Homelandings

Postcolonial Diasporas and Transatlantic Belonging

Rahul K. Gairola

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783489749
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Homelandings is a critical exploration of the ways that postcolonial diasporas challenge exclusive formulations of ‘home’ and ‘homeland’ based on racist and heteronormative assumptions. It critically engages with Foucault’s notions of “biopolitics" and "governmentality" as a conjoined technology of governance in the era of neoliberal capitalism ushered into the global economy from the late 1970s. Drawing on texts produced by diasporic people in the UK and USA whose work resists and re-appropriates exclusive home sites produced by trends of Anglo-American neoliberalism, it exposes entrenched discourses of exclusion rooted in race, class, and sexuality. In doing so, it offers an urgent intervention for students and scholars of cultural studies, postcolonial studies, Anglophone literature, comparative literature, Race and Ethnicity studies, and Queer studies.

Chapter 1

Home, Queer Home

Postcolonial Belonging in the Transatlantic Anglosphere

Perhaps the biggest irony of the afterlife of Empire is how profoundly the Atlantic Ocean, located so many miles from the geographical sites of most Victorian-era colonies, figures into panoramically understanding its parent discourses. It has been recognized as, among other things, the site of the Middle Passage for enslaved Africans and a major corridor for Asian immigration following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, thus serving as a bridge between old and new lives of diasporas of colour. A number of scholars have penned diverse, pioneering studies that render a startling panorama of colonialism’s impact around the globe, in general, and its continuing impact on people of colour, in particular. Key studies range from Ian Baucom’s deft examination of the Atlantic Ocean as a contact zone for racialized capital and murder in the context of the 1781 Zong incident, to Elizabeth Povinelli’s stunning critique of late liberalism’s administration of social difference.1 In introducing his deeply influential concept of the black Atlantic in the context of African American music, Paul Gilroy writes, “What was initially felt to be a curse – the curse of homelessness or the curse of enforced exile – gets repossessed. It becomes affirmed and is reconstructed as the basis of a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world become more likely. It should be obvious that this unusual perspective has been forged out of the experiences of racial subordination. I want to suggest that it also represents a response to the successive displacements, migrations, and journeys (forced and otherwise) which have come to constitute these black cultures’ special conditions of existence.”2

Gilroy’s landmark examination of the Atlantic Ocean as a contact zone that makes possible, through “homelessness” and the misery wrought by dominant ideologies of “racial subordination,” cultural innovations of resistance finds good company in this study despite some of its differences. For the goal of Homelandings: Postcolonical Diasporos and Transatlantic Belonging is to trace the transnational strategies through which diasporic agents of colour have challenged exclusive versions of “home,” here understood in the most general sense, rooted in racist, classist, and heteronormative regulations of populations. In joining current dialogues in postcolonial, queer, and comparative U.S. studies, I examine intersecting theoretical frameworks to locate ruptures, resistance, and instances of reappropriation at critical sites where race, class, gender, and sexuality intersect. The geographical contexts in which I examine exclusive homes critically unpack the Anglocentric link between the most dominant Western powers on earth: the United States and the United Kingdom. My historical point of departure is the late 1970s and onwards, although it certainly anticipates the 2016 departure of the UK from the European Union, colloquially called Brexit. As I demonstrate throughout this book, this period in particular was significant in shaping the notion of “home” for immigrants and other diasporas of colour in what appears, from the reflective wisdom of time and space from the past, to be a highly strategic agenda that spanned, unlike the enterprise of slavery in the Americas, across the Atlantic Ocean. Diasporas of colour in the United States and United Kingdom are today thus left saddled with the historical traces of slavery, colonialism, and institutional oppression while police brutality and open bigotry of many forms clash against public grassroots movements to protect black and brown lives. Because state policies so profoundly shape the material experience of home, “diasporic home-making affects places of origin in multiple, often unexpected ways” (Sigona et al. 2015; xx).

Our historical point of departure for this study is the housing market in the United States in the post-Bandung Conference era, in the ensuing wake of the U.S. Civil Rights movement.3 Segregation practices in home buying were conversely compounded during World War II, and continued well after Congress passed the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 to ostensibly track and quell discriminatory home lending practices in the United States.4 Indeed, anti-miscegenation laws, post-segregation resentment, domestic strife, etc., of the time evince that families and peoples with supposed equal access to housing were identified and policed through vast technologies of surveillance and population control. In the case of housing during this period, the material comforts of inclusive living in nation were linked to tangible waves of resentment and bigotry toward diasporas of colour. These waves could be felt across the Atlantic, where a similar trend was occurring. Margaret Thatcher became the new leader of the Conservative Party, which instituted the British Housing Act of 1980 (five years after the passing of the Home Mortgage Act in the United States) that effectively sold off council housing, thus dramatically increasing homelessness.5 When Ronald Reagan swept into the White House in 1980, a budding diplomatic relationship that looked more like a cross-ocean business transaction quickly bloomed between him and British prime minister Thatcher.

Though “Thatcherism and Reagonomics were political cousins rather than identical twins,”6 the duo shared a “special relationship” that was staged on national and international registers, and mutually supported tax cuts, private enterprise, and bootstrap conceptions of economic individualism. In both countries, conservative politics mired in anti-immigrant and racist ideologies profoundly tainted popular opinion and the quality of life of certain demographics through “governmental” regulations. In using the term “governmental,” I refer to Foucault’s conceptualization of an “art of government” which summarily involves the “introduction of economy into political practice.”7 Foucault details, “The general questioning of government and self-government, of guidance and self-guidance, accompanies, at the end of feudalism, the birth of new forms of economic and social relations and new political structurations.”8 For Foucault, the end of the sixteenth century into the mid-seventeenth century marked a period where the “art of government” became linked to “the emergence of the ‘reason of the state.’”9

This transformation is saliently characterized by a shift from governance that consists of traditional virtues (wisdom, justice, respect for divine laws and human customs) to governance whose principles and applicative domain are determined by the state.10 This latter “reason of the state” takes shape through “a diplomatico-military technology that consists in ensuring and developing the forces of a state through a system of alliances, and the organizing of an armed apparatus.”11 This process importantly also enfolds policy, or “the set of means necessary to make the forces of the state increase from within.”12 Arnold I. Davidson further elucidates, “As for the analysis of forms of ‘governmentality,’ a crucial concept for Foucault’s work beginning around 1977, this analysis responded to a ‘double objective.’ On the one hand, Foucault wanted to criticize current conceptions of power that, in one way or another, perceived power as a unitary system. … On the other hand, Foucault wanted to analyze power as a domain of strategic relations between individuals and groups, relations whose strategies were to govern the conduct of these individuals.”13 The notion of governmentality here offers a path upon which we can critically meditate on multiple power relations between governments and their populations, and the links between those power relations, and the ruptures in law and order that they often produce with respect to home!

In the historical context of neoliberal capitalism, governmentality as such particularly targeted not only material living conditions, but the very lifestyles and ideas that structured Western domestic life and how to live it. Indeed, the United Kingdom’s engagement in liberating The Falklands, considered a “Crown Colony,” from Argentina and the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada clearly suggest that both nations aggressively imposed their imperialist interests onto other territories that were publicly argued to warrant military intervention. As such, nation understood as home is linked to the production of place as a familiar site within the psychological landscape of memory where the familiar and unfamiliar are constantly in friction. In Ato Quayson’s words, “For the diasporic, this place is always in some form of dialectical relation to that place and to an elsewhere, the dialectical relation may in certain instances produce breaches in the commonplace, an unheimlich of place, as it were. The unheimlich or ‘unhomeliness’ of place is undergirded by the fraught dynamic of the links between ideas of homeland and host nation [original emphasis]” (2013; 148). Even old memories can feel alien while forging new ones in a new land.

This book attends to Anglo-American powers dealing with situated notions of “home” cultivated from colonial mentalities surfacing in a capitalist ethos that was and still is cast as analogous to freedom and democracy in the United States and United Kingdom. I should here make clear that I do not intend to conflate postcolonial and transnational studies, nor do I wish to claim that conceptions of home are exactly the same in the United States and the United Kingdom, or form the heyday of colonialism to the era of neoliberal capitalism. Rather, I want to track the ways in which postcolonial studies and transnational American studies inform one another through the lens of “home” in two nations divided by the Atlantic Ocean that share divergent strategies of neoliberalism shaped by the historical account of wealth accumulation of wealth, social disenfranchisement, and bigotry driven by cultural imperialism. As Amy Kaplan astutely observes:

To understand the multiple ways in which empire becomes a way of life means to focus on those areas of culture traditionally ignored as long as imperialism was treated as a manner of foreign policy conducted by diplomatic elites or as a matter of economic necessity driven by market forces. Not only about foreign diplomacy or international relations, imperialism is also about consolidating domestic cultures and negotiating intranational relations. To foreground cultures is not only to understand how they abet the subjugation of others or foster their resistance, but also to ask how international relations reciprocally shape a dominant imperial culture at home, and how imperial relations are enacted and contested within the nation.14

Kaplan’s contention puts into sharp focus the domestic stakes that surface “at home” in and through imperial ventures that take place outside of the nation-state. In accordance with this, Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt assert that “border studies’ critique of the dominance of traditional immigration/assimilation narratives within U.S. ethnic studies would be impossible to contemplate without the influence of postcolonial theory, though its sources of inspiration are by no means solely coming from outside the U.S.”15 These premises point to a critical need for additional studies which link traditional modes of Western imperialism to the emergence and overwhelming domination of global neoliberalism over other forms of financial life. This study accordingly aims to critically examine similarities and differences between these regimes and the “homes” they produce in literary and visual texts.

Before expounding on my methodology and its contribution to current scholarship, I want to orient this project to key studies of “home” that have informed it. “Home” is a concept that has greatly influenced identity formations, and is a key concept i...