Southern Postcolonialisms

The Global South and the 'New' Literary Representations

Sumanyu Satpathy

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138380301
• eBook ISBN: 9781000083996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Southern Postcolonialisms is an anthology of critical essays on new literary representations from the Global South that seeks to re-invent/reorient the ideological, disciplinary, aesthetic, and pedagogical thrust of Postcolonial Studies in accordance with the new and shifting politico-economic realities/transactions between the North and the South, as well as within the Global South, in an era of globalization.

Since the emergence of Postcolonial Theory in the 1980s, the shape of the world has changed dramatically. Old Cold War boundaries have shifted in the wake of the collapse of communism, Globalization, on an unprecedented scale, has dramatically changed the meaning of time and space. The rise of the US as a new imperial power has profound implications for the world order. In the South, new emerging markets have challenged the older division of industrial 'first world' and non-industrial 'third world'.

In most parts of the world, the academy is struggling to keep up with these developments. One result has been a major transnational turn in the humanities and social sciences. Terms like 'world history', 'globalization', 'glocalization' and 'transnationalism' now dominate academic agendas worldwide.

These changing circumstances raise far-reaching questions. What does the new emerging world order mean for established models of postcolonial theory? Is postcolonialism as a field of study being overtaken by models of globalization and transnationalism? What implications do the new configurations in the South have for postcolonial theory?

This volume, drawn from a major literary conference at Delhi University, provides a set of perspectives on these questions. With a majority of contributions by scholars from the South, these research articles have a dual focus – they revisit older debates on postcolonial theory, while suggesting new perspectives and directions.

Canons of the New

1
A Balance of Stories: The Making of a Discipline

Sue Thomas

In a moving and combative essay, Chinua Achebe addresses his millennial desire that this century

will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world’s peoples. The twentieth century for all its many faults did witness a significant beginning, in Africa and elsewhere in the so-called Third World, of the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession. I was lucky to be present at one theater of that reclamation. (2000: 79)

The newness that Achebe celebrates is the emergence of a critical mass (‘balance’) of narrative (‘storying’) in the ‘so-called Third World’. ‘[T]he trauma of all kinds of dispossession’ encompasses but is not simply metonymic of imperialism and its legacies. Restorying/restoring suggests the promise of return; communal and self-possession; empowerment through ‘complex human reinvention of self’ (2000: 79) and self-in-relation. This coming to voice in the Anglophone world has been a major energizing force in the academic discipline of English, in a field configured variously since the late 1950s as Commonwealth Literature, New Literatures in English, and Postcolonial Literatures in English, or — more broadly — Postcolonial Studies. The charting of the history of this field and of the traffic in theoretical and critical tools and epistemologies that have facilitated and shaped it has been fraught with genealogical anxieties, anxieties as usual bound up with ‘lineage and pedigree, property and inheritance’ (Nash 2003: 32). Experience is a foundational category in English’s making of its disciplinary subject. Achebe, for instance, refers to literary mediation of human experience (‘the trauma of all kinds of dispossession’) and the experience of reading (‘re-storying’). Whose literary and cultural mediations of the experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and its legacies, whose experiences of reading these mediations, indeed whose experiences of imperialism, colonialism, and its legacies, matter — or matter more — has become contentious in Postcolonial Studies.

Whether one speaks of ‘New’ Literatures in English or ‘New’ Literary Representations, ‘the idea of the new convey[s],’ as Rita Felski points out, ‘a . . . sense of urgency and heightened expectancy, of being poised on an epochal threshold’ (1995: 146). It is ‘deployed to signal an exhilarating sense of liberation from the tyranny of the past, a leaving behind of outmoded and irrelevant values and traditions through the espousal of a radical modernity’ (ibid.). Have we reached an epochal moment at which a reassessment of the valency of the categories of Commonwealth Literature, New Literatures in English, and Postcolonial Studies might radically re-energize and radicalize a field? How might a reconsideration of the regulatory practices and exclusionary matrices of these disciplinary categories in their making of their subjects re-energize a field in a genuinely transformative rather than merely assimilative way? In addressing such questions, I suggest, we must remain cognizant of our responsibilities as critics to ‘a balance of stories’ and their geopolitical reach to audiences.

I would like to investigate a few reported disciplinary wrecks, in search of the wreck and stories of the wreck,¹ sedimented ‘narratives of lost authenticity and vanishing diversity’ (Clifford and Marcus 1986: 9). My conscientization around the imbrication of legacies of empire, racialization, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality is grounded in a working-class family history which includes Romani, black African, Irish, Welsh, Scots, English, and Scandinavian ancestry, teenage reading of theoretical and autobiographical writing of national and racial liberation struggles (what was available was mostly by men), and campaigns for aboriginal, Murri,² and Torres Strait Islander rights in Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s. Black women — Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Faith Bandler, and Roberta Sykes — were prominent figures in these campaigns. In 1975 I studied Third World Literature, a new subject taught by Helen and Chris Tiffin, and in 1976 wrote my Honours thesis on ‘The African Presence in Edward Brathwaite’s Islands,’ the beginnings of a long-term interest in Caribbean literatures. From my experience of having published essays in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature, and as someone who has been on the editorial boards of New Literatures Review and Postcolonial Studies, I position my scholarship as committed to an active process, speaking of decolonizing literatures and decolonizing literary and cultural histories, rather than postcolonial literatures.³ This is a fine distinction, a nuance I wish to stress by way of emphasizing how I am only too aware of the perceived radicalism of the field. I feel the need to clarify this through an autobiographical aside. In early 2005, I was invited to speak to an English department at a British university about my current scholarship, and made this distinction. The question I was asked was prefaced with ‘in your postcolonial ransacking’, my interlocutor positioning me as a barbarian, a vandal already on the loose inside the gates of British culture, and needing to be repelled. For him, my weapons were questions in an Australian accent around the remembering and reading of slavery, forced labour migrations, and gender, racialization, sexuality, and Englishness in empire, and questions around the pedagogies of empire and decolonization. For the Australian right-wing I might be one of those ‘peek-in-your pants researchers fixated on gender or race’. In 2005 the then Australian Minister for Education, Dr Brendan Nelson, began vetoing the award of merit-based Australian Research Council grants to some research projects, in response to the view of right-wing columnists that the Australian Research Council ‘had fallen prey to “Marxists”, “leftists” and peek-in-your-pants researchers fixated on gender or race’ (Macintyre 2005: 19). The infantilization of intellectual curiosity about gender and histories of racialization refers, I take it, to the childhood game of doctors and nurses. Dr Nelson, now Leader of the Opposition in the Australian federal parliament, is a medical practitioner.

There is a broad consensus that Commonwealth Literature, while having served as a wedge to prise open a curricular and professional space for writers, critics, editors, and publishers, is now an anachronism in the historical time of Postcolonial Studies. Anne McClintock calls it ‘fuddy-duddy’ (1993: 299). Certainly, however, the field still most explicitly bears traces of this formative paradigm in the names of professional associations (the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, founded in 1964, and its current regional chapters in Canada, Europe, India, Malaysia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the South Pacific, the West Indies and the USA, and the Socie ´te´ d’Etude des Pays du Commonwealth). This is also seen in the names of journals (Journal of Commonwealth Literature, founded in 1965, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, postcolonial here designating ‘countries colonized by other European powers in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Caribbean’, Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Cultures of the Commonwealth), and the names of awards administered by the Commonwealth Foundation — since 1965 the cultural wing of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Commonwealth Foundation, it announces, ‘recognises the value of cultural and artistic expression to national life, and the central place of culture in development’, and supports ‘cultural exchange’. The Foundation is a major financial sponsor of the Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies. ‘The Harare Commonwealth Declaration’ of 1991 articulates a communal and internationally cooperative commitment to development, offered as a panacea for poverty, debt, ‘environmental degradation, the problems of migration and refugees, the fight against communicable diseases, and drug production and trafficking’. The international culture the Commonwealth affirms is committed to ‘democracy, the rule of law, good governance, freedom of expression and the protection of human rights’, ‘diversity and human dignity’, tolerant and plural civil society, ‘peace and security’ (‘The Coolum Declaration’ 2002). These are fine diplomatic desiderata, which each nation would uphold in a number of international forums to which it belonged. The Commonwealth of Nations currently has 53 member states, all but two of which were formerly part of the British Empire. Mozambique and Cameroon joined the Commonwealth in 1995. As a ‘grouping of nations’ it has, Amitav Ghosh mordantly insists, been ‘determined solely by the brute facts of time’, and the ‘ways in which we remember the past . . . are also open to choice, reflection and judgment’.

Anne McClintock argues that in the ‘invention of anachronistic space’ historical anachronisms are subject to disciplining processes of pathologization (1995: 40–42). Commonwealth Literature, in its honouring of the Commonwealth of Nations in the title, is patho-logized as a specimen of political regression: a ‘memorialisation’ of the British Empire (Ghosh 2005), and an organization which still has the British monarch as its titular head. These are its core political symbols. In the period of decolonization Britain dropped British from the organization’s title, yet the Commonwealth is usually seen to remain the property of Britain rather than its members. For Aijaz Ahmad, for instance, Commonwealth Literature is a ‘cultural hangover of the British Empire’, and its origins have an inorganic relation to decolonizing states. It is, he writes, ‘a construct pretty much of the British Council and is largely limited to its clients’ (1992: 211). As disciplinary historians point out, some German scholars were researching British colonial literatures in the 1920s and 1930s (Stilz 1989: 25–26); the first US course on Commonwealth Literature was approved in 1941 (McLeod 2000: 8). An annual conference on British Commonwealth Literature was inaugurated in the United States from 1958, an initiative based around US academics with professional experience in Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand, and US-based Australian and Canadian scholars (Robertson 1995: 3–4). A chapter of the Modern Language Association, eventually known as World Literature Written in English, meaning Anglophone literature from outside the US and Britain, was established in the early 1960s. As the Conference on British Commonwealth Literature it published a Newsletter from April 1962 (ibid.: 10). This activity predates the 1964 Leeds conference that is often held to be the inaugural moment of Commonwealth Literature. Leigh Dale argues that the ‘approach to Commonwealth literature’ articulated in A. N. Jeffares’s opening address ‘was fundamentally assimilationist’, a project instantiated in phrases like ‘“our common culture”, “our common heritage”, “a common, yet infinitely diverse, culture”’ (1997: 179). The singular ‘literature’ suggests a sense of shared, international property. As a field, Commonwealth Literature was committed to the project of ‘consider[ing] via a comparative approach the common concerns and attributes that . . . manifold literary voices [from the Commonwealth outside Britain] might have’ (ibid.: 11). Chris Tiffin urges that the exclusions of Britain, and the Anglophone United States and Ireland ‘were quite blatantly protectionist, to give the newer literatures room to breathe; they were never argued on a theoretical basis’ (1992: 15).

The rhetoric of commonality amid diversity still pervades the manifestoes of the Commonwealth of Nations. ‘The Harare Commonwealth Declaration, 1991’ speaks of ‘shared inheritance in language, culture and the rule of law . . . the sharing of experience’. ‘The Coolum Declaration: The Commonwealth in the 21st Century: Continuity and Renewal’ (2002) refers to ‘Commonwealth values’, ‘common values’, ‘enduring values’, ‘values and principles which we share’, ‘our evolving needs’. The discourse of evolution honours the rule of law. Those values were first articulated in the 1971 Singapore Declaration of Commonwealth Principles. The model of political community differs: in 1991 it is ‘friendship and co-operation’; in 2002 ‘building closer Commonwealth “family” links’. The former is animated by a powerful polemic, first formulated in the Singapore Declaration, against ‘racial prejudice and intolerance’, represented as a ‘dangerous sickness . . . unmitigated evil’; the latter represents terrorism and HIV/ AIDS as dangerous sicknesses. The ‘family’ declares its ‘implacable opposition to all forms of discrimination, whether rooted in gender, race, colour, creed or political belief’. It does not recognize class and caste prejudice, homophobia, xenophobic ethnocentrism, ageism, intolerance of disability as forms of discrimination for its agendas. As my formulations imply, the ‘family’ misrecognizes the ‘roots’ of the discriminations it can identify and speak about: misogyny, racism, colourphobia, religious and political intolerance. Its discourse is presented as generated by the needs of the cultures, international and national, to which member states belong.

In ‘Interrogating Post-colonialism’, Meenakshi Mukherjee urges that postcolonial critique is certainly desirable ‘so long as one can make sure that the terms of the discourse are indeed being generated by the needs of the culture to which one belongs, rather than by the imperatives set elsewhere’ (1994: 4). She sets ‘the needs of the culture’ (national) against the academic isolation of postcolonial theory (ibid.: 3). The ‘needs of the culture’ pose questions about ‘the people’, the ‘popular’, and the grass-roots. One might read the binary as a sign of a phenomenon celebrated by Neil Lazarus, postcolonial valorization ‘since the 1980s’ of ‘the recovery and adequate theorization of popular consciousness and popular practice: a variety of histories from below, insurgent sociologies, new approaches in political economy, mould-breaking developments in anthropology, feminist and environmentalist work in all sectors of the social sciences, and so on’ (2004: 8).

For Meenakshi Mukherjee, the fatal flaw of Commonwealth Literature ‘was the pre-supposition that an umbilical cord tied . . . diverse bodies of writing . . . to the mother country England’ (1994: 6). In critical and theoretical terms, the assimilationist drive of Commonwealth Literature in the 1960s and 1970s was apparent in the application of liberal humanist criteria of artistic excellence, measures which may be read as domesticating of cultural difference. Here one might evoke Audre Lorde: ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change’ (1984: 112). As Amitav Ghosh so mincingly pointed out in withdrawing The Glass Palace from the Commonwealth Writers Prize competition in 2001, the ‘shared inheritance in language’ is English; it ‘excludes the many languages that sustain the cultural and literary lives’ of its member states. Editors and conference organizers working under the aegis of Commonwealth Literature, though, have made efforts to encourage scholarship on vernacular literatures (Thieme and Chew 1992: 2; Trivedi 2004: 1). Ngugi wa Thiong’o, a student at the University of Leeds during the 1960s, appreciates its inspirational openness to voices from outside Europe, while pointing to the limits of the paradigm in addressing the particularities of African and Caribbean literatures. These literatures, he argues, ‘whether in English or French or Portuguese, shared a more fundamental identity and its natural literary ally was the entire literature of struggle emanating from the former colonised world of Asia, Africa and South America irrespective of linguistic barriers’ (1993: 8). Cross-cultural dialogue across linguistic barriers — vernacularized imperial languages and vernacular languages — requires cultural capital — literacy, education, travel — the acquisition of which is still profoundly shaped by gender, class, ethnicity, and local economy, even in comparatively materially wealthier countries. Famously, Ngugi urged the project of decolonizing the mind by writing in indigenous languages — instantiating a pluralism of linguistic and cultural centres — and proposed a reorganization of disciplinary boundaries within the decolonizing university to acknowledge the shifting geopolitical affiliations of the decolonizing nation (Thiong’o 1986).

Scholars who lament the eclipse of Commonwealth Literature tell narratives of lost authenticity and vanishing diversity: a loss of openness to and enthusiasm for literature (as opposed to theory), of latitudinarianism and of a comparative methodology; ‘the diversity of the literatures studied’ risking being, in Postcolonial Studies, ‘conflat[ed] . . . into a single category and (even more regrettably?) defining them in terms of their increasingly distant relationship to colonialism’ (Thieme and Chew 1992: 2). These stories are often told in response to the presentism and modernism of the credentialing of postcolonial scholarship in the US and Britain, organized around the academic star system (best exemplified by scholars such as Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). Timothy Brennan also points out how

[t]he tendency of contemporary intellectual trends to supplant predecessors by erasing the history of their own making . . . is . . . a characteristic feature of contemporary capitalist societies, which are at once presentist — that is, viewing each moment as the only reality while expunging the past in a gesture of calculated anti-historicism — and modernist in the technical sense of needing to judge every current discovery as an utterly new departure, and absolute rupture with all that went before. (2004: 121–22)

He does not give presentism and modernism ‘in the technical sense’ a sufficiently geopolitical inflection. Diana Brydon similarly tells of a 1986 conference on ‘The Colonial Mind’ at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, where speakers from the US spoke on the question of fiction dealing with US neo-imperialism, and maintained that ‘[w]hat they wanted were American (meaning US) perspectives of American imperialism, not Trinidadian, Canadian or Fijian perspectives’ (1989: 3).

The form...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Canons of the New
• Pedagogies from the Postcolony
• Gendered Citizenships in Transnational Times
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index