Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global 9783110625639, 9783110625660, 9783110625820

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Pramod K. Nayar Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global

Pramod K. Nayar

Brand Postcolonial: ‘Third World’ Texts and the Global Managing Editor: Izabella Penier Language Editor: Adam Leverton Associate Editor: Adam Zmarzlinski

ISBN: 978-3-11-062563-9 e-ISBN: 978-3-11-062566-0 EPUB: 978-3-11-062582-0 © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar Published by De Gruyter Poland Ltd, Warsaw/Berlin Part of Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston The book is published with open access at www.degruyter.com. Managing Editor: Izabella Penier Associate Editor: Adam Zmarzlinski Language Editor: Adam Leverton www.degruyter.com Cover illustration: Getty Images

This book is for K. Narayana Chandran, teacher.

Contents 1

Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global  10 1.1 The Postcolonial Author and Global Mobility  12 1.2 The Postcolonial Text in the Age of Global Reading  16 1.3 The Postcolonial and English Language  19

2 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity  22 2.1 Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic  23 2.2 Manufacturing Authenticity  28 2.3 The Literary Investment in Race and Ethnicity  31 2.4 Competing Authenticities  37 2.5 Conclusion  46 3

Re-Orientalism: The Indigene and the Subaltern  49 3.1 Re-Orientalism and (the) Postcolonial Remains   50 3.2 The Global Indigene  53 3.3 Decolonization, Land and the Indigene  54 3.4 Criterial and Relational Indigeneity   59 3.5 Alter/native Frames  63 3.6 The Global Subaltern  68 3.7 Subalternity and Citizenship  70 3.8 Postcolonial Subalternization  72 3.9 Conclusion  75

4

Thirdworldism: The Transnational Literary-Ethnic Chic   81 4.1 Authors, Authority and Global Appropriations  81 4.2 Authorial Self-fashioning in the Age of Global Cultural Empires  82 4.3 Market-fashioning and the Postcolonial Author as Ethnic Chic  89 4.4 Text and Textuality  91 4.5 Postcolonial Literature and Subjunctive Nationhood  107 4.6 Conclusion  109

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Postcolonial Texts: Towards a New Humanism  111 5.1 The Biopolitical Regime in the Postcolonial Text  114 5.2 Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Prejudice   120 5.3 Hope and Humanism  125 5.4 National and Natural Consciousness as Internationalism  131 5.5 Conclusion  136

6 Conclusion  140 6.1 The Postcolonial (as) Global Celebrity  140 6.2 Global Authors and their Homes/Homelands   141 6.3 Postcolonial Literary Tourism  143 6.4 The New ‘Hermeneutic of Intimacy’ and the Global Author  146 Bibliography  151 Index  161

Acknowledgements Izabella Penier invited me to write this book for de Gruyter in its Open Access program. Since commissioning, Izabella has been an exemplary editor – discussing content, title and form with both enthusiasm and patience. To her, then, I owe a huge debt. Nandini and Pranav, offered, as usual, their fullest support. My parents and parents-in-law periodically query about health and stress-levels but more or less leave me to my ways. To this environment of affection, and care, I commit this work. Teaching the postcolonial course – for a change! – in the MA program at the University of Hyderabad in 2017 enabled me to think through several of the themes discussed in the literatures that I read, and have found their way into this book in some form or the other. Numerous sections of the book also grew out of several years of discussions with Anna Kurian, drawing upon but also extending ideas in my earlier books and essays on the postcolonial. Finessing these ideas with inputs from Anna was, as it has been for fifteen years now, exhilarating and illuminating. To Anna, again, therefore, unquantifiable gratitude. Nandana Dutta always manages to get me to think laterally, especially on the ‘Theory question’. She engages with random ideas I throw at her, on WhatsApp no less, and with considerable gentleness urges me to ‘think more’. To her affection, I remain indebted. Friends such as Neelu, Angel, Ajeet, Soma, Ibrahim, Haneef, Josy, Vaishali, Premlata, Walter are not people I meet regularly, and some I haven’t met for years: but their solicitous enquiries and good wishes constitute strongly supportive forces. Molly Tarun, a.k.a, Chechu, deserves a special mention for her ‘how are you, little one?’ (all msgs in perfect grammatical agreement, even on WhatsApp!). To Moumita Chowdhury for furnishing requested journal articles from assorted databases, even at short notice – thank you. The DoE, UoH, as a space of work has been for many years a source of inspiration and shared knowledge – and this may be traced, with no deviations whatsoever, to K Narayana Chandran, whose supply of references and ideas has remained undiminished. To KNC’s wisdom and generosity, then, like dozens of people around the world in this profession, I genuflect; for his affectionate support, I express my gratitude.

1 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global In an early and justly influential essay, Arif Dirlik pronounced: ‘[Postcolonialism begins] when Third World intellectuals have arrived in First World academe’ (1994: 329). Dirlik went on to make this argument about postcolonialism as a field of study: It is intended, therefore, to achieve an authentic globalization of cultural discourses by the extension globally of the intellectual concerns and orientations originating at the central sites of Euro-American cultural criticism and by the introduction into the latter of voices and subjectivities from the margins of earlier political and ideological colonialism that now demand a hearing at those very sites at the center. The goal, indeed, is no less than to abolish all distinctions between center and periphery as well as all other “binarisms” that are allegedly a legacy of colonial(ist) ways of thinking and to reveal societies globally in their complex heterogeneity and contingency. (329)

Dirlik argues that there is a parallel between the ascendancy in cultural criticism of the idea of postcoloniality and an emergent consciousness of global capitalism in the 1980s and, second, that the appeals of the critical themes in postcolonial criticism have much to do with their resonance with the conceptual needs presented by transformations in global relationships caused by changes within the capitalist world economy. (331)

There is, in Dirlik’s argument, the suspicion that the postcolonial is in some ways complicit with the new global capitalism and refuses to acknowledge its origins within this global system. There is no critique, argues Dirlik, of the social, political and economic conditions of global capitalism by postcolonialism because it does not recognize that the new forms of domination are merely reconfigurations of older forms (331). On the one hand, Dirlik draws attention to the link between the postcolonial, or the formerly colonized nations of Asia, South America, Africa, the former settler colonies of Canada and Australia, and the global, but on the other he does not see how the postcolonial affects and intervenes in the circuit of culture, a circuit which is not wholly given over to the unevenness of economics alone. A founding assumption of this book is that the postcolonial text critically informs global debates about ethnic identity and authenticity, the commodification of this identity, cultural imperialism, Human Rights and the redefinitions of the human, among others. That is, the postcolonial text – and there is no one prototype of standardized postcolonial text, so I use the term to gesture at a wide variety of literary fiction produced from the former colonies – is not a simple derivative of global discourses but an active force that shapes these discourses. This book examines the sites, processes and debates that generate the ‘postcolonial aura’ (the title of Dirlik’s original essay and subsequent book) or what this book treats as ‘brand postcolonial’, in the circulation of global culture. The ‘auratic’ nature © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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of the postcolonial that Dirlik so presciently identifies is the effect of a branding. ‘Brand postcolonial’ is auratic, and as such should be read throughout within quotes, indicating a certain marketable name, recognizability, value system and cultural capital. The critical and popular capital that literature from the formerly colonized nations, mainly in Africa, Asia and South America, acquires is due to the existence of a post-colonized transnational cultural industry. The book examines four sites and discursive-thematic formations of this industry: the cult of authenticity built up around it, the globalization of the indigene and the subaltern, a ‘third worldism’ wherein the postcolonial generates a transnational literary-ethnic chic, and the promise of a new humanism from within the postcolonial literary canon. The book proposes that the postcolonial text fits and shapes a world seeking certain kinds of literary and affective histories, archives and representations. It is an ur-text for the hyperconnected world which has begun to share concerns over global warming, climate change, refugee crises, Human Rights, genocidal violence, cultural mobility, and a host of similar themes, problems and issues. That is, it shares and shapes concerns that may no longer be specific to Africa or Asia alone. For instance, questions of ethnic assertion, cultural memory as ethnic property, the myths of ‘authentic’ origins and continuing oppression that the postcolonial text often examines are, as critics like Eoin Flannery (2009) have demonstrated, concerns of white colonies such as Ireland, or Europe’s internal Others such as the Romana. As Mrinalini Chakravorty puts it, ‘such commonplaces about other worlds are crucial to shaping the ethics of global literature’ (2017: 2), where some of these ‘other worlds’ could well be within Europe itself, as demonstrated by the tensions in Serbia or the crisis in Spain over ethnic and cultural difference. Even as academics rush to point to the end of postcolonialism as an academic/ theoretical/exegetical project, its relevance to the new world (dis)order remains. Robert Young sums up the necessity of ‘continuing’ postcolonialism as follows: The only criterion that could determine whether “postcolonial theory” has ended is whether, economic booms of the so-called “emerging markets” notwithstanding, imperialism and colonialism in all their different forms have ceased to exist in the world, whether there is no longer domination by nondemocratic forces (often exercised on others by Western democracies, as in the past), or economic and resource exploitation enforced by military power, or a refusal to acknowledge the sovereignty of non-Western countries, and whether peoples or cultures still suffer from the long-lingering aftereffects of imperial, colonial, and neocolonial rule, albeit in contemporary forms such as economic globalization. (2012: 20)

If postcolonial theory, in Young’s account, is a response and an analytical frame to read these contexts, postcolonial literary production is both a response and a product of the new world (dis)order, although it is often a critical response and a critique of both the postcolony and the new world. It enables studies of displacement, dispossession, disenfranchisement not only as the conditions of the colonial era but also in the postcolony, with the latter’s attempted ‘reconstruction’ of national and cultural

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 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global

identity – for instance, most notably documented by novelists such as Amitav Ghosh (India), J.M. Coetzee (South Africa), Sefi Atta and Buchi Emecheta (Nigeria), among others. The postcolonial literary text both constitutes and is constituted by the planetary consciousness, ‘planetary humanism’ (Paul Gilroy 2000), cultural mixing – undoubtedly driven, or at least influenced, by the needs of neo-imperialism, but significant nevertheless – and social mobility of the later decades of the twentieth century. Thus, while we as readers of distant lives in distant worlds need to be aware that the text we consume might very well be engaged in stereotyping (by the natives themselves) that world, we also need to be aware that even the stereotype is a point of entry into that world. The assumption that stereotyping offers a ‘strictly limited access’ to the world it seeks to capture needs to be counterbalanced with the awareness that this access is (a) better than no access at all (this is the most basic, even banal, reason to have stereotypes), (b) like all literary representations, a representation of the reality of that world, (c) a form of ambivalent, layered and often plural suturing of our, that is the reader’s, cultural beliefs and that of the world represented in the text. The postcolonial literary text serves the political purpose of bringing-to-global-attention: persistent inequalities, subalternization within the postcolony, the shifting alignments of subjects from their historical connections with Europe (as Europe’s colony) and the new world order, the incessant questioning of the nature of humanism (as defined, again historically, by Europe), among others. Storytelling’s political purchase, then, is taken as granted in this, present, work, taking its inspiration from one of the pioneers of postcolonial literature, Chinua Achebe. In Anthills of the Savan­ nah (1987), Ikem Osodi the journalist has refused to be an activist and political figure, although he has been critical of the state. The elders, unhappy with this stance, meet Osodi. At the end of a discussion on the role of the bard, and therefore of poetry and literature, one elder declares: The sounding of the battle-drum is important; the fierce waging of the war itself is important: and the telling of the story afterwards – each is important in its own way. I tell you there is not one of them that we could do without. But if you ask me which of them takes the eagle-feather I will say boldly: the story. (123-4)

Achebe, I believe, has stated unequivocally, the purpose of stories and storytelling.

1.1 The Postcolonial Author and Global Mobility The postcolonial author is an embodiment of global mobility. Hosseini, Roy, Shamsie, Walcott, Achebe, Ali, Mo, Tan, Emecheta, Allende, Carey, Adichie, Iyer, Seth, Rushdie, Wicomb, Ngugi, Desai, Hamid, among other star authors from Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and other regions are celebrities. The celebrity, write David Andrews and Steven Jackson studying sport stars, is ‘a primary product and process



The Postcolonial Author and Global Mobility 

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underpinning what David Rowe has termed late capitalism’s “culturalization of economics” (1999, p. 70)’ (1). Or rather, one could say that these authors represent the interruptive, disruptive and reorganizational postcolonial culturalization of global eco­ nomics, even as they benefit from the global economy’s consumer capitalism, global media coverage and the global cultural stage (such as literary festivals, TED talks, awards and prizes). They possess both economic and cultural value enabled by the global cultural industry. They ‘perform’, so to speak, internationally. They do so because they are cultural workers in the global media-cultural industrial complex. These too are enabled by networks already in place via the prizes-andawards systems, global publishing and global advocacy/protest/promotional campaign (which often could lead to controversy as well – see, for instance, Adichie on feminism and postcolonial studies1). However, one needs to qualify this cultural work, in the case of authors, as riding also on a prestige economy. Commentators such as Lisa Lau, Graham Huggan and others have pointed out that the prestige of the Booker, for instance, alters the career of the postcolonial novelist. James English is right to caution us that the sociology of art or the economic model of cultural practices ‘leaves out or greatly underappreciates certain dimensions of art and literature’, especially the finer points of literary texts (2005: 8).2 These dimensions include the ability to represent human suffering and the human spirit, but also to generate empathetic identification with these situations across, often, the race and national barrier. In this task of generating empathetic identification, texts from these authors have a commercial value, but they also possess considerable symbolic value. Their authors are politically and culturally resonant in the global commercial, aesthetic and political market, embodying as they do, the crisis of nations, the trauma of displacement or civil war, the triumph of the ‘human spirit’, among others. The trends in the global novel (Ganguly 2016) or the dual gaze of window/mirror in the postcolonial text (Radhakrishnan 2016) are both determined by and determine the ‘third world’ literary productions, as critics have noted, and as this book will argue. These global author-figures also generate considerable national pride with their successes, and hence come to embody the intersection of the global and the local in the field of cultural work. Their insertion into the global cultural firmament contributes to their role in generating the ‘national symbolic’ (Berlant 1999), even when, as in the case of Ngugi, Farah or Nasreen, they function from outside the national boundaries.

1 Adichie, ‘We Should All Be Feminists’, TED Talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_ adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists); and the more recent incident where she dismissed all Postcolonial Theory (https://brittlepaper.com/2018/01/bookshop-clapback-postcolonial-theory-shade-happened-paris/ 17 April 2018). 2 There is now substantial work done on the Booker Prize, its politics, texts and cultural power. See Todd (1996), Huggan (2001), Norris (2006), among others.

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That is, the postcolonial author remains a part of their country’s national symbolic even when at odds with the nation (through bans, warrants or fatwas, for example). Adichie and Nasreen generate highly localized auras and cultural meanings, often by also intervening in local-national cultural debates, serving on local adjudicatory bodies for literary prizes or as part of the national literary scenes. They appeal to local cultural aspirations as well (Adichie, for instance, has stated that Achebe, arguably the first celebrity postcolonial author, was her icon), for emerging writers and the literary scene. Such roles entrench them firmly in the national symbolic, and instrumentalize their mediation for local consumption as a result. The postcolonial author also asserts considerable influence on what may be thought of as the ‘prestige economy’: because s/he represents the coming-of-age of the formerly colonized within the genres and languages of the former colonizer, and where the ability and felicity with which these genres and languages are internalized (‘Wow, the African author has acquired such excellent English!’) determines cultural capital and prestige. That is, while the first European language writings by the colonized were either seen as instantiations of their resistance (transgressive) or their imperial subjectivities (hence imitative and limited), the latter decades of the twentieth century see these authors as instantiations of their freedom from such subjectivities and the resistance-imperative. Rather, they are consumed as instances of their participation in the global cultural imaginary, ethical and political debates (say, about rights or equality), which is not necessarily driven by post-imperial angst. They may be seen as having moved away from the binary of imitative/transgressive models of writing by the colonized toward a more self-confident global aesthetic and thematics. This globalizing, while being embedded in the national, alerts us to see cultural workers such as postcolonial authors as embodying border-crossing and global mobility in a hyperconnected world. They are postcolonial-transnational cultural celebrities, in other words, whose mobility is at once determined by and determines their prestige as members of a national symbolic writ large, or a national symbolic that intersects, unevenly, with the global symbolic. To claim, however, that brand postcolonial is solely the effect of such a prestige economy is to ignore the divisive nature of many such author-presences. For instance, Rushdie, Nasreen, Ngugi and a host of other postcolonial authors have often been at the receiving end of criticism, even hatred, in their own countries of origin – whether these are engineered by political regimes, fundamentalist groups or the critical reader/audience. Postcolonial celebrities, such as sport stars or authors, argues Hilary Beckles (2001), are part of this prestige economy because they seem to plug effectively into the expansive global economy when the national economy, sovereignty and political systems are often the victims of this same global economy. Such authors are often seen, especially by purists and conservatives in the postcolony, as having altered, for the sake of their individual gains in the global cultural economy, the ‘acceptable’ cultural meanings of, say, literature. The debates around authentic-



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ity and misrepresentation central to many postcolonial authors (see the chapter on Authenticity) issue from this public perception of the celebrity author. The anxiety over national and cultural sovereignty in the age of globalization drives the (negative) opinions about the authors who are seen as malignantly feeding off their national identities and origins in order to acquire global celebrity status. Their literary commodification of ethnicity, cultural practices or national stories are then seen not as the globalization of the national but as renegade representations for personal gain. Just as globalization divides the populace into advocates and critics, the globalized postcolonial author divides the readership. Their global mobility itself then is read as a sign of their renegade nationality and nationalism. However, what remains puzzling is that it is the ‘respectable’ literary fiction of the postcolonial author alone that finds space in the global cultural circuit. The vast amounts of pulp and popular fiction produced from the postcolonial nations – thrillers, retellings of the myths and legends, science fiction, fantasy, children’s literature – do not appear to have made a dent in the global cultural marketplace. Lisa Lau herself, for instance, has little to say about the absence of the ‘postcolonial popular’ in the process of re-orientalization, thus implying that the key postcolonial concerns are only visible within ‘high’ literary fictions. Does this then imply that only literature that fits into a globally acceptable set of criteria – magical realism as narrative mode, debates around authentic identity, victimhood and ethnic assertions – that ‘define’ the postcolonial would be a part of this circuit? Does exoticism, or self-exoticization to be more accurate, not allow for multiple genres of the postcolonial popular to compete globally? In other words, are the postcolonial writers of popular fiction from Africa, South Asia and South America, from authors who are themselves, often, displaced, diasporic and of hybrid identity (Caribbean-American, such as Nalo Hopkinson, the science fiction writer) also postcolonial? Attempts have been made to bridge the gap between the globally legible postcolonial literary fiction and the postcolonial popular. To this end, critics such as Jessica Langer have argued that the colonial concerns of the Stranger and Strange Land, studied in postcolonial texts, remain the cornerstone of the postcolonial genre of science fiction (2011: 3). However, this theme is modified for a decolonizing purpose.3 Langer writes: writers, film-makers and others involved in the production of postcolonial science fiction partic­ ipate uniquely in this process of decolonization, utilizing the particular strengths and possibilities contained in the science fiction genre to further the project of a world not only politically but (variously) economically, culturally, intellectually and/or creatively decolonized. (8, emphasis in original)

3 On the link between colonialism and the rise of European science, including its prehistory in More’s Utopia and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, see John Rieder (2008).

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 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global

From Langer’s interpretation, it would seem that, given the shared concerns of postcolonial science fiction with its literary fiction, the absence of the former from global visibility and critical scrutiny leads one to suspect that academic work on postcolonial literatures develops a postcolonial canon, one that excludes the popular – from sci-fi to graphic novels and pulp thrillers – because the latter does not categorically deal with identity politics, oppression and victimhood. Although some work has begun to appear in the form of critical writings and collections (Emma Dawson Varughese 2014, Mehta and Mukherjee 2015, Lau and Dwivedi 2014, Dwivedi and Lau 2015, Nayar 2016) on these genres, the postcolonial popular remains on the fringes of postcolonial criticism. The ‘national popular’ rarely folds into the global popular.

1.2 The Postcolonial Text in the Age of Global Reading In the age of Human Rights, discourses of emancipation, equality, egalitarianism, among others, those texts that document the absence of and aspiration for these states of being in the formerly colonized nations, become a part of the global discourse in these domains. This is not to say that a modular archive or template of suffering exists into which the postcolonial text fits. Rather, this book proposes that the global frame of, say, human rights, and the contemporary postcolonial text are mutually constitutive. The frame, alert to racism, inequality, colonial tyranny, xenophobia has been brought into being in the form of anti-colonial thought and political struggles. Scholars such as Robert Young, Upendar Baxi, Lynn Hunt and others have noted that European ideas of emancipation evolved in the context of anti-slavery campaigns and the awareness of racial inequalities, an awareness that originated in Europe’s engagement with Asia, Africa and other non-European parts of the world. Thus, it is not as if the langue of emancipatory and Human Rights discourses was sui generis and evolved independent of the Asian and African nations and the latter only generate the parole out of already-existing langue. To phrase it differently, Human Rights discourses, discourses of emancipation, of human dignity and equality were multicultural in origin. This book maps the regional/local/postcolony picture within the global/trans­ national frame where one constitutes the other in history as well as in the contemporary. While it concedes that difference and ethnic identity from the postcolony have become commodified in the global cultural industry, it believes that these are what Sandra Ponzanesi termed ‘commodit[ies] with an edge’ (3). Values such as authenticity and subjectivity, concerns such as equality and identity, are now the result of an interaction between the postcolony and the global. Each lends a critical edge to the other despite the overwhelming threat of commodification. Just as the global Human Rights campaigns or environmentalist movements draw their sustenance, awareness and even, on occasion, ideological constructs from similar struggles, ideas and ideologies from the postcolony, the postcolony’s cultural politics around, say, tribal rights,



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draws upon and is cited within global movements. It is, in short, interested in the intersection of the postcolonial with the global. In this process of demonstrating the intersection, this book brings together a variety of literary texts. The intention is to demonstrate how anti-apartheid, anti-caste, anti-fundamentalisms, various kinds of genocide and disappearances may be read proximately. That is, drawing on texts from multiple but cognate locations enables us to see how the discourse, say, of anti-apartheid is ‘enjoined in other discursive frames’ (Whitlock 2015: 2), as embodying ‘multidirectional memory’ (Rothberg 2009, 2011), such as anti-caste testimonies from India, the battle against patriarchal Islam in Pakistan, inter-tribal conflicts in Afghanistan, among others. Such studies highlight ‘the associations that are set in train by the passages of postcolonial life writing [and] map textual cultures that extend far beyond their literary cultures of origin’ (Whitlock 2). Whitlock’s argument suggests a transnational literary idiom that has its origins in formerly colonized nations but whose diffusion is global. As she puts it: The contexts and locations that shape the ambit of these contemporary case studies are recognizably in the contact zone of postcolonial theory – the legacies of apartheid, slavery, indigenous dispossession, genocide, and decolonization across second and third worlds. (2)

The postcolonial novel, in other words, can and does function as a global novel, where the oppressed – by apartheid, caste, patriarchy, ethnic hatred, war, rape – acquires a global citizenship within multiple discursive frames. Human Rights scholar Upendra Baxi asks: How far do these [the narrative voices of the oppressed] translate the variegated adopted/ imposed/borrowed grammars of international human rights as expressive of the pain, sorrow, and suffering of constantly disenfranchised humans? How may one translate the vernacular languages of human violation, abuse, and suffering into the inclusive/commodious normative languages of contemporary human rights? To what extent may contemporary human rights languages advance the task of constructing languages of our shared political and social responsiveness and responsibility to redress human abuse, violation and violence? (2009: xxv-xxvi)

If we think of the ‘voices’ as embodied in texts from the formerly colonized nations, with their insistence on examining marginalization and oppression even in the postcolony, then Baxi’s query about the commodiousness of contemporary human rights language elicits the response: the borrowing and adaptation of human rights discourses works both ways – global to local and vice versa. The postcolonial text then fits into a canon where works have ‘creatively captured and transfigured shifts in sensibility triggered by radical phenomenological transformations in the apprehension of war and violence’ (Ganguly 2016: 10). Such novels, writes Ganguly, are inevitably aware of the state of refugees, the displaced, the consequences of war and often express a ‘new kind of humanitarian ethic’ and a ‘new kind of internationalism built on a shared dread of human capacity for evil coupled with a

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deep awareness of the ambiguities of sharing grief across large expanses of ravaged deathworlds’ (10).4 This brings the reading of postcolonial-transnational authors close to the ‘third world text as national allegory’ argument from Fredric Jameson (1986). However, the point the book emphasizes is: even if the postcolonial text functions as a national allegory, it does so in the service of a global regime of rights, values and political discourses, and is framed, consumed and critiqued within such discourses. This means the text is no longer mere national allegory: it is national allegory within the global, and globalizing, discourse where such allegories constitute key components of the discursive regime. This means: the postcolonial text is not necessarily exactly coterminous with the ontological reality of the world order or the postcolony now. It could reflect these but most often it does something more. To return to Ganguly once again, the postcolonial novel as world novel is a set of possibilities, a ‘parallel world with little or no relation to events in the actual world’ (81). It is a genre that ‘opens up many worlds that variously converse with, interrogate, interrupt, and even inter the forgotten histories of the world made in the image of contemporary global capital’ (85). Texts that open up vast swathes of historical time and bring these together are often instrumental in this process. Ganguly notes how, in texts like Salman Rushdie’s, Kashmiriyat is aligned with the global war on terror so that ‘Kashmir in the novel [Shalimar the Clown] functions as an emblematic site of the traumas of the post-cold war present’ (123). The crisis represented, then, is no longer merely postcolonial, argues Ganguly here. Dirlik made a similar point in 1994: The themes that are now claimed for postcolonial criticism, both in what they repudiate of the past and in what they affirm for the present, I suggest, resonate with concerns and orientations that have their origins in a new world situation that has also become part of consciousness globally over the last decade. (330)

When Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone brings together Armenia, the Indian freedom movement and the Great War, it achieves precisely what Ganguly is arguing: a series of disjunctive temporalities that serve as an emblem of more than postcolonial trauma. But I also see this as a way of bringing geographically distant regions together into the same frame of precarious lives. Such a linkage of the postcolonial and the world’s various traumas ‘foreshortens the distance’ between the two (Ganguly 178).

4 From Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas through Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India and Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (all on the Partition), there have been numerous novels from the subcontinent and its neighbouring regions that deal with the theme of genocide, civil war and crisis of nations: Shamsie’s Kartography and A God in Every Stone, Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, among others.



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Even when rife with stereotypes – as Third World novels are often accused of being – the postcolonial text is a mediating device between, say, a First World reader and the Asian or African cultures of the text. It disrupts and transforms existing cultural codes by proffering new aesthetic modes, political concerns and social agendas so that the rest of the world also discovers these modes, concerns and agendas in the process of reading. Cultural consumptions of even stereotypes are forms of knowledge-making and knowledge-sharing, and these enter into global cultural and social imaginaries. Whether these then enable the creation of new ways of reading is, of course, a moot point. That said, it is also important to note, Mrinalini Chakravorty cautions us, that ‘postcolonial literary texts, even as they advance a stereotype, imaginatively disable the fictions that makes such stereotypes durable in the first place’ (121). When such texts stereotype violence, genocide, civil war, and their attendant traumas, they very often raise ‘important questions about mourning, collective agency, and the subalternity of postcolonial societies’ (121). That is, the stereotype does not always stay stable and static: embedded in experimental narrative modes, the stereotype draws attention to the historical and other circumstances which produced the stereotype of the vulnerable ‘lower-caste’, the oppressed tribal or the intrinsically violent social order. The postcolonial text, then, is resonant with themes from the actual geopolitical world today and the possibilities of other worlds. It engineers chronotopes that bring together various traumas. Further, it also closes the gap between geographical regions. This resonance is mobility of a kind, where echoes, allusions, cross-connections mark the contemporary postcolonial text, when its characters move from Peshawar or Laos to New York and London, or when their lives are affected due to the events – such as 9/11 – in distant New York.

1.3 The Postcolonial and English Language The engagement of the postcolonial with the English language – the key constituent of the British Empire – continues. As early as 1999 Rita Raley had argued that the discursive transmutation of the discipline of Postcolonial Studies into “Literature in English” [was] both symptom and cause of the emerging visibility of global English as a recognizable disciplinary configuration. (51)

Raley argues that there is an implicit assumption that English is the global language. This means, she argues, there exists a notion that ‘English itself [is] the condition of possibility for the very idea of the global’ (53). Raley’s larger point is that this insistence on English as the lingua franca of World Literature is an instance of linguistic imperialism, and therefore of global capitalism. The insistence on English as a global language for the production and consumption of global text marks a homogenization that postcolonialism as a critical aca-

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 Introduction: The Postcolonial in/as the Global

demic enterprise accused the colonial empires of. However, to see the phenomenon of global English as only homogenizing is to ignore the productive, even critical, transculturation that the postcolonial’s engagement with English effects. The modification to the English language as a result of the intrusion of writings from Asia or Africa suggests that such a linguistic imperialism with one English is not possible. If there exists the anxiety that English homogenizes the postcolonial field due to its hegemonic nature, it is also true that a Shamsie or an Achebe has ensured that there cannot be a homogenized English language. Hence, in addition to the anxiety over English, it is also essential to see, as Raley argues, how the play inherent in the idioms produced by the encounter of different language systems implies a celebration of the carnivalesque tendencies of the demotic, of its triumph over the rigidity of standard languages and the unidirectional imposition of imperial culture. (61)

Thus, the postcolonial, even when it ‘takes to’ English, often does so on its own ‘demotic’ and vernacular terms. When Indian authors such as Raja Rao or African authors like Achebe began their engagement with English, not only were they inserting themselves into the hegemonic language system, they were also setting about dismantling any notion of one, pure and standardized English. Neither should we assume, of course, that there is only one kind of postcolonial that does so. In other words, the globalizing force of English is often engaged in deep conflicts with the dialectization and appropriation of English into something else, at the hands of the postcolonial. Moreover, one notes, it is in English that the sharp critique of Empire has emerged from the academia (notably the readings of English literature by Edward Said and later scholars). There has been a ‘deterritorializing’ and a decolonization of English as a language and as a literary canon by the postcolonials. Comparative regional histories of literature – such as James Arnold’s three-volume A History of Literature in the Caribbean (1997) – have demonstrated the intersection of English language and literature with regional languages and realities. This intersection profoundly affected the production and consumption of literary texts. Studies in the transnational origins and dissemination of English literature account for such intersections as well, particularly England’s geopolitical connections with the rest of the world that then are discernible in its texts (Nayar 2015, Pereira 2015). It remains to be seen how the arrival of the Third World author in First World centers of cultural production generates the brand image and value for English language and literature. Brand postcolonial is not attributable to either its insertion into the hegemony of English nor in its decolonization of ‘standard’ English but in the dialectic of these two processes. Brand postcolonial and its aura is the effect of resonances, cross-overs, cross-fertilizations, appropriations and decolonizations. It partakes of and contributes to the global discourses on rights, emancipation, suffering and vulnerability. It builds



The Postcolonial and English Language 

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possible worlds and aspirational models drawn from such discourses, and therefore is not restricted to actual postcolonial or global conditions. The onus on readers to engage with the cultural difference, stimulated by the representations (even as stereotypes), along with the mobility of literary tropes and themes across geocultural borders and the foregrounding of foundational states of being (death, life, human rights) constitutes the move towards world literatures – led by the postcolonial text. The postcolonial text undermines, contests, worries the privileged status of Western, canonical texts even as it adapts, reinvents these texts for its purposes. The globalization of the Western text is nominally, temporarily diverted or even stalled, even as the postcolonial text itself enters the global cultural flows. Resisting isomorphism at one level and embracing it at another (especially in the emphasis on humanism and foundational states of being), the postcolonial text calls attention to power differentials that have thus far entrenched the Western canon. Sameness is fought, difference foregrounded, even when the postcolonial text is full of stereotypes. It is this dynamics of local/global, same/different that draws attention to the limits of the global itself: the global is not monocultural or about Westernization. The global is postcolonial as well. Counter-narratives and stereotypes in the postcolonial text are key elements in disturbing the canonicity of texts historically constructed as ‘universal’. There might be, as Rebecca Walkowitz has suggested, the loss of local and verna­ cular specificities in these texts as the postcolonial authors emphasize narrative, and therefore, can be consumed by readers all over the world. Walkowitz therefore sees the new global fictions as ‘born-translated’ (2009). Whether this ‘loss’ of the local is as serious as it sounds is an arguable point, but it is certain that an emphasis on foundational states of being, such as rights, violations, and ethics enable cross-cultural transmission and consumption of the postcolonial texts. If the local idiomatic expressions are lost, then, I suggest, these are replaced by global expressions and the lingua franca of rights. In this book, indigeneity, authenticity, ethnic chic and humanism are the thematic concerns that situate the postcolonial in the global cultural marketplace, but does not necessarily reduce the text to marketable commodities. Functioning within but determining the shape of the global discourses, these texts are world texts, in the sense they are of the world, and (re)make the world.

2 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity Certain countries and cultures, especially postcolonial ones from Africa or Asia, are defined, described and consumed in specific ways in the global literary-cultural marketplace. Africa, for instance, would be a hotbed of embedded, natural corruption and violence. Deola, the protagonist of Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference, discovers that the Nigerian newspapers she reads in Nigeria are remarkably different in the focus of their news coverage from the English newspapers she reads in England: The Sunday newspapers are on the dining table. The headlines are about trade and politics, not the news she is used to reading about Nigeria overseas, which is about Internet fraud, drug traffickers, Islamic fundamentalism and armed militants in the Niger Delta. (56)

Atta is gesturing at the exoticization of Nigeria in the Western/global media. In 2001 Graham Huggan published his The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Here he examined what he presciently termed the ‘global commodification of cultural difference’ in the fiction from the formerly colonized nations (vii). Contrasting the politics of postcoloniality with that of postcolonialism (the latter being the academic arm of the socio-political condition of postcoloniality) he writes: Postcoloniality’s regime of value is implicitly assimilative and market driven: it regulates the value-equivalence of putatively marginal products in the global marketplace. Postcolonialism … implies a politics of value that stands in obvious opposition to global processes of commodification. Yet a cursory glance at the state of postcolonial studies at Western universities, or at the worldwide marketing of prominent postcolonial writers like Salman Rushdie, is enough to suggest that these two apparently conflicting regimes of value are mutually entangled. (6)

Huggan concedes that while exoticism has some purchase, ‘reconstituted exoticisms in the age of globalisation include the trafficking of culturally “othered” artifacts in the world’s economic, not cultural, centres’ (15). Huggan identifies three effects of the exoticization: the ‘mystification … of historical experience; imagined access to the cultural other through the process of consumption; reification of people and places into exchangeable aesthetic objects’ (19). Later Lisa Lau would propose that the exoticization of Third World culture was achieved by Third World authors themselves, a process Lau terms ‘re-Orientalism’ (2009). Chris Bongie had made a similar point in his 1998 work Islands and Exiles where he argued for the ‘self-consciously belated (re) inscription of this [imperial] exoticist project’ by early twentieth century writers so that there is discernible a ‘bridge ... a relay between the worlds of colonial and postcolonial literateurs’ (16). Brand postcolonial is the effect of the marketing of difference. But it is also due to the cultural production of simulated authenticity, the tensions and contests around authenticity and the competing authenticities of non-European texts circulating within First World reader communities. Authenticity as a valorized term itself is a part of this cultural production, and often serves as shorthand for the acceptance or rejec© 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic 

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tion of works from hitherto invisible races, ethnic groups and communities. ‘Simulated authenticity’ is the effect produced through specific strategies where authenticity is the effect in fictional representations. Simulated authenticity is also debated in popular-critical discourses and degrees of verisimilitude to ‘the real thing’ – the ‘core’ ethnic identity or culture – discussed as the merits or demerits of a literary text because of expectations of authenticity.

2.1 Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic The exotic demands not only difference but a marketing and perception of authentic difference. If, as critics from Fredric Jameson (‘Third-World Literature’, 1986, also see Ahmad 1992) through to Arif Dirlik (1994, 1997) and Huggan have argued, the Third World text or author is seen, or fashions herself, as a metonymic representative of her nation and culture, then the text and author are, in the global marketplace, valued for their difference of origins, histories and cultures. This Western valuing of difference has produced the charge of exoticism against expat, globally recognized postcolonial authors in English. Admittedly, every culture possibly experiences, perceives and evaluates another culture as exotic. For many postcolonial nations and their more or less elite reading publics, brought up through Western education on a diet of English/European texts, the English countryside or cultural practices may seem less exotic. If Indian travel writing to England, 1860-1930, is any index, the travellers were prepared for the exotic. The travellers, as argued elsewhere, demonstrate not open-eyed wonder but an ‘informed enchantment’ (Nayar 2012): conscious, knowledgeable and anticipating of the wonders of England. Literary fiction of the late twentieth century, I suggest, achieves a similar effect when it introduces the rest of the world to Euro-American readers. It on the one hand retains the exotic appeal of the Other while offering know­ ledge – Orientalist or post-Orientalist – of the same. The postcolonial author fits into this dual process of exoticizing and de-exoticizing the non-European to the European. Critics of Indian Writing in English claim that ‘the phenomenal success of the genre in the West is deeply related to a cultural affinity between I[ndian] Writing [in] E[nglish] and their audience’ (Majumdar 2014: 66). Being expatriate and therefore ‘often alienated from the very culture that he supposedly represents … the writer then compensates for his lack of cultural connectedness by resorting to reductive or exotic constructs of the nation’ (71). However, it is not clear how the home-grown and stay-at-home novelist is better qualified to present a clearer, more ‘real’ picture of the nation, given that any author (i) has only a limited range of experiences to draw upon, even when s/he lives within the postcolony and therefore can only imagine what the other’s life might be like (ii) all experience of the nation is always already mediated by the author’s training, cultural literacy and language even when within the country. That is, the assumption of autochthonous access to a culture’s

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 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity

meanings denies the role of mediation in the process, and enables the home-grown to claim authenticity and accuse the expat author of exoticization. When Meenakshi Mukherjee, a prominent commentator on Indian writing in English, claims that ‘any assertion of a broadly Indian identity was undertaken generally to emphasize otherness and exoticity rather than to make a political statement’ (2000: 15-16), the converse is also frighteningly true. When a so-called native language writer claims authenticity over the expat this political statement constructs a xenophobic otherness and exclusivity that recalls nineteenth century discourses of purity and contamination. Further, the charge of exoticism is sustained on the proposition that epistemological frameworks for the native and expat author are remarkably different (‘they cannot know the country as well as we do’) – a proposition that ignores the foundation of literary construction: the aesthetic and sympathetic imaginations. Mukherjee claims this assertion of Indianness in expat authors arises from the ‘anxiety of Indianness’, as she titles her 1993 essay. They strive for greater authenticity to compensate for writing in a ‘foreign’ language. As the novelist Vikram Chandra puts it, this suggests a ‘mind-bending faith in the untouched and original Indianness of “regional writing”’ (2000). Chandra also notes that almost every ‘regional’ writer worth her or his salt was an avid reader of English works, and Tagore, he notes, was ‘despised by his orthodox Bengali contemporaries for his loose Westernized ways and his new-fangled, imported ideas’. It is within an admittedly never-ending debate the postcolonial exotic needs to be examined. The postcolonial exotic is located within two regimes of value: as a fantastic, unfamiliar, primal space of cultural practices, and as a very real material history of the present. The former is a hark-back to the colonial era, while the latter arises with cultural globalization.5 Distances, in both time and space, are central to the appeal of the exotic. When Graham Huggan speaks of the margins that are valorized in postcolonial thought, or when the postcolonial in her self-representation speaks endlessly about the peripheries, a distance is instituted. Mary Baine Campbell in her study of travel writing in Early Modern Europe has proposed that a distancing in space and/or time could both serve the purpose of exoticization (1988). Anne McClintock proposes the idea of ‘anachronistic space’ where Europeans traversing the colony figured the journey ‘as a journey backward in time to an anachronistic moment in prehistory’ (1995: 40). The current geopolitical region identified as the ‘Third World’ or the ‘Global South’ was, in history and its narratives (fiction, travelogues), represented as the distant, peripheral, un-understandable, and therefore Other to the central, modern Europe.

5 Cultural texts such as movies from the formerly colonized nations that now feature regularly in film festivals and seem to have a considerable market in various parts of the Euro-American world (Brosius) are an equivalent to the literary fiction from the postcolonial.



Introducing the Postcolonial Exotic 

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The exotic is primal, pre-modern and distanced in time, representing a state and stage before modernity. Continuing, in some sense, the colonial concern with the ‘noble savage’, the exotic today functions as a symbol of primal purity, uncontaminated by Western culture. The distancing in time works to bolster the authenticity of a Third World culture precisely by underscoring this primordial nature – whether in terms of their dress, customs or even geography. When the Third World author stages her authenticity, it very often demands a turn to the primal. This could be the wilds of the Australian outback and its lawless robber gangs (the Australian novelist John Carey), the toilet-less cities in India (the Indian novelist Vikas Sarup), caste (the Indian novelist Manu Joseph), community (the Indian novelist Kiran Desai), religious bigotry (the Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid) or patriarchal tyranny (the Pakistani novelist Tahmeena Durrani, the Bangladeshi novelist Taslima Nasreen), among others. The exotic here is the survival of the primal and the pre-modern. Distancing in time, such as the postcolonial novel’s insistence on older practices, even as they speak the language of cultural nationalism (which has its uses), suggests an exoticization.6 The line between representations of the real social-historical conditions in the postcolony and the primal-exotic is blurred. This is so because corruption, poverty and dirt are not primal-exotic for the postcolonial novelist: they are the real world in India and other post-colonies. However, the larger point is that this real is situated on a historical timeline at a point apparently corresponding to an earlier stage in modernity and development. Thus, rather than a ‘simple’ return to the primal or pre-modern, the staging of authenticity is the effect of a linkage between temporal distancing and the contemporary: that the early stages of the modern continue to exist in the contemporary. The older stages of civilizational development and the present co-exist. It is the polychronicity of the poverty, the slums, and the patriarchal laws which hark back to an older world but existing and active in the present that invokes the primal-exotic. Other commentators have noted ‘hi-tech’ cities (India’s software industry’s major cities, such as Bengaluru) exhibit startling old-world poverty, primitive living conditions and the world’s most advanced offices all sitting adjacent to each other in startling disparities and contrasts (Madon 2004 and Heitzmann 2004). The exotic then is the primal-in-the-contemporary. Such a representation implies, of course, a certain teleological narrative that is itself European in origin, as Dipesh Chakraborty argued (1992). The evolution of humans and culture from the pre-modern to the modern, from feudal to post-industrial, religious to secular, theocratic to democratic, is a narrative that has established itself

6 Sandra Ponzanesi has argued that the rhetoric of cultural nationalism has, however, lost its cache in the era of cultural globalization (2014: 54). It is more accurate, I think, to argue that cultural nationalism recast in creative ways through adaptation and revisions, enables a simulated authenticity that serves the postcolonial well in the era of cultural globalization by sidestepping the either/or (either the local, national or the world) conundrum.

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 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity

as the normative mode of thinking about histories. It is assumed, Chakraborty points out, that there are no other forms of writing history. This means, the postcolonial author retains the teleological assumptions when she maps the primal even within the contemporary as an atavistic echo of the distant past. Thus, even when speaking of software companies and the informational cities of contemporary India, authors like Manu Joseph (Serious Men, 2010) feel compelled to make references, however veiled, to the indelible caste identities of their protagonists. This is also the forging of a continuity between a supposedly pre-modern practice – caste, patriarchy – and the present. In Nadeem Aslam’s fiction dealing with Pakistan and Pakistani migrant communities in England, for example, he depicts the migrant as carrying the baggage of their pre-modern practices, such as honour-killings (although neither caste nor patriarchy is absent from ‘modern’ India). The primal within the contemporary is a central feature of the postcolonial exotic. It distances the present through the invocation of cultural revenants. That is, the staging of authenticity positions the postcolony as a space where timelines collide and where the primal past (in terms of social conditions, for instance) and the technologized, near sci-fi present jostle for space, where impossibly ‘primitive’ cultural practices imbued with caste- and gender- based oppressive hierarchies continue to hold sway in the age of advanced techno-capitalism. This does not mean that the primal is fictional, or that patriarchal tyranny and caste have disappeared except in the fiction. As Christa Knellwolf has argued, the exotic is at once fantasy and real historical responses to Otherness (2002: 11). The postcolonial as exotic maps the very real historical remnant – tribalisms, caste, etc. – in the present, but it also caters to the continuity of an Orientalist fantasy where the Orient can only be seen through the lens of such categories as tribalisms or primitivisms. In other words, the postcolonial text functions at the interface of a continuing fantasy (dating back to the colonial era) and a historical response to very real material social condition.7 The exotic here is the convergence of an investment in the fantasy-representations of the cultural Other, and the historical documentation of the material realities of the cultural Other today, where it becomes difficult to separate the two regimes of value. The exotic within these two convergent regimes of value is carefully positioned between the familiar (proximate) and the strange (distant). The exotic represents, as Natasha Eaton has argued (2006), a boundary between home and the world, between the familiar and the strange. The exotic recalls a boundary, ‘inside which familiarity reigns and outside which is wild’ (Aravamudan 2012: 227). It was also, in the colonial era, ‘a mode of European self-representation, asking how and why it is used to gen-

7 Speaking of fantasies, the depiction of Indian women on the covers of South Asian fiction has come in for critical scrutiny. Lisa Lau has argued that ‘the ambivalence [of book covers] is inclined towards depicting Indian women as either virtuous, pure, and submissive, or glamorous, alluring, and sexy. Both depictions, whether designed to extol or eroticise, are clearly inclined to exoticise’ (2015: 57).



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erate diverse models of selfhood in the context of global economic expansion and exchange’ (Jenkins 2012: 5). Laura Rosenthal sees exoticism as serving an important function: it offered ‘multiple cosmopolitan possibilities’ for the cultural reinvention of the self, society and the nation (2012: 11). That is, the country seeking a self-fashioning could choose from many options and cultural models to emulate, adapt and adopt. I have argued (2015), following this line of thought, that England right from the Early Modern, did engage in such a self-fashioning. This ranged from its self-representation as a discoverer-trading nation (Early Modern), an empathetic nation appalled by slavery (late eighteenth to early nineteenth), discoverer and explorer nation (midlate nineteenth century), among others. In every era one discerns a self-fashioning in which English literary texts demonstrated an Englishness intimately linked to other geocultural spaces. In other words, English literature argued a case for Englishness as a transnational Englishness. Many of these characteristics of the exotic in the globalized world remain unchanged. The convergence of different value regimes ensures that the selfconstruction/representation of the First World as modern involves a degree of incorporated Otherness, the cosmetic multiculturalism and co-optation of difference (as Hardt and Negri argued in Empire, 2000) and the continuing concerns with the Other’s primitivism, whether in the form of the consumption of ethnic chic or the global humanitarian regimes founded on assumptions of Third World backwardness. That is, the self-representation of the humanitarian West and the cosmopolitanized West require the co-optation of cultural difference within diverse domains: philanthropy, cultural production, military intervention, among others. If travel writing once generated a social imagination of discovery, conquest and colonialism, as numerous critics have argued, the postcolonial author and text forge a social imaginary where the exotic can be experienced in safe ways. ‘Harmless’ travel fictions such as Thomas More’s Utopia, were always rhetorical strategies in and through which ‘the desire for a better (or different) world can be expressed and satisfied without corrupting the sources of practical geographical knowledge’ (Campbell 1988: 212-13). Even before the actual travel to new places, there was the imagining of and desire for Other places, of the world itself. The Theatrum Orbis terrarum, the Western world’s first atlas prepared by Abraham Ortelius and published in 1570, offered not only a map of the known world but also a metaphor for literary imaginations to work with: this was the theatre of the world. Just as atlases and maps in the Early Modern era produced an entire range of accounts of the worlds beyond England and Europe, ready for conquest or mercantile purposes, the postcolonial novel is the literary map of places in the formerly colonized places the world could go to. The controlled exposure to the exotic enables the cosmopolitanization of the First World, a theme to which I return in a later chapter. The exotic postcolonial icon then ‘intervenes’, as Celia Lury puts it (2004), in the global flows of capital and labour by producing a cultural flow alongside and within them, a flow that can be consumed in the form of fiction, poetry and films.

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 The Postcolonial Exotic: The Cult of Authenticity

Postcolonial authors and texts, from Achebe to Adiga, function as icons in the global literary-cultural marketplace. An icon, as Celia Lury defines it, intervenes in the social imaginary, producing similitudes and generating inferences and inducing continuity in movement (Lury 2012: 256-257). It becomes the source for the elaboration of ‘the social imaginary or ground of abstraction as the possible field from which relations of similitude might be inferred’ (254). An icon, says Bishnupriya Ghosh ‘activates a distinctive semiotic economy that lends itself to forging social bonds – to unifying a popular through signification’ (2010: 337). Both Lury and Ghosh speak of the icon as generating a possibility of tracing similitudes. What is the similitude and unification that emerges from the exoticization of postcolonial authors? In terms of marketing, academia and consumption, this similitude has been effectively established: authors as diverse as Adichie and Mudrooroo are clubbed in the category ‘postcolonial’. The continuity of movement that Lury points to in the case of the icon is, in this case, the continuity across geographical, historical and material contexts where multiple and divergent histories and traditions from which these authors emerge are smoothed into an unstriated flow, the postcolonial. We infer their colonial past, their anti-colonial history and their postcolonial concerns as part of the field we recognize as postcolonial, or Third World. The semiotic economy and social bonds, in terms of both market and cultural value, is the accordance of this recognition. In other words, the postcolonial is an icon that cathects into itself the histories of colonization, racism, anti-colonial struggles and the postcolonial present. It functions as a shorthand term that requires, like the icon, no footnote or gloss because its iterability is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

2.2 Manufacturing Authenticity 2.2.1 Authenticity is an effect The postcolonial aura around Monica Ali, Kamila Shamsie, Mohsin Hamid and texts like The Kite Runner, Shalimar the Clown, The Ibis Trilogy and The True Story of the Kelly Gang draws upon an aura of simulated authenticity around their authorship, their themes and their texts. It draws, further, upon the postcolonial anxiety, if anxiety is what it is, around ‘authentic’ representations of ethnic, racial and national identities. The point is not, I hasten to add, whether there is merit in the argument that there are authentic and inauthentic representations of reality. The point, rather, is the discourse of authenticity that frames texts and authors, where mimetic representation is taken as the index of aesthetic and political truth. This section is not about the unpacking of authentic and inauthentic representations in postcolonial texts. Instead, it examines the construction of authenticity itself as the frame. Authenticity, argues Paul Gilroy, ‘enhances the appeal of cultural commodities and has become an important element in the mechanism of racialization necessary



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to making non-European and non-American musics acceptable items in an expanded pop market’ (1993: 99). The early postcolonial theorist and activist Frantz Fanon warned that in his anxiety to identify with his people, the cosmopolitan intellectual places ‘a high value on the customs, traditions and the appearances of his people; but his inevitable painful experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism’ (1965:177). Sarah Brouillette in her Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Market­ place (2007) also believes that the postcolonial writers in particular carry this ‘excessive burden’ of ‘national authenticity’ (177). I propose that rather than an anxiety or a burden, the postcolonial author pays attention to strategies of manufacturing authen­ ticity as a mode of leveraging the local with(in) the global. It is not an adherence to specific cultural codes as much as an attention to the choreographed and calibrated process of adhering that garners visibility and accrues value to brand postcolonial. It is at once an assertion of locality and a mode of locating oneself in the global cultural arena where difference is valued in and of itself. Authenticity, often taken as a self-evident condition, is a construct. In the postcolonial cultural industry of the globalized era, the theme of authenticity has found gravitas as a legacy of anti-colonial cultural nationalisms (where asserting one’s pre-colonial, supposedly ‘pure’, authentic past was a nationalist project in the face of Westernization), and as a mode of gaining visibility for the nation in the global cultural arena. Authenticity begins, Charles Taylor reminds us, as a quest for self-fulfilment. It is about being true to oneself (1991). However, this quest expresses itself as a binarism: self and Other, I and not-I. Authenticity, writes Shelly Eversley, ‘implies value; aesthetically it distinguishes the imitation from the actual, and socially, it offers the means to see and know human particularity’ (2004: ix). More importantly, Eversley suggests, authenticity is a way of ‘making race real’ (ix). Authenticity is an effect of discursive and narrative strategies. 2.2.2 Binarisms In his response to Meenakshi Mukherjee’s oral comments on the use of tropes from the Hindu epics in his novel at a book reading that he documents, Vikram Chandra wrote: This rhetoric [of authenticity] [from Mukherjee] lays claim not only to a high moral ground but also a deep, essential connection to a “real” Indianness …the practitioners of this rhetoric inevitably claim that they are able to identify a “Real India”…(2000)

Later he goes on to note that this rhetoric also creates a binary: the ‘Indo-Anglian’ writer who lives mostly in the West, and the ‘regional’ Indian writer. They also assign to writing in vernacular/regional languages, Chandra argues, ‘a pristine purity of content and purpose, an austere and lofty nobleness of intent, and following from this virtuous abnegation, an ability to connect to a ‘Real India’.

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Chandra’s furious response reveals the binarism in operation in debates about authenticity. It assumes, as Chandra notes, a transparent access to a ‘real’ India that only authors in native, i.e, Indian, languages possess, and which the West-located author writing in English can only imitate. Thus, we discern in the debate around authenticity a binary of real versus fake access to traditions and literary histories. The Mukherjee charge against expat Indian authors of being gripped by the ‘anxiety of Indianness’ posits a real Indianness (of authors writing in Indian languages) versus a fake one (in diaspora, migrant authors writing primarily in English), and therefore a binary around authentic Indianness. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (2001) sees this identity as the effect of the Indian author in English ‘positioned to look in two directions, towards their Indian English readers on one side, and their readers in the West in another’. Sunder Rajan claims that in doing so, ‘they could and sometimes do fail between explaining too much and explaining too little: hence the anxiety’ (‘Writing in English in India, Again’). However, she herself admits that Rushdie displays ‘little of this anxiety’! This academically instituted binary (real versus fake, regional versus Westernized) assumes, as Chandra points out, that there is a real Indianness accessible only to certain authors and denied the rest. The oppositional logic implies that ‘Indian’ is a readily knowable, understandable category that pre-exists the discourses. In other words, the binarism proposed (regional vs diasporic, Indian language author vs Indian author in English) presupposes that there is a clear category ‘Indianness’ or ‘Indian’ that both precedes and supersedes its linguistic and narrative constructions in literature and cultural texts. Further, the debate around authenticity transforms an abstract idea called India and Indianness into a concrete reality which, according to the debate, is visible in some language-texts and not in others. This binarism works only when we ignore the fact that all ideas of India, Indianness – racial identities, in short – are mediated, whether in X language or Y. The binarism also operates along a different axis. Those seeking and claiming authenticity also think in terms of an essentialism to cultural forms and cultural identities, a certain fixity and unchanging nature to them.8 There is an implicit assumption that any representation of a given culture must include some timeless features, an essence. Thus, brand postcolonial is the result of two energies: an energy derived from the literary representations and debates around unchanging (postcolonial) cultures (‘truly…’) and an energy derived from literary representations and debates that position the (postcolonial) culture as dynamic, plastic, adapting to the new world

8 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak argues that ethnic communities often consciously adopt stereotypical modes of self-representation as a form of ‘strategic essentialism’ (1985). This choice is driven by the assumption that such self-stereotyping generates, besides income in a tourist-cultural marketplace some social goals (e.g. improving the mobility of their children, challenging negative stereotypes).



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order. Brand postcolonial is at once about being and becoming, about the culture that is and what it is becoming in an engagement with a changing world.

2.3 The Literary Investment in Race and Ethnicity Shelly Eversley argues that there is a literary investment in race that drives the debate around authenticity (xii). Postcolonial critics and authors alike therefore, ‘implicitly and explicitly confirmed the idea of racial authenticity as a measure of [Asian or African] literary and cultural achievement’ (xii). The postcolonial aura around Hamid, Hossaini, Roy or Achebe is drawn from two converging investments: on the part of the postcolonial cultural industry that produces authors and their authority, and on the side of the audience/readership. Following Eversley, I suggest that the convergence of investments is one of cumulative investment in racial identity via the medium of the literary text and the author. The Afghan cultural scene is embellished and writ globally through Hossaini, like the Igbo one through Achebe. It is the investment in race that drives the interest in and quest for authenticity. In other words, the literary investment in race is a version of the contribution of and by the race or ethnic group itself to the world of literature, to world literature or the global novel. The postcolonial contributes a postcolonialness to the world, in the distinct and unique form of postcolonial literature. When the world seeks to understand the uniqueness of a tribe or a community, it has to turn to that tribe’s literary expressions. Conversely, when a tribe or community wishes to make itself known to the world as a distinct identity, it needs a literary expression of this identity. There is a racial recognition of the literary and a literary recognition for the race. Four Pakistani authors, Mohsin Hamid, Mohammed Hanif, Daneedayal Mueenuddin and Kamila Shamsie satirize this linkage of race-ethnicity with literary production in a 2010 Granta piece on ‘How to Write about Pakistan’: When it comes to Pakistani writing, I would encourage us all to remember the brand. We are custodians of brand Pakistan. And beneficiaries. The brand slaps an extra zero onto our advances, if not more. Branding can be the difference between a novel about brown people and a best-selling novel about brown people. It is our duty to maintain and build that brand. I know I don’t need to reiterate here what brand Pakistan stands for, but since my future incomestream is tied up with what you all do with it, I’m going to do so anyway. Brand Pakistan is a horror brand. It’s like the Friday the 13th series. Or if you’re into humor, like Scary Movie. Or Jaws, if nature-writing is your thing. (https://granta.com/how-to-write-about-pakistan)

It is not clear which of the four this above passage is by, but that is really beside the point. The passage satirizes the essentialist stereotypes that Pakistani authors perpetuate in order to find recognition and money. ‘Brand Pakistan’ as a ‘horror brand’ is

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the conflation of racial identity with literary needs and representations. The passage also argues that literary ‘achievement’ is measured in terms of the general perception, derived from other genres and cultural texts, such as news reports of jihadis and bombers, of the race. The race invests in the literary texts and the literary embodies the race. There is, of course, a reification involved in the literary production of Pakistan: it brings a particular kind of Pakistan into being, an idea of Pakistan that then runs along on its own in the world (and in the literature for the world to read), independent of evolving dynamics and histories in that country. It simultaneously brings a Pakistan into being, and alienates it from the changing social forces. The brand becomes a thing with a specific value, which connects both the country and the literary text. Racial and ethnic authenticity is a measure of literary achievement precisely in so far as any literary achievement is measured in terms of an adherence to a specific notion of authentic racial identity. Together, then, the cultural production of race and the racial production of literary achievements contribute to the culture of authenticity. The arrival of the postcolonial on the global scene demands that she arrives marked as postcolonial – which requires the staging of an authenticity, and concomitant debates about identity, nationhood, belonging, etc., for global cultural circuits. The postcolonial has to be announced, and announce itself, in and as difference for which its literature should bear the burden of delivering this difference. The postcolonial’s burden is to not only carry this difference in convincing ways to the global cultural arena but also, because it is linked to racial identities, be embroiled in a politics of possession. The ‘right to represent’, as writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston discovered, was not a given. Take for instance the controversy around Kingston. Critics and authors like Frank Chin argued that there were ‘real’ Chinese American authors as opposed to fake ones like Kingston who merely repurposed Chinese traditions and recast them in line with white stereotypes. Chin’s 1991 essay was provocatively titled, ‘Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake’. Chin writes: Furthermore, Kingston, Hwang, and [Amy] Tan are the first writers of any race, and certainly the first writers of Asian ancestry, to so boldly fake the best-known works from the most universally known body of Asian American lore in history. To legitimize their faking, they have to fake all of Asian American history and literature, and argue that the immigrants who settled and established Chinese America lost touch with Chinese culture, and that a faulty memory combined with new experience produced new versions of these traditional stories. This version of history is their contribution to the stereotype. (135)

He goes on to add: With Kingston’s autobiographical Woman Warrior, we have given up even the pretense of reporting from the real world. Chinese culture is so cruel and she is so helpless against its overwhelming



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cruelty that she lives entirely in her imagination. It is an imagination informed only by the stereotype communicated to her through the Christian Chinese American autobiography. (154)

Chin’s charge of inauthenticity is aligned with the charge of ‘pandering to the West’ through the retention of cultural difference, which, ironically, is what constitutes the postcolonial as postcolonial. If one writes out of difference, it is also expected that one does not give up policing the boundaries of that difference. That is, when literary achievements and racial identities are seen as mutually dependent and reinforcing, to police one is to police the other – or what I am referring to as the politics of possession.

2.3.1 This is where the authenticity plot thickens Cultural nationalisms and its representations in the age of anti-colonial struggles wrote back against colonial representations, which, nationalists claimed, were mis­ representations. In the postcolonial era, with the conflation of race and literary-cultural productions in the drive for authenticity, as argued above, the right to represent and the politics of possession remains. However, it is now tied to maintaining a postcolonial ‘character’ in the face of global culture and cultural imperialisms. While at one point of time it engaged with European colonial culture when ‘writing back’, it now engages with the world itself. Even as it deals at forensic levels with genocide in Sri Lanka, for instance, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost ‘gestures repeatedly to the post-1989 world of civil wars and state terror’ (Ganguly 2016: 198). Whether Anil’s Ghost is directly referencing the world’s genocides – that is, whether it is authentic or not in its representations – or is restricted to the local (Sri Lanka) in its authenticity is not the point. As Ganguly underscores, the novel places a premium upon witnessing, by both survivors (superstes) and third-person (terstes) (210). I suggest that the appeal of brand postcolonial around Ondaatje’s powerful novel is precisely because it moves between these two witness-roles, and does not allow us to dwell on the authenticity of either because it calls to mind not a genocidal event but a genocidal imaginary across the world.9 The survivor testimony from first-hand experiences might well approximate to the authentic because of its affective response to the horrors, even though forensic examination by the protagonist (who is the third-person witness) is equally authentic because of its scientificity. One reads Anil’s Ghost as a novel of the genocide imaginary,

9 I have elsewhere defined genocidal imaginary as follows: ‘genocidal’ indicates the move towards mass extermination, a tendency and imaginary that by constructing specific models of Otherness could lead to mass killings. It is the manufacturing of conditions in which such extermination might be legitimized and sanctioned. The genocidal imaginary here assigns a specific set of attributes to people and professions (Nayar, Human Rights and Literature: 3).

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of which Sri Lanka is one instantiation and instance. Thus, even as it documents the Sri Lankan horrors, it engages with the world, howsoever unevenly.10

2.3.2 Strategies of Authentication Brand postcolonial and its power is not, I suggest, the effect of any of the above. The success and attraction of the postcolonial text is not its authenticity but its strategies of authentication. The question is not whether a novel from the Third World is true to its context, people or culture. Rather, the question is whether we perceive a simulated authenticity – since readers from around the world have nothing to compare a fictional representation of Sri Lanka or Indonesia with – as reliable. In other words, the question is whether strategies of authentication simulate an authenticity effectively. I take this emphasis on authentication rather than a ‘documentary authenticity of representation’ from Andreas Huyssen (2000: 72). Huyssen in his reading of Art Spiegelman’s Maus argues that the text embodies not mimesis but mimetic approxi­ mation. Readers, Huyssen suggests, have to get past the ciphers (mice and cats) to the people behind (the Nazis and the Jews). Through this mimetic approximation, graphic texts seek authentication rather than authenticity (Huyssen 2000). Huyssen’s point is crucial, for he suggests that realist, mimetic ‘truths’ are not essential for the readers to perceive, in the case of Maus, the horrors of the Holocaust even when these are cast close to the form of an animal fable. Rather, Huyssen points to the responsibility of the reader to seek verisimilitude (not exact replicas or identicality, but similarity) by going beyond the ciphers of the text. Huyssen elaborates: There are dimensions to mimesis that lie outside linguistic communication and that are locked in silences, repressions, gestures, and habits – all produced by a past that weighs all the more heavily since it is not (yet) articulated. Mimesis is in its physiological, somatic dimension … a becoming or making similar, a movement toward, never reaching of a goal…It requires us to

10 Mrinalini Chakravorty appears to be making this very point when she says: When Anil’s Ghost and other such novels delineate entire nations of the global south as deathscapes, they deploy a questionable stereotype that functions only through the homogenization of social actors and cultural spaces. As a consequence, the decolonial space stands apart from and compressed for the explicit burden of violence it bears, becoming allied with other such spaces across the globe. (135, emphasis added) Even when such a novel stereotypes death, or reduces the nation to a deathscape, Chakravorty writes, the stereotype ‘necessitates thinking of death beyond and individually subjective experience so that there can be a collective ethical response to it’ (142). ‘Primal’ forms of existence such as fear, violence and death, she argues, ‘tenuously unite the postcolony to a larger human community’ (146).



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think of identity and non-identity together as a nonidentical similitude and in unresolvable tension with each other. (72)

The postcolonial aura accrues to texts and authors because narrative and rhetorical strategies generate this ‘nonidentical similitude’, a tension between believable mimetic approximation and mimetic realism. It is not that everyone uses proverbs in Achebe-land or that all members of a tribe or ethnic group in the Okri-world believe in the same spirits. Just as cultural nationalism demanded a simulated homogenization, cultural globalism – which is the context of the contemporary postcolonial writer – demands a simulated authenticity and non-identical similitude. The use of myth, songs, folklore, idiomatic expressions and culturally specific tropes in the postcolonial text serves as an authenticating device although these are enunciated often in English and therefore (as Mukherjee charged Chandra) sound awkward and ill-fitted to the rhythm of the novel in English. I suggest that one needs to think of such strategies as mimetic approximations that force the reader to move beyond the immediate enunciation to seek the cultural realities embedded in the text. They are not accurate renderings of, say, the Hindi film song which Rushdie incorporates into his novels or the Igbo idioms involving kola nuts. They are evocative of cultural moments in their simulated authenticity. Mimetic approximations such as these begin by crossing racial boundaries into another context of enunciation. Though they ‘belong’ to a cultural formation, they are mobile enough in the hands of the postcolonial author to ‘appear’ in a new formation, such as the novel in English. Strategies of authentication are strategies of cultural mobility that locate the idiom, the song, the folktale in two (uneven) worlds. An idiom that is assumed to be naturally located in the black, brown or yellow and to those representative spaces (that is, the literatures and cultures in those languages of those communities and races) makes its way into other spaces and, contrary to debates about authenticity, belongs in both. Cultural mobility of this kind is essentially about mimetic approximations precisely because the trope or theme or artistic device is a performance across cultural and linguistic borders which the reader also has to cross in order to engage with the work. That is, the reader learns to understand that the figures and tropes are not to be seen as exact replicas but simulated authenticity because they are being elaborated and enunciated in a radically different context such as an Igbo phrase in an English text. When paratexts, publicity materials and commentaries gesture at the cultural hybridity and mobility of the authors, they do not either valorise or dismiss origins, cultural roots or mobility. Rather, they serve as a strategy of authentication where the author is presented as a person engaged with multiple contexts, diverse origins and constantly mobile. About Mohsin Hamid, we are told in a piece in Observer: The product of a privileged Muslim upbringing in Lahore, Pakistan, he sailed through Princeton and Harvard Law School and had his pick of investment-banking job offers when he graduated in 1996. He picked McKinsey instead, attracted by the more creative atmosphere.

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The biographical account here combines the origins of the celebrity novelist with her/his social, geographical and cultural mobility. The Hamid aura here is not to do with either his origins (Pakistan, Muslim) or his studies in elite institutions or with the choice he made regarding place of work. It emerges from the cultural mobility and cosmopolitanism Hamid embodies: finance, law and creative writing; Pakistan, Muslim, American. Emphasizing the origin localizes him in a far-away land while emphasizing his later-day progress and current location globalizes him through the focus on his mobility. It is, indeed, very much possible to see the mobility of the postcolonial author, as a person and individual, as a cause for ‘brand postcolonial’.

2.3.3 Narrative Interiority as Authentication A racial or ethnic or postcolonial truth is not reliant solely upon a collective or group identity but rather on aesthetic devices that depict an individual, complex interiority of individual characters. Thus, the success of The God of Small Things or Anil’s Ghost or The Famished Road that leads to the celebrification of Arundhati Roy, Michael Ondaatje and Ben Okri may be attributed not to their realist, magic-realist or surrealist representations of caste, ethnicity and race but rather due to the narrative interiority in these novels. The ‘lower caste’ or ‘Tamil’ identity is not delivered up to us through a survey of collective rituals, ethnic festivities and the quotidian alone – although these do contribute to the authentication – but through an interiority in characterization. Arundhati Roy writes in The God of Small Things about Ammu, who has embarked on an affair with the ‘untouchable’ Velutha: What was it that gave Ammu this Unsafe Edge? This air of unpredictability? It was what she had battling inside her. An unmixable mix. The infinite tenderness of motherhood and the reckless rage of a suicide bomber. It was this that grew inside her, and eventually led her to love by night the man her children loved by day. (44)

Rahel sees Velutha in a workers’ march and tells Ammu. Later Roy gives us Ammu’s thoughts: Suddenly Ammu hoped that it had been him that Rahel saw in the march… She hoped that under his careful cloak of cheerfulness he housed a living, breathing anger against the smug, ordered world that she so raged against. (175-6)

If the first expresses the woman’s rage at the circumscription of her life, thoughts, relationships and emotions within the patriarchal social mores, the second presents her rage as resonant with that of Velutha. Roy thus shows us the interiority of two people differently oppressed – one because of caste and class, the other because of gender and marital and maternal status – and similarly angry. Velutha himself, confused by his attraction and cautioned by his awareness of his social status thinks:



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Velutha shrugged and took the towel away to wash. And rinse. And beat. And wring. As though it was his ridiculous, disobedient brain. He tried to hate her. She’s one of them, he told himself. Just another one of them. He couldn’t. She had deep dimples when she smiled. Her eyes were always somewhere else. Madness slunk in through a chink in History. It took only a moment. (214, emphasis in original)

It is this interiority that lends authentication to the history of class, caste and gender that Roy depicts: the individual affected by the history and the individual’s affective response to the history. Postcolonial authors move beyond what Eversley terms ‘claims of a racially specific individuality’ (43) to a depiction of what an Asian or Caribbean character feels inside. I extend this to mean the intersection of publicly declared, staged and perceived racial, ethnic or communitarian identity with felt, personal and private identity that postcolonial fiction, in particular, documents. Of the former is tangible in the sense of the characters’ clothing, behaviour, social relations – their public persona, in other words – it is the invisible and internal identity that delivers a sense of authentication for Velutha, Saleem Sinai, Biswas or Amir. This of course brings us dangerously close to the psychologization of characters as an index of their believability. The point however is that authenticity and authentication are effects of narrative, of rhetoric. Whether a character or an event is close enough to what we consider the real depends on narrative modes rather than any quantifiable and verifiable reality. That is, it is through the effect of mediated representation – rhetoric – that we come to believe in the authenticity of whatever is represented. Authentication is a discursive strategy that delivers to us a simulated and perceivable authenticity.

2.4 Competing Authenticities When Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss was gaining global celebrity status, it was simultaneously gathering protests and anger in India itself. Reports appeared in the Indian and British media where readers in India and Nepal Kalimpong attacked Desai for the ‘very wrong picture’ she presents in her novel, and of being racist in her representations (Jordison 2009, ‘Inheritance Irks Nepali Readers’, 2006). The latter report begins with ‘Indian-origin author Kiran Desai’ draws attention to the ‘dislocated’ migrant authorial identity, fuelling the theme of inauthenticity from the very beginning. Yet another report protesting the novel was far more direct: Desai is fortunate in two ways. First, because she is an Indian woman, and this enables a claim to authenticity for which every writer of fiction clamours. Second, she has chosen to write about a marginalised community that has not spoken much for itself through Indian English-language fiction. But combining these two things, however, she has managed to marginalise that community within its own area. (Chaturvedi 2006)

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Authenticity implies possession and ownership of cultural practices, their meanings and cultural memories. It also implies a control over heuristic structures and interpretative schema. Competing authenticities that contribute to brand postcolonial might be seen at two levels. First, visions of culture from within that cultural formation vie for attention under the claims of authenticity. Second, among postcolonial nations, representations vie for the attention of the global cultural tourist. In the case of the first, Huggan alerts us to the competing authenticities that underwrite Aboriginal – and other indigenous –representations, and that demand a closer attention than has sometimes been paid both to the political contexts behind literary (self-)labelling and to the material circumstances behind the production and circulation of Aboriginal images and cultural goods. (176)

That is, even before the authenticity question begins to appear in the global readeror target- communities of the postcolonial texts, one needs to examine the self-representation of so-called authenticities by the postcolonials. Competing authenticities is the effect of cultural factors and the social, economic and political mileage accruing to the self-presentations by indigenous communities, many of which are in contest with each other. Huggan argues that Aborigines have learnt to play the market for their self-empowerment, and this has generated the ‘authentic’ as an economically necessary discourse, constructing an iterable phenomenon whether as cultural festivals, handicrafts or literature. The postcolonial text in the cultural circuits of the new world order which, as Hardt and Negri (2000) have argued, co-opts difference into its scheme of things, presents competing visions of their own country and culture. Thus, the diasporic author, located in the Western world and who has a Western audience, primarily, presents a vision (and this was at the heart of the Mukherjee-Chandra debate on authenticity) of India that might be at odds with that of an author who lives and works in India. The point is, these visions of the same country are not to be seen as antagonistic but in dialogue with each other. Cultural reification, as Arif Dirlik has noted, is complicit with ethnicity (Dirlik 2002). Dirlik suggests that competing visions of cultural identity speak to different historical circumstances with different social and political expectations. But they are not mutually exclusive, at least I do not think so. But closing the gap between them requires a different kind of language than has dominated cultural discussion in recent decades, a language that is more cognizant of the historicity of the cultural, which in turn is premised on a politics driven not by questions of cultural identity but questions of social and public responsibility. (222)

Dirlik is pointing to the different historical circumstances – migration, cosmopolitan travel, education – within the same country that shape these different and competing visions of their ethnic identities. Therefore, rather than debate authenticity,



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one needs to historicize authenticity and cultural identity itself. Instead of charges of ‘inauthentic’ or ‘fake’ being hurled at each other where there is a different vision of the culture being present (from within), one needs to be alert to the context from which any vision of cultural identity is being presented. We see this Dirlik argument illustrated in certain diasporic authors who, if we concede Mukherjee-Sundar Rajan their argument for a minute, seem to gesture at a ‘core’ authenticity retained by immigrant populations. This retention of a core cultural identity appears to suggest that certain aspects of a culture remain unchanged and uncontaminated despite altered historical circumstances. Take, for instance, Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers. Here Jugnu (whose grandfather is a Hindu) and Chanda are killed for their liaison – without marriage vows – by Chanda’s family – in England. Aslam suggests that despite the migration and acculturation, certain aspects of their Pakistani roots remain embedded. Aslam inaugurates this theme of a persistent social imaginary early in the novel. Speaking of immigrant cultures, he writes: So the cleric at this mosque [in England] could receive a telephone call from, say, Norway, from a person who was from the same village as him in Pakistan, asking him whether it was permitted for him to take an occasional small glass of whisky or vodka to keep his blood warm, given that Norway was an extremely cold country; the cleric told him to desist from his sinful practice, thundering down the line and telling him that Allah was perfect aware of the climate of Norway when He forbade humans from drinking alcohol; why, the cleric asked, couldn’t he simply carry a basket of burning maple leaves under his overcoat the way the good Muslims of freezing Kashmir do to keep themselves warm? (12)

Aslam’s portrait of the freezing Pakistani in Norway and the ‘thundering’ cleric disallowing any ‘deviation’ from the cultural practices and norms of Pakistani society, even when relocated into a different climate, culture and context, is a case in point. Later, Aslam would articulate for us, through his portrait of Kaukab’s views, Kaukab who has lived in England long enough but remains ‘authentically’ Pakistani: The decadent and corrupt West has made them forget piety and restraint, but the countless examples in Pakistan had brought home to them the importance and beauty of a life decorously lived according to His rules and injunctions… (90)

Kaukub’s articulation of ‘pure’ cultural traditions is a component of the postcolonial authenticity debates. The inauthentic is a native character like Mah-Jabin in this same novel who declares: ‘I’ve been to a country full of my own kind of people and seen what that like so I thought I’d try a strange country full of strangers this time’ (157). This adherence to authentic traditions, says Mah-Jabin a little later in the novel, has cost several people their lives: You would like to dig her [Chanda] up piece by piece, put her back together, and kill her once more for going against your laws and codes, the so-called traditions that you have dragged into this country with you like shit on your shoes. (163)

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Mah-Jabin’s savage appraisal of an immigrant culture suggests that it preserves the worst of its anterior, original and therefore ‘authentic’ culture. In Pakistan, Aslam writes, such honour killings are not uncommon; brothers who kill their sisters for dishonouring their family acquired a certain status: ‘their act gave them a certain nobility in the eyes of those around them’ (495). Despite relocation, there is no change in the social imaginary: this adherence to injunctions and rules, Aslam suggests, is ‘authenticity’. We could then argue that such texts document ‘postcolonial authenticity’ as insularity, a stubborn retention of old values, which results in the continuing (as in, carried over from their originating country/culture) brutalization of the immigrant population and the eventual killing of Jugnu and Chanda. The larger question that Aslam asks is: does the adherence to old values cause an erosion of human values in the postcolonial? Is the ‘authentic’ then more important than recognizing changes in historical and cultural circumstances? Implicit in Aslam is a critique where observance of custom subsumes and overwhelms any possibility of change. It is then a criticism of cultures that remain static despite changed historical circumstances, a reification that sets up the binary, ‘authentic native versus corrupted native’. The second level at which postcolonial authenticities compete is within the cultural tourism market. Literature, as we have seen, comes to embody race, and races make literary investments. Within the global cultural tourist circuit different postcolonial authenticities compete for space. In tourism studies Haywantee Ramkissoon (2015) speaks of ‘destination competitiveness’ in which ‘the concept of authenticity defined as the interpretation of the genuineness and increased appreciation of the tourism object … plays a significant role in destination competitiveness’ (294). Ramkissoon elaborates: ‘In addition to the climatic characteristics, the rich culture, cultural sites and monuments, and distinctive natural environments make them attractive destinations for seekers of authenticity’ (294). Ramkissoon goes on to argue that through perceived authenticity among the tourists, a greater sense of ‘place attachment’ appears, and positively influences the visitors’ ‘cultural intentions’ (297). Ramkissoon’s point about destination competitiveness built around perceived authenticity suggests that in global cultural tourism, self-representations play a crucial role in how the First World treats the destinations. Their cultural intentions and behaviour hinge upon these representations and the perceived authenticity embodied in them. Extending this point it is possible to suggest that competing authenticities from the various postcolonial cultures are part of the tourist value regime seeking to draw not just attention but a certain kind of attention to their parts of the world. Taking their place in the comity of nations, in other words, as specific ethnic groups, communities and cultures, requires these cultures to generate a degree and version of authenticity that is believable and which will in turn define future cultural and perhaps political relations as well. We therefore locate the authenticity debate within questions of cultural capital and cultural markets, converging self-representations (itself divided) and touristy



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expectations. It therefore stands to reason that we are discussing different regimes of value. It may not be too far-fetched, then, to imagine a competitive postcoloniality as well, with the formerly colonized nations seeking a global representational – and market – space for ‘their’ literatures and literateurs, each seeking to communicate a greater or lesser degree of authenticity. When literature and the reification of cultural or national identity go together, as the postcolonial appears to do, then different regimes of value come into operation. Critics writing about Asian American literatures have noted that first generation diasporic writers tend to use materials from their cultures and traditions with greater sincerity, faithfulness and respect whereas from the second generation this use is more creative and symbolic (Wang 1999. Also see the Frank Chin criticism of Kingston above). Wang is signaling a shift in attitude but also in value regimes when it comes to the employment of, say, myth or folklore from tribal and cultural memories. The first we might term an affective value regime, and the second a symbolic value regime (although symbols are not devoid of affect, and affect requires, very often, the symbolic). Affective value regimes intersect with symbolic value regimes to generate a brand postcolonial adhering to ‘ethnic’ texts. Alexis Wright in Carpentaria, mapping aboriginal lives and histories, says: Men such as Norm Phantom kept a library ... full of stories of the old country stored in their heads ... trading stories for other stories ... what to do, how to live like a proper human being. (245)

For Anne Brewster, this emphasis on storytelling is an index of the role it plays in the ethical living ideals/ideas of the community (2010: 88). This is not merely the symbolic but an affective value regime in operation, even as the storytelling act brings the community together. In other cases, these regimes of value shift and intersect in different ways. The abiku – the spirit of the child who died young, according to numerous African cultural traditions – would be a good instance of the layering of cultural ‘authenticity’ within the intersections of affective and symbolic economies. The abiku, a prominent figure in African texts by Wole Soyinka and others, acquires enormous symbolic value in African diasporic and African American texts. When, therefore, Ben Okri (The Famished Road) or Helen Oyeyemi (The Icarus Girl) employ the figure of the abiku, far from emphasizing any authentic cultural icon, they are generating a connection between historical African diasporas and African American literary history. As Christopher Ouma phrases it, ‘the abiku/ogbanje has an inherent ambiguity and a sense of agency that enables migration’ (2014: 191). What the abiku might, or might not, mean for African identities and culture is not the point. Ouma’s reading suggests that resignifications, determined by historical necessity and cultural drives of the present, generate new economies of the affective and symbolic kind. The insistence on migratability and transposability of the icon, idea and imaginary presupposes not

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authenticity but adaptability for the sake of continuing relevance. Ouma’s reading gestures towards the potential of cultural markers to serve current needs in new contexts. This move bypasses the thorny issue of authenticity: the African American can also claim, as much as the African-Canadian Ben Okri, the abiku as an icon and centrepiece of belonging as authentic to their present needs, irrespective of its ‘original’ cultural relevance. This generic and cultural mutation in some of the postcolonials bypasses and resists the entire authenticity debate, opting instead for postcolonial cosmopolitanism. Across generations of, say, African writing (between Achebe and Adichie) we discern a massive shift in the value regimes instituted within their work, their production and their reception. If Achebe is, in a well-worn phrase, writing back to the empire as an assertion of Igbo, African identity through the use of English, Adichie, comfortably placed within the cultural tourism market, does not require any such assertion and is therefore relatively freer to critique African society or desacralize its mores and customs (in, for instance, Half of a Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus). As Adichie looks at Africa and the world, her symbolic value regime is at once a mirror and a window (a trope I shall return to in the Conclusion): looking at her (African) Self and the (global) Other. Note here her devastating comment about Africans in Purple Hibiscus: The educated ones leave, the ones with the potential to right the wrongs. They leave the weak behind. The tyrants continue to reign because the weak cannot resist. Do you not see that it is a cycle? Who will break that cycle? (244-5)

In Half of a Yellow Sun Adichie would state unequivocally that the postcolonials had never been given the weapons and instruments to ‘negotiate’ the new world. She adds: ‘how can we resist exploitation if we don’t have the tools to understand exploitation?’ (11). Brand postcolonial is the result of a symbolic value regime that, in the hands of an Adichie crafts those tools needed to negotiate the new world order and understand a history of their exploitation. This value regime is self-reflexive, self-critical, but extremely creative. It accords some respect to the traditions received and inherited – African but also Western – and creatively uses these to fashion their contemporary identities. The contemporary postcolonial therefore exhibits the creative tension of adopting folklore, myth and the traditional cultural idiom only to repurpose it for today – for instance offering feminist or subaltern interpretations of these traditions. The charge of inauthenticity is levelled precisely because of the interpretive freedom exercised by the contemporary postcolonial. Radical re-readings, for example, of scriptural and sacred texts for their patriarchal, class or plain discriminatory subtexts immediately generates the accusation of inauthenticity, as though older cultural texts must be immune to revisionist readings. Yet this is precisely what simulated authenticity achieves: it is and is not quite the older text we all know. It is close to the already circulating stories and myths, but not quite.



Competing Authenticities 

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Take for instance a contemporary graphic memoir by a subaltern (Venkat Raman Singh Shyam, a member of the Gond tribal community, with S. Anand) Indian, Finding My Way. The story being narrated is the one of the lower-caste Ekalavya and the upper-caste Hindu warrior, Arjuna, from the Hindu epic The Mahabharata. In the canonical tale Arjuna’s supremacy as an archer is ensured when his Brahmin teacher, Drona, perpetrates a malicious act against the ‘lower’ caste Ekalavya. Both Arjuna and Drona discover that Ekalavya’s skills as an archer surpass Arjuna’s. When questioned, Ekalavya confesses that he perceives Drona to be his teacher (although Drona never taught him). Drona then asks for Ekalavya’s thumb as a kind of teacher-fee. Ekalavya without hesitation chops off his thumb and gives it to his teacher, knowing that this would forever prevent him, Ekalavya, from practising archery. For contemporary subaltern texts this incident has been seen as symbolic of the upper-caste stratagem that deprived a subaltern (Ekalavya is a tribal) from his due. Shyam and Anand recast this legendary tale sedimented in collective public memory across India by weaving in an additional layer that contemporarizes it. The Hindu god of fire, Agni, tells Arjuna and his ally, Krishna: We can all profit by it. This land is rich in minerals. These primitives, their ancient trees, the strange birds and queer animals that inhabit this land know not what they are sitting upon. If we can mine this wealth, and if this wealth can be mine, we will all prosper. I’ll be back in business, and your Indraprastha will outshine Hastinapura. There will even be an Indraprastha extension. (unpaginated)

This is narrative recension: citing a classic storyline critically in order to draw attention to the implicit deforestation in the Mahabharata’s forest-burning incident. This critical re-reading of the Mahabharata then is added to the themes of illegal mining by business-houses, ‘development’ and urban planning in contemporary India (‘Extension’ is a typical term in urban India for expanded residential enclaves and gated communities). With this Shyam and Anand render the tale of the Pandava’s valour from the ‘original’ Mahabharata into a modern allegory of deceit, exploitation and theft of tribal rights. To contemporarize the Mahabharata through a story of the subaltern’s exploitation is to draw a link between an ancient past and the present by calling attention to a continuum of suffering and social injustice.11 It could be argued that this is the ‘inauthentic’ Mahabharata, and there would be some gravitas to the charge. Yet, what is striking about this creative recension is that it communicates in the space of one image and accompanying text, the entire breadth of contemporary political crimes. It appeals precisely because it finds new subtexts to the ‘original’ tale. Yet such creative interpretations that lead to simulated authenticity

11 I have expanded this argument about Finding My Way as a recension narrative in a forthcoming essay in Narrative.

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are necessitated not solely by global demands. Postcolonial nations with their own problems of formulating a cultural identity, faced with subaltern demands, fundamentalisms and divisive forces, grapple with their colonial histories, but also battle received traditions. When the postcolonial revisions myths, stories, cultural codes she does so to ensure that they speak with and to the contemporary, that the myths and stories enable the country to question itself. That is, revisionary readings seek to bring the past in line with the present’s needs and dilemmas, to see if these older texts can help illuminate the present, even as they seek to understand a genealogy of say, tribalisms, caste-oppression and patriarchy. That these redrafted cultural identities might be deemed inauthentic is not the point, really. It is the ability to craft simulated authenticities that draws the world’s attention to a new kind of African voice.12 Whether African then functions as a symbol for failed states, native cultural assertions, lingering colonialisms is a moot point that we discern in Adichie’s fiction. This symbolization has considerable cultural value, just as the first phase of the postcolonial, invested in the affective value regime had a cultural cache by/in writing back. On occasion this investment is disputed, satirized and indicted as not quite accurate a picture. Thus, in response to the postcolonial’s foundational belief in a racialized and race-driven ‘West’, an author like Sefi Atta might point to the racialized African. In her A Bit of Difference, Atta has this to say via her character Tessa’s thoughts: Tessa would probably feel guilty, without realizing that Nigerians are as prejudiced as the English, and more snobbish. Nigerians, given any excuse, are ready to snub. Without provocation and even remorse. They snub one another, snub other Africans, other blacks and other races. Nigerians would snub aliens if they encountered them. (47)

As different postcolonial authors and texts vie for a space in the cultural marketplace driven by destination competitiveness, authenticity creatively manufactured through the symbolic value regimes, helps the making of brands: Brand India, Brand Pakistan or Brand Africa. Writing about branding, Celia Lury has argued that branding involves ‘making abductive inferences about the possibilities of objects’ (2004: 69). When African becomes a symbol or an icon, then when deployed within the postcolonial spectrum (of, say the Man Booker Prize or the Commonwealth Prize), it enables the market to conjecture possibilities on postcolonial qualities such as African genius, Indian creativity, the postcolonial use of the English language, and the institution of literature itself. It involves the ‘may-bes’ of products that are first ‘differentiated within particular products and then integrated in product ranges, series or lines’ (Lury

12 This is not to say that Achebe’s generation was blindly reverential and less self-critical. However, the value regimes are different in terms of their engagements with their own culture, in the pursuit of authenticity and the (often necessary) assertion of cultural identity.



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69, emphasis in original). The product range or the series is ‘The Postcolonial’ or ‘The Third World’ cultural productions, where even as the market differentiates between Pakistani or Filipino texts, it integrates it into the circuit of ‘postcoloniality’ itself. This abductive referencing is natural to the brand’s circulation. Brands, writes John Frow, are ‘markers of the edge between the aesthetic space of an image or text and the institutional space of a regime of value which frames and organises aesthetic space’ (Frow 2002). The text has a signature, which is that of an individual, but the brand has a trademark, which is that of the manufacturing company (Frow). The literary text produced by Shamsie, Hamid, Roy or Carey might have a signature, but they are co-opted and circulated as brands with the trademark ‘postcolonial’ stamped across. The postcolonial is a brand that is situated between the institutional space of literatures and literary studies and the text to be consumed. That is, the simulated authenticity of texts that makes them brands constantly shifts between the aesthetic and the market, between the text and the circuits of cultural consumption. Simulated authenticity is a branding strategy and only requires that the reader/consumer perceive authenticity. The point I wish to make is: the symbolic value regime employed by Adichie, Hamid or Roy generates a brand for ‘their’ culture through simulated authenticity. This brand is subject to abductive inference by both their own cultures and the global tourist regime which sets out to conjecture about the ‘true’ nature of Africa or Pakistan. In other words, the symbolic value regime puts in place a series of operations that generates interest in the various aspects of their cultures mainly through inferences gleaned from the literary texts. It does not matter that these inferences may be wrong, or that there is considerable ‘inauthenticity’ to the text, the emphasis on creatively employing one’s traditions is sufficient to generate the brand. The brand then, with its semantic autonomy, runs on its own in the cultural marketplace. However, self-branding and branding by the institutional-market forces of global cultural markets does not signify the loss of local rootedness, national concerns or aesthetic values. Between the affective and the symbolic value regimes that generate simulated authenticity it is possible to see a more challenging development that postcolonial authors and their texts exhibit. I suggest that the postcolonial text works as an instance of ‘contradictory symbolism’ (Ong 207). Simulated authenticity that relies on the appropriation and employment of folklore, myth and cultural values from one’s country of origin ensures that the literary work itself exhibits this contradictory symbolism. On the one hand it suggests a pride in one’s culture, a retention of those cultural values – in short, an assertion of one’s national and cultural identity. On the other hand it (simulated authenticity) also signals the desire to participate in the global cultural economy precisely through this marketing of ethnic authenticity. A text or artifact has no fixed value – value is relational and the result of the insertion of that artifact into a system of exchange. The postcolonial is inserted into the global cultural system through, for instance, the fact of authors writing in English, publication from global presses, the translation

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industry, reviews and interviews in global cultural sites such as the Guardian or New Yorker. The postcolonial text is animated through its relationality with English literature, institutions where such literature is produced and read, South Asian studies programs, the review system, the prizes. The contradictory symbolism – of being at once an assertion of a national identity and global aspirations – of the text is the value accruing through this insertion into the global cultural system. The contradictory symbolism ensures that the text participates in localism and globalism, sliding between Empire and national/cultural sovereignty, with the latter being asserted in the form of simulated authenticity. Following the work of Aihwa Ong on Chinese architecture in the global age, I argue that the postcolonial brand is an instance of the production of a spectacle of postcolonial sovereignty in the age of the global. That is, sovereignty and cultural identity of the postcolonial is not overwhelmed, in this reading, by global cultural flows. Rather, it embodies the spectacle of self-assured postcolonialness in the age of global culture. To adapt Ong’s formulation, brand postcolonial is the effect of the ‘spectacularization of urban success as well as of national emergence’ (206). If we replace ‘urban’ with ‘global’, we have the postcolonial scene of today. The simulated authenticity of its texts ensures that this spectacle acquires a certain cache in this age. It is no longer therefore a debate between ‘authentic native Orient’ versus ‘inauthentic colonial Orient’. Rather it is the spectacle of the Orient through the construction of simulated authenticity paving the way for its participation in the spectacle of the global cultural market that is at heart of the postcolonial aura. Sovereignty and international aspirations come together in the postcolonial aura.

2.5 Conclusion The postcolonial aura, which emerges from the various energies, conflicts and contests around authenticity, is also derived from a neat side-stepping of the authentic that postcolonial novels in particular engage in. First, the divide between the postcolonial world and the Western one is debated within the postcolonial novel – as Ganguly proposes – when it takes up witnessing as its key thematic concern and trope: it ‘foreshortens … the distance between the postcolonial world’s violent spasms and the various forms of spectatorship that have been generated in the global West’ (178). Brand postcolonial is the effect of the ‘global postcolonial’ whose frames of witnessing are slightly different, and whose emphasis is no longer authenticity but authentication of engagements with the world and the local, the past and the present, the West and the postcolonial. The postcolonial texts and authors function as survivor witnesses (to their country’s history) and as third-person witness (to the history of the elsewhere, or the world), where the former informs the way they look at the latter. That is, it is their engagement with the world through their own history of experiencing racism, colo-

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nialism, fundamentalisms, incipient nation-building processes, the battle for social justice that enables them to be the terstes to the world today. Second, this is not to argue that their perspective on the world is more or less authentic: rather, I suggest that the combination of superstes and terstes within the postcolonial is not about authenticity as much as a political and ethical response derived from their localized pasts and the global present. R. Radhakrishnan has argued about ‘World Literature’ that the challenge is to ‘imagine into existence and coordinate a simultaneous split screen and double frame partaking of a mirror structure and a window structure capable of focusing on self and other in a double gaze (2016: 6). Note here the mirror-window trope in operation as Ben Okri’s protagonist in The Famished Road delivers an account of his father’s dreams: He [Dad] saw the world in which black people always suffered and he didn’t like it. He saw a world in which human beings suffered so needlessly from Antipodes to Equator, and he didn’t like it either. He saw our people drowning in poverty, in famine, drought, in divisiveness and the blood of war. He saw our people always preyed upon by other powers, manipulated by the Western world, our history and achievements rigged out of existence. (492)

The father dreams/sees suffering writ locally and globally. He sees one through the other, he sees his own culture and race suffer when he looks into the mirror, and he sees the world through the window. If colonialism destroyed ‘his’ people in some ways, their own ‘divisiveness’ ruined them in other ways. This split screen is what entrances the reader when we step into the postcolonial novel. The mirror causes and enables the postcolonial to look at the Self, one’s own history and cultural traditions, albeit mediated by the mirror itself, with all the flaws in the glass, and some pieces missing, as Rushdie famously put it in his essay 1982 ‘Imaginary Homelands’ (‘It may be that when the Indian writer who writes from outside India tries to reflect that world, he is obliged to deal in broken mirrors, some of whose fragments have been irretrievably lost’). Simulated authenticity is the effect generated when this double structure is in place: looking at one’s own culture even as one looks at the global cultural market. Third, authenticity is not simply an either/or choice for the postcolonial because authenticity is ‘a metaphorical conversation that occurs … between … evolving and deeply rooted ideals related to a culture’s identity, and … particular individuals and groups whose interactions with these ideals are necessarily influenced by their immediate social contexts’ (Bramadat 2005). Bramadat treats authenticity itself as an evolving concept, debated across stakeholders in different contexts, from those entrenched in the local which they valorize and those whose social contexts cut across regions, cultures and worlds. Laura Rosenthal, whom I have cited earlier, argues that exoticism serves an important function: it offered ‘multiple cosmopolitan possibilities’ for the cultural reinvention of the self, society and the nation (2012: 11). I suggest that the postcolonial’s simulated authenticity that borders on the exoticizing mode, adapting fantasies

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of the primal and merging it with real historical materialities, the contradictory symbolisms of national assertion and global aspirations, of autochthonous meaning and ‘contaminated’ semantic scope is both mirror and window. It offers the postcolonial the possibilities for recasting the nation and culture in far more ways than cultural nationalism – as Frantz Fanon recognized – allows. The possibilities include a more egalitarian nation, greater social justice and level playing fields for all citizens. The postcolonial seeks a cultural reinvention of the nation through a creative re-symbolization and interpretation of past for the present, an act which results in (charges of) exoticism and ‘inauthenticity’. Brand postcolonial is the effect of the double structure, the double consciousness and flexible perspectives of cultural identity identified as simulated authenticity, at once a mirror and a window. Competitive postcoloniality therefore positions authors from the formerly colonized nations in the global marketplace of difference, offering textual tourism that relies upon competing authenticities and strategies of authentication. It inserts into global cultural circuits, reflects back upon countries and cultures of origins, and negotiates the pitfalls between stereotyping and authenticity.

3 Re-Orientalism: The Indigene and the Subaltern Numerous South Asian and South East Asian diasporic authors, as we have seen in the previous chapter, have been accused of inauthenticity, misrepresentation and exploitation of their cultural roots and codes. The myth, cult and culture of simulated authenticity around these representations, I argued, energizes the curiosity value and hence the aura around the postcolonial text. Troubling questions such as whether the diasporic author had the authority to represent her culture remain unanswered while the phenomenon of globalizing postcolonial literary representations – I write this a week before the publishing event of 2017: the release of Arundhati Roy’s second novel in two decades, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – continues unabated. Sidestepping the thorny authenticity issue of diasporic authors, this chapter turns to a different dimension of the same set of concerns. This is the literary representations by postcolonial authors of two specific postcolonial contexts, indigeneity and subalternity. The chapter proposes that the postcolonial literary thematics, often conflated, of indigeneity and subalternity, fit perfectly into a global geocultural moment today, and this generates a ready-made audience for the postcolonial text. Such thematics, however, are not the sole purview of the diasporic author. The argument here is: the geocultural conditions are just right for putting together an archive of suffering, exploitation, resistance and change. The fit between postcolonial representations and the global geocultural conditions is achieved not simply by belonging to a non-European race or ethnic group and a location in the ‘Global South’. Representations of postcolonial states of being, trauma, suffering, pathos and resurgent identities, with or without the problematic charge of ‘inauthentic’ being hurled its way, is a text ready for global consumption because of a pre-existing imaginary to which it adds its discursive force. Brand postcolonial is partly the effect of the provincializing of hitherto Euro-American driven globalization by these texts, which serve as the punctum in the admittedly uneven cultural flows, and which arrest attention precisely because of their serving as punctuations. This postcolonial punctum or swerve in cultural globalization is a modern-day version of colonizing discourses that sought to represent the Asian or African for European consumption. The difference is, it is now no longer European colonial representations of its racial-cultural Other that generate the global imaginary about these nations. These representations now emanate from the formerly colonized nations, and have since acquired a role in geocultural movements. Texts that foreground indigeneity – aboriginal, ethnic – complicate the question of origins and circulation due to the central problem of translation. Take an author like Mahasweta Devi from India or Mudrooroo from Australia, for instance. Devi writing in Bangla about the remote tribes of the Bengal region of India is writing already translated texts when she employs the dialect, idiolect, idioms and stories from the tribal corpus. When Spivak translates Devi into English, an additional layer of complexity is added. Rebecca Walkowitz, writing about the global novel today argues that works from © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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David Mitchell or Kazuo Ishiguro are ‘written as translations, pretending to take place in a language other than the one in which they have, in fact, been composed’ (2015: 4, emphasis in original). Terming these ‘born translated’ works, Walkowitz proposes that when translation is built into the very process of composition and production, today’s born-translated works block readers from being “native readers”, those who assume that the book they are holding was written for them or that the language they are encountering is, in some proprietary or intrinsic way, theirs … many contemporary works will seem to occupy more than one place, to be produced in more than one language, or to address multiple audiences at the same time. (6)

Literature in other languages (other than English) also comes to occupy a place in literary histories through translations, even as they ‘belong’ to, and may originate in, multiple literary histories and contexts. It would not be consumed as belonging to or originating in a language/culture alone. Instead A work would thus appear several times, in each of the histories in which it has a presence, and some of those histories would extend well beyond literary fiction and the medium of print. (23)

Such texts narrate not words, but entire languages, argues Walkowitz (35). In such texts ‘the local now involves thinking about the origin of audiences and the mechanisms through which audiences add meaning to books’ (44). It is this always already translated text embodying indigeneity that constitutes the globalization of the indigene, even as it triggers debates about authenticity. Indigeneity, one could say, invites translation.

3.1 Re-Orientalism and (the) Postcolonial Remains Lisa Lau (2007) proposes that, in a departure from the colonial discourse, the Orientalizing of the Orient is now being performed by the Orientals themselves. Lau, again focusing on diasporic authors of South Asian origin, writes: Orientalism is no longer only the relationship of the dominance and representation of the Oriental by the non-Oriental or Occidental, but that this role appears to have been taken over (in part at least) by other Orientals, namely, the diasporic authors. This process of Orientalism by Orientals is what I will be terming as ‘Re-Orientalism’ for the purposes of this article, which is the same relationship of the powerful speaking for and representing the other, who is all but consigned to subalternism. In Re-Orientalism, we have the curious case in which the positionality of the powerful is simultaneously that of the insider and outsider, where the representing power can be simultaneously self and other. (2)

She goes on to add that ‘Re-Orientalism is perhaps, in part, an extension of the totalisation that had always been present in the literature, imposing the culture, values, attitudes, etc., of a select minority as representative of the diverse majority’ (3). Despite Lau’s claim about the totalizing function of literature, this so-called totaliza-



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tion might serve as an auratic interruption within the global cultural flows. Such an interruption, the present chapter argues, is due to the emphasis much of postcolonial writing lays on the indigene and the subaltern. Moreover, it does not assume, like Lau, that only the diasporic authors construct a re-orientalised Orient. That said, the chronology through which the postcolonial author ‘arrives’ on the global scene is also to be accounted for: from the representations of Orientals by Europeans, then by Orientals themselves and finally by the multicultural-cosmopolitan postcolonials (diasporic authors), is itself a well-established literary trajectory. The point is, the move of the postcolonial from endorsement to resistance (in the colonial period), to cultural nationalism and nation-building to, finally, an engagement with the globalized postcolony determines in indeterminate ways, the production of postcolonial literatures. The postcolonial increasingly writes for the global because the postcolonial is situated in a space beyond the geocultural borders and in a translated/ translatable context. That is, just as ‘English Literature’ was transplanted and translated into Britain’s colonies, the postcolonial is increasingly amenable to translation (we shall return to Rebecca Walkowitz’s formulation of the postcolonial as already translated later). Representations of subalterns by Asian and African authors, who may or may not be subalterns in their countries, and whose work appears, in the main, in English, is an integral part of the postcolonial today. Robert Young in his ‘The Postcolonial Remains’ (2012) argues that the postcolonial is committed to making the invisible visible, especially unauthorized knowledges and subalterns. It highlights indigenous activism and structures of inequality. This, in the late twentieth century, has a global role to play, and contributes to the postcolonial aura. This emphasis on the inequalities and the ‘invisibles’ aligns postcolonial work with a larger set of contexts. In his earlier work Young (2001) had highlighted the role of resistance, anti-colonial and nationalist movements from Asia, Africa, South America in the formation of global political campaigns and alliances that, as we now see, were also responses to globalization directed by Euro-American forces. Thus the postcolony has contributed to a provincializing of Euro-American globalization in significant ways and, as this chapter proposes, enables the making of brand postcolonial. Nikita Dhawan and Shalini Randeria (2013) have argued that a segment of anti-globalizationists think that patterns of globalization have ruptures and continuities, and these are differently experienced. They also propose that new mobility regimes, of authors, texts, ideas, capital and labour, allow thus-far marginal voices to emerge in transnational spaces. This last – the presence of marginal voices – has, on occasion, resulted in a ‘transnational civil society activism’ (570), even as ‘marginalized citizens, social movements, and grassroots NGOs engaged in struggles for justice at the national and transnational levels are forced to rely on the postcolonial state’ (574). Finally, Dhawan and Randeria, following the work of Upendra Baxi, argue that global human rights ideas, discourses and campaigns have had their origins in the anti-colonial resistance of the colonized nations:

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 Re-Orientalism: The Indigene and the Subaltern ideas of human rights have undergone through practices of resistance in the time-spaces of the post-colony. It would, therefore, be a serious mistake in his [Baxi’s] view to conceive of human rights as a western gift to the non-western world. He shows how postcolonial constitutions are saturated with ideas of justice and redistribution as well as of human rights that have been extended well beyond western liberal templates. The very idea of rights, development, and justice had to be forged in postcolonial societies in and through peoples’ struggles, so that for Baxi anti-colonial struggles contributed a great deal to the imagination and practice of human rights. (578)

Thus, the Eurocentric paradigm of human rights, Dhavan and Randeria suggest via Baxi, needs to be replaced by a more multicultural one. It is the anti-colonial and now postcolonial discourses, activism and campaigns that have forced new ways of thinking about the human subject, as Dhawan and Randeria affirm. This is not to say that the postcolony arrives late on the scene and merely adapts a modular rights discourse from the Euro-American centre. Instead, it suggests that the centre/periphery dyad is untenable given the origins of the centre itself. It is not, in other words, the postcolonial text tapping into a pre-existing human rights discourse/regime: the discourse/regime itself owes its existence, historically, to the recognition of subaltern races, populations and classes around the world. In other words, the re-orientalist representations of indigeneity or subalternity are not merely exotic literatures from the formerly colonized that circulate globally today. They constitute a central component of the global political imagination of processes of Othering (both historical and contemporary), of the discourses of rights and justice and the making of a trans­ national civil society, as well as a politico-legal activism around these very ideas affecting hitherto marginalized subalterns as ‘subjects’. Re-orientalism then can be a self-conscious and self-affirming discourse, where the postcolonial author seeks to highlight a postcolony’s concerns with indigeneity, women’s rights, subalterns such as minorities or, increasingly, the aged and the differently-abled – concerns that constitutes the socio-political imaginary of the late twentieth century. This socio-political imaginary is one that informs and inflects discourses emerging from organizations such as the United Nations, the transnational activist campaigns, emancipatory critical theory and public discourses (around refugees, rights and the role of the state). To put it differently, the postcolonial seeks to fashion a different image of her/his nation, one that fits into and participates in the global contexts of transformative discourses of emancipation and justice. This ‘fit’ makes for brand postcolonial in the global literary-cultural market.13 The indigene and the subaltern from postcolonial literary and cultural texts, then, are important contributors to the postcolonial aura.

13 Controversies over the centrality of the concept-metaphor, the subaltern, has continued unabated. Emancipatory discourses and activism, following Spivak’s categorization of the subaltern as one who is beyond statist control, are often caught in the double bind Dipesh Chakrabarty identified early on: as Asha Varadharajan puts it, the subaltern’s ‘induction into governmentality that, ironically, constitutes both the possibility of freedom and the persistence of domination’ (2016: 733).



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3.2 The Global Indigene At first glance the notion of a global indigene in, say, the writings of Mahasweta Devi (India) or Mudrooroo (Australian Aboriginal) or Keri Hulme (New Zealand, Maori), might seem an oxymoronic construction. Yet, the ‘demise’ of the indigene, the subject of numerous literary and other texts by the indigenes themselves but also by activists, campaigners and legal scholars, bridges geocultural spaces. Noonuccal is an Australian Aboriginal and Harjo a Muskogee from Oklahoma, and in both cases the disappearance of cultural specifics at the hands of so-called civilization becomes the subject of their work. These disparate yet connected images of displacement, dispossession and enforced disappearance of the indigene, coalesce into a global movement. Indeed, ‘indigeneity increasingly exists through a condition of emerging globality’, write Jerome Levi and Elizabeth Durham (397). Ronald Niezen, a leading scholar on global indigenism, writes: Indigenism is a similar global movement that has gained momentum over the last few decades largely out of the notice of observers, pundits, and theorists of international events. This movement, it is true, is smaller in scale, more fragile, and less turbulent than the nationalist upheavals of the past two centuries, but it nevertheless has the potential to influence the way states manage their affairs and even to reconfigure the usual alignments of nationalism and state sovereignty. (2003: 3)

The emphasis in postcolonial indigenous writings on disappearing tribes, lost lands, spiritual collapse, civilizational crises and dislocated cultural memory offer up images of fragile indigenes from all parts of the world, and is in a direct line of thought from the anti-colonial discourses of national identities that were subsumed, or broken, under colonial rule. The indigene and her textualities, as Arturo Arias puts it, ‘formulate contestatory heterogeneous critiques that inevitably fall within the purview of decolonial perspectives, signaling new directions for the future and providing a critical framework on decolonial processes’ (2016: 327). Take, for instance, a poem like the 1964 work, ‘We are Going’ by Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker). In the poem she writes: We are nature and the past, all the old ways Gone now.

Noonuccal concludes the poem with: The bora ring is gone. The corroboree is gone. And we are going. (https://www.poetrylibrary.edu.au/poets/noonuccal-oodgeroo/we-are-going-0771055 )

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Or Joy Harjo in ‘An American Sunrise’: Forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We know the rumors of our demise. (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/92063/an-american-sunrise )

In both texts, the indigene is in mourning. The narrative of loss without an accompanying narrative of compensation or redemption gestures at the postcolonial nation state, which has displaced and ignored the original inhabitants of the land.14 If, as Dhawan and Randeria argue, the human rights movements are seeking greater accountability from the postcolonial state towards its citizens (571), then the indigeneity campaigns are integral to these demands made of the postcolonial state as well, for such campaigns seek more than just recognition of ancestral, land and cultural rights: they seek protection, identity and autonomy. The campaigns posit the state as the arbiter and guarantor of these rights. Literature becomes a mode of asserting their rights and clears a space within the cultural spaces of the nation. Brand postcolonial is in part the effect of the new movements that target supposedly democratic, postcolonial nation states.

3.3 Decolonization, Land and the Indigene Article 2 of the U.N. General Assembly’s 1960 Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples states: ‘All peoples have the right to self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development’. Thus, the UN assures the indigenous peoples the right to pursue their collectively arrived models of development. Ronald Niezen (2003) in his major work on globalization and indigeneity argues that this discourse on self-determination was a direct offshoot of the postcolonial struggles for independence from European colonialism. Additionally, The process of decolonization therefore provided more than a climate of liberation that carried over into a broad human rights agenda; it also produced specific changes to international law that could be used to justify the pursuit of self-determination for indigenous peoples. (41)

14 References from India that gesture at this crisis of postcolonial legitimacy would include the Narmada displaced, the exiled Kashmiri Pandits, the action against tribals/Adivasis fighting for their ancestral land rights, the victims of the Sikh pogrom of 1984, and recent killings such as the 2018 Kathua rape-murder of a Muslim girl.



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The postcolonials’ emphasis on decolonization and ‘freedom’ from European ways of thought (instilled through centuries of colonial rule) called attention to the historical denial of the right to self-determination by colonialism. As nascent nations the anti-colonial struggle was fought for the right to determine their own national and cultural destinies (Niezen 73). James Clifford notes that decolonization is an unfinished, excessive historical process … a recurring agency, a blocked, diverted, continually reinvented historical force’ and the ‘energies once bundled in phrases like the “Third World” or “national liberation” … reemerge in unexpected places and forms: “indigeneity” (all those people once destined to disappear . . .). (2013: 6)

The point the postcolonial state underscores is: people have attained their freedom, and therefore their right to self-determination, with the advent of independence. In the postcolony, therefore, all citizens have the same rights, and to seek primary status as ‘First Peoples’ makes little sense. Numerous countries such as India, Afghanistan, Mali and others therefore have a problematic relation with the decolonized, self-determined nation on the one hand and the demands for similar decolonizing and self-determining rights by indigenous peoples, within the frames of the nation, on the other. (For instance, as I write, the Gorkha peoples of India have revived their agitation for a separate Gorkhaland, within the state of India.) If indigenismo becomes a part of national identity in countries such as Mexico (in the early twentieth century), in the later decades it functions as a reminder of the decolonizing legacy that the postcolonial state has to deal with. Clifford’s argument that ‘since 1950, uneven and unfinished processes of decolonization have decentered the West and its epistemological assumptions, including the idea of a determined historical direction’ (23), can be extended to apply to the postcolonial state as well: the indigeneity question has decentered the postcolonial state as well. In the Harjo and Noonuccal poems cited above, the central theme remains the disappearance of indigenous people at the hands of the white man. In postcolonial writing, this disappearance and erosion of their distinctiveness because there is neither cultural protection nor the right to self-determination, becomes a critique of the postcolonial state. The rights of the indigene, their forced displacement, poverty and eroded cultural identities now serves the postcolonial theme of decolonization in interesting and different ways because they call attention to the same sub-theme of self-determination as the anti-colonial writings of over a century ago. In Adivasi and tribal texts from other places, such as India, the battle for land rights and cultural identity is conducted in the face of a combined state-business corporation oppression, exploitation and exclusions – see, for instance, the work of C.K. Janu from southern India, which will be discussed further below (Nayar 2013). That is, the indigeneity theme adds to brand postcolonial by demanding a greater accountability to the people by the postcolonial state in the same way as the anti-colonial struggles did vis á vis the European powers.

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There are several sites of articulation of indigeneity in the postcolonial age. One of the key sites is land. Decolonization that freed the land from the colonial master has not effected such a change for the indigenous peoples – and this becomes a keynote in numerous Aboriginal, tribal and First Nation peoples’ texts. James Clifford puts it this way: ‘landedness, or the power of place … [is a] fundamental component of all tribal, First Nations identifications’ (63). Just as anti-colonial discourse sought self-determination first through the right to their lands, the indigenous community asserts its rights to traditionally held lands. Indigeneity itself is defined in the UN documents in terms of landedness: Indigenous communities, peoples and nations are those which, having a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies that developed on their territories, consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them. They form at present nondominant sectors of society and are determined to preserve, develop and transmit to future generations their ancestral territories and their ethnic identity, as the basis of their continued existence as peoples, in accordance with their own cultural patterns, social institutions and legal systems. (cited in Niezen 19)

Another working definition would be: Indigeneity is taken to imply first-order connections (usually at small scale) between group and locality. It connotes belonging and originariness and deeply felt processes of attachment and identification, and thus it distinguishes “natives” from others. (Merlan 304)

The International Labour Organization defines indigeneity as follows in its Convention 169 from 1989: (a) tribal peoples in independent countries whose social, cultural and economic conditions distinguish them from other sections of the national community, and whose status is regulated wholly or partially by their own customs or traditions or by special laws or regulations; (b) peoples in independent countries who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present state boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.

It goes on to add: Self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply.

In indigenous postcolonial texts this theme is enacted in terms of interrelated subthemes of: displacement from their ancestral lands (‘the bora ring is gone’, as Noonuccal puts it) and the indigene reduced to slave labour for the postcolonial master. It



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could be cast as a consciousness of the pre-colonial past of the ethnic group or tribe, as in Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun where a character says: My point is that the only authentic identity for the African is the tribe...I am Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria and gave me that identity. I am black because the white man constructed black to be as different as possible from his white. But I was Igbo before the white man came. (20, emphasis in original)

To this claim of pre-colonial authenticity and identity, Ezeka responds: But you became aware that you were Igbo because of the white man. The pan-Igbo idea itself came only in the face of white domination. You must see that tribe as it is today is as colonial a product as nation and race. (20)

In the process of colonization, the native loses this pre-colonial identity and even identification (with her own cultural practices), although it remains doubtful, as Ezeka notes, whether such an identity itself is the product of the encounter with colonialism. Displacement, however, is primarily from their lands with which the indigenes have a deeper connection. In Indian tribal activist CK Janu’s Mother Forest, she writes: When our people worked in the fields there would be a man dressed in a sleeveless shirt standing on the ridge supervising our work. We were quite frightened of him. In those days we were afraid of almost everything. The backs of our people seem to be so bent because they have been terrified of so many things for so many generations. When our people speak they don’t raise their eyes and that must be because they are so scared … In those days just getting a glimpse of the jenmi was a terrifying experience for our people. (2004: 13-15)

The altered states of the indigene are directly related to the ownership of the land. Janu continues: The life cycle of our people, their customs and very existence are bound to the earth. This is more so than in any other society. When projects are designed without any link to this bond, our people suffer. This may be wrong if looked at from the point of view of civil society. But it is self-evident when we go to the newly formed colonies. (47)

At one point, Janu leads the agitation to reclaim traditional burial land, or land for an individual house, on behalf of the community as a whole (41–42). In Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria the description of the landscape offers a creation myth involving a serpent and a river. But Wright does not stay confined to topography, opting, instead, to merge human fortunes and social norms with the very land: The inside knowledge about the river and coastal region is the Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began. Otherwise, how would one know where to look for the hidden underwater courses in the vast flooding mud plains, full of serpents and fish in the monsoon season? (2010: 3)

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Wright details the making of the landscape before referring to human/Aboriginal life. She calls us to ‘imagine the serpent’s breathing rhythms’ where ‘with the outward breath, the tide turns and the serpent flows back’ (2). And later: If you are someone who visits old cemeteries, wait awhile if you visit the water people. The old Gulf country men and women who took our besieged memories to the grave might just climb out of the mud and tell you the real story of what happened here. (11)

The story and the knowledge, Wright implies, are that of the Aboriginals, and have been excluded from the very domain of ‘knowledge’. As Wright would put it in an interview: white documentation [of Aboriginal life] a lot of times doesn’t really tell … From an Indigenous writer’s viewpoint, I am trying to bring out the way that we think as people, and something of our humanity, something of our character, something of our soul. That’s what I’ve tried to do in Carpentaria. (2007: 217)

In a different context from those of Janu’s or Wright’s, Noonuccal’s poem ‘Municipal Gum’ wonders at the fate of the gum tree now relocated to the city. Instead of ‘cool’ forests, it has ‘hard bitumen’ into which it has been embedded. As an allegory for the displacement of the Aboriginals, the poem points to the loss of landedness and therefore their sense of themselves.15 With decolonization, then, the postcolonial nation acquired its territorial rights through legislation, executive action and other means. However, this does not enable the self-determination through territory – since, as commentators have noted, indigeneity is defined in terms of location and land (see the 1987 UN definition cited above) – for the indigenous peoples. Andrew Gray has demonstrated in the context of the Amazonian Arakmbut peoples that territorial links are legitimized through the spirit world (Gray 1997: 119-121, also Gorsevski 2012). Or, as has been argued in the case of works by Australian Aboriginal authors, an ‘indigenous sovereignty’ is mapped through the representation of a ‘cosmological relationship that indigenous people have with the land, the sea and spirit beings’ (Brewster 2010: 88). When Janu argues that for the tribal people the land is acquired, maintained and used in terms of a spiritual

15 Critics, however, recognize that authors like Wright are careful not to assert a pure indigenous identity. Rather, as Richard Wright et al. note: while Wright’s novels have been interpreted by critics as expressive of Indigenous difference …our ethnographically-situated analysis of Plains of Promise, Carpentaria and The Swan Book highlights more complex relations of mimesis and alterity, pointing to the existence of multidimensional and contemporary Gulf Country identities. (Martin et al. 2014: 341) There is, even among the indigenes, a sense that unitary, insular identities are neither possible nor desirable.



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or sacred connection, then she also gestures at the impossibility of any indigenous claim to ancestral lands because ancestry and ownership in the postcolonial nation continues to be defined strictly within a legal discourse. Given these common concerns over land, ownership and origins, postcolonial coalitions of indigenous groups as diverse as the Asian Indigenous Peoples Pact, the Asian Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Network, the Chittagong Hill Tracts Administration, and the Nepal Indigenous Peoples Development and Information Service Centre and African representatives from Tin Hinan and the Ancap-Tamaynaut for the Indigenous Peoples of Morocco (Niezen 73) have been forged, indicative of a global alliance of indigeneity, and yielding a conceptual category called ‘indigenism’ as a result. The postcolonial texts of the global indigene are situated within this geocultural context of heightened awareness, campaigns, activism and theorization about the lost lands, and about the asymmetry of decolonization in postcolonial nation states. Nomadic American, Aboriginal and tribal communities with no land ownership – that is legally admissible, documented ownership, despite strong a cultural belonging – is a key domain, therefore, for brand postcolonial. While ‘literature’ in the traditional sense may not exist, it is not that they lack the literary – these texts slowly make their way into postcolonial courses and reading lists.16

3.4 Criterial and Relational Indigeneity Discourses of indigeneity in literature and cultural texts often demonstrate the intersection and intertwining of two definitions of identity, what Francesca Merlan categorizes as criterial and relational: By “criterial”, I mean definitions that propose some set of criteria, or conditions, that enable identification of the “indigenous” as a global “kind”, By “relational”, I mean definitions that emphasize grounding in relations between the “indigenous” and their “others” rather than in properties inherent only to those we call “indigenous” themselves. (2009: 305)

The UN definition cited above lists some criteria (peoples which have a historical continuity with pre-invasion and pre-colonial societies, connected to specific territories). But the definition also invokes a relational categorization (‘consider themselves distinct from other sectors of the societies now prevailing in those territories, or parts of them…’).

16 Activism on behalf of the subaltern and the indigene is no always welcomed. Studies have shown how, in their quest for social equality, some subalterns have questioned the roles, narratives and perspectives of activists who spoke on their behalf (see Indrajit Roy 2016).

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The rootedness, local sentiment and distinctive cultural practices are criterial, but also, as Merlan notes, relational because the very idea of a distinctive cultural practice suggests a comparison with another. It is this criterial and relational narrations and representations of indigeneity that produces the punctum in the global circuit of culture, and which generates brand postcolonial around authors and texts. Texts that highlight distinctive cultural practices, ancestral connections to the land, pre-colonial histories – indigeneity, in short – are part of the discourse of multiculturalism, pluralism and diversity which have been strengthened since the Second World War (Merlan 319). I suggest that indigeneity fits into this discourse because it embodies difference but is also part of a grid of non-white, non-Euro-American cultural formations. Just as formerly colonized nations highlight their differences in order to claim their place within the comity of nations, within the postcolony, the indigenous peoples claim their distinctiveness and separate but equal identities. The appeal around indigenous peoples and their market-value as representations draws on the legitimation of difference as a part of the liberal democratic set up in many postcolonial nations but also in a multiculturalizing world. The inclusion of the hitherto excluded is this legitimation of difference and is the foundation for making of brand postcolonial around Australian or Canadian Aboriginal writings and tribal texts from India or Afghanistan. In order to see the operations of criterial and relational models, I turn to a celebrated postcolonial novel that invokes indigeneity, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003). As befits the criterial definition of cultural identity, Hosseini offers us the following features of the oppressed Hazara tribes. Hassan and his father Ali are described as ‘mice-eating, flat-nosed, load carrying donkeys’, and both possess the characteristics of a ‘Hazara Mongoloid’ (9). Mixing physiognomies with alleged cultural traits (mice-eating), Hosseini, through the eyes of the young Amir, gives us more criterial definitions of the tribe, although, as we can see, it slides into the relational. School textbooks barely mentioned them and referred to their ancestry only in passing. Then one day, I was in Baba’s study, looking through his stuff, when I found one of my mother’s old history books... and was stunned to find an entire chapter on Hazara history. An entire chapter dedicated to Hassan’s people! In it, I read that my people, the Pashtuns, had persecuted and oppressed the Hazaras. It said the Hazaras had tried to rise against the Pashtuns in the nineteenth century, but the Pashtuns had “quelled them with unspeakable violence”, The book said that my people had killed the Hazaras, driven them from their lands, burned their homes and sold their women. The book said part of the reason Pashtuns had oppressed the Hazaras was that Pashtuns were Sunni Muslims, while Hazaras were Shi’ah. The book said a lot of things I didn’t know, things my teachers hadn’t mentioned. Things Baba hadn’t mentioned either. It also said some things I did know, like that people called Hazaras mice-eating, flat-nosed, load carrying donkeys. I had heard some of the kids in the neighbourhood yell those names to Hassan. The following week, after class, I showed the book to my teacher and pointed to the chapter on the Hazaras. He skimmed through a couple of pages, snickered, handed the book back. “That’s the



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one thing Shi’ah people do well”, he said, picking up his papers, “passing themselves as martyrs”. He wrinkled his nose when he said the word Shi’ah, like it was some kind of disease. (9)

Amir is trained, like Hassan, to accept these tribal identities when, for instance, an old man tells him that Hassan is a ‘lucky Hazara’ and his [Hassan’s] father should ‘get on his knees, sweep the dust at his feet with his eyelashes’ (70). The passage invokes both cultural distinctiveness in terms of their religious practices and relational identities – for instance, of the Pashtuns and the Hazaras. Yet, what makes the text fit into the global postcolonial literary-cultural marketplace is its insistence not on difference but on the problematic morality of difference. Recalling the unequal racial relations of the colonial period while examining the contemporary, the novel’s central relationship (Amir-Hassan) calls attention to the existing inequalities in the arena of cultural and ethnic identities. Later, Hosseini’s Amir would be alert to the relational identities of the boys: The curious thing was, I never thought of Hassan and me as friends either. Not in the usual sense, anyhow. Never mind that we taught each other to ride a bicycle with no hands, or to build a fully functional homemade camera out of a cardboard box. Never mind that we spent an entire winter flying kites. Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a hare lipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn’t easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi’a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing. But we were kids who had learned to crawl together, and no history, ethnicity, society, or religion was going to change that either. (25)

An awareness of one’s distinctiveness as a marker of self-affirming cultural identity is here predicated upon an awareness of the ethnic other’s distinctiveness as well. If, as Francesca Merlan, suggests ‘Indigeneity as it has expanded in its meaning to define an international category is taken to refer to peoples who have great moral claims on nation-states and on international society, often because of inhumane, unequal, and exclusionary treatment’ (304), then Hosseini clearly delivers us the excluded indigenes. The moral codes around the friendship of the two boys in the novel might be read then in the light of Merlan’s argument about moral claims to equality by the Hazaras, and any other excluded-oppressed tribe/ethnic group. As Merlan notes indigeneity in the first-order sense of local connections and belonging is a very general concept, with diverse moral shadings, that has been applied much more broadly than to just those we might understand as “indigenous peoples”, As a general concept, indigeneity is susceptible to arguments for greater or lesser inclusiveness, with a variety of possible (and often contested) implications. (304)

It is this susceptibility to ‘arguments for greater or lesser inclusiveness’ that generates the brand postcolonial.

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The postcolonial aura around texts like The Kite Runner is the result of this literary representation, both implicit and explicit, of the moral claims made by the excluded, oppressed and marginalized ethnic groups. These moral claims, situated within the global framework of recognition and rights, position the texts as emblematic of larger concerns around oppression. While they may not function as ‘national allegories’ (Jameson), they do function as cultural icons of an international consciousness around the excluded. Other forms of criterial definitions of the indigene occur, most notably in the form of eco-sensitive creation myths of individual communities. As already noted in the case of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, the creation myth, the land, non-human and human lives are merged seamlessly in an assertion of ‘indigenous sovereignty’. Such a sovereignty is brought about also through a criterial assertion of specific stories. Anne Brewster argues that Storytelling is the currency of indigenous sovereignty. It constitutes indigenous law which describes indigenous social and cosmological relationships to land and sea, to ancestors, and those that pertain to the domain of social intercourse. (88)

In some cases this storytelling that reiterates their distinctive Aboriginal identity, thereby making it a criterial process of defining themselves, invokes relational definitions as well. Just as in Hosseini we discerned the relational in Amir’s account of his friendship with Hassan, we can see it employed in Aboriginal texts. In Larissa Behrendt’s Home (2004), one chapter opens thus: Garibooli awoke to the prophetic laughter of the kukughagha, who always announced the dawn. Already there was movement in the camp. She lay in the lean-to, warm under the bundar skins. She watched the lithe figure of her mother poking at the coals in an attempt to excite the flames, her father and the other men gathering in preparation for a visit to a nearby settlement. In the distance she could hear her aunt’s hacking cough. As the camp bustled with its early morning business, Garibooli thought of the festive atmosphere of the night before. There were visitors who had crept onto the property, unbeknownst to the gubbas who controlled what happened on the land. “The white man acts as though he is the only one on the land and as if it is his ancestors who inhabit the landscape”, her baina would mutter, his eyes deep and thoughtful, focused on something distant. Although her parents had wandered freely all over the land when they were children, the family now lived permanently in a small section of Dungalear, confined to an enclosed space. In return, they were given the terror of God, schooling in a tin-roofed hut, clothing they now felt immodest without, and a new language which gave them new names. When Garibooli would ask why they weren’t allowed to speak their language, her mother ran out of answers. All Garibooli knew was that it had to be that way because the gubbas said so. The hard thwack of a large wooden ruler across her knuckles, administered by the school mistress whose face knotted with rage at the sound of words that were not the ones that white people would use, reinforced Garibooli’s understanding of the way the world worked. (29-30)



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Behrendt points to the inextricability of Aboriginal stories and therefore their identity from the norms, rules and restrictions – which include the ban on Aboriginals using their own language, the loss of their names and their lands – imposed by the white settler. Even as she focuses on the uniqueness of Aboriginal identity, she recognizes the relational nature of this identity. Any assertion of indigenous sovereignty through criterial means slides towards the relational. For Anne Brewster, the assertion of indigenous sovereignty is simultaneously criterial and relational. She argues that the very term ‘has ontological and spiritual implications, foregrounding as it does the deep bond between indigenous people and their homelands, as well as their continuing inalienable rights of access to them’ (90). If the ontological and spiritual implications are constitutive of the criterial, the question of right to access and ownership are relational, since the history of the land is one of tensions between the Aboriginals and the white settlers.

3.5 Alter/native Frames Indigeneity also asserts itself in the form of alternative epistemological frames, concepts, imaginaries, ideas of history and time in the postcolonial text, most notably in the novel form as produced by Rushdie, Marquez, Allende, Tutuola, and more recently Helen Oyeyemi. Manifesting primarily in the famous narrative strategy of magical realism, the postcolonial novel goes global through a specific engagement with rationality, temporal frames, ways of knowledge- and meaning-making. Magical realism, in its most well-known conceptualization, is ‘a mode of narration that naturalises or normalises the supernatural; that is to say, a mode in which real and fantastic, natural and supernatural, are coherently represented in a state of equivalence’ (Warnes 3). The ‘supernatural as if it were a perfectly acceptable and understandable aspect of everyday life’ (2-3) is worked into accounts of the routine. The reader, as a result, is unsettled because s/he is unable to ascertain whether the events, action, characters being described are a part of the diegetic world of the story or a part of the imagination of a character’s mind in this diegetic world. Causes of the events cannot be readily tracked, in the magical realist tradition, to empirically verifiable events: ‘the horizons of the causal paradigm are extended to include events and possibilities that would ordinarily be circumscribed’ (Warnes 12). Or, [Magical realism may] critique the claims to truth and coherence of the modern, western world view by showing them up as culturally and historically contingent. The truth claims of causality are seen as contingent on consensus, founded in language, and driven by discourse about reality rather than reality itself. (13)

Non-western world-views enter through the insistence on faith, magic, the supernatural and the merging of these with the everyday life of humans and other life-forms.

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An excellent recent example of the magical realist novel would be Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. TillyTilly in the novel could be either a creation of the girl Jess, a ghost or a spirit. Oyeyemi demonstrates the undecidability of this character’s ontology through a tension between two interpretations, one ‘Western’ and one native. Dr McKenzie says of Jess’ condition: There are some things, people, that can seem very real, especially to you, Jess, because you have a big imagination. But sometimes they aren’t real in the same way that I am, or your mother is … It’s possible that TillyTilly is an alter ego, although she could also be an internalized imaginary companion … a different side to you that you normally keep hidden because it only comes out when you’re scared or angry… (287-290)

Jess’ mother, following Yoruba tradition, posits an entirely different reading of TillyTilly: “[I]f one twin died in childhood before the other, the family of the twins would make a carving to Ibeji, the god of twins, so that the dead twin would be . . . happy”. (200)17. This native interpretation of Jess’ ‘condition’ is founded on a wholly different world-view and epistemology, but is, ineluctably, a frame that helps them interpret their everyday life. For Kim Anderson Sasser, Oyeyemi’s experimentation with the magical realist mode, while paying allegiance to the postcolonial origins (South American, African), repurposes and re-visions the mode for the twenty-first century (2014: 192). With the crisis in their lives after Jess is ‘informed’ by TillyTilly that she (Jess) is one of a set of twins whose other infant died, Sarah mourns to her (English) husband: Three worlds! Jess lives in three worlds. She lives in this world, and she lives in the spirit world, and she lives in the Bush. She’s abiku, she always would have known! The spirits tell her things. Fern [the dead twin] tells her things. We should’ve …we should’ve done ibjeji carving for her. (181)

Here, the narrative slides between an imagined ‘other’ to Jess – imagined by Jess herself – and the facticity of twin births and the death of one. Does Jess then simply imagine her dead twin? If so, how does she even know of the dead twin, since the event dates back to their infancy? That the mother concedes such preternatural knowledge by Jess then merely complicates the issue of ‘knowing’ via a ghostly manifestation. Further, even the imaginary/ghostly TillyTilly, for instance, is diasporic. At one point, when Jess looks at TillyTilly in England, she thinks: ‘Jess began to get the feeling that this was either not Tilly or a different TillyTilly from the one that she had first met in Nigeria’ (161). The spirit also, then, lives in more than one world, as Sarah

17 Many pages into the book, Jess realizes that, perhaps, Tilly is invisible to all but her: She had just realized with stunning clarity that she was the only person who saw TillyTilly… Tilly Tilly had not met anyone in her family, no one had met her, and she refused to meet anyone. (164)



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says of Jess. Later in the tale, when Jess sees TillyTilly, the latter’s hair is differently styled: ‘her hair appeared to have unravelled from her thick plaits and rose up in two puffs, just like before, in Nigeria’ (237). The diasporic ghost/spirit also seems, in Jess’ imagination, to seek a return to the home/land. To take another example of magical realism’s possibilities, here is an exuberant passage from Ben Okri where he describes Azaro’s near-death experience: But deep inside that darkness a counterwave, a rebellion of joy, stirred. It was a peaceful wave, breaking on the shores of my spirit. I heard soft voices singing and a very brilliant light came closer and closer to the centre of my forehead. And then suddenly, out of the centre of my forehead, an eye opened, and I saw this light to be the brightest, most beautiful thing in the world. It was terribly hot, but it did not burn. It was fearfully radiant, but it did not blind. As the light came closer, I became more afraid. Then my fear turned. The light went into the new eye and into my brain and roved around my spirit and moved in my veins and circulated in my blood and lodged itself in my heart. And my heart burned with a searing agony, as if it were being burnt to ashes within me. As I began to scream the pain reached its climax and a cool feeling of divine dew spread through me, making the reverse journey of the brilliant light, cooling its flaming passages, till it got back to the centre of my forehead, where it lingered, the feeling of a kiss for ever imprinted, a mystery and a riddle that not even the dead can answer. (229)

Commenting on the above passage, Eva Aldea notes the ‘mix of Yoruba elements (abiku myth, spirits) as well as other mystical images (third eye, divine light)’ (138). Aldea argues that myths such as the abiku, can be seen as a national allegory indicat[ing] that the act of thinking the nation in traditional, mythical terms … Like in Rushdie’s novel, in The Famished Road myths are not opposed to the nation-state, although magic is. Myths are a way of reining in the purely different and divergent element of magic by giving it meaning. (138)

Aldea points to the ability of myth – she rejects magic for this same purpose – to generate belonging, affiliation and identity. This ability and use, then, enables the postcolonial text to serve the purpose of a ‘national allegory’, as Jameson famously described it, but also locates it within the global readership as a novel/text representative of that culture. In other words, the mythic, mystic and magical are not contrivances that merely mystify but key tools in the casting of the novel as capturing a national identity for global readerships. It works, as Aldea points out, when the magical works through and with the material conditions of the Third World (as portrayed in the realist narrative). It takes the indigenous character – the abiku – and places it on the global stage, among other such cultural icons from traditional English and American texts. It serves, therefore, national purposes and the globalization of cultural icons from the Third World. Sasser’s interpretation of magical realism, resonant with Aldeas’, also significantly contributes to the globalization of indigeneity by emphasising how the ‘magic’

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of magical realism generates a sense of affiliation, belonging and therefore identity. Faith or magic-based world-views, argues Sasser, perform cultural work by inventorying ‘cultural components that might remain absent from realism’s mimetic field’ (36). The mode also serves as a means of retaining and communicating elements of a ‘historical memory that are impossible to represent through realism due to their traumatic nature’ (37). They also serve to ‘dramatize’ states of cultural hybridization. Finally, they serve to generate a sense of belonging and the imagining of community (38). This last is crucial because Sasser sees the magical realist as demonstrating the centrality of the spirit world, magic, faith and belief as alternative ways of community-building and belonging. It is Jess’ mother, Sarah, in The Icarus Girl who admits that the Yoruba tradition should have been maintained even after she, the mother, had migrated to the UK. For Sarah, as we have seen, the ‘real’ is made of three intersecting worlds – a truth she has, as the above passage indicates, ignored since she became ‘Western’. Spirits and ghosts, the ‘immaterial’ are a part of the everyday real. TillyTilly, in Jess’ later re­ imagination of her, is also caught between two worlds, Nigeria and England. Sasser’s innovative reading of magical realism in texts such as Okri’s offers an interesting variant of the global. Sasser proposes: The narrative positions the human being and the human domain over and against competing spirit beings and the realm of the beyond; it employs human being as an ethical standard; and it promotes human agency. With these various components of its humanism, the narrative responds to the racism and Eurocentrism of colonial humanists, while reserving its most trenchant criticism for Nigeria’s dehumanizing neocolonial regime. (72)

Sasser’s argument offers a way of treating a narrative mode, magical realism, as the ma­ nifestation of an indigenous worldview, whose humanism is at once a critique of European humanism but also operates as a critique of the postcolony’s tyrannical politics. Rushdie famously argued that magical realism was an explicitly postcolonial (his term was ‘Third World’) form in his essay on Gabriel Marquez in Imaginary Homelands: El realismo magical [sic], magic realism [. . .] is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely “Third World” consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called “half-made” societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new. (1991: 301)

Fredric Jameson in his essay ‘On Magic Realism in Films’ complements Rushdie’s interpretation when he pronounces: ‘magical realism depends on a content which betrays the overlap or the coexistence of pre-capitalist with nascent capitalist or technological features’ (1986: 311).18

18 Eva Aldea notes that ‘Taken together, Rushdie’s and Jameson’s statements seem to imply that the magic encodes an “impossibly old” pre-capitalist culture, while the realism represents “appallingly New” capitalist features’ (2011: 104).



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Therefore, magical realism in these readings returns to the pre-capitalist social imaginaries that remain sedimented in postcolonial cultures, but – and this is the key  – constitute a way of belonging that the arrival of the modern, colonial era threatens to erase. When the postcolonial novelist returns to the magical world of spirits, ghosts and abikus, s/he is in fact battling for an additional tethering mechanism for the postcolonial in a capitalist world of flux, modernity and flexi-citizenship. As traditional methods of belonging, the spiritual and the magical constitute a part of the postcolonial life-world: it does not replace the modern, techno-capitalist globalizing one, but co-exists with it. This also means, then, that the postcolonial possesses a complicated, often messy, sense of belonging with the industrial-capitalist-modern coexisting with the magical and the spiritual. It is this complicated belonging, where the postcolonial cannot abandon one for the other, that magical realist texts embody. Following Sasser, and retaining the Rushdie-Jameson reading of the form in mind, I suggest that magical realism via its merging of spirit and ‘real’ worlds, enables the making of a humanism that could be universal even while originating in local cultures and social imaginaries (hence Sasser’s preferred term is ‘vernacular humanism’). This distinguishes the humanism of an Okri or an Oyeyemi from the European humanist tradition for it causes the indigenous worldview, belief (including magic and faith) and epistemologies (beyond the rational, empirical ways of knowing) to go global via the postcolonial novel’s magical realism. The success of Achebe, Tutuola, Marquez, Rushdie, Oyeyemi, Okri, Carpenter and others suggests that the indigenous world-view – that belonging can occur through an experience of the metaphysical, the magical and the transcendent that hybridize together with the empirical-real – has acquired considerable global purchase. Beyond this globalizing of indigenous ways of belonging, the adoption of the magical realist mode by postcolonial authors may also be seen as an indigenization of a globally significant cultural form: that of the novel. Established now as a truism that the novel is a European form, authors like Rushdie achieve two significant things. One, they inject into the tradition of the realist European novel elements from indigenous cultural frames (magic, spirit) that blur the lines between the realms in the diegetic space of the novel. One could think of this as a mode of indigenization. Second, through this process, they demonstrate how the novel as an embodiment of the ‘national longing for form’ (because the novel exemplifies the nation’s composite, complex nature, Brennan 1989) is capacious enough to accommodate various forms of hybridized belonging: the spiritual, the magical, the empirically real, the transcendent. The national longing for form is then to be read, through these novels, as a national longing for multiple kinds of forms, hybridized forms and variant models – all fitted into a way of belonging. Where the ‘regular’ novel (realist) enables authors to document and posit specific ways of belonging – citizenship founded on political rights, the rule of law, anti-colonial struggles, shared traditions – the magical realist novel also incorporates magic, spirit-worlds and mystic experiences into the idea of the nation.

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 Re-Orientalism: The Indigene and the Subaltern

3.6 The Global Subaltern The global indigene has as its parallel figure, in the postcolonial global, the global subaltern. Brand postcolonial is partially the result of the subaltern writ large, enmeshed within circulating discourses of rights, emancipation and citizenship. The subaltern is the product of a genocidal process in numerous postcolonial texts, experiencing corporeal damage, the loss of livelihood, the collapse of familial and social apparatuses and, ultimately, a sense of the self. While at first glance the very idea of a ‘global’ subaltern appears to militate against the historically specific conditions under which subalterns are ‘produced’ in various parts of the world, commentators have argued that such a cross-cultural category is indeed imaginable. Thus, Walter Mignolo writes: [S]ubaltern is not just a category that affects given sectors of the population of one single nationstate, but a category of the imperial and modern/colonial world that affects people and regions in a global distribution of wealth and meaning. The category ‘subaltern’, in the internal history of imperial Europe, is complemented by, yet distinguished from the ‘colonial subaltern’ in the double history of Europe/US. From the sixteenth century until today, from the ‘war’ against terrorism to the war in Iraq, our world is one in which we are forced to deal with European/US imperial expansion. So it is the colonial subaltern that carries on its shoulders the global colonial difference, the racialised colonial wound. They are what Frantz Fanon identified as ‘les damnes de la terre’ (‘the wretched of the earth’). (2005: 386)

Mignolo concedes that colonial difference did structure the racialized relations of European/non-European that produced subalterns, but he is also gesturing towards the continuing forms of Euro/American expansion, imperialism and domination that continues to create regions across the world where people are reduced – because they are reducible – to subalterns. the damne’s [wretched] refers to the changing sector of the global population (e.g., like immigration today, as well as the white population disenfranchised by neo-liberal economy) in subaltern relations of power; those people whose lives are devalued in and by hegemonic Euro-centered discourses (from the right and from the left). For not every subaltern group falls, necessarily, under the category of damne’s and of the coloniality of being – the damne’s are located in the exteriority (i.e., an outside that is defined and constructed in the process of constructing the inside) that is the consequence of the (racial) colonial difference. (395)

Assuming that assertions of origins and cultural distinctiveness serve to assert indigenous sovereignty, such assertions cannot remain the sole frame of reference, or recognition, for the indigenous in the globalizing world. Jerome Levi and Elizabeth Durham argue that even when the indigenous discourse speaks of the originary, it remains open to the future (422-23). This also means that indigeneity and globality exist in a dialectical rather an antagonistic or contradictory relation (423). This dialectic constitutes a geocultural condition where, as Levi and Durham put it, we can see the globalizing of indigenous people and the indigenizing of global people (423).



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It is possible to extend the argument of the dialectic that facilitates this possibility of identification to the historically oppressed peoples, the subalterns. The dialectic serves as a frame of recognition. In his pioneering work (1994) on the politics of recognition, Charles Taylor has argued that hierarchic modes of social re­cognition and self-definition have been eroded. Taylor argues that identities and social agency now depend upon recognition by others. With no fixed location (rank) in a social hierarchy, the traditional ‘inwardly derived, personal, original identity doesn’t enjoy . . . recognition a  priori. It has to win it through exchange, and the attempt can fail’ (34-35). For indigeneity in the postcolonizing world, this offers a different set of problems to be addressed. Ronald Niezen sums it up thus: The claims of some indigenous peoples pose significant dilemmas not only for multicultural states but also international organizations that are today striving toward greater pluralism and inclusion of the marginalized, disenfranchised, and oppressed. Demands for respect, restorative justice, and protection of distinctive ways of viewing and living in the world are accompanied by more far-reaching demands for self-determination and autonomy that transcend, in various ways, legal arrangements based on the equal rights of equal citizens. Indigenism looks for ways to conceptualize and pursue the good that may or may not harmonize with state constitutions. (136)

‘Subalternism’, to coin a term, is a way to conceptualize a condition marked by the absence of any a priori recognition, and for which new frames of recognition will have to be developed. Subalternism and the search for, first, recognition and second, citizenship (both political and civil), may take multiple routes.19 Before examining the subaltern’s quest for recognition and citizenship, it might be worthwhile to consider the shift critics see in subalternism itself. Sarah Bracke argues that (i) global capitalism creates new subalternity and (ii) the ‘centrality of resistance to the concept of agency… seems to rapidly erode in favour of resilience’ (2016: 850). The new subjects, then, will be characterized by the ability to absorb, bounce back and continue. In Bracke’s words: Resilience becomes the very stuff of which agency is made off [sic] in neoliberal times: structural pressure, including oppression, is expected to be met with individual elasticity, rebounding, and adaptation… A resilient subject or community is one who can absorb the impact of austerity measures, the effects of exploitation and dispossession, and continue to be ‘productive’ – and the rise of the ‘new subaltern’ requires us to rethink the possible meanings and locations of productivity. (851-2)

Even as/when they seek citizenship and recognition, the new subaltern in the neoliberal order are called upon to be resilient rather than resist.

19 The model of citizenship I adopt here is borrowed from Linda Bosniak (2000).

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3.7 Subalternity and Citizenship Global activism is one of the most prominent modes of subaltern articulations today. Events like the World Conference Against Racism (2001), the increasing identification of caste-based discrimination in British Indians (a court in Great Britain interpreted the provisions of the Equality Act of 2010 to encompass caste-based discrimination. See Menon 2015) are but two instances of the global interest in subaltern identities in various parts of the world but also in processes of subalternization. Subalternization is the process by which minorities, ethnic groups and communities are rendered subalterns, mostly by acts of omission or commission by the postcolonial state. This could be the Ahmadiyas in Pakistan, the Dalits in India, the Aboriginals in Australia and Canada or the Hazaras in Afghanistan. Global activism in the domain of Human Rights and investigation of war crimes and ethnicides focus almost entirely on subalternization. In effect, one could argue that it is the global visibility of the postcolonial subaltern, subalternized by the state, that ensures at least a minimal pressure being exerted on the state towards welfare or reparation. From Joe Sacco’s examinations in comics journalism of Muslim massacres in Sarajevo’s genocidal wars to the fiction written about Dalits in India, the state is almost always indicted in the texts, and the subsequent investigations, for its role in the subalternization. A collective identity, while preserving their cultural specifics, built upon the recognition of shareable histories of discrimination and oppression is likely to emerge in the future with organizations like the UN expressing solidarities with the global subaltern. Preliminary moves towards these would include the Black-Dalit solidarity that has found expression in unified campaigns, sharing of platforms and such. In 2015, for instance, Dalit women from India belonging to the All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch spoke on caste-based sexual violence in Seattle and other places in the USA. The #DalitWomenFight tour attracted attention, and reports note that accounts of Dalit oppression in India resembled the state of blacks in the USA (Teodros 2015). From a different yet related context, the indigenous tribes of India, with appallingly low levels of income, health, literacy coalesced into the Indian Council of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ICITP) in 1987.20 Later morphing into the Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (1994), the movement has been collaborating with the UNC Working Group on Indigenous Population (WGIP). As numerous commentators have noted (Xaxa 2016, Hardin and Askew 2016), a collective identity is being forged globally by historically marginalized oppressed people, from Maasai in Kenya

20 According to the National Family Health Survey, 2005-06, the infant mortality among the tribes was 62.1 as compared to 48.9 for others and under-five mortality was as high as 95.7 as compared to 59.2 for others. The literacy rate of tribes in 2001 was 47 per cent as compared to 69 per cent for the country (cited in Xaxa 2016: 146).



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to blacks in America to Sámis in Norway, to Indian hill tribes. Examining the role the indigenous peoples from around the world have played in the UN, Jens Dahl writes: in the United Nations, indigenous peoples have shown that the subaltern can create their own agenda, take agency and speak on terms and conditions that have their own logic and formed by them. (2016: 112)

Clearly, then, a transnationalized subaltern, identifiably different from another, emerges in the interstices of the transnational campaign, legal battles and popular articulations. This is the context in which the global subaltern acquire both visibility and value in literary and other texts. I now return to Khalid Hosseini’s The Kite Runner (2003) but for an entirely different set of reasons. The distinctiveness of Pashtun and Hazara tribes in the text is worked through in the form of the relations between Amir and Hassan. Their respective identities, distinctive, are cast in the form of the master-slave relation. In a conflict with some ruffianly boys, Amir runs away, and sacrifices Hassan to the thugs. While the novel later builds on this betrayal and accompanying guilt, the point I wish to make is different. The respective tribal-cultural identities of Hassan and Amir revolve around the disposable embodied identity of the servant boy/tribe. If, as Giorgio Agamben argues, the slave is ‘at once excluded from and included in humanity, as those not properly human beings who make it possible for others to be human’ (2015: 20), then Hassan represents the life which is not-life. Agamben continues: ‘the slave in fact represents a not properly human life that renders possible for others the bios politikos, that is to say, the truly human life’ (20). It is Hassan’s sacrifice that enables Amir to live (although Hassan does not die then). The point is: distinctiveness of the tribal identities metonymically represented in the Amir-Hassan relations constitute the aura of the text itself because these identities are then recast as slave-disposable and master tribes. (That Hassan turns out to be Amir’s half-brother considerably complicates the representations of unequal tribal relations.) In the tensions between the boys we discern the tensions between these tribal identities. The inequalities between tribes and their embodied ‘specimens’, so to speak, is constitutive of a cultural history of a country that has not found adequate representation in the English language. The larger point I wish to make about indigenous identities in connection with the novel is that rather than fit either of the tribes into criterial definitions of Hazara or Pashtun, Hosseini presents us a relational view of these tribes: one in power (Pashtun), one oppressed (Hazara). The representation of the disposable bodies/identities/tribes in the service of another body/identity/tribe fits right into postcolonial literature’s insistence on cultures of oppression and exclusion. Each tribe is identified in terms of its Other here, just as the postcolonial thrives by marking out the excluded and the subaltern. The Hazaras, the Dalits, the Aboriginals are instances of the visibility of subalterns globally. These align with Palestines, Serb Muslims and other internally displaced as a new social imaginary around the subaltern appears.

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3.8 Postcolonial Subalternization Much postcolonial literature focuses on cultures and contexts of fear, oppression, exploitation and genocide in their countries. Robert Spencer has argued that ‘the writers who really matter for the student of world literatures are those whose works attend to the extraordinarily violent and unequal conflicts inaugurated over the past several centuries by the project of imperialism’ (2011: 1). But the conflicts and inequality are not always attributable only to colonialism and imperialism. Postcolonies have generated their own forms of social injustice. (Neither are such conflicts the purview of literary fictions alone – as noted in the introductory chapter, the exclusion of the ‘postcolonial popular’, such as sci-fi or comics, from the global circuit when discussing postcolonial literature implies a hierarchy of genres and texts that would be examined for postcolonial themes.) Civil war, disappearances, human rights violations are part of this culture of fear, and it is in this crucible that the postcolonial subaltern is so often forged. Occasionally, a writer may project the subaltern back in time, to demonstrate how specific anti-colonial conditions bring together racially and ethnically diverse subalterns, united in their subalternity within the structure of Empire. This is the case with Pakistani-British author Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone. Here the Pashtun Najeeb is on the side of the Indian freedom movement. His elder brother Qayyum had fought alongside Indian soldiers in the British army and later, under the leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan he joins the Khudai khidmat­ gars movement in peaceful resistance against the British. Shamsie writes: ‘If a man is to die defending a field, let the field be his field, the land his land, the people his people’ (56, emphasis in original). But what Shamsie does is to show an affective community built around those whose lives have been irrevocably changed by colonial domination. Pashtuns and Indians, Peshawaris and Indian Muslims are all brought together within the ambit of anti-colonial resistance, as an instance (projected back in time, as in the case of any historical novel) of the makings of the global subaltern. ‘His people’, as a resonant phrase, links various, diverse subalterns. If Shamsie projects back in time the colonial tyranny that brings together subalterns (subaltern, because they are on the other side of the race-line from the whites), Michael Ondaatje in Anil’s Ghost delivers a postcolonial subalternization in Sri Lanka’s civil war. Ondaatje’s unlikely hero Sarath tells forensic scientist Anil Tissera that the law that covers everything, especially in Sri Lanka, is fear: ‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear....’ (135). The novel then details the horrific disappearances in passages such as these: The bodies turn up weekly now. The height of the terror was 88 and 89, but of course it was going on for long before that. Every side was killing and hiding the evidence. Every side. This is an unofficial war, no one wants to alienate the foreign powers. So it’s secret gangs and squads. … The government was not the only one doing the killing. You had, and still have, three camps of



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enemies – one in the north and two in the south – using weapons, propaganda, fear, sophisticated posters, censorship. Importing state-of-the-art weapons from the West, or manufacturing homemade weapons. A couple of years ago, people just started disappearing. Or bodies kept being found burned beyond recognition. There’s no hope of affixing blame. And no one can tell who the victims are. (17)

Ondaatje’s novel examines a culture of genocide that has gripped and transformed the country, leaving the population of one ethnic group living in fear. As I have elsewhere argued (Nayar, Human Rights in Literature, 2016), numerous texts from the postcolonial zone foreground the contexts in which subjects lose their subjectivity, the conditions that enable the taking away of their identities through the breaking of their bodies and the inflicting of loss and indignities. The worlds in which subjects are placed are ‘unmade’, where the social apparatuses that are in place to ensure citizens’ safety have eroded and are therefore instrumental in destroying rather than protecting their subjectivity and identities. The worlds inhabited by the citizens subalternize them, and prepare them for demonization, dehumanization and destruction. Postcolonial subalternization leading to political genocides occur in numerous novels.21 In works like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, through the documentation of the life of a Biafran family, one is given insights into the subalternization and victimization of specific ethnic groups in the postcolonial Nigerian state. In such texts, the brand postcolonial is generated from several interrelated subaltern themes. These texts foreground, for the world’s consumption, a failure of the postcolonial nation itself, embodying this collapse of the body-politic in the collapse of its citizenry. Central to the postcolonial subaltern theme is an emphasis on the victim and her stories, in, for instance Adichie’s and Ondaatje’s novels or Emecheta’s Destination Biafra. When Anil seeks to piece together the victim’s story in Anil’s Ghost, she relies on the victim’s bones to do so: trying to get the bones to speak. Postcolonial subalternization emphasizes the collapse of the social order, from the family to the community. In Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, narrated through the eyes of a child, the girl wonders: ‘we didn’t even know where Papa had been taken … Where was his grave? Did he have a grave?’ (2012: 309). In Isabelle Allende’s Of Love and Shadows she speaks of this collapse: They [families of the disappeared] went from place to place, asking futile questions, and received nothing but the advice to consider the men dead … Papers were lost in offices, and with the passing of time they saw their hopes fading like the lines of an old drawing. (253)

21 On political genocides in postcolonial Asia, see Robert Cribb’s essay in The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (2010). For other studies of political genocides in postcolonial nations see Heerten and Dirks Moses (2014). For terror and the Sri Lankan novel see Jayasuriya (2012).

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Ratner’s child protagonist recognizes that the displacement and loss is permanent: ‘I thought of going home … but there is no one there. Only ghosts await us’ (304). In Boubacar Diop’s Murambi, The Book of Bones, we are given detailed accounts of how Tutsis and Hutu neighbours turn against each other, tearing apart a social fabric that had served them well for generations. In Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl whether Jess is in trouble at the English school because she is partly black we are never clearly told. But the fact that the relocated Nigerian ‘ghost’ or ‘spirit’, TillyTilly is the one who enables and empowers Jess to fight against the bullying white girls in her school reads like a metonym for racial conflict, although the question of the ‘reality’ of TillyTilly is never resolved satisfactorily (‘Go on, Jessy, hate everyone, anyone, and I’ll get them for you…the whole world. We’re twins, both us’, says TillyTilly to Jess at one point, 259). The subaltern Jess taking the battle to the dominant races with the aid of the Nigerian spirit suggests not only a crisis in multicultural Britain, which seems to continue a race-based subalternization, but also that the source of strength for the subalterns may lie in their native roots and cultural imaginaries. Subaltern resistance, then, demands a return to roots, real or imagined, because as TillyTilly tells Jess, ‘stop looking to belong, half-and-half child. Stop. There is nothing; there is only me’ (261). The third is the coverage of the events themselves, the horrific genocides and loss of human life, what Rushdie’s novel describes as ‘weren’t-couldn’t-have-been true’ (356) events. Examples of this would include, in addition to the above-mentioned texts, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (on the Haitian genocide), Dave Eggers’ What Is the What (on Sudanese civil war and genocide), Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan (on Vietnam). Occasionally, we are even given insights into the mind and subjectivity of the perpetrators. Thus, an often-ignored dimension of the most celebrated postcolonial novel, Midnight’s Children, is the East Pakistan/Bangladesh invasion, massacres and eventual formation of a nation. Saleem Sinai is conscious of being an instrument of this genocidal war as a conscripted soldier in the West Pakistan (now Pakistan) army, and ponders over the ‘burden of history’, as he calls it (370) that he carries. Troubled by his role, seeking a distance from it, Saleem however has to admit: ‘even in those depths of withdrawal from responsibility, I remained responsible, through the working of the metaphorical modes of connection, for the belligerent events of 1971’ (). One of the most horrific of postcolonial protagonists in literature is Doctor Karekazi in Murambi. Instrumental in one of the largest massacres in the novel, Diop gives us a peek into the mind of a genocidaire. Karekazi, indoctrinated thoroughly into hating the Tutsis, even begins to see his marriage to a Tutsi woman as an error of judgement: ‘I, having made a youthful mistake that destroyed my entire life, I will never forgive anyone again for spoiling our blood’ (‘Doctor Joseph Karekazi’). Then Karekazi decides that his wife and children should also be killed with the rest of the Tutsis: ‘I will not see them again’ (‘Doctor Joseph Karekazi’). Karekazi’s proleptic narrative goes thus: Tomorrow I will be there. Shadows in the dawn mist, facing the motionless trees. Screams will go upward toward the heavens. I will feel neither sadness nor remorse. There will be atrocious

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pain, of course, but only the weak hearted confuse crime with punishment … I am not the kind of person who fears the shadows in his own soul. (‘Doctor Joseph Karekazi’)

Rushdie and Diop thus shift focus by giving us not the victim but the instrument of postcolonial subalternization, and of the historical wrongs perpetrated in these nations. There might be a forward-looking gaze in some texts. For instance, Adichie would declare: ‘Red was the blood of the siblings massacred in the North, black was for mourning them, green was for the prosperity Biafra would have, and, finally, the half of a yellow sun stood for the glorious future’ (281). Yet, this future remains, as her image poignantly reminds us, rooted in a bloody history. The predominance of the theme of terror, warfare and genocide and subalternization in the postcolonial texts fits these texts into the larger debates on indigeneity and violence directed at particular groups. Decolonization, so central to brand postcolonial, is tinged with these acts of violence. About the Latin American context, for instance, Arturo Arias says: ‘it is impossible to separate indigenous decolonial maneuvers from both the violence and the violation of human rights suffered by these populations in most countries with sizable native communities’ (2016: 327). If in India, the Dalit texts throw up for decolonial scrutiny the ‘embedded violence of the caste order’ (Rao 2009: 93), in places like Sri Lanka or Nigeria specific tribes, ethnicities and linguistic groups become the victims of structural violence. Nadeem Aslam, likewise, speaks of ‘ancient tribal rivalries’ as defining Afghanistan in The Wasted Vigil (2008: 110). Even as Aslam notes that the country has been defined by international wars and global interference (‘The entire world it seemed had fought in this country’, 34), he also concedes a national identity determined largely by its internecine tribal wars, embedded injustices and violence.

3.9 Conclusion It is likely that, then, following from the above examples, we assume that brand postcolonial emerges from the embedded violence of postcolonial societies and their decolonization processes, and in some ways extends the Orientalist trope of presenting the non-European other only in terms of deficits, violence and unmitigated suffering. That is, in the re-orientalist paradigm, any representation of postcolonial violence and subalternization may extend the Orientalist portrait of the non-European Other.22

22 From a different context, Joshua Ewalt (2011) argues that the rhetoric of Google Earth ‘makes and frames place for the purposes of motivating action in users’ (335). Ewalt acknowledges the politics of Google Earth – especially its corporate-capitalist nature, its military aesthetic and its visual capital and, more worryingly, its presentation of Africa as a continent with ‘embedded injustice’ (339-41).

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However, I suggest that we see these texts as engaged in a painful if necessary act of foregrounding subaltern memories, even when these memories are not always cathected through a subaltern’s perspective or affective experiences. Brand postcolonial might be seen as the effect of a postcolonial nation coming to terms (in geopolitical reality as well as literary representations) with its heritage of subaltern memories, of indigenes, the displaced and the marginalized. Yet this heritage is not about the past alone. ‘Subaltern memory’, writes Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, ‘must centrally locate the various ways in which memories – even those deemed “resistant” to dominant narratives – can and do work in the favor of present-day neocolonial, postcolonial, and imperial practices of inclusion-exclusion’. Proceeding from such a ‘locating’ of subaltern memories, they ‘must be understood as both a tool for resistance as well as a potential technique of prevailing – or future – modes of governmentality’ (2013: 36). Memories of massacres, extracted and excerpted in terms of victim narratives, eyewitness narratives or even perpetrator narratives are not, critics like Micieli-Voutsinas aver, only about the past. Instead, suggests Avery Gordon in her sociology of haunting: Following the ghosts is about making a contact that changes you and refashions the social relations in which you are located. It is about putting life back in only where a vague memory or a bare trace was visible to those who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing ghost stories, stories that not only repair representational mistakes, but also strive to understand the conditions under which a memory was produced in the first place, toward a countermemory, for the future. (1997: 22, emphasis in original)

For Gordon, then, ghosts represent the haunting reminders of postcolonial modernity’s violence, the result of a condition of exclusion and exploitation. From the above reading, it is possible to see the focus on embedded injustice and violence as transformative, directed at the future in terms of inclusivity, reparative justice, redistributive social mechanisms and emancipatory democracy. A concern with ghosts, then, is a concern with a history of structural inequities and an insistence on the transformation of the state into a more egalitarian place. Brand postcolonial then might be attributed to the postcolonial insistence on the future by learning from subaltern memories and their affects. The indigene and the subaltern are embodied ‘symptoms’ of a postcolonial state’s engagement with this transformation. If decolonization demands an engagement with the historical legacies of colonialism, it also demands an engagement with the world’s concerns with human rights, equality and inclusivity. Even as postcolonial societies grapple with much-criticized legacies of the European Enlightenment, liberalism, humanism in the process of the ‘provincializing’ of such modular concepts, these texts may be seen as attempts to rethink the state, ethnicities and identities for themselves. That is, brand postcolonial is the effect of a literary self-fashioning of a national culture, its historical legacies and its confessions to embedded injustices and vio-

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lence with a view toward the future nature of the postcolonial state. The postcolonial literary texts engage with a specifically subalternizing past as an ethical vision directed at the future. To return to the split mirror-window image from the preceding chapter: if the mirror enables the postcolonial state to reflect upon its processes of internal Othering, it is with a view toward the prospects that lie outside the window. If the subaltern, as Walter Mignolo defines it, is ‘a category of the imperial and modern/colonial world that affects people and regions in a global distribution of wealth and meaning’ (2005: 386), then the postcolonial representation of various indigeneities, subalternities and the marginalized appeal to the necessity to address this process of global subalternization itself. Mignolo goes on to propose that the ‘damned’ or ‘wretched of the earth’ (Fanon) Articulates the struggle from the perspective of the variegated non-European histories that became entangled with the history of Europe (its languages, economy, categories of thought, political theory, and subjectivity), since the sixteenth century. (390)

For Mignolo the damned is a ‘de-colonial category’ (391). Mignolo also proposes that without de-coloniality, the struggle of the multitude will remain within the logic of coloniality; improving perhaps, but not moving toward a world in which many worlds would co-exist. (392)

He elaborates: The damnés refers to the changing sector of the global population (e.g., like immigration today, as well as the white population disenfranchised by neo-liberal economy) in subaltern relations of power; those people whose lives are devalued in and by hegemonic Euro-centered discourses (from the right and from the left). For not every subaltern group falls, necessarily, under the category of damnés and of the coloniality of being -/ the damnés are located in the exteriority (i.e., an outside that is defined and constructed in the process of constructing the inside) that is the consequence of the (racial) colonial difference. (396)

However, the many worlds co-existing could also be predicated upon the recognition of generalizability of the damned. To assume that all the damned are the consequence of the operations of colonial difference, inherited by postcolonial societies, is to fall into the same trap as before: of assuming that there are only colonial inheritances. Postcolonial societies such as India have inherited their own brand of subalternization – such as casteism – that, despite arguments made by commentators like Nicholas Dirks, pre-date the colonial era. Mignolo accepts that ‘it is the damnés, rather than the proletarian or, in its updated version, the multitude, that embody the potential and the guidance to catalyse social and historical transformations’ (396). It is towards this end, of recognizing the role of the damnés in social and historical changes to be effected in the postcolonial society that there is the heavy emphasis on the indigene and the subaltern. The indigene and the subaltern have to be made a source point for this transformation, despite their specificities of location and cultural histories.

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Domna Stanton has argued that Human Rights texts embody the ‘generalizable’, ‘a process without end – generalizabilization – for forging commonalities’ (2016: 32). Citing Foucault, she speaks of ‘infinitesimal local mechanisms’ that then move upward in an ascending manner toward more general mechanisms (32). Central to the postcolonial belief system has been the resistance to the colonial/Orientalist reductive generalization. Instead it seizes upon specific instances of postcolonial trauma – the indigene and the subaltern – to speak of the state of the nation. That is, it is in the re-Orientalized texts around the indigene and the subaltern that a generalizable subaltern for global consumption begins to emerge. In such a circumstance, the re-Orientalism of the postcolonial is more geared toward the emancipatory poten­ tial of the traditional postcolonial than the exoticizing one that Lisa Lau identifies. The postcolonial literary text makes the ‘invisible visible’ (a Robert Young phrase with which this chapter began) by focusing on the instances of injustice, violence, genocide at local and specific levels in order to conceptualize more generalizable mechanisms for the postcolonial state. The literary texts are part of this stress on the infinitesimal-specific as oriented toward the general and the future. It is in its ‘fit’ with the global search for generalizable mechanisms – such as universal human rights, indigenous rights, justice for subalterns – that the postcolonial text obtains its aura. Robert Spencer believes that postcolonial literature … dramatize[s] imperialism’s violence and divisions in addition to … exploring and even instilling the cosmopolitan forms of relationship that would be required to create and to legitimise a global society that has left imperialism behind. (3)

It remains to be seen whether the global indigene and the global subaltern cohere into a resistant ‘subaltern cosmopolitanism’. G. Balachandran, building on the work of Nancy Fraser and others, while reading the texts and lives of sailors, prostitutes, working-classes, from various parts of the world and from different races and communities, at London, Liverpool, Cardiff and other ports in the 1900-1945 period speaks of a subaltern sociality: subaltern sociality is ‘cosmopolitan’ for its seeming capacity to accommodate the working poor from all parts of the world, irrespective, though not heedless, of race, faith, nation or gender and to translate and mediate habits, attitudes and meanings to affirm and sustain such sociality. (2014: 529)

More importantly, Balachandran believes that such a subaltern cosmopolitanism was global: Such cosmopolitanism was a feature of communities of the working poor in many parts of the nineteenth-century world. It was particularly pronounced in port towns big and small on every continent, a port’s relative size and importance influencing its cosmopolitan geographies more than its ethos. This article recognizes this universality while however focusing on Britain. (529)

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The larger point made here is relevant: there is the incipient potential of a global subaltern sociality whose ability to prise open racial, cultural and national borders is precisely what suggests a counter-flow to the discourse of race-based nationalism and a coalition of the damnés. Postcolonial literature instances the political subjectification of the damnés in the contemporary. Didier Fassin defines political subjectification as ‘the advent of subjects and subjectivities onto a political scene’ (2008: 533). Fassin’s argument hinges upon the role of psychiatrists and psychologists who, examining the neurosis resulting from trauma and suffering, bestow such a subject position upon the victim of conflicts. He goes on, however, to add: ‘[Humanitarian psychiatry’s] compassion for trauma produces a particular form of subjectification that is imposed on individuals, but through which they can also exist politically’ (534). Postcolonial texts, while documenting trauma, perform such a role. They introduce the racialized subaltern, rendered victim by colonial legacies and the postcolony’s socio-economic machinery, to the global stage. Postcolonial literature is instrumental in generating the political subject in the form of the damnés, from Chile to Bangladesh, South Africa to Spitalfields. In other words, postcolonial literature serves the function, like UN and Amnesty Reports, which are key elements in the globalization of humanitarian images, of taking the racial-cultural Other as a political subject, such as the indigene and the subaltern, forged in the crucible of colonial legacies, postcolonial ‘development’, diaspora and exile. The indigene and the subaltern from Asia or Africa exists politically through the literary representations (globalized), even as these subalterns from specific locations appear on the world stage (that is, beyond the nation-state), even if they serve as a ‘national allegory’. In the process, these representations make a global publics for such political subjects. If publics and counter-publics may both be produced through a reading-listening and consuming practice (Novatzke 2016) and not only through reasoning and rational debates, then the circulation of subaltern narratives, representations (both by and of subalterns) could serve as the basis for such a coalition. It is from this global coalition of the damnés, made possible by the construction of reading solidarities from re-Orientalised cultural productions, that new imaginaries might begin. Assuming, with Robert Spencer, that we should ‘contrast our cosmopolitanism (one of equality, rights and democracy) with their cosmopolitanism (of capital, exploitation and cultural standardisation)’, then it means acknowledging postcolonial literature’s insistence on suffering, emancipation and rights across the world’s subalterns (22, emphasis in original). The global indigene and the global subaltern are the motifs, figures and symbols of such a postcolonialized cosmopolitanism. Such a cosmopolitanism does not, let me hasten to add, amount to a rejection of the nation-state in its drive to slot into the transnational. For many subalterns in the postcolony, the state remains the primary guardian of interest and purveyor of welfare. We can, instead, think of post-colonialized cosmopolitanism founded on subaltern alignments as invested in putting pressure on the nation state via the transnational sentiments, to act in ame-

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liorating specific (local, regional) conditions that produce subalternity within the postcolony.23 If, as Ruth Ronen argues, in literary and art theory, ‘possible worlds serve to name concrete artistic phenomena’ (1994: 48, emphasis in original), the artistic phenomena in the literary texts cast in the form of particular narratives serve the purpose of offering alternative and possible worlds adjacent to the existing one. Utopia, Ruth Levitas (2013) proposes, is the ‘imaginary reconstitution of society’. While the postcolonial may not yet have a roadmap to this future society, a first step in mapping the contours and hidden fault-lines of the past and the present may be taken as a point of departure to this imaginary reconstitution. The insistence on the indigene and the subaltern as a tactic in re-Orientalism may therefore be read as the postcolonial fitting into a global project of social transformation and as a necessary internal transformation of every state’s own internal changes for the future. The wretched in the postcolonial is projected as the moral fulcrum of any potential social and historical change, and this is what endears it (the postcolonial canon) to the global project even in the neoliberal era. Brand postcolonial is the effect of the political re-imagination proceeding from the moral fulcrum.

23 Robert Spencer writes: a postcolonial cosmopolitanism is ‘conscious of the need to think and to campaign at the local and national levels, whilst at the same time thinking and campaigning at the level of trans-national institutions and arrangements’ (38).

4 Thirdworldism: The Transnational Literary-Ethnic Chic The preceding chapters examined two significant constituents of the postcolonial aura: the regimes of authenticity, and the globalization of indigeneity and subalternity. I now turn to the third-worldization of the transnational literary-cultural industry. ‘Thirdworldism’ is my shorthand term for the infusion of texts and authors from formerly colonized nations and cultures of South Asia, America and Africa into the global literary-cultural circuit, an infusion that bestows, as this chapter demonstrates, a certain aura around the postcolonial author-text but also, in the process injects an interesting variation into the circuit. The chapter argues that, claims and criticisms of authenticity notwithstanding, the postcolonial makes a difference to the global production and consumption of literary culture. In the process, this difference accrues cultural capital qua difference for the author (as Graham Huggan has identified throughout his The Postcolonial Exotic). The imbrication of this cultural capital and global cultures of difference in an assemblage – the transnational literary-ethnic chic of the title – is the focus of this chapter. I read this assemblage along two major axes: the self- and market-fashioning of the postcolonial author; the role of postcolonial texts and textuality. By way of conclusion, but also as an axis that results from the first two, I study the subjunctive nationhoods emerging in the process.

4.1 Authors, Authority and Global Appropriations Admittedly, postcolonial authors are appropriated and commodified by the global cultural markets and embedded in its consumer circuits. However, this appropriation, self-consciously and agentially enacted, is also, often, accompanied by a careful self-fashioning by the authors. Their embroilment in the global circuits is now irrevocable (Brouillette 3). This results in an anxiety in the authors at the ‘politicization of incorporation into a discredited global sphere’ (4). Commentators sympathetic to the postcolonial predicament – of being part of a global, neo-colonial consumer culture which is at once uneven towards the postcolony but is their chance at global visibility – have however discerned a politics wherein the authors seek to assert some form of authority in the cultural field. Sarah Brouillette argues that the industry of postcoloniality has a ‘touristic conscience’ that informs its authors. That is, the authors respond self-consciously to their commodification and incorporations, as a way of dealing with postcoloniality’s ‘touristic guilt’ (7). They ‘incorporate a critique of her tendencies into the text, deploying a strategic exoticism designed to interrogate the reader’s own constructions’ (17). She sees somebody like Derek Walcott as embodying such a self-consciousness: © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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On the one hand, he is consistently worried about his relationship with the people of the Caribbean, the region he comes from and about which he often writes. On the other hand, he frequently takes up the subject of his earned access to a privileged metropolitan audience, an audience educated in modernist poetics but also interested in the Caribbean as novel literary material. (26)

Such authors, she claims, generate figures of reading that are ‘by turns self-exempting or self-implicating’ (27). Further, she suggests, these postcolonial authors speak from a position of privilege and dissent (87). Brouillette is no doubt correct in her assessment of the postcolonial author’s self-consciousness, which we may treat as a component of her/his self-fashioning. She also gives due credit to the postcolonial author who resists being reduced to a totem, a voice for originary and reified ‘authentic’ culture or a consumer product. While implicated in the global circuit and consumer culture that now involves literary authors as much as pop icons, the postcolonial author is situated at the intersection of two axes: self-fashioning and market-fashioning as a literary ethnic icon.

4.2 Authorial Self-fashioning in the Age of Global Cultural Empires In 2001 Amitav Ghosh withdrew his new novel, The Glass Palace, from the Commonwealth Prize fray. In his letter Ghosh explaining his reasons, Ghosh wrote: The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain.... The ways in which we remember the past are not determined solely by the brute facts of time: they are also open to choice, reflection and judgment. The issue of how the past is to be remembered lies at the heart of The Glass Palace and I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of “the Commonwealth”. (https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/the-conscientious-objector/211102 )

Ghosh’s criticism here is directed at the continued legacy of colonialism as an identity marker for all formerly colonized nations, and the excessive weightage given to the language of colonialism. In other words, Ghosh is pondering over the constriction of all postcolonial identities to their colonial pasts and cultural training, effectively eroding all other forms of identity markers – many predating the colonial era – even in the decolonial century. The critic Simon Gikandi has noted how ‘how decolonial situations are marked by the trace of the imperial pasts they try to disavow’ (Gikandi 1996: 15). This is precisely what Ghosh is drawing attention to: a trace forced upon him by the rubric precisely when he seeks to reflect, in decolonizing fashion, on the imperial past of his country of origin and the violence of that past. Intensely aware of his location and origins, Ghosh



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objects to his being positioned solely on the basis of his history of being colonized. In short, Ghosh resists his appropriation by the colonial trace, a trace which is now a defining and delimiting label. The label does not, Ghosh underscores, reflect the ‘possibilities of the future’. ‘How the past is to be remembered’, Ghosh argues, is the ‘spirit’ of his novel – and, we could add, the spirit of postcolonial literature as well, considering its battles, from Addis Ababa to Asansol, in engaging with its colonial pasts. Elsewhere, Ghosh’s work on the Sundarbans, Mauritius, China, Myanmar and other places resonates with the work of authors such as Rushdie (Mumbai), Wicomb (Johannesburg), Slovo (Johannesburg), Emecheta and Adichie (Biafra) or David Park (Belfast). These authors are ‘vernacular cosmopolitans’, in Pnina Werbner’s sense of being rooted in multiple cultures but proceeding from the geopolitically bounded regions of origin, while being equally knowledgeable about several others. It ‘joins contradictory notions of local specificity and universal enlightenment’ (2006). It can also be characterized as ‘territorialized cosmopolitanism’, defined as ‘cosmopolitanism located in specific, though often multiple, places’ (Johansen 2008: 2). The post­ colonial authors are ‘people who exhibit cosmopolitan world views [and] see themselves as having ethical and moral responsibilities to the world and a specific local place – or even places’ (3, emphasis in original). Johansen elaborates: ‘a cosmopolitan worldview … is one that is affiliated simultaneously with the local and the global – and with the places in-between’ (3).24 Elsewhere Paul Gilroy has drawn attention to what he terms the ‘transmodern dissidence’, originating in W.E.B. Dubois and Mahatma Gandhi. This ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’ was ‘enacted in the national-liberation and decolonization struggles they [Dubois and Gandhi] anticipated and led’. Gilroy argues that this same transmodern dissidence’s ‘insubordinate spirit has lent emotional and ethical energy to translocal movements against racism and inequality around health, disease, and the environment’ (80). In short, Gilroy too sees the power of decolonization as drawing at least partially upon translocal and cosmopolitan ideas, intellectual energy and solidarity. Elsewhere Gilroy would write, albeit without specifying the exact modalities, as to how this solidarity may be achieved: It is my hope that, not Europe and the north Atlantic, but the postcolonial world in general, and South Africa in particular, will in due course generate an alternative sense of what our networked world might be and become, a new cosmopolitanism centred on the global south. The racial difference, to which we are told we must become resigned, obstructs empathy across the north/south divide. Ethnocentrism becomes inescapable. We cannot imagine what it is like to be somebody else, and it is hard to endow the savage, the native, or the stranger seeking hospitality with a reciprocal humanity. At the very same time, the powerful and pleasurable fantasy of transgressing those impassable boundaries has started to circulate through the core of globalized popular culture. Inside the overdeveloped world, political virtue dictates obedience to ethnic absolutism. (2005: 289-90)

24 Kwame Appiah speaks of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (2005).

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Writing in resonance with Gilroy, the philosopher Achille Mbembe also draws such links: between the Jewish and Black experiences of ‘bondage, captivity, exile, death –/ and therefore of freedom’ so as to develop a cross-cultural view on ethics (2005: 294). I suggest that the decolonial cosmopolitan writer is, first, decolonial because of her/his reflective engagement with and ideological resistance to the colonial past which enables them to fit into the (neo-colonial) global cultures of the present. The writer is also cosmopolitan in the sense s/he distances her/himself from the country and culture of origin so as to critique it. This could be Rushdie’s, Aslam’s and Nasreen’s critique of fundamentalisms, Mistry’s critique of Hindutva politics, Adichie’s of patriarchal African families, Hamid’s and Hosseini’s of tribalisms, among others. To veer away from the ‘anxiety’ argument made by Meenakshi Mukherjee of Vikram Chandra and other diasporic Indian authors, it is possible to see the postcolonial author fashion her/himself as a critical insider to her/his culture. Second, he or she is cosmopolitan due to a ‘detachment’ from provincial loyalties (Anderson 2001). I have elsewhere suggested that to focus exclusively on the postcolonial author’s ethnic accounts and local descriptions (as a means of communicating authenticity) is to ignore her/his other politics, and especially critiques of the nation (Nayar 2014). Such a postcolonial actually fits into the global discourses on these very topics (xenophobia, cultural nationalism, fundamentalism, religious bigotry). Each of these authors brings to bear on local matters insights from global concerns and political thought – such as rights, emancipation, equality, equitable development, modernization. That is, they address issues on the ground, in their home/lands, mediated through the prism of their awareness of discourses and debates circulating at the global level. Arif Dirlik posits a ‘critical localism’. The local here is the site of resistance. Arif Dirlik writes: The “local” below [is] a site both of promise and predicament. My primary concern is with the local as site of promise, and the social and ideological changes globally that have dynamized a radical re-thinking of the local over the last decade. I am interested especially in the relationship between the emergence of a Global Capitalism and the emergence of concern with the local as a site of resistance and liberation. (1997: 85)

Such a localism excludes ‘[a] romantic nostalgia for communities past, hegemonic nationalist yearnings of a new kind (as with the so-called Confucian revival in east Asia), or historicism that would imprison the present in the past’ (98). Dirlik sees this localism as essential to the rejuvenation of the local via an engagement with the global. This is precisely what the postcolonial text does. When Ghosh, for instance, shows the destruction of the rural (Sundarbans) as a consequence of modernity’s so-called progress in The Hungry Tide, he brings to bear on the region and locality concerns that have been voiced by people in very different contexts (such as Wangari Maathai in Kenya). As has been argued elsewhere, Ghosh offers a humanist critique of dispossession in the postcolonial world: it deals with people who are ‘out of place’ and seeking a ‘home’ (Nayar 2010: 89). If Ghosh points



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to the colonial legacies that shaped Sundarbans and its various land schemes in this novel, he also shows us how the postcolonial and later the neo-colonial in the form of American and global powers impact adversely upon the people in the area (Johansen). The failure of supranational organizations and national ones – from the UN to Truth Commissions – as a characteristic of postcolonial societies, whether Ireland or South Africa, also indicates a territorialized cosmopolitanism that aligns the postcolonial national text with global fields of inquiry and campaigns.25 The self-fashioning of the postcolonial author as decolonial cosmopolitan also emerges in interviews and public speeches. In an interview the Bangladeshi writer in exile, Taslima Nasreen, criticized all forms of religious fundamentalisms: Hindu and Islamic. Yet she was also quick to declare: ‘[The] West is keen to side with Islamists’, before going on to add: Are you saying Muslims cannot have a mind of their own to criticise their religion? Is criticism of religion the domain of non-Muslim intellectuals? That is an anti-Muslim remark, seriously. (Nasreen 2015)

Nasreen here is carefully positioning herself as a critic of any and all forms of fundamentalisms, whether this exists in Bangladesh or in the First World. Careful not to be appropriated as merely a propagandist against Islam, Nasreen points to the West’s encouragement to the Islamists. When queried about religion in African life, as opposed to ‘post-secular’ America, Chimamanda Adichie responds: But is America actually a post-secular society? I’m not sure. I think it’s quite religious as well, but it manifests itself in a different way. It’s less direct. I even think that in many ways the anti-religion movement is in itself a religion – and sometimes it is more strident than any religious movement. (Adichie, ‘A Conversation with Chimamanda Adichie’)

She makes the above statement before going on to describe the role of religion in African culture. Enacting the ‘detachment’ from both her ‘roots’ and her American life, marking her as a decolonial cosmopolitan, she goes on to observe: ‘Sometimes I read about earlier forms of Christianity, and I think, “Yes, exactly. This is contemporary African Christianity”’ (‘A Conversation’). Refusing to be ‘labelled’, Adichie wonders

25 There are, needless to say, various forms of dispossession. The loss of land and ownership is, of course the primary connotation of the term ‘dispossession’. However, as Athena Athanasiou and Judith Butler note, In today’s global market economy of neoliberal capitalism and “debtocracy”, dispossession signifies the violent appropriation of labor and the wearing out of laboring and non-laboring bodies. This has manifested in the current politics of economic precarity in the form of temporary, lowpaying, and insecure jobs, in combination with cuts to welfare provision and expropriation of public education and health institutions. (2013: 11)

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what it means to be an ‘African writer’ or a ‘feminist writer’ later in the interview. One can detect both privilege and dissent in Adichie and Nasreen, the privilege of escaping the claustrophobia of their originary homes, and the dissent towards their adopted society, the West and global cultural trends of which they are an important part. Correcting the stereotype of a country historically divided by tribal wars and fundamentalists, Khaled Hosseini speaking of his childhood says: Afghanistan was a country at peace with itself, with its neighbors. Kabul was a growing, thriving, cosmopolitan city. So it was a very, very different picture of Afghanistan than the one you would think of today if somebody said the word Afghanistan… While we were in Paris, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and a war began, and things became very unstable back home. And there was – the refugee crisis began, and we knew people who were in prison, and tortured, and beaten, and killed. (Hosseini 2012)

Hosseini notes that Afghanistan’s present image may be attributed directly to Soviet intervention, and there was no ‘embedded’ violence in the country. With this Hosseini introduces, as a novelist, a rupture in the global image-making around ‘his’ country. Similar instances may be found in Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil. In Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, he writes of Pakistan: Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book of sad stories, and life a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there: millions of its sons and daughters have managed to find footholds all around the globe… (12)

Throughout Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes we see Pakistani officials and the President of the country, Zia Ul Haq, consorting with the Americans, seeking their approval and support, often implying that the troubles in their country are partly the creation of this nexus. (Focusing on the dictator’s personal crises and peccadilloes, as Hanif does – for instance, in the incident where the American woman, Joanne Herring, produces a barber to alter Haq’s famous moustache into a thin line when the latter is visiting America – ensures that the third world leader is revealed as a weak, gullible man in the hands of the Western woman.) So does Kamila Shamsie. When an interviewer asks her if, when researching for Burnt Shadows, she found ‘similarities between Nagasaki and modern acts of destruction, like 9/11’, Shamsie responds: I was also struck by the disconnection . . . imagine if, on August 6, 1945, the world had seen wallto-wall coverage of the bombing of Hiroshima . . . would it still have been possible for the US to bomb Nagasaki, just three days later? (Shamsie, Interview. Undated)

Shamsie draws our attention to the heavily mediated nature of war and destruction that 9/11 represents and the absence of such coverage for the greater destruction that was Hiroshima and Nagasaki.



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What emerges from these self-fashioning comments by celebrity authors is an acknowledgement of their locational mobilities, a commitment to their local/original political affiliations and their role in dissenting transnational cultural commentaries such as the above. The self-fashioning as dissenting but privileged Third Worlder in the First World cultural sphere refuses and refutes hagiographies of endogenous identities for themselves and for the ‘West’. Thus Adichie’s sharply critical gaze on her Nigeria as well as the USA and UK or Arvind Adiga’s social satire that aligns India’s present-day crises of development with globalization are both instances of postcolonial authors demonstrating the global roots of local ‘troubles’, especially with the involvement of Western/First World nations and cultures in the formerly colonized. As decolonial cosmopolitans these authors constantly show the messy merging of the global with the local, but see the transaction as two-way, if uneven (Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil maps the global forces instrumental in creating the chaos that is Afghanistan in chapter Three). There is necessarily the risk that in the process of alerting us to the realities at the level of the local, the postcolonial author ends up romanticizing it. Indeed, commentators such as James English have noted that major literary prizes go to those authors who seem to employ effectively strategies of subnational and extra-national articulation, with success falling to those who manage to take up positions of double and redoubled advantage: positions of local prestige bringing them global prestige of the sort that reaffirms and reinforces their local standing. (312)

Building on English’s argument Sarah Brouillette claims that While authors may be dependent on the appearance of local content and applicability, ultimate esteem only accrues to texts that are ‘worldreadable,’ and only the most consumable forms of subnationality make a text ‘eligible’ for global acclaim. (79)

However, what escapes the attention of both English and Brouillette is that these very award-winning authors are ones who are very often deeply critical of their local settings and politics. Granted that awards may accrue precisely because they delve into the sordid details of the postcolony, this does not take away the fact that local and global standing does not come solely on the basis of either hagiography or critical discourses. The postcolonial author may function as a ‘promotional sign’ (Brouillette 66) for the publishing industry, but they also function as indexical signs for the invisible: the hidden histories of Western colonialism and Western dominance, of native corruption and native excellence, among others. This decolonial cosmopolitan author also therefore, additionally, functions as a decolonial nationalist. Mistry and Ghosh for India, Nasreen for Bangladesh, Adichie, Soyinka and Achebe for Nigeria, Lamming and Walcott for the Caribbean also cater to the new generation citizens of their own (originary) country by making fiction of their nation’s traumatic histories. The decolonial nationalist author provides the nec-

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essary performative corrective to the official and pedagogic histories of the nation (to appropriate Homi Bhabha’s formulation). The narrative is the ‘performative’ of the repressed that gives the lie, and generates a counter-narrative, to the ‘pedagogy’ of national identity and development (Bhabha 1995: 299, 303). The postcolonial author may be treated as a decolonial nationalist writer for enabling the repressed and the possibly-forgotten to be retrieved for the nation’s cultural memory, especially for the generations after the anti-colonial and nationalist struggles. A trauma-memory citizenship (Nayar, Human Rights and Literature, 2016) engendered by fictional accounts of, say, Apartheid (Coetzee, Slovo, Gordimer, Wicomb), colonialism (Ghosh, Hamid, Hosseini), civil wars and ethnic conflict (Ondaatje, Emecheta, Adichie, Park), crises of democracy (Mistry, Rushdie) or tensions over fundamentalisms (Shamsie, Nasreen, Mistry), communicates the ‘other’ histories of the land to a generation prepared to forget these histories. In Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, the parents, survivors of the Apartheid era, have kept the secret of his birth – he is the progeny of the rape of the mother by a white policeman – from the son. The son, Mike, ponders about the nature of history, his as well as his country’s: Yet, it [the term historical memory] has an air of inevitability, solemn and compelling … It explains everything, the violence periodically sweeping the country, the crime rate, even the strange “upsurge” of brutality against women. It is as if history has a remembering process of its own, one that gives life to its imaginary monsters. Now his mother and father have received a visitation from that dark past. (32)

Using the individual and personal memories of characters enables the postcolonial author to reflect upon, and merge with, collective memories. 26 In Mistry’s A Fine Balance, dealing with the infamous Emergency period in India when democratic laws and the Constitution of the country were suspended (1975-77), he writes: But nobody ever forgot anything, not really, though sometimes they pretended, when it suited them. Memories were permanent. Sorrowful ones remained sad even with the passing of time, yet happy ones could never be recreated – not with the same joy. Remembering bred its own

26 Marita Sturken writes about the merger of personal and collective memories: When personal memories are deployed in the context of marking the anniversary of historical events, they are presented either as the embodied evidence of history or as evidence of history’s failures. Survivors return to the sites of their war experience; they place their bodies within the discourse of remembering either to affirm history’s narratives or to declare them incomplete, incapable of conjuring their experience. They represent a very particular form of embodied memory. While history functions much more smoothly in the absence of survivors, and survivors are often dissenting voices to history’s narratives, history making also accords to them a very particular authority as the embodiment of authentic experience. (1997: 688)



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peculiar sorrow. It seemed so unfair: that time should render both sadness and happiness into a source of pain. (336)

This past of arrests, torture, executions, disappearances haunts the present as well. If Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in numerous countries – Guatemala, South Africa, Rwanda – are national attempts to grapple with the traumatic history so as to enable the generations to understand it and move on, the literary fiction performs a similar act: of knowing and healing. Thus, David Park’s The Truth Commissioner states: We also need to remember that we’re working in a society that has been deeply divided for thousands of years. This is probably the most challenging thing it’s ever been asked to do and sometimes it’s going to falter and it’s going to get frightened but if we can carry it off, then it’s the most important step this community can possibly take toward lasting healing. (244-245)

The retrieval of the bones of the mysteriously disappeared in cult postcolonial works like Anil’s Ghost may then be read as the performative that disrupts the contemporary by introducing a traumatic memory, and incorporating the present-day generation into a trauma-memory citizenship as a consequence in order to recuperate.27 This dual-edged process makes the postcolonial author a decolonial nationalist.

4.3 Market-fashioning and the Postcolonial Author as Ethnic Chic Bloomsbury advertising Kamila Shamsie’s A God in Every Stone carries the following quote from a review: Shamsie [is] engaged in a multi-layered excavation of colonial attitudes, the role of women in society, war, loyalty and betrayal.

The first keyword, for the competent literary reader, helps identify the text as a postcolonial novel with the reference to colonialism. On the Bloomsbury website announcing Shamsie’s Broken Verses we meet an extract from a review: ‘A compassionate book, which intelligently discusses the dilemmas of educated women in Pakistan’. The other keywords in these web-blurbs position the books within universal themes.

27 However, such a public retrieval and articulation of hitherto suppressed memories has its own dangers. As Aryn Bartley phrases it: It [the Truth and Reconciliation Commission processes] asks us to see the process of compiling public narrations into a larger national history as participating in forms of narrative or discursive violence, and the public context of this kind of storytelling as producing its own material dangers. (2009: 105)

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Yet another extract refers to the novel’s theme of ‘the contradictions of Empire in the age of the first worldwide war’ (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/a-god-in-everystone-9781408847206/. 2 July 2017). The write-up on A Thousand Splendid Suns states: A Thousand Splendid Suns is an unforgettable portrait of a wounded country and a deeply moving story of family and friendship. It is a beautiful, heart-wrenching story of an unforgiving time, an unlikely bond and an indestructible love.

Several reviews are extracted from, following the above description, of which three run as follows: A beautifully crafted and disturbing story of two women victims of the wrath of men. As unforgettable as The Kite Runner, this novel places us in Afghanistan with an open heart. It is incredibly moving and a real insight into the madness and suffering of Afghanistan – in particular its women. The author of The Kite Runner returns with a study of love and self-sacrifice in a modern Afghan family. (http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/a-thousand-splendid-suns-9780747582793/. 2 July 2017)

Rob Nixon’s New York Times review of Half of a Yellow Sun notes that the novel is ‘at once historical and eerily current’. His review opens thus: Are we ready for a novel about an imploding nation riven by religious strife and bloody wrangling over who controls the military, the civil service, the oil; a novel about looting, roadside bombs, killings and reprisal killings, set against a backdrop of meddling foreign powers? A novel in which several once-colonized peoples chafe against the nonsensical national boundaries that bind them together, in which citizens abandoned on the highways of fear must choose between a volatile federation and destabilizing partition? Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s second novel takes place not in the deserts of contemporary Iraq but in the forests of southeastern Nigeria – 40 years ago. If, at independence in 1960, Nigeria was “a collection of fragments held in a fragile clasp”, in 1967 that clasp snapped, unleashing the three-year Biafran War that saw Muslim-dominated forces from the north laying siege to the Christian Igbo of the south, who sought to secede from Nigeria after the widespread massacre of their people. (Nixon 2006)

The Penguin Random House website advertising Adichie’s short-story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck extracts the following from a New York Times Review: Affecting . . . . The Africa in Adichie’s collection isn’t the Africa that Americans are familiar with from TV news or newspaper headlines. Her stories are not about civil war or government corruption or deadly illnesses. She is interested in how clashes between tradition and modernity, familial expectations and imported dreams affect relationships between husbands and wives, parents and children. (http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/881/the-thing-around-your-neck-bychimamanda-ngozi-adichie/9780307455918/readers-guide/. 2 July 2017)



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Tahmima Anam’s self-description quoted in the review of The Bones of Grace says: Though I loved writing the first two books [A Golden Age, The Good Muslim] and they were important to me, I felt I was doing them out of a duty to tell a particular story that hadn’t been told before. (Anam 2016)

The postcolonial author is a part of the literary market’s ethnic chic: forgotten histories, untold stories, unique social experiences, singular cultural practices, all meshed with some universal human themes construct the postcolonial author as a national literary project that has global value. The postcolonial author’s projected ‘regime of value’ (Frow 2002) organises the aesthetic space in which an icon is circulated. We can identify two components that make up the postcolonial regime of value. First, from Zadie Smith to Adichie, this regime of value proceeds from their recog­ nizable ethnicity. It is not, therefore, enough to emphasize the cultural and racial differences in an author’s work. It is also important to foreground the universal themes underlying or framing these differences. A second constituent of this postcolonial regime of value is the author’s impossible relationship with the country of origin, and, by extension, with her/his ethnicity, usually well-publicized in marketing literature. This value is one of quasi-erased eth­ nicity. Tahmima Anam writes: On the one hand I think it’s the source of a lot of my creative energy and when bad things happen I feel deeply, personally involved in it. On the other hand it’s very difficult for me to imagine having a life there. (Anam 2016)

Taslima Nasreen declares: ‘Don’t call me a Muslim, I am an atheist’ (Nasreen 2015). Distancing herself from fundamentalism, Nasreen situates herself as an atheist, but an atheist who disowns Islam. Together these two make up the regime of value that defines the Brand Postcolonial. The brand is a corporate effort as opposed to the signature which is strictly individual. When the postcolonial author is positioned via a recognizable ethnicity which is then complicated and layered (whether through diasporic distancing – as in Anam  – or through ideological distancing, as in Nasreen) it generates a Brand Postcolonial. The market fashioning of the postcolonial author constantly moves between the ethnic chic of nation, race and ethnicity and the universal sentiments and themes the authors write about.

4.4 Text and Textuality Achebe’s Igbo proverbs offered a point of entry into the racial and cultural Other, just as Rushdie’s use of Hindi film songs did. Tutuola and Hulme, Vassanji and Soyinka

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‘abrogated’ the English language, to adapt a term from the canonical The Empire Writes Back, for their purposes. In the process of decolonizing the English tongue in this fashion, albeit using a form – the novel – that was ‘foreign’ to their cultural narrative traditions, the early postcolonial authors altered the hegemony of European literature with interesting effects.

4.4.1 The Postcolonial Text as Emergent Literature Karen-Margarethe Simonsen has argued a case where Europe’s boundaries and extent of power can no longer be understood without a significant understanding of the global. Europe’s imbrication and emplacement within the global also ensures that its cultures partake, in indisputably uneven forms, a new globally informed social imaginary which includes the formerly colonized nations and their culture. As she puts it, ‘globalization is about widening the social imaginary and about understanding the dynamics of interrelations between the local and the global’ (136). Simonsen argues that such an altered social imaginary will alter the European self-perception, mapping the continuity and discontinuity of Europe with a strong sense of historicity. This would entail the rise and inclusion of what she calls, after Wlad Godzich, ‘emergent literature’. Simonsen defines emergent literature thus: “Emergent literatures” form a challenge to our theoretical apparatus and to our literary-historiographic pre-understandings. Emergent literatures can turn up in the geographical periphery, in Africa or in South America, but they can just as easily turn up within our home-sphere… If the literary emergence changes our ingrown ways of understanding the progression of literary history at crucial points then it is a true emergence. (146)

Simonsen’s focus is Europe and the possible changes effected through emergent literature. But, given the global publishing scene and transnational literary-culture industry, one could make the argument about the global literary field as well. The postcolonial text alters the global literary-social imaginary by various means: by foregrounding a history of dispossession, settlement and displacement in Africa, South America, Canada, Australia and Asia, by pointing to the regional, racial and cultural variations within European identity or nationality itself, by foregrounding the intentional hybridity of the formerly colonized, among others. If historicity is important, as Simonsen suggests, especially to the academic reader, then the rootedness of postcolonial literature in anti-colonial struggles would signal the altered perception such readers have of Europe and these formerly colonized nations. Imaginative literature that uses tropes to signal a colonial history of the Asian city or home enables the recognition of colonial legacies – and this, one could argue, is a modification of Europe’s self-perception when read by the alert European leader. Take, for instance, Salman Rushdie’s classic account of the Methwold Estate in Midnight’s Children. Methwold sells his estate to Indians on the occasion of India’s independence



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in 1947 on the condition that nothing was to be altered on the estate. The new Indian owners, consequently, have to live in the midst of antiquated English apparatuses: ceiling fans, walls with baby posters, water closets, mini-bars and musical instruments. Two of the Indian responses to this English-yet-Indian space go like this: Lila Sabarmati is on the phone: ‘How can you stand it, Nussie? In every room here there are talking budgies, and in the almirahs I find moth-eaten dresses and used brassieres!’ And Nussie is telling Amina: ‘Goldfish, Allah, I can’t stand the creatures, but Methwold sahib comes himself to feed… and there are half-empty pots of Bovril he says I can’t throw…it’s mad, Amina sister, what are we doing like this?’ (98)

Then, Rushdie writes: ‘things are settling down, the sharp edges of things are getting blurred, so they have all failed to notice what is happening: the Estate, Methwold’s Estate is changing them’ (99). The Indian residents begin to celebrate, like Methwold, the cocktail hour every evening at six o’clock, even putting on an Oxford accent. Rushdie’s metaphor of blurring sharp edges signals the loss of identity and the sharp edge of cultural differences between the former English owner and the present Indian ones. As an instance of emergent literature, these passages draw attention to the legacies of colonialism wherein the natives were willy nilly transformed into their former masters. An awareness of this effect of colonialism when reading the postcolonial text such as Midnight’s Children enables, if Simonsen is correct, the global reader to recognize literary, national and cultural histories of Europe as inextricably linked to that of the former colonies, and vice versa. That is, Rushdie’s metaphor alerts us to the blurring of cultural identities of Europe/India, particularly in the form of a loss of identity for the latter. It provincializes Europe but also deprivileges the postcolonial. A second example where the literary text’s instantiation of colonial legacies alerts the global reader to the recognition of a problematic cultural identity of Europe may be found in Derek Walcott’s ‘Ruins of a Great House’. In this poem Walcott describes the ruined colonial manor as a leprosorium. The Empire built mansions, all of which were symbols of power, but also of oppression and tyranny. He then refers to a slave ‘rotting in the manorial lake’. Walcott offers a possible shift in the social imaginary of the European and global reader with these images.28 First, Walcott converts the colonial symbol into a memorial, a mausoleum which blots the postcolonial landscape now. Then, he forces us to see how that symbol of power was built upon the sufferings of the colonized, the slaves. Together, such images force the alert reader to recognize a different dimension to Europe’s identity as a colonial power or England as an imperial nation: its national and cultural identity has always relied upon the exploitation of different spaces. As a challenge to Europe’s understanding of itself and its history,

28 On the imperial formation and the lingering ruins, but also processes of ruination that persist from the imperial formation, see Stoler (2013).

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then, comes Walcott’s recreation of the colonial manor house. This infusion of the dark history of Europe into contemporary Euro-American reading communities, so typical of postcolonial and decolonial thought, is central to the postcolonial aura: it destabilizes Europe’s self-appraisal and historical understanding. Hanif Kureishi declares in “The Rainbow Sign” (1986): It is the British, the white British, who have to learn that being British isn’t what it was. Now it is a more complex thing involving new elements. So there must be a fresh way of seeing Britain and the choices it faces: and a new way of being British after all this time. (38)

Such a learning-to-be-British proceeds from Britain’s cosmopolitanizing force embodied in the postcolonial texts that circulate across the reading community. Margarida Esteves Pereira (2015) has argued that there is an increasing awareness of the regional differences within Europe itself. She writes of ‘a growing awareness both of the different regional variations of which the term “British” is composed (Irish, Scottish, Welsh, English) and of the global character of English literature or literatures in English’ (216). Noting the difficulty of ‘ascribing a single nationality to some of the canonical writers of English Literature’, or even separating the American and British identities of others such as Henry James and T.S. Eliot (216). Pereira writes: Between a more traditional re-emergence of the notion of nation and the thoughtful re-invention of a British national identity, we can see a third position gaining ground, “a kind of post-nationalism built on reappraised symbols and traditions that implicitly acknowledges the mongrelized nature of most British identities” [Dominic Head]. (216)

The global reader, then, consumes the postcolonial text and is made aware, I suggest, of the racial-cultural Other at the heart of Europe, of European and First World history itself. The layering of national and cultural origins and identities of literary authors contributes to the frames of reception and recognition of Timothy Mo, Amy Tan, Buchi Emecheta, Hanif Kureishi, Kamila Shamsie, Adichie, Zadie Smith and a host of contemporary writers. There is, so to speak, a postcolonial haunting of the English literary canon. The very idea and extent of ‘Englishness’, then, is open to question through the incursion of the above writers. To return briefly to the two cited instances above, there is another dimension that one needs to examine in such postcolonial texts: that of transculturation. Transculturation is the gaining of new cultures, but also, often, a loss of parts of an older one (Simonsen). In the Rushdie account the Indian residents of the Methwold Estate gain an Englishness, however nominally, and lose some of their Indianness. In Walcott’s poem, ‘Ruins of a Great House’, the postcolonial space remains grounded in the history of the colonial masters: Walcott’s speaker lists Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake and other ‘murderers’ and ‘poets’ as he calls them. The postcolonial can only define her/his legacy in terms of the colonial past.



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This legacy is modified into and through what Elena Stoican has termed ‘intentional hybridity’ (2013). Intentional hybridity, writes Stoican, ‘denotes various speeds of cultural transformation generated by cultural contacts’ (146). One immediately notes the paradox within the production and consumption of postcolonial texts. They, like their authors, are necessarily reified as symbols and embodiments of their national, cultural and ethnic identities but do not stop at just those because the postcolonial author in the process of fitting into the regime of authenticity (see chapter One) also manages to communicate a layered history and identity that is malleable, adaptable and hybridized, even if this hybridity and adaptability has to do solely with a continuing colonial legacy. That is, cultural reification is often co-existent with cultural transformation in the postcolonial text. Rushdie suggests a slower pace of cultural transformation among the Methwold Estate’s residents. In other postcolonial texts this hybridity is necessitated due to the historical circumstances in which characters find themselves. A well-known example of this would be the characters of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992). The title character, revealed as the Hungarian aristocrat Ladislaus de Almásy, has a wide variety of national, geographical and cultural connections: Hungary, France, England, the Levant and Libya. His childhood was spent in Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Syria, and schooling in England. As he puts it: ‘I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation’ (148). Caravaggio is a Canadian of Italian origin. Hana is French-Canadian, and of Finnish and Slovenian origins. Kip (Kirpal Singh) is a Sikh immigrant in England, and now fighting in the English army. In similar but not identical fashion, Hanif Kureishi’s characters in The Buddha of Suburbia and other texts present complicated portraits of their cultural identity even as they merge into the English/European landscapes. One could argue that each of these characters represents the postcolonial author’s attempts to reify her/his culture and embody it in one character – making the text a national/cultural allegory, no less – but the layering of the identity makes such an argument untenable. Kip is not a stereotype of Indian/Sikh identity alone. Nor is he an ‘authentic’ Sikh/Indian. He fits into a regime of authenticity mandated by the text’s diegetic universe. Ondaatje at one point describes Kip thus: The self-sufficiency and privacy Hana saw in him later were caused not just by his being a sapper in the Italian campaign. It was as much a result of being the anonymous member of another race, a part of the invisible world. (209)

Ondaatje takes the stereotype of the ‘invisible’ Other in England – the Indian – and turns it into something else. Kip as an alien is invisible and ‘anonymous’. (Incidentally a throw-away line of description of the European Almásy echoes the above account of Kip: ‘You were a mystery, a vacuum on their charts’, 269.) Yet Ondaatje’s description offers us much more. It is through this anonymity and invisibility that Kip has insinuated himself into English society. He has merged within it precisely because he is not

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identified or identifiable. It is possible to argue, then, that far from being invisible as a brown man in England, Kip might be ‘passing’ anonymously through the English scene. When Hana reads his self-sufficiency and privacy as stemming from the anonymity, then one could presume that racial anonymity was instrumental in a certain self-fashioning for Kip. Such an anonymity that combines the supposed invisibility of racial identity with a self-fashioning that enables merger into the receiving society is intentional hybridity. This hybridization, theorized famously by Homi Bhabha, contributes to one of the central thematics of postcolonial writing but is also, I argue, a key component of the thirdworldization of Europe and America. The postcolonial emphasis on intentional hybridity is not merely about the malleable postcolonial alone. When Ondaatje or Shamsie or Kureishi point to the mixed-up identities of the immigrants, travellers and residents of the formerly colonized nations, or even internally displaced Europeans, they embody what Periera calls the ‘the cosmopolitan force that comes from writers of the former British Empire’ (218). That is, these identities are not only cosmopolitan themselves, they cosmopolitanize English identities too. The hybridization of England or the world, in postcolonial literature, therefore is the effect of the layered cosmopolitanism that proceeds in centripetal fashion outward from the individual characters in Ondaatje or Shamsie to entire communities in Brick Lane (in Monica Ali) or New Jersey (in Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss). The characters are no longer merely the ‘formerly colonized’ – they are no longer reducible to this specific history of their country and culture. Through intentional hybridity they have distanced themselves from their traumatic received histories and moved closer to the identities they choose to adopt. As Hanif Kureishi puts it in The Buddha of Suburbia: ‘They [the British] were exhausted now; their Empire was gone; their day was done and it was our turn’ (cited in Parrinder 2008: 381). Cultural and identitarian reification by postcolonial authors are not to be read as instances of self-representation and self-fashioning alone. They are also critiques of the frames of recognition employed by the First World readers or the receiving societies in the case of immigrant identities. When the postcolonial novel speaks of the immigrant or the brown/black/yellow character in the former colony, it could also be read as a critique of failing frames of recognition where the vast majority of the human race is rendered invisible except when seen through First World eyes/lenses. In his celebrated essay, ‘The Politics of Recognition’ (1994), Charles Taylor proposes that recognition is a kind of respect conferred depending on the worth of the individual or group. His theory proposes that there is a subject who possesses this power to bestow recognition, and an object who might or might not receive recognition from the subject. The politics of recognition is, therefore, the politics that enabled one group to acquire this power. I suggest that the paradox of reification and the regimes of authenticity alongside the intentional hybridity of characters in postcolonial texts draws the First World’s attention to the processes of recognition – of difference and identity. It suggests that the First World does not possess an adequate frame of recog-



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nition, except in terms of the subject/object binary, and the postcolonial text tests this very frame by showing the agency of the object (such as Kip). Emergent literatures from the postcolony, then, introduce the cosmopolitan force that significantly alters the social imaginary, the self-perception and sense of cultural identity and the frames of recognition of the reading community in the First World cities. While exact reading habits and reader-responses are empirically difficult to pin down, it is safe to assume that the coverage and celebrity status of many of the authors cited in this study clearly points to their widespread popularity among the literary connoisseurs of the First World.

4.4.2 Emergent Literature as Multidirectional Memory When Achebe – to whom Adichie admits she owes considerable debt, and honours him by using his famous title in the first line of her Purple Hibiscus – fictionalized Igbo trauma at the hands of the colonial, he opened up a space hitherto unavailable to the formerly colonized nations (although in all cases across Africa and South Asia, literature dealing with the effects of colonialism exists from the nineteenth century, but without a global readership). Traumatic events such as the colonial experience, slavery and the Holocaust are often seen in isolation, and sometimes, as in the case of the Holocaust, rendered unique and singular. Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg has however persuasively argued that we cannot treat any one event as singular or unique. In his now-canonical work on multidirectional memory (2009) Rothberg makes several significant observations. He notes that W.E.B. Du Bois understood the relation between the Nazi genocide and colonial violence after a visit to Warsaw and in his 1949 article ‘The Negro and the Warsaw Ghetto’ recognized the differences as well as the similarities between them. Memories of different traumatic histories from different nations overlap. Rothberg insists that ‘competitive memory’ must be replaced by multidirectional memory, with the latter being ‘subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (3) so as to ‘draw attention to the dynamic transfers that take place between diverse places and times during the act of remembrance’ (11). In more recent work Rothberg continues his exploration. He writes: ‘There is an archive of multidirectional memory that stretches from early articulations by Aime Cesaire, Hannah Arendt, W. E. B. Du Bois, and others to more contemporary figures such as Caryl Phillips, Leila Sebbar, and Michael Haneke’ (2011: 524). His key point is: ‘the public articulation of collective memory by marginalized and oppositional social groups provides resources for other groups to articulate their own claims for recognition and justice’ (524). Further, he states: ‘a radically democratic politics of memory needs to include a differentiated empirical history, moral solidarity with victims of diverse injustices, and an ethics of comparison that coordinates the asymmetrical claims of those victims’ (526). Rothberg continues:

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The displacement called for today does not entail a removal of Holocaust memory from the public sphere, but rather a decentering of its abstract, reified form. Resources for such a decentering can be found in the archive of multidirectional memory. Decentering, in turn, does not mean relativization of the historical facts of the Nazi genocide … working through the implications and particularities of genocides needs to be separated from a discursive sacralization of the Holocaust that legitimates a politics of absolutism. (340)

Following Rothberg, I suggest that the postcolonial canon’s aura in the age of global literary cultures may be attributed to the making of such a multidirectional memory archive. This archive contains texts that explore Apartheid, civil war, dictatorships, the Holodomor, ‘disappearances’ (see, in particular, the works of Isabelle Allende, Mario Vargas Llosa, Joe Sacco, Igort, Lawrence Thornton, among others). These competing genocides and traumatic national histories may not displace the Holocaust, they certainly create a readership – and market – for similar but not identical histories in an age of Human Rights discourses and emancipatory campaigns. This multidirectional memory that examines genocidal continuums in Afghanistan, fundamentalisms in India and Bangladesh, oppressive regimes in South Africa and Nigeria in fictional accounts prevents not just the ‘discursive sacralization’ of the Holocaust: it also desacralizes 9/11 as a purely American tragedy. Hamid, Hosseini and Shamsie, to take three of the best-known postcolonial authors today, do address 9/11 as a great tragedy but they emplot it in Muslim lives in America, the geopolitics of the South Asian regions, the international relationships for Muslims around the world, and the cataclysmic effect on families from these regions. When Shamsie begins with Nagasaki and takes her plot via 9/11 New York (Burnt Shadows) she brings together two catastrophes and thereby desacralizes the latter. When she aligns the Armenian genocide with the First World War and the Indian independence movement she similarly desacralizes the European catastrophe by depicting the horrors from other parts of the world. Postcolonial literature’s multidirectional memory is a major contribution to the geocultural landscape of the world. Aligning atrocities and memories in what Marianne Hirsch termed ‘connective histories’ (2014), postcolonial literature is a significant constituent of the global landscape of memory. Debarati Sanyal in her work on ‘migrations’ of Holocaust memory and building on the work of Marianne Hirsch, argues that the aim is ‘not to singularize the Holocaust as the paradigm of historical trauma, but rather to connect its memory with other memories of atrocity, often through a focus on the complicities between distinctive regimes of violence’ (2015: 2).29 Postcolonial literature forces, as Rothberg suggests, attention upon spaces and moments in history that have hitherto been marginalized within the victim-history of the world. This is not competing victimage but a more comprehensive and balanced account of the contemporary.

29 However, such attempts to forge ‘connective histories’ between different regimes has not always been successful. The Hiroshima-Auschwitz project would be a case in point (see Zwingenberg 2014).



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4.4.3 Emergent Literature, Transruption and Global Affective Assemblages The decolonial cosmopolitan, rooted in but critically ‘detached’ from her/his culture of origin, might be productively read as an instance of Michel Serres’ parasite. A parasite, says Serres, was only a noise, but it was also a message, a bit of information producing panic: an interruption, a corruption, a rupture of information. Was the noise really a message? Wasn’t it, rather, static, a parasite? A parasite who has the last word, who produces disorder and who generates a different order. (3)

The postcolonial text and author are parasites that depend on the global consumer/ culture circuit for their own sustenance but who contribute significantly to the circuit. The parasite introduces a mutual transformation, in itself and the host. Arriving as ‘noise’, it proceeds to introduce a new order. The postcolonial author introduces a transruption. Barnor Hesse defines transruption as a series of ‘contestatory cultural and theoretical interventions which, in their impact as cultural differences, unsettle social norms, and threaten to dismantle hegemonic concepts and practices’ (2000: 17). Due to the multiple affiliations – cultural, economic, ethnic – to their countries and cultures but also to the global circuit, the postcolonial author transrupts both: the local and the global. Writing for a global audience ensures a transruption of local affiliations when the authors launch considered critiques of the nation. Take, for instance, Kiran Desai’s trenchant criticism of Third World poverty, the immigrant ‘cowardice’ and First World individualism, all articulated in the space of one paragraph in The Inher­ itance of Loss: He knew what his father thought: that immigration, so often presented as a heroic act, could just as easily be the opposite; that it was cowardice that led many to America; fear marked the journey, not bravery; a cockroachy desire to scuttle to where you never saw poverty, not really, never had to suffer a tug to your conscience; where you never heard the demands of servants, beggars, bankrupt relatives, and where your generosity would never be openly claimed; where by merely looking after your wife-child-dog-yard you could feel virtuous. Experience the relief of being an unknown transplant to the locals and hide the perspective granted by journey. (299)

Desai refuses to see immigration as a heroic pursuit of wealth and prosperity. She also refuses the burden of nostalgia when she indicts the country of origin for driving its citizens away to foreign shores. Transrupting both the narrative of the originary nation and the receiving one with her criticism, Desai’s passage in her globally acclaimed Booker winning novel serves a parasitic function. She is at once decolonial and cosmopolitan. The postcolonial literary text transrupts the global by introducing new ethnicities, new identities, and new critiques of the global – for instance, when Hamid, Hos-

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seini or Shamsie point to the First World creation of terrorism in South Asia – into the map. Reviews of works like The Reluctant Fundamentalist (now on South Asian studies syllabi in numerous universities in the USA and around the world) note that fundamentalism, as depicted by the Afghani and Pakistani authors, is a direct consequence of the ethnic hatred in post-9/11 America. One such review in The Yale Review of International Studies is unequivocal: Changez feels betrayed by America in the aftermath of 9/11. Manhattan, which had always seemed welcoming to him, and its crowds, in which he had always found a place and felt at ease, suddenly began to seem to accuse him. Suddenly, he became the target of racist slurs... Changez’s rationale for becoming fundamentalist is contemptible. He wrongly reduces the contemporary political context to a binary – that he could either continue with his New York job and thereby side with America, or abandon America and return to Pakistan. As various inspiring real life accounts attest, these were not the solitary options available to a Pakistani and a Muslim in the aftermath of 9/11. (Abhimanyu Chandra 2012)

The review correctly points to the reductive portrait Hamid paints of the rise of fundamentalism and the ‘conversion’, so to speak, of the moderate American Muslim. But Hamid also disrupts the portrait of a ‘tolerant’ America with this character’s opinions and views. It is this disruption – authentic or not, believable or not – that constitutes the transruption. It is the noise in the narratives of the First World. Hamid and Hosseini force the First World to listen to voices that draw a different history of the USA. Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017) begins with an airport scene: Isma’s extended interrogation at Heathrow as she prepares to leave for Boston. As the novel progresses we discover that she comes from a family whose father – who allegedly died when being transported to Guantanamo – and then her brother, Parvaiz, had both been radicalized. The radical Muslim in London (or the USA) is the subject of the early chapters. Eamonn (a Westernized version of the clearly Muslim Ayman) puzzles over Isma’s family: He tried to imagine growing up knowing your father to be a fanatic, his death a mystery open to terrible speculation, but the attempt was defeated by his simple inability to know how such a man as Adil Pasha could have existed in Britain to begin with. (58)

Isma herself says to Eamonn ‘I’d find it more difficult to not be Muslim’ (21). Eamonn’s father, Karamat Lone, tries his best to be the ‘good Muslim’ so that eventually ‘the tabloids that had previously attacked him championed him as a LONE CRUSADER taking on the backwardness of British Muslims’ (35, emphasis in original). These are the different and complicated histories of the migrant, and much-maligned Muslim, that authors like Shamsie and Hamid try to represent. The postcolonial novel alters the geography, both physical and cultural, through the introduction of new cultural practices, languages and ways of life (notably seen in the depictions of Soho, New York, Spitalfields and other areas of First World metrop-



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olises) seen in the work of Timothy Mo, Monica Ali, Kiran Desai, Buchi Emecheta and others. The transruptive influence of the postcolonial text need not stem from its politics. Indeed, it is possible to treat the postcolonial text’s transruptive power as located within its affective component. This does not, let me hasten to add, return us to the ‘sentimental East’ stereotype of the colonial era. Rather, it makes a case for a politics of affect that effectively dismantles the sacralisation of the First World’s peoples and tragedies. I suggest that ethnicity alone then does not quite market the postcolonial text. The postcolonial text and author are components of a transcultural flow that includes fashion, food, music and celebrity culture. Postcolonial authors often ‘complain that their agency is subsumed or undermined by the association of their works with overly determined local political affiliations, whether national or otherwise’ (Brouillette 4). But is this affiliation, real or imagined, to the local and the national a boost to their global standing (in terms of authenticity regimes) or a threat? The postcolonial text becomes a saleable part of a global assemblage of beauty, fashion, models of masculinity and femininity with the concomitant flows of desire, attraction and affect, which in turn boosts their national standing. Ethnic identity apart, texts with their representations of non-European feminine beauty or masculinity obtain a particular purchase and mobility within what Vanita Reddy terms ‘transnational beauty assemblages’ (2013). Reddy writes: Indian and Indian American diasporic female beauty signal access to transnational mobility and capital, marking its continuity with the elite cosmopolitanism represented in … media images. At the same time, Lahiri’s stories bring into focus the affective capacities of Indian feminine beauty, which rupture beauty’s elite cosmopolitan attachments and generate multiple emergent modes of social belonging. In both reflecting continuity with these mass-mediated images of Indian female beauty and infusing them with affective capacities that mark their nonequivalence with such images, Lahiri’s stories circulate as part of a transnational beauty assemblage. (31)

While these are, Reddy admits, ‘smaller scale shifts in the global economy’ (31), they constitute a rupture within the global flows by generating affect and a ‘socializing force within moments of cross-cultural and interracial encounter’ (32). Beauty, writes Reddy, ‘generates affects such as estrangement, identification, and desire, which open onto articulations of citizenship and belonging’ (33). Reddy’s perspicacious reading of the cultural flows enables us to expand the focus beyond questions and themes of beauty to include the global affective assemblages built around models of femininity, masculinity and non-white bodies. The postcolonial aura, it may be argued, is partially the effect of affective interests generated through the account of such bodies. While such bodies may be said to generate interest precisely because of their exotic appeal, the point is that they enable an affective turn in the response to the postcolonial text. Here, for instance, is an account of the university professor aunt in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus:

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Aunty Ifeoma was as tall as Papa, with a well-proportioned body. She walked fast, like one who knew just where she was going and what she was going to do there. And she spoke the way she walked… (71)

Kambili the protagonist watches the aunt and her own mother converse, ‘Mama’s bare lips were pale compared to Aunty Ifeoma’s, covered in a shiny bronze lipstick’ (74). And later: I watched every movement she made; I could not tear my eyes away. It was the fearlessness about her, about the way she gestured as she spoke, the way she smiled to show that wide gap. (76)

Later Kambili dreams that her own laughter ‘was cackling and throaty and enthusiastic, like Aunty Ifeoma’s’ (88). Even Ifeoma’s whisper, writes Adichie, ‘was like her, tall, exuberant, fearless, loud, larger than life’ (95). Ifeoma speaks to men, including her brother (Kambili’s father) with none of the docility of the Nigerian women (exemplified in the first half of the book in Kambili’s mother, Beatrice). Kambili notes: Every time Aunty Ifeoma spoke to Papa, my heart stopped, then started again in a hurry. It was the flippant tone; she did not seem to recognize that it was Papa, that he was different, special. I wanted to reach out and press her lips shut. (77)

The point I wish to make here is: Ifeoma who serves as a role model for feminine strength and emancipation in Adichie’s novel serves as a node for the affective response to the text itself. Ifeoma fits in with the global discursive assemblage over women’s rights, and the accounts of her posture, gait, behaviour and attitude serve to embody this insistence. Beatrice in contrast also generates affect: of sympathy, anger and pity. However, as the novel proceeds, we discover that Beatrice’s rebellion is of an entirely different sort. In the stereotype of the docile woman whose sphere of influence is the kitchen, Beatrice uses the kitchen as a space from which to launch her rebellion. She slowly poisons her husband and thereby liberates her children and herself. A model of postcolonial femininity is offered in Adichie’s description. More significantly, this model is an aspirational one for the young Kambili. The admiration and desire to be as Ifeoma is evident in Adichie’s account, through the eyes of Kambili. Ifeoma, approximating to transnational feminist models theorized and valorized (including by Adichie herself in interviews and public talks where she called herself a ‘Happy Feminist’) over the 1990s, is part of the global assemblage. Kambili’s attraction and admiration – an affective relation – for Ifeoma may therefore be read as an instance of postcolonial feminist citizenship-training that is also resonant of global trends. Works like Adichie’s or Emecheta’s that speak of empowered women are, in their documentation of atrocity or oppression, double-voiced. The theme of women’s oppression in patriarchal society, for instance, is located within a discursive structure specific to a time and place (Nigeria), thus ensuring that the atrocity is made recognizable, even as the demand for rights is made part of a universal schema of values.



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In other cases, the affective intervention by the postcolonial into the global assemblage of sentiment emerges from its characterization of suffering. Now this readily slots the postcolonial into the ‘suffering postcolonial’ category: a tag detested and objected to by numerous postcolonials as ‘a single story’ (Adichie 2009). At an early moment in Sefi Atta’s A Bit of Difference (2015), one Nigerian tells another, the protagonist Deola: They should give it a rest, the whole lot of them. Africa should be called the Sob Continent the way they carry on. It’s all gloom and doom from them, and the women are worse, all that false angst. (34)

This ‘sob’ story is the single story manufactured and articulated by the postcolonial Africans themselves, as Atta suggests, but which fits into the global humanitarian paradigm, and gesture, directed at the postcolonial. The critic Gillian Whitlock writes: ‘the ‘single story’ is the currency of humanitarian transactions, and its value is called into question by those who are framed in terms of the “well-meaning pity” of neoliberal sentimentality’ (2015: 192). That said, Whitlock herself offers a way of reading fiction that seeks to fit postcolonial models of the family, masculinity/femininity and social relations into a global affective assemblage. Examining Dave Eggers’ What Is the What she argues that Eggers shapes it [Valentino’s voice] ethically and aesthetically drawing on the vocabulary of the humanitarian imaginary, a heritage of testimonial narrative that turns to the dead to make an ethical claim on the ‘remade world of the living’. The legacy of the longue durée of postcolonial life narrative – an ethics of sentimental association between metropolitan subjects and the suffering of distant strangers – shapes this humanitarian appropriation of the African story. (196)

It is this solidarity with distant strangers that postcolonial texts, riding on representations of suffering and traumatized bodies, enables, indeed necessitates. It is an ethical claim that interrupts the global consumer cultural circuits in order to generate what Stef Craps calls ‘transcultural empathy’ (2013: 84). The affective assemblages modified by the circulation of postcolonial texts instantiate not just the hitherto silent subaltern in the form of a speaking subject. The significance of the postcolonial text in the global cultural circuit lies in its construction of a First World listening subject as well. Turning here to the work of Wendy Chun, I suggest that the affective assemblage demands a listening subject, indicating a ‘politics of listening as a necessary complement to the politics of speaking’ (2002: 161). The postcolonial text therefore attempts to construct a listening publics out of, and in, the First World. What are the ethics of listening to such voices as Nasreen’s, Adiga’s or Alexis Wright’s? Chun goes on to argue that we do not need a politics that merely valorizes the (postcolonial’s) act of speaking in and of itself. Rather, we need a politics that listens to a person’s speech or silence and then ponders over the response to it (161).

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As an instantiation of a global affective assemblage, the postcolonial text documenting suffering or even exotic ethnic identity stakes an ethical claim to be heard in specific ways. If the author constructed herself as a territorialized cosmopolitan in order to speak (albeit informed and inflected by global discourses) of specific local concerns to the world at large, then such a speaking subject demands a distant but listening subject. This subject recognizes the other’s voice, does not seek to subsume it, but accords it its difference. For Chun this ‘contract of listening’ opens up the ‘self to the others’ and in this way would ‘allow for history’ (163). The postcolonial aura emanates from the construction of such a listening contract, a listening subject and the opening up of the culture of conversation to ensure that the world listens to the stories of men and women in the formerly colonized worlds. Debates about authenticity and the perceived crises in representation apart, the emergence of the postcolonial text in the global literary circuits demands new forms of listening and citation.

4.4.4 Postcolonial Literature and a Global Precariat Public Sphere By ‘precariat public sphere’ I mean that public sphere made up of the ‘precarious lives’ (Judith Butler’s now-renowned construction, 2004) the postcolonial author speaks for, but also a public sphere made of diverse readers whose concerns and politics may lie with these classes. The displaced, disenfranchised and dispossessed – for various reasons – populations in the formerly colonized nations constitute a significant section of the precariat public sphere. The victims of the caste system in India appeared metonymically in the form of Velutha in Roy’s The God of Small Things, a critically acclaimed global best-seller. The condition of Muslim women in conservative societies is fictionalized in Leila Abouleila’s Minaret and Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim, and immigrants in Zadie Smith, Kureishi and Ali. Dystopias such as M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2017) or Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017) speak of the transformation of the postcolony into ghettoized spaces. The postcolonial novel fits into a discursive formation dedicated to this precariat public sphere, which includes Truth Commissions, Amnesty and Human Development Reports and media coverage of the inhabitants of this sphere. Literary fiction is a response to the quest for the universally recognizable and acceptable languages of rights and responsibilities that has been underway for some time now. The Human Rights scholar Upendar Baxi writes: How far do these [the narrative voices of the oppressed] translate the variegated adopted/ imposed/borrowed grammars of international human rights as expressive of the pain, sorrow, and suffering of constantly disenfranchised humans? How may one translate the vernacular languages of human violation, abuse, and suffering into the inclusive/commodious normative languages of contemporary human rights? To what extent may contemporary human rights lan-



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guages advance the task of constructing languages of our shared political and social responsiveness and responsibility to redress human abuse, violation and violence? (2009: xxv-xxvi)

If the language of political rights, of citizenship and universal human rights might need to be infused with the language of affect from the precariat public sphere then literary fiction such as Roy’s or Anam’s or Adichie’s is such an instance. The employment, whether consciously by the author or due to the market forces, of the national project within a global literary field enables a familiarization of ethnic difference, singularity and distinctiveness for the global field. Thus, Apartheid fiction, subaltern memoirs, Aboriginal life writing are rooted in the national-local but by virtue of their imbrication in the global field of rights they attain a discursive familiarity (if not a literary one). The ‘selling of regions is regarded as one way of mobilising and inventing regional distinctiveness in an age of global consumerism’, writes Defne Karaosmanoglu (2013: 372). In her study of Turkish restaurants in London, Karaosmanoglu makes a key point: ‘they attempt … modernisation and familiarising rather than claiming difference’ (381). I suggest that national projects in postcolonial texts achieve a similar effect where they balance a reified national plot that is then rendered familiar precisely because they fit into a pre-existing global literary market and value system. The postcolonial text becomes a familiar geocultural category in the age of entrenched human rights, anti-war protests, anti-racist and pro-refugee campaigns. Aryn Bartley summarizes this discursive and material context of such postcolonial societies: In the context of a global conversation about human rights, the construction of social narratives about suffering produced by interethnic racism and class injustice, rather than the forgetting of that suffering, has been central to the establishment of democratic states. (2009: 105)

Bartley points to the necessity of narratives that are contextualized within a global conversation in setting up democratic states. Thus, the local/national theme serves as an instantiation of a global concern in the same discursive field. The postcolonial aura proceeds from the distinctiveness of national and regional identity which is recognizable because it resonates with a discursive field. The point is: regional or ethnic distinctiveness in the global literary field is located within the parameters of the familiar. While the postcolonial aura does not detach ‘ethnics’ from ‘ethnic literature’ entirely, it does not hinge upon the ethnics alone, given the standardized discourses into which the postcolonial text fits. In the global market for, say, suffering or stories of oppression, in United Nations documents or Amnesty campaigns, novels of civil war, oppression, marginalization, religious bigotry and fundamentalisms, class-conflict and poverty and torture (A God in Every Stone, Burnt Shadows, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Anil’s Ghost, The Kite Runner) find a ready space. This is not to take away the literary qualities of the work of a Coetzee or an Adichie but rather an assertion of the manufacturing and management of taste that these

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authors engage upon, determine and adjudicate in their production and consumption of stories. The literary, as numerous scholars have demonstrated in the recent past (Slaughter 2007, Hunt 2007, Dawes 2009, Anker 2012, Goldberg and Moore 2012, Nayar 2016), encodes the language of political citizenship and rights and the globally recognised languages of, say, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The literary is one regime of representation whose larger ambit when dealing with its subjects from the precariat public sphere is to ponder about ‘how to create cultural images that will not perpetuate cycles of violence and revenge’ (Goldberg 2007: 14). The purpose of such a regime, argues Goldberg, is to arouse a ‘deeper consciousness’ that would encourage the audience to ‘act in a way that would contribute to efforts to decrease the occurrence of such events in the future’ (14-15). Literary texts, then, contribute to a ‘collective consciousness about torture, genocide, and other such violations’ (15). However, as noted at the beginning of this section, the precariat public sphere is also made of people/readers with an interest in such precarious lives, even though this is a form of distant consumption. The public sphere can also be constituted, Christian Novetzke has argued, through consumption, affect and reading/listening: By a public, here, I mean an open, social audience, one that attends to, but does not necessarily participate in, a capacious and circulating discourse within a given region, language, or other social context. This is a context of mutual intelligibility and access. Publics are constituted primarily by passive attention, and people often participate in them through consuming discourse and reflecting their engagement through affect. A public is defined by its open-ended address, available for attentive reception. A public is a social formation that is reflexive and organized by the circulation of a particular discourse of mutual concern. A public can be of almost any size; it may be situated in a given historical time or geographic space, or it may be transregional and transhistorical. In most cases a public is maintained through media such as literacy, visual culture, art, or performance, though any medium for the circulation of ideas will do. And so a public is an open conversation. (Novetzke 2016: 28)

Recent commentators propose that civic speech has for too long been seen as the cornerstone of the public sphere. They propose that we need to start thinking of other modes of address (such as the visual) that enables a public sphere, one that accounts for the role of the civic spectator. It entails a ‘reconsideration of civic spectatorship that takes into account changing modes of circulation and digital technologies, which fundamentally alter the contemporary public culture’ (Cram et al 2016: 228-9). Even (passive) acts of seeing become acts of knowing as consumers and viewers impute new meanings to familiar messages. Such a formulation of a witnessing public sphere of consumption, of listening, spectatorship and reading rather than deliberations or debate is constructed out of postcolonial literary texts that highlight precarity of various kinds. A global precariat public sphere is, then, the intersection of the production of texts about precarious lives and the global consumption of these texts.



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4.5 Postcolonial Literature and Subjunctive Nationhood Postcolonial literature’s aura is also the effect of its production of subjunctive rather than definitive nationhoods. This brings us, admittedly, dangerously close to the Jameson argument about the ‘national allegory’ as the standard postcolonial genre. The point, drawing upon the arguments made above, is that the postcolonial emphasis on subalternity, indigeneity, precarity and processes of subalternization in newly independent nations such as Bangladesh or India, with their tense ethnicities, identity politics, wars and coups, constitute a key theme about the nation itself. Glenn Odom, writing about Yoruba Oríkì performances, asks: ‘what manner of nation might grow from the ongoing process of Yorùbá performance of identity with its accommodations and conflicts?’ Odom continues: I write in the subjunctive, because the Nigerian nation, with its multiple constitutions, ethnicities, military coups, and wars is in the process not only of national redefinition but also in the process of defining the concept of nation itself. To reverse the logic, it is not surprising that the various performative manifestations of the Yorùbá subject have yet to be constructed as a unified whole, given that there is no nation to interpellate them. Examining the disparate contexts of oríkì performance strongly suggests a conception of national identity that is able to incorporate traditional and contemporary notions of the subject into a synergistic and fluid whole. (2011: 76-7)

Odom’s point is well taken, for it gestures at the role of performance in the construction of national identity. In other words, it is not that the genre draws upon the national longing, but that genres tell us what to long for as a nation. Postcolonial novels such as Hamid’s or Roy’s are, therefore, to be read not as reflecting the nation as it stands but, by critiquing it, ask: what might the nation become? In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness Arundhati Roy writes: Normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg: its humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yolk of egregious violence. It is our constant anxiety about that violence, our memory of its past labours and our dread of its future manifestations, that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we continue to coexist – continue to live together, tolerate each other and, from time to time, murder one another. As long as the centre holds, as long as the yolk doesn’t run, we’ll be fine. In moments of crisis it helps to take the long view. (150-51)

Roy is pointing to not only a violent history of a nation but also the potential for future violence, metaphorized in her image of the egg: a symbol of reproduction and lineage. Roy’s metaphor is powerful also because she proposes the core with the potential for replication – the DNA, so to speak – is one full of incipient violence. What is the life form, or nation, that might emerge from an egg of this kind? ‘Subjunctive nationhood’ as performed in its literature is the expression of a set of aspirations and alternate models of the nation than from what exists now. Postcolonial literature undertakes to perform the nation via a critique but also via this aspirational content implicit in the critique.

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Thus, even as the postcolonial novel seeks to serve as a ‘global novel’ with global concerns, it also embodies local and regional aspirations. The global novel is situated within a discourse of national aspirations and nation-building. The texts showcase an intra-Asian but also intra-postcolonial aspirational politics, of which one component, indisputably, is of competing victimhood resulting in the novels of suffering. Erik Falk studying the work of South African writer Yvonne Vera argues that for the formerly oppressed, literature becomes a means of demonstrating how they have become modern through the employment of print. Such a literature responds both to the global historical moment, as authors create transnational and transcultural literary modes, and, through their resistance, to the stifling conditions of colonialism and apartheid in the (proto-) South African nation. (2015: 42, emphasis in original)

The oppressed and the colonized no longer wish to stay within the identities ascribed them by their colonial masters and seek to evolve a set of identities of their own choosing. The right to narrate which the postcolonial seizes is transcoded into the right to choose the frame, modes and styles of narration. Falk effectively bypasses the limiting binary local/global by arguing that it is the emphasis on the local-national project that enables the postcolonial author’s location in a global literary-cultural field: a ‘national literary project as a way of positioning [themselves] in a diversified global literary field’ (Falk 41, emphasis in original). It is in their positioning as possessing modern concerns for their respective nations that makes the postcolonial novel an embodiment of subjunctive nationhood. Postcolonial novels that deal with the possibilities of recuperated and modified nationhood through the circulation of their symbolic logic of suffering, inequality and victimhood, however, may be seen in terms of an aspirational modern nation, when the novel participates in the global discourses of human rights or equality. Ultimately, these texts encode transformative potential, of various kinds, for these nations – hence the emphasis on subjunctive nationhood. Such a subjunctive nationhood, needless to say, is not easy. For instance, the postcolony’s quest for a constitutional scheme, Bill of Rights or federalism, adapted from global (Euro-American) models after political independence often comes up against older models of citizenship, governance, ethnic identity and its assertions, remnants of older social orders, among others. Commentators have noted, for instance, South Africa’s struggles with the Bill of Rights which is very European in its outlook but comes into conflict with customs, older forms of African sovereignty and affiliations. This Constitution is not only unusually attentive to universal enfranchisement and human rights, it is also quite explicit in its accommodation of the cultural claims of minorities. Indeed, if its own rhetorical construction were a description of its political sociology, South Africa – deeply committed to the rule of law, to the monopoly of the state over the legitimate means of violence, to a conception of citizenship that both transcends and tolerates diversity –/would seem

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to inhabit the very ideal of the Euro-nation in its twenty-first century guise. Yet, almost from the start, a ‘crisis of culture’, a counter-politics of ethnic assertion against the jurisdiction of the state, has rumbled beneath the surface of the new polity, threatening to disrupt the founding premises of its Bill of Rights… It has also raised fundamental questions of sovereignty: the sovereignty of African traditional governance and the kingdom of custom, in which ethnic subjects claim, and are claimed by, another species of authority. Conflicts are occurring more and more frequently across South Africa over initiation ritual and occult beliefs, inheritance and succession, corporal punishment, landholding, and many things besides. (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005: 300)

The postcolony’s aspiration for a modern nation, complete with the Euro-American driven constitutional ethos, is at odds with the competing models of sovereignty, belonging and affiliation, which then erupt in the form of ethnic assertions and conflicts over the limits of the state (for instance, in India, the right of the state to intervene in centuries-old customs that are now deemed cruel and unacceptable under modern law, but which, for its practitioners, constitute the core of their cultural identity).30 As the Comaroff passage indicates, questions of ancient authority brush up against the legally constructed, modern structures and definitions of authority in the postcolony. The dream of an ‘inclusive democracy’ dreamt up by the postcolonial Constitution does not account for divisive identities, as Sumit Sarkar noted in the case of India (2005). The modern state would not sit comfortably, as we now see in South Africa, India, and other postcolonies where ‘things African’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2005) or ‘things Indian’ do not map onto modern teleologies of the state.

4.6 Conclusion Thirdworldism then is the co-branding of the postcolonial author as ethnic chic and global icon, as a cosmopolitan with strong connections and commitment to countries of origin and embedded in their localities. Postcolonialism’s texts serve as aspirational narratives of the nation-to-become, even as the past is carefully fictionalized for critique. The regimes of value for the postcolonial author/text is mixed, even as its circulation alters the global cultural assemblage by introducing variations, noise and transruptions. The postcolonial is, then, not to be identified as either purely local or global. Self-fashioning and market strategies project both. As ethnic chic, the postcolonial is literally and figuratively the face of a new world. The postcolonial is transcultural, always already translated, commodified but also politically significant. Its texts contribute to the global by bringing to attention colonial legacies that inform several

30 A recent example from India would be the legal prohibition on jallikuttu in the southern state of Tamil Nadu which created a public protest because for Tamil-speaking peoples the ban was an unnecessary state interference in an ancient sport that that defined Tamil identity for many (see http://www. bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-38714539; 3 Oct. 2017).

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segments of the world even now and which need to be addressed in the light of the neo-colonial world order. Then, in turn, they bring global discourses to bear on local conditions. As a discursive-philosophical condition instantiated within literary cultures, Thirdworldism accompanies, occasionally subsumes, the commodification of the ethnic in order to push through this ethnic’s ethics and politics into the world’s debates on these issues. Even when and as it allows the Third World to be commodified, it takes the more ‘serious’ commodification – of its resources, including water, oil and people – into its account of neo-colonial world disorders and continuing empires. Thirdworldism is the re-worlding of the globe into making new imaginaries that include the aspirations and tensions of the formerly colonized. Robert Young summarizes the political project of the postcolonial, which underwrites the discourse of Thirdworldism, as follows: its objectives have always involved a wide-ranging political project – reconstruct Western knowledge formations, reorient ethical norms, turn the power structures of the world upside down, refashion the world from below. The postcolonial has always been concerned with interrogating the interrelated histories of violence, domination, inequality, and injustice, with addressing the fact that, and the reasons why, millions of people in this world still live without things that most of those in the West take for granted. (2012: 20)

5 Postcolonial Texts: Towards a New Humanism This chapter argues that central to the making of the aura around postcolonial texts from Africa, Asia and South America is the contribution they make towards revitalizing and reinventing humanism. If, as Michael Ignatieff proposes, human rights discourse is now the lingua franca of a globalized moral thought (2001), and if the definition of the human requires a narrative tradition of the human (Langlois 2005), then the postcolonial literary texts offer us the ruined, bruised, broken vulnerable no-longer-recognizable human. The broken body, as Judith Butler (2004) observes, is very far from our normative ideas of the human itself. If traditional humanism gave us the coherent, self-determined, autonomous and agential human, the new humanism shows us its opposite, and demands that we generate a humanism whose primary attention is the vulnerable body and the injured ‘person’. However, this – the exhibition of broken bodies – is not the only means through which the postcolonial text fits into the global discourses on humanism. Humanism centers the human in all studies and evaluations of social processes and cultural practices, whether legal, medical, philological or scientific. Critiques of the Humanities – such as the feminist or the postcolonial – have unpacked the exclusionary tendencies within European Humanism: tendencies that, through discourses and practices, located ethnicities, races, communities beyond the category of the ‘Human’ (Davies 1997). Universalizing the ‘Human’, these critiques demonstrated, was a deeply political project because it universalized the white man as the standard and prototype of all humans. Postcolonial humanism builds and draws upon such critiques, and discovers how European humanism was inextricably linked to the colonial project. Even colonialism’s so-called civilizational mission, postcolonial scholars and commentators such as Frantz Fanon observed, was underwritten by racialized principles of exclusion that enabled the social, political and economic system of the European empires in Africa and Asia to banish the colonized subjects to the margins of humanity, serving only as secondary life forms within the gigantic organism that was the imperial structure. It is this inheritance, from the postcolonial interpretation of the universalism of European humanism, that turns postcolonial humanism towards its interrogation of the state of nations that, having once borne the weight of European humanism, function as models of exclusion even as they seek, in the politico-constitutional realm, to expand the rights regime, welfare or suffragette. In the embryonic stages of nation-building the recognition of vulnerability of large numbers of people is far more crucial to, say, the rights regime, than any construction of grand narratives of national pride, national identity or national progress. Postcolonial humanism of the late twentieth century and beyond is concerned, then, primarily with those who do not count within the nation and questions grand narratives that exclude segments of the already vulnerable population from the ambit of the nation even as it enunciates universalizing terms such as ‘all Indians’ or ‘all Africans’. Such a © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.

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humanism, especially in its literary manifestations, details the processes that exclude certain sections from humanity, thus rendering her/him the outsider, processes that undermine the stated aspirations of the postcolonial nation to become inclusive and democratic. It is committed to an examination of processes that, instead of ensuring that the vulnerable do not become helpless (to deploy Adriana Cavarero’s distinction, 2011), render them open to further exploitation precisely because they are already vulnerable. This humanism cannot emerge, argue thinkers like Frantz Fanon, from any available European model, which embeds humanism within colonialism. Towards the end of The Wretched of the Earth Fanon makes the following argument: It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man ... So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her ... If we want to respond to the expectations of our peoples, we must look elsewhere besides Europe … For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (239)

Here ‘the risks of what nationalism may develop into do not ever negate the necessity of directing anti-colonial liberation through the unit of the nation “which is sacred and fundamental” [Fanon]’, as Laura Chrisman notes (2011: 24). That is, Fanon does believe in the nation as a key element in the constitution of a new identity and humanity, but a nation restricted to both raciological thinking and capitalism, in Chrisman’s reading of Fanon, will prevent a new humanism. As Chrisman summarizes it: the advent of a nonracial humanism, the transition from national to social consciousness, is conditional upon the creation of new economic relations within the postcolonial nation-state, and across the post-colonial world. (24, emphasis in original)

For numerous postcolonies, then, if we were to read Fanon’s texts in the light of Chrisman’s interpretation, the turn to neo-liberal economic policies, the advent of the new ‘Empire’ (Hardt and Negri) with its economic and cultural globalization, is a neo-colonial twist out of which no humanism can possibly emerge. At some point, crafting a new humanism also means moving beyond the nationstate and the racial divides. Frantz Fanon would write in this same text, The Wretched of the Earth: ‘if nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead-end’ (2004: 144). Fanon, seeking a humanism not defined in terms of national identity or either side of the colonizer/colonized divide, with humanism being the alleged hallmark of either former victims or the Enlightened European, would write in Toward the African Revolution: ‘It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built to the dimensions of the universe … the colonial peoples must redouble their vigilance and their vigor’ (114, 126). In Black Skin, White



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Masks, right on the opening page, Fanon would inventory some of the features of such a new humanism: Toward a new humanism…. Understanding among men…. Our colored brothers… Mankind, I believe in you.… Race prejudice…. To understand and to love…. (2008: 1, ellipsis in original)

Fanon’s new humanism was, according to Stefan Kipfer, a transformative one that entailed a transformation of both colonizer and colonized: The liberating horizon of countercolonialism was a new humanism. Contrary to false colonial humanism, this genuine humanism “concerns the whole of humanity” and wants to disalienate colonized and colonizer alike (Fanon 1967b:144; 1963:316). This can be achieved only through a transformation of the subjectivities of the dominated and the dominant. (Kipfer 2011: 96, emphasis in original)

Kipfer too, when elaborating Fanon, proposes a movement beyond the binary, colonizer/colonized, in order to point to the deleterious effects of colonization in both. That different postcolonial thinkers sought the new humanism in different modes of decolonization, of course, remains a truism.31 Decolonization that moves beyond raciological thought alone can bring in a new humanism, for thinkers like Fanon. This might require, Fanon argues, multiple national and international alliances: of Third World peasants, the working classes and the lumpen proletariat, as well as Europeans and members of the white race sympathetic to the cause of the workers and the Third World. In other words, an international alliance of people united in their insistence on anti-raciological, anti-colonial and anti-capitalist thinking. Moving away from Fanon and others in the beyond-race thinking, another way of framing an emergent postcolonial humanism is also possible.

31 For instance, Fanon saw the anti-colonial violence of the colonized as a means of self-affirmation, and therefore intrinsic to the making of the new human. Gandhi, on the other hand, saw non-violence as a mode of inventing the new human (Srivastava 2010). Others, such as Paul Gilroy (2000, 2004), have sought a ‘planetary humanism’ by drawing upon Black thinkers such as W.E.B. DuBois. However, the turn to cosmopolitanism, planetarity and diaspora by Gilroy has been seen as a race-neutral move, compounded by the Enlightenment legacies that he continues to work with (see Gikandi 2002, Chrisman 2011). Elsewhere, I have proposed that Fanon’s reflections speak of a new humanism, ‘born out of the historical experience of colonialism, the struggle for independence and post-colonial reflections on all these’ (2013:3). For a sense of what Nielsen (2013) calls ‘polyphonic humanism’ in African thought, specifically Leopold Senghor, see Rabaka (2009).

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To ‘be human’ is to demand that the social, economic and cultural contexts be conducive to the reduction of vulnerability at the local levels. The nation, in this argument, has to serve, via the state, as a guarantor of rights and safety. From this perspective, individual vulnerability depends on cultural contexts that are themselves vulnerable because all ontology is social ontology (Turner 2006). Bryan Turner contends that the vulnerable subject is embedded in ‘institutions that exist to protect human vulnerability’ (6). Turner argues that, ironically, where we need a ‘strong state to protect us … state power is often the cause of human rights failures’ (33). The institutional precarity of the state, the economy and the cultural frame that transform individual vulnerability into helplessness are fields of inquiry for postcolonial humanists, interested, as it is, in the exclusion of some from the category of the human. In its insistence on an examination of those excluded from the category of the human, postcolonial literature fits in, again, with the global turn to ethics, human rights and human vulnerability within the bounds of the new nation-state. The postcolonial text intersects with the global discourses (and practices) of biopolitics. This chapter proposes that the postcolonial text contributes to the new humanism by studying and representing domains in which the human is being interrogated, dehumanized and even destroyed: the biopolitical regime that alters, often for the worse, the spaces of the nation. It further examines how these texts embody a literature of prejudice where, through the characters’ encounters with prejudice – others’ and their own – the constructed nature of historical prejudice is exposed. The chapter also studies the construction of hope and a certain kind of humanism – built upon the acceptance of difference, singularity but also generalizable vulnerability and relationality. The chapter thus moves from the making of vulnerable bodies in biopolitical regimes to the idea of a new humanism.

5.1 The Biopolitical Regime in the Postcolonial Text The postcolonial text’s critique of the state and insistence on the human is routed via a careful exposition of structures and processes that may be grouped under the term ‘biopolitical’. Building on the work of Edward Said and Giorgio Agamben, Russell West-Pavlov proposes that ‘two of Said’s concepts for the spatial analysis of literary texts, “imaginative geographies” and of “contrapuntal reading” may be helpful in rendering more concrete the manifest spatial abstraction of Agamben’s biopolitical “topologies”’ (2015: 18). West-Pavlov notes how Agamben’s studies of camps, ghettos and spaces of incarceration wherein ‘bare life’ is produced may be profitably read along with Said’s interest in spaces of dispossession and displacement (such as Palestine) where, again, the biopolitical regime dehumanizes humans. There is a postcolonial/non-European genealogy, or at least a version, of the biopolitics that Agamben is interested in, notes West-Pavlov:



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The fused inside/outside relationships that Agamben locates variously in the status of “bare life”, the camp, and in the state of exception that reign there, can be projected back onto the geopolitical relationships (metropolitan center-colonial periphery), which map the emergence of biopolitics in its global genealogy. In the process, however, the non-European genesis of such biopolitical strategies may be forgotten. (West-Pavlov 23)

It is this other-origins of the biopolitical that brings the postcolonial into visibility and enables its intersection with the global discourses/critiques of the biopolitical, and thus contributes to its aura. Numerous postcolonial texts engage with the spaces of the nation, both in the private and public realm, often explicitly in terms of the biopolitical. From the tracking of the dead and the disappeared in Anil’s Ghost to crisis-driven migration in The Hungry Tide, postcolonial texts are interested in biopolitical regimes where the human begins to blur, break and even disappear qua human. Texts that discuss national ghosts contribute to the postcolonial aura because they embody the anxiety over nationhood, belonging and citizenship. The public spaces of the postcolony in numerous texts are sites where ghostification is rampant, and dispossession, displacement and rendering into ‘bare life’ – that is, mere animal life (zoe), without a political ‘form’ (bíos) – eminently possible. The public is where bare life, ghosts and the disappeared are made through institutional strategies of exclusion and marginalization. Often, the spaces of dehumanization and spectrality are legacies of the colonial era – such as the Methwold estate in Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Derek Walcott would emphasize this ambivalently valued colonial legacy in poems such as ‘Ruins of a Great House’ and Another Life: Each longitudinal window seems a vertical sarcophagus, a niche in which its family must sleep erect, repetitive as saints in their cathedral crypt, like urgent angels in their fluted stone sailing their stone dream… (Walcott 191)

Walcott’s subtitle to this section (Chapter 8 of the long poem), incidentally, is ‘West Indian Gothic’, implying a place of horror, and not necessarily of belonging or secure residence. That a place of belonging does not exist in the postcolony is made clear to the unfortunate Michael in Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K (1983) where the doctor in the re-education camp tells Michael: The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. It is off every map, no road leads to it that is merely a road, and only you know the way. (166)

Or take the opening paragraphs of Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1986):

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You like to have some cup of tea? – July bent at the doorway and began that day for them as his kind has always done for their kind. The knock on the door. Seven o’clock. In governors’ residences, commercial hotel rooms, shift bosses’ company bungalows, master bedrooms en suite – the tea-tray in black hands smelling of Lifebuoy soap. (1982: 1)

In both, we can see the postcolony’s biopolitical re-mastering of the spaces of the nation. The bodies of citizens are the focus of the state’s policies, ensuring that the social structures that enable and sustain life, even the basic ontology, are in ruins. The postcolonial critique of the state, then, begins with the latter’s biopolitical regime. If in Coetzee the body is homeless, in Gordimer, the black body is ‘bent’, constantly subservient in posture and gesture (but sanitized) in deference to the white one. The spaces divide the bodies, organize them on racial lines, but also assign specific work to them. The postcolony’s biopolitical regime creates specific topologies wherein the human is dehumanized, and eventually erased. Texts dealing with various forms of this intersection of the geographic with the biopolitical often examine spaces of incarceration and segregation, spaces of ‘disappeared’ humans and spaces of spectral lives in postcolonial dystopias. Starting off, occasionally, as imaginary spaces, the sites of dehumanization slowly acquire concrete shape and texture. Ghettos, carcerals and spaces of separation abound in the postcolony’s biopolitical regime. Coetzee’s Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians discovers the intensity of the biopolitical regime, of which, until recently, he was a part: my torturers were not interested in degrees of pain. They were interested only in demonstrating to me what it meant to live in a body, as a body, a body which can entertain notions of justice only as long as it is whole and well, which very soon forgets them when its head is gripped and a pipe is pushed down its gullet and pints of salt water are poured into it. ... They came to my cell to show me the meaning of humanity, and in the space of an hour they showed me a great deal.

Stephen Morton rightly notes that the Magistrate ‘connects the “notions of justice” he cherishes to the rights of the human body that are supposedly guaranteed by the “normal” rule of law’ (2013: 110). In the spaces of the colony, there exist sites where a human may be kept outside the purview of the law (even the habeas corpus) when the state declares a state of emergency. The state works through this biopolitical regime, which destroys the Magistrate’s humanity precisely by drawing attention to the corporeal foundation of his humanity. A particularly fine example of the biopolitical regime determining the geography of a home is to be found in The God of Small Things. Chacko first elaborates the idea of a ‘History House’ thus: Pointed in the wrong direction [Chacko says], trapped outside their own history, and unable to retrace their steps because their footprints had been swept away. He explained to them that history was like an old house at night. With all the lamps lit. And ancestors whispering inside.



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‘To understand history’, Chacko said, ‘we have to go inside and listen to what they’re saying. And look at the books and the pictures on the walls. And smell the smells’… ‘we can’t go in’, Chacko explained, ‘because we’ve been locked out. And when we look in through the windows, all we see are shadows. And when we try and listen, all we hear is a whispering. And we cannot understand the whispering, because our minds have been invaded by a war. (52-3)

Estha and Rahel had no doubt that the house Chacko meant was the house on the other side of the river, in the middle of the abandoned rubber estate where they had never been. Kari Saipu’s house. The Black Sahib. The Englishman who had ‘gone native’. Who spoke Malayalam and wore mundus. Ayemenem’s own Kurtz. Ayemenem his private Heart of Darkness. He had shot himself through the head ten years ago when his young lover’s parents had taken the boy away from him and sent him to school. … The History House…(52-3)

This originally imaginary and later ‘realized’ house/House will become the space to which Amma and Velutha go for their socially unacceptable love affair. It will also be the site of the twins’ traumatic witnessing of Velutha’s fatal beating by the policemen. In David Punter’s reading, the ‘History House is inhabited by the ghost, the phantom, of a feared miscegenation, a perverse hybridity’ (2000: 74). However, this ‘fear’ is a socially determined fear: of ostracization and caste-based marginalization. In other words, the History House is the spectral version or manifestation of a very real social condition in the postcolony, as Roy depicts it. Velutha loses his life – he dies in the police lock-up later, of the injuries received when beaten in the History House – within the precincts of the first-imagined-then-real house. This shows the conflation of a biopolitical regime (founded on caste-based ideas of ‘untouchable’ bodies) and geography. If we turn to writings by the so-called ‘untouchable’ castes from India, we see numerous instances of the postcolony’s continued segregation of spaces and bodies. Another version of the biopolitical paradigm enables the state to ‘disappear’ segments of its own citizenry as a mode of protecting the homogenous, standardized idea of the nation (Kallis 2002: 28). Alicia Partnoy (Argentina), Isabelle Allende (Chile), Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka) have all produced novels about postcolonies where citizens are ‘disappeared’ by the state. When the citizens disappear from the spaces of their families – and their bodies are rarely returned, so the survivors do not know if the disappeared are alive or dead – they disappear as citizens and vice versa. The nation then becomes a space of disappearance. Here is Isabelle Allende in Of Love and Shadows: They [families of the disappeared] went from place to place, asking futile questions, and received nothing but the advice to consider the men dead … Papers were lost in offices, and with the passing of time they saw their hopes fading like the lines of an old drawing. (253)

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Michael Ondaatje offers a short inventory of the last sightings of the disappeared individuals in Anil’s Ghost: Kumara Wijetunga, 17. 6th November 1989. At about 11.30 p.m. from his house. Prabath Kumara, 16. 17th November 1989. At 3.20 a.m. from the home of a friend… Manelka da Silva, 17. 1st December 1989. While playing cricket… Weeratunga Samaraweera, 30. 7th January 1990. At 5.00 p.m. while going for a bath at Hulandawa Panamura. (41)

The unidentified and the disappeared constitute a paradox: they are at once secret and public (Perera 2006: 650). They are a part of the nation, and yet unidentified or officially recognized. The biopolitical regime dehumanizes the population by ‘disappearing’ the citizenry but also by disallowing the rites of death by the family for their dead. The absent body, writes Rachel Cyr, is an ‘affirmation of a truth without having to equate it with knowledge’ (2013: 104). Cyr elaborates: [the empty tomb must be seen] not as absence but as a loss that cannot be verified according to certain rules, the testimony founded sometimes on trust and faith and phrased in a memorial genre where the archival, the biological, and even indexical “assert nothing” but where the witness must assert the event nonetheless. (104)

I have elsewhere argued that in such texts we can discern the ‘formation of a public sphere around this truth of loss rather than juridical and legally admissible know­ ledge, or even the idea of justice’ (2016: 141, emphasis in original). The postcolonial novel enacts this public sphere through its repeated emphasis on loss, longing and the impossibility of geographical belonging. Where the humans have not been completely erased through the harsh biopolitical regime, they have been rendered ‘immaterial’, or spectral. Renée Bergland has argued that, in the making of the American nation, ‘native Americans, but also women, poor people, foreigners, and African Americans are cast as uncivil, irrational, and even spectral’ (2013: 386). Such ‘national ghosts threaten rationalist hegemony, and hence they threaten the nation’, Bergland argues (386). Postcolonial novels fit right in with Bergland’s views regarding the role ‘national ghosts’ play in the making, or unmaking, of a national identity. To be rendered spectral by forces of nation-making or, in some cases, globalization, is to be deprived of a full life and rendered ‘bare life’ in the postcolonial novel. It could be a dog’s life, as Lucy proposes towards the end of Coetzee’s Disgrace, with no property, identity or sense of self. Or it could be the unrecognizable humans who trek across the delta in Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. In Dave Eggers’ What is the What, the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, the Lost Boys of Sudan – those displaced due to the continuous civil war and ethnocide – are described as spectral forms. They occupy a ‘shadow world’ (269) and are them-



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selves ‘shadows’ (156). The land itself was shadowed: ‘a shadow grew over the land of my giraffes’ (66). Amitav Ghosh’s justly celebrated The Hungry Tide declares early in the novel: ‘Every generation creates its own population of ghosts’ (50). Ghosh’s protagonist Kusum describes the migrants marching to search for a new homeland in Morichjhãpi thus: ‘they passed us the next day – like ghosts, covered in dust, strung out in a line, shuffling beside the rail tracks’ (164). Ghosh’s sustained examination of a postcolonial politics that not only displaces the inhabitants but also, in the process, renders them into bare life, it has been argued, constitute a postcolonial spectropoetics: Amitav Ghosh’s postcolonial uncanny is a spectropoetics of dispossession itself – the refugees haunt a place which is familiar as home, but which remains unfamiliar. Crucial to this sense of the uncanny is the state’s refusal to validate their claims to the “home/land”, It is this refusal that generates the ghosts of the Sunderbans. (Nayar 2010: 105)

For the metropolitan witness (Piya) to the Sunderbans’ biopolitics, a native is a ghost: Piya understood too that this was a looking-glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from the perpetual past that was Lusibari. (Ghosh 220)

Another character, Kusum, is reduced to a skeletal frame (260-61). Piya herself appears to waste away: ‘strangely unnerving presence . . . a kind of human wraith’ (394). The refugee-as-ghost or the displaced-as-shadow is the victim of the postcolonial state’s biopolitical regime: the loss of a material home/land resulting in the dematerialization of the human itself. Within the postcolonial, there exists a centre-periphery divide, and the later marks the state of exception. Avery Gordon (1997) in her reading of the spectral, argues that ghosts represent the haunting reminders of modernity’s violence. Bishnupriya Ghosh argues that ghosts in Amitav Ghosh’s fiction occupy a ‘redemptive place’ and force us to ask certain ‘questions of political justice and hope’ (2004: 205). In the case of Ghosh and Eggers we see clearly delineated a postcolonial condition of exclusion (based on ethnicity, caste and class) and exploitation that produces the ghost. The geography of the postcolonial nation state is marked or marred by the spaces in which dehumanization of the citizenry is made possible. Note, for instance, Ondaatje’s mapping of the landscape of conflict-ridden Sri Lanka: ‘Mass disappearances at Suriyakanda, reports of mass graves at Ankumbura, mass graves at Akmeemana. Half the world, it felt, was being buried, the truth hidden by fear, while the past revealed itself in the light of a burning rhododendron bush’ (156). The ‘truth’ of the nation, suggests this map, is inexpressible because of the fear that permeates. The truth of the map itself lies in the bodies, the disappeared and the graves that dot the landscape.

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5.2 Postcolonial Literature and the Politics of Prejudice In a key essay, Sarah Winter examining what she terms ‘the novel of prejudice’, writes: the novel of prejudice played an important early role in framing the experience of prejudice as a significant epistemological, political, and ethical problem of modernity. This type of novel, I will argue, taught readers that specific prejudices could be isolated and extracted from the customary ways of thinking and behaving in which they had been embedded. Once recognized, such instances of bias could be examined and rejected when they failed the tests of reason, experience, justice, or morality. (2009: 77, emphasis in original)

Winter argues that novels that depict various kinds of prejudice served an important function in their time. [The novels] involve the heightening of the psychological and ethical in correlation with epistemological dimensions of prejudice, and thus typically appear as the deconstruction through plot and characterization of specific false and cruel assumptions based in prejudices against certain persons. Protagonists come consciously to understand and repudiate their biases as they are revealed through encounters with other characters whose cultural or social identity is the target of prejudice, but whose individual behavior refutes negative stereotypes, thus demonstrating that the “factors” on which discrimination has been based are “morally irrelevant” (Howard and Donnelly, 72). As often as not, however, protagonists of novels of prejudice fail fully to change their prior beliefs or to do justice to the virtues of those they have previously disregarded, but this type of deficiency does not necessarily render such characters unsympathetic to the reader. The protagonists’ struggles with their prejudices provide the most interesting elements of these narratives. (90)

In and through the postcolonial novel we are made aware that prejudice masquerades as common sense, accepted belief and even, on occasion, as the principle of the state. In terms of the global circulation of many of these texts, then, the postcolonial novel demonstrates how established stereotypes about African Americans, Muslims, women and various ethnic groups are essentially embodiments of unjust and unverifiable biases. Thus, the postcolonial novel contributes in a major way to the global discourse on human rights by demonstrating how (i) the stereotypes are social constructions with no basis in empirical ‘truths’ and (ii) a collective humanity would include those who have been thus ‘restored’ to the status of the human when the prejudices are unravelled. The postcolonial text does the above by showing how characters come to recognize their presumed ‘truths’ or established stereotypes as nothing more than prejudices. That is, the novels by demonstrating how characters do not conform to their expected stereotypes reveal the identity bestowed upon them as merely an instance of unjust prejudice. The novels reveal the human beneath the prejudiced stereotype. The postcolonial novel does so by first depicting characters who are victimized for belonging to certain categories. The extermination of ‘trouble-makers’ – members of specific ethnic groups – in Anil’s Ghost is a state policy driven by fear of an unprov-



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able threat from that group. As Sarath patiently explains to Anil the evolution of ‘fear’ as a national principle (‘I wanted to find one law to cover all of living. I found fear’, 135). Ondaatje shows an entire community victimized by state policy, and embodies the deleterious effects of this policy – and the war – in one poignant image. At the beginning of the novel, which is situated in Guatemala (not Sri Lanka) Anil and her fellow scientists frequently encounter one particular woman who has lost both her husband and her brother. On one occasion they find her sitting within their open excavation site, ‘her legs under her as if in formal prayer … There are no words Anil knows that can describe, even for just herself, the woman’s face. But the grief of love in that shoulder she will not forget, still remembers’ (5-6). Ondaatje here shows us the psychological disintegration brought on by the state employment of its prejudicial policies, founded on distrust and hatred but with no foundation in facticity. Anil’s shock is a key moment of the subjective response to a historically constructed trauma. Ondaatje reinforces the necessity of closely attending to signs that tell us the story of the prejudice, and of the effects of the prejudice. At one point the forensic scientist Anil tells Sarath: Listen, there are trace elements you can find in bones…that [can] seep in from the surrounding soil…passing into and out of bones…in this skeleton, there are traces of lead all over him. But there is no lead in this cave where we found him, the soil samples show none. Do you see? (50, emphasis in original)

The passage calls attention to the corporeal consequences – and evidence of – a state prejudice in operation: the body of the unknown victim carries within it the proof that he had been killed elsewhere and the body moved to a different location, all indicative of the efforts at concealment and misdirection. When Anil instructs Sarath to ‘listen’ and to ‘see’, Ondaatje is implicitly asking us, the readers, to listen and see. In The God of Small Things, Roy offers us numerous instances of prejudices: against the divorced woman, against children whose father is away/missing, against inter-caste liaisons, against women in general, against ‘lower-castes’, against widows, among others. Ammu is punished for her divorce and for her affair with Velutha, a ‘lower caste’ man. The twins are treated badly because they are unwanted, because they are not financed by their father. Velutha is eventually killed because the social order can readily scapegoat a lower-caste for anything that goes wrong in the village. In The Kite Runner Amir can abandon Hassan not only out of the self-protective instinct of a child but because he has been brought up to believe that Hazaras (the tribe to which Hassan belongs) are ‘mice-eating, flat-nosed, load carrying donkeys’, not human. Anil in Ondaatje’s novel discovers towards the end of the novel that neither she nor Sarath can escape the fear that rules the country, but technology might help expose the state’s complicity in generating this fear: the tape Sarath leaves for her, and the skeleton, is her evidence. Estha and Rahel discover that they had been misled into betraying Velutha out of a child’s fear that their mother would also be lost to

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them, and this had led to his death. Amir’s life is spent trying to deal with the guilt of his childhood betrayal of his friend. It is this discovery by characters, as Winter argues, that leads us to the discovery of irrational fears and prejudices that produce social injustices. The characters’ discovery of their moral complicity in the tragic effects of their actions, born of misinformed, naïve and erroneous assumptions – prejudices – is the moment at which we the readers also recognize the operations of prejudice. In some cases, the characters discover the roots of their own prejudices, some of these being about their own cultures and countries. For instance, in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez speaks of his own discovery: I was saddened to find it in such a state- no, no more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness. But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed. I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country’s elite. This realization angered me; staring at my reflection in the speckled glass of bathroom mirror I resolved to exorcise the unwelcome sensibility by which I had become possessed. It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm. Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda. It was far from impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. I wondered how I could ever have been so ungenerousand so blind- to have thought otherwise, and I was disturbed by what this implied about myself: that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others. (124-5)

Here Changez is referring to his loss of cultural codes because of his stay in America. Changez’s self-awareness leads him to discover that he was viewing his home/country through the eyes of a foreigner, and hence stereotyping it as ‘lowly’. It is the prejudice of the American for the South Asian that Changez sees in himself, and which he then proceeds to eradicate. In novels such as Anam’s The Good Muslim the prejudice of the Muslim character against what is seen as the pernicious influence of Westernization/globalization often results in another, adjunct prejudice. Maya first sees Sohail’s transformation, and reports to her mother, ‘the way he looked at everyone, like he was from another world’ (unpaginated). As he distances himself from the family, he begins to object to all her actions – even something as simple as buying sandals for his young son, whose footwear had broken. Sohail, furious with Maya, tells her how he prefers simplicity even for his son, and then decides to send him to a madrasa. Anam paints the portrait of a man who seeks to forget his own multicultural and ‘tolerant’ past as he steeps himself within Islam, but she also notes that the so-called liberals and moderate Muslims are as intolerant of a man of faith. Prejudices, she implies, are not the monopoly of either side.



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The ‘good Muslim’, defining himself as anti-West and embedded within true Islam, is often prejudiced against members of his own community and even family, whom he comes to regard as un-Islamic. Characters stigmatized as ‘fundamentalist’ by the West and by members of their own community then seek to punish their community. Thus the movement of prejudices comes full circle: the ‘fundamentalist’ is stigmatized due to contemporary history’s prejudice against the devout Muslim, the devout Muslim is prejudiced against those he perceives as not Muslim enough. If the first constructs the fundamentalist through operations of stereotypes and prejudices, the second disrupts the community due to the so-called fundamentalist’s prejudices. In his active resistance to Westernization, the devout, or good, Muslim makes enemies of his own clan, tribe or community. In both cases, processes of rationalization are underway, with the social order turning against the ‘good’ Muslim for being intolerant, rigid and backward-looking because he adheres to a scriptural tradition, and the Muslim rationalizing that his community has abandoned the good ways. In most cases the novel routes and roots the prejudice in historical contexts: caste in India, racist tribalisms in Afghanistan, patriarchy in Africa, India and elsewhere, racism in America. By revealing the historical foundations of prejudice and then discrediting it through the characters’ discovery of belief as irrational prejudice, the novel achieves a humanist appeal: that beneath the (prejudiced) portrait of the ‘subhuman’ Hassan, the ‘immoral’ Ammu, the ‘criminal’ Velutha, there are humans like us. That is, the postcolonial novel of prejudice reveals the falsehoods beneath historical norms, beliefs and stereotypes, and tracks current social injustices to these falsehoods in a nation’s history. It is the individual who discovers this, contra the state or the collective social order. The postcolonial novel of prejudice, then, has an epistemological function when it reveals these stereotypes as not truth but irrational prejudice (what Winter calls ‘the historical contingency of prejudices’, 79). Further, it shows that in the postcolony not only do flawed historical prejudices serve as ‘truthful’ and normative conditions of social ordering, they also reveal the moral vacuum at the heart of the modern state. By documenting the subjective responses of Ammu, Anil, Hassan and Amir, among others, the postcolonial novel of prejudice draws our attention to alternate and more humane judgements (by characters) that defy the historical prejudice (Winter’s key example is Huck Finn’s decision not to betray Jim in Twain’s great novel). When Anil or Amir discover the human worth of those killed or maimed or incarcerated due to the prejudice, the postcolonial novel suggests that we can create situations for such alternate judgements. In the colonial period, and during the age of the ‘great white novel’, representations of black, brown or yellow characters – to intentionally employ the racialized colour scheme – often painted the other as stereotype, as postcolonial studies since Fanon and Said have demonstrated. The postcolonial literary production is an attempt to ensure that this representational mode is not solely determined by colonial legacies. The postcolonial demonstrates the fullness of non-European characters so

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that the inherited stereotypes begin to blur. They paint the non-European as human so that the postcolonial may, by extension, be recognized as human. Frantz Fanon argued that in the anti-colonial struggle, the black man fought to be recognized by the white man. The postcolonial wages a similar battle, in the discursive and representational field. However, this does not imply a power-equation: where one side seeks recognition and the other side is in a position to grant it. Rather, the circulation of postcolonial texts in global cultural productions enables what Fanon terms a ‘reciprocal relativism’: ‘universality resides in this decision to recognise and accept the reciprocal relativism of different cultures, once the colonial status is irreversibly excluded’ (‘Racism and Culture’). Fanon believes that the formerly colonized can lead this mutual transformation (of white and black cultures), because, with their anti-colonial struggle, they have come to be more self-reflexive about themselves. Fanon therefore visualizes a more inclusive humanism emerging, led by the formerly colonized, and one which expresses solidarity with the world’s suffering in ‘Letter to the Youth of Africa’: It is essential that the oppressed peoples join up with the peoples who are already sovereign if a humanism that can be considered valid is to be built to the dimensions of the universe. (1967: 114)

As a preliminary moment, the formerly colonized can, of course, be aware of her/his national identity, but Fanon would propose moving beyond these racial and national binaries in The Wretched of the Earth: Since the individual experience is national, since it is a link in the national chain, it ceases to be individual, narrow and limited in scope, and can lead to the truth of the nation and the world. (2004: 140-1)

Fanon is emphatic: ‘If nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead-end’ (144). The postcolonial text, then, by foregrounding intersubjectivity, connections and cooperation between geographies, races and cultures not only through their characters and plots but also through their circulation, suggests this movement beyond national consciousness. If the biopolitical regime in the postcolonial novel demonstrated how the state institutes practices and situations where the social ontology of the human subject – and eventually the subject in toto – is destroyed, the same postcolonial novel of prejudice maps via its characters’ subjective responses a different evaluation of the Other. Where some characters may, of course, continue to rehearse the prejudice instilled in them through cultural training, the examples discussed above suggest that alternative conceptualizations of the world and its inhabitants also exist. In doing so, the postcolonial novel situates the deconstruction of prejudice firmly within contemporary global discourses and ideas of equality, sympathy and universal rights. It ‘plots a



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series of epistemological reflections and ethical transactions that the reader is meant to consider and practice in a reasoned fashion and on an everyday basis – as a lesson learned or a new perspective gained’ (Winter 80). This emphasis, via detailed expositions of characters’ moral judgements (for or against prejudice), on epistemological reflections and ethical transactions is also the genre’s major contribution to the global discourse on ethics, cultural training and the processes of exploitative othering.

5.3 Hope and Humanism In Coetzee’s Disgrace, Lucy refuses to seek legal reparation for her rape by the black men. This decision astounds her father David Lurie (and has attracted considerable attention from critics, see Cornwell 2002; Graham 2003; Kossew 2003; Kissack and Titlestad 2005). However, Coetzee is, I believe, making a larger point here, one beyond the event of her rape. In resisting the appropriation of her rape into the very legal machinery that created the contexts for such violence, Coetzee’s heroine seeks to move beyond the historical template in which black and white lives are led. Reading Lucy’s problematic decision, Sue Kossew argues: ‘It is Lucy’s acknowledgment, too, of her having to share the land, to make compromises, that enables her to take tentative steps towards overcoming her disgrace and finding a way to live in a future South Africa that does not entail just guilt and punishment’ (2003: 161). Echoing Kossew, Carine Mardorossian writes: Lucy is then refusing “to be raped” … insofar as she recognizes that her rapist is history (in both senses of the phrase). It is the history of apartheid she identifies as the instigator of the horrific violence she was subjected to, but it is also a history that is in fact history. Its effects are lingering and undeniable but so is its passing, and it is its disappearance rather than its stronghold that she chooses to remember, reify, and will into the future. She is not, as Lurie puts it, “expiat[ing] the crimes of the past by suffering in the present” (Disgrace 112) but redeeming the present in the name of the future. (2011: 77, emphasis in original)

The future, in Mardorossian’s and Kossew’s reading, is engendered through this politics of resistance and the politics of hope which enables the victim to move beyond the history of race and gender relations in South Africa. Within this dual politics lies the germ of a new humanism in postcolonial literatures. Achille Mbembe and Deborah Posel argue that ‘a precondition for such a politics of hope is dealing effectively with the spectres of the past’ (2005: 284). This negotiation with the past varies from country to country, leading to institutional and legal mechanisms (such as the TRCs) as well as policies drafted to reduce historically constructed social inequalities. Mbembe and Posel write, echoing Mardorossian and Kossew: ‘without these [mechanisms], it is surely impossible to transcend a politics of denial and, linked to that, a politics of resentment and perpetual victimhood’ (284).

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The new humanism from the postcolonial text seeks this move and transcendence, aware of the historical legacy but refusing to stay trapped within it. Undoubtedly there are ambiguous endings to numerous postcolonial texts (Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim, to name three). However, despite this ambiguity, these texts manage to communicate the quest for redemption, hope and reparation, at least at the individual level, in the midst of memories of a horrific past. Often, as in the case of Disgrace and other South African novels (Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit), the postcolonial novel functions as a means of offering up restorative justice. If the novel, as Susan VanZanten Gallagher’s reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians puts it, carries ‘the hope that in storytelling – impotent, opaque, and uncertain as it might be – oppression and torture may be unveiled’ (281), then the postcolonial novel can be made to carry ‘a moral and linguistic center’ in a ‘world without a moral center ’ (Gallagher 285). Troy Urquhart, responding to Gallagher’s argument, elaborates: ‘By constructing the history of the oppressed from fragmentary evidence, the storyteller who speaks of violence and oppression reconstructs an ethical order’ (4). Although, as we know, the state can very well organize the remembrance of oppression to suit its own purpose, as Peter van der Veer has argued (1997) the postcolonial text does offer a nominal, or temporary, set of narrative aspirations for the victim’s voice to be heard. Hope in the postcolonial novel is woven around individual efforts at redemption (Lucy in Disgrace), a reliance on institutional mechanisms (or exposing their limitations, as in Anil’s Ghost and Of Love and Shadows), outright rebellion (The Reluctant Fundamentalist), social movements and their effects (Bitter Fruit), or a measure of reparative justice. It is possible to argue that the postcolonial text also fits in with the global turn to new ideas of subjectivity and identity – where these are seen as inherently inter-subjective. That is, the hope expressed in the postcolonial text is not a nostalgic return to a pre-colonial, golden age or pure past, but to a form of humanism that is a celebration of the African or Asian’s mobility and openness to difference. In the postcolonial humanism of Achebe, Adichie, Hamid or Rushdie, there is no attempt to foreground a determinate version of ‘blackness’ or ‘Indianness’. While not strictly the valorized ‘hybridity’ of the postcolonial theorists, this vision of the African or Asian is an embracement of otherness, of fluidity and mobility that engages with difference, and the transformation of the formerly colonized into global citizens. Therefore, the new humanism-as-hope in the postcolonial texts accounts for the mobility engendered by globalization, acculturation and cultural mixing, and thus rejects the coherent, pure or unitary African, Indian or any other. Where the Asian or African seeks a return to an originary community – like Sohail in The Good Muslim – in some novels, this is rarely projected as a pleasant prospect. The new humanism of the postcolonial embodies a geographical consciousness far beyond their original countries and cultures. Kiran Desai’s portrait of the Gorkha



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movement in India in The Inheritance of Loss is tied in with the life of those Indians who fled the region for immigrant life in New York. Kamila Shamsie’s characters move from Pakistan to London, Europe to Lahore, Nagasaki to New York. Rushdie’s characters, famously free-floating, invariably discover themselves in the process of such movement. If some of the characters are nostalgic about their countries of origin, they are also disillusioned with it – suggesting an emotional connection but a critical distancing. In this way, the postcolonial text proposes the postcolonial individual as open to the world, learning from it, adapting with it, and demonstrating that the ‘core’ cultural values are primarily about dynamism, not fixity. In each location the human is rendered vulnerable in new and different ways precisely because the human is vulnerable in general, although the specific forms of vulnerability and injury may vary. Such a humanism projected from within the postcolonial paradigm, treats the postcolonial as a ‘relational subject who moves between territories and remains in touch with natural and elemental forces’, as Jane Hiddleston in her reading of Aime Cesaire argues (2010: 93). Hiddleston enables us to effectively transform Bhabha’s and Rushdie’s insistence on hybridity and ‘weightlessness’ into a precondition of a humanism that willingly embraces otherness in order to define oneself as human. Thus Lucy’s embrace of Petrus in Disgrace is her willing acceptance of her necessary reliance on the (racial-cultural) other in order to be herself. The Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians can discover himself only when, first, he engages (cruelly) with the torture victim and then is himself othered as a tortured victim. The postcolonial’s subjectivity, unlike that of the human in European humanism, is ‘constructed by travel and by contact with the world’ (Hiddleston 94). It is an inter-subjective subjectivity that accounts for racial and cultural interactions, mutual influences, and the erosion of origins as a means of opening up an ethical relation with the world. Echoing the argument from the earlier chapter about vernacular cosmopolitanism, we can now state that the postcolonial’s humanism is rooted in the particular while seeking the universal, but always in a state of dynamic openness. It is a recognition that individuals exist in proximate relations with others, with differ­ ence. In this vision, then, postcolonial humanism upholds difference as foundational and productive – because it engenders an ethical relation – and the human itself as constituted by difference. In postcolonial texts, the vulnerability of the other’s corporeal body – even something as insignificant as the torn footwear that Sohail’s son wears (in The Good Muslim), and risks having his feet bruised – elicits an ethical response. This is not a universalizing stance towards all humans. Rather, as Ann Murphy argues, ‘this humanism is grounded in the reality that all human bodies are vulnerable to both violence and care, it is also one that recognizes that each unique body will live its vulnerabilities differently’ (578). Instead of a generalizable vulnerability, Murphy suggests, we need to recognize that

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the vulnerabilities that attend each body are both unique and anonymous – unique to the degree that no body is vulnerable in exactly the same way as any other, general and anonymous to the degree that vulnerability and exposure condition and constitute the emergence of every singular body. (578)

Hope in these texts is this recognition of the generalized condition of vulnerability that constitutes the woman’s body in Adichie’s patriarchal Purple Hibiscus, the teenage boy’s body in Eggers’ What Is the What, the ‘lower-caste’ body in Roy’s The God of Small Things, the ethnic minority body in The Kite Runner, among other examples. We all recognize the figural unity of the human that allows us to recognize a body as human. In postcolonial texts, we are alerted to the corporeal uniqueness of a Velutha or a Deng: assaulted and broken in different ways, singular to their contexts and their bodies, and through which we recognize that the figural unity of a human body has been broken. Postcolonialism ‘ground[s] a new humanism in an appeal to both corporeal uniqueness and the figural unity that makes a human body recognizable as such’ (Murphy 85). There is one further element to the thematic of hope and the foregrounding of relational subjectivity, and that is the exploration of afterlives. Yasmeen Arif, building on Foucault, Agamben and others, examines the ‘inclusive assemblage that comes into being in the contingencies of life and a social transformed by violence [in which] an “afterlife” emerges, where the even remains as an iterative presence’ (4). This reading of afterlife proposes the ‘continuation of social life where the duration of violence does not suggest a beginning or an end but rather indicates an ongoing transformation and acknowledgment of devastation and change’ (5). Then, a certain model of the social is itself framed as ‘suited to the particular conditions of afterlife …[even as] a notion of life that can find form and embodiment in that social’ can be drafted (6). The event of the catastrophe with the discourses, practices and experiences of recovery and reclamation, writes Arif, may be described as the event-afterlife (175). Afterlives are central to the postcolonial text in the age of the global. We can see reconstruction processes in the lives of post-apartheid South Africans in the novels of Gillian Slovo, Zoe Wicomb and J.M. Coetzee. Let us take, for instance, the ‘trial’, so to speak, of Lurie in Disgrace. Convened by the university authorities to examine the charge of sexual exploitation of a girl-student, Farodia Rasool has this to say about Lurie: Yes, he says, he is guilty; but when we try to get specificity, all of a sudden it is not abuse of a young woman he is confessing to, just an impulse he could not resist, with no mention of the pain he has caused, no mention of the long history of exploitation of which this is part…

The point Rasool makes is not about the event of sexual exploitation but about the historical lineage of patriarchy that enables a Lurie to do this to a/any woman. It is in the afterlife of patriarchal sexual violence that an assemblage of factors continues to empower the male. In the aftermath of extreme violence and trauma, the novel proposes a form of life that is barely human. The violence itself has proceeded, as



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Fanon would argue in his study of colonial violence, from the colonized’s need to assert identity. The Africans who rape and harm Lucy in Disgrace engage in retributive and, for them, subjectivity-forming, violence. In her afterlife, Lucy recognizes the dehumanization wrought upon her as a white, as a member of the former ruling race. History catches up with her, and the afterlife is a necessarily social one embodied in the violated (and now pregnant, as a result) body that is Lucy’s. She says of this afterlife: “I agree, it is humiliating. But perhaps that is a good point to start from again. Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. To start at ground level. With nothing . . . No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity” (205). The giving up of dignity (‘like a dog’, Lucy agrees) voluntarily is the acknow­ ledgment of a socially constructed afterlife. Her body will forever bear the scars of the event, and her afterlife will forever be deemed to start with the event. In Achmat Dangor’s Bitter Fruit, likewise, Lydia who has been raped by a white policeman during the days of Apartheid, does not see any merit in seeking to document the violence in a TRC hearing. Dangor writes: It would not have helped [Lydia] to appear before the Commission, even at a closed hearing. The offer had been made, a special session on abused women ... Nothing in her life would have changed, nothing in any of their lives would change because of a public confession of pain suffered. Because nothing could be undone, you could not withdraw a rape, it was an irrevocable act ... it could not be withdrawn, not by an act of remorse or vengeance, not even by justice… We’ll learn, all of us, to live in our spheres of silence, not saying the unsayable, denying everyone the pleasure of seeing us suffer the divine virtue of the brave new country: truth. We have to learn to become ordinary, learn how to lie to ourselves, and to others, if it means keeping the peace, avoiding discord and strife, like ordinary people everywhere in the world. (unpaginated)

Gareth Cornwall reading Lucy’s abjection at the end of Disgrace asks: ‘Is Coetzee suggesting that only through such gestures of self-abasement and radical self-refashioning can the binary logic of societal impasse be broken, can a genuine mutuality insinuate itself into the race-torn fabric of the nation?’ (2002: 317). Throughout Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, the portrait of Pakistan is that of a regressive, extremely patriarchal social order where honour killings are a norm – a norm that extends to the immigrant Pakistanis in England as well. Young women are tortured and killed – a detailed account of one such incident appears over two pages (255-6) – because they have lovers outside their community, for example. Another character, just arrived in England and seeking asylum, says ‘Freedom for Kashmir indeed. Pakistan cannot afford to feed the people it already has within its borders, and yet it wants more people, a bigger territory’ (315). In the postcolony, several sections of the population remain tyrannically oppressed, and Aslam’s novel does for Pakistan what Tahmima Anam does for Bangladesh, Emecheta and Adichie for Nigeria, Aslam and Durrani for Pakistan and Roy for India. In Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil, the response to the freedom from ‘Westernization’, when the Taliban takes Afghanistan, is amplified patriarchal control:

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They [Taliban fighters] were mostly poor foot soldiers from primitive and impoverished backgrounds. Vulnerable and easy to control, it didn’t take much effort to work them up into a frenzy over what they had been taught to believe as religious truth, and the domination over women was a simple way to organise and embolden them. They asked for all windows to be painted black so no one would catch a glimpse of a woman. Earning a living was declared inappropriate conduct for females … They had banned schools for girls immediately … Men walking by averted their eyes and quickened their pace if a woman was being lashed in the street …Afghanistan became a land whose geology was fear instead of rock, where you breathed terror not air. (203-04)

Later, he would repeat the description of the Afghani poor who are trained in communications and other fields because of the Americans and the war (295). The afterlife in Afghanistan, then, is defined by horrific patriarchy and violence in the name of ‘independence’ from Western cultural norms. Echoing verbatim Ondaatje’s claim in Anil’s Ghost – that the rule that governs all in Sri Lanka is fear – Aslam paints a picture of Afghanistan where presumed ‘independence’ from the West is through slavery for some sections of the population. The afterlife in societies recovering from long cycles of violence seizes upon survival, subsistence and bare life as the way to a new humanity and humanness. Paul Gready phrases it this way: ‘Reconciliation is ultimately rooted in the rhythms of everyday life, the opportunities and disappointments of becoming ordinary’ (2009: 174). In postcolonial texts the afterlives are narrated by those structurally and historically condemned to the margins. Thus the black African whose perspective informs the post-Apartheid novel offers us a different view of the country’s history (the postcolonial text has traditionally been concerned with how their nation’s or culture’s history has been constructed). Novels such as Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, for instance, document the afterlives of the victims of genocide, narrated through the eyes of a survivor, Amabelle. There is, however, one noteworthy feature of such texts that fits them into the global discourse on rights. The process of the victim reconstruction of the past via a narrative of afterlives seeks to move beyond the personal to the collective, and the reconstruction invariably merges individual suffering with collective suffering and social identity (as Arif argues about societies after violence). The reconstruction of the country can occur only through the reconstruction of lives – that is, afterlives – families and communities. If it is black lives in post-Apartheid South Africa (Red Dust), it is post-civil war lives in Sudan (What Is the What). In its rejection of the colonial or dominant history of the nation and the collective, the postcolonial novel of afterlives constructs an alternate history of the country. In the process of reconstructing the voice of the oppressed through fragmentary evidence, damaged bodies, disarranged minds the postcolonial text asserts the subjectivity of the oppressed as storyteller. Thus, the perspective of the children in The God of Small Things, Hassan in The Kite Runner, Amabelle in The Farming of Bones, among others, are modes of asserting the dignity of afterlives. They assert their surviving humanity by telling stories of how they, and their community survived.



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5.4 National and Natural Consciousness as Internationalism I have already argued that the kind of cosmopolitanism one discerns in postcolonial texts is rooted, embedded and somewhere between the detachment from the local and attachment to it. Extending this line of thought to examine the possibilities of a Third World-driven humanism, I see the postcolonial texts that embody national and local consciousness as sources of internationalism – which then refits the postcolonial text as a global text. This internationalism may be seen as proceeding from both, the national consciousness and a natural – or environmental – consciousness. Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth would state ‘Self-awareness does not mean closing the door on communication. Philosophy teaches us on the contrary that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is alone capable of giving us an international dimension’ (179). And later: ‘Far then from distancing it from other nations, it is the national liberation that puts the nation on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and thrives’ (180). Fanon is suggesting that the awareness of oneself as a nation enables a culture to position itself among the comity of nations, as a sovereign, self-determining country. That is, national consciousness empowers a sense of sovereignty which in turn enables the situating of the country within the global geopolitical order. We can discern two modes of such an emergent national consciousness. The first, and the most obvious, is the anti-colonial struggle that drew upon similar global discourses, ideas and beliefs. The second is a more nuanced emergence. Emancipatory moments and movements in postcolonial texts are about national consciousness, especially a subaltern one. This argument may be advanced in terms of texts such as What Is the What, The God of Small Things, Red Dust, Bitter Fruit, The Good Muslim, The Kite Runner among others. In each of these texts the victim/sub­ altern represents the flaw in the national discourse: whether it is Velutha or Deng, they are victims of a postcolonial nation’s processes of subalternization. As embodiments of national consciousness, they represent the national conscience in their appeal for recognition, rights and equality, in their crisis of identity in the face of continuing oppression and marginalization and the tensions of fundamentalisms. What is important is that none of the postcolonial novels seeks a dismantling of the nationstate. Rather, they seek reforms and equality within it. When their rights are threatened, the appeal is to the national conscience and the national legal system. Further, emancipatory movements, which may draw upon comparable movements and ideologies from other parts of the world, address structural inequalities and prejudices within the nation. Finally, threats of fundamentalisms and to foundational ways of life – equality, secularism, liberty – are seen in terms of threats to the nation-state. Thus, it is possible to see rights movements and victim consciousness in postcolonial texts as adhering to the nation-state as the source of their rights, even when they draw upon international frames of reference. This adherence is an instantiation of a

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national consciousness – one which seeks alterations, improvements and democratization of the nation so that the citizens, irrespective of their differences, are equally treated. Subaltern consciousness, while not equatable to national consciousness is an important constituent of it. This form of national consciousness, infused with ideas of liberty and equality, locates the nation on the ‘stage of history’, as Fanon puts it precisely because of its rise to the stature of the comity of all nations. Another contributing factor with which the postcolonial goes international is through its insistence on attention to ecological issues. Critical thought – such as ‘environmentalism of the poor’ – including geospatial theories, ecocriticism and ecofeminism from Ramachandra Guha, Rob Nixon, Elizabeth deLoughrey and the celebrity activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, Medha Patkar and Waangari Maathai, originating in or thematically focused on the postcolony, has had a tremendous impact on global environmental politics and interpretive modes. The critique of technoscience, the legacies of imperialism (perhaps first studied by Alfred Crosby in his pioneering Ecological Imperialism and The Columbian Exchange), the global policies towards the environment that emerged from postcolonial standpoints have demonstrated that one cannot discuss postcolonial humans without attention to habitat, rights, environmental degradation, the role of the state, species protection, sustainable living, models of development, among others. More recently, theorists have argued that there is an intrinsic link between the oppression of the environment and the oppression of specific races – termed environmental racism (Curtin 2005). When, for instance, Judith Wright in ‘For a Pastoral Family’ writes Well, there are luxuries still, including pastoral silence, miles of slope and hill, the cautious politeness of bankers. These are owed to the forerunners, men and women who took over as if by right a century and a half in an ancient difficult bush. And after all, the previous owners put up little fight, did not believe in ownership, and so were scarcely human. (cited in Huggan and Tiffin 2010: 90)

She is gesturing at the evacuation of the native landowners – who, as the lines suggest, did not think in terms of ‘ownership’ at all – by unscrupulous (white) settlers. Wright’s trenchant critique may be directed at settlers in Australia but can easily be extrapolated to other settler colonial societies in, say, Canada. The postcolonial emphasis on the linkage of state, environment and the human element is perhaps best captured in Kenyan green activist Wangari Maathai’s quote from Unbowed: I was inspired by a traditional African tool that has three legs and a basin to sit on. To me the three legs represent three critical pillars of just and stable societies. The first leg stands for democratic space, where rights are respected, whether they are human rights, women’s rights, children’s



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rights, or environmental rights. The second represents sustainable and equitable management and resources. And the third stands for cultures of peace that are deliberately cultivated within communities and nations. The basin, or seat, represents society and its prospects for development. Unless all three legs are in place, supporting the seat, no society can thrive. Neither can its citizens develop their skills and creativity. When one leg is missing, the seat is unstable; when two legs are missing, it is impossible to keep any state alive; and when no legs are available, the state is as good as a failed state. No development can take place in such a state either. Instead, conflict ensues. (294)

A critique of Euro-American (Western) anthropocentrism has also made common cause with postcolonial ideas where, for instance, the centrality of Man in Western has been treated as foundational to colonial humanism, industrial modernity and anti-environmental attitudes. Further, and in connection with the critique of anthropocentrism, commentators have turned to Native American, African and Asian modes of thinking about Nature, life forms and ecosystems to seek alternate ways of seeing the environment. Helen Tiffin and Graham Huggan are emphatic that ‘postcolonial ecocriticism … performs an advocacy function both in relation to the real world(s) it inhabits and to the imaginary spaces it opens up for contemplation of how the real world might be transformed’ (13). Arundhati Roy’s critique of the Narmada dam (‘The Greater Common Good’, 1999) in India clearly linked the question of Nature with state policy, corporate greed and the human costs of ‘development’. Big Dams are obsolete. They’re uncool. They’re undemocratic ... They’re a guaranteed way of taking a farmer’s wisdom away from him. They’re a brazen means of taking water, land, and irrigation away from the poor and gifting it to the rich ... Ecologically, they’re in the doghouse. They lay the earth to waste. (https://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1611/16110040.htm )

Roy astutely links the imminent crisis from India’s project with similar developments across the world, demonstrating not only the increasing privatization of natural resources but the corporate-state nexus. Large dams, writes Roy [are globally] worth $20 billion a year. If you follow the trails of Big Dams the world over, wherever you go – China, Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Guatemala – you’ll rub against the same story, encounter the same actors: the Iron Triangle (dam-jargon for the nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and dam construction companies), the racketeers who call themselves International Environmental consultants (who are usually directly employed by dam-builders or their subsidiaries), and more often than not, the friendly neighbourhood World Bank. (unpaginated www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1611/16110040.htm )

Roy’s prose, as argued elsewhere, ‘performed an act of “generic engineering” by making it possible to situate, or embed, the local voices of resistance – the Narmada displaced – within a global grammar of rights, responsibilities and accountability’

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(Nayar 2017: 48), and therefore ‘go[es] far beyond the immediate regional or national contexts within which they are set’ (Huggan and Tiffin 52). Like Roy, Ken Saro-Wiwa explicitly linked European colonialism with the continuing exploitation of the Ogoni people by conglomerates like Shell and the postcolonial state apparatus (A Month and a Day, 1995). In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide, the Sundarbans delta, home to refugees who ‘just wanted a little land to settle on’ (2004: 119), becomes the site of both displacement and massacre when the state decides to evict the ‘settlers’. Ghosh’s novel documents the history of the land, reclaimed by water, and its people. The state-displaced are reduced to ghosts in Ghosh’s powerful description: ‘They passed us the next day – like ghosts, covered in dust, strung out in a line, shuffling beside the railtracks’ (164). Ghosh also ensures that the land’s colonial history is linked, in an instance of contrapuntal reading, with local specifics and contemporary global developments. In a land that is sometimes not land at all, the colonial master (in Canning) and the global Indian are also rendered wraith-like (Piya), or deeply scarred (Kanai), argues Ghosh (Nayar 2010). The reduction of people dependent upon the land to ghosts or the living dead is a constant theme in writers such as Mahasweta Devi. In ‘Dhowli’, for instance, Dhowli the tribal woman, who had often sought sanctuary in the forest, prostitutes herself for food, for herself and her baby. Mahasweta Devi’s savage irony manifests itself when we learn that the men to whom Dhowli prostitutes herself are the contractors who hope to make profits from the forest. Devi thus links various forms of exploitation – land, women, humans, resources – in the tale which, while not quite a postcolonial eco-text, resonates with similar concerns as Saro-Wiwa’s or Maathai’s. In other cases, such as Jamaica Kincaid, an implicit critique of American culture manifests in the form of an interrogative stance on tourism, mobility and engagement with ‘other’ cultures. For instance, in Among Flowers, Kincaid refuses the cultural authority associated with First World travellers. Instead, she exhibits an anxiety. She repeatedly assures us that the absence of clear commentary, awareness of cultural nuances and deeper engagement with the local cultures are due to her own shortcomings: There were many other people, attached to our party, and they were so important to my safety and general well-being but I could never remember their proper names … This was not at all a reflection of the relationship between power and powerless … This was only a reflection of my own anxiety, my own unease, my own sense of ennui, my own personal fragility. I have never been so uncomfortable, so out of my own skin in my entire life… (26-7)

This denial of cultural authority may be read as an anti-colonial stance since, as commentators (Pratt 1992) have argued, such an authority marked the colonial traveller. The critique of war, development and anthropocentrism figures in other writers as well. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K, for example, agriculture and cultivation are abandoned in favour of war.



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Because enough men had gone off to war saying the time for gardening was when the war was over; whereas there must be men to stay behind and keep gardening alive, or at least the idea of gardening; because once that cord was broken, the earth would grow hard and forget her children. That was why. (109)

Elsewhere, in his Elizabeth Costello, Coetzee has his eponymous protagonist draw a controversial comparison between the Holocaust and the killing of animals. Coetzee would declare in The Lives of Animals: Let me say it openly: we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty, and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of, indeed dwarfs it, in that ours is an enterprise without end, self-regenerating, bringing rabbits, rats, poultry, livestock ceaselessly into the world for the purpose of killing them … (21)

And: I return one last time to the places of death all around us, the places of slaughter to which, in a huge communal effort, we close our hearts. Each day a fresh holocaust, yet, as far as I can see, our moral being is untouched. We do not feel tainted. We can do anything, it seems, and come away clean. We point to the Germans and Poles and Ukrainians who did and did not know of the atrocities around them. We like to think they were inwardly marked by the after-effects of that special form of ignorance. We like to think that in their nightmares the ones whose suffering they had refused to enter came back to haunt them. We like to think they woke up haggard in the mornings and died of gnawing cancers. But probably it was not so. The evidence points in the opposite direction: that we can do anything and get away with it; that there is no punishment. (35)

Coetzee’s forging of a link between man-made slaughters, whether ethnocide or animal killings, is an extraordinary vision, one that ignites the debates in environmental racism and calls for new forms of humanism. Such humanism ‘does not pretend to control nature but neither does it choose to ignore nature’s relevance’, writes George Handley (2011: 120). He continues: ‘Instead of forcing a choice between biocentrism and anthropocentrism, it offers a sense of ecology that is a kind of decentered humanism’ (120). Thinking through the new humanism possible from within the postcolonial, and which has considerable relevance – indeed, urgency – for the global predicaments and imminent eco-disasters, one can discern a set of emphases. Postcolonial eco-writing notes the tensions in world-views of the colonial settlers and their own, native ones. They recognize the hierarchization of species – fauna, flora, humans and races within humanity – that colonialism brought to Asia, Africa and other regions. They seek a transcendence of the human/nature divide, which they claim is a colonial/Western construction, by demonstrating active links, material as well as metaphysical/spiritual, between the human and ecosystems. This latter enables a rejection of hierarchization of life-forms itself – a hierarchization which, as Coetzee’s writings cited above show,

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enabled both human- and animal-slaughters. A postcolonialism-driven ecological thought also pays attention to continuing dehumanization in neo-colonial processes that exploit all life forms. More importantly, adapting native non-European models of human-Nature interactions, such a humanism can think in terms of interspecies worlding. Elizabeth deLoughrey instantiates such a way of postcolonial humanism and worlding when she writes: An anthropocentric model of species thinking tends to overlook the ways in which human beings are constituted, even in our DNA, as interspecies creatures, and it is contrary to Maori cosmo­ logies in which one claims descent from Papatuanuku and Ranginui and has kinship relationships with nonhuman beings. (2015: 362)

As deLoughrey adds, such an eco-humanist thought would be akin to the feminist and indigenous emphasis on ‘an ethics of care and obligation’ (362).

5.5 Conclusion In the marketplace of literary texts, human rights and the voices of the dispossessed, the postcolonial fictionalizing of suffering, oppression, genocide, reconstruction and recovery institute a politics of hope because, as Gillian Whitlock puts it, the postcolonial testimonial texts, ‘elicits … affiliations between indigenous dispossession and genocidal events elsewhere. It energizes and enables emergent testimonial cultures far afield’ (2015: 137, emphasis in original). When Dave Eggers writes in What is the What ‘I knew that the world was the same everywhere, that there were only inconsequential variations between the suffering in one place and another’, he is speaking of the new geographies of the world brought together through the circulation of affect, building solidarities of suffering and moral webs across victims. It is possible (necessary?) to treat postcolonial literature as instrumental in a different kind of worlding. Deepika Marya writes: opening the discussion about worldings through the category of the postcolonial, one assumes freedom from all domination, and not just European colonization, thus revising an understanding of postcoloniality, stripped of its earlier affiliations. Moreover, world literature can be a corrective to the discourse of that other worlding called globalization, in which the concept of the world as unified has introduced various new abuses that call for new forms of global solidarity. (2016: 166)

This would entail mapping the formerly colonized’s historical relationships with colonial education but also the new alignments coming into place as a result of this subject’s new locations in the world. A subject like Hamid’s Changez (The Reluctant Fun­ damentalist) is a result of his country’s historical connections with Europe (England), India and the ‘war on terror’. Changez’s location, in/between the USA and Pakistan, reframes his subjectivity not as determined by his nation-state alone but by the his-

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torical dynamics that shaped the nation-state. In Nadeem Aslam’s The Wasted Vigil this condition of a national subjectivity captures the global construction of, and interest in, this national subject: The entire world it seemed had fought in this country, had made mistakes in this country, but mistakes had consequences and he didn’t know who to blame for those consequences. Afghanistan itself, Russia, the United States, Britain, Arabia, Pakistan? (34)

Later Aslam in the same novel would describe the number of spies and espionage networks the battle for Afghanistan produced (129, 147). These networks of course hired locals for their job, and in many ways such forms of employment determined the Afghani’s identity, as the novel documents. Aslam therefore suggests that postcolonial subjects are forged in the cauldron mixed by global forces and interests. Even their nationalisms and fundamentalisms, then, may be tracked to the effect (‘consequences’) of these such extra-national, supra-national forces, although we do not think of them as globalization’s effects per se. For Marya, this kind of subjectivity in postcolonial texts is constituted by ‘shifting current epistemological investments or by underwriting new commitments that follow the marginalized, and point to cracks in traditional models’ (173-4). An awareness of this subjectivity, made possible by contrapuntal reading, suggests Marya, enables us to generate a ‘postcolonial consciousness committed to dismantling the colonial relationship in order to bring about a more equitable world’ (174). Instead of a simple Europe/post­colonial or modern/postcolonial or even liberal-humanist/traditional binary that marks contemporary worlding, the new commitments and alignments enable us to think of new forms of worlding itself, wherein ‘a more equitable world’ might be read as a code for a new humanism. The postcolonial text serves as a launch pad in the global testimonial cultures – assuming that even literary fiction shares discursive space with oral/written testimonies – for a different imagining of global humanity. As Judith Butler puts it: [w]e would be wrong to think that the First World is here and the Third World is there. . . These topographies have shifted, and what was once thought of as a border . . . is [now] a highly populated site. (2004: 49)

Lynn Festa argues that the European sentimental novel’s ‘repetition and rehearsal of emotions’ for slaves, the working classes, the poor contributed to a reimagination of the human community itself (2002). Both Festa and Winter (cited above) are gesturing at attitudinal shifts made possible by the politics of the novels of prejudice and sentiment. I suggest that the postcolonial novel enables a reimagination of the global human community when it focuses our attention onto the disenfranchised across the world. It is this focus that marks the start of a new humanism, one that includes the historically excluded from the very category of the human.

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Edward Said believed that critical humanism may ‘proceed from a sense of loss’ (Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 83). In every case noted above, the postcolonial text documents the collapse of social ontology and the loss of the right to self-determination, sustainable lives and identity through the circumstances in which the lives are embedded. This insistence on documenting the vulnerable and the helpless with no ability to determine the course of their lives, is the mark of a critical humanism within postcolonial literature. Jeff Noonan defines the tenets of a critical humanism as follows: A critical humanist philosophy thus concerns itself with identifying the general barriers to human self-determination and works to overcome these. To the extent that people gain more equal access to resources and democratic modes of political participation, to that extent they become free to create themselves according to their specific character and to transform that specific character … The critical humanist position points to those moments in history when groups in struggle for the freedom to determine themselves consciously identified with other groups in struggle and all voices together spoke in the name of human freedom as empirical evidence of the validity of its claims. Through such conflicts a shared history of struggle is forged that links the oppressed and the exploited. Through these real links the essence of humanity is historically developed and expressed. (2003: 138)

Noonan sees difference – ethnic, linguistic, religious and racial – as the grounds from which connections may be forged. That is, there is no transcendental or universal human here: humans are ‘nested’ (Ken Plummer’s term) within historical conditions and cultural contexts. It assumes that human self-realization and identity is also social and interdependent. As the preceding section demonstrated, postcolonial humanism is marked by the subject’s openness to the world, to otherness and difference. It is in this process of openness and intersubjective relations that subjectivity is forged. Critical humanism asks if the potential for self-realization by humans is in any way impeded or slowed down by contexts such as sexism, racism, colonialism – that is, historical conditions and ideologies. This, in effect, is what postcolonial studies has always documented: the absence of self-realization of the colonized in the context of colonial domination and now the impossibility of self-realization in the age of neoliberalism. When postcolonial texts as diverse as The God of Small Things, Disgrace and Of Love and Shadows document in fictional forms, worlds and societies where continuing oppression proceeding from patriarchy, caste and class divisions, the exploitative state or continuing racial tensions, prevent the individual from self-realization, they foreground a critical humanism. In the face of a homogenizing cultural globalization, the postcolonial text envisages the human subject as an open one, whose very humanness emerges in the context of interactions with the other. The postcolonial text, then, foregrounds differing forms of corporeal vulnerability – afflicted by caste, patriarchy, race, ethnocide, among others – in a generalizable state of vulnerability that marks all humans. As Ann Murphy puts it:

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The new corporeal humanism, grounded in the ontological fact of vulnerability, dispossession, and exposure, offers a more expansive and inclusive paradigm, one that is still attentive to the differences that mark bodies, and respectful of the radically different ways that vulnerability and dispossession are lived. (589)

A body abused in Sudan – in What is the What – is abused in the USA. A vulnerable child in Afghanistan or Laos discovers vulnerability as an adult too. Not restricted to identity politics nor limited by liberal individualism, postcolonial humanism is extremely aware of difference across races, cultures and nations, but does not reject this difference for a universality. The texts demonstrate relationality, above all else. Thus, Maya’s subjectivity and vulnerability as a liberal Muslim in Dacca (The Good Muslim) can only be shaped by a relation to the subjectivity of the purist Sohail. Ammu’s subjectivity in The God of Small Things is shaped not only by her experiences as a widow in a society determined by the caste-class borders but also as a sexual being whose corporeality – and its forces – is challenged, redeemed and then punished through a relation with the ‘outcaste’ Velutha and the subsequent social opprobrium. Amir in The Kite Runner remains mindful of his ethical betrayal of Hassan, and the subsequent guilt shapes his present and future. By depicting these individuals as shaped primarily by their past intersubjective experiences and an exposure to corporeal vulnerabilities of others and themselves, the postcolonial text highlights the intersubjective constitution of the human. While normative principles of human rights have not yet evolved in either the literary or philosophical texts, it is the emphasis on relationality across differences as the foundation for the recognition of humanness that marks postcolonial humanism. There is of course the possible objection that establishing a human as a hybrid of self and other (including, as posthumanism now demonstrates, the other as machine, animal or non-living matter) assumes two entities that are more or less homogenous. Thus, when the postcolonial text depicts the individual self as made up of the upper-class exposed to the lower-class, it assumes that there are upper and lower classes identities in the first place. Relationality relies upon entities and worlds that may be ‘relationable’. Postcolonialism’s critical humanism acknowledges this founding assumption, but continues ahead with its agenda of seeking new frames for the normative drawn from solidarities of suffering and recognitions of cruelties. When there is an imaginative collapse of geocultural spaces when Third World novels enter the lexicon, reading habits and the imagination of First World readers, or connect with discursive regimes of human rights, it reflects the collapse of geopolitical spaces in the wake of events like 9/11. It is not, surely, a coincidence that almost all the major postcolonial authors, at some point in their writings, touch upon 9/11 and its aftermath. By linking the lives of their characters with the sufferings of America, the First World and other subjects, these texts also highlight the frames within which, to borrow Judith Butler’s formulation, some lives are grievable. As a paradigm shift from traditional humans, the postcolonial’s emphasis on such a relationality, respectful of difference and conscious of ontological vulnerability as a ‘standard’ fact of all humans, a new humanism that rejects the coherent individual in favour of a relational, intersubjective human.

6 Conclusion 6.1 The Postcolonial (as) Global Celebrity The previous chapters examined the postcolonial text and the canon, mainly from the Indian subcontinent but also from other geocultural regions, for their prominence in the global cultural spectrum. The focus was on thematic and formal concerns in their works that enable their location in the spectrum. This reading, however, is inadequate because there is something about the authors as individuals that enables such a prominence. Arundhati Roy, Khaled Hosseini, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J.M. Coetzee, Peter Carey, Helen Oyeyemi, Salman Rushdie, Tahmima Anam, Nadeem Aslam, Hanif Mohammad, Buchi Emecheta …each of these has been a readily recognizable star in the global literary firmament since the last decades of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first. As famous as their texts, sometimes more famous than them – Rushdie might be an arguable case here – these authors have garnered literary-critical acclaim, major awards and figure on syllabi in Euro-American and global English/South Asian and other departments. While they are not exactly Keigo Higashino, Jo Nesbo or manga authors and designers selling in multiple languages in the popular segment, they are indisputably a part of the global cultural scene. The aura around these authors, their visibility and saleability, in addition to their literary standing, might be profitably and challengingly read as an instance of the postcolonial celebrity author in the global cultural scene. Contemporary studies of similar star-authors in English and American contexts (Mole, Moran) have developed ways of examining the construction of literary stardom, but there is no theory that I am aware of, that explains the postcolonial star-author. To say that these authors benefit from the global, and globalizing cultural industry is not, in my view, to say much beyond a truism. But is there a set of apparatuses, discourses and modes of self-fashioning that enables any and all of the above-listed authors that generates the aura? This is what the present chapter sets out to study. The postcolonial star-author is a celebrity who benefits from, draws upon and contributes to a corporate transculturalism in the age of globalization. Marwan Kraidy uses the term corporate transculturalism to describe the ‘discourse in which fluid identities and porous cultural borders are depicted as growth engines in the service of a cosmopolitan capitalism’ (2005: 90). It ‘actively and systematically seeks to capitalize on cultural fusion and fluid identities’ (90). The emphasis on cultural hybridity is, in Kraidy’s (dominantly economic) view, a ‘tool to make corporations more profitable, consumers more satisfied, and the world generally a better, more connected and more vibrant space’ (95). This chapter unpacks the processes and apparatuses through which the Asian, South American or African author stars in the corporate transculturalism of the current era. © 2018 Pramod K. Nayar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.



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6.2 Global Authors and their Homes/Homelands The postcolonial author-text now fits the global, multicultural image-and-icon market of a hybridized identity through a publicity machinery that emphasizes their distant origins, migrations, multiple cultural inheritances or re-locations, or all of them. Kamila Shamsie is described thus on the Bloomsbury website: She grew up in Karachi and now lives in London. (https://www.bloomsbury.com/author/kamila-shamsie . 27 Aug. 2017)

The British Council’s ‘Critical Perspective’ section on Tahmima Anam states: Born in 1975 into the Bangladesh cultural elite and educated internationally, Anam is too young to have experienced her homeland’s drive for independence and war with Pakistan in 1971… (https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/tahmima-anam . 27 Aug. 2017)

Poetry International Rotterdam’s Poetry International Web offers this information on Daljit Nagra, the poet: Born in 1966, to Indian immigrant parents, Daljit Nagra was raised in London, and currently works in a secondary school.

It elaborates the cultural identity of the poet as follows: Playing with the ‘Punglish’ dialect of his parents’ generation, and its convoluted syntax, his poems burst with rhyme and alliteration, fusing the idioms and rhythms of the two cultures … Through these surreal new coinages we see contemporary Britain painted afresh. (http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/17981/29/Daljit-Nagra . 27 Aug. 2017)

We need to approach the globalized postcolonial author as both an individual and as an effect of the discursive-cultural apparatus of global publishing. Writing about transnational stardom in the domain of films, Russell Meeuf and Raphael Raphael argue: in the case of transnational stardom, a more developed understanding of global modernity as not simply a set of political, social, and economic structures but rather as a major transformation in the textures and sensations of everyday life…[is apparent] (6)

Individual success stories, especially as immigrants, refugees or simply ‘Third Worlders’, are placed in conjunction with autobiography-laced ethnofictions. The global publishing industry highlights the immigrant, Third World identities and positions a Hosseini or a Roy that contributes to their global author status and reception.

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Revelations about their lives in the former postcolonial home, as in the case of Hosseini, Shamsie, Anam and others in their interviews underscore the conjunction of the autobiographical data and the publicity machinery’s promotional campaigns. Taslima Nasreen mentions the ‘price on [her] head’ and the loss of freedom of expression for a writer in Bangladesh in her interview (Bagchi 2015) readily allowing her to be appropriated, like Rushdie, into the ‘freedom of speech and literature’ campaign globally. Nasreen carefully constructs her subjectivity, her individual self as one forged in the smithy of an oppressive regime where the state and religion (Islam) connive to erode basic rights. It is this foregrounding of the autobiographical self that enables her work itself to acquire the status of celebrity ‘soft weapons’ (Whitlock). Chimamanda Adichie, in response to the debate around religion in everyday life and post-secular America (an idea she debunks) in her VanZanten interview, has this to say: As I was growing up, we went to church every Sunday. I was drawn to religion, but I was the kid who just wouldn’t shut up. I had questions. Everybody else went to church and came home. I wanted to go to the sacristy and talk to the priest about why he said that, I’m sure much to my father’s irritation. But my parents were very, very patient people, and they continue to be. I was drawn to the drama of the Catholic Church. I would cry at Paschal Mass when we raised the candles. They would turn out all the lights and people would hold candles. When it was time to renew your vows and they would light the candles, I would burst into tears because I was so moved. I loved the smell of incense and I loved the Latin. I keep meaning to write about it. I was a happily Catholic child. I also got into a lot of fights with Anglican friends…. (Adichie)

Helen Brown describes Kamila Shamsie as a ‘mature, cosmopolitan woman in the tan suede jacket’ before quickly turning to her origins: Pakistan. Shamsie would admit, in the course of this interview with Brown, that ‘That [the writing] came out of homesickness … It was a way of recreating the world on the page’ (Brown 2005). Mohsin Hamid describes his Lahore home: I grew up in Lahore and we lived in my grandparents’ house with my extended family: grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts, cousins, my sister. The house was full of books: we had them in our bedrooms, in the hallway, in sitting rooms. We had a lovely wood-panelled library with a leather-topped desk – even decades later, for me the smell of that room is the smell I associate with reading … When I went to study in America, this predisposition mixed with a sudden longing for Pakistan, and fiction was the result. (Hamid 2008)

In this same interview, Hamid provides an authenticating device regarding the provenance of his novels and his subjectivity: ‘I tend to write from experience, not from research’. His advice to young writers is, again, drawn from a theory of fiction as linked to the subjectivity and interiority of the writer: ‘To be as honest with yourself’. As equivalents of the confession, the personal comments and revelations about their lives, in the countries and cultures of their origin, enable the author as star-text to be an individual, whose visceral, emotional responses are as important as her role as an author.



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6.3 Postcolonial Literary Tourism Shamsie’s characters, we are told, ‘exist in the unique context of their culture, they also fall in love, have affairs, resent their parents and battle for careers as everyone does’, even as the interviewer, Helen Brown for the Telegraph, draws attention to the simultaneously local and cosmopolitan affiliations of Kamila Shamsie (Brown 2005). It is almost as though the aura around Shamsie and her characters is the effect of this double affiliation. Central to the consumption of the postcolonial author, and the consequent aura around her/him, is the textual version of literary tourism that accompanies their work. Literary tourism, developed in the United Kingdom in the eighteenth century, around the homes and places of residence of their Wordsworths and Tennysons and Brontës, is a major industry in the twenty-first century. Literary guides to the British Isles continue to be published as part of this industry. In earlier cases, such textual temptations included the promise of a glimpse of the star-author in her/his ‘home setting’, on his walk or in his garden. Indeed, regions of England were promoted through this mechanism of a promised sighting of a Laureate or a famous author. Charlotte Boyce reading the periodical press of the time terms this ‘virtual imitations of the Victorian practice of literary tourism’ (2013). Boyce, in this specific case studying the material around Tennyson at Farringford, the Isle of Wight, writes: vested with the promise of genuine insight into Tennyson’s domestic life and physical surroundings, these articles [in the periodicals and tabloid] in fact constructed only a simulated form of intimacy that, nevertheless, rendered literal contact between the poet and his readers unnecessary. Despite their facilitative function, however, these articles had a commercial interest in withholding as much as they revealed about the Laureate, for by maintaining his aura of inscrutability, they were able to both stimulate and perpetuate their readers’ desire for knowledge. (19)

I propose that these short write-ups on the publishers’ websites offer us an equivalent of both cultural pedagogy and literary tourism by introducing us to communities, regions, identities and ethnicities and the histories of all of these. The mentions of the Bangladesh war (Anam), the immigrant lineage (Nagra), the regional origins (Shamsie) may be read as an authorly route to those lineages, regions and communities, especially since the works are also served up as detailed explicatory tours of the region/community and their histories. The insistence on the home/land and racial identity is not merely an exoticizing moment: it serves as a facilitator of entry into what is hitherto an inscrutable and unknowable space. Those who desire to know more about, say, Bangladesh, would do well to examine the fiction of Anam and Monica Ali (imbued, as their texts are, with authenticating devices, as noted in the earlier chapters). Over and above the burden of autochthony and authenticity, the non-European author is the literary introduction to ‘their’ region and origins. If traditional literary tourism took the curious reader into the home of the celebrity author, allowing the reader to experience the place

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where the author crafted her/his work, the contemporary takes the reader into the homeland. Portraits of ‘the author in his/her study’ continue in the digital age when interviews with the postcolonial authors are conducted occasionally in the precincts of their home – for that ‘authentic’ locational feel – but primarily embed the authors and their texts in the social and cultural histories of their countries of origin: homelands rather than homes. In addition, in the age of corporate transculturalism there are two lenses through which one may view the postcolonial literary celebrity author/text. While not exactly the ‘global popular’, as Simon During theorized (1997), the virtual literary tourism of Asia, Africa or South America made possible by these authors/texts serves a crucial function. During has argued that the ‘global popular’, by which he meant the films, stars, music and to which we can now add cuisine and authors that are globally popular at any given historical moment, must be viewed in terms of cultural changes that are transnational and cutting across geocultural borders due to globalization and the ways individuals experience such changes. During’s larger point is that the star power of, say, a Schwarzenegger (his example) provides a fantasy of male bodies that mirrors the experiences of bodies within the global economy. It is then possible, following During, to see the fiction of Anam, Roy and Adichie as offering, if not a fantasy, but a mirror to already circulating discourses of displacement, patriarchal oppression, rags-to-riches stories and immigrant success in the global economy. While it is certainly not accurate to claim that Adichie’s careful exposition of the African family is a mirror to, say, the experiences of white, English or American families, it does serve the purpose of possible reflection by the alert reader upon different modes of family life experienced in different parts of the world and which frame, or are framed by, debates and discussions of women’s rights or human rights. The global popular then is a mirror to the cultural changes, discourses and concerns occurring in various parts of the world, and which are communicated across national borders. The postcolonial author/text captures this set of changes and discourses and brings them to the global readership. A second lens evolves directly from the above, and has to do with literary tourism. Literary tourism in the earlier age provided ‘coherence and meaning to modern experience’ (Alexis Easley, cited in Boyce 20) by ‘constructing a sense of unified national identity and shared cultural heritage’ (Boyce 20). In similar fashion, virtual literary tourism of the kind proffered by the widespread dissemination via literary festivals, massive promotional campaigns, speaking/lecture tours and simply the transnational publishing industry of the postcolonial author, constructs a sense of the world. I suggest that the virtual literary tourism made possible via the postcolonial author/text generates this sense of coherence and meaning to the experience of globalization, especially the experiences of displacement, migration, trauma, immigrant success, multicultural societies, among others. It brings the global to the First World’s, but also rest-of-the-world’s doorstep so as to allow the discovery of a multicultural heritage, whether desired or not, born of globalization’s many flows. It may



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not develop a unified national identity but it enables the making of a transnational and multicultural one. This transnational, multicultural and cosmopolitan novel from the formerly colonized nations sees global flows of people and capital, the increased technologized surveillance of people and spaces, as a networked condition that enables both productive collaboration and tense conflict, embedded in asymmetrical relations. They do not valorize or reject this transnational condition, but seek to come to grips with it, recognizing the potential for both triumph and disaster. Kristian Shaw in her account of contemporary fiction suggests that ‘an increased awareness of global others emerges as contemporary cosmopolitanism’s dominant mode’ (2017: 5). The postcolonial novel seeks to engage with these global others, even as the Others come upon, so to speak the Asian, the African and the Aboriginal in the process of consuming their fictions. It achieves the latter through the very nature of the fiction genre: ‘ability to present characters’ points of view and subjective experiences of the world, is a particularly appropriate medium for the individual’s relationship towards the lived experience of different environments and cultures’ (6). Exposing and exploring the interiority of the Asian or the Aboriginal enables the postcolonial author to present different psyches for global consumption. By presenting these psyches in conflict and cooperation the diasporic and transnational authors, as in the case of Euro-American authors such as David Mitchell or Dave Eggers, shows even postcolonial identities in tension, and not necessarily reified into essentialisms. They may function, at some level, as ‘national allegories’, but they also contribute to, and are constituted by, a cosmopolitan mode that moves them beyond the national. Further, the fact that the postcolonial concerns were instrumental in shaping global discourses of rights, ecological imperialism, immigrant/refugee ethics (as discussed earlier) suggests that it becomes difficult to disentangle the national concerns from ongoing global ethical and other debates. The global popular bestows upon the postcolonial author-text, even as it builds upon them, the function of a mirror reflecting the contemporary global cultural scene. It makes the postcolonial author-text a necessary cultural pedagogic tool. Their narratives are taken up by and coalesce with other cultural discourses around globalization. Even as these narratives are instrumental in furthering the cosmopolitan capitalism that Kraidy cautions us about, they also serve as the portraits of this cosmopolitan condition. Their individual stories contribute to the global sense of the geocultural differences, the diversity in the world, and are instrumental in enabling people from around the world to empathize, if they would, with this diversity and seek understanding.

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6.4 The New ‘Hermeneutic of Intimacy’ and the Global Author In previous eras publishers and authors tried very hard to generate what Tom Mole in his study of Byron’s celebrity status in the Romantic period termed ‘the hermeneutic of intimacy’ (2007). Mole writes: The hermeneutic of intimacy, then, is an intertextual paradigm for reading celebrity texts, seeded by the texts themselves and the ways in which they were published, propagated by a wider print culture, and variously enacted by individual readers, which, although it may not be consciously articulated or adopted, is difficult to avoid. (25)

He elaborates: The hermeneutic of intimacy succeeded commercially because it marketed as a commodity an escape from the standardised impersonality of commodity culture. It therefore had attractions for both entrepreneurs and consumers, and answered the problem of individuation through consumption. (25)

Mole here links the literary product – the book – and the producer – the author – in a circuit of production and consumption. Mole’s key focus is on the construction of an intimacy between author-text-reader and a uniqueness of the reader so that each reader will ‘imagine that those endlessly copied poems are for them alone, not for the careless multitude’ (25). I propose that such a hermeneutic of intimacy is structured as a cosmopolitan cultural intimacy wherein revelations about the author’s home, history and autobiography in the form of product information, publicity materials and interviews – now a part and parcel of book launches – seek to make the author and her/his cultural origins familiar to the reader. The hermeneutic of intimacy is a form of culturation that targets individual readers through a form of appeal to their curiosity about the text but also, primarily, about the author through a careful positioning of authors as ‘South Asian’, ‘immigrant’, ‘descendant of immigrants’ or ‘born of mixed parentage’. These labels invoke the strange and the distant as worth-knowing. By invoking war, multiracial parentage or immigration as the personal experience of the author and implying that the work captures this experience or its memories/ post-memories, the publicity machinery also achieves something else. Mole proposes that branding and reading relied on assumptions about subjectivity which the celebrity apparatus played an important part in sponsoring … The hermeneutic of intimacy required subjectivity to be understood as structured around a private interior. That interior was hidden from the view of the undiscerning, but was also continually making itself legible, expressing itself in poems where its secrets could be read by the discerning few. (25)

Contemporary publishing and publicity industries, I suggest, imply the authorial interiority as emerging from these experiences whose origins are in radically different cultures. That is, the private interior or subjectivity of the postcolonial author, when



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revealed to the discerning reader, will also reveal cultural difference. In addition to the author’s own subjectivity there is also the mystique around the subjectivity of characters unlike anything the First World has known, and which can only be discerned or understood when one situates this subjectivity in their origins. This could be a subjectivity around peculiarly African experiences such as community parenting, or as in the case of Anam, fundamentalist homes and families or, as in the case of Emecheta, civil war. The access to the interiority of the culturally different text is then coded as access to unique cultural practices and social imaginaries from distant shores. In some sense, then, I am arguing that the emphasis on authentication facilitates an interest in interiority and origins which in turn enables the making of a postcolonial aura in terms of its difference. Harnessed to the corporate transculturalism of global publishing and publicity, these author-texts offer a glimpse into the subjectivities of people ‘unlike’ us. The celebritydom of Coetzee, Anam, Adichie, Rushdie and others is at least partially, then, due to the insistence on their origins. When Monica Ali or Khaled Hosseini examine the subjectivities of Bangladeshi Muslim or Afghani Muslim characters in Spitalfields, London and New York, they also achieve something more. The unpacking of a subjectivity that originates in a local, bioregional context (Afghanistan, Bangladesh) is achieved in a completely different context now. Rebecca Walkowitz has this to say about W.G. Sebald’s fiction: [Sebald] enhances and also disables local points of view: enhances, because he shows the global network in which even the most local experiences participate, and disables, because he suggests that those networks change what local experiences are. (2006: 2)

Walkowitz heads elsewhere with this line of argument, to examine the modernists’ critical cosmopolitanism. However, the point she makes about Sebald is one that effectively captures the doubleness of subjectivity itself in the postcolonial. In Brick Lane, for instance, we meet the following passage: “It’s a success story”, said Chanu, exercising his shoulders. “But behind every story of immigration success there lies a deeper tragedy”, “Kindly explain this tragedy”, “I’m talking about the clash between Western values and our own. I’m talking about the struggle to assimilate and the need to preserve one’s identity and heritage. I’m talking about children who don’t know what their identity is. I’m talking about the feelings of alienation engendered by a society where racism is prevalent. I’m talking about the terrific struggle to preserve one’s own sanity while striving to achieve the best for one’s family…”

The ‘feelings of alienation’ that the above passage documents is a metaphor for a subjectivity whose formation may have been elsewhere but whose trajectory of development takes unexpected routes due to immigration. The local point of view is enmeshed in the experience of the global/London where the Bangladeshi sensibil-

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ity and subjectivity is changed due to the merger into the global ‘networks’. There is no longer an identifiable local subjectivity because it has been both highlighted and diminished in Ali’s portrait. Corporate transculturalism which enables the publishing of works with such layered subjectivities constantly gestures at the modified interiorities of people, interiorities that are authenticated as local and native, but which are also in a state of renovation as a result of the current locations. This is therefore an instance of a ‘hermeneutic of intimacy’ which when promising an authentic native subjectivity also proffers a native-subjectivity-in-process. It stays remarkably stable, Mole argues, as necessitated because the subjectivity has to be recognizable, but is also modifying as the narrative proceeds. However, analysts of the ‘global novel’, such as Rebecca Walkowitz have also suggested that the now-renowned novelist and her/his text ‘participates not only in one literary system, the literary system of the language in which it was composed, but also in the other literary systems in which it has a presence’ (83). She writes: Because a text may begin in several places and because it may continue to travel to numerous regions and languages, its location and culture will be dynamic and unpredictable. It is no longer simply a matter of determining, once and for all, the literary culture to which a work belongs. (83)

Walkowitz terms such works ‘born translated’, with ‘multiple beginnings, and for the ways that it participates in and cuts across various collectivities’ (83).32 Later, she would argue that such a form of world literature is ‘not a product but a process, it privileges target: the analysis of convergences and divergences across literary histories’ (30). About the writers themselves, she has this to say: it is impossible to isolate the novel today from the other genres in which its authors regularly participate. Many novelists are also reviewers, translators, anthologists, poets, editors, publishers, graphic designers, journalists, visual artists, intellectual impresarios,and essayists. (30)

Such texts ‘because they value the history and future of translation, its conduits as well as its blockages, bring circulation into view. Rather than dodging translation,

32 Walkowitz elaborates the idea of the ‘born translated’ text thus: Translation is not secondary or incidental to these works. It is a condition of their production. Globalization bears on all writers working in English today. However, it bears on them differently. Some works of fiction are sure to be translated. Others hope to achieve it. Some novelists are closely tied to the mass market, some to prestige cultures, and others to avant-garde communities. But even those novelists who don’t plan on translation participate in a literary system attuned to multiple formats, media, and languages. Born-translated novels approach this system opportunistically. (3-4)



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they try to keep being translated’ (31). The geopolitics of production is dispersed, just as the audience for such is dispersed – and these two dispersals are built into the very processes of the text. Adapting Robert Young and using instances from postcolonial texts, Walkowitz writes: Postcolonial fiction presupposes the “situation of communication” because it has always needed to compare and translate among regions, languages, and literatures. In fact, it is not only “inherently comparative”, as Robert Young has recently argued; it is inherently translated. Using the second-person voice, Kincaid and Hamid bring that history into view. Their work fits with a more pervasive staging of the anglophone novel that is taking place across the field of contemporary postcolonial fiction. Examples include the use of a blog addressed to U.S. readers in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah (2013); narrative presented as letters “in English” in Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008); and the conceit of translated audiotapes, from Hindi to English, in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People (2007) … Novels address themselves to the world by creating the impression of a work that begins in a foreign language or in more than one language; by distributing narrative action across several continents, regions, or nations; and by showing how the global circulation of narratives, even within a single novel, produces new locations for literature. (169)

The global author is one who performs a brilliant balance: between authenticating himself/herself in terms of identity and location and yet not being restricted to them. Foregrounding Pakistan, India or South Africa but not claiming these as bounded locations, having characters and languages slide across languages, cultures and geographies, appropriating ‘native’ accents, diction, genres – take Rushdie as an exemplary case study – and recasting (translating) them for global consumption, seeking both convergence with other similar texts but also divergence from them, these authors-texts are both the result and the effect of corporate transculturalism. Assuming both native and foreign readerships, these texts may stake a claim to one or other literary cultures, but refuse to be identified solely with them. African immigrants, white settlers, Hispanic passers-by are the multiple collectivities shaping the subjectivity of the characters in these texts. For instance, in Shamsie, Aslam or Hamid, the Afghani and Pakistani are as much shaped by the relations from/ of the subcontinent as by global forces and ethnic affiliations – whether with Armenians (A God in Every Stone), Russia (The Wasted Vigil) or America (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Like the multiple linguistic and cultural origins – Hindi films songs, Urdu poetry, variant Urdu-Arabic-Hindi languages – in, say, Adiga, Hamid or Rushdie, the characters’ subjectivities incorporate, in varying degrees, the other, the foreign. The celebrity status of the postcolonial novelist may, then, be attributed to the appeal to the global while authenticating the native provenance (but never staying within this frame of the national) of the texts and characters facilitated by the corporate transculturalism of Bloomsbury, Faber and Faber and Random House. The postcolonial author-text creates the transcultural circuit of literary-cultural consumption, even as s/he is shaped by it. The author-texts are mobile in both production and consumption, always already translated across languages, cultural frames and geographical spaces through their layered provenance and assimilation of multiple

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languages, frames and spaces. They therefore produce cultural meaning across the uneven power relations of nations. Adapting Meuf and Raphael on transnational stardom here, it is possible to treat the postcolonial author-text as an instance of the transnational contact zone, that enables readers and reading communities ‘to forge connections (even if only momentary) between peoples and localities that may reflect global inequalities but yet also transcend them’ (3). While this formation of the contact zone does facilitate profits for large corporate houses through their valorization and commodification of the cultural hybrid (the author, the text and its characters), the contact zone also serves as a form of identification, recognition and acknowledgement of global cultural differences. If corporate transculturalism originates in such a valorization, the texts themselves embark on an unpredictable journey of convergences and divergences: of languages, registers, origins, identities and subjectivities. Literary celebrity culture of the modern age began with Byron’s generation (as Tom Mole’s book suggests) and its construction of a certain hermeneutic of intimacy in which the ‘three components [individual, industry, audience] routinely work together to render an individual personally fascinating’ (1). In the global age we see a different hermeneutic, one where the global audience consumes difference and hybridized subjectivities through the corporate transculturalism industry.

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Index A Adichie 12, 13, 14, 28, 42, 44, 45, 57, 73, 75, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 90, 91, 94, 97, 101, 102, 103, 105, 126, 128, 129, 140, 142, 144, 147, 149, 151, 159 Affective Assemblages 99 Agamben 71, 114, 115, 128, 151, 160 Anam 91, 104, 105, 122, 126, 129, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 147, 151 apartheid 17, 108, 125, 128, 159 appropriation 20, 45, 81, 83, 85, 103, 125 Atta 12, 22, 44, 103, 151 authenticity 10, 11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57, 81, 84, 95, 96, 101, 104, 143

B Baxi 16, 17, 51, 52, 104, 151 Bhabha 88, 96, 127, 152 binarisms 10 biopolitical regime 114 Brouillette 29, 81, 82, 87, 101, 152

C caste 17, 19, 25, 26, 36, 37, 43, 44, 70, 75, 104, 117, 119, 121, 123, 128, 138, 139, 157, 159 celebrity 12, 14, 15, 36, 37, 87, 97, 101, 132, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 150 Chakravorty 11, 19, 30, 34, 152, 159, 160 Chandra 24, 29, 30, 35, 38, 84, 100, 152 Chrisman 112, 113, 152 Coetzee 12, 88, 105, 115, 116, 118, 125, 126, 128, 129, 134, 135, 140, 147, 153, 154, 156 Competing Authenticities 37 corporate transculturalism 140, 144, 147, 149, 150 Cosmopolitanism 151, 154, 155, 159 Criterial and Relational Indigeneity 59 cultural globalization 24, 25, 49, 112, 138

D decolonial cosmopolitan 84, 85, 87, 99 decolonization 15, 17, 20, 54, 55, 58, 59, 75, 76, 83, 113 Desai 12, 25, 37, 96, 99, 101, 126, 153, 155 Diaspora 158 Dirlik 10, 18, 23, 38, 39, 84, 153

E ecology 135 Emergent Literature 92, 97, 99 English Language 19 ethnic chic 11, 21, 27, 81, 91, 109 exotic postcolonial 27

F Fanon 29, 48, 68, 77, 111, 112, 113, 123, 124, 129, 131, 132, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159 fundamentalism 22, 84, 91, 100

G Ganguly 13, 17, 18, 33, 46, 154 Ghosh 12, 18, 28, 82, 83, 84, 87, 88, 118, 119, 134, 154, 157 global novel 13, 17, 31, 49, 108, 148 Global Subaltern 68

H Hamid 12, 25, 28, 31, 35, 36, 45, 84, 88, 98, 99, 100, 107, 126, 136, 142, 149, 152, 154, 156 Hanif 31, 86, 94, 95, 96, 140, 155, 156 Hermeneutic of Intimacy 146, 157 homeland 119, 141, 144 Hope and Humanism 125 Hosseini 12, 18, 60, 61, 62, 71, 84, 86, 88, 98, 100, 140, 155 Huggan 13, 22, 23, 24, 38, 81, 132, 133, 134, 153, 155 Humanism 111, 113, 138, 155, 156, 157, 160 Human Rights 10, 11, 16, 17, 33, 70, 73, 78, 88, 98, 104, 106, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 159 Huyssen 34, 155

162 

 Index

K

R

Kureishi 94, 95, 96, 104, 156

Radhakrishnan 13, 47, 158 Re-Orientalism 49, 50, 156 Rothberg 17, 97, 98, 158 Roy 12, 31, 36, 37, 45, 49, 59, 104, 105, 107, 117, 121, 126, 128, 129, 133, 140, 141, 144, 157, 158 Rushdie 35

L Lau 156 Literary Tourism 143, 152 Lury 27

M Maathai 84, 132, 134, 154, 156 magical realism 15, 63, 65, 66, 67 market-fashioning 81, 82 Mignolo 68, 77, 157 mimetic approximation 34, 35 mobility 11, 12, 14, 15, 19, 21, 30, 35, 36, 51, 101, 126, 134 Mole 140, 146, 148, 150, 157 Mukherjee 157 Multidirectional Memory 97, 158

N narrative interiority 36 Nasreen 13, 14, 25, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 91, 103, 142, 151 Niezen 53, 54, 55, 56, 59, 69, 157 Novetzke 106, 157

O Okri 35, 36, 41, 47, 65, 66, 67, 157 Ondaatje 18, 33, 36, 72, 73, 88, 95, 96, 117, 118, 119, 121, 130, 157 Ong 46 Oyeyemi 41, 63, 64, 67, 74, 140, 158

P Ponzanesi 16, 25, 158 Precariat Public Sphere 104 prejudice 113, 114, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 137

S self-fashioning 27, 76, 81, 82, 85, 87, 96, 140 Shamsie 12, 18, 20, 28, 31, 45, 72, 86, 88, 89, 94, 96, 98, 100, 127, 141, 142, 143, 149, 152, 154, 159 Shyam 43, 159 Spivak 30, 49, 52, 159, 160 stereotyping 12, 30, 48, 122 Subalternity and Citizenship 70 subalternization 12, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 77, 107, 131 Subaltern memory 76 subjunctive nationhood 108

T Thirdworldism 81, 109, 110

W Walkowitz 21, 49, 50, 51, 147, 148, 149, 160 Whitlock 17, 103, 136, 142, 160 Wright 41, 57, 58, 62, 103, 132, 157, 160

Y Young 11, 16, 51, 78, 110, 129, 149, 160