Literature's Sensuous Geographies

Postcolonial Matters of Place

S. Moslund

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349502516, 9781137479679
• eBook ISBN: 9781137453228
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Using place studies within a postcolonial context, this study explores the sense-aesthetic dimensions in literature such as smell, sound, etc. that often challenge the rationalizing logic of modernity. Through close readings of writers such as Conrad and Coetzee, Moslund invites scholars to shift focus from discourse analysis to aesthetic analysis.

PART I

THEORIES

CHAPTER 1

THE TENOR OF PLACE, LANGUAGE, AND BODY IN POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES

If there is anything that radically distinguishes the imagination of anti-imperialism, it is the primacy of the geographical in it.

Edward Said (Culture and Imperialism)

PLACE

Questions of place, language, and body have always been central to postcolonial studies. To start with the former, places, spaces, landscapes, geographies, and territories play a fundamental role as colonial and postcolonial literatures emerge out of a historical contestation of land—a contestation of land that, in fact, has its origin in the fifteenth century with the concurrent development of modernity in Europe and Europe’s expansion into the rest of the world. The setting is never just a backdrop to the story in colonial and postcolonial literature. It is of decisive importance and one of the underlying reasons why the story was written in the first place. Hence “discoveries” and conquests of space, mappings of land, the naming and renaming of spaces, settlement, dispossession and displacement, migrations and diasporic spaces, borderlands and zones of contact, territorializations and de-territorializations: these are all of crucial concern to the postcolonial scholar. And hence, Said’s observation that “the imagination of anti-imperialism” is distinguished by “the primacy of the geographical in it” (Said, 1993, 271).

Yet, even though postcolonial studies have always been intricately tied to geography and spatial issues, the sensory experiences of place remain underexplored. This is not surprising for a couple of reasons. First of all, postcolonial studies have always been dominated by a focus on history and historical questions, the “post” in “postcolonial” referring to the histories of resistance to colonialism and its lasting historical legacy. For this reason, the spatial matters of geography easily change into the temporal matters of history in postcolonial readings. The place world as such is routinely temporalized by the dominance of the historical narrative, so to speak, of human actions and changing interrelations (e.g., the history of conquest and resistance, the construction of a postindependence nation, tensions within the new nation, antinational and post-national theorizations of migration are all concerns that pertain primarily to the historical unfolding of relations between people before they include any deeper existential questions of human–place relations).

Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley are right in pointing out that place has always been used in postcolonial literature to question modernity and temporal narratives of progress imposed by the empire (DeLoughrey and Handley, 2011, introduction). But this is not always the only engagement, or even the most pronounced engagement with place in postcolonial studies. It is certainly not the first impression that would strike the novice in the field, thumbing through the dozens of introductions to postcolonial studies. Not only have the material and sensory dimensions of place been relatively obscured by the overriding temporal perspective produced by the primacy of historical perspectives in postcolonial studies, but embodied place relations have also, and for very obvious, interrelated and, indeed, crucial reasons, been pushed into the background by a primary concern with colonial and postcolonial understandings of place as a matter of historico-discursive territorializations, deterritorializations, and reterritorializations. Any casual view of the role of place and various forms of spatiality in postcolonial studies as envisioned by prominent scholars in the field shows the primacy of readings of place as a historico-political/discursive product. To Bill Ashcroft, for instance, one of the founding scholars of postcolonial studies, “Postcolonial place is . . . a site of struggle on which the values and beliefs of indigenous and colonizer contend for possession” (Ashcroft, 2005, 96). Similarly W. J. T. Mitchell demonstrates how the representation of landscape in colonial and postcolonial art is read as anything but an innocent perception or transparent rendition of place or reality. In fact, hiding behind landscape as, for instance, an object of aesthetic appreciation is landscape as an ideal medium for the naturalization of both imperialism and anti-imperial nationalist discourses, both of which conceive of themselves precisely as an “expansion of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ into ‘natural’ space” (Mitchell, 1994b, 17). Landscape representation, Mitchell is right to conclude, is a well-established mode of narrating the empire or the nation as “natural” and thus erasing the signs of their own “constructive activity” (Mitchell, 1994b, 16). The critical method Mitchell urges us to employ in response to this is one of historization or deciphering landscapes as fabricated textual systems or symbols of ideologies and power. That is, to disclose how

[l]andscape as a cultural medium . . . has a double role with respect to something like ideology: it naturalizes a cultural and social construction, representing an artificial world as if it were simply given and inevitable, and it also makes that representation operational by interpellating its beholder in some more or less determinate relation to its givenness as sight and site.

(Mitchell, 1994a, 2)

Although the present study offers a different approach to landscapes in literature, such historizations of the production of place have always been and continue to be of crucial importance in any antiauthoritarian study because of the continual transformation of human history and interhuman hierarchies into “natural space.”¹

Since the major shift in postcolonial studies in the 1990s to concerns of diaspora and international migration, the liberation of space from colonialism by postcolonial writing and criticism has moved away from the resistance offered by independent cultural identities as envisioned by national discourses—or by the “ideologues of nation building” (Mignolo, 1992, 316). Now the resistance offered by the forces of transnational or postnational movement and cultural mixture is in vogue. In her very fine book Spatial Politics in the Postcolonial Novel (2009), for instance, Sara Upstone looks at how the colonial “overwriting” of space is challenged by postcolonial disclosures of its oppressive order. Upstone sees such deterritorialization not in terms of national reclaims of space, but in terms of “the freedom,” as she puts it, of the journey, movement, nomadism, and hybridity that restores heterogeneity, diversity, and fluidity to place without reverting to new territorializations. However, ideas of deterritorialization as journey, movement, diversity, and hybridity are not only largely offered as discursive challenges to other discourses (the way I read it), but they also easily come close to a paradoxical renunciation of the significance of place in the name of movement. At least this seems to be the case when the heterogeneity and fluidity of place comes to be synonymous with a “post-space” liberation from being “land-locked,” where, for instance, Rushdie’s nomadic characters are seen in this light as “deterritorialized par excellence” (Upstone, 2009, 13, 24, 82–83). It will be shown later how a topo-poetic reading does not see movement as cancelling place—place and movement are not mutually exclusive.

Russell West-Pavlov’s Spaces of Fiction/Fictions of Space (2010) is an inspiring work that comes closest to the ways in which a topo-poetic reading seeks to reopen the field of place in colonial and postcolonial literature. West-Pavlov brings up useful distinctions between different ways in which the experience of placial presence is obscured by a territorializing form of historical and ego-logical deixis in both colonial and postindependence national discourses. As a postcolonial response to this, he identifies a literary form of deixis in certain works that causes language and space to enter into a form of reciprocal production of each other in ways that evade the historical epistemologies of empire and nation. A topo-poetic reading for the “heterogeneous powers of the sensible” shares West-Pavlov’s interest in how the materiality of place may take on agency in human–place relations and produce “a degree of spatial ‘presence’ . . . in language without the commanding gaze or monological domination inherent in speaker-centred deixis” (West-Pavlov, 2010, 44, 53, emphasis added). However, whereas West-Pavlov’s descriptions of the discursive productions of space by imperial and national imaginaries are well developed (and will be employed later in the literary analyses), his examination of the reciprocity of human life, language, and the material dimensions of place is a little more sketchy. West-Pavlov’s book tends to intimate rather than actually demonstrate the agency of space in language—which is perhaps ascribable to the fact that he does not explore the sensory dimension of the human–place relation in any greater depth. Moreover, and as in Upstone and many other studies, this is coupled with a tendency to fall back on refrains of the “liberating” place relations in transcultural migration narratives—as when West-Pavlov refers to the hybrid “middleman” or “in-between man” as offering a new kind of “non-Nativist” or exilic belonging, which incongruously ends up casting sedentary cultures or any deep-seated relation to specific places in a light of suspicion: as “ethnic” or “national” (West-Pavlov, 2010, 167–70). Arguably, studies of hybridity and transcultural processes do not all by themselves address questions of human–place relations. Cultural blending and heterogenization may certainly offer very interesting apertures to new human–place questions, but as it is today, the standard refrain of transcultural “in-betweenness” seems exclusively concerned with the sociopolitical relations between people, regardless of the placial dimension, rather than taking this interesting next step (this is an argument I will return to in the analysis of Ladoo’s No Pain Like This Body and in the chapter on sensuous geographies in migration literature).

Besides, migration and cultural pluralism is not by necessity a challenge to imperial or nationalist ideologizations of space—just think for a moment of how the old discourse of landscape in national ideology is increasingly replaced by a discourse of national identity as produced by immigration and multicultural intermixture, which essentially leaves the metaphysics of the nation or the national territorialization of spatial reality intact—the latter merely reproduces itself in the form of what Spivak refers to as a “metropolitan nationalism” (Spivak, 2003, 82). As will be shown, in this respect, a topo-poetic mode of reading distinguishes between nation and place—they are not the same. A place may be situated within the territory of a nation, but the place world is never completely saturated by the idea of the nation. There is an excess of life experience in human–place relations that spill over the borders of the nation-idea. In that way place offers a dimension of resistance to all kinds of territorial ideologies.

LANGUAGE

For much the same reason that place is a highly contested site of sociocultural representations, the second element in the place–language–body triad is a highly politicized and discursified matter in postcolonial studies too. Language is quite rightly seen as a medium of authority and power—as an “instrument of physical colonization,” as Derek Gregory puts it in his book on space, power, and knowledge in geographical imaginations (Gregory, 1994, 172). Accordingly, the connection of signs, words, and concepts with things, spaces, and places is seen primarily as a historical, political, and ideological one. Henri Lefebvre succinctly summarizes this idea of language when he describes how the power of language consists precisely in its ability to detach itself from the phenomenal world. Language, he says,

has the power of abstraction—and thus the power to construct a new world different from nature’s initial one . . . . Between the signified and the sign there is a mesmerizing difference, a deceptive gap: the shift from one to the other seems simple enough, and it is easy for someone who has the words to feel that they possess the things the words refer to.

(Lefebvre, 1974, 135)

Language in this situation is in the service of an abstract idea of the world that organizes a shared human reality according to formal regimes of power and ownership, which, over time, become illusions of reality “of which one has forgotten they are illusions,” as Nietzsche famously has it (Nietzsche, 1873, 46–47).

With reference to Paul Carter’s study of language and the Australian landscape, Gregory sums up the predominant postcolonial approach to the relation between language and place, correspondingly, as a metaphysical conquest of space through an exertion of the kind of linguistic power Lefebvre describes:

Carter sketches a “spatial history” that seeks to show how the landscape of Australia had to be brought within the horizon of European intelligibility through the multiple practices of naming in order for colonization and dispossession to be set in contingent motion. The very act of naming was a way of bringing the landscape into textual presence, of bringing it within the compass of a European rationality that made it at once familiar to its colonizers and alien to its native inhabitants.

(Gregory, 1994, 171–72)

In Carter’s own words,

Possession of the country depended on demonstrating the efficacy of the English language there. It depended, to some extent, on civilizing the landscape, bringing it into orderly being. More fundamentally still, the landscape had to be taught to speak.

(Carter, 1987, 58–59)

Or, as he also puts it, “space itself was a text that had to be written before it could be interpreted” (Carter, 1987, 48).

With reference to The Empire Writes Back, Eric Prieto defines the central postcolonial engagement with place as based on a perception of place as produced discursively by language (Prieto, 2012, 140). As a result, language in relation to space mostly appears in postcolonial studies in terms of different contestations of linguistic construals of space through acts of ideational representation—imperial and anti-imperial, colonial and anticolonial, national and antinational. The postcolonial method, accordingly, is a post-structural one, of exposing regimes of power and hierarchies of meaning in language as a medium of representation. Spivak, in this way, describes a founding book in postcolonial studies, Edward Said’s Orientalism, as, essentially, a challenge to the metaphysics of colonial discourse or representational practices: “Said’s book was not a study of marginality, nor even marginalization. It was the study of the construction of an object, for investigation and control” (Spivak, 1993, 62).

As much as postcolonial studies have excelled in exposing the power and centrality of language in acts of conquest and domination, the sole reading of place as a discursive construct or contestation may leave out a great deal of other possible questions about relations between language and place—including preconceptual sense-aesthetic language–place relations, which literary language in particular—as the language of an aesthetic form—may also be capable of producing. Nietzsche refers to the abstract language of power and possession that constructs illusions of reality as a language of “worn-out metaphors without sensory impact” (Nietzsche, 1873, 46–47, emphasis added). In this respect, a topo-poetic reading of place in literature will attempt to reinstate the sensory impact of words.

The relation between the English language and “non-English” landscapes and settings has long been a core thematic in postcolonial literature, addressed by numerous critics and writers (e.g., Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Raja Rao, Glissant, Walcott, Wilson Harris, Dennis Lee, Patrick White, and many more). In the Anglophone body of postcolonial works, writers notably struggle against the images of the world and the regimes of power and identity they have inherited with English as their medium of writing. In this connection they are particularly concerned with the development of literary representations of places, landscapes, and environments in the English language that may liberate people from the forces of displacement passed on to them by imperial and colonial place representations in the same language. Brathwaite famously addresses the problem of invoking the Caribbean experience of the hurricane in a language of “the falling snow.” “The hurricane . . . is our own experience,” he says, and as “the hurricane does not roar in pentameters,” the writer needs to work on the imperial language of English to get to an expression that “approximates the environmental experience” in the Caribbean (Brathwaite, 1984, 10). Equally famous are Chinua Achebe’s appeal to African writers to change English “to suit its new African surroundings” and “carry the weight” of their African experiences (Achebe, 1965, 349, see also Achebe 1973) and Raja Rao’s proposition of Anglophone Indian writer’s task in his foreword to Kanthapura: “One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own” (Rao, 1938, i). A topo-poetic reading is sensitive to these concerns and the endeavor to appropriate the English language to represent or call forth “non-English” landscapes or the phenomenality of “non-English” place worlds—a theme that invariably crops up in the literary analyses in the second part of this book. Yet, a topo-poetic reading will deal with the issue of the English language from within a distinctly sense-aesthetic perspective, which differs from the traditional discussion of language–place relations in postcolonial studies to the extent that these are concerned with the language–place relation (or language–culture relation) as a vehicle of establishing collective identities and sociocultural positioni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Theories
• Part II: Analyses
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index