Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures

Bill Ashcroft

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317284437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria

Postcolonial Studies is more often found looking back at the past, but in this brand new book, Bill Ashcroft looks to the future and the irrepressible demands of utopia. The concept of utopia – whether playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community – is examined in relation to the postcolonial and the communities with which it engages. Studying a very broad range of literature, poetry and art, with chapters focussing on specific regions – Africa, India, Chicano, Caribbean and Pacific – this book is written in a clear and engaging prose which make it accessible to undergraduates as well as academics. This important book speaks to the past and future of postcolonial scholarship.

1
Utopia, travel and empire

The publication of More’s Utopia launched a steady stream of utopias, most of them operating upon the dual premises of equality and shared property. But from the seed of a colonial philosophy in Utopia an imperial utopianism in various forms grew in subsequent literature as the benefits of utopian life were seen to be available to those (not so willing) cultures brought into the embrace of an imperial Britain. If, as seems likely, Utopia was in some part motivated by the discovery by Columbus of a new unknown part of the world, it is surprising that America made so little impact on writing at the time. The three most famous texts cited as evidence of the impact of America in English literature: More’s Utopia, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest – make no direct mention of America at all. However, despite the tardiness of England’s attraction to the New World, we see from Utopia onward, in various literary imaginings of lost and ideal places, the development of a concept of a utopian place in uncanny conjunction with the philosophy of colonialism. More was the first English writer to use the word colonia in the Roman (i.e. imperialist) sense, and the principles of cultural and topographic reconstruction that impel King Utopus appear to predict the developmental drive of British imperialism.

We can begin to think about the relationship between imperialism and utopia by considering Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that philosophical thought has truly flourished in two specific historical epochs: the Greek city state and the world market (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 98). In both cases what is especially propitious for philosophical thought is “the connection of an absolute plane of immanence with a relative social milieu that also functions through immanence” (1994: 98). In the Greek city state immanence is constructed politically, in the market it is created economically. These in turn correspond to two versions of utopia: product or blueprint utopia corresponds as a mode of thought to the politically constructed immanence of the agora, where the thrust of utopian thought is to arrive at collective agreement about “the good” or “justice”, “the ideal society” and so on. Process utopianism, on the other hand, corresponds to the deterritorialization and decoding characteristic of the world market, where agreeing on content is less important than identifying multiple forces of production of the new that are active in a given socio-historical milieu. The former is a matter of ideal representation, while the latter is diagnostic rather than representative.

However, More’s Utopia – a “product” utopia if ever there was one – the text from which most contemporary utopian thinking derives, is written at the beginning of the period of the world market, the cusp of modernity, the moment when the agora begins to transform into the world economy. What is it, then, that produces a utopia, an ideal society, within the epoch of the world market? There must be some factor other than economics behind this phenomenon, and that other factor is the political force lying at the foundation of the world market itself – imperialism. The world market is supposedly a field of reterritorialization. But empire, in its Anglophone (and Francophone) varieties, also comes about, paradoxically, through the reterritorialization of the imperial nation. In this process, the idea of a colonial utopia, in which civilization, prosperity and amenity is established, a utopia regulated by the ordering power of a higher civilization is absolutely fundamental to imperialism’s discourse of self-justification. It is this imperialist utopianism that gives rise to the emancipatory process of postcolonial utopian thinking. So Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction of the agora and the world market is reproduced in the distinction of colonialism and its postcolonial agonist, even while imperialism serves to expand the deterritorializing character of the world market.

Frederic Jameson offers an interesting analysis of the notion of Utopia appearing on the cusp of modernity, by seeing its appearance in the interstices of a fading feudalism and an emerging capitalism. Using the semiology of Louis Marin’s Utopiques: Jeux d’espaces Jameson suggests that one ought to look at utopian discourse as a “determinate type of praxis, rather than as a specific mode of representation” (2002: 6) whose “ultimate subject-matter … would then turn out to be its own conditions of possibility as discourse” (2002: 21). This, I think is critical in the task of separating the representation of utopia which is regularly seen as the result of illusory or wishful thinking, and the anticipatory function of utopianism, which perceives the actual possibility of a different world. Paradoxically, Utopia offers an alternative to both feudalism and capitalism, something that at the time of its writing was impossible to formulate. Marin writes: “Utopian discourse is the one form of ideological discourse that has anticipatory value of a theoretical kind: but it is a value which can only appear as such after theory itself has been elaborated, that is to say, subsequent to the emergence of material conditions for the new productive forces” (qtd. in Jameson 2002: 18). We begin to see why such praxis is eminently suited to the figurative operations of art and literature – the possibility of utopia, dwelling within anticipatory consciousness itself, lies far in advance of its representations.

The paradoxical historical location of Utopia, as well as its thick overlay of contradictions, prefigure the paradoxical nature of modern imperialism itself, a paradox grounded in the contradictory relationship between ideology and utopia. As Bloch asserts, all ideology has a utopian element (1986: 149). In imperial thinking, as in all ideology, the belief in a “better” world, however fanciful, can only be maintained by being at some level authentic. Clearly all empires, and perhaps most particularly the contemporary US empire, display their utopian element when they manage to convince themselves that their overthrow of nations, their control of international policy and their securing of markets is conducted for the benefit of humanity. Imperialism is a classic demonstration of the realisation of a utopian dream, the legislation of which ensures its degeneration into dystopian reality. The paradox of utopia then, is not limited to the contradictions of the clash between regulation and freedom, it also emerges as a feature of what is in Bloch’s mind a fundamental contradiction of the relationship between ideology and utopia.

Within a century the utopian genre had taken permanent root. Utopia emerged at a transitional period, a period in which More’s Utopia was coexistent with Machiavelli’s The Prince, written in 1513 and Luther’s Ninety Five Theses, proclaimed in 1517. This is a pivotal period for European imperialism, which we might see as the expansionist arm of modernity itself. The classical utopias that emerged in the century after More’s book were largely motivated by a sense of Christian morality, although all pursued the ideal of an equally shared material world. Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun (1602); Johann Andreae’s Christianopolis (1619) and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis (1627) were all examples of this early modern idealism that drew directly on More’s example. However, the more subtle and interesting effect of utopian thought was its gradual impact on what might be called the “pre-literature” of empire. Long before Britain even thought about an empire the dynamics of the civilizing mission, what today might be called developmentalism, were in evidence.

Imperialism, capitalism and the production of space

The location of Utopia on an island performs at least two important functions. First the island balances the “product” and “process” distinction between utopias and utopianism. While the utopian society offers a blueprint, its location at a distance separated from the present by the ocean makes it a constant, if unobtainable object of desire. But second, the creation of More’s Utopia as an island (actually made separate from the mainland) is crucial to understanding the importance of the sea in the growth of capitalist imperialism. Andre Lefebvre, in The Production of Space (1974) suggests three stages in the capitalist production of space. Pre-capitalist “Absolute Space” was “made up of fragments of nature located at sites which were chosen for their intrinsic qualities (cave, mountaintop, spring, river), but whose very consecration ended up by stripping them of their natural characteristics and uniqueness” (48). Early capitalist space was “Historical space” in which “the forces of history smashed naturalness forever and upon its ruins established the space of accumulation (the accumulation of all wealth and resources …) … One ‘subject’ dominated this period: the historical town of the West, along with the countryside under its control” (48–49). Late capitalist space – “Abstract space” – took over from historical space and became “The dominant form of space, that of centres of wealth and power, [which] endeavours to mould the spaces it dominates (i.e. peripheral spaces), and it seeks, often by violent means, to reduce the obstacles and resistance it encounters there …” (49).

Although far distant, Utopia is located in historical space, the space in which imperialism, centred on the imperial city, brings the world into history as it constructs that world space as a mercantile network. Paradoxically, the location of Utopia on an island manages to bring colonized space into history while simultaneously keeping it at a distance. While this process is fundamental to imperialism and, for example, occurs in Africa when the “pre- or non-historic” is brought into history as “primitive” dystopia, the island is brought into history as a utopia, which obscures its function as producer of commodities for capitalist consumption and underpins its lasting invention as “tropical paradise.”

Islands in general and Utopia as an island reveal the supreme importance of the sea in establishing the capitalist network of historical space. But curiously, perhaps because he links space so closely to property, Lefebvre completely overlooks the significance of the ocean.

The state and each of its constituent institutions call for spaces – but spaces which they can then organize according to their specific requirements; so there is no sense in which space can be treated solely as an a priori condition of those institutions and the state which presides over them. Is space a social relationship? Certainly – but one which is inherent to property relationships (especially the ownership of the earth, of land) and also closely bound up with the forces of production (which impose a form on that earth or land); here we see the polyvalence of social space, its “reality” at once formal and material. Though a product to be used, to be consumed, it is also a means of production; networks of exchange and flows of raw materials and energy fashion space and are determined by it.

(1974: 85)

While Lefebvre’s designation of space as both a product and a means of production is ingenious, his omission of the ocean is striking since capitalist accumulation depended so completely on the production of ocean space.¹

Hegel’s famous statement in The Philosophy of Right marries the dense connections between capitalism and the ocean to a range of concomitant concepts, on which capitalism depends – risk, industry, flux, danger, destruction, and communication:

The natural element for industry, animating its outward movement, is the sea. Since the passion for gain involves risk, industry though bent on gain yet lifts itself above it; instead of remaining rooted to the soil and the limited circle of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it embraces the element of flux, danger, and destruction. Further, the sea is the greatest means of communication, and trade by sea creates commercial connections between distant countries and so relations involving contractual rights. At the same time, commerce of this kind is the most potent instrument of culture, and through it trade acquires its significance in the history of the world.

(qtd. in Cohen 2004: 75)

While the sea could not be owned, the routes devised to traverse it could be policed. Hugo Grotius’s argument that a “law of the seas” could be established to guarantee the possibility of every (powerful) state to traverse the ocean as “free domain.” The fundamentally deterritorialized quality of the ocean was far too threatening for the law. To be contained, it had to be conceptualized as territory. According to Steinberg (2001: 91) this was a matter to be performed by capitalism itself, so adept in the constant dynamic of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Islands, those territories found between the “old world” and the “new” became immensely useful in this process: “islands were the ‘territories’ that could achieve the improbable feat of territorializing the unterritorializable” (Llenin-Figueroa 2012: 179).

While Utopia emerges at the beginning of the period of “historical space,” it is arguable that it performed a crucial role in the growing imperial imagination because it established the importance of islands, both imaginatively and strategically. At the very moment capitalism was producing historical space, with islands as nodes for territorializing the sea, a flood of imaginary utopias, mostly located on islands, began to emerge in the eighteenth century. It is arguable that, as distant and ambivalently historicized spaces, islands are by their very nature objects of desire, and although not all utopias are located on islands, their distance coincides with the imperial spread of European influence. James Burgh’s Cessares (1764), Thomas Spence’s Crusonia (1782), Carl Wadstrom’s Sierra Leone (1787), Wolfe Tone’s Hawaii (1790), Thomas Northmore’s Makar (1795), and Robert Southey’s Caermadoc (1799) were all utopias established in isolated regions of Africa, the Caribbean, South America, or the Pacific, with a blissful absence of moral qualms about setting up a colonial utopia on someone else’s land.

Travelling empire: paths to utopia

But the flourishing of utopias in distant places, as imperialism and capitalism progressed hand in hand, reveals a fundamental reality of utopian thinking – utopia has always existed at a distance in either space or time and this distance must be traversed. As Bloch puts it: “The will to journey to the end where everything turns out well … always pervades utopian consciousness” (1986: 98). Since utopia has always emerged at the end of a journey, a journey that is in fact crucial to its allure, utopian fiction has developed a strong affinity with travel writing. Indeed, the parallels between travel writing and utopian fiction are so obvious that they sometimes seem commonplace. According to Fausett, “In narrative terms a utopia is inseparable from the imaginary voyage to it” (Fausett 1993: 9); and for Kumar “Utopia retains throughout its long history the basic form of the narrative of a journey” (Kumar 1991: 89). More’s Utopia might have been an unreal place but it “looked exactly like the period’s genuine travel books – complete with a map and an alphabet of the Utopian tongue” (Hulme and Youngs 2002: 3).

So clearly is it written in the form of travel writing that in its day some people mistakenly presumed Utopia to be an actual place. Writing to Jerome Busleyden in 1516, Peter Giles suggests that the island must have been overlooked or recorded under a different name. In a reply to Giles More says, mischievously, that, “we forgot to ask, and [Hythlodaeus] forgot to say, in what part of the new world Utopia lies” (Houston 2010: 2). More’s delight at this mistake suggests that he was aware of the travel writing of the time. Most commentators believe that he was indebted to contemporary travel narratives and more directly, that Utopia had its foundations in the Renaissance “discovery” of the New World. In playing along with the idea that Utopia was a genuine travel narrative, More suggests that his text is a similarly untrustworthy document with an uncertain status. “The similarity of Utopia to contemporary travel writing, and the kinds of questions this raises about the text and the way in which it was read, demonstrate the richness of the relationship between utopia and travel from its genesis” (Houston 2010: 2).

Utopia creates its own sub-text in the island of England, the “real” island behind the island of Utopia, the potential beneficiary of the discoveries made on the island: “As he told us of many things that were amiss in those new – discovered countries, so he reckoned up not a few things, from which patterns might be taken for correcting the errors of these nations among whom we live” (2009: 7). Such potential application becomes viable as soon as one can extract knowledge of the island by means of an agent who has travelled there and has returned: “I should never have left them [the Utopians] if it had not been to make the discovery of that new world to the Europeans” (30). The condition of an imperial traveller to islands, who always returns “home” to use the knowledge gained, is therefore one that recurs repeatedly in the discovery and creation of colonial utopias. Consequently, the dual concepts of distance and travel become critical in both the capacity of home to receive the benefits of the utopian place and simultaneously declare its sovereignt...