sudden sucked into the processes of globalization, unabashedly and unhesitatingly celebrating American life-styles, fashions, values, and conveniences, all glorified and romanticized by Hollywood films. To back up my position on global capitalism’s strategic differentiation, I will cite examples from contemporary China. Lastly, I will call for a relaunching of the postcolonial critique of colonialism and imperialism in deconstructing new figurations of West-centrism in the age of globalism. There have been many attempts to define globalization. Some critics describe it as an interconnected and interdependent networked world which enables “proliferation of the logic of capital [… and] the spread of democracy in information, finance, investing, and the diffusion of technology”;5 others see it as an integrated international system which spreads “free-market capitalism to virtually every country in the world.”6 In most cases, however, the term is used in ways that seem surprisingly to neglect the question of agency: that is, who globalizes what? Let us take a look at the verb ‘to globalize’: according to Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, ‘to globalize’ means “to extend to other or all parts of the globe; to make worldwide.”7 If the objects to be extended to the whole globe are markets, goods, capital, technology, spheres of influence, ideas, values, and life-styles, then the term ‘globalization’ applies only to historical imperialist nation-states or the contemporary West – more precisely, the USA . Non-Western countries, namely, were and are still incapable of such extension, even though some of them might wish to acquire these powers. Perhaps a comparison of ‘globalization’ with terms such as ‘modernization’ or ‘democratization’ will help illustrate this point. The latter terms also imply a question of agency, but they apply to almost all coun-

5

Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization” (26 June 2003) www.gseis.ucla.edu /faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm 6 Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999): 8. 7 Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (New York: Random House, 1995): 568.

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tries including developing or previous Third World countries, for all people have embarked on modernization projects, regardless of the result, and many non-Western countries claim to have made efforts to democratize their societies. China, for example, is obviously perceived by the West as an undemocratic society, but the Chinese regimes at different times in modern history have always proclaimed that they uphold and practise democracy, except that theirs is different from that of the West. In 1966, Mao Zedong even challenged the whole world to democratize social life to the fullest by means of cultural revolution. However, never in history has China or any other Third World country been the subject of globalization. In the time of the Ming Dynasty, before Columbus discovered America in 1492, China was capable of building huge ships, far larger than any being built in the rest of the world, but instead of continuing what they had started by sending out fleets and people to such farflung areas as the east coast of Africa to ‘globalize’ Chinese culture, sociopolitical institutions, and Confucianism, it burned hundreds of its ocean-going ships, the major technological means of globalization at that time, for what the Chinese were centrally concerned with at that time was how to perpetuate the inherited imperial system with its Confucianist fabric of socio-economic life and political institutions within its borders instead of beyond. At present the Chinese government, politicians, technocrats, and capitalists all wield the rhetoric of globalization to serve their respective interests, although often at the cost of ordinary people, but they never consider themselves economically and technologically powerful enough to globalize or impose their ideas, values, life-styles and cultural products upon the rest of the world. Instead, they call upon the Chinese people to “merge rails with the world or the global system”; so who globalizes what? The answer to this question is closely related to the question of the centre/periphery structure of the world today. In Globalization Unmasked, James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer provide a rich, rigorous and illuminating exploration of the ideology of globalization and the free-market imperialism it defends and promotes. While capital and goods flow across national boundaries, Petras and Veltmeyer point out, they nonetheless remain centred in specific nationstates.8 In other words, 8

James Petras & Henry Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the

21st Century (Halifax, N.S.: Fernword, 2001): 29.

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the expansion of capital flows and commodity trade via unequal relations in the contemporary period is a continuation of the imperialist relations of the past. The subjects of globalization – the principal traders, investors and renters of services–have interests antagonistic to those of the objects of their policies – the workers, peasants, and national producers in the targeted countries […] the major economic units are owned and operated in large part by stockholders in the imperial countries; and profits, royalties, rents and interest payments flow upward and outward in an asymmetrical fashion [….] the imperial countries wield disproportionate or decisive influence. […] Hence the concept of imperialism fits the realities much better than globalization. (29–30)

To Petras and Veltmeyer, globalization is both an empirical reality and an ideology which serves to gloss over inequality between imperial centres and dominated peripheries. In this sense, globalization is a euphemistic respelling of imperialism. In their view, globalization legitimates “the domination and exploitation by imperial states and multinational corporations and banks of less-developed states and labouring classes” (30). Global capitalism has transformed whole areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America into labour-intensive manufacturing bases controlled by “an elite of highpaid executives in the imperial centres” (41; my emphasis). This is a continuation of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century “international division of labour, between mining and agricultural workers in the Third World and manufacturing and service workers in the imperial countries” (41). As for international efforts to maintain peace, stability, and prosperity, the flow of intervention has always been unidirectional, from the imperial centres to the dominated countries. There is no mutual penetration of military commands, but only the extension of military missions from the imperial centre to the dominated countries. (31; my emphases)

The biggest imperial centre is none other than the U S A , whose economic power increasingly controls the world. According to a recent survey, the U S accounts for 244 of the 500 biggest companies in the world, followed by Japan with 46, and Germany with 23.9 Of the largest 25 firms whose capitalization exceeds $86 billion (U S ) over 70 percent are US ; of the top 9

See Financial Times (28 January 1999). Quoted in Petras & Veltmeyer, Globalization Unmasked, 62–63.

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100 companies, 61 percent are U S . The entire Third World accounts for 26 of the 500 leading companies – only five percent. Today, the U S A

champions, argues Tariq Ali in his timely book The Clash of Fundamentalisms, “the most powerful imperialism […] Its defence budget for 2000 was $267.2 billion, an amount greater than the combined military budgets of China, Russia, India, Germany and France”; it “has a military presence in 100 countries.”10 For the year 2002, U S defence spending was $300 billion; even the post-9/11 increment in U S defence spending proposed by the Bush administration is larger than the entire defence budget of Britain.11 All this is part of imperialist logic. According to Thomas Friedman, one of the most fervent apologists of Americanism, The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell–Douglas, the designer of the F15, and the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s techno12 logy is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

The latest American war on Iraq is the best proof of this logic. The official reasons the Bush administration gave for the war were to destroy weapons of massive destruction and to start a model of democracy in the Middle East, while everyone knows their real purpose was to control the world’s largest source of oil – the Persian Gulf. The USA dominates the world economically, politically, militarily, and culturally. It is from some of the staunchest advocates of Americanism that we learn the bluntest truths about globalization. Fukuyama, for example, wrote recently that, in creating a stronger and more autonomous international trade and investment regime, “Americans benefit strongly from and indeed dominate the global economy, which is why globalization bears a ‘made in USA ’ label.”13 Henry Kissinger admits that “globalisation is really another name for the dominant role of the United 10

Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002): 276–77. 11 See Francis Fukuyama, “Has History Restarted Since September 11?” The Nineteenth Annual John Bonython Lecture at the Grand Ballroom, the Grand Hyatt, Melbourne. 8 August 2002 (26 June 2003) www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL02 .html 12 Thomas Friedman, “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times (28 March 1999): 96. 13 Fukuyama, “Has History Restarted since September 11?”

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States.”14 Robert Cooper, a former advisor to Tony Blair, recently called for a “new imperialism […] which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organization but which rests today on the voluntary principle.”15 In The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan write: The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there. […] We stand at the cusp of a new historical era. […] This is a decisive moment. […] It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It’s about more even than the future of the Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States intends to play in the twenty-first century.16

Noam Chomsky is certainly correct in insisting that “There can’t be a War on Terror. It’s a logical impossibility. The US is one of the leading terrorist states in the world.”17 All these facts persuade us that the US government and American transnational capitalists and big firms are major agents of globalization, while all Third World countries are the wretched objects of that same process, and that the U S A is imposing itself and actually operating as the new centre of the globe. The new global system is not only a centred empire, but it is more global and more omnipresent than ever. The White House, the American transnational capitalists, big firms, and state intellectuals all aim to build a truly global empire: an American Empire, reducing the rest of the world to the status of its provinces or manufacturing bases and markets. Contrary to the rhetoric of global balances between the different nation-states and between nation-states and world markets, we are confronted with the gaping reality of global imbalances between ‘core’ (First World) and ‘periphery’ (Third World) nations in trade, finance, and 14

See Henry Kissinger, “Globalization and World Order,” Independent Newspapers Annual Lecture, Trinity College Dublin (12 October 1999). 15 Quoted in Lance Selfa, “A New Colonial Age of Empire?” International Socialist Review May-June 2002; Third World Traveller, 26 June 2003 thirdworldtraveler .com/American_Empire/New_Colonial_Age_Empire.html 16 This passage, taken from William Kristol & Lawrence F. Kaplan’s The War Over Iraq, is quoted in Robert Dreyfuss, “Just the Beginning: Is Iraq the Opening Salvo in a War to Remake the World?” American Prospect Magazine (April 2003); Third World Traveller, 25 June 2003 thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Iraq_Just_Begin ning?html 17 See Mark Thomas, “Interview with Chomsky,” Z N E T , 26 June 2003 www .zmag.org/cntent/print_article.cfm?itemID=2804§ionID=15

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the flow of information and technology. The binary relations between parts of the new global empire are increasingly intensified instead of attenuated.18 This is true not only economically and technologically, but also culturally. As Fredric Jameson remarks, in this day of global capitalism, the distinction between economics and culture has disappeared, for “commodification today is also an aestheticization” and “the entertainment business itself [is] one of the greatest and most profitable exports of the United States (along with weapons and food).”19 Jameson sees globalization as synonymous with americanization: The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumped down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of 20 globalization.

In Europe, of the top 100 films in 1993, 88 were American, with France’s Les Visiteurs as the highest-ranking foreign feature film on place 27. Shows such as Beverly Hills 90210, Santa Barbara, Rescue 911 and Dynasty ranked among the top television shows in the Czech Republic, Poland and Russia.21 In some African countries, 90 percent of all films shown are Hollywood-made. In South America as in the rest of the Third World, cultural imperialism manipulates and westernizes the psychology of the indigenous populations, controlling their psyche to ensure fertile markets for Western commodities. The glorification of Western life-styles by Hollywood films and other Western mass media has “made people all over South America turn against their own cultural roots and being indigenous is now generally looked on as old-fashioned and inferior.”22 The Chinese case is just as gloomy. In 1995, “more than 70 domestic Chinese films were shelved without any chance of being shown in theaters” be18

Fredric Jameson, Preface in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1998): xii. 19 Fredric Jameson, “Globalization and Political Strategy,” New Left Review 4 (July– August 2000): 53. 20 Jameson, “Globalization and Political Strategy,” 51. 21 See ReseAnne Sims, “The United States vs. The World: A Theoretical Look at Cultural Imperialism.” 26 June 2003 www.mediaguide.hu/book/bookID11.html 22 Peter Woodman, “Cultural Imperialism in Columbia” (26 June 2003) www .columbia solidarity.org.uk/Solidarity%208/culturalimperialism.html

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cause of the invasion of Hollywood and and the rental chain Blockbusters, which have caused a general crisis of home-grown films. In 1994, ten imported films, including The Fugitive, The Lion King, Speed, Forrest Gump and True Lies, occupied 70 percent of the Chinese market, leaving the remaining thirty percent for a hundred-odd, home-grown feature films.23 McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, KFC , Coca-Cola, Starbucks, rock ’n’ roll, Hollywood films, and Blockbuster are emerging in increasing numbers in China. Every college student in China has some American Dream structuring his or her life, everyone approves of globalization as a passage to Americanization, and everyone, old or young, wants to possess some American goods to “smell […] America,” to borrow a term from Arjun Appadurai.24 To Appadurai’s list of things created by electronic media and migration, I should add an ‘imagined America’ in China and other developing and Third World countries. My own frequent returns to China over the past fifteen years have acquainted me with the widely shared romanticized West or America – a land of freedom, equality, democracy, consumerist pleasures and conveniences, and “cool” life-styles. Such an imagined modernity or romanticized ‘elsewhere’, I am afraid, is something mainly created by Western or American culture machines. Undeniably, the world today is a global empire with the USA and all its economic, political, cultural and ideological apparatuses of rule at the centre and at the top. But to make this argument is not to ignore the fact that the world in some aspects is becoming increasingly decentred as well. As previously mentioned, digital telecommunications have thoroughly deterritorialized and decentred our geographical sense of the globe; electronic media and migrations have created vast numbers of borderless, transnational communities: diasporic, mobile and uncontrollable. Global flows of commodity, information, finance, and the world-wide diffusion of technology have made metropolises lose their previous centrality.25 Perhaps a more enabling way of theorizing the world today is to acknowledge decentering and recentering as two dialectically related aspects of globalization, in parallel with the homogenization and differentiation that define 23 “Domestic Movies under the Shadow of Hollywood?” (25 June 2003) china.com .cn/english/2002/Apr/30289.htm 24 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996): 1. 25 See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 1–23.

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the globalized world today. And in order to render a more objective geopolitical mapping of the contemporary world, one needs to introduce the term ‘dominant’ which Raymond Williams uses in examining the multiplicity of writing and different modes of culture.26 Given that both decentering and recentering are characteristics of globalization, I argue that recentering is the dominant aspect. What ‘centre’ signifies, according to dictionary definitions, is an organizing or structuring principle, universal norm or source of authority, influence, decision or action. In this sense, the USA indisputably acts as the center or ‘epicentre’ from which capitalist imperialism dominates the world “via freedom of the market.”27 The spectre of Americanism is looming on every individual’s and nation’s horizon. What Edward Said wrote ten years ago can still serve as a beacon to us: “[We Americans] are number one, we are bound to lead, we stand for freedom and order, and so on. No American has been immune from this structure of feeling.”28 The way the U S A runs the world via institutions such as I M F , G A A T , and W T O , the way it overlords the U N , the way American cultural imperialism embodied by Hollywood invades every part of the world, means that Imperial America thinks of itself as “the source of the world’s significant action and life”; in its imperialist view, “the outlying regions of the world have no life, history, or culture to speak of, no independence or integrity worth representing without the West.”29 If the world remains centred and filled with stories of imperialism in our day, then one would have to agree that, in contrast to Hardt and Negri’s verdict, postcolonialism is not only good for reading history, it is just as useful for reading the present. There have been objections to the terms ‘postcolonial’ and ‘postcolonialism’, which were launched from a different perspective from Hardt and Negri’s. Critics such as Ella Shohat, Anne McClintock, and Arif Dirlik distrust the terms for papering over contemporary global power-relations and for their suspected premature celebration of the pastness of colonialism. I have negotiated with these

26

See Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977):

121–27. 27

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: U of California P , 2000): 192. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993): xvii. 29 Said, Culture and Imperialism, xix. 28

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critics elsewhere.30 In the light of the past two decades’ textual practices categorized under the rubric of postcolonialism, the term ‘postcolonialism’ does not point to the demise or pastness of coloniality. Actually, it more often than not alerts us to a colonial past that remains to be investigated and interrogated, and to a postmodern wave of imperialism. Postcolonialism owes its emergence to neocolonialism, which is a rejuvenation of older European colonialism through West-centered transnational corporations and hegemonizing Western economy, technology, and ideology. Postcoloniality points to a world that has done with direct-rule colonies, but remains caught up in the neo-imperial global system of capitalism.31 Postcolonialism as a counter-hegemonic discourse in the day of global capitalism admits an indebtedness to the past and a responsibility to the future; it […] clear[s] the ground of older colonialism in order to resist neocolonialism. It is more formal and symbolic yet more thorough and subversive in addressing colonialism than anticolonialism has been.32

As Robert Young has recently pointed out, postcolonialism examines “the material and epistemological conditions of [the] postcoloniality and seeks to combat the continuing, often covert, operation of an imperialist system of economic, political and cultural domination.”33 Postcolonialism should in no way be taken as an “endorsement of the new world system,” for it is a “radical response to its conditions.”34 True, postcolonialism, like any other critical enterprise whose name ends in ‘-ism’, tends to point to a 30

Shaobo Xie, “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism,” New Literary History

28 (1997): 7–19. 31

In his recent book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins, Graham Huggan also distinguishes between ‘postcoloniality’ and ‘postcolonialism,’ taking the former as pointing to a regime of “global processes of commodification” and defining the latter as a resistance politics “in obvious opposition” to those processes, although at the same time he calls attention to the danger of “postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance” themselves becoming “consumer products” (7; quoted in Chris Prentice, “Riding the Whale? Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider”; see this volume, xx – xx).§§§§ 32 Xie, “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism,” 15. 33 Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001): 58. 34 Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, 59.

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homogenous ideology, theoretical perspective, and political agenda; as such its name contradicts its divergent actual critical practices. However, despite its discursive and theoretical multiplicity and heterogeneity, all critical practices that go under the name of postcolonialism, one can argue, are urged (by an anxiety to undo various colonial structures of power) to deconstruct the West as the normative centre of the world, to move beyond West-centred historicism, beyond imperial binary structures of self/Other and centre/periphery, and ultimately beyond any form of imperialism. Hardt’s and Negri’s objections to postcolonialism are based on the argument that it, ironically, ends up coinciding with and reinforcing the new Empire’s strategies of rule, for both postcolonialism and global capitalism celebrate and deploy protean difference in the varied forms of hybridity, mobility, diversity and mixture. This indeed has the appeal of a strong argument to those who take difference not as an historically and politically situated experience, but as a Kantian entity. However, a closer look at the political, discursive motivations behind the strategies of differentiation deployed by global capitalism and postcolonialism respectively will show that the position of Hardt and Negri derives from an inadequate understanding of the concept of difference, and from a misunderstanding of the postcolonial deployment of difference. Postcolonialism’s vindication of difference is to assert the equality of being on behalf of the previous and present colonized. For non-Western peoples to assert their equality of being is to confirm the West’s colonization of the non-West and its imperial rule as unjust, illegitimate and condemnable. The West regarded the different Rest as inferior and backward, for its social organization, cultural life and aesthetic production did not conform or measure up to modern Western norms. The West’s advanced science, technology and military might established the hegemony of its civilization, which perceived other civilizations as uncivilized and which achieved control over nations differently developed in science and technology.35 Western civilization or modernity proclaims and propagates itself as universal, although its alleged universality ultimately indicates a masquerading particularity. History richly documents how the victor or colonizer has imposed, in the guise of ‘universal values’, culture-specific institutions, stan35

See Simon During, “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today?” in Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia U P , 1993): 455.

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dards, and modes of production and representation upon the defeated or colonized, subsuming and homogenizing differential cultures and values within a singular orbit of normality. This is how imperialist hegemony asserts particularity in the name of universality. In investigating and interrogating colonialism and imperialism, postcolonialism must and does celebrate ethnic and cultural difference, deconstructing ideologies of universality. Only by legitimating and valorizing ethnic and racial difference, namely, can the dominated and marginalized peoples achieve recognition as equals and justify that equality, despite their insufficient degree of technological and infrastructural modernization. The celebration and deployment of difference by multinational capitalism is an entirely different story. Global capitalism feeds on difference to create sameness at the other end. To say that capitalism feeds on difference is to say that capitalism grants areas, nation-states, and communities of different races, cultural practices and ethnic traditions uniform membership in the capitalist club, to subsume them under the global Empire of capital, and ultimately to integrate plural trajectories of modernity along a single route of development. When I talk about capitalism feeding on difference, I am referring to those concrete strategies and practices of customizing commodities to suit local preferences and tastes, of building Chevrolets, Toyotas, B M W s, Boeings, Airbuses, Toshiba lap-top computers and refrigerators, N E C s, computer software, to meet local needs and likes, of fostering capitalists and technocrats with different racial features, wearing different ethnic costumes, and eating different ethnic foods, of creating an America-centred structure of feeling and commodity-fetishism in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Tibet, Taiwan, Indonesia, Canada, Colombia, and the former Yugoslavia. True, postmodern differences also assume the form of mobile, deterritorialized, diasporic solidarities of experience, opinion, taste and pleasure, which are trans- or postnational in kind, uncontainable by nation-states and subversive to totalizing powers. But, if critics like Fredric Jameson and Wim Wenders are correct in arguing that capitalism in its global stage colonizes nature and the unconscious or the human psyche,36 then should we not say that even those 36

See Fredric Jameson, The Ideology of Theory, vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1988): 47; Wim Wenders, The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, tr. Michael Hoffman (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1988; tr. London: Faber & Faber, 1991): 98.

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mobile diasporic, transnational communities risk living with cancelled or emasculated differences? The point here is that capitalism feeds on difference and even breeds difference in varied forms, but it is all to serve its purpose of converting lands into territories of the global Empire, peoples into its appendages, cultures into commodities. Capital has to incorporate and reflect differences in order to “maintain its global position,” and “in the end, the differences do not matter.”37 Nowadays so many C E O s or T N C representatives travel to China, where they learn to speak Chinese, observe Chinese table manners and rituals while having a business dinner with their local counterparts, and they even wear Chinese-style clothes. Capitalism, ever inventive, sees no humiliation in speaking indigenous languages so long as the overseas market is rewarding. It is expert in localizing its globality to disarm resistance. For example, when Coca Cola and Pepsi were first imported to China, few people liked them, for they taste so different from Chinese tea, which has been China’s national soft drink for over two thousand years. Then transnational capitalists had Coca Cola and Pepsi transliterated into “Kekou Kele” and “Baishi Kele,” which respectively mean in Chinese ‘good taste and great joy’ and ‘all enjoyable’. Then they quickly became popular in China, because the Chinese set great store by sounds and names of things – what Western cultural critics call ‘symbolic wish-fulfilment’. All such adaptations to a differential locality are, again, strategies of globalization invented to open the door to the Chinese market. Over the past two decades, East and Southeast Asia have become manufacturing bases for all kinds of transnational corporations. Economic globalization drives Western firms to tap the lost-cost factors of production in developing countries. Saturating the Western stores and supermarkets are goods made in such places as China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam. But stories behind them are mostly unknown to their Western consumers. There are numerous factories in China, for example, which, as a recent research report shows, “produce for international garment and footwear companies, including Nike, Adidas, Disney,

37 Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 182.

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JanSport and Wal-Mart.”38 But workers there are forced to work overtime – twelve to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, although Chinese labour law restricts normal working-hours to forty hours a week. They are paid about $30–$75 U S per month. The working conditions and safety measures are extremely poor in those factories, with barred or locked gates. In a tragic accident in Southern China nine years ago, eighty-seven workers were killed in a fire in a factory making toys for Chicco, because all the gates were locked. In two Disney factories in Macao, workers mostly from Mainland China were forced to work overtime or overnight under very poor working conditions.39 Those factories run by transnational corporations prefer rural migrants to urban workers, for they are “cheaper, harder-working and more willing to work overtime.”40 In many factories, most workers are single young women aged between sixteen and twenty-five. They often have to tolerate body searches by male guards lest they steal materials from the factories. After 11 September 2001, some American firms put in huge orders for American flags, and Chinese women in China were working night and day for lousy wages to meet this demand.41 All these examples further document global capitalism’s strategies of differentiation. M N C s and transnational corporations not only customize or modify their products to suit local needs and preferences, but also ‘customize’ or localize labour law to make maximum profits. Capitalism sets different wage standards,42 different working-hour limits, and different treatments of the human body for different areas of the world. The implicit justification for such discriminations even has a humanitarian ring: we are providing job opportunities to the Third World jobless and 38

Alice Kwan, “An Interview with Alice Kwan,” 26 June 2003 multinational monitor.org/mm2000/00may/interview.html, 3. 39 Alice Kwan, “An Interview with Alice Kwan,” 5. 40 “The Unemployment Dilemma in China: A Side Effect of Globalization and the Remedy,” 26 June 2003 www.lilywu.com/Unemployment%20Dilemma%20 in%20 China.pdf, 9. 41 This information comes from the Vancouver-based writer Rita Wong’s unpublished paper “Resounding Dissent in a Time and Space of Imperial Delirium,” presented at the Fred Wah Conference, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. May 2003. 42 According to Anita Chan, “the enormous wage gap between the minimum wages in the United States and that of developing countries in Asia and Central America [stands] at an order of at least 20 times.” See Anita Chan, “Globalization and China’s ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Labour Standards,” 25 June 2003 coombs.anu.edu.au/~niap /morrison_trans.pdf, 3.

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the impoverished migrant, and the local workers at least are making more than before, though far less than their American or European counterparts. Indeed, these differential strategies work in China because there are 60 to 80 million Chinese peasants “surging out of poor regions in search of jobs”43 and because the unemployment rates in many Chinese cities have soared between twenty and thirty percent. At present, the number of urban unemployed in China has reached 15 million in total. One 1997 World Bank estimate said that between 1992 and 1996 in Shanghai alone 44 220,000 of local textile positions were eliminated. Such increasing unemployment rates are the consequence of economic globalization. To obtain a full picture of capitalism feeding on difference, one should say that capitalism has always relied on differentiating strategies, creating and exploiting difference everywhere. Capitalism creates the capitalist class and the working class; it engenders widening gaps between the poor and the rich; it divides the world into unequally developed areas; it creates and exploits gender and racial difference as well as social difference in its designation of differential wage and employment standards. However, all these differences are deployed to serve capitalism’s global project of converting all populations into its wage labourers. Capitalism may be apparelled in different ethnic costumes, speak different languages, differentiate the class structure at different points in history, employ different mechanisms to contain opposition, but none of these changes the basic fact, which is that capitalism, as Adorno warned thirty-five years ago, remains the same as it was 150 years ago – production for the sake of profit.45 Anywhere it sets foot, capitalism disseminates alienation, exploitation, commodification, and consumerist sense and sensibility, threatening to ultimately colonize everyone’s unconscious or psyche. The train of capitalism, to extend a metaphor from Fukuyama, will take along all populations as its passengers. All this was best described by Marx and Engels 150 years ago: “In one word, [capitalism] creates a whole world after its

43

Anita Chan, “Globalization and China’s ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Labour Standards,” 12. 44 “The Unemployment Dilemma in China,” 4. 45 Theodor Adorno, “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” Opening Address to the 16th German Sociological Congress, 1968, tr. Dennis Redmond, 2001 (26 August 2003) www.efn.org/~dredmond/AdornoSozAddr.PDF, 5.

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own image.”46 So what is being globalized in the day of global capitalism is capitalism itself with all its social relations, consumerist cultures, and structures of feeling. Such unification of the world by capitalism indeed logically results in what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call a new empire, a transnational, deterritorialized, interconnected empire of capital. But unlike the empire described by Hardt and Negri, the actual, lived Global Empire has never been decentred, and global capital is still “centered in the West, and it always speaks English.”47 If, as I have discussed earlier, the world is undergoing decentering, this occurs only to recentre the world with a vengeance. Whether a recentred, transnational, deterritorialized world is either an antinomy or a sheer contradiction, it can be best seen as a symptom of global capitalism. This world is full of antinomies or contradictions, and to force a contradictory social reality into a coherent theoretical model is another, pathological symptom of neurotic anxieties about fitting violated history into theory. As we have seen, global capitalism is much more thorough in both differentiating and homogenizing our social life than critics like Hardt and Negri realize. While creating and feeding on differences, global capitalism’s ultimate goal is to erase and destroy all differential social, ethnic and ideological legacies. As Marx and Engels pointed out in the mid-nineteenth century, The need for a constantly expanding market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere. [….] The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. (46–47)

Capitalism as such tends to eliminate all times and spaces of Otherness. In pursuing expansionist policies to gain markets and resources, it resorts to militaristic and violent means wherever it is stopped and challenged. The Opium War on China of 1840–42, the Scramble for Africa in the 1880s, the Vietnam War of the 1960s, and the two Gulf Wars, including the latest invasion of Iraq, to cite only a few examples, are all landmarks in the expansionist history of capitalist imperialism. Indeed, capitalism and 46

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei; London, 1848; tr. Moscow: Progress, 1952): 47. 47 Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 179.

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imperialism are essentially one aggressive process with two faces. If recent economic crises and political turbulence caused nations and peoples to question the free-market neoliberal utopianism which seized the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist bloc and the Chinese government’s veiled capitulation to capitalism, then the recent barbaric bombarding of Afghanistan and Iraq has convinced the world that imperialism has returned – indeed, never disappeared. Capitalist imperialism or globalization constantly revolutionizes itself by the means of production and the rhetoric of colonization, and it keeps shifting its geopolitical centres. After the Second World War, the globalization process began to be centred on the U S A , which sees itself as a beacon of freedom, individual rights, and democracy in a troubled world, as a model society to which everyone aspired, as a “shining city on the hill” doing battle, as Ronald Reagan framed it, with an “Evil Empire” of communism, as well as with the dark forces of ignorance, superstition, and irra48 tionality.

The actual reality of the contemporary global empire not only questions various grand narratives of globalization (Fukuyama, Huntington, Friedman, and Hardt and Negri), but also dares postcolonialism itself to think of effective strategies for resisting and interrogating neoimperialism. Apart from valorizing and emphasizing cultural and ethnic differences to counter West- or America-centrism, postcolonialism should fight all kinds of (neo)colonization. If colonization has been one of the most active terms applied to all kinds of oppression in the past few decades, then we should form an historic bloc of resistance against all kinds of colonization. One major challenge confronting postcolonialism, as I see it, is how to theorize and mobilize new forms of decolonizing agency in opposition to neocolonizing global capitalism. Since the free market depends on state power and state institutions, the nation-state and its functionaries and indigenous capitalists are increasingly in collusion with T N C s, often at the cost of many indigenous peoples. Owing to this changed relationship between indigenous nation-states and Western nation-states and T N C s, indigenous nation-states no longer play a major role in anti-imperialist movements as they did previously, such as was manifested by Nehru’s

48

David Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 192.

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Indian government and Mao’s Chinese government in the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, most contemporary indigenous governments have, one way or another, become agents of global capitalism. Therefore, nationalism has often lost its true counter-hegemonic energy and thrust and, if deployed at the collective national level, is used to consolidate the nationstate’s power or to cover up or divert public attention from domestic crises, as is the case with countries like China. Postcolonialism as a counter-neocolonial discourse must fight a transnational, mobile battle on a global scale. In order to devise an enabling theoretical framework for investigating and interrogating neocolonialism, it is necessary for postcolonialism to take up the Marxist questions of capitalism and class domination while fighting new and old forms of colonization and imperialism, This is not only because it is hugely indebted to Marxism, owing its discursive formation to its non-Western Marxist beginnings,49 but because the developed West and the underdeveloped non-West today are once more engaged in the relationship of capital and labor and previously colonized peoples are becoming the lumpenproletariat. In rewriting the labour/ capital opposition in terms of the West and the Rest, and the colonized/ colonizer confrontation in terms of the global rich and the global dispossessed, postcolonialism will hopefully renew its discursive energy and prove its legitimacy as an empowering neo-Gramscian counter-hegemonic discourse against neo-imperialism that goes by the name of globalization. Western or American culture and ideology are neocolonizing geopolitical peripheries, erasing indigenous traditions, non-capitalist values and psychological habits as capitalism eradicated pre-capitalist traditions, cultures and sensibilities in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Postcolonialism should form an historic bloc with all other counter-hegemonic forces against the common enemy – global capitalism – and identify all those forces working in collaboration with T N C s as functionaries and territories of the global empire. The most appealing rhetoric of neoconservatives and ultra-rightists served up to media-controlled populations is that capitalism is inevitable; there is no alternative. Postcolonialism must theorize against such rhetoric and imagine alternatives to American democracy and free-market capitalism. In forming a global united front against global capitalism in the age of electronic media and migration, perhaps we should indeed advocate and realize a “globalization-from-below” of resis49

See Young, Postcolonialism, 57–59.

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tance to the “globalization-from-above of corporate capitalism.”50 Over the past twenty years or so, alongside an explosion of varied insurgent discourses in the domains of cultural and sociopolitical thought and representation, there have emerged hundreds of anti-capitalist and anti-globalization movements on various scales. From Seattle, Prague, Genoa, Göteborg to Mexico City, Porto Alegre, Manila, and Daqing, the wretched and disinherited of the earth are fighting local battles against the global system. In forging global resistance to global capitalism, it is of the utmost importance to define commonalities by means of which to translate among disparate, divergent discursive and political forces of resistance.51 This is how we can effectively withstand and weaken global capitalism. For, as David Harvey remarks, unless we resort to translation, “collective forms of action [are] impossible” and “all potential for an alternative politics disappears.”52 In pursuing this goal, it is to be hoped that a genuine global postcolonial resistance to global neocolonialism as championed by U S imperialism will emerge. The global-resistance front includes all kinds of counter-hegemonic heterotopias,53 fighting guerrilla wars against the total system of the New Empire. This project contests hegemonic centres of power, working towards a truly decentred, de-imperialized world. It looks imaginatively forward to a future when imperialism will truly be a story of the past, and when postcolonialism itself will likewise be past history.

50

Douglas Kellner, “Theorizing Globalization” (26 June 2003). www.gseis.ucla .edu/faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm 51 For such commonalities, see David Harvey’s suggested short-list of universal rights in Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: U of California P , 2000): 248–52. 52 Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 245. 53 The term ‘heterotopia’ is used here in a modified Foucauldian sense. See Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 183–85. According to Harvey, the Foucauldian term of heterotopia is best explained by K. Hetherington, who notes that the concept of heterotopia refers to “spaces of alternate ordering. Heterotopia organize a bit of the social world in a way different to that which surrounds them. That alternate ordering marks them out as Other and allows them to be seen as an example of an alternative way of doing things” (quoted in Spaces of Hope, 184). For further discussion of the concept of heterotopia, see Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27.

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WORKS CITED Ali, Tariq. The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and Modernity (London: Verso, 2002). Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1996). Adorno, Theodor. “Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?” Opening Address to the 16th German Sociological Congress. 1968, tr. Dennis Redmond, 2001 (26 August 2003) www.efn.org/~dredmond/AdornoSozAddr.PDF Chan, Anita. “Globalization and China’s ‘Race to the Bottom’ in Labour Standards” (25 June 2003) coombs.anu.edu.au/~niap/morrison_trans.pdf “Domestic Movies under the Shadow of Hollywood?” (25 June 2003) china.com .cn/english/2002/Apr/30289.htm Dreyfuss, Robert. “Just the Beginning: Is Iraq the Opening Salvo in a War to Remake World?” American Prospect Magazine (April 2003). Third World Traveller (25 June 2003) thirdworldtraveler.com/American_Empire/Iraq_Just _Beginning? .html During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today,” in Postmodernism, A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty (New York: Columbia U P , 1993): 448–62. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22–27. Friedman, Thomas L. The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999). ——. “A Manifesto for the Fast World,” New York Times (28 March 1999): 40+. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1992). ——. “Has History Restarted Since September 11?” The Nineteenth Annual John Bonython Lecture at the Grand Ballroom, the Grand Hyatt, Melbourne, 8 August 2002 (26 June 2003) www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL02.html “Globalization.” Random House Webster’s College Dictionary (New York: 1995). Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 173–87. Hardt, Michael, & Antonio Negri. Empire (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). Harvard University Press Online Reviews of Empire (26 June 2003) www.hup .harvard.edu/reviews/HAREMI_R.html Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: U of California P, 2000). Hetherington, Kevin. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering (London: Routledge, 1997). Jameson, Fredric. “Globalization and Political Strategy,” New Left Review 4 (July– August 2000): 49–68. ——. Preface to The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1998): xi–xvii.

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——. The Ideology of Theory, vol. 2: Syntax of History (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1988). Kellner, Douglas. “Theorizing Globalization” (26 June 2003) www.gseis.ucla.edu /faculty/kellner/papers/theoryglob.htm Kissinger, Henry. “Globalization and World Order,” Independent Newspapers Annual Lecture. Trinity College Dublin (October 12, 1999). Kwan, Alice. “An Interview with Alice Kwan” (26 June 2003) multinational monitor.org/mm2000/00may/interview.html Marx, Karl, & Friedrich Engels. Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress, 1952). Petras, James, & Henry Veltmeyer. Globalization Unmasked: Imperialism in the 21st Century (Halifax, N.S.: Fernword, 2001). Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993). Selfa, Lance. “A New Colonial Age of Empire?” International Socialist Review (May–June 2002). Third World Taveller (26 June 2003) thirdworldtraveler.com /American_Empire/New_Colonial_Age_Empire.html Sims, ReseAnne. “The United States vs. The World: A Theoretical Look at Cultural Imperialism” (26 June 2003) www.mediaguide.hu/book/bookID11.html “The Unemployment Dilemma in China: A Side Effect of Globalization and the Remedy” (26 June 2003) www.lilywu.com/Unemployment%20Dilemma%20 in%20China.pdf Thomas, Mark. “Interview with Chomsky.” ZNET (26 June 2003) www.zmag.org /cntent/print_article.cfm?itemID=2804§ionID=15 Wenders, Wim. The Logic of Images: Essays and Conversations, tr. Michael Hoffman (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Autoren, 1988; tr. London: Faber & Faber, 1991). Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1977). Wong, Rita. “Resounding Dissent in a Time and Space of Imperial Delirium.” Presented at the Fred Wah Conference, University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada. May 2003. Woodman, Peter. “Cultural Imperialism in Columbia” (26 June 2003) www .columbia solidarity.org.uk/Solidarity%208/culturalimperialism.html Xie, Shaobo. “Rethinking the Problem of Postcolonialism,” New Literary History 28 (1997): 7–19. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001). ŽiÞek, Slavoj. Revolution at the Gates (London: Verso, 2002).

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S ECTION 2 G LOBALIZATION

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L ITERATURE

“World Famous Across Canada” National Identity in the Global Village C YNTHIA S UGARS

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OR A LONG TIME,

it seems, Canada was off the map. From the perspective of early European explorers, Canada was the land that shouldn’t have been there, an obstacle blocking the route to the riches of the Indies. One suggestion for the origins of the word Canada is a Spanish rendering, acá nada, ‘nothing here’. Northrop Frye is famous for having written about Canada as a vast unknown, prompting the archetypal settler to inquire, “Where is here?”1 Jorge Luis Borges is known to have said, “Canada is so far away it hardly exists.”2 Within Canada, this has fostered a generative circuit of global yearning and cultural angst. Canadian writers and critics have for decades bemoaned the fact that Canadian literature was considered too embarrassingly parochial to achieve international recognition. This constituted a central quandary of Canadian cultural debates throughout the twentieth century: how to forge a distinctively national literature that was at the same time universally resonant. As Frye famously stated in 1965, There is no Canadian writer of whom we can say what we can say of the world’s major writers, that their readers can grow up inside their work without ever being aware of a circumference […]. If no Canadian author pulls us away

1 Northrop Frye, “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada,” in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971): 220. 2 Quoted in John Robert Colombo, Colombo’s New Canadian Quotations (Edmonton, Alberta: Hurtig, 1987): 50.

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from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting.3

In recent years, however, the map has shifted. Carol Shields, upon winning the Orange Prize in 1998, expressed concern that she had won because she was Canadian.4 This essay will focus on the recent flurry of critical discourse about the so-called globalization of Canadian literature. What I am arguing is that in the midst of the euphoria over Canadian literature’s international success, a rhetoric of globalization masks an underlying anxiety about Canadian national and postcolonial identity. Even as contemporary critics celebrate Canadian literature for having ‘gone global’, for finally becoming securely ‘postnational’ (hence having shed the taint of an embarrassing, because ostensibly too needy, postcolonialism),5 they still insist on national distinctions. Paradoxically, as they celebrate what they see to be the ‘globalization’ of Canadian culture, literary critics are retreating into the realm of the parochial – an instance of the native turning to the cosmopolitan in order, finally, to reassert the native. Given Arif Dirlik’s account of the ways in which nationalist movements and postcolonial theory are part of the same processes,6 and his further critique of the historical amnesia at the base of much postcolonial theorizing, this contradiction may not be surprising. If the critics I am considering are pulled in two directions – between a version of anticolonial cultural nationalism and contemporary postnational global relations – it may be that at our present cultural-historical moment this movement is particularly evident, with the vector of the postcolonial, for the time being at least, mediating between the two. This is happening along two lines: an insistence on the contribution of recent writers to an identifiably Canadian ethos (and, by extension, to Canada’s international literary reputation) 3

Frye, “Conclusion,” 214. “Shields Tops Orange Field,” Vancouver Sun 20 May 1998: A2. 5 See, for example, Di Brandt: “We now see ourselves not as cultural outposts trumpeting our postcolonial pride but as successful entrepreneurs with valuable cultural capital to trade”; Brandt, “Going Global,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 107. The capitalist metaphor here, and in Stephen Henighan’s When Words Deny the World (see below), is troubling – a metaphor of globalizing economic imperialism touted as local empowerment. 6 Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder C O : Westview, 1997): 10–11. 4

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even as they are championed for their ‘postnational’ perspective; and/or an implicit disparagement of these writers for not being Canadian enough. In the process, the rhetoric of multiculturalism is used to ‘globalize’ Canadian literature, while it is also seen to undermine it as an identifiably national product. Although Simon During suggests that the postcolonial writer’s urge “to work within a global Imaginary”7 has been less prevalent in Canada than in other settler–invader societies, it is nevertheless the case that Canadian literature has in recent years attained immense international acclaim. Of course, Canadian literature had been read and taught internationally for many years before, but within Canada the perception of international recognition was brought home, so to speak, with Michael Ondaatje’s winning of the Booker Prize in 1992.8 According to some, The English Patient served two purposes: it brought Canadian culture into the international literary limelight, while also affirming its participation in a ‘global Imaginary’. Pico Iyer states: Ondaatje’s The English Patient is the defining work of modern Canadian fiction, not only because it won so many readers worldwide but because it presents us with a stirring vision of what Canada […] might offer to a world in which more and more people are on the move and motion itself has become a 9 kind of nation.

Aside from the fact that in Iyer’s account it is Canada that becomes the global commodity and not The English Patient, his statement is telling because it contains a slippage that is central to the ways the globalization of Canadian culture is being discussed. Iyer is invoking two senses of ‘global culture’: global content (the setting and subject-matter of The English Patient) and the global commodity (The English Patient, because of the Booker, brought Canada to the world).10 Iyer’s account enlists a 7

Simon During, “Literature: Nationalism’s Other? The Case for Revision,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990): 151. 8 In this sense, ‘globalization’ might be defined in terms of international recognition/ marketing (i.e., recognition in the U S A or U K ), a phenomenon not without its own colonialist underpinnings, as Chinua Achebe and so many others have pointed out. 9 Pico Iyer, “The Last Refuge: On the Promise of the New Canadian Fiction,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2002): 77. 10 See Huggan for an account of Margaret Atwood’s comparable role in the international marketing of Canadian culture.

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familiar colonialist tautology, whereby the globalization of Canadian culture (in both senses) is what contributes to Canadian notoriety/recognition, hence to Canadian national identity. The global sphere thus becomes the location of both postnational identity and national-cultural distinction. As Robert Lecker puts it, this saddles one with the “difficulty of celebrating nation as a function of dismissing it.”11 This may also be what makes an erstwhile colony postcolonial: that is, when the local becomes identifiable and validated on the global scene, which might suggest that the postcolonial holds a tenuous, ‘non-paradoxical’ place between the national and the global. If one concern of cultural critics in Canada is how to render the national international (hence how to become securely postcolonial), it may also be true that one can only achieve this transposition when the national ‘here’ relinquishes its delimiting insistence on identity while maintaining its force as a meaningful vector of association. These questions continue to plague Canadian writers and critics at the turn of the so-called postnational global era. As Herb Wyile insightfully puts it, Those interested in Canadian writing are thus presented with a delicate balancing act: to make the study of writing in Canada relevant without capitulating to the forces of commodification, and to break out of homogenizing narratives of national literature while still nurturing writing grounded in Canada 12 […] and resisting the homogenizing pressures of global commodity culture.

This problematic is connected as well with the inherent contradiction in the phrase ‘global culture’. In their article “On Critical Globality,” published in the April 2000 issue of A R I E L , Alys Weinbaum and Brent Hayes Edwards comment on the paradoxical nature of the phrase.13 If ‘culture’ is by definition particularistic, the formulation ‘global culture’ – “meaning culture purely at the level of the universal” – is oxymoronic.14 Culture, by extension, is also differential, which means that it is perceived 11

Robert Lecker, “Where Is Here Now?” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000):

10. 12 Herb Wyile, “From Roots to Routes: Cultivating Canadian Writing in an Electronic Age,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 222. 13 Alys Eve Weinbaum & Brent Hayes Edwards, “On Critical Globality,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 31.1–2 (2000): 259. 14 Weinbaum & Edwards, “On Critical Globality,” 259.

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by one group in comparison with another. Martin Levin in the Toronto Globe & Mail somewhat facetiously refers to this emphasis on global culture as “the benignly revolutionary side of globalization,”15 though to some degree he has a point: by emphasizing the cultural sphere, these discussions of globalization (and, indeed, of postcoloniality) often bracket off considerations of socio-economic dynamics.16 Moreover, they tend to do so by using metaphors of commerce and market capitalism, reproducing a slick consumerist lingo that is seemingly not cognizant of its imperializing agenda. Hence, Alan Lawson takes issue with Pico Iyer’s celebration of the “borderless economy” for “reduc[ing] the postcolonial world to one singularity.” “Global capitalism,” he argues, “can be a pretty terrifying place for those of us who do not inhabit the great and powerful places of the earth.”17 As Imre Szeman observes, “When we accept global capitalism’s isochronic rhetoric to lend support to the current global success of Canadian writing, we are in effect burying ever deeper the structural conditions that produced our earlier feelings of cultural inauthenticity.”18 This has certainly been the case in many recent discussions of the promised globalization of Canadian culture. The case of Ondaatje and, more recently, Yann Martel, is particularly interesting, because both writers are figured as literally embodying the global. Review after review emphasizes Ondaatje’s mixed heritage: born of Dutch, Tamil, and Sinhalese ancestry, educated at British public school, attended university in Canada…. Ondaatje is figured as the incarnation of both global culture and Canadian multiculturalism. While it would appear that his Canadianness exists by default – he could have settled anywhere – Canada is nevertheless acclaimed for its ability to nurture global expression. In turn, Ondaatje’s Booker success was taken as a sign of Canadian cultural achievement, an indication of Canada’s national cultural vitality at a time when Canadian nationalism appeared to be flagging. And it was effective: Ondaatje’s 15

Martin Levin, “A Post-National CanLit,” Globe & Mail (8 June 2002): D16. See Dirlik and Ahmad for critiques of the absence of interrogations of capitalism in postcolonial debates. 17 Alan Lawson, “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Settler’ Subject,” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004): 161. 18 Imre Szeman, “Belated or Isochronic? Canadian Writing, Time, and Globalization,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 193. 16

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‘postcolonial’ flavour seemed to legitimize Canada internationally (we were no longer parochial; we were post-imperial) and it helped bolster Canada’s much applauded policy of multiculturalism. In the media, Ondaatje was hailed as a national-cultural hero. In September 1992, a few weeks before the Booker Prize was announced, Cecily Ross of the Financial Post noted how Ondaatje was “the embodiment of our collective desire for recognition.”19 Some weeks later, in the Montreal Gazette, Charles Foran observed that Ondaatje’s win was a “communal thing.”20 Similarly, Derek Finkle provides an account of Ondaatje’s appearance at Toronto’s Harbourfront Theatre in 1992: “When Ondaatje walked out from behind the stage curtain to read from The English Patient, the sold-out crowd of 450 […] rose to its feet for a long, rousing ovation.”21 The internationalization of Canadian literature via Ondaatje was seen by some as an instance of our postcoloniality. Canada had effectively transcended itself. Thus Brian Johnson in Maclean’s could refer to “Ondaatje [as] our most international author” at the same time as proclaiming him to be “quintessentially Canadian.”22 Through its international success and subject-matter, The English Patient ‘wrote back’ to the erstwhile imperial centre and could therefore be celebrated as a Canadian nationalist intervention. Its postcolonial subtext, Lorna Sage asserted, was its critique of “the terminal sickness of Englishness/Europeanness.”23 According to one reviewer, the novel staged “a kind of debate between the Old World, as personified by the mysterious and possibly corrupt Englishman […] and the New, as represented by Hana and her lover.”24 In this formulation, Canada (Hana) was at last on the global map, though India (“her lover”) had been subsumed under the New World. In all of this, the novel’s 19

Cecily Ross, “Fame’s Breath Hot on Ondaatje,” Financial Post (28 September

1992): S16. 20

Charles Foran, “Ondaatje’s Award a ‘Communal Thing,’” Montreal Gazette (25 October 1992) : A9. 21 Derek Finkle, “A Vow of Silence,” Saturday Night (November 1996): 92. 22 Brian D. Johnson, “Michael Ondaatje: ‘What Interests Me Is the Poetry of the Skill …’,” Maclean’s (18 December 2000): 66. 23 Lorna Sage, “A Fragile Family,” review of The English Patient, Times Literary Supplement (11 September 1992): 23. 24 Christina Koning, “New Fictions, Stranger than Truth,” review of The English Patient, The Times (London; 10 September 1992): 5.

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critique of empire became lost. Sage describes the scene in the Italian villa as “a world without nations […] where skin colour doesn’t divide people.” The novel, she continues, carried her off “into a world of difference.”25 Iyer euphorically interprets The English Patient as evidence of our “deracinated, post-national” world.26 In the process, the tensions and disparities among the group’s members were conveniently whisked away, as was Kip’s ambivalent relation with the British authorities he serves, not to mention his response to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima, in which skin colour remains very divisive. Far from “deracinat[ing]” the characters, the novel might be said to be ‘enracinating’ them firmly within a new international order. And the benefits of this new world order, Ondaatje seems to be saying, are dubious indeed.27 A similar narrative has been constructed around Yann Martel, whose peripatetic history is likewise deemed integral to his inherent (and inherited) globality: born in Spain, child of diplomats, raised partly in Costa Rica and Mexico, travelled widely through Turkey and India, domiciled in Berlin, currently living in Saskatoon as the University of Saskatchewan’s writer-in-residence. Martel’s nomadic history renders him an authentically ‘global’ author. “Booker Prize Winner Martel Spent Life Traveling,” runs the headline for Leah Eichler’s feature on Martel’s success. She goes on to establish the likeness between Martel’s life and the experience of Pi Patel in The Life of Pi.28 However, the globality of Canada’s 2002 Booker nominees (Martel, Mistry, and Shields) sparked Charles Foran in the Toronto Globe & Mail to ruminate on the integrity of Canadian literature.29 The subtitle runs as follows: “The presence on the Booker Prize 25

Sage, “Fragile,” 23. Pico Iyer, review of The English Patient, T I M E (2 November 1992): 71. 27 Far from always being celebrated as a Canadian cultural hero, Ondaatje has sparked his share of controversy for his “international” themes. On an earlier occasion, his literary subject matter had been cause for nationalist concern. When The Collected Works of Billy the Kid won the Canadian Governor General’s Award in 1970, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker was affronted that “a Canadian prize could be given to an author who was writing about a character out of American history”; Finkle, “A Vow of Silence,” 93. 28 Leah Eichler, “Booker Prize Winner Martel Spent Life Traveling,” Toronto, Reuters, 22 October 2002, http://in.news.yahoo.com/021022/137/1wqqk.html 29 See also Terry Goldie’s remark that “the Canadianness” of Canadian Booker nominees is becoming “less and less evident”; Goldie, “Blame Canada,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 229. 26

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short list of three Canadians – all born elsewhere in the world – inspires Charles Foran to wonder: What is Canadian Literature?” In the end, because he wants to recoup these authors for Canadian culture, Foran concludes that “the nation has no business inside the books of its authors,” and yet, clearly, for Foran it does. Merely by referring to “its” authors (“the nation’s” authors), Foran is insisting on a proprietory Canadianness. “Choose Canada, and you are Canadian,” he says.30 Given this tentative grappling with the elusive ‘Canadianness’ of globalized Canadians, it is perhaps not surprising that upon winning the Booker, Martel spoke of Canada as “a good hotel to write from.”31 This brings us back to Iyer’s comment on the influence of The English Patient: “motion itself has become a kind of nation.”32 The globalization of Canada, then, even as it provides national-cultural legitimation, would seem to render the national location irrelevant, a convenient stopping-ground for writers who want a safe place to write from but not to identify with (like the Indian tea-plantation hostel from which the cosmopolitan narrator in The Life of Pi sits down to write). It would seem, in other words, to deterritorialize Canadian cultural space, even as it confirms the national locale’s ability to nurture a global imagination. ¹

Two notorious cultural critics have written extensively on the globalization of Canadian literature. Stephen Henighan’s When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing was published in 2002 to mixed reviews because of its iconoclastic claims about the decline of Canadian literature. In Henighan’s view, Canadian literature has become too globalized. Pico Iyer’s celebration of Canada as “The Last Refuge” in the June 2002 issue of Harper’s Magazine in part made a splash because it was published in the USA , in itself an indication of Canada’s growing international status, yet ironic, given Iyer’s figuration of Canada as a global sanctuary. While Iyer applauds the increasing globalization of Canadian literature, Henighan bemoans it. 30

Charles Foran, “As Canadian as …,” Globe & Mail (19 October 2002): D6. Quoted in Diana Brydon, “Writing Home,” Munro Beattie Lecture, Carleton University, Ottawa, 7 March 2003. 32 Iyer, “The Last Refuge,” 77. 31

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In his now increasingly cited article in Harper’s, Iyer noted with enthusiasm that it was no accident that the phrase ‘the global village’ had been coined by a Canadian.33 Canada, the land in which the term ‘multiculturalism’ also originated, has, some would argue, always been ‘global’.34 Iyer focuses on the global settings and international acclaim of such recent prize-winning Canadian writers as Michael Ondaatje, Anne Michaels, and Yann Martel. In Iyer’s idealizing account, this new literature speaks to a ‘postnational’ world that has become “unconscious of ancestry.”35 Yet, for him, it is the very focus on ancestry, on multiple ancestries, that makes the Canadian locale postnational, even as his statement conveniently brackets off questions of race and ethnicity. This has been a common critique of multicultural policy in Canada: that it celebrates difference by containing it and rendering it non-central.36 When perceived as all-pervasive, difference all too easily becomes negligible. Nevertheless, by celebrating the globality that has become the mark of recent Canadian fiction, Iyer is able to revalidate Canadian national identity. The English Patient, he maintains, “put[s] forth an idea of what [Toronto] – and the country – might stand for: a haven in the midst of war, where people could gather to heal their wounds.” These writings, Iyer continues, “draw on a deeper fact about Canada: that it was thinking about globalism and pluralism, the possibilities of multiculturalism, long before the rest of us knew the terms existed.”37 Iyer’s vision of the new world order is hardly postnational, and hardly new. Invoking the time-worn myths of Canadian multiculturalism and Canadian peace-keeping, Iyer 33 Iyer, “The Last Refuge,” 78. The phrase “global village” comes from the Canadian communications theorist, Marshall McLuhan. Its first published appearance occurs in McLuhan’s The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), though the phrase became more widely popularized with Understanding Media in 1964. See Glenn Willmott, McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse, for an extended analysis of the concept. 34 For an account of the dubious nature of the much applauded myth of an inherently tolerant, global Canada, see Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2002). 35 Iyer, “The Last Refuge,” 78. 36 See, as just a few examples, the assessments of Canadian multiculturalism by Bannerji, Gunew, McFarlane, Mackey, Miki, and Peter. All of these critics investigate the ways the mechanism of colonialism “covertly structures [that of] multiculturalism”; Sneja Gunew, Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004): 37. 37 Iyer, “The Last Refuge,” 78.

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proves himself to be a closet nationalist. His version of globalization combines cosmopolitan chic with non-partisan liminality. Even while, like Martel, he invokes a notion of Canada as an airport transit lounge, “one of the in-between spaces where foreigners congregate” on their way to somewhere else,38 he is nevertheless devoted to a notion of Canada as the benchmark for world harmony, thus shifting his focus from the global themes of these writers to the global marketing of the Canadian soul. As a revision of Dirlik’s account of Global Localism’s jingle, “think globally, act locally,”39 Iyer’s global sales-pitch might read: Buy Canadian, it is good for you. Iyer’s approach appealed to an underlying colonial cringe on the part of many Canadians who yearn for Canadian literature to become more cosmopolitan,40 while at the same time dodging the homogenizng implications of the globalization of culture. This is the case in Stephen Henighan’s study When Words Deny the World. Like Iyer, Henighan unintentionally slips between different notions of globality, though his valuation of terms is reversed. In Henighan’s case, the global content of recent Canadian literature is detracting from the ‘Canadianness’ of the texts.41 Henighan is anxious about the watering-down of Canadian distinctiveness. Nevertheless, he is a champion of traditional ‘comparative literature’ and elevated notions of literary value, and wants Canadian writers to be recognized internationally – but as Canadian. In short, he wants to be able

38

Iyer, “The Last Refuge,” 79. This is reminiscent of Dirlik’s observation of the ways notions of hybridity and in-betweenness “have become assets that facilitate the transnational operations of global corporations. In the process, a Eurocentric conception of modernity has given way to a multicultural one” (The Postcolonial Aura, 9). 39 Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 93. 40 This paradox has a long history in Canadian culture. See Sugars, “Can the Canadian Speak? Lost in Postcolonial Space,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.3 (2001): 115–52, for an account of the position of Canadian literature and literary criticism in the context of international postcolonial literary theory, especially vis-à-vis the “native versus cosmopolitan” rhetoric that has informed twentiethcentury Canadian literary discourse. See also David Bell’s comment that “Canada’s legendary identity crisis has with few exceptions failed to promote a wider identification with global issues that lie beyond the nation state”; Bell, The Roots of Disunity: A Study of Canadian Political Culture (Toronto: Oxford U P , 1992): 89. 41 Stephen Henighan, When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 2002): 137.

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to “sell a novel set in Canada internationally.”42 His protectionist stance conceals an avid cultural imperialism, where the stronger and more integrated the national-cultural identity, the greater its conquest of the global market; as he puts it, we need “to project a vision unmistakably ours out into the stratosphere over the World Wide Web and the satellite link.” He continues: in the twenty-first century it will be the smack of a distinctive cultural identity 43 that allows a country to flog its services over the Web.

Henighan is thus aware of the contradiction in the phrase ‘global culture’ – culture, he argues, is not global. He doesn’t want Canadian content to become ‘global’ (and for this he blames free trade with the U S A ), nor does he want globalization within Canada (this, in his view, is an instance of ethnic fragmentation and a divisive regionalism). Henighan is committed to a global market of distinct national-cultural products – a smörgåsbord, with himself as the privileged consumer. In order to be marketable, Canadian identity must be identifiable; in order to be universally resonant, the Canadian object must be packageable and localized. Speaking of the “inexorable transferral from a postcolonial realm to a globalized sphere,”44 Henighan invokes a curious version of postcolonialism to support his position. For him, postcolonialism is equated with oldfashioned cultural nationalism rather than with the more nuanced and expanded definition of the term as it is used in most contemporary postcolonial parlance.45 However, while Henighan’s invocation of a nation-centred postcolonialism enables protection from the infectious and decentralizing pull of globalization, both internationally and within the nation, it does not offer protection against commodification. Moreover, it is also the case that, for Henighan, to go global is to be postcolonial. But this only operates on an international scale; it does not allow for Canada to be globalized from within (and by this I mean cultural diversity, not cultural

42

Henighan, When Words Deny the World, 91. When Words Deny the World, 100. 44 When Words Deny the World, 100. 45 I am thinking here of a useful definition proposed by Ato Quayson: postcolonialism as referring to the “dynamic of cultural encounters” and the ensuing inequalities this dynamic involves. 43

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imperialism, though for Henighan these are the same thing).46 Multiculturalism, while central to celebrations of a holistic Canadian national identity, is held responsible for cultural decline; and cultural decline, in turn, is held up as evidence of the disintegration of the Canadian state. Invoking Canadian literature as an index of national stability, Henighan identifies the rash of Canadian novels with non-Canadian settings […] as evidence of the middle class’s need to transform itself in order to ‘belong’ to the evanescent globalized world while still clinging to a certain residual imagined community within which reading a novel about a faraway place written by a Canadian 47 represents a last tenuous homage to a disappearing self.

He thus enacts what Eva Mackey identifies as a version of “white national belonging” which has “the power to decide the limits of tolerance.”48 She argues, further: Canadians like to congratulate themselves on their tolerance […] but under what limits does tolerance exist? […] It is also important to explore how inclusion and the seeming celebration of multiplicity and difference can also be ex49 pressions of power.

For Henighan, there are clear limits. As he sees it, the Canadian “statenation” is currently in jeopardy, with people increasingly “defin[ing] themselves according to ethnicity rather than citizenship.”50 It is fine to have Booker-Prize-winning novelists such as Ondaatje, Henighan seems to be saying, but they should help consolidate Canadian identity and stick to writing about Canada. In order for the local to be fit for international consumption, it must be preserved as identifiably local. This process 46 Dirlik notes that one of the effects of Global Capitalism is the “global motions of peoples” which have resulted in “the interpenetration of the global and the local (which shows culturally in a simultaneous cosmopolitanism and localism of which the most cogent expression may be ‘multiculturalism’)”; Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 93. 47 Henighan, When Words Deny the World, 178. 48 Eva Mackey, The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002): xix. 49 Mackey, The House of Difference, xix, xx. 50 Henighan, When Words Deny the World, 99. Henighan consciously uses the form ‘state-nation’ rather than ‘nation-state’ to denote a national abstraction which would dissolve were the state formation dismantled.

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sustains a symbolic version of national integrity which at the same time maintains the privilege of the global cultural consumer. ¹

Henighan, of course, is right. The state-nation as a culturally homogeneous entity is in jeopardy. Stuart Hall identifies this as the current phase of globalization, in which the “notion of a national formation […] that could be represented through a national-cultural identity is under considerable pressure.”51 In response, both Iyer and Henighan are participating in what Hall calls “the global postmodern”: “the voice of infinite pleasurable consumption” combined with the voice of conservatism.52 In Heike Härting’s words, these critics are seeking to establish “Canada’s moral conscience” and “legitimize [its] political claims to global citizenship.”53 According to critics such as Dirlik and Hall, this is a sign of our particular historical–critical moment, when national identity constructs have reached their limit and old-style cultural nationalisms are coming smack up against transformations in global relations. The resulting sense of fragmentation, they argue, is initiating a furious bailing of the boat – how is this new seepage and fragmentation to be contained? However, from its beginnings, these debates have been central to Canadian cultural discourse – substitute ‘cosmopolitanism’ for ‘globalization’ and you are right back in the 1940s. As Richard Cavell argues, “Exhortations that we study ‘our own history’ […] tend to be unmindful, however, that our history has always been intimately tied up with the ‘effects of consumerism and globalization.’”54 I am sceptical that national formations could ever contain fragmentation so easily, nor were they always perceived to do so, which is to say that many of the issues being discussed in the current era of ‘global51 Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 175. 52 Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” 182. 53 Heike Härting, “Reading Against Hybridity? Postcolonial Pedagogy and the Global Present in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows,” in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 2004): 265. 54 Richard Cavell, “Here is Where Now,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 198–99.

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ization’ have been visited before. While nationalism has always had an incorporative and assimilative project, this flexibility has in turn contributed to an inherent tenuousness. This is not to render the dominance of nationalist discourse any the less powerful – in fact, it is surely the reverse, as Mackey argues in her account of the nation’s “institutionalisation of differences.”55 Instead, it is to say that the circulation of nationalist discourse is always incomplete. It may be a recognition of this necessary ineffectuality that is at issue here.56 Yet if the globalization of Canadian literature means one thing on the international scene, where globalization can be read as the latest instance of anticolonial postcoloniality (though this, too, is problematic), what are its ramifications within Canada, and to what extent is a discourse of globalization being used to bolster a delimiting cultural nationalism within the nation-state? While recent fiction writers are being championed as a credit to the nation’s cultural output, their status as authentically ‘Canadian’ is continually called into question. Philip Marchand’s contributions to the Toronto Star are notorious in this respect. In his view, Canada is suffering a dearth of “indubitably Canadian” writers who can adequately promote Canadianness abroad: The first wave of Canadian writers to win respect abroad – Davies, Atwood, Richler, Munro – has pretty well made its mark. Unfortunately, newer writers who have had international success – Ondaatje and Shields and Mistry – are gallingly prone to be mistaken for non-Canadians outside Canada, partly because they were born and raised outside Canada, and partly because they tend to set their fiction outside Canada. The nation cries out for indubitably 57 Canadian successors to Munro, et al.

The contradiction in this and other popular assessments of Canadian literature – Canada as distinctly multicultural; Canada as a recognizable and homogeneous national culture – is in part a result of the historical particularities of the founding of the Canadian state, whereby the historical and symbolic underpinnings of Canada as a white settler colony were overlaid 55

Mackey, The House of Difference, 17. See Sugars, “National Posts,” for a further discussion of these issues in a Canadian context. 57 Philip Marchand, Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 1998): 148–49. 56

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with liberal democratic notions of universal citizenship – and which Henighan is invoking when he sets up an opposition between ethnicity and citizenship. This has resulted in a long-standing crisis of legitimation in Canada which has perhaps only been exacerbated by the scramble for “the phoney universality of globalization.”58 In the process, implicit distinctions are being made between ‘Canadian literature’ and ‘multicultural/ global’ literature, where the national citizenship of the author (as Canadian) is secondary to the more abstract though no less powerful sense of national expression (as, in this case, less than Canadian). Tensions between global forces and national identity are highlighted in these debates. Because space is limited, I will consider only one brief example: the recent media discussion in Canada of Rohinton Mistry.59 Ven Begamudré notes how Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag “marked a turning point in Canadian literature” because it gave writers permission to be Canadian and yet not write about Canada.60 And yet, has this permission really been granted? Arun Mukherjee has noted that the “lack of ‘Canadian content’” in Mistry’s work is often commented upon.61 In a 1995 review in the Toronto Star, Philip Marchand notes that Canadian readers feel “there’s something vaguely wrong with Mistry not writing about the country he has lived in for 20 years.”62 As a result, Marchand goes to some lengths to make the case for Mistry’s Canadianness, a kind of protesting too much that insists on Canada as a “state of mind” which is embodied by Mistry himself: “Canadian is the quality of reserve and forbearance which echoes his own personality.”63 In 1997, Ken McGoogan devoted an entire article to the “difficult case of Rohinton Mistry” and the question of whether or not his novels were ‘Canadian’. Insisting that A Fine Balance was not a Canadian novel and that by “2097, it [would] not 58

Henighan, When Words Deny the World, 104. One finds similar examples in the reception of such Canadian writers as Anita Rau Badami, M.G. Vassanji, and Ondaatje. For an account of the problematic ‘Canadianness’ of South Asian Canadian writers, see Arun Mukherjee, “How Shall We Read South Asian Canadian Texts?” Postcolonialism: My Living (Toronto: T S A R , 1998): 24–40. 60 Ven Begamudré, “Greetings from Bangalore, Saskatchewan,” Canadian Literature 132 (1992): 11. 61 Arun Mukherjee, “How Shall We Read South Asian Canadian Texts?” 34. 62 Philip Marchand, “Mistry Writes Home,” Toronto Star (3 December 1995): F1. 63 Marchand, “Mistry Writes Home,” F7. 59

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appear on any course list focusing on Canadian novels,” McGoogan asserted: “this word ‘Canadian’ has to mean something.”64 Similarly, Sandra Martin’s April 2002 feature on Mistry, “You can take the boy out of Bombay …,” intimated that it was time Mistry wrote about Canada “now that he has caught up with himself chronologically.”65 There are numerous examples of this in the Canadian popular press (and not only with reference to Mistry).66 Related to this is the question of whether Canada can be held directly responsible for Mistry’s success. McGoogan takes issue with David Staines’s claim that there is something distinctly Canadian about the freedom and potential Canada offers global writers: “I say Mistry didn’t need Canada to write A Fine Balance. He could have written the same novel in England or Ireland or the U.S.A.”67 Yet any number of reviewers assert a ‘made-in-Canada’ trajectory for Mistry – as though to recuperate Mistry as Canadian they must make the case that he needed Canada as much as Canada (or Canadian literature) needs him. This becomes a dubious proposition, of course, when it is posited as a rationale for the immigrant’s gratitude to the nation that made his/her success possible. Multiculturalism, in this instance, would seem to come at a price. These questions are highlighted in a feature article by Paul Gessell in the 6 April 2002 Ottawa Citizen entitled “Mistry and Multiculturalism.” The article revolves around a very brief scene in Mistry’s most recent novel, Family Matters, in which a Japanese-Canadian immigration officer scorns an Indian man’s desire to emigrate to Canada. The scene contains a 64

Ken McGoogan, “More on the Future of Fiction: The Difficult Case of Rohinton Mistry,” Calgary Herald (14 December 1997): F2. 65 Sandra Martin, “You Can Take the Boy out of Bombay …,” Globe & Mail (13 April 2002): D3. 66 Numerous reviews highlight the non-Canadian subject matter of Mistry’s work. In addition to those already mentioned, see McGoogan, “Mistry’s”; Geddes; Foran; Andrews; Wigod; and Richler. Ironically, on a 1996 B B C - T V panel prior to the announcement of the Booker winner for that year, Germaine Greer became infamous for critiquing Mistry’s portrayal of India in A Fine Balance as an unconvincing portrait of India written by a Canadian. “It’s a Canadian book about India,” she stated. “What could be worse?”; quoted in Helen Branswell, “Greer’s Criticism of Book Asinine: Mistry,” Montreal Gazette (18 November 1996): B5. In Greer’s view, and in ironic contrast to the reviews I’ve been citing, Mistry’s Canadian citizenship rendered the book not authentically Indian enough. 67 McGoogan,“More on the Future of Fiction,” F2.

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stinging line about the ideal of Canadian multiculturalism: “Canada is a gigantic hoax.” It is this line that Gessell singles out for analysis, claiming that, according to Mistry’s novel, Canada’s multiculturalism policy is a hoax. However, in the novel it is the prospective immigrant who uses this line to counter the pessimism of the man who has been berating Canada. This is not to say that Mistry is not critical of the idealized rhetoric that surrounds multiculturalism in Canada. He is. Sarosh’s Canadian experience in Mistry’s short story “Squatter” provides ample evidence of Mistry’s ambivalence about Canadian multiculturalism.68 What I want to highlight instead is the reviewer’s own enactment of the “hoax.” Taking off from this flimsy discussion of the novel, Gessell proceeds to probe Mistry’s stance on Canadian multiculturalism, a government policy which, Gessell implies, saved Mistry from his fate back home: Mistry should be eternally grateful for the opportunities Canada offered him, an immigrant with few prospects from the Parsi minority of India who, after only three books to his credit, was elevated to the top ranks of the international literary world.

The article concludes on a note of embattlement: “[Mistry] says he is interested, some day at least, [in] setting a book in Toronto […] Consider that a warning.”69 In the end, Mistry, the international multicultural, is lined up against the ‘true’ Canadians: “Some day Canadians may find themselves reading a Mistry story about themselves in their own country […] a country that is one ‘gigantic hoax’.”70 All of this is painfully ironic, given Mistry’s post-9/11 experience of being hounded when travelling on a book tour in the USA , and the Canadian media’s account of this experience to substantiate the notion of Canada as a global sanctuary.71 68

“‘The Multicultural Department is a Canadian invention,’” Nariman says to his listeners, “‘It is supposed to ensure that ethnic cultures are able to flourish […]. If you ask me, mosaic and melting pot are both nonsense, and ethnic is a polite way of saying bloody foreigner’”; Mistry, Tales from Firozsha Baag (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987): 160. See Mistry’s responses to Geoff Hancock on this topic in “An Interview with Rohinton Mistry,” Canadian Fiction Magazine 65 (1989): 143–50. 69 Paul Gessell, “Mistry and Multiculturalism,” Ottawa Citizen (6 April 2002): J8. 70 Gessell, “Mistry,” J8 (my emphasis). 71 See Gessell’s comparable article on Anita Rau Badami, author of the acclaimed novels Tamarind Mem and The Hero’s Walk. Ostensibly attempting to defend Badami against the harsh criticism she has received from Asian–Canadians, Gessell notes how

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This sense of the global having invaded and infiltrated Canada occurs in innumerable reviews of non-mainstream Canadian writers. What all of this highlights is a contradiction in the popular formulation of Canadian national identity. Himani Bannerji describes this in terms of two crises of legitimation in Canada: (1) citizenship (liberal democracy); and (2) national ‘state’ formation (founded on a white settler colonial state). The latter is a national image that is inherently exclusionary. As Bannerji observes, “These colonial relations and representations of ‘Canada’ […] were overlayered with liberal democratic apirations.” Because the “liberal democratic state […] is the antithesis of a colonial state,” expressions of political or cultural projects in Canada can easily become compromised by one or the other.72 This might also be to say that Canada is not yet postcolonial. While Ondaatje, Mistry, and others are claimed as part of the national ethos, they fall through the cracks on both counts: they are neither given symbolic ‘Canadian’ citizenship (what they write is not Canadian) nor easily assimilable into the colonial state formation (they were not born in Canada). Di Brandt’s celebration of Canada’s cosmopolitan “coming of age” includes the comment that “multiculturalism [has] indeed become part of the Canadian literary fabric.”73 I am not so sure. Roy Miki’s account of the controversy surrounding the 1994 Writing Thru Race conference in Vancouver would seem to suggest otherwise, as do the extended analyses of Canadian multiculturalism undertaken in recent years by Sneja Gunew Badami “moved from India nine years ago and is becoming more and more Canadian every day.” Gessell invokes the familiar narrative of the grateful immigrant to Canada (Canada as a good hotel to write from – but you’d better acknowledge it). While Badami is noted for having “one foot in Canada and one in India,” Gessell hopefully observes that “that Indian foot seems to be moving closer and closer to Canada to such an extent that India, at least as a setting, may one day disappear from her writing altogether.” In the course of the interview, Badami becomes almost apologetic about the taint of Indianness in her work: “At some point in my life I’m going to be writing novels completely here (in Canada). It’s just that I’ve lived here for only 10 years.” If “Badami can sense the Canadianization taking place within her,” it is also true that the reviewer is relieved at the tempering of the Indian in this Canadian. Paul Gessell, “Maple Syrup in the Asian Curry,” Ottawa Citizen (13 May 2000): J3. 72 Himani Bannerji, “Geography Lessons: On Being an Insider/Outsider to the Canadian Nation,” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004): 293. 73 Di Brandt, “Going Global,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 106, 107.

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and Eva Mackey. The 1996 Group of Seven exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery invited visitors to compose and post on a wall their definitions of Canadian identity. One of the inscriptions ran as follows: A Canadian is someone who works for a swedish company, sitting on an indian made desk atop a persian rug drinking bavarian coffee sweetened with philippine sugar wearing english tweeds with matching italian shoes drives a german car writing to parliament with a japanese ball point pen on american paper complaining about how all the foreigners are taking away our jobs.

The globalized Canadian may not be as “unconscious of ancestry” as Pico Iyer would have us believe. ¹

So, what can we conclude from all of this? Rather than initiating a celebration of Canada’s global culture, might these novelists force a confrontation between the postcolonial and the global? Do they, in effect, enable nationalist reflection, on the meaning of borders, identities, and sovereignty? It may not be the postnational that these authors evoke, but the very yearning for national borders within a postcolonial context, a reiteration of the national within the postcolonial. As Donna Pennee argues, National literary cultural expression has been both a source of and a response to colonization: as such, postcolonial literary studies are necessarily a methodological hinge between what is possibly the end of a malign cultural 74 nationalism and the beginning of perhaps a more benign globalization.

This may be a useful definition of the ‘postcolonial’ in a global era. It may also enable us to consider and critique those instances where Canadian culture is celebrated for having gone global, but maligned as not sufficiently Canadian. Mordecai Richler’s self-mocking spin on this was to have one of his characters state that he was “world famous across Canada.” With this phrase he conjured up the parochialism of the adamant internationalist. 74 Donna Palmateer Pennee, “Literary Citizenship: Culture (Un)Bounded, Culture (Re)Distributed,” in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 2004): 76.

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Richler’s statement might also be inflected to highlight the hypocrisy of a professed globality (or a celebrated multiculturalism: the global within Canada) that falls back on an anxious defence of national essence.

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Frye, Northrop. “Conclusion to a Literary History of Canada” (1965), in The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination (Toronto: Anansi, 1971): 213–51. Geddes, John. “Mistry Puts Readers on Shrewd Tightrope of Emotions,” review of A Fine Balance, Financial Post (18 November 1995): 26. Gessell, Paul. “Maple Syrup in the Asian Curry,” Ottawa Citizen (13 May 2000): J3. ——. “Mistry and Multiculturalism,” Ottawa Citizen (6 April 2002): J1, J8. Goldie, Terry. “Blame Canada,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 224–31. Gunew, Sneja. Haunted Nations: The Colonial Dimensions of Multiculturalisms (London: Routledge, 2004). Hall, Stuart. “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti & Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P , 1997): 173–87. Härting, Heike. “Reading Against Hybridity?: Postcolonial Pedagogy and the Global Present in Jeannette Armstrong’s Whispering in Shadows,” in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 2004): 257–84. Henighan, Stephen. When Words Deny the World: The Reshaping of Canadian Writing (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 2002). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). Iyer, Pico. “The Last Refuge: On the Promise of the New Canadian Fiction,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2002): 77–80. ——. Review of The English Patient, T I M E (2 November 1992): 71. Johnson, Brian D. “Michael Ondaatje: ‘What Interests Me Is the Poetry of the Skill …,’” Maclean’s (18 December 2000): 66. Koning, Christina. “New Fictions, Stranger than Truth,” review of The English Patient, The Times (London; 10 September 1992): 5. Lawson, Alan. “Postcolonial Theory and the ‘Settler’ Subject,” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004): 151–64. Lecker, Robert. “Where Is Here Now?” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 6–13. Levin, Martin. “A Post-National CanLit,” Globe & Mail (8 June 2002): D16. McFarlane, Scott Toguri. “The Haunt of Race: Canada’s Multiculturalism Act, the Politics of Incorporation, and Writing Thru Race,” Fuse Magazine 18.3 (1995): 18– 31. McGoogan, Ken. “More on the Future of Fiction: The Difficult Case of Rohinton Mistry,” Calgary Herald (14 December 1997): F2. ——. “Mistry’s Life Has Taken Unexpected Turns,” Calgary Herald (28 October 1995): C1.

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Mackey, Eva. The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 2002). Marchand, Philip. “Aggressively Silent Michael Ondaatje,” Toronto Star (19 September 1992): G1, G10. ——. “Mistry Writes Home,” Toronto Star (3 December 1995): F1, F7. ——. Review of Such a Long Journey, Toronto Star (4 May 1991): K13. ——. Ripostes: Reflections on Canadian Literature (Erin, Ontario: Porcupine’s Quill, 1998). Martin, Sandra. “You Can Take the Boy out of Bombay …,” Globe & Mail (13 April 2002): D2–D3. Miki, Roy. “Sliding the Scale of Elision: ‘Race’ Constructs/Cultural Praxis,” in Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004): 301–22. Mistry, Rohinton. “An Interview with Rohinton Mistry,” with Geoff Hancock, Canadian Fiction Magazine 65 (1989): 143–50. ——. Tales from Firozsha Baag (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1987). Mukherjee, Arun. “How Shall We Read South Asian Canadian Texts?” Postcolonialism: My Living (Toronto: T S A R , 1998): 24–40. Pennee, Donna Palmateer. “Literary Citizenship: Culture (Un)Bounded, Culture (Re)Distributed,” in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, ed. Cynthia Sugars (Ottawa: U of Ottawa P , 2004): 75–85. Peter, Karl. “The Myth of Multiculturalism and Other Political Fables,” in Ethnicity, Power and Politics in Canada, ed. Jorgen Dahlie & Tissa Fernando (Toronto: Methuen, 1981): 56–67. Quayson, Ato. “Reading Postcolonially,” keynote address, “‘Inside the Whale’: The Postcolonial and Globalisation” Conference. University College Northampton, Northampton, U K , 11–13 July 2003. Richler, Noah. “A Benevolent Explosion: Rohinton Mistry Acts as a Witness for Our Times,” review of Family Matters, National Post (13 April 2002): BK1, 2. Ross, Cecily. “Fame’s Breath Hot on Ondaatje,” Financial Post (28 September 1992): S16. Sage, Lorna. “A Fragile Family,” review of The English Patient, Times Literary Supplement (11 September 1992): 23. “Shields Tops Orange Field,” Vancouver Sun (20 May 1998): A1–2. Sugars, Cynthia. “National Posts: Theorizing Canadian Postcolonialism.” Special “Post-Canada” issue of International Journal of Canadian Studies 25 (2002): 41–67. ——. “Can the Canadian Speak? Lost in Postcolonial Space,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 32.3 (2001): 115–52. Szeman, Imre. “Belated or Isochronic?: Canadian Writing, Time, and Globalization,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 186–94.

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Weinbaum, Alys Eve, & Brent Hayes Edwards. “On Critical Globality,” A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature 31.1–2 (2000): 255–74. Wigod, Rebecca. “Being on Oprah Was Great, Canadian Author Says,” Vancouver Sun (16 May 2002): B1, B8. Willmott, Glenn. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (Toronto: U of Toronto P , 1996). Wyile, Herb. “From Roots to Routes: Cultivating Canadian Writing in an Electronic Age,” Essays on Canadian Writing 71 (2000): 215–23.

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Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Globalized Other in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things C HITRA S ANKARAN

Introduction

A

R O Y won the Booker Prize in October 1997 for The God of Small Things. Within a year the novel is said to have sold more than a million copies worldwide, having been translated into more than thirty-seven languages. It was on the New York Times and the London Times best-seller list for weeks. Now, over eight years after its publication, it has been translated into forty languages and has sold more than six million copies. These facts attest to the global interest the book has elicited. Reviewing for the New Yorker, John Updike identified the novel’s appeal as due to its offering a combination of the local and the global. He introduced a golfing analogy: “This is a first novel, and it’s a Tiger Woodsian debut – the author hits the long, sociocosmic ball but is also exquisite in her short game.”1 “The short game” and “the long socio-cosmic ball” can in fact both lay claim to being the focal points of the plot that link the concerns of a small family in a corner of India with the cosmopolitan concerns of the world. Roy herself muses thus: “If I had to put it very simply, it is about trying to

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RUNDHATI

John Updike, “Mother Tongues: Subduing the Language of the Colonizer,” New Yorker (23 June 1997): 2–3.

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make the connections between the smallest of things and the biggest ones and to see how they fit together.”2 The novel transcends the constraints of its social milieu to address issues that form the core of humanity such as power, the ways in which power corrodes love and family relationships and so forth. Although set specifically in Kerala in south-west India, and although deeply autobiographical according to several critics who have painstakingly gathered evidence to support their claim, its universal acceptance and celebration establish it as standing testimony to the phenomenon of globalization.3 In the immense worldwide appeal of the book is already evident its globalized nature. It seems to advocate the fact that globalization is not denied to anyone, for Roy is the first Indian writer who is not a diasporic, who wrote from within India and yet caught the attention of the world at large. Thus, on the face of it, the novel seems to attest to a successful era of globalization both by its global marketability and by its being able to connect with people of many cultures. Ironically, though, at the core of the narrative there seems to be a deep anti-globalization sentiment that is wholly at odds with what the book itself has come to symbolize. This is where the ethical question at the centre of the narrative becomes important. The God of Small Things is certainly very much concerned with the fate of the marginalized. The destinies of the social outcasts seem fairly central to the text. Thus, in centering the ‘Other,’ the text centres the issue of ethics. However, this is not the only level on which the issue of ethics touches the narrative. In centering the plight of the untouchable in Kerala society, the text is actively engaged with ethical issues at a micro-level. Yet, in its ambition to make its theme and its readership global, it seems to actively employ the benefits of a global marketing industry to publicize and articulate its deepest concerns. This conflicts with the anti-global 2

Cited from Amar Nath Prasad, “Arundhati Roy: A Novelist of New Style,” in The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya & Joya Chakravarty (New Delhi: Atlantic, 1999): 136. 3 Rai Bahadur Chiman in “Gentleman Diary,” Gentleman (May 1997):10 and Venu Menon in “Sleepy Aymanam: Arundhati Roy’s ancestral village has still not awakened to their Booker celebrity,” Outlook (27 October 1997): 126. These two journalists took great pains to establish that the novel was mostly, if not entirely, autobiographical. In fact, Menon captions the photographs accompanying his article with phrases such as “Arundhati and her brother with their grand aunt (baby Kochamma in the book), grandmother (Mammachi)” and so on.

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sentiment that is consistently expressed in the narrative. For instance, the ways in which ruthless corporate globalization can erode deeply cherished values revered in local art and culture is exposed in the text’s sensitive probing of the plight of the kathakali dancers. Furthermore, globalization and its intellectual colonizing of marginal cultures – the ways in which different aspects of globalization erode and dilute ethnic cultures – are issues that engage the narrator passionately. Thus, globalization, issues of ethics, and the aesthetics of the text are closely intertwined. This essay sets out to investigate the role of globalization and aesthetics in The God of Small Things from an ethical perspective.

Globalization and The God of Small Things Since the publication of The God of Small Things, Roy has emerged as an impassioned anti-globalization activist. Her fiery indictment of what she terms “corporate globalization” is pervasive in her speeches. For example, in addressing a forum on Confronting Empire (31 January 2003, at Pôrto Alegre, Brazil), she declares: The dismantling of democracy is proceeding with the speed and efficiency of a Structural Adjustment Program. While the project of corporate globalization rips through people’s lives in India, massive privatization, and labor “reforms” are pushing people off their land and out of their jobs. Hundreds of impoverished farmers are committing suicide by consuming pesticide. Reports of starvation deaths are coming in from all over the country.4

Her write-ups on the adverse effects of globalization on India and its people are by now very well known and well-documented.5 Her famous statement “the only thing worth globalizing is dissent” underscores her concern for the disenfranchised ‘global Other’. Here it is important to highlight what Roy understands by the term ‘globalization’. In a recent interview Roy asserts: 4

See http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/confemp2.htm where the entire text of the speech is given. 5 The following websites illustrate Roy’s antiglobalization vision. The URL to some of these websites are, http://www.centre-lecture.com/home/article .php3?id_article =981; http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4266289,00.html; http: //www.satyamag.com/april00/roy.html

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I resent being called an anti-globalization activist because what I try to do is fighting for the inversion of globalization. I am pro the globalization of the protection of our environment. I am pro the globalization of justice, I am pro the globalization of free movement for all people.6

There is a clear distinction here between what Roy perceives as the ruthlessness of a ‘corporate globalization’ as opposed to a harmonious global movement to empower the disenfranchised. It is my contention that one of the most important evaluations that The God of Small Things makes is that the process of corporate globalization in all its manifestations and complexities is ultimately found to be wanting. There is a subtle undertone of irony that constantly seeks to uncover the complacency of globalization enthusiasts through exposing the shoddy underside of effusive political performances that gloss over the intricate power-play at work. Again, the paradox between the anti-globalization sentiment that permeates the narrative and its utilization of global marketing to extend its reach raises ethical questions. Therefore, to unravel the concerns of the text, it is important to probe the issue of globalization.

Globalization Today Globalization is a word that is indispensable in today’s vocabulary. As Zygmunt Bauman observes, “‘globalization’ is the intractable fate of the world, an irreversible process; it is also a process which affects us all in the same measure and in the same way. We are all being globalized.”7 Globalization now has an impact on the lives of people who range from dismal factory workers in the developing world to privileged consumers in Western, cosmopolitan, locations. However, although they all experience the impact of globalization, its effect on their lives differs vastly. Globalization, though it professes to homogenize the human condition, seems actually to polarize it in extreme ways. What appears as globalization for the privileged might often result in localization for the less privi6

Michael Sontheimer “‘Everything is being violated’: An interview with the Indian writer Arundhati Roy on the war in Iraq and the global resistance against American hegemony”; from the website on Arundhati Roy http://website.lineone.net /~jon .simmons/roy/03spiegl.htm 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998): 1.

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leged who are ‘othered’ systematically by the whole process. The divide between them is already vast and growing. Roy, in a speech (January 2003) ironically observes: “While the elite journeys to its imaginary destination somewhere near the top of the world, the dispossessed are spiraling downwards into crime and chaos.”8 Even the narrator of The God of Small Things remarks that the divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ is “as vast as that between the busker on the Best of Donahue show and Phil Donahue himself.”9 The difference, the narrator emphasizes, is like that between “Big Man the Lantern [and] Small Man the Tallow-stick” (89): the former has the right to dream and act on it, the latter can only watch from the sidelines. As Bauman remarks, Being local in a globalized world is a sign of social deprivation and degradation [….This is] a predicament neither pleasurable nor endurable in the world 10 in which the ‘globals’ set the tone and compose the results of the life-game.

Ayemenem in Kerala, the scene of the narrative, is no exception to this rule. Here too, globalization has crept in insidiously, manifesting itself in numerous ways. Its emblems are visible everywhere, from the pesticides bought with World Bank loans that make the river smell foul to the global tourist industry that has driven the owners of Kari Saipu’s house to convert it into a fashionable chain-hotel. Called “Heritage,” this stands in the midst of the heart of darkness of “exotic Kerala,” designed for tourists from far-flung lands and advertised in glossy brochures. Cocooned in their luxurious world, these ‘alien’ tourists, we are told, are served tandoori pomfret and crêpes suzette – an ironic comment on their complete insulation from the realities that surround them in this “God’s own Country” (124–26). Echoing Bauman’s sentiments, globalization in Ayemenem, as elsewhere, underlines the vast gap between the locals and the globals. The authority of the latter is secured by their very remoteness; the globals are literally ‘out of this world’, but their hovering above the worlds of the local is

8

See http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/confemp2.htm Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (London & New York: HarperCollins, 1997): 89. Further page references are in the main text. 10 Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, 2. 9

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much more, daily and obtrusively, visible than that of the angels who once hovered over the Christian world.11

The text strives to expose the vast gulf between the global elite and the disenfranchised ‘Others.’ Even the beleaguered among the elite exhibit smooth global mobility that offers them an escape-route out of their immediate and pressing problems. The twins’ father easily dumps his son Estha like unwanted baggage and, after retirement from his “carbon black job” in Calcutta, emigrates “to Australia where he had got a job as Chief of Security” (9). Again, when Rahel returns to Ayemenem at the age of thirty-one, she finds that Chacko has also shaken off his less than happy past to migrate to Canada, where he predictably runs an unsuccessful antiques business. Rahel herself, to show her allegiance (uneasy though it is) to the global elite, has been licensed to global mobility, unlike her twin. She had earlier left India for Boston, having married an American, Larry McCaslin. But later, soon after they were divorced, Rahel once again joins the horde of global nomads drifting through New York, Washington and so forth, finally returning to Ayemenem to be with Estha, “re-returned.” On one level, the vast gulfs between First and Third World locations are made to appear seamless, with memories linking dirty railway crossings on the Ayemenem–Kottayam road with “sunday trains on crisp fall mornings in upstate New York.” (72) This, in fact, can be read as an ironic mirroring of the discourse of globalization that makes it appear readily attainable – within everyone’s reach. But on a subtler level, the narrative counters this sentiment. The haunting sense of disenchantment of the ‘othered’ echoes and re-echoes in the narrative in the poignant and evocative descriptions accorded to the marginalized of the world, such as Muralidharan – the level-crossing lunatic. Opposed to this seemingly facile global mobility is the grinding situatedness of the vast majority of the population in Ayemenem, as indeed in most developing countries. The destiny of Velutha, the untouchable, is tied to his location, with no hint of reprieve, at the bottom of the casteridden social hierarchy. Kochu Maria jealously guards her upper-caste Syrian-Christian status, although no tangible benefits separate her lot from

11

Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, 53–54.

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that of the untouchable paravan, Vellya Paapen. The globalized elite effectively operates to disenfranchise them both. In a bizarre but curiously appropriate move, the narrative links Kochu Maria in Ayemenem with her completely alien counterpart at the opposite end of the world, in a passage that resonates with the futile resentment of the ‘disinherited’ of the earth. Kochu Maria was asleep on the drawing-room floor, curled into a comma in the flickering light of the television that was still on. American policemen were stuffing a hand-cuffed teenaged boy into a police car. There was blood spattered on the pavement. The police car lights flashed and a siren wailed a warning. A wasted woman, the boy’s mother perhaps, watched fearfully from the shadows. The boy struggled […] He had caked blood all over his mouth and down the front of his T-shirt […] He screamed through the car window at the camera. I’m fifteen years old and I wish I were a better person than I am. But I’m not. Do you want to hear my pathetic story? He spat at the camera and a missile of spit splattered over the lens and dribbled down. (296)

Kochu Maria, the maidservant in India, and the rebellious teenage youth in New York, although different in every possible way, separated by vast geographical distances, and vastly different in age, ethnicity, race and perspective, are yet curiously brought together in a brief moment of sharing. The narrative brackets the futility of their human condition, having been excluded and ‘othered’ by the hegemony of the globalized elite of their respective societies. While the privileged, with access to money, means and education become truly ‘global,’ others sink even more deeply into their “local penury,” be it in the inner-city slums of New York or the dirty hovels of Ayemenem. As the critic Mary E John observes, all First World citizens need not inhabit First World locations, and vice versa.12 On the surface, though, the globalized world appears uniform. Indeed, the passage with Kochu Maria reveals a further instance of this uniformity that often passes for equality. Cable television is pronounced to have penetrated the farthest corners of the world, ostensibly uniting the world population in a global social web, engaged with the same soap-operas, similar 12

Mary E. John, Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory and Postcolonial Histories (Berkeley: U of California P , 1996): 4.

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game-shows and identical serials. But this superficial uniformity is shown to gloss over grossly unequal social destinies. One facet of the globalized world, a pre-eminently consumerized society, is seen to have penetrated Ayemenem. We hear that “Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house” (27), and the transformation is sudden and overwhelming. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’état – they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together… and in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants […] Baby Kochamma followed American NBA league games, one-day cricket and all the Grand Slam tennis tournaments. On weekdays she watched The Bold and the Beautiful and Santa Barbara, where brittle blondes with lipstick and hairstyles rigid with spray seduced androids and defended their sexual empires. (27)

The gulf that separates the lives of the viewers and the viewed is unbridgeably vast. The widely eulogized ‘interactivity’ of the virtual media, exaggerated at the best of times, is revealed for its myth of being global. As Bauman rightly observes, Contrary to what academics, themselves members of the new global elite, tend to believe, the internet and web are not for anyone and unlikely ever to become 13 open to universal use.

The rest of the world, inhabited by the likes of Kochu Maria, would deem it a privilege to so much as gain access to television sets. Left with the network of satellite or cable television, with not so much as a pretension to symmetry between the two sides of the screen – pure and unalloyed viewing is their lot.

And what is crucial about this facet of globalized consumerism is that “the many watch the few.”14 These few are celebrities from the world of sports, politics, fashion, showbiz, and/or science. These are the informa13 14

Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences, 53. Globalization: The Human Consequences, 53.

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tion vendors and the newsmakers of the globe. Through their words they convey the message of a total way of life – their life, their way, which others can choose to emulate or envy from afar. The consequence of this, the narrative shows, is that, like Baby Kochamma’s ornamental garden, all other ways get neglected, overlooked or marginalized. At any rate, that seems to have been the fate of kathakali, the celebrated dance-drama of Kerala. This typically suffers the fate of all globalized narratives – truncated, diluted of authenticity, and hybridized to suit the limited attention-span of the global tourists. Here questions about the ethics of globalization intermingle with questions about the ethics of aesthetics – again of central importance in The God of Small Things.

Ethics, the Narrative and the Other In the past few decades, “ethics” has not been a popular word in literary theory. A major portion of the twentieth century has seen deeply influential theoretical movements that drive towards ‘deconstructing’ literature by reducing it to technical abstractions, with characters perceived as ‘mere’ devices having a purely functional role in relation to other abstract, at times even quantifiable units of plot or narrative by theorists such as Vladimir Propp and Gérard Genette.15 Despite these influential trends, the question of ‘the value of literature’ seems not to have lost its momentum. If anything, in the recent past – i.e. the latter half of the 1990s to the present – the number of studies devoted to probing the dimensions of the ‘moral’ in the ‘literary’ seems to have been on the rise. In one such work, Ethics, Theory and the Novel, David Parker discusses the traditional rivalry between theory and ethics in the literary field.16 The widespread turn to theory and the overriding influence wielded by postmodernism, he asserts, has made ethics redundant to literature.17 Even 15

See, for example, Genette’s Narrative Discourse Revisited or Vladimir Propp’s The Morphology of the Folktale for discussions of these issues. 16 David Parker, Ethics, Theory, and the Novel (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1994). 17 Poststructuralism, of course, displaces questions of literary value in other ways – by insisting, for example, that literary meaning is finally undecidable (Levinas). If we cannot have hermeneutic discourse, there is no point in evaluation, which surely depends on it.

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sceptics of evaluation such as Barbara Herrnstein Smith admit that “the entire problematic of value and evaluation has been evaded and explicitly exiled by the literary academy.”18 Paradoxically, though, despite its being identified as essentially a novel with a postmodern consciousness, The God of Small Things seems to engage seriously with questions of ethics. This could be because the text appears to be concerned with the fate of the marginalized, ‘othered’ by the status quo. In effect, the destiny of the marginalized seems fairly central to the book; thus, in centering the ‘Other,’ it centres the issue of ethics. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, discussing “Ethics and Its Others,” asserts that “all forms of the ethical imperative gather round the structurally obscure but commanding figure that contemporary thought has called ‘the Other’.” He notes that “ethics names the obligation to empower the hitherto disprivileged, or colonized Other.”19 In The God of Small Things, this claim of the ‘Other’ manifests itself on the level of the narrative because the ‘Other’ as we know it does not simply exist; it imposes regulations, constraints, and obligations on the ‘Self’ that constructs it. In the process of being constructed by the ‘Self’ to define itself, the ‘Other’ claims its own rights. The appearance of the kathakali dancers marks one such ethical moment, one that compels us to attend to the voice, the face, the predicament of the ‘othered.’ It focuses on the primordial obligation placed on the ‘Self’ or the subject by the existence of the Other. In effect, this seems to dictate the structure of the narrative in more ways than are immediately apparent. The kathakali dancers are the ‘othered’, shown to be desolate pawns in the global game of tourism, selling their rich and intricate ‘art’, painstakingly cultivated through a lifetime of dedicated training for a half-hour of touristy amusement. Effectively marginalized by the profit-seeking, commercial world of global tourism, they (like the untouchables ‘othered’ by casteism, and Ammu ‘othered’ by a corrosive and pervasive sexism) seem to symbolize the idea of an ‘otherness’ that resists assimilation, accommodation, and reconciliation, that retains its absolute alterity. What comes to be threatened here is their very identities – as David Punter 18 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988): 17. 19 Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting It Right: Language, Literature & Ethics (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992): 1.

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observes, “the reductio ad absurdum, is the fate of the ‘exotic’; the fate, that is to say, of being continuingly misread, […] appropriated as and by a foreign body [….].”20 Thus the ethics of anti-globalization that is embedded in the text seeks to reveal the predicament of the dispossessed. However, the ethics of the text does not stop with that but also probes the related issue of the ethics of its aesthetics. In the novel, there is a subtle but persistent engagement with questions of aesthetics. To the informed reader, the narrative design seems curiously intertwined with the aesthetic world of kathakali on many levels.

Aesthetics and Ethics When probing the question of aesthetics, Wittgenstein’s gnomic dictum that “ethics and aesthetics are one” leads us to ponder the possible links between the two.21 In The God of Small Things, the intricately told story certainly demands that we attend closely to its narrative design. It leads us to contemplate the ethical element, if any, that lies embedded in the author’s act of composing; in short, its aesthetic form. The narrative design seems to have an organic connection with the aesthetic of kathakali that is deliberately foregrounded in the chapter entitled “Kochu Thumban.” … kathakali discovered long ago that the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again. That is their mystery and their magic. (229)

20 David Punter, Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000): 83. 21 Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1998): 1.

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In a curious way, the narrative of The God of Small Things seems to follow the ethics of this particular aesthetic: i.e. “not to deceive you with thrills and trick endings” nor to attempt to “surprise you with the unforeseen.” In fact, the very first chapter of the novel outlines the entire story. We learn about Estha and Rahel getting separated from each other; Estha’s return to their father, including his encounter with the sinister “orangedrink lemondrink man” at Abilash Theatre. Rahel’s meanderings through life, her marriage, and her divorce are also etched in. Ammu’s, Velutha’s, Sophie Mol’s, Chacko’s and Margaret Kochamma’s separate and unenviable destinies are all sketched out for the reader. There is nothing in the narrative that ensues which is not already mentioned or outlined in the very first chapter. Roy herself states this as follows: In the first chapter I more or less tell you the story, but the novel ends in the middle of the story, and it ends with Ammu and Velutha making love and it 22 ends on the word ‘tomorrow’.

The narrative seems designed to emulate the philosophy of the great classical kathakali narratives like “Duryodhana Vadham” and “Karna Shabadam” – “The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably,” as indeed we do. Like these classics, here as well, we know at the beginning “who lives, who dies, who finds love,” and yet the underlying hope seems to be that we will “want to know again.” Indeed, Gillian Beer, chairperson of the Booker Prize committee, praises the book in the Booker Citation for “its linguistic inventiveness, its narrative power,” and, significantly, goes on to add: “Books often crumble on a second reading. But Roy’s had strengthened.”23 The epigraph to the book, John Berger’s evocative, “Never again will a story be told as though it’s the only one,” seems to foreground the confidence with which the teller tells the tale – with the same whole-hearted sincerity and singular dedication that the kathakali dancers bring to their performances. The emphasis on laying bare the tale at the very beginning reiterates the powerfully entrenched philosophy of Indian aesthetics where 22

Alix Wilbur, “‘For me language is a skin on my thought’: An Interview with Arundhati Roy,” The Week (26 October 1997): 46. 23 Booker Citation, quoted by Somdatta Mandal in “From Periphery to the Mainstream: The Making, Marketing and Media Response to Arundhati Roy,” in Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary, ed. R.K. Dhawan (New Delhi: Prestige, 1999): 74.

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great classical narratives such as the Sanskrit Katha Sarith Sagara eschew a linear narrative, emphasizing deep human truths through repetition and re-statement. The philosophy behind this aesthetic formulation is that universal human truths need no surprises in order to appeal to readers. Thus, in emulating this formula, the novel seems to lay claim to a higher ethic, a higher truth it believes it evokes.24 Furthermore, in drawing attention to the plight of the disenfranchised kathakali dancers, and then deliberately foregrounding its link to those latent patterns evident in kathakali narratives through its narrative design, it also demonstrates intentionality. The text seems to be invoking an organic integrity between its narrative and the kathakali narratives that makes its very aesthetic a symbolic bonding with the ‘othered’. As such, the question of ethics emerges as fairly deepseated and central to The God of Small Things. Roy also uses the narrative to engage intensively with questions of moral understanding. This emerges when she states: “Fiction for me has been a way of trying to make sense of the world as I know it.”25 This leads her to probe the pervasive sexism and deep-seated chauvinism of Indian society by exploring the disturbed pathologies of the menfolk of the Ayemenem family, starting with Pappachi. The novel devises at its centre an ethical discord between a strongly entrenched traditional casteism (still the driving force behind most Indian social formulations) and a newly acquired liberal consciousness (the legacy of social-reform movements such as Gandhism). This is further permeated by a more contemporary, liberal-humanist ethos concerning social equality that a globalized consciousness has brought about. This conflict is played out at the core of the plot. Velutha, the untouchable, is in one sense the ‘romantic hero’. He is, on another level, a ‘martyred innocent’. Some critics go so far as to claim that “in the novel Velutha also seems to be the ‘God’ [of small things], for he is a carpenter, a creator of small things.”26 Or even: “Velutha is to some extent a mythical imitation of Jesus Christ. He knows that his acts challenge the estab-

24

For a detailed discussion of Katha Sarith Sagara, see Chitra Sankaran, “The Patterns of Story-Telling in The Guide by R.K. Narayan,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.1 (1995): 87–95. 25 Cited from Prasad, “Arundhati Roy: A Novelist of New Style,” 136. 26 O.P. Mathur, “Arundhati Roy’s Paradoxical Celebration of Smallness,” in Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary, 216.

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lished authority of the pharisees (here it is the caste system).”27 Although these comparisons may appear a little laboured, Velutha certainly emerges as the best of the male characters portrayed – the only father-figure the children are able to forge an emotional bond with. His charm, sensitivity and passion combine to present him as the only complete man in the book. Yet, ironically, it is this very self-sufficiency that in fact leads to his doom. The narrative spells out this anomaly, linking it to an entire sociocultural ethic: Perhaps it was just [his ...] lack of hesitation. An unwarranted assurance. In the way he walked. The way he held his head. The quiet way he offered suggestions without being asked. Or the quiet way in which he disregarded suggestions without appearing to rebel. While these were qualities that were perfectly acceptable, perhaps even desirable in Touchables, Vellya Paapen thought that in a Paravan they could (and would, and indeed, should) be construed as insolence. (76)

Vellya Paapen’s belief that self-assurance in a so-called ‘untouchable’ should be deemed insolence brings with it a whole history of social construction that has ensured the hegemony of the upper castes.

Metaphors of Authenticity The hub of the narrative revolves around this ingrained strife that emanates from the clash between a liberal-humanistic ethic that the progressive global and globalized readers (as opposed to ‘corporate globalization enthusiasts’ who are perceived as ruthless and amoral) are expected to share, and the social obligations that a rigid and inhumane caste-system enforces on its unwilling participants. The resulting pathos is the direct ethical indictment of human mores. Thus, ostensibly, two moral perspectives seem to be pitted against each other – one that emphasizes varna dharma (caste regulations: i.e. righteous conduct with regards to caste), which binds a man to a certain set of obligations as a member of a particular caste (a Hindu legacy) and a romantic-expressivist perspective that centres on the ethical demands emanating from an acknowledgement of human uniqueness and differ27

David Myers, “Contemporary Tragedy and Paradise Lost in The God of Small Things,” in Arundhati Roy: The Novelist Extraordinary, 361.

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ence which is (to a large extent) perceived as a Western legacy. The narrator seems constantly to favour the more enlightened of these two perspectives, though on the level of the plot these perpetually clash with each other. Ammu’s personal desires conflict with her socially demarcated duties as a mother and divorcee. Vellya Paapen’s pride in his son conflicts with his duties as a paravan. At every point the novel shows how personal desires are perceived as anarchic and are relentlessly curtailed, subsumed under fixed social dictums. In the end, predictably, hegemony rules the day and power-structures are kept intact. Not surprisingly, enlightened liberalism and social reform movements are shown to be powerless against traditional hierarchies. Furthermore, globalizing trends are shown as reinforcing rather than dismantling these ancient power-structures. This is because, gradually but irrevocably, ruthless corporate globalism comes to flourish by reifying hierarchies and gaining ascendancy over the more progressive and egalitarian global movements whose interest is in dismantling them. In these emerging patterns of change, it comes as no surprise that older, entrenched caste structures and the current course of globalization (despite their professed and superficially antithetical positions) seem to share unapologetically several perspectives regarding power. But more disturbingly, on a deeper level, even the benign liberal and progressive global movements seem to reify these caste hierarchies. In “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” Gayatri Spivak discusses how the revalidation of the West and the fantasy of the Cartesian subject as the proper centre for evolution and action (whether capitalist or liberatory) relies on the repeated “reproduction of marginality.”28 The desire to look for ‘a voice’ from among the oppressed margin, like the untouchable, then becomes symptomatic of the modernist desire to extend its own West-centred (Euro-American) belief-system. Spivak identifies within this need of the Cartesian subject to “identify the margins” a concomitant desire for (inherently uneven) alliance with those ‘margins’ as a means of transcendence, which comes about through falsely imagining that one ultimately shares the same struggles and goals. The supposedly ‘authentic’ subversive struggles from those margins then become the paradigmatic fantasy of liberatory struggles for West-centred theoretical and activist 28

Gayatri Spivak, “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” in Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993): 59.

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thought. From this perspective, then, even the progressive globalists’ desire for alliance with the liberatory struggles of the margins becomes tainted with neocolonialist fantasies of power. The discursive romanticization of the marginalized hero Velutha, the untouchable, then becomes the activity of “the metaphorical subaltern in service of western hegemony” – one whom Spivak dubs the “native informant,” who is as appropriated in the power paradigm as any other. This renders problematic the very narrativization of the marginal hero’s struggles. 29 This is the final, inevitable indictment against globalization – that its very act of enacting and romanticizing the struggles of the margin is a form of complicity in the global appropriation of power. This, then, is the last in a series of aspersions cast on it. It is a judgement reached after the role of globalization and aesthetics has been delicately probed from an ethical perspective.

Conclusion The narrative of The God of Small Things moves resolutely to expose the ugly face of globalization and its dire effects on aesthetic and ethical movements that are striving to make headway in small corners of the globe. The emergence of this narrative itself then marks a symbolic but problematic ethical moment – serving as an exposé of the scaly underside of the smooth corporate body of globalism but also, paradoxically, itself becoming complicit in the very moment and by its very act of entering discourse.

WORKS CITED Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). Chiman, Rai Bahadur. “Gentleman Diary,” Gentleman (May 1997): 9–12. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Nouveau discours du récit, 1983; Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 1988). Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Getting It Right: Language, Literature & Ethics (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1992).

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Spivak, “Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” 61.

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John, Mary E. Discrepant Dislocations: Feminism, Theory & Postcolonial Histories (Berkeley: U of California P , 1996). Levinson, Jerrold. “Introduction: Aesthetics and Ethics,” in Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, ed. Levinson (Cambridge & N Y : Cambridge U P , 1998): 1–25. Menon, Venu. “Sleepy Aymanam: Arundhati Roy’s ancestral village has still not awakened to their Booker celebrity,” Outlook (27 October 1997): 126–27. Parker, David. Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 1994). Prasad, Amar Nath. “Arundhati Roy: A Novelist of New Style,” in The Critical Studies of Arundhati Roy’s “The God of Small Things”, ed. Jaydipsinh Dodiya & Joya Chakravarty (New Delhi: Atlantic, 1999): 135–41. Propp, Vladimir T. Akovlevich. The Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Laurence Scott, ed. Louise A. Wagner (Morfologiia skazki; tr. 1958; Austin: U of Texas P , 1968). Punter, David. Postcolonial Imaginings: Fictions of a New World Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U P , 2000). Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things (London & New York: HarperCollins, 1997). Sankaran, Chitra. “The Patterns of Story-Telling in Guide by R.K. Narayan,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 36.1 (1995): 87–95. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). Sontheimer, Michael. “‘Everything is being violated’: An Interview with the Indian writer Arundhati Roy on the war in Iraq and the global resistance against American hegemony.” http://website.lineone.net/~jon.simmons/roy/03spiegl.htm; accessed 9 November 2004. Spivak, Gayatri. ““Marginality in the Teaching Machine,” in Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993): 53–67. Updike, John. “Mother Tongues: Subduing the Language of the Colonizer,” New Yorker (23 June 1997): 2–6. Wilbur, Alix. “‘For me Language is a skin on my thought’: An interview with Arundhati Roy,” The Week (26 October 1997): 43–47.

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The Elephant in the Living-Room A Postcolonial Reading of Waiting for Godot A. C LARE B RANDABUR

You must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, […] perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am. I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.1

A

I H A V E Y E T T O D I S C O V E R a postcolonial reading of Waiting for Godot, three recent studies of Beckett provide detailed postcolonial explications of other Beckett works in contexts which throw light on Godot while demonstrating the efficacy of such an approach. In “Voices Out of the Air” (1997), Stephen Dilks gives a remarkable reading of Beckett’s All That Fall, while, in Anomalous States, David Lloyd presents a brilliant reading of First Love (1993) combined with a more general analysis of Beckett’s work from a postcolonial point of view.2 And Charles R. Lyons has provided a brief but extremely useful discussion (especially because of extensive compari-

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Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994): 418. 2 Stephen Dilks, “Voices Out of the Air: Freedom, Death and Constraint in All That Fall,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (New York & London: Garland, 1998): 81–110; David Lloyd, “Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject,” in Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the PostColonial Moment (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1993): 41–58.

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sons with Godot) of Endgame that we would now, twenty-some years later, call a postcolonial perspective.3 Although Dilks is primarily concerned with showing that Beckett’s plays are liberating because they frame a number of different modes of resistance to imprisoning social, linguistic, and cultural identifications, including that of gender, he makes an even more direct contribution to postcolonial analysis by freeing Beckett’s work from the limiting label of absurdist drama, and by introducing the reader to the explicitly postcolonial critique of David Lloyd.4 Distinguishing “responsible postmodernism” from “just play,” Dilks remarks that “Beckett’s work has generally been treated as ‘just play’ […] because readers have failed to see how he can be read politically.”5 Thus Dilks frees Beckett’s work from Martin Esslin’s unfortunate ‘absurdist’ label by distinguishing between popular entertainments which “do not engage us in any form of productive critique,” and can be described as “Absurd,” and the serious work of “responsible postmodernists” such as Derrida and Salman Rushdie, a category in which he also places Beckett. The “play with form” in Beckett, as in the work of other “responsible postmodernists,” Dilks maintains, has a serious purpose. In this context Dilks mentions David Lloyd, remarking that the latter “suggests how we might re-read Beckett’s more famous work with an eye to its implications for postcolonial critique.”6 Dilks does not name a specific text, but he could only have meant Lloyd’s Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (1993). In this brilliant series of essays, Lloyd treats Heaney, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett under the rubric of the “postcolonial moment.” Although each of these highly original and syntactically challenging studies requires and rewards close scrutiny, it is Lloyd’s essay on Beckett that is most immediately relevant. Because Martin Esslin’s criticism has had such a pervasive influence on the way Beckett’s work is perceived, it should be said that in the “Introduction” to Absurd Drama, Esslin singles Beckett out:

3 Charles R. Lyons, “Fin de Partie / Endgame as Political Drama” (1991), in Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion, ed. Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001): 188–208. 4 Dilks, “Voices Out of the Air,” 106–107. 5 “Voices Out of the Air,” 106, n.7. 6 “Voices Out of the Air,” 106, n.7.

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Of the dramatists of the Absurd, Samuel Beckett is undoubtedly the profoundest, the greatest poet. Waiting for Godot and Endgame are certainly masterpieces; Happy Days and Play, Krapp’s Last Tape, and the two Acts Without Words (where language has drained away altogether) are brilliant and pro7 found poetic images….

For Esslin, in Waiting for Godot, Beckett “parodies and mocks the language of philosophy and science in Lucky’s famous speech.”8 Seen through a postcolonial prism, however, Lucky’s outburst asks, in language derived from schizophrenia, the quite rational question: how could a loving God have created such a “mess”? Careful analysis of Lucky’s speech shows that he was a failed scholar, philosopher, and poet, now enslaved to Pozzo, a greedy landlord, representative of capital and corporate power. For all his evident appreciation of Beckett, Esslin’s classification of his works as absurdist merely obscures their sociopolitical implications, emphasizing instead their subjective and psychoanalytic levels of meaning. Even in a book as recent as Lois Gordon’s Reading Godot (2002), the abiding nature of Esslin’s influence is very evident. Gordon says: In the absence of attainable goals or ideals, nothing, in a concrete way, can change. As Martin Esslin, who understood Beckett’s sense of time, explains, “Waiting is to experience the action of time, which is constant change. And yet, as nothing real ever happens, that change in itself is an illusion. The ceaseless activity of time is self-defeating, purposeless, and therefore null and void. The more things change, the more they are the same. That is the terrible stability of the world.”9

Yet Beckett himself repudiated the “Absurdist” label, according to John Fletcher in About Beckett (2003). In a 1973 interview with Charles Juliet, Fletcher records, Beckett told Juliet … that he disagreed with the idea of the Theatre of the Absurd, with which […] he has often been associated by the critics, especially by Martin Esslin. These were his reasons for dissenting from the theory of the Absurd: “Because 7 Martin Esslin, “Introduction” to Esslin, Absurd Drama (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982): 18. 8 Esslin, “Theatre of the Absurd,” 14. 9 Lois Gordon, Reading Godot (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2002): 66– 67.

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that implies making value judgments. You can’t even talk about truth. That is part of the general distress. Paradoxically, it’s through form that the artist can find a kind of solution–by giving form to what has none. It is perhaps only at that level that there may be an underlying affirmation.”10

Nevertheless, Esslin’s view, giving rise to a highly subjective and psychoanalytic style of criticism, continued to fill the critical vacuum in the McCarthy era, when Marxist criticism was suspect. This was the time when modernists like E.M. Forster and Ezra Pound, together with their counterparts, the New Critics, were vigorously isolating the literary work from its historical context. It was precisely these American New Critics who awarded Pound the first newly created Bollingen Prize for his Cantos, notwithstanding their overtly antisemitic content. Postcolonialism is in one sense the attempt to re-historicize the literary artefact which had been so completely detached from the actual events out of which and within which it was created. Although its main focus is First Love rather than Waiting for Godot, Lloyd’s essay situates all of Beckett’s work in the “postcolonial moment.” The Irish, Lloyd says, have been denied their own language and forced to translate into another, creating a situation of inauthenticity which is the condition of the colonized. Without the slightest pretence of euphemism, Lloyd titles his essay “Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject,” and frames its postcolonial reflections within a groundbreaking reading of Beckett’s First Love, “the first work which Beckett published in French.”11 Premier Amour (written in 1946 but not published until 1970) deals with the relationship between language and nationality, identity, exile, and paternity. “To take on another language is already to live as an exile,” Lloyd comments.12 From the start, Lloyd assumes the oppositional nature of Beckett’s writing, implicitly dismissing the deeply rooted fiction, alluded to by Edward Said, that Irish writers could be tamed and assimilated into the English canon. Much of Said’s argument in Culture and Imperialism – that Yeats is a poet of Irish national liberation writing in opposition to the English as colonizers – can be applied to Beckett as well: 10

John Fletcher, About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). 11 Lloyd, “Writing in the Shit,” 42. 12 “Writing in the Shit,” 45.

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From this perspective Yeats is a poet who belongs in a tradition not usually considered his, that of the colonial world ruled by European imperialism during a climactic insurrectionary stage. If this is not a customary way of interpreting Yeats, then we need to say that he also belongs naturally to the cultural domain, his by virtue of Ireland’s colonial status, which it shares with a host of non-European regions: cultural dependence and antagonism together.13

If a postcolonial analysis of Godot is to have significance, it must discover in the text the sources of power, since it is obvious that much of the force of such postcolonial analysis as Said’s seminal reading of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park in Culture and Imperialism derives from the attention paid to the sources of power in the text. Said notices that, though the slave-powered sugar plantation on the Caribbean island of Antigua is the source of the wealth of the Mansfield Park estate, Jane Austen makes “a mere half-dozen passing references to Antigua.”14 Said reviews the passage in John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy in which this champion of the rights of man takes for granted England’s right to use such colonies as Antigua to produce “tropical commodities” like sugar and coffee for the metropolis.15 Said also provides a fresh insight into the force of Zionist ideology in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda to create a movement which will replace the indigenous Arab population of Palestine with European Jews, Eliot having come to subscribe to the Orientalist idea that the East is a convenient place to dispose of excess or problematic populations.16 Similar insights are generated by Terry Eagleton’s re-reading of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in Heathcliff and the Great Hunger. Eagleton observes that Branwell, Emily’s brother, would have seen starving Irish immigrants in the port of Liverpool where they gathered to take passage to Canada and the USA . In August 1845, Branwell took a trip from Haworth to Liverpool. It was on the very eve of the Great Famine, and the city was soon to be thronged with its

13

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Random House/ Vintage, 1994): 266. 14 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 70. 15 Culture and Imperialism, 69. 16 Culture and Imperialism, 74.

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starving victims. By June 1847, according to one historian, three hundred thousand destitute Irish had landed in the port.17

Less than a generation from the poverty of Northern Ireland herself, Emily Brontë must have been horrified at the spectre of the Famine, a horror that shapes the menacing image of the dark foreigner in her novel. When Eagleton says “Heathcliff is a fragment of the Famine”18 and, a little later, “The hunger in Wuthering Heights is called Heathcliff,”19 there is a shock of recognition and one can never read the novel in the old way again. With equal verve, Eagleton suggests that the villain in Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a trope for the Anglo-Irish landlord; unpacking the metaphor, Eagleton shows that Stoker, a Dublin clerk, is saying that the life-blood of the Irish peasant is being squeezed out by a blood-sucking foreign monster who needs sacred earth to keep him alive.20 When Count Dracula first appears in the novel, he is obsessively concerned with landdeeds and titles designed to secure real estate in London, and when he is stabbed, what spurts out of him is not blood, but “banknotes and gold coins.”21 Dracula’s hold on land – especially land that has been sacred – is the source of his power. A postcolonial re-reading of Godot, then, must deal with the source of power in the society internal to the text as well as intrinsic to its context. Ironically, Beckett himself believed that he derived his creativity as a writer from his lack of power. In a widely quoted interview with Israel Shenker in 1956, Beckett says: In my last book, L’Innommable [The Unnamable], there’s complete disintegration, there’s no way to go on. With James Joyce [1882–1941], the difference is that Joyce was a superb manipulator of material – perhaps the greatest. He was making words do the absolute maximum of work. There isn’t a syllable that’s superfluous. The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material. The more Joyce knew the more he could. He’s tending towards omniscience and omnipotence as an artist. I’m working with impotence, ignorance. 17

Terry Eagleton. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London & New York: Verso, 1995): 3. 18 Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 11. 19 Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 215. 20 Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 215. 21 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897; London: Penguin, 1994): 260–61.

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I don’t think impotence has been exploited in the past [….] I think anyone nowadays who pays the slightest attention to his own experience finds it the experience of a non-knower, of a no-can-er [someone who cannot].22

This interview gives us good reason to believe that Beckett actually felt overwhelmed by the events taking place around him and chose to make that very impotence and ignorance the subject of his work. Eagleton remarks that language was inadequate to express such experiences as the Irish Famine, just as Adorno had found language inadequate to represent the Holocaust.23 Similarly, in the face of the invasion of France by Hitler’s armies, Beckett has his amnesiac clowns trying to pass the time by playing games to amuse themselves in the paralysis which grips people in the face of overwhelming colonial/imperial power. As Sven Lindqvist points out in “Exterminate All the Brutes” (1996), when Hitler invaded Russia in 1941, he was following a colonialist– imperialist policy modelled first by the New World conquerors and settlers (who had exterminated most of the indigenous population of North, Central and South America), and by the English, Dutch, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Belgians (notably King Leopold), who had divided up Africa, India, China and parts of Asia among them, massacring whole segments of their indigenous peoples.24 As an Irish expatriate living in France, Beckett was in a perfect place from which to observe the height of German colonial power as Hitler invaded one country after another, at last entering France. Already in exile from Ireland, Beckett was an eye-witness to the brute force of German tanks, planes and troops as they invaded his country of adoption, and found himself among people who were on the whole incapable of resistance. Waiting for Godot is a postmodern morality play about the powerlessness of man in a world ruled by ruthless leaders (Hitler or Stalin or multinational corporations, the globalization that Marx called the Monopoly stage of capitalism). Not only did the French bourgeoisie fail to resist, but, what was especially shocking to Beckett, many of them collaborated with the Nazis in the ethnic cleansing of French Jews. It was 22

Israel Shenker, “Moody Man of Letters,” New York Times (6 May 1956), Sec. 2:

3, repr. in Fletcher, About Beckett, 69–70. 23

Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, 12. Sven Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes”, tr. Joan Tate (Utrota varenda jävel, 1992; tr. 1996; London: Granta, 2000): 153–60. 24

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when the Germans began to round up Jewish friends that Beckett joined the Resistance. Paul Léon had remained in public one day too long, Deidre Bair says, was arrested and interned near Paris, and killed by the Nazis in 1942.25 Léon’s incarceration was one of many factors that led to Beckett’s political involvement. “I was so outraged by the Nazis, particularly by their treatment of the Jews, that I could not remain inactive,” he said.26 In the same context, Bair elaborates: All around Beckett senseless arrests and killings were commonplace. Even more devastating was the knowledge that numerous friends were either collaborating openly with the Germans or indirectly toadying to them. He found 27 himself unable to remain neutral any longer.

Beckett’s outrage at this toadying and betrayal in the face of the cruelty and sadism of the Nazis, which he had seen close-up, is reflected in the play-within-the-play in which Lucky’s craven submission to Pozzo stands for the betrayal of their calling by writers, intellectuals and academics. The very people who should have recognized and taken a stand against fascism had become willing slaves of a ruthless dictator. When Lucky and Pozzo appear the first time, Pozzo is full of confidence, enjoying gourmet food and wine, an expensive watch, owning the road, and commanding his slave as he heads off on his exploits, checking his watch with an air of great self-importance. When the pair appears for the second time, Lucky is dumb, Pozzo is blind: Lucky is leading Pozzo, the dumb leading the blind. Seen in this light, Waiting for Godot is a bitter satire on the failure of the intellectuals, the scholars, experts, and even religious (it was a priest who betrayed Beckett’s Resistance cell), to stand up to the dictators, whether of the Stalinist or the National-Socialist variety. These should have been the leaders of resistance, without whose vision the people (represented by Didi and Gogo) perish. Many of the images in the play derive, as both Deirdre Bair and James Knowlson point out, from the hardships endured by Beckett and Suzanne on their flight from Paris to the yet unoccupied South of France.28 They 25

Deidre Bair, Samuel Beckett (London: Random House/Vintage, 2002): 326. Bair, Samuel Beckett, 326. 27 Bair, Samuel Beckett, 326. 28 Bair, Samuel Beckett, 410–11; James Knowlson, Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997): 342–43. 26

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went mostly on foot, foraging for food, sleeping in haystacks during the day and travelling by night, without money for food or lodging, and hunted by the Gestapo.29 The stray carrots and turnips no doubt derive from this journey. Close friends of Beckett and Suzanne, Bair says, commented that the two tramps have the same kind of “teasing, whining, loving, caring, and sometimes bitter” conversations they overheard from Beckett and Suzanne, whose relationship seemed more like that of two pals than husband and wife.30 Confirmation of this identification is provided by Beckett himself when, during a rehearsal of Endgame, he exclaimed to Roger Blin, “You must realize that Hamm and Clov are Didi and Gogo at a later date, at the end of their lives,” then added, “Actually, they are Suzanne and me.”31 Waiting for Godot belongs to the ironic mode in Northrop Frye’s sense – the eiron’s power being less than that of the audience, which makes it directly relevant to the political situation in the contemporary world.32 World leaders govern under the motto M.A.D. – Mutually Assured Destruction – so widespread are nuclear weapons that we face nuclear war, either on purpose or by accident, and endure an assault on nature amounting to eco-catastrophe, under a form of fascism which seems a direct fulfilment of the worst nightmares of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four. Yet the world’s masses remain, like Didi and Gogo, passive spectators, kept ignorant and thus unable to exercise judgment or to intervene in the seemingly inevitable disaster. Recent scholarship has offered a variety of reasons for the capitulation of whole populations to the onslaught of the fascists. In his book Hitler’s Pope (2000), to mention only one example, John Cornwell documents the collusion of Eugenio Pacelli, both as Vatican Secretary of State and later as Pope Pius X I I , with the Italian and German fascists, signing various concordats and issuing orders to lay Catholics to refrain from opposition,

29

Bair, Samuel Beckett, 410. Bair, Samuel Beckett, 408. 31 Bair, Samuel Beckett, 512. 32 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990): 34–35. 30

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effectively forbidding the clergy and the Catholic labour unions and brotherhoods to engage in organized resistance.33 The denigrating cliché that Waiting for Godot is “a play in which nothing happens – twice!” originating with Vivien Mercier in his review of the play for the Irish Times of 8 February 1956, while amusing, is actually false.34 While nothing appears to happen in the foreground of the play: i.e. in the relationship between Estragon and Vladimir, something definitely happens in the ‘play within a play’ in which Lucky and Pozzo appear, briefly interact with the two foreground characters, and then depart. In Act I, their relationship is that of master and slave: Pozzo drives Lucky forward at the end of a long rope, cracking his whip and barking orders, calling him names, and demanding that he serve as valet and manof-all-work. Yet he confides to Vladimir and Estragon that it was from Lucky that he learned all the finer and higher things in life: aesthetic appreciation of nature, language, and literature. In response to Pozzo’s demand that Lucky perform for Estragon and Vladimir, Lucky pours out an apparently incoherent speech at top speed, so terrifying that the three other men try to silence him. The silencing of Lucky’s manic tirade is a trope for the censorship practised by the fascists, but also resonates with the current censorship of academics who dare to criticize the unbridled war rampage of George Bush. Such brave dissidents are threatened with death, like Ward Churchill, accused of homosexuality (as was the late Edward Said), have their offices fire-bombed (like the courageous Israeli lawyer Felicia Langer), are accused of taking bribes from Saddam Hussein (like George Galloway – who sued British newspapers and the Christian Science Monitor for libel and won), beaten up and imprisoned (like Kathy Kelley, the co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness). When Lucky and Pozzo re-appear in Act II , their relationship has changed: Lucky, who made the manic speech in Act I, is now dumb, and Pozzo is blind. While he still dominates Lucky, he is now dependent on him, needing to be guided by his slave. These two acts of the play-withinthe-play represent the rise and fall of imperialism. Act I represents the moment of imperial ascendancy, in which the talents of artists, scientists, and poets have been skilfully harnessed to the 33

John Cornwell, Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius X I I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000): 184–99. 34 Mary Junker, Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1995): 26.

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military-industrial complex, serving as propagandists and publicists, while the world is being driven inexorably to the brink of destruction. We are inundated by Luckys such as Daniel Pipes, Bernard Lewis, Karl Rove, who serve the imperial purpose. As Edward Said pointed out in an article in the Guardian Unlimited, “Western scholars helped to justify the war in Iraq,” an event he characterizes as “one of the intellectual catastrophes of history,” in which an imperialist war fought on ideological grounds was “disguised for its true intent […] by orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars.”35 Here he mentions as examples Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Act II , in this reading, may be seen as the next phase: the fall of Rome, the Great Depression, the sinking of the Pequod, and, some would predict, the fall of the Bush plan for world domination. In the first phase, by contrast, like Ahab taking his ship and its multi-ethnic crew on his mad hunt for the White Whale, Pozzo has harnessed only Lucky to his enterprise while, in mock-epic fashion, his whip and camp-stool are shrunken substitutes for the great ship and the lances of the dark harpooneers. In Melville’s subversive epic Moby-Dick, the natural world, represented by the White Whale (which is seen as the axis of evil only from the point of view of the obsessed captain), survives. When the Pequod goes down, the whole crew except for Ishmael, saved by his epiphany among the “submarine bridal chambers and nurseries” of the deep, goes down with it, while the White Whale swims away.36 The finale of Beckett’s play has a somewhat more feeble suggestion of hope. Perhaps the ambiguous tree which, in the second act, seems to have a few green leaves, represents the slender hope that something can still be done to change things. To show how the images used in Godot were gathered from his experiences during the war years though not actually written down until several years later, I offer the following excerpt from the Brief Chronology provided by Virginia Cooke in Beckett on File: 1938–43: Met Suzanne Dechevaux–Dumesnil, who became his companion

and eventually his wife. He began writing poems in French (published as a cycle in 1946). Beckett and Suzanne became active in the French Resistance,

35

Edward Said, “A Window on the World,” Guardian Unlimited: The Guardian Review (2 August 2003): 1–2. 36 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851; Cologne: Könemann, 1995).

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and by 1942 had to flee from Paris to Roussillon, where they lived in hiding until 1944. 1943–45: Still hiding in exile, wrote the novel Watt. At the war’s end, he

returned briefly to Dublin, then joined an Irish Red Cross medical unit which was setting up a hospital in France. 30 Mar. 1945 awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Medaille de la Resistance. 1946–48: Beckett wrote critical essays, the short stories ‘La Fin’ and ‘Suite’,

and began Mercier et Camier, his first novel in French. Oct. 1946, wrote ‘L’Expulse’ and ‘Premier Amour’ (not published until 1970). In 1947 he wrote his first play Eleutheria, and half finished the novel Molloy, followed by its sequel, Malone Meurt. Again, he had trouble finding a publisher. 1949–50 Jan., finished En Attendant Godot “as a relaxation, to get away from

the awful prose I was writing at the time.” He continued to translate for Duthuit’s Transition, for which he also wrote an article about modern art called “Three Dialogues”. Began L’Innommable. Impressed with Roger Blin’s production of Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, Beckett left his manuscripts of Eleutheria and Godot with Blin for possible production.37

This chronology allows us to place the composition of Waiting for Godot not only in the sequence of his other writings, but in the sequence of the political events going on around him in this highly stressful period. The years between 1938 and 1945 saw the triumph of fascism in Spain, the rise of Hitler as his empire spread east and west in Europe, the bombing of Dresden, the London Blitz, the battle of Stalingrad, the German and Italian troops being driven north through Italy, the landing on Normandy Beach, the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and finally the suicide of Hitler in a Berlin bunker, followed by the liberation of the concentration camps. Blocked from expansion in Africa and Asia by British control of the sea, Hitler had elected to carry out his colonial expansion in the living-room of Europe, as Lindqvist points out. “And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.”38

37 38

Virginia Cooke, Beckett on File (London: Methuen. 1985): 8. Lindqvist, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” 172.

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Given this juxtaposition of events with Beckett’s texts, I think it likely that the political dimension of Godot has gone largely unnoticed because, as in the novels which immediately precede (Molloy and Malone Dies) and follow it (The Unnamable), Beckett was consciously working towards an abstraction so complete that, while omitting all specific reference to particular cases of tyrants, his ‘master–slave’ paradigm could be seen as referring to all tyrants. This abstraction in literary art is analogous to the sudden appearance of cubism in graphic art. In her biography of Beckett, Deirdre Bair explains the deletion of a reference to Stalin from the original French text of Waiting for Godot in connection with Beckett’s move towards abstraction. Bair demonstrates that Beckett’s manuscript revisions show that, throughout the shaping of the play’s final version, Beckett became progressively more minimalist, moving away from specific detail towards greater abstraction. For example, in the original text of Godot, the young boy was supposed to bring a letter from Godot to Vladimir and Estragon. Even before rehearsals began, Beckett removed these passages because they presented not the idea of Godot, but Godot himself, which he felt localized the play in concrete exactitude. Well into rehearsals, Bair says, Vladimir and Estragon practised an exchange which included the following: Estragon: avec Blim Vladimir: avec Bom, les comiques staliniens. The passage was one Beckett liked […] He kept it in the text until quite far along in rehearsal, and it was in the first printing of the book, but was subsequently removed. He finally decided that remarks about Stalin destroyed the timelessness of the rest of the dialogue.39

This momentary appearance of a reference to Stalin in Godot and its later excision also show that political considerations were present in the shaping of the play – under the circumstances, it would have been astonishing if they were not. In his analysis of Molloy in Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann draws attention to the “form” of the novel and quotes Beckett’s comments recorded in the interview already referred to by Israel Shenker. This passage, in which Beckett compares his own

39

Bair, Samuel Beckett, 451.

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writing to that of Franz Kafka, shows the importance he attached to the form of Molloy: The Kafka hero has coherence of purpose. He’s lost but he’s not spiritually precarious […] You notice how Kafka’s form is classic, it goes on like a steamroller – almost serene. It seems to be threatened the whole time – but the consternation is in the form. In my work there is consternation behind the form, not in the form. 40

Noting a case in which there is “consternation behind the form” in Beckett’s work, Uhlmann points out a rather sinister phenomenon in Molloy which has escaped the notice of other critics: namely, that Molloy is “composed of two first-person narratives,” which “are apparently not undertaken freely.”41 In other words, Uhlmann believes that the narratives that make up Molloy are reports written under orders, it is not clear from whom, suggesting the de-briefing of a spy or a prisoner. Could Beckett have been imagining what happened to people arrested by the Gestapo, how they were interrogated and, if their answers were unsatisfactory, possibly tortured? Uhlmann’s main concern is to study the transition from “spectacle” as a means of control by the Nazi regime to the use of “surveillance.” Seeing Molloy in this context, Uhlmann believes that, throughout the novel, especially in Moran’s narrative, “consciousness of surveillance is everywhere.”42 Uhlmann points out a reference to Goering in the novel which resonates with the reference to Stalin in Godot: there is one direct reference to World War Two. Sending his son off to Hole because his leg has stiffened in the night, Moran flippantly asks ‘Who is the bicycle for, I said, Goering?’43

Uhlmann points out the implications of this passage: Goering, of course, was responsible for both bringing the Gestapo into being and designing the infamous system of concentration and death camps; Moran’s throw-away line implicitly links him with the Goering he is not (yet, may, 40

Anthony Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P ,

1999): 47. (my emphasis). 41

Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, 47. Beckett and Poststructuralism, 48. 43 Beckett and Poststructuralism, 48. 42

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perhaps resemble, in the eyes of his son.) […] Moran […] works for the oppressive order as a spy, yet he claims to be ignorant of the fate of those he tracks down; it is not his province.44

Uhlmann’s analysis suggests that while the extreme abstraction employed by Beckett omits direct political comment (apart from the two rare cases we have seen: the references to Stalin in Godot and to Goering in Molloy), it nevertheless shows that Beckett was suppressing comment on topical issues of which he was only too conscious, in order to achieve greater universality. Uhlmann recounts war crimes of which Beckett must have been aware, such as harrowing instances of torture inflicted “by members of the French militia who confessed to plucking out the eyes of captured members of the Resistance, placing live may-bugs in their sockets and sowing up the eyelids.”45 In spite of this kind of risk, Beckett said, “you simply couldn’t stand by with your arms folded.”46 Such atrocities were going on all around him in occupied France, and their negative effects had to be countered by Nazi propaganda. Beckett shows how the unsuspecting Vladimir and Estragon react when they witness the brutality with which Pozzo treats Lucky. At first their spontaneous moral outrage is palpable, but it is then quickly deflected by the clever verbal tactics of Pozzo. Pozzo’s first reaction is to change the subject, then to put on an act portraying himself as the victim of Lucky’s abuse. Immediately, Vladimir and Estragon fall for these ploys, and turn from upbraiding Pozzo for his cruel treatment of a human being to castigating Lucky for making “such a good master” suffer. [After Pozzo, a monster of selfishness, has indulged in chicken, wine, pipe, and thrown the bones on the ground] V L A D I M I R : (Exploding) It’s a scandal!

(Silence. Flabbergasted, E S T R A G O N stops gnawing, looks at P O Z Z O and V L A D I M I R in turn. P O Z Z O outwardly calm. V L A D I M I R embarrassed.) P O Z Z O : (To V L A D I M I R ) Are you alluding to anything in particular? V L A D I M I R : (Stuttering resolute.) To treat a man …. no … a human being …. It’s a scandal! 44

Uhlmann, Beckett and Poststructuralism, 48. Beckett and Poststructuralism, 42. 46 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 279. 45

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E S T R A G O N : (Not to be outdone) A disgrace! (He resumes his gnawing.) P O Z Z O : You are severe. (To V L A D I M I R ) What age are you, if it’s not a rude question. (Silence) Sixty? Seventy? (To E S T R A G O N ) What age would you say he was? E S T R A G O N : Eleven. P O Z Z O : I am impertinent.

[There is a long sequence in which Pozzo decides to have another smoke; he is very polite to Vladimir and Estragon; then Vladimir says he is leaving.] V L A D I M I R : (Vehemently) Let’s go! P O Z Z O : I hope I’m not driving you away. Wait a little longer, you’ll never

regret it. E S T R A G O N : (Scenting charity) We’re in no hurry. P O Z Z O : (Having lit his pipe) The second is never so sweet … (He takes the

pipe out of his mouth, contemplates it) … as the first, I mean. (He puts the pipe back in his mouth.) But it’s sweet just the same. V L A D I M I R : I’m going. P O Z Z O : He can no longer endure my presence. I am not particularly human, but who cares? (To V L A D I M I R ) Think twice before you do anything rash. Suppose you go now, while it is still day, for there is no denying it is still day. (They all look up at the sky.)

[Sequence in which Pozzo urges them to stay in case they miss their appointment with Godot.] V L A D I M I R : Who told you? P O Z Z O : He speaks to me again! If this goes on much longer we’ll soon be

old friends.

[Sequence in which Estragon creates a diversion by asking why Lucky does not put down his bags, Pozzo explains that he is taking Lucky to the fair to try to sell him, and Lucky weeps, apparently hurt at the thought that Pozzo wants to get rid of him. Estragon goes to wipe Lucky’s tears away, Lucky kicks him viciously in his shins. We learn that Lucky has taught Pozzo all these beautiful things – “Beauty, grace, truth of the first water.” At this point the dialogue returns to the moral condemnation of Pozzo by Vladimir.]

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V L A D I M I R : And now you turn him away? Such an old and faithful servant? E S T R A G O N : Swine! (Pozzo more and more agitated.) V L A D I M I R : After having sucked all the good out of him you chuck him away Like a … like a banana skin. Really …. P O Z Z O : (Groaning, clutching his head.) I can’t bear it …. the way he goes on … You’ve no idea ... I’m going mad … (He collapses, his head in his hands.) … I can’t bear it … any longer …. V L A D I M I R : He can’t bear it. E S T R A G O N : Any longer. V L A D I M I R : He’s going mad. E S T R A G O N : It’s terrible.

[Notice that here Vladımır completely reverses his moral judgment, in response to the act in which Pozzo pretends to be suffering at the hands of Lucky.] V L A D I M I R : (To Lucky) How dare you! It’s abominable! Such a good

master! Crucify him like that! After so many years! Really! P O Z Z O : (Sobbing.) He used to be so kind … so helpful … and entertaining … My good angel … and now … he’s killing me.

[After a few lines of conversation between Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo recovers himself and denies there was any truth to what he has just said.] P O Z Z O : (Calmer.) Gentlemen, I don’t know what came over me. Forgive me.

Forget all I said. (More and more his old self.) I don’t remember exactly what it was, but you may be sure there wasn’t a word of truth in it. (Drawing himself up, striking his chest.) Do I look like a man that can be made to suffer? Frankly? (He rummages in his pockets.) What have I done with my pipe? V L A D I M I R : Charming evening we’re having. E S T R A G O N : Unforgettable. V L A D I M I R : And it’s not over

[Notice that it is just after the last speech of Pozzo’s above, ending with “What have I done with my pipe,” that the reference to Stalin would have

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occurred in the original French version of the play: where Estragon would have said “avec Blim,” to which Vladimir would have replied, “avec Bom, les comiques staliniens.“ Instead, in the revised text, Vladimir says “Charming evening we’re having.”].47 When discourse analysis is applied to this sequence in Act I of the play, it becomes evident that Vladimir and Estragon witness a play-within-a-play performed by two newcomers in a master–slave relationship. Pozzo controls Lucky at the end of a rope, with great contempt and abuse. Initially the witnesses are shocked and express disapproval of Pozzo’s abuse of Lucky. But when Pozzo cleverly manipulates the moral responses of the two, they almost immediately reverse their judgment, turning on Lucky and castigating him for being cruel to his master. The techniques used by Pozzo are, first, diversion: he does not react defensively or with anger, but asks a completely unrelated question about Vladimir’s age. This trick of changing the subject of discourse is precisely the tactic used by colonial/ imperial authorities to deflect criticism. For example, when, in the months leading up to the Gulf War of 1991, US Congressmen and citizens raised the issue of whether or not the U S A had the moral right to attack Iraq, George Bush Senior, the White House and the Pentagon simply shifted the ground of discussion. Without dealing with the moral question of whether the U S A had the right to attack Iraq, they substituted the practical question of whether or not the US military was ready to attack Iraq. They posed this question to the generals, received an affirmative answer, and proceeded to the massive killing that they called “Desert Storm.” The opposition in the country was unable to organize an effective response; though thousands of people demonstrated against the war, their demands were passed over in almost complete silence by the media. The same tactic was used again in the lead-up to the Second Iraq war, on 14 February 2003, when, in the meeting of the Security Council, the Syrian Foreign Minister clearly, eloquently, and accurately outlined Syria’s opposition to a new USA –U K attack on Iraq, pointing out the inconsistency of finding that Iraq still has to be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction when no mention is made of Israel, which is known to possess all sorts of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, has never allowed inspections, and continues to occupy territory of its neighbours in 47

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (1952; London: Faber & Faber, 1953): 20–28.

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defiance (with U S approval) of UN resolutions. Neither Tony Blair nor Colin Powell so much as mentioned this significant speech, but ignored it and turned the discussion back to the need for immediate military attack, ostensibly to protect the “peace” and security of the rest of the world with another mass-killing operation called “Shock and Awe.” The next tactic used by Pozzo, when Vladimir persists in his moral censure of Pozzo’s treatment of Lucky, is the tactic of “blaming the victim.”48 Frantz Fanon in A Dying Colonialism described this tactic. Indeed, a whole collection of essays has been published under that title by Edward W. Said and Christopher Hitchins.49 This is a well-known tactic of the colonizer and slave-owner, used to confuse the issue and justify brutality towards colonized peoples. Israel customarily blames the Palestinians, branding them “terrorists” when they resist Israeli official state terrorism, the assumption being that they should passively endure arbitrary arrests, land confiscation, house demolitions, assassinations, and destruction of infrastructure without any objections. Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht summarizes this tactic succinctly in The Fate of the Jews when she says, “Zionists executed the psychological coup of the century by taking Palestine from the Arabs and then pretending Jews were Arab victims.”50 In the above sequence in Godot, Beckett shows that Pozzo is keenly aware of the reactions of his audience, and knows exactly how to gain whatever response he wants. He realizes, after having successfully diverted Vladimir’s moral outrage, that Vladimir is speaking to him again. “If this goes on much longer,” he says, “we’ll soon be old friends.”51 Pozzo regains his commanding presence after appearing to break down in anguished sobbing at the abuse he claims to have received from Lucky, now telling his audience not to believe a word of what he has just said. That he has momentarily lost his command over his audience is suggested by the hilarity that breaks out when Pozzo loses his pipe. A succession of different terms for the pipe follows – “pipe,” then “briar,” “dudeen” and “Kapp and Petersen” – ranging from the more formal to the more idioma-

48 Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An Cinq, de la Révolution algérienne; Paris, 1959. tr. New York: Grove, 1965): 41. 49 Edward W. Said & Christopher Hitchins, Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (1998; London & New York: Verso, 2001). 50 Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews (London: Quartet, 1983): 246–47. 51 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 22.

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tic. Why these various terms for pipe should be a source of merriment for Estragon and Vladimir is not clear, though from Mary Junker’s discussion of the shades of meaning of “dudeen” in Gaelic, it seems likely that the two tramps momentarily see Pozzo as an actor putting on a performance. Junker says that “dudeen” is an idiomatic word designating the stump of clay pipe given to mourners at a poor Irish Catholic peasant wake, and so punctures Pozzo’s pretentious names “briar” and “Kapp and Petersen.”52 This sequence leads to Lucky’s speech, not a random burst of words but an important thematic statement at the heart of the drama, which hints at Lucky’s original vocation. We recall that Pozzo says of Lucky that he “carries like a pig,” since that was “not his job.” Since it was once his job to think, rather than to haul and carry like a slave, this outburst is a taste of what Lucky had been trained to do and is now prevented from doing. As soon as he begins his tirade, all three of the other players try to silence him, which explains the frantic speed with which the speech is delivered. Lucky is an Ariel forced by Prospero (Pozzo) to become Caliban. At the centre of the speech is a theological statement, which belongs to the profoundly pessimistic Calvinist Protestant tradition in which Beckett had been raised. G.C. Barnard summarizes Lucky’s speech as follows: Given the existence of a personal God with white beard who loves us dearly (with some exceptions) and suffers with those whom (“for reasons unknown but time will tell”) he has damned and plunged into hell; yet it is certain that man, both potential and actual, wastes and pines; in spite of all our science, medicine, sports and physical culture man shrinks and dwindles. In short, humanity suffers and we know not why.53

Barnard’s contention is that this speech contains a perfectly sane exposition of two problems that have baffled theologians: namely, the problem of evil and the problem of predestination, a contention with which I would agree. The vicious kick in the shins with which Lucky responds to Estragon’s sympathetic attempt to wipe away his tears also takes on meaning from a postcolonial perspective: Frantz Fanon points out in The Wretched of the Earth that at a certain stage of anticolonial struggle the oppressed take out their frustrations on each other, since they can neither understand fully nor 52 53

Junker, Beckett, 61–62. G.C. Barnard, Samuel Beckett: A New Approach (London: Dent & Sons, 1970): 95.

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reach the real sources of their oppression.54 Lucky is (on one level) the stylized representative of those native elites groomed by the colonizing powers to collect taxes and keep order among the natives. The Tutsi minority (chosen by the French perhaps because they were fewer, taller, and slightly lighter-skinned than their Hutu neighbours) served this role in Africa under French colonial rule. When the French were forced to withdraw, the majority Hutus won the ‘democratic’ election and began to take their revenge for years during which the Tutsis, as tools of French colonial power, had helped to oppress their darker Hutu brothers. So the interaction between Lucky and the two well-meaning tramps also mirrors an important reality of victims of imperial oppression; that is, the difficulty of uniting to oppose the real source of their oppression. Further indications of this theme occur in Act II when Estragon and Vladimir decide to “play Pozzo and Lucky”55 and suggest “That’s the idea! Let’s abuse each other!”56 Unlike the postcolonial approach, the psychoanalytic view fails to regard the situation represented in the drama as having a vital connection with reality. Thus Barnard sees no relation to the real world in the Pozzo– Lucky scenes: Actually three other characters do arrive and depart, but they belong to phantasy rather than reality, and such small action as there is in the play is symbolical rather than meaningful in the sense of leading to any result.57

I would argue, to the contrary, that the the Pozzo–Lucky scenes represent in highly stylized form the objective situation which was being acted out globally in a myriad of different conflicts, the totality of which is imperialism culminating in World War II . Although critics initially found it difficult to make sense of Godot, audiences who had experienced oppression soon began to respond intuitively to something profoundly true about it. The response of a Dublin audience, once it was performed in the Irish language, was immediate and enthusiastic, since the Irish recognized 54 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre; Paris, 1961; tr. 1965; University Edition; BirZeit: Department of Cultural Studies, Birzeit, 1980): 151, 204. 55 Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 64. 56 Waiting for Godot, 67. 57 Barnard, Samuel Beckett, 90.

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the colonial English oppression suffered by Ireland for over seven hundred years. For the same reason, it was also immediately understood in prisons, where a series of performances by inmates of San Quentin found an enthusiastic reception.58 As an indication of the inadequacy of the psychoanalytic interpretation to account for the power-relationships in Godot, Barnard is forced to misread the text, reading “knook” as knock” and saying that Pozzo claims to have taken a “knock” which was a sort of psychic shock. However, Mary Junker offers a different interpretation. Her note on the word “knook” reads as follows: The word knook, coined by Beckett from knout (nowt) which is a Russian leather-thonged whip, refers to the master–slave relationship between Pozzo and Lucky. Pozzo has the ‘whip hand’: the typical slave-driver insignia being the whip and the rope.59

The real meaning of the term is essential to understanding the violence of the master–slave relationship in the play.

Catastrophe (1982) The perception that political issues inform both Molloy and Godot receives confirmation in a later play which corroborates my contention that Beckett was keenly aware of political reality and deeply committed to causes involving injustice and violations of human rights. The short play called Catastrophe was written as a contribution to a “group gesture” in support of the Czech playwright and human-rights activist Vaclav Havel. In a letter of 4 April 1982, Beckett wrote to Alan Schneider: “Wrote a short act in French (Catastrophe) for a group gesture toward Vaclav Havel for the Avignon Festival. Not yet translated.”60 Maurice Harmon provides the following information:

58

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 370–71; 540. Junker, Beckett, 80, n.153. 60 Samuel Beckett & Alan Schneider, No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed. Maurice Harmon (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1998): 425. 59

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Catastrophe, dedicated to Vaclav Havel; “group gesture”: A I D A , the International Associates for the Defense of Artists, asked SB among other writers to contribute a piece as part of ‘Une nuit pour Vaclav Havel, Czechoslovakian playwright and eventually President of his country; a strong opponent of the political power then prevailing in his country, he was still a prisoner in 1982.61

The fifteen-to-twenty-minute play has four actors, only two of whom have speaking roles. A Director and his Assistant cooperate in arranging the Protagonist, who is silent, for his appearance, also aided by a silent figure, Luke, who operates the lighting effects. In his biography of Beckett, Knowlson cites as a source for the conception of Catastrophe Beckett’s reading forty years earlier of Judith Paris, a novel by Hugh Walpole, in which an old bear, tormented, chained and bleeding, raises his head and stares at the onlookers: Something very grand entered into him, the grandeur of all captured and illtreated things. He lifted his head and stared from under his jutting brows at the crowd, and was at once with that single movement, finer than all of them (qtd by Knowlson from Walpole’s Judith Paris).62

Beckett’s concern with the imprisonment of a fellow writer, Vaclav Havel, obviously underlies the conception of Catastrophe. For this task, Beckett employs a highly minimalist form, biblical allusions, and images from classical paintings and sculpture. He conceives the figure of the Protagonist as a statue. The stage directions (see Correspondence, in which Beckett explains his wishes to Alan Schneider) call for him to stand barefoot on a “plinth,” like a piece of sculpture. The role of graphic art in Beckett’s dramatic imagination cannot be underestimated and becomes overwhelmingly clear in Catastrophe. Knowlson recounts Beckett’s acknowledgment of a graphic inspiration for Godot. Knowlson quotes Ruby Cohn, the theatre scholar and friend of Beckett, who accompanied the author in 1975 to an exhibition of German Romantic painters. As they looked at a painting entitled Mann und Frau den Mond betrachtend (‘Man and Woman Observing the Moon’) from 1824, Beckett announced unequivocally: “This was the source of Waiting for Godot, you know.”63 61

Beckett & Schneider, No Author Better Served, 425. Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 297–98. 63 Damned to Fame, 342. 62

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Havel had been under house arrest and, at a trial in October 1979, was imprisoned for four and a half years for his political activity. He had been adopted as a prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International, to which Beckett was a contributor. Beckett had signed the Declaration against Martial Law in Poland, and often assisted families of imprisoned writers.64 Knowlson observes: Beckett was appalled to learn that, as part of the punishment for his courageous stand against abuses of human rights, Vaclav Havel had been forbidden to write. This seemed the ultimate oppression. Standing on a ledge outside Beckett’s study window was a small sculpture – a gift from the Russian sculptor Vadim Sidur – as a permanent reminder of the struggle for artistic freedom in a totalitarian regime.65

He indicates in a letter to Alan Schneider that the title is intended in the sense of dénouement.66 Beckett told Knowlson he intended the title “in its more technical, theatrical sense, derived from its Greek roots kata (down), strophren (turn) to allude to the scenes of classical tragedy depicting the downward turn of the protagonist’s fortune.”67 In this brief play, Protagonist stands on a podium, and the Director and his Assistant treat him like an object, gradually exposing his body – stripping him of his gown and hat, rolling up his sleeves and trousers, ordering the whitening of his face, hands, and shins. The Director wears a fur coat and a matching toque, and smokes a cigar (reminiscent of Pozzo’s pipe), and is in a hurry to go off to a “caucus,” suggesting a position of some political power. The Director is contemptuous of the Assistant’s suggestion that the Protagonist might “raise his head … an instant … show his face,” and replies irritably: “For God’s sake! What next? Raise his head? Where do you think we are? In Patagonia? Raise his head? For God’s sake!”68

64

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 595–96. Damned to Fame, 596. 66 Beckett & Schneider, No Author Better Served, 429. 67 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 741. 68 Samuel Beckett, Catastrophe, in The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1986): 460; Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theatre (New York Oxford U P , 1987): 151. 65

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In Enoch Brater’s meticulous discussion of the later plays in Beyond Minimalism, the author is careful to subordinate the political implications of Catastrophe to its aesthetic concerns. Even so, he points out a possible double meaning to “Caucus”: on the surface it suggests a rather ad-hoc political gathering at which important decisions are to be taken, but Brater also allows “its possible allusion to the Caucasus, to Russia, and the 69 K G B .” Surprisingly, however, although it occurs in the same context, the seemingly random reference of the Director to “Patagonia” appears to have escaped his attention. The entire text may be scanned in vain if we are to look for any obvious association with this remote South American region within the play itself. Since it can be safely assumed that Beckett did not wish to conjure up a vacation paradise, the only other possible association which, in the context of the stripping and victimization of an anonymous captive, he might wish to invoke seems to be the long history of brutal colonialist struggle in Patagonia in the course of which indigenous people were and continue to be violently driven from their land. One very recent chapter of this history is the legal battle of United Colours of Bennetton to wrest a sizeable area of land from its native inhabitants. As the light focuses on just the Protagonist’s head, the Director says triumphantly, “This is our Catastrophe. […] Terrific! He’ll have them on their feet. I can hear it from here.”70 Distant applause is heard, applause which falters, then dies, as, despite the scornful opposition of the Director, the Protagonist lifts his head in what Knowlson calls “a gesture of defiance and independent will […] he re-asserts his humanity in a single, vestigial, yet compelling movement.”71 As Brater says, The Protagonist will no longer cooperate. In one autonomous gesture this trooper raises his head, subverting the pathetic little drama prepared for him 72 and performing another of his own liking.

The authorities who imprisoned Havel, Beckett implies, believed that by robbing him of his freedom and silencing his artistic voice, they could make him appear a contemptible object, and hoped to elicit public approbation for their dehumanization of the man, both as resistance fighter and 69

Enoch Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 151. Beckett, Catastrophe, 460–61. 71 Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 596–97. 72 Brater, Beyond Minimalism, 151. 70

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as dramatist. Instead, the intrinsic dignity of the Protagonist, like that of the chained and bleeding bear of Walpole’s novel, silences the applause of the crowd. Knowlson suggests that Beckett also had in mind the Ecce Homo scene in which Pilate in the Gospel of Luke sought to move the crowd by presenting to them the bound and bleeding figure of Christ. Knowlson points to the multilayered allusions of this brief drama, among them the recent images of survivors of the concentration camps, but also the rich tradition of Renaissance religious paintings with which Beckett was very familiar, such as the paintings of the Ecce Homo by Titian and Caravaggio. These painterly associations are interwoven with biblical passages like those invoked directly in Godot, references to the crucifixion of Jesus between two thieves, and less direct allusions such as the reed shaken by the wind, which also find their fullest scriptural treatment in the Gospel of Luke. This biblical passage is obliquely alluded to by Beckett when he names the silent actor who does the stage-lighting, the name Luke being derived from the Latin ‘lux’ meaning light. Of all the scriptural accounts of the crucifixion, Luke’s description of the Ecce Homo scene is arguably the most moving. He has Pilate present to the crowd the stripped, bleeding, suffering Jesus, and says, “Behold, nothing deserving death has been done by him” (Luke 23:13). It is also to Luke that Beckett alludes in Godot, when Estragon and Vladimir are startled by noises just before the first appearance of Pozzo and Lucky: V L A D I M I R : I thought it was he. E S T R A G O N : Who? V L A D I M I R : Godot. E S T R A G O N : Pah’ The wind in the reeds.73

In Luke’s gospel, the passage alluded to occurs in a conversation between Jesus and his disciples concerning John the Baptist. It reads as follows: When the messengers of John had gone, he began to speak to the crowd concerning John: ‘What did you go out into the desert to see? A reed shaken by the wind? What did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? [….] What did you go out to see? A Prophet? Yea, I tell you and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send my Messenger before thy face who shall prepare thy way before thee. (Luke 7:24–25) 73

Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 12.

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I quote this passage at length to confirm Knowlson’s suggestion that, in the figure of the suffering Protagonist, a surrogate for the imprisoned Vaclav Havel, Beckett invokes the Ecce Homo! of St. Luke. In a note on Catastrophe, Knowlson says: “Behind Beckett’s image, even if only obliquely evoked, lie centuries of iconography of the martyred Christ and martyred saints.”74 This judgment can be given full credence in light of the constant recurrence throughout this biography of Beckett’s fascination with and attention to graphic art. According to Knowlson (and Deirdre Bair in her earlier biography), Beckett spent hours in the studios of artist friends (especially that of Jack Yeats) and more hours in the Dublin National Gallery and in art museums in Berlin and elsewhere contemplating paintings by the great masters, including Titian and Caravaggio, both of whom depict the Ecce Homo and of course countless other “martyred saints.”75 Knowlson records a very moving letter from Havel, who communicated to Beckett his appreciation for the play, saying how greatly it had strengthened his spirit in prison: “Beautiful letter in English from Havel, sent from Stockholm. He still in Prague.”76 After he was released from prison, Havel dedicated to Beckett a play called The Mistake.77 How much are we to take Catastrophe as a political statement? Knowlson in effect asks. In this case we have Beckett’s own response: Beckett told me that in referring to what one might describe as the “Grand finale,” a reviewer had claimed that it was “ambiguous.” “There’s no ambiguity there at all,” he said angrily. “He’s saying: You bastards, you haven’t finished me yet!”78

As Beckett was dying, Knowlson says, perhaps the last information to which Beckett was able to respond was news of Havel’s becoming President of Czechoslovakia.79

74

Knowlson, Damned to Fame, 741. Damned to Fame, 140. 76 Damned to Fame, Letter 21 May 1983. 77 Damned to Fame, 598. 78 Damned to Fame, 597. 79 Damned to Fame, 617. 75

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Conclusion Beckett’s work gains in intelligibility when it is read as part of the oppositional tradition outlined in Edward Said’s chapter on “Resistance and Opposition” in Culture and Imperialism. He belongs also to the Irish satirical tradition of Swift and Joyce, as Eagleton suggests. But what differentiates Beckett as a writer of postcolonialism in what is perhaps a unique way is articulated by David Lloyd in his insightful analysis of Beckett’s First Love. Like Joyce and even more vehemently than Joyce, Beckett rejected the project of re-creating Irish identity by attempting to restore the quaintness of the Celtic past and with it the inherently inauthentic Irish self.80 Such a rejection, however, places him in a paradoxical position very similar to that of Swift, who, according to Eagleton, told Pope that “What I do […] is owing to perfect rage and resentment, and the mortifying sight of slavery, folly and baseness about me, among which I am forced to live.”81 Swift, says Eagleton, […] reviles the British for reducing the Irish to slaves, then condemns the Irish for internalizing this slavery, which is at once more and less reason for excoriating the British, and excellent reason for loathing oneself. The Gulliver who is caught on the hop between conflicting cultural norms, whose whole existence is a barely tolerable in-betweenness, is then an appropriate figure for an Ascendancy which was both colonized and colonialist.82

Although Beckett refrained from joining any political party and denied that there was any religious implication to his writing, yet he was a man of such broad culture and deep sympathy that he brought to bear on the spectacle of human suffering images from Scripture, from Dante and from great works of graphic art to embellish his strongly felt depiction of social injustice and human suffering. Beckett disclaimed a philosophy or a religion, but said that he wrote from feeling. In an interview with Gabriel d’Aubarède in 1961, John Fletcher records, Beckett said: I never read the philosophers. I understand nothing of what they write [….] I am not an intellectual. All I am is feeling. I conceived Molloy and the rest of

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Lloyd, “Writing in the Shit,” 55–56. Eagleton, Heathcliff and The Great Hunger, 159. 82 Heathcliff and The Great Hunger, 160. 81

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the day I became aware of my stupidity. Then I began to write the things I feel.83

David Lloyd sees Beckett’s work, starting with his beginning in the 1930s “from the marginal site of a post-colonial nation,” confronting “a new thing that has happened,” then working out of that new condition – which Lloyd takes to be “the breakdown of the object, or, by reverse, that of the subject.”84 That Lloyd regards First Love as the inception of a new vision on the part of Beckett of what had yet to be done is clear from this passage, with which Lloyd’s important essay concludes: His working out of that new condition, by no means complete even in First Love, approaches the threshold of another possible language within which a post-colonial subjectivity might begin to find articulation […] In the meantime, Beckett’s own oeuvre, as inaugurated by First Love / Premier Amour, stands as the most exhaustive dismantling we have of the logic of identity that at every level structures and maintains the postcolonial moment.85

It is my hope that such efforts as this to understand the significance of Beckett’s work from a postcolonial point of view may help to expand the concept of the postcolonial field, since his double cultural marginality makes possible what is perhaps a unique contribution to postcolonial literature. Approached from this perspective, Beckett’s still largely unexplored body of work may add another dimension to what Edward Said describes as “the drama of Yeats’s accomplishment in restoring a suppressed history and rejoining the nation to it.”86 I am convinced that we have not read Beckett with complete understanding and full appreciation until we have looked at his oeuvre from a postcolonial perspective.

83

Fletcher, About Beckett, 71. Lloyd, “Writing in the Shit,” 56. 85 “Writing in the Shit,” 56. 86 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 286. 84

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WORKS CITED Austen, Jane. Mansfield Park (1814; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974). Bair, Deirdre. Samuel Beckett (1978; London: Vintage Random House, 2002). Barnard, G.C. Samuel Beckett: A New Approach (London: Dent & Sons, 1970). Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot (London: Faber & Faber, 1953). ——. “Catastrophe,” in The Complete Dramatic Works of Samuel Beckett (London & Boston M A : Faber & Faber, 1986). ——. Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (London: Calder, 1994). ——, & Alan Schneider. No Author Better Served: The Correspondence of Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider, ed Maurice Harmon (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1998). Brater, Enoch. Beyond Minimalism: Beckett’s Late Style in the Theater (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1987). Cooke, Virginia. Beckett on File (London: Methuen, 1985). Cornwell, John. Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius X I I (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000). Dilks, Stephen, “Voices Out of the Air: Freedom, Death and Constraint in All That Fall,” in Samuel Beckett: A Casebook, ed. Jennifer M. Jeffers (New York & London: Garland, 1998): 81–110. Eagleton, Terry. Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London & New York: Verso, 1995). Esslin, Martin. Absurd Drama (1961; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism, tr. Haakon Chevalier (L’An Cinq, de la Révolution algérienne; Paris, 1959. tr. New York: Grove, 1965). ——. The Wretched of the Earth, tr. Constance Farrington (Les damnés de la terre; Paris, 1961; university edition; BirZeit: Department of Cultural Studies, 1980). Fletcher, John. About Beckett: The Playwright and the Work (London: Faber & Faber, 2003). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). Gordon, Lois. Reading Godot (New Haven C T & London: Yale U P , 2002). Hyland, Paul, & Neil Sammells, ed. Irish Writing: Exile and Subversion (London: Palgrave, 2001). Jeffers, Jennifer M.E. Samuel Beckett: A Casebook (New York & London: Garland, 1998). Junker, Mary. Beckett: The Irish Dimension (Dublin: Wolfhound, 1995). Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997). Lindqvist, Sven. “Exterminate All the Brutes”, tr. Joan Tate (Utrota varenda jävel, 1992; tr. 1996; London: Granta, 2000).

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Lloyd, David. “Writing in the Shit: Beckett, Nationalism and the Colonial Subject,” in Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-Colonial Moment (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1993): 41–58. Lyons, Charles R. “Fin de partie / Endgame as Political Drama,” in Irish Writing: Insights, Exile and Subversion, ed Paul Hyland & Neil Sammells (London: Palgrave, 1991): 188–208. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (1851; Cologne: Könemann, 1995). Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism (1993; New York: Random House/Vintage, 1994). ——, & Christopher Hitchins. Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question (London & New York: Verso, 2001). ——. “A Window on the World.” Guardian Unlimited: The Guardian Review (2 August 2003. http://www.books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084 ,1010417,00 .html Shenker, Israel. “Moody Man of Letters,” New York Times (6 May 1956), Sec. 2: 3, repr. in Fletcher, About Beckett, 69–70. Stoker, Bram. Dracula (1897; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Strauss Feuerlicht, Roberta. The Fate of the Jews (London: Quartet, 1983). Uhlmann, Anthony. Beckett and Poststructuralism (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1999).

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On Invasions, Weeds, and Wilderness The Dutch Imagination of Globalization (thrice) I SABEL H OVING

Introduction: Multiculturality and the Natural Imagination I am not a lover of nature, or of nature imitated, and I steered clear of the park.1

T

H I S S E N T I M E N T is expressed by the unhappy, nervous hero and narrator of the Moroccan–Dutch writer Hafid Bouazza’s novel Salomon (2002). And right he is. Nature, in Bouazza’s dizzying novel, is dangerous – it is uncontrollably invasive. It threatens the shy hero by its sheer vitality.

In the mirages the busy town fluttered like a far-away, immeasurable clothesline. She became unrecognizable. […] The Royal Palace was a miserable heap, on which the mirages played the accordion, it was a vibrating mass of living stone, it seemed to crawl with lizards and frogs who jumped up and down and to and fro on the clinkers, incessantly, while the maddening swarm of pigeons, turned into a grey–black mass, vibrated like flies on a corpse and flamed and melted like asphalt – and stank like asphalt.2 1 Hafid Bouazza, Salomon (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001): 44. My translation of: “Ik ben geen liefhebber van de natuur, noch van imitatienatuur en meed het park.” 2 My tentative translation of Bouazza’s incomparable prose. The original: “In de luchtspiegelingen wapperde de drukke stad als een verre, onmetelijke waslijn. Zij werd onherkenbaar […] Het Paleis was een miserabele hoop, de luchtspiegelingen speelden er accordeon op, het was een trillende massa levend steen, het leek te krioelen van hagedissen en kikvorsen, die op en neer en heen en weer op de klinkers sprongen en dat

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Mirages like these torture the hero, whose mental health is seriously disturbed by the end of a love affair. The very stones of the town come alive, and living beings are transformed into a vibrating mass. The over-sensitive eyes of the narrator perceive both the organic and inorganic cityscape as a threatening, metamorphosing sphere of boundless vitality. In the first sentences of the novel, the narrator warns us that his extreme sensitivity borders on madness, and that the near-madness from which his eerie perception of nature stems is triggered by the presence of women and their capricious sexuality. In elaborate metaphors, the novel compares women to flowers who mutate into plant-like monsters: Tirelessly, the women opened the ever-refreshed flower stands of their charms, shook as hollyhocks just as many flower-bells. Just as many tall statures they shook, while at the same time they projected their thorns […] Were they freshly picked flowers with lumps of earth on their roots, or did they overnight in buckets of water? Yet nothing of this appeared capable of resisting the tortures of the mirage: many-armed, cactus-shaped monsters they became, in the glowing creek. (45)

And in the city’s womb, a caged griffon lies, and the unusual “brooding heat was there to stimulate his growth” (56) – until it rises and destroys the hero’s house.3 At first sight, this perception of nature as gruesome vitality seems nothing but the feverish vision of a mentally disturbed, broken-hearted young Dutch man, who struggles with his intense loneliness amidst the sexual vitality of the Dutch metropolis. However, this approach does not merely testify to individual madness. I will argue in this essay that this evocation of environmental vitality can be read as a perfectly sensible approach to the environment by contrasting it with prevailing Dutch environmental discourses. onophoudelijk, terwijl de gekmakende zwerm duiven een zwartgrijze massa werd, trilde als vliegen op een kadaver en vlamde en smolt als asfalt – en stonk als asfalt” (44–45). 3 My – again tentative – translations of: “De vrouwen openden onvermoeid de immer verfriste bloemenstallen van hun charmes, schudden als stokrozen zovele bloemklokken, zovele rijzige gestalten, maar staken tevens hun doorns uit […] Waren zij versgeplukte bloemen met aardkluiten aan de wortels of overnachtten zij in emmers water? Maar niets van dit bleek bestand tegen de martelingen van de mirage: veelarmige, cactusvormige monsters werden zij in de gloeiende kreek” (45), “broedende hitte was er om zijn groei te bevorderen” (56).

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To prepare the grounds of my argument, I want to make some preliminary remarks about the place of sexuality and interculturality in this alternative approach to the environment. Although it is not immediately obvious, this imagination of the Amsterdam cityscape could be said to express the (cultural) outsiders’ experience of Dutch culture, be they migrants or strangers to the land in other ways. The omnipresence of sexuality and the sexual assertiveness of women in this culture are the main elements to which outsiders react (and many visitors to the Netherlands, whether writers or tourists, testify to being struck by this sexual openness as well). Remarkably, the town’s sexuality intensifies and becomes threatening when the sun (presented as a visitor from abroad) causes a heat wave (38); it is tempting to interpret this as a reference to the intensification of tensions around sexuality and gender that come with multiculturalization. Within the larger context of Bouazza’s work, the novel Salomon can be read as an elaborate effort to find words and images to capture a recurring motif through which this inescapable sexuality is explored: the motif of the evasive otherness of a desired woman who is part of an often alien, always excluding, excessively sexual culture.4 My point is not that Salomon is about the intercultural conflicts surrounding sexuality, far from it – the novel’s scope is much wider, its significance much greater than that. But I do want to argue that the imagination of the natural/cultural cityscape in the novel evokes a whole range of cultural debates current in postcolonial Western societies, in which the issues of sexuality and cultural otherness are intertwined, and that this intertwining is often motivated by certain basic assumptions about nature. Some of the recurring elements in these public debates are central in Salomon, too: apart from the anxious obsession with abundant sexuality, there is fear of the untamed vitality of botanical and animal life, and anxiety about interculturality, fragmentation, and the loss of boundaries. These discourses are governed by specific, often different perceptions of nature. Perhaps the best-known instances of these discourses are the racial theories that developed from the time of the Enlightenment. These theories have resorted to nature to prove the ‘naturally’ inferior character of people from the Orient or the South. Natural metaphors have always 4 The character comes most explicitly to life in “Apollien,” the story about the fated love affair between a young Moroccan man and a self-conscious Dutch girl in Amsterdam.

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been very effective instruments in exploring the great anxieties caused by the effects of colonization, modernization, globalization, and multiculturalization in the West – anxieties that were often translated into anxieties about gender and sexuality, just as they are in Bouazza’s novel. For migrants are still liable to be the target of strategies of racial and ethnic othering; nature still plays a key role in such strategies. If “biological theories of decline were […] the dominant form of social critique” at the end of the nineteenth century, biological and natural discourses are nowadays still used to corroborate other discourses on multiculturalization and globalization, whether by policymakers on immigration, public debaters, or literary and non-fiction writers.5 However, the basic assumptions about nature that structure these present-day discourses differ from those of a century ago. What interests me especially is that, today, even with reference to environmental theorizing alone, there are many competing discourses on nature, all based on different disciplines (from the natural sciences to cybernetics, from economics to philosophy). In the Netherlands at least, the popularity and dominance of these environmental theories are formed less by their cogency than by other, political factors. What is more, as the Dutch environmental philosopher Jozef Keulartz and his colleague Mechtild de Jong point out, there is no sustained intellectual debate concerning the different basic assumptions about nature which govern these theories. This contradictory range of environmental theories is therefore able to furnish participants in the debate on multiculturalization and globalization with completely opposed arguments about nature and the natural. Debaters of all political persuasions will be able to find an argument to naturalize their opinions on multiculturalism. For example, some will say that fundamentalist Muslim migrants threaten the easy pluralism of the Netherlands, just as an invasive species threatens biodiversity (this view amounts to what some call eco-racism).6 Conversely, others may hold that diversity can only benefit from the introduction of new species or cultures.

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Rod Edmond, “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard J. Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2000): 44. 6 Guido Bolaffi et al., Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture (London: Sage, 2003): 82.

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The point I want to make in this essay is that postcolonial and migrant literature can do more than just pick its own arguments and images from the many discourses available and build a story around them. I will show that Bouazza’s work, although referring to a wealth of existing connotations about nature and privileging one specific view of nature over others, is doing something more than just creating a new story. The most innovative literature, which is often migrant literature in the Netherlands today, questions and exposes the unresolved inconsistencies and tensions in and between the discourses on nature that are evoked in the debates about globalization and multiculturalization. I will argue this point by focusing on the concept of ‘diversity’, which lies at the heart of both environmental discourses (biodiversity), and social discourses on the multicultural, globalizing world (managing diversity). Two literary examples from the Netherlands will allow me to show the specific contribution that migrant literature can make to the hopelessly confused debate about “diversity.”

Diversity 1: Bouazza’s Boundless Vitality The first of my two literary examples is Hafid Bouazza’s Salomon. What discourses of nature is Bouazza evoking through his critical imagination of the feminization and sexualization of Dutch multicultural society? What notions of diversity does he imply? I have already argued that Bouazza’s work refers to elements in older racial theories, such as the fear of boundless vitality, but I can now suggest a more precise interpretation. Bouazza’s emphasis on the invasive abundance of city life can be seen as echoing the concern with invasions and floods in public discourses on Dutch multicultural society. Nautical metaphors abound. Migrants are said to flood the country and, as Marlou Schrover pointed out in 2002, many comments speak of the great need to control these inundations to protect the nation from these floods.7 The anxiety that lies behind this discourse is not just related to the centuries-old Dutch fear of the flood. The assumption here is that Dutch society is a limited, closed system that will collapse under the strain of invasions by migrants. This assumption is repeated again and again in most public debates on migration. Listen, for example, to the State Secretary of Justice, who, a few years ago, defended Dutch and European immigration policy 7

In N R C Handelsblad 8–9 June 2002.

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with the following words: “The restrictive immigration policy in Western Europe is directly related to the wish to defend the existing prosperity and to maintain political stability.”8 The argument is that prosperity and stability can only be maintained within a closed system. Within such a context, metaphors like Garret Hardin’s “[overcrowded] lifeboat,” coined in 1974, or even that of “Spaceship Earth,” first used by R. Buckminster Fuller in 1963 and Kenneth E. Boulding in 1965, seem perfectly obvious. Many Europeans are used to thinking along these lines. This discourse goes back a long way, as the Dutch philosopher Hans Achterhuis argues in an influential critique, at least as far back as the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke and Adam Smith after him:9 scarcity is nature’s main characteristic; its carrying capacity is not sufficient for all. In the first half of the twentieth century, this argument was elaborated in new discourses about the environment which opposed earlier mechanistic approaches. In response to the more general scientific revolutions at the beginning of the century (notably Einstein’s theory of relativity) and, later, quantum physics and Big Bang theory, which effected a break with Newtonian mechanicist science, organicist models were proposed which assumed that living organisms, rather than being machines, were hierarchically organized wholes which could not be reduced to the sum of their parts. In Europe and the U S A , this approach was elaborated in theories which understood nature as a self-regulating, efficient system: climax theory and its successor, systems ecology (theories associated with, respectively, Frederic Clements and Eugene Odum). This became the predominant view in the 1970s.10 This holistic, anti-mechanicist, organicist approach did not break with the dualism of mechanicism, however. In its

8

Jeanine Suurmond, Grenzen aan grenzen: Een analyse van politieke debatten over vluchtelingen en migranten in termen van zorg en rechtvaardigheid (Maastricht: Shaker, 1998): 99. (My tr.) 9 And it has been questioned by critical thinkers such as the social ecologist Murray Bookchin and the philosopher, theologian and educationalist Ivan Illich. See Hans Achterhuis, “Scarcity and Sustainability,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1993): 104–16, and Jozef Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur: Kritiek van de radical ecologie (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995). 10 See Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur, and Alan Marshall, The Unity of Nature: Wholeness and Disintegration in Ecology and Science (London: Imperial College Press, 2002) and Matthijs G.C. Schouten, De natuur als beeld in religie, filosofie en kunst (Utrecht: K N N V , 2001).

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most radical form, namely, man is seen as external to nature – a nature which is best left alone to develop its greatest diversity. Moreover, despite these radical changes in the philosophy of the environment, scarcity still appears as the crucial concept whereby the earth remains a closed system, its resources limited, its balanced biodiversity easily destroyed. In the Netherlands, systems ecology – which was strongly influenced by the philosopher Henri Bergson’s anti-mechanicist emphasis on life’s creative vital force – developed through intense debates between writers (notably the famous Dutch writer Frederik van Eeden, 1860–1932), (language) philosophers, lawyers, theologians and mathematicians. These advocates of Dutch systems ecology put their trust in the tendency of every natural community to develop to its fullest potential. By this reasoning, ‘man’ should interfere as infrequently as possible, while nature management should devote itself to limiting the influence of civilization as much as possible. This approach is nowadays still the foundation of the Dutch Junior Nature Association, N J N , and of Dutch governmental nature management.11 A related Dutch theory of the ecosystem, based on cybernetics, assumes that the development of an ecosystem can be predicted, controlled and stimulated, if the mechanisms by which it regulates itself are known. Although this approach has never explicitly guided Dutch nature management, its assumption that well-informed management will produce rich, diverse ecosystems is at the base of the ministerial order to produce a specific Plan for Nature Policy for every province.12 In general, then, systems ecology is as popular in the Netherlands as elsewhere in the world, where its concept of nature and diversity can be recognized in the report on sustainability by the Brundtland committee of 1987, and in the Rio de Janeiro Biodiversity Treaty of 1992. Bouazza’s representation of nature emphasizes its threatening abundance, and as such it seems to echo the Dutch fear of floods. However, a careful reading shows that the approach of Bouazza’s hero to nature is completely different from that of systems ecology. His perception of nature is anything but hat of a balanced ecosystem whose scarce resources are threatened by invading migrants. On the contrary: in his view, nature can 11 Mechtild Dominica Theresa Maria de Jong, Scheidslijnen in het denken over natuurbeheer in Nederland: Een genealogie van vier ecologische theorieën (doctoral dissertation; Delft: D U P Science, 2002), and Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur. 12 Jong, Scheidslijnen, 284.

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never be dominated; it will inevitably burst any dam attempting to hold it back. In this literary universe, space is limitless; its abundant life multiplies itself everywhere. A palace becomes a mass of living stone, teeming with animal life; transformations, mutations and incessant growth characterize city life. This imagining of nature’s abundance not only offers a view of nature that is wildly at odds with the dominant Dutch environmental discourses but it also embraces the notion of the boundlessness of culture: the metropolis is a space where culturally specific views of nature and sexuality collide and mingle (such as the Arabic and the European botanical views of love and passion), producing ever more stories, images, nightmares, and illusions.13 Waving away as irrelevant the idea that migrants invade and destroy the nation’s indigenous cultural diversity, Bouazza’s work suggests that the most pressing issues are those of gender and sexuality. The real problems of the multicultural metropolis originate in the difficulty of managing always intense, always conflicting sexual desires, mind-sets, and relations. If the Western imagination has long preferred to see its cultural Others in the Orient as naturally passive, feminine, and sexual rather than rational, as body rather than mind, as closer to animals than to humans, Bouazza’s novel subverts the original eurocentric argument: his confused hero, sick with the pain of frustrated love, feels overwhelmed by the intensely sexual, feminine Western metropole, where human beings are constantly turning into animals and plants, and where nature always threatens to burst through the thin veneer of civilization. Salomon shows that multiculturalization intensifies the metropole’s sexuality, increasing its potency and multiplying the conflicts and tensions that spring from the collision of emotions about sexuality and gender. Bouazza’s novel is about the tempestuous multiplicity of desire, and as such it can also be seen as a comment on diversity (of desire, of perceptions of nature and sexuality, of the appearances in which life presents itself). His work can even be said to understand unpredictable change and dynamism as the inevitable condition of the multicultural world, and thus as the source of diversity.14 This view stands in stark contrast to the holis13

Ortwin de Graef & Henriette Louwerse, “De alteratie van Amsterdam: Hafid Bouazza’s liefdesgeschiedenissen,” Onverwerkt Europa: Jaarboek voor Literatuurwetenschap 1 (2001): 169–91. 14 This does not mean Bouazza’s work is based on chaos theory or any other environmental theory. His work should, rather, be understood within a transnational context of classical, biblical, and medieval Dutch, European and Arabic cultural traditions.

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tic theories of nature and culture mentioned above, which hold that diversity springs from stability, and that therefore the stability of ecosystems should be protected and stimulated by being left untouched. In one sense, then, Bouazza offers a minority standpoint.15 But that does not mean he is wrong. It makes very good sense to read his intervention in the debate on diversity as a welcome, radical, alternative approach to the mainstream view in environmentalism, for the debate is far from settled. Scientific arguments alone are not capable of deciding the point. If the advocates of holistic ecology are in the majority, this is not because science has proven their theories right. More and more ecologists oppose the notion that nature will always endeavour to reach a stable, harmonious balance with maximum diversity. Research suggests that ecosystems are always reacting to outside influences and should, rather, be characterized as dynamic and unstable. Contrary to the belief that diversity thrives in a stable system, an ecosystem’s stability can even be seen to diminish as populations increase.16 Such empirical findings are now being integrated into new ecological theories influenced by modern scientific insights, such as chaos theory and evolutionary ecology.17 Still, the holistic and organicist champions of stability continue to decide environmental policy in the Netherlands, and beyond. According to some critics, the main reason for their continuing prominence is that their view offers policy makers an opportunity to act.18 For my argument about the Dutch discourses of diversity, however, another remark is even more relevant. As one critic stated with irony, systems ecology is also popular because it offers an attractive holistic rhetoric in

15

Within a literary context, the eager exploration of the boundlessness of life is far from exceptional, though the representation of nature as excessive has different connotations within different literary contexts – compare the Romanticist celebration of nature as an unbridled, vital, life-giving force with the anxious focus in fin de siècle writing on nature’s destructive degenerating forces, which became visible in nature’s unstoppable, uninhibited, and immoral acts of hybrid procreation; see Mary Kemperink, Het verloren paradijs: De literatuur en de cultuur van het Nederlandse fin de siècle (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 2001), and Edmond, “Home and Away.” 16 Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur, 183. 17 Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur, Marshall, The Unity of Nature, and Robert Kirkman, Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2002). 18 Keulartz, Strijd om de natuur; Jong, Scheidslijnen.

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which nature appears as a perfect, harmonious, organic whole. This way of imagining nature is evoked in cultural critiques of present-day mechanized, globalized, multicultural society, where it promises to reintroduce a welcome authenticity that has been lost. The debate about biodiversity, then, is informed by different disciplines, professions, discourses and interests, and this interdisciplinarity makes it very difficult to reach consensus about what is the most accurate and most productive approach to diversity. Let me give an example of a recent conflict between holistic New Ecology (as Keulartz calls it) and liberal multiculturalism, to show how inevitable the collision between these interests and insights is, and how hard it is to decide the debate. Influential Dutch nature conservation organizations are currently engaged in the creation of areas of ‘primeval’ nature. These modern wildernesses are meant to offer the citizens of this densely populated and highly industrialized nation an opportunity to re-experience ‘real’ nature. A recent article on a project to create a truly native forest with only native trees was unexpectedly met with indignation. Should we not see such a project, a reader asked in an outraged letter to the editor, as inimical to society’s duty to strive for multiculturality? The article ‘Alien stock’ was ‘only’ about trees, but the theory on which it is based is suspiciously close to the theory that led, in a now friendly and respected neighbouring nation, to atrocities committed against human beings only some decades ago. Such xenophobia may nowadays only be uttered with restraint when it concerns people. But when it concerns nature it is apparently professed and uttered freely. ‘Love for all that grows and blooms’ is apparently affected by the hatred for migrants and exotics.19

19

N R C Handelsblad (17–18 August 2002): 33 (Hester van Santen. “Vreemde stammen; kweekprogramma moet autochtone bomen redden”) and 25 August 2002 (H.A. Vonder. “Exoten 2”). My translation of “In ‘Vreemde stammen’ [...] ging het ‘slechts’om bomen, maar de theorie waarop het berust leunt wel zeer dicht tegen die welke bij een thans bevriende en geachte buur-natie slechts enkele decennia geleden leidde tot gruwelijkheden mensen aangedaan. Die vreemdelingenhaat waar het mensen betreft mag dan tegenwoordig in beperkte mate geuit worden, waar het de natuur betreft is het kennelijk in bepaalde kringen iets dat beleden wordt en vrijelijk tot uiting komt. ‘Liefde voor al wat groeit en bloeit’ is kennelijk aangetast door allochtonen – of exotenhaat.”

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This reaction shows how much the debate on ‘diversity’ is riddled with ambivalence. While the nature conservation project hopes to counter the loss of diversity by preserving old genetic material, the reader understands diversity as the result of inviting new species and new genetic material into the ecosystem. It is clear that the conflict stems from the difference I signalled above, between understanding diversity as springing from stability, and understanding diversity as the result of dynamic conditions. But it also refers to the vexed issue about whether diversity can be managed at all. The angry reader is right in questioning the assumption that a reconstructed ‘authentic’ wilderness, if left to itself, would be the best condition for diversity. But opening up the environment to migrant species is not a guarantee of diversity, either, as studies of damaging invasive species show. I do not have the space to spell out all the lessons to be learned from this modest case, but I want to offer two provisional conclusions.20 First, the dominant view in Dutch environmental policy may hold that diversity thrives in a closed ecological system, and, for a variety of nonscientific reasons, may continue to do so in the face of evidence to the contrary. But that does not mean that the Dutch public agree. The ways in which the Dutch public experience nature may be different from what the policymakers assume; their experiences of nature may be more varied, and perhaps even less nostalgic. Second, this example suggests that it is very hard to talk about the management of environmental diversity without taking recourse to sociological and cultural arguments, and vice versa. This is not due to some deplorable inability to respect the boundaries of strictly separate discourses. Rather, this intermingling of discourses may spring from the actuality that these discourses are already intertwined with one another. Jonathan Culler once suggested that new theoretical insights often occur when a theorist borrows a concept that was developed within the con-

20

Such as the observation that, in general, invasive species become pests only if the receiving ecosystem’s diversity has already been destroyed, and turned into a vulnerable monoculture (as in large-scale agriculture); see Chris Bright, Life Out of Bounds: Bio-Invasions in a Borderless World (London: Earthscan, 1999). Let me add that the letter-writer is not right in accusing the author of the article or the advocates of the project of xenophobia or racism. Indeed, one of the speakers quoted in the article tries to undo the xenophobe dichotomy between natives/aliens, and the other speakers offer a variety of views on diversity.

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text of one discipline to use it in another.21 Such interdisciplinary translations are illuminating, even if they are not the conscious translations of interdisciplinary scholars. They may bring to light unexpected dimensions in the holistic environmental theories I have discussed. History offers instructive examples of what happens when early twentieth-century holistic theories are translated into insights in the nature of man and society. To put it bluntly: the holistic view has been used to defend isolationist, monocultural, nostalgic, and downright totalitarian notions of society. Keulartz points out that the holistic assumption that the interests of the community (the ecosystem) are more important than those of the individual might explain the relation between these organicist models and destructive totalitarian ideologies, such as national socialism.22 My discussion offers a less dramatic example of the interdependence between the environmental discourse on nature as a harmonious, stable, closed universe, where diversity thrives, and the Dutch debates on multicultural society. But just as in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, those involved today in the debate on culture are still reaching out to natural discourses to find arguments. Because the interdependence between natural and cultural discourses on diversity is inescapable, I think the debate about multiculturalization and globalization would benefit from discursive alternatives to the highly attractive, romantic, holistic images of indigenous nature as a bountiful stable entity, threatened only by human intervention. This is the very point made by Rom Harré and his colleagues in their 1999 study Greenspeak, about the inadequacies of environmental discourse.23 But where to look for such alternative discourses about nature’s diversity? The problem is that the new environmental theories in which diversity is linked to dynamics are hardly ever taken up in everyday speech. However scientifically sound they may appear, they do not offer inspiring rhetoric, nor do they offer guidelines for ethical behaviour. Should we, then, turn to literature for alternative discourses? Bouazza’s work does offer an alternative view, but it can hardly count as an effective, coherent 21 Culler, Jonathan, “Introduction: What’s the Point?” in The Point of Theory, ed. Mieke Bal & Inge E. Boer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 1994): 13–19. 22 Biehl & Zimmerman, referred to in Marshall, The Unity of Nature, 249. 23 Julian Walker makes the same point in his 2003 essay “The Language of Encroachment.”

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counter-discourse. This may be a disappointing conclusion to those who expect the new postcolonial and migrant literatures to do what everyday speech cannot do: offer productive new imaginings of diversity. But that is simply not how literature works. In contrast to those theorists of globalization who hold that we need new images to grasp the multicultural, global world, and that art might provide such images, I want to argue that migrant writing often refuses the task of providing such imaginings.24 Bouazza’s novel, however, offers something that is at least as valuable. By playing with different elements from a range of colonial, modernist and Arab discourses about nature, it exposes and maximizes tensions within Dutch multicultural society. This might be a far more relevant task than fashioning a new, conscientiously realist image of diversity. My second and last literary example will serve to argue this point in a different way: that is, that such representations are perhaps not even desirable.

Diversity 2: Ombre’s Anti-Globalist Narratives of Diversity The short stories of the Surinamese–Dutch writer Ellen Ombre make their point by focusing on a quite different aspect of the debate about biodiversity: the economic and political contexts of globalization. In addition, they seem to build on a specifically Caribbean notion of the interrelatedness of the global world. Their references to economics and politics, nevertheless, have great impact on their structure and style. In one of these stories, the heroine’s mother sighs that Europeans have so much more admiration for Surinamese nature than the locals do: “Those people value our natural environment more than we do ourselves,” my mother said, while she was cultivating plants in pots and complaining about how hard it was to obtain large Planta-margarine tins for her gerberas. (8–9)

But the father shrugs. “Who cares. Nature! We were taught not to love this country” (9).25 And he goes on to argue that Europeans often soon tire of their initial aesthetic enthusiasm. This conversation is interrupted 24

Arjun Appadurai, Globalization (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). My translation of “‘Die mensen hebben meer waardering voor onze natuur,’ zei mijn moeder toen die planten in potten kweekte en zich beklaagde dat het zo moeilijk was om aan grote Planta–margarineblikken te komen voor haar gerbera’s [...] ‘Ach wat, natuur, het is ons afgeleerd om van dit land te houden’” (8–9). 25

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by the narrator’s comment about the mother busying herself with her home-grown plants. For that purpose, as the quotation shows, she once used the big tins of a certain brand of margarine. However, this margarine is now no longer for sale, after it apparently all but poisoned whole families. The spoiled product had been dumped in Surinam by the Netherlands, a depressingly familiar destructive commercial strategy that marks the relations between North and South. The mother now complains that the new butter tins are too small for her cultivating needs. Her effort to create natural diversity in her little potted garden is frustrated by the Surinamese resistance to exploitative global economics. In this ironic manner, Ombre locates the debate about nature in the context of global trade. Thus, a new aspect of the debate about diversity comes to light. Biodiversity has nowadays become an economically quantitative notion instead of a qualitative concept. It is conceptualized and traded as a resource; old genetic varieties are turned into market commodities.26 Nature is thus changed from boundless variety into a provider of marketable resources, thus creating scarcity. However, the example of the mother’s need for the global market to create biodiversity shows that there is no easy way out. Nostalgic musings about a return to authentic nature would be a particularly useless response. Popular holistic discourses on biodiversity cannot serve as an alternative, because these depart from the assumption that an ecosystem is a balanced whole. Nevertheless, the desire-inspired projection of coherence onto nature’s diversity is very close to the desire for unification in the discourses and the strategies of the global market that Ombre criticizes. Even if Ombre’s stories are concerned with exploring cultural diversity, and the need to find better ways to manage multiculturalism, her narrative style questions the desire to find a coherent discourse by means of which to represent the diversity of multicultural society – to the point of questioning the possibility of representing this diversity at all. This is made explicit in a story about a young Hindu girl from Surinam who marries in Holland amidst a confusion of desires, fears, cravings, rituals, consumer products and status symbols from all over the world. One sentence is repeated in this short text, narrated in fragments: “It is not easy to 26 Christine von Weizäcker, “Competing Notions of Biodiversity,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, ed Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1993): 117–31.

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capture everything in one image. It is too much at once” (101).27 Ombre’s fragmented narrative echoes this as if it were a writer’s statement. I read this reluctance to create a coherent image as a critique of unifying discourses of diversity, such as the dominant discourse of globalization mentioned above. The diverse elements of the multicultural experience, namely, can only be brought together in one image when they are treated as quantitative entities. And that, of course, is precisely what happens in the global market that Ombre criticizes. Polemically, Ombre’s aesthetic emphasizes the incommensurability of all these events and things. Cultural diversity cannot be quantified. With this statement, Ombre addresses and criticizes the dominance of the economic discourse of diversity (including its key concept, scarcity). In addition, she shows that even the art of literary writing is implicated in this economic discourse, and thus cannot but respond (however critically or unsatisfactorily) to its unifying aesthetic. Let me make it quite clear that Ombre’s work is not just responding to dominant political and economic discourses and narratives. Her response is inspired by the Caribbean idea of the interconnectedness of all spaces and identities in the world, which does not lead to a harmonious whole but can nevertheless be understood only after accepting the untranslatable complexity of every specific local place or identity, which is shaped by its relationship to other spaces. Such incommensurable plurality can never be represented in its totality. This idea, most explicitly articulated in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, which builds on phenomenological notions, is sometimes expressed in such natural metaphors as the mangrove. Ombre’s narrative style also seems to be inspired by the notion of an incommensurable plurality. However, her understanding of this plurality is not built on phenomenological notions of the irreducible, non-generalizing, infinite character of totality (as in Levinas, and to a certain extent also in Glissant) but, rather, on a political critique of the reductive and generalizing logic of the global market, which translates all qualities into quantities. The economy and politics are therefore ever-present dimensions in Ombre’s writing. Her writing interweaves a mother’s nostalgic exclamations about nature with stark economic analysis, and with reports of (neo)colonial bluntness and migrant naivety. Thus, Ombre’s stories

27

My translation of “Het is niet eenvoudig alles in beeld te vangen. Het is te veel tegelijk” (101).

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show that no discourse is able to capture the painful complexity of globalization, and that no discourse can escape this intertwining.

Conclusion Literature plays a unique role in this complex of intertwined discourses about diversity – it can be said to be the privileged third discourse alongside the environment and politics. Literature shows new ways of exploiting earlier discourses on nature. By picturing the Western metropole as a sexualized, threatening, but endlessly vital space, Hafid Bouazza evokes colonialist, (post)modernist and certain classically Arab ways of using natural images to address issues of sexuality. In this way, he implicitly criticizes the restricted view of nature as scarce, limited, and predictable, as advocated by Dutch environmentalists. In addition, he offers a different approach to multiculturalization by bringing out the crucial role played by sexuality and gender in the conflicts of the multicultural metropole. Ellen Ombre combines her sharp critique of economic discourses of biodiversity with an aesthetic of fragmentation that counters the ideology of coherence created by the global market. At the same time, her aesthetic seems to be inspired by a Caribbean poetic of diversity through which she can imagine the interconnections between all the incommensurable elements of globalization. These writers do not offer a recognizably new and coherent view of environmental concerns. But their readers are rewarded by a clear insight into the conflictual entanglement of the various discourses about diversity, and into the many gaps in the Western European and North American ability to imagine multiculturality and globalization.

WORKS CITED Achterhuis, Hans. “Scarcity and Sustainability,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, ed. Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1993): 104–16. Appadurai, Arjun. Globalization (Durham N C : Duke U P , 2000). Bolaffi, Guido, et al. Dictionary of Race, Ethnicity and Culture (London: Sage, 2003). Bouazza, Hafid. Salomon (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2001). Bright, Chris. Life Out of Bounds: Bio-Invasions in a Borderless World (London: Earthscan, 1999). Culler, Jonathan. “Introduction: What’s the Point?” in The Point of Theory, ed. Mieke Bal & Inge E. Boer (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 1994): 13–19.

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Edmond, Rod. “Home and Away: Degeneration in Imperialist and Modernist Discourse,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard J. Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester & New York: Manchester U P , 2000): 39–63. Glissant, Édouard. Poétique de la Relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). Graef, de Ortwin & Henriette Louwerse. “De alteratie van Amsterdam: Hafid Bouazza’s Liefdesgeschiedenissen,” in Onverwerkt Europa: Jaarboek voor Literatuurwetenschap 1 (2001): 169–91. Harré, Rom, Jens Brockmeier & Peter Mühlhäuser. Greenspeak: A Study of Environmental Discourse (Thousand Oaks C A : Sage, 1999). Jong, Mechtild Dominica Theresa Maria de. Scheidslijnen in het denken over natuurbeheer in Nederland: Een genealogie van vier ecologische theorieën (doctoral dissertation; Delft: D U P Science, 2002). Kemperink, Mary. Het verloren paradijs: De literatuur en de cultuur van het Nederlandse fin de siècle (Amsterdam: Amsterdam U P , 2001). Keulartz, Jozef. Strijd om de natuur: Kritiek van de radical ecologie (Amsterdam: Boom, 1995). Kirkman, Robert. Skeptical Environmentalism: The Limits of Philosophy and Science (Bloomington: Indiana U P , 2002). Marshall, Alan. The Unity of Nature: Wholeness and Disintegration in Ecology and Science (London: Imperial College Press, 2002). Ombre, Ellen. Vrouwvreemd (Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1994). Sachs, Wolfgang. Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict (London: Zed, 1993). Schouten, Matthijs G.C. De natuur als beeld in religie, filosofie en kunst (Utrecht: K N N V , 2001). Suurmond, Jeanine. Grenzen aan grenzen: Een analyse van politieke debatten over vluchtelingen en migranten in termen van zorg en rechtvaardigheid (Maastricht: Shaker, 1998). Walker, Julian. “The Language of Encroachment,” in Nature and Nation: Vaster Than Empires, ed. Anne Eggebert & Polly Gould (London: The London Institute/Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, etc., 2003): 115–22. Weizäcker, Christine von. “Competing Notions of Biodiversity,” in Global Ecology: A New Arena of Political Conflict, ed Wolfgang Sachs (London: Zed, 1993): 117–31.

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discussions of postcolonial texts have tended to focus on the writer and his or her context, rarely on the reader’s context. Where context is considered, the reader is assumed to be either a member of the writer’s nation, as in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, or, more frequently, a generalized cosmopolitan Westerner. Thus, in Graham Huggan’s The Postcolonial Exotic or Timothy Brennan’s At Home in This World, it is taken for granted that the reader is European or American, and there is little differentiation between kinds of Western readers. As a result, there is an implicit assumption that the texts may be read in one way, that there is a kind of homogeneous or universal reading. Thus Graham Huggan declares that Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart “implicitly address[es] a Western model reader who is constructed as an outsider to the text and to the cultural environment(s) it represents.”1 Where there is diversity or ambiguity of meaning, many critics assume it to be a property of the text rather than a consequence of diverse readerships. Indeed, those diverse reader responses may coexist to varying degrees in the same person, and I will argue that the construction of a multiple or hybrid reader is one of the properties of many postcolonial texts, whether they originate in Ireland, Africa, or the Indian subcontinent. Thus, I seek to raise a number of questions about the complexities surrounding the readers of postcolonial texts, and the varieties of readings and responses that may then emerge. For example, how does an ‘inside 1

NTIL RECENTLY,

The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): 46.

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reader’s’ response to a text differ from that of an ‘outside reader’? That is, how might an Igbo or a Nigerian reading of Things Fall Apart differ from an English or North American or Danish one? How does a British reader’s response to Les Murray’s poetry differ from mine, as an Australian with a similar rural and urban background to Murray’s? Or how might readings of James Joyce’s Ulysses differ between that of his contemporary Irish audience and that of present-day Englishmen and women? And, even given readers with similar national or ethnic identities, how does the context in which the book is published and read alter their responses? To some extent one could give sociological answers to these questions by carrying out multiple surveys and checking reviews, but this is a speculative essay, suggesting problems and issues rather than seeking to provide a survey and supply statistical data. My argument is that many anticolonialist and postcolonial writers differ from English, American and European modernist and postmodernist writers in their sense of a double audience, one existing as an immediate community within or identified with the colonized people, the other an outside or metropolitan readership, often connected with the colonizer. For the immediate community, reading might be largely an act of recognition and bonding; naming of people and places or allusions to them, and specific idioms (or the use of “nation language,” in Kamau Brathwaite’s term) become an assertion and (re-)creation of this intimate inside community. Thus the small group of people who originally received copies of Yeats’s “Easter 1916” from its privately printed run of twenty-five copies did not need to be told the names; they knew who was being referred to by “That woman who rode to harriers,” “This man who kept a school,” “This other his helper,” “This other who seemed a drunken vainglorious lout.” Among the ways in which the participants in the Easter Rising have “changed, changed utterly” is that they become not only members of an inside community but also members of an outside community, for which they become merely the names invoked at the end of the poem. (One might note that women remain barred from that outside community; “that woman,” although she is the first to be described, is not named in the final stanza along with “MacDonagh and MacBride / And Connolly and Pearse.”) Thus “Easter 1916” in part commemorates the changing status of Ireland from colonized and marginalized community to the status of nation that speaks its own history and names its own heroes.

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Although James Joyce’s Ulysses makes a more oblique response to the Easter 1916 Rising and its aftermath, it nevertheless presupposes an inner audience, acquainted with the cultures and persons involved in the Rising, and responding to Joyce’s parodic version differently from readers less inwardly acquainted with those events. As W.J. McCormack has pointed out, Ulysses is an historical novel,2 and its Irish readers would have been particularly aware of the gap between the Ireland of 1904, when the novel is set, and the Ireland of 1922, when it was published The “Cyclops” episode, in particular, is likely to create an awareness for its Irish readers of the differences between then and now. The cultural and political world represented in 1904 by “Citizen” Michael Cusack, the Gaelic League, and the Gaelic Athletic Association had now been overlaid by the fearful bloodshed of World War I, the Easter Rising and subsequent executions, the elections that brought Sinn Fein to power in Ireland, the declaration of Irish Independence, the fierce fighting between the Irish Republicans and the British Black and Tans. In this context, the romantic and racially based nationalism espoused by the Citizen is brought into question and seen as one of the sources of the performance of the Rising and the defects of its ensuing narration. More specifically, Joyce parodies the narration of events surrounding Robert Emmet’s execution, and his role as a model for twentieth-century rebels. Leader of a failed Irish rebellion in 1803, Emmet is invoked and recalled frequently throughout Ulysses. Irish readers would be quick to recognize the events and the restaging of events (there existed at the time some forty plays and numerous ballads and popular novels with Emmet as the central character).3 He was a role model for Padraic Pearse, who spoke thus of him in relation to the ideology of St Enda’s, the school Pearse founded: Here at St Enda’s we have tried to keep before us the image of Fionn during his battles – careless and laughing, with that gesture of the head, that gallant, 2

W.J. McCormack, “Nightmares of History,” in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W.J. McCormack & Alastair Stead (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982): 88. 3 For a description of some of these works, see Maureen S.G. Hawkins, “The Dramatic Treatment of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran,” in Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature, ed. S.F. Gallagher (Irish Literary Studies 14; Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983): 125–37.

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smiling gesture, which has been an eternal gesture in Irish history; it was most memorably made by Emmet when he mounted that scaffold in Thomas Street, smiling, he who had left so much, and most recently by those three who died at Manchester. I know that Ireland will not be happy again until she recollects that old proud gesture of hers, and that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing a gibbet.4

This particular speech about Emmet was made by Pearse in 1913, and the scenario is reiterated in other speeches around the same time. Lennox Robinson’s play about Emmet, The Dreamers, which represents the hero in a similar light, was staged in Dublin in 1915. Emmet’s marriage to Sarah Curran on the eve of his execution may well have inspired one of the 1916 rebels, Joseph Plunkett, to wed his fiancée, Grace Gifford, the day before he was executed for his part in the Easter Rebellion. Joyce and his Irish readers must surely have had both the Easter Rebellion and the post-1904 iconography of Emmet in mind when writing or reading the parodic account of Emmet’s death in the Cyclops episode: She would never forget her hero boy who went to his death with a song on his lips as if he were but going to a hurling match in Clonturk Park. […] Oblivious of the dreadful present, they both laughed heartily, all the audience, including the venerable pastor, joining in the general merriment.5

Joyce’s burlesque of this sentimentalized and romantic heroism speaks to a European and American audience which has seen the deaths of thousands of young men in World War I; but it speaks more directly and intimately to an Irish audience which has witnessed the replaying of Emmet’s story on the streets of Dublin, and would have recognized the Easter rebellion in that context, and indeed in the wider context of a series of heroic martyrdoms and rebellions, remarked by Leopold Bloom in his dispute with the citizen about “the point, the brothers Sheares, and Wolfe Tone beyond on Arbour Hill and Robert Emmet and die for your country, the Tommy Moore touch about Sarah Curran and she’s far from the land.”6 Bloom’s detailed consciousness of Irish history, culture and 4

Quoted by Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London: Faber & Faber, 1979): 177. 5 James Joyce, Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986): 254. 6 Ulysses, 251.

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places, his consciousness of himself as an Irishman rather than an ‘Other’, unites him with the Irish readers of Ulysses and the community depicted by Joyce. Writing Ulysses in the years between 1914 and 1921, Joyce may have wished to construct an Irish readership which would be ready to identify Bloom as one among themselves, and to reject as they recognized it, an outdated and xenophobic nationalism which was unable to acknowledge Bloom as an insider. It might also be a readership growing towards the affirmation of Ireland as an independent nation, writing and reading itself into its own version of history. However, while Joyce provides a critique (via the Citizen and others) of Irish readings of their history and culture, he also sets up a model and implicit critique of readings by outsiders, and contrasts ‘outsider’ readings with the responses of an ‘insider’ Irish community. For Joyce’s Irish contemporaries, the act of reading Ulysses was in many ways an act of recognition, the retracing, hence sharing and repossession, of familiar places, names and persons. The novel is peopled with actual Dubliners, with familiar figures, and is full of passing references to well-known places, anecdotes, and events. Some are explicitly named (like Eglinton, George Russell, Best, and Nanetti – who was to become Mayor of Dublin); others like Buck Mulligan and the Citizen are given names and characteristics which disguise only to reveal. Ulysses is a novel for which inside knowledge and authority as a reader comes from being part of a community, which Joyce seeks to extend but also to define. In this novel, Haines, the Englishman who is Stephen’s unwelcome fellow-lodger in the Martello Tower, is not only a caricature of the English imperialist, with his nightmares about guns and panthers, his collecting of folklore and his amateur anthropological and philological interests, he is also a figure of the excluded or outside reader, who fails to ‘get’ Stephen’s jokes or to understand the nuanced references in the speech and chatter of the Dublin community. The distinction being made here between Haines as ‘excluded’ or outside reader and the insiders who share jokes and understanding to which he has no access has to do with ‘constructed’ or fictional readers, rather than ‘real’ ones. The issue of Joyce’s actual readership is a complicated one; nevertheless, it could be argued that Joyce sets up a tension between a number of implied readers and his actual readers – if only in terms of engagement and disengagement. In seeing how Haines ‘misreads’ Mulligan, Stephen, the old woman who brings the milk, we can

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perhaps become more nuanced readers ourselves. Many critics have shown the significance of the multiplicity of voices in Ulysses, and have commented in various ways on the problem of locating an authoritative voice in this novel. A corollary of the multiplicity of voices and the question of the authoritative speaker is the multiplicity of listeners and the question of the authoritative reader. Ulysses is a book noteworthy for the number of listeners who inhabit it, and for the number of scenes that draw attention to the listener hovering on the margins of conversations. In the first two episodes of the novel, Stephen suffers the chatter of Mulligan, the earnest commentary of Haines, the preaching of Deasy, the halting mistranslations and misreadings of his pupils; he himself says remarkably little, although his silent responses to Mulligan, Haines and Deasy suggest how we should read what they say. In the ninth episode, Stephen is heard, but he also frequently overhears himself, and at certain points nudges his readers towards sceptical detachment from his autobiographical readings of Shakespeare. Indeed, this central episode in the Dublin National Library is as much about reading and misreading as it is about authorship, whether of Shelley, Shakespeare, or Irish writers. The “Aeolus” episode, set in the Newspaper offices, also shows Stephen and Bloom as listeners and readers, both at times seeking to insert themselves into the community of speakers. John Nash has demonstrated the interplay and clash between modes of writing displayed in this episode, and Joyce’s use of the London Times as a source for news which reveals here and in the Cyclops episode the novelist’s awareness of London as a centre of empire.7 But this chapter also invokes a series of readings dependent on ‘insider knowledge’ which is unavailable to Londoners. Beginning with that resounding phrase “In the heart of the Hibernian metropolis,”8 with its playful insistence on Dublin as a centre, not only of paralysis and a mimic culture, but also of a history and “Hibernian” counter-culture of its own making, Irish metropolitan readers find themselves in an almost entirely known world, amidst a familiar series of place names and a group of speakers who assume both a mastery of Greek, Latin and Judaeo-Christian oral and written cultures 7 John Nash, “‘Hanging Over the Bloody Paper’: Newspapers and Imperialism in Ulysses,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester U P : 2000): 175–96. 8 Ulysses, 162.

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and an insider knowledge of Irish history and affairs. The references to lines from “The Boys of Wexford,” a ballad well known to Irishmen and women, to the Wild Geese, Isaac Butt, [James] Whiteside, John Philpott Curran, the mass meetings held by Daniel O’Connell, news sheets such as Paddy Kelly’s Budget and The Skibbereen Eagle 0150 all invoke a specific national history and culture which have little or no meaning for readers outside Ireland. The anecdote narrated by Myles Crawford about the reporting of the Phoenix Park assassinations in coded form, whose decoding depended on access to the Irish Freeman’s Journal and a ready knowledge of Dublin’s streets and suburbs, can be seen as a paradigm for the reading of many sections of Ulysses, in which incidents, name, and phrases signify differently for Irish and non-Irish readers. The effect is not to make those sections meaningless to those who do not share the knowledge of Irish place and history; it is, rather, to create an awareness among Irish readers of a shared knowledge and history, over which they have authority and mastery, and which non-Irish readers must be taught.9 But this tactic of writing in the outside reader is found not only in Ulysses or other Irish texts. In different ways, he (and it is usually a he) appears in many other anticolonialist and postcolonial novels and plays. The District Commissioners in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God are comparable to Haines in their misreading of ‘native’ culture, and as with Haines their misreading depends partly on an anthropological approach to the world they observe. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat recalls for Kenyan readers a particular understanding of Kikuyu history and culture from which the English administrator, Thompson, is excluded. In these African novels, as in Ulysses, the role of the outsider as a misreader of the culture also functions to encourage the actual readers to disengage themselves from the constructed misreading allocated to the English administrators At the same time, the use of Igbo or Gikuyu words and references, the construction of an inner audience which belongs to a specific village community and which is aware of a history that often remains slightly mysterious to outsiders, gives Igbos and Kiku-

9

For a fuller discussion of Joyce and Yeats in relation to their appeal to a double audience, see my essay (from which some paragraphs have been excerpted here) “Modernism, Ireland, and Empire: Yeats, Joyce and Their Implied Audiences,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 137–55.

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yus (and, at a further distance, other Nigerians, Kenyans, and Africans) a sense of authority and community. As Graham Huggan points out, the construction of the insider or ‘insider knowledge’ in novels such as Things Fall Apart is by no mean uncomplicated, for the question of who speaks for the local culture and who interprets it is clearly bound up with questions of power and production.10 Anthropological discourse is both presented and questioned in this novel. One could argue that Arrow of God takes the issue of the relationships between power and knowledge, authentic histories and their interpretation further – indeed, the question is central to the novel and the contests between the two priests and the relationship between Ezeulu and Winterbottom and Clarke, all of whom claim to speak truths sanctioned by an outside and higher authority, divine or imperial. And whereas the failure of the outsider in Things Fall Apart lies in his arrogant dismissal of Igbo institutions as merely primitive, the failure of Clarke and Winterbottom also comes through their unwillingness to acknowledge or even conceive of the complex divisions and power struggles, personal and political, within that particular Igbo society, and their assumption that one model (indirect rule as applied to the North) is appropriate for all of Nigeria. Thus, one aspect of outsider reader characters, whether Haines or a District Commissioner, is their generalization from particular individuals to judgements about the group as a whole. Haines views the woman who brings the milk as representative of Irish-speaking peasant folk; the District Commissioner sees Okonkwo’s behaviour, regarded as aberrant by the members of his own clan, as useful for drawing conclusions about all Africans. In this aspect, one might regard Fredric Jameson’s much-debated essay describing Third World texts as “national allegories”11 as a more contemporary example of outsider reading practice. Jameson’s argument that all Third World texts are to be read as national allegories assumes that characters and plot represent a whole nation’s values and history– in other words, the native writer and his or her characters become native infor10

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 46. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature and the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 5 (1986): 65–88. For a recent defence of Jameson’s essay as a base for constructing a more sophisticated hermeneutics of postcolonial texts, see Julie McGonegal, “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory and the Always-AlreadyRead Third World Text,” Interventions 7:2 (2005): 251–65. 11

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mants who speak for the race or society as a whole. Not only does his argument ignore the very contested nature of ‘the nation’ in most Third World countries (one would have thought that the Civil War in Nigeria would have been caution enough against such homogenizing), but it also ignores the different kinds of fiction produced within those so-called Third World countries. It is the case, of course, that some writers set out to produce allegories of the national condition and its past: Sembène Ousmane’s Xala, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, and Salman Rushdie’s Shame could be considered examples. However, as Aijaz Ahmad vehemently affirms, their work is by no means typical of the majority of fiction and drama produced in Africa and the Indian subcontinent.12 But, as Graham Huggan points out, the marketing of African fiction contributes to the construction of it as ‘Other’, as works providing anthropological understanding that will reinforce Western preconceptions about Africa, rather than aesthetic pleasure, or sympathetic identification, or even political comprehension. Huggan takes the Heinemann African Series as the prime example of such marketing, which, in his view, “has often shown symptoms of the controlling imperial gaze,”13 with book covers that are claimed to emphasize their status as African and primitive. To some extent there seems to be an elision here in Huggan’s own thinking, between drawings which are clearly African and images which are primitive, for it is the case that some of Africa’s leading and most talented and sophisticated artists were employed to illustrate the covers. Nor does he take sufficiently into account the role of African writers such as Chinua Achebe, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Adewala Maja–Pearce as general editors of the series.14 And although he acknowledges the enormous readership that the series gained within Africa, he still maintains that the series and the novels selected suggest mainly the desire to reflect a Western concept of Africa back to Western readers. What Huggan seems to ignore is the hybrid culture of readers within Africa or India, the fact that they will

12

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992):

95–122. 13

Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic, 52. Sadly, it has been announced recently that Heinemann International will no longer produce the African Writers Series, and so is lost what has been a significant outlet for new writers from the African continent. 14

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all have had access to European literatures, films, advertising, and systems of knowledge, including those influenced by anthropology, as well as indigenous cultures and systems of knowledge. It is this hybridity or double consciousness that African and other postcolonial writers acknowledge as the diverse reading practices and backgrounds within each local reader, and which arguably their works seek to develop in the outside reader. In other words, their texts seek to encourage outsiders to become not observers, but more like insiders, and to recognize the interplay as well as the ironies which exist in such a double consciousness. Salman Rushdie’s novels also include a wealth of reference to Indian cultures, characters and histories which will be more readily recognizable to readers from the Indian subcontinent that to English or American readers. But he differs from Joyce, Achebe and Ngugi, in that an outsider reader is not given a significant role within the novels. Here might be one indication of the difference between anticolonial and postcolonial texts, for in Rushdie’s novels different historical narratives are contested within the Indian subcontinent rather than between colonizer and colonized. Thus Midnight’s Children foregrounds the marginalized history of Muslim participants in India’s move towards independence, and almost ignores the mainstream histories placing Gandhi at the centre (except where the narrator ‘deliberately’ gives an inaccurate date for Gandhi’s assassination).15 One could argue also that the fluidity of Rushdie’s characters and the manifest unreliability of their narratives (including that of the central narrator, Saleem Sinai) constitute one means of making it difficult for the outsider reader to make them representative spokesmen. How might these reflections affect the reading and teaching of postcolonial texts in Britain and the U S A ? One response could be to move away from an emphasis on cultural and anthropological analyses which, on the one hand, distance the text and, on the other, encourage readers to see the worlds they encounter as static and unchanging. Rather, we need to encourage an understanding of identities in process, or what Stuart Hall

15

In like manner, Anita Desai in Clear Light of Day, Arundhati Roy in The God of Small Things, Tsitsi Dangarembga in Nervous Conditions assume that their readers can supply as background the details of an official national history which is barely alluded to in the novels.

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has called a cultural identity of “positioning.”16 In a 1982 interview with Anthony Appiah, Chinua Achebe says: I’m an Ibo writer because this is my basic culture; Nigerian, African and a writer … no, black first, then a writer. Each of these identities does call for a certain kind of commitment on my part. I must see what it is to be black – and this means being sufficiently intelligent to know how the world is moving and how the black people fare in this world. This is what it means to be black. Or an African – what does Africa mean to the world? When you see an African, what does it mean to a white man?17

These are the multiple and shifting identities, and the tensions between them, that call upon Achebe’s commitment as a writer and that emerge in the ironic and creative interplay which make his novels so rewarding. But they are also the multiple identities which call upon our commitments as readers and as teachers. By opening ourselves to that creative and ironic interplay between observer and observed, between insider and outsider, by allowing ourselves to become hybrid readers, we can enter into dialogue with the texts and their political implications. We can understand what it means to be both inside and outside the whale and we can understand the different kinds of spaces and insularities different whales permit.18 In other words, we allow ourselves to be transformed and translated culturally, entering into dialogue with the work, its implied readers, and the power-relationships between them. This, I would argue, is a very different process from that assumed by Huggan or Brennan when they define the ‘postcolonial exotic’ as a process of domesticating the Other, or, as Huggan puts it, “a mode of aesthetic perception which domesticates the other even as it makes it strange.”19 16

See “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993): 392–403. 17 Cited by Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1992): 73. 18 An allusion to George Orwell’s quietist position advocated for the writer in his 1940 essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940), in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 101–32; and Salman Rushdie’s insistence on ‘rowdyism’ in his riposte of 1981, “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991): 87–101. 19 Huggan, The Post-Colonial Exotic, 13.

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WORKS CITED Achebe, Chinua. Arrow of God (London: Heinemann, 1974). ——. Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1958). Aijaz Ahmad. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London: Verso, 1992): 95– 122. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991). Appiah, Kwame Anthony. In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford U P , 1992). Brennan, Timothy. At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1997). Edwards, Ruth Dudley. Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure (London: Faber & Faber, 1979). Hall, Stuart, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory, ed. Laura Chrisman & Patrick Williams (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993): 392–403. Hawkins, Maureen S. G. “The Dramatic Treatment of Robert Emmet and Sarah Curran,” in Women in Irish Legend, Life and Literature, ed. S.F. Gallagher (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1983): 125–37. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Innes, C.L. “Modernism, Ireland, and Empire: Yeats, Joyce and Their Implied Audiences,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester: Manchester U P , 2000): 137–55. Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature and the Era of Multinational Capital,” Social Text 5 (1986): 65–88. Joyce, James. Ulysses (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986). McCormack, W.J. “Nightmares of History,” in James Joyce and Modern Literature, ed. W.J. McCormack & Alastair Stead (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982): 77–107. McGonegal, Julie. “Postcolonial Metacritique: Jameson, Allegory and the AlwaysAlready-Read Third World Text,” Interventions 7.2 (2005): 251–65. Nash, John. “‘Hanging Over the Bloody Paper’: Newspapers and Imperialism in Ulysses,” in Modernism and Empire, ed. Howard Booth & Nigel Rigby (Manchester U P : 2000): 175–96. Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” (1940), in The Penguin Essays of George Orwell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994): 101–32. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981).

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——. “Outside the Whale” (1984), Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981–1991 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991): 87–101. Yeats, W.B. Collected Poems (London: Macmillan, 1950).

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The Fantasy of Home in memory of Jacques Derrida

M USTAPHA M ARROUCHI

You ask me about that country whose details now escape me, I don’t remember its geography, nothing of its history. And should I visit it in memory, It would be as I would a past lover, After years, for a night, no longer restless with passion, with no fear of regret. I have reached that age when one visits the heart merely as a courtesy.1 Je vous demande pardon, je m’apprête à vous saluer dans ma langue […] ; la langue [...] de l’autre, la langue de l’hôte, la langue de l’étranger, voire de l’immigrant, de l’émigré ou de l’exilé.2

N 1

of Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said,3 three celebrated writers who spent most of their lives in exile, can fail to be impressed by their intelligence, conviction and O READER

Faiz Ahmad Faiz, The True Subject, 45. Heartfelt thanks go to Ms Fran Devlin for reading the manuscript in its entirety. Always kind, thorough, and most of all, perspicacious, Ms Devlin always does it with a wonderful smile. 2 Jacques Derrida, La Contre-allée, 67. 3 Said confronts the pain of exile with irony. Roughly, a forlorn apprehension of all humanity as the virtually unresisting prey of the powerful, made or sane – of men who enjoy, day in and day out, the infliction, on an enormous scale, of pain, misery, and death, away from home. Another instance can be found in the way Darwish fights back: he is what one would call an exile thrice removed. Dao, on the other hand, has chosen to impose that very condition on himself.

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innovation. These artists cobble together fable, sermon and poetic fragments to produce a modernist way of writing about their rootprints. However, what is most memorable about them as mapped-out solitudes can be found in the answer their work provides to the following question: what do they have in common, and from what mysterious perennial do they draw their endless energy as writers in exile? In their poetry and narrative, the present dispossessed subject introduces himself as a metaphysical foreigner twice displaced. For all three, the search is for the “logic of irreconcilables.” Unlike Said and Dao, however, Darwish, almost like a jealous child, is reluctant to share his homeland with others. And while he and Dao continue to strike with iron in their soul, and the metal bars to dismantle all the words in order to construct a single one, abode, Said lays the fragile foundations for a homecoming. In the process, their plight, which is founded on and built in the language they use to describe their private anguish, dreams and surroundings, travesties the idea of a single homeland. For all three, exile is an unusual, not to say urgently fraught, occurrence. Poetry is a place of perfection, and we should resent anyone who attempts to insinuate into it some of the squalor of ordinary life: for it provides intimacy with the dead, a solace and comfort in our necessary isolation. Each poet, on the other hand, fashions his or her own allusive manner and chooses a subject-matter: Dryden and Pope use allusion when writing about inheritance and succession; Burns, about coupling and lovechildren; Byron, about money; Tennyson, about winds, ghosts and solitude. Darwish uses allusion when writing about the estrangement and exile from within that concern generation and sonship, or haunting and echoing, or filiation and affiliation, because allusion itself can be described as filial inheritance or spectral reproduction or covert intermingling. For Bei Dao, in the face of lonely suffering and anxiety, poetry and allusion embody the comfort of company. Distance is inexpressible except in dignity of language. There is pathos in this choice, but it is only half true. For both Darwish and Dao, however, the presence of the poet is an elusive one: he is not really there, so his presence (in absence) cannot temper his loneliness. Viewed from this angle, poetry must exacerbate solitude as much as it soothes, insofar as it does exert a strange power of speech. The beauty of the poetry written by Darwish and Dao is its openness, its recognition of due gratitude. A critic like Said, on the other hand, did

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participate in such gratitude. As a matter of fact, gratitude became him, and it becomes us. His forte was identifying effective poetry, and explaining why it works. (An essay on W.B. Yeats is a case in point; another on Aimé Césaire gives utterance to things as Tennyson would have it.4) Said valued the everyday, but only if it could be grist to the mill of his highly formal art. Darwish, like Yeats, has endured the “baptism of the gutter,” descending into the underworld of occupation only to gather it into the artifice of poetic eternity, and his aesthetic is similarly redemptive. He grubs among the odds and ends of secular history so as to salvage them for an art which is concerned with nothing but itself. In this, ironically, he can be faithful to the way the world is: the universe itself, he believes, is a set of endless, self-enclosed cycles, which his own art mirrors in its very narcissism. Dao, on the other hand, like his art, is concerned with nothing but his displaced self. He is a poet in the Valérian mode, for whom writing is sweated labour in which you might spend a week sculpting a single sentence into shape. His work, like Darwish’s and unlike Said’s, is designed to insulate the reader from everyday life as surely as writing it had done for him. However, this attribution of attitude to Darwish, Dao or Said is not the real crux; to imagine the poet and/or critic as either respectful or ambivalent merely gives psychological colouring to interpretative choices. More important is the poets’ or critic’s exilic condition: Are the resonances, the ghosts of feeling and meaning, raised by the presence of things strange, in some form or another, in their poetry and narrative? On this question their views do not overlap but, rather, pass each other in the night. It matters, therefore, that one begins by sketching a brief genealogy of their anxiety, rootlessness and seduction. I The attention this essay pays specifically to exile is a pointed reminder of the mission of the poet and writer. This is the connection between the most intimate of frontiers, home, and, on the largest, global scale, the impermanence of the place where one might have felt at ease and at rest, surrounded by ordinary objects that together constitute the feeling, if not the actual state, of being at home, but which is now impermanent – this 4

For more details on this point, see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993): 199–234.

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connection necessitates an invocation of the anguish, despair and courage of those who must from now on negotiate their space.5 The big buildings with battlements like the ones most of us live in are a distortion of the idea that every man’s home is his castle: it’s like Gulliver’s Travels. And like Lemuel Gulliver, the uprooted has a pain he cannot locate; it seems to wander about his body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time he tries to touch it.6 He knows that homes are always provisional, that borders and barriers which enclose him within the safety of a familiar territory can also become prisons. Just as he stands outside his new home, so too no abiding locale is possible in his partitioned world which articulates so fundamental a dislocation as to assault not only his memory of what once was, but proclaims, too, how distant from the original abode he finds himself. For now, the border, still elusive and invisible, forces him to face the future with varying shades of foreboding.7 Suddenly rooted nowhere, the uprooted moves backward into a future that has transcended the boundary of time altogether and moves forward in order to disprove the illusion of home. He feels certain that there are times in life when the next, clear, logical step seems one he cannot take at all. In the process, he becomes what Theodor Adorno aptly called “der Intellektuelle in der Emigration” for whom rootlessness is a metaphysical project, a meditation on space, a sermon on his estrangement. Timely, too, is the drama and struggle to create on the page the mind in action. Pushing and pausing, cresting and deepening, the intellectual as exiled intelligence is driven, over his writing life, to many strategies and reflections not on, but from, damaged, bruised, mutilated life; reflections marked by pain and scarred by injury. As it happens, his thoughts plunge down into what the empty future represents: the attempt to hold a sidewalk-place lest another take it. The debris he left behind fuses with the shore rubble, and the 5

Jacques Derrida, Tourner les mots (Paris: Galilée, 2000); Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (New York: Random House, 1995); V.S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: N Y R B , 2000); Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: Plume, 1997) easily come to mind. 6 I intend to use “uprooted, exile, émigré, immigrant, rootless” interchangeably, insofar as they all fall under what Jacques Derrida has aptly called “mapped out solitudes.” See, in this context, his Fichus (Paris: Galilée, 2002): 34. 7 Edward Said expounds on the idea of “leaving home” in Reflections of Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000): 165–73, 337–46.

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empty wrappings with the empty response to anonymity. The flurrying thoughts that flash through his memory are those of a baulked mind, weighing questions of dislocation, incertitude and responsibility. When the high tide of his private thoughts journeys out, it deposits fragments on the foreign shore; then he realizes that he too is a piece of the debris. There is a certain urgency to the life of the uprooted during the first few weeks following flight, as the vastness of what has been lost makes itself known in unanticipated ways. The moment is captured with consummate skill by Bei Dao, who writes about how it feels to be out of place: In six years between 1989 and 1995, I moved fifteen times through seven countries [….] My first stop was West Berlin [….] Shortly afterward, I moved to Oslo [….] Until then, I hadn’t realized I wouldn’t be able to go home again [….] Winter came and, with it, northern Europe finally gave color to look at: pitch black [….] On New Year’s Day 1990, I […] moved to Stockholm [….] A group of Chinese exiles, who lived in a refugee camp in another part of the country, came to spend the night, bringing with them their escape stories. Among them were workers, business people, and college students, all taught a lesson in loneliness in this large world. In the midst of darkness, we helped each other. Winter in Stockholm was depressing; the sun just climbed out, rose a little, when darkness swallowed it like a fish, spitting out a little froth. With this day/night reversal, it was best to keep the window blinds closed all day.

He continues: Spring went and summer came, and, as before, I closed the blinds to shut out the noisy days and nights. That autumn, I moved to Denmark’s second largest city, Aarhus [….] In the beginning of October in 1992, I moved from Denmark to Holland [….] Before coming to America, I lived in Paris for three months [….] Early in 1994, I moved to […] Ann Arbor [….] A [migrant’s] […] life is always between departure and arrival, and it doesn’t matter where you’re coming from or going to. The most important thing is to maintain this attitude of not knowing and in the midst of wandering have a firm grasp of your self, yes, wandering and possessing nothing.8

The gist of this passage lies in the terror of survival, which is all that the uprooted thinks of at first as he sits with other fellow-exiles who are 8

Dao, Journal, 81–84.

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amenable to one another, congregating in the shade of a tree or around the brightness of a lamp-post, the new totem-pole of their togetherness. Gradually, however, the uprooted realizes that his world is changing. Light and colour are draining from his mind, and even the arrival of spring does not restore it. The grey ache of absence is too much to bear; and why bear it, if it can be celebrated in the sadness of a travelling narrative as he reminisces, spending a million man-hours of rootless time in introspection and self-analysis, and consequently more depressed at the end of the day than he was at dawn? He is suicidal, passive, docile. Like a great many migrants, he is also metaphysically reflective, pondering on the curse that has been visited upon him. Only much later, in the small hours of the morning, in the privacy of the sleepless dark, with insomnia as his theatre, does he divulge his secret worries to himself. Dao makes the point thus: When my mood was good I walked clockwise and, when it wasn’t, I walked counterclockwise. I’m afraid that a designer must take great pains to make an animal cornered in a cage, or a prisoner allowed out for exercise, always turn in circles.9

In this way, the uprooted takes in what he has unwittingly done: leaving home as Chinese, Algerian, Bosnian, Rwandan, or Palestinian and arriving in the host country as Other, he must hide what he is thinking or feeling, just as one hides a five-dollar note; but it is odd to think of this as any more definitive of consciousness than it is of a five-dollar note. And learning to hide his feelings is a very public affair, inasmuch as he is brokenhearted, especially when he realizes that only a few days separate him physically from home, but the distance is greater when he revisits it in his memory. Rejected by those who have erected great walls to keep him out, the uprooted leaps into a confining stockade of his own making. By leaving the warmth of his bed back home as he did and by stepping across the line, it is as if he has demolished the bridges linking him to his place of birth; the journey will create him, he has a more or less fixed memory of the date of arrival in the host country: “On August 25, 1993,” Dao continues, “I carried my passport stamped with a visa that showed I had the intention of becoming an immigrant, passed through customs, and, dirty

9

Dao, Journal, 85.

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and disheveled, stepped onto a new continent, not at all in the heroic spirit of Columbus.”10 As an intended consequence, however, the migrant becomes the frontier he traverses. To cross into another language, another climate, another sound, another food, another smell, another way of life and/or being, is to take a step toward beatitude, the worldly blessedness to which all migrants aspire; but only for a while. For when his movement becomes circumscribed within the narrow parameters of his alienness, the migrant reminds himself often, as does Dao, how fear, in effect, liberates him from a sense of belonging and its opposite, un-belonging. He then comes to a sudden halt, as if unwilling or unable to proceed, though something not expressed must be understood, as in the case of the door-handle that Edward Said speaks about in “The Art of Displacement”: Consider the door handle’s place as you stand before the entrance to a room. You know that as you reach forward, your hand will move unerringly to one side or another of the door. But then you don’t encounter the handle, curl your fingers around it, and push forward because […] it has actually been placed two feet above your head in the middle of the door, perched intransigently up there where it eludes your ready grasp, cannot fulfill its normal function, and does not announce what it is doing there. From that beginning dislocation others necessarily follow. The door may be pushed open on only one of its hinges. You must therefore enter the room sideways and at an angle but only after your coat or skirt is caught and torn by a nail designed to do that every time the room is entered. Inside, you come upon a carpet of undulating curves, which on close examination reveal themselves to be intestines frozen into plastic stillness (15–16).

By braving the unknown, which is the first in a series of fixed steps, beginning with the idea of home and ending on the threshold of his state of mind, the uprooted makes a commitment to saving his life rather than waiting for possible death – an act that requires an affirmation of selfregard and trust in one’s right to live. “Sometimes I sit in the backyard and reconsider and feel it wasn’t I who moved all those years but it was the world revolving like a stage.”11 To this end, the migrant, like the writer, is one of the many inhabitants of a half-way house. Each may build 10 11

Dao, Journal, 86. Dao, Journal, 90.

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a (new) house, but only one can construct a narrative or a poem, which may be thought of as another dwelling, an imaginary homeland, as Rushdie would have it. As writers twice displaced – for, in being forced to leave their homes, they ended losing their places in the world – Dao, Darwish and Said, in sentences of great precision and balance, re-animate the dilemma of the exilic experience, the pathos of marginality and solitude, the fear of throwing oneself into a void, and the fear of the liberated “I” to remake his home elsewhere. As they do so, does the fact of stepping across the border commit them to become wanderers of sorts, belonging to the weak and unrepresented? Can a case be made for them not as passive subalterns but as active voices determined not to ‘shut up’ but to sing on, in spite of attacks? After all, these rootless intellectuals do not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on, so to speak, not standing still. And yet the question remains whether there is, or can be, anything like an independent, metaphysical exile, one who is not beholden to, and therefore constrained by, his loyalty to family, constituency and country. Every poet, Heidegger once contended, always rewrites the same unsayable poem: a belief borne out by the tortuous genesis of Mahmoud Darwish, whose poems evolve, mutate, divide and recombine: the time is always evening, the season autumn, the mood despair. The same images recur verbatim throughout his work, functioning like hieroglyphs to indicate an inscrutable higher meaning, and the same colours – silver, red, blue, yellow, black, white – are used to evoke a kaleidoscopic reality. One may regard Darwish as the “singer of the hidden” East, and this certainly reflects his own cultural ambition: in the Arab world he explicitly attacks the overwhelming inertia and impotence of the will, and foresees its immediate crisis and impending doom. In the manner of poems by Adonis and Al-Bayati, though without their faith in an imminent golden age, Darwish’s poems display an historical dialectic, manifest both in the individual and in civilization, which moves from a pristine state of being ‘unborn’ via birth, decay and death into a redemptive metaphysics. As befits a poetry in which “things fall apart,” Darwish’s poems often resemble shards or palimpsests. By its very texture, his poetry invokes a tradition that stretches from the effusions of al-qasida (ode), through the nineteenth century, down to Darwish himself. It is inevitably translated in

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the following poem, which enacts the drama and pathos of resistance to Israel’s genocidal occupation: I will slog over this endless road to its end. Until my heart stops, I will slog over this endless, endless road with nothing to lose but the dust, what has died in me, and a row of palms pointing toward what vanishes. I will pass the row of palms. The wound does not need its poet to paint the blood of death like a pomegranate! On the roof of neighing, I will cut thirty openings for meaning so that you may end one trail only so as to begin another. Whether this earth comes to an end or not, we’ll slog over this endless road. More tense than a bow. Our steps, be arrows. Where were we a moment ago? Shall we join, in a while, the first arrow? The spinning wind whirled us. So, what do you say? I say: I will slog over this endless road to its end and my own.12

Darwish contradicts the bleakness in the streets of Ramallah, and presents the same imagery with wistful awe. Given the terrors he confronts on a daily basis, his humility when aligning himself with his dying country – men and women caught in the jaws of a brutal Israeli army bent on destroying the indigenous population’s sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they either leave or become indentured servants – is strangely endearing. But it also implicates him in their death. When he apostrophizes an object or a feeling in order to conjure up its real presence, he betrays his helplessness in the face of an existence that propels him toward silence and destruction. “An Exile’s Letter,” for example, expresses the tension in his work between “Thought [as … a place of exile: / […] / The past [as …] a place of exile / […] / [and] Poetry [as …] a place of exile” as they change over time: “I’ve built my homeland,” he writes, “I’ve even founded my state – in my language.”13 The antiphonal symmetries of “Who am I, Without Exile” show the mind in constant 12

Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 3. Darwish stubbornly refuses to declare defeat to a ruthless and deliberate occupation inflicted by Israel on innocent civilians, who are forced to live under appalling conditions. There is a shrewd account of the poet and his people under siege in Mahmoud Darwish, “Under Siege,” tr. Marjolijin de Jager, Autodafé 3–4 (2004): 45–46. 13

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motion; in and out, back and forth, up and down. We find there a naked early phrasing of the longings for home (that never was) which continue to animate “An Exile’s Letter”: a desire that our sense questioning should mend and change us. To this, he adds that the world of the exile also desires, as we receive its conflicting aspects, that we should repair or calm its incoherence in our reciprocating consciousness. This Janus-faced spatial and/or temporal precariousness, in which the exile turns to the resources of the provisional new homeland, the text, where strangeness and a new sense of belonging are locked together in a logic of paradox, brings to mind one fragment, number 18 in Adorno’s Minima Moralia, that encapsulates the idea of in-betweenness with delicacy and reserve and in a manner that might suggest issues beyond the specific ones addressed here. Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we have grown up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests [.… People] live, if not in slums, in bungalows that by tomorrow may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air.

Thus, Adorno states, the “house is past [i.e. over ….] The best mode of conduct, in the face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one [….] It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.”14 Or, to put it differently, not only does the exile feel that he cannot return to the way things were, but there is also a sense of how odd yet ‘normal’ the new abode is: the bed looks like the one he left behind and the new comb most definitely resembles the old one; it is just that the bed-springs are unusually bare, or that the teeth of the comb somehow feel too rough. Domesticity is waiting to be re-defined. The search for lost time is to no good effect. For now, he must accept his new surroundings, since the old address has been annulled once and for all. The exile can become a beginner in his new circumstances, and this new fate allows him a new style of life and, above all, a different, often unpredictable, destiny. The expense of relocating, the logistical manoeuvres required, the wear and tear on the nerves, means that, in leaving home, the exile brings along 14 For more on what Adorno called “My Homeland, the Text,” see Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; London & New York: Verso, 1997): 43–47.

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with him damaged memories. Time and time again he speaks of the terror he has lived through, his demeanor undignified, his eyes mournful, his temperament as liquid as an orphan’s tears. He reminds one of the earth recently dug and piled by a grave as yet unfilled: one senses that, buried among the ashen memories he brings with him, are incommunicable worries. And before he is conscious of his dislocation he starts to play host to a set of memories: leaving his bed unmade, the chairs in his dining-room upturned, his kitchen unswept, his dishes in the sink, his future undone. He runs as fast as he can, not bothering about where he might end up, in another country, among the displaced and stateless. He locks up his house as though he is going away for a week-end trip into the country. Afraid of what might happen to him if he stayed on, he does not question the wisdom of leaving. He crosses the border or is arrested on the spot, walled up somewhere, confined to a cell or a residence under surveillance. The predicament of the placeless place might well be explained, I think, as the difference between Said and Darwish: one the great angry secular architect of minute dislocation, isolation and discontinuity; the other the eloquent mourner of the loss of “two Edens, [the one …] who lost Paradise twice.” If, for Said, the migrant experiences life as multiple – “to cross the frontier is to be transformed”15 – for Darwish, what once was can be restored by prayer, ritual and language. The narrator of his poem “An Exile’s Letter” sets out from home as a place where one begins, then wanders off aimlessly until he finally realizes that the passage of time culminates in not going back to what had once been but in carving a place for himself in a world of drifters, full of grotesque structures that bespeak excess as well as paucity. His masira (plight) travesties the idea of a single homeland. It is founded and built on the language he uses to describe the exile’s most private anguish, dreams and surroundings. all I have in my exile is a tiny knapsack of breadcrumbs and longing, and a notebook laden with griefs in whose pages I spat out all the bitterness possessing me. […]

15

Said, Reflections on Exile, 152.

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My eyes can still see. There is still a moon in the sky, And my old clothes aren’t quite worn out. They’re only frayed, but I mended them and it’s fine.16

The obsessive drive towards remembrance through representation, entangling sense and mind in a Gordian knot, poses the problem underlying poetic composition: how to make a meaning, a linguistic one, in which the senses represent mind, and mind re-creates the senses. Every achieved line is built on the paradox by which an object (the poem) reproduces, on the virtual plane of language, sense and mind moving inextricably together, as they do in every act of consciousness. O brother, what is a man worth if he falls asleep hungry every night? But I am well, I am well. I have a piece of barley bread and a small basket of vegetables. And my sister how is she? Is she all grown up and do young men come round to court her? Does she still sit beside the door praying for us all, praying for the peace of mind and good fortune?17

How to follow the flickers of consciousness without reducing it to pure remembrance (that Proustian fiction) is one aim of the poetry of Darwish; another is to accept consciousness as a universal without prior limitation by identity or location; a third is to caress the universe as the exile examines it. 16 17

Darwish, “An Exile’s Letter,” 1. “An Exile’s Letter,” 2.

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“It is myself that I remake,” Yeats once wrote.18 So, too, does Darwish. The riveting seven-page poem is all drama, in which the reader is urged into active and strenuous cooperation. The poet’s courage in remaking his poetry over the years is exemplary. He has not shrunk from his large selfset tasks: to make language fit the mind’s motions, to accept the burden of uncertain modernity, to describe the phenomenon of occupation passionately and exactly, to claim what he can (in the absence of a collective narrative) for feeling, for knowing, for thinking. The three languages of his upbringing (Arabic, Hebrew, which he learned in prison in Israel, and French, which he taught himself while in exile in Paris), the countries in which he has lived (Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, France), his mixed fields of study (literature and politics) account in part for his comprehensive, ever-evolving and inclusive view of the physical world and of human identity and suffering. He has learned from both classic and modern masters, from Farid-u-a-ddin Al-‘Attar and Al-Mutanabbi to Rilke and Lorca, and his linguistic resources, especially in description, are astonishing. In the long sequences, he risks everything, and perhaps cannot always keep the several parts from flying apart – but the wildness of the risk is itself exhilarating to encounter. Reading “An Exile’s Letter,” one can feel a nostalgia for the shapeliness of the pure lyrics in “Fewer Roses” and “A Bed for the Stranger.”19 But no good poet can stand still, and to read under Darwish’s powerful impetus is to have one’s consciousness, like molten glass, pulled into unforeseen – and sometimes almost unbearable – shapes. Like “Who am I, Without Exile?,” “An Exile’s Letter” evolves in tandem with human migration, beginning with the ritual of greeting a guest, except that this time the guest is an uprooted “who came here and couldn’t go home.” This self-scrutinizing frame-by-frame style is suddenly abandoned when continuous narrative memory is required for what is left behind. How is my father? Does he still love and praise God? 18

This is persuasively set out in W.B. Yeats, A Life: The Arch Poet, 1915–1939 (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2003): 45–61. 19 See Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, tr. Munir Akash & Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon & Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003): 2, 100.

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And of the children? And the land? And the olive trees? And how are my brothers? Have they become government workers? Once I heard my father say They will all be teachers. I heard him say I go hungry so they can have books. And how is our house, its worn-out threshold, and the stove, and the doors?20

Here, memory oscillates between a past moment and the same past moment revived as a present-tense moment. Spliced into these two ways of ‘doing’ memory is the ‘real’ present-tense moment of writing (in exile), which compulsively swerves back into the past-which-is-nonethelesspresent. By the time the exile “dies without even a shroud,” the poet has taken on the challenge of representing the self not only through its dialectic, or its reflexive consciousness and memory, but through its simulacra of the world as well. It is an astonishing leap of confidence. The poet says, implicitly: “If I describe how the world of the exile looks to me, you will know who I am.” The paradigm of this step-by-step process resembles someone who unweaves as she weave, keeping alive in her mind a lover’s desire by prolongation of her own desire for the beloved. This predicament yields the frantic exhaustion of the rooted errantry (rootlessness), exile which combine disillusionment and disappointment. As the poem evolves, it dissipates the forces it gains, then briefly forces its dissipation to cohere, and then watches its achieved coherence disperse into inefficacy. One of its summary lines celebrates a utopia, insofar as, for the poet, a true home is a lost one. So much for what might be called (though inappropriately) the exilic underpinning of Darwish’s poetry. But why this obsessive fastening on boundaries and border-crossings which, at times, can lead to cultural misunderstandings and even tragedies? In the play of sense opened up by this analysis, I want to draw on a set of distinctions by Edward Said, who offers a different view of the notion of root or being rooted. According to 20

Darwish, “An Exile’s Letter,” 5.

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him, although the root is unique, a stock-taking all upon itself and killing all around it, the rhizome is, by contrast, an affiliation of sorts, with no tribal rootstock taking over forever. It maintains, therefore, the idea of rootedness but challenges that of a permanent home. There is a double perspective in the rhizome, Said seems to be saying, that never sees things in isolation, for displacement forces the exile to see things in terms of what has been left behind and what is actually here and now. Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that, to borrow a phrase from music, is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.21

Said tends to discern things not simply as they are but as they have come to be that way. In the process, he is more likely to see the world and mind as incongruent, the one resisting any fixed interpretation by the other. Once he speaks through the voice, however, the self, like the aspectual world, is fractured. Forward direction is lost as the mind, in fission, hovers like diamond-dust over scattered thoughts, and will not or cannot go forward to a formed conclusion, a shape. It is also well-adapted to the circumstances that surround the exile – say, Edward Said, whose dislocation and transplantation were derived in part from his loneliness as a Palestinian under siege in New York,22 itself a city of migrants in transition.23 For an exile like Said, always at odds with his immediate surroundings, scarcely able to come to terms with the reality of being at home, the proper way to comprehend what he calls al-manfa (displacement and estrangement) is to understand it as a process generated from its point of origin, which one can always locate in the humblest of circumstances. 21 Said, Reflections on Exile, 186. Some instances describe Said longing for the home that never was. 22 Until his untimely death, Said maintained that New York was the exilic city par excellence: he refers to it in Selves and Others as a city of transition in the sense that immigrants who arrive there hardly ever stay. They move on to Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and other cities in America. For more on the subject, see Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said, a documentary film by Emmanuel Hamon (Wamip Films, 2003). 23 “New York is the ideal place for me to live in”; Selves and Others.

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This state of exilic condition, Said notes, means seeing things as having evolved from definite beginnings, which can be made and remade, as opposed to origins, which are sacred, as the adult human being derives from the babbling child. Or, to put it more simply, moving from the image-sense world of the infantile place represented by the maternal order to the symbolic mode of language or the paternal realm may be our first taste of exile of the kind that seems to haunt yet energize much of Proust’s writing. In this respect, we may all be exiles of a sort, and this helps explain why even those of us who have not shared the terrible fate of those driven from home can nonetheless grasp their fate keenly. Said recognizes the benefit of movement outside of one’s primary place, to a new location from which the self and its others are seen in a different light altogether. Despite its seemingly traditional, almost Schubertian cadences, Said’s narrative on exile embodies an ideal of linguistic truth-telling which is curiously close to the later Darwish. Indeed, in addition to the exilic link between the two, there are deeper affinities, including their shared plight as “strangers who lost the way to the strangers’ picnic”;24 but above all, both came to reject the concept of truth as an exemplary way to live, replacing it with a notion of inner coherence. Darwish occupies a central place not just among the Palestinian people, who see him as their national poet of dispossession, but in the grander line that stretches from Abu Nawas to Abu Al-Kacem A’Chabbi. Where A’Chabbi attempted to restore a lost idyll in his verse, Darwish is concerned with the unresolvable conflict between idyll and reality, the former conceived as a dream, the latter as fallen, sick and evil. In this sense, he reminds us of Georg Trakl, who writes, in “Surrender to Night”: “Feeling at moments of deathlike being: all human beings are worthy of love. Waking you feel the bitterness of the world; therein lies all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect penance.”25 The vatic poet wishes to redeem the darkness by his art. As Trakl did before him, Darwish encircles the trauma of modernity. But it is not just what Darwish says that matters, it is how he captures the unspeakable. As Said notes, Darwish’s poems revolve around their silences. He quotes Rilke as saying: 24

Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 106. For more on the subject, see Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose, tr. Alexander Stillmark (London: Libris, 2001): 122–34. 25

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The rise and fall of this poem possesses an unutterable sweetness, and what moved me most were its inner distances. It seems as if the poem were built up on its pauses, a few encirclements around the infinite silence: that’s how the lines come to stand. Like fences in a flat land, beyond which the encircled territories continuously merge again into a great, inalienable plain.26

Here, Rilke is speaking of “Helian,” a poem by Trakl whose personality he finds “Linos-like mythic” (“linoshaft mythisch”), linking him with a figure whose death, according to Homer, inaugurated the history of lament. For Rilke, Linos and his modern incarnation are Orphic beings, poets who by their sacrifice produce art from silence. This notion also informs Darwish’s mythology, the heroic scenery of death in “He Embraces his Murder,” and its subtle elaborations in “When the Martyrs Go to Sleep.”27 These poems, more than others, show Darwish in a constant struggle with form, the discipline of line, the tussle for expression with all its incremental ambiguities. They also display the discontinuities, the acceptance of incoherence, the paratactic style, the striking images, the drastic line-breaks, the depersonalization: all these characteristics of his poetry, misunderstood by his contemporaries, strike us as congenially modern. Darwish’s recourse to ‘signs’ – the plaintive kalima (word) that figure prominently in his poems – has proved irresistible to semioticians. The constant revisions, which layer his manuscripts in virtual palimpsests, provide endless material for the hermeneutical critique that has grown up around his work. This is not yet the mature Darwish. To find his own, increasingly oracular voice, he undoes traditional forms, and in such poems as “We Were without a Present,” “Sonnet II” and “The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger,” he develops his own verse.28 This jagged style, often resembling montage, suppresses the lyric impulse, foregrounding instead the poet’s pity at the horror of Palestine. In doing so, he, like Said, responds to his existential moment in answerably ambitious terms; and it is he, therefore, who, in raising the most searching questions about the world and its content, is able to produce the finest literary art. Said, on the other hand, stands as a rootless Palestinian émigré turned pin-striped New 26

Said, “On Mahmoud Darwish,” 34. Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 17, 22. 28 Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, 101, 105, 106. 27

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Yorker. His own personal version of the entire world as a foreign place is at the centre of his narrative. One might, to be sure, see Said the New Yorker as a belated re-invention of Said the Jerusalemite.

II The modern artist, so Baudelaire once declared, trades in both the eternal and the ephemeral, and this is true of Said’s exilic condition. While its fractured surface is nervously responsive to fleeting sensations, its mythological sub-text is stealthily at work converting all this supposedly random stuff into archetypal truths. Said articulates the point with dash: Better disparity and dislocation than reconciliation under duress of subject and object; better a lucid exile than sloppy, sentimental homecomings; better the logic of dissociation than an assembly of compliant dunces. A belligerent intelligence is always to be preferred over what conformity offers, no matter how unfriendly the circumstances and unfavorable the outcome. The point is that the past cannot be entirely recuperated from so much power arrayed against it on the other side: it can only be restated in the form of an object without a conclusion, or final place, transformed by choice and conscious effort into something simultaneously different, ordinary and irreducibly other and the same, taking place together: an object that offers neither rest nor respite.29

In this sense, Said the avant-gardist and Said the traditionalist are secretly at one: if the illusions of suburban consciousness and the permanent, imperishable selfhood are to be shattered, a good many guerrilla raids on ordinary language will prove necessary. But the modern condition of the exile proves unable to stabilize the relationship between the changeless and the contingent, which usually turns out to be frustratingly oblique, or, as the ironic form of Joyce’s Ulysses would suggest, flagrantly artificial. James Joyce sees that there is an inhumanity at the root of art, for all its ardent affirmation of the human. It is a characteristically modernist insight. In Darwish and Dao, too, there is usually some unspeakable horror just out of sight, some nameless nastiness an inch off-frame, some traumatizing truth which can be shown but not stated. In fact, evasion is the very 29 Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994): 43–44. I owe much gratitude to Said for the formulation of the idea I develop in this

paragraph.

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stuff of their poetic style. It is an attempt to mediate the delicacies of private experience into the public domain without, as it were, spilling a drop. Its tortuousness hints at some yawning gap between the two realms. Yet the poetry does take the measure of whatever they have to suppress in order to flourish, which is what makes their plight tragic in a way that Said’s is not. Darwish is all about loss, lack, absence, deprivation, all of which are harbingers of the ultimate non-being of death, and which resound like stifled cries of anguish through his buoyant, close-packed poetry. Dao, by contrast, is the kind of poet who is all too little anguished, too sedately assured that suburban reasonableness and a realist aesthetic (laced with the odd dash of modernism) will be enough to see us through. Said’s flourishing today, on the other hand, is built on loss and failure in his own lifetime. It is mildly shocking to be reminded of just how hounded he was, and of the wretched, paralytic state to which this reduced him. His exilic narrative is the record of a life of desperation, and this is one of the unspoken horrors beneath his supple, supremely civilized prose. Another was the need to pass up on life if he was to do justice to it in art. Perfection of the artistic work, as Yeats insisted, meant imperfection of the life. Said strove all his life to catch the flow and recoil of experience with exquisitely nuanced fidelity. The paradox of such an art is that you need to live as fully as possible to gather the materials for it, but also to abstain with monkish austerity from living in order to wrestle them into artistic shape. Indeed, living as little as possible, in order to nurture that substitute form of living known as art, was one of his most sedulously cultivated aims. In this sense, Said makes “new thought possible,” as Michel Foucault once put it,30 for, unlike most of his contemporaries, he wrestled to the end with the question: what do the lucky owe to the unlucky? The Said of this question is thus not only a distinguished figure, but a committed intellectual who would have agreed with another no less engagé writer, Nadine Gordimer, when she writes: There is no ivory tower that can keep reality from beating at the walls. In witness, the imagination is not irreal but rather, the deeper reality. Its exigence can never allow compromise with conventional cultural wisdom, and what Milosz calls “official lies.” The intellectual of no compromise, Edward Said, asks

30

Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France

1981–1982, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).

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who, if not the writer, is “to elucidate the contests, challenge and hope, to defeat the imposed silence and normalized quiet power?”31

For Said as for Gordimer, a writer’s highest calling is to testify to the evils of conflict and injustice, not to scurry in and scurry out the way Susan Sontag did when she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1991. In her acceptance speech, Sontag deliberately chose to ignore the Palestinian issue, but spoke instead about her “love for Israel with emotion and the world with obligation.” When notified of the Israeli accolade, her response was: “I trust you have some idea of how honored and moved, deeply moved, I am to have been awarded this year’s Jerusalem’s Prize.”32 Rightly so perhaps, insofar as Sontag was the second female recipient of the award since its inauguration in 1963, the first being Simone de Beauvoir, whose record on Israel was perfect: she never deviated and remained a staunch supporter of the Jewish State until her death in 1980, while wholly neglecting the Palestinian cause. Unlike Sontag and de Beauvoir, when Gordimer was awarded the same prize in 1996 she declined, saying that she did not care to travel from one apartheid society to another. To take that kind of courageous position would be a risky course for a careful and, by a less obliging token, cowardly intellectual like Sontag, who opted for “the laws of intellectual safety on her side so that she can lay claim to what is politically safe, but not to what is intellectually respectable.”33 For to lend one’s name to a wide variety of causes, to speak out against injustice of any kind as a matter of universal principle, not just for one’s people, is vividly enacted in Gordimer’s, not Sontag’s, stand. In the age of migrants, curfews, identity cards, refugees, exiles, massacres, camps, and fleeing civilians, Gordimer’s voice stands for the poet’s mouth, a mouth that does not fear to give utterance implacably in the face of its oppressors. In the process, we, like Gordimer but unlike Sontag, may be tempted to remind ourselves that The time for the liberation of heart and mind has not come as yet.

31

Gordimer, “Treatment of the Word,” 5. For more on Sontag and Said, see Alexander Cockburn, “Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety,” Left Coast (20 March 2001): 3. 33 Cockburn, “Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety,” 3. 32

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– and that we are to Continue [our ...] arduous journey. Press on, [for …] the destination is still far away.34

WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, tr. E.F.N. Jephcott (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1951; tr. London & New York: Verso, 1997). Cockburn, Alexander. “Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety,” Left Coast (20 March 2001): 3–5. Dao, Bei, “Reciting,” Autodafé (Fall 2001): 177–85. ——. “Journal de mes déménagements,” Autodafé (Fall 2000): 81–90. Derrida, Jacques. Fichus (Paris: Galilée, 2002). ——. Tourner les mots (Paris: Galilée, 2000). Darwish, Mahmoud. “An Exile’s Letter,” tr. Mustapha Marrouchi, Wayne Tompkins & Salwa Ben Zahra. Forthcoming in The Antigonish (Fall 2004). ——. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, tr. Munir Akash & Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon & Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: U of California P , 2003). ——. “We Have an Incurable Malady: Hope,” in The Trip to Palestine (Paris: Éditions Climats, 2003): 34–36. Faiz, Ahmad Faiz. The Rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems, tr. Agha Shahid Ali (Boston M A : U of Massachusetts P , 1995). Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Colored People (New York: Random House, 1995). Gordimer, Nadine. “Treatment of the Word,” Guardian Weekly (15 June 2002): D4. Hamon, Emmanuel, dir. Selves and Others: A Portrait of Edward Said. Wamip Films, 2003. Kincaid, Jamaica. The Autobiography of My Mother (1996; New York: Plume, 1997). Kristiansen, Wendy. “Essor et divisions des islamistes koweitiens,” Le Monde Diplomatique (June 2002): 13–14. Foucault, Michel. The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982, tr. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Naipaul, V.S. Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: N Y R B , 2000). Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2000). ——. “The Art of Displacement,” in The Entire World as a Foreign Place, ed. Mona Hatoum (Nottingham: Sherwood, 2000): 15–17. 34

Faiz, The Rebel’s Silhouette, 45.

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——. Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process (New York: Vintage, 1996). ——. Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994). ——. “On Mahmoud Darwish,” Grand Street (Winter 1994): 34–47. ——. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).

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G LOBALIZATION , P OLITICS

S ECTION 3 AND C ULTURE

Macaulay to Microsoft Globalization and the Indian Academy V IJAYASREE C HAGANTI & K ANUKOLANUK R AVICHANDRA

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L O B A L I Z A T I O N H A S E M E R G E D in the last decade or so as the most powerful and irresistible force to sweep across human life, affecting every aspect of existence, despite the most violent contestations it has periodically had to contend with. No other development in recent years has provoked greater controversy, and globalization has had both its devout votaries and its vehement detractors. On the one hand, it has been acclaimed as a global movement for the sharing of knowledge and resources; on the other, it is seen as being complicit with the reproduction of neocolonial forms of domination. The objective of this essay is to explore the impact of globalization on Indian academies, their autonomy and their ethos. Globalization and the internationalization of higher education happen to coincide in the context of radical changes that have occurred in the Indian academies since the 1990s. Has the internationalization of higher education brought about a qualitative transformation in Indian academic activities? Is it promoting intercultural exchanges between nations and peoples on a basis of equality? Has it created an international mind-set, as it promised to? Has it opened doors to inexhaustible resources, as was anticipated? What exactly are the visible manifestations of globalization on the Indian academic scene today? If our exploration of these questions has something of the autobiographical about it, insofar as it focuses primarily on the current situation in South

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Indian universities, we trust it will also be something more than a personal undertaking. Education has often served as an ideological apparatus of the state, to use Louis Althusser’s term, because it was designed and used for the perpetuation and furtherance of the state’s interests. Any ideological apparatus by its very nature functions with a fair degree of sophistication, obscuring partisan interests and putting forth a benevolent and so-called universal front. While it is true that higher education has been used as a tool to promote dominant ideologies, it is equally true that resistance to such manufacture of consent through control has been most strongly registered in the universities alone. A strange, ambivalent relationship therefore exists between the state and the academy, making a certain amount of tension inevitable. Autonomy of the university has thus been viewed by the state with concern bordering on suspicion; consequently, the state keeps the university in check by rationing its funding. Institutes of higher learning in India share the above predicament with universities across the globe, and they also suffer from certain other problems inherent in the postcolonial predicament. The origin of modern universities in India may be traced to Sir Charles Wood’s Education Dispatch (1854), which led to the establishment of three universities in the presidency towns of Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras in 1857. The higher education in India offered by the colonial system was modelled on the British system of education, and the imperial imperatives of this education system are by now part of widely accepted knowledge.1 Indian universities served as instruments to strengthen British cultural, intellectual and political domination, and European learning was the staple of the curriculum. Modelled on the University of London and on Oxbridge, these universities promoted a canon that upheld British values and supremacy and thus served the needs of the colonial government. The universities in India continued to develop under the impact of British higher education in terms of their structure – such as in the affiliation of colleges to universities, in the curricula, methods of assessment and

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For a detailed discussion of the impact of colonial imperatives on Indian higher education, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia U P , 1989); Svati Joshi, ed. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991); Bernard S. Cohn, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996).

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systems of evaluation – even after Independence. The legacy of British education can, in fact, be seen in virtually every aspect of academic administration. Institutions such as St Stephens College in Delhi, Presidency College in Calcutta and Madras Christian College in Chennai are just a few examples of prestigious institutions that bear the imprint of their British heritage. Serious attempts to develop a truly Indian education began in the postIndependence period. But these efforts were complicated by two factors: i) defining what is Indian was a rather tricky and sometimes hazardous business in the multireligious, multi-ethnic and multilingual ethos of India; ii) the impact of two hundred years of colonial rule could not simply be erased without a trace. However, concerted efforts to evolve a national education policy were made by the leaders of the newly independent nation-state. The educational planners of independent India were quick to recognize the bi-directional links between education and development. They rightly considered the former as a critical input into the latter, with a view to achieving the goals of socio-economic development which figured prominently on the agenda of the new India. Higher education was viewed as an essential part of national development and a necessary input into the life of the nation. Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, who laid the foundation for the process of India’s modernization, declared that if all were well with the universities, all would be well with the nation. The National Policy of Education of 1968 envisaged a radical transformation of the education system in India which would relate it more closely to the lives of people; its goal was nothing less than the creation of an ethos that would produce young men and women of character and ability committed to national service and development. The Kothari Commission Report (1966), which had paved the way for the educational policy of 1968, clearly viewed education as an instrument of social change. “If this ‘change on a grand scale’ is to be achieved without violent revolution there is one instrument, and one instrument only, that can be used: E D U 2 C A T I O N .” The commission noted the existing gulf between the content and purposes of higher education and the priorities identified by the policies of national development, and it suggested reforms to bridge this gap. 2

D.S. Kothari, Kothari Commission Report 1964–66 (New Delhi: Government of India Publication, 1966): 4.

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Urging the study of agricultural sciences, relating education to productivity, harnessing student energies to the reconstruction of the nation, promoting social and national integration through education, inculcating the interests, attitudes and values required for a democratic and socialist society – all these were among the suggested reforms. Active attempts at restructuring education ensued after the National Policy on Education 1968. However, with the exponential growth of institutes of higher education, it became almost impossible for the state to ensure uniform standards of education across the nation. The inseparable link between higher education and national development continued to influence the vision of educationists well into the 1980s. The National Policy of Education (1986), the next important state document on education, also stresses the social obligations of academies. It states: Higher education opens up the world of knowledge and provides an opportunity to reflect on the critical social, economic, cultural, moral and spiritual issues facing humanity. By promoting the search for truth and adventure of ideas it contributes to intellectual growth as much as to national development through dissemination of specialized knowledge and skills. It is therefore, a crucial factor for survival.3

Two objectives were outlined in this statement: i) higher education should provide strength, cohesion and dynamism to society; ii) it should prepare manpower to enable the country to participate vigorously in the technological revolution sweeping across the world. Enabling students to understand their social environment, and inculcating in them a commitment to principles of secularism and social justice as well as instilling a sense of national pride – these were some of the express concerns of this policy. Despite the nationalist sentiments conveyed by the policy-makers, the reconstruction of the educational system in post-Independence India was done within the set parameters inherited from colonialism, in both policy and infrastructure. For instance, the English/urban bias of higher education, the filtration of education from the upper echelons to those lower down the socio-economic scale, and an unqualified preference for West3 Government of India, Ministry of Education, National Policy on Education 1986 (New Delhi: Government of India Publication, 1986): 25. See also http://www .shiksanic.nic.in/cd50years/g/T/GV/0TGV0101.htm

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ern modes of teaching and learning continued to dominate the highereducation scenario. Macaulay’s ghost cast a very long shadow over the academy in India. Higher education, however, continually interrogated itself, and these frequent introspections created productive tension in the Indian universities. As Raza and Aggarwal rightly point out, Even a quick perusal of developments in higher education indicate that in spite of its many inadequacies and limitations the system is not only the abode of the third largest stock of scientific and technical manpower in the world but it also produced a large number of humanists and social scientists who are recognized as respected peers by the international community of scholarship.4

The last decade of the twentieth century brought new challenges for Indian tertiary education. Globalization, privatization of education, new trade agreements such as G A T S , commercialization of education, largescale student migration to the metropolitan centres, the I T revolution – all these created a state of emergency in the Indian university. Higher education in India is today caught between two strong impulses. On the one hand, there is a strong move to indigenize education in order to make it sufficiently ‘national’ in content and purpose; on the other, the impact of globalization has led to privatization and reduced government funding at the tertiary level. Unfortunately, it has never been easy to specify what ‘national’ in the Indian context means. When you speak of ‘nation’, it is heard as ‘Hindu’; conversely, one often conflates the two categories for political advantage. Therefore, attempts to ‘indianize’ education have been viewed with suspicion and seen as a part of ‘saffronization’, and as a threat to the secular spirit of the nation. The margins between ‘national’ and ‘Hindu’, ‘religious’ and ‘communal’, and ‘traditional’ and ‘fundamentalist’ are so imperceptible that they often get erased in theory as well as in practice. The indianization of education ushered in by the recent government has provoked widespread protest, on the grounds that it marks a general shift from a secular perspective to a religious orientation in education.5 4

Moonis Raza & Aggarwal, “Higher Education in Contemporary India: Nature of Qualitative Growth,” in Higher Education in India Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Moonis Raza (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 1991): 33. 5 The government of National Democratic Alliance led by the Bharatiya Janata Party.

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While debates on the ‘indianization’ of education are raging in the universities and public forums, transnational capital is tightening its stranglehold on the Indian economy and society, and the effects of this new wave of power from outside, a form of neocolonization called globalization, pervade today’s Indian academy. The 1990s saw a major turn in the history of contemporary higher education in India. The decade witnessed swift changes on the academic scene and violent debates on higher education racked the university system on an unprecedented scale. There were sustained efforts to privatize higher education as public budgets shrank drastically: the gradual withdrawal of the state from higher education is generally considered to have been the result of urging from the World Bank. In 1997, the Indian government’s Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance issued a discussion paper on government subsidies in India in which ‘higher education’ was classified as a “non-merit good” (in contrast to elementary education, which was classified as a “merit good”). Non-merit goods are not deemed worthy of government subsidy. Higher education, which was earlier seen as a “public good,” as providing a valuable contribution to society and therefore being worthy of support, obviously lost its place and place-value with its transfer onto the list of “non-merit goods.” Indian academics and educationists were quick to see the similarities between the position adopted by the Indian government and that of the World Bank, as presented in a 1994 report on higher education and its 1995 Review.6 Despite widespread protest, the considerable cuts in state funding to higher education mean that universities are facing a serious financial crisis. Privately sponsored institutions have exploited the situation, making higher education available to those who can afford it, regardless of merit or other academic criteria of eligibility. It is in this context that the report submitted by Ambani and Birla merits special mention. The government, through the Prime Minister’s Council on Trade and Industry, appointed a committee headed by two noted industrialists, Mukesh Ambani and Kumarmangalam Birla, to suggest the reforms needed in the education sector, along with other sectors. The brief of this team of young industrialists was to formulate a policy framework for private investment in education, health and rural develop6

See State Funding of Higher Education, ed. K.B. Powar (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 1998).

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ment. The Ambani report states its vision for education in India in laudable terms. It proposes a revolution in education with a view “to create a competitive, yet cooperative, knowledge based society.” While this can hardly be contentious, the methods proposed for realizing this vision have come in for serious criticism. The Ambani report elaborates its design as follows: As the developed world moves to forging an information society founded on education, India cannot remain behind as a non-competitive labour oriented society. India has to envision being a competitive knowledge economy. India has to create an environment that does not produce industrial workers and labourers but one that fosters knowledge resources. Such resources must be at the cutting edge of knowledge, be competitive and innovative. Education development has a major role to play in shaping knowledge resources and, in turn, placing India in the vanguard in the information age.7

The enthusiasm of the young team for prioritizing technical education to the exclusion of everything else from the domain of knowledge is spelt out in this statement. More importantly, the Report stresses that this programme can be put into effect only through privatization and direct foreign investment. It suggests that a Private University Bill should be legislated to encourage establishment of new private universities in the field of science, technology and management. It states: “Allow foreign direct investment in education. To begin with, limit this to science and technology areas.” The other disciplines of higher education, “whose scholars do not command a market,” may be left to the patronage of the state.8 The assumptions underlying the policy are quite obvious. It makes a clear distinction between useful and saleable disciplines and not so useful and simply decorative disciplines. The private sector is allowed to get away with offering “saleable courses” and making “a quick profit.” The Government runs “programs that have no market value” and ends up with losses. Hierarchization of academic disciplines on the basis of their marketability in itself spells doom to the academic culture of universities. It would adversely affect the holistic character of education necessary for 7 Mukesh Ambani & Kumaramangalam Birla, A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education (New Delhi: Government of India, 2001). Quotations from this report are taken from the web document: http://www.nic.in 8 Ambani & Birla, A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education.

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the creation of a healthy society. A considerable space for interaction between science and the humanities was purposely created in the academy by early education planners in post-Independence India, since such interaction was considered to enrich both streams of knowledge. The most recent developments in Indian education planning ignore this vital factor. Lured on by the hype of I T and other technological courses, the education planners are even contemplating relegating programs in Humanities and Social Sciences to the distance-learning mode. It is ironical that educational experts consider face-to-face human interaction disposable in the teaching–learning situation of social sciences whose prime objective is to foster healthy interpersonal and social relationships. The whole thrust of developing an information society in countries like India needs to take into consideration the unambiguous reality that India could at best remain a subordinate partner of advanced capitalist countries in the field of Information Technology. The early results of the I T thrust in education are already manifest. A large number of young men and women trained in I T are in fact employed in what are called I T -enabled sectors. They are actually performing innumerable labour-saving tasks for the benefit of transnational capital. Two glaring examples are the medical transcription services and call centres that have sprung up like mushrooms in the past four or five years. A large number of Indian students trained in the universities are performing clerical work for American hospitals or wooing customers for American concerns or business ventures. Wellqualified university graduates employed in call centres live to American timings, sleeping when their society is awake and staying awake when their families and the world are fast asleep. Their initial training includes learning the American accent, euphemistically called “neutralization of accent,” and developing the necessary patience to pocket abuses with the utmost politeness. While one cannot ignore the fact that these centres are providing some job opportunities for unemployed youth, it is important to note that employment involves not only earning a salary, but also utilization of employee potential. At the risk of sounding simplistic, we would add that while Macaulay’s education, aimed at the creation of a cadre of clerks, produced theorists and thinkers as well, Microsoft education, promising to produce knowledge experts with a cutting edge, has resulted in the growth of large groups of I T coolies. As part of the so-called computer revolution, private agencies offering computer courses made quick profits in the early 1990s. Whatever Microsoft launched was consumed

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with alacrity by Indian learners. Owing to the inevitable jet-lag these programmes suffer on account of their transcontinental journeys, the languages would quite often become obsolete by the time Indian learners became adept at them. As K.N. Panikkar rightly cautions, “it is necessary to recognize the fact that the educational conditions created by information technology are pregnant with the possibilities of intellectual colonization.”9 The consequences of rapid privatization of higher education – gross imbalance in university policies regarding the promotion of technological and management education at the cost of other disciplines, and inequalities of resource distribution among different disciplines – are not hard to imagine. These have already begun to manifest themselves. In India, with the rapid growth of private technological institutions, the number of engineering graduates has increased exponentially in the last decade. Production within the country is not sufficient to absorb these graduates, and therefore the number of Indian graduates seeking admission to universities abroad – the U S A , the U K , Australia – has assumed huge proportions. One cannot be sure whether such an exodus can rightly be viewed as part of the internationalization of higher education. An Indian student studying in the U S A typically spends 20,000 U S dollars for tuition alone, quite apart from other expenses. If this amount is raised through bank loans, earnings will have to be in dollars to pay off the loan and the accrued interest. Those students who cannot raise this kind of capital queue up for software jobs at consultancy offices. The export of computer-skilled labour, abominably called ‘body-shopping,’ evokes horrific images of the slave markets of yesteryear. The practical problems discussed above are but the tip of the iceberg. More serious are the ideological and philosophical lacunae in the ‘globalized’ vision of education, which inextricably links education with market forces. Elimination of liberal education amounts, in fact, to elimination of dissent and protest, because it is social scientists and specialists in the humanities who are engaged in a study of social processes and who are alert to all forms of totalitarianism. The crisis of survival faced by these disciplines in most universities worldwide, particularly in developing 9 K.N. Panikker, “Whither Indian Education?” in South Asia Documents (Delhi: Akhbar: A Window on South Asia, 2002): 9. See http:www.erewilcom.net/indo window

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nations, points to a global phenomenon: the drive to manufacture consent and eliminate dissent. Furthermore, educational reforms introduced in the name of globalization are often aimed at the creation of necessary conditions for the operation of national and transnational capital. Having thus dilated on the various insidious ways in which globalization has interfered with the functioning of the Indian academy, we wish to make the necessary distinction between globalization and internationalization. Internationalization of education, to recall the oft-quoted Knight and de Wit definition, has been described as “the process of integrating an international / intercultural dimension into the teaching, research and service functions of the institution.”10 Such an approach to internationalization can hardly be contested and is in fact familiar in India. It may be recalled in this context that Tagore conceived Santiniketan as an international centre for humanistic and cultural studies. Inaugurating Visva– Bharati in 1921, Tagore spoke of India’s obligation to offer to others the hospitality of her best culture and India’s right to accept from others their best. A commitment to cultural reciprocity becomes a vital factor in genuine international education. Paige and Mestenhauser define internationalization as “a complex, multidimensional learning process that includes the integrative, intercultural, interdisciplinary, comparative, transfer of knowledge-technology, contextual and global dimensions of knowledge construction,” and, elaborating on this, maintain that these dimensions together form what is called an “international mindset.”11 The advantages of such an education can hardly be questioned. But while we need to understand all the implications of this rather complex phenomenon and to study its manifestation in different parts of the world, our focus is on Indian tertiary institutions; we shall demonstrate what internationalization of education has come to mean in this context. Developed with a political rationale after World War I I , internationalization of higher education has as its driving force economic objectives. Ostensibly, it is to be promoted in developing countries, because it leads to economic improvement and prosperity. But in effect it is emerging as a 10 Jane Knight & Hans de Wit, Internationalization of Higher Education in Asia Pacific Countries (Amsterdam: E A I E , 1997): 8. 11 R.M. Paige & J.A. Mestenhauser, “Internationalizing Educational Administration,” Educational Administration Quarterly 35.4 (1999): 500–17.

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marketing operation for the financial gain of developed nations. As such, internationalization can be perceived as a by-product of the process of globalization. The current realities of internationalizing education reflect a highly skewed relationship between East and West. Here are some findings from the U N E S C O student mobility data: Of the 51,400 foreign students currently studying in the United States more than 54 percent are from Asia, Seven of the top ten ‘sender countries’ of international foreign students in the U S are Asian, while not a single Asian country is represented among the top ten destinations for American students studying abroad. India alone accounts for more than 42,000 students in the U S compared to only 700 Americans who studied in India in the 1998/99 academic year.12

If student mobility is an aspect of internationalization, we see from the statistics mentioned above that the mobility is monodirectional, from the developing to the developed world. Both the academic and the economic motives of this phenomenon are obvious. But the irony of the situation is that a middle-class Indian student studying at an American university is contributing his/her might in every sense to make education for his/her affluent American classmate more affordable! He/she pays three times the fees an American citizen pays and works on/off campus to bear this burden. The economic potential of the internationalization of higher education is being exploited fully today at the cost of the academic purpose of education. There is active and growing competition for Indian students among foreign universities. Educational expos are conducted and students are enrolled in various academic programmes – generally engineering or management – and these outreach operations create excessive pressure on Indian universities, which, for lack of resources, can obviously not compete with Western institutions in terms of infrastructural facilities. Moreover, there is little leeway for academic systems and individual universities in India to develop independently in the increasingly competitive and fast-moving global higher education scene, dominated as it is by world-class universities in the industrialized countries. These countries 12 Quoted in David Arnold, “Globalization in Higher Education: What it Means for India?” in Internationalisation of Higher Education, ed. K.B. Powar (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 2001): 50.

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house not only privileged universities but also multinational corporations which control the global knowledge-system. What is the future of universities in developing countries like India when faced with this kind of competition? As Altbach warns, “Globalization in higher education exacerbates dramatic inequality in the world’s universities.”13 Another related development is the establishment of franchise centres by foreign universities and institutions. These collaborations, in many cases, have turned out to be unholy alliances, as such organizations do not enjoy academic credibility on their own home ground. Further sophistication of this phenomenon may be seen in collaborations with “Virtual Universities” located nowhere in the U S A or the U K . In the absence of a programme of action which would encourage commitment to academic excellence and the promotion of international values in education, gross irregularities such as those mentioned above will multiply, marring the academic culture of the institutions of higher learning and making the very project of internationalization highly suspect. A study conducted in the U K on the quality of degrees abroad identified fifteen universities and colleges as engaging in degree-hawking.14 Similarly, a number of Indian educational institutions boasting of collaborations with foreign universities lack accreditation and therefore count as unreliable. Internationalization which would promote a sharing of knowledge, an exchange of scholarship, and enrichment of cultures through fruitful interaction is an important step in revitalizing higher education. But if this process is primarily monitored by the market index, then it will only remain a business venture devoid of all academic content. In this context we wish to make brief reference to the changing diction and discourse of education today. The tyranny of the language of the marketplace is strangling the voice of the academy. Language, we know, shapes our life, aspirations, goals and objectives. The language of commercial materialism is pervading human experience today and has appropriated a sizeable space in academic discourse. This generates a kind of anxiety: to compete at any cost and somehow succeed. When political leaders, industrialists, market gurus, and media outlets use terms such as 13 Philip G. Altbach, “Higher Education and the W T O : Globalization Run Amok’,” International Higher Education 23 (Spring 2001): 2. See http://www.bc.edu/bc_org /avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News23/text001.htm 14 Quoted in Internationalisation of Higher Education, ed. Powar, 70.

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“export of higher education,” “saleability of particular courses,” “fundraising strategies,” “capitation fees,” “education as a fast growing export industry,” “scholars in demand and out of demand,” and “subjects profitable and profitless,” this anxiety is created both unintentionally and by design. All of us in the academy are targets of this type of language; we are all afflicted by it. Most of these terms are familiar to us, but, grafted onto an academic milieu, they transmit specific messages such as “Do or Die,” “Earn or Exit,” “Sell or to Hell” (recent versions of slogans like “publish or perish”). The use of special kinds of language for specific political purposes is nothing new; but rather than accept the meaning, usage and truth of such language, we academics have an obligation to question and work against the language of the marketplace, as well as against the values it embodies. Language shapes how we see the world; what we hear affects the way we see the world. Language operates on different levels of mediation and, as such, when the rhetoric of the marketplace pervades the space of the academy, it entails a change in what Said called “methodological attitudes.” This change quite radically alters social and cultural relationships, behavioural patterns, modes of thought and value-systems. Now we wish to note briefly some recent developments in policymaking on international higher education in India. Two Round Table conferences were organized by the Association of Indian Universities in 2001 and 2002 respectively. Senior educationists and planners, international educators representing developed and developing countries, had in-depth discussions on the internationalization of higher education. After the first Round Table they adopted unanimously what is called the Mysore Statement. We shall quote the important parts of that Statement to demonstrate the position of policy-makers on the issue of internationalization of higher education in India: Accepting that internationalization of higher education is a fact of life in the new ‘knowledge era’, Realising that ‘internationalization’ would lead to an improvement in the quality of education, promote Indian culture abroad, generate goodwill and understanding, and yield financial benefits, Recognizing that partnership and networking are essential for the enrichment of the teaching-learning process, and for improved quality of research, Believing that it is necessary to act in earnest without further delay,

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Resolved that government, academic institutions and the Association of Indian Universities be urged to take necessary steps to promote Indian higher education internationally, and for this purpose the following recommendations be given due consideration.15

The recommendations include improvement of infrastructure in the universities, facilities for foreign students, marketing strategies to promote Indian higher education abroad, and the simplification of visa rules and admission procedures. What must be noted, however, are the overtones of historical inevitability embedded in the references to internationalization as a fait accompli. It almost sounds as though this important academic body is indulging in an exercise in auto-suggestion in order to believe in the many benefits of internationalization. However, the Statement issued after the Second Round Table in 2002 is more explicit about the “need to ensure that the academic, cultural and social aspects of internationalization are not overshadowed by commercial and financial considerations.”16 The recommendations do not specify how this can be done, but they rightly urge the need for the development of a proper policy for internationalizing higher education. We have examined these developments to show how governments in the developing countries are acting under the pressure of world funding bodies and trading corporations, and are unable to evolve sound policies regarding the internationalization of higher education. Voices of dissent and caution urging reconsideration of the whole process of internationalization which the forces of globalization have unleashed, and protesting against commercialization of higher education, are heard today all over India. It can only be fervently hoped that this protest will consolidate itself into a sustained movement for the protection of academic autonomy. The future of the universities depends on whether education will play an important role in defining a new world-order based on equality or whether the new power-conglomeration will manipulate educational priorities for its own ends. It is high time that academic communities across the world came together to resist the invasion of the universities by market forces and to protect academic culture in institutions of higher learning. That, indeed, would be a welcome step towards internationalization! 15 16

Internationalisation of Higher Education, ed. Powar, 193–94. Quoted in Internationalisation of Higher Education, ed. Powar, 145.

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WORKS CITED Altbach, Philip G. “Higher Education and the ‘W T O : Globalization Run Amok’,” International Higher Education 23 (Spring 2001): 2–4. http://www.bc.edu/bc _org/avp/soe/cihe/newsletter/News23/text001.htm Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Tr. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971). Ambani, Mukesh, & Kumaramangalam Birla. A Policy Framework for Reforms in Education (New Delhi: Government of India, 2001). http://www.nic.in Arnold, David. “Globalisation of Higher Education: What it Means for India?” in Internationalisation of Higher Education, ed. K.B. Powar (New Delhi: Association of India Universities, 2001): 48–55. Cohn, S. Bernard. Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India (Delhi: Oxford U P , 1996). Government of India. Ministry of Education. National Policy on Education 1986 (New Delhi: Government of India Publication, 1986). http://www.shiksanic.nic.in/cd50years/g/T/GV/0TGV0101.htm Joshi, Svati, ed. Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History (New Delhi: Trianka, 1991). Kothari, D.S. Kothari Commission Report 1964–66 (New Delhi: Government of India Publication, 1966). Knight, Jane, & Hans de Wit. Internationalisation of Higher Education in Asia Pacific Countries (Amsterdam: E A I E , 1997). Paige, R.M., & J.A. Mestenhauser. “Internationalizing Educational Administration,” Educational Administration Quarterly 35.4 (1999): 500–17. Panikker, K. N. “Whither Indian Education?” in South Asia Documents (Delhi: Akhbar: A Window on South Asia, 2002). http://www.erewilcom.net/indowindow Powar, K.B., ed. State Funding of Higher Education (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 1998). ——, ed. Internationalisation of Higher Education (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 2001). ——, ed. Internationalisation of Higher Education (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 2002). Raza, Moonis & Aggarwal. “Higher Education in Contemporary India: Nature of Qualitative Growth,” in Higher Education in India: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Moonis Raza (New Delhi: Association of Indian Universities, 1991): 31–35. Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia U P , 1989).

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Creativity Inc. Globalizing the Cultural Imaginary in New Zealand J ENNIFER L AWN

I don’t have to prove that I am creative. – Talking Heads, “Artists Only”

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two articles on New Zealand cultural policy appeared in back-to-back issues of the arts journal Landfall. In “Going Mad without Noticing: Cultural Policy in a Small Country,” Lydia Wevers and Mark Williams express disappointment that the Labour–Alliance coalition government elected in New Zealand in 1999 has “continued policy directions going back to the mid-’80s,” in particular affirming the “traditional” assumption that “culture produces the nation.”1 This desire of policy-makers to “find a stable point of identification for everyone” (17) has led to a lamentably “happy consolidation of opinion about how the ‘creative industries’ contribute to the economy and arts practitioners enrich all our lives” (15). The cultural sector serves as an instrument for the hegemonic submerging of difference, threatening the creative autonomy of the arts, from which they derive their power to provoke new registers of thought and feeling (17). In “Against Creativity,” Tim Corballis attributes the lack of passionate debate about cultural policy in New Zealand to a wider loss of discursive agonism in the Western world following the perceived triumph of neoliberalism as “the most suc-

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Lydia Wevers & Mark Williams, “Going Mad Without Noticing: Cultural Policy in a Small Country,” Landfall 204 (2002): 16.

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cessful ideology in world history.”2 Astutely observing that “democracy is rapidly becoming redefined as fiscal technocracy, and politics is becoming redefined as policy” (59), Corballis pursues as an example the incorporation of the term “creativity” into neoliberal discourse, where it is “increasingly articulated with ideas of individualism, risk and ambition” and with “optimistic national slogans (‘New Zealand is a great place full of creative people’ etc.), reminding me of nothing so much as the desperate, repeated ‘affirmations’ (‘I am a great person and I deserve love’ etc.) of the chronic anxiety-sufferer” (62). In this essay, more analytical than programmatic, I want to triangulate, document, and contextualize this productive exchange of ideas. On the face of it, Wevers’ and Williams’s undifferentiated claim that the government of 1999 continued policy directions of the previous fifteen years seems factually unsustainable. In contrast to the fiscal austerity of the 1990s, Labour coalition governments since 1999 have provided at least 3 N Z $138.2 million in additional funding for arts and cultural industries. Labour has thus presided over a spectacular conversion in the status of the New Zealand cultural sector from the grudgingly state-protected Oliver Twist of market forces to poster-kid for global-market innovation. In 1998 the Ministry of Cultural Affairs discussion paper Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector defensively justified government’s continuing financial support of the arts in aesthetic, expressive, collective, and preservationist terms. By 2002, the Labour government applauded the “creative industries” – a word on this phrase later – solely in commercial terms, noting their potential global reach, their ease of reproduction, which allowed advantageous economies of scale, their fit with the governmentdriven integrated branding of New Zealand as creative and entrepreneurial, and their horizontal impact across other industries. Neoliberal doctrine 2

Perry Anderson, cited in Tim Corballis, “Against Creativity,” Landfall 205 (2003): 58. 3 This sum comprises: an $86.6 million Cultural Recovery Package for the arts in May 2000; increased baseline funding to Creative New Zealand by $11.6 million over four years from 2003–2006; and subsidies totalling up to $40 million a year for large budget film producers who spend at least 70% of their production budget in New Zealand. Ministry staff numbers have also risen from twelve in 1998 to seventy in 2003. See Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector: A Survey of the Issues (Wellington: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1998): 16; Statement of Intent 2003–04 (Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2003): 18.

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thus appears to have been reversed: where arts agencies were encouraged to behave more like businesses during the 1990s, businesses are now encouraged to act more like arts agencies, for “creativity is at the heart of innovation.”4 Yet Wevers’ and Williams’s assertion of fundamental policy continuities does, I believe, hold up to deeper scrutiny, and Corballis’s jeremiad against corporatized creativity helps explain why. By positioning creativity at the intersection of national identity, commerce, the arts, and subjectivity, government policies can knit together globalization and nationalism – discourses that in other contexts run counter to each other – to acclimatize the population to the continual shocks of technological change, instability, and cycles of self-refashioning in the era of deregulated markets and global competition. Labour government cultural policies thus dress the wolf of neoliberalism, so to speak, in the sheep’s clothing of cultural nationalism. This deployment of creativity as a regulatory mechanism has been influentially theorized and promulgated by Anthony Giddens as an element of Third-Way politics. The Third Way broadly situates itself within what Diana Crane describes as the “cultural flows or network model” of globalization.5 Contemporary communications are deemed to create multidirectional openings in international trade and cultural exchange, enhancing growth in nations that open their economies to international markets.6 While acknowledging the decentred nature of globalizing processes, the Third Way rejects the passivity and hysterical tinge of the view that “no one seems now to be in control” as “nation-states turn more and more into the executors and plenipotentiaries of forces which they have no hope of controlling politically.”7 Instead, Giddens argues, “control” rightly passes from centralized bureaucracies to small agents, such as local and community bodies and, ultimately, individuals themselves, that can respond most 4

Growing an Innovative New Zealand (Wellington: Office of the Prime Minister,

2002): 56. 5

Diana Crane, “Culture and Globalization: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima & Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002): 3. 6 Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalisation Is Reshaping our Lives (London: Profile, 2nd ed. 2002): xxviii. 7 Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998): 58, 65.

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flexibly and effectively to many aspects of global change. Governments should thus manage their own transformation from protector and controller to facilitator, passing over to civil society “tasks which can’t be effectively run by the state.”8 Government continues to assert regulatory force over such aspects of national infrastructure as financial markets, the environment, and human rights, but directs its energies toward empowering and mobilizing citizens through “life politics.” An anglicization of Michel Foucault’s term “biopolitics,” this self-actualization programme helps individuals to develop conceptual resources and technologies of the self to “respond to a world in which tradition and custom are losing their hold over our lives, and where science and technology have altered much of what used to be ‘nature’” (40). Investment in culture, as “the most important form of social inclusion,”9 aids this purported revolution in subjectivity from “dull conformity” to “creativity, diversity and achievement” (6). Bearing in mind Saskia Sassen’s view that “the global is not simply the non-national, that global processes materialize in national territories and institutions,”10 I will offer a case study tracing the rapid convergence of the cultural sector with corporate values in New Zealand, focusing particularly on the years 1998–2002. In what specific ways, and through what agencies, is the state instrumentalizing cultural policy to “produce the nation” in contemporary New Zealand? How are the terms ‘culture’ and (particularly) ‘creativity’ imbricated with processes of economic globalization? As Virginia R. Dominguez has demonstrated with the term ‘culture’, in this discussion I will be less concerned with what creativity is than with asking “what is being accomplished socially, politically, discursively” when the concept of creativity “is invoked to describe, analyze, argue, justify, and theorize.”11 To place these issues in context, I start in 1984, when the incoming fourth Labour government radically dismantled the protectionist economic nationalism that had characterized the previous five decades. The programme of export substitution and economic internationalization – the

8

Anthony Giddens, The Third Way and Its Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 2000): 20. Massimo D’Alema, cited in Giddens, The Third Way, 5. 10 Saskia Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia U P , 1996): 108. 11 Virginia R. Dominguez, “Invoking Culture: The Messy Side of ‘Cultural Politics’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91.1 (1992): 21. 9

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most far-reaching in the O E C D 12 – was widespread, rapid, and unmandated.13 The unilateral opening of the New Zealand economy to international competition, it was believed, would press industries to diversify both the range and the market destinations of exported goods and services. Under the neoliberal principles of wealth-creation through free-market competition, individualism, mobility of capital, and devolution, these governments slashed agricultural subsidies; deregulated financial markets, service sectors, and employment laws; reduced real funding to higher education by one third; fully or partially privatized the national airline, railways, telecommunications, and energy infrastructure; and instituted commercial imperatives for state television. Foreign ownership of New Zealand businesses increased to 51% of shareholding of New Zealand’s Top Forty publicly listed companies by the mid-1990s.14 In 2002, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development ranked New Zealand the most “transnationalized” country in the O E C D .15 Cultural policy was sheltered from this economic storm, temporarily, by the disjunction in the fourth Labour government between its foreign policy and its “economic fundamentalism.”16 While New Zealand’s economic sovereignty was eroding, political sovereignty was compensatorily aroused through Prime Minister David Lange’s highly popular antinuclear campaign against the “goliaths” of Australia, the U S A , and France. Lange envisaged the cultural sector as a complement to foreign policy, in particular favouring a “New Zealand feature film industry” encouraged to “make statements about New Zealand overseas which are worth immeasurable amounts to us in focusing attention on New Zea-

12 Paul Dalziel, “‘Third Way’ Economics: What Might This Mean in New Zealand?” in The New Politics: A Third Way for New Zealand, ed. Srikanta Chatterjee et al. (Palmerston North, N Z : Dunmore, 1999): 75. 13 On the unmandated nature of the reforms, see Simon Walker, “The Politics of Rogernomics,” in Rogernomics: Reshaping New Zealand’s Economy, ed. Simon Walker (Wellington: New Zealand Centre for Independent Studies, 1989): 208–24. 14 Priyatosh Maitra, “The Globalisation of Capitalism and Economic Transition in New Zealand,” in The Political Economy of New Zealand, ed. Chris Rudd & Brian Roper (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 33. 15 Jane Kelsey, At the Crossroads (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 2002): 37. 16 Jane Kelsey, Economic Fundamentalism (London: Pluto, 1995).

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land.”17 However, some arts-sector restructuring was undertaken: from 1987, the Arts Council and Film Commission received bulk funding grants from Lotto proceeds, and under the State Sector Act 1988 arts bodies were split between policy-making/funding agencies and serviceprovider agencies.18 Lange’s interventionist sympathies alienated him from the right-wing factions of Cabinet, leading to his resignation in 1989 and Labour’s failure in the 1990 election. The incoming National government implicitly aligned state-funded writers and artists with other welfare “bludgers,” or fraudulent dependents. As occurred in other Western countries, cut-backs in state funding for the arts paralleled constraints on welfare provision.19 Tightened fiscal “incentives” induced arts bodies to seek increased alternative revenues from individual and corporate sponsorship, from earned income, and from merchandising and marketing initiatives. During the 1990s, state funding fell in real terms from 1990–2000 for all national arts institutions except the New Zealand Historic Places Trust and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, the latter being the amalgamation of the National Museum and the National Art Gallery, which opened in 1997.20 The state-owned television network was corporatized and required by statute to return a profit to the government as sole shareholder; the Broadcasting Commission (now New Zealand on Air) was deregulated; cultural policy development became fragmented across sixteen

17

Cited in Gregory A. Waller, “The New Zealand Film Commission: Promoting an Industry, Forging a National Identity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television n.s. 16.2 (1996): 251. 18 Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector, 40. 19 Stefan Toepler & Annette Zimmer, “Subsidizing the Arts: Government and the Arts in Western Europe and the United States,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima & Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002): 29. 20 The Heart of the Nation: A Cultural Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand (Wellington: McDermott Miller, 2000): 62. The government publication Government Spending on Culture 1990-1999 (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2000) records a different story, highlighting an increase of 54% in public expenditure on culture between 1990 and 1999 (9). However, this figure is unadjusted for inflation. It also includes $290 million spent on early childhood education in 1998/99 and funding of $17 million in the same year for Te Papa, which did not exist in 1990/91 for a viable budget comparison.

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departments;21 and demand-side rationales such as community outreach and the development of sustainable new markets were introduced into the grants application system administered by Creative New Zealand, formerly the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council.22 These policies did not yet amount to a concerted globalization of the New Zealand cultural sector. Although charged with “the development of cultural industries’ potential particularly with regard to export and tourism earnings,” the Ministry of Cultural Affairs formed in 1991 took few material steps to implement this objective.23 As late as 1999, the arts community “continued to use the rhetoric of the pre-1984 framework” regarding returns from state funding of the cultural sector that include “outcomes higher than just material output,” such as the cultivation of taste, national pride, or bicultural identity.24 However, a series of unheralded documents stepped towards the discursive convergence that Fredric Jameson formulates as “the becoming cultural of the economic, and the becoming economic of the cultural.”25 The 1990s saw a series of joint documents between the Ministry of Statistics and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs published under the Cultural Statistics Programme, establishing definitions and methodologies for quantifying the economic contribution of cultural activities.26 On the one hand, this statistical framework served a defensive purpose for arts practitioners, who could now prove to sceptical detractors of state funding that “cultural businesses are real businesses, art is real work.”27 21 Michael Volkerling, “Death or Transfiguration: The Future for Cultural Policy in New Zealand,” Culture and Policy 6.1 (1994): 9. 22 Dennis McEldowney, “Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Auckland: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1998): 685–86. 23 Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector, 16. 24 Brian Easton, The Whimpering of the State: Policy after M M P (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1999): 183. 25 Fredric Jameson, “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1998): 60. 26 New Zealand Framework for Cultural Statistics (1995); Household Spending on Culture (1996); Employment in the Cultural Sector (1998); Government Spending on Culture 1990–1999 (2000). 27 Judith Tizard, cited in the government press release “Economic and Social Benefits Continue Two Years on from Government’s Cultural Recovery Package,” issued 22 May 2002.

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On the other hand, the framework renders cultural sector “outputs” calculable, accountable, and comparable to other sectors of the economy, and thus subsumes them under a managerialist ethos. A second initiative, The Heart of the Nation: A Cultural Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand (2000), presented by a taskforce of arts practitioners, analysts, and economists, represents the creative industries as an under-realized export industry. Although rejected by government, 28 the report theorized the cultural sector in precisely the globalizing terms now espoused by the government. The authors dismiss the “policy legacy of nineteenth century civic welfarism” that has “positioned cultural institutions and programmes as social services rather than economic assets” (103). The Heart of the Nation report supports the government’s twopronged policy to “nurture and sustain” cultural activities “through which a strong and confident cultural identity can emerge,” and to “back a strong creative industry sector which provides sustainable employment and is able to contribute to economic growth and prosperity” (20). No tension is presumed to arise between these twin imperatives, culture and commerce. Heritage is defined in a self-reinforcing and relativist manner as “a current cultural resource, continually reinvented to meet present needs” (16). Using the language of the marketplace, identities – whether based on national affiliation or on transnational categories such as indigeneity, sexual orientation, or gender – are represented as “primary cultural assets” (16). Globalization is theorized according to the network model as a two-way traffic of cultural products, allowing New Zealand creative entrepreneurs to develop niche export markets in cultural products and services (30). In effect, The Heart of the Nation embraces a cultural internationalism analogous to the post-1984 process of economic internationalization. In broad terms, settler nationalist and postcolonial cultural paradigms might be regarded as import substitution programmes, to the extent that they share the desire to replace metropolitan and colonial modes and representations with those deemed more fully representative of reality as locally experienced (however contested the content of ‘the local’ might be). Cultural policy as export substitution, by contrast, regards the saleability of any representation in the global entertainment market as the most salient criterion, furthering the government’s aim to reduce reliance on bulk 28

Martin Matthews, “Report to the Minister on the Heart of the Nation Document” (Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2000).

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commodity trading. “In essence,” as the strategy document, Growing an Innovative New Zealand (2002), puts it in tones reminiscent of a personal trainer, “our exports need to reduce in weight and become heavier in knowledge and value” (32). A blockbuster such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, produced in New Zealand, provides the model weightless foreignexchange earner for a nation located 2,200 kilometres from its nearest export market. The film can be quickly distributed (through simultaneous multiple cinema releases, for example) and it can be replicated many times over. Production techniques can adapt technology from other industries (as director Peter Jackson’s special-effects company Weta Workshop adapted 3D imaging techniques developed in the meat-packaging industry to make digital body doubles of principal characters). In turn, production innovations can themselves be saleable (such as Weta’s development of Massive software for staging large-scale fight scenes). Copyright and royalties generate income for decades after production; international tourism benefits from fan pilgrimages; film premieres and other star appearances boost the events-management sector; museums can cash in with special exhibitions (the Lord of the Rings: The Motion Picture Trilogy exhibition attracted 200,000 visitors to Te Papa in Wellington and has toured venues in Australia, the United Kingdom, the U S A , and Singapore). Merchandising and cross-marketing initiatives add value by encouraging consumers to extend their filmic experience into their selection of clothing, restaurant meals, toys, décor, toiletries, and leisure reading. Finally, through their global distribution networks, cultural exports profile Brand New Zealand, currently marketed under the tagline “100% Pure New Zealand.”29 On the principle of integrated branding, this cohesive national projection should be “supported, reinforced and enriched by every act of communication between the country and the rest of the world.”30 This export-oriented imaginary judges cultural production in terms of successful or unsuccessful market performance rather than aesthetic, moral, or intellectual qualities. Splatter movies, Mori kapa haka (tradi-

29

See Nigel Morgan, Annette Pritchard & Rachel Piggott, “New Zealand, 100% Pure: The Creation of a Powerful Niche Destination Brand,” Journal of Brand Management 9.4–5 (2002): 335–54. 30 Simon Anholt, Brand New Justice: The Upside of Global Branding (Oxford: Butterworth–Heinemann, 2003): 11.

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tional performance), and opera are all good as long as they find an international audience.31 If the product enhances production across several economic sectors, all the better. The Heart of the Nation report rather weakly attempts to revivify value by citing Casson’s view that “the success of any economy depends on the quality of its culture” (85), but the circular logic is apparent: if economic success is the primary index of quality, then quality has little or no content beyond the economic. Nor has national identity: witness Rod Oram’s complaint that “the unfocused enthusiasm for The Lord of the Rings suggests we [New Zealanders] still don’t have a clear idea of who we are and what we’re trying to sell the world,” which implicitly equates “knowing we who are” with “knowing what we’re trying to sell.”32 Yet this conflation of branding with identity can advantage the arts to the extent that they raise or maintain national brand ‘profile’ and so justify state funding. Just as the language of economics can be applied to rationalize subsidies for products that are not commercial in the sense of profit-making, marketing is also capable of measuring and analyzing non-pecuniary values. Loss-making products such as a national ballet or symphony orchestra may continue to be subsidized if they are deemed to enhance total brand equity – the “values, assets, properties and perceptions of a product, service, or idea, assigned to it and promoted by its creator”33 – for both domestic and international markets. The cultural sector’s new confidence with the language of global economics was matched by the business world’s discovery of creativity during the 1990s. Thomas B. Lawrence and Nelson Phillips develop the managerial implications of the observation that “it is not just advertising that is the art of the capitalist world but a broad range of goods and services that have taken on an important symbolic dimension and that make 31

For further discussion of the process in which New Zealand cultural production is fashioned toward a kind of modularizable, hyperreal global market, see Patrick Evans, “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction,” Kite 22 (July 2002): 4–14; repr. in World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000 [2003]): 94–105; Chris Prentice, “Riding the Whale: Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider,” this volume, 247–67. 32 Rod Oram, “Brand New Zealand,” Unlimited (December 2001–January 2002): 42. 33 Daniel L. Yadin, The International Dictionary of Marketing (London: Kogan Page, 2002): 53.

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up the fabric of signs that characterizes modern society.”34 Under postFordist patterns of specialized consumption, a wide range of goods becomes subject to the process that Tom Peters terms “fashionisation,” the capacity to go in and out of style. As capitalist production in general comes to resemble cultural production, goods become increasingly valued for their meaning rather than their intrinsic quality or purpose, so that “a city is turned into an event, a commodity into an experience, a way of life into a style, ethics into icons, [and] everyday life into design.”35 Managers in a range of sectors should now emulate cultural-industry workers, who constitute an emergent “creative class”:36 …organizations now need to manage their relationship with communities of consumption rather than simply with aggregates of individual consumers. This is because the concept of style is one that is constructed in social settings among groups of people. What constitutes cool, beautiful, or exciting are decisions made socially rather than in isolation as an individual.37

The cultural industries thus excel in perpetual newness, “imagineering,” energy, passion, responsiveness to transitory consumer whim, and innovation through an essentially metaphoric process, the “meeting of surprising combinations.”38 Such “surprising combinations” include the oxymoronic concepts “work play” and “creative entrepreneurship.” The Ministry for Culture and Heritage demonstrates the purchase of “work play” in current policy when it offers as one of three “commonly cited purposes” for government’s support of the cultural sector the idea that “cultural activities have the potential to be much greater employers of people doing the jobs they love.”39 Creativity heals the wounds of alienated labour, as all work becomes intrinsically satisfying and self-motivated no matter who owns the means of production. Rather than basing cultural policy on time-use 34 Thomas B. Lawrence & Nelson Phillips, “Understanding Cultural Industries,” Journal of Management Inquiry 11.4 (2002): 435. 35 Orvar Löfgren, “The New Economy: A Cultural History,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 3.3 (2003): 244. 36 Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class (New York: Basic Books, 2002). 37 Lawrence & Phillips, “Understanding Cultural Industries,” 437–38. 38 Löfgren, “The New Economy: A Cultural History,” 245. 39 Ministry for Culture and Heritage, Statement of Intent, 6.

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studies showing that New Zealanders divide their time almost equally between paid work, unpaid work, and leisure, as Michael Volkerling proposes, the government has even further entrenched “the image of homo economicus [as] rational utility maximizer on which current New Zealand economic policy is based,”40 by subsuming play under post-Fordism’s “highly Calvinistic moralism.”41 As for “creative entrepreneur,” Corballis asks whether the phrase is a tautology or an oxymoron, and implicitly sides with the latter option, rejecting as he does the contentless, vague, and unfalsifiable corporate appropriation of creativity.42 Löfgren agrees: “Here is the striking paradox of trying to domesticate the imagination while at the same time trying to preserve its magic aura as an unbridled energy,” for “in order to become a creative person or setting one might institutionalize creativity in ways that make it disappear.”43 Ironically, the Prime Minister herself showed a lack of creative leadership in the “paintergate” scandal of April 2002, in which a sketch signed by Clark and auctioned at a community fund-raising event for $1,000 later proved to have been drawn by somebody else. Clark had – in an offence against the very concept – delegated her own creativity. As political economy, the scramble for creativity engages New Zealand in competition to secure niches in the design and merchandising segments of commodity chains, those most reliant on the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. Industries most subject to fashionization, such as fashion and entertainment, may also be characterized as “buyerdriven commodity chains,” in which “large retailers, brand name merchandisers, and trading companies play the pivotal role in setting up decentralized production networks in a variety of exporting countries.”44 Transnational companies such as Gap and Nike contract out production and devote an increasing portion of their investments to market research, advertising, and promotion to shape consumer taste and excite demand. The corporate call to creativity addresses itself primarily to the perpetual

40

Volkerling, “Death or Transfiguration,” 17. Mike O’Brien & Chris Wilkes, The Tragedy of the Market: A Social Experiment in New Zealand (Palmerston North, N Z : Dunmore, 1993): 21. 42 Corballis, “Against Creativity,” 63. 43 Löfgren, “The New Economy: A Cultural History,” 246, 247. 44 Gary Gereffi, cited in Aida A. Hozic, Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2001): 23. 41

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development and renewal of such distributional networks, rather than to the debased earth-and-time-bound arena of production.45 However, pancreativity suffers from the paradox that the more states and localities claim unique attributes of innovation, dynamism, and so on, the more their efforts appear indistinguishable from each other. “Mimicry, after all, has always been a by-product of competition.”46 The Weta Workshop boss Richard Taylor, for example, attributes his Oscar-winning inventiveness to growing up in a rural area of New Zealand remote from the hyperconsumerism of the USA : “Unlike the American kids,” he reminisces, “we couldn’t go out and buy [toys] in a blister pack” but, rather, tinkered with “the cotton reel, the rubber band, the matchstick and the wax candle.”47 Yet, in a kind of performative contradiction, this claim to creative specialness itself manifests most powerfully the americanization of cultural identity in New Zealand through imitation of enterprise mythology, irrespective of whether American kids actually play with rubber bands and wax candles.48 The risk for marginal economies such as New Zealand, however, is that competition to create unique national and local identities may end up collapsing distribution-based economies of space into production-based economies of time, such as “low labor costs, unrestricted work hours, expediency and efficiency of production, microregulation, and infrastructural investments favorable to the continuous flow of production.”49 “We Kiwis” may be just as creative as “you Aussies, Americans, and Brits,” in other words, but our creativity carries a cheaper price tag, as those who enviously compare the economic benefits of the Lord of the Rings production to the New Zealand economy (up to $NZ352.7 million) with New Line’s gross earnings to date (approximately $NZ4.6 billion) are aware.50 In a further irony, in the domain of 45 Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking on the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000): 195–97. 46 Hozic, Hollyworld, 121. 47 “Taylor an Honorary Teaching Fellow,” Massey News (Palmerston North, N Z ; 24 February 2003): 3. 48 See Ruth Brown, Cultural Questions: New Zealand Identity in a Transnational Age (London: Kakapo, 1997): 6. 49 Hozic, Hollyworld, 114. 50 The figure of N Z $352.7 million derives from a scoping report released by the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research in 2002. However, the report does not take into account the tax break negotiated with New Line prior to 1999, which allowed

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international competitiveness New Zealand’s own late arrival at Creative Capital only displays the nation’s policy-making derivativeness. Australia became a Creative Nation in 1994 when a document announcing the restructuring of federal funding was published under that title;51 Great Britain in 1997 with the establishment of the Blair government’s interdepartmental Creative Industries Task Force.52 And at any rate the creative economy may already be on the decline – Löfgren discusses it in the past tense – as new concepts such as the hydrogen economy and cultural ecology, theorized as the sustainability of a community’s cultural capital stock, emerge on the policy scene.53 The policy field is itself subjection to fashionization, as successive administrations repackage attempts to accommodate the public to the perilous knowledge that governments can no longer “guarantee outcomes for their citizens.”54 In Thatcherite mode, National and Labour governments of 1984–99 in New Zealand entrenched a new elitism based on economic technocracy, dismissive of industry representatives, voters, and the gene-

one third of the production costs, approximately N Z $219 million, to be written off in lost tax revenues (see John Barnett, “Shaky Statistics Don’t Help Film,” National Business Review 10 May 2002: 17). As the Heart of the Nation report also advises, what is often casually termed international “investment” in New Zealand film “can be described more accurately as the purchase of services and use of facilities (including scenery),” which does not return export receipts but rather “the development of creativity, skills, goodwill and new business opportunities” (68). The economic debate over foreign–funded screen production (“runaways”) and coproductions becomes considerably more complex when potential threats to local production are factored in. See Gordon Campbell, “Lord of the Deals,” N Z Listener (21 October 2000): 18–24; Gordon Campbell, “Planet Middle Earth,” N Z Listener (15 December 2001): 16–24; Hozic, Hollyworld, 85–131; Greg Elmer, “The Trouble with the Canadian ‘Body Double’: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting,” Screen 43.4 (2002): 423–31. 51 See Jennifer Radbourne, “Creative Nation – A Policy for Leaders or Followers? An Evaluation of Australia’s 1994 Cultural Policy Statement,” Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society 26.4 (1997): 271–83, and Denis Cryle, “‘Redefining Australia’: Cultural Policy and the Creative Nation Statement,” Southern Review 28.3 (1995): 283–88. 52 See Chris Smith, Creative Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). 53 See Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy (Oxford: Polity, 2002); David Throsby, Economics and Culture (Cambridge & New York: Cambridge U P , 2001). 54 Giddens, The Third Way, 10.

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ral public.55 Third-Way life politics, by contrast, favours carrots rather than sticks to coax the mulish workforce along much the same policy track. What Löfgren calls “the cult of creativity” thus serves as a more effective subjectivizing vehicle for the empowerment and mobilization of individuals than the confrontational tactics of unalloyed neoliberalism or the faceless, white-coated researchers hailed by the Knowledge Economy. The so-called Knowledge Wave privileged the fundamental and applied sciences, deterred young New Zealanders from graduating in the nonproductive fields of law and business, and essentially overlooked the humanities and social sciences as outside its technophilic purview. However, as a Prime Ministerial adviser commented to Rod Oram, “the whole vernacular around the Knowledge Economy alienates people. They think it is about research, universities, innovation and entrepreneurship but not about them. They don’t get the concept of their own intellectual capital.”56 Creativity, by contrast, anchors state policy to individual subjectivity through self-recognition, aided by the shift in rhetorical emphasis from the ‘arts’ to ‘culture’ to ‘creativity’.57 ‘The arts’ connote high culture and elite consumption, whereas ‘culture’ more inclusively bridges the aesthetic and the anthropological.58 Very few of us are professional artists, demonstrably, but 93% of us take part in cultural activities, according to the Cultural Experiences Survey of 2002;59 and almost all of us could be flattered into believing that we have some creative capability waiting to bloom with the right tending and nourishment. This democratization of creativity produces new heroes: where the New Zealand media profiled wealthy financiers such as Bob Jones, Michael Fay, and Ron Trotter during the

55

See Richard Mulgan, “State and Democracy in New Zealand,” in The Political Economy of New Zealand, ed. Chris Rudd & Brian Roper (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 256–72. 56 Oram, “Brand New Zealand,” 45. 57 For a detailed semantic discussion see Ruth–Blandina M. Quinn, Public Policy and the Arts: A Comparative Study of Great Britain and Ireland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998): 59–94. 58 Toby Miller & George Yúdice, Cultural Policy (London: Sage, 2002): 1. 59 A Measure of Culture: Cultural Experience and Cultural Spending in New Zealand (Wellington: Ministry of Statistics and Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2003).

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1980s, it is now ruffle-headed Peter Jackson who has become the “poster

boy for fast capitalism.”60 That cultural policy serves state interest in producing self-regulating subjects devoted to capital accumulation has become a commonplace of the cultural-studies-based analysis of institutions.61 Indeed, Toby Miller and George Yúdice define cultural policy as “the merger of governmentality and taste […] dedicated to producing subjects via the formation of repeatable styles of conduct, either at the level of the individual or the public.”62 Both neoliberal and Third-Way cultural policies thus act as modes of microregulation, albeit with different emphases, seeking to adapt the populace to a life unsheltered from the volatile weather of market competition. The neoliberal preference for separating service delivery from government policy-making ostensibly protected the “arm’slength” principle of state funding of the arts in liberal democracies, in which fund-distribution decisions are made by specialists and peers to ensure artistic freedom of expression. As has occurred in other state-funded sectors, however, tightening budgets and stringent accountability mechanisms have tended instead to render arts-funding agencies more subject to surveillance. In Britain, “government influence has been increasing steadily since the early 1980s,”63 to the extent that the cultural policies of the Blair government can be provocatively likened to the strategies of Soviet Socialist Realism.64 Thus the arm’s-length principle is reversed: cultural agencies serve not to protect artists and their audiences from government but, rather, offer a vehicle to disperse the form of social control that Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose term “government at a distance.”65 The “stable point of identification” for the nation that Wevers and Williams refer to thus entails the governmental production of creative subjects

60

Thierry Jutel, “The Lord of the Rings: Landscape, Transformation and the Geography of the Virtual,” paper presented at New Zealand Studies Association Annual Conference. London, U K : 28 June 2003. 61 See Tony Bennett, “Useful Culture,” Cultural Studies 6.3 (1992): 395–408. 62 Miller & Yúdice, Cultural Policy, 12. 63 Quinn, Public Policy and the Arts, 90. 64 Andrew Brighton, “Towards a Command Culture: New Labour’s Cultural Policy and Soviet Socialist Realism,” Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 24–34. 65 Peter Miller & Nikolas Rose, “Governing Economic Life,” Economy and Society 19.1 (1990): 1–31.

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who are not docilely regulated so much as adventurously risk-taking and deregulated. This programme, Corballis summarizes dystopically, fits neatly into constructions of nationhood devoid of citizenship: a nation understood as a collection of fully independent individuals, expecting no help from their compatriots, but each of whose creativity is claimed by the branded 66 collective in the race for position in the world market.

Together with Wevers and Williams, Corballis argues that art can only relocate its point of resistance by extracting itself from this attenuated yet compulsory mode of corporatized creativity and decolonizing itself from the indiscriminate semantic spread of the term ‘culture’. As a concluding thought-experiment, and in the spirit of creative engagement with cultural policy, I have considered what narrative endings might be envisaged by the four theorists whose ideas have prompted and guided my own elaboration here. Giddens’s projection of resourceful, mobile small units pooling their human capital towards enterprising goals chimes perfectly with the ending of Peter Cattaneo’s film The Full Monty (1997), which has enjoyed continuing success as a Broadway musical since 2000. Five unemployed Sheffield men turn their discarded labourpower into striptease performance, shedding their emotional insecurities, as well as their former wage dependency, with their clothes. The grim converse of this jubilant vision appears in Ken Loach’s film The Navigators (2001), in which The Full Monty’s football-team metaphor of a homosocial cooperative is replaced by the unidirectional impetus of the train, analogous to the acephalous representation of a globalized world without controls. Loach’s intervention reverses The Full Monty’s movement from community fragmentation to integration: when British Rail is split and sold to private companies, a gang of rail workers find themselves tendering for their old jobs and competing against each other. Compromises in safety lead to the death of one of the men, and where The Full Monty climaxes with bright lights, crowd adulation, and carnivalesque release, The Navigators trails off in isolation, darkness, internalized guilt, and unredeemed sacrifice. Loach’s artistic vision thus realizes Corballis’s insistence on a critically reflective creativity, one that inhabits a point of tension and “encourage[s] the audience not to celebrate the work, but to

66

Corballis, “Against Creativity,” 62.

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look again, at length, at the world.” 67 Wevers and Williams prefer to counter the politics of life with an aesthetic of death, appealing to Lacanian psychoanalysis. Whereas cultural policy models rational, profit-seeking subjectivity without remainder, Wevers and Williams insist on the unassimilable forces of art as the destabilizing Real to the Imaginary projections of national consensus.68 Their allegory of creativity might be Zoe Bryce’s sculpture of a silver forest from cigarette packet foil in the concluding chapters of Janet Frame’s The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). This creativity is surprising, incandescent, impossible. It tugs us towards that which is otherworldly and unaccountable, which in Frame’s world is ultimately figured as death, to which Zoe consigns herself the night after this most isolating culmination of her expressive self.

WORKS CITED Anholt, Simon. Brand New Justice: The Upside of Global Branding (Oxford: Butterworth–Heinemann, 2003). Barnett, John. “Shaky Statistics Don’t Help Film,” National Business Review (10 May 2002): 17. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences (Cambridge: Polity, 1998). Bennett, Tony. “Useful Culture,” Cultural Studies 6.3 (1992): 395–408. Brighton, Andrew. “Towards a Command Culture: New Labour’s Cultural Policy and Soviet Socialist Realism,” Critical Quarterly 41.3 (1999): 24–34. Brown, Ruth. Cultural Questions: New Zealand Identity in a Transnational Age (London: Kakapo, 1997). Campbell, Gordon. “Lord of the Deals,” N Z Listener (21 October 2000): 18–24. ——. “Planet Middle Earth,” N Z Listener (15 December 2001): 16–24. Cattaneo, Peter, dir. The Full Monty. 1997. Corballis, Tim. “Against Creativity,” Landfall 205 (May 2003): 53–65. Crane, Diana. “Culture and Globalization: Theoretical Models and Emerging Trends,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima & Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002): 1–25. “Creative New Zealand welcomes Government’s ongoing support for the arts.” [Press release]. Wellington: Creative New Zealand, 14 May 2003.

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Corballis, “Against Creativity,” 63. Williams & Wevers, “Going Mad Without Noticing,” 17.

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Cryle, Denis. “‘Redefining Australia’: Cultural Policy and the Creative Nation Statement,” Southern Review 28.3 (1995): 283–88. Dalziel, Paul. “‘Third Way’ Economics: What Might This Mean in New Zealand?” in The New Politics: A Third Way for New Zealand, ed. Srikanta Chatterjee et al. (Palmerston North, N Z : Dunmore, 1999): 63–85. Dominguez, Virginia R. “Invoking culture: The Messy Side of ‘Cultural Politics’,” South Atlantic Quarterly 91.1 (1992): 19–42. Easton, Brian. The Whimpering of the State: Policy after M M P (Auckland: Auckland U P , 1999). “Economic and social benefits continue two years on from government’s cultural recovery package.” [Press release]. Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 22 May 2002. Elmer, Greg. “The Trouble with the Canadian ‘Body Double’: Runaway Productions and Foreign Location Shooting,” Screen 43.4 (2002): 423–31. Employment in the Cultural Sector (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1998). Evans, Patrick. “Spectacular Babies: The Globalisation of New Zealand Fiction,” Kite (Dunedin, N Z ) 22 (July 2002): 4–14. Repr. World Literature Written in English 38.2 (2000 [2003]): 94–109. Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002). Frame, Janet. The Edge of the Alphabet (London: W.H. Allen, 1962). Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalisation is Reshaping our Lives (London: Profile, 2nd ed. 2002). ——. The Third Way and Its Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 2000). Government Spending on Culture 1990–1999 (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2000). Government’s Role in the Cultural Sector: A Survey of the Issues (Wellington: Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1998). Growing an Innovative New Zealand. Wellington: Office of the Prime Minister, 2002. The Heart of the Nation: A Cultural Strategy for Aotearoa New Zealand. A report prepared for the Prime Minister and the Minister of Arts, Culture and Heritage (Wellington: McDermott Miller, 2000). Household Spending on Culture (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1996). Hozic, Aida A. Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca N Y : Cornell U P , 2001). Jameson, Fredric. “Notes on Globalization as a Philosophical Issue,” in The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson & Masao Miyoshi (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1998): 54–77.

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Jutel, Thierry. “The Lord of the Rings: Landscape, Transformation and the Geography of the Virtual” (paper presented at New Zealand Studies Association Annual Conference, London: 28 June 2003). Kelsey, Jane. At the Crossroads (Wellington: Bridget Williams, 2002). ——. Economic Fundamentalism (London: Pluto, 1995). Klein, Naomi. No Logo: Taking on the Brand Bullies (Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2000). Lawrence, Thomas B., & Nelson Phillips. “Understanding Cultural Industries,” Journal of Management Inquiry 11.4 (2002): 430–41. Loach, Ken, dir. The Navigators. 2001. Löfgren, Orvar. “The New Economy: A Cultural History,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 3.3 (2003): 239–54. McEldowney, Dennis. “Publishing, Patronage, Literary Magazines,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of New Zealand Literature in English, ed. Terry Sturm (Auckland: Oxford U P , 2nd ed. 1998): 631–94. Maitra, Priyatosh. “The Globalisation of Capitalism and Economic Transition in New Zealand,” in The Political Economy of New Zealand, ed. Chris Rudd & Brian Roper (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 22–39. Matthews, Martin. “Report to the Minister on the Heart of the Nation Document.” Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2000. A Measure of Culture: Cultural Experience and Cultural Spending in New Zealand (Wellington: Ministry of Statistics and Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2003). Miller, Peter, & Nikolas Rose. “Governing Economic Life,” Economy and Society 19.1 (1990): 1–31. Miller, Toby, & George Yúdice. Cultural Policy (London: Sage, 2002). Morgan, Nigel, Annette Pritchard & Rachel Piggott. “New Zealand, 100% Pure. The Creation of a Powerful Niche Destination Brand,” Journal of Brand Management 9.4–5 (2002): 335–54. Mulgan, Richard. “State and Democracy in New Zealand,” in The Political Economy of New Zealand, ed. Chris Rudd & Brian Roper (Auckland: Oxford U P , 1997): 256– 72. New Zealand Framework for Cultural Statistics (Wellington: Statistics New Zealand and the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, 1995). New Zealand Institutional of Economic Research. Scoping the Lasting Effects of The Lord of the Rings (Report to the New Zealand Film Commission; Wellington and Auckland: The New Zealand Institutional of Economic Research, 2002). O’Brien, Mike, & Chris Wilkes. The Tragedy of the Market: A Social Experiment in New Zealand (Palmerston North, N Z : Dunmore, 1993). Oram, Rod. “Brand New Zealand,” Unlimited (December 2001–January 2002): 40– 46.

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Quinn, Ruth–Blandina M. Public Policy and the Arts: A Comparative Study of Great Britain and Ireland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Radbourne, Jennifer. “Creative Nation – A Policy for Leaders or Followers? An Evaluation of Australia’s 1994 Cultural Policy Statement,” Journal of Arts Management, Law & Society 26.4 (1997): 271–83. Rifkin, Jeremy. The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the Worldwide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth (Oxford: Polity, 2002). Sassen, Saskia. Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia U P , 1996). Smith, Chris. Creative Britain (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). Statement of Intent 2003–04. Wellington: Ministry for Culture and Heritage, 2003. Talking Heads. “Artists Only,” More Songs about Buildings and Food. [C D ]. Warner Brothers, 1990. “Taylor an Honorary Teaching Fellow,” Massey News (Palmerston North, N Z ; 24 February 2003): 3. Throsby, David. Economics and Culture (New York: Cambridge U P , 2001). Toepler, Stefan, & Annette Zimmer. “Subsidizing the Arts: Government and the Arts in Western Europe and the United States,” in Global Culture: Media, Arts, Policy, and Globalization, ed. Diana Crane, Nobuko Kawashima & Ken’ichi Kawasaki (New York: Routledge, 2002): 29–48. Volkerling, Michael. “Death or Transfiguration: The Future for Cultural Policy in New Zealand,” Culture and Policy 6.1 (1994): 7–28. Walker, Simon. “The Politics of Rogernomics,” in Rogernomics: Reshaping New Zealand’s Economy, ed. Simon Walker (Wellington: New Zealand Centre for Independent Studies, 1989): 208–24. Waller, Gregory A. “The New Zealand Film Commission: Promoting an Industry, Forging a National Identity,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television n.s. 16.2 (1996): 243–62. Wevers, Lydia, & Mark Williams. “Going Mad Without Noticing: Cultural Policy in a Small Country,” Landfall 204 (2002): 15–18. Yadin, Daniel L. The International Dictionary of Marketing (London: Kogan Page, 2002).

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Riding the Whale? Postcolonialism and Globalization in Whale Rider C HRIS P RENTICE

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N HIS 1984 REVIEW ESSAY

“Outside the Whale,” Salman Rushdie disputed the attitude of political quietism in the relationship between literature and politics that George Orwell espoused in his 1940 essay “Inside the Whale” – a lack of “‘impulse to alter or control’” processes or conditions, the writer “‘allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting’.”1 Rushdie proposed that “there is no whale,” no hiding-place, and we are all in the midst of “the unceasing storm, the continual quarrel, the [irradiating] dialectic of history”; “rowdyism” is the appropriate response.2 Adapting the positions of both Orwell and Rushdie, I posit that history has given birth to ‘whales’ – ambivalent sources, structures, or systems of protection and enclosure or entrapment – some swimming more extensive oceanic routes than others, encountering one another variously in peace, indifference, pragmatic cooperation and fights to the death. The ‘whale’ of relevance to this discussion is ‘globalization’ – similarly ambivalent in its promise of much to consume and its own enormous capacity to consume, posing risks to both those enclosed on the ‘inside’ and those buffeted around on the ‘outside’. This whale of globalization will nevertheless cross the paths of others during the course of the essay. Globalization is taken here, in Baudrillard’s sense, to refer to something quite other than universality; “in fact,” Baudrillard argues, “they 1

Salman Rushdie, “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 95. 2 Rushdie, “Outside the Whale,” 93–101.

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could be considered mutually exclusive. Globalization pertains to technologies, the market, tourism and information. Universality pertains to values, human rights, freedoms, culture and democracy.”3 This will require further discussion in the course of the essay. Clearly, most selfconscious postcolonial perspectives stand in a critical relationship to both universality and globalization; while having deployed the terms of the universal in critiquing imperialism, postcolonialism now seeks to affirm the agency of the postcolonized in the economies of the global. Given the uncertain status of ‘values’ and ‘agency’, I question the opposition between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ as the only available relations to the whale, to argue that ‘riding the whale’ (of globalization) better describes the ambivalence of both historical and contemporary strategies and discourses of postcolonial cultural production. This argument turns on a cultural work in which the spatio-temporal and political energies of postcolonialism and globalization intersect: Whale Rider (2002), a film directed by Niki Caro and based on the 1987 novella The Whale Rider, by Witi Ihimaera. To posit the intersection of postcolonialism and globalization presumes their different beginnings, dynamics, and political trajectories. Despite the present historical conjuncture pointing to their convergence, I suggest that critical analysis of contemporary discourses of cultural agency might reinvigorate the capacity of culture to resist capture and containment by policy- and market-driven hegemonies. There has been much debate on the question of relations between the postcolonial and the postmodern, the postcolonial and world capitalism, the postcolonial and globalization. Arif Dirlik is one of the more trenchant critics of postcolonialism as a critical discourse. In The Postcolonial Aura (1997), he focuses on the emergence in the 1980s of postcolonialism as 3 Jean Baudrillard, “The Global and the Universal,” in Baudrillard West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 23. Globalization is a term whose meanings are obviously highly contested. Appadurai’s “complex, overarching, disjunctive order” traversed by flows of elements in ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and ideoscapes (221), along with Huggan’s reference to “transnational solidarities in an age of cultural fragmentation and mass dispersal of people, goods and ideas” (9) evoke its potentially democratizing configurations of power. However although at best these are organized around the ‘universals’ of democracy, rights, freedom and culture, the latter are put under strain as values by the market forces and virtualizing technologies that characterize globalization, returning us to Baudrillard’s distinction above.

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shaped by poststructuralist and textualist approaches and concerns. He describes this postcolonialism as “one off-shoot of postmodernism,”4 which has lost contact with its origins in the specificities of earlier decolonization movements and Third-World struggles, and he takes issue with the later inclusion of (First World) within the framework of postcolonialism (54). Dirlik advocates a Marxist analysis which attends to structural and systemic perspectives forfeited in a postcolonial epistemology in which “meaning in linguistic encounters becomes a metaphor [and paradigm] for all encounters” (5). He maintains that In an ideological situation where the future has been all but totally colonized by the ideology of capitalism, we can ill afford to overlook the critical perspectives afforded by past alternatives that have been suppressed by the history of capital. (2)

The designation of settler–indigenous (ex)colonies in terms of First and Third Worlds does not effectively capture local political conditions and discourses in such contexts as Aotearoa–New Zealand where, as Stephen Slemon has persuasively argued,5 the complex cultural condition of (post) colonial settlement is better conveyed by the term Second World, while displaced indigenous populations such as Mori are referred to as Fourth World. However, Dirlik’s insistence on the need for attention to structural and systematic processes and conditions, including the economic, and on the need for postcolonialism’s focus on local conditions and resistances to consider the structures within which the local itself is formed, is important. The latter has been addressed with reference to the notion of “glocalization,” which is not simply a matter of the local shaping global flows, but of the global influencing the construction of the local.6 Dirlik also prompts us to consider contemporary challenges to erstwhile subversive

4

Arif Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder C O : Westview & Oxford: HarperCollins, 1997): 1. Further page references are in the main text. 5 Stephen Slemon, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 30–41. 6 See Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherston, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995): 30.

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discourses and strategies that have now arguably become hegemonic, swallowed up by global capitalism and its manifestation in culturalism: Culturalism as hegemonic ideology mystifies the hegemonic role that culture plays in relationships between and within societies. A hegemonic culturalism abstracts culture from its social and political context in order to present it as an autochthonous attribute of entire groups and peoples that is exterior to, and independent of, social relationships. Culture, thus abstracted, is alienated from the social present, and is made into a timeless attribute of peoples that determines the character of the relationships into which they enter with others. It serves as a principle for organizing time and space, with the culture of the self at the center of space and the apogee of time. Abstraction is the epistemological starting point of culturalism as hegemonic ideology. (45)

I will develop a number of these points, principally those of culture’s centrality in social (economic and political) relationships and (indeed through) its abstraction (and reification), but note here that Dirlik qualifies his implication that culturalism as an ideology is imposed over ‘others’ or ‘other cultures’ in his recognition that “What makes culturalism truly hegemonic rather than nakedly oppressive [...] is the participation of the hegemonized in this abstraction” (45). I shall analyze this participation focusing less on postcolonial critical discourse itself than specifically on Whale Rider, approaching the question of how this postcolonial cultural work ‘rides the whale’ of globalization. In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan offers both a substantial overview of the debates about the relationships between the postcolonial and globalization – specifically global commodity culture – and a detailed analysis of specific encounters between these formations. Starting with the premise that postcolonialism, turned into a watchword for fashionable study of cultural otherness, represents “the postcolonial exotic [...] the global commodification of cultural difference,”7 he addresses such questions as “To what degree is the recognition [...] of postcolonial writing bound up in a system of cultural translation operating under the sign of the exotic? What role do exotic registers play in the construction of cultural value,” particularly in relation to products and discourses represented and 7 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001): vii. Unless otherwise indicated, further page references are in the main text.

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circulated as postcolonial? (viii). One critical move he makes is to differentiate ‘postcoloniality’ from ‘postcolonialism’, only to emphasize further their contemporary mutual implication: Postcoloniality, in its function as a regime of cultural value, is compatible with a world-wide market whose power now “extends over the whole range of cultural production” [Harvey 1989: 45] [...] Value is constructed through global market operations involving the exchange of cultural commodities and, particularly, culturally “othered” goods. Postcoloniality’s regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market-driven. [...] Postcolonialism, by contrast, implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. [...] It is not just that postcolonialism and postcoloniality are at odds with one another, or that the former’s emancipatory agenda clashes with the latter’s; the point that needs to be stressed here is that postcolonialism is bound up with postcoloniality–that in the overwhelmingly commercial context of late twentieth-century commodity culture, postcolonialism and its rhetoric of resistance have themselves become consumer products. (7)

In his focus on the role of exoticism in the circulation of postcolonial cultural products and discourses, Huggan is ambivalent about the participation of the ‘postcolonized’ in this regime. He emphasizes “commodifying processes” and “fetishization of cultural otherness” (10) deriving from the appetites of the market (whale) itself, but implicitly called up and enacted by metropolitan centres of economic power. However, he also suggests that the “choice here may not be so much whether to ‘succumb’ to market forces as how to use them judiciously to suit one’s own, and other people’s, ends” (11). This presumes acceptance of the notion of choice, of the unified and autonomous humanist subject of intentions, of agency, in a trajectory of means and ends, all of whose problems point again to the ambivalent notion of ‘riding the whale’. ‘Riding the whale’ implies that questions of acceptance (being carried) or agency (steering) are more difficult to differentiate. Similarly, questions of the ‘success’ or otherwise of the critical or ‘oppositional’ strategies remain ambivalent. Indeed, while Huggan disputes “the myth of commodity culture as some vast imperialist conspiracy sucking in its unwary victims” (12), an image suggestive of a whale sucking in plankton, his own reference to “a range of available options [including anti-imperial interests] for both the consumers and producers of culturally ‘othered’ goods” (12) endorses the rhetoric of the

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market itself – choice, agency, goods, producers and consumers – without challenging the consumerist relation to culture or considering how this might inflect even anti-imperialist interests. The discussion thus far has introduced most thematics of the analysis of Whale Rider to follow: culture, difference, and globalization encompassing the critical energies of postcolonialism and the forces of capitalism and commodification. In having focused on questions regarding postcolonial scholarship, I also point to my own inevitable position as riding the whale of globalization. My analysis depends as much on the existence of postcolonialism as an academic field as on the commodification and circulation of works such as (The) Whale Rider, including, especially in the case of the film, all of the promotional and marketing materials and media coverage. As Gyan Prakash puts it, “Criticism formed in the enunciation of discourses of domination occupies a space that is neither inside nor outside the history of western domination but in a tangential relation to it.”8 Whale Rider invokes varying stakes in the construction and representation of Mori cultural identity, as bound up with the contemporary intersections of culture and politics in Aotearoa–New Zealand. If ‘inside the whale’ represents political quietism, and ‘outside the whale’ represents rowdyism, both can be argued to constitute ‘moments’ in the history of Mori response to the (post)colonial condition of Aotearoa–New Zealand. While it is beyond the scope of the present essay to rehearse the forms of putative quietism and rowdyism characterizing Mori relations to British, colonial, and national institutions – the whale of Empire and its progeny – some forms of rowdyism, notably the political activism associated with the Mori political and cultural ‘renaissance’ of the 1970s and early 1980s cannot be seen entirely without implication in, or complicity with, the principles and institutions of democratic government of the nation-state and the law. Both the large-scale Mori protest movements, mainly over questions of land, and the later governmental, bureaucratic, and massmedia structures and measures through which Mori concerns have been registered and addressed, are as dependent on such principles as they are contestatory of the institutions, or at least the institutional practices, that embody them. Similarly, the (politicized) cultural efflorescence in indigenous literary publication, visual and traditional arts and performance, is 8

Cited in Dirlik, The Postcolonial Aura, 56.

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complicit with the neocolonial systems and institutions of cultural production and dissemination, even as it challenges a monocultural national discourse and its representations. These Mori cultural assertions and affirmations, in turn, have a post-renaissance (after)life as elements both in a ‘Mori development’ policy discourse and in a discourse of national biculturalism. The recognition of Mori as ‘partners’ in the national culture coincides both with the culmination of the era of the ‘renaissance’ and with the deregulation of the national economy, in line with the emergent economic and cultural intensification of globalization. Thus ‘Mori culture’ has been harnessed, on the one hand, to the project of addressing the problems underpinning the overrepresentation of Mori in forms of social negativity: poverty, unemployment, homelessness or substandard accommodation, imprisonment, addiction, and educational failure. The ‘culturalist’ argument is that these both represent and arise from the destruction and suppression of Mori culture during and following colonization, and that a cultural revival can contribute to healing – a collective rhetoric but one that is equally geared to the constitution of citizen-subjects exercising productive economic agency. On the other hand, ‘Mori culture’ is celebrated as the nation’s distinctive ‘brand’ (along with the landscape and environmental ‘purity’), in the global trade, culture and tourist markets. Indeed, this has been one source of Mori economic agency as brokers of their own cultural products and images: riding the whale. Government departments and state-funded institutions are, in the words of Steven Webster, “quietly making room for Maori as representatives of their culture” (32) and for “Maoritanga” as such, exemplifying culturalism as an “ideological separation between contemporary Maori society and Maori culture” (8), resulting in “public objectifications of Maori culture” (14). Mori culture has been deployed in a process of transition from politics (contestation) to policy (negotiation), and now, in a different way, appears as the product of that transition. Webster argues that the example of artworks “clarifies the often ideological role of the notion of culture in ethnic political movements” (189). In other words, acts of cultural self-assertion and self-representation in terms of identity politics have often been incorporated into a project of national economic development in the context of a need for branding Aotearoa–New Zealand for a global market. That there are active Mori participants in this suggests how notions of culture, particularly of cultural difference, have shifted from oppositional to complicit relations. Meanwhile, statistics of

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social negativity – abstractions of conditions of material struggle for many Mori – point to another construction or positioning of Mori within the political economy In Whale Rider, the whale of globalization encounters another whale: for the Ngati Konihi people of Whangara on the east coast of the North Island, the whale is the ancestral link to originary Hawaiki, their means of arrival, settlement and cultural continuity in Aotearoa. As one of the Ngati Porou tribes, they trace their origins to Paikea, who, according to legend, arrived from Hawaiki on the back of a whale, and whose descendant four generations later, the original Porourangi, is the founding and eponymous ancestor of the Ngati Porou tribes.9 This is the area in which Witi Ihimaera set his 1987 novella The Whale Rider, and it is the film’s location as well as being the home of many of the cast. The adaptation from novella to film would constitute another study, so this discussion will focus on the film, comparing it with the novella only in order to contribute to the argument. One such factor concerns the historical moment into which each work entered, and the cultural economy that characterized it: the novella’s publication-date situates it in the ‘late postcolonial’ moment, on the cusp of the country’s developing participation in the “rhythm of globalization.”10 By contrast, the film’s 2002 release situates it definitively in the era of globalization.11 Formal factors include the medium of print translated into the medium of film, modifications to genre, and the change of narrative point of view. The novella intersperses realist with mythic episodes throughout: the latter are presented in italic typeface, and trace the journey of the ancient whale, Koroua, with his female companions in a herd from Hawaiki to Aotearoa, to the village in trouble, whose people have lost their way. This quest, which invokes the founding ancestral journey, is narratively focused through the whales’ point of view, and interweaves with the human/community quest that takes place on the story’s realist plane. 9

Ranginui Walker, Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou (Auckland: Penguin, 1990): 53. Simon During, “Postcolonialism and Globalization,” Meanjin 48.2 (1992): 343. 11 Although it is simplistic to propose a strictly chronological relation between postcolonialism and globalization, I argue that the particular form of contemporary globalization, relating to a specific set of developments in late capitalism, specifically in information technologies enabling practically instantaneous image, message and financial flows, as well as an ability to figure a global ‘market’, emerges more recently than the political energies that define(d) the postcolonial. 10

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The novella includes more explicit cultural history than the film, invoking a pedagogical function that has often come to characterize Mori fiction since the ‘Mori Renaissance’. In fact, the novella is narrated by Rawiri, incorporating into the narrative a wider context of colonialism, past and present, as it shapes his and others’ lives. Both the medium of print and Rawiri’s narration allow non-diegetic material to develop an explicitly political discourse. In the film, by contrast, Paikea’s narration dominates. Confined to the experiences, perceptions and understandings of a child, as well as to her more limited sphere of movement within the space of the village itself and its surroundings, her narration lends the film a ‘naturalized’ or ‘innocent’ tone. The film’s simplification of the novel’s plot and perspective means that basic ancestral and cultural background is given in the adults’ answers to Paikea’s questions, or is ‘overheard’ in brief scenes set in the whare wananga [house of learning], but much more is implied in visual imagery. Indeed it is an obvious point that the film is a visual medium, but the director Niki Caro’s choice of a predominantly realist mode of cinematography (as opposed to the more insistently ‘magical-realist’ elements of the novella), informs much of my analysis of its cultural politics, specifically the pitfalls and progressive aspects of the politics of representation. The novella, as a print medium, is subject to a more limited mode and reach of circulation; books are rarely marketed with the same intensity and diversity as films, and Whale Rider’s marketing, promotion, and publicity arguably conflict with the intimate, human ‘affect’ of the film itself.12 The film has screened in cinemas around the world, is available on video and D V D , has a website, promotional posters and marketing materials, and has been the subject of intense media publicity regarding the conditions of its production, the lives and careers of cast members, and much more. It won awards almost with each international release, and 12

The film may be seen as celebrating the local (Mori culture, the village of Whngr, the intimacy of family) while invoking the universal (intergenerational tensions, coming-of-age, conflicts between tradition and change, the role of gender in family and social relations). It should be noted that the release and dissemination of the film through the diverse media and marketing strategies associated with globalization, was followed by the 2003 release of an ‘international edition’ of the novella whose changes from the 1987 edition, outside the scope of this essay to discuss, point not only to the desire to reach a new generation of young people, but also to the influence of the global on the (representation of) the local.

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with the publicity surrounding Keisha Castle–Hughes’s nomination for the Best Actress Award at the 2004 Oscars, as well as the event of the Oscars itself, Whale Rider has been drawn into the globalizing machinery of media publicity. Thus, against the “veiling of the material circumstances under which the commodities are produced and consumed,” as Huggan defines Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, one might pit Jameson’s account of postmodernism as “the consumption, not just of commodities, but of ‘sheer commodification as a process’,”13 situating Whale Rider in the latter moment. In this vein, the recent screening of Whale Rider on free-to-air television in New Zealand was followed by a one-hour documentary, Riding the Wave: The Whale Rider Story, that looked at the three-year making of the film, including behind-the-scenes footage, insights into some of the special effects and interviews with the director Niki Caro, the actress Keisha Castle–Hughes, the author Witi Ihimaera and the producers, John Barnett and Tim Sanders.14 Nevertheless, one understated fact about the film’s production is its German co-production, with post-production work having also been carried out in Germany. This is likely to explain the appearance of Anna, Porourangi’s German girlfriend, rather than the novella’s Ana, a Mori woman from the South Island of New Zealand. Instead, publicity has strongly focused on it as a New Zealand film. The film, therefore, can be analyzed in terms of the extent to which its cultural mode of production and representations travel ‘inside the whale’, swallowed by global late capitalism; or, alternatively, whether they remain ‘outside the whale,’ refusing or contesting the forces of global capitalism (which may render them what Latouche termed “development’s castaways”),15 or true to their own singularity and symbolic order; or, finally, whether they are ‘riding the whale’, using globalization to further local cultural aspirations. While this third position invokes the privileged terms of the era – agency, self-realization, participation – it is both risky and ambivalent. Just as Paikea, in riding the whale, was prepared to die, there are no assurances of maintaining agential mastery over 13 Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, x, citing Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991): 18. 14 Television Programme Listings. N Z Listener (24 July 2004): 82. 15 Serge Latouche, In the Wake of the Affluent Society (London & Atlantic Highlands N J : Zed, 1993): 33–48.

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the whale, and at any moment it remains undecidable whether the rider is steering or being carried by this larger force. There are many ways in which Whale Rider calls up such dilemmas, whose pertinence goes beyond the specific cultural product and relates to larger questions of Mori (or any local culture/community) participation in the global cultural market. The film references ‘the local’ in the sense of a community with a definitive link to a specific region. The village, Whangara, is presented in almost solely self-contained terms: Porourangi departs after the death of his wife and infant son to work in Germany as an artist and he returns some time later, but no scenes are shot outside of the village and region itself. Similarly, the only non-local and non-Mori character is Anna, Porourangi’s pregnant girlfriend, who arrives from Germany at the end of the film. She is shown as already assimilated into the family, gathered with them to watch the launch of the waka carved by Porourangi, while Shilo, Rawiri’s girlfriend, strokes Anna’s pregnant belly. However, this local reference – indeed, referentiality (to the village, the cast – largely members of it – and to the specific Ngati Porou story which defines them) – enables a ‘local’ reading of the film in terms of the authenticity of its iconic representations. Specifically, the local is defined by, and attached to, the particular myths and ancestry of its indigenous Mori community. Thus there are cultural stakes in the production and the nature of its representations that render its fictionality partial and problematic. Decisions taken in the interests of filmic or narrative effectiveness may be held accountable to those cultural stakes. Indigenous cultures in (post)colonial contexts have struggled to assert the right to self-representation against a history of incorporation into colonial discourses. On the one hand, a fictional story based on a legend that carries a spiritual belief-system through which identity and belonging are defined risks offending sacred values, and also complicating contemporary political standpoints. On the other hand, the fictional space can serve to open up problems of cultural representation tied to notions of authenticity, truth, value, and tradition. In his endorsement of a “critical localism,” Dirlik points out that discourses of tradition, referencing an idealized past as a source of authenticity, can reinforce oppressive relations of the past (98). Such discourses risk overlooking the imprint of colonial relations on the ‘traditions’ themselves, and I would add that they

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can generate new relations of oppression if they perpetuate orders and assumptions that take no account of new conditions and challenges. Nevertheless, despite the specificity of its local, indigenous Mori context, the film relies on its story’s appeal to ‘universal’ values.16 Its global market has been secured through what Simon During refers to as “the global popular,” whose ‘family-of-man’ humanism “produces a mood in which exoticism, normality and transworld sharedness combine, and in which consumption warmly glows.”17 The story is assimilable to ‘universal’ struggles between tradition and change, intergenerational tensions, the quest for ‘self’ through recognition by others, self-fulfilment and selfrealization. It has been described as a ‘coming-of-age’ story for Paikea, Koro Apirana and the whole community: a number of ‘lost’ characters are redeemed, while the community itself celebrates wholeness at the end.18 Importantly, politics and the broader political context that shape the lives of the Mori community are almost entirely absent from the film. The village is represented as a circumscribed, self-contained social space. But what precisely is at stake in the quest for a new leader for the community, what leadership will involve, what struggles the community faces, and what the ‘trouble’ is that precipitates the crisis of the whale stranding, is never indicated. Apart from one brief exchange between Koro and Porourangi about the latter’s failure to meet his local obligations, and the work Koro has been doing in the meantime, and a brief scene in which Koro meets a small group of men in the wharenui, the emphasis is more on the interruption by Paikea than on any of these issues.19 This once again 16 The director Niki Caro has expressed her belief that “universality comes out of total cultural specificity, never ever diluting that culture for an international audience.” Cited in Lorenzo Munoz, “A Girl Shall Lead Them,” Los Angeles Times (6 May 2003); accessed on http://www.whaleriderthemovie.co.nz (press files). 17 During, “Postcolonialism and Globalization,” 342. 18 Tania Ka’ai & Brendan Hokowhitu, “Te Kauae Maro o Murirangawhenua” (unpublished conference paper, January 2004, np). 19 In the novella, Rawiri narrates that while he had been in Australia and Papua– New Guinea learning about race and sovereignty issues there, his brother Porourangi had written letters about the problems he felt were facing the Maori people. He had […] been very impressed with the way in which Raukawa was organizing its youth resources to be in a position to help the people in the century beginning with the year 2000. ‘Will we be ready?’ he asked. ‘Will we have prepared the people to cope with the new challenges and the new technology? And will they still be Maori?’ (58–59).

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allows the film to be enjoyed – consumed – for its visual beauty and ‘family story’. There is no challenge to viewers to consider cultural politics as anything more than the most generalized and aestheticized senses of cultural identity, or cultural difference-as-diversity, or to consider their implication in such politics through participating in the global cultural economy. This invokes Huggan’s definition of exoticism as “an aetheticizing process through which the cultural other is translated, relayed back through the familiar.”20 One element contributing to the ‘exotic’ appeal of the film’s depiction of the village and its people is the rhetoric of ‘the natural’. ‘Naturalness’ is principally constructed through the use of a child narrator whose simple, spare narration suggests an artless innocence and authenticity of perspective. Her sentences are short and convey the simple patterns and rhythms of childhood speech, though her ‘voice’ is also remarkable for its evenness of tone, its calmness and acceptance. This contributes to the fabular tone of the film. Narrating the events of her and her twin brother’s birth, she concludes, “but he died. And I didn’t,” the pause effectively signalling both her youthful speech-patterns and the ocean of emotional and cultural crisis through which the film will navigate. As the crisis reaches its height with the stranding of the whales, she narrates that “I called them and they came. But it wasn’t right. They were dying”; then eventually, as she climbs on to the whale to ride it back out to sea, she calmly observes, “I wasn’t scared to die.” This direct and natural tone, which could only seek to be a reconstructed effect in much contemporary cinema, contributes to the film’s ‘difference’ in the global cultural marketplace. Both the village and the villagers constitute another element of Whale Rider’s evocation of nature or naturalness. This is partly due to the use of genuine locals – non-professional actors like Castle–Hughes – in all except the principal cast roles. The earthy humour, including scatological and sexual references, conveys a community ‘close to nature’, not repressed but accepting of the immediacy of the body. As these moments and references are largely vehicles for children’s humour, they serve as a vicarious release for the viewer, moments of the carnivalesque, again identifying the film with a lost, more innocent (historical or biographical)

20

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, ix; see also 13–14.

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time.21 Similarly, the houses, cars, and clothing all suggest a non-materialist ‘authenticity’ which foregrounds communal values, and may call up nostalgic associations with simple holiday dwellings, country bicyclerides, freedom from the demands and pressures of a consumer life-style. However, metropolitan nostalgia for simplicity risks celebrating the poverty of others, reading their old cars, basic houses, and functional clothing as ‘lifestyle choices’. As Jamaica Kincaid suggests in A Small Place, the (virtual) tourist’s holiday is the locals’ everyday life; the tourist’s sunshine might be the locals’ drought.22 On the other hand, the question of poverty is a difficult one: it is implicitly measured against a standard that not all necessarily seek to attain or even acknowledge; and it is invariably conceptualized in economic terms. It does not account for cultural or symbolic wealth that, without endorsing economic oppression in the name of such wealth, can stand as a critique of a solely economic construction of the ‘experience’ of wealth or poverty. Yet it is significant that the ‘exotic’, sought largely by metropolitan readers and audiences, tends to refer to ideals and values associated with a lost past, and that these are sought in ‘Others’ as a compensatory displacement from the present. In other words, whether it is true or not, the implication is that ‘they’ are rich in something ‘we’ have lost. While the self-serving aspects of this reasoning are obvious, it is a view at least entertained, if not indulged in, in a film that offers contained and historically decontextualized depictions of a ‘natural’ Mori community. Further, the unglamorous presentation of the community itself (old houses, dirt tracks, rusting cars, non-actors) does not in this context subvert the consumerist ideology, but extends it via the contemporary fashion for the ‘natural look’ – a hyperrealization of ‘truth’, revived following its collapse. Thus the local is disseminated as a ‘value’, reproduced as a ‘sign’ suspended between exoticism and primitivism, fetishized as an image that resolves the anxiety of its loss in the technology of its reproduction. The spiritual belief-system linking ancestry to location is largely depicted in Whale Rider through landscape images, and references to the natural world. While this is consistent with Koro Apirana’s proclamation in the novella that the natural and the supernatural join in “‘the oneness 21

The specific instances also suggest that they function as a subversive response to discourses of authority, or children’s response to adult authority. 22 Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Penguin , 1988): 19, 4.

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which the world once had’,” and that “‘if we have forgotten the communion then we have ceased to be Maori’” (96), it is complicated in the film – a visual medium – by the ways that the natural world has been colonized and commodified by and for the gaze: the camerawork, with its panoramic sweeps, or sustained shots of the coast and landscape, combine the explorer’s ‘monarch of all I survey’ visual stance with the tourist’s fetishization of landscape in terms of its beauty and its accessibility. Thus what defines an indigenous relation to place also serves to invite the tourist to experience its pleasures through either the virtual tourism of the film or even the real tourism that many New Zealand films, with their emphasis on landscape, have helped to promote. The scene in which Porourangi drives along a sweep of coastline while Paikea stares at the ocean out of the car window builds to another assertion of her spiritual connection to the place through the whales she senses far out in the ocean, while simultaneously participating in the marketing of panoramic beauty combined with convenient accessibility. Such moments in the film constitute a gamble, like that of actual Mori cultural/tourism ventures, because such use of global media can be destructive of local aspirations, rather than furthering them through a notion of ‘agency’. Huggan endorses what he calls Aijaz Ahmad’s “analysis of the fetishization of cultural otherness that allows metropolitan readers to exercise fantasies of unrestricted movement and free will,”23 which reminds us that the market may manifest appetites and energies that cannot be contained or constrained by specifically local cultural forms of agency: it may tend towards the end, rather than the ends, of local culture, for example, as inevitable development changes the ‘attraction’ itself. On the other hand, it is ironic that, as the film generates international awareness of, and interest in, the beauty of Aotearoa–New Zealand’s coastal setting, there is national contention over ownership of, and access to the foreshore and seabed. ‘Public’ concerns that Mori ownership would deny coastal access to ‘New Zealanders’ for beach visits, fishing, commercial ventures, and so on, clash with Mori concerns that Crown ownership could lead to selling vast tracts of coastline to overseas buyers. The underwater shots of whales, while referring to the spiritual totems of Ngati Porou belief and identity, simultaneously reference the familiar natural-history documentary, and, particularly through the soft lighting 23

Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 10.

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and focus, render the Mori spiritual/natural world indistinguishable from New Age, sentimental and globally commodified ‘environmentalism’. The ethical stance of the latter is compromised by its focus on “charismatic megafauna”: the marketable cause whose iconography has been captured by product marketing to signify ‘environmentally friendly’. One reviewer asserted of the film that “Other territories are sure to snap up this treasure for these ecologically correct times: it’s good and it’s good for you.”24 Although Paikea sometimes calls to the whales, the spiritual connection between them is often visually evoked in close-ups of her face juxtaposed with shots of the ocean, sometimes moving underwater to reveal the whales whose presence she has sensed. At one point her link with them is suggested when she wakes in tears as the adults are already out in the dark of night struggling to save a pod of stranded whales. The facial close-up, usually of either Paikea or Koro Apirana, is a frequent shot in the film to convey both spiritual communion and crisis, and emotional states more generally. While it signals the special cultural status of each – the ageing leader, and the aspiring leader seeking recognition of her qualities – it is also an historically and culturally overdetermined shot. It carries overtones of the colonial project (ethnographic, missionary, administrative) of individualizing the colonized to subject him/her to regimes of surveillance. The close-ups also play an essential role in constructing audience-identification with the characters through their emotional states, both ‘universalizing’ the intergenerational story of a struggle between Koro Apirana’s attachment to the old ways and Paikea’s conviction that she is destined to lead them into a new world, as well the individual child’s struggle to win the love of her grandfather. In this sense, there is a tension between the challenge to Koro’s culturally determined traditionalism and Paikea’s (mistaken) belief that he does not love her: in short, between a culturalized and an individualized epistemology. Nevertheless, there are invocations of ‘1990s’ discourses of Aotearoa– New Zealand cultural politics, and a post-Mori-renaissance emphasis on bureaucratized leadership and mass-mediated messages of Mori healthpromotion and self-help.25 Early in the film, Paikea enters the house to 24

Screen Daily (26 September 2002); accessed on www.whaleriderthemovie.co .nz (press files). 25 In referring to these as aspects of 1990s discourse, I signal a shift in policy begun in 1984 with the Labour Government’s economic deregulation and its impact on social

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find three old nannies playing cards and smoking. She admonishes them, saying “Mori women have got to stop smoking. We have to protect our child-bearing properties,” a statement that is in ‘cultural’ tension with her own actions in leading the boys on to the marae at the formation of the wananga, and her attempt to sit at the front of the paepae. As Tania Ka’ai explains, although Ngati Porou have a strong tradition of women leaders (against what she called the film’s “primitive hyper-patriarchy”), that same tradition would never allow a young girl to cross the marae atea, the domain of Tumatauenga, god of war, because she would be vulnerable to the curses of enemies and negative forces, which could render her barren. This is why kuia, women elders, past child-bearing age, take on this role. In other words, Whale Rider’s cultural representations attempt to span rationalist and non-rationalist epistemologies: Paikea’s actions in relation to her gender privilege the (modern, Western) rationalist position, defying tapu, or the sacred principle, and this constitutes a vulnerable point in terms of a ‘cultural-authenticity’ reading. Although Paikea maintains an emphasis on childbearing as female destiny, aligning ‘traditional’ Mori values with health-promotion rationality, the film nevertheless invokes her ‘special powers’ in relation to the whales, linking her intimately to the mythic and spiritual foundations of her community, and her own identity to that of her original whale-riding ancestor. Other ‘1990s’ messages are implicitly conveyed in Hemi’s tears when his father prefers to leave the children’s performance of the wananga skills and knowledge with a car full of leather-jacketed associates, after arriving late and staying only briefly to watch Hemi’s performance. Up to this point, Hemi had been a likely contender for Koro’s mantle of leadership, but the events that follow his disappointment imply that Mori children suffer from an absence of parental interest and support, and this estab-

welfare structures and policies, orienting them more to user-pays and self-help values. This reached its height in the 1990s with the National Government’s attempt to introduce a “Code of Social Responsibility,” geared towards individual responsibility for health and well-being as well as effective parenting. These values also constituted a significant and controversial element in the fictional and non-fictional work of Maori writer Alan Duff, beginning with his novel, Once Were Warriors (1990), and continuing into Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993) as well as numerous columns and interviews. The values and the mixed legacies of the policies, including frequent public service announcements concerning various health and safety issues, persist into the twenty-first century.

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lishes the conditions for failure. Indeed, Koro’s own son Rawiri similarly appears to be a victim of his father’s lack of interest. Nanny Flowers tells Paikea that he had once been a strong, handsome and skilful exponent of the taiaha, but through most of the film we see him as an overweight and rather directionless young man who is nevertheless kind, likeable and who, as the underdog, takes a special and supportive interest in Paikea. What they share is Koro’s disregard of their capacities because of accidents of birth: she is a girl, and he was the second son, meaning that Koro devoted his attention (unsuccessfully) to Porourangi as the obvious new leader. Thus Hemi suffers neglect as a result of contemporary social dysfunction (there is implication of drugs and gangs, even if only by way of media stereotype), and Rawiri suffers from the rigid observance of ‘traditional’ values. Although reading singular (or even mirrored) incidents and tropes in the film as ‘representative’ of aspects of the Mori condition is problematic, the film was released into a climate of social and cultural policy discourse that has made such implications familiar, at the same time as its own quest narrative links Paikea’s future with that of the whole community invoking its ‘representational’ status. 26 Finally, then, has Whale Rider steered the whale of globalization towards local (and) Mori cultural ends, or has it been carried into a market for which, and in which, culture functions like any other commodity? Further, while the film establishes that living traditions have to be challenged and will survive change, what distinguishes such change and adaptation from either deculturation or (essentially another form of destruction), the release of ‘Mori traditions’ into flotation as signs on the global culture market? In the film, Porourangi is an artist living and working in Germany, and Koro’s dismissal of Porourangi’s art with the words “It’s not work, it’s souvenirs” is an ambivalent moment. His point of view is, of course, fundamentally problematized through his response to Paikea, situating the problem with the recalcitrance of an old man who will not accept changing times and the need to let go of ossified ways, to recognize hope for the future in new and unexpected sources. Yet Koro’s anger and

26

Whale Rider escapes an entirely ‘public service announcement’ political correctness in its depiction of an overloaded boat in which nobody is wearing a life-jacket, or in the scene of Rawiri, Shilo and Paikea in a boat, along with a crate of beer. Such images fly in the face of New Zealand boating-safety advertising that dominates summer television and other media.

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dismissal of Porourangi evoke a problem that remains unarticulated: the disappearance of culture’s symbolic dimension in favour of its objectification, signalled in the difference between art and souvenirs. Neither he nor the film can articulate the problem of his resistance to Paikea as a future leader (cultural conservatism) with the deeper concerns over what is lost in social and economic changes that appear to sustain Mori culture through increased self-agency but which draw Mori into the belly of global consumerism. Homi Bhabha’s location of postcolonialism’s critical force “‘within the hybrid spaces opened up by cultural translation; [attesting] not to the transparency or accessibility of different cultural representations but, on the contrary, to the incommensurability – the untranslatability of culture itself,” offers an important challenge to the celebration of global cultural flows of images and representations.27 Bhabha’s point resonates, in its critique of the positivization of culture with Baudrillard’s uncompromising critique of culture as political identity or object of consumption, despite differences between their critical perspectives and epistemological directions: Culture does not translate the identity of a society, the immanence of a system of values. On the contrary, culture is their transcendence, disavowal, challenge, distance. [...] This is why, whatever one may do, culture remains irreducible and ungraspable – this is what remains of its singularity even at the heart of the universal. This is why all ministries of culture are a joke.28

This is clearly as much a challenge to cultural policy and discourses of traditionalism as it is to the commodification of culture. Nevertheless, in positing traditionalism and commodication of culture as mutually implicated, I conclude by suggesting that the film’s fibreglass and computer-graphic whales are a metaphor for an ontological shift in the meaning of ‘culture’ under globalization. Their ambivalence lies in the fact that (to the non-cetacean-expert) they ‘look real’, and produce the same emotional responses in the audience as real whales in their ‘distress’ 27

Bhabha, “Postcolonial Criticism” (1992), cited in Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic, 26, who disagrees, considering this position too idealistic. 28 Jean Baudrillard, “The Global and the Universal,” in Baudrillard, West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 29.

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would produce. At the same time, the film invests both in their being not real and in the audience’s understanding that they are not real. As artificial and digitized productions, they are a celebration of the technical ingenuity of film-props makers (an industry-promoting feature); more importantly, as not real, they are manipulable, and will not do anything random or destructive the way real whales might. So they are ‘even better’ than real. Similarly, in ‘these ecological times’, the film can assert that no whale died in the making of the film. However, the audience is presented, edited into the footage of real whale strandings, with both models, which are indistinguishable from the real, along with an archival real that serves to authenticate the models (and vice versa). Accordingly, I propose that the whales be understood as simulation models, and as pointing the way to the hyperrealization of ‘Mori culture’ inserted into such an economy.

WORKS CITED Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London & New York: Routledge, 1999): 220–30. Baudrillard, Jean. “The Global and the Universal,” in Baudrillard, West of the Dateline, ed. Victoria Grace, Heather Worth & Laurence Simmons (Palmerston North: Dunmore, 2003): 23–36. Bhabha, Homi. “Postcolonial Criticism,” in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies, ed. Stephen Greenblatt & Giles Gunn (New York: Modern Language Association, 1992): 437–65. Caro, Niki, dir. Whale Rider. South Pacific Pictures, ApolloMedia Pandora Film, 2002. Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder C O : Westview & Oxford: HarperCollins, 1997). Duff, Alan. Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem, 1990). ——. Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1993). During, Simon. “Postcolonialism and Globalization,” Meanjin 48.2 (1992): 339–53. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London & New York: Routledge, 2001). Ihimaera, Witi. The Whale Rider (Auckland: Heinemann, 1987). ——. The Whale Rider (International Edition; Auckland: Reed, 2003).

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham N C : Duke U P , 1991). Ka’ai, Tania, & Brendan Hokowhitu, “Te Kauae Maro o Murirangawhenua – The Jawbone of Murirangawhenua: Globalising Local Indigenous Culture; Maori Leadership, Gender and Cultural Knowledge Transmission as Represented in the Movie Whale Rider” (paper presented at the “Strange Localities: Utopias, Intellectuals and National Identities in the 21st Century” Colloquium, University of Otago, January 2004). Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place (New York: Penguin, 1988). Latouche, Serge. In the Wake of the Affluent Society: An Exploration of Post-Development (London & Atlantic Highlands N J : Zed, 1993). Muñoz, Lorenzo. “A Girl Shall Lead Them,” Los Angeles Times (6 May 2003). Accessed on http://www.whaleriderthemovie.co.nz (press files). N Z Listener. Television Programme Listings (24 July 2004): 82. Orwell, George. “Inside the Whale” (1940), in Inside the Whale and Other Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin/Secker & Warburg, 1957): 9–50. Prakash, Gyan. “Postcolonial Criticism and Indian Historiography,” Social Text 31.2 (1992): 8–19. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time–Space and Homogeneity–Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash & Roland Robertson (London: Sage, 1995): 25–44. Rushdie, Salman. “Outside the Whale” (1984), in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta/Penguin, 1991): 87–101. Screen Daily (26 September 2002); accessed on http://www.whaleriderthemovie.co.nz (press files). Slemon, Stephen, “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World,” World Literature Written in English 30.2 (1990): 30–41. Walker, Ranginui. Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990). Webster, Steven. Patrons of Maori Culture: Power, Theory, and Ideology in the Maori Renaissance (Dunedin: U of Otago P , 1998).

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Representing Interconnection and Cultural Flow Towards Reframing Tourist Experiences with New Media M ARTIN S PAUL & A MINA M INHAS

Introduction

I

N E C O N O M I S T I C A L L Y I N C L I N E D S T U D I E S of tourism, it is commonplace to present quantitative measures of its pervasiveness, and on this basis to proclaim the tourist ‘industry’ as one of the most significant segments of the global economy.1 Whatever misgivings one might have about such a reductive delineation of tourism, it is clearly accompanied by highly significant economic, social and cultural effects. This is clearest in developing countries, which act as ‘hosts’ to large numbers of visitors from the developed world, where a radical disparity in economic power between ‘hosts’ and ‘guests’ amplifies the effects of tourism. As with all exchanges between unequals, tourism has inflicted a range of penalties on those at the least powerful end of the bargain;2 to this extent, NGO s, governments and pressure groups have, under the banners of ethical and eco-tourism, begun to control abuses associated with tourism with a range of codes, policies and visitor-awareness programmes.3

1

See, for example, Luiz Moutinho, Strategic Management in Tourism (Oxford:

C A B International, 2000). 2 David Harrison, Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies (Oxford: C A B International, 2001). 3 Mike Smith & Rosaleen Duffy, The Ethics of Tourism Development (London: Routledge, 2003).

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The more qualitative, cultural dimensions of tourism – the transformation of life-experience and world-view for both ‘guest’ and ‘host’ – are more resistant to analysis and intervention. A central tenet of ethical tourism is that the tourist should view and experience the activities of tourism as consequential, and not as ‘time out’ from the world of cause, effect and responsibility. In cases of obvious abuse of workers or indigenous populations by the tourist industry, the consequences of tourist choices and actions are relatively easy to communicate.4 But it is more difficult to analyze and express the idea that the tourist is an active participant in the unfolding experiment of cultural formations in mass and, as such, has a responsibility to take a reflective role in that process. A central challenge for ethical tourism, therefore, is to communicate to those engaged in tourism on both the production and the consumption side, an idea that has only belatedly become part of the academic study of tourism: that tourism takes place in a non-Euclidean, sociocultural space. A dense halo of connections exists between tourists, the tourist industry and destination societies long before and after the act of travel; this may be revealed by reflection on and analysis of the social and cultural frameworks that support the immediate physical dimensions of tourist travel and experience.5 A possible starting-point for the critical project of exploring and fostering a sense of cultural responsibility is the design of the interpretative materials which accompany cultural tourism to sensitive destinations; and this essay attempts to set out a design philosophy which meets these cultural concerns.6 A ‘sensitive destination’ may be interpreted quite widely in this context as one affected by conflicts and misunderstandings between host and guest, by distortions of vulnerable cultural forms in the face of economic pressure, or by the serious depletion of cultural and environmental resources by the uninformed actions of large numbers of tourists. Cultural tourism is essentially bound up with the provision of materials for orientation and interpretation, and critical interventions can begin with the design and presentation of such materials. The need to 4

Jean Keefe & Sue Wheat, Tourism and Human Rights (London: Tourism Concern,

1998). 5

Adrian Franklin & Mike Crang, “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” Tourist Studies 1.1 (2001): 8. 6 Mike Robinson & Priscilla Boniface, Tourism and Cultural Conflicts (Oxford: C A B International, 1999); Julie Lacy & William Douglass, “Beyond Authenticity: The Meanings and Uses of Cultural Tourism,” Tourist Studies 2.1 (2002): 6.

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exchange the common interpretative tropes of the heritage and tourism industry for more critical ones which analyze the historical provenance and contemporary social setting of cultural ‘attractions’ poses a distinct design challenge. Tourist representations tend to be dominated by the presentation of cultural forms as isolated objects available for disinterested consumption, as ‘cultural treasures’ or as ‘timeless’ regions, environments and ways of life.7 The reasons for this range from the commodified nature of tourist exchange, through a need to present interpretations which a mass audience can comprehend quickly and easily, to the ease of preparing such materials from descriptive histories and geographies. The development of adequate representations according to the standpoint of a culturally concerned, ethical tourism constitutes a long-term, experimental problem. A useful technological basis for such a critical project is provided by the new media;8 not just because complex social problems can have a technological fix, but because new media communication has several properties which make it a congenial basis for experimentation. A key property is that the low costs of maintaining an internet presence may be exploited by N G O s and committed individuals who wish to communicate outside the institutional confines of the tourist industry (e.g., the web sites of Tourism Concern, www.tourismconcern .org.uk, or Ron Mader’s on eco-tourism in Central America, www .planeta.com). A less extensively exploited property of the new media is their adaptable interfaces; these enable a broadening, educative process to be launched on ‘textual’ paths, branching out from familiar forms of tourist interpretation. The problems of such a project are not principally technical; rather, they concern overall critical orientation and the kinds of representation on which design practices should be based. The following discussion tracks some of the conceptual difficulties involved in establishing a consistent design philosophy.

7

See, for example, David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985) for a detailed analysis of the reductive tourist tropes used in Western heritage contexts. 8 Jay David Bolter & Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999).

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Ironic Tourism Critical discussions of the phenomena surrounding tourism have a long history; however, the literature does not provide a univocal basis for rethinking problems of tourist interpretation. In order to delineate a focused basis for design, it is necessary first to consider some of the tensions and contradictions found in the critical literature on tourism over the past twenty-five years. Broadly speaking, it presents two principal critical orientations towards tourism: a condemnatory stance based on Marxist critiques of commodity consumption and the mass culture industries (of which many tropes still appear in popular environmental and anti-globalist critiques of tourism), and a less easily characterized stance based on a quasi-Derridean re-inscription of the tourist as the ‘post-’ or ‘ironic’ tourist. In critiques of heritage and tourism of the 1980s and early 1990s, the critical discourse stemmed from Debord’s Society of the Spectacle,9 which portrayed the tourist as a passive consumer of a contrived product, while engaged in an illusory search for authentic experience.10 In this framing, tourism is seen as a compensation for the dullness of everyday life under industrial capitalism; the tourist is ensnared in a quest for the extraordinary and authentic, but his/her objectives in undertaking the quest have already been delineated by the ‘culture industry’ – the infrastructure, itineraries, brochures and interpretation that create the objects of tourism. This critique also provides an evolutionary model for tourism; the quest for authentic experience is ratcheted up to ever higher levels as new culture-industry constructions frame the common spectacle as ‘ordinary’, and some new, rarefied spectacle as ‘extraordinary’; hence the emergence of ever more exotic forms and destinations in the tourist industry. More recently, tourism has – albeit with heavy qualification – been portrayed as the potential source of insights into a global condition in which everything travels: people, objects, media and cultures. The tourist in Marxist critiques existed as the negative pole of a binary: the deceived mass consumer, implicitly balanced against the insightful subject, the authors and readers of the critiques in question. Now this image has undergone an institutionalized deconstruction in the critical tourism litera9

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994). John Urry, The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 1990).

10

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ture. The tourist as cultural dupe has been reinscribed as a reflexive, ironic figure, experienced in the media codes and institutional supports used to sustain tourist products and capable of looking beyond the framing of those products at their social setting.11 In a series of empirical studies, Dean McCannell unpacks this reflexivity in terms of a Lacanian “second subject” who reflects on the “tourist subject” of earlier critiques.12 McCannell’s analysis identifies the “second subject” through the “desire to get beyond tourist representation” and an ability to deconstruct the binary opposition between the spectacle and the everyday by tracing the framing of the spectacle and revaluing the ‘ordinary’ supports (the local workers and their environment, etc.) on which it depends.13 McCannell’s illustrative text, Stendahl’s Memoirs of a Tourist, indicates that the ironic tourist is not so much a newly emergent form of the concrete social subject as a new critical focus on a regulative ideal which may be present in any concrete social subject to a greater or lesser extent. Stendahl’s tourist pursues an itinerary of the tourist sights of early-nineteenth-century France, but finds himself diverted – like a Parisian surrealist avant la lettre – by the marvels of the everyday. The ironic tourist constitutes a human critical resource, a moving agent who detects and decodes the global flow of cultural products, and, through social contact, disseminates knowledge of the global condition. The development of this dimension in real social subjects may be seen as a focus for a positive intervention based on the principles of ethical tourism. As indicated above, a promising locus for such support is the design of interpretative materials which serve to foster the “second sight” of the tourist. Such a project would seem to overlap with recent debates on the fostering of cosmopolitan attitudes to engender the awareness and tolerance required to live harmoniously in a globalized world. Indeed, the ironic tourist may be seen as a specific form of the cosmopolitan, a figure that has received much attention in discussions of global modernity, and of the cultural skills and citizen virtues required to function in contemporary social formations. One of the earliest links between existing concepts of the cosmopolitan and the social conditions of the globalized 11

See, for example, Chris Rojek, Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (London: Routledge, 1993). 12 Dean MacCannell, “Tourist agency,” Tourist Studies 1.1 (2001): 30. 13 MacCannell, “Tourist agency,” 31.

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world was made by Ulf Hannerz, who adopted the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ to identify a critical mind-set appropriate for global cultural contact.14 Hannerz’s central characterization of cosmopolitanism comes from the work of Alvin Gouldner, who used it to denote the organizational mind-set of employees who identified with a range of portable, flexible professional principles, rather than with a single employer and single set of institutional principles.15 In Gouldner’s model, the cosmopolitan’s achievement is in being at home in a culture of critical discourse, and in having a “problematizing disposition” that constantly questions personal and institutional principles and attachments. Central to such a disposition is the metacommunicative skill of perceiving all discourses as local, mutable adaptations to local circumstances. Hannerz’s adaptation to the demands of a globalized world of Gouldner’s definition of the cosmopolitan’s achievement and disposition can also serve an ethical tourist practice based on cultural re-orientation and the re-framing of tourist experience. It provides a model for identifying the desired characteristics of the cultural tourist. In pursuit of this goal, it is necessary to enquire into how “core competences” implied by strong cosmopolitanism might be externally represented so as to reflect their cognitive complexity. Expositions of cosmopolitanism have linked the concept with a range of different capacities drawn from critical approaches to culture. For Hannerz, the ability to move rapidly from the everyday facts of cultural life – encounters, conversations, artifacts, everyday practice – to general properties of the cultural system in which everyday facts find their meaning is crucial. The instinctive ability of the cosmopolitan is that of the intellectual analyzing cultural matters. Stuart Hall, for example, documents an ability to account for the meaning of a cultural object by centering it in a web of interconnecting “cultural circuits.” These enable one to follow the multiple paths between meaningful elements of a culture, to comprehend their historical formation, the social codes into which meaning has been sedimented, the 14

Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning (New York: Columbia U P , 1992): 246–261; Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996): 102–11. 15 Alvin Gouldner, “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles – I ,” Administrative Science Quarterly 2.3 (1957); “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles – I I ,” Administrative Science Quarterly 2.4 (1958).

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practices which facilitate individuals’ contact with those elements, and the differential experiences of the elements across the range of social identities that exist in the culture.16 For Ulrich Beck, the key feature is openness to other voices, articulated via Bakhtin’s “dialogic imagination,” the ability to detect the traces of other systems of meaning at work in cultural objects upon which we might blindly project our native assumptions, a sensitivity towards different historical perspectives, the workings of nature and of other cultures.17 Bryan Turner homes in on the key international citizen virtues of irony and reflexivity;18 according to Richard Rorty these include the ability to stand outside our own perspectives and see them for the limited, contingent structures that they are.19

Representing Globalized Cultural Formations The design goal of fostering and supporting cosmopolitan competences in cultural tourists need not be approached in a vacuum, since it may be seen as recasting – in a form appropriate for popular consumption – a representational problem common in academic cultural disciplines. In particular, it corresponds to the representational reorientation of anthropology when it attempted to cast off eurocentric perspectives and pretensions to scientific objectivity, a movement which, arguably, reached its apogee with the ‘postmodern anthropology’ of the 1980s and 1990s,20 and with the more recent ‘anthropology of globalization’.21 At the centre of post16 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997). 17 Ulrich Beck, “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 18. 18 Bryan Turner, “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalisation and Patriotism,” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 51. 19 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1989). 20 See, for example: James Clifford & George Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986); George Marcus & Michael Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). 21 See, for example, James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997), and Xavier Inda & Renato Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002).

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modern anthropology are two concerns: the status and meaning of a representation of another culture, and the notion of a culture as a bounded object capable of objective description. As sensitivity towards the cultural contingency of language and an awareness of the constructed nature of all representations undermined claims to objectivity in anthropological description, geopolitical developments eroded the preferred disciplinary object of anthropology: the bounded community with a distinctive culture, uncontaminated by external contact. This gave rise to anthropological experimentation with both form and object; with representations which attempt to subvert and question their own status, and with the representation of hybrid and mobile cultural formations. George Marcus abstracted these developments into six principal dimensions: key representational features which any self-aware ethnography should embody.22 The level of abstraction of these features renders them conveniently portable into other genres and media which purport to represent cultures: travel writing, tourist guide books, popular ethnographic film, travelogues, etc. Marcus’s representational programme – developing each of his six dimensions – required the inversion of epistemological assumptions and a questioning of the forms of representation constructed on these assumptions. This challenged what had been settled disciplinary assumptions and practices in ethnography. In translating these ideas into the domain of tourism, it is necessary to reconstruct Marcus’s process according to the assumptions and representations typical of the new domain. A brief indication of Marcus’s dimensions as they have been reconstructed for tourism will expose representational problems – and the critically adequate interpretative strategies they require. i. A critical approach to the representation of space in anthropology rejects simplistic models of the relationship between space and culture, in which cultural formations are identified with fixed locations and settled communities. The loosening of this assumption provides a space for a globalized anthropology: the study of migrant cultures, cultural hybridity, the culture of global media and travel etc. Projecting this point onto the terms of debates over tourism involves loosening the connection between 22

George Marcus, “The modernist sensibility in recent ethnographic writing and the cinematic metaphor of montage,” in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux & Roger Hillman (Berkeley: U of California P , 1995): 40.

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tourism and specific tourist destinations and sites – eroding the assumption that a cultural object is solely and completely encountered at a physical site. Adrian Franklin’s and Mike Crang’s reorientation of tourist studies recognizes that such a spatial focus masks an appreciable portion of the phenomena relevant to an understanding of tourism;23 this includes the mediated dissemination of place images, and the travel of objects (such as crafts and other exotic products) and cultural formations (such as cuisine or fashion) as part of the global economy.24 It also occludes such culturally relevant studies such as the role of travel and exotic experience in the formation of identity and the cultural cachet attached to such experience. ii. Anthropology was forced to confront critically a hangover from nineteenth-century models of social evolution: temporal and developmental schemes which can embrace all cultures, and the adoption of Western developmental history as a universal evolutionary time-line. Such schemes encourage a perspective in which ‘primitive’ or ‘less developed’ cultures are given a spurious kinship with Western culture; exhibiting aspects of ‘our’ past, and viewed nostalgically as embodying qualities which ‘we’ have lost – usually romanticized versions of simplicity, happiness, closeness to nature, organic community and ancient wisdom.25 Without overtly subscribing to the underlying scientific principle, unreflective tourism and travel writing has traded on its nostalgic afterglow. The rejection of universal evolutionary schemes undermines one of the stock tropes of the tourist industry, in which the tourist is encouraged to travel back to, and ‘bathe’ in, these qualities. The formation of an exotic tourist commodity, such as the ‘tropical island paradise’, depends on being able to offer some kind of redemptive experience – the life that we might have led, had not industrial civilization intervened. iii. The assumption that a culture can be straightforwardly and objectively described is challenged by drawing parallels with paradigm shifts in literature, between the nineteenth-century realistic novel and the multivocal,

23

Franklin & Crang, “The trouble with tourism and travel theory?” 6–8. Celia Lury, “The Objects of Travel,” in Touring Cultures, ed. Chris Rojek & John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997): 83. 25 Mary Louise Pratt, “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford & George Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986): 27–50. 24

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multiperspectival experiments of high modernism. Since there seems to be no privileged standpoint from which a culture can be described, the seamless certainties of scientific description have to give way to the descriptive uncertainties of multiple accounts of a cultural milieu – at cross-purposes, in different terms, with different priorities. Tourist interpretation is customarily anchored in unreflective realism; usually with a mélange of ‘facts’ from objectivist histories and geographies collected, with a marketing gloss added, into a synoptic tourist image. Popular tourist guides, such as the Lonely Planet series, offer – along with a postmodern mélange of gazetteer facts, straight-from-the-shoulder advice, and colourful anecdotes – the culture of a destination rehearsed in the terms of an outdated, objectivist geography textbook. iv. Further to the overall rhetorical form of a cultural representation is the problematic origin of its underlying conceptual scheme. In Bakhtinian vein, Marcus suggests the “dialogic appropriation” of concepts and narrative devices from the culture being described. Even if the ethnographer is responsible for the final drafting of a cultural representation, the language and form do not necessarily express concepts and ways of speaking native to the ethnographer. To use Bakhtin’s term, the “alien word” must be allowed to inflect the ethnographer’s speech, so that intertextual links spread from the ethnography to the oral, written or visual forms of the culture in question. This poses a particular challenge in the design of tourist materials, since it involves the head-on confrontation of an alien conceptual scheme whereby comfortable, westernized description is exchanged for the radically unfamiliar. v. Another literary concept provides the motif for a further inversion of representational practice which Marcus terms “bifocality.” In writing of alien cultures, the commonplace reflex is that ‘our’ conceptual scheme is treated as ‘close’ – familiar and unproblematic – and the alien cultural scheme is treated as distant, exotic and in need of explanation and translation. The well-known literary device of ostranenie reverses this priority, rendering the familiar as unfamiliar and vice versa;26 and Marcus suggests that “bifocal” ethnographic writing should exhibit a productive oscillation between frames of reference, so that no single conceptual scheme is treated as ‘near’. An ethnography written like this comments as much on the culture of the ethnographer as it does on the ‘target’ culture. This 26

Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Normal I L : Dalkey Archive, 1990): 12.

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again reverses a pivotal assumption of tourist interpretation – that the tourists are consuming an exotic product rather than exchanging their own seemingly humdrum experience for someone else’s, a deflating suggestion that undercuts the rhetorical strategies of brochure and guidebook. vi. The final point of Marcus’s programme goes to the heart of anthropological enterprise by interrogating the core motivation for representing other cultures. The classical framework is scientific: exotic or vanishing cultures are botanized as part of a grand enterprise of knowledge accumulation. The posited alternative is critical: the juxtapositions, shifting perspectives and conceptual distances of re-framed ethnography deliberately raise questions about the relations between cultures, the geopolitical circumstances which have brought them into contact, and the forms of life which those cultures embody. This latter cannot be a neutral enterprise, but is, rather, a situated, political act whose assumptions have to be declared. The implication is that scientific neutrality is a situated stance with an unstated purpose, as part of a colonial enterprise of domination. This point returns us to the central assumption of ethical tourism: contact with other cultures is always ideologically and politically charged, always consequential, and it always places the tourist in a position of responsibility. From this perspective, no tourist representation discharges its critical duty without raising questions about the practices of tourism and their hidden politics. Marcus’s programme establishes desiderata for all forms of cultural representation which seem to correspond closely to the competences required of the ironic/cosmopolitan tourist. However, the specific kinds of representation to which they lead is more elusive.

Ethnographic Surrealism and Montage Marcus’s discussion of what an ethnographic representation should try to achieve leads him to formulate how this programme might be realized: i.e., a representational practice that can express the global contacts and flows within which ethnography now operates. His contention – as one might expect from the modernist literary forms which provide the models for several of his principles – is that a “montage sensibility” is required to give concrete form to his abstract principles: specifically, that associated with radical cinema. Using the standard opposition between mundane and intellectual montage enshrined in the cinematic practices of Pudovkin and

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Eisenstein, and the characterization of literary modernism as an inherently ‘cinematic’ form, Marcus is able to appropriate the theoretical basis of the montage cinema and photography of the inter-war years for ethnography.27 This crystallizes a widespread tendency in recent anthropology to look back towards the era of high modernism for its models.28 Marcus argues for the “remediation” of ethnography, with the use of cinematic media becoming core practice. This suggestion is particularly attractive in the context of the present discussion – the design of cultural interpretations embedded in new media – since arguably they offer a natural platform for classic montage practice. In particular, Landow argues for the convergence between a Barthesian ‘writerly’ literary practice and the new media;29 and Manovich argues for the convergence between montage cinema and the new media; both have elaborated this point.30 The revival of interest in ethnographic surrealism may be important in the resuscitation of the literary, cinematic and graphic practices of montage in the anthropology of globalization. This form of ethnography, prominent in the work of Clifford, stems from the French ethnographic surrealism of the 1920s and 1930s and covers a range of exhibition, literary and cinematic practices.31 These are based on bizarre and pregnant juxtapositions between artifacts, behaviours and linguistic expressions from widely diverse cultures, presented so as to offer surrealist ‘illuminations’ of contemporary Western culture.32 Such juxtapositions may be the direct work of the ethnographer (acting in the role of a surrealist artist), or the record of naturally occurring juxtapositions in hybrid cultures (which

27

James Monaco, How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000): 400–06. 28 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 117–51; John Vickery, “Frazer and the Elegaic: The Modernist Connection,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1990): 51–68; Steven Webster, “The Historical Materialist Critique of Surrealism and Postmodernist Ethnography,” in Manganaro, Modernist Anthropology, 266–99. 29 George Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997). 30 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2001). 31 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture, 279–98. 32 Anna Balakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (London: Unwin, 1972): 123–39.

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function as the surrealist objet trouvé). A contemporary focus on cultural collisions, hybridity, and unlikely material configurations suggests that the artistic vocabulary of the inter-war years is unusually appropriate for representing the experience of the twenty-first century. Indeed, it seems almost impossible to describe contemporary cultural hybridization without evoking echoes of surrealist absurdity. The vignettes sketched by Inda and Rosaldo illustrate the object of global anthropology;33 Hannerz’s provocative combination of “Nigerian Kung Fu, Manhattan fatwa” as exemplary transnational connections suggests a world neatly aligning itself with the tenets of surrealism.34 Despite this apparent elective affinity and the enduring appeal of surrealist practice – not least in cultural studies, fuelled partly by the iconic status of Walter Benjamin’s work – it is worth questioning the general relevance of surrealism in representing the hybridization and cultural flows resulting from accelerating globalization.35 In particular, it is worth asking whether surrealism is valid for popular representations of the expanded context of contemporary tourism and the inculcation of cosmopolitan competences. It was part of the self-understanding of surrealism, and of 1920’s montage cinema, photography and graphic art, that it should have a popular revolutionary role, developing critical awareness on a mass basis. Accepting that the surrealist project was a failure in its own terms, it has to be asked whether its resuscitation in the context envisaged by Marcus has any greater prospect of success. Resolving this problem requires an historically informed investigation of the achievements of montage art and the soundness of its philosophical basis. A careful analysis is essential if one is to progress beyond a programmatic link between abstract principles for ethnographic representation and the ‘headline claims’ of an historically specific artistic movement. This analysis may be focused by viewing it against the background of a concrete representational project. A designer working to produce critical representations for a nonacademic contemporary audience is forced to reflect that the art forms 33

Inda & Rosaldo, The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader, 1–2. Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places, 1. 35 Particularly the near-legendary status acquired by Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1982; Cambridge M A : Belknap P /Harvard U P , 1999). 34

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taken as models in ethnographic surrealism – surrealist exhibitions, the cinema of dialectical montage etc. – have specific properties, historical origins and reception histories. It cannot be assumed that the structural principles of works – say, the films of Vertov, or the photomontages of Moholy–Nagy – can survive a radical translation into the representation of the hybrid cultural forms of the twenty-first century without a change of meaning and purpose. Intervening history and derivative artistic practice have changed the meaning of such gestures and the contexts in which they are exhibited and understood. It has to be asked what meanings such works bear now and what meanings contemporary works modelled on these landmarks convey, and how they are affected by different contexts and purposes. Montage representations do not appear solely in the kinds of avantgarde contexts in which they originated; indeed, montage practice has become the basis of many popular styles in graphic art, magazine layout, pop videos and advertising. Montage gestures have been thoroughly domesticated in contemporary culture, and it is difficult to ascribe worldrevealing status to something that has become a matter of mundane ‘style’. The popular use of montage does not imply that these forms have been evacuated of meaning, nor that they cannot be used in academic or politicized contexts; but it does cast doubt on whether they are still underpinned by a surrealist self-understanding. As Watney points out in his discussion of the use of the Russian formalist concept of ostranenie in photography and film (and as a key feature of surrealist effects), all that the communicator ever has available are codes temporarily negotiated with a bounded audience. 36 No art-form can ever hope to transcend this situation with a new medium or device. The efficacy of any form of communication depends on a process of negotiation with an audience over the use, adaptation or subversion of existing codes; and not with finding some ‘magic form’ which somehow short-circuits this process and points directly at reality.37 When montage practice is looked at from this somewhat deflating perspective, shorn of the aura of grandiose claims made by

36

Simon Watney, “Making strange: the shattered mirror,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan, 1982): 154–76. 37 This point is prefigured in Adorno’s famous objections to Benjamin’s ‘wide-eyed’ use of montage; see, for example, Susan Buck–Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Bejamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1989): 216–52.

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landmark figures, then one has to ask anew what contribution it can make to representing the cultural swirl of the twenty-first century. Practitioners of cinematic montage such as Eisenstein and Vertov, or the Paris surrealists in graphic and literary montage, founded their work on the perceived revolutionary potential of these techniques; the promise that the world could be seen in a new, truer, way. Insofar as there is a philosophical basis for these claims, it lies in the revelatory power ascribed to art in the philosophy of romanticism.38 The early romantics operated with a distinction between representations which were mired in convention, which shaded reality, and spontaneous representations which could burst through convention to reveal things as they truly are. Hence, the archetypal romantic art-work would be a fragment, gesturing beyond its confines at a larger reality which could not be grasped by any systematic, conventional means.39 This principle is at work in influential refinements of montage theory and practice: in Benjamin’s and Adorno’s philosophy of the constellation, which underpinned their distinctive approaches to historical and literary critique.40 No approach to montage is complete without the articulation of a relationship with this intellectual space, and an attempt to grapple – in both theory and practice – with the philosophical difficulties that surround it. To raise these questions is not necessarily to reject montage practice; but it does demand that montage be based on a reflective, contemporary appropriation of a complex tradition. New media design and the representation of globalized culture provide concrete contexts in which these questions can be posed; but the design process must involve a working through of these difficulties, and not the unreflective assumption that montage practice automatically releases a critical power.

38

See, for example, Charles Rosen & Henri Zerner, Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1984): 51–70, and Charles Larmore, “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 141–160. 39 Joseph Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion, 1990): 5–14, 23–28. 40 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: Verso, 1998): 27; Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973): 134, and Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: U of California P , 1994): 163.

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Montage and Multivocal Multimedia There are at least two areas in which ethnographic surrealism and postmodern anthropology have been influential in the design of new media cultural representations: avant-garde approaches to museum display and art-historical presentation, and the production of multimedia ethnographies. The context of each is slightly different, since they are based on different traditions, audiences and priorities; but both are of relevance in the current discussion. In a series of books and articles, Charles Gere has outlined an approach to multimedia museum display which is deliberately distanced from standard, catalogue-based kiosk design. Gere details at length the close connections between computer-based representation and categorical rhetoric – the ‘data-base’ mentality which reduces representation to orderly headings and rational navigation – and proposes an alternative practice based on ethnographic surrealism.41 His argument is supported by an established moment in museum theory which has rebelled against monologic classification and didactic presentation and by the obvious fact that any rhetoric may be reproduced in a computer-based representation.42 However, Lev Manovich points out that, although at a technical level multimedia computer systems support flexible montage representations in a manner unparalleled by any other technology, audience expectation generates strong forces that pull in the opposite direction.43 The overwhelming bulk of computer design practice has meant that audiences expect computer-based representations to display a seamless unity and rational order – indeed, an entire design discipline of usability is based solely on this premise. While the meditative environment of an austere museum gallery may provide fertile ground for a physical exhibition practice based on avant-garde montage, the same need not be true of the virtual environment of a com41

Charles Gere, “Hypermedia and Emblematics,” in Computing and Visual Culture, ed. Tanya Szraijber (London: C H A rt, 1999): 45–62; Digital Culture (London: Reaktion, 2002). 42 See, for example, Irit Rogoff, “From Ruins to Debris: The Feminisation of Fascism in German-History Museums,” in Museum Culture, ed. Daniel Sherman & Irit Rogoff (London: Routledge, 1994): 223–49, and Gaby Porter, “Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Sharon Macdonald & Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 105–26. 43 Manovich, The Language of New Media, 141.

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puter system located in that space.44 A couple of examples illustrate the tensions confronting the would-be surrealist montage designer. First, the physical space of the Shakespeare’s Globe exhibition in Southwark is characterized by disorientating montages of texts, images and etched glass; but its numerous multimedia computer offerings are a model of navigable order, and serve to hold the exhibition together as a rational experience. Secondly, the Mongrel Tate experiment – in which normal access to the Tate Gallery website was seemingly disrupted by acts of cyber-terrorism, disruptions which were, in fact, a conceptual art-work – functioned within the established structure and style of the Tate’s own (highly ‘usable’) website. Its montage strategy was limited to the substitution of politically radical content, itself organized along conventional journalistic lines, in unexpected places. There has been a recent upsurge in multimedia approaches to ethnography, and at least one has been explicitly based on Marcus’s programme for postmodern ethnographic practice. Dicks and Mason45 have translated Marcus’s principles into a general approach to ethnographic research and representation, and have used it in the construction of an extended example. Dicks’ research on the loss of the mining industry in the Rhondda Valley, and the subsequent ‘heritagization’ of the area with the development of the Rhondda Heritage Park, was the basis of an experiment in multivocal ethnographic presentation using a multimedia platform.46 Dicks and Mason explain that the construction of a multiperspective ethnography in multimedia poses enormous difficulties of organization: written transcripts, voice recordings, images and video footage comprise a highly complex space of data which must somehow be rendered comprehensible. The problems of organizing different voices into a crafted whole (the basic problem of written multivocal ethnography) are multiplied by the problems of organizing the different modalities in which data may be presented. These problems may be seen from two perspectives: that of the technical study of navigation and data organization which has grown up around the 44

See, for example, accounts of the ‘Paradise’ exhibition of the British Museum Department of Ethnography in Clifford, Routes, 168. 45 Bella Dicks & Bruce Mason, “Hypermedia and Ethnography: Reflections on the Construction of a Research Approach,” Sociological Research Online 3.3 (1998): http: //www.socresonline.org/socresonline/3/3/3.html; “The digital ethnographer,” Cybersociology 6 (1999): http://www.socio.demon.co.uk/magazine/6/dicksmason .html 46 Bella Dicks, Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiff: U of Wales P , 2000).

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new media; and that of the more broadly literary consideration of comprehension and cognition. On a technical level, a freely navigable space of linked, multivocal media elements constitutes an invitation to a user to become lost in a hyperspace of jumbled media elements – a defect familiar from early hypermedia experiments (in fiction, criticism and history) in which free, disorganized linking was the sole design principle.47 In purely technical terms, the solution to this problem is to structure and restrict navigation, to provide some higher-level organizing model for the mass of linked texts; but this implies the suppression of the revelatory power of montage effects. This may be seen as a new incarnation of a perennial artistic problem: in any medium, some rhetorical devices are required to weld multiple fragments, perspectives and voices together into a comprehensible experience; but these devices should be used in such a way that they do not evacuate surprise and challenge from the reading experience. Dicks and Mason opt for the rhetorical figure of a guide who helps the reader down paths in the hypermedia structure and stands in for a common figure at a heritage site. Their guide-figure is an ethnographer, knowledgeable, but sensitive to the problems associated with imposing itineraries and interpretations. There is a sense in which this device is the embodiment of Adorno’s plea for “theoretical mediation” in the face of the hybrid “positivism and magic” of Benjamin’s pure-montage approach in the Arcades Project.48 Adorno envisaged theoretical mediation as being provided by critical theory, aware of its own provenance and limits, and essentially self-effacing. Similarly, Dicks’ and Mason’s guide suggests but does not dictate interpretative paths through the hypermedia space, in an attempt to square the circle of radical openness to new experience, and to create some framework for making sense of new experience.

In Place of a Conclusion: A Strategy The design of critical interpretative materials for cultural tourism seems inescapably to take place within a closed circuit of ideas. An image of global tourism as an element of accelerating cultural collision demands a response couched in terms of cosmopolitanism and transnational citizenship, a re47

The double-edged nature of such disorientation is discussed in Landow, Hypertext

2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology, 115. 48 Buck–Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 216–52.

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cognition that cosmopolitan competences on the part of travellers are an essential element of global responsibility, sensitivity and justice. Central to those competences is the ability to bracket any given cultural perspective and set it against the valid claims of other perspectives, a competence that requires the representational resources which are the legacy of modernist montage in literature, graphic arts and cinema. Further, the globalized condition that marks the start of this circuit of ideas can only be visualized in terms of modernist montage. The designer must choose a point in this circuit from which to begin a critical intervention in tourism by providing a framework for the construction of interpretative materials. If the new media designer enters this circuit by assimilating the formal properties of modernist montage, backed by the authority of ethnographic surrealism, then the socially and historically specific limitations of these codes become apparent: a surreal montage can only be read as an ‘illumination’ or ‘provocation’ by those who have learned to do so, and in an environment which encourages such readings. Evidence for this is the fact that the world of globalized tourism teems with surreal ‘shock effects’ which often pass unnoticed. When a group of tourists watch a supposed ‘traditional tribal display’ in Uganda, seemingly oblivious to the backdrop of a refugee camp and U N H C R trucks associated with those fleeing unstable areas of the country to the relative haven of the protected tourist trail, or when tourists to Botswana happily purchase souvenir packs of playing cards emblazoned with images of “Bushmen of the Kalahari” living out a “timeless indigenous culture,” then shock effects have been evacuated of content, and some other form of communication must be sought.49 Attempts to short-circuit the developmental processes that lead to cosmopolitan competences by means of modernist montage creates texts which cannot be read by a broad audiences, and whose messages cannot be integrated into an enduring world-view. A more promising design focus is provided by the more processual aspects of Marcus’s principles of postmodern ethnography, and of models of cosmopolitanism; since the active nature of the new media favours the design of representations which mirror unfolding processes.50 In particu49 These examples came from personal communication with Stan Frankland, University of St Andrews, and Susan Keitumetse, University of Cambridge. 50 See Landow, Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology, 49.

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lar, it is possible to model the mental processes involved in stepping back from a text cast in a taken-for-granted code and in questioning its limitations and assumptions. A design based on this process can be constructed around familiar tourist experiences and interpretative devices – the interactive map or virtual tour, timelines, the catalogue of historical objects – and by doing so it begins in a semiotic environment which does not alienate the intended audience. However, the interpretative environment, like the real environment on which it is based, must support a progressive stepping-back from this pre-cast image to the points at which the tourist spectacle meets its social frame, and in which the spectacle is seen through other frames. As an essential element in this strategy, montage devices are domesticated and given specific meanings as markers of transition between levels of interpretation. They are the points at which, to revert to the examples above, the troubled political backdrop of the tribal display becomes visible and begins to be interpreted, or when the emblem of a timeless, indigenous culture begins to be seen as ensnared in the mechanisms of reduction and commodification. However, the tourist reader cannot be left to cope with the dissonant experience of the disjunction between spectacle and frame without the support of some discourse to make it meaningful. Essential to such a strategy is the feature emphasized by Dicks and Mason: that ultimately a process of interpretation must efface its own authority, recognizing its cultural and representational limitations; but an interpretative new media text cannot avoid arrogating temporary authority during its interpretative process without lapsing into incomprehensibility. Following through such an interpretative strategy for a real site or tourist experience is unlikely to be an economic proposition for even the most enlightened commercial tourism operation. The essence of any successful critical interpretation of a tourist object is its suggestion of endlessness – that the social and cultural contexts of the object may be multiplied without limit. Indeed, this is the chief mechanism by which the authority of the interpretation must be effaced. This underlines the importance of the use of new media outlined in our Introduction: as a platform for intervention in tourism by N G O s, committed individuals, and publicly engaged academics.

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WORKS CITED Adorno, Theodor. Negative Dialectics, tr. E.B. Ashton (Negative Dialektik, 1966. tr. London: Routledge, 1973). Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, tr. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: U of Texas P , 1981). Balakian, Anna. Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute (London: Unwin, 1972). Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies,” Theory, Culture & Society 19:1–2 (2002): 17–44. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama, tr. John Osborne (Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928. tr. London: Verso, 1998). ——. The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland & Kevin McLaughlin (Das PassagenWerk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 1982; Cambridge M A : Belknap P /Harvard U P , 1999). Bolter, Jay David, & Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1999). Buck–Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Bejamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 1989). Clifford, James. The Pedicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1988). ——. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 1997). ——, & George Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: U of California P 1986). Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone, 1994). Dicks, Bella. Heritage, Place and Community (Cardiff: U of Wales P , 2000). ——, & Bruce Mason. “Hypermedia and Ethnography: Reflections on the Construction of a Research Approach,” Sociological Research Online 3.3 (1998): http: //www.socresonline.org/socresonline/3/3/3.html ——. “The Digital Ethnographer,” Cybersociology 6 (1999): http://www.socio .demon.co.uk/magazine/6/dicksmason.html Franklin, Adrian, & Mike Crang. “The Trouble with Tourism and Travel Theory?” Tourist Studies 1.1 (2001): 5–22. Gere, Charles. “Hypermedia and Emblematics,” in Computing and Visual Culture, ed. Tanya Szraijber (London: C H A rt, 1999). ——. Digital Culture (London: Reaktion, 2002). Gouldner, Alvin W. “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles – I ,” Administrative Science Quarterly 2.3 (1957): 281–306. ——. “Cosmopolitans and Locals: Toward an Analysis of Latent Social Roles – I I ,” Administrative Science Quarterly 2.4 (1958): 444–80. Hall, Stuart. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London: Sage, 1997).

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Hannerz, Ulf. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organisation of Meaning (New York: Columbia U P , 1992). ——. Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996). Harrison, David. Tourism and the Less Developed World: Issues and Case Studies (Oxford: C A B International, 2001). Inda, Xavier, & Renato Rosaldo. The Anthropology of Globalization: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Keefe, Jean, & Sue Wheat. Tourism and Human Rights (London: Tourism Concern, 1998). Koerner, Joseph. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (London: Reaktion, 1990). Lacy, Julie, & William Douglass. “Beyond authenticity: the meanings and uses of cultural tourism.” Tourist Studies 2.1 (2002): 5–21. Landow, George. Hypertext 2.0: The Convergence of Contemporary Literary Theory and Technology (Baltimore M D : Johns Hopkins U P , 1997). Larmore, Charles. “Hölderlin and Novalis,” in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 2000): 141–60. Lowenthal, David. The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1985). Lury, Celia. “The Objects of Travel,” in Touring Cultures, ed. Chris Rojek & John Urry (London: Routledge, 1997): 75–95. MacCannell, Dean. “Tourist agency.” Tourist Studies 1.1 (2001): 23–37. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media (Cambridge M A : M I T Press, 2001). Marcus, George. “The Modernist Sensibility in Recent Ethnographic Writing and the Cinematic Metaphor of Montage,” in Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography, ed. Leslie Devereaux & Roger Hillman (Berkeley: U of California P , 1995): 35–55. ——, & Michael Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Chicago: U of Chicago P , 1986). Monaco, James. How to Read a Film: Movies, Media, Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). Moutinho, Luiz. Strategic Management in Tourism (Oxford: C A B International, 2000). Porter, Gaby. “Seeing Through Solidity: A Feminist Perspective on Museums,” in Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World, ed. Sharon Macdonald & Gordon Fyfe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996): 105–26. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Fieldwork in Common Places,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford & George Marcus (Berkeley: U of California P , 1986): 27–50.

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Robinson, Mike, & Priscilla Boniface. Tourism and Cultural Conflicts (Oxford: C A B International, 1999). Rogoff, Irit. “From Ruins to Debris: the Feminisation of Fascism in German-History Museums,” in Museum Culture, ed. Daniel Sherman & Irit Rogoff (London: Routledge, 1994): 223–49. Rojek, Chris. Ways of Escape: Modern Transformations in Leisure and Travel (London: Routledge, 1993). Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge U P , 1989). Rosen, Charles, & Henri Zerner. Romanticism and Realism: The Mythology of Nineteenth-Century Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1984). Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose, tr. Benjamin Sher (O teorii prozy; Moscow, 1929. tr. Normal I L : Dalkey Archive, 1990). Smith, Mike & Rosaleen Duffy. The Ethics of Tourism Development (London: Routledge, 2003). Turner, Bryan. “Cosmopolitan Virtue, Globalisation and Patriotism,” Theory, Culture & Society 19.1–2 (2002): 45–63. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze (London: Sage, 1990). Vickery, John. “Frazer and the elegaic: the modernist connection,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1990): 51–68. Watney, Simon. “Making strange: the shattered mirror,” in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin (London: Macmillan, 1982): 154–76. Webster, Steven. “The Historical Materialist Critique of Surrealism and Postmodernist Ethnography,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton N J : Princeton U P , 1990): 266–99. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: U of California P , 1994).

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anredoM acitpO or Aztec Cameras Cultural Hybridity and Latin American Photography P ETER D. O SBORNE

Preface The mestizo, the impure, the capacity to absorb and encompass contraries is one of the characteristics which mark the Hispano American the most.1

S

O M E B O D Y O N C E S A I D , “You can’t talk your way out of language.” Using the word ‘language’ in a somewhat extended way, the work I’ll be examining by some mostly contemporary Latin American art photographers appears to do just that. Or rather, such work uses one kind of visual representation to talk its way out of another and in this represents the attempt by those trapped, estranged or restrained in the monoglot and monologue of dominant voices and conventions originating in colonial or postcolonial formations to speak through, around and beyond them. While the essay is focused on the specific characteristics of a visual medium studied in a postcolonial context, the themes and concepts opened up have, I think, relevance to literary studies as it converges on the field of postcolonial studies. However, I offer no generalized description of the postcolonial condition abstracted from any context. I tend, anyway, to view the postcolonial as a type of social and cultural practice, always

1

Arturo Uslar Pietri, quoted in Jorge Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America (London: Polity, 2000): 149.

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embedded in specific contexts and for that reason barely describable outside of them. If this essay produces any insights into the study of postcolonial cultural practice, it does so by means of some reflective descriptions of the historical, political, cultural and intellectual environment in which Latin American art photographers work. I will be looking at their work by means of a discussion of two sets of issues: cultural identity, cultural hybridity and their relationship with aesthetic practice, on the one hand; and the particular characteristics of Latin American photographic and visual culture, on the other.

I The appearance of photography in Latin America has its fictional account in Gabriel García Márquez’s mythical–materialist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, the history of a distant and obscure Colombian town, Macondo. Like the spectre of modernity, the gypsy Melquíades returns to Macondo after a long absence travelling the world. He’d even died on his journey but, unable to bear the solitude, had repudiated death and returned to life excommunicated by his tribe and stripped of his supernatural powers. But in his possession he carried rational magic – he’d brought with him the daguerreotype: José Arcadio Buendía had never heard of that invention. But when he saw himself and his whole family fastened on to a sheet of iridescent metal for an eternity, he was mute with stupefaction. That was the date of the oxidized Daguerreotype in which José Arcadio Buendía appeared with his bristly and greying hair, his cardboard collar attached to his shirt by a copper button, and an expression of startled solemnity, whom Ursula described, dying with laughter, as a “frightened general.” José Arcadio Buendía was, in fact, frightened on that clear December morning when the Daguerreotype was made, for he was thinking that people were slowly wearing away while his image would endure on a metallic plaque … 2

Fuelled by a mental compound of positivism and mysticism, José Arcadio Buendía resolved to prove once and for all the existence or non-existence of God by means of photography. This was to be achieved by making 2

Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, tr. Gregory Rabassa (Cien años de soledad, 1967, tr. 1970: London: Everyman, 1995): 53.

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superimposed images taken in different parts of the house, in the expectation that deities dispose themselves in sublunary space. To catch God there, though, he would have had to photograph space from every possible angle and from every point on earth – a project requiring, I suppose, eternity. Melquíades had something else with him when he reappeared in Macondo. Just prior to his return, the people had lost their ability to sleep and were disappearing into a profound forgetfulness from where they could recognize nothing, neither objects nor faces. When he’d begun to realize that memory was slipping from the town, José Arcadio Buendía hung labels on things with instructions for their use: ‘This is a cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk’. Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters. 3

A drug supplied by Melquíades cures the collective amnesia. But the coincidence of the return of memory – and therefore of identity – and the introduction of the daguerreotype urges on the reader a connection between the two. Through silver salts and oxidized mercury and a modernizing gypsy’s unspecified medication, Macondo, which is, after all, a microcosmic, imaginary Colombia, returns to itself, starts again, but now with a machine that secures its sense of the past and adds to its capacity for mystifying it, a history machine – photography. With the help of the “fantastic camera,” as Ursula Buendía calls it, Macondo remembers itself, seems to escape from obscurity, just as it might be said that photography helped invent for the actual Colombia a memory of imaginary nationhood in the same moment as it was brought into historical existence. The effect of Melquíades’ rational magic on the isolated community of Macondo reveals the town’s sense of isolation, its melancholy, its feelings of terror and fascination when faced with a modernity imported through the machines and systems of strangers – the daguerreotype and the United Fruit Company. The passage brings out the clumsy syncretism of beliefs and practices, uncovers the frailty of memory, the transience of identity, 3

García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 53.

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and the desire for being. These are among the general themes of the novel. They also play through and around the photographic work I am discussing. More generally, the cultural heterogeneity that characterizes Macondo has its equivalent in the general culture of photography in Latin America – the symbolic context or the visual culture within which we need to understand these images. To this I shall return. One of the earliest images in modern Latin American art photography was made in 1931 by the great Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo, titled Parábola Optica (Figure 1 at the end of this essay). It shows an optician’s shop window in Mexico City from which is suspended the giant image of a pair of bespectacled eyes. The photograph is normally reverse-printed so that the words on the shop’s façade, Optica Moderna, read backwards as anredoM acitpO. As so often in his work, the title is crucial – here there are two: Optica Moderna or, more commonly, Parábola Optica, or, sometimes, just Parábola. One announces a modern way of seeing, with its use of visual technology (optics, photography), its modernist taste for cool geometrical forms, its promotional typography, and the projectile energy connoted by the word parábola. But parábola can also mean parable; for this is also the story of an eye, of a looking that sees from some other place, from the reverse side of things – the seeing of some other eye. Additionally, and linked to this distinctive visuality, the presence of a different spirit or mentality is connoted, or possibly uncovered, by the reversed name of, presumably, the shop owner, otiripS.E/ E.Spirito. This photograph documents an actual cultural/visual event. Perhaps more critically, it introduces a motif or theme that would recur throughout Álvarez Bravo’s career and is present in the imagery of many other significant contemporary Latin American photographers. It is a modernist theme concerned with displacing habitual modes of perception and producing forms for expressing a transforming urban experience. But in Latin America the modernist impulse becomes combined with the effects of cultural hybridity and the problem of how to represent a multiplicity of ways of seeing in which traditional visualities and epistemologies both combine and conflict with modern, often globalized and technologically transformed ways of seeing and understanding. The photograph’s aesthetic and semiological operations are overdetermined by their location in a postcolonial space. Parábola Optica/Optica Moderna is a self-conscious, formal and metaphoric gesture made by a photographer formed in, and in

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relation to, the art movements, institutions and markets of an extended Western – more precisely, Parisian – world. At the same time, it is a figuring of the powerful social realities and cultural imaginaries within in a country typified by the coexistence of preindustrial symbolic and material cultures, extensive underdevelopment and the most radical modernity. The work is both a dwelling in and a dwelling on Mexican modernity by the postcolonial artist, who both participates in and observes his own seeing. The hybridity of the cultural order from which the image emerges – its trans-cultural nature – may explain the way the photograph proclaims that the visible is not the only true; that the visible is a mask concealing yet indicating what is concealed. First, within this cultural condition where different cultural systems are co-present, appearances are already constructed and understood in fundamentally different ways before any act of visual representation occurs. Secondly, cultural production in Latin America has often been a type of either measured or spontaneous resistance to dominant modes of seeing and representation. In a recent essay, Christopher Pinney speaks of varieties of popular photographic practice in postcolonial situations as “vernacular modernism,” in which the real surface of the photograph calls attention to itself through techniques such as doubling, collage, overpainting and so on. As interferences in the visual field, such techniques problematize or challenge the single unmediated truth that photography has historically so often laid claim to in mainstream Western traditions.4 In Latin America at least, such practices, refined, elaborated and often theorized, are central to the work of art photographers; but they retain a connection with the defiant impulses of popular visual culture. Indeed, for all its preoccupation with the uncertainties of photographic truth, Álvarez Bravo’s work and the contemporary work it has inspired – especially the stylistically hybrid work often described as postmodern – continue to address the social, if obliquely. In the struggle with its own forms and materials, this work establishes an analogical relationship to the conflicts and complexities in the social world that has induced its production – in particular where they bear upon the production of cultural identity. We can be guided here by Andy Grundberg when he writes, “postmodern artists are 4 Christopher Pinney, “Notes from the Surface of the Image, Photography, Postcolonialism and Vernacular Modernism,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney & Nicholas Peterson (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2003): 202–20.

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interested in photography not as a distinct means of describing the world but as an embodiment or metonym of how the culture represents itself.”5

II Latin America has been shaped by a psychic system that, in the manner of the identification of the Latin American with Caliban […] assumes the confrontation of a threatening native Id with an introjected European superego.6

The anxiety of cultural identity preoccupies the work I am looking at; it forms its subject-matter and determines its form. Indeed, identity is perhaps the central issue in Latin America. The Chile-based writer Nelly Richard argues that “all aspects of identity there are born from a colonizing venture.”7 But it was a colonizing venture of a particular type – one containing a number of colonizations within it – that has resulted in Latin America being both a part of and apart from the West.8 As a group of Euro-American colonies and settler societies that tore themselves away from the colonizing ancestor, and which contain significant indigenous populations, Latin America, of all regions that can be considered postcolonial, most dramatically contains both the West and its Other within itself. Jean Franco sees all identity there as marked by ‘Others’, by “alterity.”9 Ethnically and culturally, many parts of the region are mestizo: mixed or hybrid. I think that some kind of negotiation with hybridity affects the interiorities of all Latin Americans, whatever their status or ancestry. The condition of hybridity is compounded by the experience of exile. In the view of many of its authors, conquest, domination, patterns of dis5

Andy Grundberg, Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography 1974–1989 (New York: Aperture, 1990): 232. 6 Hernan Vidal, “Postmodernism, Postleftism, and Neo-Avant-Gardism,” in The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, ed. John Beverley, José Oviedo & Michael Aronna (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1995): 285. 7 Nelly Richard, “Metaphors of the Photographic Negative,” in A Marginal Body: The Photographic Image in Latin America / Un Cuerpo Marginal: La Imagen Fotográfica en América Latina, ed. Charles Merewether (Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography, 1987): 64. 8 Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1987): 114. 9 Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2002): 239.

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placement and migration have made Latin America a subcontinent of exiles. One has gone so far as to suggest that the Latin American is “a kind of European who is not the owner of his identity,” who is, in effect, the possessor of a “non-identity.”10 Exile also has had close links with the kind of artistic modernism that continues to influence contemporary visual arts in Latin America, and so many of modernisms’ practitioners were exiles or émigrés. Edward Said notes how exiled or expatriated artists, deprived of their familiar world, develop self-conscious and sharpened perceptions, acquiring more than one set of eyes. Exile, he says, is “contrapuntal.”11 Paul Gilroy speaks of the decisive influences brought into European and New-World modernity by the “diasporic aesthetics” of the “Black Atlantic” with their improvisational techniques. In a comparable fashion, Susan Suleiman links montage and visual and textual fragmentation to the condition of exile.12 Exile or, rather, self-exile is also part of an anthropologist’s working practice, the necessary dislocation for making ethnographic judgements. Given its culturally complex and existentially exiled condition, and given the fascination that the strange, the marginal and the Other hold for contemporary art and literature, it is unsurprising, then, that Latin America produces so much art that is anthropological and so much anthropology that is art. In Latin America, art and literature have become renowned for their revelation of mental universes unfamiliar to most of its publics, local or global; and any ethnographic description of its own cultures is as likely to be a mode of self-expression, or self-analysis, as it is to be an attempt to describe the cultural universe of the other – it so often amounts to the same thing. It is a predicament imposed by history, distinct from the “ritual of self-othering” of the Ethno–Surrealists so disapproved of by Hal Foster.13

10 Carlos Pérez, “La no identidad latinoamericana: una vision peregrina,” quoted in Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America, 186. 11 Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh–ha & Cornel West (Cambridge M A : M I T Press & New York: M O M A , 1990): 366. 12 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993); Susan Rubin Suleiman, Exile and Creativity (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1998). 13 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge M A : October Books/M I T Press, 1999): 175.

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In a series produced in the late 1980s and early 1990s titled Us for Example, the Brazilian photographer Bauer Sá dramatizes these issues (and see also work by his fellow-Brazilian, the photographer Cravo Neto). In this series produced in the studio, the most tangible presence of self, the body, provides no certainty – these identities manifest themselves as changing performances, representations, studio fictions, in which the multiple historical conditions of black Brazilian identitities materialize in the forms of the elusive metaphors, gestures and moments of selfhood, but not as stilled essences. One image, titled White Shoe, is a high-contrast monochrome half-profile portrait, against a dark background, of a young black man who is carrying on his head a white casual shoe. Its meaning is somehow at once obvious and mysterious. It exemplifies how, in Bauer Sá’s work, the self is shown as present in other times still present – the time of slavery, for one. The self is shown objectified in terms of something else, something other than itself. Us for Example dramatizes the displacement and restlessness of postcolonial identity. It reveals other conditions of identity. The more the self is revealed in its historical and imaginary reality, the stranger and uncannier the images become. Homi Bhabha writes: The uncanny structure of cultural difference is close to Lévi–Strauss’s understanding of “the unconscious as providing the common and specific character of social facts […] not because it harbours our most secret selves but because […] it enables us to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once ours and other.”14

We might regard this kind of image as visual tourism for the viewer – exotic, even racist, in the quality of its fascination. But, alternatively, it is possible to regard it as a manifestation of how black Brazilians are viewed, of the identities imposed on them. Other images in the series, all of black males, show a boy with a gun in his mouth (Figure 2); a man with a whipping scar and an antique long-stemmed tobacco pipe; a youth wearing bananas as a headdress. Seen in this manner, Bauer Sá’s photographs are resistant mirrors, portraits of othering, and, potentially, portraits of the white viewer’s own ‘look’. We may also want to consider that, as these selves are at once so elusive and provocative, there is 14

Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge,

1994): 163.

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nothing stable to possess. The realism of the medium makes reference to social realities; but the beauty of the photographic surface signifies only surface, hence the absence of any concealed or latent authenticity beneath it. In the manner of Victor Segalen’s “aesthetics of diversity,” we may argue that Bauer Sá’s images acknowledge difference but do not seek to possess it.15

III Postmodernism is not a style but the tumultuous co-presence of all styles, the place where the chapters in the history of art and folklore are crossed with each other and with the new cultural technologies.16

Linking the concern with identity and the engagement with anthropology is a prevailing interest in syncretism and hybridity in Latin America thought.17 What is striking is how dramatically this tradition promotes aesthetic practices as essential means of depicting and celebrating the syncretism of Latin America’s cultures and selfhoods, of contesting the dominating and restrictive descriptions and representations of them, and even of freeing an emergent postcolonial symbolic culture from their spell. This view of art is predicated on the understanding that art transforms the world not by negating it, but by re-making it; that it frees itself from a particular world by embodying it in aesthetic form. It is an essentially modernist approach, according to which art renders its own process of making or representing palpable or foregrounded, pace Russian Formalism. In doing so, it emphasizes the fabricated or constructed aspect of all worlds, and thus of all cultures and identities. What we see in the work under discussion are visual fictions, or, to adopt some terms favoured by Habermas, as artworks they “virtualize” their relationship to their actual 15

Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys Between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). 16 Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, tr. Christopher L. Chiappari & Silvia L. López (Culturas híbridas: Estrategías para entrar y salir de la modernidad, 1989; tr. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1994): 244. 17 See Fernando Ortiz, Miguel Ángel Asturias, Gilberto Freyre, Wilfredo Lam, Manuel Gamio, Alejo Carpentier, Benjamin Arditti; see also Gwen Kirkpatrick, “The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,” in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2000): 177–98.

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world. Released from “the business of the world,” to which speech-acts are normally directed, Habermas argues, poetic language invents its own world, or, through the use of innovative language, playfully discloses new worlds.18 This destabilizes the present reality of the world and loosens its grip on the imagination. These are the techniques that Latin American artists and writers have famously mobilized in their confrontations with the postcolonial order. They have also used those other effects of modernist and postmodernist art, the fragmentation of spaces, times, selves and viewpoints. Richard Wollheim notes that a consequence of fragmentation as it upsets the integrities underpinning our familiar sense of reality is to invoke the condition of the uncanny, the unheimlich: that is, the ‘unhomed’ – a condition which haunts postcolonial subjectivity with its undertow of exile and the traces of the cultural homelessness identified by Fanon as part of colonialism’s existential legacy.19 Disruptive and resistant forms of aesthetic practice, colonial and neocolonial domination, postcolonial anxieties – especially in relation to cultural identity – appear causally or expressively connected. Two NewWorld writers, Aimé Césaire and Néstor García Canclini, have offered some of the most considerable contributions to the understanding of these relationships and to the project of bringing about what Homi Bhabha terms a “postcolonial” agency capable of producing its own modernity with or against the dominant forms – a “counter-modernity,” something Octavio Paz also dreamed of.20 For the Martinican poet and politician Césaire, writing from the 1940s onwards, the process involved questions of language, representation and identity. For these reasons, the activities of the artist and writer were indispensable to it. Insisting that colonialism had maintained dominion over its subjects in the imagination as well as in the world of social institutions and material life, Césaire argued that that the imagination had to be seen as a potential domain of resistance to colonialism and its postcolonial aftermath. The resistance was to be con18

Jürgen Habermas, “On the Distinction between Poetic and Communicative Uses of Language,” in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke (Cambridge: Polity, 1998): 389–90. 19 See Suleiman, Exile and Creativity; Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 242; Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markham (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1956, tr. 1967; New York: Grove & Weidenfeld, 1982). 20 Octavio Paz, Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1987): 173, 252.

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ducted by means of what he called “miraculous weapons” (the title of his 1946 collection of poems, Les armes miraculeuses): that is, the resources of poetic language allied with a cultural politics that sought reunification with a lost Africa that was more virtual or inspirational than actual. Like Álvarez Bravo an associate of the Parisian Surrealists, Césaire favoured Leo Frobenius’s romantic/irrational African anthropology over the positivism of French ethnography, above all because of the visionary function it gave to art as the expression of a whole culture. He called on postcolonial writers and artists to draw on the transformative and unifying powers of mythic and poetic language, especially its ability to reshape reality, to secrete texts and images out of profoundly hostile oppositions and contradictions, to speak where the poet was not, from a place in which multiple and contradictory beliefs and identities coexisted, in which the voice spoke and the eye saw from several different places, positions and dimensions at the same time. Césaire’s mythopoiesis sought to make whole the broken realities of colonial and postcolonial life in which the future might only be rescued by way of the past, where the self might also be the Other, where the Slave had once both feared and introjected the Master, and where the Master had once both romanced and murdered the Slave. His verse, influenced by Surrealist automatic writing techniques, is a poetry of hybridity, a language of otherness uttered at times in a ventriloquizing voice speaking from somewhere else, by ghostly personae, in bits of language and out of the remnants of selves drifting in diasporic space. It is built out of the fragments and fractals of the lost culture, the recalled or reimagined culture which had survived transportation and slavery; the imposed, borrowed, or parodied elements of the culture of the colonists, the beautiful music of the slave master, the enforced and disgraced religion, now part of the life-world of the colonial subject; all the debris and cultural flotsam, the often conflicting practices and beliefs that history had left the subordinated with – all these would have to become the source of some future coherence.21 The “miraculous weapons” were the means of unhooking the imagination from the unendurable real; of dreaming oneself out of the colonial nightmare by means of another dream; of conquering one myth 21 Aimé Césaire, Les armes miraculeuses (1946; Paris: Flammarion, 1985); see also A. James Arnold, Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1981).

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by means of an alternative one. The cultural energy of an independent imagination would then bring about liberation from the icons and metaphors of the master and permit the invention of other worlds, other possibilities – if only, in the first instance, in the poem, in the painting, in the magical-realist novel, in the film, or in certain types of photographic work – that is, in the provisional reality, the utopian space, of the poetic. Césaire’s ideas continue to influence New-World cultural practitioners. Their characteristics are present in the work of the Guatemalan photographic artist Luis González Palma. The latter’s La Lotería is a multiple piece (see, for example, Figure 3 below) consisting of a set of a dozen images that reworks icons from a card game introduced by the colonists to encourage the acquisition of Spanish and its attendant cosmology. The aesthetic process draws full attention to itself. We see chemical stains, masking tape, scratches, and blemishes. A variety of effectively acknowledged visual styles and traditions coincide within the image. For example, there are documentary portraits of contemporary Guatemalans, but dressed awkwardly in the kind of theatrical props once common in nineteenthcentury photographic studios: angels’ or birds’ wings, crowns, flowers and other devices antithetical to the conventions of documentary realism. Yet, even in their outmoded amateurishness, these elements are able to summon up pre-Columbian stories and myths concerning the after-life and the overlapping of human and non-human identities. Additionally, they visualize imposed identities that are worn uncomfortably, that don’t quite fit. The work is rich in Catholic references in the form of pastiches of the Baroque and its allegorical impulses; indeed, the brown surface of each image has been seen to connote the countless religious paintings that hang in Latin American churches darkened by centuries of candle-soot.22 In its reflexivity and its use of collage and pastiche, La Lotería also cites North American postmodern art practices – the work of Joel–Peter Witkin in particular. As the Russian semiologist Juri M. Lotman has taught us, we always interpret or simulate the texts of another age by means of codes unavailable to those ages.23 Although La Lotería mixes the iconographies

22

My thanks to Amanda Hopkinson for many of these insights into the work of González Palma. 23 Juri M. Lotman, “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, ed. Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore M D & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1977): 216.

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of different epochs, it is a work entirely situated in and concerned with the condition of the present. It reflects García Canclini’s contention that art “exacerbates the heterogeneous,” and that Creole formations generate aesthetic hybridities.24 And it is Canclini’s work that offers the most useful contemporary Latin American exposition of the hybrid cultural condition and of the importance of art for its revelation. In his book Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, he writes that Latin America is a region “where traditions have not yet disappeared and modernity has not completely arrived”; it is, he says, “a heterogeneous continent consisting of countries in each of which coexist multiple logics of development.” He continues: Latin American countries now are the product of sedimentation, juxtaposition and intercrossing of Indian traditions […] of colonial Catholic hispanism and modern political, educational and communicative practices.

When speaking more precisely of taste and artistic production, he asks: What are the painters looking for when, in the same painting, they cite preColumbian and colonial images along with those of the culture industry, and 25 then elaborate them using computers and lasers?

Perhaps one answer lies in the work of the Mexican photographer Pedro Meyer, who uses digital imaging the better to simulate a Mexican social imaginary that is lived simultaneously across a number of different times and traditions at once (Figure 4). Within a single constructed space, Meyer mirrors this hybridity by mixing historical, mythic and religious iconographies, personal and collective memory and narratives. He compounds distinct technologies (analogical and digital), different modalities of representation and discordant ontologies, all within the single image. His aim is to visualize how a world is experienced by means of how it is imagined; that is, to depict the real fictions of cultural life. His work embodies a Mexican cultural condition characterized by what Canclini has termed “multitemporal heterogeneity.”26 Meyer’s digital work appears to 24

Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 242. Hybrid Cultures, 1, 7, 46, 2. 26 Hybrid Cultures, 3. 25

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be saying that only when Mexico incorporates its own otherness will it fully develop its own modernity. Homi Bhabha has argued that postcolonial modernity remains undescribable and unrealizable unless the repressed antagonisms and temporalities and excluded otherness on which such a modernity rests are re-inscribed in its conscious discourses in the form of what he calls “the projective past.”27 In contrast to Bhabha’s somewhat psychopathological account of the postmodern condition, Canclini celebrates the possibilities for new kinds of cultural practice it offers. Out of its “multitemporal heterogeneity” Latin America has produced, he says, a culture of, “pastiche and bricolage where many periods and aesthetics are cited,” in which oppositions such as the copy and the original, the metropolitan and the peripheral are losing their force.28 While the modernization process in the region is deficient in so many ways, and the process of hybridization is neither equal nor positive for all involved – inseparable as it is from a history of domination and violence – Canclini nevertheless celebrates the exuberance that comes from it; the collapse of cultural hierarchies it brings about. Additionally, he notes that the sheer density and complexity of the cultural grain means that Latin American cultures possess the means of resisting easy cultural domination from outside, by refracting and reshaping whatever external influences they accept, or by being able to absorb and transform whatever they ingest.29 Canclini speaks of cultural hybridity as an objective condition, one inherited from history. He also speaks of it as an active thing, to be accepted, celebrated and mobilized. He writes: Latin American modernization is not an alien dominant force operating through the substitution of tradition and traditional identities, but rather as one of the projects of renovation with which diverse sectors take charge of the multi-temporal heterogeneity of each nation. 30

As an example of how this is registered in an artwork, we can take the series All Saints Are Dead by the Venezuelan artist Nelson Garrido (Figure 5 below). It consists of parodies of religious tableaux made from a 27

Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 252. Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 3. 29 See Latin American cultural movements such as the Brazilian Cannibalists of the 1920s, or the Tropicalists of the late 1960s. 30 Hybrid Cultures, 2. 28

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scandalous mix of elements borrowed from the traditionally segregated iconographies of religion, promotional culture, mass media, and pornography to dramatize the loss of a shared symbolic order – or the arrival of a new one. Garrido’s tableaux resemble religious allegories, a form of no small interest to contemporary Latin American artists. But allegory depends on the evocation of collectively known stories and representations. When the great shared narratives of both Catholic Christianity and progressive modernity have either lost their way or must jostle for space with increasing numbers of other stories and picturings, allegory, as Garrido’s work demonstrates, becomes almost impossible. All Saints Are Dead ridicules a loss of meaning in contemporary Latin America culture. Of this work, Lois Parkinson Zamora writes: “the visible no longer signals the invisible [as in allegory] but rather the manufactured, the simulated, the sentimental.”31 But All Saints Are Dead counters any melancholy of loss. Bakhtin once spoke of Rabelais laughing modernity into existence. The comedic force of Garrido’s scandalous and kitsch constructions is powered by the irreverent energy of the region’s new cultural confluences and laughs one version of the Latin American postmodern into life. There are a number of photographers in the region who share the same preoccupations as Meyer and Garrido. These are marked off, though, by the attempt to develop a distinctive Latin American cultural practice which allows the cultural, even religious, force of the Amerindian and Catholic pasts to energize their work. Before looking at an example, there are some further distinguishing characteristics of Latin America’s visual culture we need to consider.

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Zamora, “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror,” in Watriss, Image and Memory, 349.

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IV At the limits of scientific-representative space, the poet even takes on the ‘role of allegory’. Beyond the order of signs he will rediscover the role of correspondences.32

Latin America photography shares the technologies and all the contending aesthetic and epistemological theories that surround photographic practice in the modern world in general. Additionally, it has absorbed, and has been absorbed by, beliefs and practices rising from the region’s own visual traditions. Lois Parkinson Zamora writes that we need to recognize that Latin American photography is a Western visual medium which “expresses western cultural constructions,” but that it does so “with difference,” as it contains “the presence of non-western traditions.” To recognize this, Zamora says, is to “develop our second sight as critics and viewers.”33 As Zamora herself acknowledges, Juri M. Lotman’s typological descriptions of culture are useful here. According to Lotman, what distinguishes one culture or one cultural epoch from another is, unsurprisingly, how each defines authenticity, order and spatiality. But what is assigned primordial importance in his approach is the culture’s distinctive theory of signs, its semiotic system.34 In this light, we can see hybridity in Latin America’s visual culture but also note the presence of contradiction. Implicit theories of the sign there conform both to the post-Enlightenment view that holds the relationship between signifier and signified to be unmotivated and conventional, and to views that appear to conform to Lotman’s premodern, medieval or religious type, which is distinguished by its high level of “semioticity,” in which everything in the world is filled with significance.35 In this type of culture, the sign stands in an iconic or motivated relationship to what it represents. Widespread in Latin America are visual traditions that carry 32

Christine Buci–Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, the Aesthetics of Modernity (London: Sage, 1994): 135. 33 Lois Parkinson Zamora, “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror: Reflections on the Photographic Image in Latin America,” in Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America 1866–1994, ed Wendy Watriss & Lois Parkinson Zamora (Austin: Texas U P , Fotofest, 1998): 315. 34 Lotman, “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” 220. 35 “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” 217.

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within them the mentalities of premodern cosmologies, non-secular, nonscientific values. They can be embodied in the use of ritual masks and costumes, Catholic and pre-Columbian statues and images, ex-votos, landmarks or topi or natural species imbued with spiritual meanings, and a variety of popular, often syncretic, religious and quasi-religious forms and devices. These are utilized as iconic signs, even as affective mechanisms such as charms or relics which, to use Lotman’s words, “participate in the divine.” Their semiotic value is established “not by their intrinsic value but by that of the thing they represent.”36 In religious cultures, Lotman notes, “the actual materiality of the sign becomes an object of adoration,” not magical in itself, but able to reflect the power or presence transmitted through it.37 Zamora quotes the historian of Meso-America, Alfredo López Austin. “Indigenous images,” he writes, “do not resemble their object, but contain it.”38 Photographic practice in Latin America is often as deeply marked by such traditions as it is by an adherence to both modernist notions of photographic truth and postmodern scepticism regarding all truth-claims. Take the work of Gerardo Suter, an Argentinian photographer long established in Mexico. In the early 1990s, he produced a series of photographed studio-made constructions and performances titled Codices. Using the human figure to personify Aztec deities, Suter’s images are sign-events which bring to life pre-Columbian religious or mythological drawings and ideographs of the kind destroyed by the Spanish in enormous numbers soon after the conquest. Coatlicue (Figure 6), to focus on one, depicts a story concerning the eponymous Aztec goddess in whom birth and violent death, vengeance and maternal love are encountered within the same being. The coexistence of apparently contradictory qualities is given formal equivalence in Coatlicue through the presence within the same representation of mutually exclusive symbolic orders, one based in Lotman’s medieval or religious sign, the other in his post-Enlightenment mode of signification. Religious signs are ritual devices. They conjure presences. The palpable words, symbols, moves, sounds and spaces that form any ritual must fuse with the sacred forces and entities it desires to connect with. 36

Lotman, “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” 217–18. “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” 217–218. 38 Zamora, “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror,” 315. 37

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The ritual sign either becomes the thing it represents or is transfigured by it. Its beauty – an excess that passes beyond representation, an intensification of perception – is the embodiment of the divine presence within the religious sign. To achieve this, the ritual must always seek its own perfection. Suter’s 1992 exhibition was titled Escenarios Rituales, and his images imitate ritual practices in two ways. First, they are ‘enlightenment’ signs, visual documentations of an aesthetic act and photographed fictions or performances that bestow physical presence on metaphysical entities. Through them, the ideograph is translated into the photograph; the mythological premodern into the technological modern and beyond. Secondly, the photographs are invocatory images. Suter employs the silver-gelatin process that has strong associations with fine print art photography and its commitment to the exquisite surface, the perfect image. This, in turn, has links with Western post-Romantic notions of aesthetic transfiguration where the aesthetically intensified materiality of the image, like some spiritualized substance, is equivalent to the immaterial or spiritual qualities of its object. The sign becomes one with its referent.39 The aesthetic of Codices mimics the qualities of the religious icon that, rather than merely representing the divine, either becomes itself a sacred object, that is, it transubstantiates, or, where this would be idolatrous, becomes the privileged transmitter of a sacred presence. But Suter’s work is not the expression of a desire to return to some lost authenticity. The Aztecs and their cosmology remain unreachable – indeed, are unacceptable. Photography does what it is famous for, gives presence to what is absent and yet cruelly confirms its irretrievability. Suter’s work is firmly placed in the present closer to Raymond Williams’s notion of “critical nostalgia,” signifying a sense of insufficiency in the contemporary Mexican condition brought about by the repression or devaluation of its non-European traditions, made invisible, spectacularly exotic or confined in museums to testify to their own disappearance. His work challenges modernity’s incapacity for thinking within more than one symbolic order. Dead cultures are given life in Suter’s performing bodies; invisible cultures are brought into the presence of light. Suter’s imagery can be regarded as embodying some of the qualities of what has been called Latin America’s “Baroque Modernity,” and thus as relatable to the more recent art-category of the “Ultra Baroque,” one de39

Zamora, “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror,” 315.

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rived from Alejo Carpentier’s notion of an intensified “New World Baroque.”40 The Baroque tradition and its association with the use of allegory are important elements making up the region’s visual and literary cultures. Faced, as Canclini puts it, by “an excess of objects” and the “diverse and Baroque nature of our history,” no synthesis or “nostalgic searching for non-existing traditions” is possible.41 It might be said, too, that when behind one language there persists another and perhaps another behind that, and all in the same cultural space, artistic recourse to allegory is inevitable. In the Baroque, writes Christine Buci–Glucksmann, “the visible refers to the reverse side, to an invisible that is at once present and absent.”42 Of allegory, Craig Owen writes: “In the allegorical structure one text is doubled by another […] one text is read through another […] the paradigm for the allegorical text is the palimpsest.” 43 Allegory is not about uncovering some lost original meaning; it has nothing to do with any endeavour to denote a real outside of representation. Rather, the allegorist, Owen writes, adds another meaning to the image […] only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants the antecedent one; it is a supplement.”44 The European Enlightenment and the rise of the scientific method caused the partial abandonment of the old semiotic order based in resemblances and analogues and its replacement by the sign. However, as the arts and sciences diverged, poetry or the poetic in general took over the ground that science had disowned and entered the domain of correspondences. The allegorical and the play of correspondences appear to displace any claims to verisimilitude in most of the works I am looking at. But they are gestures of uncertainty rather than religious faith, the resort to the procedures of an earlier aesthetic language thought able to evoke a cultural reality and an existential condition often typified equally by an excess and a diminishment of meaning – a proli40

Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America, 156; Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong & Victor Zamudio–Taylor (San Diego C A : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000). 41 Néstor García Canclini, “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994): 498–506. 42 Buci–Glicksmann, Baroque Reason, 135. 43 Craig Owen, “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism” (1980–81), in Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 317. 44 Owen, “The Allegorical Impulse,” 317.

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feration of signs occurring in the absence of a single shared symbolic order. Fredric Jameson, who regards allegory as the most appropriate narrative form in postcolonial societies, notes that “the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream.”45 These qualities we have encountered in the photographic work. Its truth, if that is the appropriate term, will not be found in the immediate revelation of some single event, object or subjectivity, but in the display of uncertain correspondences between different modes of being, different historical periods, and cultural artefacts, different types of representation and varieties of photographic practice, and even between different living species. The photographic surface is more textual than transparent. Buci–Glucksmann reminds us that the term ‘allegory’ derives from Greek words meaning both ‘to speak’ and ‘the other’. She writes: For allegory consists precisely in saying something other than what one means, or in saying one thing so that, by oblique procedures, another thing will be understood. But this discourse through the other is also discourse of the Other, a vocalization and staging of an otherness which eludes direct speech and presents itself as an elsewhere.46

And yet, however allegorical contemporary Latin America photography becomes, its commitment to realism or, rather, to reference, remains ultimately undiminished. Before and after anything else, the photographs under discussion are the documentations of aesthetic acts that are the expressions of actual cultural conditions. We can see this in Álvarez Bravo’s photography, which combines a documentary of street level contingencies with the uncovering of allegorical meanings. In his photograph from 1966 titled Justo Sueño / Well Earned Rest, a small dog lies sleeping beneath the black and white diagonals of a broken gate, a fragment of accidental modernism. If read out of a deeper Mexican competence, the photograph reveals the presence in the urban world of contemporary Mexico of a creature that in the ancient Mexican cosmology was associated with the dogfaced deity Xolotl, which was an intermediary species that could pass 45

Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 71. 46 Buci–Glucksman, Baroque Reason, 138.

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between the world of life and death, between sleeping and waking, between light and dark. The gate then becomes the opening between two worlds, two states – two cultural universes perhaps. Álvarez Bravo’s art was strongly influenced by Surrealism, and there is something in it, too, of Baudelaire’s allegorizing ‘premodernism’, though free of the French poet’s hatred of modernity. But just as important in Álvarez Bravo’s way of seeing is a dimension that corresponds to Lotman’s religious symbolic order. All the events, objects, signs, pictures, and the chance juxtapositions and coincidences encountered in the city street are visually celebrated as parts of the contemporary and its energies. At the same time, they are seen as elements in an ideographic text persisting from pre-conquest Mexico that continues to inscribe itself in or under the surface of modernity – the subordinated code – or persists in the collective dreams of the culture. It is worth noting that the photograph bears an alternative title, Los Sueños Han de Creerse / Dreams Must Be Believed. Álvarez Bravo was engaged in a form of cultural nationalism, trying to reveal or describe a particular Mexican modernity, a haunted modernity in which histories, evolved out of the region’s distinctive conditions, are present within and alongside the abstract and often placeless order of modernity. Álvarez Bravo’s imagery captures a cultural universe both as it is experienced and as it is imagined. His photography is not so much a description of a cultural reality as a challenge to the viewer’s limited way of seeing by means of it.

V [The hybridity of photography:] photography’s own distinctive implosion of nature and culture (an implosion embodied in the very word “photography”, from the Greek meaning “light-writing.”47

Photography is a type of enunciation. The calculated or unconscious complexities, the hybridity of form, the actual or faux allegories, the copresence of multiple cosmologies and times in the images I have been discussing – all are instances of the often-denied discontinuities and disturbances set deep in Latin American cultures by their historical formation. At the same time, they are also strategies, conscious or not, whereby 47 Geoffrey Batchen, “‘fearful ghost of former bloom’: What Photography Is,” in Where is the Photograph? ed. David Green (Brighton & Maidstone: Photoworks with Photoforum, 2003): 22.

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photographers uncover such discontinuities and disturbances. In doing so, they seek to destabilize the established picturings of Latin American worlds and selfhoods. As we have seen, when Canclini uses the term ‘cultural hybridity’ he means in part a conscious practice, an act. These photographs set out to break up the false singularity, the fictional unity that normally prevails in the official order. In Bhabha’s phrase they, “fracture the time of modernity from within.”48 They are Césaire’s miraculous weapons, assaulting the habitual visual order, disclosing what it is blind to. They are symbolic forms of the violence that Fanon saw as necessary if the lingering effects of colonialism were to be overcome. And their assaults can also be directed at their own traditions of radical art practice as shown by the Chilean artist Juan Davila’s pastiche of Frida Kahlo’s work and its commodification; or the Argentinian photographer Marcos López’s Pop Latino, a parodic version of a classic Álvarez Bravo photograph, La Buena Fama Dormiendo / Good Reputation Sleeping of 1938, in which the surrealist depth of the photographer Father is replaced with the strategic superficiality of the disenchanted postmodern Son. Bhabha maintains that the language of a postcolonial space is by definition a disturbed and disturbing kind of speech which rises from a cultural unconscious formed from the repressed history of ethnic difference; from the anguish and rage and confused desire left by that history; from the knowledge that the colonial and postcolonial order is founded on the displacement and denial – even annihilation – of the identities and meanings that have made its own existence possible. In short, it is an unconscious formed through the repression of difference and is itself a symptom marking the existence and denial of non-identity in the cultural formation; the silencing of other speech which murmurs from other temporalities than that of established modernity; voices that speak from other cultural orders. The discontinuities in the postcolonial order reveal themselves, he says, “at the level of enunciation” – in dissonance, in stutterings – in the vulnerability of enunciation itself.49 These photographic works are instances of this.

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Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 245. See also John Kraniauskas, “Hybridity in a Transitional Frame: Latin-Americanist and Post-Colonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies,” in Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, ed. Avtar Brah & Annie E. Coombes (London: Routledge, 2000): 235–56. 49 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 251.

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WORKS CITED Armstrong, Elizabeth, & Victor Zamudio–Taylor, ed. Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art (San Diego C A : Museum of Contemporary Art, 2000). Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Cambridge M A & London: Harvard U P , 1981). Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture (London & New York: Routledge, 1994). Brah, Avtar, & Annie E. Coombes, ed. Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture (London: Routledge, 2000). Buci–Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (London: Sage, 1994). Canclini, Néstor García. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, tr. Christopher L Chiappari & Silvia L. López (Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad, 1989; tr. Minneapolis & London: U of Minnesota P , 1994). ——. “Remaking Passports: Visual Thought in the Debate on Multiculturalism,” in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994): 498–506. Césaire, Aimé. Les armes miraculeuses (1946; Paris: Flammarion, 1985). ——. Return to My Native Land, tr. John Berger & Anna Bostock (Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 1956; tr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1966), in Writing and Difference, tr. Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978): 278–94. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skins, White Masks, tr. Charles L. Markmann (Peau noire, masques blancs, 1956, tr. 1967; New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1982). Forsdick, Charles. Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys Between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford U P , 2000). Foster, Hal. The Return of the Real: the Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge M A : October Books/M I T Press, 1999. Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America and the Cold War (Cambridge M A : Harvard U P , 2002). Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Green, David, ed. Where is the Photograph? (Brighton & Maidstone: Photoworks with Photoforum, 2003). Grundberg, Andy. Crisis of the Real: Writings on Photography 1974–1989 (New York: Aperture,1990). Habermas, Jurgen. “On the Distinction between Poetic and Communicative Uses of Language,” in Habermas, On the Pragmatics of Communication, ed. Maeve Cooke, (Cambridge: Polity, 1998): 383–401.

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Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88. Kirkpatrick, Gwen. “The Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde,” in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2000): 177–98. Kraniauskas, John. “Hybridity in a Transnational Frame: Latin-Americanist and PostColonial Perspectives on Cultural Studies,” in Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, ed. Avtar Brah & Annie E. Coombes (London: Routledge, 2000): 235–56. Larrain, Jorge. Identity and Modernity in Latin America (London: Polity, 2000). Lotman, Juri M. “Problems in the Typology of Culture,” in Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology, ed. Daniel P. Lucid (Baltimore M A & London: Johns Hopkins U P , 1977): 213–21. Meyer, Pedro. Truths and Fictions: A Journey from Documentary to Digital Photography, intro. Joan Foncuberta (New York: Aperture, 1995). Owen, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Towards a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (1980): 67–86, October 13 (1981): 58–80. Repr. in The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, ed. Donald Preziosi (Oxford: Oxford U P , 1994): 315–28. Paz, Octavio. Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 1987). Pinney, Christopher. “Notes from the Surface of the Image: Photography, Postcolonialism and Vernacular Modernism,” in Photography’s Other Histories, ed. Christopher Pinney & Nicolas Peterson (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 2003): 202–20. Richard, Nelly, “Metaphors of the Photographic Negative,” in A Marginal Body: The Photographic Image in Latin America / Un Cuerpo Marginal: La Imagen Fotográfica en América Latina, ed. Charles Merewether (Sydney: Australian Centre for Photography, 1987): 64–69. Said, Edward. “Reflections on Exile,” in Out There, ed. Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh–ha & Cornel West (Cambridge M A & New York: M O M A & M I T Press, 1990): 357–66. Schelling, Vivian, ed. Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America (London: Verso, 2000). Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Exile and Creativity (Durham N C & London: Duke U P , 1998). Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Quetzalcóatl’s Mirror: Reflections on the Photographic Image in Latin America,” in Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America 1866–1994, ed. Wendy Watriss & Lois Parkinson Zamora (Austin: U of Texas P / Fotofest, 1998): 300–84.

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Cultural H y b r i d i ~and Latin American Photography

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I. Manuel ~ l v a r e Bravo, z Pardbola Optica (1931); reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art,New York City, US A .

317

Figure 2 . Baucr SL, Dundo, from the serics Nds Por Exemplo (UsfirExumple) (l3raziI. 1993; reproduced by kind permission of Throckmorton Fine Art, New York City, U S A .

Cultural Hybridio and Latin American Photography

319

Figure 3. Luis G o h l e z Palma, La Loteria (1990);produced by kind permission of Schneider Galley, Chicago, US A .

Figure 4. Pedro Meyer, La Tentacidn delAngel (The Temptation ofthe Angel) (199192; original in colour); reproduced by land permission of the photographer

Culrural Hybridip andLatin American Photography

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Figure 5. NeIson Garrido, La Sonrisa de SarrtaLiherata, from the series Todos 10s Sanr0.s Son M~rel-ter(All Saints Are Dead) (1990;original in colour);reproduced by kind permission of the photographer,

Figurc 6.Gerardo Sutcr. Cout!illiu~re(Mexico 1990): ~ d u c e by d kind permission of ~irockmortonFinc Arts. New York City, U S A .


A . C L A R E B R A N D A B U R taught in the English Department at the University of Illinois for twelve years, and from 1981 at several universities in the Middle East. She now holds an assistant professorship at Do«uÍ University, Istanbul, Turkey. She has published on D.H. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Naguib Mahfouz, Yaúar Kemal, Nazım Hikmet, George Orwell, Michael Ondaatje, George Eliot, Benjamin Disraeli and John Fowles. Her work shows a comparative approach and, increasingly in recent years, an interest in postcolonialism. V I J A Y A S R E E C H A G A N T I is Professor of English at Osmania University, Hyderabad. Her published work includes Mulk Raj Anand: The Raj and the Writer (1998), Suniti Namjoshi: The Artful Transgressor (2001), an edited volume of critical essays, Writing the West (2004), and an English translation of a Telugu classic, Kanyasulkam. She has published articles on pedagogy, postcolonial literatures and diasporic women’s writing. She is currently working on a major project focusing on marginal writing in Telugu. J O H N C . H A W L E Y is Professor and Chair of English at Santa Clara Univer-

sity, California, where he teaches postcolonial and Victorian literature. He is an associate editor of the South Asian Review, a member of the executive committee of the M L A division on Literature in English Other Than British and American, and Secretary of the U S chapter of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, A C L A L S . He is the author of Amitav Ghosh: An Introduction (2005) and the editor of ten books, including The Postcolonial Crescent (1998), Postcolonial Queer (2001), and the Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (2001). I S A B E L H O V I N G teaches in the Department of Literary Theory at the University of Leiden, where she runs a programme in intercultural and postcolonial literary theory. Her publications include the edited volumes Veranderingen van het alledaagse (‘Transformations of Everyday Culture’; with Hester Dibbits and Marlou Schrover, 2005), Africa and its Significant Others

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GLOBAL FISSURES : POSTCOLONIAL FUSIONS

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(with Ernst van Alphen and Frans–Willem Korsten, 2003), Convergences and Interferences: Newness in Intercultural Practices (with Kathleen Gyssels and Maggie Bowers, 2001), and a study of Caribbean migrant women writers, In Praise of New Travelers (2001). She is currently preparing a study of the discursive interconnections between environment, multiculturality and globalization. She edits the international journal Thamyris. Her first (award-winning) youth novel, De gevleugelde kat (2002), is based on the same themes as her academic work, and appeared in English (as The Dream Merchant) in 2005. L Y N I N N E S has taught at universities in Australia, the U S A and, most re-

cently, at Kent University, Canterbury, where she was Professor of Postcolonial Literatures. She has published books and essays on African, Irish and Australian writing. Her recent publications include A History of Black British Writing, 1700–2000 (2002) and Ned Kelly: Icon of Western Culture (2005). C L A R A A . B . J O S E P H specializes in postcolonial theory and literature in the Department of English at the University of Calgary, where she also coordinates the university’s Postcolonial Studies Research Group. She has taught and published on postcolonial theories, literatures of the African continent and South Asia, and migrant literatures of Canada. Together with Janet Wilson she has published two special issues of World Literature Written in English (W L W E ) on the topic of postcolonialism and globalization. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (S S H R C C ) has funded her current project on postcolonial theory and Christian literary works of India. J E N N I F E R L A W N is Senior Lecturer in Massey University’s multidisiplinary School of Social and Cultural Studies, Auckland. Her research and writing interests include the Gothic, New Zealand cultural studies, Canadian literature, and the representation of trauma in literature and film. She has coauthored further articles on cultural policy in the film journal Post Script and in “The Lord of the Rings”: Text in Context (ed. Ernest Mathijs; in press). M U S T A P H A M A R R O U C H I is an associate professor of English at Louisana

State University, Baton Rouge. He is the author of Signifying with a Vengeance: Theories, Literatures, Storytellers (2002) and Edward Said at the Limits (2004). A M I N A M I N H A S holds Masters degrees in Persian history and in multimedia. She is studying for a Ph.D at Anglia Ruskin University in the use of the new media in the construction of multiperspectival interpretative materials for Islamic heritage sites. P E T E R D . O S B O R N E is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Photography

Theory at the London College of Communication, University of Arts, Lon-

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don. He has published articles and essays on Latin American photography, travel culture, and contemporary photography. He is the author of Travelling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (2000). He has lectured at the Tate Modern (2001) and Cardiff University (2001), and was keynote speaker at the Bright Paradise conference and art exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Auckland (March 2001) and a panel member in the debate launching the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition Universal Experience: Art, Life and the Tourist Eye (October 2005). C H R I S P R E N T I C E is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Otago, where she teaches New Zealand and postcolonial literatures and theory, and cultural studies, and convenes a Postcolonial Studies Research Network. She is on the editorial boards of the Journal of New Zealand Literature and New Literatures Review. Her research focuses on cultural difference in postcolonial settler societies, in particular the implications of mobilizing culture for political intervention at the intersections of decolonization and globalization. K A N U K O L A N U K R A V I C H A N D R A is Professor of Psychology at Osmania

University, Hyderabad. His teaching and research, essentially of an interdisciplinary nature, cover the faculties of Psychology, Education and Management. The author of seven textbooks in psychology and numerous research articles, he has been continuously engaged with such aspects of teaching theory and practice as curriculum designing, teaching methodology and evaluation. His areas of specialization include corporate training and organizational behaviour. C H I T R A S A N K A R A N is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore. Her areas of research interest include feminist theory and writing, postcolonial theory and criticism, Indian fiction in English, Singapore fiction, and comparative East– West literatures. Her publications include The Myth Connection: The Use of Hindu Mythology in Some Novels of R.K. Narayan and Raja Rao (1993) and the critical collection Complicities: Connections and Divisions; Perspectives on Literatures and Cultures of the Asia–Pacific Region (co-edited with Rajeev Patke and Leong Liew Geok, 2003). M A R T I N S P A U L is Senior Lecturer in multimedia systems in the School of

Design and Communication Systems, Anglia Ruskin University. His research interests are in multimedia heritage interpretation. R O B E R T C . S P E N C E R completed his University of Warwick doctorate on

“Fredric Jameson and the Ends of Modernism” in the summer of 2004. He has published articles in New Formations, Polygraph, the Sociological Review, and Law, Social Justice, and Global Development.

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C Y N T H I A S U G A R S is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Ottawa, where she specializes in Canadian literature and postcolonial theory. She is the author of numerous articles on Canadian literature, and is the editor of two book-length collections: Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism (2003) and Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature (2004). She currently serves on the editorial boards of Studies in Canadian Literature, Australian Canadian Studies, and Books in Canada. Her research interests are in the areas of settler postcolonialism, Native/non-Native relations, and colonial nostalgia. J A N E T W I L S O N formerly taught at the University of Otago and is now Reader in English at the University of Northampton and editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing (previously known as World Literature Written in English). She has published Intimate Stranger: Reminiscences of Dan Davin (2000) and numerous articles on New Zealand writing, and is on the editorial board of the Journal of New Zealand Literature. She is currently working on white settler postcolonialism and intellectual diasporas (the twentieth-century movement of scholars from Australasia to the U K ). S H A O B O X I E is an associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is an associate editor of A R I E L : A Review of International English Literature. He has published on literary theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and Chinese modernity. Recent publications include Dialogues on Cultural Studies: Interviews with Contemporary Critics (co-edited with Fengzhen Wang, 2002), and her monograph Fleur Adcock is in press.

¹

Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (Cross Cultures 85) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Cultural Transformations. (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English)

Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial (Cross Cultures 87) (Cross Cultures - Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Chewing Over the West: Occidental Narratives in Non-Western Readings (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi (Cross Cultures 81) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Five Emus to the King of Siam. Environment and Empire. (Cross Cultures 92) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Memory and Myth: Postcolonial Religion in Contemporary Guyanese Fiction and Poetry. (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational (Cross Cultures 89)

The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies (Cross Cultures 65) (Cross Cultures)

Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English. (Cross Cultures) (v. 11)

The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction (Cross Cultures 86) (Cross Cultures Series)

Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays

Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays

Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India. (Cross Cultures)

Postcolonial Literatures in Context

Law and colonial cultures

From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language, and Literature in a Postcolonial Context. (Cross Cultures)

Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (Post-Colonial Studies)

Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (Post-Colonial Studies)

Mothering Across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations

Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World (ASNEL Papers 9.2; Cross Cultures 79)

Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' as Twentieth-Century Epics (Cross Cultures 88) (Cross Cultures)

Cultures in Flux

Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures)

Cross

Cross

Cross

Cross

Cross

Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Religion in Contemporary Cultures)

Global Fissures: Postcolonial Fusions (Cross Cultures 85) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Cultural Transformations. (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English)

Hidden Mutualities: Faustian Themes from Gnostic Origins to the Postcolonial (Cross Cultures 87) (Cross Cultures - Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Chewing Over the West: Occidental Narratives in Non-Western Readings (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Still Beating the Drum: Critical Perspectives on Lewis Nkosi (Cross Cultures 81) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Five Emus to the King of Siam. Environment and Empire. (Cross Cultures 92) (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in)

Memory and Myth: Postcolonial Religion in Contemporary Guyanese Fiction and Poetry. (Cross Cultures: Readings in the Post Colonial Literatures in English)

Readings of the Particular: The Postcolonial in the Postnational (Cross Cultures 89)

The Politics of English as a World Language: New Horizons in Postcolonial Cultural Studies (Cross Cultures 65) (Cross Cultures)

Experiences of Freedom in Postcolonial Literatures and Cultures

Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New Literatures in English. (Cross Cultures) (v. 11)

The Labyrinth of Universality: Wilson Harris’s Visionary Art of Fiction (Cross Cultures 86) (Cross Cultures Series)

Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays

Francophone Post-Colonial Cultures: Critical Essays

Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India. (Cross Cultures)

Postcolonial Literatures in Context

Law and colonial cultures

From Creole to Standard: Shakespeare, Language, and Literature in a Postcolonial Context. (Cross Cultures)

Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (Post-Colonial Studies)

Post-Colonial Literatures: Expanding the Canon (Post-Colonial Studies)

Mothering Across Cultures: Postcolonial Representations

Towards a Transcultural Future: Literature and Society in a 'Post'-Colonial World (ASNEL Papers 9.2; Cross Cultures 79)

Ambition and Anxiety: Ezra Pound's 'Cantos' and Derek Walcott's 'Omeros' as Twentieth-Century Epics (Cross Cultures 88) (Cross Cultures)

Cultures in Flux

Postcolonial Poetry in English (Oxford Studies in Postcolonial Literatures)

Cross

Cross

Cross

Cross

Cross

Buddhism in World Cultures: Comparative Perspectives (Religion in Contemporary Cultures)

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