Traversing Transnationalism: The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies

TextxeT

Studies in Comparative Literature 62 Series Editors C.C. Barfoot and Theo D’haen

Traversing Transnationalism The Horizons of Literary and Cultural Studies

Edited by

Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011

Cover Image: “Night scene, buildings near the docks,” Beira. (2009). By Juan Orrantia. Cover design: Pier Post The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO 9706: 1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence’. ISBN: 978-90-420-3307-8 E-Book ISBN: 978-90-420-3308-5 © Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2011 Printed in The Netherlands

CONTENTS

Pier Paolo Frassinelli, Ronit Frenkel and David Watson Traversing Transnationalism

1

I: NATIONAL BORDERS/TRANSNATIONAL SUBJECTS Pamila Gupta Friction and Fragments: Local Cosmopolitanism in Postcolonial Mozambique

15

Amanda Lagerkvist Velvet and Violence: Performing the Mediatized Memory of Shanghai’s Futurity

33

Bianca Kai Isaki Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History: Asian Americans in a Decolonizing Hawai‘I

57

Sang Hea Kil Immigration and “Operations”: The Militarization (and Medicalization) of the US-Mexico Border

75

II: TRANSNATIONAL LITERARY ROUTES Shane Graham “I had forgotten a continent”: Cosmopolitan Memory in Derek Walcott’s Omeros

95

Ronit Frenkel Local Transnationalisms: Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret and South Africa in the Global Imaginary

119

Tomoko Kuribayashi Nomadic Narratives: Tawada Yoko’s Japanese-German Fiction

137

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo Primitive Accumulation: Unwriting Diaspora in Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet

155

III: MIGRATIONS OF THEORY Nicholas Brown The Identity of Identity and Difference: Modernism and African Literature

179

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson World Literature: A Receding Horizon

191

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick The Adventures of a Technique: Dodecaphonism Travels to Brazil

209

Ashleigh Harris What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

227

Ulrike Kistner Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis: Aesthetic Judgment as Model for Political Judgment?

251

Notes on Contributors

269

Index

273

TRAVERSING TRANSNATIONALISM

PIER PAOLO FRASSINELLI, RONIT FRENKEL, AND DAVID WATSON

In recent years, transnationalism has reshaped debates across the humanities and social sciences by providing a new theoretical lingua franca for describing extensive multi-regional exchanges and connections. Yet, as with similarly encompassing and unavoidably murky concepts, what transnationalism stands for exactly remains open to debate. While the prefix is indicative of an effort to represent cultural movements, along with economic and political processes, which strive towards a borderless, postnational world, the noun also reminds us of the polarizations that this project mobilizes. As this collection of essays helps to illustrate, the ambiguities surrounding the concept of transnationalism, and the space it provides for theoretical interventions cutting across the historically constructed boundaries of the nation, make it a productive but slippery construct difficult to situate in relation to both national and other postnational formations. Transnationalism signals a movement towards the crossing and breaking open of national boundaries; while also it can be thought of as a way of naming the tensions between formations such as globalization and the nation-state, which, in the face of the continued interrogation of national boundaries, has proven to be a tenacious construct. The essays in this book investigate how transnational discourses have been articulated in specific historical, geographical, and cultural contexts, drawing attention to the complex, plural character of transnational studies scholarship, and to its potential to offer diverse paradigms for thinking planetary and regional connectivity. As the interventions of our contributors indicate, these connections are sometimes subnationally or nationally situated, sometimes not. Often they emanate from Europe or the United States, but from time to time they bypass the West and illustrate the possibility of allegiances between what have been thought of as peripheral, non-western cultural

2

Traversing Transnationalism

formations. At times they are determined by capitalist globalization, at other times they offer a critique and prefigure alternatives to this dominating force. Heuristically, the contradictions and possibilities surrounding the term “transnationalism” point to a set of questions related to whether recent theories of transnationalism are a manifestation of, or present an alternative to what Fredric Jameson describes as the “standardization projected by capitalist globalization in this third or last stage of the system”.1 Furthermore, does the adoption of the language of transnationalism promote multiple attachments to more than one nation or community, or does it lead to detachment from the local? Is transnationalism, as suggested by critiques of its present status as “bearer of the zeitgeist”,2 a by-product of a celebratory cosmopolitanism championing elite mobility, or does it more broadly point to “the massive economic and political diaspora of the modern world”?3 What is the relationship between the ongoing erosion of the boundaries and territories of knowledge marked by the nation-state, and the function still played by the state as a political and military apparatus? These are some of the issues that this collection addresses. Most significantly for our purpose, transnationalism has come to represent an opening up of various transcultural and interdisciplinary spaces, reflecting a growing unease with nationalizing narratives, and the transfer of spatial and temporal properties onto different geographical coordinates. Historically, Randolph Bourne first used the term in his 1916 essay “Trans-National America”, where he argued that the US should accommodate immigrants into a cosmopolitan culture.4 The concept resurfaced in mid-twentieth century International Relations scholarship, and from there it traveled into Migration Studies, before spreading across the humanities and social sciences. At the same time, the adjective transnational comes to us as a by-product of more recent processes of economic globalization. This history is centered on the emergence and consolidation of transnational corporations (TNCs): since the 1970s, TNCs have 1 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essays on the Ontology of the Present, London, 2002, 12-13. 2 R. Radhakrishnan, “Ethnic Studies in the Age of Transnationalism”, PMLA, CXXII/3 (May 2007), 809. 3 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York, 1994, 8. 4 Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America”, Atlantic Monthly, CXVIII (July 1916), 86-97.

Traversing Transnationalism

3

increasingly bypassed national borders not only through commodity exports and investments, but also by dislocating the production of goods to areas offering cheap labor markets. It follows that today there exists an array of conflicting descriptions of transnationalism, including, but needless to say not limited to, “transnationalism as social morphology, as a type of consciousness, as a mode of cultural reproduction, as an avenue of capital, as a site of political engagement, and as a reconstruction of ‘place’ or ‘locality’”.5 In literary and cultural studies, in particular, the recent dramatic expansion of this field has been stimulated by critiques of the area studies model still prominent in these disciplinary areas, developments in postcolonial criticism, and renewed interest in comparative literature and translation studies. Yet, if these developments have provided transnational studies with new theoretical motivations, the tenacious grasp of nationalism and national boundaries throughout the world, of which the US “war on terror” is but an example, shows that it would be overhasty to dismiss the nation-state and the cultural identities and local attachments it continues to produce in most parts of the world. Were we to offer one word to serve as an entry-point into our discussion of transnationalism, we would suggest “traverse”. “Traverse”, in common usage, means to cross over or move through a particular space or obstacle; originally it also meant to discuss, dispute and oppose. The latter meaning is now obsolete, but it would serve us well to keep it in mind while considering the implications of what we have called “traversing transnationalism”. Running together, these two meanings of “traversing” translate into paying attention to how transnationalism’s focus on circulations and crossings among different spaces, different scales – subnational, national, outernational, and global – and different temporalities, including pre- and postnational, does not occur for its own sake, but enables the critical interrogation of these spatio-temporal coordinates, for which the transnational serves as a substitute. Therefore traversing transnationalism allows for models of transnational relationships, whether operating on a planetary or more modest scale, to appear as figures of thought and contestation. Yet, there is no doubt that the key spatial configuration routinely displaced by transnational narratives is that of the nation-state as a 5

Steven Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, XXII/2 (March 1999), 1.

4

Traversing Transnationalism

self-sufficient unit of analysis. A paradigmatic instance of such a substitution took place in Janice Radway’s presidential address to the American Studies Association in 1998, during which she decoupled the field of American studies from the territorial space of the nationstate, insisting that scholars in the field focus on the “intricate interdependencies” between the “near and far, the local and the distant”, so as to prevent the field from promoting a version of American exceptionalism that insists upon a “distinctive set of properties and themes in all things American”.6 In short, from this perspective the nation is replaced by the transnational as the privileged paradigm from which to analyze the disciplinary field of American studies. Such interventions have serious implications for area-studies based scholarship. For example, how do these insights affect our reading of transnational movements like pan-Africanism? In fact, a similar supplementation of the nation-state as a discrete unit of analysis informs such broader critical projects as Paul Gilroy’s mapping of the Black Atlantic as the terrain for the elaboration and diffusion of a counterculture to western modernity,7 and, more recently, scholarship on South-South contact zones like the world of the Indian Ocean.8 These zones are alternative models to nationalizing narratives wherein it becomes possible to reconfigure imperial and postcolonial cultures as the products of international exchange. This same drive to challenge the naturalness of national narratives as selfcontained sites of meaning has led to extensive acts of relocation in the humanities. Indeed, this movement has been so pervasive that any attempt to list key figures and moments could only be partial: many different versions of such a projected list come readily to mind, but these would do little but confirm the contested status of the nationstate paradigm in contemporary literary and cultural studies. Not that (as we have already said) the nation-state is going away anytime soon. Ulf Hannerz accordingly notes that, ironically, transnationalism has the tendency “to draw attention to what it negates

6

Janice Radway, “What’s in a Name? Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, November 20, 1998”, American Quarterly, LI (March 1999), 10, 15, 4. 7 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, London, 1993. 8 Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives”, Social Dynamics, XXXIII/2 (December 2007), 3-32.

Traversing Transnationalism

5

– that is, to the continued significance of the national”.9 It might indeed very well be that it is the friction between real life in what Gilroy calls the “age of ‘extraordinary rendition’” and the more convivial and democratic possibilities he speaks of,10 as well as the continued globalization of the economy, media and military power, and the opening up of transnational possibilities, which drive and energize transnational studies. But in spite of the irreducible persistence of the national, much effort has gone into representing a variety of cultural, economic, social and political “linkages that cross borders and span the globe”.11 These, again, are numerous. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Paul Gilroy have both spoken of the “planet” as an analytical category. In Spivak’s usage, it refers to a kind of pre-capitalist territorial commons respectful of alterity,12 while Gilroy uses it as a ground for imagining a mode of conviviality operating across national and racial lines.13 Kwame Anthony Appiah, in turn, synchronizes the local and the universal – “between being part of the place you were and part of a broader human morality”14 – into a cosmopolitan sense of community that resembles Martha Nussbaum’s invocation of a cosmopolitan humanity.15 This synchronicity assumes a radically different configuration in Slavoj Žižek’s statement that “today’s (late capitalist global market) social reality itself is dominated by what Marx referred to as the power of ‘real abstraction’: the circulation of Capital is the force of radical ‘deterritorialization’ (to use Deleuze’s term) which, in its very functioning, actively ignores specific conditions and cannot be rooted in them”.16 For Žižek, what we call transnationalism is grounded in a mode of deterritorialization most commonly referred to as globalization: a deterritorializing movement that for Michael Hardt 9

Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Cultures, Peoples, Places, London and New York, 1996, 6. 10 Paul Gilroy, “Multiculture in Times of War: An Inaugural Lecture Given at the London School of Economics”, Critical Quarterly, XLVIII/4 (December 2006), 27. 11 Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, 1. 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, 2003. 13 Paul Gilroy, After Empire, London and New York, 2004. 14 Kwane Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York, 2006, xviii. 15 Martha C. Nussbaum, "Equity and Mercy", Philosophy and Public Affairs, XXII/2 (Spring 1993), 83-125. 16 Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion, London, 2001, 2 (emphasis in original).

6

Traversing Transnationalism

and Antonio Negri corresponds to that new form of decentered supranational sovereignty they have named “Empire”.17 However we define these supplements to the nation-state, one thing is clear: the interrogation of national narratives characteristic of transnational studies entails the putting forth of a different set of coordinates whereby to understand global configurations. Wai Chee Dimock’s work on American literature is exemplary of this trajectory. Cracking open a range of critical discourses as to whether knowledge can be contained within the nation’s spatio-temporal borders, she writes: Rather than being a discrete entity, it [American literature] is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures. These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment – connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world. Active on both ends, they thread American texts into topical events of other cultures, while also threading the long duration of those cultures into the short chronology of the United States …. I would like to propose a new term – “deep time” – to capture this phenomenon.18

Using the notion of “deep time” – a concept sourced in Braudel’s longue durée and theories of relativity – as a way of denationalizing space and time, Dimock deterritorializes and repositions American literature as a molecular trace in the long duration of the planet’s history. Deep time becomes the ground and framework for the literature of the planet, forcing an adjustment in the scales we use in thinking about literature, but also the scales operative in the ways we imagine the planet. Conversely, in an equally influential argument, Bruce Robbins calls for a cosmopolitics that is geographically, often nationally, situated, while rejecting an aesthetic cosmopolitanism rooted in alienation and rarified experiences.19 In a related but distinct context, Ania Loomba argues, in her discussion of Benedict Anderson, that the modern nation-state is based on a European, colonial construct, and therefore that anti-colonial nationalism “is itself made 17

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge: MA, 2000. Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Princeton: NJ, 2006, 3. 19 Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, New York, 1999, 24. 18

Traversing Transnationalism

7

possible and shaped by European political and intellectual history”.20 The irony here is that the colonial state becomes the ground of national liberation, yet once the postcolonial state is constituted its autonomy is eroded by transnational forces that originate from the same historical trajectory that enabled its constitution. What is clear from these arguments, and the tensions between them, is that transnational narratives enable reflection upon the nature of a world in which national boundaries are no longer assumed as natural. The transnational names a point at which we decide between and negotiate different ways of being within the world, with the national and transnational, and the relation between them, being only the first set of questions that we confront. Indeed, one could argue, as Imre Szeman does, that “the transnational acts as an incitement for new kinds of theoretical maneuvers that might help to produce human communities and solidarities no longer in thrall to global capitalism and which cut across the always-artificial boundaries of national belonging”.21 Transposed into a somewhat different register, treating transnational networks as figures of and for contestation enables what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as the “creation of the world”: this “creation” means that the form given to the globe by globalization and its attendant discourses can be opposed by acts of world-forming in which the representation of the world is treated as a site of a “struggle for a world”,22 from which different forms of community, irreducible to the nation-state, might emerge. Here, with questions about community, is an opportune moment to turn to the first section of this volume: “National Borders/ Transnational Subjects”. In the words of Susan Stanford Friedman, many scholars working on issues related to migrancy and travel have recently endorsed “transnational models emphasizing the global spaces of ongoing travel and transcontinental connection”.23 Such a turn is exemplified by the two opening chapters of this section, the 20

Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, London and New York, 1998, 189. Imre Szeman, “Cultural Studies and the Transnational”, in New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, eds Gary Hall and Claire Birchall, Edinburgh, 2006, 201. 22 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: NY, 2007, 54. 23 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Migrations, Diasporas, and Borders”, in Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures, ed. David Nicholls, New York, 2006, 906. 21

8

Traversing Transnationalism

first of which explores the cosmopolitan space inhabited by the Goan community of Maputo, Mozambique. In her case study, Pamila Gupta argues that a proper understanding of the present and future of postcolonial communities requires an excavation of the transnational histories that shape their “specific locations and experiences” and, with reference to Mozambican Goans, recontextualize the seemingly remote corner of the world they inhabit within a fully modern social and cultural transnational network. From this theoretically informed ethnographic study, we then move to Amanda Lagerkvist’s analysis of international tourists as “the mobile agents of transnationalism, the ‘globalizers’ on route” in the hyper-modern landscape of contemporary Shanghai. This landscape is read by Lagerkvist as mining its past, the “Golden Age” of the pre-Communist 1920s and 30s, to imagine its future: Lagerkvist describes Shanghai’s “memories of futures lost” as supported by a desire to make sense of and construct a narrative for its fast paced, but fragile, movement into a transnational future. Finally, in the last two essays of the section, we travel to sites of conflict located at the borders of the US empire: the annexed territory of Hawaii and the US-Mexican border. Both Bianca Isaki’s and Sang Hea Kil’s articles examine the mechanisms of empire from transnational perspectives that reveal, simultaneously, the instability and reinforcement of national borders. Isaki offers an account of the multiple, often contradictory forms of political identification mobilized by Asian settlers in relation to Hawaiian decolonization; while Kil, through her analysis of the public rhetoric surrounding the militarization of the US-Mexican border, highlights how the reassertion of national boundaries in the United States is entangled with racial anxieties that permeate US society. Interestingly, all four essays engage with transnational communities existing within or connected to states – China, India, and the United States – that, as Seyla Benhabib remarks, have embarked on a unilateral reassertion of their sovereignty through “increased militarization, disregard for international law and human rights, regressive and hostile relations with neighbors, and criminalization of migration”.24 These essays, by looking at different sides and effects of such forms of state, complicate traditional models of national sovereignty, and illustrate 24

Seyla Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, Oxford, 2008, 28.

Traversing Transnationalism

9

how the national narratives that they engender are haunted by fears and desires unleashed by the history of decolonization and contemporary social transformations and transnational migrations. If transnational configurations force us to reconsider the relation between various communities and the nation-state, they also affect issues pertaining to literary and cultural studies. How, for example, do we read literary texts when the nation-state looses its centrality as an interpretative framework? How has our understanding of literature been transformed by transnationalism? The transnational formations discussed in our second section, “Transnational Literary Routes”, are narratives of migration, connectivity, displacement and travel in all of their various forms. These narratives explore such transnational spaces as a Caribbean world located at the crossroads of the American hemisphere, Africa, Europe and Asia (Graham), and link sites and times such as late-apartheid South Africa, post-9/11 London and the Indian Ocean world (Frenkel), Japan and Germany (Kuribayashi), and the US and India (Myambo). Shane Graham’s essay argues that Derek Walcott’s poetry exceeds the circumferences of the poet’s own travels and allegiances, and becomes the site for the emergence not so much of Salman Rushdie’s “imaginary homelands” as of an imaginary globe consisting of, as Dimock puts it, the “input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment” that thread the nation-state “into the topical events of other cultures”.25 Ronit Frenkel reads Ishtiyaq Shukri’s recent novel, The Silent Minaret, as a transnational cultural history that creates a temporal and spatial overlay between the local and the transnational. She traces the emergence of a transnational humanism or cosmopolitanism that is born in a local revolt in South Africa. In the next essay, Tomoko Kuribayashi’s examination of Yoko Tawada’s work, we find a nomadic subject negotiating not only various allegiances to gendered, racial, and ethnic formations, but also, and perhaps foremost, notions of belonging and homelessness. These narratives are intimately tied to geopolitical concerns, as Melissa Tandiwe Myambo highlights in her reading of the links between the reproductive mechanisms of capitalist globalization and the diasporic subjectivities presented in Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories.

25

See footnote 18 above.

10

Traversing Transnationalism

The literary works discussed in this section are perhaps best understood in terms of Rebecca Walkowitz’s notion of “comparison literature”: works of literature that embody processes of global translation and circulation within their textual fabric, thereby showing how the ontology of a text is embedded in material processes of circulation and transnational contextualization.26 These narratives cannot be folded back easily into the canons of the nation-state. They demand a different set of coordinates by which to be interpreted. But if that is the case, we should not forget that cultural objects not only offer accounts of transnational mobility and connections, but also are themselves mobile and enter into relationship with cultural texts from other parts of the globe. David Damrosch has defined the field of world literature as consisting of those works “actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture”.27 Yet, as Nicholas Brown points out in the essay that opens our last section, “Migrations of Theory”, if “these relationships remain external, and leave their constitutive parts in their simple positivity”, the “question of what ground unites them is left unthought”. In other words, what relations exist between these texts? And what difference do these relations make? Brown posits that the Hegelian dialectic holds the potential for offering a way of grasping the shared ground of texts as diverse as William Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic and Pepetela’s A Geração da Utopia. Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson consider a different way of speaking to the heterogeneous collection of texts circulating across the globe: the notion of world literature. They show that models of the literature of the world, as appearing in the work of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, are riddled with tensions emerging from their relation to a larger geopolitical system. Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick, and Ashleigh Harris argue, in turn, for the need to test transcultural categorizations akin to those deployed by theories of world literature in light of the transnational appropriations of, respectively, dodecaphonism and continental theory. These essays make it apparent that neither continental theory nor music theory circulates without friction or resistance, and that their appropriation requires supplementation and adaptation according to local conditions. 26

See Rebecca Walkowitz, “Unimaginable Largeness: Kazuo Ishiguro, Translation, and the New World Literature”, Novel, XL/3 (Summer 2007), 216-39 27 David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: NJ, 2003, 4.

Traversing Transnationalism

11

In the last chapter, Ulrike Kistner investigates, through Hannah Arendt’s reading of Kant, the potential of the aesthetic to function as a political category, and a tool for engaging with questions regarding human rights and cosmopolitan citizenship. It is not easy any longer to dismiss this category, in Terry Eagleton’s phrase, as “an imaginary consolation for a bourgeoisie bereft of home”,28 not when what is at stake is exactly what is taken as “home”. What becomes clear in this final section then, is how, once relocated within transnational discourses, traditional topoi – the dialectic, world literature, the relation between the popular and the avant-garde, questions about how theory travels, the local, the aesthetic – gain new urgency and return defamiliarized. What we make of transnational configurations depends very much on our image of the planet. We know that it is impossible to imagine the globe today without drawing on notions of globalization and uneven development. We also know that the transnational flows mapped in these essays cannot be separated from the various grids imposed on the globe by the unfolding of modernity and capitalism. But, to return to our earlier remarks, the modalities of our mapmaking involve political, theoretical and aesthetic choices. They require a traversal of both the borders that persist in the world, and how we imagine alternatives to those borders.

28

Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Oxford, 1990, 337.

I: National Borders/Transnational Subjects

FRICTION AND FRAGMENTS: LOCAL COSMOPOLITANISM IN POSTCOLONIAL MOZAMBIQUE PAMILA GUPTA

In 1975, on the eve of Mozambican independence from Portuguese colonial rule, the Goan community was quietly told to “go back to Goa” (India) by the incoming government. This was part of an attempt to carve out a new nation-state from the formerly Portuguese Mozambique, which was to be exclusively an “Africa for Africans”. Members of this immigrant community proved, however, to be more resilient than the new government expected. Their commitment to stay on in Mozambique points towards a history of Portuguese colonialism that continues to shape Mozambique’s postcolonial landscape, including its nationalist imaginaries. It also reflects a history of transnational migrations that has everything to do with the itinerant quality of Portuguese colonization and decolonialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the role of Goan local cosmopolitans in Mozambican society today, where citizens simultaneously maintain varying attachments with Portugal, Goa, India, and Mozambique. The following essay addresses the multiple ways in which Goan Mozambicans living in Maputo (formerly Lourenço Marques, the capital of Portuguese Mozambique) negotiate or mediate between three subjectivities: transnational, postcolonial, and local, a process that constitutes their unique experience of cosmopolitanism.1 Therefore, instead of associating cosmopolitanism with an

1

See T.N. Harper, “Empire, Diaspora, and Languages of Globalism, 1850-1914”, in Globalization in World History, ed. A.G. Hopkins, London, 2002, 141-66. Harper makes a parallel argument concerning the ways early twentieth century diasporic networks mediated between colonial, transnational, and local political identities. I am applying his analysis to develop a better understanding of late twentieth century cosmopolitanisms.

16

Pamila Gupta

indeterminate and relatively new subjectivity in a globalized world,2 I will suggest, following Engseng Ho, that older forms of migration directly shape and define the cosmopolitan identities of today; this process, in turn, empowers the use of the term “cosmopolitan”, and renders it analytically powerful.3 My understanding of these Goans’ lived experiences derives from a series of ethnographic interviews I conducted with members of this community in Maputo in March 2007. Therefore my argument is one that provides not only a window onto individual cosmopolitans, but also a larger interrogation of transnational, postcolonial, and cosmopolitan debates through an analysis of what Anna Tsing terms ethnographic “friction” and “fragments”.4 To excavate these theoretical terrains, I will suggest, is to look more closely at the imbricated and largely unmapped histories of horizontal migrations between colonial outposts,5 which created and sustained enduring cosmopolitan pockets in the postcolony. For, in the case of these Goan Mozambicans, I argue that they are simultaneously deeply local, transnational, and postcolonial without necessarily being in conflict over these different “structures of feelings”.6 This perhaps allows us one way to rethink the politics of location as constitutive of the formation of new subjectivities. This kind of research becomes even more prescient if we take seriously the claim that “postcolonial Africa is off the cosmopolitan map”.7 To understand the cosmopolitanism of such groups as the Goan Mozambican community of Maputo is then critical to a politicized intervention into this situation. Thus, to make a contribution to the larger cosmopolitan debates is to suggest that we need not only to look at non-western examples and bring them into the 2

See Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitanisms and Locals in World Culture”, in Global Culture, ed. Mike Featherstone, London, 1990, 239. 3 While I am focusing specifically on socio-cultural cosmopolitanism, my attempt here is to expand discussions of cosmopolitan subjectivities by infusing them with a sense of history and agency and vernacular rootedness. See Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean, Berkeley: CA, 2006. 4 See Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, Princeton, 2005. 5 Thomas Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 18601920, Berkeley: CA, 2007. 6 See Ramond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford, 1977, 128. I do not mean to suggest that there are no Goan Mozambicans without any identity issues. 7 Cosmopolitanisms, eds Sheldon Pollack, Homi Bhabha, Carol Breckenridge and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Durham: NC, 2002, 11.

Friction and Fragments

17

fold of cosmopolitanism studies, but should also examine older cosmopolitan communities that were created out of the cleavages of colonialism and its concomitant, decolonization. It is within this historical context that the importance of the postcolonial local or vernacular becomes even more relevant to our discussions of cosmopolitanism.8 Ethnographic “friction” and “fragments” Speaking of friction is a reminder of the importance of interaction in defining movement, cultural form, and agency. Friction is not just about slowing things down. Friction is required to keep global power in motion …. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing … the effects of encounters across difference can be compromising or empowering. Friction is not a synonym for resistance. Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction ….9 Global connections are made in fragments – although some fragments are more powerful than others .… Honoring the fragment means acknowledging this power but not accepting it as a done deal. Through fragments, ethnographers can immerse themselves in the contests and engagements of the present.10

In this section, I want to turn briefly to the writings of Anna Tsing, whose conceptualization of ethnographic “friction” and “fragments” is employed throughout this essay. I adopt her idea of “friction” – “the grip of worldly encounter”11 – not only as an apt metaphor but also as a theoretical stance indicative of a more general understanding of globalization and its often overlooked effects.12 Specifically, I employ 8

We need to look at the roots of these cosmopolitanisms just as much as we need to discuss their routes. Hence my return to or invocation of the local within cosmopolitanism studies. For a discussion of vernacular or rooted cosmopolitanism, see Mamadou Diouf, “The Senegalese Murid Trade Diaspora and the Making of a Vernacular Cosmopolitanism”, in Cosmopolitanisms, 111. 9 Tsing, Friction, 5. 10 Ibid., 271. 11 Ibid., 1. 12 Tsing writes that “a study of global connections shows the grip of encounter: friction. A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produced heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. As a metaphorical image, friction reminds us that

18

Pamila Gupta

this analysis of friction to look at the historical process of transnational, colonial migration and the intersection of various subjectivities as these relate to a specific group of people in a particular place and time. In the case of the Goan Mozambican community, friction becomes a productive way to think through the ways in which the transnational, the postcolonial, and the local coalesce to produce an unexpected kind of cosmopolitan identity, one that is largely underdeveloped in transnational studies and is very much based on a politics of location.13 Moreover, the value of Tsing’s related concept of the ethnographic “fragment” lies in the fact that it encapsulates a methodology for conducting fieldwork in increasingly globalized settings and on the subject of globalization itself, that is, for capturing the globalized world ethnographically.14 I strongly believe that the nature of the available documentation reveals much about the subject at hand: the fact that a life history approach became the best way to access information about the Goan community of Mozambique divulges much about them.15 Specifically, this community’s absence from the heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (ibid., 5). 6 We must be careful about the terms we employ for analytical writing. Here I follow cultural theorists Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke in their reference to “globalization” as “centralizing by shunting commercial and cultural activities back through imperial or northern centers and in the process homogenizing and maintaining hegemony”. Following Ghosh and Muecke once again, I view “transnationalism” as a product of globalization: “the transnational designates a space of exchange, participation, and transformation of people and things without any necessary mediation by a center”; and I employ “cosmopolitanism” as a type of socio-cultural practice and identity associated with “cultural accommodation, networks, and relationships in transnational contexts” – see Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke, “Oceanic Cultural Studies”, in Cultures of Trade: Indian Ocean Exchanges, eds and intro. Devleena Ghosh and Stephen Muecke, Newcastle, 2007. 14 Tsing advocates the fragment for interrupting stories of “a unified and successful regime of global self-management” (Friction, 271). Ethnographic fragments ask us to pay attention to details and nuanced understandings of global connections. 15 Much of the data presented here comes from interviews and the recording of life histories with a multitude of Goans living in Maputo in March 2007. This research is restricted to the middle and upper-class Goans of Maputo, and does not include the Goan fishing community of Catembe or the Goan community of Beira, both of which are sizeable and have very different histories. This ethnographic research was made possible through a Humanities Research Grant from the Graduate School at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dirce, Brigitte, and Celso for putting me in contact with members of

Friction and Fragments

19

archival record suggests how very mobile and dispersed this group was in fact.16 Consequently the collection of ethnographic fragments through a life history approach became my entry point for accessing the cosmopolitanisms of individual Goan Mozambicans.17 Transnational lives Transnational activities are cumulative in character … while the original wave of these activities may be economic and their initiators can be properly labeled transnational entrepreneurs, subsequent activities encompass political, social, and cultural pursuits as well.18

I first want to explore the multiple ways in which Goan Mozambicans experience their daily lives as affected by a set of ongoing, transnational attachments to places outside Mozambique, attachments that have everything to do with the history of their migration from Goa under the umbrella of Portuguese imperialism. I will argue that this is the first subjectivity they interpolate on a daily basis, and that it includes a variety of connections to Goa and, to a lesser extent, India. First, however, I will briefly interrogate the larger theoretical literature on transnationalism from an anthropological perspective concerned specifically with agency. This helps to both contextualize the displacement of these Goans within a larger postcolonial space and illuminate their ongoing biographical connections to Goa and India. If we understand transnationalism as providing “an umbrella concept for some of the most globally transformative processes and the Goan community in Maputo. Most of the Goans I interviewed were passionate about the subject at hand. I thank them for their generosity and candidness. I have changed the first names of my informants to protect their privacy, excepting public and published figures. 16 Archival research reveals a pattern of emigration from Goa during the nineteenth century, but not a history of elite Goans moving to Mozambique during the 1920s and ’50s: these waves of migration were revealed only by way of life history interviews. Recent archival research suggests that there is extant legislation on the Goa Clubs that functioned in Portuguese Mozambique from 1920 to 1950. 17 The idea of fragments resonates furthermore with the multiple and fragmentary experiences of the Goan Mozambicans, who, while living in postcolonial Mozambique, maintain connections to other places that are integral to their sense of being. 18 Stephen Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, XXII/2 (March 1999), 10.

20

Pamila Gupta

developments of our times”,19 we are taking the first step in recognizing the need to appreciate how transnational practices such as migration profoundly shape the lives of peoples within particular contexts. We must also go one step further to delineate the specific ways whereby a group is defined as transnational; that is, instead of treating transnationalism as a set of abstract “dematerialized cultural flows”,20 we must give full attention to the concrete everyday changes in people’s lives that mark them as transnational in their subjectivities. Here it is also important to recognize the particular contribution of anthropology to understanding transnationalism as a product of globalization. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo set out an ambitious agenda for such a study: The anthropology of globalization in other words is concerned with the situated and conjunctural nature of globalization. It is preoccupied not just with mapping the shape taken by the particular flows of capital, people, goods, images and ideologies that crisscross the globe, but also with the experiences of people living in specific localities when more and more of their everyday lives are contingent on globally extensive social processes. What anthropology offers that is often lacking in other disciplines is a concrete attentiveness to human agency, to the practices of everyday life, in short to how subjects mediate the processes of globalization … and on how subjects respond to these processes in culturally specific ways.21

I argue that anthropology’s focus on agency and the practices of everyday life lends itself well to the project at hand. Consequently, the ethnographic fragments I collected during fieldwork from individual Goan Mozambicans are used to reveal the many ways they interpolate their transnational subjectivities on a daily basis. It is firstly important to contextualize these Goan Mozambicans as having ties with not only Goa, which makes sense given that it shares a history of Portuguese colonialism with Mozambique, but also with India. India is important precisely because of the unusual circumstances that saw Goa, after four hundred and fifty years of Portuguese colonial rule, integrated into a postcolonial Indian nation19

Vertovec, “Conceiving and Researching Transnationalism”, 18. Donald Nonini and Aihwa Ong quoted in ibid., 14. 21 Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo, “Introduction: A World in Motion”, in The Anthropology of Globalization, A Reader, London, 2002, 4.

20

Friction and Fragments

21

state fourteen years after it gained its independence in 1947.22 Even prior to this forced integration – or “invasion” as some label it – in 1961, there had been a long history of connections between Goa and India: these include those shaped by the movement of learned elites from Goa to India, in particular to the former Portuguese controlled Bombay, which began in the second half of the nineteenth century.23 Here I want to extend an argument made by Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg that we rarely understand the cultures of territorial entities engaged in transnational practices (in this case Goa and India) as “already hybridized”.24 In other words, only if we view Goa and India as already historically hybrid in themselves, and as sharing a history not solely due to practices of migration but also despite and because of their different colonial experiences (Portuguese and British, respectively), can we understand the ways in which Goan Mozambicans today have an ongoing relationships with both places. In my interviews with male and female Goan Mozambicans of various ages living in Maputo today, I encountered a range of degrees of attachment to Goa. Many of these learned elites have inherited family ancestral properties back in Goa – Fernando in Betim and Esmeralda in Loutolim – and this reinforces their habit of making annual visits, families in tow, to Goa. Seventy-year-old Luis takes his extended family to Goa regularly to visit relatives and for holidays. In the same way that he reconnects with Goa when he visits “home”, he 22 Studies of Goan diasporic communities are complicated by the fact that in many of the East African cases, they were lumped together with other Asian and Indian migrants as “stranger communities” or as “the hyphen between Europeans and Africans”, when they were in fact a distinct group with their own cultural patterns of migration, patterns imbricated in the history of the longue durée of Portuguese rule. This last point is reinforced by sociologist Jessica Kuper, who makes a case for the uniqueness and separateness of the Goan community living in Uganda in the 1970s. According to Kuper, Ugandan Goans, largely working class, regarded themselves as culturally European rather than Indian. They also tended to see themselves as different from all other Asians, and kept to themselves within Ugandan society while maintaining strong ties with Goa. This idea of distinctiveness also comes up in the Mozambican case, but in relation to learned elite Goans and with very different, complicated effects. See Jessica Kuper, “The Goan Community in Kampala”, in Expulsion of a Minority: Essays on Ugandan Asians, ed. Michael Twaddle, London, 1975, 53-69. 23 See Silvia M. de Mendonça-Noronha, “The Economic Scene in Goa 1926-1961”, in Goa Through the Ages, ed. T.R. de Souza, New Delhi, 1990, II, 270-76. 24 Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg, Introduction, Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity, Durham: NC, 1996, 15.

22

Pamila Gupta

desires his children and grandchildren to create their own individual attachments to Goa through these visits. Other Goan Mozambicans, such as Adelia, time their visits “home” to coincide with Goan Catholic ritual events such as the feast of St Francis Xavier on 3 December.25 The recently retired Vicente typically spends his summers in Portugal, but stays in Goa during the month of January on a regular basis – this affords an opportunity for him to reconnect with the place and its people. Other Goan Mozambicans suggested to me that they do not need to visit Goa to be reminded of their place of origin. Marriages between Goans, both during and after Mozambique’s colonial phase, produced a large and now wellestablished Goan community in Maputo. Many of them keep up an involvement with “all things Goan” through community-organized social events such as the annual celebration of “Goa Day”.26 Other Goans such as Miranda, who intermarried with a Portuguese Mozambican, cooks such typical Goan dishes as prawn curry and rice or sorpatel on a regular basis, recipes passed down to her through generations of Goans.27 Interestingly, Rego maintains his Goanness online – he is part of a larger transnational cyber community that connects itinerant Goans in the US, UK, Canada, Portugal, India, the Gulf States, and so on.28 Many of these same Goan Mozambicans maintain ongoing ties with India. Luis not only has close relatives in Mumbai, he also often visits them after spending a few days on the beaches of Goa. In Luis’ case, his paternal uncle left Portuguese India for what was then British India around the same time, the 1920s, as his father emigrated from Goa to Portuguese Africa.29 Other Goan Mozambicans, largely 25 Information on the role of diasporic Goans returning to Old Goa for the feast of St Francis Xavier on 3 December was gathered during fieldwork in Goa in 1999-2000, and 2004. 26 This annual celebration is relatively new for Mozambique. According to my informants, it was created in response to other Goa Days that take place in a variety of international contexts, with which it coincides. 27 These are two classic Goan dishes. Sorpatel (in Goan konkani) is a spicy pork curry dish usually served over rice. 28 See http://www.goanet.org. 29 Patterns of migration from Portuguese India to British India mirrored in some ways the migratory patterns from Portuguese India to Portuguese Africa. The 1920s, in particular, witnessed a large stream of migration out of Goa due to its limited internal opportunities and increased globalization. The direction of migration was determined by one’s language skills: if one were a good English speaker, he (rarely a she) would

Friction and Fragments

23

members of the younger generation who maintain less of an ideological opposition to Goa’s forced integration into India, take advantage of the fact that Goa is now located within exotic India: they often use it as an entry point for visiting the rest of the country, largely as tourists.30 Together, these ethnographic fragments reveal a variety of attachments (old and new, physical and imagined) that Goan Mozambicans maintain with Goa, “Goa-ness”, India, and “Indianness”, attachments that shape their transnational subjectivities in everyday ways. Next, I turn to the connections they maintain with postcolonial Portugal. Postcolonial lives Paradoxically, the process of decolonization after the Second World War, which released former colonies from nineteenth century colonial arrangements, is perhaps the least meaningful signifier of what might be thought of as postcoloniality.31

In order to understand the postcolonial lives of Goan Mozambicans, we must return, however briefly, to the history and distinctive character of Portuguese colonialism, particularly its “itinerant quality”. This involves mapping the largely uncharted histories of horizontal migrations between colonial outposts as shaping directly the unique positionality of the Goan community living in Maputo today. I also use this space to trace three different waves of Goan migration to and from Mozambique during the twentieth century, relying in the process on an archive of individual life histories, which are read through the analytic of Portuguese decolonization. I position these Goans of Mozambique as doubly postcolonial: they experienced decolonization in two different locations (Portuguese India and Portuguese Mozambique) and at two different moments (1961 and 1975). This in turn helps to explain the resilience of some of its members to stay on in Maputo while at the same time maintaining varying postcolonial attachments with Portugal.

emigrate to British India or British Africa, if not, then to Portuguese Africa (see Mendonça-Noronha “The Economic Scene in Goa 1926-1961”, 270-76). 30 Interestingly, I interviewed two Goan Mozambicans of an older generation who still refuse to visit India due to its forced integration of Goa in 1961. 31 Jane Jacobs, Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City, London, 1996, 22.

24

Pamila Gupta

Portuguese colonies were connected historically, economically, politically, and culturally to each other because of the particular farflung character of the Portuguese empire, which spanned Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These connections endured in the face of the empire’s waning power over the longue durée of the period stretching from the fifteenth century to the twentieth. Out of these connections emerged what I call the uniquely itinerant quality of Portuguese colonialism, a characteristic that endured through decolonization and continues in the postcolonial context.32 Not only were colonial officials and Catholic missionaries frequently moving between colonies, but colonial subjects did the same in response to colonial integration, oppression, and conversion. Both groups – those in power and those dispossessed of it – often relocated in the hope of finding improved colonial conditions and increased economic opportunities elsewhere.33 In other words, colonial inter-dependence through migration was integral to the survival of the Portuguese colonial enterprise over the long term. Interestingly, Mozambique was ruled from Goa during the seventeenth century, a history that shaped the particularly close ties between these two Portuguese colonies and left an indelible mark on Mozambique, though not only through the practice of migration.34 That Goa and Mozambique’s historical imbrications remain an understudied topic suggests that we must also trace specific horizontal migrations between colonial outposts. Here I follow historian Thomas Metcalf who, in his recent book entitled Imperial Connections, makes a compelling argument for looking at the “webs of empire”: too often, he asserts, the history of a colony is written in isolation from its colonial neighbors, a practice that often belies the fact that there was much movement vertically and horizontally across the imperial web.35 The duplication of this historiography in state archives furthermore provides a practical hindrance to such research endeavors. Taking into account horizontal movements between colonies (and not just vertical movements between metropole and colony) thus allows us a window 32 This is an argument that I have developed further elsewhere. See Pamila Gupta, “Mapping Portuguese Decolonization in the Indian Ocean: A Research Agenda”, South African Historical Journal, LVII/1 (2007), 93-112. 33 To get a full sense of the itinerant quality of the Portuguese colonizing process, see Goa: Cultural Trends, ed. P.P. Shirodkar, Panaji, 1998. 34 See Malyn Newitt, A History of Mozambique, London, 1995, 123-26. 35 See Metcalf, Imperial Connections, 9.

Friction and Fragments

25

onto alternative and lesser-known colonial narratives, experiences, and subjectivities. Gesturing towards one such lesser-known narrative, Metcalf argues that individual Indians migrating between British India and British Africa in the early twentieth century were able to imagine new identities for themselves in the African context: they conceived of themselves not merely as colonial subjects but as “imperial citizens”, which, as in the Goan case, opened up a world of new possibilities and positionalities for them. Historian Mark Frost elaborates further on this description of imperial citizens operating in the Indian Ocean world as: learned elites drawn from the ranks of civil servants, company clerks, doctors, teachers, public inspectors, communication workers, merchants, bankers, and above all from the legal profession … began to form themselves into intelligentsias by immersing themselves in discursive activity, and quickly developed habits of intellectual sociability that became organized and systematic.36

This “learned elites” distinction or marker is extremely relevant for the Goa-Mozambique case, for it was through the act of migration that many of these Goans were able almost to transform themselves into colonizers.37 Moreover, it is the lived experiences of their postcolonial descendants that I am trying to situate in this essay. A crucial aspect of this research is then to overlay historical information with ethnographic material. Thus, while historical source materials on Portuguese colonialism reveal a better understanding of its overall character and point to a specific history of imbrications between Goa and Mozambique, ethnographic sources suggest an additional layer to this history that needs to be uncovered. Archival 36 I find his definition of “learned elites” more useful than describing them as strictly colonial elites. They were not necessarily confined by colonialism and restricted to movements between colony and metropole; instead, they moved across oceans, between horizontal colonial outposts, and into new transnational spaces, which opened up new possible identities for them. Thus, with the concept of learned elites, the idea of transnational movement is already incorporated into their identities. See Mark Frost, “‘Wider Opportunities’: Religious Revival, Nationalist Awakening and the Global Dimensions in Colombo, 1870-1920”, Modern Asian Studies, XXXVI/4 (October 2002), 937. 37 See Pamila Gupta, “The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)Colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean”, Journal of Asian and African Studies, XLIV/1 (February 2009), 19-47.

26

Pamila Gupta

sources reveal a history of isolated Goans living in colonial Mozambique as early as 1560,38 and also shed light on a more general pattern of Goan migration to Mozambique during the first half of the nineteenth century.39 Ethnographic source materials – specifically, the life histories I collected – reveal an additional history of learned elite Goans migrating to and from Mozambique throughout the twentieth century. That these three distinct waves of migration are not delineated archivally suggests once again the value of an anthropological approach focused on capturing “ethnographic fragments”.40 It also indicates the importance of the often overlooked analytic of Portuguese decolonization for connecting the histories of Goa and Mozambique through migration.41 The migration patterns of these largely learned elite Goans can be described in terms of three distinct waves: migrations from Portuguese India (Goa) to Mozambique in the 1920s in search of economic betterment; next, migrations during the 1950s and 1960s, a period that saw the beginning of the end of Goa’s decolonization and its integration into the Indian nation-state; and, lastly, immigration to Goa or Portugal in direct response to Portuguese decolonization in Mozambique in 1975.42 Interestingly, during all three phases of potential migration, Goans occupied a precarious position – viewed

38 See Sharmila Karnik, “Goans in Mozambique”, Africa Quarterly, XXXVIII/3 (April 1998), 95. 39 These accounts attest to the history of this migration pattern. Portuguese colonial policy promoted the immigration of Goans to Mozambique to help as prazeiros (managers) on the many landed estates that were part of Mozambique’s colonial economy. See M Prinz, “Intercultural Links between Goa and Mozambique in their Colonial and Contemporary History”, in Goa and Portugal: Their Cultural Links, eds Charles J. Borges and Helmut Feldmann, New Delhi, 1997, 113; and Anders Ehnmark and Per Wastberg, Angola and Mozambique: The Case Against Portugal, trans. P. Britten-Austin, London, 1963, 113-14. 40 These other waves of migration never came up in my historical readings, but figured unexpectedly and prominently in the imaginaries of the Goans I interviewed. Hence their ethnographic significance. 41 See Gupta, “The Disquieting of History”, 94. 42 Harper argues that the 1920s witnessed a period of large transnational flows and global shifts in the world, which were enabled by new forms of communication and technology. It is necessary to contextualize the movement of Goan elites to Mozambique within this larger history of flows. The same can be said of the period following World War II, according to Harper.

Friction and Fragments

27

with uncertainty by both colonizer and colonized – within Mozambican society, a position that had postcolonial consequences.43 In the first phase (1920s), it was considered the colonial duty of a good Portuguese citizen to emigrate from Goa to help out with the “Africa cause”. This was largely a male phenomenon. Many migrants were trained medical doctors from elite Portuguese speaking Goan Catholic families, which allowed them to take full advantage of the instabilities of colonial rule and its “ambiguities of difference” so as to transform themselves from colonial subjects into “imperial citizens”.44 During the second phase (1950s-1960s), many Goans chose emigration to other Portuguese colonies in the face of Goa’s imminent decolonization and absorption into a culturally and linguistically different Indian nation-state. Here, interestingly, migration was largely a female practice – many women moved as the wives-to-be of Goans already settled in Mozambique. In the most recent phase (1975), many Goans chose to leave, or rather, were persuaded by outgoing colonial officials to depart on the eve of Mozambican decolonization in order to help prove Portugal’s point that independent Mozambique would devolve into chaos without a colonial government. That this same colonial administration conveniently employed many Goans in key positions of authority only added to the pressure on them to emigrate from Mozambique for this administration ideally wanted to represent Africans as incapable of governing themselves. That many Goans did leave was seen as a source of betrayal by the newly independent Mozambican government even though the government did not envision them as fitting into their new nationalist imaginary.45 In fact, in theory, the incoming government wanted all non-Africans, including Goans and Indians, to leave the country; in practice, however, they wanted Goans to stay to show their commitment to the new Mozambique, thereby allaying fears that the Goan community had always been historically aligned with their 43 Here I emphasize Jacob’s point that “the existence of a postcolonial politics is not a mark of being beyond colonialism but precisely a reminder of the persistent neocolonial relations within the new world order” (Jacobs, Edge of Empire, 25). 44 See Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds Fred Cooper and Ann Stoler, Berkeley: CA, 1997, 4. 45 For a comparable example of the complicated position of Goans (as opposed to Indians) in Uganda, see Jessica Kuper, “Goan and ‘Asian’ in Uganda: An Analysis of Racial Identity and Cultural Categories”, in Strangers in African Societies, eds William Shack and Elliott Skinner, Berkeley: CA, 1979, 243-59.

28

Pamila Gupta

Portuguese colonizers. During this last phase of Portuguese decolonization in Mozambique, other Goan learned elites did choose to stay, even in the face of Mozambique’s troubled postcolonial future.46 It is those Goans and their descendants that are under analysis here. However, I also want to emphasize once again the importance of understanding their migration patterns as being shaped directly by the politics of Portuguese decolonization in two specific locations: Goa (1961) and Mozambique (1975). Hence, those Goans who stayed on in Mozambique after 1975 are doubly postcolonial: they experienced or engaged ideologically the end of empire in two very different locations and under very different political conditions. In my interviews with Goan Mozambicans in Maputo, their testimonies give evidence of a variety of ongoing attachments with Portugal that still circumscribe their postcolonial identities within Mozambican society today. Just as Fernando described himself in my interview with him as having a “Portuguese identity without a concept of race”, I would attribute a similar sense of self to a large portion of the Goan community who position themselves as culturally Portuguese – “culture” here standing in for all the burdens of their complicated colonial pasts, including race, language, and religion.47 In addition, many of these same Goans can afford to maintain close ties with Portugal for a variety of ideological reasons. That many of these same Goans intermarried with Portuguese prior to Mozambican independence suggests their privileged positionality as learned elites both during and after the end of Portuguese colonialism, a position of privilege that has been largely reproduced by following generations. Esmeralda’s father was one of the many Goan doctors who immigrated to Mozambique in the early 1920s. He not only married a Portuguese woman, but also established himself as the first doctor of 46

Mozambican decolonization lay in the hands of the Mozambican African liberation group Frelimo. They led the country to independence in 1975, only for it to experience its own postcolonial civil war against the Rhodesian (now Zimbabwe) and apartheid South African supported Renamo. This war ended in 1992. 47 Fernando elaborated that his Portuguese identity consisted of his ability to communicate in Portuguese and his Catholic religious background. This idea of identifying as Portuguese without a sense of race is an interesting choice of words as it perhaps describes the situation for many Goans living in Mozambique; it also needs to be probed further in relation to Gilberto Freyre’s idealized theory of Portuguese race relations – “lusotropicalismo” – which had such a profound effect worldwide on the psyche of Portuguese colonialism as “good to think”.

Friction and Fragments

29

Inhambane Province. Esmeralda, in turn, grew up in an advantageous environment, one that included being educated at an exclusive Portuguese school in Maputo. She has two brothers and one sister currently living in Lisbon, and she visits them regularly with her three young children and Portuguese Mozambican husband. Just as the recently retired Vicente regularly spends his summers in Portugal, Maria and Jose have sent two of their children to Portugal for postgraduate studies: one is studying Portuguese heritage tourism in the hopes of returning to Mozambique in the near future. While João’s son is currently living in Macau, another former Portuguese colony, Isabel works as a flight attendant for the Portuguese airlines TAP. She maintains apartments in both Maputo and Lisbon as a result. Lastly, that these Goans continue to speak Portuguese as a first language and bequeath Portuguese names to their children not only makes them indistinguishable from the rest of Mozambique’s Portuguese speaking Catholic population, but also allows them mobility in Portugal itself.48 As a result, they are less marked by cultural or racial difference, their Goan-ness, while staying there. Both these attributes contribute in turn to the potential of future generations of Goan Mozambicans to maintain ties with Portugal. Therefore it was through ethnographic interviews with Goan Mozambicans that I gained a sense of their varying attachments to Portugal and Portuguese-ness, which together make up a part of their everyday experiences of living in Maputo. These ethnographic fragments give evidence of the postcolonial lives of these Goans. That is, their very postcoloniality is one of three subjectivities that shape their cosmopolitan identities. Moreover, it is this same group of Goans that serve as one of the many colonial specters that continue to haunt the landscape of postcolonial Mozambique, disrupting its very own postcolonial imaginaries in the process.49 In the following section, I

48 Here I am also reminded of Ho’s point (Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 190) that having a name that circulates across nations – as is the case for these Goan Mozambicans – allows one to remain comfortably within many of them. These Goans are not marked by their Portuguese names: they can fit in comfortably in Mozambique, Goa, India, Portugal, and potentially Brazil and Angola. 49 One such disruption would be the Goa Clubs, which were disbanded with Mozambican independence. More recently, Goans have reconstituted them as centres of cultural activity for themselves and their future generations. The history and role of these social clubs need further historical and ethnographic elaboration.

30

Pamila Gupta

turn to the connections they maintain with their local context, that is Mozambique itself. Local cosmopolitan lives Cosmopolitanism may instead be a project whose conceptual content and pragmatic character are not only as yet unspecified but also must always escape positive and definite specification, precisely because specifying cosmopolitanism positively and definitely is an uncosmopolitan thing to do.50

Next, I situate the Goan Mozambicans of Maputo as cosmopolitans, but of a specific non-western kind that maintains a set of political attachments with the local. Thus, instead of pointing to the historical indeterminacy of cosmopolitanism, I follow Engseng Ho in suggesting that older forms of migration directly shape and define cosmopolitan identities today. This situation empowers cosmopolitanism as an analytic and practice. The conceptual import of Ho’s idea of “local cosmopolitans” lies specifically in his very definition of them as “persons who, while imbedded in local relations, also maintain connections with distant places …, they thus articulate a relation between different geographical scales”.51 Ho views cosmopolitans as escaping the binary of homeland versus host country: they are motivated by travel, mobility, and ideology, interpolating minimally between at least two different contexts, and remaining “itinerant across the oceanic space”.52 Ho’s analysis is useful for situating the historical complexities of colonialism that pertain to the Goan Mozambique case, and understanding this group of migrants as itinerant in relation to more than two locations. Additionally, we must not forget in our attention to all the globalized movements and consumption practices of these learned elite cosmopolitans that they maintain strong ties with their local contexts as well, and that this element, I argue, is as much a part of their cosmopolitan identities as their transnational and postcolonial subjectivities. In my life history interviews with a range of Goan Mozambicans living in Maputo, it became increasingly evident that there was a 50

Cosmopolitanisms, 1. Ho, The Graves of Tarim, 31. 52 Ibid., 189. 51

Friction and Fragments

31

politics to their cosmopolitan location: just as many Goans intermarried with Mozambicans both during and after Portuguese colonialism, many stayed in postcolonial Mozambique out of a commitment to resist Mozambique’s nationalist imaginary of itself as exclusively African. Raul was one such case: his marriage to a Mozambican prior to independence gestures towards, among other things, his political commitment to Mozambican independence from Portuguese colonial rule. Other learned Goan elites, such as Carlos, who is married to a Portuguese Mozambican, also purposely chose to stay on in Maputo after 1975 out of a real commitment to the country’s promising future. Carlos now holds a prestigious government post. Isabel, a Goan Mozambican with equally strong ties to Goa and Portugal, has also elected to stay in Mozambique. She told me that she identifies herself not as Goan, not as Indian, not as Portuguese, not as African, but specifically as Mozambican.53 Angela, married to a Goan Mozambican like herself, was living in Lisbon at the time of Mozambique’s independence. She returned to her birthplace along with her husband to take part in the rebuilding of the country, and stayed on out of a strong political commitment, even during the civil war and despite the death of her husband in the interim. This sense of politics, I suggest, is a crucial part of the cosmopolitan subjectivities of many Goan Mozambicans. It is an aspect that allows them to maintain varying attachments to Portugal, Goa, India, and Mozambique without needing to create a hierarchy out of their multiple postcolonial identities in an increasingly globalized world.54 At the same time, they remain committed to being local cosmopolitans in Maputo. Perhaps then, historian Walter Mignolo’s re-conceptualization of cosmopolitanism from the perspective of coloniality is a useful one for the case at hand. Adopting a stance of “critical cosmopolitanism[s]” affords us a rare opportunity to see how other kinds of cosmopolitan communities located in the non-West –

53 Isabel’s point is an important one in that she suggests that it is her cosmopolitan location in Mozambique that allows her to create attachments to other places and identities, without being in conflict over them. 54 Here I would emphasize globalization’s homogenizing effects as well as suggest that in the same way that their Portuguese names enable them to occupy a nondifferentiated comfortable space in both Portugal and Goa, it also allows them to fit within the context of Mozambique as local cosmopolitans.

32

Pamila Gupta

such as the case of the Goan Mozambicans – were reproduced out of particular colonial histories, migrations and experiences.55 The politics of location This essay has been dedicated to exploring how, from an anthropological perspective, the current generation of Goan Mozambicans living in Maputo situate themselves in relation to their decolonized past or pasts and local context, and within a larger transnational space. Through the entry point of life histories, I have accessed ethnographic fragments of individual experiences in order to suggest that these Goan Mozambicans interpolate three subjectivities on a daily basis – transnational, postcolonial, and local – which function as the points of friction that constitute their lives as cosmopolitans. The journey has not only been about revealing unusual (and hidden) histories of migration, or connecting Goa and Mozambique through the analytic of decolonization while highlighting the endurance of certain kinds of connectivities, but also about rethinking theoretical terrains – those of transnationalism, postcoloniality, and cosmopolitanism – in relation to each other and to specific locations and experiences. Finally, if we conceive of anthropology as a “critical cosmopolitan” discipline in itself, as one fully grounded in a politics of location (both of the people we study and our own), and as employing an analytic of friction and fragments, then perhaps we can realize its full potential for unearthing new kinds of “archives, geographies and practices” of cosmopolitanism. They, in turn, “might help us to see that cosmopolitanism is not a circle created by culture diffused from a center, but instead, that centers are everywhere and circumferences nowhere”.56

55

See Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”, in Cosmopolitanisms, 157-88. 56 Ibid., 12-13.

VELVET AND VIOLENCE: PERFORMING THE MEDIATIZED MEMORY OF SHANGHAI’S FUTURITY AMANDA LAGERKVIST

This article engages the discourse on transnationalism through interrogating the mediatization of experience in an era of increasing, global mobility.1 In order to interrogate the dimensions of power involved in how visitors interact with the urban transformation of contemporary Shanghai, it draws attention to those subjects who move in and through today’s global cities, and to those hyper-nostalgic settings in which an elite constituency of cosmopolitan travelers moves about – spaces in which certain performances are scripted and encouraged. This discussion is incited by an enigma: how is it that particular gestures come so easy to travelers in certain urban settings? How do visitors know how to easily, almost effortlessly, acclimatize to the city, and engage in gestures and behavior there that seem offlimits elsewhere? At the core of these questions lies a problem that has preoccupied sociologists and anthropologists for a long time, which boils down to the relationship between structure and agency, or script and performance/ritual. The social world, here the leisure spaces of the global elites, functions as a stage on which social roles are performed according to pre-established patterns, as Erving Goffman suggests in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.2 In global modernity, such patterns and many first-hand experiences come through media. Experiencing places is increasingly a matter of experiencing mediations, and physical encounters reactivate a series of mediatized 1

This research was made possible by grants from The Foundation of Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus and STINT. This article was first presented as a conference paper at the NordMedia07 Conference, Helsinki, 17-19 August 2007. I wish to acknowledge the valuable input and the comments on an earlier version of this article by David Watson and Jenny Sundén. 2 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, New York, 1959.

34

Amanda Lagerkvist

memories.3 A mediascape, as Arjun Appadurai suggests, constitutes a source of knowledge and perhaps even a guide for moving about the world.4 Hence, we learn about places, circumstances, people, manners, and ways of traversing spaces – “gestures, vocalizations, posture, dress, and pace of activity”5 – through media scriptings. Alexander des Forges, in Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, argues that visitors and Chinese migrants at the turn of the previous century learned that Shanghai is the modern place to be and to spend money excessively in the city from a particular form of fictional scripting: the installment novel of the 1890s to the 1930s. As part of a culture industry of images and texts, they played, des Forges argues, a crucial role in producing the culture of the city by providing it with a concrete narrative logic and aesthetic agenda.6 They not only contain the typical characteristics of Shanghai, but their formal features, defined in terms of simultaneity, interruption, mediation, and excess, also organized social practice, and taught readers to desire a certain experience from the city as an entertainment centre and a transnational mediasphere, which consisted of an expanding and interconnected visual and verbal field of different media forms – fiction, non-fiction, newspapers, magazines, films, radio. This article expands on this notion of the “mediasphere” to mean not only actual cultural products and media forms, but also the spaces and experiences generated by these scriptings. It thereby explores the ways in which such an aesthetic is brought into play in contemporary mediations as well as in mediatized perfomativity, that is to say practices of spatially appropriating the city. 3

Amanda Lagerkvist, “Travels in Thirdspace: Experiential Suspense in Mediaspace – the Case of America (un)known”, European Journal of Communication, XXIII/3 (September 2008), 343-63. 4 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: MN, 1996. To regard media as scriptings for certain actions reverberates with contested traditions within media studies of studying the effects of the media. Yet, the key question here that continues to beg attention is whether we can describe media as a loosely composed manual for action. The force, scope, and justifiability of such claims have indeed been a bone of contention for media studies; see, for instance, Nick Couldry, Media Rituals: A Critical Approach, London, 2002, 16-20. 5 Joshua Meyrowitz, No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, New York, 1985, 37. 6 Alexander des Forges, Mediasphere Shanghai: The Aesthetics of Cultural Production, Honolulu: HI, 2007.

Velvet and Violence

35

Accordingly, I am interested here in the reciprocal exigencies of the city imaginary, and the various mediatized, mnemonic, scripted, and embodied performances in urban spaces. Urban performativity obeys a particular spatial story constituted by the layers of memories, legends, and histories making up the city’s palimpsest.7 Since space is produced in order to be “lived by people with bodies and lives in their own particular urban context”,8 this article privileges the role of performance for the (re)production, navigation, negotiation, and activation of the spatial stories of places. By proposing that lived experience, spatial materialities, and mediated scripts are thoroughly enmeshed and co-productive, this article develops Michel de Certeau’s attempt to delineate how a spatial story is brought about through the co-workings of three entwined dimensions. The first dimension is what de Certeau calls the “concept city”, which is a mobile and shifting entity, constituted by contemporary scriptings in the media (“Expo City”, “Digital Shanghai”, “Magical Shanghai”, “New Life-New Shanghai”). This official city image carries components of, and shares some affinity with, the second spatial realm of the urban landscape, the collective memory of the city, which has durability and is connected to a certain location, but which is also bound to particular groups and particular interests. De Certeau argues that apart from the univocal and totalitarian concept city, memory and legend are crucial for cities: cities are uninhabitable without their legends. It is thus necessary to search for the collective memory of the city in order to grasp how this space becomes meaningful. Memories in today’s world are mediatized, that is bound to our media culture: cultural memory can only be established by media.9 7

For a sampling of material that reflects the diversity of the urban palimpsest, see Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, Berkeley: CA, 1984; Andreas Huyssen, Urban Palimpsest and the Politics of Memory, Stanford: CA, 2003; Amanda Lagerkvist, “Futurity Replayed: New Media and Collective Memory in Shanghai”, International Communication Association, San Francisco: CA, 24-28 May 2007; and Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, London, 1991. 8 Lefevbre, The Production of Space, 143. 9 See Huyssen, Urban Palimpsest, and Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia, London, 1995; J. Nerone and E. Wartella, “Introduction: Studying ‘Social Memory’”, Communication, XI/2 (October 1989), 85-88; Maria Sturken, Tangled Memories, Berkeley: CA, 1997; and Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory, Chicago: IL, 1992.

36

Amanda Lagerkvist

But memories, I hold, are also inscribed in spaces, and they await a remembering agent to become activated. Reminiscing depends on the appropriation of memory deposit, and, conversely, “cosmopolitan visitors” come into being through these mediatized performances: they are constituted by mnemonic acts and technologies. It is thus through practice that memory becomes alive and significant. Collective memory must be conceived of in terms of process, as collective and enacted remembering, rather than as a fixed cultural memory.10 Memories may also be adversarial to the image ideals of the “concept city”, if we follow de Certeau. They entail the activation of the overt and the hidden, or what is remembered officially and what people are compelled to forget, that which is relegated to the subconscious domains of the city imaginary. This means in the words of de Certeau: There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not .… Places are fragmentary and inward-turning histories, pasts that others are not allowed to read, accumulated times that can be unfolded but like stories held in reverse, remaining in an enigmatic state.11

Finally, and most importantly, one must pursue how cities reinvent themselves by, as I have already suggested, turning attention to the role of practice, such as performance, in this process.12 This perspective will “dynamise representations of the city and open them

10

David Middleton and Derek Edwards, Introduction, in Collective Remembering, eds Middleton and Edwards, London, 1990, 1-22. 11 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108. 12 Politico-emotive city textures of vibrancy, electricity, and energy are no doubt mediated in order to produce ways of gazing at signs of development. A future gaze is infused and activated in visitors and inhabitants through landmark buildings and panoramic settings (see André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist, “The Future Gaze: City Panoramas as Politico-Emotive Geographies”, Journal of Visual Culture, VIII/1 [April 2009], 25-53). But spaces of futurity engender more than gazing: encountering cities is an emotional and embodied practice. For cosmopolitans, Shanghai can be described as an intersensuous geography (see Amanda Lagerkvist, “Gazing at Pudong – ‘With a Drink in Your Hand’: Time Travel, Mediation, and Multisensuous Immersion in the Future City of Shanghai”, The Senses and Society, II/2 (July 2007), 155-72.

Velvet and Violence

37

to the itinerant and tactile knowledges of immersed participants”.13 Hence, in connection with the collective memory of the city, there are spatial stories constituted by spatial practices – such as walking in the city – which also invent spaces in diverse ways. Practices include both the remembered and, as de Certeau argues, the forgotten, which is layered in the body and the spaces where it moves. The present discussion is based in part on the official discourses of the city, which is to be found in museums and tourist websites, but foremost on the scriptings of travelers and cosmopolitans: the mobile agents of transnationalism, the globalizers on route. This traveling culture under scrutiny – studied through travel journalism and travel blogs – consists of visitors to Shanghai: tourists, and people who are making other short-term or recurring visits. Many of them can be categorized as possessors of a “cosmopolitan connoisseurship”, which, according to Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry, involves, among other things, extensive mobility, a curiosity about and capacity to consume places, and both openness toward other people and the semiotic skill to interpret different cultures.14 This educated, welltraveled, savoir-faire group sometimes takes a critical stance towards rampant modernization, when, for instance, confronting the social inequalities and conditions in migrant enclaves, or the repressive political atmosphere and human deficiencies in the Chinese Brave New World of dazzling cities of speed, light, and consumerism. And visitors are often ironic about Shanghai’s adventurous past, and renegotiate it as they roam the city. Yet the colonial nostalgia of restaurants and bars still offers an escape from the predicaments of the contemporary city, and contrivances for inventing pasts and futures through performance: Almost all cities in the world have their unique cultural and leisure districts, such as Montmartre in Paris, Soho in New York, and the Ginza in Tokyo. Shanghai, as an emerging international metropolis, should have her own. Xintiandi is designed as a landmark that 13

Mike Crang, “Rhythms of the City: Temporalised Space and Motion”, in TimeSpace: Geographies of Temporality, eds Jon May and Nigel Thrift, London, 2001, 192. 14 Bronislaw Szerszynski and John Urry, “Visuality, Mobility and the Cosmopolitan: Inhabiting the World from Afar”, British Journal of Sociology, LVII/1 (February 2006), 114-15.

38

Amanda Lagerkvist encapsulates the City’s past, present and future. Its old Shikumen houses were given a breath of new life after the interiors were remodeled to meet the needs of modern lifestyle. Today, they are occupied by restaurants, bars, cafés, and shops with a recognized international standard. Here travelers and local residents alike can relive the city’s past while savoring the changes of today and tomorrow.15

Contemporary Shanghai, in its headlong march toward capitalism and modernization, is mining its past in order to pursue the future.16 Massive changes are occurring in this rapidly resurrecting metropolis as the city tries to reinvent itself and draw global attention to its territory. Today’s “New China” shows the world its new face in this metropolis, the second largest city in China, and, with approximately twenty-million inhabitants, one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Political efforts to transform Shanghai into a world city – one of the financial and cultural centers of the world – have spurred a frantic construction boom, unsurpassed in its history. Boosted by foreign direct investment and native capital, modernization and urban restructuring are taking place at an unprecedented rate, which increased at about 12 percent yearly between 1992 and 2008. The ongoing encapsulation of the city within a coherent narrative framework and realm of sensory-emotive experiences, as discussed by des Forges, that would complement these material changes involves an obsession with a sense of futurity, which is pursued through various means by politicians, urban planners, architects, public relations specialists, tourism promoters, and media workers. Shanghai has been anticipating the World Expo of 2010, where the city has put on display its modernization and claim to an important global role. It is home to the world’s fastest train (the Maglev), a 77-kilometer elevated highway (the Gaoija), and some of the world’s tallest skyscrapers, mostly along the skyline of Pudong on the eastern side of the Huangpu River. Advanced ICTs (information and communications technologies) have also become intrinsic to the urban fabric.

15

Plaque at Xintiandi Museum. See Ackbar M. Abbas, “Cosmopolitan De-scriptions: Shanghai and Hong Kong”, Public Culture, XII/3 (Fall 2000), 769-86. 16

Velvet and Violence

39

As scholars have suggested, a ubiquitous strategy among planners and politicians, commercial interests and entrepreneurs has been to draw upon a particular “Shanghai nostalgia” and memory craze for the “Golden Age” of the 1920s and ’30s.17 Shanghai – sometimes called the Paris of the East – was then one of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities, attracting foreign businessmen, adventurers, remittance men, scoundrels, and dreamers, as well as Chinese migrants, to its dance halls, movie theatres, and opium dens. Instances of conspicuous consumption and refinement co-existed in the city with poverty and decadence.18 Memorabilia from this era have made a return by way of advertising, posters, music and books, books and in nostalgic documentaries such as Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin, Shanghai.

Figure 1: Cover of the DVD-film Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin, Shanghai. (By permission of Demi-Monde Productions). 17 See Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, “Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re)Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis”, in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationlism, eds Aiwa Ong and Donald Nonini, London, 1997, 287-319; Xudong Zhang, “Shanghai Nostalgia: Postrevolutionary Allegories in Wang Anyi’s Literary Production in the 1990s”, positions, VIII/2 (Fall 2000), 349-88; Hanchao Lu, “Nostalgia for the Future: The Resurgence of an Alienated Culture in China”, Pacific Affairs, LXXV/2 (Summer 2002), 169-86; Tianshu Pan, “Historical Memory, Community-building and Placemaking in Neighborhood Shanghai”, in Restructuring the Chinese City, eds Laurence Ma and Fulong Wu, London, 2005, 122-37. 18 See Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism and the Search for an Alternative Modernity, ed. Mario Gandelsonas, Princeton: NJ, 2002.

40

Amanda Lagerkvist

Websites such as “Historic Shanghai” and “Tales of Old Shanghai” abound.19 Another such nostalgic website is “An American in China 1936-39: A Memoir”, which promotes a book of the same name by Gould Hunter Thomas, who worked for Texaco in China in the 1930s.20 The website is an assemblage of the manifold expressions of Shanghai mania, epitomizing the current city script by displaying a visual culture consisting of photographs, ads, old hotel brands, and postcards (Figures 2-3) together with signs of how Shanghai nostalgia reverberates in recent Hollywood films like The Painted Veil with Edward Norton and Naomi Watts (2006), and Ang Lee’s Lust Caution (2007). As is evident on the website, this imaginary also materializes in Shanghai’s museums, art galleries, restaurants, hotels and bars that play on the western feel of this former era, on its decadent and thrillingly licentious atmosphere, violence, and entrepreneurial spirit. At the Xintiandi Museum, for example, the Shanghai Municipal Government explains on a plaque the imperative behind the design of this central tourist area: “Here travelers and local residents alike can relive the city’s past while savoring the changes of today and tomorrow”. The quote reveals that within the current urban script, certain practices among foreigners (a growing presence in the city since the mid-1990s) are called for in particular spaces in the city. These visitors are encouraged to relive, remember, and replay a particular past, and to relish the city’s movement into the future. In the next section, I discuss the particularities of the Shanghai imaginary by tracking down those spirits haunting the city. Shanghai, as I will suggest, is a space of futurity involving a structure of feeling that is pervaded by an affective duality of velvet and violence – it is permeated both by hopes for a bright future, and by apprehension.21 Along with massive growth and development, there is unease in the future city. I propose that this unease underscores and undercuts its ambitions. Here we must carefully distinguish between the city’s inhabitants and visitors: this duality points to radically different 19

On line at: http://www.historic-shanghai.com/; http://www.earnshaw.com/shanghaied-india/tales/tales.htm; http://www.willysthomas.net/OldChinaHandmain.htm. 20 On line at: http://www.willysthomas.net/OldChinaHandmain.htm (accessed 26 November 2008). 21 Zhang, “Shanghai Nostalgia”, 353-5.

Velvet and Violence

41

memories (of, for example, pain and trauma) and potential consequences of the city’s development for those who pass through it and those who live there, bounded by its political and economic realities. Many people in Shanghai feel that the city is returning to how it was in the past, and that it is once more becoming a metropolis contaminated by foreign adventurers.22 It must be noted also that many Chinese harbor strong resentment towards what happened in the past, and feel ambivalent about the semi-colonial era of “Shanghai Modern”. Although I eschew engaging with ordinary Shanghainese and their perspectives on their city in transition,23 I will nevertheless bring their documented histories and experiences in through the back door, as it were, to make this point further. Velvet and violence: the hopes and trepidations of futurity Shanghai is capable of invoking a sense of out-of-this-worldness, and a feeling that the future has arrived.24 In concert with this emergent feeling of futurity, the city is dominated by the overriding fantasy that this very sense of futurity has been residing there since the 1850s, when, after the Opium wars, colonial powers established themselves in the city. Hence, I find futurity to be a defining propensity to the place: it is an atmosphere that is frequently reproduced and re-enacted, and a mnemonic resource used by different agents with differing agendas at various points in time. Shanghai has had a history of setting off new futures, beginning with the era when it was a treaty port, through the cosmopolitan 1930s and the turbulent 1960s, and into today. Through this port city, all that was modern and new came into China. It is not surprising, then, that cultural fantasies about interwar Shanghai reverberate in the city’s current resurrection. Shanghai’s particular entrepreneurial spirit, and the decadent and bohemian demeanor of the city, contributed and contribute to the myth that nothing is prohibited and everything is possible in the city. 22

Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis, London, 2003, 32. 23 For such an account, see Duncan Hewitt, Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China, London, 2007, 32-59. 24 See Jeffrey Wasserstrom, “The Second Coming of Global Shanghai”, World Policy Journal, XX/2 (Summer 2003), 51-60; and Seng Kuan, “Image of the Metropolis: Three Historical Views of Shanghai”, in Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China, eds Seng Kuan and Peter G. Rowe, Munich, 2004, 84-103.

42

Amanda Lagerkvist

Yet, imaginary spaces of the future can never be fully sealed or secured. The frailties of the future city deserve closer examination. One of them resides in the very processes of globalization itself, which can certainly be seen as destructive, but which holds thereby the potential to make possible a re-imagining of the world: the world ending and beginning anew.25 Globalization is a risky business: the dream of realizing the globalized future contains the unintended potential toppling of this very same vision; and, as in other modernizing spaces where there is a high stake of monetary, cultural, and symbolic investments in the future, Shanghai balances itself between a general hope and unrest. As an undercurrent to all its gloss, this apocalyptic modernity of Shanghai thus represents both the last days and the city still to come. Even the landscape comes to embody this feeling. Visitors and residents make apocalyptic reflections on the city’s future, even as they are hesitant and ambivalent about a straightforwardly glorious future: I saw all the billboards along the Bund and I thought: It will all go to hell!26 I was wondering how long such prosperity could last when I noticed a mirage-like skyscraper under construction at the end of the horizon.27

But, apart from this general ambivalence about the future within modernity, I wish to stress the particular memories of futures lost in the city. There is, in fact, a duality to Shanghai’s spatial story, in which a general hope for newness and indulgence in extravagance – the velvety feel of the city – conflicts and coalesces with a subtle and menacing latent violence inherent in this urban landscape. It seems especially true in this case to argue, with Andreas Huyssen, that “the strong marks of present space merge in the imaginary with traces of the past, erasures, losses and heterotopias”.28 Such traces can be invoked if we turn to specific points in the historical drama in 25 See François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Introduction, in Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, Albany: NY, 2007, 1-26. 26 Unpublished interview with returning Swedish visitor, 2006. 27 Lianne Li, “CHINA, SOCIETY, FEATURE SERIES, On the Road to Shanghai…. The Beginning”, 2004. On line at: http://josephbosco.com/wow2004/wow.html. 28 Huyssen, Urban Palimpsest 7.

Velvet and Violence

43

Shanghai. An odd tale from the era of 1937-1941, the era of the Japanese war, invasion, and occupation, sheds a different light on the actual meaning of decadence in the city. Alongside the lottery, the racetrack and glittering dance halls, movie theaters and opium dens, there was death and terror: In these terrible years hundreds of people were killed and wounded. Death pounced on them in hotels, outside theaters, in crowded cafés, in the streets, in their offices, and at home as they lay peacefully in bed. This was a period of armed bodyguards, armor-plated cars, bullet-proof vests, and street pill boxes .… [T]he situation was beyond police control.29

This period was marked by the strained triangular relationship between the foreign settlement, the Japanese military, and the puppet regime. Japanese thugs threatened the inhabitants, especially in a district called Huxi – “the Badlands” – where most of the opium dens and brothels could be found. From Shanghai’s historical archive of dramatic brutality and upheaval, we may also recall the year 1949, which ended the epoch of “Shanghai Modern” as Chinese Communist rule began and westerners fled the city. It was a moment when one vision for the future was lost while another was propelled forward. Seventeen years later the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was inaugurated by Mao Zedong, who sent his wife Jiang Qing to Shanghai, where she and the Gang of Four unleashed the revolution in the summer of 1966. This led to the confiscation of property, the harassment of people displaying feudal characteristics, the destruction of national treasures, and the humiliation and murder of numerous of the city’s inhabitants.30 Shanghai today is both a place of lavish consumption and undisciplined decadent excess, and, I will propose, a place suffused by an undercurrent threat, a “spirit”, as de Certeau would call it, which may reappear with decisive suddenness to disrupt, destroy, and depose the future to come. How long will the future last? Will we lose it again, before we could even enjoy its full bloom? In this 29

Percy Finch, quoted in Frederic Wakeman, The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937-41, Cambridge, 1996, np. 30 See Roderick MacFarquar and Micheal Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution, Cambridge: MA, 2006.

44

Amanda Lagerkvist

hyperglobalizing space, specters pointing both to the past and to the future haunt its here-and-nowness. The lingering memories and forgetfulness of the badlands, the Japanese war, the humiliation of a colonial presence, the great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, and the current authoritarian market dictatorship amount to a premonition of unspoken and unspeakable violence that is relegated to the subconscious chronicles of the city. As was discussed earlier, this obviously carries different meanings and material effects for inhabitants and travelers. Nevertheless, they all share something of this structure of feeling. And, as in the past when the “illicit pleasures flourishing in the no-mans land of Western Shanghai (Huxi) – the badlands – were both a momentary escape from unbearable social tensions and a constant reminder of a cleaved city festering under foreign domination”,31 velvet and violence feed off each other. Cosmopolitan movements: performing futures past In the face of (or perhaps because of) its history of pain, violence and repression, the city brashly glitters again, flamboyantly declaring with department stores, hyper modern technology, futuristic architecture, and world-class restaurants that it is a Future City, and even a world center at that. But can we discern the dual spatial story of velvet and violence as it plays out through the movements and practices of cosmopolitan visitors in Shanghai? How may we make further sense of the ways in which the memory of Shanghai’s futurity is performed? May we speak of a modus loci that prescribes certain modes of behavior in the city? And where exactly is the source of this impulse? Who taught the westerner in today’s Shanghai to animate himself/herself by adopting a gentleman’s ways of domination and control while having coffee in the 1846 hotel Astor House, and to adjust rapidly to being very demanding of the local service culture? When waiters cringe in response to foreigners – “Yes, Madam”, “Anything else, Sir?” – the foul scent of the colonial 1890s or 1920s is invoked. Uncannily reflecting this very scene, a 1930s advert for Hennessy Cognac on the “An American in China …” website provides a “smart set in Shanghai” that epitomizes the colonial script of Shanghai: 31

Wakeman, The Shanghai Badlands, 1.

Velvet and Violence

45

Figure 2: Illustration from “An American in China 1936-39: A Memoir” website.32

Performances of the colonial and cosmopolitan Shanghai script carry demeaning and scornful dimensions in relation to the history of western colonialism. How are such manners nursed or fostered? Repetition is key to making sense of the sensory-emotive performances of futures past that I attend to here. But the enigma lies elsewhere: there are initial moments of breaking into a performative attitude. These are elusive workings of power: no one taught the westerners to behave in this way in their home setting. Or did they? If not, does mediation have anything to do with it? Or did space itself set this off? It is clear that new, global, and digital Shanghai is entangled with a living, highly mediated, and material past. Scriptings of the city encourage westerners to behave once more in a sassy and adventurous, yet refined, manner. The following is taken from one of

32 This illustration is accompanied by the caption: “’SMART SET IN SHANGHAI’. This United States magazine advert from 1934 for Hennessy cognac gives a somewhat idealized view of tea or cocktail hour on the Bund at perhaps the Cathay or the Palace. Note the explorer on left reading a map of the Yangtze region. The elderly gentleman in background, center, is surely George Bernard Shaw, who visited Shanghai in February 1933. The businessmen behind the young lady are probably Japanese”. Source: http://www.willysthomas.net/CathayHotel.htm (accessed 5 November 2009).

46

Amanda Lagerkvist

the major tourist websites for New Shanghai and the anonymous author writes under the rubric “Sexy Shanghai”: Since the 1990s, however, Shanghai is rising again .… And the foreigners, from other parts of Asia, Europe and America, are pouring in to catch a slice of the action, creating an intoxicating atmosphere of energy and possibility.33

A travel blog posting, recounting how the blogger moved through spaces of colonial nostalgia and onto a 1930s stage, underscores the congruency between script and performance: The rain was still falling when we left the shop, so we decided to go to the faded glamour of the Astor House Hotel (Charlie Chaplin was one of its famous guests but now it is home to backpackers) to make use of their internet bar where we spent a few hours planning the next leg of our trip in Japan. By the time we left the bar, it had stopped raining!! To celebrate, we headed back onto the metro to go to Xintiandi, in the centre of Shanghai, for dinner. Xintiandi is a fabulous shopping centre and restaurant complex in restored Shikumen houses, a special form of old architecture only found in Shanghai.34

Apart from the writings of bloggers and reporters, we find concrete examples of scriptings of the city in tourist brochures, guidebooks, travel magazines, official websites, and travel programs. On a purely subjective level, visitors may also conjure up mediatized memories of, for example, the 1932 film Shanghai Express with Marlene Dietrich, Shanghai Surprise with Sean Penn and Madonna (1986), or Zhang Yimou’s The Shanghai Triad (1994) starring Gong Li. But the enactment of a particular urban script may also come into play in indirect ways, which refer back to the subconscious registers of the city; registers informed not by the clearly distinguishable mediation of Shanghai, but by, for example, films we have never seen but which seem likely to us to exist: film as myth.35 33

“Sexy Shanghai”, June 2007, on line at: http://shanghaitown.online.sh.cn. “Richardandfiona: ‘Bag, Watch, DVD? – Shanghai, China Travel Blog’”, 11 April 2006, on line at: http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/richardandfiona. 35 Miriam Hansen, “The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism”, Modernism/Modernity, VI/2 (April 1999), 59-77. 34

Velvet and Violence

47

Furthermore, such gestures and manners must be understood not only in relation to how they are provided by media scriptings, but also by how they are made available by inscriptions in space. As westerners catch a slice of the action, the backdrop to this is a palimpsest of 1920s and 30s interior settings, neoclassical and Art Deco western architecture from the Golden past when Shanghai was a true world metropolis (Figure 3), and a visual culture old of labels and brands that bid the westerner welcome.

Figure 3: Photograph of the Old/Metropolitan Shanghai Skyline featured on the website “An American in China 1936-39: A Memoir”.36

Space, as Henri Lefebvre suggests, communicates and thus prescribes performances.37 This is why we must pay attention to what (material, symbolic, and lived) space itself affords lived practices both in terms of settings, stages, and edifices, and in terms of its current script – the memories it holds and the movements of subjects, which together make up the material imaginary of the city. Lived practice, here, refers to elitist movement within spaces of globality, one of which is the chronotopes of nostalgic dwelling that set the stage for performances of the city’s script. Visitors seek out these spaces; they are attracted to them, and feel at home there: Shanghai was exhausting. Like New York only much more chaotic .… We walked everywhere but never seemed to get anywhere. Shanghai is big and there are so many foreigners there that it almost felt like you were back in the States .… There is hardly little Chinese style in 36 Source: http://www.willysthomas.net/OldChinaHandmain.htm November 2008). 37 Lefevbre, The Production of Space, 143.

(accessed

26

48

Amanda Lagerkvist Shanghai, except for the people. It is mostly westernized. One night we went to the French Concession which resembles the back streets of Paris. Everything was very westernized and I felt I was back in the States right down to the Jazz bar we went to one night.38

For blogger Denise, “Cosmopolitan Shanghai” felt like being “back in the States”. Westerners are often taken by surprise by the uncanny familiarity of the city. Bergère makes the point that the revived fascination with Shanghai and its former image as a romantic oriental metropolis make it easier for the city to hire foreign experts.39 The American journalist Seth Faison recounts, in a similar vein, his feelings regarding the city when he moved there in the mid 1990s: I felt at home in Shanghai .… I moved into a regal 1930s French apartment building with tall ceilings and wood floors and art nouveau trimmings. I found antique Chinese tables and chests at a warehouse at the city’s edge, where migrant workers restored them for a few dollars each. In a smoky old market, I bought old posters with advertisements for cigarettes and soap from the 1920s, adorned with attractive Chinese women in sexy gowns. The shops along my street offered almost everything a consumer could want, espresso machines and French wine and Irish butter.40

Seeing certain scenes, touching artifacts, or enjoying sophisticated flavors reawakens repressed desires and dreams, and thereby connects past and present.41 Hence, memory has, as Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright claim, “a texture which is both social and historic: it exists in the world rather than in people’s heads, finding its basis in conversations, cultural forms, personal relations and the structure and 38

“Denise: News from China”, 29 October 2006, on line at: http://www.wydeangle.com. 39 Marie-Claire Bergère, “Shanghai’s Urban Development: A Remake?”, in Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism for Modern China, 49. 40 Seth Faison, South of the Clouds: Exploring the Hidden Realms of China, New York, 2004, 130. 41 See, Chris Rojek and John Urry, “Transformations of Travel and Theory”, in Touring Cultures: Transformations of Travel and Theory, eds Chris Rojek and John Urry, London, 1997, 14; Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, London, 1999, 52; and The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. Nadia C. Seremetakis, Chicago: IL, 1994.

Velvet and Violence

49

appearance of places”.42 Artifacts and architecture from the 1930s, media forms, representations of young modern Chinese women, clothing, and exclusive foods all restore and call back a certain comfort, which “the haves” of the city (the Faisons of the past) were privileged to enjoy. Visitors readily join in and perform the role of “adventurous westerners infesting the city”: It was much too early to call it a night at this stage, so I wandered around an area called the French Concession. This is where you’ll find Shanghai’s cafe culture hidden away, giving it a distinct European flavor – another surprise awaiting the casual visitor. I went on a impromptu bar crawl along Henshang Lu and met a string of interesting characters who make up the city’s vibrant and rapidly growing expat community (as well as the local AA meetings most likely). I’d love to share some of it with you, but unfortunately that would mean remembering at least some of it first. It’s a real mystery how I got back to the hotel!43

Through performance, cosmopolitans enact a form of time travel – an imaginative, yet material, journey into both the colonial past and the new Chinese future – offered to and perhaps even required of foreigners. They invent, confront, appropriate, and shape the city through particular performances of mediatized memories.44 As I have discussed at length elsewhere, the sense of time that is activated in the future city is then, in fact, that of a complex intertwining of past, present, and future.45 The practices of time travel and collective remembering are here performed in a geography of overlapping temporalities, and these practices feed back into and inform the rhythms of the spaces cosmopolitan visitors inhabit.

42 Michael Bommes and Patrick Wright, “The Charms of Residence: The Public and the Past”, in Making Histories, eds Richard Johnson, Gregor McLennan, Bill Schwarz, and David Sutton, London, 1982, 256. 43 “Tom’s Shanghai Diary”, June 2005, on line at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/black country. 44 See Lagerkvist, “Gazing at Pudong”. 45 See Amanda Lagerkvist, “The Future is Here: Media, Memory and Futurity in Shanghai”, Space & Culture, XIII/3 (August 2010), 220-38; and “La Villa Rouge: Replaying Decadence in Shanghai”, in Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity, eds André Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist, Aldershot, 2009, 149-68.

50

Amanda Lagerkvist

One story of western manners in Shanghai, provided by Seth Faison, makes this explicit, as he details an experience, shared by many foreigners, of identifying with this place of extravagance, unboundedness, and luxury: On the surface, it looks as though history were repeating itself, with Shanghai recovering its old cosmopolitan anything-goes mentality. When I went to an afternoon lawn party featuring Westerners dressed up in tutus and sipping martinis as we played croquet on the sprawling lawn of an old British mansion, it occurred to me that we were replaying the rootless profligacy of Shanghai’s heyday.46

As this reveals, time travel in Shanghai involves remembering through performance. In fact, as Baz Kershaw suggests, to remember is to instigate collectively a performance.47 This means that visitors have to cooperate with others to produce memories. Hence, the performativity of reminiscing is not a passive act of consumption.48 The performers get in touch with, remember, or even invent segments of the past.49 Christopher Hawthorne depicts his routines in the city in the following way in “Shanghai: The Sky’s the Limit”: After just two trips to Shanghai, I’ve already developed a first-day routine that I’m sure I’ll stick to on future visits: As soon as I drop my bags at the hotel, I head directly for one of the rooftop bars and restaurants lining the Bund, the city’s famous riverfront boulevard and the best place from which to assess Shanghai’s sometimes daring, sometimes schizophrenic attempts to balance Chinese urbanism and outside influence. One particularly good spot is the broad terrace of the New Heights restaurant, atop a former bank at the southern end of the Bund. Stretching north from there in a gentle crescent are the lavish neoclassical buildings that suggest Shanghai’s reign in the 1920s and 30s as one of the most cosmopolitan and hedonistic cities in the world. 46

Faison, South of the Clouds, 132. Baz Kershaw, The Radical in Performance: Between Brecht and Baudrillard, London, 1999. 48 Rojek and Urry, “Transformations of Travel and Theory”, 14. 49 See Richard Schechner, Between Theatre and Anthropology, Philadelphia: PA, 1985, 35-36. 47

Velvet and Violence

51

He appropriates and produces “New Shanghai” through performance. While gazing at Pudong, he compares it to other world cities: There is no view in the world quite like it. The skylines of Hong Kong and Rio may be perched on the edge of more dramatic natural locations. European capitals may have deeper collections of architectural masterpieces. But only in Shanghai can you see unfettered 21st-century ambition facing off as dramatically against the early twentieth-century vision. It’s like getting to watch Stanford White debate Rem Koolhaas. In China. With a drink in your hand. 50

What is Hawthorne actually doing at the New Heights restaurant? The drink, or the act of consuming extravagance, seemingly logs Hawthorne into the collective memory of the Shanghai of the 1920s and ’30s – the previous era of reign and plenty for Shanghai. This involves a complex temporal play in which experiencing Pudong (or Shanghai in general) becomes an act of taking on the subject position of the colonialist/adventurer/reporter/capitalist in the Shanghai of the interwar years. Such performances occur in places in which one can feel at home while away – these chronotopes of nostalgic dwelling are places to feel rooted in while in a space of flux and hypermobility. Hawthorne leaves the busy city of commerce, only to enjoy the newly opened restaurants, cafés, and bars of the quarters of the select few of the settlements. He goes to the private club, The Yong Foo Elite, which is “tucked away on a pretty street in the French concession”. On his last night in town, he ventures into a place/time frame of “luxurious colonial privilege”. Roaming in the old villa gardens of the western elites, which bear evidence of the colonial heritage of the city, imbues the trip with a refined, yet hedonistic and decadent, ambiance. Hawthorne is also entering into a liminal space where some of the restrictions of routine life are relaxed and replaced by different norms of behavior. His journey entails new and exciting forms of sociability and playfulness, as he delves into the past as well as into the future. But, as I have shown, these performances also need to be understood in the light of a dual spatial story pervaded by Shanghai’s structure of feeling of velvet and violence. When blogger Fiona seeks 50

Christopher Hawthorne, “Shanghai: The Sky’s the Limit”, Los Angeles Times, 26 February 2005.

52

Amanda Lagerkvist

out the leisurely thrill of living in a hotel that used to be the home of a gangster, she engages with this feel of the urban fabric: … on the following day we moved to our next hotel, the Dong Hu in the French Concession. We were very excited about going to this hotel as it had been the home of Du Yuesheng, a notorious Shanghai gangster in the 1920s, and it had been used as, among other things, an opium den. Our cab drew up in front of the hotel which looked beautiful – a mansion house set in beautiful gardens. So, you can imagine our disappointment when the receptionist sent us back out and across the street to the ugly modern block that housed the cheap rooms!!51

The city script requires visitors to play with both velvet and violence in their consumption of place. In the spaces of gangsters, westerners relive a mythical Shanghai where their presence is obligatory and natural. Notably, however, while these performances are extremely important, materially and symbolically, for the city’s resurrection, they are always a combination between habit, creative innovation, and intention.52 Since the city is still in the process of becoming imbued with a certain identity, and its structure of feeling is evolving, performances both adhere to and mould the script they follow. Many tourists say, when asked about their expectations, that they were in fact oblivious about Shanghai. They have no medial attitude towards the city, no connotations associated with it, and no obvious objects for their tourist gaze to fix on.53 This means that the production of the city’s script and its performance contains a tension between irreverence and adherence. This would also seem to suggest that the city may reinvent itself rather freely, in relation to both memories and phenomena from the past and grand aspirations for the future. At the same time, as I have suggested, there are durable legends, and even 51

“Richardandfiona: ‘Bag, Watch, DVD?’”. See Susanna Rostas, “From Ritualization to Performativity: the Concheros of Mexico”, in Ritual, Performance, Media, ed. Felicia Hughes-Freeland, London, 1998, 85-103. 53 See Amanda Lagerkvist, “‘We See America’: Mediatized and Mobile Gazes in Swedish Post-war Travelogues”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, VII/3 (September 2004), 321-42.

52

Velvet and Violence

53

unspeakable memories and menaces lingering there, which also impact on the city’s imaginary. Since Shanghai invokes an experience of unfamiliar familiarities, journeying there is also a venture into both mnemonic territories of second nature – mediatized territories – and a virgin land of unknown, or undefined, strictures and novelties. Therefore traveling there involves performing, inventing and transgressing this script. Conclusion This exploratory article has sought to unpack one form of social behavior in our global mediated age and transnational era of hypermobility by assessing the movements of global tribes through a world city like Shanghai. I have also attended to the sense in which Shanghai is both overloaded with meaning and a virgin territory for bringing to the surface, and perhaps even inventing, the subjectivity and interactional modes of the cosmopolitan visitor. I have zoomed in on the restaurant, the café, and the villa garden as chronotopes of nostalgic dwelling, bringing into view performances of western cultural superiority. In spite of the semiotic skills and openness toward others among the cosmopolitans, in these spaces they act out power and control. As travelers devour the city at restaurants and bars with names such as 1931, Le Garçon Chinois, and Old Shanghai Moon or sit and drink on the terraces of the old banking palaces on the Bund, feeling a bit extravagant – the Shanghai way – they are inclined to draw on and engage the collective and mediatized memory of the Golden Age, which is reactivated by these physical encounters. In spaces of gangsters and reckless divas, and on the streets of a glorious past, subjects engage in manners and acts of letting go that combine desires for dominance and profligacy. The enigmatic practices of concern in this article are rarely something that agents speak about proudly, although they loom in their blog posts and travel reports. It is primarily, however, the narratives constructed by these spatial practices, and movements in the city that tell these stories of Shanghai, and, consequently, produce both this cosmopolitan space and its subjects. Consequently this article has foregrounded the ways in which bodies make time-space,54 54

Crang, “Rhythms of the City”, 194.

54

Amanda Lagerkvist

and moved thereby beyond a focus on spatiality alone. Time travel and the nostalgia for cosmopolitan Shanghai contain considerable mythological, ideological, and economic power;55 they also offer a comforting guarantee that westerners belong in and share a future in Asia. Appropriating Shanghai is generally an ecstatic experience for westerners, in part because they may exploit a selective memory of hedonism and affluence. But as I have argued, this sense is dependent upon the feeling of velvet and violence bearing on the city when it is silenced, highlighted and romanticized. I have suggested that consumerist New Shanghai, with its endless possibilities for the affluent, and its captivating, even infatuating, atmosphere, contains a feeling of futurity pervaded by this tension, which the memory politics of the city and its nostalgia industry, together with commercial interests, adventurous westerners, and the dictatorship seem to uphold. This commitment to modernization and futurity feeds on memories of adventure, ordeal, and sudden disruption: memories called upon deliberately by nostalgia and tourism industries. But let me suggest that parts of what they entail reverberate in the double apocalyptic impulse that is integral to the city; that is, the eschatological gesture performed by modernity in combination with the city’s collective memory of traumas. This suggests a finale where questions rather than answers present themselves: may these performances of the city’s script by the cosmopolitan visitor in fact reveal or at least bring to the surface unspeakable, elided dimensions to collective memory that are “encysted in the pain or pleasure of the body”?56 Within the mythography of Shanghai, will they both reinforce the sense of newness, and momentum, and potentially undercut such a sense, as visitors perceive an end to the future while sipping martinis in something that might also resemble the last days of excessive consumption? And is the unrestrained, libidinal impulse to consume the city’s offerings congenial not only with glamour and indulgence –

55

Christine M. Boyer, “Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: the Case of Zhang Yimou and Shanghai Triad (1995)”, in Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism and the Search for an Alternative Modernity, 64. 56 De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 108.

Velvet and Violence

55

the re-enchantment of our disenchanted world57 – but also with fear, apocalypse and thrill? If we grant this final point some credence, then in the registers of the city the slogan for shopaholics must be modified to account for the uncertainty of Shanghai’s futurity and the threat of its violent overthrow. It should read: shop until someone or something makes it all drop!

57

See George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption, Pine Forge: PA, 1999.

TOWARDS AN AESTHETIC POLITICS OF TRANSNATIONAL HISTORY: ASIAN AMERICANS IN A DECOLONIZING HAWAI‘I BIANCA KAI ISAKI

Hawaii, pronounced huh WY ee or huh WAH ee, is the only state in the United States that does not lie on the mainland of North America. It is made up of islands near the middle of the North Pacific Ocean. Honolulu, the capital and largest city, is about 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers) southwest of the U.S. mainland .… Hawaii, the youngest state, joined the Union on August 21, 1959.1

In the World Book Encyclopedia’s pedestrian taxonomy, “Hawaii” is identified through its geopolitical relationship to the United States. Secured in this order, the relationship cannot be defined the other way around. This asymmetry is among many that mark Hawai‘i on an uneven terrain of colonial knowledge. Delving deeper than its identity as a “young” addition to an itinerary of US expansion, Hawai‘i has a genealogy of settler colonization that is relegated to the margins of American history. This marginalization is a political process also known as “colonizing history”. As an interwoven tangle of national spaces, Hawai‘i calls for approaches that diffract the historical trajectories, which consolidate its incorporation into the US. I argue that transnational renditions of history usefully interrogate the colonial processes through which America organizes Hawai‘i’s past. While retaining the nation as a crucial area of study, theories of transnationality create spaces to analyze traffic between nations that are not organized only by the nation but can be re-entered on new terms. Such scholarship has been crucial to articulating colonization’s myriad effects on gender, labor, culture, international orders and diaspora in an era of globalization.2 1

Entry for “Hawaii” in the World Book Encyclopedia: www.worldbook.com. See Talking Visions: Multicultural Feminism in a Transnational Age, ed. Ella Shohat, Cambridge: MA, 2001; and Erika Lee and Naoko Shibusawa, “Guest Editors’

2

58

Bianca Kai Isaki

My discussion focuses on the ways that the reassertion of Hawaiian nationhood impacts on Asian “American” identities in Hawai‘i. This means staging the relationship between political identity, history and the decolonial demand to re-form histories and identities oriented towards America. Here, a transnational history can help us approach the question of how does one detach from one national identity and transfer to another? The American state of Hawai‘i The tradition of colonialism follows a pattern of reasoning away the constitutive violence of the colonial state and to deny the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i prior to its incorporation into the United States: as the logic of this pattern went, natives never constituted a nation and therefore neither Hawai‘i’s annexation to the United States (1898) nor the imposition of statehood (1959) violated their national sovereignty. However, the now well-documented existence of Hawaiian nationhood demands different strategies to reconcile the idea of Hawai‘i as an American entity. Rather than deny historical wrongdoing, US occupation attempts to justify itself by controlling the modalities through which the two nations can be seen to exist within and against each other. The designation of Hawai‘i as an independent nation-state, colony or a US state has historically been highly contested. The 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i was engineered by a white settler ruling class, composed of descendants of eighteenth- and nineteenth century American and British missionaries, who forcibly deposed Hawaii‘s then reigning monarch, Queen Lili’uokalani. The illegality of this deposition was formally recognized in the same year by president Grover Cleveland in an address to the US Congress on 18 December. However, this recognition notwithstanding, US assaults on the Hawaiian nation persisted. A Joint Resolution of Annexation was imposed in 1898, and international legal protocol was ignored in order for Hawai‘i to be admitted as a US state in 1959.3 Designated a nonself governing territory by the United Nations in 1946, Hawai‘i was Introduction: What Is Transnational Asian American History? Recent Trends and Challenges”, Journal of Asian American Studies, VIII/3 (October 2005), vii-xvii. 3 See Haunani-Kay Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony: Locals in Hawai‘i”, Amerasia Journal, XXVI/2 (Summer 2000), 1-26.

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

59

entitled to a UN supervised-plebiscite (mandated by the UN Charter, Chapter XI, Article 73) in regard to changing forms of government. Instead, the US federal government approved the Hawaii Admission Act (admitting Hawai‘i as a US state) based on a referendum vote for Statehood conducted by Hawai‘i’s Territorial administration.4 This vote has been later contested because the ballot offered only two choices: to become a US state or remain a Territory. The possibility of self-government, which UN Resolution (VIII) afforded to non-self governing territories, was not offered as an option. Three decades later, in 1993, US president Bill Clinton signed what has become popularly known as the “Apology Bill”, which recognizes US culpability in the aftermath of the forced deposition of Queen Lili’uokalani. But despite Clinton’s official apology and Hawaiians’ ongoing struggle for the restoration of nearly two million acres of land and political self-determination, the US government continues to be recalcitrant on institutional transformation and systemic change, which is indicative of the persistence of colonial domination in Hawai‘i. In this article I argue that to counter such forms of colonial power means reconsidering what we identify as political enactment, as well as examining how national forms of subjectivity come to monopolize such identification. Foregrounding what is transnational about historicity cuts through a facile analysis which presumes that native national sovereignties only mimic the form, and thus the disrepairs, of the colonizing nation-state. Historicizing underscores how politics is encountered in spaces of knowledge production. Colonization structures historical knowledge along multiple axes: what can be known as history, its emphases and silences, how history colonizes in the first place, and how the “remaking of history involves a negotiation with the structures that have produced the individual as agent of history”.5 Settler and native identities are thus condensed out of complex cultural and historical cross-hatchings. This condensation presumes forms of identifications that can attach, and reattach, to nations – relying on the malleability of history to give that identity 4

See Kehaulani J. Kauanui, “Precarious Positions: Native Hawaiians and US Federal Recognition”, The Contemporary Pacific, XVII/1 (Spring 2005), 1-27. 5 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Who Claims Alterity?”, in Remaking History, eds Barbara Kruger and Phil Mariani, Seattle: WA, 1989, 282.

60

Bianca Kai Isaki

coherence. The point is not to re-consolidate original national groups, but rather to understand how political agency emerges. Academic labor enters this project with the limited agenda of engaging the colonial complicity of knowledge production. Gayatari Spivak parses this engagement into two registers: the retrieval of information to restore an imbalance of historical knowledge, and securing this restoration’s effectiveness to transform consciousness – lest the information retrieved becomes a quantitative addition to a colonized knowledge structure. Naturally, the latter task has proven to be more beleaguered by politics and power.6 Re-describing history’s transnational moments is a subset of decolonizing knowledge, which is, in turn, a subset of decolonization. As a subset of a subset of decolonizing work, a transnational analytic can nevertheless serve the crucial function of keeping alive the persistent dissensus of a Hawai’i under US hegemony by attending to the plurality of forms of political subjectivity and the feelings that are always immanent in national attachments. Cauldron-borne Feelings surround and shape the emergence of political subjects in the decolonial taking of sides. Candice Fujikane writes that the “most profound of Asian American anxieties is the indigenous challenge to Asian American claims to America”.7 Traversing these unsettled feelings, as a transnational historical formation, can underscore fractures in Asian American identifications. Feelings take on material form, and condense in overlapping and contradictory contexts. As they are embedded in the political, these anxieties site a contested point of attachment to US hegemony. Hawaiian studies professor and political activist, Haunani-Kay Trask describes this scenario as follows:

6 As Spivak observes in Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York and London, 1993: “We cannot exchange as ‘truth’, in the currency of the university, what might be immediate needs for identitarian collectivities .… If academic and ‘revolutionary’ practices do not bring each other to productive crisis, the power of the script has clearly passed elsewhere” (53). 7 Candace Fujikane, “Foregrounding Native Nationalisms: A Critique of Antinationalist Sentiment in Asian American Studies”, in Asian American Studies after Critical Mass, ed. Kent A. Ono, Malden: MA, 2005, 83.

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

61

Asians and haole have been thrown into a cauldron of defensive actions by our nationalist struggle. Either they must justify their continued benefit from Hawaiian subjugation, thus serving as support for that subjugation, or they must repudiate American hegemony and work with the Hawaiian nationalist movement.8

Trask’s call to action situates identity as a transaction of anti-colonial nationalist currency: political agents take sides with Hawaiians by repudiating American hegemony. Yet, this project is not most powerfully understood as an effort to re-consolidate original national groups, but rather in how it re-aligns experiences previously narrated as “American” into acts complicit with colonial power. Turning histories erroneously identified with America into newly critical meanings, enacts a type of politics by stressing the play of power in historical identity. More than a mere shift in nominal status, the impropriety of Hawai‘i’s US histories inflects these discourses, feelings and past-futures – how we see who we have been. This concept of political identities as historical co-ordinates underscores temporality as a dimension of political enactment. Politics is thus relocated in a plethora of acts that rehistoricize events and identifications that have been used to pledge allegiance to, or repudiate, America. When it fails to attend to the temporality of political acts, takingsides is subject to what Arif Dirlik identifies as “an obliviousness to the reconfiguration of past legacies by contemporary restructurations of power – especially changes in the practices of capitalism and the nation-state that have already called forth a reconsideration of the colonial past”.9 To reconsider the reconfigurations of nation-ness by American colonial power in Hawaiian history, we must look at the temporal bounded nature of the forms that have constituted national side taking between the US and its others. Transnational histories, as a framework sensitive to the temporal malleability of national forms, may help elucidate the political forms that can be taken up now in a decolonizing scenario. 8

Trask, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony”, 30. In contemporary vernacular, “haole” refers to whites in Hawai‘i. I follow Trask in not italicizing Hawaiian words in recognition of Hawai‘i as the space from which we write. 9 Arif Dirlik, “Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, and the Nation”, Interventions, IV/3 (November 2002), 429.

62

Bianca Kai Isaki

To introduce my thinking about this, I offer a brief account of the process of Asian settlement and its class dimension in Hawai‘i. Asian settlement in Hawai‘i Asian settlement in Hawai‘i began with the approximately 300,000 plantation laborers who arrived between 1850 and 1920.10 At that time, oligarchic state monopoly capitalism installed the legal, interpersonal and socio-economic infrastructures necessary for Hawai‘i’s plantation economy. This included legislation that institutionalized private land ownership and transnational contract labor migration, mostly from the rural, non-industrialized regions of China, Japan, Korea, and later the Philippines.11 By the turn of the twentieth century, planters, commercial owners of affiliated transportation and processing industries as well as their political allies formed a white resident governing body, the mainstay of which was popularly referred to as the “Big Five” – that is, the interlocking directorates of five sugar companies, and their associated businesses, which aligned their economic interests along racial and political lines, effectively installing a white corporate oligarchy in Hawai‘i. By the 1930s, local Asians and Hawaiians allied together in opposition to the white elite and the sugar plantation system that buoyed its economic dominance. Labor unionization was an important factor in the epochal rise of this political alliance, which pushed for a progressive brand of state welfare, centralized funding for public education, abortion rights, non-discriminatory housing statutes, and equal opportunity employment. However, this period of progressive social governance ended up giving rise to a rhetoric of racially egalitarian “power sharing”,12 which came to legitimate a “land and power” system of land development profiteering and political 10

Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans, New York, 1989, 132. 11 The primary bills were the Act to Abolish the Disabilities of Aliens to Acquire and Convey Land in Fee Simple, which allowed foreigners to purchase land (also known as the “Kuleana Act”), and An Act for the Governance of Masters and Servants, which established the wage-labor system (see Eiko Kosasa, “Predatory Politics: U.S. Imperialism, Settler Hegemony, and the Japanese in Hawai‘i”, PhD thesis, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, 2004, 61). 12 See Task, “Settlers of Color and ‘Immigrant’ Hegemony”, 3.

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

63

domination.13 This ethos of anti-racism and class struggle gave way to the facile multiracial politics of a newly enfranchised, mostly Asian, ruling class. Composed of elected officials and capitalist entrepreneurs, this class formed huis (“clubs”) through which its members shared the spoils of overlapping control over land legislation and development capital. This racialized class transition had both local and global sources. Locally, “Territory-born” Asians won a majority of elected offices during Hawai‘i’s “democratic revolution” of 1954,14 thereby displacing a historically dominant Republican alliance of white (haole) elites and Hawaiians.15 In 1959, these Democrats were at the forefront of celebrations of Hawai‘i’s statehood, which was represented as an elevation from second-class US citizenship to equality. A pervasive ethos of citizenly entitlement and racial elevation functioned in tandem with economic shifts, through which a haole dominated agricultural monopoly became enmeshed with global capital. Together, they funded Asian settler class mobility, facilitating a shift from subjection to white colonial capitalism into shareholders with those colonial systems that were being re-formed by economic globalization. The mixed race and class composition of this new local ruling class complicates a white-only analysis of Hawai‘i’s colonial order.16 13

The historical significance of “land and power” is elaborated in footnote 16 below. See George Cooper and Gavan Daws, Land and Power in Hawai‘i: The Democratic Years, Honolulu: HI, 1985, 42-43. 15 Franklin Odo, No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i During World War II, Philadelphia: PA, 2004, 5. The Republican Party, constituted by increasingly marginalized Hawaiians and haole elites, dominated the early political life of the Territory of Hawai‘i. Unlike the Asian and Portuguese laborer populations, who were disqualified from voting through discriminatory statutes against naturalization and foreign birthplaces, a politically active community of Hawaiians outnumbered the haole vote by more than three to one (see David E. Stannard, Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai‘i, New York, 2005, 69). At the turn of the twentieth century, haole and Hawaiian political parties allied over racist anxieties that a growing alien Asian voting bloc would control Hawai‘i. These anxieties recognized that Territory-born Asians increasingly took on features of a settler community – marrying, having children, seeking employment away from the isolated rural plantations – and had become a significant voting block. 16 The “land and power” explanation treats race as a subordinate clause of capitalist consolidation of political and economic power. Two factors channeled Hawai‘i Democrats’ interest towards land development. First, many were connected with a 14

64

Bianca Kai Isaki

At this intersection with indigenous Hawaiian assertions of non-US nationhood and Asian American culture’s usual ur-narrative of struggles for meritocratic racial equality, the possibility of justice under US capitalism is problematically redeemed.17 In fact, since the late 1960s, Hawaiian activists have pushed past the limits of a civil rights discourse to put Hawai‘i’s histories and politics into narratives of colonization.18 These narratives refract struggles for citizen equality into colonial terms of analysis – national sovereignty, indigenous concepts of land tenure, contests over ceded lands, opposition to racist blood quantum censuses – and, most fundamentally, Hawai‘i’s eccentricity with respect to US legal jurisdiction.19 This discursive and analytical shift calls Asian settlers to revise their pasts as well. Karen Kosasa and Stan Tomita assert that “To tell the story of immigration and democracy is to obscure an ‘other’ history in which Asian immigrants were involved in the creation of a colonial paradise

new entrepreneurial class of Asian settler developers and financiers (e.g., Clarence Ching, K.J. Luke, Hung Wo Ching, Chinn, and Joseph R. Pao). Secondly, these elected officials “had their hands on the levers of control by which government approved or disapproved much that had to do with development” (Cooper and Daws, Land and Power in Hawai'i, 46). Taking a different tack, I focus on race as central to Hawaiian statehood as a geopolitical discourse that attaches racial equality to justice and justice to Asian settler elevation from “second-class citizenship” to state representatives. 17 George Cooper and Gavan Daws’ Land and Power in Hawai‘i is foundational to theorizing the conditions, implications and mechanisms of Asian class mobility in modern Hawai‘i. This important text cross-lists the names of developers, real estate lawyers, and other land development affiliated entrepreneurs with those wellconnected to a Democrat dominated post-war political structure, and those who profited from an economic boom during the period between 1954 and the 1980s. 18 See Haunani-Kay Trask, “The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, O‘ahu”, The Hawaiian Journal of History, XXI (1987), 126-53; and Bob Nakata, “The Struggles of the Waiahole-Waikane Community Association”, in The Ethnic Studies Story: Politics and Social Movements in Hawai‘i, ed. Ibrahim G. Aoudé, Honolulu: HI, 1999, 60-73. 19 In 1898, 1.4 million acres of lands were “ceded” to the US federal government upon annexation, and then transferred to the State of Hawai‘i in 1959, when Hawai‘i became an American state (by a process that, as I have noted, violated international law). Another 180,000 acres is currently held in trust by the State of Hawai‘i under the Department of Hawaiian Homelands (see Trask, “The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement”, 151).

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

65

at the expense of indigenous peoples”.20 In their “other” history, Asian settler colonialism is the product of past practices of land theft and political control through which descendants of transnational contract laborers moved into middle class American-ness.21 Doubtless, recognizing Asian settlers’ colonial complicity clears historical space for Hawai‘i’s reclaimed non-American nationality. What is less certain is how calculating complicity in terms of “land and power” can attend both to liberatory signs of racial justice – the feelings, affects and aspirations that adorn political and economic enfranchisement22 – and to the affective and aspirational modalities through which “America” co-ordinates with capitalist processes to organize political identifications. These are uncertain registers of national identification that fall out of a history formatted only in an accounting model of debt and expense. A transnational colonial history better addresses the notinevitably national discourses that shape Asian settler attachments to America, and thus the frameworks through which we approach history, culture and especially the limits of US justice. This model of transnational history is illustrated by the agendas of historians such as David Thelen and Akira Iriye, to which I now turn. Aesthetic politics, transnational analytics David Thelen argues that the task of a transnational history is “not to imagine experiences differently from how people in the past had lived them or to develop narratives that had never been imagined before … [but] the reverse: to recover and reuse experiences and narratives”.23 Through a transnational lens, we can see how wider patterns of US colonial power embed Hawai‘i through constructions of gender, race, labor, culture, and diaspora on terms not only organized by the nation. Resituating the nation as a transnationally framed cultural formation pluralizes contexts for viewing inter-national traffic between the US, Hawai‘i and non-Hawaiian settlers, and for the related attempt to recover new political identities from this traffic. 20

Karen K. Kosasa and Stan Tomita, “Whose Vision, 2000”, Amerasia Journal XXVI/2 (Summer 2000), viii. 21 See also Fujikane, “Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i”. 22 See Cooper and Davis, Land and Power in Hawai‘i. 23 David Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond: Transnational Perspectives on United States History”, Journal of American History, LXXXVI/3 (December 1999), 971.

66

Bianca Kai Isaki

In a similar vein, Akira Iriye’s essay “The Internationalization of History” inverts a structure which presumes that nations are only vehicles for grouped economic interests. He builds on Max Weber’s argument that “the economic community is … only another form of the conflict of nations with each other”. The “individual attitudes and orientations that constitute a culture” are also foundational to the relationships that hold together a national community.24 At this micropolitical level, the coherence of nations and their histories begins to fray into modalities that call for interdisciplinary dialogue: International historians in particular may have much to learn from art historians who, after all, have explored the transfer of artistic styles and tastes from one part of the world to another … [and have] emphasized the need to go beyond national frameworks and to look for transnational artistic themes.25

While executed within infrastructures authored by nation-states, the transnational transfer of ideas, styles, tastes, trades and people place material challenges to the limits of an only national order of things. This means that although we must still talk about the nation, its myriad modalities of influence call for new analytical models not corralled within hermetic nation forms. Thus, Iriye’s account of the nation’s less-continent dimensions suggests a need for an expanded literacy in variable modalities of inter-national traffic and the forms that this movement takes. However, even if a language of culture and aesthetics offers a powerful means to theorize variously nation coded interfaces between Asian settlers and US hegemony in Hawai‘i, aesthetics and culture cannot mark national boundaries between settlers and Hawaiians in any simple way. These interfaces are cross-hatched with political communities that are already immanent to the nation’s boundaries. Against the US’ attempts to cohere a political community over and against a history of violated Hawaiian nationhood, the decolonial strategy, as Michael J. Shapiro writes, is to “re-constitute a critique of

24 Akira Iriye, “The Internationalization of History”, American Historical Review XCIV/1 (February 1989), 7. 25 Ibid. 8.

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

67

U.S.-Hawaiian relationships as a critique of U.S. foreign policy”.26 Shapiro further observes that “This discursive gesture radically reorients the spatial predicates of the issue .… Native claims are profoundly political, not just because they address a polity, but because they force ‘a moment in which a part that has had no part asserts itself’”.27 In this formulation, Hawaiians’ emergence as political subjects depends not only on sovereign organization into nations, but in the very assertion that the presence of political subjectivity disrupts the order of things. Shapiro’s passage refers to Jacques Rancière’s definition of the political, which Rancière has elsewhere elaborated that politics is an “aesthetic affair” because politics is not the exercise of power or the struggle for power. It is the configuration of a specific world, a specific form of experience in which some things appear to be political objects, some questions political issues or argumentations, and some agents political subjects.28

An aesthetic politics locates power as a function of how the configurations of a world, events, an experience, or an affect become reconfigured by the eruption of something new. Seen as a project of re-arranging things, decolonizing history is an aesthetic political enactment. By highlighting its role as an optic, nation-ness can be seen as an interpretive apparatus which, in Rancière’s characterization, “determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience”.29 From this perspective, the political can be reconceived as an aesthetic synthesis to structure the otherwise vague metaphorical operation of Asian settlers’ detaching themselves from American identities. National identity normally cuts citizens out from other identity-markers: territorial birth, reproductive kinship, ancestry, and other cultural practices. In these other networks, myriad 26

Michael J. Shapiro, “Social Science, Geophilosophy and Inequality”, International Studies Review, IV/2 (Summer 2002), 28. 27 Ibid. 40. 28 Jacques Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus: Politics and Aesthetics”, paper presented at the Fidelity to the Disagreement: Jacques Rancière and the Political. Conference, Goldsmiths College, London, 16-17 September 2003, 6. 29 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, London, 2004, 13.

68

Bianca Kai Isaki

dimensions of a life-world (that get translated into citizenly meanings) appear recoverable from their heretofore-American moorings. Asian American political emotions Asian settler repudiations of “America” have a historical precedent in the “no-no boy”, who was the subject of John Okada’s 1956 eponymous novel. Briefly, Japanese American internees during World War II were forced to respond to a questionnaire that asked if they would forswear Japan and serve in the US armed forces. The “no-no” boy declined both. Turning away from a racist US hegemony and suffering the consequences of national abjection, he marks a resistant political animus that might be recovered as a historical referent for Asian settler decolonizing subjects today. To recover his history, however, also requires an account of the historical context in which his “no-no”-acts achieved a politics, and how the politics of those acts has shifted over the distance between his time and ours. In the following paragraphs, I outline a Fordist to post-Fordist transition in socio-economic regimes as the crucial context in which to understand this history. The “no-no” has a historical counterpart in the avid “yes, yes” of the Americanizing Asian. Many Asians in Hawai‘i eagerly embraced Americanizing campaigns in response to American xenophobia and suspicions of Japanese American wartime espionage. This process of voluntary assimilation, current from the turn of the twentieth century through World War II, embodied the promise that Americanism was a matter of transcending race and ancestry.30 In the cultural and political discursive economy of the Cold War era, this “yes” to America meant assenting to share in the bounty of rationalized capitalism. Therefore an Americanizing Asian patriotism carried currency as an affirmation of the fitness of US democracy for post-World War II leadership. More significant than their opposition, the “no-no boy” and Americanized Asians’ “yes” to pledges of US allegiance hold a 30 In a letter to Henry Stimson offering “full approval” for the organization of a combat team of “loyal American citizens of Japanese descent”, Roosevelt writes: “The principle on which this country was founded and by which it has always been governed is that Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart; Americanism is not, and never was, a matter of race and ancestry” (quoted in Bill Hosokawa, JACL: In Quest of Justice, New York, 1982, 212).

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

69

common morphology. The capacious binary code of these figures of political speech flourished amidst American wartime patriotism, the expansion of the liberal welfare state, and the ideological eve of the Cold War. Historically, much was invested in a “yes, yes” to America from non-whites and immigrants, especially those from Hawai‘i. Situated in the mid-twentieth century’s claims about the need for “one-world” governance in an atomic age, Hawai‘i’s multichromatic community could be configured into evidence of racial justice in a USstyled free (capitalist) world. The national bearing of this yes/no-speak can be historically situated in a scholarly and political economy related to nation-state centric discourses. As David Thelen points out, the presumption that the nation should organize history is a rather recent development. Understood as historical artifacts of a certain period, US nation-statecentric narratives are departure points for recovering “lines of inquiry that were submerged during the high tide of professionalization and the nation-state [roughly between 1900 and 1970]”. The dates he uses to bookend “the high era of American national history” are significant.31 In 1900, US industrialism was well on its way towards Fordism, and the 1970s mark the onset of post-Fordism. The transition from Fordism to post-Fordism involved structural shifts from industrial to post-industrial production, from mass consumerism to service-oriented economies, from the Cold War to global geopolitics, and, most relevantly, from US welfare statism to neoliberalism. As David Harvey argues, the Keynesian welfare state legitimated itself by claiming to ensure a living wage for all, remediate social inequalities through legislative and juridical means, and basically spread the benefits of Fordism over the entirety of its citizens.32 These immense regulatory responsibilities gave birth to a new concept of the state’s public obligations, which were tethered to the state’s high level of involvement in economic structures.33 Under post-Fordism, the state changed from its large national role in regulating social production, to a more stripped-down, economic facilitator for neoliberal capitalism. 31

Thelen, “The Nation and Beyond”, 971. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge: MA, 1992, 139. 33 Leerom Medovoi, “Nation, Globe, Hegemony: Post-Fordist Preconditions of the Transnational Turn in American Studies”, Interventions, VII/2 (July 2005), 164-65. 32

70

Bianca Kai Isaki

While shrinking its role in welfare and economic regulation, the postFordist nation-state retains its authority by reconfiguring codes of political legitimacy vis-à-vis global capital. Post-Fordism has not only shifted the socio-economic co-ordinates of Fordism and the welfare state, but also set a changed context for the subjects, acts and emotions that appear to take part in the political. In the post-Fordist disjoining of economic structure and public obligations, the construction of American identity has relied upon acrobatic endeavors to maintain a national community. Yet, this does not mean that an increasingly internationalized economic community has rendered the nation-state obsolete. As Leerom Medovoi writes: It is obviously not the case that national imaginaries have withered away. Rather, I would argue that the national imaginary is … a ruined “ideology”, still ideologically potent, yet failing to provide a map of post-Fordism through which people might effectively negotiate the gaps between their desires and interests. The state, though increasingly disarticulated from the national imaginary, nonetheless remains a territorial institution. It therefore continues to produce political if not cultural space.34

Like Thelen, Medovoi marginalizes the compulsion to nationalize histories as a historically contingent phenomenon, while acknowledging the force that American political cultures continue to hold over institutions, imaginations, forms of disciplinary knowledge and newly neoliberalized economies. In this context, Hawaiian Asian Americans’ historical “yes, yes” can be reconceptualized as the valence put on a jumble of not-inevitably-national forms on which America stakes its claims. This jumble can be diffracted into components of something other than only a colonizing investment in an American-Hawai‘i. In his Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson posits nations as “cultural artifacts of a particular kind”.35 To conceive of nations as cultural entities is particularly appropriate to the US, where the constitutive mode of recruiting the emotive into national culture has a 34

Ibid. 171. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn, London and New York, 1991, 4. 35

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

71

particular American history. The emotive clustering of goodness around an American community gave rise to what Lauren Berlant describes as “a liberal rhetoric of promise historically entitled in the United States, which avows that a nation can best be built across fields of social difference through channels of affective identification and empathy”.36 Built from patterns initiated in the 1830s, “national sentimentality” is the term Berlant has offered for a US emotiveapparatus. This mode of communion recurs as “a modal shift from the rational to the emotional in U.S. political rhetoric”, through which the object of national justice becomes the remediation of social injuries.37 Alongside the post-Fordist dismantling of social welfare, the role of feelings as national attachments has been compounded. In the era of neoliberal capital’s shrinking public sector, national polity is increasingly contoured by a common orientation of feelings. Feelings get magnified into visceral attachments to an American political community, which is increasingly imagined as a flattened televisual media-sphere. Consequently, citizens interface with their representative institutions and other citizens in a “constricted nation of simultaneously lived private worlds”.38 This newly neoliberal US hegemony has changed the spatio-temporal co-ordinates that inscribed the “no-no” boy’s model of resistance. The point is not that opposing America is futile, but that outdated forms of opposition may be newly configured by a post-Fordist, neoliberal America that assimilates prescriptions for un-citizenly behavior. Historicizing America as an apparatus of political feelings follows Benedict Anderson’s inquiry into “how they [nations] have come into historical being, in what ways their meanings have changed over time, and why, today, they command such profound emotional legitimacy”.39 My aim is not to recount the nation’s genealogy only as an object of affection, but to mark how the emotive dimensions of national legitimacy render Asian settler identifications in Hawai‘i as functions of aesthetic politics. Emotional legitimacy sites the nation’s 36 Lauren Berlant, “The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics”, in Cultural Studies and Political Theory, ed. Jodi Dean, Ithaca: NY, 2000, 44. 37 Lauren Berlant, “Unfeeling Kerry”, Theory & Event, VIII/2 (2005), 75, n.11: http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/ theory_and_ event/v008/8.2berlant.html. 38 Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship, Durham: NC, 1997, 4-5. 39 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 4.

72

Bianca Kai Isaki

command over the interpretation of felt-sensations – emotions – as evidence of political attachments to the nation’s community. In these forms, the nation does not have to be a government or economic institution so much as an optic through which people can place their political attachments. Therefore, I am locating colonial power within the ways that an American political culture recruits and exploits the nation’s authority to name an emotion. We know what we feel through a relation to the nation’s lexicon of emotions. This authority is aesthetic because it organizes the spatio-temporal schema through which sensation is registered, interpreted, and set to work. In this analysis, Asian American anxieties over indigenous political claims thus indicate a conflicted attachment to an American object. Sorting out the kinds of aesthetic forms that emerge in the political pushes towards a robust reading of Asian settler political emotions. And that is not always a bad thing. Uncommitted to the nation’s sparse categories of “yes and no” citizenship, transnational analytics focus on making nationality visible as a contingent formation of history, politics and culture. These analytics let us see how Asian settlers, who depart from America’s usual pattern of national identifications, call for a learning of new vocabularies of political action. Among other things, the US “political sphere”, Berlant writes, “has long been a space for cultivating emotions to which we aspire”.40 And the “fair-minded [Asian] settler … interested in social justice” who repudiates America implicitly draws on this discursive and imaginative space.41 And while Asian settler resistance in Hawai‘i is productively conversant with this feeling-led mode of political speech, forms and expressions of political emotion have a shelf-life. As Wendy Brown has noted, political acts of taking sides happen less and less frequently in “scenes of speaking truth to power”. The “drama of the scene falls flat”, perhaps because its radical gestalt lacks an ethical theater in which political speakers can feel like they have displaced power.42 I suggest that this scene may regain its potency if displaced 40

Berlant, “Unfeeling Kerry”, 20. Kosasa, “Predatory Politics”, viii-ix. 42 Wendy Brown, “Moralism as Antipolitics”, in Materializing Democracy: Towards a Revitalized Cultural Politics, eds Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson, Durham: NC, 2002, 369. In her discussion, Brown links this pessimism to the ambiguous results of experiments in Third World national liberation and socialist autonomy, the 41

Towards an Aesthetic Politics of Transnational History

73

onto the historical heterogeneity of forms that constitute the changed co-ordinates of political speech. On the other side of that limit, the “no-no” boy perhaps too readily accepted the nation as the axis for political activity. Clinton’s apology’s failure to heal Hawaiians’ political claims illuminates the colonizing capaciousness of a discourse that telescopes feelings into politics. Both instances stage the nation as a constellating object for promises, aspirations and injuries. Justice premised on America’s promise to have progressed from its history of injustice, merely serves to reconcile injured others to that promise again. As Anderson and Berlant have discussed, such capillary forms are malleable national attachments, which condense out of complex cultural and historical cross-hatchings. That search might be set to work on the limits of reconciling the nation’s injustices as healed injuries. An aesthetic political analytic may offer a primer for reading emotions within neoliberal hegemony’s confused amalgam of culture, feelings and national citizenship. Emotions can serve as texts of how to reconfigure the political, and when. Seen over the space of a transnational history, otherwise opaque categories of sensation and emotion retain political consistencies that are continuous with support for Hawaiian decolonization. The project, then, is to get a better grasp on how colonial power suffuses desires and subjects in and around the nation, in order to make analytical room for what might otherwise look like merely a struggle for a hegemony already in place.43 To conclude, transnational analytics point towards national sidetakings as being aesthetic disruptions of political configurations. Hawaiian national sovereignty not only asserts the established rights of those who are already seen as political subjects, but also partitions a colonial field in new ways. Asian settler repudiations of America that abet this new partition do more than add to the body count of a Hawaiian nation’s supporters. Insofar as identifying as settlers, rather than Americans, aims to contest Hawai‘i’s nationality, it also implicitly agitates for a new mode of political part-taking. As I have fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Stalinist atrocities, and the excesses of China’s “cultural revolution” (368-69). 43 For an exploration of the limits of this struggle, see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Hegemony, Contingency, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, London, 2000.

74

Bianca Kai Isaki

argued, these enactments of support must take timely forms. Mining moments in which Asian settlers emerge as political subjects excavates material histories to be reorganized at a contemporary intersection between Hawaiian decolonization and America’s postFordist neoliberal regimes. The “no-no boy” is anachronistic: although we may want to recover the radical gestalt of his disidentification with the US, reproducing that attachment to him in our political activities may render those acts ineffective. Currently, he is iconic of an illusory scenario of “speaking truth to power”, as well as the desire to be the agent of that speech. Taking sides with a decolonizing Hawai‘i today demands, instead, that we relinquish the aesthetic patrimony of a heroic “no-no” without losing touch with the desire for political transformation. I have argued that an aesthetic political focus on historical transnationality can guide the recollection of these affective forms into a present alive to the sense of emancipation that invests decolonization with audacious promise.

IMMIGRATION AND “OPERATIONS”: THE MILITARIZATION (AND MEDICALIZATION) OF THE US-MEXICO BORDER SANG HEA KIL

The US-Mexico border’s complexity as a transnational region collides with US anxiety, which results in a reassertion of territorial boundaries. But this reassertion also clashes with broader globalizing economic forces. This essay attempts to reconsider the politics and rhetoric of this border region within the context of transnationalism. My focus is on the role the US state plays in maintaining national divides within a militaristic paradigm. While the process of globalization transcends nation-states in social, economic, cultural and demographic ways, US policies adopt an aggressive posture at the border with a reverberating effect on the civilian population, which contributes to the rise of vigilante groups. Government officials’ and the media’s use of war as a rhetorical strategy ideologically and materially reinforce boundaries. In particular, the tension between the rhetorical use of war within frameworks of crime and medicine converge in a latently raced, classed, gendered, and sexualized manner. This essay is divided into four parts. First, the concept of transnational crossing is analyzed in relation to globalization and nativism. Second, a description of the US policy of militarizing the shared border with Mexico is provided. Third, a description of the rise of vigilante groups in Arizona (the “ground zero” of these militarized policies) is offered. And finally, a rhetorical analysis of news media coverage of the border shows how the criminalization of immigrants reveals a concern for the body politic, with implications for the meaning of whiteness and the nation. Transnational crossing Although nations of the “Global North” advance neo-liberal economic agendas that open the flow of trade, investment and capital, these same nations have difficulty with the economically driven migration

76

Sang Hea Kil

of people that concurrently occurs. Furthermore, the US public tends to see transnational identities as contradicting traditional and cherished notions of assimilation. In response to this changing world, the rise of nativism, defined as the defensive nature of nationalism,1 has led to calls for extreme action and demarcation based on a simplistic “us and them” territorialism. The cultural and political fear of being overwhelmed or invaded by difference drives the militarization of the border. Conversely, the celebratory trend among transnational migration scholars sees migrants as existing in dual worlds, characterized by hybridity and fluidity as they acclimatize to their new home, while also retaining links to their old one. Although these forms of existence and identity are seen as constituting a challenge to national boundaries,2 dismissing the importance of borders seems a premature activity. In fact, according to Michael Kearney, transnationalism “calls attention to the cultural and political projects of nation-states as they vie for hegemony in relations with other nation-states, with their citizens and ‘aliens’”.3 The reinforcement of borders is an example of such a cultural and political project. The reinforcement of borders also relates to a fear that, in part, comes from the implosion of the process of globalization itself. The movement of the capitalist world-system no longer moves from the center (“Global North”) to the periphery (“Global South”), but increasingly brings the periphery to the center. The concentration of transnational corporations in what Sassen calls the “Global City” speaks not only to global capitalist growth, but also to the complex interdependent global relations that have produced the implosion. Kearney describes this process as an “explosive outward movement of capitalism’s power to differentiate [what has] had gone full circle and is now falling back onto itself, imploding into its cores and reducing their difference from their peripheries”. He cites the example of the 1

John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, New Brunswick: NJ, 1955. 2 Peggy Levitt and Nadya B. Jaworsky, “Transnational Migration Studies: Past Developments and Future Trends”, Annual Review of Sociology, XXXIII (August 2007), 131. 3 Michael Kearney, “The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism”, Annual Review of Anthropology, XXIV (October 1995), 553.

Immigration and “Operations”

77

media coverage of the Vietnam War “imploding” into the homes of US residents, as well as the return of veterans and the arrival of refugees as additional instances of implosion. He also offers contemporary examples of implosions, such as the “Caribbeanization of New York City” or the description of Los Angeles as the “Capital of Latin America”.4 In the case of the US-Mexico border, the fear of a global implosion corresponds to the perceived threat of the re-conquest of the Southwest region, or even the nation, by Mexicans: as I describe later, some nativists genuinely believe that transnational migration in this region is a purposeful action to reclaim parts of the US that formerly belonged to Mexico. These processes of globalization challenge the geographic dimensions of the state. National space can become a type of national possession through a fusion of “place, property, and heritage”, a compound “whose perpetuation is secured by the state”.5 However, this is a “territorial trap” that relies on the assumptions that states are fixed units functioning as natural containers for societal spaces.6 This state centered concept of space allows for the naturalization of borders and hides the socially constructed, contestable nature to these divides. Globalization and transnational border crossings challenge fixed notions of us/them, inside/outside, and domestic/international that undergird the nation-state. Thus transnational crossings by capital, culture or communities begin to deterritorialize nation-states, while giving rise to issues of security and sovereignty. The fluidity of globalization that has enabled the dynamic hybrid identities of the borderlands or diasporas gives way to a “gated globe”, in which movement is restricted and regulated.7 Political and economic structures shape this “gated” landscape. This “implosion” and the need for “gates” on a global scale help to make sense of the recent attempts by the US to intensify border enforcement against migrant entry. The mainstream public can see 4

Ibid., 554. Ana Maria Alonso, “The Politics of Space, Time and Substance: State Formation, Nationalism and Ethnicity”, Annual Review of Anthropology, XXIII (October 1994), 383. 6 See Roxanne Doty, “The Double-Writing of Statecraft: Exploring State Responses to Illegal Immigration”, Alternatives, XXI (1996), 171-89. 7 See Hilary Cunningham, “Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe”, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, XI/3 (July-September 2004), 329-50. 5

78

Sang Hea Kil

border migration as an invasion so easily because of the tensions caused by recent economic policies that liberalize trade and capital, as well as labor. This also explains why the US public reacts to proposals like the highway that would run through the US connecting Mexico and Canada as a threat to sovereignty.8 The introduction of new economics policies set the stage for intense border militarization. These policies began to appear in the form of legislation and trade pacts that would satisfy industries’ demand for low-cost labor and the consumers’ desire for cheap goods. When the US formed a free-trade zone with Canada and Mexico through such agreements as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1986 and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, these agreements greatly affected the border situation. In effect, a “smoke and mirrors” situation developed where the US would claim to move toward economic integration while insisting on political separation.9 Thus, policies that liberalized trade and the flow of capital between these nations contributed to an increase in the movement of capital, goods, commodities, and information; but while capital can flow freely, labor cannot. Undocumented labor began to flow in greater numbers despite (or because of) these trade agreements. However, the flow of people in conjunction with the flow of capital is decoupled from the broader economic processes and all blame for migration is directed towards Mexico. In fact, the US media generally portray the nation as a hapless victim to Mexico’s irresponsible economic situation. In this scenario, Mexico is seen as attempting to use emigration to the North, and the hope of remittances sent back from the North to the South, as a solution to its economic woes.10 Issues of security are trumpeted by government officials and clamoured for by the public in response to this perceived deterritorialization. As Nestor Rodrigúez sums up:

8

See James L.T. Langton, “Texans Fear US Sovereignty Will Disappear Down Superhighway”, The Sunday Telegraph, 4 March 2007, 32. 9 See Douglas S. Massey, Jorge Durand, and Nolan J. Malone, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors: Mexican Immigration in an Era of Economic Integration, New York, 2002. 10 See Leo R. Chavez, Covering Immigration: Popular Images and the Politics of the Nation, Berkeley: CA, 2001, 216.

Immigration and “Operations”

79

National security is seen as essential for national sovereignty and the public order; hence governments have the right to control the entry of people from other countries. According to this perspective, unrestrained entry through the U.S. southern border endangers the existence of basic social, cultural, and political institutions, and thus the very “American way of life”.11

The militarization of the border Over the years, more government agencies are helping to co-ordinate the enforcement of the border. This co-operation has increased in relation to illegal drug control and this greatly affects border enforcement policy. The militarization of the border really began when President Nixon declared a “war on crime”, with each subsequent President contributing to this “war”. In particular, the Clinton administration escalated this trajectory with the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) offensive-border strategy called “prevention through deterrence”.12 This strategy began with “Operation Hold the Line” (in El Paso, Texas in 1993), and continued with “Operation Gatekeeper” (in San Diego, California in 1994), “Operation Safeguard” (in Nogales, Arizona in 1994), and “Operation Rio Grande” (in the Brownsville corridor that extends from the Lower Rio Grande Valley to Laredo, Texas in 1997). Each operation involved building walls and installing stadium-style lighting, while increasing border patrol staffing dramatically. The overall goal of all these operations was to push the migration path toward more remote mountain and desert terrain, in an effort to deter people from crossing, as well as making their apprehension easier. The Clinton administration passed many laws that further criminalized immigrants and made immigrant lives more difficult by reducing access to social services such as the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (or Welfare Reform Act) enacted into law in 1966. The Welfare Reform Act prohibited most legal immigrants from accessing welfare 11

Nestor Rodrigúez, “The Social Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border”, in Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, ed. J.F. Perea, New York, 1997, 227. 12 Peter Andreas, Border Games: Policing the U.S.-Mexico Divide, Ithaca: NY, 2000, 92.

80

Sang Hea Kil

assistance like food stamps and limited the aid given to needy families. IIRAIRA increased the number of border patrol agents and authorized the construction of more physical barriers.13 In addition, it also provided tougher sentencing guidelines for smuggling immigrants.14 Moreover, in 1996 the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) diminished the legal protections available to immigrants convicted of a crime by making it easier to deny them habeas corpus, and making their detention harder to challenge. These laws and policies reflected a national and still growing trend characterized by the theme of “white injury” that reflects nativist anxieties.15 There were three fronts of attack that put direct pressure on how the public perceived immigrants, and particularly Mexican immigrants. First, the public began seeing immigrants less as workers and more as violent criminals who smuggle drugs. Second was the increasingly popular image of immigrants as fiscal burdens.16 California in particular became a symbol of “white injury” due to such immigration issues. In 1994, Governor Pete Wilson’s promotion of Proposition 187, the “Save our State” or “S.O.S.” (implying California was a ship in danger) gripped the nation’s attention. Proposition 187 sought to deny any public education, emergency health services, and social services to undocumented people. The federal courts later deemed the proposition unconstitutional. Also during the 1990s, the “English only” movement took hold with popular legislative and public support in twenty-seven states.17 This movement sought to make English the only official language of the US and targeted bilingual education and public services. Concurrently, other social forces successfully rolled back affirmative action policies, affecting states like California with Proposition 209 in 1996, and in Washington with Initiative 200 in 1998. These social forces contributed to putting 13

Ibid., 90. Ibid., 91. 15 See Lisa Marie Cacho, “‘The People of California Are Suffering’: The Ideology of White Injury in Discourses of Immigration”, Cultural Values, IV/4 (October 2000), 389-418. 16 Kitty Calavita, “The New Politics of Immigration: ‘Balanced-Budget Conservatism’ and the Symbolism of Proposition 187”, Social Problems, XLIII/3 (August 1996), 284-305. 17 See “Resource Room: State with Official English Only Laws”, U.S. English, Inc, on line: http://www.us-english.org/inc/official/states.asp. 14

Immigration and “Operations”

81

pressure on immigrants by creating a difficult racial climate. This decade marks the rise of virulent anti-immigrant and anti-people of color sentiments. This was not just a conservative agenda since liberals also participated in shutting immigrants out of vital services and resources, albeit with more “benevolent rhetoric”.18 By the late 1990s, the term “alien” was commonly used by the state to refer to “foreign-born persons, especially from Mexico and other Latin American countries”.19 Given this context, it is no wonder that border deaths have doubled since 1995 (General Accounting Office). And given this context, it is also no wonder that Clinton’s Drug Czar, General Barry R. McCaffrey avoided using the term “war on drugs”. He preferred disease metaphors and stated that “The analogy of cancer is far more adaptive and useful as a model to a way of thinking and talking about the problem”.20 The Bush administration also increased border security. Its most notable contribution to the criminalization of immigrants was redescribing immigration as a terrorist concern rather than a citizenship issue. This was enacted through the dissolution of the INS and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to oversee immigration in the wake of 9/11. The use of the concept of “homeland” by the DHS echoes a family and genealogical strain in the national imagination, where solidarity is based in common blood and shared territory. This reflects the “territorial trap” discussed earlier in that the use of “homeland” depicts the state as a fixed and natural notion. And the concept of “security” further lends support to the state to act as container for national property. However, the state also encourages its residents to act for the security of the homeland. Tom Ridge, as head of the DHS, urged citizens to be “vigilant” toward anything or anyone suspicious.21

18

See Sang Hea Kil and Cecilia Menjívar, “The ‘War on the Border’: The Criminalization of Immigrants and Militarization of the USA-Mexico Border”, in Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence, eds Abel Valenzuela Jr. and Ramiro Martinez, Jr., New York, 2006, 164-88. 19 Rodrigúez, “The Social Construction of the U.S.-Mexico Border”, 231. 20 Christopher S. Wren, “New Drug Czar is Seeking Ways to Bolster His Hand”, The New York Times, 17 March 1996, 18. 21 M.B. Saltar, “Passports, Mobility, and Security: How Smart Can a Border Be?”, International Studies Perspectives, V/1 (February 2004), 79.

82

Sang Hea Kil

Although the militarization of the border pushed the migration flow away from urban border areas, it did not deter undocumented immigration; in fact, the number of immigrants residing in the state has increased since the build-up. Immigrants are more likely to stay longer in the US because the return and re-entry poses a far greater physical danger and monetary cost to them now than before the border build-up.22 Since no official attempt has been made to document the number of border deaths there is no exact number available. However, counts by researchers and human rights groups estimate the number to be in the thousands since an unofficial count began in 1994. If one counts the deaths on the Mexican side, in addition to the US side, as a result of these border policies, then the number surely reaches or exceeds four thousand. As a result of militarization, the change in migration patterns that focuses on Arizona as an alternate border crossing-area has made this region into a type of “ground zero” given that half the border-crossing deaths since 1995 have occurred there.23 The precarious state that immigrants now occupy can also be explained if one considers the historical shifts in how the state has treated immigration matters. In the late 1800s, during the early years of American policy and law, when immigration from Western and Northern Europe was encouraged, authority was granted to the Treasury Department to handle matters concerning immigration.24 The responsibility then shifted to the Department of Commerce and Labor in the early 1900s. A decade later, immigration shifted again to the Department of Labor. Immigration matters have had its longest stay under the Department of Justice when it shifted there in the late 1940s. Since 1993, the Department of Homeland Security oversees immigration. Thus, immigration began as a management of resources under the Treasury Department, then as management of commerce and/or labor, until its transformed into a crime issue under the

22

See Kil and Menjívar, “The ‘War on the Border’”, 167. See ibid., 168. 24 See Sang Hea Kil, “Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Race, Crime, Nation and the United States of America-Mexico Divide”, PhD thesis, Arizona State University, 2007, 90. 23

Immigration and “Operations”

83

Department of Justice. Now, under the Department of Homeland Security, immigration is an issue of terrorism and security.25 Vigilante movements The state’s criminalization of immigrants motivates vigilante groups. These groups mimic the government’s aggressive posture in adopting a military border paradigm in rhetoric and strategy.26 Their names sound official and at times mirror actual government agencies like the American Border Patrol, lead by Glen Spencer.27 Many of these groups are linked to larger racist hate groups.28 The border policy has affected not only the migration pattern of immigrants, but also the movements of vigilante groups, forcing both in the direction of Arizona.29 The vigilantes have brought with them their weapons, detection technologies, training and expertise honed in their home states and deployed in Arizona.30 Presently, there are several vigilante groups operating in Arizona. The American Border Patrol, for instance, changed its name from Voices of Citizens Together/American Patrol (a recognized hate group), and moved operations in 2002 from California to Arizona, where they focus on high-tech detection equipment for use along the border. Glenn Spencer, the leader of this group, advocates these extra precautions because he is convinced that the Mexican government purposefully sends undocumented immigrants to the US in an effort called “Reconquista” – or the retaking of the Southwest by Mexicans. In a moment of collaboration, the Border Patrol met with Glenn Spencer about his use of a remote controlled surveillance plane called “Border Hawk”, before deploying the State’s own official planes to patrol the border, demonstrating thereby an official support for vigilante projects.

25

See ibid., 90-102. See Kil and Menjívar, “The ‘War on the Border’”, 171. 27 See ibid., 181. 28 See “Immigration Fervor Fuels Racist Extremism”, Southern Poverty Law Center: http://www.splcenter.org/news/item.jsp?aid=186. 29 See Zoe Hammer-Tomizuka and Jennifer Allen, “Hate or Heroism: Vigilantes on the Arizona-Mexico Border”, Border Action Network: http://www.borderaction.org/BAN-Vigilante.pdf 4. 30 See Kil and Menjívar, “The ‘War on the Border’”, 181. 26

84

Sang Hea Kil

Chris Simcox, a former California resident who runs a local paper in Tombstone, Arizona, leads the Civilian Homeland Defense (CHD) group, a militia that claims to serve the interests of national security.31 In 2005, CHD joined forces with Minuteman project, a group headed by James Gilchrist, another California resident. The Minuteman project stationed volunteers along the border in Cochise County for the month of April 2005 and described its operations as a type of “neighborhood watch”.32 The project garnered media attention, and the support of media personalities like CNN’s Lou Dobbs, and Fox News Network’s Sean Hannity. Minuteman spokespeople regularly speak as legitimate stakeholders in major news outlets and have since established branches all over the US. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the current Governor of California, supported their activities and said, “They’ve done a terrific job”.33 The Minuteman project later splintered into two groups. Chris Simcox now leads the Minuteman Civil Defense Corp (MCDC) and James Gilchrist continues the Minuteman project. In 2006, the Minuteman project under Gilchrist launched “Operation Sovereignty” in an effort to track undocumented immigrants so as to report them to the border patrols. 34 Although only one vigilante group, the Barnett Family, actually owns ranchland in Arizona, which consists predominantly of stateleased land, many of these groups use the legal justification of “protection of property” and profess pro-rancher interests to gain public and legal legitimacy in a state with historically libertarian values. Arizona Attorney General, Terry Goddard, has claimed a lack of jurisdictional authority when called by human rights activists to do something about the vigilante activities. He claims that immigration matters are the jurisdiction of the US Attorney, and criminal matters 31

See ibid., 173. In the summer of 2005, I volunteered as a legal observer when the Minutemen converged on the border. I also have activist ties to human rights groups in the Arizona border region. I served on the board of Border Action Network, a grassroots community group of immigrants and border residents, for several years. 33 Carla Marinucci and Mark Martin, “Governor Endorses Minutemen on Border: Schwarzenegger Parts with Bush on Group of Armed Volunteers that Stops Immigrants”, San Francisco Chronicle, 29 April 2005, 1. 34 Roxanne Doty, “States of Exception on the Mexico-U.S. Border: Security, ‘Decisions’, and Civilian Border Patrols”, International Political Sociology, I/2 (May 2007), 121. 32

Immigration and “Operations”

85

are the jurisdiction of county attorneys.35 In the Southwest border region, particularly in Arizona, the militarization rhetoric creates a social and cultural atmosphere that incites racial anxieties based on national-security concerns, which in turn permit more criminal activity to take place in the form of anti-immigrant militias. Clearly, vigilantes see transnational migration as a threat to national sovereignty and use extra-legal patrols as a way of reinforcing the border in a political, symbolic, and cultural manner. Their vigilante activities amount to a “public performance” that “emphasizes the power and privilege of citizenship”, disciplines the populace, and forces the government to react to the vigilantes’ cause.36 Medicalization and criminalization An analysis of the rhetorical strategies within this “war on the border” paradigm reveals an interesting relationship between whiteness and nation as socially constructed ideologies. These strategies, which emphasize drugs, crime, disease, and security, focus on the transnational migrants’ capacity for inciting fear in the population when crossing the border. In this social construction of what “brown” represents, a latent construction of whiteness emerges that points to the vulnerability of the body politic. Toni Morrison argues that race “has assumed a metaphorical life so completely embedded in daily discourse that it is perhaps more necessary and more on display than ever before”.37 She further argues that these uses of race occupy definitive spaces in the “national” character and deserve critical analysis. Her own analysis entails “an effort to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served”.38 In essence, she urges a more critical reading of how whiteness is imagined and maintained within the nation. Adding to Morrison’s call to look at how whiteness 35 See Luke Turf, “Activist Hope to Take Down Vigilantes”, Tucson Citizen, 2 December 2003, 1. 36 See Leo R. Chavez, “Spectacle in the Desert: The Minuteman Project on the USMexico Border”, in Global Vigilantes, eds David Pratten and Atreyee Sen, New York, 2008, 27. 37 Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, New York, 1990, 63. 38 Ibid., 90.

86

Sang Hea Kil

is imagined, I examine how newspapers define “brownness = them” and “whiteness = us”. The hidden constructions of whiteness relate directly to the nation and its collusions with race, class, and gender constructions. The body, as a symbol of the political, organizes these subtle constructions, especially within immigration debates. As John Gabriel describes it: Paranoias around the body and the nation state have exchanged metaphors to the mutual enhancement of both. For example, the term “leaking” has been applied to both bodies and borders. The capacity of immigration discourse to forge links between bodies, both politic and personal, has proved decisive in the construction of whiteness.39

Therefore, the alarmist concern with immigrants and their border crossing becomes a submerged concern with the polluting influence of an undesirable race, the purity of whiteness, and the health of the nation. The frequent use of “Operations” in describing border policies then becomes an interesting term. It symbolizes the rhetorical intersection and exchange of the fields of medicine, warfare, and law enforcement. All three fields use the word “operation” to mean an exertion of power that includes planning, coordination, and execution. And all three fields powerfully contribute to the social construction of deviance, as well as relying on scientific technologies in restoring order, be it health, peace, or lawfulness. Both government officials and border vigilantes frequently use the word “operation” in describing border strategies or policies. This directly relates to transnationalism as we see nativist rhetoric on the rise in conjunction with the global implosion encouraging border crossings. A transgressible, permeable border becomes a powerful and complex symbol where immigration is represented as a colonizing force, bringing the margins (South of the border) to the center (nation’s interior), and collapsing the relationship of national and racial power back onto itself. The nativist rhetoric which deploys the notion of national or white injury in union with immigrant criminality, offers a workable explanation for the escalating militancy of border enforcement. 39

John Gabriel, Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media, London, 1998, 98.

Immigration and “Operations”

87

Below, I offer a preview of a larger data set, based on my own research, which demonstrates this nexus between crime, medicine, and war on the national border. My data covers a ten-year period of heightened border militarization, beginning with “Operation Hold the Line” in El Paso on 19 September 1993, and ending with the transfer of power of immigration concerns to the new Department of Homeland Security on 1 March 2003. This ten-year period covers an intense time as immigration enforcement escalated into a framework of crime, which then turned into a security framework in light of the events of 11 September 2001. This marks a unique time where the conflation of immigration with crime and war reflected a deep nativist fear of succumbing to racial change (or to the death of whiteness). I have analyzed the leading newspaper of each border state: Los Angeles Times (California), Arizona Republic (Arizona), Albuquerque Journal (New Mexico), and The Houston Chronicle (Texas). I retrieved 1,035 articles (“N”) that contained a crime frame in the title or lead paragraph. I coded by words (shown in bold below) embedded in text units (“tu”), which essentially were paragraphs or sentences, depending on the writing style of the article. The use of discourse analysis enabled me to reveal embodied rhetorical strategies concealed in these news stories. Generally, I organized the embodied discourse into three general categories: “aches”, “functions”, and “parts”. The leading embodied concept used in these newspaper stories of crime on the border was “Danger”. “Danger” was retrieved in 313 text units (tu=313) in 194 documents (n=194), which reflect 19% of all news articles (19% of N). Danger is associated with the body in that danger can represent a polluting force that threatens order and integrity: concepts associated with bodily purity. Thus, the body becomes a symbol of society where “the powers and dangers credited to social structure [are] reproduced small on the human body”.40 In this way, danger can represent a body “ache”. Below are examples of relevant text units, culled from the border newspapers: Title: ILLEGAL ENTRY HAS MANY DANGERS 41

40 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, Harmondworth, 1966, 115. 41 Albuquerque Journal, 5 December 1999, B1.

88

Sang Hea Kil The case dramatizes the dangers that come with Phoenix’s booming smuggling trade and the soaring number of drop houses shielding illicit activities across the Valley.42

In these two examples, the use of danger paints a portrait of a system in crisis. Mary Douglas argues that danger emanates from transitional and marginal states, where notions of dirt and pollution are associated: “The person who must pass from one to another is himself a danger and emanates danger to others”.43 Transnational migrants are perceived as emanating ambiguity because of their unauthorized resident status. Their border crossing lends itself to be seen as an act of defilement, which is represented by such war rhetoric. Complementing the notion of “danger,” the use of “strain” (tu=35, n=30, 2.9% of N, 0.09% of TU), and “burden” (tu=29, n=23, 2.2% of N, 0.08% of TU) continue this notion of “aches”: Simcox and his supporters contend that illegal immigrants strain the nation’s drug enforcement and health-care systems and burglarize ranches and homes near the border. Simcox also worries that terrorists may sneak across with biological or chemical weapons.44 It is too soon to determine whether the reduced flow has affected hospitals and other social services, which some have asserted are burdened by illegal immigrants.45

Here the phenomenon of migration and its impact on social services, like hospitals and health care systems, help to shape immigrants as dependents, an over-reliant group both culturally and economically. These news dailies repeated the idea of the nation as a limited, susceptible system, a system that could be pushed to breaking point much like a physical body under great stress. The use of words like “strain” and “burden” provided more figurative details to the danger presented by immigration to social systems. These concepts reinforced the fear of transitions: from health to illness, vitality to fragility. The body politic in pubic discourse can be “fit or ill, harmonious or 42

Arizona Republic, 9 July 2001, A1. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 97. 44 Los Angeles Times, 8 December 2002, A19. 45 Los Angeles Times, 2 October 1993, A1. 43

Immigration and “Operations”

89

discordant. There is no room for evolution or development”.46 Thus, there is little room for seeing migrants as a healthy constituent. Additional imagery in the next cluster of terms reinforces this negative picture of migrants as “aches” to society. Examples of “disease” (tu=27, n=12, 1.2% of N, 0.08% of TU) and “hurt” (tu=18, n=17, 1.6% of N, 0.05% of TU) are shown below: This time last year, the citizens of Nogales, Ariz., were outraged and more than a little fearful of the young outlaws who were living in the tunnels connecting to their sister city in Mexico. High on inhalants, and carrying diseases from the storm sewers, the “tunnel rats” were preying on illegal immigrants and emerging on the U.S. side to burglarize houses and extort food and money from local businesses.47 Title: MIGRANTS HURTING NATION, SOME SAY48

The association between actual diseases and migrants is not a new phenomenon.49 In the example above, the fear of a transnational transmission of disease by migrants is amplified by a fear of delinquent, homeless, brown youth. Furthermore, on a metaphoric level, the use of “hurt” as a migrant action toward the nation underscores fear rather than empathy. And it is “fear” (tu=248, n=173, 17% of N, 0.71% of TU) that leads the second category of body “functions”. The news media’s use of fear comes from many sources: residents, immigrants, enforcement officials, activists and advocates. Below are some examples of this fear: Ranchers and other border residents complain about cut fences, trash, thievery and vandalism. Beyond all that, they say the stream of illegals makes them fearful of crime.50

46

Randall McGowen, “The Body and Punishment in Eighteenth-Century England”, Journal of Modern History, LIX/4 (December 1987), 658. 47 Houston Chronicle, 16 April 1995, 1. 48 Arizona Republic, 26 August 2001, A6. 49 See Alan M. Kraut, Silent Travelers: Germs, Genes, and the "Immigrant Menace”, New York, 1994. 50 Arizona Republic, 28 April 1999, B1.

90

Sang Hea Kil The troops involved in such reconnaissance patrols say they feel the adrenaline, fear and boredom common in combat.51

Unlike the concept of “danger” that migrants seem to emanate, “fear” comes from everywhere and seems endemic to the border area. The use of “fear” in the news media defines “what will be discussed, how it will be discussed, and above all, how it will not be discussed”.52 In this case, the news media do not treat immigrants as “economic migrants” but as “illegal aliens”, preferring to use a language that marginalizes immigrants as “alien” (noun) and “illegal” (modifier), or as simply “illegals” (a metonymy in which “illegals” stand for immigrants). This takes the border region out of a historical, economic, or global context and hinders opportunities to see immigrants as benevolent. “Heart” and “muscle” are examples that round out the last embodied category of body “parts”. This is the most intermittent category but contains very vivid imagery: “They’re [migrants] from the interior [of Mexico] and want to go farther north to the very heart of America,” Cruz said.53 They [migrants] are dodging Gatekeeper’s muscle by taking greater risks and paying higher fees for a promise to sneak into the United States.54

Though subtle, the use of heart suggests contamination with undertones of sexual violation. “Heart”, as used here, is a geopolitical metaphor linked to the body politic.55 Since it is a major body organ and the seat of passionate emotion, especially love, the metaphor of the heart includes a vital, sentimental aspect. The notion of migrants “wanting to go the heart” of America can anticipate an illness or a 51

Los Angeles Times, 29 June 1997, A1. David L. Altheide and Sam R. Michalowski, “Fear in the News: A Discourse of Control”, The Sociological Quarterly, XL/3 (1999), 478. 53 Albuquerque Journal, 9 February 1995, A1. 54 Arizona Republic, 7 September 1997, A16. 55 See Andreas Musolff, “The Heart of the European Body Politic: British and German Perspectives on Europe’s Central Organ”, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, XXV/5-6 (September 2004), 437-52. 52

Immigration and “Operations”

91

failure of the heart. But, in this context, “heart” also suggests the penetration or infiltration of the center (of the US), as well as a southern to northern movement that could damage this sensitive organ. Here, immigrants are seen as violators or abusers, which underscores the vulnerability of the nation. Their “desire to go to the very heart of America” suggests a capacity to defile an important, almost sacred space that serves a central function. Moreover, the use of “muscle” clearly demonstrates the power and brawn of border enforcement strategies. This is a gendered, masculinist rendering of enforcement. Enforcement “muscle” forces immigrants to dodge, take risks, pay more, in order to sneak into the US. In sum, muscular border enforcement forces immigrants to act as animals or desperate entities in order to cross successfully. These two concepts work well together in showing how “muscle” (masculine), demonstrated by enforcement practices, protects the “heart” (feminine). This emotive geopolitical metaphor also shows a clear gendered distinction between the state as masculine and the nation as feminine entities. As demonstrated by the ten examples I analyzed in this section, the link between the body politic and immigrants as threats exists in everyday news discourse. The notion of immigrant crime fills the national imagination and directly affects policies. Politicians and the public imagine the border and the immigrants who cross it as a disease, infection or parasite within public debates, thereby treating the border like an “open wound”.56 The criminalization of immigrants and the defense of the border result in a medicalized paranoia, where racial anxieties of surviving, of mixing, of losing whiteness to brownness, and losing parts of the US to Mexico, are widespread. The implosive effect of globalization greatly affects transnational migration. First, it incites feelings of nativism and territorialism toward border matters that contribute to vigilantism. Second, globalization challenges the geopolitical integrity of the state, and 56

See Jonathan X. Inda, “Foreign Bodies: Migrants, Parasites, and the Pathological Nation”, Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, XXII/3 (Fall 2000), 46-62; Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse, Austin: TX, 2002; Marcelo SuárezOrozco, “California Dreaming: Proposition 187 and the Cultural Psychology of Racial and Ethnic Exclusion”, Anthropology and Education Quarterly, XXVII/2 (June 1996), 151-67.

92

Sang Hea Kil

deterritorializes national boundaries by exposing the “territorial trap”. Third, the fluidity of the concept of globalization gives way to the highly regulated and restricted “gated globe” practice, which characterizes the current militarized border policy. And finally, a rhetorical analysis of border news coverage shows how the war paradigm in this region encourages a view of the nation-state as a vulnerable body in need of intervention, with its attendant medical connotations. The deployment of “operation” after “operation” is an easy example of the blending of crime, war, and medical frameworks at work on the border. The erosion of the nation-state, symbolized by a porous border, also suggests an erosion of national culture with its deep investments in the meanings of “whiteness” that are embodied by the dichotomies of purity and pollution. So, despite the perceived economic success of and push toward globalization and economic integration, the US border states express deep yet subtle reservations towards these developments through their media’s coverage of the border. This uncertainty fuels public policy towards further militarization in the USMexico border region. The idea of war, as an armed struggle between antagonistic nations, stimulates racial anxieties within the immigration debate without anyone ever having to utter a racial slur.57 The assumption that the border needs to be militarized because of it susceptibility to “invasion” and possible “defeat”, allows public culture to endorse a racialized border policy. To speak effortlessly of war and militarization, but rarely of race and racism, within the discourse of the US-Mexico border, is to give consent to a border policy that is really a human rights crisis.

57

See Kil and Menjívar, “The ‘War on the Border’”, 169.

II: Transnational Literary Routes

“I HAD FORGOTTEN A CONTINENT”: COSMOPOLITAN MEMORY IN DEREK WALCOTT’S OMEROS SHANE GRAHAM

Cosmopolitanism has long had a bad rap. The “citizen of the world” is often derided as either an unfeeling adherent to universal rationality or a decadent bourgeoisie; either way, he or she is seen as “floating, without material base or emotional attachment to others, insubstantial”, as Bruce Robbins summarizes Benedict Anderson’s dismissal of the internationalist.1 In his defense of nationalism, Benjamin Barber claims likewise that our “attachments start parochially and only then grow outward. To bypass them in favor of an immediate cosmopolitanism is to risk ending up nowhere – feeling at home neither at home nor in the world”.2 Similar charges have sometimes been leveled against St Lucianborn poet Derek Walcott. There is an irony to these criticisms, since unlike virtually every other West Indian writer of his generation he did not leave the Caribbean for any significant length of time until nearly fifty years of age, when he established quasi-permanent residence in the United States. Nevertheless, because his poetry is deeply indebted to the work of such western writers as Shakespeare, Donne, Eliot, and Auden, he has sometimes been accused of misplaced cultural loyalties. Most famously, his rival Edward Brathwaite once dismissed Walcott as a “humanist poet”, in contrast to his own preferred “folk poetry”: “It is very difficult for [Walcott’s] poems to immediately communicate to society in general .… His voice is often speaking away from that society rather than speaking in

1

Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress, New York, 1999, 69. Benjamin R. Barber, “Constitutional Faith”, in For Love of Country?, eds Martha C. Nussbaum and Joshua Cohen, Boston: MA, 34. 2

96

Shane Graham

towards it”.3 The implication is that Walcott has chosen to embrace a Eurocentric universalism at the expense of a close communion with the peasantry of his native island. But if cosmopolitanism has long been tarred with the brush of Kantian universalism, its recent defenders have begun to rescue the notion from its connotations of “an unpleasant posture of superiority toward the putative provincial”.4 Appiah calls this a “rooted cosmopolitanism, or, if you like, a cosmopolitan patriotism”.5 Robbins likewise denies that this newly emerging cosmopolitanism is intrinsically opposed to nationalism: Like nations, cosmopolitanisms are now plural and particular .… For better or worse, there is a growing consensus that cosmopolitanism sometimes works together with nationalism rather than in opposition to it.6

These various conceptualizations of a “rooted” cosmopolitan – an identity that is simultaneously patriotic and transnational – help us to sort through and understand the complex, seemingly contradictory allegiances we see in Derek Walcott’s work throughout his career, and especially in the decade after he moved to the United States. It is simply not true, I will argue, that he chooses western cosmopolitanism over a declaration of national belonging; rather, after long and anxious negotiation, he opts for plural allegiances and multiple identities. As Amanda Anderson notes, from “a postethnic perspective, one does not dissociate oneself from particular attachments in a purely negative way, but rather reflectively relates to overlapping communities, and

3

Quoted in Mervyn Morris, “Walcott and the Audience for Poetry”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, ed. Robert D. Hamner, Washington: D.C., 1993, 17778. 4 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, New York, 2006, xiii. 5 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots”, in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, eds Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, Minneapolis: MN, 91. 6 Bruce Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism”, in Cosmopolitics, 2.

“I had forgotten a continent”

97

sees the individual’s relation to its multiple attachments as voluntary, shifting, and part of an ongoing process”.7 We can see this ongoing process at work particularly in Walcott’s Omeros. In that poem, more successfully than in any other work, Walcott stakes out an identity that is at once St Lucian, West Indian, and American; global and local; rooted and cosmopolitan. He does so, in part, through what Wai Chee Dimock conceives of as fractal, shifting “kinship networks” that intersect and penetrate what she calls “deep time”.8 It is perhaps ironic that Walcott is able to accomplish this in Omeros, not in spite of his living in a state of continual migration between the US and St Lucia, but precisely because of his condition of flux and liminality. Moreover, Walcott’s crafting of a cosmopolitan identity, one derived not from a linear genealogy but from a web of interlinked transnational relations, helps him solve a dilemma that has pervaded his work from the beginning: it allows him to transcend a narrow provincialism without resorting either to a Eurocentric universalism or to a conception of diasporic collectivity rooted in essentialized identity politics. “A different tree”: alienation and self-division It is not without cause that critics often ascribe to Walcott a sense of aloofness and alienation from the dominant culture in St Lucia.9 He 7

Amanda Anderson, “Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity”, in Cosmopolitics, 279. 8 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time, Princeton: NJ, 2006, 3. 9 In one interview, Walcott complains “I’m constantly running into this idea … that I’m not sure which world I’m in, that I don’t know who I am. I know very precisely .… But perhaps to an American living in such an atmosphere as black-is-black and white-is-white and never-the-twain-shall-meet, a mixed person like myself has to be seen as a mixed-up person” (quoted in Paula Burnett, Derek Walcott: Politics and Poetics, Gainesville: FL, 2000, 25). There may be some truth to the claim that American critics are projecting our absolutist worldview onto Walcott; then again, perhaps these critics simply have in mind his own words, as when he writes in “A Far Cry From Africa” that he is “poisoned with the blood of both” English and African, and “divided to the vein” (Derek Walcott, Collected Poems 1948-1984, New York, 1986, 18); or when he describes his adolescent self as “a knot of paradoxes: hating the Church and loving her rituals, learning to hate England as I worshipped her language … loving the island and wishing [I] could get the hell out of it” (Derek Walcott, “Leaving School”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, 32).

98

Shane Graham

was born of a mixed race middle-class family on an island of poor peasants of black African descent; his family was Methodist on an island of Catholics; and they spoke English in a place where most people speak French Creole. His poetry often reflects an anxiety over belonging: for example, in one of his best-known poems, “The Schooner Flight”, the narrator-protagonist Shabine feels himself internally divided, exiled, and rootless: I’m just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation.10

If Shabine thinks of himself as a nation unto himself, it is because he feels rejected from the nation of his birth: “I had no nation now but the imagination. / After the white man, the niggers didn’t want me / when the power swing to their side”.11 If Edward Baugh is correct that the “writing of the self … is Walcott’s way of engaging with the world, by examining himself-in-the-world”,12 then “The Schooner Flight” shows the poet searching the islands of the Caribbean for a healing connection, in “flight to a target whose aim we’ll never know, / vain search for one island that heals with its harbour / and a guiltless horizon”.13 Yet that target of a “guiltless horizon” is a difficult one to hit, given Shabine’s ambivalence toward the nation he feels has rejected him. And Walcott seems to have shared that ambivalence. After many revisions, “The Schooner Flight” was published in its final form in the collection The Star-Apple Kingdom in 1979. This was the year that Walcott left Trinidad to establish what would become a more-or-less permanent residence in the United States. It was also the year that his native St Lucia finally broke from British rule and became an independent nation. Both events intensified Walcott’s crisis of belonging and identity.14 10

Walcott, Collected Poems, 346. Ibid., 350. 12 Ibid., 311. 13 Ibid., 361. 14 Walcott’s biographer Bruce King writes that “To become an American citizen … would be a betrayal of St Lucia, it would mean saying he wrote about the people, but could escape to safety. He decided against it. His passport would still have two 11

“I had forgotten a continent”

99

The Arkansas Testament, published in 1987, shows that crisis still unresolved. The volume is divided into two sections – “Here” and “Elsewhere” – reflecting the poet’s own self-division: the poems in “Here” describe St Lucia, while “Elsewhere” deals with his nomadic life abroad. The poem “Cul de Sac Valley” expresses the writer’s frustration at the inability to do justice to his compatriots through language: If my craft is blest; if this hand is as accurate, as honest as their carpenter’s, every frame, intent on its angles, would echo this settlement of unpainted wood .… exhaling trees refresh memory with their smell: bois canot, bois campêche, hissing: What you wish from us will never be, your words is English, is a different tree.15

The trees’ reproach stings. As Laurence Breiner points out, behind “all [Walcott’s] linguistic experimentation, motivating it all, is the poet’s continuing renegotiation of his relationship to his people and their common language”.16 When Walcott writes about the French Creolespeakers of St Lucia, their common language is not the one he has parrots” (Bruce Alvin King, Derek Walcott: A Caribbean Life, Oxford, 2000, 468). Paul Breslin similarly observes that the “cumulative effect of Walcott’s experience during the late 1970s and most of the 1980s was to push him toward a more liminal, cosmopolitan conception of his identity” (Paul Breslin, Nobody's Nation: Reading Derek Walcott, Chicago: IL, 2001, 43). 15 Derek Walcott, The Arkansas Testament, New York, 1987, 10. 16 Laurence A. Breiner, “Creole Language in the Poetry of Derek Walcott”, Callaloo, XXVIII/1 (Winter 2005), 40.

100

Shane Graham

chosen for his verse; to represent those people in poetry written for an international Anglophone audience, he must engage in a continual process of linguistic and cultural translation. But in that process he is continually reminded that his language “is a different tree”, one without roots in the island to which he longs to connect. This anxiety pervades the collection, and reflects a real distance and alienation from everyday life in St Lucia. What makes Walcott’s next book, Omeros, remarkable is the mitigation of this sense of distance. The poet-narrator still struggles to establish a place for himself on the island, but there is little sense here that the invention of a St Lucian identity is at odds with a deep connection to western artistic traditions. Walcott’s great success in Omeros is in his creation (or revelation) of a Caribbean cosmopolitanism. His cosmopolitanism insists on the multiplicitous ancestries of the islands’ populations and lays bare the deep connections through time and across space which bind together the West Indies’ many cultures. He uses these networks of cultural flows not in the service of reactionary nostalgia but to invent a foundation for future identities. Many of his Caribbean predecessors and contemporaries have sought an antidote to the amnesia of slavery and the Middle Passage in racial essentialism and a romanticism that presents Africa as a mythological motherland. Walcott, by contrast, has long rejected the racial identity politics of, for instance, negritude; in Omeros he lays unequivocal claim to his African ancestry, but as only one of the many transnational vectors informing his life, art, and identity. The multitudinous cosmopolitanism of Walcott’s vision of St Lucia is evident immediately in the large cast of characters introduced in the poem. One of the primary plots, concerning a group of St Lucian peasants and fishermen, centers around the woman Helen who variously works as a maid, a waitress, and a trader. Two fishermen compete for her affections: Achille, who undertakes a dream journey to Africa in a quest for his roots and sense of his identity; and Hector, who gives up fishing and buys a taxi van. They are friends with Philoctete, who has a gangrenous wound on his shin, the healing of which constitutes a major subplot; with Ma Kilman, the obeah woman who owns the “No Pain Café” and cures Philoctete’s wound; and with Seven Seas, an old blind man. Another plot strand involves Sergeant

“I had forgotten a continent”

101

Major Dennis Plunkett, an officer in the British army who has retired to St Lucia with his Irish wife Maud, where for a while they employ Helen as a maid. Woven throughout these plot threads is the narrative of the poet-narrator, who closely resembles Walcott himself and whose travels transport the reader widely throughout Europe and North America. It is through these various characters and their wanderings that Walcott lays bare some of the complex cultural flows that make up the cosmopolitan character of the West Indies. Deep time and the multicultural Caribbean Stuart Hall has remarked that “it is impossible to locate in the Caribbean an origin for its peoples”,17 because …everybody there comes from somewhere else .… That is to say, their true cultures, the places they really come from, the traditions that really formed them, are somewhere else. The Caribbean is the first, the original and the purest diaspora.18

The amnesiac state created by such a diaspora is the cause of enormous pain and anxiety, but it can also be a condition of possibility for reinvention. As Azade Seyhan says, social ruptures “caused by displacement, migrancy, and exile lead to impoverishment of communal life and shared cultural histories. This loss requires the restorative work of cultural memory to accord meaning, purpose, and integrity to the past”.19 Walcott has long preferred to emphasize the possibilities of diaspora than to brood bitterly over questions of blame. His formulations often parallel Seyhan’s observation about the need for imagination and “cultural memory” to fill the gaps created by social 17 Stuart Hall, “Negotiating Caribbean Identities”, in Postcolonial Discourses: An Anthology, ed. Gregory Castle, Oxford, 2001, 282. 18 Ibid., 283-84. Guyanese writer Wilson Harris likewise notes that in studying Caribbean poetry “it is impossible not to be conscious of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, and of other poetries that bear profoundly on interwoven tapestries of movement around the globe” (Wilson Harris, The Womb of Space: The Cross-cultural Imagination, Westport: CT, 1983, 120). And Martiniquan poet Édouard Glissant observes that the Caribbean “may be held up as one of the places in the world where Relation presents itself most visibly” (Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation [1990], trans. Betsy Wing, Ann Arbor: MI, 1997, 33). 19 Azade Seyhan, Writing Outside the Nation, Princeton: NJ, 2001, 15.

102

Shane Graham

ruptures. In the essay “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?”, he writes that what matters in the West Indies is “the loss of history, the amnesia of the races, [and] what has become necessary is imagination, imagination as necessity, as invention”.20 The poet figure in Omeros shows us a personal instance of this “amnesia of the races” through the microcosm of his aging mother’s senility and his own feeling of alienation from the Castries of his childhood: It was another country, whose excitable gestures I knew but could not connect with my mind, like my mother’s amnesia; untranslatable answers accompanied these actual spirits who had forgotten me as much as I, too, had forgotten a continent in the narrow streets.21

Walcott’s aim in Omeros is to regain or reinvent the “forgotten continent” whose spirits surround him at every step. These spirits, I would suggest, are those not only of the African ancestors from whom West Indians are separated by the amnesiac curtain of the Middle Passage, but also their ancestors from Europe and Asia, accompanied by the ghosts of their Arawak and Carib ancestors who originally occupied the West Indies. This cosmopolitan fusion has not always come readily to Walcott. Much of his early work strove for a kind of universal humanism, but that universalism was of a particularly Eurocentric variety. In the 1962 poem “Ruins of a Great House”, for example, the poet rues the “leprosy of empire”22 and its legacy of slavery, yet finds consolation in the thought “That Albion too was once / A colony like ours, ‘part of the continent, piece of the main’”. The legacy of Donne (represented by this quotation from “Meditation 17”) not only counterbalances that of “men like Hawkins, Walter Raleigh, Drake, / Ancestral murderers and poets”,23 but also provides a possible basis for reconciliation between the descendents of slaves and masters. 20

Derek Walcott, “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry?”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, 53. 21 Derek Walcott, Omeros, New York, 1990, 167. 22 Walcott, Collected Poems, 19. 23 Ibid., 20.

“I had forgotten a continent”

103

The debt of Omeros to Homer, which is implied by the title and by names like Helen, Achille, Hector, and Philoctete, might seem to suggest that Walcott is still relying here on a Eurocentric universalism. But I would counter instead that the poem’s many European allusions and borrowings constitute merely one thread in Walcott’s intricate cosmopolitan tapestry. In Omeros, emphasis is placed not on tropes of trauma and rupture, such as that of an archipelago broken off from the mainland, but on the trope of the ocean itself, which becomes an especially powerful figure for transnational connectivity. It closely resembles what Edouard Glissant calls “the entanglements of world-wide relation”,24 as well as what Bruce Robbins calls “feeling global”, or Freud’s “feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, ‘oceanic’”.25 It is the sea that binds together the poem’s far-flung locales – as the narrator notes when Achille is casting his fishing nets: our only inheritance [is] that elemental noise of the windward, unbroken breakers, Ithaca’s or Africa’s, all joining the ocean’s voice, because this is the Atlantic now, this great design of the triangular trade.26

It is the ocean and its “triangular” slave trade that links Homer’s Europe, Achille’s West Indies, and his ancestor Afolabe’s Africa. And it is the ocean that binds together the multitude of African tribes into a perceived unity of races: during the journey, “they felt the sea-wind tying them into one nation / of eyes and shadows and groans”.27 Many readers have noted the ubiquity of oceanic imagery in Walcott’s poetry. Less critical attention has been paid to another major figure for trans-Atlantic cosmopolitanism in Omeros: the net, or web. The trope arises, for instance, when Dennis Plunkett is pondering St Lucia’s (or Helen’s) role in history: “If she / hid in their net of myths, knotted entanglements // of figures and dates, she was not a 24

Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 31. Quoted in Robbins, Feeling Global, 170. 26 Walcott, Omeros, 130. 27 Ibid., 151. 25

104

Shane Graham

fantasy / but a webbed connection”.28 Plunkett seems to acknowledge that, despite his best effort to write a linear history of the region, the true history of the Caribbean is a “net of myths, knotted entanglements” between British, French, Dutch, Arawak, and African competitors for the island. Net imagery appears again when the narrator describes captured slaves on the Middle Passage: “This is prehistory, // that itching instinct in the criss-crossed net / of their palms, its wickerwork”.29 For both Plunkett and Achille, who sees the capture of his ancestors on his dream journey to Africa, retracing their racial histories is no easy matter of following simple linear genealogies; what they find instead is that their pasts are a labyrinth of crisscrossing networks and intersecting trajectories. In this regard, the poem resembles the “tangle of relations” that Wai Chee Dimock identifies in American literature: Rather than being a discrete entity, it is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever-multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures. These are input channels, kinship networks, routes of transit, and forms of attachment – connective tissues binding America to the rest of the world.30

One of the “crisscrossing set of pathways” that make up Walcott’s web of transatlantic migrations takes the form of the ship: the slave ship carrying Achille’s ancestors to the New World; the Dutch merchant ship, The Marlborough, that brings Plunkett’s eighteenthcentury namesake to the Antilles to defeat the French Ville de Paris; even Achille’s humble fishing canoe. All these vessels cross and recross the ocean, acting like the ships that Paul Gilroy sees as emblematic of the Black Atlantic as a single cultural unit: “ships were the living means by which the points within that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected”.31 For Walcott as for Gilroy, ships are sites of transition, of translation, and of

28

Ibid., 95. Ibid., 150. 30 Dimock, Through Other Continents, 3. 31 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge: MA, 1993, 16. 29

“I had forgotten a continent”

105

transformation, where conceptions of selfhood and group allegiance are open to reinvention. An even more frequently recurring trope in Omeros for cosmopolitan or transnational networks is the migration of birds. Toward the end of the poem, the narrator describes for us the tapestry Maud Plunkett has been sewing; it bears illustrations of Caribbean birds copied from Bond’s Ornithology, and in its diversity embodies the cosmopolitan make-up of the islands: The African swallow, the finch from India now spoke the white language of a sea-tipping tern, with the Chinese nightingales on a shantung screen, while the Persian falcon, whose cry leaves a scar on the sky till it closes, saw the sand turn green, the dunes to sea, understudying the man-o’-war, talking the marine dialect of the Caribbean with nightjars, finches, and swallows, each origin enriching the islands to which their cries were sewn.32

Maud Plunkett’s birds symbolize the multitude of cultures whose ship-bound migration to the Caribbean Walcott describes in his Nobel Prize lecture: not just African slaves, but “the first indentured Indians … the chained Cromwellian convict and the Sephardic Jew, the Chinese grocer and the Lebanese merchant”.33 Of all the birds to make an appearance in Omeros, the sea-swift is the most frequently recurring and the most significant. It is a swift that leads Achille in his canoe east, toward Africa and his ancestral origins: “He stood as the swift suddenly shot past / the hull … // … and he saw the whole world / globed in the passing sorrow of her sleepless eye”.34 As this line implies, the swift serves as a link not just to Africa, but also to the many places it visits in its global migrations: She touched both worlds with her rainbow, this frail dancer 32

Walcott, Omeros, 313-14. Derek Walcott, “The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory”, in What the Twilight Says: Essays, New York, 1998, 70-71. 34 Walcott, Omeros, 127. 33

106

Shane Graham leaping the breakers, this dart of the meridian. She could loop the stars with a fishline, she tired porpoises, she circled epochs with her outstretched span; she gave a straight answer when one was required, she skipped the dolphin’s questions, she stirred every spine of a sea-egg tickling your palm rank with the sea; she shut the ducts of a starfish, she was the mindmessenger, and her speed outdarted Memory.35

Walcott’s description of the swift leaps over not just individual lines but whole stanzas, with the hyphen in “mind-messenger” crossing stanza borders just as the swift “leaps the breakers”, crosses national borders and global meridians, and “outdart[s] Memory”. The swift’s ability to transcend memory is especially important given that, for Walcott, the slave’s amnesia is “the true history of the New World”,36 and the ocean separating that New World and Africa is “a white, amnesiac Atlantic”.37 The swift symbolizes the tissue of cultural imagination that connects the residents of the Caribbean to the Old World despite these gaps in conscious memory. Not only does the swift lead Achille on the dream-journey back to pre-colonial Africa; she is also credited with bringing the African herb that cures Philoctete’s wounded shin to St Lucia: “A swift had carried the strong seed in its stomach / centuries ago from its antipodal shore”.38 Thus, the swift connects the New World to the Old World not only geographically but also temporally. Paul Breslin, noting the swift’s “circular pattern”,39 says that “in Omeros, all diasporic routes have to be retraced .… It is an unfinished and unfinishable shuttling back and forth between past and present, present and future, by which we

35

Ibid., 130-31. Derek Walcott, “The Muse of History”, in What the Twilight Says, 39. 37 Walcott, Omeros, 61. 38 Ibid., 238. 39 Ibid., 188.

36

“I had forgotten a continent”

107

provisionally shape who we are, whence we came, and where we are going”.40 Again, the retracing of diasporic routes symbolized by the swift is not limited to the African diaspora. The birds appear in the poem whenever the narrative shifts to a new place or a new time, as when the narrator ends the Boston section at the end of Book Four and the “sea-swift vanishes in rain”.41 When the narrator arrives in Portugal, the swifts are there to meet him, “their flight, in reverse, / repeating the X of an hourglass”.42 The swifts trace the outlines of a transatlantic kinship network; they are like the African gods Ma Kilman evokes and sees “when their wings with crisscrossing stitches / blurred in the leaf-breaks, building a web overhead, / a net that entered her nerves”.43 The crisscross movements of ships and swifts across the Atlantic become figures for Walcott’s narrative, which is itself a web or net that stretches across the globe. This net connects West Indians to people around the world, and reveals the extent to which the Caribbean has been a cosmopolitan space for centuries. “The sea was still going on”: racial memory and the oceanic epic The net crisscrossing Omeros emblematizes not only the narrative of the poem, but also the collective or racial memory shared by the residents of St Lucia and the islands of the Caribbean. Walcott discusses this notion in an interview with Robert Hamner: “I think [a poem] moves off the page and goes into the memory. It goes into the collective memory of the entire race”.44 The notion of racial memory might seem to be at odds with Walcott’s long-standing rejection of, or at least suspicion toward, negritude and Afrocentrism, which have frequently relied on romantic notions of racial unity and collective memories of an idyllic African past. Walcott’s most scathing attack on Afrocentrism appears in “What the Twilight Says”:

40

Paul Breslin, “Derek Walcott’s ‘Reversible World’: Centers, Peripheries, and the Scale of Nature”, Callaloo, XXVIII/1 (Winter 2005), 19. 41 Walcott, Omeros, 187. 42 Ibid., 189. 43 Ibid., 243. 44 Robert D. Hamner, “Conversation with Derek Walcott”, in Conversations with Derek Walcott, ed. William Baer, Jackson: MS, 1996, 30.

108

Shane Graham So now we are entering the “African” phase with our pathetic African carvings, poems and costumes, and our art objects are not sacred vessels and costumes, and our art objects are not sacred vessels placed on altars but goods placed on shelves for the tourist .… The result is not one’s own thing but another minstrel show.45

Walcott, moreover, gives us a parody of “back-to-Africa” romanticism in his play Dream on Monkey Mountain, in which the old woodcutter Makak promises to lead his people to Africa, but concludes in the end that “Makak lives where he has always lived, in the dream of his people”.46 Dream on Monkey Mountain and many of Walcott’s other works imply that, while vestiges of African cultural practice may have persisted in the lives and dreams of Afro-Caribbeans, there is little to be gained from attempting to go back to Africa or recuperate the precolonial African past. Rei Terada suggests that Walcott “shows more empathy with Africa, the ‘other’ Old World, as his career develops”.47 Yet in the relatively late work, Omeros, Achille’s dream-journey to Africa is only somewhat more satisfying than Makak’s earlier quest. Granted, Achille does find a sort of kinship and familiarity in Afolabe’s village, but the entirety of Book Three is pervaded by a sense of nostalgia for the islands of his birth: for example, Achille’s face reflected in the water “seemed homesick / for the history ahead, as if its proper place / lay in unsettlement”. His failure to find a real place for himself in the West African village is symbolized by “a tree-hole, raw in the uprooted ground”.48 A full-grown tree, once uprooted, does not grow back. The implication of this image is that Achille does not belong in Africa: if he, like the narrator, has forgotten a continent, he finds that the continent has also forgotten him. In short, then, Walcott at the end of the 1980s is no less skeptical of negritude’s romanticizing of Africa than he was in 1964, when he wrote that “Negritude offers an assertion of pride, but not of our complete identity, since that is mixed and shared by other races, whose writers are East Indian, white, mixed, whose best painters are 45

Derek Walcott, “What the Twilight Says: An Overture”, in Dream on Monkey Mountain, and Other Plays, New York, 1970, 8. 46 In ibid., 326. 47 Rei Terada, Derek Walcott's Poetry: American Mimicry, Boston: MA, 1992, 26. 48 Walcott, Omeros, 140.

“I had forgotten a continent”

109

Chinese, and in whom the process of racial assimilation goes on with every other marriage”.49 But Terada is right that Achille’s dreamjourney back to Africa lacks the implicit scorn that characterizes many statements the younger Walcott made about Afrocentric movements. Moreover, the genealogical web that Walcott spins in Omeros is also significantly more complex than the Eurocentric universalism he resorts to in “Ruins of a Great House” and other early works. Indeed, if he rejects negritude and Pan-Africanism as the singular basis for West Indian identity, he is no less skeptical in Omeros of Eurocentric forms of shallow cosmopolitanism, which often seem less interested in understanding other cultures than in putting them under museum glass. We can see the narrator’s rejection of this musealizing impulse in his caustic remark about a museum in Boston in which “Art has surrendered / to History with its whiff of formaldehyde”.50 In a sense, the poet himself is guilty of the same reduction through analogy and capital-H History. He wonders, for instance, why he cannot “see Helen / as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow”.51 Walcott thus deviously calls into question the entire Homeric analogy that informs the poem. The narrator’s apparent disavowal of the poem’s classical European antecedents and its epic form is further complicated by Walcott’s contradictory, even coy, remarks in various interviews after Omeros was published.52 The book’s critics have begun an extended debate about how sincere Walcott is in his disavowal of the poem’s epic attributes and classical analogs.53 I will discuss the issue of the 49 Derek Walcott, “Necessity of Negritude”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, 23. 50 Walcott, Omeros, 182. 51 Ibid., 271. 52 Asked in one interview if Omeros is an epic poem, Walcott replies with a qualified “Yes. I would think that the design of it, yes” (J.P. White, “An Interview with Derek Walcott”, in Conversations with Derek Walcott, 174). But elsewhere he expresses a different view: “I think the reason why I hesitate about calling it that is I think any work in which the narrator is almost central is not really an epic … since I am in the book, I certainly don’t see myself as a hero of an epic” (ibid., 189). 53 For some of the key contributions to this debate, see John Figueroa, “Omeros”, in The Art of Derek Walcott, ed. Stewart Brown, Bridgend, 1991, 193-213; Robert D. Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed: Derek Walcott’s “Omeros”, Columbia: MO, 1997; Gregson Davis, “‘With No Homeric Shadow’: The Disavowal of Epic in Derek Walcott’s Omeros”, South Atlantic Quarterly, XCVI/2 (Spring 1997), 321-33; Joseph

110

Shane Graham

poem’s genre at greater length below, but the short version of my take on these debates is that the European traditions from which Walcott borrows are, like the allusions to pre-colonial Africa, only one strand in the vastly complex web of influence and cultural flows that inform Walcott’s cosmopolitan vision of West Indian identity. Given this palimpsest of overlapping cultural signifieds, a stable and monolithic allegorical reading of the poem is impossible. There is no need, then, to choose between the polarized positions Joseph Farrell describes: “Is the author of Omeros ‘really’ the White Walcott descended in blood from men of Warwickshire and in ink from the Bard of Avon, or is he the Black descendent of slaves whose history and language have all but disappeared from the official record …?”54 Walcott is both at once, and more. If he sometimes denies the Hellenic and epic qualities of Omeros, it is not because he does not intend us to notice those qualities, but because he wants to discourage a blinkered preoccupation with the “Homeric shadow”. Likewise, if he insists throughout his career that negritude is a celebration of “romantic darkness”, it is not because he disavows his African ancestry, but because he recognizes that there is more to his people than being the descendents of African slaves.55 He has said that artistic maturity is “the assimilation of the features of every ancestor”,56 and that he has always tried to create “a theatre where someone can do Shakespeare or sing Calypso with equal conviction”.57 Omeros is Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros: The Classical Epic in a Postmodern World”, South Atlantic Quarterly, XCVI/2 (Spring 1997), 247-73. Breslin offers the most nuanced view of Walcott’s self-conscious critique of his own work’s generic conventions: he makes the case “for the poem’s critique of its own analogical method”, but argues that it is impossible “to feel that the whole poem is built with that critique in mind. Too many parts of it seem sincerely invested in the Homeric analogy critiqued elsewhere or simply unaware that their reaching for analogies is strained” (Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 272). 54 Farrell, “Walcott’s Omeros”, 251. 55 This is Jahan Ramazani’s point when he says that “the Caribbean poet builds into his aesthetic construct inevitably mixed cultural inheritances” (The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English, Chicago: IL, 2001, 62). 56 Walcott, “The Muse of History”, 36. 57 Derek Walcott, “Meanings”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, 46. In a later interview with Anthony Milne, Walcott expresses a similar sentiment: “It is about time the experience of the theatre here be expanded, and it shouldn’t contract itself racially … the thinking may tend to be only in black or in Indian, and that is not

“I had forgotten a continent”

111

where he most effectively brings together the multiple strands of West Indian ancestry to create what Breslin calls an “oceanic epic”: “To history’s timeline, drawn by a determinism of cause and effect, Walcott answers with a vision of an oceanic eternal present to which temporal movement always returns, cyclical rather than linear”.58 This cyclical “eternal present” is clearly visible in the last line of the poem, which associates the sea with the past continuous verb tense, and thereby implies that the sea’s global web of history is enduring, linking the past to the present and the future: “When [Achille] left the beach the sea was still going on”.59 The Caribbean through deep time The claim that I hope to prove in the remainder of this article is that the cosmopolitan web or “oceanic eternal present” that Walcott weaves in Omeros is a powerful exemplar of the phenomenon Wai Chee Dimock calls “deep time”, a term that she believes highlights “a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric”.60 In discussing the African-American family, Dimock deploys an image similar to the metaphor of the ship Gilroy uses to signify the Black Atlantic: This family is born not of the nearness of blood but of an alchemical overcoming of distance; it multiplies not by linear descent but by the circuitousness of shipping routes .… Cross-fertilizing takes place when far-flung arcs meet at distant points.61

I have already noted the recurrence of ships as figures for migration in Omeros. The botanical metaphor of cross-fertilization in this passage from Dimock is equally apt in relation to Walcott’s work. So, for instance, in his Nobel Prize speech, Walcott says that Caribbean peasants are “all fragments of Africa originally but shaped and

what the West Indies is supposed to mean, or Trinidad certainly” (Anthony Milne, “Derek Walcott”, in Critical Perspectives on Derek Walcott, 59-60). 58 Breslin, Nobody’s Nation, 269. 59 Walcott, Omeros, 325. 60 Dimock, Through Other Continents, 3-4. 61 Ibid., 144-45.

112

Shane Graham

hardened and rooted now in the island’s life”.62 The African slaves and indentured South Asian workers set down roots in the islands and adapted to life there, because the “widening mind can acquire / the hues of a foliage different from where it begins”.63 Similarly, the healing plant carried from Africa in the stomach of the sea-swift has adapted: but the vine grew its own wings, out of the ocean it climbed like the ants, the ancestors of Achille, the women carrying coals after the dark door slid over the hold. As the weed grew in odour so did its strength at the damp root of the cedar, where the flower was anchored at the mottled root.64

Thus, again, the flower serves as a figure for the displaced African slaves who manage to adapt and, eventually, thrive in their strange new locale. But as Dimock notes, their ties to Africa follow “complex paths of temporal and spatial displacement”.65 In the cosmopolitan web of memory that Walcott sketches in Omeros, displacement operates not just literally – the slaves uprooted from their African villages and displaced to the New World – but also in terms of a Freudian symbolic economy, in which events, places, people, and practices repressed from collective or oceanic memory shift and morph into other forms. This symbolic displacement helps to explain the global wanderings of Omeros, including not just Achille’s trip to Africa, but also the narrator’s trips to Portugal, Ireland, Boston, the Dakotas, and other European and North American locales. These wanderings have attracted more critical displeasure than probably any other feature of the poem – even Hamner, despite his half-hearted defense of the Great Plains chapters of the poem as “pulling together the disparate threads of a unique narrative that obtains mythic proportions”, concludes that

62

Walcott, “The Antilles”, 81. Walcott, Omeros, 207. 64 Ibid., 239. 65 Dimock, Through Other Continents, 145.

63

“I had forgotten a continent”

113

the European and American scenes “disrupt the general texture of the narrative” and are not “thoroughly integrated into the poem”.66 If one focuses on the narrative of Helen and the St Lucian fishermen competing for her affections as the driving force of the poem, then the chapters set in Europe and North America do indeed appear to be aimless digressions. But if the true narrative thrust of the poem is the author’s quest for poetic figures that can give expression to the layers of multiple cultures, traumatic histories, and lost memories in the West Indies, then these scenes become crucial to Walcott’s project. Glissant argues that “Sometimes, by taking up the problems of the Other, it is possible to find oneself … [I]dentity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation”.67 Walcott seems to share Glissant’s vision of a rhizomic identity that results from “relation” with the Other. So, for instance, Walcott uses the plight of the Sioux and Dakota Indians and of blacks in the US as figures for his own people’s history of slavery and colonization. Achille finds a link to “his name and his soul”,68 not in Africa, but only after his return, while listening to Bob Marley’s song “Buffalo Soldier”: He saw the smoky buffalo, a black rider under a sweating hat, his slitted eyes grazing with the herds that drifted like smoke under low hills, the wild Indian tents, the sky’s blue screen, and on it, the black soldier turned his face, and it was Achille’s. Then, pennons in reggae-motion, a white bonnet in waves of heat like a sea-horse, leading them in their last wide charge, the soft hooves pounding in his skull, Red Indians bouncing to a West Indian rhythm … 66

Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 106. Early reviewers complained, for example, that these sections of Omeros are “a narrative red herring” (David Mason, “Review of Derek Walcott’s Omeros”, Hudson Review, XLIV/3 [Autumn 1991], 514) and “not only narratively peripheral but thematically superfluous” (Brad Leithauser, “Ancestral Rhyme”, New Yorker, 11 February 1991, 92). 67 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 68 Walcott, Omeros, 154.

114

Shane Graham then to repeated cracks from the rifle, more savages, until the shore was littered with palm spears, bodies: like Aruacs falling to the muskets of the Conquistador.69

This passage is the very embodiment of Glissant’s “whorls of time, mingling of centuries and jungles, the same epic voice retying into the weft of the world”.70 It also embodies the oblique, transnational kinship networks Dimock describes: the St Lucian descendent of African slaves, listening to a Jamaican song about African-American soldiers, and discovering, through that experience, a feeling of solidarity both with the First Nations of North America and with the Arawaks whose absence haunts Achille’s own island. This web of displacement is no mere metaphorical substitution implying an ahistorical equivalence between these various peoples and situations; it is, rather, an instance of Bruce Robbins’ oceanic “feeling global” – that is, it expresses the poet’s recognition of the interconnectedness and shared mutual responsibility of people around the globe, and especially of the dispossessed. This transcultural and transnational network that Walcott portrays goes well beyond content and symbolism. It also operates at the level of form, from genre to diction to syntax. I have already suggested that the genre of Omeros is deeply eclectic and fluid. On one level, it is a rewriting of a Hellenic epic, which uses the hexametrical lines of Homer, but the poem also loosely adapts the terza rima structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and includes scenes that evoke Dante and Virgil at the gates of Hell.71 There are chapters written in the form of a play script (for instance, 137-38), and one in which the poet breaks

69

Ibid., 161-62. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 35. 71 See, for example, the passage in which Plunkett drives around the island: “This was the gate of sulfur through which he must pass, // singeing his memory” (Walcott, Omeros, 59). On Walcott’s use of hexameter, Burnett notes that the form “has hitherto been rarely used in English, although it is established in other European languages. It is also the Homeric meter .… His recent introduction of the twelve-syllable hexameter is thus an act of active creolization, reinvigorating the language with a new/old orality” (Burnett, Derek Walcott, 156). 70

“I had forgotten a continent”

115

from the terza rima form altogether and uses rhymed couplets (17374). Walcott goes further still in creating a deeply creolized poetry. At times, he attempts to capture the rhythms of the French Creole spoken by his fishermen characters, even trying to render their speech directly while juxtaposing it with English translations: “Touchez-i, encore: N’ai fender choux-ous-ou, salope!” “Touch it again, and I’ll split your arse you bitch!” “Moi j’a dire – ’ous pas prêter un rien. ’Ous ni shallope, ’ous ni seine, ’ous croire ’ous ni choeur campêche?” “I told you, borrow nothing of mine. You have a canoe, and a net. Who you think you are? Logwood Heart?”72

The rhyme pattern in these two stanzas draws attention to how thoroughly Walcott is blending the two languages, with “bitch” and “campêche” forming a bilingual slant rhyme and illustrating Emily Apter’s claim that “translation’s referential field is an unbounded mappus mundi of linguistic contact zones and sites of literary techniques”.73 In this case, the translation marks the contact zone between English, French, and the African languages that loaned their syntax to the French Creole. Another, especially complex example of this creolization of genres appears in Chapter 55 of Omeros, which depicts Achille and Philoctete dressing up as African women for the Junkanoo festival. As Achille tells Helen: “he and Philoctete had done this / every Boxing Day, and not because of Christmas, // but for something older; something that he had seen / in Africa, when his name had followed a 72

Walcott, Omeros, 15-16. Emily Apter, “Taskography: Translation as Genre of Literary Labor”, PMLA, CXXII/5 (October 2007), 1404. Omeros is also in this regard much like the novels of Walcott’s near contemporary from Martinique, Patrick Chamoiseau. Wendy Knepper claims that Chamoiseau “argues for a rhizomic approach to literature, language and genre”: “This creolizing principle of ‘illicit blendings’ also applies to the need for generic intermixtures in an increasingly globalized world … in which peoples, cultures, races, gods, traditions, languages, and explanations of the universe are increasingly interconnected, influencing and transforming one another” (“Remapping the Crime Novel in the Francophone Caribbean: The Case of Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique”, PMLA, CXXII/5 (October 2007), 1433).

73

116

Shane Graham

swift”.74 This festival appears to borrow from Carnival – itself already a deeply transnational phenomenon – and from African rituals and folk tales.75 Extending the African influence, the description of the dance is marked by a stuttering alternation of dactyls and anapests, mimicking West African percussion: “Then, knee passing knee, he stepped lighter // than a woman with her skirt lifted high crossing / the stone of a stream when the light is small mirrors”.76 Yet, even in this chapter that seems to be the one mostly deeply immersed in African-derived West Indian folk tradition, there are also traces of antiquated usage that imply that the English language has roots in the Caribbean as deeply primal as those African traditions. Twice in four pages Walcott uses the strong past tense or strong past participle of a verb derived from Old English instead of the weak form, which has become standard usage: “A stale cock crew” (“crew” as opposed to “crowed”);77 and “to Achille, the / faster they flew, the more he remembered, blent / to his rite” (“blent” as opposed to “blended”).78 Neither verb form is unprecedented in modern usage, but both are uncommon enough to arouse curiosity. Used in such close succession, two reversions to verb forms that have lain mostly dormant since Middle English suggest that something primal and atavistic is surfacing through the dance. Hamner suggests that through the performance Achille and Philoctete “exorcise the degradation of the Middle Passage”:79 indeed, the ritual is a form of reversing time, and seizing control of the past. Omeros as a whole performs the same function – it makes visible large swaths of the temporal history of the Caribbean, and shows the extent to which West Indian identity has always been fed by a network of cultural flows from around the globe. Diana Taylor posits the need to rethink the Americas in hemispheric terms “as a complicated, back-and-forth history of migratory, cultural, 74

Walcott, Omeros, 275. For analyses of Caribbean Carnival as a transnational phenomenon, see Philip W. Scher, Carnival and the Formation of a Caribbean Transnation, Gainesville: FL, 2003; and Trinidad Carnival: The Cultural Politics of a Transnational Festival, eds Garth L. Green and Philip W. Scher, Bloomington: IN, 2007. 76 Walcott, Omeros, 276-77. 77 Ibid., 273 (emphasis added). 78 Ibid., 277 (emphasis added). 79 Hamner, Epic of the Dispossessed, 146. 75

“I had forgotten a continent”

117

economic, political, military, linguistic, and religious practices, of which we are all a part”.80 In Omeros Walcott does indeed show us a St Lucia that is closely linked with the continents of North and South America: the US chapters might be digressions from the central plotlines of the story, but when we are told that “Professor Statics”, the would-be politician, “went Florida, / after the election, as a migrant-picker”,81 we get an inkling of how closely intertwined the economic and political histories of even small islands like St Lucia are with their continental neighbors. But for Walcott, the hemisphere is only one of a series of concentric circles of cosmopolitan identity that begins with St Lucia but eventually extends to include the entire globe: I followed a sea-swift to both sides of this text; her hyphen stitched its seam, like the interlocking basins of a globe in which one half fits the next into an equator .… Her wing-beat carries these islands to Africa, she sewed the Atlantic rift with a needle’s line, the rift in the soul.82

Through the complex network of symbolism Walcott develops in the poem, we see how the American hemisphere is connected to and defined by the Old World – how the two hemispheres are in fact “interlocking / basins of a globe”. Far from being a betrayal of his St Lucian and West Indian identities, the hybrid and cosmopolitan aesthetic Walcott develops in Omeros allows him to achieve the fullest expression of those local identities. The irony, though, is that he must leave the islands to find them. The remark made by the narrator of Omeros about the Sioux seems to apply to Walcott’s own relationship to St Lucia: “Privileges did not separate me, instead / they linked me closer to them by that

80

Diana Taylor, “Remapping Genre Through Performance: From ‘American’ to ‘Hemispheric’ Studies”, PMLA, CXXII/5 (October 2007), 1426. 81 Walcott, Omeros, 316. 82 Ibid., 319.

118

Shane Graham

mental chain / whose eyes interlocked with mine”.83 By seeing the “chains” that connect the suffering and dispossessed around the world to one another, Walcott is better able to construct an art that links him to those people both at home and abroad. In short, then, it is through the distance provided by travel and the rhythms of his own migration between Boston and St Lucia that Walcott finds the cure for his alienation from his homeland. As Glissant observes, “uprooting can work toward identity, and exile can be seen as beneficial, when these are experienced as a search for the Other (through circular nomadism) rather than as an expansion of territory (an arrowlike nomadism)”.84 In Omeros, Seven Seas shares similar wisdom, urging a “circular nomadism”: As the sea moves round an island that appears to be moving, love moves round the heart – with encircling salt, and the slowly traveling hand knows it returns to the port from which it must start. Therefore, this is what this island has meant to you, why my bust spoke, why the sea-swift was sent to you: to circle yourself and your island with this art.85

With these words, the character whose name includes all the world’s interconnected oceans ties together the motifs of seas, swifts, traveling, and the artistic imagination. Before Walcott can “cherish [his] island” and circle it with his art, he must first explore the oceans that connect it to the world at large.

83

Ibid., 210. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 85 Walcott, Omeros, 291. 84

LOCAL TRANSNATIONALISMS: ISHTIYAQ SHUKRI’S THE SILENT MINARET AND SOUTH AFRICA IN THE GLOBAL IMAGINARY RONIT FRENKEL

When the Reagan administration began its war with Nicaragua, I recognised a deeper affinity with that small country in a continent upon which I had never set foot. I grew daily more interested in its affairs, because after all, I was myself the child of a successful revolt against a great power, my consciousness the product of the triumph of the Indian revolution. It was perhaps also true that those of us who did not have our origins in the countries of the mighty West, or North, have some things in common – not, certainly, anything simplistic as a unified “Third World” outlook – but at least some knowledge of what weakness was like, some awareness of the view from underneath, and how it felt to be there, at the bottom, looking up at the descending heel.1

This essay begins with a quotation by Salman Rushdie, which appears in the middle of Ishtiyaq Shukri’s novel The Silent Minaret, as a signifier of the relationship between place, transnational interconnectivity and consciousness. Sarah Nuttall argues that South African thought and scholarship is characterized by a bifurcated logic, which reflects South Africa’s history of racial segregation and results in a type of segregated theory that is premised on categories of difference, and is further enforced by the ubiquitous position of postcolonial theory.2 In attempting to move away from such bifurcated logic, this astute observation is my theoretical catalyst in examining Ishtiyaq Shukri’s The Silent Minaret as a theorization of a type of transnational South African-produced consciousness that reverberates 1

Salman Rushdie, quoted in Ishtiyaq Shukri, The Silent Minaret, Johannesburg, 2005, 201. 2 See Sarah Nuttall, “City Forms and Writing the ‘Now’ in South Africa”, Journal of Southern African Studies, XXX/4 (2004), 731-50.

120

Ronit Frenkel

through the image of the nation-state in the global imaginary. I use “the global imaginary” in order to explore both South Africa as an external signifier, and as a contested construct born of a successful revolt. I argue that the connection between hybridity and overlapping cultural formations is linked to a politics of tolerance, while the reification of boundaries is linked to a politics of exclusion. This relationship between a politics of tolerance and a politics of exclusion forms links between past, present and transnational connectivity using South Africa as a springboard which connects to the formation of cosmopolitan knowledges. Specifically, Shukri establishes networks of interconnectedness, born out of a local revolutionary consciousness in South Africa, to create transnational solidarities within a post-9/11 world of political divisions. At the center of this network is his conception of a South African produced cosmopolitanism – the transnational born in the local: he depicts how an ideal conception of non-racialism from the anti-apartheid movement broadens to become a type of cosmopolitan humanism in understanding the links between transnational cultural formations. South Africa, as a country overdetermined by racial taxonomies, becomes a space in which Manichean conceptualizations of subjectivity can be overcome and replaced with a cosmopolitan understanding of identity and interconnection. While Shukri’s text is a novel, it is also a nuanced theorization of the relationship between history, transnational connectivity, and shifting ideas of identification that have less to do with identity politics but are more about the historical routes that shape cultural understandings. The novel centers on the disappearance of Issa Shamsuddin, a South African student completing his history PhD in London. Its non-linear narrative cuts across times, focusing mainly on South Africa’s transition to a democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and London post-9/11. Shukri thus uses the dual location and dual time-frame found in many post-apartheid novels. Through a blend of narrative styles and innovative form that incorporates prose, poetry, song lyrics, first- and third-person narration, references from religious texts, passages from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) reports and historical accounts, Shukri employs local conventions and histories to comment on transnational connectivity. He creates an image of South Africa in the global

Local Transnationalisms

121

imaginary by using narratives that move across time and place to establish commonalities: the image of South Africa as a place of extreme racial injustice is replaced with an image of post-apartheid South Africa as a moral arbitrator of global justice, born out of its particular history. The novel begins with Frances, Issa’s elderly neighbor in Finsbury Park, North London, who is the first to notice that he has gone missing. For three years while he is writing his thesis, Issa lives next door to Frances. Due to the paper-thin walls, they are intimately aware of, and involved in, each others’ lives. Issa visits Frances daily to watch the news until everything changes after the US and Britain bomb Afghanistan and Issa begins to unravel. The narrative shifts between Issa as an anti-apartheid activist in late-apartheid South Africa, and his response to the “war on terror”, which Shukri links through Issa’s background, as well as his history thesis. Through fragments and clues, Issa is revealed to be reclusive, having lost intimacy with friends and family after internalizing trauma. This breach in intimacy is linked to violence and how people mourn. Issa is revealed to have been an African National Congress (ANC) operative while a student at the University of the Western Cape. His mission is compromised and his comrades killed after he accidentally breaks his leg when Kagiso, his brother, brings to his residence a drunken friend who knocks him down the stairs on the night of their mission. Issa disappears for weeks afterwards, turning the brothers into strangers. The text is structured in such a way that Kagiso discovers this only when he looks for Issa in London, after his disappearance. He reads his copy of the TRC report, recognizing the names of Issa’s murdered friends and the date of the incident. The ordinary impact of violence and how losses are quietly mourned, in a society that has traded justice for transition, is actualized in Shukri’s sophisticated psychological portrait of this character. This is further linked to the invasion of the Finsbury Park mosque in London by police in 2003 as part of the war on terror. Frances wakes Issa in the night to watch as police with helicopters surround the mosque, but the images return Issa to South Africa in 1989 when police attacked students on campus, just before the other members of his cell were betrayed. The connection between different types of political repression, when places of worship and learning are not respected,

122

Ronit Frenkel

forms links between apartheid South Africa’s attempted suppression of dissent and the precarious position of Muslims within the racialized conflict of a post-9/11 West. Judith Butler, in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, calls attention to a dimension of political life that is linked to our vulnerability to loss, our exposure to violence and our complicity in it, within a global context that begs the question of whose lives are grievable.3 This in turn raises the question of who is normatively human when it is permissible to grieve for the lives lost on American soil on 9/11, but public cultures in the West are marked by a lack of grief for those killed in Afghanistan or Iraq, as Muslims have been disavowed as being fully human in post-9/11 western discourse. A link is made here between racialized nationalisms and the creation of a new western other that has ironically been termed “being brown”. Inderpal Grewal argues that the creation of this other, where Muslim men are associated with terrorism in Euro-American culture, is a recuperation of an older colonial legacy that is used for new purposes – a type of Orientalism which creates an Islamic other as a threat and situates the ensuing conflict as a “clash of civilizations” within a paradigm of difference.4 Shukri uses the dualistic underpinnings of this segregated logic as a means of critique, creating a different image of cosmopolitanism in the form of a transnational South African-produced consciousness that inheres in the main character of The Silent Minaret, Issa Shamsuddin. Issa and Frances are central in highlighting the blendings and interconnectedness between what has been placed as incommensurate in post-9/11 discourse. Both recluses, Frances due to her age and Issa by choice, they form a bond that Shukri exploits as a mechanism to critique the idea that the conflict is one of incommensurate civilizations. Frances’ rosary beads and the tasbeeh Issa gives to her become interchangeable religious artifacts, while the New Testament and the Koran are read together in terms of their similarities and the intertexual dialogue taking place between them. The idea that one religion remembers what the other forgets in symbiotic narratives 3

Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York, 2004, 19. 4 See Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham: NC, 2005.

Local Transnationalisms

123

enforces the overlap between Islam and Christianity as Shukri traces blendings, such as Jesus’ grandparents being Arabic, and references to Jesus and Mary in the Koran.5 Shukri does not draw out simple similarities but rather highlights how political and cultural difference is manufactured in the creation of empires. By stressing the overlap between what is constructed as incommensurate, restrictive binary models give way to mutually enabling categories.6 Shukri then fashions networks of interconnectedness to create transnational solidarities and a quest for global justice. At the center of this network is his conception of a South African produced cosmopolitanism – the transnational rooted in, or perhaps through, the local. The grief that Issa exhibits for his post-9/11 present, as well as for South African history, is not privatized or depoliticized but rather, returning to Butler, “furnishes a sense of political community of a complex order” that highlights ties to others.7 Shukri creates a character whose consciousness is not merely shaped, but determined by the process in which South Africa became a democracy, and whose complex sense of political community ties his consciousness to the fate of others globally. Issa disappears after he is unable to make sense of the British and American response to 9/11. His declining mental health is traced in the novel through his obsessive washing and increasing withdrawal from people. While he spends his days writing his thesis, he is eventually unable to differentiate between past and present events because “Then time buckled, history flipped and the [seventeenth] century became indistinguishable from the [twentyfirst]”.8 As he watches scenes of the war in Afghanistan, and the images of prisoners with no rights at Guantanamo Bay, he sees that history has begun to resemble current events. As the narrative shifts between the present, past and the text of Issa’s history thesis, history is read by Shukri as including the present, where the mechanisms of empire continue to determine power relations:

5

Shukri, The Silent Minaret, 16-17. See Laura Chrisman, Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism, Manchester, 2003, 86. 7 Butler, Precarious Life, 22. 8 Shukri, The Silent Minaret, 70.

6

124

Ronit Frenkel The history of early European exploration and settlement at the Cape remains universally and eternally pertinent. The procedures of dispossession and domination implemented here in the fifteenth century would be repeated around the globe for the rest of the millennium, and then again at the start of this new millennium. To declare these events over is the recourse of perpetrators, collaborators, benefactors and perpetuators. While Europeans and latterly North Americans have achieved economic gain, which was the ultimate aim of their economic migrancy, the majority whose indigenous systems were adversely shaped, experience the political, economic, cultural and mnemonic consequences of this flooding as present and perpetual catastrophes.9

Using Cape colonial history as a microcosm for the continued history of violence and domination that shapes our world, Shukri links colonial history, apartheid and the present-day “war on terror”. The connections between these systems, where people are dispossessed and dominated within a discourse that rationalizes oppression on the basis of keeping the dominant safe, rather than examining the conditions of poverty and despair that empire creates, become the central concern of the novel. Shukri attempts to delineate an alternative history of Islam, to counter its negative image in the West, through centralizing another aspect of Cape colonial history – the relationship between slavery, Islam and liberation politics. South Africa was first colonized in the 1600s by the Dutch, who brought slaves to the colony from across their empire in the Indian Ocean. Many came from Southeast Asia, with the British adding to this population after they colonized South Africa in the early 1800s. Slaves came from areas as diverse as the Indian subcontinent, Malaysia, Indonesia, Madagascar and Mozambique, forming an early transnational community of the dispossessed. Slavery in the Indian Ocean has distinct characteristics that distinguish it from the slavery of the Atlantic world, which has been more extensively studied. Dutch colonial slavery grafted onto a pre-existing open system of indigenous slavery, ubiquitous to the Indian Ocean world. Markus Vink designates Indian Ocean slavery as the oldest trade in the world, 9

Ibid., 65-66.

Local Transnationalisms

125

involving the movement of people, cultural diffusion and extensive economic exchange. Dominant characteristics of Indian Ocean slavery include people having property or chattel status; and the “ensuing potential of re-isolation, institutionalized coercion and systematic exploitation, outsider status or essential kinlessness defined as ‘social death’; and a lack of control over physical reproduction and sexuality”. Vink, in his formative study, distinguishes between two basic systems of slavery in the area: The “open system” of slavery could be found in the commercialised, cosmopolitan cities of Southeast Asia and elsewhere where the boundary between slavery and other forms of bondage was porous and indistinct and upward mobility was possible. In the “closed systems” of South (and East) Asia, with some notable exceptions, it was inconceivable for a slave to be accepted into the kinship systems of their owners as long as they remained slaves because of the stigma of slavery; instead they were maintained as separate ethnic groups. The term “slave” here includes so-called “true slaves”, those recently captured and sold in open systems, and those in closed systems of slavery, along with all other forms of bondage and ties of vertical 10 obligation.

Indigenous slavery in the region emerged from three major traditions – Hindu, Muslim and Southeast Asian legal codes – with distinct geographical and cultural variations in each. Under Dutch rule, Islam was introduced to the Cape with the importation of the first Muslim slaves. These Southeast Asian and Bengali slaves were initially not permitted to observe Islamic rituals in public, which led to a home-based religious practice that often drew on Sufi rituals.11 The Cape also served as a type of penal colony for disobedient colonized subjects, particularly those opposing colonial rule such as Sheikh Yusuf of Macassar, who is often seen as the progenitor of Islam in South Africa. The majority of these political

10

Markus Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’: Dutch Slavery and Slave Trade in the Indian Ocean in the Seventeenth Century”, Journal of World History, XIV/2 (June 2003), 3. 11 See Abdulkader Tayob, Islam in South Africa: Mosques, Imams and Sermons, Gainesville: FL, 1999, 4.

126

Ronit Frenkel

prisoners were high profile Muslim leaders who brought their resistance politics, along with their religion, to the Cape. Shukri, through Issa’s thesis, asserts that “throughout his imprisonment, Yusuf continued to agitate against Dutch colonial rule so that the history of Islam in South Africa is therefore synonymous with the struggle against oppression”.12 Under colonial rule, Islam grew among the slave population for numerous reasons. The Statutes of India of 1770 prohibited the sale of slaves who had converted to Christianity. This resulted in slaveholders discouraging slave conversions to Christianity, while facilitating slave conversions to Islam.13 Christian authorities at the Cape refused to solemnize either slave marriages or burials,14 which enforced the slave’s subservient status in all areas of life. Islam at the Cape, by contrast, created a community for slaves where they could participate in all rituals and ceremonies. This Islamic community created a network of mosques and schools, and popularized an independent ethic around slave holding itself. Muslim (Malay) slave holders allowed their slaves to earn money and eventually purchase their freedom in accordance with the open system of slavery found in the Indian Ocean. Slave converts could not later be sold and had to be treated equally within the family, while still remaining a slave. Manumission was attained on the slave owner’s death if not purchased before.15 The seemingly impossible practicalities of treating an enslaved person equally are not described, while the stigma attached to slave status is ignored in much of the scholarship on slavery. Still, the differences between Atlantic slavery and Indian Ocean slavery are crucial for, in part, people were able to move in and out of slavery at different points. Contemporary understandings of slavery, serfdom and indenture have overlapping bounds in the context of Indian Ocean slave practices. While Islam at the Cape was predominantly a religion of the masses, Shukri’s assertion that the history of Islam is synonymous with the fight against oppression in South Africa is a revisionist one because he attempts to 12

Shukri, The Silent Minaret, 74. See Kirsten McKenzie, The Making of An English Slave-owner: Samual Eusebius Hudson and the Cape of Good Hope 1796 -1807, Cape Town, 2003, 90. 14 See Ibid., 92. 15 See R.L. Watson, The Slave Question: Liberty and Property in South Africa, London, 1990, 175. 13

Local Transnationalisms

127

associate Islam with a libratory ethos at the expense of delineating a nuanced depiction of this history. Most slaves at the Cape were bought from slave traders across the Indian Ocean world, and many of these traders were Muslims. The irony of this history, where Islam becomes the dominant religion of slaves at the Cape, while the religion also condones the sale of human beings, is glossed over by Shukri. Additionally, the history of Islam in South Africa also includes the history of indentured and passenger Indians with their more dominant brand of Islam. Abdulkader Tayob situates this history as being marked by division: The Muslims of Cape Town came as slaves, exiles and convicts during Dutch company rule and lived through slavery, freedom, British colonialism, and then apartheid. Muslims in the Transvaal region came from India as indentured workers, hawkers and traders during British colonialism and also lived through the gold rush, the unified government of the former British colonies and Boer republics as one nation, and apartheid .… The mosques in Cape Town represented the aspirations of leaders … to build communities and structures for the underclasses of Cape Town. Through education and ritual services, they provided some semblance of community for slaves and free blacks on the margins of Cape society. Mosques in the Transvaal were built against a backdrop of specific legal opposition and represented the aspirations of Muslims who were determined to make South Africa a home.16

While the Cape Islamic tradition is based on a strong overlay between civil and religious space, which results in political leadership that is often oppositional, the Islamic tradition in other parts of South Africa followed a different route. Religious life belonged inside the mosque, while civil and political space resided with the traders’ interests, which sometimes involved political compromises with the state. The history of Islam outside of the Cape often revolved around an insulated community politics, rather than a politically emancipatory one, as a response to a hostile environment.17 Shukri’s concentration on the more radical roots of Islam in the Cape can then be read as an interventionist historical account. This alternative history attempts to 16 17

Tayob, Islam in South Africa, 138. Ibid., 141.

128

Ronit Frenkel

create an image of Islam as liberating and cosmopolitan, rather than insular and intransigent, to counter its current Orientalist image. In positioning Islam as a type of egalitarian discourse that encouraged humanism in response to colonialism and slavery, Shukri tries to connect a South African-produced transnational consciousness with the history of Islam. Shukri asserts an egalitarian Islamic history in South Africa, where the history of Islam is tantamount to the struggle against oppression. While the history of Islam in the Cape has an undeniable relationship to liberation politics, the vicissitudes of this past are ignored in his account. The role of Islamic traders in the slave economy, the religious sanction on Muslims being slave holders, as well as the broader history of Islam in South Africa, point toward a more nuanced and fractured historical trajectory. Shukri could then be read as employing a type of strategic historical revisionism that parallels tactics employed in other fraught contexts. Faced with the overwhelming demonization of Islam in the West, The Silent Minaret can be considered an attempt to associate Islam with the more positive aspects of its history, such as the role the religion played within the underclasses of the Cape under colonial rule. In much the same way that Islam’s dynamic aspects and grass roots appeal have been written out of western history, Shukri removes its intransigent aspects from his narrative, in an attempt to balance this picture. This is further compounded by the present context where Islam is becoming more fundamentally reified and the lines between its different manifestations are being subsumed into the dominant Arabification of Islam. Shukri is then also writing against the reification of Islam, with the novel being a reminder of alternatives and unrestricted possibilities within the same religious paradigm. The Silent Minaret recalls many types of oppressive regimes to create a tapestry of interconnected struggles, which inhere within a consciousness (both Issa’s and Shukri’s) that is the product of a successful revolt in South Africa. Shukri makes reference to various struggles from Chile to Palestine, South Africa to the Holocaust, in order to highlight the mechanisms that sustain oppressions, and the flow of history that undoes them. The cosmopolitan consciousness that comes out of the South African revolt is not simply situated, or idealistically celebrated, but

Local Transnationalisms

129

rather points to both the successes and failures of post-apartheid South Africa. The novel traces Kagiso’s unsuccessful search for Issa in London, with their mutual friend, Katinka. Issa has been raised with Kagiso and their two mothers, Vasinthe, his biological mother, and Gloria, Kagiso’s biological mother. The different paths that Issa and Kagiso follow reflect the intricacies of both apartheid and postapartheid choices. While they are sent to the same private school and university, the fractures of race and class impact on the boys’ choices. Vasinthe, as a doctor, controls their financial lives. Kagiso’s choices are shaped by the knowledge that his privilege is precarious, and contingent on a relationship that could terminate at any time. He chooses to go to the University of Cape Town and stays out of student politics in order to pursue the life that may follow from a university education. Issa, protected by his class position, is able to pursue a more radical path, without fear of losing family privilege. He chooses to attend the University of the Western Cape and gets involved in antiapartheid politics, having greater freedom of choice than Kagiso. Shukri captures the nuances of political choices, which often reside in ambiguous spaces. The ability to defy a regime is sometimes linked to much more than ideological positioning, revealing the relationship between some radical politics and privilege, and the silences of poverty and selfpreservation, within a relational rather than a Manichean framework. The choices that Issa and Kagiso make seem to be more about their class background in South Africa, rather than their racial or ethnic identifications. This shifts for Issa when he moves to London and is harassed on the basis of his Muslim identity post-9/11. Shukri posits the particular experience of South African oppression as a mechanism that can be used to form a broad type of cosmopolitan humanism that recognizes the commonalities of oppressions across sites and subjectivities, in the connections that he traces between late-apartheid South Africa and world politics post-9/11. While Issa is a political activist and continues his political life through his scholarship in a post-apartheid context, Kagiso external life lacks political activism but internally he searches to fill the gaps that apartheid censorship left in his consciousness – “The books not read, music not heard, histories not known, have become, like the expensive smelly cheese for which he has developed a liking, a part of

130

Ronit Frenkel

his truthfully reconciled and liberated life”.18 Kagiso’s ability to choose a life marked by the normalization of relations post-apartheid represents an aspect of a successful revolt, in the act of individual choice. But the failures of post-apartheid South Africa are also embodied in this very same act, in that this normalization of relations has led to a loss of communally motivated choices, where collective responsibility for ongoing poverty is not recognized. This tension between post-apartheid successes and failures is metonymic of a democratic society where difference (as in different choices) is received regardless of its ideological implications: the choice to lead an ordinary life without any sort of overt political activism is a postapartheid luxury of normalization, while simultaneously revealing a complacency around collective responsibility for further social transformation. This results in an image of South Africa as a place of tolerance, that is born out of an intimacy with its opposite in South Africa’s past. Yet, Shukri adds an additional layer to this narrative in his extensive critique of post-apartheid culture. He references the failures of transition by invoking a passage from the Eritrean revolt: “The morning freshness of the world to be intoxicated us.” That is all he wishes to remember of it and tries hard to ignore the rest of it. But the passage lingers, demanding to be recalled in its entirety: “yet, when we achieved and a new world dawned, the old men came out again and took our victory to re-make in the likeness of the former world they knew”.19

This is a damning indictment of the neo-colonial aspects of South Africa, where class has become as reified a barrier as apartheid racial taxonomies. The relationship between present class cleavages and previous forms of political activism are highlighted in lines that point to Issa’s obsession with his thesis because he finds it “more compelling than the successful career-minded comrades back home, paralysed by self-congratulatory nostalgia for their part in an amicably settled dispute”.20 While this critique is severe, it is also a testament to 18

Shukri, The Silent Minaret, 109. Ibid., 123. 20 Ibid., 70. 19

Local Transnationalisms

131

a new image of South Africa in the global imaginary. Transition has not meant the transformation of the materiality of all aspects of South African life, but it has resulted in a transformation of consciousness in different ways, where diversity and choice are paramount. This critique then also reveals the strength and contradictions of a new democracy that is able to contain normalization alongside crushing poverty, indifference alongside a quest for global justice, and the neocolonial alongside the revolutionized. This new configuration of South African politics, where what is incommensurate is re-defined in terms of boundary crossing formations and a troubling of dichotomies, also reverberates through identity formations: Issa’s thesis picks up on the transcultural exchange and fusion, of both people and ideas, in a historical context that is situated contemporaneously. His historical research delves into the hybridity of South African culture, which he uses to comment on the roots of “global cross-pollination”, and how history has been whitewashed to ignore them: My interest in the hybrid dynamic, the complex transcultural exchange and fusion that, though fragile and uneven, nevertheless formed an integral feature of the early settlement and ensured its development; the heterogeneous bartering, which, by the time of the disaster of 1948, had been almost entirely obliterated from memory. Whatever shards of the bastard truth remained by that stage, would, over the next four decades, be ruthlessly revised, edited and suppressed as racist nationalists in South Africa – and their counterparts around the post-war world – embarked upon simplification, the very literal whitewashing, of history. They commenced their collision path with the intricate fabric of diversity by substituting the reality of global cross-pollination and intermingling with the sanitised invention of “man”’s most dangerous myth: the fallacy of race, and the synthetic fabrication of inviolate national identity.21

Shukri, through his characterization of Issa, links the ideological suppression of diversity and intermingling with the ascent of a politics of authenticity, through the making of race, and the construction of national identities. The connection between hybridity and overlapping cultural formations with a politics of tolerance, and the reification of 21

Ibid., 66-67.

132

Ronit Frenkel

boundaries with a politics of exclusion, forms a link between past, present and transnational connectivity using South Africa as metonymic for the formation of cosmopolitan knowledges. Shukri thus depicts how the idealized idea of non-racialism from the antiapartheid movement transforms across times and sites to become a type of cosmopolitan humanism through Issa’s consciousness. The novel is then a theorization of shifting ideas of identification that have less to do with identity politics as an embodied phenomenon, but are more about the historical routes that shape cultural understandings. South Africa, as a country overdetermined by racial taxonomies, becomes a space in which such logic can be overcome and replaced with a cosmopolitan understanding of identity and interconnection. “Global cross-pollination and intermingling” in terms of understanding identities thereby replace a politics of authenticity that often polices the borders of identity politics. It is perhaps out of this image of tolerance and heterogeneity that new transnational connections can be traced in the movement of ideas. Amitav Ghosh, in In an Antique Land, examines the inherent blendings and continuities of the pre-colonial Indian Ocean trade routes of the tenth and eleventh centuries, thereby linking current ideas of globalization with an older pre-colonial history of trade.22 Ghosh argues for a type of cosmopolitanism as a “world of accommodations” that is not western in origin but based on mutually beneficial trade routes that override religious differences in a history which establishes cultural connections.23 While his account is somewhat romanticized, particularly in terms of his uncritical stance on slavery and other types of prejudice that existed in pre-colonial times, he is successful in establishing an alternative history of ideas. Inderpal Grewal situates this contribution as follows: He presented the medieval spice route as a corrective to the idea that the first explorers were European, the first global economy the European one, the first cosmopolitanism that produced by Western Europe. The Eurocentric history of travel was thus shown to have

22 Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale, New York, 1992. 23 See Grewal, Transnational America, 50-55.

Local Transnationalisms

133

erased the world that existed before, in which the global economy linked the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.24

“Globalization” is not a new phenomenon. Over two thousand years ago, sailors began to use the seasonal monsoon winds off and onto the Asian continent, thereby knitting together the coasts of the Indian Ocean into a world system of trade and integration.25 K.N. Chaudhuri looks at the cohesion of the region as one influenced by the rise of Islam in the seventh century, the presence of Chinese civilization and political power, the migration of central Asian nomadic people, and European maritime exploration after 1500, which all gave rise to an early globalized world. Current studies also show the presence of Chinese trade on the East coast of Africa in the fourteenth century, while the presence of Phoenician beads at Great Zimbabwe remains unexplained.26 While the history of globalization is usually situated as a transatlantic phenomenon, the Indian Ocean world re-configures this history as one of early Southernization. This world of accommodations, which was based on far reaching travel routes and the interchange of ideas, would include the hybridity and syncretism of current postcolonial theory, along with other current cultural theories, which attempt to describe the blending, intermingling and global cross-pollination that mark our current world. Shukri is then accurate in his assertion that the history of early settlement at the Cape is “universally and eternally pertinent”. The same systems of dispossession and domination have been repeated, increasing hybridity and interchange has been denied, while race and nation have become naturalized as reified categories. At the same time, this history has also facilitated the intermingling it so vehemently denied, particularly in terms of the different types of transnational cosmopolitan knowledges that circulate and connect us. While globalization usually points to increasing interconnections, it manifests differently across contexts. Globalization is often situated as an economic phenomenon, which has a homogenizing universal appearance. Ulf Hannerz importantly reminds us that globalization is 24

Ibid., 51-52. See Vink, “‘The World’s Oldest Trade’”, 4. 26 See K.N. Cauduri, Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean: An Economic History from the Rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge, 1985. 25

134

Ronit Frenkel

sometimes accompanied by deglobalization, where there is a desire to delink, rather than to connect, to a wider world.27 Globalization also refers to western ideas and practices spreading across the world, but the local is often delegitimized in this process. The current reification of Islam can be read as a response to this phenomenon. Concepts of transnationalism frequently accompany ideas of globalization. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih reconceptualize transnationalism as including relations amongst or between margins – an orientation that is often absent from transatlantic-centered scholarship on transnationalism. They define transnationalism as a “space of exchange and participation wherever processes of hybridisation occur and where it is still possible for cultures to be produced and performed without necessary mediation by the center”.28 They intervene in theories on transnationalism by defining a concept of “minor transnationalism”. According to this theory, minority cultures are no longer assumed into a dominant model of North/South, dominant/resistant, but emphasis is rather placed on the transversal movements of cultures.29 In effect, this is a type of Southernization, but it also builds on the concept by further tracing connections between minority cultures within the overdeveloped world too. It therefore highlights the existence of Southernization and minor exchanges within the broader context of globalization as a contested whole. Spaces, both physical and intellectual, are re-articulated through cosmopolitan discourses of power along both old and new routes, as they build upon older histories of colonialism and modernity. While connectivity may be asymmetrically based according to current power and wealth, the flow of ideas follows its own more egalitarian routes, which impact on ideas of globalization and transnationalism. More recently, South Africa has lost its image as a place of extreme racial strife and oppression and has become, as Issa Shamsuddin

27

Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections, New York, 1996, 18. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-Mei Shih, “Introduction: Thinking Through the Minor, Transnationally”, in Minor Transnationalism, eds Francoise Lionnet and Shuh-Mei Shih, Durham: NC, 2005, 5. 29 Ibid., 8. 28

Local Transnationalisms

135

exemplifies, a place where consciousness has been transformed.30 This is a transnational South African-produced consciousness, born out of a successful revolt, which connects to others through a type of cosmopolitan humanism. The narrow idea of identity politics that apartheid inculcated and which was stereotypically associated with South Africa thereby gives birth to its opposite in Shukri’s text. And in this lies Shukri’s perfect post-apartheid ambiguity, because his transnational cosmopolitan perspective is, ironically, the result of a local revolution. While connectivity across sites is often based on sidelining the local, Shukri anchors his transnational connectivity in the local – in South Africa – in order to transcend it.

30

Kagiso represents the reification of consciousness in this text in his desire to not transform. Yet, his very choice underscores the idea of how consciousness has been transformed in that he is able to make this choice. While apartheid forced people to choose sides within its Manichean system of violence, the ability not to choose or transform on a personal level highlights how collective consciousness has transformed in the present. It is, in a sense, a post-apartheid luxury where freedom involves the ambiguous idea to not choose anything.

NOMADIC NARRATIVES: TAWADA YOKO’S JAPANESE-GERMAN FICTION TOMOKO KURIBAYASHI

Tawada Yoko is a travelling writer.1 In her 2007 collection of essays, Tokeru machi, sukeru michi (Melting Cities, Transparent Streets), she describes her visits to a total of forty-eight cities, ranging from Hamburg, where she lived for more than twenty years before relocating to Berlin, to Gothenburg in Sweden, Montreal in Canada and Amman in Jordan.2 Tawada visited these cities between the spring of 2005 and the end of 2006, mostly for the purpose of giving readings from her books and meeting her readers. She understands these transnational spaces as being linked through the shared practice of inviting authors for public readings. The places to which Tawada’s writing has taken her fuel her prolific writing, as well as provide challenges to it. In the Afterword of the same collection, Tawada says: Every city changes in any given year. This year’s Berlin is different from last year’s Berlin. Moscow of five years ago was totally different from Moscow of fifteen years ago. Therefore, I felt that this year’s Budapest and this year’s New York can more reasonably coexist in a book than this year’s Budapest and Prague of several years ago. Spending one’s life moving at a fast speed over the face of the Earth, one feels that various places are connected with invisible threads and are alive together in the one and same time frame. It was more interesting for me to weave essays based on those connections than to I am grateful to Dejan Kuzmanovic, Hassan Melehy, John Morser, and Lorri Nandrea for their helpful feedback on the manuscript at its various stages. 1 When discussing Japanese authors, I follow the standard practice of writing the names in the Japanese order, that is, the family name first, the given name second. 2 The original title in Japanese may also be more faithfully translated as the slightly awkward Cities that Melt, Streets that Become Transparent or Cities Melting, Streets Becoming Transparent.

138

Tomoko Kuribayashi trace the chronological thread of the history of each particular town from a faraway time.3

Placed in the context of recent theoretical writings on transnationalism, this passage invites the reader or critic to define Tawada as a sort of nomad – a species which is much touted by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, as well as Rosi Braidotti, while being more cautiously regarded by James Clifford and Caren Kaplan as an elitist postmodern concept. In the Introduction to her book, Nomadic Subjects, Rosi Braidotti defines what she calls “the nomadic viewpoint”. One kind of nomad Braidotti considers is the “polyglot [who] is a linguistic nomad. The polyglot is a specialist of the treacherous nature of language, of any language”.4 The polyglot is “a person who is in transit between the languages, neither here nor there, is capable of some healthy scepticism about steady identities and mother tongues”, because “being in between languages constitutes a vantage point in deconstructing identity”.5 The polyglot knows that “writing is … a process of undoing the illusory stability of fixed identities, bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site”.6 In Braidotti’s terms, the polyglot is defined less by multilingualism than by awareness of the false sense of fixedness that any linguistic or cultural system confers – a description that fits Tawada’s position as a writer well. The concept of a postmodern nomadic subject is also feminist in Braidotti’s definition, but this construction has been severely criticized.7 James Clifford warns against “terms such as ‘nomadism’, 3

Tawada Yoko, Tokeru machi, sukeru michi, Tokyo, 2007, 260-61 (all translations are mine, unless noted otherwise). 4 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York, 1994, 8. 5 Ibid., 12. 6 Ibid., 15. 7 The nomadic subjectivity is also feminist in Braidotti’s view because of its potential for redefining subjectivity. Elizabeth Grosz also discusses the implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s theories in relation to feminism, but more critically and with more reservations than Braidotti does. One focus of Grosz’s critique is Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of “becoming-woman”. Grosz’s and other feminist theorists’ major problem with this concept is that it is another form of male appropriation of marginalized positions, and that women end up being subsumed under the

Nomadic Narratives

139

[that are] often generalized without apparent resistance from nonWestern experiences”.8 He adds, “we need to be very wary of a ‘postmodern primitivism’ which, in an affirmative mode, discovers non-Western travelers (‘nomads’) with hybrid, syncretic cultures, and in the process projects onto their different histories of culture contact, migration, and inequality a homogeneous (historically ‘avant-garde’) experience”.9 Clifford reminds us that “travelers move about under strong cultural, political, and economic compulsions and that certain travelers are materially privileged, others oppressed”.10 In other words, Clifford believes that Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology ignores the socio-economic privilege of travelling, while erasing colonial histories of oppression and exploitation. Examining nomadology in light of modernism and postmodernism, Caren Kaplan points out that Deleuze and Guattari’s “privileging of ‘nomadic’ modes relied upon an opposition between a central site of subjectivity and zones of marginality”. This sort of positioning is often typical of a modernism whose practitioners chose to remove themselves from the center of power and relocate into what they perceived to be margins of power structures. Kaplan also criticizes the French theorists’ “inability to account for the transnational power relations that construct postmodern subjectivities”.11 She says that for Deleuze and Guattari the “Third World functions simply as a metaphorical margin for European oppositional strategies, an imaginary space, rather than a location of theoretical production itself”.12 Kaplan adds, “The movement of deterritorialization colonizes, appropriates, even raids other spaces”.13

“neutralized masculinity of the phallocratic” (Elizabeth Grosz, “A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics”, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, eds Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, New York and London, 1995, 188). 8 James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: MA, 1997, 39. 9 Ibid., 41. 10 Ibid., 35. 11 Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, Durham: NC, 1996, 86. 12 Ibid., 88. 13 Ibid., 89.

140

Tomoko Kuribayashi

Deleuze and Guattari’s declaration that “nomads have no history; they only have a geography”14 seems to justify Kaplan’s, as well as Clifford’s criticism that nomadology disregards colonial histories of political oppression and economic exploitation. Braidotti, however, contends that “The radical nomadic epistemology Deleuze and Guattari propose is a form of resistance to microfascisms in that it focuses on the need for a qualitative shift away from hegemony, whatever its size and however ‘local’ it may be”.15 In Braidotti’s analysis, the nomad both offers resistance to the power mechanisms of the state and traverses the smooth space outside the influence of the state, which facilitates, in Deleuzian terms, the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of nomadic space. Should one, heeding Clifford’s and Kaplan’s advice, be skeptical or even dismissive of Tawada as a postmodern nomad that is oblivious to her privileges as a member of the First World? Tawada’s remarks in Tokeru machi on having less interest in historical threads than geographical movements seem to invite such criticism regarding the possible ahistoricism of the nomad. Many of the cities that appear in her 2007 essay collection belong in the post-industrial world, while those that do not, such as Riga and Tartu, are described from the viewpoint of the visiting author or her local host rather than from the perspective of an ordinary local resident. In this light, one may argue that Tawada’s experience as traveler/writer is limited to the economically privileged parts of the world. Moreover, her original identity as a post-World War II Japanese citizen shields her from the harsher realities of the globe. Tawada herself has addressed this question numerous times. In an interview on 25 February 1993 with the Japanese newspaper Asahi shinbun, for example, Tawada discussed how Japanese people living in Germany are regarded as simultaneously western and part of the industrially developed world, and eastern in terms of their ethnic heritage. She describes how this leads some Japanese-Germans to be biased against and distance themselves from other Asians as they feel the urge to align themselves more closely with the privileged West. This sentiment is echoed pointedly by her main character, Michiko, in 14 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: MN, 1987, 393. 15 Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, 5.

Nomadic Narratives

141

an early story titled “Perusona” (“Personae”). Yet, in a chapter entitled “Paris” in Tokeru machi, the narrator’s friend L, a Korean raised in Germany and now living in Paris, gives the answer of “I live in Paris” to whoever asks her where she is from.16 So, Tawada’s writings suggest both that one may belong to a certain national group no matter where one lives (the case of the Japanese in Germany in the first example), and that one can make up or disguise one’s national identity as one goes from place to place (the case of the Korean German living in Paris). The latter view informs her claims, in Tokeru machi, that current connections among various cities seem more noteworthy than the history of each place, and that one’s current geographical placement may be more important to one’s subject position than one’s origin or past itinerary. While Tawada’s writing may embody postmodern nomadism and has received critical recognition in both Germany and Japan, it also asks fundamental questions about various forms of identity and about the role played by language in the formation of such identities. This essay explores the ways in which questions of identity and language are dealt with in Tawada’s early story, “The Gotthard Railway”, and such later works as Henshin no tame no opiumu (Opium for Metamorphoses) and the two essay collections Tokeru machi and Ekusofoni (Exophony). Based in Germany for the last twenty-plus years and traveling widely while writing in German and Japanese, Tawada often explores the conflicting and tenuous relationship between individual subjectivity and allegiances to ethnic, racial, and gender group identities. As a bilingual writer, Tawada challenges the legitimacy of various socially sanctioned authenticities that she sees as being based on an illusory linguistic integrity passing as the “mother tongue”. Rather than aligning herself with a particular linguistic system, a “mother tongue”, Tawada is fascinated with the gap found between two or more languages and cultures. Her fiction, published in Japanese and German, is not an attempt to bridge that gap, as some might expect, but is rather something born of such a gap. Her writing resides in this liminal space, enjoying the in-betweenness and the unnamed (and perhaps unclaimed) territory between languages. 16

Tawada, Tokeru machi, 113.

142

Tomoko Kuribayashi

As Tawada herself commented in the 2003 collection of essays Ekusofoni: More important than languages themselves, I feel, is the gap between two languages. I may not want to be a writer who writes in both Language A and Language B as much as I want to fall into a poetic gap that I have found in between two languages.17

This is one of the many times she has uttered the desire to reside in what Deleuze and Guattari would call a “smooth space” outside the control of states, which often prefer to have one language and one culture representing their essential integrity. Living outside conventional definitions of mother-tongue languages, as Tawada desires, may allow one to experience this “smooth space”. Tawada has also described the creative experience that learning a foreign language bestows on one: If you have a new linguistic mother, you can experience a second childhood. As a child, you take language literally. Consequently, every word acquires a life that is independent of its meaning within a sentence. There are even words that are so alive that, like mythical figures, they can develop biographies.18

This creative fermentation found in and between languages is what gives Tawada’s writing its energy. It is not that Tawada does not engage with either Japanese or German as languages or cultures: by writing in these languages, she actively, but skeptically, participates in cultural dialogues and employs specific discursive modes. In fact, Tawada has sought out folktales and other familiar narratives from the two cultural traditions in order to transform them into new stories that belong in the aforementioned in-between space. Examples include “Inu-muko iri” (“The Bridegroom Was a Dog”), which retells an old Japanese story about a dog who marries a princess, and “Futa kuchi otoko” (“TwoMouthed Man”), which features a man from an old German folktale 17

Tawada Yoko, Ekusofoni: Bogo no soto e deru tabi (Exophony: Traveling Out of One’s Mother Tongue), Tokyo, 2003, 31-32. 18 Tawada Yoko, “From Mother Tongue to Linguistic Mother”, trans. Rachel McNichol, Manoa, XVIII/1 (Summer 2006), 142.

Nomadic Narratives

143

who can speak with his nether mouth as well as the one above. Appropriately, Tawada has compared her use of language as a bearer of culture to a “multilingual web” whose … structure … gets denser when new traits are incorporated. In this way, a new pattern is formed. There are more and more knots, tight and loose spots, irregularities, uncompleted corners, edges, holes, or superimposed layers.19

In addition to commenting on the gaps and interactions between multiple languages and cultures, Tawada’s characters or narrators comment on the devious nature of linguistic systems in those moments when this quality is displayed overtly through the overlapping of multiple linguistic systems. For example, in a chapter titled “Clymene”, in Henshin no tame no opiumu, the unnamed narrator muses over the idea that learning a foreign language allows or enables one to become a liar: … in a foreign language, one ends up telling lies whether one wants to or not. That is, learning a foreign language is learning to tell lies. Eventually one will be able to create a world that does not really exist, just by using words. This means that Clymene [who is a teacher of foreign languages] offers us an alluring taboo commodity without making us feel guilty.20

I take this to suggest that since ideas, beliefs and emotions are shaped by cultures and languages they are, on one level, untranslatable because there is always some gap between languages, and between a translation and its original. The gap results in a somewhat erroneous communication of the concept, which makes the speaker something of a liar, intentional or not. The passage also highlights that in one’s mother tongue one has more obligations and responsibility than in a foreign language: “One’s mother tongue is the language of responsibility which one must carry on one’s shoulders for one’s lifetime”.21 In contrast, a foreign 19

Tawada Yoko, “Writing in the Web of Words”, in Lives in Translation: Bilingual Writers on Identity and Creativity, ed. Isabelle de Courtivron, New York, 2003, 148. 20 Tawada Yoko, Henshin no tame no opiumu, Tokyo, 2001, 113-4. 21 Ibid., 113.

144

Tomoko Kuribayashi

language enables one to think in relative terms. Such freedom has the potential to soften strict ideas of national and ethnic boundaries, which make certain kinds of differences possible. What Tawada highlights here as a desirable outcome of multilingualism seems to be in agreement with what Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Braidotti, define as the anti-state resistance function of the nomad: the French theorists stress “The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own language”,22 which mirrors the experience of being immersed in a foreign language that Tawada so often discusses in her writings. Having offered a brief introduction to Tawada’s inquiries into the legitimacy of various identities constructed by language, I will now focus on one of her earlier stories called “The Gotthard Railway”. This story allows one to examine the ways in which her female narrator, placed in a foreign space, attempts to redefine her identity as well as the identities of others, through a critique of stereotypes and biases. There are other early stories by Tawada where the main character, usually female, lives in a foreign place that triggers questions related to identity positions: “Perusona”, which I discussed briefly above, and the prize-winning “Kakato wo nakushite” (“Missing Heels”) come to mind immediately. “The Gotthard Railroad” is of particular interest here since this story calls into question not only national identities, but also gender and sexual identities that are grounded on particular forms of language. The way the narrator describes herself in “The Gotthard Railway” provides a fertile background for the questioning of national borderlines and individual identities. The narrator sees herself as a marginal being, excluded either by choice or by force from the rules governing others. She says, “I don’t have a profession”;23 nor has she ever “worked for a living”.24 The narrator, a jobless foreigner, is doubly placed outside of conventional social systems. As a cultural outsider, she considers herself “out of reach”, especially when she thinks and says things that her German boyfriend, Reiner, and his 22

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 378. Tawada Yoko, “The Gotthard Railway”, in The Bridegroom Was a Dog, trans. Margaret Mitsutani, Tokyo, New York and London, 1999, 133. 24 Ibid., 145. 23

Nomadic Narratives

145

friends do not understand. The event that occasions this particular narrative, as well as functions as its framework, further emphasizes her positioning as an outsider. She is given the assignment of riding on the Gotthard Railway, a stretch of railroad connecting German Switzerland and Italian Switzerland through the Gotthard Mountain region. This task was intended originally for a “very busy Japanese writer living in Germany”, who asked the narrator to go in her place. This act of substitution is for the narrator another manifestation of how her life as a whole is a “fraud” as she literally and metaphorically takes the place of someone else.25 Yet, she seems undaunted by the possibility of losing sight of her self amidst these deceptions and doubts. Having lived for some time in Germany as a cultural and social outsider, the narrator is both familiar with and weary of the stereotypes and beliefs embedded in the local culture. One prominent example is how Italy and Germany itself are viewed in German culture: “To be considered an intellectual in northern Germany, you must yearn for the Italian sunshine”, the narrator muses. Goethe wrote in one of his poems, “Do you know a land where the lemon trees flower?… / With you, my love, I long to go”. The narrator annotates: For him, the word “Italy” conjured up visions of ancient ruins bathed in golden sunlight. He was burdened with longing, piled up like oversized trash. It’s the duty of intellectuals to pine for Italy. They feel 26 an obligation to drink wine.

But this traditionalist orientation, which Deleuze and Guattari identified in Goethe, that “veritable man of the State”,27 does not interest the narrator. In fact, she would like to abolish what she considers prescribed desires. At the same time, she also realizes that this contrast of light and darkness, which is accentuated by the German intellectual’s longing for the Italian landscape, is precisely what makes it possible for Germany and Italy, as well as every and each other country and its nationals, to establish and maintain their sense of national self. 25

Ibid., 146. Ibid., 133. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, One Thousand Plateaus, 378. 26

146

Tomoko Kuribayashi

Against such ideological stabilization, the narrator levels her unrelenting questions. Maps and national flags, which are normally guidelines and signs for demonstrating and recognizing national borders and identities, are immediately suspect in the narrator’s mind. In preparation for her trip on the Gotthard Railway, she buys a map of central Europe where she finds “Gotthard [Mountain] in all his majesty lying right across the centre”. First impressed that the mountain (which she addresses as “he”) is in the middle of Europe, she adds “But you can never rely on maps for that sort of information. Japanese maps all put Japan in the centre, as any other country seems entitled to do for itself if it feels like it”.28 She has an even more negative reaction to the Swiss flag (on a metal plaque) that is affixed to her train: How awful it would look if Japanese trains all had the Rising Sun on the front. You’d get the depressing impression that whole neighborhoods of wartime children were being evacuated to the countryside. Seeing their flag must be quite different for the Swiss.29

The narrator goes on to discuss how they may have put the flag there for good luck, or as a talisman to ward off accidents: The white cross in the middle of the Swiss flag. Just thinking of its four arms makes European geography, which can easily slide together in a gooey mess if you’re not careful, fall neatly into place. Of course, anything that’s too orderly is probably a lie. Still it’s comforting when things look methodical. As long as you have a map, you don’t mind getting lost. But without one, even when you know where you are you can still be worried sick.

Then she asks a series of potentially disconcerting questions: Does Europe really exist? Or do we just think so because everyone talks as though it did? Or because there are maps of it? 30

28

Tawada, “The Gotthard Railway”, 135. Ibid., 137. 30 Ibid., 138. 29

Nomadic Narratives

147

The fact that the tunnel through the mountain connects not Germany and Italy, but German Switzerland and Italian Switzerland, is a marker of an ambiguous aspect to Switzerland’s national identity: the nation occupies a kind of in-between place situated between Germany and Italy, which have their own clearly differentiated national characters.31 At this point in the story, however, Tawada’s narrator does not seem ready to affirm the legitimacy of these doubts. She says to herself, There certainly seems to be a place called Europe. And if there’s a Europe, there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be a Switzerland too. Let’s take their word for it. It’s safer that way.32

In the next paragraph, however, the narrator again addresses the deceptive and unreliable way in which a nation’s identity is symbolically portrayed by its flag. In her blurred vision, the Swiss flag changes into the flag of Japan. As unlike as the two countries may seem to the average eye, the narrator recognizes their, or at least their flags’ similarities, in contrast to the tri-colored flags of Germany, France, and Italy: “Two sacred islands, standing alone. Isolated, yet brash enough to plant themselves in the center of the world before anyone notices”. She also questions the authenticity of place through cartography as she looks at Lake Zurich: “On the map it looks like a long teardrop, falling from the city’s eye. But though on paper it’s weeping, from the window all one sees is a flat stretch of water, with nothing sad about it”.33 The narrator wishes to escape the artificial nature of maps and flags, as well as the national borderlines and identities they embody. Just as she questions the legitimacy and solidity of national identities, the narrator also questions conventional dichotomous constructions of gendered and sexual identities. The mountain through which she is to ride is a body that can be penetrated. “I’d rather crawl 31 See Benedict Anderson’s discussion of Switzerland in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, New York, 1983, 49, 123-27. Anderson asserts that having a language in common does not necessarily make a nation, but that the same trait – common linguistic “heritage” – can give a nation the feeling that it has existed from times before memory. He discusses the case of Switzerland in some detail. 32 Tawada, “The Gotthard Railway”, 138. 33 Ibid., 139.

148

Tomoko Kuribayashi

into Gotthard’s belly and stay there for a while”, she fantasizes.34 This body, the mountain, is “female”. As her train leaves the tunnel, the narrator feels that “The womb was calling, ‘Come back’”.35 Yet, it also becomes a symbol of the male body: The Swiss talk of the railway “passing through Gotthard”. Through a man’s body, in other words. The mountain penetrated by this long tunnel is also known as St. Gotthard. Which means that the train runs through a saint’s belly. I’ve never been inside a man. Everyone was once trapped in the belly of a woman we call Mother, and yet we go to our graves without knowing what a father’s body is like inside.36

The narrator’s desire for mountains that are male but can also bear life extends to human male bodies. The narrator once dreamed that her German boyfriend, Reiner, had an androgynous body, or at least belly: The night before Reiner’s liver operation, I had a dream. His moist, red-black belly, exposed to view, was filled with penises – like a selection of neatly packaged salamis. “With this many stored away, you’ve nothing to worry about,” a nurse said reassuringly. The surgeon grimly stuck a Japanese doll in among those serried penises, which were all about the same size as it. Jet-black hair. Glazedlooking eyes. I was worried he might leave her there when he sewed Reiner up. But, not knowing the medical term for “a Japanese doll,” I couldn’t protest.37

The Japanese doll obviously represents the narrator, and her desire to be held, fetus-like, inside a male body, her boyfriend’s body. On a more symbolic level, she also considers the threatening possibility that she will be incorporated into his German identity and deprived of her autonomy. It is important to emphasize here that the narrator does not desire to reverse gender relations or hierarchies, but rather wishes to find an alternative to the way she believes gender operates in her life. First, she rejects the possibility that she takes up the masculine role when 34

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 154. 36 Ibid., 131. 37 Ibid., 163. 35

Nomadic Narratives

149

her boyfriend’s body assumes an androgynous quality or when she finds herself riding into the belly of the mountain. “‘Penetration’ is a word I don’t care for. It has none of the appeal of ‘cul-de-sac’ or ‘cavern’”,38 she parenthetically comments. So, although she enjoys the sensation of sticking her finger into Reiner’s ear and his mouth, she is fantasizing mainly about inserting herself inside his body as a child or fetus, rather than penetrating his body as a penis would. She likes it that Reiner is getting fat around the belly, because “a man’s soft belly is more to my taste, a mound of flesh fed on foetuses that forgot to be born, decaying”.39 This suggests that what matters to the narrator is not so much that an androgynous-looking male body should be able to bear life but rather that it should be able to incubate life, as in the case of the narrator herself or of a future child. This reading is complicated by the fact that traditionally, a kokeshi (literally, “child-deleting”) signifies a child, often a girl, who has been “weeded out” by parents who cannot afford to feed her. This adds a sinister connotation to the mention of “decaying” in the sentence just quoted.40 In her examination of the inside of Mt Gotthard, her scrutiny of gender, and her questioning of national identities and borderlines, the narrator necessarily must address the meaning of language since she believes language to be the means by which all distinctions are made possible. The narrator wonders if there is anything not made of words. She grows increasingly wordless as she rides the train through the darkness, immersed in a silent world. The lack of light in the tunnel is an optical reflection of the lack of words. This absence of language, in which the narrator feels comfortable, and in which it seems possible for social and cultural distinctions to disappear, does not outlive the narrative, however. An incident, taking place after her train ride, forces her to re-evaluate her convictions. The narrator walks onto a snow-covered field right above the tunnel, only to realize that she is walking on snow piled on top of a lake and therefore may at any 38

Ibid., 134. Ibid., 157. 40 The Japanese doll or kokeshi in “Gotthard” is read by a Japanese critic as both a future child as well as a letter of the alphabet to be used for future writing: see Tanaka Jun, “Ningyo to iu moji/moji to iu ningyo: ‘Gottoharuto tetsudo wo chushin ni” (“Letter Called Doll/Doll Called Letter: With a Focus on “Gotthard Railway”), Eureka: Poetry and Criticism, Special Issue on Tawada Yoko (December 2004), 16269. 39

150

Tomoko Kuribayashi

moment fall into the cold water under the snow and thin ice. A sign saying “Do not take a walk around here” has been put up. Fearing for her life, the narrator returns to the town of Göschenen, whose name suggests solid ground or rocks, and which represents words in contrast to the snow-covered lake. This ending seems to suggest that the narrator must live with language and all the worldly distinctions that come with it. Tanaka Jun suggests that the narrator’s journey “down from Andermatt to Göschenen is the itinerary from a blank sheet of paper to text, which is also the process of writing”41 – a process of reterritorialization, something that Kaplan criticizes Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad for not participating in: “As a symbol of utter and complete deterritorialization, the nomad does not engage in the reterritorializaion that Deleuze and Guattari describe as a necessary component of language (the return of sense after the experimentation of ‘becoming minor’)”.42 Tawada’s narrator’s return in “Gotthard Railway” to Göschenen, a town of stones and words, may qualify as such a process of reterritorialization, in that this turn symbolizes also a return to the possibility of fixed identities and demarcations, or, to use Kaplan’s phrase, a “return of sense”. One might also add that in contemplating the mountain of Gotthard as a potential maternal body, and seeing stones (small pieces of a rock or a mountain) as potential words, Tawada’s narrator conflates the maternal and paternal. The mountain, normally seen as a male, becomes maternal, and the phallic language becomes the mother tongue. Numerous feminist theorists, such as Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have suggested that the mother tongue, or (m)other tongue, has narrative potential different from the state’s phallic language. However, the mother tongue is not regarded as an ideal or better medium in Tawada’s writing. After deconstructing gender identities and silencing both phallic language and the mother tongue (which is after all an important component of the state and nationalism), Tawada’s narrator goes back to the words offered by Göschenen’s stones, which are possibly the new words, or rather letters, created by tunneling through the existing text of Mt Gotthard. It is also useful to situate Tawada’s exploration of national identities and boundaries in the context of recent discussions 41 42

Tanaka, 164. Kaplan, Questions of Travel, 89.

Nomadic Narratives

151

regarding the status of what may be called “the European subject”. Kristeva, for example, addressing what she calls the “crisis of the European subject” in an eponymously titled volume, argues, to borrow Samir Dayal’s words in the Introduction, that “Europe today lacks a narrative, a discourse comprehensive enough and particular enough to give meaning to the diversity and the specificities of European subjectivity”.43 Kristeva points to the over-reliance on freedom, independence, and rationality in Western Europe as the root cause of the impasse in which the European subject finds itself today. She proposes that Europe should look to the Orthodox Christian Church of Eastern Europe for elements that can counterbalance or complement the dominant ideology of the “West”. Instead of the Cartesian reliance on the mind as separate from, and superior to, the body, Kristeva argues that the European self can regain the sensory experience of what she calls the overabundance of the soul through participation in a divinity that remains outside of language.44 In other words, the European subject can regain its feminine side, as embodied by Mary and Eurydice, whom Kristeva positions against Orpheus, by immersing itself in the mystery that is central to Eastern Orthodoxy. Tawada’s narrator’s experimentation in “Gotthard” with doing away with language (though she does return to it by the end of the story) might be compared to the experience of living outside language that Kristeva proposes, just as Tawada’s questioning of gender identities points to the possible rejection of gender dichotomies Kristeva delineates, which for Kristeva goes together with the reclamation of a feminine identity. Citing Kristeva, as well as Kaplan and Clifford, Nicoletta Pireddu shows examples of literary or linguistic works that take on closely related issues concerning the European subject. Pireddu makes it clear that the current questioning of what being European means is directly related to the solidification of the European Union: what does it mean to be European and how can one be European without being global? Pireddu does not propose going outside language altogether, but does illustrate ways in which translation from one language to another can give rise to “in-between-ness”. She points out that “contemporary 43 Samir Dayal, Introduction, in Julia Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, New York, 2000, 13. 44 Kristeva, Crisis of the European Subject, 148-50.

152

Tomoko Kuribayashi

Europe …, while coming to terms with its problematic Euro-centered past, is also struggling to redefine its place in relation to national and global dimensions”, and that writers like Christian Brooke-Rose and Diego Marani “contribute to the creation of a new European consciousness modelled upon border crossing” and “refashioning Europeanness as hybrid and diasporic subjectivity”.45 What Tawada attempts in writings such as “Gotthard” is a similar kind of transcultural and translinguistic movement. In her essay “Boston” in Ekusofoni, Tawada argues that even monolinguals are affected by interlingual exchanges, citing the examples of Japanese people using the literal translation of the English expression “Have a good weekend” when such an expression did not exist in Japanese until perhaps a generation ago. Tawada sees English as having had similar discursive influences on German.46 Pireddu admits that the examples she takes from Brooke-Rose and Marani are possibly elitist and still centered on Western Europe and its major languages, and the same is potentially true of Tawada’s experiments. Yet Tawada does look towards the non-West in her other works, most notably in Henshin no tame no opiumu, where China and Tibet figure prominently. Just as Kristeva juxtaposes Western and Eastern Europe, Tawada posits the “Orient” against the Occident. Whether in doing so she exoticizes the East, even if she herself originates in Asia, is a very complex question requiring further exploration. Though the Eastern Orthodoxy Kristeva advocates is not “Orientalist” in the strictest sense of the term, it is worth pondering whether Kristeva and Tawada are being Orientalist in seeking a “cure” in the non-West, even though they originate in the East or Orient. Here it is worth noting Tawada’s comment on Orientalism in Tokeru machi: Tawada runs into a Kurdish writer, F, at a literary festival in Saint-Malo on the Mediterranean coast. He asks Tawada whether she thinks the word “Orient”, used as this year’s festival’s theme, is discriminatory or stereotypical. She responds: “Isn’t it appropriate in that it points to the imaginary place that exists in the European mind?”47 45

Nicoletta Pireddu, “Scribes of a Transnational Europe: Travel, Translation, Borders”, The Translator: Studies in Intercultural Communication, XII/2 (2006), 34748. 46 Tawada, Ekusofoni, 116-17. 47 Tawada, Tokeru machi, 131.

Nomadic Narratives

153

Many contemporary Japanese writers have explored the meaning of national and gender identity. Today both new and veteran Japanese writers record and analyze their encounters with foreign cultures either at home or abroad, which often necessitate the questioning of the meaning of being Japanese.48 One might argue that Tawada’s point of view is especially effective for such an inquiry because it is that of somebody who could feel at home in a foreign language yet clearly does not, and does not wish to completely do so. Still, writing in both languages is one of the elements that make Tawada’s writing appealing. One critic has commented that “Tawada’s style, which almost makes one dizzy with its surrealistic physicality, may in part come from the tension born of the linguistic gap between German and Japanese”.49 One might well diagnose her stance as that of somebody who dissects a culture’s problems from almost-inside, which can produce a more wounding blow than one wielded by a complete outsider. Such a stance also creates a kind of guilt that one is not being a grateful adopted child of the host culture, as well as the awareness that just as the host culture is susceptible to one’s critical examination, what might be called Tawada’s homeland and its culture – Japan – is hardly immune from the same sort of analytical surgery. However, one might then remember that Tawada attempts to transcend national consciousnesses as well as borderlines. She would be quite happy, in all probability, to be called a nomadic writer of the in-between space, with a horde of ambiguous affiliations and criss-crossing itineraries trailing her track.

48

See, for example, some of the chapters of Nihon bungaku ni okeru tasha (The Other in Japanese Literature), ed. Tsuruta Kinya, Tokyo, 1994, which discuss Yamada Eimi’s and Murakami Ryu’s fiction dealing with Americans and their culture. 49 Quoted in “Tsukuru anguru” (“Creative Angle”), Asahi shinbun (Morning Edition), 22 November 1998.

PRIMITIVE ACCUMULATION: UNWRITING DIASPORA IN LAVANYA SANKARAN’S THE RED CARPET MELISSA TANDIWE MYAMBO The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.1

I begin with these questions: why do we have to work? How far would you travel for a good job? As the questions suggest, this essay is a quest. I am in search of a better understanding of the relationship between contemporary diaspora, as a theory and a practice, and the workings of global capitalism today. To come to a better understanding of this tangled nexus, I read a sampling of contemporary South Asian diasporic literature and current diaspora theory. What do contemporary literature and theory contribute to our understanding of literal and metaphorical primitive accumulation? And what do they contribute to our understanding of the intricate politics of blood and belonging at play between diaspora and capitalism? Primitive accumulation is capitalism’s “point of departure”.2 For Marx, it accounts for how the English peasant was removed from the soil and having to earn a living, was forced to sell the only thing he

I am grateful to Prof. Rhonda Cobham-Sander, Prof. Timothy Reiss, and Prof. Christopher Winks for comments on earlier versions of this essay: Thank you also to the students who participated in my course entitled “Contesting Diaspora: Blood Fictions” (2006). I am also grateful to Nicholas Brown (MLG 2007), Pier Paolo Frassinnelli and Sujani Reddy for their comments. Needless to say, all remaining weaknesses are solely my responsibility. 1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes, London, 1990, I, 876. 2 Ibid., 873.

156

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

had left: his labor.3 My primary interest is in how Marx’s primitive accumulation mobilizes a series of movements away from the land: “The immediate producer, the worker, could dispose of his own person only after he had ceased to be bound to the soil”.4 Pivotal to this transformation is an implied movement and displacement. This dual character of movement, actual but also metaphorical, results in the creation of an urban wage laborer out of the rural peasant: We must still pause a moment on this element of primitive accumulation. The thinning-out of the independent self-supporting peasants corresponded directly with the concentration of the industrial proletariat.5

Marx’s thesis is my theoretical point of departure. Pushing this thesis as far as it can go, and even, possibly, further than that, I want to consider the multiple meanings of leaving the land as a form of displacement, and whether contemporary diaspora is a modality of this displacement. Before examining the theoretical implications of such displacement as it is illuminated by Lavanya Sankaran’s The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories, I would like to propose a juxtaposition – to underline from the outset the applicability of primitive accumulation to our contemporary situation. Let us fast forward to the twenty-first century, the era of late capitalism known popularly as globalization. Globalization theorist, Saskia Sassen, in her book The Mobility of Labor and Capital, 3

For a more comprehensive overview of this history, see E.P.Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, New York, 1966, in particular pages 337-58; and also James R. Siemon, “Landlord not King: Agrarian Change and Interarticulation”, in Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England, eds Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, Ithaca: NY, 1994, 1733. For an interesting critique of Thompson, see Crystal Bartolovich, who claims that capitalism’s birth in England was also related to international factors and colonialism: “E.P. Thompson … managed to write over 800 pages on the ‘making of the English working class’ without any consideration of colonialism to speak of – not even the destruction of the indigenous cotton industry in India, which clearly had an impact on the fate of mill workers in England” (Crystal Bartolovich, “Global Capital and Transnationalism”, in A Companion to Postcolonial Studies: A Historical Introduction, eds Sangeeta Ray and Henry Schwarz, Malden: MA, 2000, 144). 4 Marx, Capital, I, 874. 5 Ibid., 908.

Primitive Accumulation

157

analyzes what forms of displacement become migration-inducing factors at an international level, which is to say, why people leave “their” lands in search of work, forming diasporas of migrant labor: The large-scale development of commercial agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean Basin has long been recognized as a key factor in the displacement of subsistence farmers and small producers. This displacement created both a supply of rural wage laborers and large-scale migrations to the cities. For a variety of reasons, in some of these countries the migrations became international.6

My point in introducing Sassen here is to highlight how the ongoing processes and effects of displacement, a version of primitive accumulation, continue to supply capital with wage labor. While Marx’s male peasant turned proletariat may have migrated from his rural area to a nearby labor market in an urbanizing England, today’s male or female wage laborer – in Sassen’s Americas or elsewhere – is forced to search out labor markets further away, sometimes, literally, on the other side of the globe.7 Whether approaching globalization from an environmental, economic, political, or cultural standpoint, this term designates an era marked by an unprecedented movement of people, capital, media, information and technology. Globalization both creates and depends on a situation in which the laborer is a “free seller of labor-power, who carries his commodity wherever he can find a market for it”.8 Diaspora too refers to a movement of people, and the boundaries between a diasporic subject, a migrant, an immigrant, an émigré, and an expatriate are becoming more and more porous because of the hyper-mobility that defines globalization. Economic globalization 6 Saskia Sassen, The Mobility of Labor and Capital: A Study in International Investment and Labor Flow, Cambridge, 1988, 95. 7 There is an ongoing debate in Marxist scholarship about whether primitive accumulation is in fact an ongoing process or whether it formed the “pre-history” of capital. For more of this, see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Cambridge: MA, 2001, 256-59. See also the debate between Werner Bonefield and Paul Zarembka in The Commoner: Werner Bonefield, “History and Social Constitution: Primitive Accumulation is not Primitive”, and Paul Zarembka, “Primitive Accumulation in Marxism, Historical or Trans-historical Separation from the Means of Production” (The Commoner, March 2002, online at www.thecommoner.org.uk March 2002). 8 Marx, Capital, I, 875.

158

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

depends, like diaspora, on the large-scale displacement of populations from one location (a “homeland”, “motherland”, or a “sending country”) to another location (a “host nation” or “receiving country”) in relation to a number of factors. But this is a rather bloodless formulation. At the heart of diaspora is the lived experience of real people who make real choices (or have real choices made for them) that are based on complex interactions with notions of home and family, of roots and routes, of economics and politics. At the intersection of diaspora and capitalism, there is at play an intricate politics of blood and belonging or unbelonging. My aim here is to analyze the politics of blood and belonging, as it is theorized in contemporary literature, in order to throw light on diaspora and diasporization as modalities of the constant displacements fundamental to global capitalism. To that end, I look at a literary depiction of the post-1965 South Asian diaspora which attempts a radical revision of traditional notions of where we belong, and who belongs where. I examine these questions by looking at an example of literary contestation of diaspora. This work rejects the diasporic subject’s essentialist relationship to the motherland, and privileges diasporic disconnections rather than connections to the land – a work, in short, that un-writes diaspora. If we take seriously the proposition that expropriation from the land in the fullest literal and metaphorical senses, is capitalism’s point of departure, the question that most urgently rears its head is whether subverting the traditional meanings of “home”, “land”, “nation”, and “belonging” serve to reify and reinforce a certain modern mobility, where a continuous displacement is in fact necessary for globalization as the latest stage of capitalism. In other words, do contemporary literary representations of diasporic practice work to promote, in conjunction with capitalism, the continuation of globalization’s need for a mobile labor force unburdened by ties to the land? Does unwriting diaspora translate into underwriting a global migrant’s ability to respond to a global marketplace?

Primitive Accumulation

159

America, Assimilation, ABCD’s: “Alphabet Soup” Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.9

Lavanya Sankaran’s short story “Alphabet Soup”, in her collection The Red Carpet, is a piece of Indian or Indian-American literature that hilariously recounts an ABCD’s attempt to reconnect with India as motherland: ABCD – American Born Confused Desi. Desi, countryman … ABCDEFGHI? American Born Confused Desi Emigrated From Gujurat Hall-the-vay-frum India.10

It is the story of a failed return to India that portrays the pain, and humor, of diasporic disconnections. The tongue-in-cheek “Alphabet Soup”, so-named to depict the stereotypical confusion and “mixed-up ness” attributed to secondgeneration Indians or ABCD’s, relates the story of the Chicago-raised Priya who longs for the “authenticity” of India. Although not technically an ABCD because she was born in India, Priya “had the facial features of a tropical rice-eater, but [when she] opened her mouth … was pure corn-fed Chicago”.11 Her elite college education immersed her in political correctness and “the vocabulary of political victimhood”.12 The narrator’s tone is amusedly sarcastic in describing Priya’s misguided and naive criticism of her parents’ decision to leave the motherland for America and assimilate into its culture: “‘Assimilation is a betrayal of your skin’, Priya explained to her father more than once”.13

9

Robert Frost, “The Death of the Hired Man”, in Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, New York, 1979, 43. 10 Lavanya Sankaran, The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories, New York, 2005, 122. I have heard reliable rumors that there is a version that goes from A to Z and that there are several versions. Another version states that H.I.J. refers to “Hiding In Jersey” because of the high number of Indians in the Tristate area. 11 Ibid., 103. 12 Ibid., 102. 13 Ibid., 103.

160

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

Yet, her father is part of the post-1965 wave of Indian immigrants, which was largely made up of professionals who have done very well in the US, and so his reply is: “How can it be a betrayal of your skin to work hard and do well?”14 Priya’s father, an innocuous capitalist, loyally expresses the American Dream – work hard, do well, your children will do better – but to no avail: Undaunted, Priya focused her efforts on her father. Not for nothing was she a member of the Color Coalition and the Wymyn’s Alliance. “The mistake you made,” she told him, “was in moving to America all those years ago.” “You would have preferred to grow up in India?” Priya’s father was tall and thin, with a receding hairline and eyes hidden behind thick glasses, which sometimes made his daughter miss the twinkle that lay deep in them. “The more I think about it … yes,” said Priyamvada. “There is strength in being Brown in a Brown Country.” “And what is that?” “Well, look at the way we’re treated here.” “Meritocratic promotions, good education, nice homes?” He didn’t say it but Priya knew he also meant: his country club membership, his partnership in a multinational accounting firm, and the fact that both his children studied in universities that had groomed American presidents. “Not that stuff,” she said. “You’re always focusing on material comforts, ignoring everything else. Here in America, nice stores treat whites better, and blondes best. In a brown country, everyone looks at each other with respect and feels the bond that comes from having the same color skin. There, there is a sense of pride about their own history, a refusal to cater to eurocentric notions of the world, a joy that comes from being perfectly centered culturally .… Are you laughing?”15

Priya is a hilarious parody of political correctness. In order to understand the “vast gap between the social theories they preach in the 14 There is an emerging body of work on the experience of this wave of Indian immigrants. See Vijay Prashad, The Karma of Brown Folk, Minneapolis: MN, 2000, on their construction as a “model minority”; and Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, Durham: NC, 2005, on the complexities of their identities. 15 Sankaran, The Red Carpet, 104.

Primitive Accumulation

161

universities and the realities outside”,16 Priya’s father challenges her to go to India and see for herself. Hence, her return journey back to the motherland is spurred on by a neoliberal challenge to her liberalism by her father who epitomizes the American immigrant success story. It is not only her parents but most of their immediate family who emigrated from India: “Priya didn’t have any immediate aunts or uncles in India; all of her parents’ siblings were scattered across the globe, in America, Canada, England, and Australia, returning to India only for annual pilgrimages along with her mother”.17 It is significant that Priya’s family is made up of global migrants who, presumably, like her father, are all doing well working in multinational firms. They are paradigmatic of the era of globalization with its large number of diasporic Indian professionals. This means that Priya ends up staying in India with the Iyer family, her distant relatives who reside in Bangalore. Mr Iyer, of course, is a foil to Priya’s father, the one who stayed behind, “her own father’s Alternate Reality. The two men were even similar in face and build, except that Mr Iyer lacked the spit-andpolish conveyed by Americanization, Italian suits, and hundred-dollar haircuts”.18 But Mr Iyer lives not just anywhere in India but in Bangalore, a city that has become one of the centers of Indian globalization during the last decade. Sankaran’s collection is entitled The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories. Yet, nearly every story is in some way influenced by other cities in India, or by relatives in Australia or the mundane comings and goings between the US and India. In contemporary diasporic works, the story of any particular place is almost automatically placed in dialogue with other spatially distant, yet culturally near locations. Richly symbolizing the successful integration of India into a globalizing world economy, Bangalore … had the first online retailer in India. It had India’s first oxygen bar and largest wine-and-cheese shop. The Cyber Crime Police Station was the first in the country to solve any sort of cyber crime.19 16

Ibid., 105. Ibid., 107. 18 Ibid., 113. 19 Ibid., 135. 17

162

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

The city is also the center of BPO (Business Process Outsourcing), which means that Priya, armed with her guidebooks, arrives in a city experiencing an economic renaissance connected to the economic globalization she and her college friends protested against back on her East Coast college campus. Even worse for her, Mr Iyer is a Brahmin and proud of it. Caste divisions are not relegated to the past as Priya had assumed, but caste prejudices and caste-related cultural practices are still alive and well, even in modern India. Although Mr Iyer claims that “caste is a dead issue”,20 Priya is not so sure as she begins to face up to the fact that her idealized version of the unified nature of a “Brown Country” was blatantly naive, and discovers increasingly that she is her “father’s daughter”. When Mr Iyer invites her to attend a poonal ceremony, during which Brahmin males are initiated, Priya is reluctant. Mr Iyer explains to her that she is merely taking after her father: He is famous for rebelling against all these rituals. You must be knowing of the big argument he had with … your grandparents? …. He liked the philosophy behind Brahminism, he said, but he did not like the social rituals. He said they took certain practices beyond the realms of common sense. Your grandmother was shocked, I remember. Before he left for America, he removed his sacred thread.21

The more Priya sees of India, the more resonances between father and daughter become apparent. As she fumbles through various social events, unselfconsciously adopting an anthropological participantobserver relationship towards “the natives”, she comes up constantly against the “confused” and confusing Indian middle classes who straddle multiple worlds more successfully than she does: Anu, a distant cousin, wears tank tops when her parents are not around but wears a sari to her brother’s poonal ceremony. She respects tradition but breaks with it by getting secretly engaged to a Muslim boy called Farhan. Farhan works for the same multinational as Priya’s father – a further effect of globalization. Priya is “strangely unsettled” by this tidbit,22 which she discovers in a café resembling Starbucks while 20

Ibid., 124. Ibid., 125. 22 Ibid., 123. 21

Primitive Accumulation

163

their acquaintances are discussing the relative merits of Britney Spears and J-Lo. She glosses over these details in her emails back to her white boyfriend in the States. Her white boyfriend clearly contradicts her affirmation of an essentialist “brown” belonging, and she did not allow him to accompany her because “her notion of standing … in a world where the color of the skin on the street matched hers, did not, for some reason, include having a pink-and-orange man by her side (however well muscled)”.23 Despite the Americanization of Bangalore, which disappoints her cultural expectations of a romanticized “motherland”, she also finds herself missing home, the US: India starts to fatigue her with its “maddening mixture of ancient values and modern pop culture, of great wisdoms and blank ignorance”.24 She ponders anew her father’s decision to leave: She found herself asking Farhan: “Would you like to leave all this and live in America?” “No, but I can see why your parents would,” he said, answering the question in her mind. “Things were different for them. Today, I can work in the same firm as your father, without leaving India. He couldn’t. Things are different. We have choices now.” Choice. It was her father’s word, one he used whenever Priya pressed him for an explanation of why he came to America. “Choice,” he would say, which Priya had always assumed was his own particular synonym for “Money”.25

The more Priya grows disenchanted with the real India, the more she respects her father’s choices. She dreads admitting to her father that she was wrong and the story ends with her trying to muster up the courage to write him an email to tell him so. Sitting in front of the computer, she debates whether she should see the “stereotypical” tourist attractions like the Taj Mahal, or head home and “offer to report for work in a corporation of his choice”.26 Part of her longs for the courage to write “I can see why you made the choices you did, and

23

Ibid., 106. Ibid., 134. 25 Ibid., 131-32. 26 Ibid., 134. 24

164

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

I thank you for allowing me to make my own”.27 However, she shuts off the computer and waits for his phone call, hoping that she will be able to verbalize what she cannot write. The story significantly ends with a direct correlation between Priya’s attachment to the notion of India as motherland and her conviction that she should capitulate to capitalism should this attachment prove untenable. This will dictate her choices, and choice has become a multivalent word in the story. Before leaving the US, Priya had entered into a deal with her father: She had lectured him, and then swore that if things didn’t go as she’d anticipated she would eat her hat, or rather, seriously consider any career choices he might suggest. Even if this meant her suiting up and going to work in a corporation that worshipped greed and destroyed the environment and spread American pop culture like a disease throughout the world.28

On the surface, this is a curious equation. Why would Priya’s inability to find a home or a sense of belonging in India lead her to consider a corporate career, possibly in a multinational company like her father’s? Why does this negation of blood belonging, this unbelonging, translate into choosing capitalism? And why, without the ground of India on which to stake her liberal claims, do her antiglobalization political beliefs come tumbling down? What seems to be a counter-intuitive turn to capitalism becomes profoundly logical if we recall that leaving the land, both literally and metaphorically, is the basis of capitalism proper. The story ends with Priya still waiting her father’s phone call, and thus we never know what her final choices are. “Alphabet Soup” unwrites the Indian diaspora’s connection to India as motherland by undermining essentialist notions of identity. However, if we proceed from the standpoint that the story satirizes the idea that this is the real nature of Priya’s available choices, then the reader, if not Priya, might be able to see other possibilities. Priya is also guilty of looking for a connection in the wrong way: her exclusion, in her search for “brownness”, of the rest of the color spectrum and the various cultural 27 28

Ibid., 135. Ibid., 134.

Primitive Accumulation

165

connections she shares with her Americanized Indian contemporaries blinds her to other possibilities. Priya, for the time being, cannot find a path through this maze. In the end, it seems that “corn-fed Chicago” Priya triumphs over her “tropical rice-eater’s” facial features, and with that discovery Priya is now presumably free of the motherland and free to become an American. Despite Farhan’s insistence that Indians have choices too, the US is reinscribed as the ultimate land of choice, and Priya seems set to assimilate to the culture of consumerism that is central to “neoliberal citizenship”. We can tease out the multiple layers of meaning that inform Priya’s choices by turning to Inderpal Grewal’s analysis of Asian immigrant women’s narratives: What has been particular to the [Asian immigrant women] narratives produced in the United States was that the movement from “tradition” to “modernity” was figured also within the discourse of “choice” as a central element of a liberal democratic agenda for which the United States and America became both model and context. Choice here was not only the act through which freedom could be understood as central to the subject of modern America as well as of liberal feminism, but also an important aspect of neoliberal consumer culture’s imbrication within the liberalism of democratic “choice” figured as “freedom”. The particular “freedom” of “America” thus became the ability to have the “choices” denied to those in “traditional” societies and “cultures”.29

Embedded also in “choice” is Marx’s double sense of the worker’s freedom. If America keeps a monopoly on choice and freedom, will the migrant worker’s mobility, accompanied by a politics of displacement, continue to encourage a cycle of migration necessary to complete a movement from tradition to modernity, from rural to urban, from India to America? Or, Priya’s failed return to India notwithstanding, does “blood” as an excessive signification that global capitalism cannot contain or exhaust, still retain some hold over the exercise of choice and negotiations and renegotiations of the meaning of America and India?

29

Grewal, Transnational America, 64-65.

166

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

Choice and freedom: capitalism’s paradox If the satirical tone of “Alphabet Soup” undercuts the significance of Priya’s final choice, The Red Carpet’s final story, “Apple Pie, One by Two”, presents choices in a more serious light and imbues them with gravity and pathos. The story is about two Indian friends, Murthy and Swamy. Swamy is “one of the new fairy tales, someone who has founded and sold a software company that everyone talks about and venture capitalists see in their favorite visions”.30 Swamy and Murthy are two software engineers who, by dint of hard work, have made it to graduate school in the States and then into big jobs in Palo Alto, California, where they are “finally living the American Dream”.31 But one day, they come up with a new program and decide to go into business for themselves. They had always been best friends and because they had always shared everything, soon it was “equity … one-by-two”. Things got even better when, to their joy, they discovered that “the Indian economy had been changing while they were away, and Bangalore, of all places, home, had suddenly emerged as a significant [and cheaper] location for software development”. Before, “There was simply no other choice but to live and work in America – until, suddenly, it appeared, there was”.32 The narrative loops back to choices again. Here we see that Swamy and Murthy’s choices are constrained by economics, a truth so banal that it is hardly ever even verbalized. Allowed by changing economic fortunes to return to India, they do so, but not for long. When an economic recession hits, they are forced to reevaluate their choices – whether to stay at home or go back to the land of choice, freedom and opportunity. The story recounts their last night together. Swamy and Murthy have gone to a daba, an informal roadside diner, to have a final meal with a group of friends before the two part ways: Murthy is staying in India; Swamy is going back to the US. As Murthy strums his guitar and the group sits around the fire singing songs like “California Dreamin’”, Swamy is deliberating on his choice to sell their company and go back to America, while Murthy will be staying on and looking for a job. There is a complex interplay between Swamy’s relationship to his motherland, to a literal 30

Sankaran, The Red Carpet, 192. Ibid., 198. 32 Ibid., 202. 31

Primitive Accumulation

167

and ideal America and economic mobility and immobility in this passage: No. Murthy might well be making the right choice. All the faith that Swamy has reposed in Murthy’s judgment over the years tells him that. Swamy’s surprise is directed at himself – and the sudden realization that, unlike Murthy, he does not seem to have it in himself, in this crucial moment of decision, to make that final commitment to India. He had felt the first inklings of this a little earlier, fueled by the fear that first erupted during those long nights when things looked like they might fail, utterly and completely; when none of the arguments that he used to convince himself to return home – the opportunities, his aging parents, the wonder of being home – gave him comfort. A fear that, by staying behind now, when the going has gone so badly wrong, the fruits of all his years of hard work and sacrifice in America would never again be his for the plucking – that he would, in some atavistic fashion, revert to the state of his boyhood, stuck in India, full of longing, with America hung full and ripe and out of his reach.33

If committing to India means running the risk of financial failure, Swamy cannot make that choice. This is the bind of many Third World professionals, the fact that commitment to a nation may mean committing financial suicide. Yet, he is surprised at the limits of his own choices. Murthy is settling down, about to marry Ashwini and begin a family in an uncertain economic Indian future. But Swamy cannot turn his back on the “call of America”. Within the context of metaphorical primitive accumulation, and given the significance of movement and displacement within it, it is important to note that Swamy, as a “deterritorialized”, middle-class Indian boy, had already begun to move psychologically towards America during his boyhood. Inderpal Grewal makes the interesting point that the discourse of America produces “subjects outside its territorial boundaries through its ability to disseminate neoliberal technologies through multiple channels”.34 Discussing the subjectivity of Indian H-1B visa holders, who, like Swamy, are “computer coolies” working in Silicon Valley, she explains their decision to 33 34

Ibid., 207. Grewal, Transnational America, 3.

168

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

migrate to the US as opposed to Germany by pointing out that there is no “German dream”. The notion of the American dream produces a “specific subject of migration”, since it circulates by way of “advertisements, movies from Hollywood and Bombay cinema, cable 35 TV, and returning and visiting migrants”. This is traced through the American music of the Sixties and Seventies that echoes through the text. These are songs they sang, “thousands” of times,36 before they had even left India. However, the weakness of the Indian economy, underdeveloped by the colonial West, is also pushing Swamy towards the United States. Noam Chomsky illustrates how the Indian cotton industry was destroyed in the 1700s to benefit the British textile industry,37 which then went on to employ Marx’s displaced peasants turned proletarians. The historical destruction of somewhat self-sufficient economies in what is now called the “developing” world can be read through Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation. Lack of “means of production” at home translates for many into becoming a mobile migrant worker searching for a more stable, economically secure labor market. Referring to the recession that shattered Swamy and Murthy’s dreams of working at their own business in Bangalore, the text proclaims that “The future was not supposed to lie so”,38 a line repeated more than once. A historical understanding of political economy may lead us, however, to believe that the future of “Third World” economies is, in some senses, pre-determined and the future is supposed to lie so. Yet, or perhaps because of these reasons, Swamy is not satisfied with his choice to return to America. “Disappointment [washes] through his mouth” as he states that he is returning to California.39 Swamy fears that he will be condemned to become “like the nabob in the [Billy Bunter] storybook, another foolish Indian abroad”.40 Billy 35

Ibid., 4-5. Sankaran, The Red Carpet, 209. 37 Noam Chomsky, “Free Trade and Free Market: Pretense and Practice”, in The Cultures of Globalization, eds Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi, Durham: NC, 1998, 357, 362-63. 38 Sankaran, The Red Carpet, 205. 39 Ibid., 204. 40 Ibid., 211. In his experience in England, Rushdie writes of the influence of the representation of the Indian nabob, Hurree Jamset Ram Singh, in Billy Bunter:

36

Primitive Accumulation

169

Bunter is another cultural reference that runs throughout the text. The title alludes to the colonial education that created Swamy and Murthy’s subjectivities, and makes them desire migration even when migrating to America invokes confusion – it is “the land of dreams always reconfiguring itself into the one left behind, tinged with regret and wistful desire”.41 But Swamy, despite his hesitation, has made a commitment instead to an ethos that is best summed up by a verse from Crosby, Stills and Nash that is quoted in the text: You who are on the road Must have a code that you can live by And so become yourself Because the past is just a good-bye.42

What is this “code” that you can live by? Is it one of “flexible citizenship”, flexible attachments, a mobile lifestyle “on the road”, a “you” always “becoming”, which leaves the past – origins, motherland, family, nation, and home – always in the past? When Swamy stands up to leave the gathering at the daba, he has just enough time to get to the airport. Ignoring the people trying to say goodbye to him, he casually says to Murthy, “See you later”, to which Murthy “nods and says, Okay, then”.43 This anticlimactic ending portrays the poignancy of their unexpressed emotions at their first separation. But then again, why say goodbye, if, when the economy changes again, Swamy might return? In the era of globalization, he might very well see Murthy “later”. Swamy may have to go the US right now, but the fact that he leaves his “other half” in India, also suggests he will try to come back and they will be reunited. The story depicts them as almost indistinguishable, until the very end when their paths suddenly diverge. Yet their bond, that is both essentialist (they are both Indians) and constructivist (they are not family but friends “Recently, on a live radio programme, a professional humourist asked me, in all seriousness, why I objected to being called a wog. He said he had always thought it a rather charming word …. The ghost of Hurree Jamset Ram Singh walks among us still” (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism, 1981-1991, New York, 1991, 18-19). 41 Sankaran, The Red Carpet, 204. 42 Quoted in ibid., 209. 43 Ibid., 212.

170

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

who share the same dreams), might be strong enough to transcend Swamy’s time away. Or, to speculate further, it could be that Murthy eventually comes to America again, and they both return to India’s growing economy together at some later time. Disconnections and reconnections are left as an open possibility that global capitalism delimits in very profound ways. But it needs to be said that these limits are also constantly being renegotiated in the very marketplace that regulates them – not the least of all, by the politics of blood and belonging and unbelonging. Theorizing diaspora in the era of globalization and transnationalism Benedict Anderson’s work on long-distance nationalism, which delineates the ill effects of diasporic subjects interfering from a safe distance in the political situation in their homelands, cautions against this particular concept of diasporic politics. Certainly, the examples Anderson gives, like the Serbo-Croatian war being financed by Canadian-based Croatians sending money through the internet, are cautionary tales against diasporic involvement in a homeland from afar.44 But it is worth asking, nevertheless, what happens when, as in the case of Priya, even spiritual and cultural bonds to the motherland are etiolated. Are we really liberated from the bonds of blood and belonging and all their attendant baggage? Or are we, like Priya, freed from such baggage only to work better in a capitalist economy reliant on mobile labor? What is the relationship between land and identity within globalization’s framework of acceptable subjectivities?45 We need to wonder, like Swamy, what choices are we allowed. But then again, what are the alternatives? I am certainly not suggesting that we return to a wholesale romance of origins. However, I am suggesting that, as critics and readers, we think carefully about the meaning of a 44

See Benedict Anderson, “Exodus”, Critical Inquiry, XX/2 (Winter 1994), 314-27. The disjuncture between identity and “homeland” is symbolic of the times we live in and includes all social classes. Aihwa Ong begins her provocative analysis of the “cultural logics of transnationality” and “flexible citizenship” with a parable about the Hong Kong’s elite’s multiple passports on the eve of mainland-Chinese rule. In case things “went wrong”, they wanted to ensure that they could flee to a friendlier climate (Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: NC, 1999, 1-2). As Anderson points out, a passport is less a testament of national affiliation these days and more a pass to work in certain labor markets (323). 45

Primitive Accumulation

171

wholesale celebration of displacement. If the route that capitalism takes is based on a lack of roots, we must rethink the relationship between ties to the land and capitalism in order to find out if there is a form of diaspora that really can contest global capitalism, rather than work with it. I raise this because a wide range of contemporary theorists of diaspora, transnationalism, and globalization are prone to naturalizing, reifying, and celebrating displacement. They claim, interestingly, that diaspora resists the workings of global capitalism and actually subverts the hegemony of globalization. James Clifford, for example, begins his meditation on the meaning of diaspora by claiming that “contemporary diasporic practices cannot be reduced to epiphenomena of the nation-state or of global capitalism .… old and new diasporas offer resources for emergent ‘postcolonialisms’”.46 Like most contemporary critics, Clifford uses the word “postcolonialism” as shorthand for “good, resistant, and subversive”. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur also state unequivocally that “diaspora offers myriad, dislocated sites of contestation to the hegemonic, homogenizing forces of globalization”.47 Gayatri Gopinath, building on their thesis, takes it one-step further, stating that “queering” diaspora allows “the means by which to critique the logic of global capital itself”.48 But like Braziel and Mannur, Gopinath does not fully back up these lofty claims that diasporas somehow challenge the forces of global capitalism. The question remains: how exactly do they challenge it? In a good deal of current diaspora theory, attempts to read diaspora as contestatory to globalization depend on an anti-essentialist notion of diasporic identity as hybridized or unmoored from a place of origin, which directly plays into a politics of displacement, a displacement fundamental to global capitalism. If traditional diasporas – Jewish, Armenian – were supposedly tied, no matter how remotely, to a 46

James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge: MA, 1997, 302. 47 Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur, “Nation, Migration, Globalization: Points of Contention in Diaspora Studies”, in Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader, Malden: MA, 2003, 7. 48 Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Durham: NC, 2005, 12.

172

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

distant motherland or idea of origin, these modern diasporas are instead depicted as paying homage to displacement itself. Gopinath positively associates queer diasporas with the memory of an originary displacement: “Rather than evoking an imaginary homeland frozen in an idyllic moment outside history, what is remembered through queer diasporic desire and the queer diasporic body is a past time and place riven with contradictions and the violences of multiple uprootings, displacements, and exiles”.49 But are not these the same “displacements” integral to the mass migrations facilitating and responding to global capitalism? Is it not a pronounced cherishing of displacement, the structure of feeling that allows for Aihwa Ong’s notion of flexible citizenship, the very displacement that is essential to a migrant subjectivity currently? James Clifford has been one of the major forces behind highlighting the importance of travel to culture and cultural formation. Building on Clifford’s work on travel, globalization theorist John Tomlinson defines “deterritorialization” as one of the principal elements of a globalizing world. Rather than privileging routes over roots, he suggests they coexist. Even though large numbers of people are traveling or migrating, the majority of the world’s population, due to socio-economic factors, is still not able to travel. But even if they do not literally travel, the infusion of media allows people to travel metaphorically and symbolically expand their horizons, so that the chances of finding a monocultural person are decreasing. Tomlinson defines deterritorialization as what happens when “complex connectivity weakens the ties of culture to place”.50 This means that even people technically still in the motherland are deterritorialized, which, in my understanding, would be another modality of displacement. Our understanding of identity, even for those who are still “in their place”, is moving away from a sense of belonging to the land or the land belonging to “us”. How much more displaced are those who have migrated from the homeland? Is there any possibility of returning to the land in the positive sense of reclaiming it as the ground of resistance to corporate-led, top-down globalization? Significantly, contemporary theorists have also tried to rethink the diaspora’s relationship with the motherland, particularly by negating 49 50

Ibid., 4. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture, Chicago: IL, 1999, 29.

Primitive Accumulation

173

the notion of return. As Stuart Hall states, the idea of a motherland has also provided a certain sense of coherence to the Caribbean diaspora, for example, “by representing or ‘figuring’ Africa as the mother of these different civilizations”.51 But Hall is clear that this type of return is purely metaphorical and ideological rather than literal. In Hall’s words, “I use [diaspora] here metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even if it means pushing other people into the sea”. For Hall, this literal notion of return is, in fact, “the old, the imperializing, the hegemonizing, form of ‘ethnicity’. We have seen the fate of the people of Palestine at the hands of this backward-looking conception of diaspora.”52 Clifford too tries to get away from the notion of return, stating that: … the transnational connections linking diasporas need not be articulated primarily through a real or symbolic homeland – at least not to the degree that Safran implies. Decentered, lateral connections may be as important as those formed around a teleology of origin/return. And a shared, ongoing history of displacement, suffering, adaptation, or resistance may be as important as the projection of a specific origin.53

Clifford disagrees with William Safran’s definition of diaspora, summarized by Clifford as “a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (bad host?) country, desire for eventual return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship”.54 Clifford critiques this definition as relying too much on the classic Jewish case and implying that Zionism would be the apotheosis of most diasporic peoples. Like Hall, Clifford ends up invoking the examples of Israel and Palestine. But, putting aside this vexed question, I want to make the larger theoretical point that contemporary theory itself has unmoored identity from its place of origin and established mobility and unbelonging as the norm. 51

Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, 224. Ibid., 235. 53 Clifford, Routes, 306. 54 Ibid., 305. 52

174

Melissa Tandiwe Myambo

It is interesting to dwell on Hall here. Hall hails from Jamaica, a part of the “New World”, which he says is a place constituted by “displacement” beginning with the original “displacement” of indigenous Amerindians who were deprived of their lands in a type of primitive accumulation.55 Failing to become useful laborers, they were decimated. The Americas were then inhabited by “other peoples displaced in different ways from Africa, Asia and Europe”; the New World “stands for the endless ways in which Caribbean people have been destined to ‘migrate’; it is the signifier of migration itself – of traveling, voyaging and return as fate, as destiny; of the Antillean as the prototype of the modern or postmodern New World nomad”.56 Reading the depressing history Hall maps here, why would this form of displacement be something to celebrate? Hall’s understanding of the diasporic condition is historically informed, so the question is, why are we applauding this series of displacements that lead to more displacement? What exactly are the politics of this displacement? Interestingly, this form of displacement is for Hall a very New World condition: the notion of identity as becoming, not being, is part of the American Dream. There is one part of the myth of America (the United States) which claims that anyone, regardless of blood and origin, can become an American. This ideological discourse has in fact closed off a space for legitimate, indigenous claims to the land: autochthonous claims to Americanness are almost always offset by claims that America is the land of immigrants. If the word “American” has come to mean in common parlance “white and European” American, and all other Americans must stake their claim to this identity by way of a tenuous hyphen, as in African-American, it is telling that the original inhabitants of the Americas are also known by an implicitly hyphenated identity: Native Americans. Should not the “Native Americans” have the right to the unhyphenated term American since they are the first American-Americans?57 In the age of displacement, diaspora and mobile identities, what is the place of ties to the land? What can we learn from Swamy’s limited choices? Is it possible to construct a culturally legitimate claim to the 55

Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora”, 236. Ibid., 234. 57 The deep irony of this situation was brought home to me by a paper by my student Antonio Urias. 56

Primitive Accumulation

175

land that is not a version of reactionary nationalism like Priya’s original, misguided brown attachment to India? The politics of blood and (un)belonging demand a more nuanced approach to fully tease out the relationship between diaspora and global capitalism. The capitalist underpinnings of globalization mean that more and more of the globe’s inhabitants respond to the economic logic that we must put ourselves, through our labor, up for sale in a global market. And we will travel far from places called home and people called family to do so – a process of self-diasporization, if you will, that takes us further away from the land and deeper into an ever-changing, always-mobile capitalism

III: Migrations of Theory

THE IDENTITY OF IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE: MODERNISM AND AFRICAN LITERATURE NICHOLAS BROWN

While I hope the readings I am going to offer, which are really a single reading, hold some interest in themselves, this essay is also intended as a demonstration of the fecundity for African literary studies, and for transnational cultural studies more generally, of the Hegelian theorem of the identity of identity and difference. A singularly unpromising lens, one might think, especially if one is inclined to be at all reflective about the relationship between forms of knowledge produced in the West and those produced elsewhere. But in an historical moment when the genuinely non-western (if by that we mean that which has not been hollowed out by its subsumption under global capitalism) is increasingly hard to come by, one might be forgiven for advancing the paradoxical thesis that Hegel – a certain Hegel, anyway – has become the last non-western thinker. Certainly few theoretical languages meet with more resistance in the United States today than that of the dialectic, whose laundry list of evils – it begins with teleology, eurocentrism, idealism – is familiar to us all. These are genuine evils, if not uniquely Hegelian ones, but our hostility derives from something else. After all, there is as much or more to be discarded in, say, Spinoza – who, in a tradition stretching from Gilles Deleuze through Italian operaismo to Michael Hardt, has been a hero and model for anti-dialectical thought – and this antiquated material is, perhaps, harder to extricate from contemporary Spinozism than the husk of Hegelian narrative is from the living heart of the dialectic. Our contemporary unease in the dialectic comes from elsewhere, and one gets closer to its source when one recalls that in our recent past the dialectic was officially dominant not in the West but – often in more or less vulgar and sclerotic forms – in the communist East. Leaving aside a host of questions clustering around the fate of dialectical reason under Communism, one has to remember

180

Nicholas Brown

that the richest development in the Left experience of the dialectic since Marx is its deployment in the anti-imperialist and anticolonialist movements of the mid-twentieth century, such that in many instances a version of the dialectic became the very language of anticolonial resistance. Hegel, whose unflattering opinion of pre-colonial societies is well known, becomes, through pathways we cannot begin to trace here, the formal inspiration for some of the profoundest insights of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements – as well as for some of their more embarrassing certitudes. In our immediate context, then, the reconsideration of the dialectic marks, in a sense different than the one Cabral intended but one that he might have recognized, a return to the source. In any case, much of Hegel can be thought of as an extended riff on the theorem of the “identity of identity and difference”, even if the development of this theorem in its explicit and abstract form is forbiddingly opaque.1 The formula looks like our everyday stereotype of the Hegelian procedure: the reduction of difference to the rule of identity. But the dialectic is not a philosophy of identity (an argument for another occasion), and one can read Hegel’s formulation in the other direction: every identity contains difference within it. Everything that appears self-contained and solid hides a secret selfcontradiction, an internal rift whose unrest we call “history”; from another perspective, everything that appears self-contained and solid is determined by its relation to something else, a relation comprising an external rift – whose unrest we call “history”. The relevance of this basic maxim has to do with the problem of what might go by any of a half dozen names, like “globalization and the novel” or “transnational literary studies”. Now, it is true that even the most sophisticated analyses sometimes forget that the objects of analysis – a novel, a nation – are not as self-contained and solid as they seem. But far more common today is to grasp the inconsistency that characterizes them, while understanding this inconsistency as mere variety: the diverse, the multiple, the fluid and shifting. But the philosophical problem here, if we can incautiously use that word, is that such an understanding of things merely displaces self-evidence, so that now the various elements simply are what they are, unaffected 1

See especially §112-130 in G.W.F. Hegel’s Logic, trans. William Wallace, Oxford, 1975, 162-86.

The Identity of Identity and Difference

181

by the relations in which they stand to one another. That is, these relationships remain external, and leave their constitutive parts in their simple positivity. No ground unites them, thereby intervening in their meaning; or rather, the question of what ground unites them is left unthought. Upon closer examination, the ground of variety turns out to be none other than the pleasure of the agent who identifies its elements and brings them together. In this sense, variety is essentially an aesthetic category. Things stand differently with the identity of identity and difference. We are not here dealing with binary oppositions in the sense to which we have become accustomed. The oppositions through which the dialectic moves are meant to be false ones: that is, they are explicitly and inherently unstable, always already on their way to becoming something else. The theorem sounds like a riddle, and in the Logic the answer to the riddle is none other than the ground that, in the thought of the multiple, remains a question. Simply put, the ground is an explicit, non-arbitrary framework of comparison. The ground is what brings out relations that reach into and determine the meanings of things themselves, which then must be understood not to have independent significance outside of these relations. A canon is supposed to differ from a collection in precisely this way. The elements of the former derive their meaning from their relationships with the rest; the elements of the latter sit alone next to the others, their unity established, if at all, by the whim of the collector. That said, the comparison between the two texts juxtaposed here may seem willfully arbitrary, though both novels were written in more or less the same period: William Gaddis’ Carpenter’s Gothic, an American late modernist novel published in 1985, and A Geração da Utopia (The Utopian Generation), which the Angolan novelist Pepetela published in 1992. Carpenter’s Gothic takes place entirely within the four walls of a house in upstate New York; A Geração da Utopia ranges from Lisbon to Luanda, and follows an approximately thirty-year period in the lives of fictional leaders of the Angolan revolutionary movement. But the texts are not as alien from one another as they might initially seem. Carpenter’s Gothic turns out to be an African novel in a very peculiar sense, its plot ultimately hinging, against all expectations, on a mutation in Cold War hostilities as they play out in Southern, particularly Portuguese-speaking Africa.

182

Nicholas Brown

In other words, Gaddis’ novel is completed, off the scenes, in Pepetela’s. The ground that both novels share, however, is more substantial than this. Both texts are passionate responses, both from the Left but from radically different (but at the same time intimately connected) geographical and social situations, to a single historicalpolitical problem – which is, perhaps even to a greater degree than it was when either of these novels was written, our own. Our reading is going to focus very narrowly on four moments, two in each text, which are not representative passages but which rather frame decisive turns in each novel. We will begin with Carpenter’s Gothic, whose substantial peculiarities stem from a simple formal problem: how to narrate the profound world-historical changes, affecting all individual destinies, that we know today as the endgame of the Cold War, while at the same time doing justice to the real insulation from history that characterizes Gaddis’ North American and largely upper-middle-class narrative milieu. Gaddis’ problem is recognizable as an attempt to resolve the opposition between realism and modernism: on one hand, a responsibility to historical truth; on the other, a fidelity to the formal energies released by the emergence of a form of subjectivity liberated (or alienated) from historical consciousness. A great deal of what would be required to produce a narrative map of the late Cold War – the moment of the Reaganite policy of “rollback”, which entailed the overthrow or strategic weakening of legitimate postcolonial governments perceived as hostile to the US but friendly to the Soviet Union – would take place in the third world, specifically southern Africa. But the narrative itself is constrained to the insular world of Croton-on-Hudson, as emphasized by the modernist conceit of constraining the narrative to the intensities experienced within four walls. The measures taken in this attempt to square the circle are several. In Joycean fashion, Gaddis leaves clues strewn around the house. For example, a real New York Times headline from July 1980 alerts us to a crisis in the rate of profit that conditions much of the action of the novel. But this dead fact is no more a felt part of the characters’ lives than it is of ours, and Gaddis knows this: the newspaper remains

The Identity of Identity and Difference

183

unread, “of no more relevance then than now in its blunt demand to be read”.2 The second attempt is the great tentacled plot itself, essentially a conspiracy narrative that draws together big business, religious fundamentalism, and the Cold War, ultimately producing a direct strategic American military intervention in Southeast Africa, support for which is drummed up by means of a sham mineral deposit. This is not a particularly plausible narrative, but that is not the point. Rather, Gaddis uses the pulp form to produce a kind of force-diagram of American society circa 1980 by directly personalizing relationships that are too diffuse to narrate otherwise. To take just one example among many, a shadowy financier named Grimes is improbable as the puppet master behind the whole charade, but we are reminded that the policies that ended the recession that brought Reagan into office disproportionally benefitted finance capital at the expense of other sectors of the economy. The whole thing is quite wonderful, and yet it does not accomplish what Gaddis sets out to do, which is to connect this force field to bourgeois domestic life. The final and truly desperate attempt is named McCandless, who bursts in – this is our first citation – to tell us all we need to know about our relationship to South Africa, “our great bulwark against the, what was it? aggressive instincts of an evil empire?”: … no, take a look at every country bordering South Africa you’ll see who’s doing the destabilizing …. Who set up the Mozambique National Resistance Movement in the Transvaal when Rhodesia went down, want to write to them they’re at Clive Street, Robindale, Randburg, want to see a reign of terror see them raiding into Mozambique beating, raping, disfiguring the locals, teachers, health workers, all the forces of darkness and the whole rickety thing collapses, Mozambique’s brought to its knees like Lesotho.3

By the end of the novel, McCandless, a semiautomatic version of Stendahl’s “pistol shot in the middle of a concert”, threatens to destroy the narrative texture of the novel completely. As McCandless takes over the narrative, he becomes a kind of Ancient Mariner, trying the 2 3

William Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic, New York, 1999, 28. Ibid., 190.

184

Nicholas Brown

patience whoever will listen, including the reader. The diatribe from which I have just quoted an extract takes up most of twelve pages. In its last third, Carpenter’s Gothic threatens to become a didactic novel – rather than paring his Joycean fingernails, Gaddis is down here on earth explaining how the final stage of the Cold War works, and the self-referential turn of making McCandless himself an author whose protagonist resembles him a bit too much does little to repair the damage. Just to emphasize how desperate this attempt appears to be: if McCandless is going to explain to us the mediations between American domestic life and the endgame of the Cold War, then there is no need to have written the novel in the first place, since the whole aim is to produce these mediations in narrative form: to show, not tell. In the final pages, however, the protagonist of the novel interrupts McCandless in the middle of his denunciation of millenarian Christianity: —Because you’re the one who wants it, she said abruptly in a voice so level he stopped, simply looking at her…—And it’s why you’ve done nothing… She put down the glass,—to see them all go up like that smoke in the furnace all the stupid, ignorant, blown up in the clouds and there’s nobody there, there’s no rapture no anything just to see them wiped away for good it’s really you isn’t it. That you’re the one who wants Apocalypse, Armageddon all the sun going out and the sea turned to blood you can’t wait no, you’re the one who can’t wait! The brimstone and the fire and your Rift like the day it really happened because they, because you despise their, not their stupidity no, their hopes because you haven’t any, because you haven’t any left.4

The reversal here is complete. (It should be noted that the cool diegetic tone of the “she said abruptly” clause, though it might look quite normal in another novel, is so radically out of tune with the breathless cacophony of the dialogue that precedes it throughout the novel that it already marks the passage as a kind of break). A perspective which had seemed to violate the canon of immanence – making statements rather than pseudo-statements, to use Brooksian language – is suddenly ironized in the most abrupt and absolute way, as the real content of McCandless’ jeremiad is shown to be identical 4

Ibid., 243-44.

The Identity of Identity and Difference

185

with what it denounces – worse, in fact, because the desire that feeds religious fundamentalism is here understood not as despair but hope. McCandless’ diatribes are only pseudo-statements after all, no more true in themselves than the pathetic self-deceptions of the other characters. What had looked to be an attempt to give us an experienceable relationship to events of geopolitical magnitude turns out to give us one man’s neurosis. Gaddis thus returns safely to the Joycean realm above his handiwork, refined out of existence. McCandless himself is a modernist fragment, telling us something obscure about the modern American condition; and Carpenter’s Gothic becomes, once again, just another late modernist novel.5 So Carpenter’s Gothic abandons its quest for pedagogical truth – statements – and flees to the safety of modernist truth, which is of a different order, that of the pseudo-statement, of language which is symptomatic rather than informative. But things are not so simple: the link between Gaddis’ didactic impulses and those of his character McCandless cannot be severed so easily. If McCandless secretly desires a raptureless Apocalypse, Gaddis in his turn unleashes an Armageddon on the central characters. Some of the deaths in the final pages of the novel are unmotivated in purely narrative terms. But it is precisely the extravagance and destructive fury of these final pages that suggests that we are looking at something more than the simple recontainment of pedagogical energy. Unlike most of the main characters, McCandless the intellectual survives. But the death of the characters surrounding him only serves to focus attention on his final act. In fact, McCandless’ fate – exile – is the one unforgivable choice in the book. Rather than acting, like the protagonist Liz, in an imperfect, compromised, and even hypocritical way, he retreats to a “quiet shore where [he] can be secure in enjoying

5

For an elaboration of this idea of the modernist fragment, see my Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth Century Literature, Princeton: NJ, 2005, which develops a thesis similar to the one broached here at much greater length. The “Joycean realm” here refers to Stephen Dedalus’ disquisition on the aesthetic in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails” (James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, 1996, 294).

186

Nicholas Brown

the distant sight of confusion and wreckage”.6 For McCandless maintains his purity and innocence rather than commit himself to something that might involve compromise and hypocrisy – and by his inaction, therefore, hands himself over to the deepest complicity and hypocrisy. It should be clear that his dilemma – not only his, but also Gaddis’, and that of the first-world intellectual more generally – is both political and representational. For what is missing in McCandless’ understanding of the Cold War – what is missing in Gaddis’ representation of McCandless, and in our own most urgent political discourses – is a way out: not necessarily a map of the future, a path to salvation, but simply the possibility that things might be otherwise; what, for Liz, even fundamentalism possesses as hope. Without this possibility – without the notion of the present as impossible, as fragile, riddled with unsustainable antagonisms, and therefore as the transition to a future that is still to be invented – the very idea of political action, while demanded at every point by the fury of the text, is at the same time rendered incoherent. The actual is intolerable, but also unshakable, and this is the corollary of Gaddis’ representational dilemma: the failure to produce any plausible connection between subjectivity and history is, simply restating this problem, the failure to produce a political subject. This representational flaw, as Gaddis implicitly understands, is founded on a choice: Gaddis’ escape from didacticism into modernist truth follows McCandless into his more literal exile from the possibility of compromised engagement. The singular pathos and genius of Carpenter’s Gothic is that Gaddis separates himself from McCandless only by aligning himself with him. For the unforgivable choice made by McCandless is one for which, by exposing it, Gaddis does not forgive himself. Across the continent of Africa from Gaddis’ imagined Mozambique, Pepetela will raise precisely the question that Gaddis cannot: the question of the impossibility of the present. But despite its title, A Geração da Utopia does not immediately present itself as a utopian narrative at all. On the contrary, its central impulse seems to concern the death of Utopia, specifically, the descent of former Angolan revolutionaries into either deliberate political mystification 6

G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. Leo Rauch, Indianapolis: IN, 1988, 24.

The Identity of Identity and Difference

187

or disillusion and intellectual cynicism. (The main character, whose nom de guerre is Sábio or “Savant”, is in fact McCandless’ thirdworld counterpart). The revolution has died, but it lives on as the husk of Utopia which “today stinks, like any other putrefying corpse” (“E hoje cheira mal, como qualquer corpo em putrefacção”).7 This is allegorized in any number of ways, but for now, I will limit myself to one. One of the characters is named Mundial, or “Global”. The name is originally the nom de guerre of a guerrilla who takes as his name the worldwide contagion of the third-world anti-colonial movements that dismantled classical imperialism. By the end of the novel, this same Mundial has become the representative of the new economic globalization as the broker of government contracts to foreign businesses, coming at last to stand for global capital itself, “the most vicious capitalism yet seen on this earth” (“o capitalismo mais bárbaro que já se viu sobre a Terra”).8 This is far from an unfamiliar narrative structure in African fiction of the last quarter of the twentieth century: the “novel of disillusionment” is a veritable genre. Our first citation encapsulates the movement of the novel as a whole, the sclerosis of political and social invention into rigid bureaucratic orthodoxy: I was thirteen years old when Luanda mobilized en masse to greet the heroes of liberation .… We marched, we listened to the stories of the elders come back from the bush, we sang revolutionary songs, we invented that dance-march that exploded over the entire Country, mixed of patriotic fervor and creative imagination. And then they wanted to discipline us. They said, you must march like soldiers, you are the future soldiers. We could no longer do those crazy moves that got everyone going, go forward, a step to the side, one to the back, a crazy little twist in the middle. Even during Carnaval, years later, one could only dance like the soldiers, the groups gave up dancing. They liquidated the imagination.9 7

Pepetela, A Geração da Utopia (The Utopian Generation), Lisbon, 1992, 240 (my translations). 8 Ibid., 277. 9 Ibid., 361: “Eu tinha treze anos quando Luanda se mobilizou em massa para receber os heróis da libertação .... Marchávamos, ouvíamos os relatos dos mais velhos vindos das matas, cantávamos as cancões revolucionárias, inventámos aquela marcha-dança que se espalhou por tudo o País, misto de fervor patriótico e imaginação criativa. E depois quiseram enquadrar-nos. Disseram, devem marchar como os soldados, vocês

188

Nicholas Brown

Our second citation, however, will perform a precise inversion of the first. Here collective joy will initially be manufactured, in bad faith, by a group of former guerillas hoping to profit from collective misery. Mundial and others back a new church, and in a climactic scene they work up the crowd into a fervor of religious joy that is mainly channeled towards filling the coffers of the church with “the money and the baubles and even the shirts” (“o dinheiro e as poucas jóias e até mesmo as camisas”) of the celebrants. But for all that, this scene, the final scene in the novel, is deeply ambiguous. The energies of this multitude (Pepetela’s word), once released, cannot be so easily recontained, overflowing the boundaries set for them by Elias’ church. Carnaval returns: Everybody dancing and kissing and touching, dancing belly to belly even in the aisles and hallways and later in the square in front of the Luminar and in the streets nearby ... toward the markets and the streets, the beaches and the slums, in self-multiplying processions like in Carnaval, leaving the Luminar to reach the World and Hope10

This scene marks the re-emergence of the same musical collective joy that had been seen last at the moment of independence, fifteen years earlier, when “the multitudes were singing the slogans of independence with equal fervor” (“as multidões [estavam] cantando as palavras-de-ordem da independência com igual fervor”).11 The movement from creative joy to bureaucratic regimentation is answered by a move from the culture industry to creative joy. But the power of this reversal derives from its ambiguity, precisely from the fact that the creative joy of the poor is organized for profit initially. The powers thus magnified then struggle against this arrangement and

são os futuros soldados. Já não podíamos dar aqueles passos malucos que arrancavam palmas a toda a gente, vai para a frente, um passo para o lado, volta para trás, uma piada no meio. Mesmo no Carnaval, anos mais tarde, só se podia marchar como os soldados, os grupos deixaram de dançar. Liquidaram a imaginação.” 10 “Todo o povo dançando e se beijando e se tocando, se massembando mesmo nas filas e nos corredores e depois no largo à frente do Luminar e nas ruas adjacentes ... a caminho dos mercados e das casas, das praias e dos muceques, em cortejos se multiplicando como no carnaval, do Luminar partindo felizes para ganhar o Mundo e a Esperança.” 11 Ibid., 375.

The Identity of Identity and Difference

189

must be, ever after – the novel ends here without a period – either placated or repressed. This is a familiar dialectic, probably originating with Marx and given contemporary expression by Hardt and Negri. But for all the excitement generated by the re-emergence of this collective joy – and always keeping in mind that its conditions of possibility are nothing if not dire – we have to note the relation of this moment to the earlier one it echoes. The earlier moment of political, social, and aesthetic creativity bore all of the problems associated with a Leninist vanguard party – but it was capable of delivering the coup de grâce to an empire; and it might, but for superpower realpolitik, have been able to deliver much more. One must ask of Pepetela’s multitude the same thing one must ask of Hardt and Negri’s: how can it become a political subject? Despite their radically different settings and techniques, despite the different stakes being played for in the lives represented in each, the fundamental representational dilemma in both Carpenter’s Gothic and A Geração da Utopia is the same. How can one represent Utopia – by which I mean here the bare existence of political possibility – when there is no political subject available, no class, party, or movement, that might conceivably make such a possibility actual, and that might, in Hegelian terms, make it concrete? Only once this ground is established does the real difference that passes through the two novels become apparent. The problem in Carpenter’s Gothic remains implicit, hidden in the circularity of the novel’s self-condemnation: the novel can see no way out of the present, no viable opening for the creation of a political subject, and so produces the present as one with no way out – but this very structure is radically condemned, in the figure of McCandless, by the narrative itself. In A Geração da Utopia, however, the problem can be made explicit: the question becomes that of the contemporary Angolan poor, the multitudes whose labor is deemed superfluous by capital, but who nonetheless have recourse to no other system of satisfying their needs than capitalism – and who do not (or do not yet) exist for themselves as a movement or class. I have suggested elsewhere that this relationship – African literature as the making-explicit of problems that canonical modernism circles without being able to formulate – is a more general

190

Nicholas Brown

one.12 I hope to have in some measure demonstrated here that the “identity of identity and difference” – the positing of an internal frame or point of identification which then shows up a specific difference – enables one to produce a truth about Gaddis that one could not access without reference to Pepetela, and to produce a truth about Pepetela that one could not access without reference to Gaddis, thereby producing one more line of flight from the insularity of our separate literary fields. It is worth pointing out, finally, that the difference I hope to have established between the two texts is not idealist in the bad sense: that is, it does not posit its own existence as outside history, as the relationship between two opposed essences. Rather, it is grounded in the mundane but fateful difference between economies that can afford to keep the appearance of the rift between capital and superfluous human labor at bay and those that cannot. But I will suggest that in a final twist, this genuine difference, the implicit versus explicit posing of the question of political subjectivity, is itself incomplete and on its way to something else. Like Hardt and Negri’s multitude (by whose own admission the concept of the multitude is still “poetic”13), Pepetela’s Angolan multitude has no project; it is not a political subject; its obscure desires can be mobilized for ill as well as for good. The explosive political potential of the global poor is only implicit, in-itself. The question posed by the juxtaposition of these novels is now this: how to make this potential explicit, to move from the poetry of the multitude to the prose of a possible politics?

12

See n.5 above. Nicholas Brown and Imre Szeman, “What is the Multitude? Questions for Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri”, Cultural Studies IXX/3 (May 1995), 372. 13

WORLD LITERATURE: A RECEDING HORIZON PIER PAOLO FRASSINELLI AND DAVID WATSON

For transnational literary studies – a growing field devoted to studying literature as a deterritorialized and unsynchronized formation cutting across the spatio-temporal coordinates of the nation-state – thinking critically about the notion of world literature invites a set of pointed questions: how is this field related to the discipline of comparative literature, for which world literature has traditionally represented a legitimating ideal? Is there anything significantly new in current debates about world literature and the ways it is being framed? And, not least, is there such a thing as world literature, besides the list of literary works that are regularly anthologized under this heading, and how can this category be conceptualized productively? Questions regarding how to think of literature outside of national paradigms are certainly not new, even if their ubiquity has been exacerbated of late by the pervasive influence of globalization discourse.1 Such questions have always circulated in comparative literature, which, as Susan Bassnett suggests, has “carried with it a sense of transcendence of the narrowly nationalistic” since its beginnings.2 Thus, as the qualifier transnational is increasingly attached to disciplines dedicated to national literatures – “transnational American Studies” and the like – it works to bring these area studies closer to the domain of comparative literature. Rey Chow accordingly notes that the term “comparative” functions increasingly “in tandem or interchangeably with such words as ‘diverse,’ ‘global,’ ‘international,’ ‘transnational’” to define a broader framework for

1

Another set of crucial questions that would have to be asked here revolves around whether and how the expansion of transnational literary studies reflects the emergence of what Etienne Balibar describes as new “kinds of identities, interests and norms which, seen from a national point of view, escape sovereignty and cross boundaries” (Étienne Balibar, “Strangers and Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship”, lecture at McMaster University, 16 March 2006, on line at: http://www.europeanstudiesalliance.org/calendar/sp07events/BalibarPaper.pdf 16). Even though we will not be able to directly address them, these questions should be kept in mind. 2 Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: An Introduction, Oxford, 1993, 21.

192

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

literary studies than the narrowly national,3 so that the globalization of the literary canon in recent years may be viewed as the “‘comp-litization’ of national literatures throughout the humanities”.4 The question, then, is what is the common ground between comparative literature and transnational literary studies? A crucial point of intersection is the notion of world literature: Goethe’s Weltliteratur, which was the forerunner of contemporary transnational literary paradigms such as global literature or the literature of the planet. In principle, comparative literature has always taken world literature as its domain; in practice European literature has remained central to the discipline.5 Still, even if falling short of what Edward Said describes as Goethe’s “grandly utopian vision” of a “vast synthesis of the world’s literary production”,6 comparative literature engages with world literature as a field that functions as something like a horizon for transnational literary studies. If transnational literary studies involves an outward movement, across national and linguistic boundaries and away from national frameworks, it heads inevitably towards the meeting between area studies and comparative literature – the very shift that Gayatri Spivak calls for in Death of a Discipline,7 and the terrain that Goethe, Eric Auerbach and Leo Spitzer had already started to map. After all, as David Damrosch points out, once a text travels and is read outside its local or national culture, how else to understand it other than as a synecdoche of the virtual library of world literature, encompassing in

3

Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work, Durham: NJ, 2006, 72. 4 Emily Apter, “Global Translatio: The ‘Invention’ of Comparative Literature, Istanbul, 1933”, in Debating World Literature, ed. Christopher Prendergast, London, 2004, 76. 5 Franco Moretti, for instance, suggests that comparative literature has been a “modest intellectual enterprise, fundamentally limited to Western Europe, and mostly revolving around the river Rhine (German philologists working on French literature). Not much more” (Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, in Debating World Literature, 148). 6 Edward Said, “Introduction to the Fiftieth-Anniversary Edition”, in Eric Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton: NJ, 2003, xvi. 7 See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline, New York, 2003.

World Literature

193

its broadest sense “all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language”?8 All of this sounds relatively straightforward: transnational studies displaces the national framework for the analysis of literary works, genres and histories, and repositions them within a larger, global literary context that matches with what comparative literature describes as world literature. In this formulation, world literature marks a series of intersections between diverse literary works and traditions, between different bodies of literature, and between literature and the planet. It also functions as a contact zone between various area studies and the field of comparative literature in its most expansive, rather than narrowly European, sense. It is not clear, however, that it is possible to think of world literature as anything other than an aporia, a “wild idea, unattainable in practice”, as Claudio Guillén objects.9 Satellite imagery has provided us with images of the globe, but we are still lacking an image that would allow us to “think of literature as a totality”, as René Wellek and Austin Warren phrased the interpretative challenge of accessing, aggregating, and classifying the heterogeneous variety of the planet’s literatures.10 This is a problem of numerical excess, of the unmanageable number of works and languages in the world, even if we were to restrict our count to the works in global circulation, as Damrosch suggests. But is also a taxonomical problem: what classifying system can render the literature of the world intelligible, describing both the relationships between works and the significance of an individual work within the larger aggregation? Operating at this scale, literary studies runs into the problem diagnosed by Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, as the absence of a ground that “enables thought to operate upon the entities of our world, to put them in order, to divide them into classes, to group them according to names that designate their similarities and their differences”.11

8

David Damrosch, What Is World Literature?, Princeton: NJ, 2003, 4. Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature, trans. Cola Franzen, Cambridge: MA, 1993, 38. 10 René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature, New York, 1984, 10. 11 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London, 1970, xvii. 9

194

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

World literature, as a concept, therefore harbors two distinct meanings: an incalculable, sheer multiplicity, an ever-receding, vertigo-inducing horizon; or a representable object of knowledge. To move between these possibilities, if that is at all possible, might very well require something like what Neil Hertz, in his The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime, describes as a “moment of blockage in sublime scenarios”: “the scholar’s wish is for the moment of blockage, when an indefinite and disarrayed sequence is resolved (at whatever sacrifice) into a one-to-one confrontation, when numerical excess can be converted into that supererogatory identification with the blocking agent that is the guarantor of the self’s own integrity as an agent”.12 Hertz is concerned here with a proliferation of textual detail and interpretative possibilities, but this description functions equally well as an account of the critic’s mastery of the global literary archive via demarcations and delimitations, a process frequently involving both the imposition of a particular form on this archive and its reproduction as an object of knowledge that can be accessed by the critic’s gaze. This is in fact the governing logic of two recent interventions in this debate that have drawn significant and controversial attention: Franco Moretti’s account of world literature in his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory and elsewhere, and Pascale Casanova’s description of a world republic of letters – a “world literary space” that comes replete with its own internal political, economic, social and linguistic orders – in La république mondiale des letters, translated in 2004 as The World Republic of Letters. The problem for both Moretti and Casanova is how to convert the metonymical excess of the globe’s literature, what Moretti describes as the “the world and the unread”,13 into a manageable whole. With both proceeding as if the notion of world literature has received scant attention since Goethe and Marx, their object of investigation is presented as a newly rediscovered idea of literature as a “planetary system” or,14 in Casanova’s phrase, “the interdependence

12

Neil Hertz, The End of the Line: Essays on Psychoanalysis and the Sublime, New York, 1985, 60. 13 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, 149. 14 Ibid., 148.

World Literature

195

of local phenomena” that structure “the literary world as a whole”.15 But for this to be more manageable than working one’s way through all of the unread texts in the world, it is necessary for Moretti and Casanova to assume that the various relations between texts are far fewer in number than the amount of literary works making up world literature. If, as they propose, the study of literature is to become the study of the structural relationships that constitute the literary world, then this relational system cannot be idiosyncratic or arbitrary, which is to say dependent upon and constituted by, the ungovernable interactions between individual texts and local literary phenomena, but must follow a small number of basic principles. For Moretti, these principles are derived from Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system school of economic history, which, in Moretti’s synthesis, reads modern capitalism as “simultaneously one, and unequal: with a core, and a periphery (and a semiperiphery) that are bound together in a relationship of growing inequality”. The same, we are told, applies to literature: “one literature (Weltliteratur, singular, as in Goethe and Marx), or perhaps, better, one world literary system (of inter-related literatures); but a system which is different from what Goethe and Marx had hoped for, because it’s profoundly unequal”.16 As in Wallerstein’s economic history, Moretti’s world literary system proposes a periphery that is indebted to a center, from which it has imported its key literary “forms”, and in relation to which it is therefore dependent. The example offered by Moretti to validate this thesis is the history of the modern novel, from which he derives what he calls the “law of literary evolution”. It says, “in cultures that belong to the periphery of the literary system (which means: almost all cultures, inside and outside Europe), the modern novel first rises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a 15

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise, Cambridge: MA, 2004, 5. Moretti’s and Casanova’s evasion of the history of comparative literature makes it difficult to assess, for instance, how much Moretti’s rejection of close reading as a comparative method owes to the “French School”, whose chief proponent, Paul Van Tieghem, suggested that methods of comparison take as their enabling condition the elimination of all “aesthetic, critical, and speculative inquiry into the meaning of literature” (Paul Gordon, The Critical Double: Figurative Meaning in Aesthetic Discourse, Tuscaloosa: AL, 1995, 129) – which is to say “close reading”. 16 Moretti, “Conjunctures on World Literature”, 149-50.

196

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials”.17 In other words, world literature comes into being through the diffusion and evolution of literary forms. Being exported from Western Europe, the novel is imported by the rest of the world through a process of transculturation. The “foreign form” of the novel is assimilated by the peripheral culture, imbued with local content, and enunciated by a “local narrative voice”.18 This law is followed by others, which Moretti had already sketched in his The Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900. They postulate that this “compromise is usually prepared by a massive wave of West European translations”, and that “the compromise itself is generally unstable”, but “in those rare instances when the impossible programme succeeds, we have genuine formal revolutions”.19 In line with Moretti’s deliberate provocation – literary history as a “distant” or “second hand” reading or “a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading”20 – these laws are supported not by empirical validation, based on actual textual analyses, but by a reading of selected national and regional literary histories.21 Distant reading takes as its object not texts and their content, but either the small elements of the literary work, its “devices, themes, tropes”, or larger literary frameworks, literary “genres and systems”.22 What is elided is the text itself. In fact, there is a double exclusion at work here. In the first instance, the world literary system is reproduced by the critic independently from the hermeneutic processes of reading. Secondly, world literature is flattened to an account of large and small, but not intermediate, forms. The content of texts and the practice of reading are elided in this construction of world literature in favor of the creation of frameworks whereby to depict the global spread and uneven development of forms. In short, what Moretti does is to perform a kind of formal askesis upon world literature, which is slimmed down to an account of the export and transformation of western literary forms: the content of a text that 17

Ibid., 152. Ibid., 158. 19 Ibid., 152. 20 Ibid., 151. 21 Ibid., 153-54. 22 Ibid., 151; emphases in original. 18

World Literature

197

would anchor it in a local reality is not the main concern for the comparativist. Pascale Casanova, as will become clear soon, needs to perform a similar reduction to arrive at her model of a “world republic of letters”. Both constructions of world literature then, amount to a flattening out of the world literary space – a problem to which we will return. Pascale Casanova’s “world republic of letters” or “world literary space” shares many of the formal qualities of Moretti’s image of world literature.23 Even though her main influences are Fernand Braudel and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of the literary field, rather than Wallerstein’s world-system theory, for her world literature inhabits an equally unequal world literary space that is organized by translators, publishers, and international prizes. Like Moretti, she also uses a model of uneven development to offer a simultaneously diachronic and synchronic account of world literature: a diachronic literary history is pressed into service as a means to map “the literary field in space and time, or, better perhaps, in a time that has become space”.24 Casanova’s diachronic account of literature is inherently a progressivist notion of aesthetic development: “writing the history of literature is a paradoxical activity that consists in placing it in historical time and then showing how literature gradually tears itself away from this temporality, creating in turn its own temporality”.25 This history of literature is an account of the literary aesthetic overcoming history, the nation, and the political, and generating its own autonomous space.26 It is, more concretely, a teleological 23 How, in terms of its expansiveness, does Casanova’s “world republic of letters” compare to Moretti’s “world literature”, or rather the “world and the unread”? She suggests, “my purpose in analyzing the world republic of letters is not to describe all of the world’s letters”, but “to bring about a change of perspective” (Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 4). Yet at the same time, it is not clear what might be the boundaries or internal delimitations of the systematic literary taxonomy she offers. 24 Ibid., 101. 25 Ibid., 350. 26 As Casanova admits, there might be another end to literary history after this teleological end. She suggests that commercial publishing and the economics of globalization are endangering the autonomous literary space she seeks to map through the proliferation of popular texts mimicking some of the distinctive features of the autonomous literature she values, but with none of its substance (ibid., 168-72). Is this re-inscription of literature in a politico-economical structure not, however, a sign that the history Casanova maps is cyclical rather than linear?

198

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

narrative terminating with Samuel Beckett’s “invention of the most absolute literary autonomy”, which for Casanova is identical to his flight from any kind of “national, linguistic, political, and aesthetic rootedness”.27 Transposed onto a map of a literary field, this historical narrative frames the “world republic of letters” as a field of unequal development. Literary autonomy, or what Casanova calls the “Greenwich Meridian of Literature” which she associates with the publishing industry in Paris, is reached by only a few. Yet, in her account, it centers and structures the literary field to such a degree that it becomes a figure of literary modernity. Accordingly, the “aesthetic distance” of a work from this ideal also implies a “temporal remove from the canons that … define the literary present”.28 Casanova’s argument is that the field of literature has its own spatial and temporal coordinates, which are determined in relation to the “Greenwich Meridian”. The aesthetic remove of a work from the ideals of autotelic literature is one way to determine its position in this field. This aesthetic distance also translates into a temporal distance, however, which means that the work is positioned in terms of its temporal relation to the “literary present”. It follows that a perhaps unintended effect of Casanova’s suggestion that a “literature … relatively dependent on politics” remains distant from the literary “Greenwich Meridian”,29 is that her literary field ends up reproducing a geography in which much of the postcolonial world is positioned as peripheral to literary modernity. What is clear is that the form given here to world literature is radically centripetal: the literary “Greenwich Meridian” functions as a center of 27 Ibid., 318-20. This autonomous literary field is in many ways similar to what Bourdieu describes as an emergent “literary field” that enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from different types of external restraints, and, indeed, one way of understanding Casanova’s “world republic of letters” is as a “literary field” expanded to a planetary scale. It is doubtful, however, whether this literary field is as autonomous, at least in terms of national contexts, as Casanova suggests. As Gisèle Sapiro has argued, the relative autonomy of the French literary field is enabled by state control, which allows the center of Casanova’s “world republic of letters” to maintain a “certain degree of autonomy from the market” (Gisèle Sapiro, “The Literary Field between the State and the Market”, Poetics XXXI [October 2003], 442). 28 Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 88. 29 Ibid., 39.

World Literature

199

gravity for the literary field, narrowing the potential array of literary relationality to the relationship a work of literature enters into with literary modernity and the institutions that maintain it. There is no clear distinction between national and international literatures to demarcate and define the field of world literature: “the national and the international are not separate spheres; they are two opposed stances, struggling within the same domain”.30 Instead, Casanova offers an account of the literary field, in which its structure is recapitulated by the relation between each literary text and the literary “Greenwich Meridian”: each literary text is constituted by its hierarchical relation to literary modernity, but not to other forms of relationality which, for instance, could link together different “peripheral” literatures.31 To be sure, Moretti’s model of world literature follows the lineaments of an uneven globe, divided between centers and peripheries, more precisely and literally than Casanova’s one. Casanova is more concerned with how the internal mechanisms of a world literary space duplicate a logic of uneven development, than with political and geographical correspondences between the literary field and the world. Yet for both critics, the principle of unevenness is mobilized to posit a systematized account of world literature in which the unequal relations between the constituent parts of this literary world are pressed into service as a way of mapping a literary history. In both cases, the model used to explain the appearance of world literature ends up reproducing what the geographer J.M. Blaut terms “Eurocentric diffusionism” – the equation of modernization with westernization. In this “colonizer’s model of the world”: Europeans are seen as the “makers of history”. Europe eternally advances, progresses, modernizes. The rest of the world advances more sluggishly, or stagnates: it is “traditional society”. Therefore, the world has a permanent geographical center and a permanent 30

Pascale Casanova, “Literature as a World”, New Left Review, XXXI (JanuaryFebruary 2005), 81-82. 31 Christopher Prendergast comments that the problem with the literary field Casanova maps is that no room is made in it for other relations than “relations of competition” (Christopher Prendegast, “The World Republic of Letters”, in Debating World Literature, 7). It is tempting to add that the rules of this competition are exceedingly strict: there is only one move that can get you to win.

200

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson periphery: an Inside and an Outside. Inside leads, Outside lags. Inside innovates, Outside imitates.32

As Blaut explains, this view is dependant upon the idea that “Europe was more advanced and more progressive than all other regions prior to 1492”, and that the “economic and social modernization of Europe is fundamentally a result of Europe’s internal qualities, not of the interaction with the societies of Africa, Asia and America after 1492”.33 Diffusionism, as an ideological structure, depends then on not only notions of European superiority and the belatedness of the rest of the world, but also on the belief that European advancement takes place in pristine isolation. This view is uncannily echoed by Moretti’s suggestion that “the independent paths”34 – which is to say independent from foreign influence – taken towards the novel in France, Britain and Spain are exceptions to the general rules and routes observable in the spread of the novel across the globe.35 For both Casanova and Moretti, self-originating western literary modes, whether in terms of literary autonomy or the form of the novel, serve as a starting point for conceptualizing a world literary space. These modes spread everywhere and anywhere, creating a system in which literature is not solely the province of the West in all its geographical specificity, but in which there is an irreducible association between literature anywhere and the determinations given to literature in Western Europe. In other words, they systematize the literature of the globe by subsuming it under one diffusionist model of the literary. What are the dangers and limits of such a way of imagining world literature and the space through which it circulates – a way that clearly 32 J.M. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History, New York, 1993, 1. 33 Ibid., 2. 34 Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature”, 60. 35 To be fair, we must note that Moretti acknowledges his mistake in “More Conjectures on World Literature”, where he concedes that: “early English novels were written, in Fielding’s words, ‘after the manner of Cervantes’ (or of someone else), thus making clear that a compromise between local and foreign forms occurred there as well. And if this was the case, then there was no ‘autonomous development’ in western Europe, and the idea that forms have, so to speak, a different history at the core and at the periphery crumbles. The world-system model may be useful at other levels, but has no explanatory power at the level of form” (Franco Moretti, “More Conjectures on World Literature”, New Left Review, XX [March-April 2003], 79).

World Literature

201

opens up problems regarding what Rey Chow describes as the “politics of comparison”?36 It might very well be that Moretti and Casanova run the risk of reestablishing a number of interrelated divisions: between global and local literatures, and between comparative literature and area studies. The various asymmetrical relations, inscribed in their respective models of the literature of the world, may very well reproduce a literary system in which a significant segment of world literature remains, not so much unread, as incalculable by any disciplinary approach other than the nationstate based approaches of area studies. There is an illuminating moment in this regard in Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory. In his discussion of the provincial novel, Moretti suggests that “like the provinciae of antiquity, subject to Rome, but denied full citizenship, the provinces are ‘negative’ entities, defined by what is not there; which also explains, by the way, why one cannot map provincial novels – you cannot map what is not there”.37 To map or describe “provinces” is, from this perspective, to perform a catachresis, the aberrant imposition of a name or figure on something that resists naming and description; it is to fill in arbitrarily a blind spot in your vision. This returns us to Moretti’s account of the evolution of the novel. If the evolution of the novel is to be described purely in terms of the export and transformation of a literary form, then the places to which the novel is exported are also defined by “what is not there” but derived from elsewhere: they stand in the same relation to the center of Moretti’s world system as the provinces of Rome stood to the center of the Roman empire. These places and the local pressures that their realities enforce on the novel form are the negative elements in the history of the evolution of the novel. These elements are provincial, and their presentation, graphic or otherwise, even if mediated by processes of distant reading, raises the specter of a possibly catachrestic imposition of form on a receding, barely visible ground. Moretti’s excursion into a discussion of provincial forms then raises issues regarding the systematic and inclusive nature of his project and his depiction of a global literary space. It might well be 36 Rey Chow, “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies”, English Literary History, LXXII/2 (Summer 2004), 304. 37 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees, New York, 2005, 53 (emphasis in original).

202

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

that what we are offered is little more than the imposition of a tropological form on an incommensurable ground, rather than an abstract map of a clearly delineated territory.38 Moreover, if the provinces of world literature cannot be mapped as such by comparative literature, if they can only be considered in terms of their relation to a different, foreign literary network, then it is not clear how Moretti expands the purview of comparative literature beyond its narrowly European focus. Are the literatures that resist mapping here not exactly those that are the subject of area studies and postcolonial criticism? Does Moretti not run the risk of making these literatures invisible to the calculations of comparative literature, thereby returning the task of studying them to those fields he ostensibly wants to include within the framework of comparative literature? Similar questions can be posed regarding Casanova’s “world republic of letters”. It is certainly possible to suggest that what Casanova offers is an account of the politics and institutions that determine the literary field. Accordingly, she rejects the valuations of critics who rely on ahistorical and universalizing readings of literary works – a practice she scorns as ethnocentric. But for her “political, social, national, gender, ethnic” struggles have an equivocal relation to the literary field: these struggles are “refracted, diluted, deformed, or transformed according to a literary logic”, which implies that the socio-cultural and political determinations operative in the literary sphere surface inside it in a mediated form.39 What cannot be systematized and subsumed by this classificatory logic, however, is 38 It is worth noting that this possibility also complicates other aspects of Moretti’s project. Moretti, as Christopher Prendergast discusses in his “Evolution and Literary History”, frames his comparativist project as a mode of scientific inquiry via “a general appeal to the validity of scientific method as such; and a particular appeal to the life sciences, crucially evolutionary theory” (Christopher Prendergast, “Evolution and Literary History: A Response to Franco Moretti”, New Left Review, XXXIV [July-August 2005], 42-43). His depiction of the spread and evolution of the novel is grounded in an appeal to the truth-value and objectivity of scientific inquiry, and the graphic presentations of this evolutionary development in his Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory thus claim for themselves a kind of mathematical, representational value, according to which they are abstract formal depictions of observable and objective processes in the world. Yet, it seems that these forms function more as a figural rather than mathematical depiction of these processes. 39 Casanova, “Literature as a World”, 72.

World Literature

203

the relationship between the politics of the literary and the politics of the world, which remain incommensurable to each other. This incommensurability is a necessary condition of the historical dynamics she delineates: she displaces aesthetic autonomy at the end of literary history, which culminates in the achievement of the literary freedom she associates with literature’s independence from the world. But this is not the case for works that have not yet acceded fully to the “world republic of letters”, which according to Casanova are still negotiating conflicting pressures exerted at the same time by the nation-state and by the autonomous world literary system, which remains firmly grounded in the Parisian world of letters. The distinction Casanova draws within the body of world literature therefore runs the risk of occluding, like Moretti, literatures entangled with the discourses of the nation-state. Casanova’s discussion of the “Faulknerian Revolution” is instructive in terms of the economy of this gesture.40 The William Faulkner that matters for her is the Faulkner of Valery Larbaud – the Faulkner that has acceded to modernity and serves as a model for writers in León, Algeria, and Latin America. The Faulkner of the American South, that “rural and archaic world prey to magical styles of thought and trapped in the closed life of families and villages”,41 as Casanova describes the entangled discourses of race, gender, and class that constitute this “archaic world”, is gestured towards only to be rendered invisible. We do not see here either the Faulkner who in texts such as Absalom, Absalom! attempts to position the American South within a broader transnational network constituted by slavery – the Faulkner that mattered to Wilson Harris, for instance.42 The point here is not simply to point towards those issues that Casanova does not take up, it is rather that her model of the “world republic of letters” operates like a disciplinary machine determining what can and cannot be discussed. As in Moretti’s “abstract models”, this leads to what appear to be internal divisions within the body of work of a single 40

Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 336-45. Ibid., 337. 42 See Richard Godden, “Absalom, Absalom!, Haiti and Labor History: Reading Unreadable Revolutions”, English Literary History, LXI/3 (Fall 1994), 685-720; and Vera Kutzinski, “Borders and Bodies: The United States, America, and the Caribbean”, CR: The New Centennial Review, I/2 (Fall 2001), 55-88. 41

204

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

author; and as such, authorizes us to talk about, for instance, the Faulkner of the “world republic of letters” as something distinct from the Faulkner of US American studies or any kind of hemispheric American studies project. Divisions like these correspond exactly to disciplinary distinctions between fields that take world literature as their horizon, and area studies that take the literature of a region or a particular nation-state as their object. This is to say that, like Moretti, Casanova reinscribes, rather than deterritorializes, the disciplinary and hermeneutic boundaries of comparative literature and area studies, of world literature and local literary productions. The reason why these boundaries return with such regularity in Moretti and Casanova relates directly to what, in both cases, is a diffusionist model of world literature. This model has internalized the unevenness or asymmetricality of this field as an a priori principle, or perhaps as an enabling condition, for the spread of particular literary formations. It is by acceding through a vertical movement to modernity that Faulkner is taken up by the world literary system, while being internally divided at the same time. According to the same logic of uneven differentiation, it is by being an exception to a general rule that the novel in England, France, and Spain has not only developed, but also become a rule for novelistic practices elsewhere. By being differentiated from other literary productions – differentiated as exceptional exceptions – the authors, texts and literary fields identified with these nations are posited as exemplars for world literature: they are the lenses through which to interpret and evaluate the works from those areas of the literary world that have not proven to be exceptions to these same rules. To what extent is this model of world literature a reproduction of a “Eurocentric will-to-power already centrifuged and spread across the globe”?43 This is perhaps primarily a way of asking whether a model proposed for world literature must simply reproduce the contours and inequalities of an unevenly developed world-system. It is not clear whether Moretti, at least, would have much trouble with this proposition. In a puzzling reversal of Marx’s famous dictum, in the Theses on Feurbach, on the relation between philosophy and praxis, 43 Armando Gnisci, “Manifesto for a Revolution of the West”, CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, I/1 (1999), 2, on line at: http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol1/iss1/.

World Literature

205

he writes, “Theories will never abolish inequality: they can only hope to explain it”.44 It is also not clear whether Moretti follows the model he has in mind with absolute fidelity. As Jonathan Arac has noted, Moretti’s first thesis presents a significant distortion of the theoretical paradigm on which it relies. Although Wallerstein’s project is historical, his model is a synchronic one, in that core and periphery define each other in a reciprocal relation that constitutes the worldsystem at any specific stage of its development. But in Moretti’s use of Wallerstein, this synchronic relation is turned into a diachronic one, in which the center influences the periphery, although there is little room to register the opposite influence – the influence of the periphery on the center itself. As Arac points out, “what in Wallerstein is spatial becomes, in Moretti, temporal; and the result comes closer than Moretti might wish to the old priorities of western comparatism and also to the stadial (‘stages’) model of development theories”.45 But, besides Moretti’s misreading of Wallerstein, is it legitimate to deduce the laws of “literary evolution” or the “world republic of letters” from a diffusionist model that privileges movements from the supposed center to the periphery? Efraín Kristal, for instance, in a detailed riposte to Moretti that also touches on his privileging of the novel as an exemplary form in literary history, invokes an alternative model of transnational literary history in which: … the novel is not necessarily the privileged genre for understanding literary developments of social importance in the periphery; in which the West does not have a monopoly over the creation of forms that count; in which themes and forms can move in several directions – from the centre to the periphery, from the periphery to the centre, from one periphery to another, while some original forms of consequence may not move much at all; and in which strategies of transfer in any direction may involve rejections, swerves, as well as transformations of various kinds, even from one genre to another.46 44

Moretti, “More Conjunctures on World Literature”, 77. Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?”, New Left Review, XVI (July-August 2002), 38. 46 Efraín Kristal, “Considering Coldly… A Response to Franco Moretti”, New Left Review, XV (May-June 2002), 73-74. It might be possible that this account of literary evolution and transculturation is only applicable to the form and history of the novel. Moretti suggests, in his “More Conjectures on World Literature”, that “novels would

45

206

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

In response to the critiques directed at his theses, Moretti’s defense is in line with his neo-positivist premises, based on the argument that what he has proposed is merely a descriptive, analytical model. It is not his fault, he explains, if the analysis shows that “movement from one periphery to another (without passing through the centre) is almost unheard of; that movement from periphery to centre is less rare, but still quite unusual, while that from centre to the periphery is by far the most frequent”47 – a description of literary movements that serves equally well as a summary of the various trajectories traced by Casanova. On the face of it, this account seems difficult to accept. Recent scholarship on South-South literary and cultural relations, such as the work that is currently being done on the Indian Ocean,48 indicates the possibility of delineating alternative transnational connections to the dominant North-South or center-periphery paradigm. As this body of research helps to illustrate, the main problem with Casanova’s and Moretti’s construction of world literature, from which all the others derive, lies in their mapping of a world literary system defined by the rigid division between core and periphery. If this division might be justified in the economic field (but even here Wallerstein’s theories are not without their critics49), when we talk about literature things get a lot more complicated. The cultural and literary movements of modernity do not necessarily overlap with economic ones and the boundaries superimposed by geopolitical be representative, not of the entire system” of world literature, “but of its most mobile strata” (74). However, in the same essay Moretti reiterates that the same rules apply to all literary genres: “literary movements … depend on three broad variables – a genre’s potential market, its overall formalization and its use of language” (74). In other words, his qualification begs the question of why he postulates laws regarding “world literature”: if we can indeed talk about world literature as a system and even try to determine the laws that regulate its historical evolution, then surely we must be able to include all the known genres subsumed under the heading “literature”. 47 Ibid., 75-76. 48 See, for instance, Isabel Hofmeyr, “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives”, Social Dynamics, XXXIII/2 (December 2007), 3-32. 49 For a representative critique of Wallerstein’s version of world-system theory as a perpetuation of the prejudice that progress corresponds with the history of the “West”, see David Washbrook, “South Asia, the World System, and World Capitalism”, Journal of Asian Studies, IL/3 (August 1990), 479-508.

World Literature

207

divisions. Rather, these movements tend to cross such divisions and move in different directions: they cut across the confines of national cultures, as well as the boundaries that supposedly separate the European center and the various peripheries and semipheries of our world, and thereby the dichotomic construction of a North-South transnational literary axis. Instead of resuscitating a center-periphery paradigm then, it would seem more appropriate to think about a polycentric model of literary history50 and, more generally, a theory of cultural exchanges sufficiently complex and flexible to account both for how the cultures of the periphery interact with each other and are differently transformed by the encounter with western models and forms, and also for how these cultures appropriate western forms and materials according to modalities that radically transform both those materials and the cultural matrixes from which they come. Clearly, this change of perspective is not merely predicated on an empirical imperative to provide a more detailed and accurate account of the dynamics of the evolution of world literature, but is also motivated by political choices. Transnational literary studies is preoccupied with questions about what form to give to the literary world. But the modality of this form-giving and map-making, and its relation to other representations of the globe, cannot be excluded from broader discourses on the transnational – not if the transnational is to harbor an imagining of new possibilities which challenge and move beyond old prejudices and unwarranted assumptions about a “permanent geographical center and a permanent periphery”. R. Radhakrishnan has remarked that to “find a way out of the curse of ‘derivativeness’”, postcolonial cultures would have to “engage [themselves] in the multilateral demonstration that there is nothing that is not derivative”.51 Such a “multilateral demonstration” remains impossible without a working model to account for multiple forms of relationality within a world literary system. What is becoming clear is that models of world literature based on principles of unevenness are not conducive to imagining literary relations not haunted by the specters of diffusionism and 50

See, for instance, N. wa Thiong’o, Moving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms, Oxford, 1993. 51 R. Radhakrishnan, “Derivative Discourses and the Problem of Signification”, The European Legacy, VII/6 (December 2002), 790.

208

Pier Paolo Frassinelli and David Watson

derivativeness. Consequently, the task of transnational literary studies might very well be to discover the kind of equal footing for its comparative work gestured towards by Giorgio Agamben in his “In This Exile (Italian Diary, 1992-94)”: E.M. Forster relates how during one of his conversations with C.P. Cavafy in Alexandria, the poet told him: “You English cannot understand us: we Greeks went bankrupt a long time ago.” I believe that one of the few things that can be declared with certainty is that, since then, all the peoples of Europe (and, perhaps, all the peoples of the Earth) have gone bankrupt. We live after the failure of peoples .… As the Alexandrian poet might say today with a smile: “Now, at last, we can understand one another, because you too have gone bankrupt”.52

What would a world literature grounded on a principle of equivalence look like? What would a world literary system based not on exceptions, competitiveness, and the achievement of a normative modernity, but on the rejection of these claims to sovereignty, on economic and cultural bankruptcy offer us? These might very well be the questions that transnational literary studies, and a model of world literature that is still to come, would have to address.

52

Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino, Minneapolis: MN, 2000, 141.

THE ADVENTURES OF A TECHNIQUE: DODECAPHONISM TRAVELS TO BRAZIL FABIO AKCELRUD DURÃO AND JOSÉ ADRIANO FENERICK

Like so many other strong concepts, “transnationalism” already contains in its morphology the opposing forces that will coalesce once broader debates are consolidated. If at first the emphasis seems to fall on its “trans” prefix – suggestive of an effort to break barriers and borders, to stress movements and characterize a world of flows and fluxes – the noun still remains there, reminding one that all this apparent multiplicity is staged with its opposite as the necessary (regulating?) background. Furthermore, together with the idea of “beyond”, “trans-” also projects one “across”, thus suggesting a perspective from above, in which the objects of analysis will tend to become blurred and undifferentiated. To avoid both the reification of the nation (so easily expressed by spirit, character or some other essence), and its dissolution into excessive fluidity (so easily leading to abstraction and homogenization), it is best to focus on the implied hyphen – the tense space between unity and circulation, tradition and importation, with its imagined national communities and cosmopolitan practices or ideals. This essay investigates the conflict between the idea of a “musical nation” and its rupture through the introduction of a European, avant-garde compositional technique. Brazil is not in fact devoid of its own ironies, melancholy frustrations, and unexpected reappearances in this arena, as we illustrate below. Few revolutions in modern art were both as momentous and unambiguous as that of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method of composition. Occurring in parallel with the dissolution of a traditional perspective in painting and the omniscient narrator in literature, it surpassed both because of its systematic character: the very simple rule that in a twelve-note series no note should be repeated before all the others have appeared. From this innovation, a number of possible

210

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

procedures emerged, together with a new set of prohibitions, which completely reorganized and reconceptualized the very idea of what music was thought to be. History was waiting for the emergence of such serialism in music as it centralized this revolution: the tonal system itself, through its own internal development, furnished the means for its overcoming. This can be seen in the increasing lack of preparation of dissonances and the tendency to postpone their resolution, the accumulation of wandering chords, the use of chords with more than five notes, and the extension of modulation to ever more distant tonalities. The system of seven notes proved, however, so resistant to change that it survived, zombie-like, long after its demise was logically predicated. Schoenberg’s “revolution” therefore deserves all the force that this term may connote. Indeed, dodecaphonism’s importance can be derived not only from the artistic horizons it opened, but also from the theoretical findings it stimulated. Theodor Adorno provided an influential, albeit not still fully explored, interpretation of what was at stake with the development of the twelve-tone composition in his Philosophy of New Music.1 Embedded in the technique, he argued, were issues that influenced society as a whole; the musical form articulated vital social and psychological questions that were unconscious and in need of deciphering. In a clear continuation of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, in the Philosophy of New Music Adorno interprets Schoenberg and Stravinsky as exemplars of the two related dialectics of progress and regression. Put in very broad terms, the latter epitomized the progress of regression: recourse to past musical forms has as its precondition the fact that they are equally available, therefore devoid of any intrinsic necessity and binding character. Schoenberg’s music, in contrast, exhibited the idea of moving forward in the musical sphere, 1

Two reasons may account for this. First, only in 2006 did a completely reliable English translation of Adorno’s central book on music appear (see T.W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: MN, 2006); second, as Nho points out, historically the proper balance between philosophy and music has been difficult to maintain (see Myung-Woo Nho, Die Schönberg-Deutung Adornos und die Dialektik der Aufklärung: Musik in und jenseits der Dialektik der Aufklärung, Marburg, 2001). The two extremes, as a result of an increasingly powerful social division of labor, have tended to prevail: either philosophical musings on music without connection to its inner logic, or musical descriptions devoid of a broader conceptual import.

The Adventures of a Technique

211

that process of rationalization (in the Weberian sense of disenchantment or Entzauberung) whereby nothing can be justified by merely being given. The possibility of submitting everything to judgment corresponds to the positive drive of rationalization; its bleaker side lies in dominating the material to which it is applied. The twelve-tone technique represented an advance in relation to the tonal system because of the demythologization of the apparently natural hierarchies inherent in this system. Rather than an order ruled by the relationship between a tonic and its dominant, dodecaphonism presents a homogenized ideal of musical notes. All of them had the same status, to the point that the repetition of notes became anathema. With this move, the nature of music was radically reconfigured and transformed into something more general and abstract, because the note was considered in relation to twelve rather than seven basic possibilities and its accidentals, which made for more manageable material. The systematic character of the twelve-tone technique made this musical innovation mobile. Yet, travelling across the oceans was not merely a set of rules and insights to organize the notes of a score, but an entire worldview – a particular employment of reason with its own attendant promises and dangers. In sum, the adventures of the twelvetone row in Brazil stage, micrologically, the broader issues that are involved in projects of national modernization and import substitution. Ultimately, they reveal patterns of transnational circulation of organizing principles in western rationality itself. In the implantation of this technique, three questions need to be considered: the nationalist reaction to it; the difficulties composers faced when trying to make use of dodecaphonism; and the attempt made to appropriate it into popular music, which parallels the consolidation of the culture industry in Brazil. Dodecaphonism’s voyage to Brazil had one unmistakable bearer: Hans-Joachim Koellreutter. As in so many other cases, this important chapter in the country’s cultural history happened as a result of war, then impending. Without the political turbulence of the period, it seems unlikely that Koellreutter, a socialist activist, would have left Germany for Brazil in 1937. It is difficult to overestimate Koellreutter’s role as teacher and educator. Most of the important contemporary Brazilian composers, from serious music to that which

212

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

is called “popular”, had contact with him in one way or another. He not only introduced dodecaphonism to the country, but also developed a complete musical pedagogy of his own, which continues to be used today. In fact, even though Koellreutter acquainted himself with the technique while under the tutelage of Hermann Scherchen in Geneva and Budapest, he never composed anything similar to the Second Vienna School before his arrival in Brazil. The musician who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1937 was a young composer, but primarily a flute virtuoso. His first compositions in the country remind one more of Paul Hindemith than Schoenberg, with whom he had never had strong musical affinities. It was precisely because of Koellreutter’s role as a key representative of European music, and consequently as an educator and promoter of modern music, that he saw himself duty bound to adopt the twelve-tone technique early in the 1950s. By this time, dodecaphonism had already been established abroad, but remained virtually unknown in Brazil, which justified Koellreutter’s work of divulging the technique in an attempt to modernize musical composition. Indeed, from the start Koellreutter managed to gather around him Brazilian composers who would later become formative names in Brazilian music such as Cláudio Santoro, César GuerraPeixe and Eunice Katunda. He was also in close contact with intellectuals, music critics, and established Brazilian composers such as Heitor Villa-Lobos and Camargo Guarnieri. The result of the emphasis on group work was the creation of Música Viva in 1939, formed by students of Koellreutter, and which represented the first avant-garde collective music of Brazil.2 Several documents of the group have survived, including musical programs, letters, statements of purpose and so on, as collected by Carlos Kater in Música Viva e H.J. Koellreutter.3 Among them, one can find a manifesto, perhaps previously unpublished, which is particularly useful in showing the philosophy of the members of 2 This is not to say that there were no technically advanced compositions before the Música Viva, as in the case of Villa Lobos, but these could not be strictly conceived of as forming a vanguard. Música Viva’s contribution lies rather in the programmatic and collective nature of their project. 3 Carlos Kater, Música Viva e H.J. Koellreutter: Movimentos em direção à modernidade, São Paulo, 2001.

The Adventures of a Technique

213

Música Viva. Not only are musical innovation and freedom equated, but teaching and divulging musical techniques are also viewed as fundamental elements in the life of music. While ideas may be jumbled at points, the text still expresses the enthusiasm of bringing in the new: History registers now one more period of transformation. We are passing through a moment when one of the greatest movements of Humanity takes place .… Aware of this spiritual revolution which is spreading all over the Earth, and comprehending the imperatives of this new world, the Música Viva group demands an essentially altered behavior from the artist and especially the musician in view of the community; we condemn the individualistic mentality of the romantic musician and we appeal to “modern man” to establish the guidelines for the creation of a free music in a free and new world. 4

The realm of opening possibilities, however, is not restricted merely to formal questions. The manifesto states that this should be materialized through opening musical teaching and education. An otherwise unexpected mixture of socialism and musical experimentation becomes clear here: We place teaching above everything; we consider it the basis for any evolution in the artistic field and for achieving a high collective level. Educated in the mysticism of the “ego”, in the concept of individuality, we have been conditioned to live in a decadent social organization. The result of this education is a low collective level, with only a handful of individuals of merit, who are ever farther from the majority’s understanding, segregating themselves in elites that are noxious to the collectivity and the evolution of mankind. We therefore will combat the education that aims at instructing such elites and we demand an education that aims at a high collective level, an essential precondition for all evolution allowing the masses to understand the manifestations of the human spirit.5

To be sure, the belief in an impending new era was misplaced; in addition, the emphasis on education is dangerously close to populism, 4 5

Ibid., 246 (unless noted otherwise, translations are by the authors). Ibid., 248.

214

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

especially if one bears in mind Villa-Lobos’ orpheonic singing project.6 But the manifesto is useful in showing the possibility of this otherwise strange equation of avant-garde composition and engaged art – to which Koellreutter’s Salmo Proletário (Proletarian Psalm) from 1946 and the 1947 Mensagem (Message) attest. The intended result of this equation was political or existential liberation, and educational practices were viewed as driving social change. This context of absolute musical novelty engendered such unlikely conjunctions. Parallel to this singular form of musical and political engagement, Koellreutter distanced himself from free atonalism and moved in the direction of more formalized composing techniques, that is, towards dodecaphonism. For him, this was a compositional system appropriate to a coming socialism: not only were there no tonal hierarchies (the tonic as the king, president or capitalist); the equality among notes was not achieved by chance, but was the result of a set of rational laws. The reason normally given for this shift relates to an episode where Cláudio Santoro, Koellreutter’s most gifted student, spontaneously wrote dodecaphonic passages in his Symphony for Two String Orchestras (1940) without ever hearing of the technique. As a result of such natural inclination, Koellreutter started to teach him composition in twelve-tone rows, and “was encouraged to write his [Koellreutter’s] own first piece based on the dodecaphonic series, his Invention (for oboe, clarinet and bassoon), which may be seen as his only composition rigorously following all the dictates of the technique”.7 The story may indeed be entertaining, but one can still ask whether the introduction of dodecaphonism was not simply unavoidable and dependant on a natural progression over time. Furthermore, the rupture had to happen because the leader of Música Viva “was totally convinced of the latent identity between the principles of Marxism and atonalism” – the latter would work as “a substrate for a functional music, representing the new music of the time, which, grounded on a direct correspondence with dialectical materialism, should be in tune with the latest evolutionary stage of

6

Villa-Lobos organized massive events, sometimes in soccer stadiums, mobilizing thousands of singers, children, and adolescents from public schools. 7 Kater, Música Viva e H.J. Koellreutter, 107.

The Adventures of a Technique

215

society and culture”.8 Dodecaphonism, in Brazil, was therefore introduced at the intersection of new musical experiments, educational activities aiming at democratization, and political engagements intended to contribute to the revolution through an opening of new knowledge systems. As could be expected, the introduction of the twelve-tone technique was not smooth but faced strong opposition from native composers. When Debussy, for instance, was introduced in Brazil, musical culture was prepared for it because of a reasonably developed romanticism in relation to which impressionist harmony could be viewed as a continuation, albeit not a smooth one. Nothing of the kind happened with dodecaphonism, which appeared as hopelessly foreign. Music here allows for a clearer insight into what is at stake in the modernist desire to erect universes out of nothing, for “nothing” does not really exist. The resistance to the new in music makes visible what is obscured, for instance, in the construction of Brasília, perhaps the greatest example of the modernist demiurge complex. The nationalist claim to exceptionality – amounting to the claim that “we have something that others lack, we don’t need foreign imports” – has its own curious logic, which can be characterized as a reactive formation. It is not the case that the “normativity of the soil” existed as such in the first place; rather, it emerged after the introduction of dodecaphonism. To be sure, immoderate praise of things Brazilian has been a common phenomenon in the cultural history of the country, but the novelty here stems from the distance between the imported compositional procedure and the supposed Brazilianity to be cherished. Indeed, just to think of a possible, tentative comparison, dodecaphonism did not prove to be as malleable as the novel form, as Roberto Schwarz’s theorization of misplaced ideas in Misplaced Ideas and A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis illustrates.9 According to the latter work, Machado de Assis managed to transform the realist narrator into a dysfunctional figure, thereby laying bare its ideological matrixes. One may wonder if music, by virtue of its particular material qualities, would be more resistant to such acclimatization. 8

Ibid., 90. See Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas, London, 1992; and A Master on the Periphery of Capitalism: Machado de Assis, Durham: NC, 2001.

9

216

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

Be it as it may, the 1950s started with the “Open letter to musicians and music critics of Brazil”, in which composer Camargo Guarnieri urged the nation against the “immense dangers that right now deeply threaten all of Brazilian musical culture, that culture to which we are so closely attached”.10 Guarnieri’s letter, aimed at warning young Brazilian composers against the “immense dangers” introduced by Koellreutter, is emblematic of the accusations that would be ceaselessly leveled against the twelve-tone technique: it is a cerebral music, a token of European cultural decay which could bring about the “destruction of our national character”. Guarnieri says, further, that dodecaphonism managed to attract “some young composers of valor and great talent, like Cláudio Santoro and Guerra-Peixe, who, fortunately enough, after pursuing this erroneous direction, were able to free themselves and return to the right path of the artistic-scientific study and use of our folklore”.11 “Our folklore”: for non-Brazilians (and for us writing in English) it is easier to see the irony here, which is typical of the problems involved in the construction of nationality. In this case, it involves the defense of an autochthonous music being made by a composer with the most Italian of names. Nevertheless, this movement, which can be heard in Santoro’s and Guerra-Peixe’s work of the period, is not as whimsical as it may appear at first. The insertion of the twelve-tone row in Brazil did not happen in the course of the natural development (whatever the expression may mean) of a Brazilian musical language, in the way it did in Europe, as a result of the collapse of the tonal system. Adopting the technique in the country was, before anything, a gesture and not an imperative driven by a tradition of ruptures in the history of the development of a musical language.12 In this sense, the

10

Quoted in Kater, Música Viva e H.J. Koellreutter, 119. Ibid., 120. 12 It is hard to think about musical historical necessity outside Europe. The way in which the tonal system developed out of its own original contradictions and specificities turned it into a highly organized, self-regulating musical language: this seems a strictly European phenomenon. The internal advance of the system, as well as its underlying rationality cannot be abstracted from European modernity. Max Weber, for instance, identified in the unfolding of European music the specific trait of the modernity Europeans created as a model for western civilization. Thus, the insertion of dodecaphonism into other continents transforms it into a graft, a more or less 11

The Adventures of a Technique

217

rationalization effected by dodecaphonism was ambiguous, contradictory even. Composers could see themselves on the side of nationalism, as well as avant-gardism without apparently contradicting themselves. Even Koellreutter’s most talented and promising pupils, Santoro and Guerra-Peixe, wrote both serial and nationalist pieces side by side. If they composed their most daring scores – Santoro’s Three Sonatas (1939-1940) and Variations on a Dodecaphonic Series (1946), and Guerra-Peixe’s Music n.1 for Piano (1941) and Piece for Two Minutes (1941) – they also produced Batucada – no Morro das duas Bicas (1948) (Santoro), or Suíte para Orquestra de Cordas (Inspired in the Folklore of Pernambuco) (1949) (Guerra-Peixe), among others. This duality would also have its own temporal pendulum, for in the 1950s nationalism would dominate, while in the 1960s vanguard music would be the order of the day (Santoro, for instance, composed electro-acoustic music at the time). In sum, they fluctuated between nationalism and avant-gardism. Consequently, dodecaphonism was not employed as the result of convictions, or as a matter of principles, but rather as a momentary choice among others. This is an aspect that is indicative of the modernity fostered by a certain vision of the country in the 1950s – a blended, “mestizo” modernity that daringly and ambitiously erects Brasília, a new capital, from scratch to stand as a symbol of national unity and integration, but whose constructed modernity placed it at the very center of the country, away from all and everything. Although Santoro and GuerraPeixe had been Koellreutter’s first pupils to work with the twelve-tone series, they were only recognized as important composers of serious music based on their nationalist pieces, and even today only a relatively small part of their more avant-gardist work has been recorded or is performed regularly. This precarious articulation of a properly experimentalist space in Brazilian music, squeezed between the desire for revolutionizing expression and the compromises demanded by a national project, did not allow composers to pursue experiments beyond dodecaphonism, even if a few attempts were made in that direction in the following years.

foreign element brought into a national or local tradition (see Max Weber, The Rational and Social Foundations of Music, Carbondale: IL, 1958.).

218

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, a younger generation of composers started a new movement in São Paulo called Música Nova. Still guided by Koellreutter, though not following him as closely as the previous generation, the group hoped to reshape the scene of contemporary music in Brazil. Among the participants were Julio Medaglia, Rogério Duprat, Gilberto Mendes, Willy Correia de Oliveira, and Damiano Cozzella, all musicians who were closely attached to the growing cultural scene in São Paulo, which was quickly becoming the new cultural and economic center of the country. The infrastructure for contemporary art had been established with the founding of such institutions as the Modern Art Museum (MAM) in 1947, and the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP), in 1948; the early 1950s witnessed the emergence of the concrete poetry movement, and the first São Paulo Biannual Exposition, which took place in 1951. The Música Nova shared much of the atmosphere of the city.13 The group’s purpose, as stated in their “Manifesto Música Nova”, was “total engagement with the contemporary world”. The intent was to go beyond canonical dodecaphonism and to explore all the possibilities of serialism as Pierre Boulez and Henri Posseur were doing in Europe. Moreover, through exchanges with Germany and the US, several members of Música Nova became acquainted with the work of John Cage and Stockhausen, with their techniques of indeterminacy, electronic and electroacustic music. Nevertheless, and in spite of its “total engagement with the contemporary world”, Música Nova was at odds with mainstream Brazilian music of the time. In the words of historian Regiane Gaúna, “one may say that the Música Nova manifesto does not have an innovative character, but rather a founding one, because the ideas therein presented, common for artists in other countries, had not yet found a suitable space to develop in Brazil, hence the urgency of such ideas for the transformation of the Brazilian music scene”.14 For all its efforts and in spite of the favorable atmosphere of the time, Música Nova floundered due to the lack of an audience and the absence of reliable private or governmental sponsors. 13

See Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda, Metrópole e Cultura: São Paulo no meio século XX, São Paulo, 2001. 14 Quoted in Regiane Gaúna, Rogério Duprat: sonoridades múltiplas, São Paulo, 2002, 88.

The Adventures of a Technique

219

If, given the frailty of the field, serious Brazilian music was not mature enough to nurture the radical vanguard of the period, Brazilian culture in the 1960s did possess another sphere that was sufficiently ripe to promote innovative practices – popular music. Because of his educational activities, Koellreutter had already been working closely together with several popular composers, and had taught Tom Jobim (the father of Bossa Nova) and Tom Zé (an earlier participant of the Tropicália movement), for instance. The novelty came, however, when a number of serious composers (such as Julio Medaglia, Rogério Duprat, and Damiano Cozzella) from the Música Nova group started to interact regularly, and without an educational posture, with the field of popular music. This change of register made them collaborators rather than teachers, and can be accounted for not only by the frailty of the field of erudite music in Brazil, but also because of “the possibility of carrying out a project of popular music which could prove to be different from other kinds”.15 This different project took the shape of Tropicália in 1967-1968, which, by means of its all-inclusive aesthetics, made it possible to break away from the clear-cut distinction between serious music and mass culture, the archaic and the modern, and the national and the international. The result was a creative integration of erudite musical avant-gardes and the experiments of Tropicalist composers such as Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé, and Caetano Veloso. Thus, according to Celso Favaretto, avant-garde musicians and the Tropicalists carried out a kind of group work in which the rules were collectively invented, thereby precluding the former from imposing their musical material on the others.16 In this kind of collaboration, Favaretto suggests: … elements of avant-garde music were integrated into the popular song, such as: material originating in the two extremes of contemporary composition – those of Boulez-Stockhausen, on the one hand, which adopted the rigor and constructivism of the Vienna School (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg), and which included experiences 15

Ibid., 91. Celso Favaretto, Tropicália alegoria alegria, São Paulo, 2000, 42-43. On the opening of horizons promoted by Tropicalism in Brazilian popular music, see also Cristopher Dunn, Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture, Chapel Hill: NC, 2001; and Cristopher Dunn and Charles A. Perrone, Brazilian Popular Music and Globalization, Gainesville: FL, 2001.

16

220

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick of electronic and chance music (in which, however, the work of chance was controlled by the composer); and John Cage, on the other, who represented the lines of anti-music and of the happening, which brought about a sudden break with traditional concepts of art, by means of strategies of indeterminacy applied to the musical material as well as his interest in the reception of music. Through the creation of a non-discursive syntax, the two trends got mixed up in an iconoclastic use of tonality, similarly to what had been happening in literature, film and the visual arts. Ultimately, the discussion on popular and erudite music coalesced into one discourse. Ignoring the conflict between quality and quantity, and due to the interest in establishing new ties with an urban audience, working within the relationship production/consumption, serious music had a lot to learn with the popular: for instance, in handling short bits of time and condensation of sound, as proposed by television.17

Nevertheless, the dream of a happy conciliation between extremes did not last long. Popular music became a powerful branch of the culture industry, which, because of its structural drive for profit, very soon made the joining of the erudite vanguard and popular music unviable. By the beginning of the 1970s this confluence was no longer effective. The consolidation of the culture industry in Brazil, fostered by a project of conservative modernization carried out by the military regime of the time, gradually occupied all available spaces in the media. As for dodecaphonism itself, it had already lost its vitality in Europe, becoming an academic discipline within the walls of music departments. It continued to thrive at the University of São Paulo, where composer Oliver Toni unambiguously practiced “the Vienna School and nothing more”.18 This hard line of Toni’s was not without its motives. Indeed, it may be explained as a defensive position against the increasing domination of the culture industry in all media – the music department of the University of São Paulo openly stated that “possibility of critique and mass culture cannot join hands”. The department then became, under the guidance of Oliver Toni, a place of … avant-garde music, of elitism, which offered courses of composition and performance of orchestral instruments (piano, 17 18

Favaretto, Tropicália alegoria alegria, 44-45. Maria H.P. Martins, ECA: Retrato em Branco e Preto, São Paulo, 1988, 98.

The Adventures of a Technique

221

violin, viola, cello, percussion, clarinet, flute, oboe and bassoon), and did not allow entrance to popular instruments, not even the 19 guitar. According to maestro Toni, “anyone can play the guitar”.

Given the rigid lines adopted by the music department of the University of São Paulo, it is no wonder that the most significant student compositions happened precisely in the field of popular music, of that kind of guitar music that “anyone can play”. By the end of the 1970s, a number of musicians from the underground music scene of São Paulo aggregated around the Teatro Lira Paulistana and eventually became what was known as the Vanguarda Paulista (São Paulo Avant-Garde). Arrigo Barnabé, Luiz Tatit of the Rumo Group, Mário Manga and Clauss Petersen of Premeditando o Breque, among others, were or had been students at the University of São Paulo. Instead of merely following the dictates of the Music School, they decided, individually, to apply their musical knowledge to the field of popular music. Among these composers, Arrigo Barnabé stands out for his inclusion of dodecaphonism strictu sensu in the popular song. Self-conceived as a direct descendant of Tropicália, Barnabé’s musical project pushed beyond the limits of the experiments carried out in the 1960s. If Tropicália completely changed the notion of the arrangement of the popular song by introducing several techniques originating in erudite music, and opened up song lyrics to literary influences such as concrete poetry, the next step, for Barnabé, was the introduction of atonalism and the twelve-tone row in popular music. Clara Crocodilo (1980), his first and technically most accomplished album, mixes twelve-tone compositional procedures with such defining features of the popular song as a regular beat, intonational singing, and a tendency to theatricality. Of its eight pieces, three make use of free atonalism (Diversões Eletrônicas, Sabor de Veneno, and Clara Crocodilo), and five are strictly dodecaphonic (Acapulco Drive-In, Orgasmo Total, Instante, Infortúnio, Office-Boy). His work includes transpositions, retrogressions, inversions, rotations, multiplications, fragmentations, derivations, and partitionings. Integrated into and appropriated by the popular song, these compositional procedures create an aesthetics in which the 19

Ibid., 103.

222

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

rhythm and pulsation of the megalopolis resonate. At the same time, Barnabé transforms its ever-more automated inhabitants into characters of his songs by means of different tempos, overlapping pulses and polyrhythms.20 These characters appear as dehumanized beings, who are disintegrated or disintegrating. They are, in short, monstrous creatures. The song “Clara Crocodilo”, for instance, tells the story of a harmless office boy who sells his body to “a powerful multinational lab”, and has his frail, anonymous human body accidentally transformed into a mighty mutant, “the dangerous criminal, Clara Crocodile, public enemy no.1”. This is how the lyrics begin: [spoken] São Paulo, December 31st, 1999. There is little, very little for 2000 to come. And you, absent-minded listener, who in the coziness of your home has carelessly placed this record on the player; you who now eagerly wait to open your champagne and hear the clinking of the glasses; you, mortal enemy of anxiety and despair, be prepared … the nightmare has started. Yes, I know, you’re going to say that’s only your imagination, that you’ve been reading too many comics lately, but why is it that your hands started to shake, shake, shake so much when you went for that cigarette? And why did you become so pale all of a sudden? Would that be just your imagination? No, my friend, go to the bathroom now, before it’s too late, because in this old record you bought at a second hand store there has been imprisoned for more than twenty years the dangerous criminal, the delinquent, the terrible public enemy #1: Clara Crocodile. [The song starts] – Silence gives consent, I don’t silence I’m not dying at a cop’s hand Silence gives consent, I don’t consent I’m not dying at rat’s hand! I’m not staying in this hell Nor going to a cemetery Machine guns don’t reach me I’m no longer staying in this ring.

20

See Façanhas às próprias custas: A produção musical da Vanguarda Paulista, 1979-2000, ed. José Adriano Fenerick, São Paulo, 2007, 152.

The Adventures of a Technique

223

[Speaking/singing] – Hey you listening to me, Do you think you’re going to catch me? So take this ... I see that you want to go on. Let’s see if you can take this one … Gee, girl, do you guys think that they want more? – Yes they do! – You’re such a smarty, let’s see if you can follow me in this labyrinth.

Dodecaphonism is the unifying force in the song: it joins a poor melodic line, at times indistinguishable from plain speaking and shouting, with very colloquial lyrics. Without the technique these elements would hardly manage to constitute anything noteworthy, but welded in and through the dodecaphonic arrangement, the song acquires a sui generis identity allowing one to argue that it expresses … crudely and realistically the neurotic and dehumanizing life in contemporary Brazilian metropolises .… In order to integrate the text with serialism and free atonality, Arrigo Barnabé carried out a distortion and disintegration of the tonal center, thus bewildering traditional listeners of urban popular, tonal music, those to whom the 21 LP is explicitly addressed.

Despite Barnabé’s efforts to see himself as heir to Tropicália, and his insight that the historic advance in Brazilian popular music could only come about by means of atonalism and dodecaphonism, the use of dodecaphonism in popular music did not take place as if in a historical continuum, as had happened in Europe with Schoenberg. In other words, Barnabé introduces dodecaphonism in Brazilian popular music “as an apocalyptic sign, an outrage, an explicit rupture with tonalism”.22 Therefore the adoption of the technique and its introduction into Brazilian popular music are characterized by a confrontational sense vis-à-vis the mainstream or the commodified 21 André Cavazotti, “O serialismo e o atonalismo livre aportam na MPB: as canções do LP Clara Crocodilo de Arrigo Barnabé”, in Per Musi, Belo Horizonte, 2000, 8-9. 22 Ibid., 11.

224

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

music of the culture industry of the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, Barnabé’s dodecaphonism can be viewed as a gesture of resistance to the increasing homogenization and standardization promoted by the culture industry. And this challenge to the market had a price: the systematic exclusion of Barnabé’s work from the mass media.23 It is important to point out how unique Barnabé’s case is in the history of Brazilian popular music (maybe even worldwide), due not only to the originality of his appropriation, but also to the fate of his efforts which ultimately did not prove to be economically viable. Furthermore, according to Cavazotti, “by stating that after Tropicália the next step would be the use of atonalism and serialism, Arrigo Barnabé made a direct transfer to Brazilian urban popular music of another kind of music, which belonged to another cultural universe, determined by other forms of social relations”.24 Thus, Barnabé’s feat was eventually as frustrated as the experiments carried out in serious music. Now inserted into the field of popular music, the twelve-tone technique once more failed to find fertile ground for its full development, becoming more of an exception or curiosity than a fountainhead from which other creations could originate. Barnabé today sees himself as a classical composer in his own right: his last work, A Requiem (2005), has no traces left of popular music.25 This should not, however, be interpreted as an indictment of Barnabé’s earlier work, which did manage to reinvigorate Brazilian popular music like the Vanguarda Paulista did as a whole. But nor should it prevent one from viewing their experiments as failures.26 To explain why this is so, it is necessary to recall Roberto Schwarz’s words when he argues that: It has been noticed that at each generation Brazilian intellectual life seems to start from scratch. The appetite for the recent production of advanced countries has frequently as its counterpart the lack of

23

See Façanhas às próprias custas. Cavazotti, “O serialismo e o atonalismo livre aportam na MPB”, 12. 25 Indeed, in a recent email exchange Barnabé denied that Clara Crocodilo is made of songs [canções] in the formal sense of the term, as A-B-A constructions. We can only see this as an attempt by the composer to distance himself from the popular field. 26 See Fabio A. Durão, “Apresentação”, in Façanhas às próprias custa, 11-16. 24

The Adventures of a Technique

225

interest in the work of the previous generation and the ensuing lack of continuity in thinking.27

To be sure, the passage should be not be read as implying that sheer continuity would in itself be desirable, as opposed to the frenzied import of cultural artifacts and techniques. Its validity is contingent on the analysis of concrete experiences such as that of dodecaphonism in Brazil. From its inception with Koellreutter, it did not manage to become a generative organic form, nor did it prove itself capable of being integrated objectively into the classical or popular Brazilian music scenes. But rather than merely viewing this as a failure, it is more productive to consider it as a result of the contradictory and ambiguous character of Brazil’s modernity. Resembling a pendulum, it cannot firmly define itself as either cosmopolitan or nationalist, as fostering the arts or the culture industry. Dodecaphonism exemplified this to perfection: it proved unable to create a self-regulated movement in Brazilian serious music, yet Brazilian modernity did not obstruct dodecaphonism’s circulation within several spheres of society as a whole. The twelve-tone technique neither stagnated as a musical language of the past, largely because of specific historical necessity, nor functioned as a basis from which further musical experiments could develop. Its trajectory was not a necessity but was rather the agent of a possible newness in a given time and within determinate fields. The adventures of dodecaphonism in and through Brazil made it possible for musicians to break with the past, for a small view of the future to open, and for the creation of fundamental movements in the history of Brazil’s culture, but the technique itself was never converted into an effective rationality, for traditional Brazilian modernity did not afford it this opportunity. Here again, everything was lacking that materially supports a determinate cultural practice: sponsorship, audience, government funding, and concert halls. Interpreting the history of dodecaphonism in Brazil as a representative case of transnational exchange, it is tempting to posit a parallelism between its fate and that of national projects of modernization, as Robert Kurz so cogently argued in his Der Kollaps

27

Roberto Schwarz, “Nacional por subtração”, in Que horas são?, São Paulo, 1987, 30.

226

Fabio Akcelrud Durão and José Adriano Fenerick

der Modernisierung.28 The conclusion which imposes itself on the impartial observer is that if the twelve-tone technique was a frustrated experience in Brazil, it did demonstrate, conversely, how much it could circulate in the country by mobilizing nationalists and avantgardists, and involving both the popular and the erudite. Brazil’s porosity regarding dodecaphonism is the flipside of its lack of sedimentation. This reflects the ultimate ambiguity of this transnational encounter: the failure of dodecaphonism to take root as a living manifestation of Brazilian culture; at the same time, the ease with which it penetrated different spheres and was welcomed by different artists. This can be read as the bleak fate of a peripheral country trying to catch up with advanced or developed countries; while Brazil’s openness to new kinds of appropriations in a promising, fruitful kind of conviviality, reflects its alternative modernity. This force field, here obtained through the history of dodecaphonism’s reception, deserves to be investigated in broader terms. We suspect that the adventures of the twelve-tone technique could stand as a microcosm for larger dilemmas.

28

Robert Kurz, Der Kollaps der Modernisierung: Vom Zusammenbruch des Kasernensozialismus zur Krise der Weltokonomie, Frankfurt, 1991.

WHAT REVOLT IN THE POSTCOLONY TODAY? ASHLEIGH HARRIS

Since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous denunciation of Julia Kristeva’s politics in her paper “French Feminism in an International Frame”, postcolonial studies and Kristeva’s thought have had an uneasy relationship with one another. The primary reason for this unease, as Spivak’s excellent critique of Kristeva’s About Chinese Women illustrates, has to do with the problem of politics and the politically posited subject within Kristeva’s work. Yet, Kristeva has recently enjoyed a great deal of critical reappraisal and promotion from postcolonial scholars and political theorists alike, as is most evident in her being the recipient of the Institute Français de Brême’s Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought in 2006. Indeed, Kristeva’s recent work on Arendt certainly marks a shift in her approach to the political. In her address on receiving the Hannah Arendt prize, she argues for a “new politics”, imagined by way of Arendt’s “refoundation of the self, of a people, of a political time-and-space”, in which we are invited to “bring the concern for the singular destiny of each man and woman, without distinction, into the heart of the democracy of opinion”.1 Whilst such an imagining of the political may, indeed, begin to answer some of the questions I raise as to Kristeva’s earlier conception of politics, a careful examination of the politics of her notion of “revolt” still requires further consideration – especially if one attempts, as I do here, to use the concept in a postcolonial studies frame. It is precisely the ethics and politics of this movement from one scholarly frame to another – a trans-disciplinary reading, if you will – that this essay seeks to interrogate. As such, Spivak’s denunciation of how Kristeva deals with the political is a productive site of conflict 1

Julia Kristeva, “Hannah Arendt or Refoundation as Survival”, Hannah Arendt prize address, 15 December 2006, on line at: http://www.kristeva.fr/Arendt_en.html.

228

Ashleigh Harris

between these two key contributors to the fields of postcolonial and French theory. Spivak states of French theorists: “In spite of their occasional interest in touching the other of the West, of metaphysics, of capitalism, their repeated question is obsessively self-centred: if we are not what official history and philosophy say we are, who then are we (not), how are we (not)?”2 The idea that the “other” is narcissistically driven in French theory is at the core of Spivak’s broader argument. What is of interest here is that Spivak claims that both Kristeva and the Tel Quel group more broadly put their “trust in the individualistic critical avant-garde rather than anything that might call itself a revolutionary collectivity”.3 As such, Spivak accuses the Tel Quel group of naïvely assuming that access to this avant-garde, by the “other”, would be politically empowering since it would result in their fulfilling “the possibilities of their discourse”.4 We have seen this debate emerge in various feminist critiques of, and claims for, the political values of Kristeva’s theory. Her detractors argue, as Spivak does, that because political empowerment is largely discursive, it “is more politically significant for the producer/writer than the consumer/reader”.5 The “other” here becomes the “consumer/reader”. In postcolonial scholarship, this is the position of the subject written about, for example the Chinese women of Kristeva’s analysis: the political other for whom access to the “avant-garde in general”, as Spivak puts it, remains politically irrelevant. After Spivak’s early critique, there have been numerous critical reappraisals of Kristeva’s work that have sought to recuperate the significance of her politics for postcolonial and feminist studies, and numerous postcolonial literary scholars have integrated Kristeva’s 2

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame”, Yale French Studies, VXII (1981), 158-59. 3 Ibid., 163. 4 Ibid., 166. This is an idea that Kristeva has not entirely abandoned, even in the present day. In “Hannah Arendt or Refoundation as Survival”, she claims: “I am convinced that there is no other way to confront the forces of death, which are making headway today in the guise of religious extremism and the automatization of the species, than the capacity of survival … rooted in the bliss of thinking and judging.” The passage suggests, among other things, that real political capacity exists in the realm of “thinking and judging”, activities very closely aligned to Kristeva’s earlier formulation of the role of the critical avant-garde. 5 Spivak, “French Feminism in an International Frame”, 166-67.

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

229

ideas into their scholarship. While feminist studies of Kristeva’s work have engaged her theory reasonably substantially,6 various postcolonial studies have tended to take the methodological approach of applying various useful concepts from Kristeva’s oeuvre to the subject of their analysis.7 My concern is that in aphoristically quoting various Kristevan concepts, such as “abjection”, “melancholy” and “mourning”, and most famously, “intertextuality”, scholars dismiss the problem of politics in Kristeva’s work as though this impasse has been resolved. Yet, by applying these terms to a reading of postcolonial literatures, without engaging the underlying tensions and problems that inevitably emerge in such an undertaking, such an approach tends to present Kristeva’s terms as somehow immutable and not subject to change in their encounter with the literatures they are being used to analyze. In order to avoid imposing the same “colonial benevolence” upon the subject of our postcolonial studies that Spivak accuses Kristeva of doing in her analysis of Chinese women,8 we must ask ourselves what the methodology of applying various theoretical models across different ethico-political contexts does to the object of our study. Despite the density of debate around this issue, particularly in feminist analyses of Kristeva’s works, it seems that much contemporary postcolonial literary scholarship needs to reassess how it negotiates the use of theoretical ideas from Kristevan theory (and, for that matter, any theoretical idea read across different class, gendered, raced and nationally determined contexts).

6

Notable examples include Carol Mastrangelo Bové, Language and Politics in Julia Kristeva, Albany: NY, 2006; Nancy Fraser and Sandra Lee Bartky, Revaluing French Feminism, Bloomington: IN, 1992; Victoria Hesford and Lisa Diedrich, Feminist Time Against Nation Time: Gender, Politics, and the Nation State in an Age of Permanent War, Lanham: MD, 2008; Ethics, Politics and Difference in Julia Kristeva’s Writing: A Collection of Essays, ed. Kelly Oliver, New York, 1993; Kelly Oliver, Reading Julia Kristeva: Unravelling the Double Bind, Bloomington: IN, 1993; And Chris Weedon, Feminism, Theory, and the Politics of Difference, Boston: MA, 1999. 7 Since this methodological approach to using Kristeva’s concepts in postcolonial scholarship dominates the site of inter-disciplinary crossover between postcolonial and psychoanalytic and French theory, there are simply too many examples to elaborate here. 8 Spivak, “French Feminism in a Transnational Frame”, 161.

230

Ashleigh Harris

This essay seeks to produce a syncretic encounter between the postcolonial theory of Achille Mbembe and Kristeva’s theories of revolt. In so doing, it tracks the necessary reimagining of Kristeva’s ideas when read, following Mbembe, in the African postcolony.9 Moreover, I undertake this encounter because it seems that Kristeva’s work is illuminating to our analyses and discussions of the postcolony, and should not be whole-heartedly discarded. At the same time, it should not be blithely, and simply, applied to postcolonial studies. When combined with Mbembe’s work, both theorists open up various possibilities for how we might effect a postcolonial reading of “French theory” and its “others”. Kristevan revolt and the problem of politics In an interview with Rainer Ganahl, Kristeva outlines her particular usage of the term “revolt”, stating: I would like to strip the word “revolt” of its purely political sense. In all western traditions, revolt is a very deep movement of discontent, anxiety and anguish. In this sense, to say that revolt is only politics is a betrayal of this vast movement. People have reduced, castrated and mutilated the concept of revolt by turning it only into politics. Therefore if we still want to conquer new horizons, it is necessary to turn away from this idea and to give the word revolt a meaning that is not just political. I try to interpret this word in a philosophical and etymological sense.10

Before discussing the implications of Kristeva’s dismissal of a political understanding of revolt here, it is necessary to consider what, exactly, she means by the “political”. In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt and Intimate Revolt, she presents “political revolt” as “replacement in time”. That is, she argues: “What has been taken for revolt or revolution for two centuries, particularly in politics and its attendant ideologies … [is] a rejection, pure and simple, of the old, 9

I must assert that this is only one, already multiple and endlessly complex, context in which to read the dynamics of the postcolony. There are others that would render very different readings. I do not, by any means, privilege this site of the postcolony, but use it because it is the site of Mbembe’s analysis. 10 Julia Kristeva, “Revolt and Revolution”, in Revolt, She Said, trans. Brian O’Keefe, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, New York, 2002, 99-100.

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

231

destined to be replaced by new, dogmas.”11 Kristeva provides an etymological grounding for this political understanding of revolt pointing out that “In the Middle Ages, the word ‘revolution’ is used to mark the end of a period of time that has ‘evolved’; it signifies completion, an occurrence, or a completed duration”. Furthermore, she notes how “in 1550, and for a century afterward, [the word ‘revolution’] is applied to another semantic field, that of politics: thus the revolution of time leads to the revolution of State”.12 Kristeva urges us to venture into other, richer, etymologies of the word “revolt” in order to unchain the term from this now static understanding, which inevitably reads historical time as successive and linear. In The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, she suggests that we recall the Latin roots of the term in the words volvere (to turn, and return), and volta and voltare, which imply “circular movement and … temporal return”.13 In urging us to recall these etymological traces of “return” embedded in the word “revolt” – all of which imply a nonlinear temporality – Kristeva prompts a psychoanalytic Freudian reading of the term, in which she focuses on “the return of the archaic, in the sense of the repressed but also the timelessness (zeitlos) of the drive”.14 Thus, Kristeva calls “rebellion as access to the archaic … an impossible temporalizing”. She understands “temporalizing” not in Heidegger’s sense, for whom time is always suspended, always already there, but in Freud’s, for whom there existed “‘non-time’ or ‘timelessness’ … time undone”.15 It is clear that in focusing on revolt as psychoanalytic return, Kristeva takes the term out of the time of history and politics. This is a removal from what she sees as the time of succession, and places “revolt” in the intimate sphere of “a retrospective return, by anamnesis, by memory”.16 Revolt, then, becomes “interrogation”, an intimate act emerging, primarily, from within the singularity of 11 Julia Kristeva, Intimate Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York, 2002, 6. 12 Julia Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt: The Powers and Limits of Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeanine Herman, New York, 2000, I, 3. 13 Ibid., 1-2. 14 Ibid., 12. 15 Ibid., 16. 16 Kristeva, “Revolt and Revolution”, 100.

232

Ashleigh Harris

experience, rather than from shared, communal and political experiences of time and history.17 When Kristeva asks “What Revolt Today?” (implying that such revolt is no longer likely, or perhaps even possible), what is the context of the present – the “today” – of which she speaks? She sets up a dichotomy between a revolutionary kind of self-interrogation and radical questioning (which, in both of the volumes under discussion as well as in her earlier Revolution in Poetic Language, she sees as exemplified by the literary aesthetics of Joyce, Mallarmé and Proust) and a contemporary “culture of entertainment”.18 In Kristeva’s view, this “culture of entertainment” pervades post-industrial and postCommunist democracies, which as “societ[ies] of the image, or of the spectacle exclude the possibility of ‘revolt’”.19 Just as, for Kristeva, “political revolution … has managed to strangle revolt in the sense of free questioning or permanent unrest”,20 so too is a contemporary culture of blunt and empty spectacle in danger of foreclosing and restricting such questioning. Whether we are replacing ideologies, in times of political revolution, or blandly inhabiting them, as in the case of contemporary cultures of entertainment, Kristeva warns of the “deadly, totalitarian” consequences of such “suspension of thought”.21 Yet, what is the political value of Kristeva’s version of revolt? In an attempt to demonstrate this value, Cecilia Sjöholm, in Kristeva and the Political, argues that: “Rather than promoting an apolitical and naïve belief in artistic revolt, which she has often been accused of, [Kristeva’s] theorisation of the semiotic, of the pre-Oedipal, of the intimate … draws the consequences of a sustained displacement of the political from the universal towards the singular: art and psychoanalysis.”22 While art and psychoanalysis might be one version of such singularity, the danger, in both Kristeva’s thought and her supporters’ recuperation of it for political ends, is that they are seen as privileged sites of singularity. Yet, even Kristeva seems aware of the 17

Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 13. Kristeva, “Revolt and Revolution”, 101. 19 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 4. 20 Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 266. 21 Ibid., 6. 22 Cecilia Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, New York, 2005, 126. 18

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

233

need to theorize more carefully the relationship between singular experience and the polity when she asks: “One wonders if the realization of the revolt I am referring to is possible only in the private sphere: for example, in the psychoanalytical self-interrogation that people practice with themselves, or in an aesthetic framework.”23 There are two clear dangers in Kristeva’s privileging of art and psychoanalysis as central to a culture of revolt. The first has to do with how Kristeva circumscribes this culture of revolt as uniquely, and perhaps necessarily, European. She proclaims “doubt and critique” as “essential components of European culture”24 and writes, elsewhere, of the “European Tradition”, in which “Europeans are cultured in the sense that culture is their critical conscience; it suffices to think of Cartesian doubt, the freethinking of the Enlightenment, Hegelian negativity, Marx’s thought, Freud’s unconscious, not to mention Zola’s J’accuse and formal revolts such as Bauhaus and surrealism, Artaud and Stockhausen, Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon”.25 This argument reproduces what Achille Mbembe, in On the Postcolony, accuses western social theory of doing in its analysis of Africa. He argues that in western thought “The… triumph of the principle of free will … as well as the individual’s acquired capacity to self-refer, to block any attempt at absolutism, and to achieve self-realization through art, are seen as key attributes of modern [and we could add, European] consciousness”.26 The first problem, then, emerges in Kristeva’s view of revolt as a uniquely European phenomenon, or at least, one best expressed through European forms of questioning and aesthetics: a Europhilia, which can only sit uneasily within a postcolonial studies frame.27 Second, when Kristeva evokes the language of a European “tradition” and a “culture” of revolt, she is of necessity gesturing away from her reading of revolt as primarily an act of self-interrogation, since both terms necessarily trace a path from the individual to a broader society. Yet, the exact nature of this relationship between selfinterrogating individual and a culture of revolt remains inadequately 23

Kristeva, “Revolt and Revolution”, 107. Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 4. 25 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 6. 26 Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: CA, 2001, 10. 27 See Kristeva’s discussion of “Europhilia-Europhobia” in Intimate Revolt, 255-68. 24

234

Ashleigh Harris

contoured in her theory. Addressing precisely this issue, Sjöholm writes: Arguing that intimacy has become excessively severed from the political domain, Kristeva, however, makes it into the privileged domain of revolt. Since the political is cut off from the private, it has become stale, abstract[ed] from issues of daily life. The intimate is not the same as the private, but has evolved as a domain in which issues of life may be negotiated in a productive manner: the intimate is a domain of signification where the subject may share the questions, affectations, and sensations that relate to a certain society at a certain point in time. It is thus a domain of sharing that may be directed to the public (in the form of art and literature, for instance) but still exist [sic] only in the singular.28

While this responds to the point as to the relationship between the cultural and the individual in Kristeva’s thought, it still reads politics as dichotomously opposed to singularity. Recent postcolonial theory has moved away from such dichotomous understandings of the singularity of experience as cut off from the realm of politics. Mark Sanders’ argument in Complicities: The Intellectual and Apartheid is exemplary and apposite, particularly because of his dexterous reading of French theory in a highly complex and fraught political environment.29 Sanders’ analysis rejects a 28

Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, 110. I do not want to fall into the same trap as I have accused others of falling into in making theoretical applications of Kristeva’s work, and reductively read the contexts that inform Mark Sanders’ Complicities: the Intellectual and Apartheid, Durham: NC, 2002. The more so because Sanders is discussing the complicities of a certain intellectual elite at the time of apartheid in South Africa, and thus considers a social positioning very different to the postcolonial subject of Mbembe’s analysis (although, in some ways, and perhaps interestingly, both can still be defined as “postcolonial”). Moreover, Sanders’ discussion of complicity is not without its detractors: see, for example, Benita Parry’s “The New South Africa”, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, XLI/2 (November 2005), 179-88; and Grant Farred’s “The Black Intellectual’s Work Is Never Done: A Critique of the Discourse of Reconciliation in South Africa”, Postcolonial Studies: Culture, Politics, Economy, VII/1 (April 2004), 113-23. Both Parry and Farrad criticize Sanders for, amongst other things, imposing an equivalence upon all subjects under apartheid, a criticism that does usefully point to the pitfalls of this analysis. In my own assessment, whilst acknowledging the value of Farred’s and Parry’s readings, I do feel that Sanders’ analysis of complicity remains an important 29

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

235

dichotomy between politics and singularity in his ideas of “complicity” and “advocacy”. Seeking to develop “a conception of complicity that would make it possible to think of resistance and collaboration as interrelated”,30 Sanders argues that “specific acts of opposition … remain complicit in what they oppose”.31 He derives his notion of complicity as “folded-together-ness (com-plic-ity)” from Jacques Derrida’s Of Spirit.32 The deconstructive aspect of Derrida’s “complicity” becomes, in Sanders’ analysis, ethically enabling in that, “When opposition does not free one from complicity, but depends on it as its condition of possibility, responsibility is sharpened”.33 Furthermore, Sanders similarly reads advocacy as “a version of the essential human foldedness whereby one can assume the place of another”. Therefore, for Sanders, in an ethico-political sphere there is always “a contamination of the other with an other”.34 For now, however, it suffices to say that the contamination “of the other with an other” indicates that the singular always advocates something else – an other to itself that necessarily reaches towards communal and political meaning. Singular experience becomes deeply embedded in broader political meanings then: an idea that can be usefully elaborated in turning to the work of Achille Mbembe, who also resists “the false dichotomy between the objectivity of structures and the subjectivity of representations”,35 or between political revolt (as successive in time, zeitgeist) and intimate revolt (as timeless, zeitlos). Conviviality and the impossibility of revolt For Mbembe, the contemporary African “postcolony” – a term he ultimately comes to dismiss as having no meaning36 – also precludes the possibility of revolt. To understand what Mbembe means by

contribution to the field of postcolonial scholarship, where ideas about how complicity operates are requiring ever more detailed analysis. 30 Sanders, Complicities, x. 31 Ibid., 10. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 10. 34 Ibid., 17. 35 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 6. 36 Ibid., 242.

236

Ashleigh Harris

“revolt” we need to understand how he positions the postcolonial subject’s relationship to state power. To begin with, he argues that, … it would seem wrong to continue to interpret postcolonial relationships in terms of resistance or absolute domination, or as a function of the binary oppositions usually adduced in conventional analyses of movements of indiscipline and revolt (e.g. counterdiscourse, counter-society, counter-hegemony, “the second society”).37

Thus, the “practices of ordinary citizens cannot always be read in terms of ‘opposition to the state’, ‘deconstructing power’, and ‘disengagement’”. Instead, for Mbembe, in “the postcolony, an intimate tyranny links the rulers with the ruled”.38 This “intimate tyranny”, which marks the individual “ordinary citizen’s” relationship to the postcolonial state, is the result of postcolonial subjects having internalized the episteme of state authority, an authority that Mbembe calls the “commandement”: If subjection appears more intense than it might be, this is because the subjects of commandement have internalized an authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce it themselves in all the minor circumstances of daily life – social networks, cults and secret societies, culinary practices, leisure activities, modes of consumption, styles of dress, rhetorical devices, and the whole political economy of the body.39

Ordinary citizens, then, reiterate state authority across and through these various practices: practices that may be mundane and banal, and thus reiterated without self-reflexive awareness; or that may be expressive and critical, and thus consciously self-reflexive. We are therefore not speaking here, only, of an internalization such as that which occurs in W.E.B. Du Bois’ “double consciousness” or Frantz Fanon’s “epidermalisation of inferiority”.40 Instead, Mbembe’s 37

Ibid., 104-5. Ibid., 128. 39 Ibid., 128. 40 See Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman, London, 1986, 13. 38

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

237

postcolonial subject does have critical self-awareness of his/her relationship to the commandement, yet reiterates its episteme anyway; unlike Kristeva’s subject, who is caught without critical selfawareness in a culture of spectacle and entertainment. It must be noted that the subject of commandement gains nothing, in a material sense, from keeping the commandement in power. Instead, Mbembe calls this a relationship of conviviality in which “the dynamics of domesticity and familiarity, inscrib[e] the dominant and the dominated within the same episteme”.41 In a sense, we could say that the postcolonial subject may critically question the commandement, but is inscribed into its episteme in ways that force a relationship of intimacy and conviviality. The idea resonates with Sanders’ notion of complicity, despite its being imagined through a different contextual and theoretical frame. In both instances, the subject is folded into the episteme of the commandement, which reinscribes all acts of opposition and resistance within that episteme. It is, furthermore, important to note that the postcolonial subject’s relationship to the commandement is, for Mbembe, a deeply embodied one. He writes: These practices are not simply matters of discourse and language, although of course the existential experience of the world is, here as elsewhere, symbolically structured by language; the constitution of the African self as a reflexive subject also involves doing, seeing, hearing, tasting, feeling, and touching. In the eyes of all involved in the production of that self and subject, these practices constitute what might be called meaningful human expressions.42

Thus, the postcolonial subject: … is a subject of experience and a validating subject, not only in the sense that she/he is a conscious existence or has a perceptive consciousness of things, but to the extent that his/her “living in the concrete world” involves, and is evaluated by, his/her eyes, ears, mouth – in short, his/her flesh, his/her body.43

41

Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 110 (emphasis in original). Ibid., 6 (emphasis in original). 43 Ibid., 17. 42

238

Ashleigh Harris

The postcolonial body, in Mbembe’s view, then, is not simply inscribed into the commandement’s discourse (though this is, of course, also the case). More than that, it embodies the rule of law of the commandement: an idea that gives substance to the specific nature of the relationship between the individual subject and the collective. How, then, within the intimacy and conviviality of power in the postcolony, as described above, does the subject “revolt” against the commandement? It is important to note that Mbembe is not speaking, here, of political parties or social movements that formulate public social critique of a particular government. Instead, Mbembe’s concern is an epistemic one: how does the subject revolt against the presiding episteme. Replacement of governmental structures does little to challenge the episteme of the commandement, which survives even as it takes on new administrative forms. Returning to the epistemic contours of this question we may consider the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, where an embodied form of revolt might be seen to exist in the carnivalesque, or in cultural sites of humor, in which the authority qua authority is ridiculed and thereby undermined. For Bakhtin, “the carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions”.44 Not dissimilar to Kristeva’s idea of revolt, the carnivalesque transgresses the symbolic law, but does so only temporarily – it cannot form the basis of a sustained political revolt or resistance. Yet, while Mbembe is interested in the dynamics of humor and critique in and of the commandement in the postcolony, he argues that: Those who laugh, whether in the public arena or in the private domain, are not necessarily bringing about the collapse of power or even resisting it. Confronted with the state’s eagerness to cover its actual origins, they are simply bearing witness, often unconsciously, that the grotesque is no more foreign to officialdom than the common man is impervious to the charms of majesty.45

Laughter at the commandement, then, both critiques and upholds it; it is folded into the commandement, thereby undermining any easy 44 45

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, Cambridge: MA, 1968, 10. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 100.

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

239

dichotomy between individual and state in which one can critique the state by laughing at it. Laughter, one could say, is a form of critique and complicity. In the postcolony, argues Mbembe, the self and the state are mutually supporting: … the public affirmation of the “postcolonized subject” is not necessarily found in acts of “opposition” or “resistance” to the commandement. What defines the postcolonized subject is the ability to engage in baroque practices fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and modifiable even where there are clear, written, and precise rules. These simultaneous yet apparently contradictory practices ratify, de facto, the status of fetish that state power so forcefully claims as its right .… This is what makes postcolonial relations not only relations of conviviality and covering over, but also of powerlessness par excellence.46

The ambiguity and fluidness of such practices of critique (interestingly tied, mostly, to death, bodily functions, and sex, all of which resonate with Kristeva’s notion of the abject, which would thus require radical reinterpretation in this particular context) are in direct contradistinction with the strict rules of the commandement. Yet, such ludic practices do not enable subjects to get beyond the episteme of the commandement because, for Mbembe, “the grotesque and the obscene are two essential characteristics that identify postcolonial regimes of domination”.47 We might add corruption to Mbembe’s list of practices that re-inscribe the logics of the commandement. In their argument that “Empire necessarily declines in the very moment of its rise”,48 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write: “corruption cannot play a role in any transformation of the forms of government [of Empire] because corruption is itself the substance and totality of Empire. Corruption is the pure exercise of command, without any proportionate or adequate reference to the world of life.”49 For Mbembe, the “political economy of the body” engaged in acts of writing, creating art and retrospective return, is also engaged in banal and mundane modes of existence, and cannot revolt against the 46

Ibid., 129. Ibid., 103. 48 Ibid., 392. 49 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard: MA, 2001, 391. 47

240

Ashleigh Harris

commandement because “this logic has resulted in the mutual ‘zombification’ of both the dominant and those dominated. This zombification means that each has robbed the other of vitality and left both impotent (impouvoir).”50 Interestingly, Mbembe posits this question as to the mutual impotence of ruled and rulers in the postcolony in ways not dissimilar to Kristeva’s reading of the subject of a culture of spectacle and entertainment, arguing that “what is missing … is any sign of radical questioning”.51 However, the significant difference here is that in Mbembe’s postcolony the conditions of Kristeva’s revolt are not available to the self-reflexive subject despite their self-reflexivity. This is because where Kristeva continues to claim the value of singularity in her notion of revolt, in Mbembe’s postcolony the lines between the singular and the political are not, and should not be, clearly delineated. The consequence of this in terms of how we might read a concept such as “abjection” (specifically in its relationship with revolt) within Mbembe’s postcolony is worth considering. In her discussion of Freud’s analysis of Oedipal revolt against the father in Totem and Taboo, in which the actual death of the father becomes symbolized in ritual, Kristeva argues that the sons “replaced the dead father with the image of the father, with the totem symbol of power, the figure of the ancestor”.52 Therefore, “Freud emphasizes the necessity to mimic this revolt: not to reproduce it exactly but to represent it in the form of a festive or sacrificial commemoration”.53 It is important that this symbolic revolt should take the form, in Totem and Taboo, of sacrifice, since, for Kristeva, the “defiled object of sacrifice” is the abject,54 the “remainder that the self may attempt to cut off in order to be kept ‘pure’ from an alterity that is already part of itself”.55 Yet, in the logic of conviviality and complicity, the abject itself sustains the grotesque and obscene power of the postcolonial commandement. That is, Kristeva’s reading of revolt as disgust in The Powers of Horror does not account for the full dynamic of disgust and 50

Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 104. Ibid., 8. 52 Kristeva, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 12. 53 Ibid., 13. 54 Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, 31. 55 Ibid., 99. 51

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

241

obscenity in the postcolony, in which the obscene upholds, rather than transgresses, the episteme of the commandement.56 For Kristeva, the subject may be constantly destabilized by that which he/she wishes to abject. This creates the illusion or semblance of a pure self, and in the postcolony the abject cannot be purged because it is, itself, fundamental to the conditions of power in which every subject is complicit. There is no singular experience, utterly cut off from the political sphere, towards which this sacrificial logic gestures. Instead, the postcolonial subject is folded into the abject. For Kristeva, to quote Cecelia Sjöholm, the “body is always contaminated and contaminating. The maternal with which it is infused opens up a space of revolt that is not to be confused with the dialectics of protest caught up in the paternal axis of Symbolic laws”.57 So while for Kristeva the abject as a site of revolt is linked to the semiotic bodily sphere of the maternal, in Mbembe’s postcolony, we have only to think of the “obesity of men in power” and the ways in which these bodies stage the excesses of power to understand that the body itself reiterates, even in a state of rupture – in pain and having been violated – the phallic laws of the commandement. In Mbembe’s postcolony, the abject has lost its revolutionary potential. It is worth noting that Mbembe, too, focuses on the significance of the feast and its symbols in the postcolony. However, unlike the Oedipal sacrificial feast, which represents the revolt against the father but symbolically commemorates the dead father, the feast in Mbembe’s postcolony must be read differently. Mbembe writes: If indeed it is the festivities and celebrations that are the vehicles for the expression to the commandement and for staging its displays of magnificence and prodigality, then the body in question is first a body that eats and drinks, and second a body that is open in both ways: hence the significance given to orifices, and the central part they play 58 in people’s political humor.

56

See Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York, 1982, 155-56. 57 Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, 119. 58 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 107.

242

Ashleigh Harris

Once again, the laughter here is not a form of revolt against the authoritarian episteme or a symbolic slaying of the symbolic father of commandement: it is simply a form of participation in the prodigality (both consumptive and expulsive) of the feast. Folding zeitlos/zeitgeist Before turning to the question of how one might imagine a way out of impouvoir in the postcolony, it is helpful to consider both Kristeva’s and Mbembe’s discussions of time, which are tied into their respective notions of revolt. This undertaking enables us to move beyond a further false dichotomy that posits singularity in opposition to the political – that of zeitgeist as successive, political time and zeitlos as individual timelessness – thereby gesturing towards a possible site of synthesis between these two theories. For Kristeva, “the psychoanalytic notion of temporality is consistently avoiding a description of modernity as a time of strife, against which death presents the only moment of rupture”.59 Instead, for her, “modernity … is determined by the irruption of the unconscious [and thus] is determined by the irruptions of timelessness overcoming and liquidating time itself”.60 Interestingly, Mbembe, too, seeks to move away from a definition of time as successive: a striving – or strife-ing – towards a symbolically recuperated moment of death as the ultimate moment of symbolic rupture; and he, too, sees time as necessarily embodied. He writes: “Social theory has failed to account for time as lived, not synchronically or diachronically, but in its multiplicity and simultaneities, its presence and absences, beyond the lazy categories of permanence and change.”61 In addition to viewing time as embodied and lived, Mbembe develops his ideas on time alongside his critique of social theory that situates the time of the postcolony as successive (to put it plainly, as the time after colonialism) – or to reframe the point for my own purposes, the time after the successful revolt against the colony.62 In 59

Sjöholm, Kristeva and the Political, 118-19. Ibid., 119. 61 Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 8 (emphasis in original). 62 It is worth noting here Mbembe’s criticism of how Africa has been presented in western thought as a place in which “the idea of progress is said to disintegrate .... Should change occur – rare indeed – it would, as of necessity, follow a disordered 60

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

243

seeking to “define the quantitative and qualitative difference, if any between the colonial period and what followed”, Mbembe asks, “have we really entered another period, or do we find the same theatre, the same mimetic acting, with different actors and spectators, but with the same convulsions and the same insult? Can we really talk of moving beyond colonialism?”63 Instead of dividing colonial and postcolonial time so neatly, Mbembe argues that “[as] an age, the postcolony encloses multiple durées made up of discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings that overlay one another, interpenetrate one another, and envelope one another: an entanglement”.64 This entangled time is also a time of experience, an embodied time. Mbembe deserves quoting at some length to establish what he means by the time of existence and experience, or the time of entanglement: First, this time of African existence is neither a linear time nor a simple sequence in which each moment effaces, annuls, and replaces those that preceded it, to the point where a single age exists within society. This time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones. Second, this time is made up of disturbances … instabilities, unforeseen events, and oscillations [that] … do not always lead to erratic and unpredictable behaviors on the actors’ part …. [And, finally], close attention to its real pattern of ebbs and flows shows that this time is not irreversible. All sharp breaks, sudden and abrupt outbursts of volatility, it cannot be forced into any simplistic model and calls into question the hypothesis of stability and rupture underpinning social theory, notably where the sole concern is to account for either western modernity or the failures of non-European worlds to perfectly replicate it.65

trajectory and fortuitous path ending only in undifferentiated chaos” (ibid., 4). Mbembe seeks to resist such a reading of Africa as the alterity to modern progress, but does not wish to show, as many scholars have done, how modern progress ordered African time. Instead, he criticizes the very notion of progressive time. 63 Ibid., 237. 64 Ibid., 14 (emphasis in original). 65 Ibid., 16 (emphasis in original).

244

Ashleigh Harris

Much like Kristeva’s zeitlos, the timelessness of the psyche rupturing time itself, we have Mbembe’s time of existence, also a force of rupture and volatility. Yet, where Kristeva’s timelessness of the psyche exists outside political time, Mbembe effects this rupturing from within a subject that exists within political time. This is possible because for Mbembe: … for each time and each age, there exists something distinctive and particular – or, to use the term, a “spirit” (Zeitgeist). These distinctive and particular things are constituted by a set of material practices, signs, figures, superstitions, images, and fictions that, because they are available to individuals’ imagination and intelligence and [are] actually experienced, form what might be called “languages of life”.66

Mbembe’s time of entanglement accounts for the individual’s relationship to political authority in and across political time; and Kristeva’s theory of “revolt as psychic return” gives substance to the psyche of the living and laughing (yet convivially inscribed) being that is Mbembe’s postcolonial subject. Thus, zeitlos and zeitgeist themselves become entangled with one another, as we see the singular subject’s experience of time deeply knotted into the “languages of life” that constitute political and public spheres. What revolt in the postcolony today? What, then, does Kristeva’s notion of revolt bring to a reading of Mbembe’s postcolonial subject? In a sense, I am enacting what I choose to call a trans-political reading because, in setting up this encounter between the two theorists, I am necessarily reading both works out of context (whether that context be geo-political, national, or disciplinary). The question remains as to the value of this undertaking which I am reformulating here as the question: can a trans-political reading of Kristevan revolt offer a way out of what Mbembe sees as the mutual zombification of the commandement and the postcolonial subject? I have suggested in this trans-political syncretic reading that “revolt”, in the context of Mbembe’s postcolony, can be imagined as both “timeless” in Kristeva’s sense, and as having tangible or material 66

Ibid., 15.

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

245

value in historico-political time. It is just because of the intimate nature of Mbembe’s tyranny that I argue for a form of “intimate revolt” which is waged from the singularity of experience, but is not uniquely expressed through the realms of art and psychoanalysis, as in Kristeva’s discussion of the term. Instead, it seems to me that revolt against the commandement occurs at the point at which the subject experiences him- or herself as foreign to the commandement, even if that requires, given the epistemic bonds that tie the subject to the commandement in intimate ways, a feeling other to oneself. In Kristeva’s writing, this positionality, of being the stranger-tooneself, is tied to the role of the writer who is seen as a visionary who stands in a position of alterity to her or his society. Indeed, in Intimate Revolt, Kristeva asks whether the writer is always-already positioned as a foreigner in his/her society. She qualifies her question by stating that “so many writers have managed not only to be fervent ideologues of national identity, nationalists, indeed even fascists but have managed, very sincerely and unswervingly, to consider themselves linked indissolubly by the umbilical cord that is national language and its traditional codes”. 67 Kristeva does not argue, then, that in simply being a writer one transgresses authoritarian epistemes. Instead, it is the alterity of the writer who positions him- or herself as foreign to a dominant episteme that interests her. Mark Sanders, in his discussion of the role of the intellectual in apartheid South Africa, makes similar claims for the literary (at the same time as he broadens its domain). He writes: As generator of otherness in language and of the self, the literary work, understood broadly, emerged as a place where intellectuals grappled imaginatively with complicity. Autobiographical and testimonial narrative of various kinds formed a hinge between history and fiction as its authors figured the greater complicity or foldedness in human being that stands as the condition of possibility for any opposition to a system that constantly denies it.68

Sanders’ privileging of the literary in this context may work precisely because the literary became a site for confronting the ethical 67 68

Kristeva, Intimate Revolt, 253-54. Sanders, Complicities, x.

246

Ashleigh Harris

implications of complicity with the apartheid state for intellectuals. But in this analysis, I do not want to make claims for sites of resistance that operate only in educated, elite spheres. Indeed, this matter marks one of the perennial contradictions of postcolonial literary scholarship, in which the underlying political assumptions of the field are in tension with its object of study (the literary), precisely because literature requires literacy and remains largely, though not exclusively, targeted at and read by an educated middle- and upperclass. At the same time, I do not want to dismiss such readings of the value of the literary: I simply do not want to privilege them. The political value of the literary might be not only intended to resonate with the experiences of the consumer/reader (as Spivak’s early critique of Kristeva pointed out),69 but this does not, necessarily, mean that the writer is engaged in an entirely narcissistic and therefore apolitical act. That is, if the text is itself a negotiation of the writer’s positioning of his/herself as either a stranger to the subject he/she writes, or as foreign to the dominant episteme in which he/she writes, this would introduce a layer of political significance to the writing. To reject Kristeva’s argument that the aesthetic is a privileged site of folding the foreign into the self, I would like to propose that the intimate revolt I imagine here occurs at any point at which the subject imagines him- or herself as foreign to the commandement. Once again, I am trans-politically rending the term from Kristeva’s own contexts of reading and analysis. While cultural practitioners – including writers, musicians, artists and journalists – are often the subjects who give public voice to these intimate sites of revolt, they are by no means the only subjects able to experience such a foreignness-tooneself. Similarly, non-government aligned social or aid workers, or even political activists and leaders, may consciously criticize the epistemic bonds of the commandement, and consequently may position themselves as foreign – though equally they may not – and such subjects may also have greater access to public platforms from 69 Although this is one way of rescuing the literary for postcolonial scholarship, as Sanders’ review of Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present suggests. He argues that, in Spivak’s book, “what emerges is an ethics of reading, of the making of a reader; and socio- and geopolitical situatedness as complicity” (“Postcolonial Reading”, Postmodern Culture, X/1 (September 1999): http:// muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v010/10.1.r_sanders.html).

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

247

which to express this dissent. Yet, similarly, these are not privileged sites of revolt: they are simply some of the sites in which the enactment of such revolt is made visible and, perhaps, has the capacity of generating others’ critical reflections on how they are “mutually zombified” by the rule of commandement. What I am proposing here is the public enactment of the meanings of hospitality, in which (through Kristeva) we meet the “strange” and “foreign” as a first step towards confronting the “strangers within ourselves”. Thus, a critical positioning vis-à-vis the authoritarian episteme can move from positioning oneself as foreign, to meeting, or being hospitable to the foreignness of others and confronting the alterity within oneself. While this may gesture towards Kristevan revolution, we may argue that there is still no possibility in Mbembe’s postcolony for effecting a revolution against the dominant episteme. In much the same way as Bakhtin’s carnivalesque laughter fails to undermine the epistemic logic of the commandement, so too may the intimate revolt offered here, as a positing of oneself as foreign to that authority, become re-inscribed into its episteme. Yet, this does not result in a total political impasse (and thus total political impouvoir) either, since there is political value in the capacity of the subject to position him- or herself as “other” to the commandement, even if he or she is ultimately re-inscribed into that broader episteme. This is not dissimilar to Kristeva’s reading of women’s position in a phallic order. She states that: … the woman is a stranger to the phallic order she nonetheless adheres to, if only because she is a speaking being, a being of thought and law. But she keeps a distance vis-à-vis the social order, its rules, political contracts, etc., and this makes her skeptical, potentially atheist, ironic and all in all, pragmatic. I’m not really in the loops, says the woman, I’m staying outside, I don’t believe in it, but I play the game.70

This tension between the potentially atheistic and ironic scepticisms of women, and of having no access to symbolic or phallic power, results in a “sort of imbalance … giving rise to a feminine melancholia that’s 70

Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 93.

248

Ashleigh Harris

both endemic and deep”;71 it is also important to note here the political value of “being the outsider”. Additionally, we might argue that melancholy is preferable to zombification since the former emerges in the space of critical tension, not out of “powerlessness par excellence”.72 The recent spate of xenophobic attacks against foreigners in South Africa serves to remind us that the question of the foreign and its relationship to the postcolonial state has a very real, violent materiality today. Such xenophobia might be seen as yet another symptom of the excesses of Mbembe’s postcolony: certainly, the excessive violence of the attacks themselves would fit this profile. This observation requires us to breach the sometimes all too immense gap between discussions of the “other” as theoretically posited and the “other” as real, historical and political, subject. Mark Sanders’ analysis of what he calls advocacy becomes instructive here, despite the fact that he is speaking about the literary. He writes: “Involving self-differing and substitution, advocacy … calls upon a reader to assume responsibility for an other in the name of general foldedness in human-being.” We may speak of a subject, rather than a reader, in which case this statement opens up two possibilities for my argument: the acceptance of the alterity within oneself (the abstract idea of foreignness, which has been the substance of my argument, folded into the self) and the opening up to, or the hospitality towards, the actual “other”. This involves Sanders’ suggestion, quoted above, of the “contamination of the other with an other”.73 In the face of this, the subject who advocates for an other, despite his/her conviviality and complicity with the commandement, acts: he/she enacts (or maybe writes, speaks, sings, dances) his/her revolt, which is experienced from the position of alterity and otherness, while also embracing the alterity of otherness. Therefore, the “stranger to oneself” might be able to enact intimate revolutions against intimate tyrannies. While this may not effect a revolt against postcolonial regimes in real political terms, it is, nevertheless, not politically inconsequential: if the power of the commandement relies on the 71

Ibid., 93-94. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 129. 73 Sanders, Complicities, 17. 72

What Revolt in the Postcolony Today?

249

intimacy of conviviality, what better site to begin the process of revolt than from within the intimate spaces of communication that undermine the phallic or nationalist logic of the commandement which posits the “other” as a radical and unknowable alterity?

COSMOPOLITAN SENSUS COMMUNIS: AESTHETIC JUDGMENT AS MODEL FOR POLITICAL JUDGMENT? ULRIKE KISTNER How do you give form to a difference of values that would not be a difference of wealth in terms of general equivalence, but rather a difference in singularities in which alone the passage of a meaning in general and putting into play of what we call a world can take place?1

Europe’s long twentieth century has given both the lie and the truth to talk of cataclysms, the mass mobilizations of totalitarian movements, the delimitation, persecution and genocidal killing of populations considered to be superfluous, and the eclipse of the political in the social and the national. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, differential articulations of the national and the global pose the question of citizenship anew. Finding a polity for transnational polites now, as then, turns out to be a near-imponderable project. Giving this task back to thought will be my aim in the reflections that follow. This in turn leads me to explore the world-forming possibilities that emerge if we consider the “cosmopolitan right” underlying Kant’s vision of “perpetual peace” in the light of aesthetic judgment. This philosophical contextualization will allow us to trace a convergence with some of the paths through which Hannah Arendt addresses the “perplexities of the Rights of Man”2 in the course of her life’s work: the relationship between human rights and sovereignty; and the contradictions between human rights and citizenship, and human rights and state sovereignty. These contradictions haunt a postnational 1

Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. François Raffoul and David Pettigrew, Albany: NY, 2007, 53. 2 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948, 1951), New York, 1994, 290.

252

Ulrike Kistner

institution of the political to this day and conceptualizations of transnational citizenship in particular. Human rights cannot be founded on the will of the people; they have to be grounded in a source above and beyond the nation-state. But a legal sphere above nations does not exist, and hence cannot operate to facilitate and regulate agreements between sovereign states. Moreover, a modern, egalitarian democracy has historically been tied up with the form of the nation-state. Insofar as human rights could only be actualized under conditions of nationally defined citizenship, loss of a home, of a community, of social and political belonging, of government protection, of legal status, of citizenship and nationality meant loss of human rights – in absolute terms. The end of the nationstate has spelled the end of the rights of man, in the formulation of the famous Chapter 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The “perplexities of the Rights of Man” that Arendt traces from the moment of their declaration at the end of the eighteenth century, and, with exacerbated force, from the beginning of the twentieth century, constitute the horizon for both post World War II and present-day visions of constituent power. An international order envisaged as guarantor of human rights does not hold any promise for resolving this contraction, either. As Arendt explains: … contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that …. The establishment of one sovereign world state, far from being the prerequisite for world citizenship, would be the end of all citizenship. It would not be the climax of world politics, but quite literally its end.3

It is precisely the crack in any analogy drawn between an international human rights framework presumed binding on states, and the laws of states binding individuals within their territory that plays into the hands of ideologists of totalitarian movements trashing human rights, as well as those of their victims and survivors who have given up on human rights. The charge of utopianism becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy of totalitarian ideologues advocating the abrogation of 3

Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times, Harmondsworth, 1973, 85.

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

253

citizenship and political rights for those relegated outside of a supposedly unitary national community. Arendt explains this vicious circularity in the following manner: … the incredible plight of an ever-growing group of innocent people [rendered undesirable through persecution] was like a practical demonstration of the totalitarian movements’ cynical claims that no such thing as inalienable human rights existed and that the affirmations of the democracies to the contrary were mere prejudice, hypocrisy, and cowardice in the face of the cruel majesty of a new world. The very phrase “human rights” became for all concerned – victims, persecutors, and onlookers alike – the evidence of hopeless idealism or fumbling feeble-minded hypocrisy.4

Yet emerging from these formulations is an indication that the factual spuriousness and normative undesirability of a posited correlation between international law and the laws of states do not exhaust the validity of a human rights framework. While Arendt’s critique enormously complicates the relationship between ethics and politics, and begs the very question of the status and role of the political itself, a human rights framework is not thereby rendered out of ethical purchase. At the very least, the question of an international order of rights remains valid. As Karl Jaspers, writing at the same time as Arendt in 1949, amidst “the rubble of the devastated European nationstates”, asked5 “Wird nicht doch irgendwann das Neue möglich, das Sichzusammenfinden aller in einem Reich des Friedens?” (“Will this new order not one day become possible, this convergence of all into a realm of peace?)”6 Jaspers here refers to Kant’s “Zum ewigen Frieden” (“Toward Eternal Peace”), incorporating Kant’s own caution about “Friedhofsruhe” (“the peace and quiet of the graveyard”), a caution ironically implied in the choice of Kant’s title, which he

4

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 269. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, New Haven and London, 2006, 164. 6 Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949), Frankfurt, 1957, 204 (Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, trans. Michael Bullock, New Haven: CT, 1953, 211). 5

254

Ulrike Kistner

gleaned from the sign carrying the name of an inn, along with the image of a church yard.7 These and related Kantian themes were taken from Arendt’s conversations with Jaspers. She revisited them time and again in her writings, from her engagement with Jaspers at the stage of his writing Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (1949) (The Origin and Goal of History) “with cosmopolitan intent”, through Arendt’s postulation of a “comity of nations” in 1951, to her Kant lectures and notes on judgment in the second half of 1970.8 In the following, I will provide an exposition of these Kantian themes in so far as they would have impinged on, and underscored, Arendt’s critical position on human rights as a framework for an international order, and on judgment in the sphere of the political. I hope to show that her project of deriving political judgment from aesthetic judgment may not be possible, theoretically speaking, on the grounds of her substantivist reconstruction of a Kantian sensus communis. But in contrast to those commentators who have critiqued her Kantian extrapolations on those grounds,9 I wish to show that this does not spell the demise of judgment in the sphere of the (cosmo)political precisely in as much as it is modeled on aesthetic judgment. Such a critical possibility, I will argue, is validly reinstated in Arendt’s remarks on the limitations of international law in guaranteeing the Rights of Man, leading her to explore cosmopolitan right based on a Kantian theory of judgment. For Kant, attempting to draw a philosophical outline of “perpetual peace”, the possibility of perpetual peace lies with a constitution comprising a system of law/right at three levels: – at the level of “the state citizens’ law of men in a people” (ius civitatis); 7

Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein Philosophischer Entwurf (1795), ed. Rudolf Malter, Stuttgart, 1984, 3. 8 Jaspers held an idea of federations of states that renounced complete sovereignty (Young-Bruehl, Why Arendt Matters, 164). Arendt titled Jaspers with the epithet “Citizen of the World”, appended with a question mark, in one of the essays collected in the volume entitled Men in Dark Times (81-94). 9 See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: Ursprung und Wege der Gemeinschaft (1998), trans. Sabine Schulz and Francesca Raimondi, Berlin, 2004, 120; and Andrew Norris, “Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense”, Polity XXIX/2 (Winter 1996), 176.

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

255

– at the level of ”the law of nations, of states in relation to one another“ (ius gentium);

– at the level of “cosmopolitan right”, “so far as men and states standing in an external relation of influence on each other are to be regarded as citizens of a universal state of men” (ius cosmopoliticum or “Weltbügerrecht”).10

Kant attempts to explicate the relationship of these three levels to each other through an analogy that distributes the same attributes to each one of the three levels even as these levels progressively increase in magnitude: just as members of a polity should organize themselves into a lawful civil state on the basis of a social contract formalized in a republican constitution, so, too, states should form themselves into a confederation; and just as peace should be safeguarded within a republican state, so a league of nations should regulate the peaceful co-existence of different states in relation to each other; and the rights of a world citizen should pertain to all states and citizens. A simple equation, or so it seems. If we do take a closer look at this edifice, it turns out that it is extremely fraught and fragile. What remains solid in this edifice is its foundation – namely a civic-republican constitution for the individual state. But even this basic requirement cannot be transferred to the next level: a state within a comity of nations, or federation, is not bound by law in the same way as an individual citizen is to the laws of one particular state. States entering into a comity with each other already have a constitution infusing a set of laws internally, and thus are relieved of the obligation to establish a constitution at the level of inter-state relations.11 Kant comes to reject the model of the state for the form of organization of a comity of nations: a comity of nations cannot, without the risk of contradiction and self-elimination, organize itself 10

Immanuel Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, 11, §2; Immanuel Kant, Principles of Lawful Politics. Immanuel Kant’s Philosophic Draft Toward Eternal Peace, trans. Wolfgang Schwarz, Aalen, 1988, 61, translation modified. Schwarz translates ius cosmopoliticum as “cosmopolitan law” (61); I translate the Latin term as “cosmopolitan right” in order to signal the shift by which the “Weltbürgerrecht” (“cosmopolitan right”) becomes embedded in a theory of judgment. See arguments towards the end of this essay. 11 Kant, Principles of Lawful Politics, 74, 77.

256

Ulrike Kistner

into a polity of the form of the national state; a united world state would annihilate all sovereign liberties of individual states, and would undermine the obligations of individual states toward their respective citizens.12 Instead, Kant postulates a federal consociation of free states based on a peace covenant.13 But such a consociation of states has no state-guaranteed legal basis and no civil society as a critical counter to the state. At the third level – that of cosmopolitan right – the edifice, so far held together by a fragile analogy, threatens to collapse altogether. It is instructive to see how Kant switches registers here – from practical reason to imagination. And this is where Kant’s theory of judgment becomes relevant: “The validity of these innate and inalienable rights, which necessarily belong to humanity, is confirmed and elevated by the principle of man’s legal relations even to higher beings ..., in conceiving of himself, according to the same basic propositions, also as citizen of a super-sensible world.”14 Cosmopolitan right does not fall under the criteria of practical reason, but under Kant’s theory of judgment. While cosmopolitan right is a “necessary complement of the unwritten code of both the law of the state and the law of nations”,15 and therefore forms an analogue to the law of nations, it adheres to a different cognitive principle. In eluding our understanding, and even our capability of deducing it, we have to add it in our thinking, “in the manner of artifice” (“nach der Analogie menschlicher Kunsthandlungen”),16 which is to say through imagination. Kant bases cosmopolitan right on a philosophical fiction – a contractus imaginarius fundamentally distinct from the originary social contract of ius civitatis.17 In relation to the rights of citizens within a state, and a state within a confederation of states, the cosmopolitanism of Kant’s idea of perpetual peace contains a critical excess. To be able to trace the source of this excess, I would like to 12

Ibid., 74. Ibid., 77. 14 Ibid., 64. 15 Ibid., 87. 16 Kant, Zum ewigen Frieden, 25; Kant, Principles of Lawful Politics, 88. 17 See Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, “Kant's Idea of Peace and the Philosophical Conception of a World Republic“, in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, eds James Bohman and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Cambridge: MA, 1997, 68. 13

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

257

revert to Kant’s Third Critique at those points where it is integrally connected to the sense of human commonality located, in Kant’s scheme, in imagination and aesthetic judgment, and judgment of taste in particular. Paradigmatic for the definition of judgment is the judgment of taste. The judgment of taste – probably the most radically idiosyncratic of the senses – seems, at first glance, a paradoxical foundation for a sense common to all. In aesthetic judgment, a general term has to be found for a radically subjective and particular judgment. This difficulty presented by the case of aesthetic judgment is compounded by the antinomy peculiar to the judgment of taste: taste, as an internal sense, is highly particular and subjective, and yet has to be thought of as objectively purposeful, and under the presumption of what is societally agreeable.18 It seems that Kant is reveling in this paradox to make the point that even highly subjective forms of an aesthetic sensorium presuppose sociality – not as an object of thought, but as one of its conditions. In implicating sensus communis in the judgment of taste, Kant’s Third Critique suggests that one of the most telling features of being human – and of freely being human – lies in the aptitude for grounding feeling in reason through beauty, understood here as a pleasure not directed by desire or interest. Therein lies the link between the aesthetic and the ethical; this link is not established cognitively, but symbolically.19 Aesthetic judgment, as subjective judgment, claims general validity not in relation to a concept of the object, but in relation to that which emerges from the contemplation of the object for every subject – “subjective universality”. Kant adds, significantly, that this “subjective universality” does not simply turn a subjective condition of judgment into an objective one, but also validates judgment that itself contains an “ought”, making of it an ideal norm, a case of exemplary validity. This latter aspect approximates aesthetic judgment to moral judgment: under the presupposition of an accord with sensus communis, aesthetic judgment gestures toward moral law. In such a 18

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. J.H. Bernard, New York and London, 1951, 64; Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, Willing (1971, 1977), New York and London, 1978, 264. 19 See John Zammito, The Genesis of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, Chicago, 1992, 95 and 273; Esposito, Communitas, 111.

258

Ulrike Kistner

presumed accord, sensus communis itself attains the character of an ideal norm; the judgment that is thought in accordance with such sensus communis could become universally regulative.20 This pertains not only to the propositional structure of such judgment; it is the very “feeling in the judgment of taste [that] comes to be imputed to everyone ... as a [moral] duty”.21 In contradistinction to a vulgar kind of common sense, Kant says: … under the sensus communis we must include the idea of a sense common to all, i.e. of a faculty of judgment which, in its reflection, takes account (a priori) of the mode of representation of all other men in thought, in order, as it were, to compare its judgment with the collective reason of humanity …. This is done by comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man ….

The ability peculiar to judgment, “to put ourselves in thought in the place of everyone else”,22 is what Kant calls “enlarged thought” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”); it entails reflection upon one’s own judgment “from a universal standpoint” (“allgemeinen Standpunkt”).23 Such capacity of judgment that mobilizes imagination, taste, sensus communis, and in doing so attains representative or enlarged thought, dissolves the antinomies of taste by setting the judgment of taste in analogy with a concept of reason: “[The peculiarity of the judgment of taste] consists in the fact that, although it has merely subjective validity, it claims the assent of all subjects, exactly as it would do if it were an objective judgment resting on grounds of knowledge that could be established by a proof.”24 The peculiarity of the judgment of taste lies in the procedures of analogy and abstraction involving the imagination. They center on the construction of an “as if” through which the subjective and objective are mediated in cognition. Thus, the presupposition that my judgment is compatible with that of all others does not find its validation in 20

Kant, Critique of Judgement, 76. Ibid., 138. 22 Ibid., 136. 23 Ibid. 137; Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), ed. Wilhelm Weischedel, Frankfurt, 1994, 226-27. 24 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 127. 21

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

259

reality. Aesthetic judgment as an instance of reflective judgment reserves for itself an “as if”-character, which is reducible neither to the determinate concepts of reason, nor to practical reason. It is related to reason in a symbolic fashion. Through the symbolic route then, the constitution of sociality is given back to thought. In returning to our earlier exposition of Kant’s stipulation of the conditions of perpetual peace, we had followed his argument on a system of right at three levels: ius civitatis, ius gentium, and ius cosmopoliticum. We had found that while the first two levels were constructed as relations that formed a limited analogy, it was at the third level, that of the ius cosmopoliticum, that the analogy became unhinged. At the third level, a different kind of “right”, more appropriately describable as “norm”, was shown to come into play. This casting of right that Kant calls ius cosmopoliticum informed Hannah Arendt’s critical position on human rights as framework for an international order. This exposition of Kant’s theory of judgment gives us grounds for both tracing and contesting Arendt’s turn to Kant. It turns out, as I have tried to show, that Kant’s switch of register at the level of ius cosmopoliticum has the effect of embedding cosmopolitan right within a theory of judgment. The link between cosmopolitan right and judgment is established with the sensus communis mobilized by the imagination and the judgment of taste, which Kant calls “enlarged thought” (“erweiterte Denkungsart”), “extended” or “universal communicability” (“erweiterte”, “allgemeine Mitteilbarkeit”).25 This link is one of the instances of Kant’s theory of judgment that leads Arendt to the derivation of what she calls “political judgment” from aesthetic judgment. However, this derivation is fraught with difficulties, and requires careful differentiation. In what follows, I will outline some of the landmarks in Arendt’s extrapolations from Kant’s theory of judgment,

25 Ronald Beiner notes that in discussing, by reference to Kant’s theory of judgment, the “universal communicability/agreement” of aesthetic judgment, Arendt “consistently substitutes ‘general’ where the standard translations would have ‘universal’” (in Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner, Chicago: 1982, 163, n.155). Norris sees here one of the sources of “Arendt’s misinterpretation” (“Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense”, 189), in which the distinction between formal and substantive dimensions of judgment, between reflective and determinative judgment, is narrowed or even obliterated.

260

Ulrike Kistner

and from the judgment of taste and sensus communis in particular, in her attempt to find in this theory a ground for “political judgment”.26 In a note in her Denktagebuch (Diary of Thought) dated August 1957, Arendt substantiates sensus communis by defining it as “presence of others” and condition of reflective judgment.27 In a related passage, she explains sensus communis as “the plural inside me”, through which a life in common becomes possible.28 Arendt credits Kant with having politicized judgments of taste, by drawing them out into the political.29 The interest in making Kant’s theory of judgment productive for an explication of the political emerges from an exchange with Jaspers in 1957. In drawing the distinction between determinative and reflective judgment, aesthetics, like politics, is assigned to reflective judgment insofar as it is not rule-governed.30 Arendt confirms this more emphatically at a later stage (April 1968) in calling the faculty of judgment “the political capacity (“das politische Vermögen”) par excellence”.31 This idea continues to impel Arendt’s later reflections on judgment. In the essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations” (1971), she calls the faculty of judgment qua reflective judgment, “the faculty to judge particulars without subsuming them under general rules”, and “the most political of man’s mental abilities”.32 In the wake of the documentation and reflection on the role and trial of Adolf Eichmann, and later re-visionings, judgment appears as a form

26 I am referring here to those writings of Arendt that appeared after The Human Condition (1958), in which she ties the political to action (see also Between Past and Future: “The raison d'être of politics is freedom, and its field of experience is action” [145]). In her subsequent readings of Kant, Arendt discovers judgment as the capacity of the spectators. With sensus communis as its necessary condition, for Arendt reflective judgment becomes the locus of the political. 27 Hannah, Arendt, Denktagebuch, Bd. I: 1950-1973, Munich, 2002, 570. 28 Ibid., 578 (my translation). 29 Ibid., 571. 30 Ibid., 569. 31 Ibid., 679. 32 Hannah Arendt, Responsibility and Judgment, ed. Jerome Kohn, New York, 2003, 188-89.

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

261

of practical reason – as “the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And this indeed may prevent catastrophes …”.33 Arendt became convinced that Kant’s political philosophy was embedded in his Critique of Judgment:34 her claim that Kant’s unwritten political philosophy was to be found in the Critique of Judgment has become one of the stock-in-trades of Arendt scholarship. Inspired by the correlation that Arendt imputed to Kant’s Third Critique, in her article “The Crisis in Culture” (1961), she remarked: “Culture and politics belong together because it is not knowledge or truth that is at stake, but rather judgment and decision, the judicious exchange of opinion about the sphere of public life and the common world”. 35 Spelling this out more specifically in the article entitled “Freedom and Politics” of 1961, and later in her 1977 Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt develops Kant’s political philosophy in close correlation with aesthetic judgment, and aesthetic judgment in close correlation with Kant’s “moral politics” in the Third Critique. She motivates this correlation by pointing out that the faculty of judgment, and the imagination associated with it, is linked, in Kant, with political thinking and freedom, because it enables us to “put ourselves in the minds of other men” and create an “enlarged mentality” otherwise referred to as “representative thinking”.36 In her “Laudatio” to Karl Jaspers (1958), Arendt identifies as “the political mentality par excellence” the Kantian “enlarged mentality”, which is based on the “will to limitless communication, and objectively, the fact of universal comprehensibility”.37 The general communicability of common sense is linked to the public use of one’s reason, of which, for both Hannah Arendt and 33

This is echoed in her reflections in Life of the Mind: “It was this absence of thinking”, she wrote, “that awakened my interest. Is evil-doing … possible in default of not just ‘base motives’ ... but of any motives whatever .… Might the problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty of thought?” (Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, I: Thinking, New York and London, 1978, 4-5). Later, Arendt implicitly rejects this confounding of aesthetics and morality by referring to Kant’s bracketing of moral judgment from his theory of judgment (see Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 255). 34 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 61. 35 Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, New York, 1977, 222. 36 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 102. 37 Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 82, 92.

262

Ulrike Kistner

Ronald Beiner, the spectator is an exemplar. In establishing these correlations in their lectures on Kant, they refer to Kant’s passage from The Conflict of the Faculties that ascribes a moral disposition not to the actors, but the spectators of the French Revolution, in order to emphasize the requirements of a socio-ethical revolution over and above those of a political revolution.38 For Arendt and Beiner, spectatorship, disinterestedness, universality, and morality are the attributes that draw aesthetic judgment and political judgment together. They add a few more: public-ness, the spectator in the public realm, and common sense as public sense defined, in part, by public use of one’s reason.39 Aligning the spectator with the public use of one’s reason (in the sense articulated by Kant in his essay “What is Enlightenment?” (1784)), catapults him or her into the limelight as citizen (as opposed to subject – associated by Kant in that same essay with “private use of one’s reason” and “obedience”).40 In elaborating on the citizen as a modern subject, Arendt and Beiner turn to Kant’s aesthetic theory in order to develop a theory of political judgment, while leaving out of their account his political theory elaborated in the Critique of Practical Reason (1788).41 But more than that, they neglect Kant’s idea of the role of judgment being to bridge the gulf between pure reason pertaining to laws in the realm of understanding, and practical reason pertaining to the laws of moral action. The link established between these realms by judgment is subject to an “as if” construction – the subjective judgment of taste claiming “the assent of all subjects, exactly as it would do if it were an objective judgment”;42 and “comparing our judgment with the possible rather than the actual judgments of others”43 – which Arendt and Beiner seem to gloss over.

38

See Immanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans. Mary J. Gregor, Lincoln: NE, 1979, 153. 39 Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 63, 103, 121, 122. 40 Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”, in The Enlightenment? A Sourcebook and Reader, ed. Paul Nyland with Olga Gomez and Francesca Greensides, London and New York, 2003, 55-58. 41 See Norris, “Arendt, Kant, and the Politics of Common Sense”, 176. 42 Kant, Critique of Judgement, 127. 43 Ibid., 136.

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

263

To demonstrate and substantiate this charge, let us take another look at relevant Kantian formulations, some of which I would like to repeat here for purposes of clarification: [The person who judges] cannot find the ground of this satisfaction in any private conditions connected with his own subject, and hence it must be grounded on what he can presuppose in every other person. Consequently he must believe that he has reason for attributing a similar satisfaction to everyone. He will therefore speak of the beautiful as if beauty were a characteristic of the object and the judgment logical (constituting a cognition of the object by means of concepts of it), although it is only aesthetical and involves merely a representation of the object to the subject. For it has this similarity to a logical judgment that we can presuppose its validity for all men. But this universality cannot arise from concepts.44

Aesthetic judgment presumes the universal validity of the apperception as if it were logical or objective, in the mode of the coniunctivus irrealis that simulates a similarity with reason, logic and objectivity that it is not. It is on the ground of this simulation, that it attains the possible assent of every other person, in which possibility Kant anchors the sensus communis. The latter is defined as the universal (allgemeine) communicability, mediated above all by that faculty of judgment called taste that comes into play in the process of contemplation (of the aesthetic). The sensus communis, the universal communicability of aesthetic judgment, in turn, turns the subjective sense of taste into the representation of something objective, as Kant states in paragraph 22 of the Critique of Judgment: “The necessity of the universal agreement that is thought in a judgment of taste is a subjective necessity, which is represented as objective under the presupposition of a common sense”.45 Thus, for Kant, the assumption of the possibility that our aesthetic judgment is comparable to that of all others has its basis not in actuality, but in an “as-if”. Aesthetic judgment, while not immediately cognitive, fulfils the Kantian understanding of critique as secondorder thinking: thinking the conditions of possibility of (noncognitive) thinking that defines reflective judgment. Aesthetic 44 45

Ibid., 46 (emphasis added). Ibid., 76 (emphasis added).

264

Ulrike Kistner

judgment is not the judgment of each individual subject; its a priori character is motivated by the assumption of its mediation through all others who exercise judgment. The ascription of value takes place in the name of others, but the assent of others is assumed by projection. This is to say that the possible assent of others is not to be understood as corroborating a substantivist understanding of a common sense as constituting our own – as it features in Hannah Arendt’s later reflections and remarks on judgment – but appears under the sign of an other. Kant states, “what is … left undetermined by … universal laws, must be considered in accordance with such unity as they would have if an understanding (although not our understanding) had furnished them to our cognitive faculties …”.46 Aesthetic judgment produces a sense of the common by way of a fictionalizing move. It cannot be construed to give rise to a substantive, actual common sense, as it is in a certain sense virtual, producing a unity of understanding only by analogy with it. Common sense cannot be seen to affirm an integral sense of community, nor should it be understood as an extension of the self to others, nor as an expression of a collective identity. Those senses of common sense are forestalled in the contention that sensus communis passes through the other’s appearance.47 By virtue of these conditions, the complex mediations of aesthetic judgment (as reflective judgment) cannot validly be considered to be instantiated in a substantivist understanding of common sense, nor can they be equated with practical reason, nor with the rules of particular social formations, nor with a particular historical positioning of aesthetic judgment as sociability-founding act. The charges of a substantivist understanding of sensus communis, and of the conflation of a Kantian theory of judgment with practical reason, however, come unstuck in one aspect of Hannah Arendt’s thought that has fallen entirely out of the ambit of scholars studying her extrapolations from Kant’s theory of judgment for an understanding of the political. It is an aspect of Arendt’s work that, I would contend, remains most true to a Kantian sensus communis implicated in a theory of judgment, yet one in which the Kantian 46

Ibid., 16. Peggy Kamuf, The Division of Literature: or the University in Deconstruction, Chicago, 1997, 33. 47

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

265

reference points do not even explicitly feature: in the relationship between the “Rights of Man” and international law. And with that, I would like to return to the reflections at the opening of this essay. To establish this arena as the most if not only cogent possibility of a confluence of a Kantian theory of reflective judgment and sensus communis, a Kantian ius cosmopoliticum, and an Arendtian politics of human rights, I would like to go through Arendt’s explanation of “The Perplexities of Human Rights”; her postulation, by way of a positive critique, of “the right to have rights”; and Kant’s vision of cosmopolitanism as based on a theory of judgment. Arendt’s skepticism about the possibility of protecting human rights at an international level is well known. The experience of the first half of the twentieth century has shown that the independence from government claimed on behalf of the “Rights of Man” referenced to natural right, was detrimental for those relegated out of the definition of the “nation-people”, who were left to abandon in the absence of any government or institution or international body to guarantee and protect their rights.48 In the face of the experiences of rightlessness, statelessness, and genocide, “the right of every human being to membership in a political community” becomes an important element of a positive critique of the “Rights of Man”.49 To be posited as an alternative to nationally defined and protected rights, “the right to have rights” would have to be independent of natural law and its actualization in the laws of individual states. For Arendt, the paramount right is “the right to have rights” – which “is not the right of members [of a political community], but a right to membership”.50 It should not presuppose that human beings are already members of a “pre-given” community, but that they constitute themselves as polites in and through the “right to have rights”. The “right to have rights” does not comprise “the rights of citizens”, but is “the right to citizenship” itself,51 or the “right to reside with rights”.52 In spelling 48

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 295-97. Hannah Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’: What Are They?”, Modern Review, III/1 (Summer 1949), 34. 50 Christoph Menke, “‘The Aporias of Human Rights’ and the ‘One Human Right’: Regarding the Coherence of Hannah Arendt’s Argument”, Social Research, LXXIV/3 (Fall 2007), 748. 51 Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’”, 37.

49

266

Ulrike Kistner

out this reconstitutive critique of Right and rights, Arendt simultaneously posits a new vision for international right. The “right to have rights” is part of a “sphere of law that is above the nations”, one that no longer only regulates “the intercourse of sovereign nations”.53 Arendt’s reconceptualization indicates a move from “international right” to transnationalism. A transnational “right to have rights” is one that constitutes man or a woman as beings whose belonging to humankind is a matter of political sociability, in which the right to have rights is the paramount right established through mutual agreement and guarantee of a political nature, rather than through the givens of natural law still resonating in the bonds of national belonging congealed into a unitary notion of citizenship.54 In Arendt’s words: This human right, like all other rights, can exist only through mutual agreement and guarantee. Transcending the rights of the citizen being the right of men to citizenship – this right is the only one that can and can only be guaranteed by the comity of nations.55

The close parallels with Kant’s ius cosmopoliticum in Arendt’s formulation of a right transcending citizenship of the nation-state, can hardly be overlooked. Kant invokes the faculty of imagination in visualizing the relationship between natural law and the realm of freedom and equality, by way of transcending the former, and asserting the priority of the latter: “The validity of … innate and inalienable rights, which necessarily belong to humanity, is confirmed and elevated by the principle of man’s legal relations even to higher beings (if he thinks such), in conceiving of himself, according to the same basic 52

Balibar, Étienne. “Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship”, lecture at McMaster University, 16 March 2006, on line at: http://www.europeanstudiesalliance.org/calendar/sp07events/BalibarPaper.pdf, 14. 53 Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’”, 36; Menke, “‘The Aporias of Human Rights’ and the ‘One Human Right’”, 750. 54 Balibar similarly calls for a cosmopolitics based on transnational citizenship – a “citizenship without community”, “democracy without demos” – with corresponding new modes of civility, that should become enshrined in political institutions (“Strangers as Enemies”, 11). 55 Arendt, “‘The Rights of Man’”, 37.

Cosmopolitan Sensus Communis

267

propositions, also as citizen of a super-sensible world”. The transformative analogy that is peculiar to the work of the imagination, is extended further: “For, as concerns my freedom, I have no obligation even in regard to divine laws cognizable by me through mere reason but only so far as I have been able to give assent to them myself (for it is only through the law of my own reason that I come to form the concept of a divine will)”.56 Correspondingly, we do not see evidence of sovereign law at the third level of law/right – ius cosmopoliticum. Perpetual peace cannot be ordained by law – otherwise it would become subject to a human rights fundamentalism, a risk of which Arendt was very wary. An elimination or dissolution of the utopian, ideal, or Kantian-aesthetic dimension of citizenship would threaten citizenship as such.57 As Habermas explains, “fundamentalism about human rights is to be avoided not by giving up on the politics of human rights, but rather through the cosmopolitan transformation of the state of nature among states into a legal order”,58 which, I would argue, transposes it into a realm of Right. Thus, imagining Right beyond law given and executed by national or state sovereignty would yield a different order for the cosmopolitan toward perpetual peace. A nationally circumscribed and policed right of residence is transformed, in the ius cosmopoliticum, into universal hospitality: the unconditional right of visiting and the obligation of hosting. Based on Kant’s transnational vision of “the right of common possession of the earth’s surface”, on any one place of which “originally nobody has a better title to being … than another”, Kant posits a “right and law, where hospitality (neighborliness) means a foreigner’s right not to be treated inimically because of his arrival on another person’s ground”.59 This postulate would entail a transformation of strangers taken as enemies to strangers held in the position as possible citizens – that impossibility of community by

56

Kant, Principles of Lawful Politics, 64. See Balibar, “Strangers and Enemies”, 13. 58 Jürgen Habermas, “Kant’s Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight”, in Perpetual Peace. Essays on Kant’s Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. James Bohmann and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann, Cambridge: MA, 1997, 149. 59 Kant, Principles of Lawful Politics, 83. 57

268

Ulrike Kistner

which we come to appear under the sign of an other – as a condition for all.60 Arendt echoes this vision in describing the imagination from the position of Kant’s world citizen: “To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one’s imagination to go visiting”.61 But more importantly, Arendt follows closely in Kant’s cosmopolitical footsteps towards the end of her life. In a statement referring to Kant’s “Perpetual Peace”, in which she grasps and formulates the role of the imagination and of aesthetic judgment with a clarity evidenced nowhere else in her writing on these themes. Here, for the first time, she gives clear expression to the “as if” relation and the coniunctivus irrealis (yet designating possibility) that defines reflective judgment and the sensus communis thus constituted: … it is no longer a question of whether perpetual peace is possible or not, or whether we are not perhaps mistaken in our theoretical judgment if we assume that it is. On the contrary, we must simply act as if it could really come about … even if the fulfillment of this pacific intention were forever to remain a pious hope … for it is our duty to do so.62

In reaching for a cosmopolitics, finally, the imagination sponsors a close relationship between aesthetic judgment, sensus communis, and political judgment. On these gestures-in-thought “toward eternal peace”, after a long hard debate that I tried to stage here between Immanuel Kant and Hannah Arendt, the two protagonists would reach temporal/temporary agreement.

60

See Balibar, “Strangers as Enemies”, 13. Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 43. 62 Arendt, The Life of the Mind, II, 260.

61

Notes on Contributors

NICHOLAS BROWN heads the African American Studies Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches Modernism, African literature, and critical theory. His research interests include Marxism, the history of aesthetics, Lusophone literature, and music studies. His book Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, 2005) examines the relationship between postcolonial literature and European modernism, and the relationship of each to continuing crises in the global economic system. His current project is Hegel User's Manual. FABIO AKCELRUD DURÃO is Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He is the author of Modernism and Coherence (Peter Lang, 2008), has co-edited several books, including Modernist Group Dynamics (Cambridge Scholars, 2008), and published a number of articles on the Frankfurt School, modernism and Brazilian critical theory. JOSÉ ADRIANO FENERICK has a PhD in economic history from the University of São Paulo (USP). He is the author of Nem do morro, nem da cidade: as transformações do samba e a indústria cultural - 19201945 (São Paulo: Annablume/FAPESP, 2005) and Façanhas às Próprias Custas. Um estudo sobre a produção musical da Vanguarda Paulista. 1979-2000 (São Paulo: Annablume/ FAPESP, 2007). PIER PAOLO FRASSINELLI teaches Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University, South Africa campus. He has published in the areas of early modern and postcolonial studies and literary and cultural theory. RONIT FRENKEL completed her PhD in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies at the University of Arizona in 2004 and is currently a senior lecturer in the English Department at the University of Johannesburg. Her book entitled Reconsiderations. South African

270

Traversing Transnationalism

Indian Fiction and the Making of Race in Postcolonial Culture appeared from UNISA Press in 2010. Her publications have appeared in Research in African Literatures, English Studies in Africa, genre, Scrutiny 2, African Studies and various anthologies. She specializes in African literatures, postcolonial theory, African feminisms and transnationalism. SHANE GRAHAM is Associate Professor of English at Utah State University, the author of South African Literature after the Truth Commission: Mapping Loss (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and coeditor of Langston Hughes and the South African Drum Generation: The Correspondence (Palgrave, 2010). PAMILA GUPTA is currently a researcher at WISER (Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research), based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She completed her PhD in Socio-cultural Anthropology from Columbia University in 2004. Forthcoming publications include: “Goa Dourada, the Internal ‘Exotic’ in South Asia: Discourses of Colonialism and Tourism” in A. Phukan and V.G. Rajan, eds Reading the Exotic, South Asia and its Others, Cambridge Scholars Press; “The Disquieting of History: Portuguese (De)Colonization and Goan Migration in the Indian Ocean”, Journal of Asian and African Studies; “A Voyage of Convalescence: Sir Richard Burton and the Imperial Ills of Portuguese India”, South African Historical Journal; “‘Signs of Wonder’: The Postmortem Travels of Francis Xavier in the Indian Ocean World”, in A. Jamal and S. Moorthy, eds Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social and Political Perspectives, Routledge Press. Her areas of interest include: history and anthropology of South Asia; Portuguese colonial history and emigration in the Indian Ocean (India, Mozambique, South Africa); Catholic missionary history, colonial and postcolonial studies; visual anthropology; ritual studies; anthropology of tourism; corporeality, cults, and state pageantry; and historical anthropology. ASHLEIGH HARRIS received her PhD in English Literature from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She currently lectures in English Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has published on postcolonial and Southern African literature, and is currently completing a book entitled Postcolonialism on Edge: Reading Contemporary Zimbabwe.

Notes on Contributors

271

BIANCA KAI ISAKI is a lecturer in the Women’s Studies Program at the University of Hawai`i at Manoa. She is currently working on a book manuscript, A Decolonial Archive: The Space of Asian Settler Politics in a Time of Hawaiian Decolonization. SANG HEA KIL is an assistant professor in the Justice Studies department and San José State University. Her research focuses on the nexus between immigration and crime, media and discourse analysis, and whiteness and nationalism within a critique of racism and the social construction of USA-Mexico border. Sang has several published works in such edited books as Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence, and such academic journals as Social Justice, and Violence against Women. She is also interested in pedagogy, social justice, and coalition work within a scholar-activist perspective that stems from her political work around issues of human rights, antiglobalization, immigration and alternative media. She is currently working on her manuscript based on her dissertation entitled, Covering the Border War: How the News Media Create Race, Crime, Nation and the USA-Mexico Divide. ULRIKE KISTNER is working in the Department of Classics and World Languages at the University of South Africa (UNISA). Her teaching interests include 18th century aesthetics and political philosophy, and theories of postcoloniality. She has published numerous articles on aspects of nations and nationalisms, psychoanalysis and literature, modernity and its dis-contents. A book entitled Commissioning and Contesting Post-Apartheid’s Human Rights appeared in 2003. TOMOKO KURIBAYASHI earned her MA and PhD degrees from Universities of Tokyo, Alberta, and Minnesota, and has taught courses in literature, composition, and women's studies at the University of Wisconsin. She specializes in contemporary fiction, mainly by women and minority writers from the US, Canada, and Great Britain. She has co-edited two volumes of essays: Creating Safe Space: Violence and Women’s Writing (SUNY Press, 1998) and The Outsider Within: Ten Essays on Modern Japanese Women Writers (University Press of America, 2002). Kuribayashi continues to examine contemporary women writers in English and Japanese, including Atwood, Alice Munro, and Yoko Tawada.

272

Traversing Transnationalism

AMANDA LAGERKVIST holds a PhD degree in Media and Communication Studies and is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University, Sweden. She works within the fields of media studies, urban theory and transnational American Studies. Her ongoing project engages Americans and American expatriate spaces in New Shanghai. She is the co-editor (with André Jansson) of Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity (Ashgate, 2009). MELISSA TANDIWE MYAMBO completed her PhD, The Politics of Blood: The Poetics of (Un)belonging in Globalization, in the Comparative Literature department at New York University in 2008. She is the author of Jacaranda Journals. DAVID WATSON is a senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of English, Uppsala University. He has published on Literary Modernism, American Literature, and Transnational Studies, and is currently working on two project: a book-length study of transnational connectivity in 19th century America entitled The Hauntings of America, and a research project entitled Locating the Ends of US Imperialism.

INDEX

Adorno, Theodor W., 210 aesthetic, 11, 34, 66, 181, 189, 197-98, 203, 219, 221, 232-33, 246, 263; judgment, 251, 254, 257, 259-64, 268; politics, 57, 65-68, 71-74 (and see cosmopolitanism) Agamben, Giorgio, 208 American, African, 111, 114; studies, 4, (and see Asian[s], border[s], history, literature, transnational) Anderson, Amanda, 96 Anderson, Benedict, 6, 70-71, 73, 95-96, 170 Angola, 181, 186-90 Appadurai, Arjun, 34 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 5, 96 Apter, Emily, 115 Arac, Jonathan, 205 area studies, 3, 4, 191-93, 201202, 204 Arendt, Hannah, 10, 227, 25154, 259-62, 264-68; Works: “The Crisis of Culture”, 261; “Freedom and Politics”, 61; “The Rights of Man”, 265-66; “Thinking and Moral Considerations”, 260; Denktagebuch (Diary of Thought), 260; Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 261, 268; The Life of

the Mind, II, 268; Men in Dark Times, 261; The Origins of Totalitarianism, 251-53 Artaud, Antonin, 233 Asian(s), 140, 165, 112, 125; Americans, 58, 60, 64, 70, 72; continent, 133; settlers in Hawaii, 8, 61-68, 71-74; South, 112; Southeast, 125 Auerbach, Eric, 192 Bacon, Francis, 233 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 238, 247 Barber, Benjamin, 95 Barnabé, Arrigo, 221-24; Works: Clara Crocodilo, 221-23; A Requiem, 224 Bassnett, Susan, 191 Baugh, Edward, 98 Beckett, Samuel, 198 Beiner, Ronald, 262 Benhabib, Seyla, 7 Berlant, Lauren, 71-73 Blaut, J.M., 199-200 Bommes, Michael, 48 border(s), 6, 8, 11, 76-77, 209; lands, 77; national, 2, 7-8, 106, 144, 146-47, 149, 152-53; spatio-temporal, 6; transnational, 77; USMexican, 8, 75-92 Boulez, Pierre, 218 Bourdieu, Pierre, 197 Bourne, Randolph, 2 Braidotti, Rosi, 138, 140, 144 Brathwaite, Edward, 95-96

274

Traversing Transnationalism

Braudel, Fernand, 6, 197 Braziel, Jana Evans, 171 Brazil, 209-26; Brazilianity, 215; culture industry in, 211, 218, 220, 225; dodecaphonism in, 211-12, 214-16, 223-6; composers in, 211-12, 216; and modernity, 225 (and see music) Breiner, Laurence, 99 Breslin, Paul, 106, 111 Brooke-Rose, Christian, 152 Brown, Wendy, 72 Bush, George W., 81 Butler, Judith, 122-23 Cabral, Amilcar, 180 Cage, John, 218 capitalism, 11, 38, 61, 68, 76, 155, 158, 164, 166, 170, 175, 187, 189, 195; colonial, 63; global, 7, 155, 158, 165, 170-73, 179; late, 156; neoliberal, 69; state monopoly, 62; US, 64 (and see globalization) Caribbean, 95-118, 157; diaspora, 173-74 Casanova, Pascale, 10; Works: “Literature as a World” 199, 202-203; The World Republic of Letters, 194-95, 197-204, 206 Cavafy, C.P., 208 Cavazotti, André, 224 Chaudhuri, K.N., 133 Chomsky, Noam, 168 Chow, Rey, 191, 201 Cleveland, Grover, 53 Clifford, James, 138-40, 151, 171-73

Clinton, Bill, 59, 73, 79, 81 Cold War, 68-69, 181-84, 186 colonialism, 17, 30, 58, 12728, 134, 242-43; Portuguese, 15, 20, 23-25, 28, 31; settler, 65; western, 45 (and see capitalism) Correia de Oliveira, Willy, 218 cosmopolitanism, 2, 9, 15-19, 30-32, 95-97, 100, 103, 109, 120, 122-23, 132, 256, 265; aesthetic, 6, 117 Cozzella, Damiano, 218-19 Damrosch, David, 10, 192-93 Dante Alighieri, 114 Dayal, Samir, 151 Debussy, Claude, 215 De Certeau, Michel, 35-37, 43 Deleuze, Gilles, 5, 138-40, 142, 144-45, 150, 179 Derrida, Jacques, 235 Des Forges, Alexander, 34, 38 diaspora, 2, 57, 65, 77, 101, 107, 155-58, 164, 170-75 (and see Caribbean, literature) Dietrich, Marlene, 46 Dimock, Wai Chee, 6, 9, 97, 104, 111-12, 114 Dirlik, Arif, 61 Dobbs, Lou, 84 Douglas, Mary, 88 Du Bois, W.E.B., 236 Duprat, Rogério, 218-19 Eagleton, Terry, 11 Eichmann, Adolf, 260 Faison, Seth, 48, 50 Fanon, Frantz, 236

275

Index Farrell, Joseph, 110 Faulkner, William, 203-204 Favaretto, Celso, 219 Foster, E.M., 208 Foucault, Michel, 193 Freud, Sigmund, 103, 231, 233, 240; symbolic economy, 112; psychoanalytic reading, 231 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 7 Frost, Mark, 25 Fujikane, Candice, 60 Gabriel, John, 86 Gaddis, William, Carpenter’s Gothic, 10, 181-86, 190 Ganahl, Rainer, 230 Gaúna, Regiane, 218 Ghosh, Amitav, 132 Gil, Gilberto, 219 Gilchrist, James, 84 Gilroy, Paul, 4, 5, 104, 111 Glissant, Edouard, 103 globalization, 1, 5, 7, 11, 1718, 20, 42, 57, 75-77, 9192, 132-34, 156-58, 161, 169-72, 175, 180, 187, 191-92; anti-, 164; capitalist, 2, 9; economic, 2, 63, 157, 162; and the novel, 180 Goddard, Terry, 84 Goethe, J.W. von, 145, 192, 194-95 Goffman, Erving, 33 Gopinath, Gayatri, 171-72 Grewal, Inderpal, 122, 132, 165, 167 Guarnieri, Camargo, 212, 21516 Guattari, Felix, 138-140, 142, 144-45, 150

Guerra-Peixe, César, 212, 21617 Guillén, Claudio, 193 Habermas, Jürgen, 267 Hall, Stuart, 101, 172-74 Hamner, Robert, 107, 112, 116 Hannerz, Ulf, 4, 133 Hannity, Sean, 84 Hardt, Michael, 6, 179, 18990, 239 Harris, Wilson, 203 Harvey, David, 69 Hawaii, 8, 57-74

Hawthorne, Christopher, 50-51 Hegel, G.W.F., 10, 179-81; dialectic 10, 179-80; Logic, 181; theorem of the identity of identity and difference, 179-81, 190 Heidegger, Martin, 231 Hertz, Neil, 194 Hindemith, Paul, 212 history, 6, 7, 9, 15, 24, 64-65, 67-69, 72, 102, 109, 111, 116, 120-21, 123, 128, 131, 140-41, 180, 182, 186, 190, 228, 231-32; American, 57, 69, 71, 73; Cape colonial 124, 126-27; cultural, 9, 211, 215; life, 18-19, 30; literary, 195-97, 199, 203-7; of Goans, 21, 25-26; of Islam, 127-28; of music, 210, 216; of South Africa 119, 121, 123; of the Caribbean, 102, 104, 106, 116; of the New World, 174 (and see transnational, novel) Ho, Engseng, 16, 30

276

Traversing Transnationalism

Huyssen, Andreas, 42 Inda, Jonathan Xavier, 20 India, 8-9, 15, 19-27, 31, 105, 119, 126-27, 159-70, 175 Indian Ocean, 4, 9, 25, 124-27, 132-33, 206 Irigaray, Luce, 150 Iriye, Akira, “The Internationalization of History”, 65-66 Jameson, Fredric, 2 Japan, 9, 46, 62, 68, 146-47, 153; Japanese, 141-42, 153 Jaspers, Karl, 253-54, 260 Joyce, James, 232 Jun, Tanaka, 150 Kant, Immanuel, 10, 251, 25368; aesthetic judgment, 257; cosmopolitan right, 256, 259, 265-67; sensus communis, 254, 257-59, 261, 263-64, 268; theory of judgment, 254, 256-65; Third Critique, 257, 261; and universalism, 95; Works: “What Is Enlightenment?”, 262; The Conflict of Faculties, 262; Critique of Judgment, 26164; Critique of Practical Reason, 262; Zum ewigen Frieden (Principles of Lawful Politics), 253-56, 267-68 (and see aesthetic judgment) Kaplan, Karen, 138-40, 15051 Kater, Carlos, 212 Katunda, Eunice, 212

Kearney, Michael, 76 Kershaw, Baz, 50 Koellreutter, Hans-Joachim, 211-12, 214, 216-17, 219, 225 Kosasa, Karen, 64 Kristal, Efraín, 205 Kristeva, Julia, 150-52, 22734, 237-47 passim; Works: “Revolt and Revolution”, 230-33; About Chinese Women, 227; Intimate Revolt, 23033, 245; The Powers of the Horror, 240; Revolution in Poetic Language, 232; The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, 230-33, 240 Kurz, Robert, 225 Larbaud, Valery, 203 Lavie, Smadar, 21 Lefebvre, Henri, 47 Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, dir. Ted Remerowski and Marrin Canell, 39 Li, Gong, 46 Lili’uokalani, 58-59 Lionnet, Françoise, 134 literature, 6, 9, 10, 209, 246; African, 189; American, 6, 104; comparative, 3, 19193, 201-202, 204; diasporic, 155; European, 192; Indian-American, 159; of the planet, 6, 193; postcolonial, 229; world, 10-11, 191-208 (and see history) Loomba, Ania, 6 Lust Caution, dir. Ang Lee, 40

Index McCaffrey, Barry R., 81 Machado de Assis, Joachim Maria, 215 Madonna, 46 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 232 Manga, Mário, 221 Mannur, Anita, 171 Marani, Diego, 152 Marley, Bob, 113 Marx, Karl, 5, 155-57, 165, 168, 180, 189, 194-95, 205, 233; theory of primitive accumulation, 155-57, 167-68, 174; Theses on Feuerbach, 205 Mbembe, Achille, 230, 247; On the Postcolony, 233, 235-45 Medaglia, Julio, 218-19 Medovoi, Leerom, 70 memory, 35-38, 44, 48, 54, 101, 106-7, 112; collective, 35-37, 51, 53-54; racial 107 Mendes, Gilberto, 218 Metcalf, Thomas, Imperial Connections, 24-25 Mignolo, Walter, 31 migration, 8-10, 16, 18-21, 2327, 30-32, 62, 64, 75-88, 91-92, 97, 104-105, 111, 118, 133, 139, 157, 165, 168-69, 172, 174; of theory, 10; studies, 2 (and see transnational) Moretti, Franco, 10; Works: “Conjectures on World Literature” 194-97, 199201, 203-206; “More Conjectures on World Literature” 205-206; Atlas of the European Novel,

277 196; Graphs, Maps, Trees, 194, 201-202 Morrison, Toni, 85 Mozambique, 8, 15-32, 124, 183, 186 (and see postcolonial) music, 39, 139, 168, 188, 20926; avant-garde, 209-12, 214, 219; Brazilian, 212, 215-26; dodecaphonism, 210-12, 214-18, 220-26; electronic and electroacoustic, 218; erudite, 21921, 226; European, 212; and form, 210; modern, 212; popular, 211, 219-25; serious, 211, 217, 219, 224-25; theory, 10, tonal, 223; serialism in, 210 (and see Brazil) Música Nova, 217-19 Música Viva, 212-14 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 7 Nationalism, 3, 15, 76, 95-96, 150, 170, 175, 217; anticolonial, 7; racialized, 122 Negri, Antonio, 6, 189-90, 239 Nixon, Richard, 79 Norton, Edward, 40 novel, 119-20, 180; African, 181; circulation of, 180-81; didactic, 184; history of 195-96, 200-201, 204-205; installment, 34; late modernist, 181, 185; of disillusionment, 187; provincial, 201 (and see globalization) Nussbaum, Martha, 5 Nuttall, Sarah, 119

278

Traversing Transnationalism

Okada, John, 68 Penn, Sean, 46 Pepetela, A Geração da Utopia (The Utopian Generation), 10, 181-82, 186-90 Petersen, Clauss, 221 Picasso, Pablo, 233 Pireddu, Nicoletta, 151-52 Pollock, Jackson, 233 Portugal, 15, 22-23, 26-31, 107, 112 (and see colonialism, postcolonial) Posseur, Henri, 218 postcolonial, 18; Africa, 16; body, 238; commandement, 240; communities, 8; criticism, 3, 202; culture(s), 4, 207; debates, 16; governments, 182; identities, 28, 31-32; imaginaries, 29; lives, 23-25, 27, 29; local, 17; Mozambique, 15, 28-29, 31; Portugal, 23; regimes, 239, 248; space, 19; state, 7, 20, 236; studies, 227-30, 233, 244, 248; subjects/subjectivities, 1516, 30, 236-37, 241, 244; theory, 119, 133, 228, 230, 234; time, 243; world, 182 (and see literature) postcolonialism, 171 postcoloniality, 23, 29, 32 Proust, Marcel, 232 Qing, Jiang, 43 Radway, Janice 4 Rancière, Jacques, 67 Radhakrishnan, R. , 207

Ridge, Tom, 81 Robbins, Bruce, 6, 95-96, 103, 114 Rodrigues, Nestor, 78 Rosaldo, Renato, 20 Rushdie, Salman, 9, 119 Said, Edward, 192 Sanders, Mark, 234-35, 237, 245, 248 Sankaran, Lavanya, The Red Carpet: Bangalore Stories, 9, 156, 159-70, 174-75 Santoro, Cláudio, 212, 214, 216 Sassen, Saskia, 156-57, 176 Safran, William, 173 Scherchen, Herman, 212 Schwarz, Roberto, 215, 22425 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 84 Schoenberg, Arnold, 209-10, 212, 219, 223 Seyhan, Azade, 101 Shanghai, 8, 33-55 Shanghai Express, dir. Joseph von Sternberg, 46 Shanghai Surprise, dir Jim Goddard, 46 Shapiro, Michael J., 66-67 Shakespeare, William, 95, 110 Shih, Shu-Mei, 134 Shukri, Ishtiyaq, The Silent Minaret, 9, 119-35 Simcox, Chris, 83, 88 Sjöholm, Cecilia, 232, 241 South Africa, 9, 119-35, 183, 245, 248 Spencer, Glen, 83 Spinoza, Baruch, 179 Spitzer, Leo, 192 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 5, 60, 192, 227-29, 246

Index Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 218, 233 Szerszynski, Bronislaw, 37 Swedenburg, Ted, 21 Switzerland, 145-47 Szeman, Imre, 7 Tatit, Luiz, 221 Tawada, Yoko, 9, 137-53 passim; Works: “Futa kuchi otoko” (“TwoMouthed Man”), 142; “The Gotthard Railway”, 141, 144-50; “Inu-muko iri” (“The Bridegroom Was a Dog”), 142; “Kakato wo nakushite” (“Missing Heels”), 144; “Persusona” (“Personae”), 141, 144; Ekusofoni (Exophony), 141-42, 152; Henshin no tame no opiumu (Opium for Metamorphoses), 141, 143, 152; Tokeru machi, sukeru michi (Melting Cities, Transparent Streets), 137, 140-41, 152 Taylor, Diana, 116 Tayob, Abdulkader, 127 Tel Quel, 228 Thelen, David, 65, 69-70 The Painted Veil, dir. John Curran, 40 The Shanghai Triad, dir. Zhang Yimou, 46 Thomas, Gould Hunter, 40 Tomita, Stan, 64 Tomlinson, John, 172 Toni, Oliver, 220-21 transnational, 2-5, 7, 9, 18, 66, 120, 123, 191-92, 207; American studies, 191,

279 204; analytics, 60, 65, 7273; appropriations, 10; artistic themes, 66; attachments, 19; circulation, 211; citizenship, 252; community/ies, 8, 21, 124; configurations, 9, 11; connections/connectivity, 10, 103, 119-20, 132, 135, 173, 206; consciousness, 119, 122, 128, 135; contextualization, 10; corporations, 2-3, 76; crossing(s), 75, 77; cultural formation(s), 65, 120; cultural history, 9; cultural studies, 179; debates, 16; discourses 1, 11; encounter, 226; era, 53; exchange, 225; flows, 11; forces, 7; formations, 9; future, 8; Goan Mozambicans, 16; history/ies, 8, 5761, 65, 73; humanism, 9; identity/ies, 76, 96; knowledges, 133; lens, 65; literary axis, 207; literary history, 205; literary routes, 9; literary studies, 180, 191-92, 207-208; lives, 19; migration(s), 9, 15, 18, 62, 65, 75-77, 85, 88-91; mobility, 10; models, 7; mediasphere, 34; movements, 4; narratives, 3, 7; network(s), 7-8, 105, 114, 203; perspective(s), 8, 134; phenomenon, 116; polites, 251; power relations, 139; practices, 20-21; region, 75; relations, 97; “right to have rights”, 266; solidari-

280

Traversing Transnationalism

ties, 120, 123; space(s), 9, 32, 137; studies, 1, 3, 5-6, 18, 193; subjects/subjectivities, 7, 15, 20, 23, 30, 32; vectors, 100; vision, 267 (and see border[s]) transnationalism, 1-11, 19-20, 32-33, 37, 75-76, 86, 134, 138, 170-71, 209, 266 transnationality, 57, 74 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 60-61 Tropicália, 129, 221, 223-24 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 12021 Tsing, Anna, 16-18 United States, 1-3, 6, 8-9, 22, 57-61, 63-66, 68-74, 74, 90, 95-98, 111-13, 117, 121-23, 159-61, 163-66, 168-70, 174, 179, 181-85, 200, 204, 218 Urry, John, 37 Vanguarda Paulista, 221, 224 Veloso, Caetano, 219 Vertovec, Stephen, 3, 5 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 212-13 Vink, Marcus, 124-25 Virgil, 114

Walcott, Derek, 9, 95-118 passim; Works: “The Caribbean: Culture or Mimicry”, 101-102; “Cul de Sac Valley”, 99; “Ruins of a Great House”, 102, 109; “The Schooner Flight”, 98; “What the Twilight Says”, 107-108; The Arkansas Testament, 99; Dream on Monkey Mountain, 108; Omeros, 97, 100-18; The Star-Apple Kingdom, 98 Walkowitz, Rebecca, 10 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 195, 197, 205-206 Warren, Austin, 193 Watts, Naomi, 40 Weber, Max, 66 Wellek, René, 193 Wilson, Pete, 80 World Book Encyclopedia, 55 Wright, Patrick, 48 Yusuf, Sheikh, 125-26 Zé, Tom, 219 Zedong, Mao, 43 Žižek, Slavoj, 5