Verbal-Visual Configurations in Postcolonial Literature

Intermedial Aesthetics

Birgit Neumann, Gabriele Rippl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000060584
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire pour la littérature comparée

Examining a range of contemporary Anglophone texts, this book opens up postcolonial and transcultural studies for discussions of visuality and vision. It argues that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and modes of identification in an unevenly structured world. The representation of visual practices in the imaginative realm of fiction opens up a zone in which established orders of the sayable and visible may be revised and transformed. In 12 chapters, the book examines narrative fiction by writers such as Michael Ondaatje, Derek Walcott, Salman Rushdie, David Dabydeen and NoViolet Bulawayo, who employ word-image relations to explore the historically fraught links between visual practices and the experience of modernity in a transcultural context. Against this conceptual background, the examination of verbal-visual relations will illustrate how Anglophone fiction models alternative modes of re-presentation that reflect critically on hegemonic visual regimes and reach out for new, more pluralized forms of exchange.

1 Introduction

The Art and Power of Seeing in Postcolonial Contexts

Contemporary Anglophone literature abounds with images. Readers encounter cover images, reproductions of paintings and photographs inserted into the text, ekphrastic descriptions of works of art and documentary photographs, pictorial descriptions of landscapes evocative of certain paintings and/or painting styles and “Schriftbildlichkeit” (Krämer/Cancik-Kirschbaum/Totzke 2012), i.e. typographical experiments that produce iconic forms with the help of the text’s materiality. The postcolonial and transcultural texts discussed in this study are entangled with multiple forms and material realizations of images and thrive through their interaction with them. This intermedial aesthetics brings literature into a productive relationship with images, giving rise to a reflexive negotiation of materiality. One fine example is We Need New Names (2013), a novel by the American-Zimbabwean writer NoViolet Bulawayo whose female protagonist Darling has left her unnamed sub-Saharan African home to live with her aunt in Detroit. In the basement of their house, she finds an African “batik the size of a beach towel” in a storage box (282), which she describes in great detail:

It’s a painting of a market scene and it’s crazy with life and color, people selling things – fruits, vegetables, foodstuffs, colorful beads and cloth, handbags, belts, animal carvings, just anything you can think of. There’s children, women, men, women with babies on their backs, old people, a couple of dogs, a bicycle, everybody and everything alive under a bright blue sky.

(Bulawayo 2014, 283)

Through numerous ekphrastic descriptions of batik cloths, African masks, film stills and photographs, Bulawayo entangles intermedial strategies with questions of migrant identity and belonging. The market scene above reminds her protagonist of life at home, thus filling her with nostalgia and making her feel “this ache in [her] heart” (283) that always comes over her, when she, an African immigrant, thinks of home. Another striking example is Lucy (1990), a novel written by the American-Antiguan author Jamaica Kincaid. Like Bulawayo’s Darling, Kincaid’s young female Caribbean protagonist Lucy arrives in an American metropolis. As she struggles with the material and psychic complexities of diasporic life, she becomes an enthusiastic museumgoer and presents a range of descriptions of the paintings and photographs that fascinate and affect her. Her intense engagement with these paintings, which are frequently entrenched in the western imaginary,¹ becomes crucial to Lucy’s negotiation of belongingness in the diasporic space.

Bulawayo and Kincaid are only two of many examples of how insistently contemporary writers address the power of seeing and the art of rendering verbally visual impressions. Their texts demonstrate the innovative ways in which postcolonial and transcultural authors experiment with visual modes of writing like ekphrastic practices to engender new, pluralised signifying practices, practices that affect both the orders of the sayable and visible. Starting from these visual practices and verbal representations of images – mainly but not exclusively paintings, engravings, frescos and photographs – in Anglophone fiction, we argue that many contemporary novels register the discontinuous histories of postcolonial and diasporic subjects, foregrounding the passages, ruptures and networks of exchange that underlie their sense of (cultural and personal) identification. According to established scholarship, the constitution of postcolonial subjectivity involves the creative adaptation of circulating images and the locally inflected translation of western visual practices, thus enacting what Jacques Derrida calls an “exappropriation” of hegemonic regimes (2002, 37). How literary texts represent vision and visuality and how they stage modes of seeing at certain times and places are in many ways indicative of a culture’s epistemological agenda, aesthetic concepts, power relations and socio-cultural boundaries between visibility and invisibility. Derrida notes that

[t]here is much to say, whether about the right to penetrate a ‘public’ or ‘private’ space, the right to ‘introduce’ the eye and all these optical prostheses […] into the ‘home’ of the other, or whether about the right to know who owns, who is able to appropriate, who is able to select, who is able to show images, directly political or not.

(Derrida 2002, 34)

The historicised, culture-specific understanding of visuality and vision is particularly important to the heterogeneous field of colonial and postcolonial relations, which Mary Lou Emery has defined as “one of vision – of seeing and looking” (2007, 15). Postcolonial texts in particular frequently foreground the close relationship between power and visuality, drawing attention to the extent to which political recognition depends on visibility in the public spheres. In this context, verbal-visual relations as they materialise in postcolonial ekphrasis have been read as “re-visionary effort[s]” (Döring 2002, 166) with the potential to contest western representational authority, its regimes of vision and the gaze of the coloniser. The employment of visual modes of writing with their focus on visual phenomena, the gaze, and ekphrasis attests to the postcolonial writer’s urge for translation and transgressive transformation. However, the literary strategies and visual modes of writing developed by some of the writers discussed in this study transcend the ‘the-empire-gazes-back’ paradigm (Döring 2002) and cannot be described solely as a negation of western regimes of vision (Neumann 2014, 2016).

Visuality and ekphrasis in Anglophone postcolonial and transcultural literatures explore the manifold complexities and the plurality of visual practices in our global world, and they do so by fathoming the political dimensions of these visual practices. By developing a new visual, intermedial aesthetics, they offer counter-visions and turn the colonial gaze inward just as much as they establish visual contact zones and transcultural spaces of ‘hybridity’ and ‘in-between-ness’, as postcolonial studies call them. In particular, more recent Anglophone novels take an increasing interest in imagining visual practices that forge connectivity and polycentric networks of aesthetic exchanges and transcultural linkages, while at the same time recognising difference and locality. Our approach, then, not only pays tribute to the ‘postcolonial shift’ from the traditional cultural and political centre in the ‘west’ to the former periphery within the literary system; it also responds to “the remarkable explosion of English literature produced outside Britain and the United States in the last decades of the twentieth century” (Jay 2010, 25). The majority of the writers we are concerned with transcend and complicate unified paradigms (such as national or postcolonial frameworks) and can only be adequately discussed with reference to concepts such as ‘transcultural’ authorship, which puts new emphasis on entangled and connected geographies, cultural pluralities, hybrid forms of identification, nomadic subjectivities, transitory spaces, travelling literary genres, migrating modes of writing, as well as the polycentric networks of aesthetics and cultural forms in general (Neumann 2015a; Neumann/Rippl 2017a, 2017b). The interplay between words and images and an emergent, open-ended aesthetics of in-between-ness perfectly captures this sense of cultural hybridity and pluralisation.

The intermedial aesthetics of the literary texts we focus on not only deals with verbal references to highbrow cultural products such as sculptures, oil paintings, drawings and etchings but also with images transmitted and circulated by the contemporary mass media of our time – the Internet, television, videos as well as social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Time and again, texts such as Teju Cole’s Every Day Is for the Thief (2007/2014), NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names and Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) illustrate the centrality of images as a constitutive form of knowledge, imbued with different political and ideological meanings, which vary in different cultural contexts (Neumann 2015a, Rippl 2015b). The increase in globally circulating images makes possible new relations between subjectivity, sociality and visuality that transgress traditional local and cultural confines and foster new forms of identification (Appadurai 2002). Images, according to Mitchell, “have legs” (2005, 31): They travel into different cultural and historical contexts, are imbued with new, locally inflected meaning and propel unpredictable connections and associations across cultures, people and periods. In this process, they introduce both difference and connectivity. Many postcolonial and transcultural texts trace the discontinuous travels and creative appropriations of images across cultures and explore the potential of travelling images to give rise to new transnational and transcultural modes of sociality, while also hinting at the social dynamics of literary texts that engage with visuality and the “ambivalence about social others” that is inscribed in word-image relations (Mitchell 1992, 702). Frequently, the engagement with images and visuality entails a critical negotiation of western regimes of visuality, which were central to colonialism and persevere in contemporary capitalism and its various encodings of the relation between western and non-western people.

This study engages with postcolonial and transcultural narrative texts from diverse parts of the Anglophone world written by writers whom we consider transcultural, in that they divide their time between different locations. The writers and texts assembled here were not chosen solely for geographical reasons, but also because they attest to the many different ways in which today’s Anglophone literature imaginatively articulates forms of identification and embodies them in innovative aesthetic and formal modes. Michael Ondaatje, David Dabydeen, Salman Rushdie, Derek Walcott, Jamaica Kincaid, Anne Carson, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Teju Cole are writers the majority of whom were either born in Asia (India and Sri Lanka), the Caribbean or sub-Saharan Africa, but now live, at least part-time, in the United States or Britain. They write about postcolonial and transcultural identities and lives in multiple topographic settings and locations (Behdad/Thomas 2011). Up to now, the works of these writers have been discussed almost exclusively in connection with colonialism, imperialism, individual, collective and national identity formation, ethnicity, race, ideology and post- and neo-colonialism as well as globalisation. We argue that the engagement with visual artefacts in literature is crucial since it evokes a sense of (semiotic and material) difference that can be used productively to negotiate hybrid, pluralised and in-between modes of being in our transculturally entangled modernity.

‘Intermedial aesthetics’ is the term we employ to designate textual practices and writing modes that intertwine visual sense perception, cognition, affect and references to other media, while evoking cultural norms and epistemic systems. The term ‘aesthetics’ is intimately connected with aisthēsis, i.e. sensation, sense perception and feeling (Baumgarten 1954, 2007; also Böhme 1995, 2001; as well as Welsch 1993, 1997a, 1997b, 2003). For our project, this notion of aesthetics is important because it enables us to explore our primary texts as aesthetic/aisthetic intermedial practices, i.e. as artistic negotiations of sensuous perception. Verbal-visual phenomena such as ekphrasis belong to the category of the aesthetic and cannot be separated from the reader of a text or viewer of an artwork. In this sense, the term ‘aesthetics’ in our book title also “indicates an affect-oriented enquiry (or multi-affect) and takes us back to the root meaning in Greek of an act of perception, a sensory response, literally a ‘breathing or taking in’ (aisthesis)”, as Stephen Cheeke notes (2008, 3). Scholars working in the field of cognitive poetics maintain that intermedial references such as ekphrasis function as triggers for cognitive participation and influence reception processes in important ways – attention management, heightened emotional responses and increased creative reader participation being just some of them: “On the level of the individual reading processes it aids comprehension, memory and emotional response. These individual benefits can also have larger socio-cultural repercussion when they impact the formation of cultural memory” (Brosch 2015, 343). Issues of cultural memory are of great importance in postcolonial and transcultural constellations, hence our interest in ekphrasis and its socio-cultural functions.

We argue that aesthetic practices in Anglophone fiction are closely connected to aisthetic practices, which highlight the writers’ political and ethical ramifications through postcolonial and transcultural lenses (Spivak 1985, 1987, 2003; Ashcroft et al. 1989; Bhabha 1994a) and in connection with more general philosophical reflections on processes of othering (Derrida 1978a, 1998; Levinas 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2006). Hence the aim of our analyses of contemporary Anglophone narrative texts is to open up postcolonial and transcultural studies for in-depth discussions of visuality, ekphrasis and practices of seeing. At the same time, we intend to locate socio-political, epistemological and ethical questions at the heart of intermediality studies. Against the background of these central aims, we argue that the preoccupation with visual practices in Anglophone postcolonial and transcultural literatures addresses the power of images, vision and visual aesthetics to regulate cultural visibility and “the distribution of the sensible”, which, according to Rancière (2004a), informs political orders and prefigures modes of identification and sociality. The representation of visual practices in narratives creates ‘spaces of in-between-ness’ (Neumann 2015a), thus allowing readers to complicate their usual way of looking at things, to denaturalise cultural orthodoxies and to contemplate new aesthetic experiences. Precisely because the translation of images into words produces a residue, which cannot be contained by representation, verbal-visual configurations frequently point beyond existing orders of the sayable and the visible and may expand the field of existing epistemic and affective possibilities. Intermedial relations therefore touch on the very socio-political conditions of media access, political (self-)representation and recognition in our transcultural modernity.

Our examination of verbal-visual relations in Anglophone literature is based on a number of central concepts. First, the term ‘Anglophone literature’ is commonly used to refer to postcolonial literature written in English. However, the term is sometimes also more ...