Metaphors of Invention and Dissension
eBook - ePub

Metaphors of Invention and Dissension

Aesthetics and Politics in the Postcolonial Algerian Novel

Rajeshwari S. Vallury

Share book
  1. 282 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Metaphors of Invention and Dissension

Aesthetics and Politics in the Postcolonial Algerian Novel

Rajeshwari S. Vallury

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Metaphors of Invention and Dissension explores the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the postcolonial Algerian novel, examining six novels written by two Algerian authors of French expression, Tahar Djaout and Rachid Mimouni. Rajeshwari S. Vallury argues that postcolonial literature demonstrates a conscious, rational, and deliberate engagement with the question of democracy. The author shows how the metaphors of literature invent an arena or platform for the enactment of democratic dissension. Postcolonial texts stage contentious debates about the principles that can and must sustain a life of the common. The capacity of the poetic word to regenerate and recreate forms of thinking, being, saying, and doing lies at the heart of the political power of literature. In the case of Algeria, the dual forces of military rule and radical Islamism have not succeeded in stifling the revolutionary will of the people, which continues to find self-expression in the idea of the nation, the concept of universal human rights, the notion of civility, and the philosophical traditions of pluralism and toleration within Islam. This book argues that postcolonial literature attests to the dissonance of democracy by staging the nation as the space of a universal equality and civility.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Metaphors of Invention and Dissension an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Metaphors of Invention and Dissension by Rajeshwari S. Vallury in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Filosofía & Teoría crítica. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Year
2017
ISBN
9781786603180
Edition
1

Part I

THINKING POLITICS AND AESTHETICS

Chapter 1

Democracy, Citizenship, and Postcolonial Politics

With what terms may one define a politics of the postcolonial? Do the words “postcolonial politics” carry any currency today, or does it make more sense to address oneself to the question of politics in short? Rather than enter into a quarrel over the specific meanings and appropriateness of a critical vocabulary or terminology, I wish to begin with the simple thesis that postcoloniality, by which I mean a historical conjuncture that follows decolonization, but which also encompasses the material history of struggles against colonial domination, the emancipatory movements for national independence, as well as a critical engagement with the oppressive practices and socioeconomic inequalities that endure long after the demise of colonial regimes, marks the emergence of a world configuration that demands alternative practices of political justice and a renewed investment in the concepts of freedom, equality, sovereignty, citizenship, the universality of rights, and the construction of a life in common.1 The present chapter maps the conceptual coordinates of a politics of the postcolonial in the age of suspicion toward the legal and juridical constructs inherited from the colonial powers of the Western world, which continue to structure the organizational forms of political participation of much of the globe today. Its argument proceeds in three stages. First, I examine recent critical interventions into modes of political engagement available to the postcolonial subject. Second, I revisit the mistrust toward the normative legacy of Enlightenment ideals to underscore the manner in which such concepts may be reframed in the service of a renewed engagement with politics. The thought of Jacques Rancière and Étienne Balibar will play a crucial role in this undertaking. Finally, I extend their redeployments of the categories of classical political theory toward a reconfigured postcolonial politics. Throughout, I reaffirm the centrality of the principles of democracy and citizenship for a politics of the postcolonial, principles that have lost none of their relevance for political life today. My conclusion proposes a mode of interpretation for the politics of postcolonial literature, an analytical lens that will guide my understanding of the link between aesthetics and politics in the chapters that follow.

POSTCOLONIAL HISTORIES AND POLITICS

Published a decade and a half ago, David Scott’s Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality draws attention to the absence of sustained critical inquiry into the politics of the postcolonial at a time of new and emerging global conditions. The loss of Third World faith in the narratives of secular, progressive modernity embodied by the nation-state and in forms of representative democracy generates a new epistemological and practical “problem-space” for the postcolonial critic, wherein the urgent task at hand is to configure the political horizon that will succeed the age of liberationist, anticolonial, and nationalist struggles. The decline in the emancipatory power of the nation-state, the collapse in the collective movements of communism and socialism, and the accompanying rise of economic liberalism demand a form of critical thinking capable of resisting the normalizing structures of political modernity (14–15). Recognizing the importance of questions of community, citizenship, justice, and rights within the postcolonial problem-space, Scott nonetheless holds that the institutional structures and regulatory ideals of liberal democracy are inadequate to addressing the political and intellectual crisis of the postcolonial era, since the normative concepts of democracy (e.g., liberty, equality, freedom, procedural justice, equality before the law, representative government, consensus, and public opinion) derive from the Enlightenment project of reason and modernity bequeathed to the colonies by the colonial regimes of Europe. To the extent that institutional forms of liberal democracies exemplify modes of power and governmentality that condition the field of political possibility and action, they establish universal, secular reason, and rational morality (of the type embodied by Rawls and Habermas in contemporary times) as the sole, privileged forms of organizing political communities. Postcolonial politics must refuse the categorical imperative of democracy—the assumption that democracy constitutes the unique political principle that confers validity upon all varieties of political life (150–57). Scott affirms the play of subaltern difference, the ambiguity of “partial and contingent settlements” (20), and as yet undetermined forms of community against the logic of rational consensus that subtends the power configurations of modern, liberal democracy. The schematic parameters of the new postcolonial problem-space can no longer presuppose or prescribe the sovereign nation-state as the highest locus of political freedom and action (224). Scott attempts to theorize viable alternatives to the hegemonic structures of state power and domination that do not disappear with colonialism but continue to operate within the territorial boundaries of sovereign, independent nations while acting in concert with the unequal forces of global capital and transnational institutions. His analysis is noteworthy for the balance he seeks to strike between a Marxist materialism that locates political forms within a field of historically determined socioeconomic practices and a Kantian–Gramscian–Foucauldian critical autonomy which recognizes that the principle of determinate conditionality does not reduce political discourse and participation to an ideological reflection of determining conditions (140).
Scott’s arguments parallel those of the Indian postcolonial critic, Dipesh Chakrabarty, whose book Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000), published only a year after Scott’s Refashioning Futures, addresses itself to the comparable task of critiquing the global heritage of Enlightenment modernity along with the universal, secular conception of the human upon which it is founded. The project of provincializing Europe or, more precisely, the political modernity that underlies any engagement with social justice in postcolonial nations such as India, goes hand in hand with a deconstruction of the historicist logic that drives such a vision: the idea that the colonies or nations of the Third World may not yet be ready for state sovereignty, self-determination, or popular democracy. For Chakrabarty, the historicism that denies the readiness of a people or a citizenry for self-determination operates not only in colonial regimes but also in decolonized and postcolonial nations. With specific reference to India, which inherits all of the politico-economic concepts and juridico-legal structures of modernity (democracy, rights, citizenship, equality before the law, civil society, the public sphere, social justice, rationality, capitalism, and the welfare state), politics reveals the tensions between a pedagogical narrative of progressive education into citizenship and a performative mode of political participation whereby the subaltern enacts citizenship in the time of the “here and now” as opposed to the deferred future of the “not yet.” Political modernity (an ideational shorthand for politics in Chakrabarty’s analytical schema; an equivalence replicated with Scott, and as we will see later, in Partha Chatterjee), poses the problem of how to think about historicity and political agency within the coevalness of a present in which the subaltern performs citizenship (11). Claims and arguments based on communities of tradition, kinship, caste, and religion do not signify premodern archaism or prepolitical irrationality. Rather, they reveal the heterogeneity of life experiences and worlds that sit at odds with the modern conception of historical time as empty, homogenous, and secular. Political modernity narrativizes social justice as a tale that unfolds within the singular, teleological movement of historicist time. But politics in India is situated within a spatiotemporality that is out of joint, equally conditioned by traditions that are copresent to the secular time of the modern and the historical. Politics occurs within the space of a confrontation between the logic of secularity and the logic of tradition.
With the simple thesis that postcolonial politics consist in the demonstration of the artifice of history, Chakrabarty knots politics, history, culture, and the condition of postcoloniality together in complex fashion. In the face of a pedagogical narrative that circumscribes the history of India within the universal history of Enlightenment through the birth of the nation-state and the developmental extension of citizenship secured by individual rights emerge contestatory narratives of self and community that reject the abstract figures of the citizen and the subject of rights, the split between a public and a private self, and the divide between the state and the civil sphere. Such stories of contestation express an antihistorical consciousness and memory that undermine the cohesive sociality of the historicist political subject. Subaltern political subjectivities perform a critically carnivalesque inversion of the “fable of the Indian constitution” and the “bourgeois legal fiction of citizenship” as “a farce” (34–35). As historical subjects, they express the ambivalent tension between the pedagogical narrative of the nation-state (posited as the universal, highest form of the political community), the citizen, and the public self—a tension they enact through the performative difference of tradition and memory. In short, for Chakraborty, political subjectivity takes the form of a paradoxical inscription within the duality of the pedagogical and performative modes of the narrative of the nation-state. The critical task of provincializing Europe lies in exposing the undemocratic foundations of modern democracy by revealing the heterotemporal forms of solidarity and communal affiliation that are violently repressed by the homogenizing narratives of citizenship. To provincialize Europe means to construct collectivities opposed to state institutions, “defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates” (43).
As chapter 3 of this book makes clear, my analytical framework is faithful to Chakarbarty’s location (pace Homi Bhabha) of the postcolonial politico-historical subject within the intersectional, but dueling zones of pedagogical and performative spatiotemporalities of nation. Like Bhabha (and Chatterjee, as we will see later), Chakrabarty provides a crucial corrective to Benedict Anderson’s notion of the empty, homogenous, and secular space–time of nation.2 Each critic allows us to conceptualize the inscription of difference and heterogeneity within the normative uniformity of the nation-state. While Chakrabarty is careful to note the role played by discourses of citizenship rights and equality in the performance of subaltern subjectivities, his (Marxist) suspicion of the bourgeois origin of such political principles as well as the institutional forms of the state that enshrine or put them into practice risks reducing struggles for social justice and equality to the antihistorical performance of memory, and politics to the performance of a cultural difference (defined as an affiliation by faith, religion, ethnicity, community, or tradition). For my part, I suggest that such acts can only be construed as political when they manage to juxtapose and conjoin disparate worlds on a single plane of the common, such that the particularity of a difference manifests the power to extend the validity of a principle established as a universal. While I have argued elsewhere against an overly rigid divide between culture and politics,3 I also believe that politics (defined as an engagement with the democratic right to freedom, equality, and justice) can be conflated neither with culture nor with a form of history nor with a mode of historical consciousness. Political rights and principles bear meaning and do so only to the extent that they are posited as universal, absolute, and valid for every human being, or none at all. To reprise Chakrabarty’s insight into the paradoxical figure of the subaltern who already enacts citizenship in the here and the now, there is no need to split the scene of politics between a true, deep, realm, where political subjectivities emerge in actuality against the false or deceptively historicist sphere of the state, its institutions, and ideological constructs. The concepts of democracy, equality, citizenship, rights, and civil liberties represent more than the ideological productions of a state apparatus or the dark shadows of Enlightenment reason and rationality. As I submit later (pace Rancière and Balibar), it is more productive to investigate postcolonial politics as a meeting between two forms of reason or rationality, one of which is democratic, and the other not. Political acts deploy themselves in the mode of a performance, but not necessarily in the pejorative sense of the unreal or the imaginary held to characterize the fictional genres or narrative modes of tragedy, farce, and fable or the rhetorical device of irony (Provincializing Europe 43). To be fair, Chakrabarty proposes a nuanced formulation of the relationship between the universal and the particular when he notes that the “universal … can only exist as a placeholder, its place always usurped by a historical particular seeking to present itself as the universal.”4 My divergence stems from the Platonic terms that cast the dialectic between the universal and the particular as a power play between a shadowy idea and the false claimant to the deceptive truth of the idea: “[T]he universal turns out to be an empty placeholder whose unstable outlines barely become visible only when a proxy, a particular, usurps the position in a gesture of pretension and domination” (“Universalism and Belonging” in Cosmopolitanism 106). Universals can demonstrate their political efficaciousness by generating claims that resort to the modest reason and logic of equality, rather than the posture of force or domination.
A crucial, if discreet, interlocutory presence in the works of both Scott and Chakrabarty is Partha Chatterjee, whose theoretical reflections on colonial and postcolonial politics are firmly rooted at the productive disciplinary intersections of history and political science. Chatterjee aims to rewrite the heterogeneous autonomy of subaltern subjectivities, histories, agencies, and communities out of the colonizing imaginary of the colonial and postcolonial state in India. His critique attempts to negotiate the dialectical distance between, on the one hand, the political community sanctioned by state power and, on the other, the sovereign inscriptions of communal life that take place at the margins of that sphere. Neither anticolonial nor postcolonial politics coincide with the institutional divide established between the domains of the public and the private.5
Important in this regard is the distinction he draws between the normative zone of liberal, civil society engendered by the postcolonial state (based on the regulatory ideals of individual rights, rationality, deliberation, electoral consensus, and state-controlled violence) and the zone of political society which represents the “the density of arguments within a lived community.”6 As a field that mediates the constitutive division set up between the state and the civil sphere in modern, liberal democracies, political society counters the statist narrative of progressive modernity with the messy democracy that resists the normalizing forces of governmentality. It delineates a democratic domain, a “politics of the governed” that is irreducible to the constitutional limits of the postcolonial state as well as the regulatory order of a civil society based upon the universal rationalism of individual rights. In India, democratic politics do not occur within the ordered rule of the civil sphere where citizens address their claims to the state on the basis of mutually conferred, legally enforceable rights. Demands are not framed as the civil rights and liberties of citizens in relation to a state in whose sovereignty they participate. Rather, claims are articulated within the very language of governmentality that classifies large population groups according to empirically defined characteristics. Democratic politics take the form of populist negotiations of welfare state governmentality. Democratic unreason in India transforms the normalizing categories and nomenclatures of the state into exceptional moral and ethical communities. It counters forms of normative citizenship dictated by the principle of an empty, homogenous equality by converting the norm of a population group into an ethical exception, rather than by appealing to the discourse of universal human rights. Such rights (which for Chatterjee exemplify the dubious legacy...

Table of contents