Mimicry and Performative Negotiations of Belonging in the Everyday

A Synthesized Analysis of Maryse Condé's I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem

Jannik Kohl

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783946507390
• eBook ISBN:
  9783946507406
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

In the past three decades, Nira Yuval-Davis' concept of belonging as well as Homi K. Bhabha's concept of mimicry have received considerable attention within social and cultural sciences, as both are involved in discussions concerning the construction of social identities and the relationship between self and Other. Within these fields of social research, the two concepts have proven to be attractive analytical categories in order to re-think traditional and essentialist views on processes of social identification, while at the same time highlighting the importance of fluid and more intersubjective notions of those processes. However, due to some blind spots in their conceptualizations, both have been subject of critique for ignoring important dimensions of social realities. The paper aims to show that by synthetizing both concepts into a new analytical framework, it will be possible to overcome those shortcomings and gain new insights into the process of social identification. In order to prove the viability of this synthetized concept of belonging as a possible analytical concept in literary studies, the framework will be applied on the analysis of the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Caribbean author Maryse Condé. In doing so, the thesis addresses the question of how subjects are capable of negotiating their everyday belongings in contexts of social power relations which are characterized and expressed through intersecting forms of hostility and oppression.

1. Introduction

In 2008 at the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica, the long termed rivalry between two of the most prominent and significant authors of the Caribbean, namely the two Nobel Laureates V.S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, culminated in a genuine scandal. On the second day of the festival Walcott performed The Mongoose, a poem that consists in a bitter reckoning with Naipaul’s remarks concerning the Caribbean region and its cultural production, paired with a hodgepodge of dirty anecdotes about Naipaul’s private life that were aimed at questioning his moral integrity – as the following excerpt from his poem illustrates:

For five years he waited / India and England were in his citation / Of gratitude, but not the Negroid nation […] The Mongoose came home to the canes / He phoned, he wanted us to go to the club Miramar / A dingy nightclub on the Port of Spain waterfront / Screwing negresses is part of his memoir / He doesn’t like black man but he loves black cunt / This is a common fact in his late fiction / He told me once he thought sex was just friction. (Walcott 2008)

Hence, just like the mongoose, which was imported in 19th century by the British Empire from India to Trinidad in order to diminish the population of black rats and reduce their damage on the sugarcane plantations, Walcott describes Naipaul, whose grandparents once migrated from India to Trinidad, as an accomplice of Great-Britain while at the same time disdaining his country of birth Trinidad and its entire population. Although the polemic poem is, of course, not representative for the whole body of Walcott’s literary and poetic career, it serves as a starting point for the present thesis, as it marks the escalation of a several decades lasting feud between both Nobel Laureates, in which terms like belonging, mimicry, authenticity, and even racist prejudices informed the central inquiry about cultural production and Caribbean identity. Furthermore, with regard to the style of confrontation and the content of the poem, several authors have pointed to the significance that masculinity plays in the conflict. This observation is insofar relevant for my thesis, as it reflects the fact that, historically, heteronormative positions have proven to be the rule rather than the exception in the discussion and construction of Caribbean identities.

Walcott’s polemic at the Calabash Festival represents the peak in a dispute that started four decades earlier, consisting in opposing opinions with regard to the sphere of cultural production in the Caribbean region. In his autobiographic travelogue The Middle Passage (1962) as well as in his novel The Mimic Men (1967), V.S. Naipaul characterizes the region as a culturally bloodless landscape, which lacks any sort of cultural production, since every piece of art represents a pale imitation of European works. At the same time, Naipaul expresses at various occasions his distanced relationship to his country of birth, reflected in his lacking sense of belonging towards the island – a motif that constantly shaped his early literary creations (Zhou 2015, 13f.). As his work did not receive as much attention in the Caribbean as it provoked in Europe, Naipaul did not hesitate to pick up racist stereotypes that disdained the Trinidadian population in order to expose their supposed cultural inferiority and their disinterest for cultural progress. In addition to this, he repetitiously expressed his feeling of belonging to Great-Britain and its literary tradition, which he presumed to be culturally much more advanced in comparison to the West Indies.¹ Thus, as a consequence, Naipaul found himself caught in the crossfire of criticism, which was most prominently expressed by his colleague Derek Walcott (1998).

After Naipaul took his aversion against the cultural scene of the Caribbean to a new peak in the year 1972 by claiming that “nothing has ever been created in the West Indies, and nothing will ever be created” (quoted after Walcott 1974, 8/9), Derek Walcott intervened in the controversy with his essay The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry? (1974). While agreeing with Naipaul on the mimic condition of Caribbean cultural production, Walcott realizes a positive re-interpretation of the concept of mimicry. In doing so, he calls into question Naipaul’s idea about the originality of cultural products: “The absurdity of pursuing the anthropological idea of mimicry then, if we are to believe science, would lead us to the image of the first ape applauding the gestures of what we must call the first man (…) henceforth everything can only be mimicry” (Ibid., 7/8). Thus, Walcott takes the stance that cultural goods never exist for themselves but, on the contrary, are always related to another in their intellectual invention and manual production, as it seems simply impossible to define originality or to localize the original version of a certain piece of art at all. By introducing the example of Carnival as a cultural practice in the Caribbean, Walcott emphasizes on the procreative dimension of mimicry, a phenomenon that always implicates efforts of imagination, reinterpretation and translation.² Subverting the meaning of Naipaul’s affront against the outcome of cultural production in the West Indies, Walcott twists the words of his rival – a rhetorical operation that impressively shows the creative dimension of mimicry: “Nothing will always be created in the West Indies, for quite long time, because what will come out of there is like nothing one has ever seen before” (Ibid., 9).

As an introductory example the debate illustrates the intensity with which Caribbean artists participated in public debates about identity formation and cultural production. Furthermore, the controversy serves to characterize three principal aspects that formed the core of the conflict and which also reflect the central interest of the present thesis; the construction of belonging and social identities in the Caribbean and the role that mimicry plays in these processes, both under the critical gaze of gender relations.

The intensity of the feud and its historico-political background correlates with the fact that both issues at stake, mimicry as well as belonging, received considerable attention in different fields of social research during the last three decades (Lähdesmäki et al. 2016). The most attractive elaborations have probably been formulated by Nira Yuval-Davis and Homi K. Bhabha, who introduced belonging and mimicry as analytical categories in order to re-think traditional and essentializing views on processes of social identification, highlighting instead the importance of fluid and more intersubjective approaches to those processes. Both authors share the conviction that social identities are not to be considered as fixed possessions of the subject, but more likely as something that is produced and constructed in the subject’s everyday relationships with Others. Furthermore, they place the subject and its agency at the center of attention, without neglecting the significance of social power relations. Hence, both concepts will allow us to engage in more detail with the leading question of the thesis: How do subjects negotiate their belongingness in everyday interactions with Others?

At the same time, however, it is important to point to the fact that both concepts have received different points of criticism for ignoring important dimensions of social realities due to some blind spots in their conceptualizations. These critical interventions mark the point of relevance of the present thesis, as the principal aim lies in dissolving the respective shortcomings of both concepts by synthesizing them into one single analytical framework. By virtue of doing so, the thesis will contribute to the elaboration of a new perspective concerning the role of the subject in the process of social identification and the construction of social boundaries. In approaching this goal, the thesis is structured in three different chapters.

The second chapter aims at a historical approximation to the construction of identities in the Caribbean, by which the relevance of the research interest becomes accentuated. Similar as in any region that was colonized by the European powers, knowledge production about the colonized Other formed a fundamental aspect of colonial rule in the West Indies. As a consequence, the non-White population of the region experienced a form of, what Spivak calls, epistemic violence with regard to their representation in colonial discourse (Spivak 1988, 280/281). The effects of this kind of epistemic violence may be best described in the words of Frantz Fanon, who stated that “I am overdetermined from without” (Fanon 2008, 87), or, as Jean Bernabé and his colleagues formulated: “We [the Creoles] are fundamentally stricken with exteriority” (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1990, 886). Thus, as a direct response to this epistemic violence and the objectification of the Caribbean Other in discourse, the area of cultural production has shown to be an important field in which diverse approaches on Caribbean identities were fought out on different levels, as they were discussed theoretically by authors and artists alike, as well as realized in practice through various literary representations.

Hence, while the majority of traditional European models of identity were based on the imagination of the national community in terms of a supposed ethnical homogeneity and racial purity of its members, the example of the Caribbean calls these concepts into question. In direct response to those European concepts, the discussion of identity in the Caribbean went hand in hand with the recognition that processes of cultural formation are, in fact, the result of dialogical relationships between different cultural entities, highlighting therewith the importance of hybridity as a precondition of social identities.

However, the last three decades have witnessed a new wave of Caribbean feminist voices that scandalize the blindness towards gender relations within those concepts. According to them, the discussion of Caribbean identities was largely held by men and is therefore inherently linked to a masculinist vision of the world – as we were already able to witness in the case of Naipaul and Walcott, for instance. While criticizing their reductionist understanding of identity by defining it primarily in ethno-cultural terms without taking into account other important aspects of social life, these interventions highlight the necessity to include an intersectional perspective that focuses on power relations in everyday life. Hence, this point marks the transition from the historical to the theoretical part of the thesis, which will deal with the concept of belonging, as it proves to be a more justifiable proposition for the understanding of social realities and identifications.

In the third chapter of the thesis, we will therefore engage more deeply with the concepts of belonging and mimicry, in order to synthesize both into a new analytical framework. In general, debates about feelings of belonging are deeply involved in relations of power, as the emotional intensity and the escalation of the conflict between Naipaul and Walcott has shown. This gets displayed, on the one hand, by the fact that Naipaul now and then encouraged racist stereotypes in order to reassure himself of his belonging to Great-Britain. On the other hand, however, Walcott went beyond the limits of legitimate critique by condemning Naipaul’s lack of belonging to the Caribbean as a cultural and social betrayal against the entire Caribbean population, therewith subordinating the individual freedom of decision-making under the supposed interest of an imagined collective.

This observation is in line with Nira Yuval-Davis’ conceptualization of belonging as an analytical category that is based, in fact, on two different dimensions of belonging: belonging as such, in which the subject and its emotional attachments are placed at the center of analysis, and the politics of belonging, which focuses on analyzing the discursive construction and negotiation of the boundaries of belonging. However, as scholars like Marco Antonsich (2010, 647), Melanie Hoewer (2014, 106), or Pauline Stoltz (2014, 124) have commented, Nira Yuval-Davis’ empirical realization of her own analytical framework is limited due to an imbalance of attention: in her analysis of citizenship discourses in Great-Britain she focuses almost exclusively on the politics of belonging, leaving aside the analysis of belonging and, as a consequence, losing the intersubjective scope of her analytical framework out of sight (Yuval-Davis 2011b). Therefore, the aim is to take up this point of critique and focus on this blind spot in Yuval-Davis’ own empirical work by integrating Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of mimicry as an essential, performative force that enables the subject to negotiate its belonging in everyday life.

Bhabha’s concept gained considerable popularity in Postcolonial Studies as it sheds new light to the relationship between colonizers and colonized by being based on intersubjective notions of agency. However, focusing almost exclusively on questions of culture and ‘race’, Anne McClintock has complained that Bhabha's concept of mimicry fails to recognize other categories of social discrimination (McClintock 1995, 64/65). In this sense, integrating the concept of mimicry as a concrete social practice of negotiating belonging into the analytical, and explicitly intersectional, framework of Nira Yuval-Davis, could therefore throw a new and refreshing light on the concept of mimicry itself.

As we will see, the point of departure of synthesizing both concepts is marked by the question of negotiation, as both authors share a similar perspective on human agency: both highlight the importance of performativity and intersubjectivity as modes of social action, which involve the possibility of transforming boundaries of social difference and belonging. In accordance with her colleague Nira Yuval-Davis, Floya Anthias describes this fluid notion of social identification as becoming, sharing therewith significant similarities with Caribbean concepts of identity: “Becoming is a process and this opens the potential for change and transformation as well as the recognition of practice and agency, although this too has its provocations. For we could ask: Who is the subject who is able ‘to become’ and under what conditions?” (Anthias 2013, 5). As this last part of the quote already anticipates, the scope of negotiating belonging through mimicry in the everyday is faced with some restrictions, as social relations are always informed by intersectional categories of power. Hence, the synthesis of both concepts will allow us to gain a more differentiated view on belonging and its negotiation in everyday encounters by dealing with the question: How do subjects make use of their possibilities given by their positionality in society and how do they deal with possible restrictions given by the same?

This question will also inform the fourth and last chapter of this thesis, as it will guide the analysis of the novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (originally published in French in 1986, translated in English 1992) by Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé. The examination of the novel will serve as an exemplary case study in order to show how belongings are negotiated in everyday life and prove the viability of this synthetized concept of belonging as a possible analytical concept in the realm of cultural and literary studies.

The novel was selected as the object of analysis because it addresses questions of belonging as an omnipresent conflict between the main protagonist, Tituba, a young girl of African-Caribbean descent who is born in Barbados in the 17th century, and her social environments. In detail, Tituba experiences several types of social exclusion, which are structured along different interlocking social categories like gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, etc. In this setting, Tituba presents herself as a subject who is capable to actively confront these different forms of exclusion and is able to negotiate the terms of belonging – sometimes successfully, in other occasions less successfully. However, the fact that she experiences several forms of spatial mobility – first from Barbados to the New England colonies, then from Boston to the Puritan village of Salem and, finally, back to Barbados – presents at the same time new challenges to her own belonging, as each migratory movement signifies a re-orientation in a new sociocultural context.

By analyzing the construction and negotiation of belonging in the novel, the aim is to carve out how the lines of social boundaries are drawn and how, as a consequence, the protagonists experience social in- or exclusion in their everyday relations. Hence, by integrating the concept of mimicry into the analytical framework of belonging, the main focus will be put on the performative agency of the protagonists in encountering those social boundaries and negotiate their belongings.

With regard to the questions of interest formulated above, the analysis of the novel will serve to gain new insights to the questions of how belongings get negotiated in everyday relations and how those prospects of negotiation are already largely influenced by one’s positionality in society. In this sense, the guiding question for the exemplary analysis of Maryse Condé’s novel can be formulated by mimicking Floya Anthias: ‘Who is the subject who is able to belong and under what conditions?’

2. The Crux of Identity: A Consideration of Identity Discourses in the Caribbean

As the main concern of the thesis is directly linked to overarching issues of identity construction in the African-Caribbean Diaspora, it will be necessary to start with a brief contextualization of the Caribbean as a space of cross-cultural contact.

Even after the phase of political independence and emancipation from the so-called European motherlands, which was obtained by the majority of the West Indian countries, questions about a distinct creole, either national or transnational, Caribbean identity are still widely discussed in different spheres of society. However, in perhaps no other public realm these issues haven been discussed more controversially and fervently as in the realm of cultural, and especially literary production as the introductory example of the Naipaul/Walcott feud has already shown. In this sense, the interest of this chapter lies in providing a short overview of the historical background of Caribbean identity formation and the interventions that were made by artists in these processes.

2.1 Identity and Cultural Production in the Caribbean

During the conquest of the Americas by the European colonial powers, the experience of the West Indies was unique with regard to its social and cultural implications: On the one hand, the cultural contact between indigenous populations and European conquerors led to an almost complete extinction of the former group, produced by epidemics and the brutality of the conquest. On the other hand, no other American region experienced comparable processes of migration with respect to their cultural consequences. The forced translation of millions of Africans and the migration of thousands of people from European and Asian countries led to a unique experience of cultural contact, amalgamation and ethnic diversity (Condé 1998, 61; Hall 1990, 234ff.), that has been considered by Sidney Mintz as “a modernity that predated the modern” (Mintz 1996, 305), in the sense that “the modernization of...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Crux of Identity: A Consideration of Identity Discourses in the Caribbean
• 3. Overcoming Identity: Belonging and Mimicry as Alternative Categories of Social Research
• 4. Belonging in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
• 5. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Copyright