Rerouting the Postcolonial

New Directions for the New Millennium

Janet Wilson, Cristina Sandru, Sarah Lawson Welsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415543248
• eBook ISBN: 9781135190200
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Rerouting the Postcolonial re-orientates and re-invigorates the field of Postcolonial Studies in line with recent trends in critical theory, reconnecting the ethical and political with the aesthetic aspect of postcolonial culture.

Bringing together a group of leading and emerging intellectuals, this volume charts and challenges the diversity of postcolonial studies, including sections on:

• new directions and growth areas from performance and autobiography to diaspora and transnationalism
• new subject matters such as sexuality and queer theory, ecocriticism and discussions of areas of Europe as postcolonial spaces
• new theoretical directions such as globalization, fundamentalism, terror and theories of 'affect'.

Each section incorporates a clear, concise introduction, making this volume both an accessible overview of the field whilst also an invigorating collection of scholarship for the new millennium.

Section 1
Theoretical reroutings

Cosmopolitanism, transnationality and the neo-liberal subject

1
Introduction

Janet Wilson

The essays in this first section articulate significant shifts within postcolonial theory made in response to the persistent manifestations of empire and imperialism in the current global era; first, through expanding the concept of cosmopolitanism into a more inclusive and ethically nuanced term with implications for an improved citizenship; and, second, through supplementing and modifying current postcolonial-based theories of the global such as transnationalism and neo-liberalism. A counterpoint is provided by Patrick Williams’s emphasis on the discipline’s simultaneous ‘rerooting’ – through a reinvigorated engagement with resistance and liberation, areas that have historically constituted postcolonialism’s strength – and ‘rerouting’ into new areas of inquiry, such as postcolonial film and the ‘ethical scandal’ (92) of Palestine. Notably, such explorations reveal an emotional softening of the often strident polemic of earlier theorizations and arguments, a stress on the affective in subject formation, and a forward-looking utopianism energized by the engagement with globalization and based on praxis – producing a ‘positive pedagogy of practical, resistant, “concrete” hoping’ (94).

The focus on a politics or ethics of identity in revisionist cosmopolitanism takes its bearings from Kwame Anthony Appiah, Paul Gilroy and Tim Brennan. Simon Gikandi, in discussing cosmopolitanism in relation to the claims of locality, takes issue with the term’s inherent universalist, transnational ideals, arguing that differences and inequities persist. Gikandi’s challenge to the canonical view of cosmopolitanism as identified with the elite and privileged subject comes from reading the term under the sign of its own anxieties, namely the fear of being part of the ‘rootless’ crowd (27). His subject is the ‘Other’ of cosmopolitanism, the postcolonial migrant of the south who has relocated in the European or American metropolis, and whose alternative narrative defines a third zone – inscribed as global – between the metropolis and ex-colony. Gikandi’s theorizing of cosmopolitanism as ‘a redemptive narrative of globalization, which is in contrapuntal relationship with the condition of being stateless’ (26), anticipates the concerns articulated by Spencer and Nagai, who also look to cosmopolitanism for a renewed dialogue between the postcolonial and globalization and for mediation of the relationship between roots (denied or repressed) and routes (paths taken); it also prefigures the interpretative framework of Anna Ball’s and Erin Goheen Glanville’s essays, which discuss modes of underprivileged diasporic experience. Gikandi’s claim that postcolonialism is ‘authorized by a signature gesture of displacement’ (23), which, in turn, is ‘an essential condition of the modern subjectivity’ (24), is pivotal not only to the project of rerouting, but also to other reconceptualizations of cosmopolitanism currently taking place (see, for example, Schulze-Engler and Helff 2009, Werbner 2008).

Gikandi considers what it means to think of the refugee rather than the intellectual as the quintessential figure of life outside national boundaries, arguing for the necessity of a discourse to articulate the experience of such lives lived across the nation, beyond ethne. More urgently, he asks why refugee diasporic subjects who belong to the ‘global tribe’ often reinscribe archaic loyalties to ethne and their original homeland, so contradicting ‘fluid’ or ‘hybridized’ forms of postcolonial identity (as, for example, in the case of the 17-year-old Islamic Somali migrant living in the US who returned to Somalia to fight for the Muslim cause). He observes that the trust in what Virginia Wolf called ‘unreal loyalties’ by migrant refugees stems from the same fear as that of the intellectual elites who historically made them their ‘Other’: that of being rootless. Such adherence to local loyalties, he argues, does not necessarily negate the obligations traditionally associated with cosmopolitanism (as articulated by Ulf Hannerz, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Arjun Appadurai), that of engaging ethically with and understanding the Other. In fact, as Anna Ball also argues, many second- or third-generation migrants (including those from under-privileged backgrounds) successfully negotiate the competing allegiances of global, multicultural identity and ‘rooted’ (in faith, tradition, local community) subjectivity. One reason for this is that the local, Gikandi points out, has in fact become globalized due to the effect of mass migration and the reinscription of locality in global spaces – a transformation echoed by Diana Brydon’s concept of the ‘glocal’ or by Dorota Ko

odziejczyk’s formulation of ‘provincialism’.

In his democratizing and localizing of the term ‘cosmopolitan’ through defining the spaces inhabited by the ‘not quite’ cosmopolitan subject who may also be described as global, Gikandi draws on a concept of transnationality that is at variance with Bill Ashcroft’s notion of the transnation, a space within and beyond nations, ‘without boundaries’, where utopian transformation can occur; while his questioning of the privileged, elite cosmopolitan adds to Victor Li’s critical reading of the neo-liberal globalized subject who reprogrammes himself in order to reenter corporate capitalism as morally improved. Indeed, Gikandi’s unease about his own western, privileged subject position, and consciousness of the non-representativeness of cosmopolitan elites who deem to speak for others seems to demand a response such as Patrick Williams provides in his essay: it is what the postcolonial critic does that has the greatest implication for the building of a better world, an idea echoed in Diana Brydon’s call for a renewed postcolonial pedagogy.

Robert Spencer, in contrast to Gikandi’s concern with mobility and questions about the relationship to the Other in global space, suggests that literature makes cosmopolitans of us all in other words, the encounter with postcolonial literature and literary criticism will engender a more morally aware cosmopolitan citizenship. He identifies three ‘schools’ of cosmopolitan thought – the sceptical (Said and Orientalism); the celebratory (Bhabha and Appadurai); and the socialist (Gikandi, Neil Lazarus, Brennan) – which, while not necessarily as clear-cut as this classification may suggest, nevertheless distances the concept as currently conceived from earlier divisive discourses of anti-imperialism. Spencer suggests that cosmopolitanism implies a politics that is both more far-reaching than nationalism or localism, but less overbearing than traditional forms of universalism; he also differentiates the concept from neo-liberal globalization, emphasizing its potential as a method for reading postcolonial texts whereby politically-conscious critics and readers might ‘unmask the textual concealment of injustice’ (42). His concept of a multivalent postcolonial cosmopolitanism is thus an essentially dialectical understanding which requires ‘reconciling local attachments with global allegiances’ (40). In anticipating a new form of community – and hence the opportunity for postcolonial critics to articulate not what the discipline is against, but what it is for – Spencer’s position intersects with Williams’s and Ashcroft’s emphasis on the utopian possibilities emerging out of the engaged creative act and with the utopian dimension which Kaori Nagai identifies in advocating the civilizing influence of the ‘international’ or ‘auxiliary’ language of Esperanto.

Nagai examines the historical roots in the first decade of the twentieth century of the artificial language of Esperanto that defined a newly emerging public sphere as multinational/lingual, and relocates it as a ‘new bilingualism’ within the present condition of what she terms ‘transnational cosmopolitanism’. Her claim that speaking Esperanto, a language not one’s own, is ‘the art of being cosmopolitan without losing one’s nationality’ (50) shows affinities with Spencer’s argument that cosmopolitanism begins at home, with Kwame Anthony Appiah’s concept of ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ and Mitchell Cohen’s ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (40). Nagai reroutes this transnational movement, which has been largely neglected by postcolonialists, by situating it within the humanistic discourse of the ‘brotherhood of man’ and simultaneously reading it as a paradigm of local cosmopolitanism, which offers a way of reconciling competing identitarian allegiances. Its affinity with postcolonial versions of cosmopolitanism recalls for Nagai Bhabha’s vernacular cosmopolitanism situated ‘on the border, in between’ (56), as well as Ashcroft’s utopian concept of the literary transnation; for, as she points out, Esperanto stages a cosmopolitan space, ‘a utopian yet quintessentially human space’ (58), where conversations can occur.

In Victor Li’s essay, it is the affluent neo-liberal subject – both propagator and beneficiary of global capitalism, and so akin to the privileged cosmopolitan elites whose ascendancy Gikandi challenges – who comes under scrutiny. Li’s example is Robert Zemeckis’s Hollywood film Cast Away (2000) whose hero, in learning how to survive on a desert island, reinscribes the cultural and social ideology of capitalist globalization. Li demonstrates that the self-reformation and education undertaken by Chuck Noland, a FedEx efficiency expert in systems management, have parallels in advice manuals from business sociologists, entrepreneurial philosophy and New Age thinking. Noland’s redefined role as castaway requires flexibility and adaptability to uncertainty, enhancement of his human capital through reproduction and reconstruction, and the development of a new emotional subjectivity in keeping with the ‘soft skills’ of the corporate market: finally, he reenters the corporate world as a more caring, flexible and adaptable subject. As Li admits, cultural texts such as Zemecki’s film, whose ‘redemptive’ scenario conspicuously lacks any ‘Other’ – the Friday of the ur-ancestor, Robinson Crusoe, or of postcolonial ‘Robinsades’ such as J. M. Coetzee’s Foe – lack a point of entry for a postcolonial analytics that draws on theories of resistance (see Krishnaswamy, 2008: 13–14). Yet Li defends the critical return to the more affective, intimate domain of the individual as one way of detecting the film’s bio-political investment in self-reliance and self-improvement as outward expressions of neo-liberal governmentality. In arguing that postcolonialism should engage with neoliberal ideology in order to account for globalization’s influence on subject formation, he addresses a key preoccupation: the need to formulate a viable subject position from which to articulate politically resistant agency.

In contrast to other terms denoting global movements such as diaspora, migrancy and multiculturalism with their attendant discourse of loss, Bill Ashcroft in his essay articulates the idea of the transnation as the space occupied by local, mobile subjects, whose experiences in an increasingly globalized world assert the ambiguous relation between the nation and the state. Yet the ‘transnation’ is not an abstract ‘object in space’ but, rather, a migratory, even diasporic aggregation of flows and convergences, which describes the contingency and variable cultural positions of ostensibly ‘national’ subjects. It extends ‘beyond the geographical, political, administrative and even imaginative boundaries of the state’ (73), and can be located both within and beyond the boundaries of the nation (as in India and China). It thus differs from formulations of the ‘transnational’ or the ‘international’ because it works across rather than among states; at the same time, it is distinct from the categories of ‘diaspora’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’, for it encompasses subjects that may be locally rooted (in nations, ethnicities, religions, families or tribes), yet simultaneously impervious to state boundaries, moving in and out of national borders, and thus strangely ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘global’. Ashcroft locates a utopian potentiality in the transnation’s deconstruction of bounded ideas of nationhood and statehood, and its prefiguring of a rhizomatic postcolonial subjectivity, one predicated on travelling both within and across given national and cultural boundaries. The transnation’s transformative possibility is also embodied in the utopian function of literature, which enables the imagining of a different world: Ashcroft asks if the colonial language ‘releases the writing subject from the myth of a fixed identity’ (82), illustrating his premise that utopia is the constant horizon of a present rooted in the past with an analysis of the process of naming and unnaming in Jumpha Lahiri’s novel, The Namesake. This, he argues, invests the subject with ‘the potentiality of subjectivity itself’ (83), for names implicate the operation of memory (a ‘smooth’ space which flows through the ‘striated’ space of history) and the past adumbrates a future that transforms the present.

‘Outlines of a Better World’, the title of Patrick Williams’s concluding article, signals kinship with Ashcroft’s concept of the utopian literary transnation, with Nagai’s acclaim of an essentially utopian cosmopolitan space, and with Spencer’s anticipation of a new form of community as postcolonial readers and critics search for alternatives to hegemony and imperial rule. But utopianism, for Williams, in reviewing the case for postcolonialism’s rerouting, is not simply something to hope for or aspire to; it can – indeed, it must, if it is to preserve its ethical purchase and political force – find ways of inserting itself in the compl...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Editors
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• General acknowledgements
• General introduction
• Section 1 Theoretical reroutings
• Section 2 Remapping the postcolonial
• Section 3 Literary reroutings
• Index