Cosmopolitan geographies : new locations in literature and culture 0415925061, 041592507X, 9780415925068, 9780415925075, 9781315865720

Citation preview

Cosmopolitan Geographies

Since 1944, the English Institute has presented work by distinguished scholars in English and Am erican literatures, foreign literatures, and related fields. A volume of papers selected for the meeting is published annually. Also published in the series:

What's Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory

Edited and with an introduction by Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas

Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text

Edited and with an introduction by Hortense J. Spillers

English Inside and Out: The Places of Literary Criticism

Edited and with an introduction by Susan Gubar and Jonathan Kamholtz

Borders, Boundaries and Frames: Essays on Cultural Criticism and Cultural Theory

Edited and with an introduction by Mae Henderson

Performativity and Performance

Edited and with an introduction by Andrew P arker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Human, All Too Human

Edited and with an introduction by Diana Fuss

Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production

Edited and with an introduction by Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers

ESSAYS FROM THE ENGLISH INSTITUTE

Cosmopolitan Geographies NEW LOCATIONS IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Vinay D h a r w a d k e r , EDITOR

First Published in Great Britain 2001 by Routledge Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2001 by The English Institute

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cosmopolitan geographies : new locations in literature and culture / edited by Vinay Dharwadker. p. cm. – (Essays from the English Institute) Includes bibliographical references. 0-415-92506-1 – ISBN 0-415-92507-X (pbk.) 1. Cities and towns in literature. 2. Internationalism in literature. 3. Internationalism. I. Dharwadker, Vinay, 1954- II. Series. PN56.C55 C67 2000 809'.93321732—dc21 00-036590 ISBN 978-0-415-92506-8 (hbk) ISBN 978-0-415-92507-5 (pbk) ISBN 978-1-315-86572-0 (eISBN)

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION

vii 1

C os m o p o lita n is m in Its T im e and Place VINAYDHARWADKER

1.

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

15

BRUCE ROBBINS

2.

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER- TOUN33

‫״‬

C o s m o p o lita n is m and Late Medie v al L iteratu re ROBERT R. EDWARDS

3.

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

63

B alz ac in Paris DAVID HARVEY

4.

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT,

89

UNIVERSALISM AND PATHOS SHARON MARCUS

5.

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

133

AND POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL MEMORY PHENGCHEAH

6.

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

171

N e w Sto ries, Old S ta g es UNA CHAUDHURI

7.

COSMOPOLITAN READING

197

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

CONTRIBUTORS

229

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks go especially to Karen Newman and Anthony Appiah for their invaluable help as coorganizers of the "Cosmopolitan Geographies" conference at the English Institute in 1998; and to Lee Edelman, the chair of the Institute's Board of Supervisors and Trustees that year, and M arjorie Garber and Andrew Parker, trustees, for their timely suggestions, interventions, and words of encouragement. My thanks go also to Monica Miller, for her hard work as the coordinator of the conference; to Judith Butler, Jay Clayton, John Guillory, Wahneema Lubiano, and Kendall Thomas, all members of the board in 1997 and 1998, for their contributions to the conception of the conference; and to Jeffrey Masten, for his support as secretary and member of the Board over several years before and after the conference. I owe large debts of gratitude to earlier colleagues at the English Institute, particularly John Brenkman, Peter Stallybrass, Nancy Vickers, Diana Fuss, and Joseph Roach, for their generosity in many ways; to Kim Hall, Bharati Mukherjee, and Robert Thurman, for their papers at the conference; and most of all to A nthony Appiah (again), Una Chaudhuri, Pheng Cheah, Robert Edwards, David Harvey, Sharon Marcus, and Bruce Robbins for their original papers at the conference, their revised essays in this book, and their patience and goodwill throughout. As always, my personal debt is to Aparna Dharwadker, for her understanding at home and in the world, and to our children, Aneesha and Sachin, who now have one more book to read and reinvent in the future. Vinay Dharwadker

This page intentionally left blank

INTRODUCTION Cosmopolitanism in Its Time and Place VINAYDHARW ADKER

A quarter century ago, cosmopolitanism was a point of reference in the humanities primarily in the context of the aesthetics of early and late modernism, whether in poetry and fiction or in painting, sculpture, and architecture. When it appeared as a subject of interdisciplinary debate two decades later, it had become a flashpoint for heated political and theoretical disagreement.1 At least three largescale developments around the world between about 1975 and 1995 contributed directly to this transformation of cosmopolitanism. One was the consolidation of new types of nationalism, based frequently on programs of racial, religious, or cultural purification, both in the so-called Third World and in and around Europe. Another was the empowerment of new immigrant communities in the national public spheres of the North and the West, as diasporic populations from the South and the East attained an economic and demographic critical mass in their host societies. The third was the accelerated globalization of capital and material production and consumption after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which rapidly altered the economic and political relations among old and new nations. In the last two decades of the tw entieth century, each of these multidimensional phenomena generated a large, diverse body of discourses and counterdiscourses about it. The (re)assertion of

2

VINAYDHARWADKER

national identities and nationalist ideologies, for instance, stimulated an extensive reexamination of nationalism and the nationstate; the postcolonial diasporas and their former homelands launched fresh attacks on Eurocentrism and European colonialism, orientalism, and neocolonialism; and globalization sparked off justifications as well as denunciations of its unrestrained exploitation of international labor, resources, markets, and environments.2 Driven by their engagement with concrete situations, these critiques focused on issues— such as internationalism, transnationalism, antinationalism, anticolonialism, migrancy, multiculturalism, and displacement—that have turned out to be part of the general theory and practice of cosmopolitanism. Not surprisingly, their entanglement in urgent practical problems has meant that "the return of cosmopolitanism" has been been freighted with politics rather than aesthetics. This volume, which brings together seven papers delivered originally at the fifty-seventh session of the English Institute, held on the Harvard-Radcliffe campus between September 25 and 27,1998, intervenes in the current discussion of cosmopolitanism along several lines. It is an interdisciplinary project that draws on several specializations in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences, and devotes as much energy to theories and critiques of cosmopolitanism as to actual cosmopolitan practices. It combines theoretical analysis with literary interpretation, focusing on the historical as well as geographical locations of cosmopolitan cultures, institutions, and texts. Its overall framework rejects the tendency in some recent analyses to examine cosmopolitanism and its conjuncts in a dehistoricized or delocalized "ideological space," on the grounds that such an abstraction from specificity usually amounts to "decontaminating" cosmopolitanism of its intrication in time, space, and culture, and thereby rendering it merely portable across frames of reference.3 Each essay in this volume therefore carves out a "thick slice" of cosmopolitan space-time, so that the book as a whole unfolds like a succession of cross sections

INTRODUCTION

3

cutting through particular histories and cultures at different angles, or unscrolls across much of the past millennium and much of the modern world like a montage of overlapping maps in motion. Building their arguments around specific literary texts, genres, or literatures that variously represent the formation and reproduction of cosmopolitan worlds, these essays resist the easy portability of self-sufficient theory, even as they connect situated particulars to issues that exceed limited situations. Such a multilayered treatment of cosmopolitanism has important consequences. Unlike other recent work on the subject, this book moves rapidly from Dante's Italy, Chaucer's England, Balzac's Paris, Anne Frank's Amsterdam, and Hannah Arendt's Germany and Israel to Pramoedya A nanta Toer's Indonesia, Ninotchka Rosea's Philippines, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Zimbabwe, and the multicultural America of Chang Yew, José Rivera, and David Hwang.4 The double dispersion of time and space involved in this movement expands the analysis of cosmopolitanism from its usual setting in post-Enlightenment modernity and contemporaneity back toward late medieval vernacular Europe and the classical Latin Middle Ages, even while redistributing its points of critical departure outward from the North and the West to the South (Africa) and the East (Asia). Along one line, this volume tries to push cosmopolitan practice and theory "outside" the cartographic circle of Europe; along another, it attempts to change the very terms of the discussion. Given the variety of humanistic disciplines and specializations at play—from philology, philosophy, economic and political history, urban geography, and area studies to rhetoric, feminism, theater history, and narrative theory—the highly condensed result is a series of unprecedented arguments about languages and nations, texts and places, dispersions and life stories. How much fresh ground this enterprise covers may be measured quite precisely by setting it beside a work such as Stephen Toulmin's Cosmopolis (1990), written and published just a decade earlier.5

U

VINAY DHARWADKER

The essays that follow are independent texts, but they are also thickly intertextured. David Harvey, in "The Cartographic Imagination: Balzac in Paris," and Bruce Robbins, in "The Village of the Liberal Managerial Class," draw on different disciplines, but both reconstruct the multiple intersections of politics, class, and capital that inform literary and material cosmopolitan practices, and explicate strikingly complementary texts: metropolitan fiction at the height of empire (France) and diasporic fiction in the metropolis and its new peripheries after decolonization (England, Germany, Italy, North Africa, and Canada). Sharon Marcus, in "Anne Frank and H annah Arendt, Universalism and Pathos," and Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "Cosmopolitan Reading," view their materials from different angles of vision, with one focusing on the Holocaust, autobiography, and "sentim ent," and the other on postcolonial Africa, the novel, and narrative logic, but both take a hard look at cosmopolitan women's writing in relation to universalism. Pheng Cheah's "Chinese Cosmopolitanism in Two Senses and Postcolonial National Memory" and Una Chaudhuri's "Theater and Cosmopolitanism: New Stories, Old Stages" deal with disparate cultural forms— among others, fiction in translation and theater in performance—but they converge on two remarkably illustrative, broadly interconnected phenomena: the Chinese mercantile diaspora in Southeast Asia and the multinational diaspora in N orth America. Harvey's essay and Robert Edwards's " 'The M etropol and the M ayster-toun': Cosmopolitanism and Late Medieval Literature" are methodological opposites but overlap unexpectedly: the former dramatizes a "compression" of spacetime and several disjunctions of the literary, architectural, and cartographic imaginations in a single city that projects itself as a coherent cosmopolis (Paris), whereas the latter dramatizes an "elaboration" of space-time in which cosmopolitanism traverses many regions, ethnic groups, and languages, even as protonationalism comes to fashion itself in a state that is doubly cosmopolitan (England). Edwards's and Chaudhuri's essays then confront widely

INTRODUCTION

5

separated times and places, but both give us glimpses of the multilingualism and cultural heterogeneity that underlie cosmopolitan formations, highlighting the Latin, French, and English moment of Chaucer's England and the translated English, Spanish, and Chinese moment of the contemporary New York stage. Within this mosaic, the essays by Robbins, Edwards, Marcus, Cheah, Chaudhuri, and Appiah also map out the multifarious interdependencies and tensions between nations and nationalism, on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism and internationalism, on the other. The pieces gathered here thus prise apart the closed world of European cosmopolitanism and the cosmopolitan discourse that has flowed out of it without flowing out of its reach, offering critical alternatives that can be applied productively to a range of other cases. The possibilities that Cosmopolitan Geographies opens up may be gauged by looking briefly at two general propositions about cosmopolitanism in its time and place, and two corresponding sets of examples. One is the proposition that, in the all-too-familiar period since the European Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism has been so closely embattled with nationalism that we forget that the idea of the cosmopolis is much older than the idea of the nation.6 The cosmopolite is a classical creature, a figure of antiquity—and not just in Europe—whereas the nationalist is a vernacular creature, a child of the languages of the past one thousand years—and, again, not in Europe alone. Bruce Robbins's argument here, that it is our responsibility under globalization today to recognize, even fight for, the rights of others outside our national borders, is formulated in the thick of the ongoing conflict between globalization and its internationalism, on one side, and resurgent nationalism and patriotism, on the other, but it derives its moral-political force from an uncanny resonance with the first cosmopolitanisms framed in the ancient world. One such early stance in the West was devised by the Stoics, between about 300 B.C. and A.D. 200, when they proposed that all members of the human race are "children of Zeus" (Epictetus), share the faculty of reason, and are uniformly subject to one

6

VINAYDHARWADKER

divine law. Any human being therefore can become a Stoic, and the true practitioner of Stoicism, who extends his or her love of self to family, friends, fellow citizens, and ultim ately all of humanity, transforms himself or herself into a cosmopolite, a citizen not of just one state but of the world as a whole. This argument was aimed at the older, conventional distinction between Greeks and barbarians, which had meant that, in social, economic, and political theory as well as practice, the Greeks did not extend to foreigners, conquered peoples, and enslaved populations the rights, freedoms, and acts of virtue (such as kindness and generosity) that they reserved for themselves and each other. Against this, the Stoics insisted that a human being's "moral worth" is independent of his or her race, sex, social status, birth, and upbringing, that humanity constitutes a natural fraternity, and that even subjugated barbarians are "brothers" or "kinsmen" and therefore ought to be treated as such.7 A nother ancient cosmopolitan argument, formulated around 500 B.C. and probably the oldest in the East, comes from SiddharthaGautama, the Buddha, and foreshadows the Stoic one to an interesting degree. In Gautama's conception, the sangha of bhikkus (almsmen) and bhikkunis (almswomen)—the community of Buddhist monks and nuns that he established after his enlightenment— is open to anyone, regardless of caste, wealth, rank, sex, or ethnic origin, and the wandering monk, nun, or teacher is at home everywhere. Gautama's conception was "cosmopolitan" specifically in relation to the all-encompassing Hindu society of his time, the socalled epic period of small, semi-democratic republics on the lower Ganges plains. In that early brahmanical social order, there was no way to be fully human except to belong by birth to a particular varna (caste group) and, successively within it, to a particular jati (caste) and a particular vamsha, kula, or gotra (lineage, clan). This system of emboxed genealogical identities discriminatingly excluded three conflated categories of people—the asparshya (untouchables), the ajat ("casteless" individuals, of indeterm inate

INTRODUCTION

7

genealogy, often abandoned upon illegitimate birth), and the mlechchha (foreigners, belonging to other lands and races)—and the members of the four legitimized varnas (Brahmans, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, and Shudras proper) treated these "outsiders" and "others" much as the Greeks, before and in spite of the Stoics, treated barbarians. Against this, the Buddhist sangha emerged as the first programmatically cosmopolitan community on the subcontinent, and remains the oldest continuously surviving community of this type in the world today.8 Even in the simplified forms in which I have presented them, these two examples from the ancient world foreground the sharp differences between closed, exclusionary, self-homogenizing societies (the Greeks, the Hindus) and open, inclusionary, heterogenous societies (the Stoics, the Buddhists). As invented by the Buddhists and the Stoics, cosmopolitanism in antiquity is already a validation of inclusive, egalitarian heterogeneity, of the tolerance of difference and otherness, of the equitable (re)distribution of resources and privileges, of the recognition of others' freedoms, of (comm)unity in diversity, or very simply, of the unqualified practice of fairness, kindness, and generosity. Instances like these suggest that for almost 2,500 years cosmopolitanism has continuously— though variably—aligned itself with what we now call universal human rights, equal opportunity, nondiscrimination, and social justice, or what Thomas McCarthy has recently identified as "the establishment of a basic structure of cosmopolitical justice under a global rule of law."9 The second proposition worth stressing is derived from the first, and reminds us that cosmopolitanism, in its time and place, frequently differentiates itself from more than nationalism, arising out of clusters of cultural formations that are denser in their interactions than binary oppositions. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Indian cosmopolitanism—which is qualitatively different from modern Middle Eastern, African, or Caribbean cosmopolitanism, for example—emerges from a dynamic rectangulation of

8

VINAY DHARWADKER

empire, village, nation, and city. That is, in the British colonial period, an Indian could commit himself or herself to four rather different objects of allegiance at these sites: complicity with imperialism and the metropolis; precolonial indigenous tradition, centered on the village as its authentic, immemorial location; anticolonial nationalism, framed by an imagined India that had yet to come into existence; and modernity and cosmopolitanism— secular, socialist, or liberal-hum anist— affiliated with the city. In practice, these options were never mutually exclusive because they defined themselves in multiple, simultaneous relations of coordination and conflict. Thus, for instance, the Indian village and the Indian city both opposed the empire, but they deployed distinct antimetropolitan strategies and also opposed each other intransigently; the nationalism centered on a protonation developed separate relations with the traditionalist village and the cosmopolitan city, and consequently differentiated itself into mutually distrustful village-centered and city-centered nationalisms; whereas modernist urban cosmopolitanism disaligned itself equally from the villager's reactionary traditionalism, the nationalist's monologic anti-imperialism, and the comprador's unalloyed complicity with the colonizer.10 The complexities of modern Indian cosmopolitanism become vivid in the contrast between M ahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Uncompromising in his opposition to British imperialism, Gandhi chose to locate himself in the Indian village, and therefore developed an anti-industrial economics based on self-sufficient, low-technology agricultural production and village handicrafts. At the same time, he also superposed the nation on the autonomous village, so that his "India" literally was its 700,000 villages—and excluded the cities, which materially and ideologically were all imperial constructions (Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras were British; Delhi was Mughal). As a consequence, he merged his nationalism with rural traditionalism , using a combination of Vaishnava-Hindu and Jain orthodoxies to construct an indigenous

INTRODUCTION

9

religious frame for his political action (hence the emphasis on vegetarianism, prayer, sexual self-purification, raw-cotton clothing, and absolute nonviolence). In contrast, Nehru located himself in the city: he was opposed to empire, and therefore a nationalist, but he was also an urban modernist, and therefore an unapologetically westernized Indian. As a compatriot of Gandhi, he was committed to the structural and demographic centrality of the village in the nation, but as a westernized rationalist, planner, scientific modernizer, and secularist (though born a Brahman of the highest caste group) he was antagonistic to the ritual traditionalism and religious fundamentalism of the village. Gandhi was an international cosmopolitan, shaped irreversibly by London and South Africa, the New Testament and the Bhagavad Gita, Tolstoy and Mill, and Ruskin and Thoreau, but he emphatically ruralized his cosmopolitanism. Nehru was also a cosmopolitan, but he differed in both the degree of his internationalization and the kind of cosmopolitanism he had urbanized: unlike Gandhi, Nehru was a builder of dams, steel mills, and fertilizer factories, a founder of cities (he commissioned Le Corbusier's Chandigarh), a dreamer of socialist five-year plans, and an ideologue who initiated new dialogues among new nations and postcolonial partners (he played a leading role in the Nonaligned Movement at the Bandung Conference in 1955 and later, in the middle of the Cold War). In the convergences and divergences between Gandhi and Nehru we thus see the internal differentiation and dispersion of cosmopolitanism across village, nation, city, and empire, a complex that is not reducible to a simple nationalisminternationalism binary.11 The quadrangulation I have just outlined implies that if, on one level, tw entieth-century history is a shift from a few European empires to a multitude of non-European nations, followed later by a shift from political independence to economic globalization, then on another (equally important) level it is also a massive shift from village to city, followed subsequently by a shift from individuated

10

VINAY DHARWADKER

cities to a global network of increasingly similar cities connected by capital. Though the rural village remains the final target of expropriation under colonialism as well as neocolonialism, the city continues to be the site where power is concentrated and capital is accumulated and deployed—still very much the archetypal geopolitical unit of cosmopolitanism in all its proverbial forms, from port city, market city, and provincial bureacratic city to grand imperial city. Village and city, and the corresponding processes of ruralization and urbanization with their links to degrees, kinds, and stages of development, thus are as vital to the life of cosmopolitanism as individual nations and the collective order of nations. The "dirty work" of globalization, in fact, is done not so much on generalized national maps as on the detailed inset-maps of particular cities and countrysides, the urban and rural sectors where raw materials, labor, economic production, distribution networks, infrastructure, and consumers can be quantifiably located and exploited. It is therefore no accident that so much of twentieth-century Indian literature, especially fiction, projects itself onto two coordinate axes of transformation: the temporal axis from colonial subjugation to freedom, which leads to the carnage of Partition and the failures of Independence; and the spatial axis from village to city, along which so many of the narratives before, during, and after decolonization are actually plotted.12 In this irreducible quadrature, the disposition of cosmopolitanism is at once causal and structural, historical and geographical. The papers at the fifty-seventh session of the English Institute, like their select, m ostly more formal versions in this volume, charted some of the variable circumstances and forms of cosmopolitanism in the past and the present. But their concern was (and is) also with the future of cosmopolitan life, in times and places yet to be. Will cosmopolitanism survive globalization's omnivorous compression of cultural space-time and erasure of differences? Can it hold on to its old ideals of "humanity" as a single

INTRODUCTION

11

(comm)unity, and the earth as a home for everyone? Will it be able to protect the willingness of (many) human beings to coexist peacefully with others like as well as unlike themselves, or the possibility that "nothing human is alien"—even when, as Jonathan Arac now has it, because "I am an alien[,] everything hum an is alien to m e"?13 Can it expand its geocultural repertoire, so that it can include, for example, the cosmopolitanism that the Arabic-Persian world constructed over several centuries before the dominance of the West in the modern period? Can it dissociate itself from class, hierarchy, and affluence, so that it might transform itself some day into a "true cosmopolitanism from below" ? NOTES 1.

Compare, for instance, the essays in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism, 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1976); and those in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the N ation (M inneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

2.

Among the more frequently cited and useful books on these subjects are Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Homi K. Bhabha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Kwame A nthony Appiah, In M y Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

3.

For examples of such abstraction, see Richard Rorty, "Justice as a Larger Loyalty," in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 45-58; and Thomas McCarthy's article, "On Reconciling Cosmopolitan Unity and National Diversity," Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999).

12

4.

VINAY DHARWADKER

M y points of comparison are Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics; the cluster of articles, Geopoetics: Space, Place, and Landscape, in Critical Inquiry 26, no. 2 (2000); and the special issue, Cosmopolitanism, of Public Culture, ed. H om i K. Bhabha, Carol A. Breckenridge, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sheldon Pollock, forthcoming late in 2000 as the fourth of its Millennial Quartet.

5.

Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity

6.

See the discussion in Pheng Cheah's "Introduction Part II: The Cos-

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). mopolitical— Today," in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 20-41. 7.

For a more nuanced discussion, consult Amanda Anderson, "Cosmopolitanism, Universalism, and the Divided Legacies of Modernity," in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 265-89; for succinct overviews, refer to "cosmopolitanism" and "Stoicism," in The N ew Encyclopedia Brittanica, 15th ed. (1995), 3:662a and ll:280a-b.

8.

For a more detailed account, see Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), especially chaps. 1 and 4.

9.

See the opening section of McCarthy, "On Reconciling Cosmopolitan Unity and National Diversity."

10.

For further discussion of the subject positions and identity politics associated with these "locations," see Vinay Dharwadker, "Print Culture and Literary Markets in Colonial India," in Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, ed. Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy J. Vickers (New York: Routledge, 1997), 108-33.

11.

On Gandhi, refer to Raghavan Iyer, ed., The Moral and Political Writings of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 1, Civilization, Politics, and Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986); and B. R. Nanda, Mahatma Gandhi: A Biography (1958; reprint, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996). On Nehru, consult Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (1946; reprint Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989).

12.

Examples in English that display this complex pattern individually and collectively over the past sixty-five years would include the

INTRODUCTION

13

novels of R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, G. V. Desani, Khushwant Singh, Kamala Markandaya, Anita Desai, and Salman Rushdie. Similar lists can be constructed for tw entieth-century fiction in Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, and Urdu, among other languages. 13.

Quoted in Bruce Robbins, "Comparative Cosmopolitanisms," in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 260.

This page intentionally left blank

1 THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS BRUCE ROBBINS

I take my title from Robert Pinsky, acclaimed graduate of Rutgers University and recently poet laureate of the United States. Pinsky used the phrase "village of the liberal managerial class" in a response to M artha Nussbaum's essay "Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism."1 The cosmopolitanism Nussbaum was arguing for entailed a strong recognition of the moral rights of noncitizens. In an apparent effort to forestall that recognition, Pinsky replied that arguments like Nussbaum's need not be taken seriously, for they merely reflect the provincial ethos and assumptions of "people like ourselves: happily situated members of large, powerful nations, prosperous and mobile individuals, able to serve on UN commissions, who participate in symposia, who plan the fates of other peoples while flying around the world and staying in splendid hotels" (87)—in short, "the village of the liberal managerial class" (87). The fact that Pinsky includes himself in the liberal managerial class does not ease my misgivings. Without being quite ready to go to the wall in defense of Nussbaum's version of universalism, I'm worried that the seductive modesty of Pinsky's an fzuniversalism, like that of Samuel Huntington's influential "clash of civilizations" thesis, represents the emergent style of post-Cold War American nationalism, now modified to suit missile-launching adventures

16

BRUCE ROBBINS

and other shoot-first interpretations of the national interest.2 And I'm also afraid that antielitism, which has been mobilized against affirmative action at home, will help bring further discredit on transnational efforts to represent others (one of the indispensable tasks that political activists and educators share) and on images of the hoped-for achievements of education generally, efforts and achievements that the public is already too eager to be cynical about. Still, there is some truth in what Pinsky says. For the purposes of this essay, I am going to assume that he is right at least about the two theses embedded in the phrase "liberal managerial class": first, the thesis that there is indeed a connection between the privileges of "people like ourselves" and "liberalism"—I would prefer to call it progressivism or social democracy; and second, the thesis that this progressive or social democratic impulse does indeed spill over merely national loyalties and demand or encourage recognitions of rights beyond our national borders. If cosmopolitanism is indeed the ideology of something like a new global elite, then I want to ask what follows—whether there is a proper tone in which this can be acknowledged, a tone implying that acknowledgment is not the end of the conversation. The second half of this paper will look to the novel as a place where such matters of tone are most searchingly experimented and reflected on. But before turning to Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient3 and to the tonal experiments with cosmopolitanism that I find in those novels, I want to say something about the theory of the "liberal managerial class." That theory goes back at least to James Burnham, and it is explicitly connected to cosmopolitanism in the subsequent work of Alvin Gouldner. The most pertinent recent formulation, however, is probably that of John and Barbara Ehrenreich in their essay "The Professional-Managerial Class."4 Writing in the late 1970s, the Ehrenreichs set out to explain the anomaly that the socalled " 'middle-class left' . .. is, to a very large extent, the left

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

17

itself" (5). Between 1880 and 1920, they proposed, a new class had arisen between labor and capital. This "professional-managerial class" serves capital— its ultim ate goal is "the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations" (12). But it is also antagonistic to capital. Its identity is based not on ownership of property but on ownership of expertise; its goals are "efficiency, order, and rationality," which are "not in themselves capitalist goals" (23). Thus its "own self-interest [is] bound up in reforming capitalism" (19), and it often embraces an "explicitly socialist politics" (24). Yet this version of socialism is defined by both "scorn for the capitalist class and elitism toward the working class" (31). Hence, among other deficiencies, the dramatic limits of student radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s. The Ehrenreichs showed unusual courage in offering the American left a collective autobiography that is so consistently and gratingly imperfect. It is understandable that, having done so, they recoiled in horror from the elitism they had revealed. But it is in the larger spirit of their enterprise to take another and more positive step, asking whether the left's unpredicted and unsettling middle-classness is not a resource as well as an embarrassment. In the relative absence of a theoretically predicted working-class internationalism, for example, what are we to make of the verifiable existence of middle-class internationalism ? In the period the Ehrenreichs were most concerned with, there was certainly working-class opposition to the war in Vietnam as well as workingclass solidarity with the victims of U.S.-supported military dictatorships elsewhere in the world. But a hard-nosed, irreverent look at where the bulk of the internationalist opposition and solidarity came from would have to recognize the large and perhaps dominant role of groups other than, say, the labor movement. I apologize for dredging up ancient battles between the old, or Cold War-era, left and the new, or Vietnam-era, left. But it's hard not to, because those battles are still with us. It's these same issues— not just the ghost of Vietnam, but current issues around

18

BRUCE ROBBINS

immigration, human rights, and the welfare of noncitizens—that Richard Rorty is still fighting over in Achieving Our Country, that find an echo in Pinsky, and that continue to trouble efforts to reunite intellectuals with a reinvigorated Sweeney-led labor movement.5 How we imagine conflicts between national and international loyalties, how we work to avoid or negotiate such conflicts, how we might be able to stop our politicians from exporting the worst effects of our internal contradictions to other countries where there are no voters to worry about: these are questions on which more than the future of this country depends. The goal I dangle before myself, with no undue confidence that it will be on anyone's agenda very soon, is the goal of getting a working majority of Americans behind policies that would try to redistribute wealth more equitably not just within the United States—though that would be challenging enough—but also between the United States and the rest of the world, a world in which, as the United Nations recently reported, 20 percent of the population consumes 86 percent of the resources. For there to be any movement at all in this case, two of the many things that would have to happen are: (1) there would have to be a desire for more knowledge of the world outside our borders, and (2) there would have to be belief in some possibility of common interest across class lines. Both of these are ruled out in advance by the Ehrenreichs' case against elitism, a case against "authority, knowledge, skill" (41). In the Ehrenreichs' account, the rise of the the professional-managerial class—the PMC—coincides with and derives from a "drive to reorganize and reshape working class life"— a colonizing, divide-and-conquer strategy in which professional expertise and state-run or semiofficial agencies, which provide jobs to the PMC, displace the working class's "indigenous networks of support and mutual aid" and destroy "autonomous working class culture" (16). This interest in colonizing the workingclass life-world is not a casual or contingent failing; it virtually defines the PMC, explaining w hy it is not m erely likely to

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

19

encounter stylistic and cultural resistance from working-class allies but "objectively antagonistic" to the working class. I quote again: "professional-managerial workers exist, as a mass grouping in monopoly capitalist society, only by virtue of their expropriation of the skills and culture once indigenous to the working class" (17). The guiding m etaphor behind this model of expertise-asexpropriation-of-indigenous-knowledge is that of colonization. It is a much-used metaphor, but a highly questionable one. Is the PMC usefully thought of as a band of foreigners penetrating the territory of natives? Is the working class a colony deprived of its national sovereignty? The mode of rule characteristic of advanced capitalist societies, as we have all heard a hundred times, is "hegemony," a mode in which the working class is not denied any voice in the manner in which it is ruled, but on the contrary has its consent actively elicited. For Gramsci, the working class in the West could no longer simply be dominated; domination was reserved for more primitive forms of rule, as in the colonies. The Ehrenreichs implicitly and properly adopt the model of hegemony when they speak of the PMC as "mediating" between capital and labor, a process that would require conceding something to the working class while trying to regulate it (19). But when they borrow a national vocabulary for class, they slip back into the implication that the American working class suffers not hegemony but domination; it is like Algeria or Rhodesia or Vietnam, colonized by the holders of knowledge. Like the familiar metaphor of the colony as a woman penetrated and violated by the colonizer, a metaphor that never did any good to actual women whether in the colonial or the postcolonial period, the metaphor of the working class as a colony certainly does no good to the actual or former colonies. On the contrary, it undermines many of their strongest supporters by presenting them as constitutively middle class, or PMC; it makes the antiimperialists out to be imperialists. According to the Ehrenreichs' zero-sum view, the possessor or seeker of "knowledge, skills, and culture"

20

BRUCE ROBBINS

(45) is set against the working class in an essential, nonnegotiable way. The only good expertise, by this "expropriation" model, is an expertise that abolishes itself. New knowledge, for example extranational knowledge, is not seen as something the working class would ever want. Knowledge about the world outside one's borders, which cannot be seen as knowledge expropriated from a depleted, Forrest Gump-like working class, cannot be seen as an object of worthwhile epistemological desire. In presenting the working class as a colonized nation, the Ehrenreichs also obscure the allegiance to and dependence on the nation, their shared nation, that is common to both classes, the supposed colonizer as well as the supposed colonized. To say that the working class is not a seeker after knowledge is to say that it has no desire for education, except perhaps in sporadic self-betraying imitation of the middle class. To remain true to itself, it cannot desire, say, the social welfare state, which has made free democratic access to education a key constituent of public policy since—precisely—the Progressive Era: the era when the PMC was supposedly born. Hence working-class desire for education is read out of the Ehrenreichs' history of the making of the social welfare state, a history that can in fact only be understood if working-class desire is factored in alongside the career ambitions and rising expertise of the PMC. In order to preserve the pure victimhood of the working class, the Ehrenreichs take away their partial but hardly negligible effect on social welfare legislation—in the current jargon, their agency. The fact that free public education requires large numbers of teachers, for example, can only appear as a source of jobs for "greedy" members of the PMC (28).6 It's as if, as the colonization metaphor suggests, the desire of PMC members for teaching jobs and the desire of the working class for free education could not both be satisfied without making one a winner and the other a loser. This is not an idle example, of course, given the state of the academic job market today, and it is even more pertinent in that lack of public support for higher education is so clearly tied to fear

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

21

of subversive globality whipped up by the "unpatriotic academy" refrain in Rorty and others. My suggestion is that state-supported education can stand as a paradigm of the common ground between the PMC and the working class, common ground that is denied by the Ehrenreichs but also by Pinsky and for that matter by voters who hesitate to fund higher education. However uneven and sometimes degrading, it is the product of a real historical coincidence of interests between "elite" providers of expert services and their "nonelite" recipients, a result of class conflict but also of class concession and compromise. In short, it is a cross-class institution, as limited but also as real an achievement as the weekend. As the AFL-CIO was well inspired to present itself as "the people who brought you the weekend," so academics would be well inspired to answer insinuations of elitism with some version of the slogan "from the people who brought you the social welfare state." Yet this reminder of a common national adherence, which the Ehrenreichs' colonization metaphor disguises, also presents a difficulty for my argument. As the reader may already be thinking, one might well agree that there is significant common interest between PMC and working class at the level of the welfare state, that the sort of zero-sum conflict over expertise that the Ehrenreichs posit does not hold here, and yet still maintain that none of this applies outside the nation-state. Outside the state, the "liberal-managerial class" looks guilty as charged, you may be reflecting, for outside the state there are none of those small but appreciable checks and balances on capital that operate within national borders; there are only the interests of global capital. Global capital encourages people to think globally—this is the most obvious reason for the PMC's cosmopolitanism—but it does not encourage them to think about the common welfare. In the international domain, the argument would go, there is no provisional synthesis of the sort that the welfare state has provided. Beyond the reach of the welfare state, capitalism really is a jungle, and a global elite would have to be a

22

BRUCE ROBBINS

jungle elite. This is more or less the argument that former labor secretary Robert Reich makes when he says that the "symbolic analysts"—his version of the cosmopolitan "liberal-managerial class"— are doing great for themselves on the world market but have cut loose from their responsibilities to the rest of the nation. Hence new liberal nationalists like Reich tend to give the defense of the welfare state as their eminently respectable motive for cutting off foreign commitments and shutting down the universalistic modes of thinking that encourage such commitments.7 In a book that I recently coedited, I tried to counter this argument by proposing that the same historical process that produces national solidarity, according to Benedict Anderson's account, could also be expected to produce, however incipiently and unevenly, versions of international solidarity. Now that what Anderson calls "print capitalism" has so clearly extended beyond the borders of the nation, one would expect something like the "deep horizontal comradeship" Anderson describes to appear beyond or across those borders as well.8 For just as capitalism is national as well as international (the populist attempt to make capitalism merely global, as if it did not inform and determine the nation from within, is clearly invidious), so too the institutional, statelike efforts to moderate and contain capitalism are international as well as national.9 This is one thing that is happening, even in the absence of formal state structures, in what is called international civil society, made up of relative good guys like the UN, Amnesty International, and Greenpeace as well as relative bad guys like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Some socializing impulse is now visible even within multi- and transnational corporations, which are increasingly forced to defend themselves in public for their labor practices, their environmental impact, and so on. The at least superficial Benetton-style multiculturalism that can result from multinational marketing has been much commented on. How much deeper it might go, and what other unpredictable cultural results might follow, seem to me questions worth investigating in

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

23

the same dialectical spirit with which Marx looked at earlier, equally unintended consequences of capitalist development. The cultural consequence that interests me most here is the ideology of professionalism. Though the Ehrenreichs do not comment on the cosmopolitan tendencies of their professional-managerial class, Alvin Gouldner does make this point about his "new class," which he sees as encouraging "a cosmopolitan identity, transcending national limits and enhancing their autonom y from local elites."10 For Gouldner, professionalism is the ideology that legitimates this identity.11 This makes sense. Professionalism, with its peculiar ability to produce bonds among detached, institutionally scattered subjects, bonds not created or sustained by the frequent, face-to-face engagements of the same-site work group, would seem well suited to new demands for loyalty and solidarity at a distance, whether corporate or quasi-governmental. The question is whether this fit between professional affectivity and geographical globality, supposing it could be demonstrated, would prove to be anything other than a new style of social hierarchy. Consider the coincidence that in two recent Booker Prizewinning novels, Ishiguro's Remains of the Day and Ondaatje's The English Patient, both of them also very successful films, we are presented with characters who are both cosmopolitans and aristocrats. In Ishiguro's novel, the cosmopolitanism belongs to the butler's employer, Lord Darlington, and this cosmopolitanism is apparently seen as a tragic mistake, a solidarity with German fellow aristocrats that is stronger than mere national solidarity and that produces a disastrous complicity with the Nazis. In Ondaatje's case, the aristocrat is the so-called English patient, the Hungarian count Almasy, and his cosmopolitanism is apparently seen quite positively, as a desert dream of existence free of national rivalry that is shattered along with the love affair— again shattered by World War II. One hypothesis that m ight account for this untimely linking of cosmopolitanism to aristocracy is an analogy between aristocracy then and professionalism now. In other

2U

BRUCE ROBBINS

words, has professional expertise become a modern equivalent of aristocratic blood? The English Patient would seem to support this hypothesis. The pleasures of dislocation and mobility that Count Almasy enjoys are less tied to his rank than to his expertise, an expertise that is intensely and repeatedly eroticized not just for him but also for his fellow, nonaristocratic cosmopolitan, an involuntary or constrained cosmopolitan rather than a privileged one, the Sikh sapper Kip. What we fall in love with, Ondaatje says, is knowledge (120-21). The search for knowledge, which unites the explorers, is explicitly aligned with love and against nations: "We were German, English, Hungarian, African—all of us insignificant to [the desert tribes]. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states. Madox died because of nations" (138). The death of the Englishman Madox, a protest against the national rivalry that will destroy the brotherhood of male explorers, is for once not set against heterosexuality or blamed on a meddling woman. Though the familiar structure is there, a woman coming between men, there is also the surprise that Almasy's erotic bond with Katharine Clifton has the same content as his homosocial bond with Madox and the other men: an eroticizing of cosmopolitan knowledge. With Katharine, as with the men, what we see is bonding via literary quotations, quotations ranging from Herodotus to Stephen Crane and passing notably through Eve's desire to be instructed by Adam in Paradise Lost. We see a love story entangled in the classics, and the classics embedded in North African geography, archaeology, history— a full curriculum for "world studies" in an age when the line between Europe and nonEurope can no longer pretend to be coherent. We see the banal metaphor of education-as-exploration made into a story about the shedding of one's clothes, about achieving states of nakedness. The glamorous cosmopolitanism of the love story, accompanied by the explorers' quest for further exotic knowledge, becomes a sort of propaganda for humanistic education— some of the more effective

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

25

propaganda I've seen. And the tragedy of the love story carries with it, as a sort of shadow, the tragedy of disinterested knowledge itself, gathered for love but made to serve national and imperial purposes. Much the same is true of the exotic knowledge of Kip, a Sikh who has won some acceptance from the British by virtue of his technical expertise as a sapper. His expertise too is eroticized, eroticized both by its place in a fraternal solidarity among colleagues and in Kip's love story with Hana: "The sappers kept to themselves for the most part. They were an odd group as far as character went, somewhat like people who worked with jewels or stone, they had a hardness and clarity within them, their decisions frightening even to others in the same trade. Kip had witnessed that quality among gem-cutters but never in himself, though he knew others saw it there. The sappers never became familiar with one another. W hen they talked they passed only inform ation along, new devices, habits of the enem y" (110). It is his sapper colleague Hardy, with whom he has no personal conversation, who "keeps [him] human" (216), Kip realizes—more so Hardy than Hana, one might say, and human in an impersonal, gem-cutter mode that might also be described as inhuman. Sex with Hana is itself less palpable and less vibrant than is the lengthy, unhurried, step-bystep process of defusing bombs, the displaced sensuality of the embrace of metal, the intim ate, fingertip handling of those charged, mysterious moving parts. Yet the relation with Hana too takes the form of exchanges of knowledge, both about bombs and about the cold, time- and nation-transcending inhumanity of Italian Renaissance art. According to Pinsky, "the village of the liberal managerial class" is unlike all other villages in one crucial respect: it is a village without love. Cosmopolitanism is "a view of the world that would be true only if people were not driven by emotions" (87). It is "bloodless," "arid"; it has no room for "patriotism and similar forms of love" (88). I am suggesting that he is both right and wrong: that the

26

BRUCE ROBBINS

homosocial and heterosexual love in The English Patient exemplifies a peculiar sort of postpatriotic love, an eroticizing of professional knowledge that may well seem cooler or more bloodless than certain other passions and that is also characteristic of the transnational scale—love of a peculiar sort, no doubt, yet love nonetheless. And love vicariously enjoyed by a broad public, much of which will have experienced class as an unequal distribution of meaningful work—meaningful in the sense of allowing room for initiative, control, adventure, accomplishment, collegiality. Benedict Anderson has suggested that male buddies provide the erotic paradigm of American nationalism.12 To judge from the many narratives now in circulation where the buddy principle crosses gender lines and replaces or confuses heterosexuality with collegiality, it seems that this paradigm is now stretching—and stretching toward an erotics of cosmopolitanism as well. In Remains of the Day, unlike The English Patient, professionalism and love seem antithetical. "Our professional duty is not to our own foibles and sentiments," the butler-protagonist tells Miss Kenton, "but to the wishes of our employer" (149). Professionalism seems responsible both for the butler's personal sacrifice of love with Miss Kenton and for his moral failure in backing his employer's backing of the Nazis. The argument seems straightforward. Lord Darlington convenes a conference of European diplomats at Darlington Hall in March 1923 in order to make "a strong moral case for a relaxing of various aspects of the Versailles treaty, emphasizing the great suffering he had himself witnessed in Germany" (92). In the years and pages that follow, we will see Lord D arlington as an open anti-Sem ite whose efforts to stop the approaching war with Germany align him with the Nazis. In case we had missed the point, the 1923 conference is also the moment when Stevens' father, lying upstairs gravely ill, has a stroke and dies while his son, who has been warned that the end is near, refuses to interrupt his professional attentions to the diplomats downstairs. Told that his father has passed away, he remarks that he

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

27

is "very busy just now." All of this suggests with a certain crude force the aristocratic inhumanity of what Lord Darlington is trying to accomplish in the world and the professional inhumanity that leads the butler to serve Lord Darlington's ends so blindly, with very bad consequences both for himself and for the world. There are two problems with this equation of ethics at the level of global policy making with ethics in the domestic workplace. One is the real historical possibility that Lord Darlington was right— that "a freezing of German reparation payments" in 1923, as proposed at the conference, might indeed have stopped World War II from happening.13 This is a disturbing hypothesis, maintained in the 1920s by figures of the stature of John Maynard Keynes, that the film version avoids by pushing the conference forward into the 1930s, when the Nazis were already in power and there can no longer be doubt about Lord Darlington's mistake. The other problem is that there is a critic of Lord Darlington present at the conference, an American senator named Lewis, and his is a criticism to which the novel cannot quite say no. Lewis is publicly exposed as trying in a duplicitous and ungentlemanlike way to undercut Lord Darlington's aims, inciting hostility to Germany so as to guarantee debt payments to the United States. Lewis's response is to tell his host and fellow guests that "international affairs today are no longer for gentlem en amateurs" (102). He then offers a toast: "To professionalism." No one drinks except himself. Later in the novel, however, young Mr. Cardinal, soon to be killed in the war and speaking with the authority of his imminent death, tries to enlist Stevens to save Lord D arlington from his support of the Nazis. He offers the highest interpretation of Darlington's motives. But he agrees with the American about the desirability of professionalism: "I remember coming here years ago, and there was this American chap here. We were having a big conference, my father was involved in organizing it. I remember this American chap, even drunker than I am now, he got up at the dinner table in front of the whole company.

28

BRUCE ROBBINS

And he pointed at his lordship and called him an amateur. Called him a bungling amateur and said he was out of his depth. Well, I have to say, Stevens, that American chap was quite right." Something is clearly going on if the term professionalism can refer both to Stevens's ideological self-mystification and, at the transnational level, to something like a solution.14 This double reference opens up the logical though still mysterious possibility that professionalism like the butler's might somehow belong to a new transnational ethic—as it did, according to Niall Ferguson, in the case of Keynes. The speech in which "Keynes's influence on the reparation issue reached its zenith," in August 1922, also contained, Ferguson notes, Keynes's prediction that "the day of scientific, administrative and executive skill was at hand . .. not this year, indeed, but next year" (405-6). Let me offer two brief exhibits suggesting that a more positive or Keynesian appreciation of professionalism, seen as enabling a necessary cosmopolitanism, is at least within the horizon of this apparently antiprofessional novel. Exhibit one: The character who seems to embody the clearest, most democratic antithesis to professionalism is one Harry Smith, a democrat and "common man" (as his name suggests) who defends the war against the Nazis and (again in contrast to Stevens) affirms that "ordinary people truly can be expected to have 'strong opinions' on all manner of things" (194). What is so interesting about Harry Smith is that he is just as passionately sure it is wrong to allow "all kinds of little countries going independent" (192). The democrat at home is a defender of empire abroad. If critics of professionalism are also champions of imperialism, then are we sure their antielitism or antiprofessionalism really speaks for democracy? Robert Pinsky might well be asked the same question. Exhibit two: Renata Salecl has suggested that professionalism in this novel is not set against love, as it might appear; love must be thought of rather as love in and for the professional "constraints"

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

29

that seem to block it. "The masks of decency, professionalism, and asexuality" that seem to block Stevens from his desire are actually what he desires. "It is useless to search in Stevens for some hidden love that could not come out because of the rigid ritual he engaged himself in—all of his love is in the rituals. Inasmuch as it can be said that he loves Miss Kenton, he loves her from the perspective of submission to the codes of their profession" (185).15 One can make sense of this insight without recourse to Salecl's Lacanian concepts. What she astutely perceives in Remains of the Day anticipates the theme I tried to bring out a minute ago about love in The English Patient: the historically emergent eroticizing of expertise and of the social bonds for which expertise stands. I would suggest, in other words, that the erotically unconsummated affection between the butler and Miss Kenton, a relationship between colleagues that will not lead to marriage and children, exemplifies a characteristic professional affectivity, an affectivity that substitutes recruitment for reproduction and that has come to assume a larger and larger place in our narratives, and not coincidentally a larger place in the fashioning of global or transnational subjects. This is in part because it is an alternative not so much to Lord Darlington's diplomatic amateurism as to the hot nationaldemocratic passion of Harry Smith, which is equally certain about the need to fight Hitler and about the need to keep a tight hold on the empire. It makes room for such disjunctions as the fact that, though Lord Darlington is an anti-Semite, his 1923 conference was a good idea. The same might be said about Lord Darlington's classbased, aristocratic cosmopolitanism that Pinsky says about Martha Nussbaum's: it is a very partial universalism. Like professionalism, it involves solidarity with some people outside the nation, not solidarity with humanity as a whole.16 Yet this partial universalism enables him to see and urges him to act on something that those around him will not, the injustice of the Versailles Treaty and the potentially fatal effects of national revenge. This means that,

30

BRUCE ROBBINS

unlikely as it may seem, the butler's professionalism turns out to have been correct. His detached professional affectivity removes him sufficiently from the national passions raging around him that he can play his small part in what turns out to have been a plausible, even visionary project, a project to avoid Hitler's rise to power and the catastrophe of the World War II. (This is, strangely, much the same moral as is carried by Kip and Almasy in The English Patient.) The butler's moral obtuseness toward those closest to him has to be radically revalued at the world scale, for it helps nurture the larger, more distant solidarities that will come back to determine whether those closest to him, like Mr. Cardinal, end up dead on the battlefield. That is the sense in which Mr. Cardinal is right about professionalism The tonal complexity I have been trying to bring out in Remains of the Day and The English Patient is obviously not easy to sustain, or even to articulate. Neither movie version even made the effort. One way to get at it, with an eye to the generational split I alluded to earlier, would be the following rule: as a prerequisite for contemporary worldliness, we will henceforth permit no case for the moral value of World War II that neglects the cosmopolitan geography of its anticolonial and neocolonial aftermath. This is a test that the film Saving Private Ryan would fail, not just because it makes a Pinsky-like argument for patriotism in the postuniversalistic, post-Cold War era, but because (I owe this point to Bonnie Honig) it puts the educated liberal cosmopolitan interpreter in a moral category lower than that of the Germans. I have been suggesting that Pinsky was right to link cosmopolitanism and a "liberal managerial class," but that he did so in the wrong tone. The tone of Pinsky's anticosmopolitanism, like Spielberg's, is ingratiatingly populist—the tone of someone who wants to be loved (fair enough), but loved by those with whom he already has every reason to feel close. Ishiguro and Ondaatje seem to me to be experimenting with tones that cannot afford to take such proximities for granted. I'm with them.

THE VILLAGE OF THE LIBERAL MANAGERIAL CLASS

31

NOTES 1.

Robert Pinsky, "Eros against Esperanto/' in Martha C. Nussbaum with respondents, For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism, ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 85-90.

2.

Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). What H untington means is that we in the United States should continue the effort to amass as much of the world's scarce resources as possible— something we have already been rather successful at— but should hide our efforts behind the excuse of cultural difference rather than pretending this is in the world's interest, an excuse that will not longer wash.

3.

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (New York: Vintage International, 1989); Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient (New York: Vintage, 1992).

4.

Barbara and John Ehrenreich, ‫״‬The Professional-Managerial Class," in Between Labor and Capital, ed. Pat Walker (Boston: South End Press, 1979).

5.

Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). See also Steven Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman, eds., Audacious Democracy: Labor, Intellectuals, and the Social Reconstruction of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).

6.

The state sector has also served as a significant source of employment and upward mobility for working-class minorities. See Stanley A ronowitz, "The Professional-M anagerial Class or Middle Strata," in Walker, Between Labor and Capital, 213-42.

7.

Robert B. Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for

8.

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Ori-

Twenty-first Century Capitalism (New York: Vintage, 1992). gin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 9.

Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

10.

Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the

11.

More recently Ulf Hannerz has made much the same connection in

N ew Class (New York: Continuum, 1979), 2.

32

BRUCE ROBBINS

Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 252-55. 12.

Anderson, Imagined Communities, 202-3 n. 32. Anderson writes, "Rather than a national eroticism [as suggested by Leslie Fieldler], it is, I suspect, an eroticized nationalism that is at work."

13.

This hypothesis is vigorously debated in Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 395-432. Ferguson ultimately rejects the idea, pressed forcefully by figures like John Maynard Keynes, that "the burden of reparations on Germany doomed Europe to a new war" (439); for him, responsibility for the rise of Nazism falls more heavily on the Versailles Treaty's assumption that "disarmament could suffice to eradicate militarism" and on its "invocation of the principle of 'selfdetermination' " (439). According to Ferguson, "Keynes was manipulated by his German friends" (408). He was "too trusting" (410). Still, the intriguing parallels between Keynes and Ishiguro's Lord Darlington clearly work in the latter's favor, especially considering how widespread Ferguson shows the reaction in Britain to be against the perceived harshness of the reparations (397).

14.

Cardinal's explicit point seems to be the disciplinary premise of international relations: though honor may work locally, globally it is

15.

irrelevant and misleading. Renata Salecl, "I Can't Love You unless I Give You Up," in Salecl and Slavoj Zizek, eds., Gaze and Voice as Love Objects (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 179-207. "For that reason, it would be a mistake to depict Stevens as the only culprit for the nonrealization of the love affair___On the one hand [Miss Kenton] wants Stevens to change, to reveal his love for her, but on the other hand, she loves him only for what he actually is— a functionary who tries by all available means to avoid his desire" (185).

16.

Without some partiality, of course, it could not have the emotional charge it does have.

2

"THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN‫״‬ Cosmopolitanism and Late Medieval Literature ROBERT R. EDWARDS

Half a century ago the cosmopolitan features of medieval literature could be explained to almost anyone's satisfaction by invoking tradition as a means of analysis and a standard of enduring value. Tradition showed how medieval texts lined up with their forebears and w hether— or how m uch— they measured up to them. In Anglo-American scholarship, this kind of appeal would have derived proximately from T. S. Eliot and remotely from Matthew Arnold, but it was the European exponents of tradition who were then bringing the advanced literary technology of the day to medieval studies in America.1 Erich Auerbach furnished a conceptual framework and historical narrative— the story of high mimetic realism—to link antiquity's synchronic theories of style and decorum with Christianity's elevation of the historical and quotidian. Ernst Robert Curtius, surveying the rhetorical continuities of literary tradition from Hesiod to the Romantics, located the geography of cosmopolitanism in a Romanized Europe and discovered its temporal center in the Latin Middle Ages: "One acquires the rights of citizenship in the country of European literature only when one has spent m any years in each of its provinces and has frequently moved about from one to another. One is a European when one has become a civis Romanus."2

34

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

The unified tradition these scholars and others could invoke was, of course, already under threat; indeed, it was shifting and crumbling away even as they traced its shape and influence with consummate learning and powerful insight. Revisionist theories of culture have in the meantime transformed tradition from an analytic tool and qualitative measure to a topic itself of interrogation and often profound dispute. If we are to revisit the literary and cultural geography that earlier medieval scholars could largely take for granted, we need to take some account of issues in contemporary debates over cosmopolitanism. W hether these debates have produced a consistent method of analysis is of less concern than the utility of the interpretive categories—imagined communities and nationhood, identity, modernity, and the cultural politics of colonialism. This essay examines some areas where cosmopolitanism can aid our critical understanding of medieval literature and where medieval literature might help refine our grasp of what is at stake in cosmopolitanism. I want to begin with two general considerations—the defining topos of the world citizen and the structure of high literary culture in late medieval England—and then move to some illustrative texts. These texts are from the "matter" of Troy, which served a formidable range of literary, political, and cultural objectives. My aim is not to offer comprehensive readings but to examine some of the critical positions the texts open up on literary cosmopolitanism in the late medieval period. I Certainly the most pervasive topos of cosmopolitanism is the trope of the world citizen. The kosmou polites of classical Greek antiquity fashioned himself a citizen of the world more than a citizen of a particular state or native land. Cosmopolite, in this sense, appeared in English usage at the very end of the sixteenth century, became common in the seventeenth, and acquired a further, pejorative sense in the nineteenth century, when it designated

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN"

35

someone w ithout roots or conviction, as against the patriot grounded in a homeland. As Timothy Brennan points out, in Eastern Europe it served as a lexical marker of anti-Semitism, even before Stalinism gave it added currency and a state apparatus for enforcement.3 There is no Middle English instance of cosmopolite or cosmopolitan, but if we look to late classical and medieval Latin usage, we find a rich context of speculation about allegiance and identity. Saint A ugustine's City of God gives the most influential formulation of what it means to be a citizen of the world in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. In the second part of his work, after reviewing the dossier on the pagan gods, Augustine turns to the social and cultural history that follow on from the Creation. He imagines two lines of human descent, headed respectively by Cain and Abel (De ciuitate Dei 15.1): . . . in duo genera distribuim us, u n u m eorum , qui secu nd um hom inem , alterum eorum, qui secundum deum uiuunt; quas etiam m ystice appellamus ciuitates duas, hoc est duas societates hom inum , quarum est una quae praedestinata est in aeternum regnare cum deo, altera aeternum supplicium subire cum diabolo.4 [I classify the hum an race into two branches: the one consists of those w ho live by hum an standards, the other of those w ho live according to God's will. I also call these two classes the two cities, speaking allegorically. By two cities I m ean two societies of hum an beings, one of w hich is predestined to reign w ith God for all eternity, the other doom ed to undergo eternal pun ishm ent w ith the D evil.]5

The most striking feature of A ugustine's form ulation is the complexity that lies beneath the stark dichotomy of two cities, the allegorical Babylon and Jerusalem. In Augustine's geography, the two cities are communities and associations (the proper

36

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

sense of civitates), constituted by human choice and grace. The language describing them emphasizes distribution and division— a parsing out of mankind at the beginning of time, within the temporal extension of linear history, and at the final ordering of apocalypse. Augustine's two cities coexist and overlap. The city of God is described, in a repeated image, as wandering in the world, and so the civis and the peregrinus (the enfranchised citizen and the foreigner or alien of Roman political taxonomy) switch their expected positions. The citizen of the heavenly city is isolated from other earthly communities, while the citizen of the world is alienated from God, his fellow souls, and himself. In this transposition, the worldly city is constituted against itself. Shifting the grammar of desire from active to passive voice, Augustine says, "quae cum dominari adpetit, etsi populi seruiant, ipsa ei dominandi libido dominatur" [it "aims at dominion [and] holds nations in enslavement, but is itself dominated by that very lust of domination" [1 Praef.]).6 Further, the distribution of citizens into these communities is dynamic and temporal rather than static. Those who comprise the heavenly city as a sacramental body may not necessarily attain to its final anagogic mysteries, while some citizens of the world may in time join the spiritual city (1.35). In the Confessions (8.2), the learned teacher Victorinus, a worldly citizen already honored by a statue in the Forum, illustrates this shift from one form of allegiance to another by becoming a Christian. At the end of Piers Plowman, Langland deftly inverts A ugustine's categories, when the Church identified as Unitas collapses from within and Conscience must journey as a peregrinus from a corrupt Christian community to search for Piers Plowman (B 20.371-84; C 22.373-86). Augustine treats the world citizen as more than a foil for the citizen of paradise, and his contemporaries and followers absorb his nuanced understanding. Saint Ambrose, his spiritual father, goes directly to the question that Augustine avoids in defining the two cities. In a letter to the bishop Sabinus (6.34.16), Ambrose says

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN37

‫״‬

that the world is a homeland (patria) created for all mankind. He continues: N am si hodie quocumque accesserit sapiens, ubique civis est, ubique sua intellegit, nusquam se peregrinum, nusquam hospitem iudicat, quanto magis ille primus hom o totius erat m undi incola et ut Graeci dicunt, !cosmopolites, opus dei recens, confabulator adsiduus, "civis sanctorum," conplantatus virtutibus, praepositus om nibus terrenis anim antibus, marinis, volatilibus, totu m m un du m suam p o ssessionem putabat, quem dom inus tuebatur ut opus suum neque ut bonus parens adque auctor deserebat.7 [Even today, if, w herever the w ise m an goes, he is a citizen and knows his own, now here considering h im self a m ere pilgrim or a foreigner, h ow m uch more was that first man an inhabitant of all the world, and as the Greeks say, a "cosmopolite," for he was the final work of God, continually talking w ith God, a fellow citizen of the saints, a groundbed of virtues? Placed over all the creatures of earth, sea, and sky, he considered the w hole world his dominion; God guarded him as His handiwork, and as a good parent and maker never abandoned h im .]8

In this passage, Ambrose anticipates the Enlightenment paradox of universalism and cultural difference, whose medieval version is the problem of the virtuous pagan. Ambrose privileges virtue, here specifically spiritual virtue. His analogy between a wise man and Adam, the first world citizen, depends on the recognition that mankind and the world are providential creations. God is the father and author of what Adam takes possession over, and he watches over both works simultaneously.9 Echoing Ambrose's terms civis and incola, the Carolingian writer Sedulius Scottus moves from spiritual to moral virtues as he identifies Socrates as the prototypical citizen of the world.10 The eleventh-century monastic writer Goswinus explains Socrates's world citizenship by saying that

38

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

virtue is the same everywhere; those who follow reason participate in a common municipium, a free city whose citizens are governed by their own laws and magistrates.11 As in Augustine, the language of statehood serves to challenge the claims of authority over human communities with radically different allegiances and identities. II

In late medieval England, cosmopolitanism occupies a shifting rather than fixed geography. Built on the foundations of AngloN orm an culture and adm inistration, Middle English literary culture succeeded a sophisticated Anglo-Saxon culture already operating in both the Germanic and Latin traditions. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, English literature stands at the intersection of cultural forces: cosmopolitan culture meets national and regional practices, and it exists simultaneously within and apart from a courtly social base. Moreover, cosmopolitanism is largely inseparable from the question of language and particularly the role of the vernacular. Thorlac Turville-Petre has argued that, among English historical writers of the earlier fourteenth century, language, territory, and people are the criteria for defining national identity.12 The difference between cosmopolitan and national agendas consists, then, in the use of language horizontally across aristocratic and administrative elites or vertically to integrate those elites with other social strata sharing the same territory and moving toward some measure of political authority— "the learned and the lewed" comprising the English people and nation.13 At the end of the thirteenth century, Dante had confronted the contrasting goals of cosmopolitanism and civic, if not national, identity in the first systematic treatment of literary theory in the vernacular. In his De vulgari eloquentia, he contrasts a secondary, rule-governed language, which he terms grammatica, with the vernacular, and he finds the latter more noble (1.4):

"THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN39

‫״‬

Harum quoque duarum nobilior est vulgaris: turn quia prima fuit hum ano generi usitata; turn quia totus orbis ipsa perfruitur, licet in diversas prolationes et vocabula sit divisa; turn quia naturalis est nobis, cum ilia potius artificialis existât. [Of these tw o kinds of language, the more noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally used by the hum an race; second, because the w hole world em ploys it, though with different pronunciations and using different words; and third, because it is natural to us, w hile the other is, in contrast, artificial.]14

Dante goes on to show that the vernacular matches Latin by having a comparable grammar and by creating a literary tradition of its own. Drawing on French, Provençal, and above all Italian examples, he demonstrates the continuities and great themes (the magnalia of love, arms, and ethics) within the Romance vernaculars. Though Dante initially makes the point that eloquence is necessary to everyone (not only men but also women and children insofar as they are able [1.1]), he emphasizes lyric genres and the male w riters who practice them in a vernacular poetics divided into the illustrious, cardinal, courtly, and curial (1.16.6-19.2). His discussion combines a recognition of distinct municipal styles with participation in a literary culture that extends across boundaries of dialect and idiom. The illustrious vernacular is the common medium of a differentiated yet integral elite within an imperium of letters. The English situation in the late Middle Ages differs from what Dante envisions not because three languages are simultaneously at play in a single territory but because those languages exercise different claims to cultural and political authority. The view has long been that Latin operated in clerical circles, French at the court and among the aristocracy, and English in the emerging national consciousness. Recent scholarship has stressed, however, the reciprocity between and across these idioms and the dynamism of the connections. English writers in Latin comprised a textual

40

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

community that drew on a thousand years of tradition and intertextual resonance, even as their idiom was absorbing a new working vocabulary from the vernaculars and adopting semantic and stylistic features from them .15 Macaronic Latin and "latyn corrupt" testify to a vital, practical idiom whose social base widened from monastic circles to secular clergy and the professions.16 For English writers and readers, French remained not only a language of record but the medium of cosmopolitan culture, especially in the material practices of commissioning and owning books. These exchanges between languages can be regarded as hegemonic influence from a donor to a recipient culture, but it may be more accurate to describe them as participation. Ardis Butterfield notes, for example, that in the highly formalized lyric poems that form a major avenue for courtly traffic, the refrains migrate back and forth between English and French writers, sometimes in French and other times in English translation. She proposes, "The more closely medieval vernaculars are studied, the more it appears that they did not separate neatly into discrete, culturally exclusive linguistic groups, but that people often wrote a shifting kind of lingua franca."17 Her point is illustrated in another cultural sphere by the prologue to the Manières de langage, w ritten at Bury St. Edmunds in 1396. The prologue describes French as "la plus beale et la plus gracious langage et la plus noble parlere après latyn de scole que soit en monde et de toutz genz melz preysé et amee que nulle autre." For all these claims to elevation, the Manières served the needs of merchants involved in continental trade, clerics who had to retain some practical knowledge of w ritten French, and jurists for whom French remained a professional language.18 The major poets of the fourteenth-century English literary canon all speak to their audiences through shifting linguistic registers. Langland's Piers Plowman, arguably the most popular English poem of its own age, structures its English passages around quotations from the Vulgate and connects these quotations by a technique of biblical concordancing; Latin as well as English is the

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN41

‫״‬

lingua franca of Langland's social and spiritual vision.19 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight shows an extensive knowledge of French romance, and its narrative economy is closer to the twelfthcentury narratives of Chrétien de Troyes than to the sprawling, interlaced structures of the later prose romances.20 John Gower writes in all three literary languages of fourteenth-century England. An artifact like the unique manuscript of his Cinkante Balades, presented to Henry Bolingbroke, opens with poems in English, Latin, and then French; in general Gower's lyric poems correspond to the best contem porary practice at the Parisian court.21 Chaucer's earliest writing may have been in French.22 His first narrative poem, The Book of the Duchess, stages its inaugural moment by troping a French romance by Jean Froissart, the great chronicler then employed as secretary to Queen Philippa. Chaucer is the recipient, in 1386, of a poetic compliment from Eustache Deschamps, who fashions him the "Grant translateur." Chaucer, says Deschamps, has transplanted the Roman de la rose and now keeps the source from which other poets must seek their inspiration.23 In a gesture whose elegant wit would be recognized by the international readers of the Rose, he is thus textualized as the figure who thwarts the lover. Throughout his poetic career, Chaucer turns to what he evocatively calls "al the world of autours" (Legend of Good Women G 308)—a community of writers extending over time, language, and culture. Moreover, this authorial world is situated in history rather than isolated from it. W hat David Wallace has w ritten about Chaucer's encounter with the great Italian poets applies as well to French and Latin writers. Chaucer discovered not just the poetic texts but also "the cultural and political contexts that they were designed to affirm or critique; he was thus able to imagine them at work, as cultural forces, before translating them to English as written or remembered texts."24 With the examples of Gower and Chaucer, we might want to distinguish cosmopolitanism in a weak and strong sense, respectively.

42

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

Gower absorbs his Latin and French sources so as to reproduce them, whether in their original languages or in English. He sets himself the task of gathering materials and displaying them in new arrangements, such as the confessional structure of the Confessio Am antis. His aim is to participate in a cosmopolitan literary culture. Though his revised prologue to the Confessio promises a "bok for Engelondes sake" (Prologue 24), his audience— real and imagined— is consistently aristocratic and courtly.25 Chaucer depends as much on literary sources as Gower; his "world of autours," too, is "Cristene and hethene" (G 309), both sides ostensibly underwriting the shared values of aristocratic culture. What distinguishes his strong cosmopolitanism is the aim of transforming, challenging, and to some extent resisting the cultural sphere that his writing both draws on and restructures. From the standpoint of literary history, the pervasive yet disjunct presence of the English court is as important as the dialectic between cosmopolitanism and national or regional claims. John Burrow's Ricardian Poetry famously, if controversially, annexed the term Ricardian, to connect the four great Middle English narrative poets under a loose rubric of periodization.26 Burrow depended, in turn, on Gervase Mathew's Court of Richard II, which found the sources of Richard's cultural ambitions in the cosmopolitan Angevin court of Robert the Wise at Naples, where Boccaccio launched his literary program of classicizing epic and romance.27 Later scholarship has resituated the points of emphasis and influence in this literary geography, particularly the French influence, yet an international courtly culture remains our foundational explanation for high literary culture in the age. K. B. McFarlane points out that chamber knights of Richard II "belonged to the international chivalrous class and spoke its lingua franca."28 Nigel Saul examines the impact at court of an increasingly civilian character, the cultivation of elegant manners and fashion, the presence of women, and a heightened interest in polite letters and patronage. With increasing diplomatic contacts, he says, "there was

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN”

43

a near synchronism in the developments in the courtly life of the period."29 These developments prompted the often-quoted complaint of the chronicler Thomas Walsingham that Richard's knights were "knights of Venus rather than of Bellona: more effective in the bedchamber than the field."30 But if the Ricardian court fostered cosmopolitan values in literature, art, and social performance, its patronage was highly determinate. Like the Angevin court, it supported French and Latin literature but largely ignored its own vernacular. The only vernacular poetic text directly associated with the Ricardian court is Gower's Confessio amantis. The prologue I quoted earlier, in which Gower announces his aim to write a book "for Engelondes sake," replaces a passage in the original text where Gower proposes to write a "bok for king Richardes sake" (Prologue 24*) and recounts his meeting the king on the Thames "[ujnder the toun of newe Troye" (Prologue 37*) when he receives his commission. The Ricardian court may be a m atrix for cosmopolitanism in late medieval English literature, but cosmopolitanism is not strictly courtly or curial in the sense Dante had used for the vernacular. We are closer to the mark in saying that it is international, as Elizabeth Salter described it, or transnational, as we might say today, emphasizing the dynamism of cultural and political forces.31 Cosmopolitanism thus understood operates through forms of allegiance and identity that reach across the medieval boundaries of states and regions, ethnicity, and language. Ill For the late Middle Ages, the Troy story is a paradigmatic cosmopolitan narrative. As told by medieval rather than classical authors, the story has a symmetrical three-part structure. It begins with Jason's search for the Golden Fleece and the destruction of Lamedon's Troy; its middle phase encompasses Priam's rebuilding of the city, the renewal of war after Paris carries off Helen, and the

UU

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

disastrous fall of the city; its final phase is the catastrophic return of the Greek heroes, notably Ulysses. Besides mythographic amplitude, the story offered a m yth of national origins for European cities, regions, and nations (translatio imperii) and a mirror for aristocratic and princely conduct. Medieval writers found the appropriate medium for the Troy story in chronicle history rather than poetry.32 Its overall linguistic trajectory is from Latin "translations" of Dares and Dictys, the supposed chronicle witnesses to the war, to the French epic romance of Benoit de Sainte-Maure {he Roman de Troie, ca. 1160] to Guido delle Colonne's Latin Historia destructionis Troiae (1287), thence to vernacular translations and adaptations, notably those of Boccaccio and Chaucer. In late medieval England, the Troy story is at once regional and cosmopolitan. Moreover, all the extant versions incorporate a distinct viewpoint on their shared material. The Laud Troy Book uses techniques of oral address and the form of romance to tell the story.33 The Seege of Troye, composed early in the fourteenth century in the northwest Midlands, supplements Benoit de SainteM aure with the Latin poem Excidium Troiae. The "Gest Hystoriale" of the Destruction of Troy, probably composed in Lancashire in the later fourteenth century, translates Guido for the universal moral lessons of the story; the "noble history" recounted in the poem, as John Finlayson remarks, looks at the past "as a series of actions involving human beings struggling to create their own destinies" with some measure of confidence rather than fatalism.34 A fifteenth-century Scots translation of Guido's Historia survives in fragments added to two late manuscripts of John Lydgate's Troy Book.35 The version of Guido's Troy story that defines itself most consciously as at once cosmopolitan and national is the translation Lydgate undertook in 1412 at the behest of Henry, Prince of Wales, and completed in 1420. Like the poet of the Gest Hystoriale, Lydgate wants to preserve the memory of heroic figures and their deeds from the passage of time. But Henry's commission endows

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN45

‫״‬

the project with a special configuration. The "prowesse of olde chiualrie" is absorbed by the monarch as an ethical example to the aristocratic world. His own princely reading has the "fyn only vertu for to swe / Be example of hem, and also for to eschewe / The cursyd vice of slouthe and ydelnesse" (Prologue 81-83).36 In addition, the translation he commands frames this ethical modeling of nobility on the monarch within a national project: [He] m e comaunded the drery pitus fate O f hem of Troye in en glysche to translate, The sege also and the destruccioun, Lyche as the latyn maketh m encioun, For to compyle, and after Guydo make, So as I coude, and write it for his sake,

By-cause he wolde that to hy3e and lowe The noble story openly wer knowe In oure tonge, aboute in euery age, A nd y ‫־‬writen as w el in oure langage As in latyn and in frensche it is; That of the story J)e trouth[e] w e nat m ys N o m ore than doth eche other nacioun: This was the fyn of his entencioun. Prologue 1 0 5 -1 8

Henry's commission reflects the ambitious rivalry within international aristocratic culture. Lydgate's poem, more than the other English translations of Guido, will secure an English presence in the major textual and cultural communities of the age. To this end, Lydgate exploits the advantage of being a compilator—a writer who gathers and arranges the materials originally written by other men.37 "Making" (composing competent verse) after Guido rather than "enditing" (creating his own, fully authorial work), he produces a text that stands as a counterpart to the Latin and French versions. At the same time, Henry's intention is to tell the "noble

46

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

story openly" in a language accessible to all classes and social estates.38 Besides asserting the place of English and English nationhood within an international cosmopolitan order, Lydgate's translation of the Troy story is to integrate the high and the low w ithin an aristocratic ethos. Cosmopolitanism is to forge allegiance and identity across social strata on a common political geography. By the time of the poem's completion in 1420, it also provides a shared framework of aristocratic culture to support H enry's accession to the French throne after the death of Charles VI—a solution to national claims negotiated in the Treaty of Troyes (1420) and secured by Henry's marriage to Katherine of Valois on June 2,1420. Lydgate reports his commission with the confident assurance of an administrative policy statement. In one respect, however, his language belies the transparency of the monarch's goals. Henry, as Lydgate describes him, evidently believes that making the "noble story" available to all in English will leave its meaning stable and uncontested: the princely reader will disseminate the story and enforce his hermeneutics without disturbance. But to tell the "noble story openly" is to submit the unifying narrative of chivalry to ideological scrutiny. Vernacular poets had discovered the difficulties of policing narratives centuries earlier. The Roman de la rose, the manual of aristocratic culture, shows how "open" meaning is already put in question, how the literal rather than the allegorical level is the key point of contestation, and Chaucer's translation of it registers precisely this awareness.39 In Lydgate's Troy Book, this awareness unfolds equally in narrative and commentary. For instance, Lydgate dutifully rehearses Guido's misogyny about Criseyde's betrayal of Troilus, repudiates it, and then reproduces it in his defense of Criseyde (3.4264-445).40 Love and war, as Anna Torti observes, are parallels in Lydgate's poem.41 Derek Pearsall proposes that Lydgate comes to an understanding of his story only with Troy's fall in book 4: "Within a narrative context of ruin, destruction, and loss, Lydgate comes to

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN”

47

grips finally with a significance in the story which is profoundly meaningful to him, namely its profound meaninglessness" in the face of destiny, fortune, and worldly mutability.42 Moreover, Troy Book demonstrates the confusion of prudence, the chief virtue ostensibly uniting the characters in the poem and the poem with its audience.43 As Lydgate disperses prudence to a multitude of meanings, his governing virtue for aristocratic culture is both mystified and undone. The chief narrative sequences of his poem and the fates of his most conspicuous chivalric and political figures illustrate the repeated failure of prudence to negotiate uncertainty and repair the defects of character. IV

Lydgate and the other English translators of Guido's Historia show some of the critical positions that open up within the cosmopolitan story of Troy. Adaptations of the Troy story provide an important perspective on this process, for by adapting the story as background and subtext Middle English writers reveal its function as cultural work. Perhaps the most notable example is the use of Troy's fall as a temporal and thematic frame for A rthurian romance in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I want to focus on two adaptations— Saint Erkenwald and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde— which tie the Troy story to other facets of cosmopolitanism. The late Middle English alliterative poem entitled Saint Erkenwald, written in the northwest Midlands, most likely Cheshire, balances regional and metropolitan interests in a penetrating analysis of national myth.44 Erkenwald, son of the king Offa of the East Angles, was a seventh-century bishop of London, and tradition credits him with institutionalizing the church and establishing the primacy of Saint Paul's Cathedral. The poem celebrating him is a work that not only rehearses a narrative of cultural hegemony but carefully explores the internal tensions of dominance. The organizing conceit of the narrative frame is archaeology, both in its

48

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

classical sense of lists of officials and in the sense of successive historical strata to be exposed and studied. Erkenwald is situated in an episcopal succession that begins with Augustine's mission to Christianize the Britons, continues through three other missionary bishops, and finds consolidation in Erkenwald's tenure. Promulgated by Pope Gregory, the mission extends the power of the Roman church into barbarian lands and seems, at first glance, to represent cultural imperialism, even if in divinely sanctioned form. But the narrative frame turns away from the salvific and civilizing missions we have come to expect from narratives of colonialism. Instead, it presents the mission as a restoration— a religious, ethnic, and national renovatio. Appropriating chronicle history, it portrays the Saxon invasion as an assault and forced conversion of an originally Christian people. On this view, Horsa and Hengist's arrival in England ca. 449, the pivotal event of Saxon intervention, brings both political treachery and moral decay: "t)ai bete oute \>e Bretons and bro3t hom into Wales / And peruertyd alle \>e pepul t>at in £>at place dwellide" (9-10).45 In this account of early English history, the Christianizing mission returns the Britons to their original identity. Augustine "conuertyd alle t>e communnates to Cristendame newe" (14). The overall program of restoration follows a moderate colonial policy of transforming temples to churches, changing the names of pagan deities to those of Christian saints, and respecting established jurisdictions in setting the ecclesiastical boundaries for the sees of the three archbishops—those of London, York, and Wales. In this transition to a new political order, London acquires preeminence and takes on a mythology central to English chivalric culture: "Now ]sat London is neuenyd—hatte Jse New Troie— / J)e metropol and t>e mayster-toun hit euermore has bene" (25-26). At this point, the anonym ous poet does not explicitly work out the connections between restoring C hristianity and nam ing London after the supposed Trojan source of Britain, but he does effect a unified revisionist history: the Christianizing mission against the Saxons

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN”

49

has restored the Britons to their earlier faith, while integrating the "mayster-toun" with the mythic Trojan origin of the people. The narrative frame of Saint Erkenwald presents a vision of totalizing control, in which foreignness is accommodated and true selfhood is restored. At the same time, it prepares for a more complex, internal critique, which unfolds within the main action of the poem. The decisive action occurs when Erkenwald razes the pagan temple at London, the distinctive landmark of Saxon culture ("{)at one dole"—line 6), in order to build Saint Paul's. The poem identifies this project as a point of historical origin at the same time that it conflates the fictional project with the "New Werke" (38) of restoration actually begun in the m id-thirteenth century. W hat the project discovers is not, however, a telescoping forward in time but a recursion to the history it intends to displace by restoration. The masons and grubbers who dig the foundation find at the base a richly ornate tomb, on which the poet lavishes description: H it was a throghe of thykke ston thryuandly hewen, W yt gargeles garnysht aboute alle of gray marbre. The sperle of l>e spelunke ]sat sparde hit o ‫־‬lofte Was m etely made of \)e marbre and m enskefully planede, A nd £>e bordure enbelicit w y t bry3t golde lettres, Bot royn ysh e were J3e resones ]sat f)er on row stoden. (47-52)

Inside the coffin lies the richly dressed, uncorrupted body of a figure with crown and scepter. The condition and identity of this noble corpse become a hermeneutic puzzle for the clerics and citizens drawn to the marvelous coffin. Neither memory nor written authority can locate the figure, and nothing reconciles the freshness of the corpse with its apparent great age. Erkenwald, sum moned back to London from a visit to Essex, shifts the interpretive problem from the competing explanations of experience and authority to a matter of faith over reason. The very strangeness of the corpse is a token of divine power.

50

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

In a subsequent colloquoy with Erkenwald, the corpse reveals that he is not a king but a judge— "a lede of £>e laghe J)at ]Den \>is londe vsit" (200). He has served as a "mayster-mon" (201) and "domesmon" (227) judging cases and ruling the city of New Troy during the reign of Sir Belyn. He dates, in other words, from a period after Brutus's mythical founding of Britain but before the birth of Christ.46 The regalia he wears was bestowed on him as a token of his righteousness and honesty as a judge. His clothes and body remain undecayed through the intercession of "Ipe riche kynge of reson J)at ri3t euer alowes / And loues al \>e lawes lely t>at longen to trouthe" (267-68). These disclosures not only reveal another stratum in the archaeology of national consciousness— a classical base underneath the Christian Britain paganized by the Saxons—but also render the project of restoration deeply problematic. The virtuous pagan judge is preserved by the God of Christian revelation, who honors him for his virtue. Just as the Emperor Trajan posed enormous theological difficulties for Dante and Langland, the pagan judge of Saint Erkenwald challenges religious dogma and the ideology of cultural and religious succession. Virtuous pagans call into question the spiritual historiography of medieval writers. As we have seen with Augustine and Ambrose, such figures reside uncertainly in the city of the world. Augustine allows some standing to Platonists and holds open a place in the heavenly city for those pagans who come to understand spiritual truth. When Ambrose speaks of the wise man as a citizen of the world, he elides spiritual and moral virtues. As Alastair Minnis points out, fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English writers styled themselves as historians when they dealt with classical antiquity, and they saw in the classical past the boundary of natural reason, the limit of mankind's unaided powers to act virtuously and do good.47 But if virtue abides in pagans and Christians alike, what difference remains, except grace; and if grace makes the difference, what place is left for virtue, except as a residual habit of the spiritually elect?

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN51

‫״‬

The most convenient escape from this dilemma is to devise a way of Christianizing virtuous pagans. In Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda aurea, Trajan is resuscitated long enough to undergo conventional salvation.48 In Saint Erkenwald, the judge's soul is released from the darkness of limbo and joins the heavenly cenacle, when the bishop weeps at his plight and so baptizes him with his tears. This transformation is the narrative climax of the poem, yet the sacramental resolution obscures the delicate ideological salvage that has simultaneously occurred. The narrative frame of Saint Erkenwald sets out the bold claim of restoring a lost identity to Britain: behind the chronicle history of the Saxon invasion lies a prior Christian community. The main action of the poem seemingly cancels this project of restoration by finding a deeper stratum to the archaeology of national identity in the m yth of Trojan origins. By redeeming the judge who stands as the moral exemplar of Britain's founding culture, the poem thus joins the Trojan origin of England to the Roman mission of Augustine of Canterbury National identity is already doubly cosmopolitan. V

The adaptation of the Troy story that interrogates its cosmopolitanism most intensely in late medieval England is Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. A translation of Boccaccio's Filostrato, Chaucer's poem explores the experience of noble life in Troy during the alternating cycles of Greek and Trojan advantage and through the decisive period in which the deaths of Hector and then Troilus seal the city's fate. In the master narrative of Troy, it takes us up to the point where, as Pearsall suggests, the "profound meaninglessness" of the story becomes apparent. At the beginning of his poem, Chaucer's narrator insists that his topic is not the destruction of the city: "But the Troian gestes, as they felle, / In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite, / Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write" (1.145-47). At the end, as Troilus throws himself into

52

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

battle, vainly seeking Diomede, the narrator repeats his point: "His worthi dedes, whoso list hem heere, / Rede Dares, he kan telle hem alle ifeere" (5.1770-71). But if Troilus's love and "double sorwe" are his topic, the poem, as commentators from George Lyman Kittredge onwards have recognized, exploits the symmetry of civic and personal catastrophe, the fall of Troy and the death of "little Troy."49 Among recent critics, Barbara Nolan has emphasized that the "Lollian" history promulgated through the narrator is a record of mutability and deceit in the private sphere that mirrors Trojan history in the public sphere.50 As a cosmopolitan poem, Troilus and Criseyde absorbs the exemplary as well as the unintended lessons of the Troy story. Though Chaucer may exploit Guido's pessimistic view of human helplessness and ignorance, he finds the more important lesson that alternate choices exist at the political and personal levels, even in doomed pagan antiquity.51 Hector's refusal to endorse the exchange of Criseyde for Antenor, a scene Chaucer invents, could have forestalled the city's betrayal. Troilus's proposal to flee the city with Criseyde connects private action and public consequences in much the same way as do the abductions of Hesione and Helen earlier in the Troy story. Pandarus's teachings about Fortune and the self-regulation of the Ovidian lover offer Troilus a means for escaping erotic necessity, which he rejects out of hand. The Troy story also provides Chaucer the lesson of internal contradiction. Lee Patterson argues that the history of Troy is indecipherable to the principal characters.52 But for readers of the story like Lydgate, the difficulties of exemplary history are fully present in the confusion of values that are presumed to underwrite aristocratic life and to assure its coherence across ethnic, regional, national, and temporal differences—the very values required to make the story cosmopolitan. In Troilus and Criseyde, the moral crisis internal to chivalry is the failure of trouthe— a term that variously means truth, truthfulness, fidelity, pledge, and contractual bond. Later medieval and Renaissance writers devised the

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN53

‫״‬

formula "true Troilus" and "false Criseyde" to express the poem's contradictions as a dichotomy.53 But the formula reduces the complications and nuances that Chaucer strives to introduce into his poem, especially in the investments of his narrator and in the opacity of Criseyde's motives. Moreover, it obscures the problem of cosmopolitanism that Chaucer explores sim ultaneously in relation to Boccaccio and to the cultural life authorized by stories from antiquity. In the Filostrato, Boccaccio accentuates the interior and social worlds of a courtly-chivalric order. The "gentili uomini e le vaghe donne" of the Angevin court, who debate love questions in his narrative frame and thereby provide a rationale for his story, are identical to the characters of his poem. They have their counterparts in other young aristocrats at leisure—Florio's company and the noble Neapolitans who withdraw from the midday heat to exchange love questions in book 4 of the Filocolo, and the brigata escaping Florence as the plague rages in the Decameron. Just as he instructs Filomena on how to read the Filostrato as a partial allegory of his love for her, so he addresses the young men, urging them to see themselves mirrored in Troilus and to choose their love objects wisely. The English equivalent to this cosmopolitan social realm is captured visually in the frontispiece to the Corpus Christi Troilus (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS. 61). The social world legitimated by the Troy story enters Chaucer's poem in the narrator's address to "ye loveres" (1.22) and the "God of Loves servantz" (1.15), in his assurance that love remains a constant practice despite historical and linguistic change (2.22-28), and in the apostrophes Chaucer adds to allow the narrator to shape or prevent their interpretation of events. Inside the poem's narrative action, Pandarus gives a slightly different view of this social world. He portrays it to Criseyde as a realm of friendship (2.365-82) but remarks later on Troy's erotic surplus— "This town is ful of ladys al aboute" (4.401). The contradictions within this imaginative-historical world surface with Criseyde's betrayal of the trouthe that ostensibly holds

54

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

it together. Though Criseyde precipitates the crisis, it is Diomede, however, who represents the indwelling problem. Diomede notices the lovers' affection when Criseyde is exchanged (5.85-91). When he subsequently professes his love to her, he claims that Greeks and Trojans, though rivals in war, are bound by the same devotion to love: "O god of Love in soth we serven bothe" (5.143). He is the calculating Ovidian lover that Troilus refuses to become (5.771-77). Isolated in the Greek camp and told by him that the Greeks will settle for nothing less than the complete annihilation of Troy, Criseyde appraises Diomede's qualities in the same way she earlier reckoned Troilus's virtues (5.1016-29). Just as Troilus is the second Hector, so Diomede is the second Troilus. The instability of Troy's cosmopolitan world translates, at the end of Chaucer's poem, to a notorious interpretive crux. Chaucer recounts Troilus's death in a single sentence ("Despitously hym slough the fierse Achille" [5.1806]) and then describes his apotheosis in a scene added to his source. Looking down from the eighth sphere Troilus despises "[t]his wrecched world" (5.1817), dismisses its vanity, and laughs at those who mourn him. Modern readers are invariably disturbed that Chaucer seems here to abjure his fictional world for moral and religious truth. Troilus's dismissive laughter seems to be the exemplary lesson that the narrator recommends to the "yonge, fresshe folkes" (5.1835) of his audience and to himself. The most persuasive recuperative reading of the passage tries to historicize it by interpreting Troilus's apotheosis as the appropriate reward for a virtuous pagan.54 Chaucer's ending, I suggest, is not just an awkward theological intrusion on a secular, courtly poem but a critique of cosmopolitanism where it is most vulnerable as a literary and cultural practice. The scene of Troilus's laughter that Chaucer adds is from Arcita's apotheosis in Boccaccio's Teseida; this source is modeled in turn on the flight of Pompey's soul, as he sardonically observes the spoiling of his corpse in Lucan's Pharsalia. Thus the "payens corsed olde rites" (5.1849) rejected in Troilus and Criseyde are not

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN55

‫״‬

only the game of love, which begins for Troilus at the feast of the Palladion, but specifically the funeral games held for heroes. The games are a literary convention, by which classical antiquity could make a spectacular display for itself, in order to contain death by ritual and ceremony. Troilus's laughter is directed at a poetic set piece that stands as an emblem of medieval adaptations of classical literary conventions. Outside the action but still inside the poem, he challenges the writerly enterprise of imagining a literary imperium with open citizenship. At the end of his Troy story, having made his book subject to the classical auctores, Chaucer faces the question at the heart of cosmopolitanism: what kinds of allegiance and identity can it not only create but sustain? NOTES 1.

For discussion of the intellectual backgrounds of these scholars and their investment in history as a record of human creation, see Geoffrey Green, Literary Criticism and the Structures of History: Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982); Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 43-61; and Seth Lerer, ed., Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996).

2.

Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (1953; reprint, N ew York: Harper and Row, 1963), 12.

3.

Timothy Brennan, A t Hom e in the World: Cosmopolitanism N ow

4.

A ugustinus Hipponensis, De ciuitate Dei, ed. B. Dombart and

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 21. A. Kalb, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 47-48 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1955). Cf. De ciuitate Dei 18.2: "sed inter plurima regna terrarum, in quae terrenae utilitatis uel cupiditatis est diuisa societas (quam ciuitatem mundi huius uniuersali uocabulo nuncupamus), duo regna cernimus longe ceteris prouenisse clariora, assyriorum primum, deinde romanorum, ut temporibus, ita locis inter se ordinata atque distincta."

56

5.

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), 595.

6.

Augustine's figure of the peregrinus is anticipated by Tertullian, De corona, ed. E. Kroymann, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 2 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1954), ch. 13: "Sed tu, peregrinus mundi huius et ciuis ciuitatis supernae hierusalem,— noster, inquit, municipatus in caelis— habes, tuos census, tuos fastos, nihil tibi cum gaudiis saeculi, im mo contrarium debes." See also Caesarius of Aries, Sermones, ed. G. Morin, Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina 103-4 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1953), 151.1: "In ista enim peregrinatione mundi huius, etiamsi in una civitate esse possemus, simul semper esse non poteramus: est enim alia civitas, ubi christiani boni numquam sunt ab invicem separandi." At the end of Culture and Imperialism, Said invokes Hugh of Saint Victor's idea of man as peregrinus (335-36) but says nothing about the long tradition behind the image.

7.

Ambrosius Mediolanensis, Epistulae, ed. O. Faller, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 82, no. 1 (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1968), 237. This letter elaborates on Ambrose's six earlier sermons about creation.

8.

Saint Ambrose, Letters, trans. Sister Mary Melchior Beyenka, O.P.

9.

(New York: Fathers of the Church, 1954), 133. In the final subordinate clause of this passage, the relative pronoun quem must refer directly to the world (totum mundum) and only obliquely to Adam (ille primus homo). The end of Beyenka's translation should read: "he considered the whole world as his dominion, which god protected as his handiwork and which, as a good parent and maker, he never abandoned." I am grateful to Philip Baldi and Stephen Wheeler for their advice on this passage.

10.

Sedulius Scottus, Collectaneum miscellaneum, ed. D. Simpson, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaeualis 67 and supplement (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1988-90), 81.26: "Socrates cum interrogaretur cuiatem se esse diceret, mundanum inquit; totius enim mundi se incolam et ciuem arbitrabatur." The Latin sentence traditionally used to illustrate the grammatical form of indirect discourse (relatio obliquo) likewise has Socrates as its subject: "Socrates putavit se esse civem totius mundi."

11.

Gozechinus (Goswinus) Moguntinensis, "Epistula ad Walcherum," ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Medi-

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN57

‫״‬

aeualis 62 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1985), 19-20: "Socrates quoque rogatus cuiatem se esse fateretur, mundanum se esse respondit, id est non unius alicuius loci sed incolam et civem esse totius mundi, hoc verbo designans quod ubicumque esset, nichil de virtutis proposito mutans idem esset quodque cum omnibus qui in toto m undo ratione uterentur com m unem vitae m unicipatum haberet." 12.

Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 14.

13.

Janet Coleman, "English Culture in the Fourteenth Century," in Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 34, holds cosmopolitanism and nationalism in a similar balance: "A common history of the nation, when written at all, was composed half from myth, half from a common European stock of Latin and French writings cobbled together, most often by monks who, in having chosen the monastic vocation, indicated their own class allegiance: they, like many of their secular ecclesiastical and noble counterparts with connections with the royal Court, had more affinities with an international chivalric and aristocratic code maintained by a relatively small portion of the European population, whose manners were more like one another's than like those of the men and women they ruled." Coleman goes on to locate English experience and identity in Parliament and subsequently to associate Parliament with merchants, bourgeois, and oligarchs in the late Middle Ages.

14.

Dante, De vulgari eloquentia, ed. and trans. Steven Botterill, Cambridge Medieval Classics 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity

15.

On the penetration of Anglo-French and English into late medieval

Press, 1996), 2-3. Anglo-Latin, see W. Rothwell, "The Trilingual England of Geoffrey Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 16 (1994): 45 -67 , esp. 46-54. 16.

A. G. Rigg, "Anglo-Latin in the Ricardian Age," in Essays on Ricardian Literature In Honour of ]. A. Burrow, ed. A. J. Minnis, Charlotte Morse, and Thorlac Turville-Petre (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 129: "The m edieval textual com m unity was becom ing secular— not in the modern sense of 'hum anist/ ‫׳‬rationalist/ 'nonreligious/ but 'living in the world' (saeculum) as opposed to the

58

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

cloister. The literate class had broadened to include secular clergy of all kinds— not only parish priests and canons but many in minor orders, who might become lawyers or teachers." 17.

Ardis Butterfield, "French Culture and the Ricardian Court," in Minnis, Morse, and Turville-Petre, Essays on Ricardian Literature, 84-85.

18.

Andres M. Kristol, ed., Manieres de langage (1396, 1399, 1415), A nglo-N orm an Text Society 53 (London: Birkbeck College for Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1995), 3, xviii.

19.

For an overview of scholarship on the sources and themes, see John A. Alford, ed., A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988), 159-60. For the argument that Langland is a metropolitan poet, see Caroline M. Barron, "William Langland: A London Poet," in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 91-109.

20.

For discussion of the poems in London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.x as part of Ricardian court poetry, see Michael J. Bennett, "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Literary Achievement of the North-West Midlands: The Historical Background," Journal of Medieval History 5 (1979): 63-88; and John M. Bowers, "Pearl in its Royal Setting: Ricardian Poetry Revisited," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 111-55. Thorlac Turville-Petre, "The 'Pearl'Poet in his 'Fayre Regioun/ " in Minnis, Morse, and Turville-Petre, Essays on Ricardian Literature, 276-94, offers a critical appraisal of these suggestions and theorizes how a regional poetry can participate in metropolitan and international literary culture.

21.

Butterfield, "French Culture," 108, quoting W illiam Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 380.

22.

James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of "Ch " in University of Pennsylvania MS French 15 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), makes the case for French poems in his apprenticeship.

23.

Text in T. A. Jenkins, "Deschamps' Ballade to Chaucer," Modern Language Notes 33 (1918): 268-78, with emendations suggested by James I. Wimsatt, "Chaucer and French Poetry," in Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. D. S. Brewer (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), 109-10; and John Hurt Fisher, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), 952-53.

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER-TOUN59

24.

‫״‬

David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford U niversity Press, 1997), 10.

25.

John Gower, The English Works of John Gower, ed. G. C. Macaulay, 2 vols., Early English Text Society, e.s. 81-82 (London: Oxford U niversity Press for the Early English Text Society, 1900), 1:2.

26.

John A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower; Langland, and the Gawain-Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971). See Charlotte C. Morse, "From 'Ricardian Poetry' to Ricardian Studies," in Minnis, Morse, and Turville-Petre, Essays on Ricardian Literature, 316-44, for a defense of Burrow's "heuristic" aim in coining the term as a replacement for "The Age of Chaucer" and for discussion of its reception.

27.

Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (London: Murray, 1968).

28.

К. B. McFarlane, Lancastrian Kings and Lollard Knights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 33, notes that the chamber knights were those closest to Richard but were not among his favorites: their job was to serve as "councillors, special commissioners, and diplomats."

29.

Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

30.

Chronicon Anglide, 1328-1388, ed. Edward M. Thompson, Rolls

1997), 346. Series 64 (London: Longman and Co., 1874), 375; quoted in Saul, 31.

Richard II, 333. Elizabeth Salter, "Chaucer and Internationalism," in English and International: Studies in the Literature, A r t and Patronage of Medieval England, ed. Derek Pearsall and Nicolette Zeeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 239-44. See also Derek Brewer, "The Relationship of Chaucer to the English and European Traditions," in Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in M id dle English Literature, ed. Derek Brewer (University: University of Alabama Press, 1966), 1-38.

32.

In the House of Fame, Chaucer comically dramatizes the competing claims for authority over the myth by locating Homer, Dares, Dietys, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the fictitious Lollius all on the iron pillar bearing up the fame of Troy (1464-80). The "envye" between them involves not just Homer's favoritism toward the Greeks but the "[f]eynynge" (1478) of truth inherent

60

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

in poetry. All quotations of Chaucer will be taken from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton M ifflin, 1987). 33.

See C. David Benson, The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne's "Historia Destructionis Troiae" in Medieval England (Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1980), 67-96, for discussion.

34.

John Finlayson, "Guido de Columnis' Historia Destructionis Troiae, the 'Gest Hystorial' of the Destruction of Troy, and Lydgate's Troy Book: Translation and the Design of History," Anglia 113 (1995): 152.

35.

Cambridge, University Library, MS Kk.5.30, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 148; texts in Carl Horstmann, ed., "Die Fragmente des Trojanerkrieges von Barbour," in Barbour's des Schottischen Nationaldichters Legendensammlung nebst den Fragmenten seines Trojanerkrieges, 2 vols. (Heilbronn: Gebr. Henninger, 1881-82), 2: 215-307. Angus McIntosh, "Some Notes on the Language and Textual Transmission of the Scottish Troy Book," Archivum Linguisticum n.s. 10 (1979): 1-19, demonstrates that the lost original of these fragments was a Scots text with a veneer of English forms. I am grateful to Priscilla Bawcutt for bringing McIn-

36.

tosh's article to m y attention. All quotations of Troy Book will be taken from Lydgate's Troy Book, ed. Henry Bergen, 4 vols., Early English Text Society, e.s. 97, 103, 106,126 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner and Co. and Oxford University Press for the Early English Text Society, 1906-35).

37.

Saint Bonaventure's prologue to his commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard distinguishes the function of scribe, compiler, commentator, and author; see John A. Burrow, Medieval Writers and Their Work: Middle English Literature and Its Background, 1100-1500 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), and Alastair J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 94-117, and 190-210, for applications of compilator to authorial roles in medieval texts.

38.

For discussion of the political aims contained within Henry's championing of English, see John H. Fisher, "A Language Policy for Lancastrian England," PMLA 107 (1992): 1168-80.

39.

For analysis of Chaucer's response to Guillaume's claims for representation, see Robert R. Edwards, The Dream of Chaucer: Repre-

“THE METROPOL AND THE MAYSTER‫־‬TOUN"

61

sentation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 32-39. 40.

Gretchen Mieszkowski, "The Reputation of Criseyde, 1155-1500," Transactions of the Connecticut Academ y of Arts and Sciences 43 (1973): 116-26.

41.

Anna Torti, "From ‫׳‬History' to 'Tragedy': The Story of Troilus and Criseyde in Lydgate's Troy Book and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid," in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 180.

42.

Derek Pearsall, "Chaucer and Lydgate," in Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 48.

43.

Robert R. Edwards, "Lydgate's Troy Book and the Confusion of Prudence," paper presented at The North Sea World: Saints, Seamen and Soldiers, joint conference, University of Saint Andrews and Center for Medieval Studies, Pennsylvania State University, 24 March 1996.

44.

British Library, MS Harley 2250, has the rubric "De Erkenwaldo" (fol. 72v). Carl Horstmann, ed., Altenglische Legenden: Neue Folge (Heilbronn: Gebr. Henninger, 1881), 265-74, gave the title Saint Erkenwald, which has been followed by subsequent editors.

45.

Saint Erkenwald, Clifford Peterson, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977), 73.

46.

See ibid., 105-6, for the complex link between manuscript readings

47.

and the putative dating. Alastair J. Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan An tiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1982), 7-60.

48.

Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea vulgo Historia lombardica dicta, ed. Th. Graesse (1850; reprint, Osnabrück: O. Zeller, 1965),

49.

George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge,

197; quoted in Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity, 55. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1915), 108-45, especially 112,114, 1 1 7 ,1 1 9,12 0-2 1. 50.

Barbara Nolan, Chaucer and the Tradition of the "Roman Antique, " Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 209-16.

51.

C. David Benson, " 'O Nyce World': What Chaucer Really Found in Guido delle Colonne's H istory of Troy," Chaucer R eview 13 (1978-79): 313, argues for the influence of Guido's pessimism.

62

52. 53.

ROBERT R. EDWARDS

Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 114-26. C. David Benson, "True Troilus and False Cresseid: The Descent from Tragedy," in The European Tragedy of Troilus, ed. Piero Boitani (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 153-70, surveys the reception of Chaucer's poem in the later Middle Ages and Renaissance; see also Torti, "From 'History' to 'Tragedy,' " 184-97.

54.

E. Talbot Donaldson, "The Ending of Troilus," in Speaking of Chaucer (New York: Norton, 1970), 96.

3 THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION Balzac in Paris DAVID HARVEY

My primary concern is the city and the material social processes of urbanization that continuously produce, sustain, undermine, or destroy it. Politically, I am interested in alternative urban forms as a means to pursue broadly socialist and emancipatory possibilities.1 For this reason, I am also interested in how cities get represented, how the imaginary of what the city is and could be gets put to work. A guiding thread of argument is given by Robert Park: "The city and the urban environment represent man's most consistent and, on the whole, his most successful attempt to remake the world he lives in more after his heart's desire. But if the city is the world which man created, it is the world in which he is henceforth condemned to live. Thus, indirectly, and without any clear sense of the nature of his task, in making the city man has remade himself."2 There is a parallel, of course, with Marx's conception of the labor process: "By thus acting on the external world and changing it, [man] at the same time changes his own nature. He develops his slumbering powers and compels them to act in obedience to his sway.... We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the

64

DAVID HARVEY

construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality."3 The invocation of the architect is interesting. The architect creates spaces so as to give them social utility as well as aesthetic/ symbolic meanings. The architect shapes and preserves long-term social memories and strives to give material form to the longings and desires of individuals and collectivities (the utopian strain is strong).4 Construing ourselves as "architects of our fates," furthermore, allows the figure of the architect to operate as a metaphor for our own agency as we go about our daily practices and through them effectively preserve, construct, and reconstruct our lifeworld. This highlights our capacity to change the world, ourselves, and the whole dynamics of the social order. If we construct our cities in the imagination before realizing them in material form, then the dialectical moment in which the imaginary takes shape is a crucial moment for the dynamics and directionality of progressive politics. But there are clear constraints. Dominant powers (capital and the state) can appropriate the products of the imagination for narrow purposes. Adam Smith pointed out that our ordinary employments would likely "corrupt the courage of our minds," thus making us mere "puppets of the institutional and imaginative worlds we inhabit" (to use Roberto Unger's trenchant phrase).5 Breaking the molds of convention, tradition, and power relations, to say nothing of the influence that language and systems of representation exercise over the free play of the imagination, is never easy The question of where new ideas come from and who will educate the educators looms large as a serious issue in the construction of alternative urban worlds. Novels, it has been said, are "possible worlds."6 As such, they can inspire the imagination. They have influenced conceptions and imaginaries of the city and affected material processes of urbanization. Sometimes (as when Ebenezer Howard was inspired by

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

65

Edward Bellamy's novel Looking Backward to launch the "new towns" movement) the influence is direct. But literary works more often permeate thought in more subtle ways, helping to create a climate of opinion or some "consensus of the imagination" in which certain kinds of political-economic action suddenly seem both possible and desirable. Two decades ago, when I was working on the processes of urbanization in Second Empire Paris,7 it became clear to me that the novelists of the period had played an undefined but nevertheless crucial role in representing and imagining the city. They provided innum erable acute observations on urban life (a documentary source, however dubious as a record of actual facts, of some importance). They recorded much about their material world and the social processes (desires, motivations, activities, collusions, and coercions) that flowed around them. They explored different ways in which to represent that world and helped shape the popular imagination as to what the city was and might be about. They explored alternatives and possibilities, sometimes didactically, but more often indirectly through their evocations of the play of human desires in relation to social forms, institutions, and conventions. They helped make the city legible and provided ways in which seemingly inchoate and often disruptive processes of urbanization m ight be grasped, represented, shaped, and molded to human wants, needs, and desires. It would be far-fetched, of course, to think that Georges-Eugene H aussm ann drew directly from, say, Balzac. He had his own engineering tradition to appeal to. But Balzac's representations are by no means inconsistent with Haussmann's actions. Balzac may well have helped to create a climate of public opinion that could better understand (and even accept, though unwittingly so) the political economy of urban transformation in Second Empire Paris. And insofar as Balzac reveals much about the psychological underpinnings of his own representations, he may furnish insights into the murkier plays of desire (which Park alludes to) that lie behind

66

DAVID HARVEY

the lifeless documentations in the city's archives. What needs to be unpacked here—insofar as it is possible—is the complex dialectic between literary representations and the literary imagination on the one hand and the guiding or competing visions deployed in the tangible work of urbanization and city building on the other. BALZAC IN PARIS

Consider, then, how Balzac appropriates, maps, and represents Paris and how his codings work to interpret both what is and what might be. I will largely concentrate my attention on Balzac's History of the Thirteen,8 while drawing particular inspiration from Georges Poulet's writings.9 In History of the Thirteen, Balzac understands Paris as some kind of "moral entity," as a "sentient being" endowed with a distinctive personality and physiognomy. He prides himself as being among those "few devotees, people who never walk along in heedless inattention," who "sip and savour their Paris and are so familiar with its physiognomy that they know its every wart, every spot or blotch on its face" (330). He sets out to observe, map, interpret, dissect, and understand this "moral entity" while thoroughly respecting its "sentient qualities." He does far more than locate action on an existing map of Paris (which is where Franco Moretti leaves m atters in his Atlas of the European N ovel10). Balzac actively constructs a map of the city's terrain and evokes its living qualities. He is his own cartographer. He puts a signature on that map, his own. It is through this cartographic method that he establishes his power within and over the city. At the same time, he renders the city legible for us in a very distinctive way. This last is no mean achievement. As Kevin Lynch points out, the image of a city affects behaviors (of administrators, industrialists, developers, and financiers as well as plain citizens) with respect to that city.11 The rapid growth and seemingly chaotic forms arising in early-nineteenth-century cities posed serious dilemmas

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

67

for interpretation, to say nothing of social control in the midst of the threat of revolution. Balzac shows that it is possible to grasp the complexity of the city while making the whole legible and comprehensible. The details of his accounting are less important than his insistence that the city can be comprehended as a whole by an act of will. W hat makes Balzac's own account peculiarly compelling, however, is his insistent urging to us, his readers, to follow his example. Check the city out, he often suggests, and figure things out for yourselves. You, too, can become one of those devotees who can "sip and savour" the city if you wish. "Could you really grudge," he asks, "spending a few minutes watching the dramas, disasters, tableaux, picturesque incidents which arrest your attention in the heart of this restless queen of cities?" (33). "Look around you" he urges us, as you "make your way through that huge stucco cage, that human beehive with black runnels marking its sections, and follow the ramifications of the idea which moves, stirs and ferments inside it" (311). We, too, become explorers with Balzac acting as guide. There are frontiers and wild territories galore to be mapped and surveyed. But how is this to be done? And what mental equipment do we need? THE TOTALIZING VISION

Balzac is out to possess Paris and make it his own. It is an object of his desire. But he is often beset by doubts and fears: "Thus I envelop the world with my thought, I mold it, I fashion it, I penetrate it, I comprehend it or think I comprehend it; but suddenly I wake up alone and find myself in the midst of the depths of a dark light."!2 All manner of interpretions can be found for this compelling confession: the certitude followed by the moment of doubt that ends in a dark light. The dark space of the cemetery always looms in Balzac's fiction as a space of "the other," which simultaneously

68

DAVID HARVEY

mirrors and flattens life while also holding out the promise of final redemption. As a clear end point it propels the lust to envelop, mold, and penetrate the world of the living in the here and now. The dialectical relation between motion and stasis, between flows and movements and the finalizing permanence of death, impels Balzac into a frantic desire to envelop the world now. Hence arises his totalizing vision: "I was riding across the world, disposing all in it to my liking---- I possess the world effortlessly, and the world hasn't the slightest hold upon me."13 The imperial gaze is overt: "I was measuring how long a thought needs in order to develop itself; and compass in hand, standing upon a high crag, a hundred fathoms above the ocean, whose billows were sporting among the breakers, I was surveying my future, furnishing it with works of art, just as an engineer, upon an empty terrain, lays out fortresses and palaces."14 The echo from Descartes's engineer as well as from Goethe's Faust is unmistakable.15 But Balzac also respects and loves Paris as a living entity. His desire to appropriate is not a desire to destroy or diminish. He respects and needs the city far too much as a sentient being that feeds him images, thoughts, and feelings to want to turn it into a dead object. Paris is often depicted as a woman (playing opposite Balzac's male fantasies): "Paris is the most delightful of monsters; here a pretty woman, farther off a povertystricken hag; here as freshly minted as the coin of a new reign, and in another corner of the town as elegant as a lady of fashion" (32). Or: "for the devotees, Paris is sad or gay, ugly or beautiful, living or dead; for them Paris is a sentient being; every individual, every bit of a house is a lobe in the cellular tissue of that great harlot whose head, heart and unpredictable behaviour are perfectly familiar to them" (33). But in its cerebral functions it takes on a masculine personality: "Paris is the intellectual centre of the globe, a brain teeming with genius which marches in the van of civilization; a great man, a ceaseless creative artist, a political thinker with second sight" (324).

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

69

The end product is a synoptic vision, encapsulated in extraordinary descriptions of the physiognomy and personality of the city (such as those that open The Girl with the Golden Eyes). But again and again we are urged to see the city as a totality and graspable as such. Consider this passage from "Ferragus": Paris again w ith its streets, shop signs, industries and m ansions as seen through dim inishing spectacles: a microscopic Paris reduced to the tiny dim ensions of shades, ghosts, dead people___ Jules perceived at his feet, in the long valley of the Seine, between the slopes of Vaugirard and M eudon, those of Belleville and Montmartre, the real Paris, wrapped in the dirty blue veil engendered by its smoke, at that m o m en t diaphanous in the sunlight. He threw a furtive glance over its forty thousand habitations and said, sw eeping his arm over the space betw een the colum n of the Place Vendôm e and the gilded cupola of the Invalides: "there it is that she was stolen from me, thanks to the baneful in qu isitiveness of this crowd of people which mills and m ulls about for the m ere pleasure of m illing and m ulling about." (147)

Rastignac, at the end of Old Goriot, standing in that same cemetery, "saw Paris spread out below on both banks of the winding Seine. Lights were beginning to twinkle here and there. His gaze fixed almost avidly upon the space that lay between the Column of the Place Vendôme and the Dome of the Invalides; there lay the splendid world that he wished to conquer. He eyed that humming hive with a look that foretold of its despoliation, as if he already felt on his lips the sweetness of the honey, and said with superb defiance: 'it's war, between us two.' "16 This synoptic vision echoes through the century. Haussmann, armed with balloons and triangulation towers, likewise appropriated Paris in his imagination as he set out to reshape it on the ground (maybe even muttering, "It's war, between us two," as he did so). Emile Zola, in La Curée, records that same spirit (though

70

DAVID HARVEY

after the event) as the speculator Saccard looks over Paris from the Butte Montmartre, envisioning Paris "raining twenty franc pieces" in a "sheer orgie, a bacchanal of millions," as the city was "slashed by sabre cuts, its veins opened, giving sustenance to a hundred thousand navvies and bricklayers," while gold sticks to "the fingers of those who heat and stir the mortar." Saccard's companion is terrified "at the sight of this little man standing erect over the recumbent giant at his feet, and shaking his fist at it while ironically pursing his lips___The smallness of [his] hand, hovering pitilessly over a gigantic prey, ended up becoming disquieting: and as, without effort, it tore asunder the entrails of the enormous city, it seemed to assume a strange reflex of steel in the blue of the twilight."17 In both Zola's and Haussm ann's cases there is, however, an important difference. Whereas Balzac is set upon an almost obsessive personal quest to command, penetrate, dissect, and internalize everything about the city within himself, Haussmann converts that fantastic urge into a distinctive class project in which the state and the financiers will take the lead in techniques both of representation and of action. Zola properly gives the whole project of Haussmannization a class interpretation. It is the domination and production of space by the state engineers, the developers, the financiers, and the speculators that counts. In Zola's L'Assommoir, we find the working classes trapped in space, unable to relate to the city as a totality at all, bewildered by the changes in the spatial order (H aussm ann's boulevards) occurring around them and unable in any way to command the spaces of the city in the fashion that Balzac had envisioned. By the Second Empire, as T. J. Clark notes, "capital preferred the city not to be an image." Haussmann's achievement, in Clark's eyes, was "to provide a framework in which another order of urban life— an order w ithout an imagery—would be allowed its own existence."18 Balzac produced an image of the city as a sentient being in principle available to all. Haussmann pursued and Zola recorded

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

71

a totalizing vision of the city as a dead object to be understood and manipulated at will by the state planners and the developers. And when the Second Empire was over, the bishop of Paris actually stood where Zola placed Saccard, waved his hand across the whole of Paris, and swore to build upon that spot a monument to the expiation of the sins of the city that had supported both the crass materialism of the Second Empire and the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871. Thus was the Basilica of Sacre Coeur conceived and built.19 THE ANNIHILATION OF SPACE AND TIME

"In the whole work of Balzac," remarks Poulet, "nothing recurs so frequently as the proclamation of the annihilation of space‫־‬time by the act of mind." Writes Balzac: "I already had in my power the most immense faith, that faith of which Christ spoke, that boundless will with which one moves mountains, that great might by the help of which we can abolish the laws of space and time."20 W hatever else may be said about this theme, Balzac plainly believed himself capable of internalizing everything within himself and thereby empowering himself to express the totality through a supreme act of mind. He could live "only by the strength of those interior senses t h a t ... constitute a double being within man." Even though "exhausted by this profound intuition of things" the soul could nevertheless aspire to be, "in Leibniz's magnificent phrase, a concentric mirror of the universe."21 The annihilation of space and time was a familiar enough theme at the time. The phrase may have derived from a couplet of Alexander Pope's: "Ye Gods! annihilate but space and time / And make two lovers happy." Goethe deployed the metaphor to great effect in Faust, and by the 1830s and 1840s the idea was more broadly associated with the coming of the railroads. The phrase then had widespread currency in both the United States and Europe among a whole range of thinkers contemplating the consequences and possibilities of a world reconstructed by new transport and

72

DAVID HARVEY

communication technologies (everything from the canals and railroads to the daily newspaper, which Hegel had already characterized as a substitute for morning prayer). Interestingly the same concept can be found in Marx (latently in the Communist Manifesto and explicitly in the Grundrisse). Marx uses it to signify the revolutionary qualities of capitalism's penchant for geographical expansion and acceleration (speed up) in the circulation of capital. It refers directly to capitalism's penchant for periodic bouts of what I call "time-space compression."22 In Balzac, the idea usually depicts a sublime moment outside of time and space in which all of the forces of the world become internalized within the mind and being of a monadic individual. It is a moment of intense revelation, the religious overtones of which are hard to miss. Its connection to sexual passion and possession of "the other" (a lover, the city, nature, God) is likewise unmistakable (as indicated in the original Pope couplet). But it is not a passive moment. The blinding insight that comes with the annihilation of space and time allows for a certain kind of action in the world. Consider, for example, how Balzac uses the idea in The Quest of the Absolute, when Marguerite reacts after a furious argument with her father: W h en he had gone, Marguerite stood for a w hile in dull bewilderment; it seem ed as if her w hole world had slipped from her. She was no longer in the familiar parlour; she was no longer conscious of her physical existence; her soul had taken w ings and soared to a w orld w here thou ght annihilates tim e and space, w here the veil drawn across the future is lifted b y som e divine power. It seem ed to her she lived th ro u g h w h o le days b etw e en each sou nd o f her father's footsteps on the staircase; and w hen she heard him m oving above in his room , a cold shudder w en t th rou gh her. A sudden w arning vision flashed like lightnin g through her brain; she fled n oiselessly up the dark staircase w ith the speed of an arrow, and saw her father pointing a pistol at his head.23

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

73

The sublime moment of revelation outside of space and time thus allows one to act decisively in the world. Moreover, the search for that sublime moment powers much of the action in the novels. The desire often gets frustrated, as possibilities and connections are missed, as opportunities get lost, until death intervenes as the m om ent in which space and time truly are transcended. The sequence in "La Duchesse de Langeais" is telling. A frustrated passion is converted (in the course of an "annihilating" scene of threatened criminal branding of the abducted duchesse by her suitor, Montriveau, for trifling with his passions) into a sublime love that fails (through a chapter of accidents in timing and location) to be realized except in a transmuted form many, many years later. Montriveau, after finally tracking his lost love down, listens to a sublime rendering of the Te Deum on an organ in a remote chapel on a Mediterranean island. The duchesse, long lost to the world as Sister Therese, now given to God, is the player. Montriveau's plan to abduct the nun succeeds exquisitely, but it is only her dead body that is retrieved, leaving him to contemplate a corpse "resplendent with the sublime beauty which the calm of death sometimes bestows on mortal remains" (305). The sublime (a word frequently deployed by Balzac) is outside space and time. The quest for it calls for the annihilation of space and time. This idea raises the tantalizing (though thoroughly speculative) thought that this psychological quest is as implicated in the perpetual bourgeois desire to reduce and eliminate all spatial and temporal barriers as it is implicated in the pursuit of scientific, sexual, artistic, and religious passions of the sort that Balzac so wonderfully depicts. And Balzac is not unaware of the secular dimension to this quest. He observes, for example, how "the crowd of lawyers, doctors, barristers, business men, bankers, traders on the grand scale" are ruled by time. They m ust "devour time, squeeze time" because "time is their tyrant; they need more, it slips away from them, they can neither stretch nor shrink it" (316-17). And then:

Ik

DAVID HARVEY

Man possesses the exorbitant faculty of annihilating, in relation to himself, space which exists on ly in relation to himself; of utterly isolating h im self from the m ilieu in w hich he resides, and of crossing, by virtue of an almost infinite locom otive power, the enorm ous distances of physical nature. I am here and I have the power to be elsewhere! I am dependent upon neither time, nor space, nor distance. The world is m y servant.24

Is Balzac, through his appeal to the ideal of annihilation of space and time, providing us with some hints as to how the distinctively capitalistic and bourgeois version of the sublime (making the world its servant) is being constituted in both thought and practice? This standpoint will later emerge in the reconstruction of the spatiotemporal world of Second Empire Paris, if not in the whole bourgeois project of construction of the world market through what we now call globalization.25 More mundanely, Zola later captures the personal psychological state of the entrepreneur thus in his novel Money. Says Saccard: You w ill behold a com plete resurrection over all those depopulated plains, those deserted passes, w hich our railways w ill traverse— yes! fields w ill be cleared, roads and canals built, n ew cities w ill spring from the soil, life w ill return as it returns to a sick body, w h e n w e stim u la te the sy ste m b y in jectin g n ew blood in to exhausted veins. Yes! m on ey will work these miracles___You m ust understand that speculation, gam bling, is the central mechanism , the heart itself, of a vast affair like ours___ Speculation— why, it is the one inducem ent that w e have to live; it is the eternal desire that com pels us to live and stru ggle. W ith o u t speculation, m y dear friend, there w ould be no business of any kind___ It is the same as in love. In love as in speculation there is much filth; in love also, people think on ly of their own gratification; yet w ithout love there w ould be no life, and the world w ould come to an end.26

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

75

The conquest of space and time and the mastery of the world (of Mother Earth) appears as the displaced but sublime expression of sexual desire in Zola's depiction of capitalistic fantasies. If "expectations" and "animal spirits" are what count in keeping capitalism going as a political economic system, as John M aynard Keynes insisted, then this displaced search for the sublime through the annihilation of space and time has a nontrivial psychic role in capitalism's historical geography.27 The collapse of time future and time past into time present is, moreover, precisely the moment at which hope for an alternative can "flash up" into consciousness.28 Poulet records Balzac's insights: " 'Hope,' a Balzacian character says with profundity, 'is a memory that desires.' And the culminating instants of passion are those in which the actual emotion is charged and swollen with a double weight of memories and hopes. Then 'one triples present felicity with aspiration for the future and recollections of the past.' "29 This is, of course, the moment of revolution, a sublime moment that Balzac loves and fears. PARIS PRODUCT: MONEY AND PLEASURE

Paris, says Balzac, is a "vast metropolitan workshop for the manufacture of enjoyment" (309). It is a city "devoid of morals, principles and genuine feeling," but w ithin which all feelings, principles, and morals have their beginning and their end: "no sentim ent can stand against the swirling torrent of events; their onrush and the effort to swim against the current lessens the intensity of passion. Love is reduced to desire, hate to whimsy ... in the salon as in the street no one is de trop, no one is absolutely indispensable or absolutely noxious__ In Paris there is toleration for everything: the governm ent, the guillotine, the Church, cholera. You will always be welcome in Parisian society, but if you are not there no one will miss you" (310).

76

DAVID HARVEY

So what makes Paris tick? To find that out, says Balzac, you have "to break open the body to find therein the soul."30 The dominant forces at work are variously interpreted. But at the heart of it all lie gold and pleasure filtered through class perspectives. "Take these two words as a guiding light," and all will be revealed because "not a cog fails to fit into its groove and everything stimulates the upward march of m oney" (311); "in Paris people of all social statures, small, medium and great, run and leap and caper under the whip of a pitiless goddess, Necessity: the necessity for money, glory or amusement" (325). "The monster we call Speculation" takes over. But it is speculation of all sorts that rules. The working classes speculate as "they wear themselves out to win the gold which keeps them spellbound" and will even take to revolution, "which it always interprets as a promise of gold and pleasure!" (312). The "bustling, scheming, speculating" members of the lower middle classes "assess demand in Paris and reckon to cater for it." They forage the world for commodities, "discount bills of exchange, circulate and cash all sorts of securities" while making "provision for the fantasies of children," spying out "the whims of vices of grownups," and squeezing out "dividends from their diseases" (316). The "stomach of Paris in which the interests of the city are digested and compressed into a form which goes by the name of affaires" gives rise to "more causes of physical and moral destruction than anywhere else" (318). It is here where the motif of what Joseph Schumpeter was later to call the entrepreuneurial lust for "creative destruction" is most in evidence. Throughout his works, Balzac is keenly aware of how when money "becomes the community" (as Marx would have it), so all passion becomes "resolved into two terms: gold and pleasure," and of how incredibly destructive such a resolution can be.31 The aristocracy and the artists cannot but bow down before these same forces. Rendered impotent, condemned to a hollow existence, a perpetual waiting for pleasure

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

77

that never comes, the aristocracy acquire "pasteboard faces" in which "only gold is mirrored and from which intelligence has fled" (324). Speculation reshapes the city itself: D uring that period Paris had a building mania. Paris m ay be a m o n ster, but it is the m ost monomaniacal of monsters. It falls for a thou sand fantasies. A t one m om ent it takes to brick-laying like a lord en am ou red o f the t r o w e l .. . . T hen it falls in to the slo u g h of despond, goes bankrupt, sells up and files its petition. But a few days later, it puts its affairs in order, sallies forth in holiday and dancing m ood -----It has its day to day manias, but also its manias for the m onth, the season, the year. Accordingly, at that m oment, the w hole p opu lation w as d em o lish in g or rebu ildin g so m eth in g or other, som eh ow or other. (64)

"Such a picture of Paris," Balzac concludes, from the perspective of class divisions, habits, and moral aspirations, "proves that physically speaking, Paris could not be other than it is." Thus is the "kaleidoscopic" experience and "cadaverous physiognomy" of the city understood and the forces that compel it laid bare (57,324-29). THE CITY AS A SPATIAL PATTERN AND A MORAL ORDER

Paris understood merely as an undifferentiated sentient being would be an incoherent concept. Balzac has to dissect and map it if he is to come to terms with it. Social distinctions of gender, class, status, and provincial origin are, of course, everywhere in evidence. Their seeming rigidity is softened by the rapid molecular shifts that occur to individuals in the high-stakes pursuit of money, sex, and power. Lucien, for example, fades back into his provincial origins, penniless, powerless, and disgraced, at the end of Lost Illusions, only to reappear in Paris reempowered through

78

DAVID HARVEY

his liaison with a woman in A Harlot High and Low. These aspects to Balzac's world are so well known as to need little further elaboration. What is less remarked is the way the spatial order of the city, as Balzac maps it, secures so much of the social positioning. The principle is clearly stated. In every zone of Paris "there is a mode of being which reveals what you are, what you do, where you come from, and what you are after."32 The physical distances that separate classes are understood as "a material consecration of the moral distance which ought to separate them" (181). The functionality of those "lobes in the cellular tissue of that great harlot" need to be thoroughly understood. The separation of social classes creates vertical segregations as well as different sociospatial zones. Paris has "its head in the garrets, inhabited by men of science and genius; the first floors house the well-filled stomachs; on the ground floor are the shops, the legs and feet, since the busy trot of trade goes in and out of them" (31). But Balzac toys with our curiosity about the innumerable hidden spaces, turns them into mysteries that pique our interest. "One is loath to tell a story to a public for whom local colour is a closed book," he coyly states (34). But he immediately opens the book to reveal a whole world of spatiality and its representatations: In Paris there are certain streets w hich are in as much disrepute as any man branded w ith infam y can be. There are also noble streets; then there are streets w hich are ju st sim p ly decent, and, so to speak, adolescent streets about w hose m orality the public has not y et formed an opinion. There are murderous streets; streets which are m ore aged than aged dowagers; respectable streets; streets w hich are always clean, streets w hich are always dirty; working class, industrious mercantile streets. In short, the streets of Paris have hum an qualities and such a p h ysiog n om y as leaves us w ith the im pressions against w hich w e can put up no resistance. (31)

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

79

This spatial pattern enforces a moral order. In "Ferragus," anyone and everyone who transgresses the spatial pattern dies. Characters out of place disturb the ecological harmonies, pollute the moral order, and must pay the price. Madame Jules, a pure and perfect creature, ventures, out of filial devotion, into a part of Paris inconsistent with her social status. "This woman is lost," declares Balzac, because she has strayed outside the bounds of the spaces that define the Parisian moral order (34). Contaminated by entry into an odious space, she finally dies of "some moral complication which has gone very far and which makes the physical condition more complex" (128). Auguste, Madame Jules's admirer, is likewise ordained to die because "for his future misfortune, he scrutinized every storey of the building" that is Madame Jules's secret destination. Ferragus, the father, is, however, one of the secret band of the thirteeen. Equipped with wings, they were able "to soar over society in its heights and depths, and disdained to occupy any place in it because they had unlimited power over it" (26-7). Their secret power resides precisely in the inability to locate them in either a spatial or social sense. The location of Ferragus, sought out by both Auguste and by Jules (as well as by the police), is never found. As the tragedy concludes, Ferragus, having lost his daughter, ends up in a "nameless spot" where "Paris has no sex or gender," where "Paris has ceased to be; and yet Paris is still there" (151). Balzac's cartography in "Ferragus" is, clearly, an intensely spatial and moral statement. Many years later, Robert Park wrote a suggestive essay on the city as a spatial pattern and a moral order.33 Park observed how social relations were inscribed in the spaces of the city in such a way as to make the spatial pattern both a reflection of but also an active moment in the reproduction of the moral order. This idea plays directly throughout Balzac's fiction: "In every phase of history the Paris of the upper classes and the nobility has its own centre, just as

80

DAVID HARVEY

the plebeian Paris will always have its own special quarter. This separatism with its periodic variations offers ample material for reflection to those desirous of studying or depicting the different social zones, and perhaps we ought to research into causes" (178). While it may be doubted that Park drew any direct inspiration from Balzac, the whole tradition of sociological inquiry into the conditions of urban life and of possible measures to ameliorate their worst aspects falls into a genre of writing that is broadly concordant with the attitudes fostered within Balzac's fiction. Balzac and Park both accepted the idea that the city is simultaneously a spatial pattern and a moral order and appreciated the relation as dialectical and consequential rather than passive or merely reflective. The History of the Thirteeen, read as spatial stories, as essays on the production of space (as materiality, as representation, and as lived experience, in Lefebvre's terms), takes on an extraordinary luminescence as the product of a distinctively cartographic imagination.34 THE UTOPIAN MOMENT

Balzac wrote when socialist utopian thoughts and schemes were in their heyday.35 He makes no bones about his distrust and even contempt for ideals of equality and communitarianism. The savage and satirical criticism to which Balzac subjects Paris and Parisians is often animated by his sense that they have fallen victim to the false illusions of the epoch: "The more our laws aim at an impossible equality, the more we shall swerve from it by our way of living. In consequence rich people in France are becoming more exclusive in their tastes and their attachment to their personal belongings than they were thirty years ago" (82). The result is "a fanatical craving for self-expression": "Equality may perhaps be accepted as a right, but no power on earth will convert it into a fact. It would be well for the happiness of France if this truth could be brought home to the people" (180).

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

81

This critical stance is accompanied by appeal to utopian ideals of harmony, perhaps reinforced, as in Sir Thomas More's Utopia, by a distinctive organization of space:36 "Harmony is the poetry of order and all peoples feel an imperious need for order. Now is not the cooperation of all things with one another, unity in a word, the simplest expression of order?" (180). Even the working classes, he holds, are "drawn towards an orderly and industrious way of life." The sad thing is to observe how "they are thrust back into the mire by society" (58). It is even possible for "the different types contributing to the physiognom y" of the city to "harm onize admirably with the character of the ensemble" (112). But in the final analysis, the "only solid foundation for a wellregulated society" depends upon the proper exercise of power by an aristocracy secured by private property, "whether it be real estate or capital" (182). What Jameson calls "the still point" of Balzac's churning world here comes into focus: "The Balzacian dwelling invites the awakening of a longing for possessions, of the mild and warming fantasy of landed property as the tangible figure of a Utopian wish fulfillment. A peace released from the competitive dynamism of Paris and of metropolitan business struggles, yet still imaginable in some existent backwater of concrete social history."37 This is, of course, the utopian sensibility that frequently reemerges in the history of urbanism as nostalgia for a genteel aristocratic world within a secure social order. Today it lies behind the quest to construct "urban villages" (like Prince Charles's Poundbury) or even to build a "new urbanism" into the American city For Balzac it depends upon the return of a properly constituted aristocratic class power capable of realizing such a dream: "Those who wish to remain at the head of a country must always be worthy of leading it; they must constitute its mind and soul in order to control the activity of its hands. But how can a people be led except by those who possess the qualities of leadership__ Art, science and wealth form the social triangle within which is inscribed the shield of power and from which modern aristocracy must emerge" (179).

82

DAVID HARVEY

Balzac tries to ward off nostalgia, recognizing that "means of action lie in positive strength and not in historic memories." He admires the English aristocracy because they recognized that "institutions have their climacteric years when terms change their meaning, when ideas put on a new garb and the conditions of political life assume a totally new form w ithout the basic substance being affected" (182-84). But this last phrase on "the substance being unaffected" takes us back to the still point of Balzac's utopianism. None of this abolishes class distinctions or eradicates class conflict: "An aristocracy in some sense represents the thought of a society, just as the middle and working classes are the organic and active side of it. Hence there are different centres of operation for these forces, and from the apparent antagonism between them there results a seeming antipathy produced by a diversity of movement which nevertheless works for a common aim" (179). Balzac appears to follow Heraclitus, who believed "the finest harmony is born from difference." The proper moral and spatial ordering of the city can arise only out of meaningful conflict. But speculation and the senseless pursuit of money and pleasure only wreaks destructive havoc on the sociospatial order. URBAN VISIONS AND CARTOGRAPHIC POWERS

Cartography, writes J. B. Harley in one of his seminal essays, is a form of knowledge and of power: "Maps are a way of conceiving, articulating, and structuring the hum an world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon particular sets of social relations."38 Balzac's cartography was a power play in a highstakes game. It played a crucial role in "a properly bourgeois cultural revolution— that immense process of transform ation whereby populations whose life habits were formed by other, now archaic, modes of production are effectively reprogrammed for life and work in the new world of market capitalism."39 Balzac's "new

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

83

kind of objectivity"—however critical its orientation and intent— inevitably helped produce the very situation it described. The referent is Paris in the full flood of its social and political transformation under the twin impulsions of compulsive capital accumulation and the commodification of everything, including pleasure, status, and power. Balzac's cartography constitutes an attempt to intervene in and resist that process. It has a "still point" of utopian longing, a distinctive perspective, and a particular mechanics of projection. Like any map, it conceals as much as it reveals, distorts in certain dimensions while holding to a microscopic accuracy of detail in others. Balzac's perspective may be judged warped, his positioning inappropriate, and his utopianism anachronistic. But we also see the naked power that resides in the sort of cartographic imagination he cultivated. Power of that sort is necessary in any attempt to change the world in meaningful ways. In Harley's judgment, "maps are preeminently a language of power, not of protest." The "social history of maps, unlike that of literature, art or music, appears to have few genuinely popular, alternative, or subversive modes of expression."40 Haussmann's use of the totalizing vision Balzac espoused and its reduction to a passive manifestation of class power by Zola support Harley's view. But this leaves the question of Balzac's cartographic imagination open. In spite of his aristocratic preferences, there is something incredibly democratic and accessible about Balzac's cartographic objectivism. "Look around you," he tells us. You too can explore and map the city. Balzac's cartography is, furthermore, hardly a passionless affair in which dead spaces are manipulated to some superior purpose. The credibility of Balzac's mapping rests precisely on his passionate commitments. Balzac constructs the kind of geographic knowledge necessary to shape the city to human desires. The totalizing vision, the search for the sublime in the midst of those ordinary employments that

U

DAVID HARVEY

so "corrupt the courage of our minds," the clear recognition of the forces of change that m ust be tamed or harnessed, the understanding of how the production of space is a constitutive moment in the transformation of social and moral orders, and the need to mobilize utopian desires and dreams—these are all for Balzac necessary elements in any embrace of future possibilities. That these became (or already were) exclusive powers of the bourgeoisie, of the capitalist class in alliance with the state, was a condition that Balzac fought resolutely though hopelessly against. Sadly, as Balzac himself presciently observed, "when a literature has no general system to support it lacks solidity and fades out with the age to which it belongs" (190). If capital did not want the city to have an image, as T. J. Clark suggests, then Balzacian fantasy and democratizing cartographic power had also to be effaced. That Flaubert, as Jameson points out, did such a good job of this is more than a little fortuitous. Frederic Moreau, that "anorexic figure" who "no longer has the force to desire anything," experiences Paris in a quite different way in L'Education sentimentale. He "moves from space to space in Paris and its suburbs, collecting experiences of quite different qualities as he goes. The sensation of space is quite different from that in Balzac. The same disaggregations may be there, but what is special is the way that Frederic moves so freely and easily, even into and out of the space of the 1848 revolution. He glides as easily from space to space and relationship to relationship as money and commodities change hands. And he does so with the same cynicism and lassitude."41 But it is always open to us to exhume Balzac's cartographic vision. And it may be of more than passing interest to do so, for there is something subversive about Balzac's technique. It runs against the grain of ordinary and more passive forms of cartographic manipulation. Balzac reveals the secret cartographic passions of the ruling classes, about how their totalizing vision and quest for the sublime through the annihilation of space and time get constituted. He may even have written, out of his own monadic

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

85

insights, an appropriate epitaph for that day when the bourgeois era of seemingly endless capital accumulation comes to some crashing halt: They enveloped the wo rld with their thoughts, molded it, fashione d it, pen etrate d it, com prehen ded it— or thought th ey comprehen ded it; but suddenly th e y w o ke up alone and f oun d th em se lv es in the m idst of the depth of a dark light.

NOTES 1.

See David Harvey, Social Justice and the City (London: Edward Arnold, 1973); Consciousness and the Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985); and Spaces of Hope (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, in press).

2.

Robert Park, On Social Control and Collective Behavior (Chicago:

3.

Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967),

4.

See Kojin Karatani, Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number,

Chicago University Press, 1967), 3. 177-78. Money (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1995); and Harvey, Spaces of Hope, pt. 4. 5.

Adam Smith is cited in Marx, Capital 1: 386; Roberto Unger, False Necessity: Anti-nec essitarian Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 37.

6.

Ruth Ronan, Possible Worlds in Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cam-

7.

See Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, particularly

bridge University Press, 1994). the essays "Money, Time, Space and the City" and "Paris, 1850-1870." 8.

Unless otherwise stated, page numbers are cited from Honoré de Balzac, History of the Thirteen (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Classics, 1974).

9.

Georges Poulet, The Interior Distance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959). I also wish to record m y debt to the reading of The History of the Thirteen in a joint course, The City in Literature, taught with Neil Hertz. Many of m y interpretations rest on his insights.

86

10.

DAVID HARVEY

Franco Moretti's Atlas of the European Novel (London: Verso, 1998) fails to open up such a dialectics. He reduces spatiality and geography to simplistic mapping. Plotting the action in Jane Austen's novels produces the stunning revelation that none of the action occurs in the industrializing North. The reduction of Balzac's rich cartography of Paris to points on a two-dimensional map is equally banal. Tom Conley's Self-Made Map (Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 1996) provides an exemplary antidote to Moretti's cartographic banalities.

11.

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1960). Lynch's arguments also play a role in Frederic Jameson's Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991).

12. 13. 14.

Poulet, Interior Distance, 110. Ibid., 100. Ibid., 99.

15.

Cf. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York:

16.

Honoré de Balzac, Old Goriot, trans. M. Crawford (Harmondsworth,

Simon and Schuster, 1982), chap. 1. England: Penguin, 1951), 304. 17.

Emile Zola, The Kill (La Curée), trans. A. Teixera de Mattos, intro.

18.

A. Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1954), 76-79. T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the A r t of Manet

19.

For an account of the Sacre Coeur story, see Harvey, Consciousness

20.

Poulet, Interior Distance, 106.

21.

The citations from Balzac are given in Louis Chevalier, "La Come-

and His Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 36. and the Urban Experience, chap. 4.

die Humaine: A Historical Document?" in Critical Essays on Honoré de Balzac, ed. Martin Kanes (Boston: G. K. Hall), 176. 22.

On this theme see Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 164; Karl Marx, Grundrisse (New York: Viking Books, 1973), 524-39; and David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pt. 3.

23.

Honoré de Balzac, The Quest of the Absolute (New York: Hipocrene Books, 1989), 173-4.

24.

Poulet, Interior Distance, 103-5.

25.

For an excellent account of globalization in Balzac's lifetime, see

THE CARTOGRAPHIC IMAGINATION

87

Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party (Moscow: Progress Publishers Edition, 1952), 46-47. 26.

Emile Zola, M oney (Stroud, England: Alan Sutton, 1991), 170,140.

27.

John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and M oney (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1964). See also Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993), 79-80.

28.

The phrase "flash up" comes from Walter Benjamin, but the general concept of a moment of revelation coinciding with a moment of revolutionary possibility is often found in Balzac and made much of by innumerable French revolutionary thinkers. See, for example, Henri Lefebvre, The Explosion: Marxism and the French Revolution (New York: M onthly Review, 1969).

29.

Poulet, Interior Distance, 126.

30.

Cited in ibid., 137.

31.

Joseph Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934); Karl Marx, Grundrisse (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1973), 221-24.

32.

Honoré de Balzac, A Harlot High and Low (Harmondworth, England: Penguin, 1970), 19.

33.

Robert Park, On Social Control, chap. 4.

34.

See Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).

35.

Keith Taylor, The Political Ideas of the Utopian Socialists (London: Frank Cass, 1982).

36.

See Harvey, Spaces of Hope, chap. 8.

37.

Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981), 157.

38.

J. B. Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," in The Iconography of Landscape, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 278-79.

39.

Jameson, Political Unconscious, 152.

40.

Harley, "Maps, Knowledge, and Power," 297.

41.

Jameson, Political Unconscious, 184; Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience, 204.

This page intentionally left blank

4 ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT, UNIVERSALISM AND PATHOS SHARON MARCUS

"Cosmopolitan": from the Enlightenment until World War II, Europeans used this word to praise or blame, depending on w hether they spoke as universalists or as nationalists. W hen Enlightenment intellectuals described themselves as cosmopolitan, they complimented themselves for exemplifying a universal humanity based on reason. Philosophers linked reason to universality in two ways: the activity of reasoning united particular actions to general rules and thus generated universal categories; and reason was itself a universal attribute that defined the common ground of humanity. Philosophers who had perfected the use of reason thus saw themselves as cosmopolitans, citizens of a world unified by rationality. European nationalists described not themselves but others as cosmopolitan, in order to attack those others—especially internal others, such as Jews— for an unstable, rootless universality that consisted of sheer ubiquity. In the case of Jews, because there was no Jewish homeland, because there were Jews in each European country, because a few prom inent Jewish families were in ternational, Jews were considered a problematically universal element within each nation. For nationalists, Jewish universality meant, on the one hand, that Jews as a group were less than national and thus

90

SHARON MARCUS

insufficiently attached to the nation; and on the other hand, that Jews as a group were more than national and thus threatened the nation's claims to a transcendent, universal status. Jews were citizens of the world, but only of the world; as cosmopolitans who seemed truly members of all nations, they were false members of any single one.1 Much recent work on contemporary transnationalism and globalism has also had recourse to the term cosmopolitan. Intellectuals working in the United States in the wake of decolonization, emigration, and globalization have begun to construct a new cosmopolitanism that turns the old cosmopolitanism against itself. Writers continue to define cosmopolitanism in relation to universalism and nationalism, but many now view it as a positive alternative to both. No longer the outgrow th of universal reason, cosmopolitanism now refers to transnational experiences that are particular rather than universal; no longer a despised internationalism, cosmopolitanism now provides a valued way to achieve what the subtitle of Cosmopolitics terms "thinking and feeling beyond the nation."2 Bruce Robbins has proposed a cosmopolitanism freed from Kant's universalization of reason; Anthony Appiah has advocated replacing the humanist desire for global homogeneity with the cosmopolitan desire for cultural and local differences; and Homi Bhabha has outlined a cosmopolitan community that deliberately stops short of the universal, a community narrower than the nation, made global by the repetition of singularity.3 The new cosmopolitanism transvalues the philosophical categories of the European Enlightenment: the universal thinker becomes a global intellectual worker, the abstract individual becomes a concrete and heterogeneous citizen. For good historical reasons, this recent work has not focused on the Jews who were once inescapable reference points for cosmopolitanism. Postcolonial studies has brought other remnants of rationalism and nationalism to the fore; and as a result of the Holocaust, the founding of Israel, and increased political and social assimilation, Jews no

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

91

longer represent the cosmopolitan citizen of the world, particularly not in the United States, the country that now serves as the primary reference point for theorists of cosmopolitanism. Although theorists of cosmopolitanism no longer think much about Jews, self-identified Jewish thinkers continue to position themselves relative to cosmopolitanism. In the United States from the 1930s through the 1950s, a prominent set of Jewish intellectuals embraced cosmopolitanism—interchangeable for them with universalism—as one way of assimilating to American culture.4 More recently, academic theorists w ithin Jewish studies have affiliated themselves with the postmodern assumptions and antiimperialist aims of the new cosmopolitanism in work that celebrates diasporic and multiply differentiated Jewish identity.5 Conversely, m any prom inent American Jewish spokespersons, particularly since the 1950s, have also denounced cosmopolitanism and its affiliated concept, universalism, for effacing Jewish particularity and, by extension, Jews themselves.6 This essay examines the universalism that has been and continues to be embedded in cosmopolitanism, and takes as its text several decades of heated debates about how to read the diary of Anne Frank, and particularly about whether Anne Frank and her diary should be read as universal.7 My focus is not on the Diary itself, which takes no insistent or consistent position on Jewish identity and universality. Rather, I concentrate on readings of the Diary (translations, reviews, adaptations, reeditions, and published responses to it) and on debates about the proper mode such readings should take, since those readings and debates have highlighted the question of universalism .8 In the course of analyzing the debates about the Diary's universalism, I move toward replacing the classic Kantian version of a universalism based on reason, not with cosmopolitanism, but with a universalism derived from the work of Hannah Arendt, who defines the universal as plurality, the difference from one another that all human beings have in common, and as natality, the human capacity for beginning.

92

SHARON MARCUS

Objections to universalizing readings of the Diary take issue not only with universalism per se but also condemn what it enables: an identification with Anne Frank that promotes a sentimental response to her. Once again, I locate the problem of sentimentality in Anne Frank's readers rather than in the text of her diary; far from being sentimental in the classical sense of soliciting sympathy through heightened representations of suffering, the Diary adheres much more closely to realist conventions and genres.9 The reconsideration of universalism that I undertake in the first part of this paper leads me to question the entrenched critique of sentimentality as an identification that can only appropriate or obliterate difference, and then to propose that Anne Frank inspires a pathos (rather than a sentimentality) that has ethical and political merits. In order to explore the merits of pathos, I once again draw on the work of Hannah Arendt, this time to counterpose Arendt's ongoing hostility to sentiment and sympathy with her own defense of representation and the imagination as bases for politics and thinking. Arendt specifically extended her critique of sentimentality to the reception of The Diary of a Young Girl when she wrote that its "world-wide success ... was clear proof" of the tendency to reduce "horror to sentimentality."10 Arendt recurs as a theoretical reference point in this paper because she, like Anne Frank, was the author of a best-selling book about the Holocaust, Eichmann in Jerusalem; because she wrote substantially about the political history of European Jews, the Holocaust, and the foundation of Israel; and because, as scholars are only now beginning to show, Arendt worked out even her most abstract political philosophy in relation to her ideas about Jewish identity and history.11 By thinking through the conjunction of these two very different Jewish figures—the dead "young girl" who has become an international symbol of suffering, and the Holocaust survivor who became an internationally renowned cosmopolitan intellectual— I hope to answer a question raised by both Anne Frank's diary and the work

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

93

of Hannah Arendt: what are the politics of universal pathos—a pathos imagined as one that everyone can feel, in which one feels for everyone? Though often an idiosyncratic thinker, Arendt was not alone in her disdain for those moved by The Diary of a Young Girl. For decades, Anne Frank—the person, the diary, the play, the film, the mass-cultural icon—has been a lightning rod for highly publicized rejections of universalism, sentimentality, and representation. Immediately upon the Diary's U.S. publication in 1952, and particularly since its dramatic adaptation in 1957, a vocal handful of critics has remained skeptical about what one critic called "the universal accolades accorded it throughout the press and the large public that has taken it to heart," arguing that those accolades have been universal only because the public has inappopriately universalized the Diary.12 This critique entered the mainstream with Cynthia Ozick's influential 1997 New Yorker essay, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" which decried "the shamelessness of appropriation" that allows "identification" with Anne Frank only by replacing her "specific" Jewishness with "human interchangeability."13 Ozick and others maintain that the Diary has attained its universal status because it allows us to forget the Jewish identity of the Holocaust's victims.14 This may seem a paradoxical claim, since the Diary's status depends on its ability to stand for the Holocaust by standing in for Anne Frank, who in turn stands for all the Jews murdered by the Nazis, who in turn, for many, epitomize the entire history of the Jewish people. Critics who share Ozick's views accept the order of this series but see its final term as universal human suffering; as a result, they consider the Diary progressively to attenuate rather than concentrate what it represents. This deflation of the Diary's value moves quickly from exposing the text's limited ability to represent genocide to exposing its limited ability to represent Jewishness, from arguing that adaptations have stressed an optimism that makes us forget the worst horrors of the

94

SHARON MARCUS

Holocaust to arguing that they have promulgated a "universalism" that makes us forget the Jewishness of the Holocaust's victims. The best-known proponent of this view was Meyer Levin, a Jewish American writer who charged for decades that his dramatic adaptation of the Diary was not produced because it was considered "too Jewish."15 Levin has been the subject of two books, and his arguments have been amplified and documented in numerous articles, so I will not rehearse the details of that controversy here. Nor was Levin's the most radical version of this position: while Levin maintained that in its original form, the Diary was a perfect document of the Holocaust whose message had been distorted in adaptation, other critics have traced excessive universalism and deficiency of Jewishness to the original Diary and to its author, charging that Anne Frank herself was not Jewish enough—too assimilated, too unreligious, too cosmopolitan.16 For other critics, the Diary's limitations stem less from its relationship to Jewishness than from its tone. In their view, the Diary fails as a representative document of the Holocaust because it is too idealistic and optimistic.17 Bruno Bettelheim accused the Diary's most famous line— "in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart"—of denying the Holocaust altogether: "If all men are good, there never was an Auschwitz."18 For another critic, the popularity of this statement disavows Anne Frank's fate as an innocent Jewish victim, since if universal goodness exists, then the Jews were somehow to blame for their fate.19 According to these readers, the Diary's idealism about universal goodness makes us not remember the Holocaust but forget it; indeed, for many, the erasures effected by the Diary's limitations are the true cause of its popularity. Others have dismissed the Diary's popularity on somewhat different grounds, criticizing neither the text nor its author but the affect that both aroused in readers and viewers worldwide. Responding to Bruno Bettelheim in a 1962 issue of Midstream, Hannah Arendt wrote, "I too think the admiration for Anne Frank,

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

95

especially in Germany, was phony and that the whole business was highly unpleasant—cheap sentimentality at the expense of a great catastrophe."20 Arendt was well placed to understand the intense limitations of the public's desire for emotional, mythologizing representations of the Holocaust. Not only had she mounted a sustained critique of sentimentality in her political writings, particularly On Revolution, but her account of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann's trial was to inspire impassioned objections to her own lack of sentimentality. The critical furor that surrounded Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, first published as a series of articles in the New Yorker and then as a book in 1963, had its basis in substantive disagreements with her theory of evil and her characterization of Jewish community leaders, but invariably reviewers capped their objections by pointing angrily to what they called her tone: flippant, contemptuous, ironic, clever, paradoxical, judgmental, heartless, unsympathetic, and unsentimental, as well as lofty, omniscient, and insufficiently identified with the Jewish people—too universal and too cosmopolitan.21 From the point of view of sentiment and the history of taste, the dramatically divergent receptions of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl and Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem are easy to explain. As many scholars have already shown, the diary of a talented and attractive adolescent, especially when filtered of negative emotions by its adaptors, was especially appealing to Americans in the 1950s, who valued conformity, liberal optimism, and a universalism based on assimilation to a homogenized American culture.22 The publication of Anne Frank's diary in 1952, with her schoolgirl photograph prominently gracing the cover, represented the exterminated Jews in an image that linked lost life to hyperbolic innocence. That image held special appeal at a time when popular culture and public discourse had not yet grappled with the "unmastered past" of the Holocaust, and found it easy to begin to do so through a female author who, made mute and permanently youthful by death, could be idealized, and whose diary,

96

SHARON MARCUS

however implausibly, could be described as "not a lament but a song to life," as "a story of great adventure which was to sym bolize a triumph of the human spirit," written with a "light touch" by a girl who remained "indomitable," full of spirit and compassion "even in the most frightful extremity" of Auschwitz and BergenBelsen.23 The Eichmann trial, which took place nine years after the Diary was first published in the United States and one year after the film version won several Academy Awards, offered the complementary image of an absolute villain to represent Nazis and antiSemites. Arendt rejected that image in her report, which criticized Eichmann's prosecutors for making him representative of criminality rather than responsible for crimes; termed Eichmann banal rather than monstrous; and pointed out that Jewish leaders might have unwittingly facilitated Nazi genocide. Eichmann in Jerusalem upset readers enormously because it interfered with the intelligible schema structuring the upset they already felt, without providing an equally lucid new schema in its place. The narrator's sardonic neutrality, cultivation of paradox, and frequent use of ironic indirect discourse made it difficult to identify—and to identify with—any clear feeling on the part of the text's authorial persona.24 Nor could Arendt herself stand in vividly for the positions of victim and villain that she had evacuated. In 1963 Arendt was no longer the beauty whose youthful photos now promote books by and about her, nor had she ever been, even in those images, a plausible icon of cherished innocence; and although many of her critics reacted to Arendt's alleged exoneration of Eichmann by rhetorically putting her on trial in his place, it remained difficult to substitute for the missing Nazi villain a Jewish woman who had herself fled the Nazis and written extensively about anti-Semitism. In the 1950s and 1960s, those who loved Anne Frank's diary for its sentimentality hated Eichmann in Jerusalem for its lack of it, just as intellectuals now prefer Arendt's attack on sentimentality,

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

97

which anticipates current skepticism about the politics of feeling.25 Yet from the point of view of universality the difference in their receptions is puzzling, since in the 1950s and 1960s, both books were identified as universal, yet the alleged universality of each has been used to explain both why The Diary of a Young Girl appealed to readers and why Eichmann in Jerusalem outraged them. Not only was Eichmann in Jerusalem considered "universalizing" because of its tone and its refusal of a unified Jewish history; in works like The Human Condition and her final lectures on Kant, Arendt remained committed both to a version of universalism and to the imaginative processes that also undergird the pathos she distinguishes from sentimentality.26 At the end of this essay, I will return to the relation between universalism and pathos in Arendt's work, but let me begin by analyzing why so many critics of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl have rejected its universalism and, along with it, the sentimentality they see as its inevitable attendant. Most critics of universalism work to expose its status as what Naomi Schor calls false universalism. False universalism claims to include everyone in theory but defines the standards of inclusion so that particular groups or traits are excluded in practice.27 Critics of The Diary of a Young Girl and its adaptations object to the promotion of a different universalism, which I will call negative universalism. Negative universalism excludes certain groups or traits in theory as well as in practice by defining the universal solely as what it is not; this brand of universalism does not incidentally exclude but intentionally negates the particularity against which it defines itself. Many of the Diary's earliest readers propounded a negative universalism by encouraging adaptations that equated making the text more universal with making it less Jewish. Barbara Zimmerman, the Diary's editor at Doubleday, contrasted "simply Jewish experience" to experience that was "really universal"; a theater

98

SHARON MARCUS

reviewer for the Daily News wrote that "The Diary of Anne Frank is not in any important sense a Jewish play.... It is a story of the gallant human spirit"; and the director of the Jewish Film Advisory Committee praised the film version for taking what "could easily have been an outdated Jewish tragedy" and giving it "a more 'universal' meaning and appeal."28 These statements posit Jewish and universal as perfectly opposed terms; the universal is attained only by leaving Jewishness behind. Even when negative universalists give the universal a positive content, such as "the gallant human spirit," they must express that content in terms of negation— "not in any important sense a Jewish play." By defining the universal as not Jewish, they remove any sign of what the particular and universal might have in common, defining each as simply the negation of the other. Those who protest this brand of universalism point out not only that it excludes Jews by defining the universal as not-Jewish; its deployment as a hermeneutic principle for reading or adapting the Diary actively negates Jewishness by including Jews in a universal that refuses any trace of Jewish particularity.29 Critics of negative universalism thus argue that reviewers, readers, and adaptors who refer to the Diary's universal qualities have removed Jewish markers of identity so effectively that it is not only possible but necessary to forget that Anne Frank is Jewish and that the historical context for her diary is the genocidal anti-Semitism of the Holocaust. Yet even the most cursory reading of the reviews of the Diary in its various forms shows that this has in fact never been the case. Almost all the 1952 reviews that praised the Diary's universal import also identified Anne Frank as a Jewish girl who hid from Nazis and died in a concentration camp. Even the many egregious reviews that praised the play and film for being not only universal but cheerful had to make that point in the context of everyone's knowledge that the entire subject matter had to do with Jews hiding unsuccessfully from Nazis. Nor has any version of the Diary removed all references to Jewishness.30

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

99

That the critics of negative universalism misrecognize the public's ability to see the Diary as both universal and Jewish, to maintain contact between the universal and the particular, suggests that those critics themselves are strongly invested in negative universalism, albeit from the opposite direction: they insist that universalism excludes and negates Jewishness because they want to assert an extreme version of Jewish particularity in which Jewishness can have no relation to universality According to this logic, for example, to use Anne Frank's diary to teach about suffering in general automatically teaches us that the Jews in particular did not suffer; one recent essay claims, for example, that by making universalizing statements about "intolerance in general," the play denies "anti-Semitism in particular."31 The line that critics of negative universalism seize upon, Anne's comment in the play and film that "We're not the only people who've had to suffer," is, on the face of it, indisputable and inoffensive.32 But because critics of negative universalism are themselves negative universalists, they understand the removal of Jewish particularity, the insistence that the Jewish "people" resembles other "peoples," as a negation of Jewishness and Jews. For these critics, "We're not the only people who've had to suffer" thus comes to mean things that are disputable and offensive: that Jews are the only ones who have not really suffered, or that the Holocaust had no relation at all to Jewish suffering.33 Critics of negative universalism thus agree with their opponents that Jewishness and universality are completely incompatible; they too oppose "the Jewish story" to what they dismiss as "the more universal issue of tolerance" and unfavorably contrast "pallid universalism" to "Jewish consciousness."34 This agreement ironically leaves both parties suggesting that Jews are not truly human, that "those seeking to universalize Anne Frank's story" have offended not only by "removing its Jewish content" but also by making that story "a symbol of humanity" that casts the Holocaust's victims "as 7human beings' rather than Jews."35

100

SHARON MARCUS

The debate about the Diary's universalism is thus a curiously reversible one. One side insists that Anne Frank and her diary must be universal, hence not Jewish; the other demands that they be Jewish, hence not universal; and both agree that Jewishness and universality are irreconcilable. This reversibility emerges with startling clarity in the writing of Meyer Levin. As the fiercest opponent of adaptations that stressed the Diary's universalism at the expense of Jewish identity and history, Levin seems least likely to have ever advanced the Diary's universality. Yet Levin was in fact the first U.S. reviewer to promote the very brand of negative universalism he eventually came to protest. In his 1952 front-page review of the The Diary of a Young Girl for the New York Times Book Review, Levin hit every note that he would subsequently revile. The headline of the review does not explicitly describe Anne as Jewish; its first paragraph describes the Diary as a "warm and stirring confession" that communicates "in virtually perfect ... form the drama of puberty," deferring any mention of the Diary's account of Jews hiding from the Nazis until the second paragraph, and immediately qualifying that aspect of the text with a statement that emphasizes the universalism and optimism Levin would later abjure: "This is no lugubrious ghetto tale, no compilation of horrors.... Anne Frank's diary simply bubbles with amusement, love, discovery ... it is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature. These people might be living next door; their ... emotions, their tensions ... are those of human character and growth, anywhere."36 Far from emphasizing the specificity of the Holocaust, Levin aligns the emotion inspired by the Diary with a fear of war, a fear shared by "any family in the world today." Anne's conflicts with her mother are "arch-typical," her musings about Peter express "love-anguish of the purest universality," and Levin himself cites the passage in which Anne says she still believes people are truly good at heart, editing it to end on a more positive note than it does in her text.37

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

101

Reversibility similarly governs Cynthia Ozick's 1997 essay on the Diary. "Who Owns Anne Frank?" accuses those who identify with Anne Frank of appropriation and projection and charges that even to imagine what Anne Frank might have been had she lived is an "unholy speculation" that "tampers with history"—after a lengthy speculation of her own about what kind of writer Anne Frank would have become, a speculation that operates on the basis of Ozick's identification with Anne Frank. Readers and adaptors of the Diary have made the pure impure, turned dread into hope, trepidation into uplift, and the truth that people are bad at heart into the lie that they are essentially good; Ozick's mission is to reverse these reversals.38 That the Diary could be a record of trepidation and uplift, that Anne could be pure and impure, that identification could operate across difference without obliterating it, is as impossible for these writers to articulate as any relationship other than pure opposition between universality and particularity. The reversibility of these oppositions allows us to see not only that universality and particularity are ultimately inseparable but also that even those who strongly reject universalism cannot sustain pure particularity. For example, those who since the 1980s have reclaimed Jewish specificity by showing that an earlier emphasis on universalism was part of an American tendency to promote homogeneity fail to recognize that their current insistence on Jewish particularity is similarly part of a new, but still generally American (not uniquely Jewish), shift to identity politics.39 An unwitting drift to universalism similarly characterizes more theological arguments that Anne Frank's diary records a specifically Jewish suffering and the emergence of a uniquely Jewish consciousness. In this version of Jewish particularity, Jews have been chosen to redeem the world through their suffering, a credo that Meyer Levin himself called "our Messianic belief ... in universal illumination." Jewishness becomes a destiny "in which individual tragedy is transmuted into a collective will to live and labor

102

SHARON MARCUS

for the day when all barbarity will be sublimated into social good."40 Thus, while messianism defines Jewish suffering as absolutely unique and particular (Jews alone suffer for the world), it also posits a Jewish universalism in which Jewish suffering is transhistorical, prophetic, and supernational (Jews have always suffered, and do so for the future redemption of all people).41 Even those who object most strongly to the universalism of Anne Frank's diary thus cannot relinquish universalism. If universalism could indeed mean only the erasure of Jewishness, and the Diary's status depended on universalism alone, this persistence of universalism would have sinister implications. But as we have already begun to see, universalism does not have to be understood in solely negative terms, and the Diary's quasi-universal appeal does not have to depend on the denial of Anne Frank's Jewishness. Nor does the Diary's universality, its ability to move people the world over, stem solely from its relationship to Jewishness, positive or negative. Only if we reduce Jewishness to a vector so particular that it can connect with no others can we ignore the multiple ways that Anne Frank's diary evokes universal categories. Those multiple universals neither deny nor affirm her Jewishness but intersect with a Jewishness from which she can never be separated. Let me propose some ways in which the universality attached to Anne Frank neither negates nor affirms her Jewishness. First, Anne Frank feels universal, and international, because she wrote her diary as a child and remains, by virtue of her death, a child. Lacking the rights and responsibilities of citizens, subordinate to elders, children are less firmly fixed within national bounds than adults; their shared powerlessness seems to link all children transnationally.42 Second, Anne Frank lends herself to universalization because she exists in pictures, icons that make both her presence and absence (always combined in the photographic image) palpable across linguistic and cultural differences.43 Third, Anne Frank lends herself to universalization because her diary explored her heterosexuality, commonly taken to be a universal structure and teleology

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

103

of desire. And though the universalization of A nne's h eterosexuality is linked to post-Holocaust moves to set straight the historical associations of Jews with gender inversion and sexual perversion, the Diary intervenes in any simple equation of universality and heterosexuality by also attesting to Anne's homosexual desires, equally universal for some readers, and which give the Diary's depiction of sexuality a completeness of range that passes for universal.44 Finally, as the ease with which we speak of Anne Frank in both the past and present suggests, Anne Frank lends herself to universalization because she occupies two types of time, ongoing and terminal. The immediacy of the diary form and of the extant photos of Anne Frank allow us to apprehend her in a continuous present that gestures toward the future; yet we simultaneously sense that the very continuity and presence registered in her diary and photographs were irrevocably discontinued by her death, and thus exist only in a completed, futureless past.45 If the Diary's universal appeal can thus be neither reduced to nor detached from its representation of Jewishness, the feelings it arouses— and the pages that follow will assign those feelings a more precise name—cannot be attributed solely to the universalism with which sentim entality has been associated since the Enlightenment.46 Sentimentality tends to be associated with sympathy and compassion, which require a subject to identify with the object of sympathy as well as with other subjects who also feel sympathy, hence its association with universalism. Once feeling with and thus becoming another has been established as the proper goal of sentiment, sentiment becomes vulnerable to several critiques, as Hannah Arendt shows, for example, in her discussion of Rousseau and Robespierre in On Revolution. Arendt distinguishes between but criticizes both pity and compassion. As a "sentiment," pity is self-enclosed and self-conscious, "enjoyed for its own sake" as a reflection on one's capacity for compassion; the sentimental subject congratulates himself on his capacity to feel for another. Furthermore, one who pities does not suffer with the object but

104

SHARON MARCUS

instead enjoys a spectating, impassive or even sadistic distance from it, indeed requires the object to suffer misfortune. For Arendt, both pity and compassion fail to mediate between the collective and the individual; pity can only be expressed for an aggregate and compassion only for one person. And when the sentimental subject truly feels with another, as in the "passion" of compassion, she negates the particular being of the other through that very identification. For Arendt, identification negates politics, action, and active goodness, and for others, identification appropriates and hence obliterates otherness.47 Sympathy, compassion, and pity tend to be felt for the living. Although its presentation in diary form lends Anne Frank's suffering an impression of immediacy, readers know that Anne Frank's worst suffering is not represented in her diary and that the author who writes in the present tense is dead. The suffering that lies outside the Diary is too fatal and inexorable to inspire sympathy and pity; a more accurate term for the feeling it evokes would be pathos, a response that registers the excess of a fate that readers know about but do not and cannot share. The Diary's pathos derives from the powerful difference between what we know about Anne Frank's fate and what she, as the writer of the diary through which we know her, could not know. Our knowledge that Anne Frank died in a concentration camp structures our reading of her diary, making its notations of the present and imaginations of the future poignant in the gap they stage between her hopes and our awareness of their futility.48 The painful awareness of her own death, necessarily absent from Anne's own writing, surfaces in the reader who must imagine it; and the pathos of Anne's death in and of itself is accentuated by the affect that invests the very act of imagining. Our investment in the act of imagining could be the basis for a positive version of universalism, in which we would understand such imaginative investments as generalizing identifications with the formal processes of representation and feeling that human

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

105

beings share in common.49 Yet for many critics, the feelings attendant on the act of imagining are only narcissistic investments in our individual emotions, and what we feel when reading the diary or viewing the play can only be the sentiments produced by solipsistic, mimetic identification, in which we take ourselves to be Anne or take Anne to be ourselves. Such critics construe identification as both an end and a means of the negative universalism they denounce: an end, as when Judith Doneson writes that Anne's father memorialized her by "stressing the diary's universal aspects over its specific Jewish content" in order to facilitate "identification for the general public"; a means, when the same scholar argues that "the film seeks an audience identification with the Jewish victims for the purpose of appealing to a universal antipathy toward the persecution of all men."50 For these critics, identification denies the absolute difference of Jewish victims of the Holocaust or of all Jews, and thus becomes what Ozick calls a "shameless ... appropriation" that responds in the negative to the question posed by Jacob Weinstein in a 1957 article, "The Betrayal of Anne Frank": "Does the Jewish people have a right to its own cultural material?"51 Identification becomes an assertion of absolute identity that categorically denies difference; Ozick writes that identification is "to become what one is not," hence to "usurp" and "own." In this model, identification with Anne Frank can only operate by denying our difference from her, a denial that effaces the Holocaust itself; for the public "to imagine themselves in the place of the heroine" is to "evade real confrontation of the archetypal vision" by encouraging "pity of the self ... the purging of guilt, responsibility, and even memory."52 It is certainly the case that readers of The Diary of a Young Girl identify with Anne Frank on the basis of perceived similarities, many of them trivial.53 The perception of similarities, however, does not automatically eliminate the perception of difference; the very work involved in establishing an identification acknowledges difference as identification's ongoing condition. Nor is the feeling pro-

106

SHARON MARCUS

duced by reading Anne Frank reducible to a mimetic identification in which we simply put ourselves in her place. Anne Frank's diary does not move us only because we identify directly with her helplessness; rather, we realize we are not helpless in the way she was (and is, in the eternal present of the diary), yet we are helpless to help her. Our difference from her collides with our inability to use that difference to help her. To the extent that sympathy is related to identification and to the impulse to help another, the particular pathos of the Diary, its poignance, stems from our painful awareness of being unlike Anne Frank yet unable to help her. Pathos emerges not from mimetic identification but from its blockage.54 Critics of the Diary's popularity, however, are offended not only by the universalizing identification on which they claim sentiment depends, but by sentiment itself. I am arguing that the affect triggered by the Diary corresponds more closely to pathos than to sentim ent, but such a distinction would make no difference to a critique directed at affective response in general. That critique, when not based simply on automatic contempt for the female adolescents with whom it associates feeling, aligns itself with a refusal of a representational strategy that produces affect through the rhetorical substitutions of personification and synecdoche, as well as a refusal of mass culture's reliance on mechanical reproduction.55 Anne Frank's diary has moved people so much because it stands for herself, 6 million murdered Jews, all Jewish martyrs, and all victims of intolerance; it has reached such great numbers because mass media can and do reproduce it over and over again. The immense range of the series of substitutions in which the diary itself is the initial figure, and the enormous scale of its cultural reproduction, link both Anne Frank and her readers in a circuit of compounding emotion that moves from one to millions; we feel with, for, and through the diary of Anne Frank because it represents so many others and has been represented so many times. These processes and techniques of substitution and repetition, and the feelings they make possible, disturb writers such as Robert

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

107

Alter, who explains his disaffection with the Diary and its adaptations by noting "a fortuitous complicity ... between the ... understandably sentim ental simplifications of a young girl's naive idealism and the ersatz idealism that is the stock-in-trade of Broadway and Hollywood and the publishing industry"; both are "cloying" and "saccharine." Linking sentim entality to a negative universalism that promotes identification, Alter deems Anne "neither very Jewish nor very mature" and notes that her "adolescent tone may too readily inspire sympathy of an adolescent sort."56 To dilute the Diary's appeal requires asserting one's im perviousness to girls, sentiment, and popular culture, as well as to the representational strategies they favor. After referring slightingly to the Diary's "popular cult," Alter diagnoses Meyer Levin's susceptibility to the Diary as "implicated in a common predisposition ... to naturalize these unspeakable events."57 The link Alter makes between popularity and naturalization makes clear that his mistrust of the popular (20 million people must be wrong) is both political and aesthetic. In this view— one with many adherents— the Holocaust is fundamentally unrepresentable because it shattered history, memory, and language; therefore, any representation based on the principles of realism or sentimentalism would deny the very effects they set out to record, and the only proper representational mode for the Holocaust is one that registers the end of representation itself.58 Memorials and testimonies to the Holocaust must be post/modernist, or they must not be. The Diary "made the world weep for all the Jewish children whom Anne represents," but that very "sentimentality can be a form of vandalism," not only because it had to distort Anne to make her representative but because sentiment and representation them selves deface the truth of the Holocaust.59 Must we regard sentiment and representation as so injurious? Can we reconceptualize universality by rethinking pathos? We can approach this question through a comment by Stuart Klawans in his review of the documentary Anne Frank Remembered. Like

108

SHARON MARCUS

m any others, Klawans praises the film for transform ing Anne Frank from an icon back into a person; in contrast to the "sentiment and piety" of the play, the film "leaves you alone with the facts, which are irreducible, terrible and above all idiosyncratic."60 Klawans's contrast between sentiment and facts suggests that sentiment is inappropriate to the Holocaust because it highlights a way of knowing the Holocaust that involves imagining it, and imagination is injurious both because it challenges the Holocaust's status as unimaginable and because it can converge with neo-Nazi charges that the Holocaust is imaginary. Klawans thus advocates returning the Holocaust to sheer facticity, to "irreducible and idiosyncratic" facts that are part of no naturalizing schema.61 But what of the curious turn of phrase, the film "leaves you alone with the facts"? Klawans is proposing that the film transforms not only Anne Frank but the viewer, who by being left alone with the facts becomes as irreducible and idiosyncratic as they are. The assertion of a pure reality untainted by representation or sentiment is allied to the pure particularity of sheer individuality—a particularity so absolute that it banishes the universal. How might a new understanding of pathos relate to a different concept of universality? To begin to answer this final question requires that we shift our understanding of the Diary's pathos away from both universality and particularity to focus instead on substitution, which both universality and particularity categorically exclude: there can be no substitute for the universal, which includes everything w ithin itself, or for particularity, which excludes everything from itself. Anne Frank's diary, however, mediates between the general and the particular; Anne Frank functions as what Hannah Arendt calls, in her lectures on Kant, an exemplar whose "very particularity reveals the generality that otherwise could not be defined."62 For Arendt, the example represents one of the ways that the faculty of judgment manages to think the particular, especially one for which no general rule is given. The faculty that "provides examples for judgment" is the imagination,

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

109

which she defines in terms of representation and substitution: imagination is "the ability to make present what is absent." Significantly, Arendt does not condemn imagination and representation for impeding understanding and judgm ent; rather, imagination and representation make judgment and understanding possible.63 Exemplarity depends on substitution: the substitution of representativeness, in which one can stand for many, and the substitution of personification, in which an object like a diary replaces the person who wrote it and a voice fills in the silence of a dead person. Anne's status as representative, as a particular exemplar, surfaces in a common move among her readers, who insist, often in the same sentence, that she was both "extraordinary" and "typical," her diary "unique" but her character "common" to all Jewish children during World War II, that she possessed "startling insight and a remarkable talent" but "an average teen-ager's desires and emotions."64 Attributing ordinariness to Anne Frank enables her to stand in for the many millions of others who died in concentration camps and keeps her extraordinariness from separating her from those whom she represents. Remarking on her extraordinariness both justifies her selection as the representative one and prevents her representativeness from entailing the homogeneity of 6 million different Jews. In her typical uniqueness, Anne Frank represents the extraordinariness of everyone who died and stands for the uniqueness of each lost life.65 The substitution of representation does risk homogenizing the millions killed by implying that everyone who died was Anne Frank; yet even those who criticize representation's effects involuntarily concede its necessity. Robert Alter, for example, objects that "the widespread tendency to take the Diary as the emblematic testim ony of the m urdered 6 million betrays a failure of moral imagination," one that implies that "without it we could not imagine concretely that there were countless others who were vibrant human beings and lost their lives."66 Yet the very tension in his final clause between the drive to imagine

110

SHARON MARCUS

"concretely" others who by virtue of being "countless" precisely resist being concretely imagined suggests that without the kind of representation provided by the Diary we would fail to envision 6 million dead as anything but a nebulous mass. The figure of Anne Frank allows us to bring a problem of unimaginable scale into individual focus. By individualizing a representative member of the masses of the dead, the Diary transforms 6 million from a barely discernible mass to an aggregate of differentiated individuals. Anne Frank's representativeness produces effects of concreteness that are intensified by the Diary's ability to personify and animate both its author and all those murdered in the Holocaust. Over and over again, writers remark that her diary has given a face and a name, a writing hand, to anonymous, murdered, dismembered, and pulverized millions. Her diary institutes a resistant remembering of the Holocaust by bringing the dead to life and restoring the dehumanized to the hum anity exemplified in faces and names.67 Representative personification inspires a pathos that does not simply reduce the scale of the Holocaust to that of a single individual. As Martin Dworkin noted in an essay on Anne Frank, "The very size of the horror the Germans had perpetuated was difficult to make into a fact, into something that could be known," which in turn makes it difficult to bring "all who can care to the state of personal bereavement."68 Reading the Diary, we do not feel grief only for the individual Anne Frank. If we cry when we read Anne Frank, we cry because it is easy to cry for one person, but the sadness we feel for her single person is intensified because she is representative, her singleness always multiplied. Pathos seems to require a scale smaller than the infinite but larger than the singular: the personification of a face and a name in a representative figure. Because its effects depend on personification, some have argued that the Diary inadvertently denies the Holocaust by promoting the illusion that Anne Frank still lives.69 Certainly a drive to reincarnate Anne Frank and the millions of dead Jews whom she represents surfaces in the repeated invocation of the numbers of

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

111

copies sold of her diary ever since those numbers have entered the millions— 9 million, 18 million, 20 million, but never the 6 million that these numbers are cited to surpass. The millions of copies sold stand for the millions who were killed, in an impossible substitution that strives to reanimate and replace them. The pathos produced by representation and personification collides with the pathos produced by the limits of rhetoric.70 In a more troubling instance of the problems with representative personification, the Diary is also said to bring the dead to life by giving Anne Frank a voice even after her death, and by extension to bring back to life the millions of silenced Jews whom Anne Frank represents. Anne Frank's life story speaks "with the voices of the dead"; her "voice becomes the voice of 6 million vanished Jewish souls"; "out of the millions who were silenced forever, one voice remains to remind us—the voice of Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl."71 In this way, however, the Diary comes to represent not Anne's death but its opposite, survival, since although "Anne and all the other annex dwellers except her father died in Belsen[,] her diary was rescued" and "the book is the girl."72 Not only is Anne Frank still alive, then, she will always be so: "As long as there are people to read, her words and her name will live on. Anne Frank will never die."73 By giving voice to the voiceless and life to the lifeless, the Diary substitutes for the dead by resurrecting them, a substitution that some argue denies the very death and suffering that, as a Holocaust document, the Diary is supposed to represent. That some readers of the Diary inadvertently deny the Holocaust through personifications of Anne Frank should not convince us to reject the imagination as a means of understanding the Holocaust; that would be to conflate imagination and error. Personification does not deny genocide but helps us to imagine the lives that were destroyed, and imagining life is necessary to condemning its destruction. As the faculty that has traditionally been assigned the role of mediating between universals (apprehended by reason) and

112

SHARON MARCUS

particulars (sensed by the understanding), imagination generates and consumes the personifications that mediate between the abstract and the concrete.74 Representation similarly, as we have seen, helps us to picture the Holocaust, an action that does not constitute a failure of moral imagination but is a necessary component of it. There is nothing wrong, and much that is right, about a book that makes us cry over a victim of genocide; and there is nothing right, and much that is wrong, in the insistence that Anne Frank can teach us about nothing except Anne Frank, or that the extermination of Jews can teach us about nothing except the history of anti-Semitism. As the actress who most recently played Anne Frank, Natalie Portman, put it, in what Newsweek called her "case for a universal Anne Frank," "You don't want to say 'Don't do this to the Jews' but 'Don't do this to anyone.' "75 Or, as H annah Arendt put it in Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Nazis committed "a crime against humanity, perpetrated upon the body of the Jewish people."76 What Arendt's work offers is a definition of humanity that is universal, but frees universality from its troubling antipathy to particularity. A rendt defines universal humanity as the conditions of plurality and natality. In defining plurality, she writes that "we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live."77 W hat human beings have in common is the world, which can only exist between people and thus requires, rather than denies, the difference and distance between them; and what each human being represents is natality, the possibility of beginning something new and initiating the unforeseen. Indeed, Arendt understands the Holocaust as an attack on plurality: genocide "is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the 'human status' without which the very words 'mankind' or 'hum anity' would be devoid of meaning."78 Arendt acknowledged the relevance of imagination, representation, and nuanced versions of sympathy and universalism for grappling with the political problems raised by the Holocaust.

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

113

Eichmann in Jersualem cites the "transforming realm of poetry" as the one most equal to the task of depicting the Holocaust. In portraying Eichmann, Arendt focuses on his "heroic fight with the German language, which invariably defeats him"; on his abandonment of the categorical imperative; and on his "lack of imagination" and his "inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else."79 Despite her dislike of the cheap emotion she perceived in the public's acclaim for the diary, that public shared Arendt's desire to understand the human condition in terms of natality rather than mortality. For those who define hum anity in terms of natality, the desire to foster rather than destroy the hum an condition must mean not only a refusal to inflict death but also a recognition of the value of life, of a natality that is necessarily universal. Pathos is the affect that acknowledges natality, according to Arendt, who traced the "pathos" generated by genuine revolution to its apprehension of a "new experience" that is "at the same time the experience of man's faculty to begin something new."80 The universal pathos of Anne Frank's diary lies in its manifestation of m ortality as the destruction of natality. The diary's astonishing ability to move people derives from its power to manifest Anne Frank's death as a loss of life, as the destruction of what Anne Frank had in common with everyone—the ability to begin something that no one else could. NOTES For their conversation and comments, I would like to thank Elizabeth Abel, Jennifer Callahan, Julie Carlson, Anne Cheng, Margaret Cohen, Keith Crudgington, Stephanie Ellis, Kevis Goodman, Gillian Harkin, Dana Hollander, Cathy Jurca, Rob Kaufman, A nnie Levy, Alan Liu, Mark Maslan, Susan Maslan, David Miller, Chris Nealon, Karen Newman, John Plotz, Mike Rogin, and Vanessa Schwartz. For her extraordinary research assistance, I thank Marcelle Cohen. 1.

On Jews as international, supernational, and micronational, see Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996),

1U

SHARON MARCUS

120; and Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). There are instances of the less than national status of the Jews being equated with a Jewish universalism, as in the case of Jewish messianism, which as Rose points out (29) transforms the lack of a Jewish nation into a universal mission to redeem the world's suffering, but those messianic thinkers never identified Jewish universalism as cosmopolitan. On the relationship between nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and internationalism in the context of Latin American nationals in Europe, see Natalia Majluf, " 'Ce n'est pas le Pérou' or, The Failure of Authenticity: Marginal Cosmopolitans at the Paris Universal Exhibition of 1855," Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 868-93. 2.

Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). It is important to note that many writers continue to argue for the political dangers that cosmopolitanism poses to the nation, especially to nascent Third World nationalism; see, for example, Timothy Brennan, "Cosmopolitanism and Celebrities," Race and Class 31, no. 1 (1989): 1-20. Others continue to equate cosmopolitanism with an Enlightenment universalism; Martha Nussbaum, for example, argues that rationally recognizing difference allows us to see that we all have reason in common; see Cultivating Humanity : A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).

3.

Bruce Robbins, "The Weird Heights: On Cosmopolitanism, Feeling, and Power," differences 7, no. 1 (1995): 167; Kwame A nthon y Appiah, "Cosmopolitan Patriots," Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 621; H om i Bhabha, "Unsatisfied: N otes on Vernacular C osm opolitanism," in Text and Nation: Cross-Disciplinary Essays on Cultural and National Identities, ed. Laura García-Moreno and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia: Camden House, 1996), 198.

4.

See Jennifer Ring, The Political Consequences of Thinking: Gender and Judaism in the Work of Hannah Arendt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), especially chap. 4, "The N ew York Intellectuals and Eichmann in Jerusalem." See also Margaret Olin, "Cflement] Hardesh [Greenberg] and Company: Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity," in Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities, ed. Norman L. Kleeblatt (New York: Jewish Museum and Rutgers University Press, 1996), 39-59.

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

5.

115

See Jonathan and Daniel Boyarin, eds., Jews and Other Differences: The N ew Jewish Cultural Studies (Minneapolis: University of M innesota Press, 1997).

6.

M any of these antiuniversalists, whom I cite later in this paper, advocate a brand of Jewish identity politics that insists on the minority status of Jews as an oppressed group. A more critical take on Jewish particularity argues that European Jews who emigrated to the United States were able to assimilate by identifying with a whiteness based on the oppression, effacement, and exploitation of African Americans. See, for example, Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the H olly w ood Melting Pot (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996).

7.

Although it would be possible to differentiate readings of Anne Frank's diary along temporal and national lines, those differences are far less striking than the similarities that have persisted among readers of dozens of nations for the last four decades; see, for example, the many responses to the diary published in Anna G. Steenmeijer, ed., A Tribute to Anne Frank (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1971). I am not suggesting that Anne Frank is "truly" universal— that her text will always have the same meaning for readers worldwide. Nor am I suggesting that readers have at every level responded to Anne Frank in exactly the same terms. One could, for example, find differences among American, German, Dutch, Israeli, and Japanese readers of the diary, or show how arguments about Jewish particularity that have persisted for decades nevertheless shifted cultural locations, from the specialized Jewish press in the 1950s to the mainstream media in the 1990s. Yet such finely tuned comparisons would need to acknowledge that for the past forty years readers on an international spectrum have responded to the diary in remarkably similar ways: since the 1950s, readers have either identified passionately with Anne Frank and taken her text as a point of departure for learning more about issues such as anti-Semitism and genocide, or have dismissed the text for producing sentimental readers who disregard the specificity of the Holocaust.

8.

A lthough there are m any significant differences between Anne Frank's diary and its various adaptations (as well as between versions of the diary itself), these differences blur in the cultural text produced by the reception of the diary, which often fails to distin-

116

SHARON MARCUS

guish among its multiple forms. The differences between text, play, and film notwithstanding, in fact every criticism made of the play and the film has also been leveled at the original diary itself, further obviating the need to distinguish among these versions in order to understand the diary's cultural impact. 9.

I take m y definition of classical sentim entality from Margaret Cohen, "Sentimentality without Borders," paper presented at the ACLA conference in Montreal, April 1999. In its use of objective description to document living conditions in the Secret Annex, and in its portrayal of war, everyday life, family conflict, and adolescent development, the diary draws on the realist codes of the novel, historiography, the bildungsroman, and popular adolescent fiction.

10.

Hannah Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times," in Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 19. See also Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 251.

11.

As well as in the works that I cite later, the relationship between Arendt's writings on Jews and her political philosophy in general is brilliantly explored in Martine Leibovici, Hannah Arendt, unejuive: expérience, politique et histoire (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1998). For Arendt's writings on Jews, in addition to the works cited throughout, see Hannah Arendt, La Tradition cachée (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1987); Auschwitz et Jérusalem (Paris: Presses Pocket, 1991); Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. Liliane Weissberg, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

12.

Leo W. Schwarz, review of The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, Jewish Social Studies 14, no. 4 (October 1952): 377.

13.

Cynthia Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" N ew Yorker, 6 October 1997, 79, 87.

14.

Robert Alter attributes the diary's popularity to its "safe distance of indirection from the horrors of genocide" and to "the marginal nature of [Anne's] Jewish identity" ("The View from the Attic," review of An Obsession with Anne Frank, by Lawrence Graver, and of The Diary of a Young Girl, by A nne Frank, N ew Republic, 4 December 1995,40). For Judith Doneson, the removal of Jewishness derives from blunting horror. By m inimizing the horrors of the Holocaust, the film maintains "the likeness of all suffering," hence

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

117

denying the uniqueness and specificity of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust by universalizing it; "The American History of Anne Frank's Diary/' Holocaust and Genocide Studies 2, no. 1 (1987): 155. 15.

For a full account of this controversy, see Lawrence Graver, An Obsession with Anne Frank: M eyer Levin and the "Diary" (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U niversity of California Press, 1995); and Ralph Melnick, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meye r Levin, Lillian Heilman, and the Staging of the "Diary" (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

16.

Suggestions that Anne Frank was not Jewish enough span the four decades of her reception in the United States. In his 1952 review of the diary for Jewish Social Studies, Leo Schwarz wrote, "What one misses in Anne's portrait is the attachment to any specific Jewish values___Who knows— perhaps the strength derived from Judaism may have given her the endurance needed to hang on several weeks until Belsen was liberated?" (379). A 1998 article in Commen tary stated that "[A lthough Anne was unambivalently loyal to the Jews, her own personal aspirations were not centrally bound up with the issue of Jewish identity"; Molly Magid Hoagland, "Anne Frank, On and Off Broadway," Commen tary 105, no. 3 (1998): 63. For a biographical account of Anne, Margot, Otto, and Edith Frank's respective religious identifications, see Elma Verney, "Anne Frank's World," in Anne Frank in Historical Perspective: A Teaching Guide for Secondary Schools, ed. Alex Grobman and Joel Fishman (Los Angeles: Martyrs' Memorial and Museum of the Holocaust of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles, 1995), 13-22. Evaluations of degrees and forms of Jewishness have their own complex motives and modes of reading. Sander Gilman interprets M eyer Levin as pitting himself against Otto Frank, whom Levin cast as "the 'bad' Jew . . . the German Jew, the international Jew," thus protecting Anne Frank, the "positively different" Jew, from the taint of cosmopolitanism; Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U niversity Press, 1986), 348. One sees this tendency throughout the literature on Anne Frank: those who want Anne Frank to be a certain kind of Jew, or woman, or writer, but do not find consistent or ample evidence for their view in the diary assert that Otto Frank removed the passages that would prove their interpretation correct. Berteke Waaldijk points out, however, that many of the editorial

118

SHARON MARCUS

omissions attributed to Otto were executed by Anne herself when she prepared a version of her diary for possible publication after the war; "Reading Anne Frank as a Woman," Women's Studies International Forum 16, no. 4 (1993): 329. Readers can now easily trace these various editorial decisions by consulting David Barnouw and Gerrold van der Stroom, eds., The Diary of Anne Frank: The Critical Edition (New York: Doubleday, 1989). Although Otto Frank did agree to the Dutch publisher's request to cut Anne's references to menstruation and sexual curiosity about women's bodies, he also insisted on restoring those passages in the first American edition. 17.

To pick several of many possible examples: Albert Johnson's review of the 1959 film pointed out that its appeal depended on the U.S. audience's uneasy relationship to the "spectacle of terror" and "inconceivable horror" of the concentration camps, which made a film emphasizing "human courage and indomitability during the Nazi occupation . . . uniquely effective in America"; Film Quarterly 12, no. 4 (1959): 41. Lawrence Langer has similarly argued that adaptations of the diary allow viewers "to cope with the idea of the Holocaust without forcing a confrontation with its grim details"; "The Americanization of the Holocaust on Stage and Screen," in From Hester Street to Hollywood:The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 214. See also Ilan Avisar, Screening the Holocaust: Cinema's Images of the Unimaginable (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), who notes that the diary "downplays the place of evil" (120).

18.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, The Diary of Anne Frank (New York: Random House, 1956), 174; Bruno Bettelheim cited in Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 53.

19.

Sidra DeKoven Ezraki writes about how adaptations of the diary emphasize "a litany of human suffering and a declaration of ultimate faith in universal goodness," and asserts that "the emphasis on Anne's faith [in goodness] . . . is an implicit denial of her fate . . . as . . . innocent victim . . . as . . . Jewish victim"; By Words Alone: The Holocaust in Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 202.

20.

Hannah Arendt, letter to the editor, Midstream, September 1962, 85-86.

21.

It is important to note that although critics attributed to it a univer-

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

119

salizing tone, Eichmann in Jerusalem did not promote a universal understanding of the Holocaust. If most of Arendťs work is about politics, Eichmann in Jerusalem is primarily about judgment and the law, whose appropriate limits Arendt delimits carefully. In the realm of justice, Arendt explains throughout, moral responsibility and legal guilt for even mass crimes are particular and individual, not collective and general. In a similarly legalistic and antiuniversal vein, she insists that in a court of law the prosecution should not have presented the Holocaust as one instance in a timeless history of anti-Semitism (267). 22.

See Alex Sagan, "Examining Optimism: Anne Frank's Place in Postwar Culture," in Grobman and Fishman, Anne Frank in Historical Perspective, 55-65; Lester D. Friedman, Hollywood's Image of the Jew (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1982), 136-55; Doneson, "American History of Anne Frank's Diary"; Ezraki, By Words Alone, 202; and Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 235, 238.

23.

Blurb on back of 1972 edition (27th printing); George Stevens, introduction to 1963 paperback; Frances Alter Boyle, review of The Diary of a Young Girl, Library Journal 77 (1952): 889; "A Tragedy Revealed: Heroine's Last Days," Life, 18 August 1958, 78; " Diary of Anne Frank: The End," Time, 17 February 1958, 31. Bosley Crowther criticized Millie Perkins's performance as Anne in the film version for failing to express Anne's "sense of indestructible life, of innocence and trust that show no shadows, of a spirit that will not die" (New York Times, 19 March 1959), and a 1959 review praised the film for conveying "the beauty of a young and inquiring spirit that soars beyond . . . cramped confinement" (Variety, 18 March 1959). On the relationship between female muteness and idealization, see Barbara Johnson, "Muteness Envy," in Human, All Too Human, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1996).

24.

On Arendt's tone, see Ring, Political Consequences, 111; Dagmar Barnouw, Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U niversity Press, 1990), 238-39; and Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 159.

25.

For examples of recent work that criticizes sentim entality, see Shirley Samuels, ed., The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford

120

SHARON MARCUS

University Press, 1992); Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997); and Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late M od ernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). Many of the essays in Samuels's collection focus on the problems with cross-racial sentimental identifications and on the disciplinary effects of sentimental culture. Although Lauren Berlant's essay on Fanny Fern in The Culture of Sentiment recognizes the value of a sentimentality that asserts "a fem inine value that still exists in a private realm outside social circulation" ("The Female Woman: Fanny Fern and the Form of Sentiment," 268), in The Queen of America Berlant defines sentimentality as anti-political; the right's national sentimentality "is sentimental because it is a politics that abjures politics, made on behalf of a private life protected from the harsh realities of power" (11). Berlant's book also defines sentimentality as a sympathy that requires "abject suffering as the only condition of social membership" (189), a view that links her work to Wendy Brown's. States of Injury does not explicitly refer to sentimentality, but the political identity it criticizes, one based on injury, suffering, and powerlessness, is sentim ental in the classic eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury senses. Even in The Queen of America, however, Berlant cannot completely banish feeling from politics and the public sphere; she sees pilgrims to the capital as citizens who "seek to capture, even fleetingly, a feeling of genuine membership in the United States" (21). And in Place for Us: Essay on the Broadway Musical (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), D. A. Miller finds a historical justification for sentimental forms that evoke embarrassment and falsity: "Excessive sentimentality . . . was the necessary condition of sentiments allowed no real object" (27). 26.

On the refusal of a universal Jewish identity in Eichmann in Jerusalem, see Norman Fruchter, "Arendt's Eichmann and Jewish Identity," in For a New America: Essays in History and Politics from "Studies on the Left," 1959-1967, ed. James Weinstein and David W. Eakins (New York: Random House, 1970), 4 2 4 -2 5 , 451, 454. Fruchter suggests, however, that Arendt was committed to a political universalism that would translate, for example, into an international court of law (452). See also Shiraz Dossa, "Hannah Arendt on

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

121

Eichmann: The Public, the Private and Evil," Review of Politics 46, no. 2 (April 1984): 163-82. 27.

See Naomi Schor, "French Feminism Is a Universalism," differences 7, no. 1 (1995): 21; Schor also points out that proving that one universal is false does not prove the necessary falsity of all universals.

28.

Barbara Zimmerman, 1953 letter to Otto Frank, cited in Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 71; John Chapman, 1955 review, cited in Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 94 (ellipses are Graver's); John Stone, 1957 letter to George Stevens, cited in Doneson, "American History of Anne Frank's Diary," 155. Kermit Bloomgarden wrote that the Goodrich and Hackett play "captured not only the Jewish but also the universal meaning of Anne's story"; "Meyer Levin and Anne Frank's Diary," Congress Weekly, 17 June 1957, 7.

29.

See, for example, Judith Doneson on the film version of the diary: "The universalization of the H olocaust. . . that is, the adapting and adjusting of images so that a broad consensus of the population can identify with the event, dim inishes its Jewish particularity" ("American History of Anne Frank's Diary," 150).

30.

For book reviews of the diary that mention that Anne Frank was Jewish and that she died in a concentration camp, see Janet Flanner, "Letter from Paris," N ew Yorker, 11 November 1950,142 (Flanner calls Anne Frank "a precocious, talented little Frankfurt Jewess," demonstrating that attention to Jewish particularity can be as antiSem itic as its effacement); review in Spectator, 30 May 1952, 726-27; "Lost Child," review in Time, 16 June 1952,102; review in N ew Yorker, 21 June 1952,106; Jean Holzhauer, "A Record of Adolescence," review in C o m m o nw ea l, T7 June 1952, 297; Ludwig Lewisohn, "A Glory and a Doom," Saturday Review of Literature, 19 July 1952, 20. The review in Newsweek was unusual for m entioning the Nazis and concentration camps without ever using the word "Jewish" to describe A nne and her family ("Distressing Story," 16 June 1952, 114-15). Even reviews and articles about the play and film, which were the focus of objections to universalization of the diary, the Holocaust, and Jewishness, often explicitly referred to those very issues; see, for example, Bosley Crowther, film review, N ew York Times, 19 March 1959.

31.

See Jacob B. Michaelsen, "Remembering Anne Frank," Judaism 46, no. 2 (1997): 220.

122

32. 33.

SHARON MARCUS

Goodrich and Hackett, Diary, 168. In ‫״‬Anne Frank, On and Off Broadway," Hoagland singles out the exchange in which this line appears, which culminates with Anne's statement that she believes people to be really good at heart, as the play's "most egregious piece of optimistic 'universalizing'" (60). Meyer Levin stated that "generalizing away the particular Jewish doom falsifies the Holocaust" (cited in Melnick, Stolen Legacy, 229).

34.

Melnick, Stolen Legacy, 101; Hoagland, "On and Off Broadway," 59. See also Doneson, "American History," who equates the play's status as a "universal symbol" with the "deSemitization" of its characters (52). Jacob Weinstein suggested that the play "opposed . . . strong Jewish identification" in a bid to become universal; "Betrayal of Anne Frank," Congress Weekly, 13 May 1957, 5-6.

35.

All but the last quotations come from Judith Tydor Baumel, "Teaching the Holocaust through The Diary of Anne Frank," in Grobman and Fishman, Anne Frank in Historical Perspective, 50; the very last quotation is from Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 195.

36.

Meyer Levin, "The Child behind the Secret Door," New York Times Book Review, 13 June 1952, 1, 22. The review's subheading is "An Adolescent Girl's Own Story of How She Hid for Two Years during the Nazi Terror."

37.

Ibid., 1,22. In The Obsession (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), Levin also noted that his positive reaction to the Diary was based on a belief that it would appeal to Americans; the D ia ry was "the needed document. For h ere.. .was an urban family with which every American reader could feel empathy" (cited in Melnick, Stolen Legacy, 3). Again, this was exactly the attitude he had condemned for over twenty years. Even when reviewing the diary for Congress Weekly: A Review of Jewish Interests, Levin emphasized the book's "classic qualities" and reiterated that "all this might be the writing of the little girl next door, in a suburb of Boston, in an apartment house in Manhattan, in a town in California"; Anne's eager avowal of life was not an example for the Jews alone, he concluded," and "for this reason . . . Anne's book can break the sectarian circle" ("A Classic Human Document," Congress Weekly, 16 June 1952,12,13). Years later, when Levin had begun to insist that adaptations of the diary must reflect the specificity of the Holocaust, he continued to undo that specificity by converting Anne Frank's extermination in

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

123

the Holocaust into an analogy for what he called the murder of his play; see Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 52,182, and 190. 38.

Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" 76, 78, 81, 78.

39.

For a recent anthology attesting to the emergence of Jewish identity

40.

Meyer Levin, cited in Henry T. Moore, review of The Obsession, by

politics, see Kleeblatt, Too Jewish? Meyer Levin, New Republic, 2 February 1974, 28; Jacob Weinstein, letter to the editor, Congress Weekly , 22 July 1957, 20. See also Judith Thurman, "Not Even a Nice Girl," New Yorker, 18 December 1989,119; and Melnick, Stolen Legacy, 229. 41.

On the universalism of messianism in general and Jewish messianism in particular, see two papers by Dana Hollander: "Specters of Messiah," presented at the International Philosophical Seminar, July 1997, and "Derrida's 'Europe' and the Discourses of Jewish Marginality," presented at the annual conference of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, May 1997.

42.

For suggestions that Anne's status as child or adolescent underlies her universal appeal, see Holzhauer, "Record of Adolescence," 297; and Stefan Kanfer, "Child Sacrifice," Time, 30 January 1984, 77. On the relation between Anne Frank's age and her international appeal, see Chris Searle, review of The Diary of Anne Frank: Critical Edition, Race and Class 38 (October-December 1996), 95.

43.

On the importance of photographs of A nne Frank, see Garson Kanin, "Anne Frank at Fifty," Newsweek, 25 June 1979, 14; Jane Pratt, "The Anne Frank We Remember," McCall's, January 1986, 72—73; Anna Quindlen, introduction to Ruud van der Rol and Rian Verhoeven, A n ne Frank: Beyo nd the Diary: A Photographic Remembrance, trans. Tony Langham and Plym Peters (New York: Viking, 1993), x-xii; Johanna Hurwitz, Anne Frank: Life in Hiding (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1988), 53; and Marjorie Agosin, Dear Anne Frank, trans. Richard Schaaf (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), 7. Note that photographs of Anne Frank universalize (make iconic and disseminate on a mass scale) features that one knows to be and can easily read as particularly Jewish. (Usually Jews who achieve such iconic status cannot look Jewish and must deny or downplay their Jewish identity; see Kleeblatt, Too Jewish ?) Most writers hesitate to say explicitly that Anne Frank looks Jewish; only Kanin notes that her photo shows a "bright, sweet, smiling little Jewish face." The others who com m ent on her looks

124

SHARON MARCUS

studiously avoid mentioning her hair or nose— features still considered to typify Jewishness— and concentrate instead on her eyes, no longer privileged markers of Jewishness, although they were in nineteenth-century physiognomies of Jews; see Sander Gilman, The Jew's Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), 68-76. 44.

For reviews and articles that underline heterosexuality as the basis for Anne's universal appeal, see "Lost Child," 102; Holzhauer, "Record of Adolescence," 297; George Scarlett, "Adolescent Thinking and the Diary of Anne Frank," Psychoanalytic Review 58, no. 2 (1971): 276, which also characterizes Anne's lesbian desires as a universal phase on the road to an inevitable heterosexuality; and Elizabeth Cutter Evert, "Sexual Integration in Female Adolescence: Anne Frank's Diary as a Study in Healthy Development," in The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child (New Haven, Conn.: Yale U niversity Press, 1991), 46: 109-24. For many critics, the tragedy of Anne's death is the tragedy of a thwarted heterosexual teleology; while many have lamented that Anne's death prevented her from ever becoming a wife and mother (and numerous articles about her surviving friends emphasize that they became wives and mothers), no one has ever suggested that Anne's death was also tragic because it meant she did not live to realize the lesbian desires she also expressed in her diary. For an example of the pathos associated with interrupted heterosexual development, see Quindlen, introduction to Beyond the Diary, ix; for a discussion of how the Diary articulates Anne's lesbian desires, see Katherine Dalsimer, "Female Adolescent Development: A Study of The Diary of Anne Frank," in The P sychoanalytic Study of the Child (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 37: 499-500; Waaldijk, "Reading Anne Frank as a Woman"; and Wendy Chapkis, "The Uncensored Anne Frank," Ms., October 1986, 79.

45.

On the temporality of the diary, see Ezraki, By Words Alone, 203. In Writing as Resistance: Four Women Confronting the Holocaust: Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Anne Frank, Etty Hillesum (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), Rachel Feldhay Brenner suggests that Anne's diary may have universal appeal because Anne herself was steeped in the values of liberal, humanist universalism and asserted those values even more strongly in response to anti-Semitism (8, 9,17, 40).

46.

On sentim entality as "the lingua franca of the Enlightenm ent

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

125

republic of letters," one that used the mass medium of print to solicit a transnational community of readers linked by common expressions of sympathy and pity, see Cohen, "Sentimentality without 47.

Borders." Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Faber and Faber, 1963),

48.

See Avisar, Screening the Holocaust, who is quite critical of the

84; for the discussion of compassion and pity, see 69-84. pathos and irony generated by the film's tragic structure, which she considers inappropriate to portraying people who had no tragic agency or flaw (119), and Ezraki, By Words Alone, 203. See also Thurman, "Not Even a Nice Girl," 118; Quindlen, introduction to Beyond the D ia ry, xi; Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 118, 200; and Brenner, Writing as Resistance, 6. Robert Alter uses our knowledge of Anne's death to dismiss the notion that the Diary has any intrinsic value: "What makes the Diary m oving is the shadow cast back over it by the notice of her death at the end___ Try to imagine . . . an Anne Frank who survived . . . and, let us say, settled in Cleveland, became a journalist, married and had two children. Would anyone care about her wartime diary except as an account of the material circumstances of hiding out from the Nazis in Amsterdam?" ("View from the Attic," 41). Beyond its breathtaking condescension about the value of the life he imagines Anne might have lived, this assessment mistakenly assumes that a Holocaust document should be judged according to the ordinary criteria of literary value, which include (for a modernist like Alter) the autonomy of the text from the circumstances of its author's life. Yet while Alter argues that we should separate the worth and meaning of Anne's text from our knowledge about her life, he contradicts himself by reading the worthlessness of the life she might have lived back into the D ia ry itself, by adducing it as proof of the Diary's inherent shallowness. The pathos of Anne's death is also accentuated by the knowledge that she was almost saved many times: protected by being in hiding, then found; deported to Auschwitz but then transferred to BergenBelsen as late as 1944; spared murder by gassing but dead of typhus shortly before the camp was liberated. 49.

See N eil Hertz, " 'The Scene Came Alive': Autobiography and Anger," differences 9, no. 1 (1997): 36-47. Hertz argues that the pleasure of an emotion like anger lies not only in the content of

126

SHARON MARCUS

what one envisions when angry but in the act of envisioning itself (37), in "a transient identification of the self with processes of sym bolization" and the dispersal of the self "into plural instances of energized figuration" (47). Hertz's point is relevant to debates about the aestheticization of the Holocaust; while the commodification of the Holocaust as an aestheticized object is clearly problematic, the problems that attend specific aestheticized products should not be transferred wholesale to the aesthetic process itself. I return to this point later in m y discussion of representation and substitution. 50.

Doneson, "American History of A nne Frank's Diary," 152, 156; according to Martin S. Dworkin, the play and film make "identification" too easy because of their "effort to universalize the imagination of a particular young girl" ("The Vanishing Diary of Anne Frank," Jewish Frontier, April 1960, 8).

51.

Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" 79; Weinstein, "Betrayal," 5. In " 'You who never was there': Slavery and the N ew Historicism, Deconstruction and the Holocaust," Narrative 4, no. 1 (1996): 1-16, Walter Benn Michaels debunks the personification of culture and texts embedded in Ozick's and W einstein's claims in order to criticize the ways that history (which can be known by anyone) becomes experience (which can be understood only by those who have it). W here Ozick and W einstein say that only the Jewish people can identify with the Holocaust without appropriating it, Michaels argues that no one who did not actually experience it can identify with it, but anyone willing to learn it can know about it (see 7 ,1 1 ,1 3 ).

52.

Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" 87; Dworkin, "Vanishing Diary," 10. See also Sagan, "Examining Optimism," 63 and 65 n. 16, on how identification with the play allowed Germans to see themselves, falsely, as victims rather than persecutors. The most extreme version of this position argues that since the Holocaust was a doom that denied its victims all agency, representations of it must refuse the pathos of identification promoted by tragedy, which assumes the hero's agency vis-à-vis fate: doom "forbids identification: for who can share the last gasp of the victim of annihilation, whose innocence so totally dissevers him from his end?" (Langer, "The Americanization of the Holocaust," 213). On the relationship between identity and identification, see Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995).

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

53.

127

For example, a high school teacher writing about Holocaust literature in the classroom notes that she has always identified with Anne because they share the same birthday; Judy Mitchell, "Children of the Holocaust," English Journal 69, no. 6 (September 1980): 18.

54.

Jacqueline Rose (States of Fantasy, 135) similarly redefines identification by asking if instead of imposing universal sameness, identification takes place only in the gaps of self-knowledge.

55.

For examples of writers who associate inappropriate feeling with young women, see Ozick, "Who Owns Anne Frank?" and Alter, "View from the Attic." Ozick singles out Cara Wilson, who began a decades-long correspondence with Otto Frank in her teenage years, for her "embarrassing and shabby effusions" and "unabashed triflings" (79, 80). In an error that may be symptomatic of his inability to take young women seriously, Robert Alter mistakenly writes that Meyer Levin came across the diary in France "while living with his second wife, Tereska" (39), although Lawrence Graver, the writer whose book Alter is reviewing, clearly states that Torres, a writer in her own right, first came across the diary in French translation and showed it to Levin (Graver, Obsession with Anne Frank, 1).

56.

Alter, "View from the Attic," 41 ,4 2,41 . Alter is not factually wrong to identify Anne Frank as steeped in an adolescent popular culture; her invented interlocutor, "Kitty," who embodies the public to whom Anne consciously directed her diary, was named after a character in a series of popular girls' books that Anne read avidly. On Anne's reading of popular girls' literature, see Waaldijk, "Reading Anne Frank as a Woman," 334; on Kitty as not a special friend or alter ego but an embodiment of the public, see Brenner, Writing as Resistance, 140. To understand Brenner's argument, it is important to recall that when Anne heard on the radio that people keeping diaries were producing valuable historical documents and should plan to publish them after the war, she undertook a thorough revision of her diary for publication; that revision formed the basis of the first published version of The Diary of a Young Girl, edited by her father, who collated both versions, restoring some material Anne had removed from her revised version while excising passages she had included. The Critical Edition allows readers to compare Anne's first draft of her diary, her own revision of it, and Otto Frank's edition.

57.

Alter, "View from the Attic," 39,40. For other examples, see Laurie Stone, who cites Ozick's article approvingly and asserts that

128

SHARON MARCUS

"markets promote simplifications" (review of The Diary of Anne Frank, as performed at the Music Box, Nation, 26 January 1998). Henry R. Huttenbach, in "The Cult of Anne Frank: Returning to Basics," Anne Frank in the World: Essays and Reflections, ed. Carol Rittner (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 79-80, criticizes the commodification of Anne Frank and sees the market and mechanical reproduction as a taint. Doneson notes disapprovingly that Anne Frank's diary enabled the Holocaust to enter "the popular imagination" ("American H istory of Anne Frank's Diary," 151). In The Future of a Negation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), Alain Finkielkraut scorns "the tyranny of pathos that submits Love Story and the death camps to the same sentimental treatment" (51). 58.

The arguments against representing the Holocaust usually refer to the ethical difficulties of testimony by those who survived the Holocaust or histories by those who never experienced it directly Since Anne Frank was neither a survivor nor a historian, it is not surprising that the strictures against representing the Holocaust usually get transferred to how her readers use her text rather than to her position as a writer. Alter is unusual in applying the standards of post-Holocaust representation to Anne Frank herself. The classic formulation of the impossibility of art after the Holocaust is Adorno's statem ent that "to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric"; but Adorno later complicated his own comment when he wrote that "suffering . . . also demands the continued existence of art while it prohibits it; it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, w ithout immediately being betrayed by it." ("Commitment," in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt [New York: Unizen Books, 1978], 312-13). As Kevis Goodman, who directed me to this quotation, points out, Adorno has recourse to representation in the very moment that he articulates its necessity; he personifies suffering, just as readers have personified Anne Frank's diary. Adorno goes on, however, to reassert that "turning suffering into images" risks "the power to elicit enjoyment out of it" and risks arguing for an authentic humanity that would blur "the distinction between executioners and victims." In "The Holocaust as Vicarious Past: Art Spiegelman's Maus and the Afterimages of History," Critical Inquiry 24 (1998), James E. Young builds on the notion that representations of the Holocaust

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

129

should highlight the "dilemmas of representation" (666). In another reading of Maus, Judith Goldstein offers an interesting variation on the argument against naturalization. Her "Realism with a Human Face" argues that by undoing "entrenched social and political ways of seeing," denaturalization enables identification and sympathy with particular groups and individuals who otherwise would be objectified or reviled (86). For an article that summarizes the arguments against representing the Holocaust, and offers a very interesting defense of what the culture industry, narrative, and representation can contribute to knowledge about the Holocaust, see Miriam Bratu Hansen, "Schindler's List Is Not Shoah: The Second Commandment, Popular Modernism, and Public Memory," Critical Inquiry 22, no. 2 (winter 1996): 292-312. 59.

Thurman, "Not Even a Nice Girl," 119.

60.

Stuart Klawans, review of Anne Frank Remembered (film, dir. Jon Blair), Nation, 18 March 1996, 35.

61.

See also Michaelson, "Remembering Anne Frank," who writes that the Jews killed in the Holocaust "were not simply the victims of a universal tendency toward intolerance: they were the victims of a virulent racism that has yet to be fully comprehended" (225). In asserting the specificity of Nazi racism, a particularity that makes it unique, or as Klawans would put it, idiosyncratic, Michaelson has to also assert its incomprehensibility.

62.

Hannah Arendt, Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald

63.

Ibid., 80, 65.

64.

Holzhauer, "Record of Adolescence," 297; Schwarz, review, 379;

Beiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 77.

"Distressing Story," 114. 65.

Representativeness can also have the opposite effect of suggesting that if Anne Frank stands for everyone who died, then everyone who died was Anne Frank. In his 1952 review, Ludwig Lewisohn wrote that "a million Anne Franks died in horror and misery" (20). Even critics of her representativeness fall into this trap: Huttenbach insists that "Anne is just one" of the Holocaust's many victims, then contradicts his own point by writing "they were all Annes," making it hard to understand what he means when he concludes "her m em ory must not become a substitute for the other millions" ("Cult of Anne Frank," 82-83).

130

SHARON MARCUS

66.

Alter, "View from the Attic," 40.

67.

To cite only a few of many possible examples: Dworkin writes that the Diary is "a work . . . that has become the torch to light up the faces of all the unknown dead in the dark spaces of our hearts" ("Vanishing Diary," 8); A gosin writes that "Anne Frank's face became an unusual presence in m y life . . . because she had a name, a face, because she was not just one more anonymous story among the countless stories of the Holocaust" (Dear Anne Frank, 7); and Kristine McKenna, reviewing Anne Frank Remembered, writes that the Diary put "a single face on the vast horror of the Holocaust" (Los Angeles Times, 18 February 1996, Calendar section).

68. 69.

Dworkin, "Vanishing Diary," 7-8. Nervousness about the reversibility of personifications dates back at least to the eighteenth century; in Personification and the Sublime: Milton to Coleridge (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), Steven Knapp notes that critics of personification worried that its demonstration that the figurative could be made real meant that the real could be made metaphorical; he links this worry to a general fear of "imagination" and "poetic power" (2).

70.

In this sense, m y reading of how personification works for readers of Anne Frank's diary differs from what might seem a related point made by Paul de Man, since in showing how prosopopoeia, by addressing the dead or absent, confers the animation and intelligence of a face on a name, de Man argues against any lim it to rhetoric; "Autobiography as D e‫ ־‬Facement," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 67-82.

71.

Brenner, Writing as Resistance, 5; Levin, "Child Behind the Door," 1; blurb on the front cover of the Pocket Books edition of Anne Frank: The D ia ry of a Young Girl (95th printing). See also "A Tragedy Revealed," 90; and Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred, 346.

72.

Flanner, "Letter from Paris," 142; Dworkin, "Vanishing Diary," 9.

73.

Hurwitz, Anne Frank: Life in Hiding, 60. See also Norbert Muhlen, "The Triumph of Anne Frank," Com monweal, 31 October 1963, commenting on Anne's death and her diary: "her life on earth did not quite end then" (125).

74.

See Arendt, Kant Lectures, 80; Knapp, Personification and the Sub-

75.

Jack Kroll, review of The D ia ry of A n ne Frank, N ew sw eek, 15

lime, 18; Margaret Cohen, "Sentimentality without Borders." December 1997, 71.

ANNE FRANK AND HANNAH ARENDT

131

76.

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 269.

77.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (New York: Anchor Books, 1959), 10.

78.

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 269. Arendt understood concentration camps as organized around the systematic destruction of both plurality and natality; see her early essay "Social Science Techniques and the Study of Concentration Camps," in Essays in Understanding, 232-47; written well before The Human Condition, this essay suggests that Arendt came to her definition of the human condition through her understanding of the Nazis' attempts to destroy it.

79.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, 4 8 ,1 35 -3 7,28 7,49 . To think from the point of view of somebody else did not mean, for Arendt, to become someone else: "This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is [not] a question . . . of empathy, as though I tried to be or feel like somebody else . . . but of being and thinking in m y own identity where actually I am not" (Between Past and Future, cited in Lisa Jane Disch, Hannah Arendt and the Limits of Philosophy [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994], 158). Cf. Arendt's remarks in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy: "By the force of imagination, it [critical thinking] makes . . . others present and thus moves in a space that is potentially public, open to all sides; in other words, it adopts the position of Kant's world citizen. To think with an enlarged mentality means that one trains one's imagination to go visiting." Arendt distinguishes this from "an enormously enlarged empathy through which one can know what actually goes on in the mind of all others" (43).

80.

Arendt, On Revolution, 27.

This page intentionally left blank

5 CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES AND POSTCOLONIAL NATIONAL MEMORY PHENG CHEAH

The Chinese were econom ically successful in South-East Asia not sim ply because th ey were energetic immigrants, but more fundam entally because in their quest for riches they knew how to handle m o n ey and organize m en in relation to money. — Maurice Freedman, "The Handling of M oney: A N ote on the Background to the Economic Sophistication of the Overseas Chinese"

This essay is not about the territorial-political entity, the People's Republic of China (PRC), or any of the other existing Chinese states. Nor is it directly about the Chinese nation, however broadly defined. It is about two opposed representations of the cosmopolitanism of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asian postcolonial national memory. Diaspora studies have become such a fashionable topic that in the past decade or so, there has been growing support even within the staid field of China studies for the suggestion that the study of Chinese culture ought to shift its focus from mainland China in favor of a broader, more cosmopolitan definition of Chineseness that would include not only the different Chinese states or territories of Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore, but also the many overseas Chinese communities scattered throughout the globe. In his influential essay "Cultural China: The Periphery as

134

PHENGCHEAH

the Center/' Tu Wei-ming, the director of the Yen-ching Institute at Harvard University and a leading voice for the revival of Confucianism in contemporary social ethics, makes the even bolder claim that these various Chinas beyond the mainland proper, what he calls "the periphery,"1 are beginning to displace the PRC as the dynamic cultural center for the articulation of Chineseness and "will come to set the economic and cultural agenda for the center, thereby undermining its political effectiveness."2 Tu's argument is premised on the dawning of a new era of capitalist accumulation centered in the Pacific Rim. The Pacific Century, Tu suggests, is heralded by the rise of the four East Asian Dragons— South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore—in the wake of Japanese economic success.3 Its significance is twofold. First, it allows him to dismiss both Communist China and Western capitalism in favor of a Confucian Chinese modernity that he detects in the East Asian economic miracle.4 He suggests that guanxi or networks/connections capitalism, a form of capitalism that is underwritten by a Confucian humanism and that implies a degree of communitarianism, is superior to Western capitalism because it can alleviate the atomistic individualism and instrumental rationality of the Western Enlightenment.5 Chinese m ercantile culture and its Confucian basis are therefore to be regarded as modular or normatively cosmopolitan. But second, and more importantly, Tu's focus on Pacific Rim development leads him to privilege the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia as the best example of this alternative model of modernity. They carry the burden of maintaining the Pacific Century, he argues, because they are a crucial terminal for the transmission of the Chinese gwanxz-capitalist ethos in their part of the world: A recent economic phenom enon w ith far-reaching political and cultural implications is the great increase in intraregional trade in the Asian-Pacific region. The annual volu m e of $200 billion already exceeds trans-Pacific trade (which is now significantly larger than

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

135

trans-Atlantic trade). Since the Four Dragons are providing 31 percent of all foreign investm ents in the countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), notably Malaysia, Indonesia, the P hilippines, and Thailand, the p a r tic ip a tio n of "diaspora" Chinese is v ita ll y im portant; th ey are responsible for the largest transfer of capital in this region, exceeding that of both Japan and the U nited States. A predictable result is the evolving im age of the C hinese-----The im age of Chinese as economic animals is likely to be furt her magnified in Southeast Asia, changing perhaps from that of trader to that of financier. The Chinese merchant culture underly in g C hinese behavior as trader, banker, and entrepreneur adds vibrant color to the im pressive reality that the Chinese constitute n ot o n ly the largest peasan try in the world, but also the m o st m obile merchant class.6

In other words, the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia— cosmopolitans in the colloquial sense of rootless m erchant sojourners—have become the best exemplars of Chinese cosmopolitanism in the normative sense. In light of the current Asian financial crisis, we cannot speak with such confidence of a Pacific Century. Indeed, the fallout from the Asian crisis provides us with a less benign perspective on Chinese cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia: the popular unrest in Indonesia on May 14-16,1998, that led to the resignation of President Suharto was marked by a spate of anti-Chinese riots. The organized looting and burning of stores beginning in and radiating outward from Jakarta's Chinatown district, which saw 1,200 Indonesian Chinese killed, has been compared to the Nazi Kristellnacht. The systematic gang-rape of 180 Chinese women has reinforced the impression of deliberate ethnic cleansing.7 These inhumane atrocities are all the more shocking because the uprising is widely regarded as a progressive popular-nationalist revolution against a neocolonial regime and its right-wing dictator.8 Significantly, transnational Chinese solidarity condemning this

136

PHENGCHEAH

anti-Chinese violence has been registered from the mainland Communist state, human rights and women's groups in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and other overseas Chinese com munities in Southeast Asia.9 W hat makes this tragic picture of the Indonesian Chinese the flip side of Tu's vision of Chinese cosmopolitanism is the shared identification of the overseas Chinese, or more precisely, their culture, with global capitalism. But whereas Tu regards Chinese capitalism as the embodiment of a new cosmopolitan ethos, the Indonesian rioters regard it as neocolonial exploitation.10 This violence against the overseas Chinese is not confined to Indonesia. The widespread personification of cosmopolitan capital as "ethnic Chinese" in the various (national) public spheres of Southeast Asia has a rich history. In Thailand, then known as Siam, a pamphlet entitled The Jews of the East, the authorship of which is generally attributed to King Vachiravut, appeared in 1914. The contemporary persistence of this conflation of capital and "ethnic Chinese" is best seen in the following anecdote from the Philippines: from the late 1980s to the present, wealthy Philippines Chinese have been the victims of kidnappings for ransom. When a graduate student from the University of the Philippines was asked if she was disturbed by the spate of kidnappings, she replied, "No, because I am not Chinese and I am not rich."11 But is this identification of the cosmopolitanism of the Chinese diaspora with neocolonial capital entirely accurate? If it is, does this then make them the proper targets of popular-national revolutionary action? Does nationalist revolution necessarily involve fanaticist violence against ethnic minorities? There are no simple answers to these questions, no clear-cut line separating the virtuous from the evil to be found. What I want to do in this essay is to trace, in as analytical a way as possible, how cosmopolitan capital has become personified by the Chinese diaspora as a result of both historical and contemporary globalization and the policies of colonial and postcolonial regimes in Southeast Asia. I will then look at

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

137

a more positive representation of revolutionary Chinese cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asian postcolonial national memory by turning to the activist narrative fiction of Ninotchka Rosea and Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Although I will attempt to reconstruct for a generalist readership some of the necessary background for assessing the ethical complexities raised by the "overseas Chinese" and the violence directed against them, I will not be able to explore the question of ethical responsibility in any detail. Even though colonial and postcolonial regimes are partly responsible for the historical conflation of the Chinese diaspora with cosmopolitan capital and for instigating anti-Chinese violence in the resurgent national awakening, one ought to explore how it is that both the Chinese and the national awakening/postcolonial nation-people are susceptible to this contamination by the state. For present purposes, suffice it to say that "the Chinese question" in postcolonial Southeast Asia cannot be solved by simple finger pointing. Let us begin with an obvious question: in what manner of speaking can the Confucian ethos that Tu detects in contemporary Chinese mercantile capitalism be described as a form of normative cosmopolitanism? Now, the relationship between Confucianism and cosmopolitanism in modern intellectual history has always been fraught. In his sociology of religion, Max Weber argued that the Confucian ethos was antipathetic to the cosmopolitan vocation characterizing a modern personality. Despite some surface similarities to Protestantism, Confucian rationalism, he suggested, could not give rise to modern economic capitalism because its ultimate goal was adjustment to the world and not salvation from it through rational mastery: A true prophecy creates and systematically orients conduct toward one internal measure of value. In the face of this the "world" is viewed as material to be fashioned ethically according to the norm. Confucianism in contrast meant adjustment to the outside, to the

138

PHENGCHEAH

conditions of the "world." . . . Such a w ay of life could not allow man an inward aspiration toward a "unified personality," a striving w hich w e associate w ith the idea of personality. Life remained a series of occurrences. It did not becom e a w hole placed m ethod ically under a transcendental goal.12

Consequently, Chinese culture restricted access to universal norms of the utmost generality that characterized a modern conscience. "The great achievement . .. of the ethical and asceticist sects of Protestantism," Weber argued, "was to shatter the fetters of the sib," leading to the establishment of "the superior community of faith and a common ethical way of life in opposition to the comm u nity of blood, even to a large extent in opposition to the family."13 In contradistinction, Chinese culture remained particularistic and parochial, as evidenced by the traditional domination of sib organizations and the cult of village ancestors in everyday life.14 Thus Confucianism, to use Benjamin Nelson's felicitous phrase, obstructed the passage from "tribal brotherhood to universal otherhood."15 In his account of cosmopolitanism in modern Chinese intellectual history, Joseph Levenson reinforces this interpretation of Confucian provincialism. Insofar as Confucianism could no longer meet the intellectual challenges of an encroaching modernity, insofar as it was reduced to the dogma of unreflective peasants, Levenson argued, it became provincial. It was succeeded by the liberal and iconoclastic anti-Confucian nationalism and cosmopolitanism of the May Fourth modernization movement.16 This was in turn succeeded by Communist cosmopolitanism in the 1950s. Chinese communism was antiimperialist. But it was also antitraditionalist. This made Chinese communism cosmopolitan, for it had a universalistic sense of mission that was similar to the Pauline spirit of Christian universalism, precisely that which Weber regarded as the necessary condition of modernity.17 Now, if we situate the contemporary revival of Confucianism

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

139

within this intellectual history, then it should be clear that this neotraditionalism is both a critique of Western cosmopolitanism and also a new form of cosmopolitanism. In Tu's view, the sociological, political, and cultural implications of East Asian capitalism are as follows: "If, indeed, the 'Sinic World' or the Tost-Confucian' region has succeeded in adopting a form of life, definitely modern, distinctively East Asian— by implication Chinese as well—the sharp dichotomy between tradition and modernity must be rejected as untenable, as useless in analyzing developing countries as in its application to more highly industrialized or postindustrial societies."18 On the one hand, insofar as the East Asian capitalist model is explicitly non-W estern, it is a critique of the rootlessness of (Western) capitalist cosmopolitanism: "aggressive anomie, radical individualism, disintegration of society and vulgarisation of culture."19 But, on the other hand, this neo-Confucian capitalism is also an alternative cosmopolitanism because it purports to be an alternative universal model of global capital. It is also a cosmopolitanism because its bearers are the diasporic Chinese, who constitute, in Tu's words, "the most mobile merchant class."20 The thesis of neo-Confucian capitalism thus takes as its fundamental premise a narrative that regards the migration of the Chinese to Southeast Asia as crucial to the auto-genesis of global capital in its East Asian form. By this, I do not simply mean that the diasporic Chinese have historically emerged as the bearers of East Asian capital. The neo-Confucianists propose a much more direct link between Chinese Confucian culture and global capital: the suggestion is that a superior form of global capitalist development necessarily grows out of Chinese culture once it is freed from the restrictions of the mainland Communist state.21 One could even say that they regard capital as ontologically proper to Chinese culture, as co-belonging with it, to use a Heideggerian word. This position is dangerous because ultimately, it further inflames antiChinese feeling in Southeast Asia, since this is aroused by a similar historical conflation of the overseas Chinese with global capital.

UO

PHENGCHEAH

For if the co-belonging of Chinese culture and capital is ontologically inevitable, then the relationship between the overseas Chinese and the native peoples of Southeast Asia can only ever be one between exploiter and exploited. At this point, an examination of the history of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia is instructive because we see a more complex relationship to capital that includes the m achination of colonial regimes as well as political forces from mainland China. W hat I want to suggest is that the irrefutable historical link between the Chinese diaspora and capital is not genetic but instead a spectral process of paradoxical incorporation. In the first place, the claim that a genetic relationship exists between Confucian values or Chineseness and mercantile culture/East Asian development is extrem ely dubious. As Wang Gungwu has argued, because of the low status accorded to the trader in Confucian China, merchant culture was hard to define within imperial China and only became identifiably Chinese among the overseas Chinese. Moreover, the values of mercantile culture— thrift, honesty, trust, loyalty, and industriousness—are not exclusive to Confucianism.22 Indeed, there is nothing exceptionally Chinese about the mercantile culture of the overseas Chinese because allegiance to imperial China was minimal. Wang points out that: as long as the Qing dynasty was weak and unable to protect them and indeed rejected them once th ey left the shores of China, any loyalty to China [from the overseas Chinese], was itself tenuous. A n d . . . for m ost of the time, it was irrelevant since China exercised no influence over any part of Southeast Asia. The on ly real link with China was to families in their hom e villages and to that end, good relations had to be maintained with Chinese officials. It was also necessary to m aintain the use of C hinese language and such cultural links as w ould enable them to fit in w ell w hen they eventually returned to China or if th ey should send their children to study in China.23

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

U1

Related arguments can be made about the genetic link between Confucian values and East Asian industrialization: the values of the mercantile Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore that enable them to adapt to modern capitalist ways have more in common with traders outside China than with the Chinese literati.24 I want to suggest that the personification of the mercantilism of the overseas Chinese as "Chinese" can only be explained by referring to the role of colonial regimes in Southeast Asia as instruments or agents of global capital. Before the sixteenth century, overseas Chinese were largely sojourning merchants in foreign ports who traded and returned home. The small m inority who married locally and settled were absorbed into native society, and being Chinese was not an issue. However, as European naval power expanded, the Chinese were encouraged to stay and perform specific trading and artisan roles in European-controlled ports such as Manila, Malacca, Batavia, Penang, and Singapore, leading to the formation of distinctively mestizo or peranakan Chinese communities that were replenished with new immigrants.25 Generally speaking, the colonial regimes in Southeast Asia dealt with such communities by means of segregational policies designed to produce what John Furnivall has termed a "plural society," a society of different ethnic or racial groups segmented by religion, culture, and language, and held together solely by the self-interest of market forces regulated by alien colonial institutions: Probably the first thing that strikes the visitor is the m edley of peoples— European, Chinese, Indian and native. It is in the strictest sense a medley, for th ey m ix but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its ow n culture and language, its ow n ideas and ways. As individuals, th ey meet, but on ly in the market-place, in b uyin g and selling. There is a plural society, w ith different sections o f the co m m u n ity living side by side, but separately, w ithin the same political unit."26

U2

PHENGCHEAH

The essential feature of a plural society is that it lacks a general or collective will, either of the native customary variety or the homogeneous unitary society that is conventionally regarded as typical of Europe. Furnivall takes this segregation to be a necessary historical consequence of societies formed by labor migration, but it can be argued that plural societies in Southeast Asia were in fact actively fostered by colonial regimes by means of the colonial census. In his description of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon as an architectural figure for the surveillance (or generalized panopticism) that characterizes a society of discipline, Michel Foucault suggests that one of the intended effects of the Panopticon's division into cells is the dissolution of a compact mass into a segregated multiplicity of individuals that can be counted and monitored, and made into objects of information: "The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised."27 The colonial census can be understood as an apparatus and a technique of colonial surveillance and discipline. By dividing and classifying colonial society in Southeast Asia, the colonial census impeded the assimilation of migrants into the native population and prevented the formation of an undifferentiated colonized mass that would be more difficult to regulate and bend toward colonial interests. The historical conflation of the overseas Chinese with mercantile capital, the culturalization of these merchants as self-consciously Chinese, is a direct consequence of these colonial "plural society" policies. For instance, Benedict Anderson observes that under the census category "chinees," the Dutch East Indies Company included descendants of immigrants w ho had settled locally and married local w om en, adapted to local cultures and even religion, and lost the use of Hokkien or Cantonese— in other words, m estizos of a second, non-Eurasian type. Over the years the Company pursued a general

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

U3

policy of attempting to block or reverse the assimilative process by ruthless legal and adm inistrative means: people it decided w ere "chinees," were compelled to live in restricted residential areas, pay separate taxes, be subject to their "own" authorities, and have their marriage and inheritance practices regulated in distinct institutional niches. A lthou gh this administrative segregation collapsed in the first decade of the twentieth century, by which time the steamship and the abandonment of the closed colonial econom y had encouraged a su bstantial n ew flow of H ok kien ese, C antonese, and Hakkaspeaking im migrants, the category of "chinees" remained fundam entally in place, even though it "fantastically" covered groups not only speaking the above languages as their mother-tongues, but also Malay, Javanese, Madurese, Balinese and so forth.28

In this way, the Dutch colonial government encouraged Chinese‫־‬ consciousness by making it clear to these migrant merchants that it was their "Chineseness" that gave them a key economic place in colonial society. And by virtue of their adaptability, these m erchants affirmed their "Chineseness" as an instrum ent of profit making.29 One should, of course, exercise appropriate caution against overgeneralizing about the position of "the Chinese diaspora" in colonial Southeast Asia. Far from being a politically homogeneous region, colonial Southeast Asia included British Malaya and Singapore; French Indochina; Siam, a semi-independent buffer state between British Burma and French Indochina; the Dutch East Indies; the Spanish (and later United States) Philippines; and Portugese East Timor. Different colonial states practiced different forms of census politics that altered in the course of history. Thus, depending on the kind of classificatory scheme, the category "Chinese" had a different social position vis-à-vis other census categories that were used to classify Europeans, natives and other non-indigenous "Asiatics."30 The differences between these policies have different consequences for ethnic or racial politics in the

U4

PHENGCHEAH

different societies, even after formal independence. Moreover, "the Chinese" were equally heterogeneous. They came from villages in different regions of the Chinese empire and spoke different languages. It seems absurd to have to point out that not all of them were traders or merchants. They engaged in a variety of occupations and assumed varying sociological positions depending on which colony they migrated to and w hether they ended up in densely populated areas, where they were mainly relegated to trade, or less settled regions, where they could engage in agriculture or mining.31 Nevertheless, it is possible to make four general observations about "the Chinese diaspora" in colonial Southeast Asia. First, even though not all overseas Chinese were traders, it was this occupational identity that took hold and that could adversely affect their position throughout Southeast Asia. Second, the colonial situation was a general im pedim ent to complete assimilation. As Wim Wertheim notes: Inasmuch as a status of inferiority became attached to the position of "being a native," the attraction of complete assimilation w ithin native society decreased accordingly. Though ethnic Chinese, w ho were considered as more or less foreign elem ents, suffered from a good deal of discrimination on the part of the colonial authorities, still their position w ithin the colonial setting, which set them apart from native society, was in general more favourable than it would have become after complete assimilation. For ambitious members of the higher strata of local Chinese society the trend became rather to identify them selves w ith the colonial upper caste.32

Moreover, the colonial authorities actively prevented any assimilation via the disciplinary techniques of census enumeration that subjectified these migrants as Chinese. Third, insofar as the various colonial regimes needed "the Chinese" to fill different economic functions within their respective economies—traders, but

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

U5

also artisans, lessees of different government monopolies and tax farms, etc.—but also feared the power that these settlers began to accrue, the colonial state persistently oscillated between protection and repression of the Chinese.33 Finally, the casting of "the Chinese" as agents of large-scale European enterprises and the main compradors of European capital often aroused economic envy in the native population, which could be incited to aid the colonial state in its oppression of its Chinese subjects. This is exemplified by the 1603 massacre of the Chinese in Manila and the 1740 pogrom against the Chinese in Batavia. In the postcolonial era, it is the economic competition between the postcolonial indigenous elite and the Chinese that prevents the latter's assimilation.34 W hat we are witnessing in these twin processes of subjectification and scapegoating of "the Chinese" is precisely the negotiability of "Chineseness." It is a form of mercantile capitalism that becomes "Chinese" via the machinations of the colonial state and not a preexisting Chinese ethos that engenders mercantile capitalism. A fictive ethnic category of the colonial census has become real. This process has political-institutional and socialpsychological consequences that continue up to the present. It lays the ground for neo-Confucianist Chinese cosmopolitanism and anti-Chinese sentiment. But how should we understand this process of fabulation? This fabulation cannot be explained by theories of ideological mystification in combination with accounts of orientalist stereotyping. Crudely put, ideology refers to a set of ideas that is foisted upon a subordinate group by a politically dominant social or economic group and is lived by the former as natural reality. An expression of the self-conscious interests of the dominant group, ideology functions to organize the whole of society in a way that prevents the subordinate group from knowing their oppression and the material conditions of that oppression. It thereby obscures the true interests of the subordinate group in its social relations with the dominant group.35 Because ideology generally connotes deception,

U6

PHENGCHEAH

the concept of ideology necessarily presupposes a distinction between truth and falsehood. What is important here is not the distinction between truth and falsehood per se but the linking of tru th to the ontological trait of active self-determ ination as opposed to a state of passivity in which distorted ideas are imposed upon consciousness by external historical processes that are contingent because their significance as a concrete totality remains unthematized.36 It is this dimension of passive acceptance or internalization of an external imposition that allows the concept of ideology to be spliced onto the idea of stereotypes. (This passivity is also assumed in definitions of ideology as material practice as well as theories of social-discursive construction and performativity.) In contradistinction, the fabulation of "Chineseness" involves a situation in which the ontological distinction between active selfdetermination and passive internalization of an imposed idea or norm no longer holds. For although "Chineseness" was a category of the colonial census, it was not simply an ideological stereotype imposed upon these merchants. Nor were they mystified by it. They actively accepted this idea/identity because it suited their interests: they both desired and needed its attendant material benefits. In ontological terms, the historical co-belonging of Chineseness and mercantilism is more appropriately understood, I think, as the spectralization of these merchants by colonial capital, in the precise sense that Jacques Derrida gives the term: the incarnation of an ideational or phantomatic form in an aphysical body that is then taken on as the real body of a living and finite being: "The spectrogenic process corresponds therefore to a paradoxical incorporation. Once ideas or thoughts [Gedanke] are detached from their substratum, one engenders some ghost by giving them a body. Not by returning to the living body from which ideas and thoughts have been torn loose, but by incarnating the latter in another artifactual body, a prosthetic body, a ghost of spirit."37 A specter is not an ideologem. It is not merely a mystification that is confused with and lived as concrete reality. Whereas an ide-

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

U7

ologem is an illusion that begins from the living body and ought, in the final instance, to be referred back to its material historical conditions by immanent political critique, spectral forms are part of a process that is coextensive with the radical finitude of all beings in time. In order for any present being to exist or be present, its form—that which makes it actual and allows it to be materialized— must be able to persist through time so that it can be identified as the same throughout all its possible repetitions. This differingdeferral (differance) of a present being in the living-on of its form, i.e. its spectralization, is neither simply active nor passive. It is a type of automatism. But this automatism, while it is clearly not an effect of human reason, society, culture, techne, or language, is also not an effect of the mechanism of nature. Instead, it is the trace of the inhuman and unnatural spectral other within the present itself. Spectrality is thus the originary opening up of any present being by and to the other, a radical susceptibility to the outside that constitutes all finite beings. It is precisely this internal vulnerability of any present being to iterability/alterity—its pregnancy with the movement of alter-ing—that allows it to alter, change, or transform itself in time. But by the same token, insofar as the spectrality that constitutes any finite being also allows it to be changed, transformed, or altered by another in time, the spectral forms that are taken on by any finite living being to protect its own life can also entrap it and endanger its life. The fabulation of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora can be understood in the same way. The merchants who are now said to embody the Chinese ethos inhabited a situation where their continued survival required them to respond by taking on the spectral form, "Chinese." It became them. These merchants had become and were Chinese in the Dutch, British, Spanish, etc. colonial sense. And their being Chinese, even though it was given to them by their official niche in colonial society, and bore little resemblance to the Confucian ethos of their homeland, would henceforth be used to explain, by way of a metalepsis, their daily habits and their institutional roles

U8

PHENGCHEAH

in colonial society. These habits and roles would in turn repeatedly mark them and reconfirm their Chineseness in perpetuity. Their adaptability and political flexibility had made them Chinese, but paradoxically, their identity thereby remained fixed, immutable in its very mutability. The role of the colonial state is decisive in this plural-society type of spectralization. For if we simply assume an autogenetic relationship between Chineseness and mercantile capital, we sanction the historical self-representation of the colonial state as protector to the natives against Chinese mercantile capital, thereby dissimulating the fact that the colonial state itself was the most powerful agent of global capital in the age of imperialism. In the early twentieth century, however, another type of spectralization of the overseas Chinese took place that ran counter to this plural-society type of spectralization. Between 1895 and 1911, as China began to modernize in reaction to Western imperialism, the imperial Chinese government began to harness the enterprise and capital of the overseas Chinese to develop its own national resources and industry. Likewise, representatives of the Republican movement and other revolutionary political organizations traveled to Southeast Asia and sought support from the Chinese thereby invoking patriotic sentiment.38 What evolved in the first half of this century was another paradigm of "Chineseness" that is conventionally described as the huaqiao pattern.39 At the end of the nineteenth century, huaqiao was used to refer to a Chinese person or a Chinese community temporarily residing abroad. By the early 1900s, it had become a political term with strong emotional overtones. After 1911, it was generally used to refer to all overseas Chinese.40 The central thrust of this type of spectralization was re-Sinicization. Contrary to colonial policy, which saw the overseas Chinese as eternally Chinese, the assumption was that the overseas Chinese were not Chinese enough and had to be renationalized through law, education, and renewed contact with China. In 1909, the Chinese Nationality Law recognized all overseas Chinese as Chinese nationals by adopting the doctrine of dual

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

U9

nationality. As a result of stronger communication links between the Chinese ports and European colonial bases in Southeast Asia— faster and safer shipping; cable and telephone connections— China was brought closer to the overseas Chinese. Political activists from the mainland shared the excitement of a rejuvenating China with the Chinese diaspora. But most important of all was the role of modern Chinese education—the numerous teachers and journalists recruited from China, and Chinese schools—in spectralizing the overseas Chinese with a modern Chinese nationalist identity. This identity was consolidated and strengthened by Japanese expansion in China and the subsequent invasion of Southeast Asia. Now, these two types of spectralization lead to the formation of two quite different types of Chinese cosmopolitanism. As we have seen, the plural-society type engenders a mercantilist cosmopolitanism. Huaqiao spectralization, on the other hand, produces a fervent patriotism that is also a revolutionary cosmopolitanism. For although this type of spectralization instilled political loyalty toward the Chinese state, this patriotism was not necessarily a form of chauvinism and played a part in the stimulation of indigenous nationalism, and later, communism and socialism in Southeast Asia. Indeed, some of the overseas Chinese identified with indigenous nationalist movements, while others identified with the international struggle against imperialist exploitation.41 From an intellectual-historical perspective, this is precisely the progressive form of cosmopolitanism that Levenson attributed to Chinese Republicanism and early Chinese communism. Huaqiao nationalism, however, was very threatening to the colonial regimes and provoked an intensification of the plural-society type of spectralization. On the one hand, this aggressive Chinese patriotism could be demonized as a threat to the native well-being that the colonial governments claimed to exist to protect. Conversely, the less politically radical Chinese, whose adaptability to colonialism aroused feelings of contempt and resentm ent among the native population, could be frightened into helping the Europeans against

150

PHENGCHEAH

recalcitrant natives. Once these Chinese were successfully isolated from the native population, the Europeans could ossify the Chinese in their traditional economic skills and encourage their modernization, while the indigenous peoples were left to stagnate.42 What resulted was the entrenchment of a more complacent, even chauvinistic Chineseness that, being "largely backward-looking and rarely assertive," allowed the Chinese to fulfil the economic functions allotted to them in the colonial social machine.43 Relations between the ethnic Chinese and indigenous peoples in postcolonial Southeast Asia have been governed by this plural society politics inherited from the colonial era. The specters of Chinese communism and Chinese capitalism are routinely conjured up by neocolonial regimes to secure their domination.44 This continuing spectralization of the overseas Chinese as the personification of cosmopolitan capital is responsible for anti-Chinese violence in contemporary Indonesia. Contemporary transnationalism has only served to magnify this chauvinistic version of Chinese cosmopolitanism of which the neo-Confucianists are ideologues. The narratives they fabricate w ithin the domains of national and international public discourse obscure the fact that the spectral identity of capitalist merchant-financier does not incorporate many lower-middle and working-class diasporic Chinese.45 When explicitly sanctioned by the state to maintain its legitimacy, as in the case of Singapore, these narratives have discriminatory political consequences. As Aihwa Ong notes, "by claiming the superiority of Confucian-based moral economies, these discourses define a hierarchy of moral and economic performances that coincide with racial difference in Southeast Asia."46 But most importantly, these neo-Confucian fables foreclose the fact that the Chinese diaspora have become spectralized by postcolonial global capital even as capital also spectralizes the postcolonial nation-state in such a way that the Chinese can both facilitate the flow between global capital and the postcolonial state and also become the scapegoat for the postcolonial state to the extent that they alone are identified with

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

151

exploitative cosmopolitan capital by the native population. As Wang Gungwu observes, being an overseas Chinese today for many entrepreneurs and businessmen has n oth ing to do w ith becom ing closer to China. It [is] . . . a private and domestic matter on ly m anifested w hen needed to strengthen a business contact or to follow an approved public co n v en tio n ___ [T]he one le g iti m a te reason to be Chin ese in the A S E A N open economies is th a t it is useful f o r a wide range of trading purposes. Even nationalistic governm ents accept that traders and entrepreneurs helping in national developm ent m ay need to act and think like C hinese in order to m axim ize their effectiven ess in certain Chinese-dom inated trading areas

Being Chinese, therefore, m a y

be s o m e w h a t dis embodied or internalized and is confined to a ctiv ities of economic benefit to bu siness___ [B]eing Chinese is a legitim ate extension of having a profitable . . . enterprise.47

I have suggested that the intensified spectrogenic processes that are part of the financialization of the globe have led to the conflation of Chinese diasporic cosmopolitanism with exploitative chauvinism. This conflation has obscured the indelible contributions of revolutionary Chinese cosmopolitanism to the native awakenings of Southeast Asia in postcolonial national memory. In contemporary Southeast Asia, the tight control of many postcolonial states over the economic and political spheres is in part secured by fostering public amnesia through educational policies and media censorship. W ithin this context, activist literature has become an im portant agent for reviving postcolonial national memory, for retrieving the history of nationalist revolution that colonial regimes and neocolonial and postcolonial states have tried to obliterate. As the Indonesian w riter Pramoedya A nanta Toer has observed, "The New Order [Indonesian regime] is born from stone, without any history.... [It] is simply the New Order, victimizing millions of people."48 But if nationalist historical fiction aims to

152

PHENGCHEAH

point the nation beyond its neocolonial present by looking back into the revolutionary past, much of that past involves the overseas Chinese. I want now to look briefly at how Pramoedya and the Filipino author Ninotchka Rosea try to undo the collective amnesia of their respective nations about the overseas Chinese by pointing to the importance of huaqiao cosmopolitanism. Rosca's State of War (1988) is a novel about memory. Anna Villaverde, the central character, is a mestizo Chinese who joins the resistance against a Filipino dictatorship that resembles the Marcos regime. As the novel unfolds, the reader is given an insight into her lineage. Insofar as Anna's own recollection of her ancestry takes her back into the history of the Filipino nation and its birth, her personal memory also reenacts and symbolizes the Filipino people's collective memory of their struggles against Spanish, American, and Japanese colonialism. There is much nostalgia and yearning by various characters for a forgotten innocent past, a lost presence uncontaminated by colonial culture, a "morning when the archipelago's song was just beginning, in a still-young world of uncharted seas," "a time when the world was young, the sea was simply the sea, and names were but newly invented."49 Rosea characterizes the various colonial regimes as blights upon the archipelago's collective memory. They had introduced alien languages and renamed the landscape until the people became so confused about where they were that they no longer knew who they were and where they were heading. Anna puts it this way: "They monkeyed around with language ... while we were growing up. Monkeyed around with names. Of people, of places. With dates. And now, I can't remember. No one remembers. And even this ... even this will be forgotten. They will hide it under another name. No one will remember."50 But since there is no going back, the way out of this confusion is to retrace these successive colonial invasions and more importantly, the various revolutions against them, backward. If one could at least remember how one got to the befuddled present, then one could go forward.51

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

153

One of the things to be remembered is the role of revolutionary Chinese cosmopolitanism in Philippines history. At a crucial moment of Anna's family history, Anna's part-Chinese grandmother, who has followed Anna's father into the hills to fight against the Japanese after the Philippines has been abandoned by the United States during World War II, comes across three Chinese guerrillas who teach the Filipino soldiers how to fight. When she does not believe in the guarantee given by one of the nameless Chinamen that her son will be safe, he reproaches her: "You have never trusted us. We were trading with you before the Spaniards came. Your ancestors were buried in porcelain kilned in our land. Yet, at the white man's word, you razed our districts and massacred our uncles__ We'll never understand you."52 When she questions him about why he is fighting a Filipino war, he replies, "Some say [we are fighting the Japanese] because of Manchuria. Some say because any ground where our forefathers are buried is hallowed ground. Can you, with your blood, understand that? The others don't; your people do not. So we say because of Manchuria. This country—it has no continuity. It is only a country of beginnings. No one remembers. Not the burial jars at least."53 This scene is a missed encounter, for there is no mutual understanding. Anna's grandm other does not reassure the Chinaman that she understands him, and he is never mentioned again. But it is a fragment of historical record of a different type of Chinese cosmopolitanism that can be retrieved by the contemporary Filipino reader from underneath the erasures of colonial and postcolonial plural society politics. In his Buru quartet, a portrayal of the birth of Indies national consciousness in the first three decades of the twentieth century, Pramoedya Ananta Toer suggests that huaqiao cosmopolitanism and Indies nationalism are genetically connected, but that this connection has been effaced by the racial enmity instigated by the Dutch colonial government.54 Minke, the protagonist and narrator of the first three novels, is a fictive version of Tirto Adhi Soerjo, the

154

PHENGCHEAH

father of the national awakening. As Pramoedya tells it, Minke was deeply influenced by the Chinese Republican movement, especially by the ideas of Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China. The first chapter of Glass House, the final volume of the quartet, evokes the thriving activity of two emergent nationalisms in the Indies, Chinese and native, from the perspective of Pangemanann, a native member of the colonial secret police who is Minke's nemesis. As a native representative of the colonial regime, Pangemanann is also a proleptic personification of the neocolonial Indonesian state. Caught between these two waves of awakening, the colonial state attempts to channel them into a path that is less threatening to it. Although the national awakening cannot be stopped, it can be blunted and attenuated into a less radical, reactionary form. It can be coopted. Pangemanann spreads rumors that ignite the riots against the Chinese. The colonial state is afraid that Chinese and native organizations will begin to oppose European interests and erode whatever loyalty it commands. By turning these two groups against each other, the state can attract Chinese loyalty by claiming to be the protector of the Chinese community. At the same time, violence against the Chinese will destroy the international esteem that the native awakening has commanded from the foreign press.55 The colonial archives only record the enmity between the overseas Chinese and the Indies natives. The archaeological effort behind the second and third volumes, however, uncovers the direct influence of the Chinese revolutionaries on Minke. They show how he develops a national consciousness, first by emulating Khouw Ah Soe, a Chinese youth movement leader who has come to the Indies to urge the Indies Chinese to modernize, and later by learning from Ang San Mei, the bereaved fiancée of Khouw, who becomes Minke's wife. Khouw exemplifies an anti-imperialist Asian model of modernity. He teaches Minke about European imperialism, Japanese modernization, the Philippines revolution against Spain, and the importance of publishing to the life of a political movement. He also teaches Minke the differ-

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

155

ence between huaqiao cosmopolitanism and mercantile cosmopolitanism. He points out that most of the overseas Chinese work hard to acquire personal wealth and return to China to attract the admiration of others and to rebuild the graves of their ancestors. "They were not like the overseas Japanese, who always returned with some new learning, who humbly set out to learn all they could from the countries where they sought their livelihood, and who took home what they learnt as a contribution to the development of their own nation and people."56 It is precisely the geopolitical scenario of the early twentieth century that induces the urgent need for an alternative spectralization of the overseas Chinese as huaqiao. "The children of the overseas Chinese must be prepared to receive a modern education" so that they can be instilled with an "awareness of the need for change; and for a new man with a new spirit, ready to work for his people and his country.... If not, the country of his ancestors would be swallowed up by Japan, just as Africa has been swallowed whole by the English."57 By stressing the responsibility that the overseas Chinese ought to have toward their nation at the same time that he stresses the modular nature of the Chinese youth movement and Chinese nationalism, Khouw also teaches Minke that cosmopolitanism and nationalism are not incompatible and can be mutually reinforcing. For the contribution that the huaqiao can make to the Indies is precisely to stim ulate the native awakening by example. The nationalist awakening of each Asian country has a cosmopolitan or world-historical significance (or at least a significance for all the colonized peoples of Asia), because "every country in Asia which begins to arise and awaken is not just awakening itself, but is helping to awaken every other nation that has been left behind, including China."58 Likewise, Ang San Mei reminds Minke that all the educated natives of Asia have a responsibility to help awaken their peoples (bangsa).59 The title of the quartet's second volume, Child of All Nations [Bangsa], expresses the related ideas that the nationalism of each colonized people can contribute something to

156

PHENGCHEAH

a more cosmopolitan movement against anticolonialism, and conversely, that the revolutionary cosmopolitanism of the overseas Chinese has been crucial to the birth of Indies nationalism. One cannot, of course, measure in any tangible way the success of such literary attempts at revising the position of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asian postcolonial national memory. Insofar as such activist literary narratives try to penetrate, influence, and reshape their respective national public spheres (Öffentlichkeit) so that the public sphere can in turn press upon and transform the state by inspiriting the latter, activist literature must also be seen as a form of spectralization that runs counter to and must compete with the spectralization of the postcolonial nation-state by global capital that I have outlined above. The success of activist literature can only be judged in the longue durée and even then, only with a lot of reconstructive guesswork. But Rosea and Pramoedya at least help to illustrate the analytical line that I believe needs to be drawn between the two types of cosmopolitanism of the Southeast Asian Chinese. To recapitulate, the type celebrated by neoConfucianists is continuous with the Chineseness generated by the plural society policies of colonial regimes and their neocolonial and postcolonial successor states. It is recidivist, chauvinistic, immutable, and a cause of the ethnic enmity that has shaped most postcolonial societies in Southeast Asia. In contradistinction, the huaqiao cosmopolitanism of Ang San Mei, Khouw Ah Soe, and Rosca's Chinaman guerrilla is measured by generous action and self-sacrificing political commitment. In contemporary globalization, it is clear that huaqiao cosmopolitanism has been overshadowed by Chinese mercantilism, to the point that it has almost completely disappeared. The historical decline of huaqiao cosmopolitanism occurred because Chinese m igration to Southeast Asia ended by 1950. In the 1950s, in response to pressure from the newly postcolonial states of Southeast Asia and also because it was in fact unable to protect the over-

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

157

seas Chinese, the PRC adopted a restrictive definition of huaqiao and encouraged the overseas Chinese to settle abroad and become loyal citizens of their adopted countries.60 Nevertheless, the question that remains is why the political radicalism of huaqiao cosmopolitanism failed to survive on a large scale in the overseas Chinese as patriotic commitment to their adopted nations. In other words, was the general decline of huaqiao cosmopolitanism, or at least its admirable features, inevitable? Conversely, can this type of cosmopolitanism from a period of anti-im perialist euphoria that is clearly dated be revived in contem porary globalization? The answer to the first question is probably yes; the answer to the second is probably no. One m ust rem em ber that both types of Chinese cosmopolitanism were generated by processes of spectralization at different points in history. They were induced within and by certain conjunctures of capitalist globalization. Historically, the mercantile activity of the overseas Chinese was spectralized as Chinese mercantilism by the plural society policies of colonial regimes that stressed the exploitative nature of Chinese business, even as the Chinese were indispensable to colonial capital. In contradistinction, the spectralization that gave rise to huaqiao cosmopolitanism was induced by anticolonial modernization. If these identities are spectral responses to various shapes (Gestalten) of the appearance of global capital, then perhaps the analytical line that I have tried to draw was always doomed to break down because one cannot guard absolutely against the spectral inspiriting of the huaqiao paradigm by (mercantile-financial) capital.61 Spectrality is not an imposition from the outside but the constitutive openness of any finite body. And finance capital is indeed spectral in nature: national modernization and revolution, after all, need to be financed, and those who are able to finance them are the merchant-financiers. The fiscalization of the globe is part of the era of postcolonial capital. I use the phrase to refer to the huge inflows of capital and technology from the two most powerful capitalist economies in

158

PHENGCHEAH

the post-World War II era, Japan and the United States, to Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia under the general sanction of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund over a sustained period of forty years, in the form of either foreign direct investment or international subcontracting.62 Whereas neocolonial capital is typified by the development of underdevelopment (to use Ander Gunder Frank's phrase) that characterizes Africa and South America,63 postcolonial capital is typified by the development of hyperdevelopment by authoritarian regimes in East and Southeast Asia through global financialization. The governments of hyperdeveloping East and Southeast Asia are not merely comprador states in the strict Marxist sense of the word. They are often vocal in their policy disagreements with and ideological opposition to Northern or Western governments. But this hyperdevelopment does not really indicate the emergence of an Asian Pacific hegemony, as the neo-Confucianists claim. The thematic distinction and occasional doctrinal skirmish between crony capitalism and visions of world trade liberalization (multinational capitalism) remain part of the configuration of postcolonial capital, a structure that ultimately rests on and is sustained by the exploitation of the masses of Asian Pacific nations in the names of free trade and development. As the Asian financial crisis clearly indicates, the United States remains the hegemonic economic power in this configuration. The high economic performance of these East and Southeast Asian nation-states is largely induced by the spectrality of finance capital, and after the abandonment of the gold standard and the deregulation of the international currency markets, the U.S. dollar has become the universal equivalent for all other currencies; the money of all other regionally or nationally marked monies, even though it can weaken against other currencies in the short term. The contemporary rise of Chinese mercantile cosmopolitanism must be situated within this larger force field. The Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora are crucial conduits of finance capital in larger

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

159

East Asia. Thus in the era of postcolonial capital, the Chinese mercantilism of the colonial era has been respectralized as guanxi capitalism and celebrated by a new overseas Chinese literati in collaboration with the official policies of various East Asian states as a Confucian revival and the beginning of a new Pacific era. This can only serve to exacerbate popular anti-Chinese feeling in those parts of Southeast Asia with Chinese minorities, even though some indigenous ASEAN leaders are now referring to their countries as "East Asian."64 Ironically, the PRC is now appealing to the huaqiao paradigm again to attract foreign capital and expertise from the Chinese overseas to facilitate its own development—but this time, development in the image of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.65 Thus it would seem that what was initially a spectral identity that arose in order to allow China to defend itself against Western imperialism now finds itself possessed by the opposite type of specialization. The revived huaqiao paradigm is now a means for China to open itself up to capitalist globalization, with all its attendant contradictions. In Special Economic Zones such as Xiamen and Shenzhen, where the new huaqiao managers and businessmen mistreat mainland workers, especially women workers, the chauvinism of mercantilist Chinese cosmopolitanism is felt in full force in the ancestral homeland.66 Such phenomena exemplify and attest to the spectral power of finance capital to conjure up concrete forms of Chinese cosmopolitanism that can monstrously supplement and usurp even the putative geographical origin of Chineseness. NOTES It was Caroline Hau's provocative essay on the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines, "Kidnapping, Citizenship, and the Chinese," that inspired me to think of the personification of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora as cosmopolitan capital in terms of spectralization. Her research on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia is far more penetrating than m y scattered and situational reflections on the topic. This essay is dedicated to her in friendship.

160

PHENGCHEAH

I have also benefited from reading Aihwa Ong's recent book Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, which was published during the revision of my essay. 1.

"External China" and "Greater China" are other names for these Chinas outside China. For "External China" (Waihua Zhengce), see Wang Gungwu, "External China as a N ew Policy Area," in Wang Gungwu, China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1991), 222-39. The concept of "Greater China" is discussed in a special issue of China Quarterly, no. 136 (December 1993). In his contribution ("The Concept of 'Greater China': Themes, Variations and Reservations," 660-86), Harry Harding offers a concise summary of the three distinct themes subsumed under the rubric "Greater China": the rise of a transnational Chinese economy, the rise of global Chinese culture, and the project of a reunified Chinese state. He points out that these three domains are not perfectly correlated. He also points out that although the term was originally coined with benign economic intent, it may also evoke more aggressive connotations in the manner of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere envisioned by Tokyo in World War II.

2.

"Cultural China: The Periphery as the Center," in The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, ed. Tu Wei-ming

3.

(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13. For Tu, as for many others, the Pacific Century is markedly Chinese. Cf. David Shambaugh, "Introduction: The Emergence of 'Greater China,' China Quarterly, no. 136 (December 1993): 653: "It is not unimaginable or unrealistic to assume that early in the twenty-first century the combined Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Greater China will surpass those of the European Community and United States; it will be the world's leading trader and in possession of the world's largest foreign exchange reserves;. . . it will be the world's largest consumer.. . . Greater China will also overtake Japan as the dominant regional power, with Shanghai and Hong Kong the financial nexus of East Asian economic dynamism."

4.

For Tu, most mainland Chinese intellectuals are in crisis because they regard the Confucian heritage of traditional Chinese culture as incompatible with modernity and modernization. The emergence of the Asian dragons are such a godsend because they indicate that Confucianism is not only compatible with capitalist modernization but can in fact lead to a better path of capitalist development. In Tu's

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

161

text, however, the link between Confucianism and East Asian capitalism remains ambiguous. There is a weaker thesis that East Asian capitalism indicates that Confucianism does not impede capitalist development. But there is also a stronger thesis that Confucianism is a necessary and sufficient condition of East Asian capitalist success. 5. 6.

Tu, "Cultural China," 32-33. Ibid., p. 8, m y emphasis. From the historical fact that the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora are the facilitators of intraregional trade in the Asia Pacific, Tu spuriously infers that they are the best example of the ethos of Chinese mercantilism. He also conflates the Confucian ethos with Chinese mercantilism. For a similar argument about the Chinese diaspora and the Pacific Century, see Ronald Skeldon, "Migrants on a Global Stage," in Pacific Rim Development: Integration and Globalisation in the Asia-Pacific Economy, ed. Peter J. Rimmer (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1997), 222-39.

7.

A nti-C h in ese violence was not confined to the capital but also occurred in other towns on Java. For more details on the role played by the Indonesian army in instigating anti-Chinese violence, see John McBeth, "Shadow Play," Far Eastern Economic Review, 23 July 1998, 23-27, and I. Sandyawan Sumardi, "Mass Rape in the Recent Riots: The Climax of an Uncivilized Act in the Nation's Life," Report by Tim Relawan untuk Kemanusiaan (Volunteers for Humanity), Jakarta, 13 July 1998, and "Condition of Our Shared Life: The May 1998 Tragedy in Indonesia," report by Tim Relawan untuk Kemanusiaan (Volunteers for Humanity), Jakarta, 28 July 1998. M y thanks to Douglas Kammen for giving me access to the Jakarta sources.

8.

The uprising has been described as "a national reawakening" and "another independence day" [Far Eastern Economic Review, 4 June 1998, 21) and also as "Indonesia's May Revolution" (Far Eastern Economic Review, 28 May 1998, cover).

9.

The Chinese foreign minister, Tang Jiaxuan, has expressed official concern about the situation of Indonesian Chinese and called upon the Indonesian government to punish the rioters. He placed emphasis on the indelible contributions of the Chinese Indonesians to Indonesia's economic development and social progress. See "Indonesia Called on to Punish Rioters," China Daily, 5 August 1998,1.

10.

Ethnic Chinese make up 3.5 percent of the Indonesian population. Yet, they own nine of the top ten business groups and control more than 80 percent of the assets in the top 300 groups. Thirteen of the

162

PHENGCHEAH

top 15 taxpayers in Indonesia are ethnic Chinese. Even the less prosperous Chinese are a target of resentment because they control most of the local economic activity. See Salil Tripathi and Ben Dolven, "Shattered Confidence: Ethnic-Chinese Hold the Key to Economic Revival," Far Eastern Economic Review, 28 May 1998, 20-23; and Margot Cohen, "Turning Point: Indonesia's Chinese Face a Hard Choice," Far Eastern Economic Review, 30 July 1998,12-18. 11.

Jacqueline Co, " 'Democracy' at Work in Crime," Tulay, 4 December 1995, cited in Caroline S. Hau, "Kidnapping, Citizenship, and the Chinese," Public Policy 1, no. 1 (1997): 62. Hau's article is a brilliant analysis of the conflation of the Chinese and capital in contemporary Philippines.

12.

Max Weber, The Religion of China. Confucianism and Taoism, trans. Hans H. Gerth (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1951), 235. For a fuller discussion of Weber's position on Confucianism and its place within his sociology of religion, see Wolfgang Schlucter, "World Adjustment: Max Weber on Confucianism and Taoism," in The Triadic Chord. Confucian Ethics, Industrial East Asia and Max Weber, ed. Tu Wei-ming (Singapore: Institute of East Asian Philosophies, 1991), 3-52.

13.

Weber, The Religion of China, 237.

14.

Weber suggests that Chinese religion as a whole, whether represented by the personalist principle of Taoist mysticism or the impersonal rationalization of Confucian bureaucracy, repeatedly ties the individual to the sib and prevents the rationalizing of religiouspractical ethics. Ibid., 236-37.

15.

See, for instance, Benjamin Nelson, "Civilizational Complexes and Intercivilizational Encounters," in On the Roads to Modernity: Conscience, Science and Civilizations. Selected Writings by Benjamin Nelson, ed. Toby Huff (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981), 80-106. In its initial formulation in comparative sociology, the issue of Confucian rationalism is tied to the question of modern science qua universal world science. The uncosmopolitan, bounded, or parochial nature of Chinese culture is used to explain w hy a universal science only developed in the West. Later, this cultural explanation is inserted into the discursive domain of political economy and used to secure theories of underdevelopment. Capitalist modernization is then explicitly coded as Westernization.

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

16.

163

See Joseph R. Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism: The Western Stage and the Chinese Stages (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 2-5. Cf. Myron Cohen, "Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Traditional Identity," in Tu, ed., The Living Tree, 101-2: "For increasing numbers of people Chinese culture simply did not work: as a self-centered definition of the cosmos rooted in its own history, it had little relevance to the unprecedented conditions created by W estern domination and the large-scale introduction of new technology, institutions, and ideas. For those most immediately involved in these novel circumstances, such as students in the new schools, treaty port merchants and workers, and many others, the cultural crisis was most acute___ Among these intellectuals and some other segments of the population . . . emerged and continues to thrive an important connection precisely between nationalism and an at times almost ferociously iconoclastic antitraditionalism___Nationalistic antitraditionalism received its first forceful expression during the May Fourth M ovement that exploded in 1919."

17.

See Levenson, Revolution and Cosmopolitanism, 24-25: "From the point of normative Confucianism, wedded to culture and history, and anti-messianic to the core, the barbarians are always with us. From the point of view of normative Christianity, transcending culture and history . . . the pagans are not always with us: they can be sought out and converted___Though Chinese left home in great numbers, no one had any Confucian pretensions to be bearing out a Word. Now, however, the new China was a Word for the world, beginning with all its Bolivias. China commends itself as a model of revolution. The model applies, allegedly, because all ‫׳‬peoples' (i.e., all victims of imperialists) are brothers." Nelson makes a similar comment about the Cultural Revolution and Maoist thought, which he regards as crucial to the spreading of the new universalities of nation and peoplehood that will undermine traditional particularisms. On the Roads to Modernity, 91.

18.

Tu, "Cultural China," 7, emphasis added. Note that in the above passage, the different nations of East Asia are homogenized into "the Post-Confucian region," which is then conflated with Chineseness.

19.

Wu Teh Yao, "Opening Remarks," in Tu, The Triadic Chord, xviii. As the prefatory remarks to the Proceedings of the 1987 Singapore

164

PHENGCHEAH

Conference on Confucian Ethics and the Modernisation of Industrial East Asia, these words have the weighty tone of a manifesto. See also Wu, "The Confucian Concept and Attributes of Man and the M odernisation of Industrial Asia," in the same volum e, 397-413. 20.

Tu, "Cultural China," 8.

21.

The literature on this topic is voluminous and comes from numerous conferences sponsored by U.S. think tanks and East and Southeast Asian states since the mid-1980s. See, for instance, Peter L. Berger and Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, eds., In Search of an East Asian D evelopmen t Model (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1988) and Hung-chao Tai (ed.), Confucianism and Development: An Oriental Alternative? (Washington, D.C.: Washington Institute Press, 1989). For critical views of this argument that are attentive to the text of global capital, see Arif Dirlik, "Confucius in the Borderlands: Global Capitalism and the Reinvention of Confucianism," boundary 2, 22, no. 3 (fall 1995): 229-73, and Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship :The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999).

22.

See Wang Gungwu, "The Culture of Chinese Merchants," in Wang,

23.

1991), 181-97. Wang Gungwu, "The Chinese as Immigrants and Settlers: Singa-

China and the Chinese Overseas (Singapore: Times Academic Press,

pore," in Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 172. 24.

See Wang Gungwu, "Little Dragons on the Confucian Periphery," in Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 312.

25.

See Wang Gungwu, "Among N on-C hinese," in Tu, The Living

26.

J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice— A Comparative Study

Tree, 129. of Burma and Netherlands India (New York: N ew York University Press, 1956), 304. Cf. 303: "Man is a social animal, but economic forces tend to convert human society into a business concern. In tropical dependencies the outward and visible sign of this is the evolution of a plural society." 27.

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1979), 201.

28.

"Recensement et politique en Asie du Sud-est," Genèses 26 (April 1997): 68-69. The "translation" is from Anderson's original English manuscript.

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

29.

165

Cf. James Rush, "Placing the Chinese in Java on the Eve of the Twentieth Century," Indonesia (1991), special issue on the Role of the Indonesian Chinese in Shaping Modern Indonesian Life, 17-19: "It was the intensity and variety of this quest for livelihood that most thoroughly marked the Chinese, for they were everywhere 7material m an/ . . . Where the economy was concerned, the Chinese were ubiquitous and essential___From top to bottom, commerce marked the Chinese---- As revenue farmers, Chinese merchants were a critical part of the state apparatus."

30.

For an extremely insightful and detailed discussion of the various censuses of the Spanish Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, see Anderson, "Recensement et politique en Asie du Sud-est." For instance, in the Spanish Philippines, the offspring of Spanish-mixedwith-native occupied the juridical category "mestizo." In contradistinction, there is no such category for Eurasians in the Indies, and Eurasian children became legally European if they were acknowledged by their father and native if they were not. Anderson also notes that in the Philippines, "the word used to refer to those whom the English called 'Chinese/ the French, 'chinois/ and the Dutch, 'chinees/ was the non-racial term, 'sangley,' which comes from the Hokkien w ord ,'sengli' meaning ‫׳‬trader' " (62, n. 8).

31.

See W. F. Wertheim, "The Trading Minorities in Southeast Asia," in East-West Parallels: Sociological Approaches to Modern Asia (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965), 39-82.

32.

Ibid., 47.

33. 34.

Ibid., 54-55. Ibid., 76, 78. Cf. Allen Chun, "Pariah Capitalism and the Overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia: Problems in the Definition of the Problem," Ethnic and Racial Studies 12, no. 2 (April 1989): 254.

35.

The classical formulation comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 42: "Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these___[But i]n all ideology men and their relations appear upsidedown as in a camera obscura."

36.

This becomes clear in Lukacs's suggestion that the "falseness" of ideology qua bourgeois class consciousness is not simply empirical or veridical in nature but "implies a class-conditioned unconsciousness

166

PHENGCHEAH

of one's own socio-historical and economic condition." Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1971), 52. Lukács adds that classes unable to organize society in accordance with their interests "are norm ally condemned to passivity" (52). 37.

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 126.

38.

See, for instance, Prasenjit Duara, "Nationalists Among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900-1911," in Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, eds. Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39-60.

39.

See Wang Gungwu, "The Origins of Hua-Ch'iao," in Wang, Co m m u n i ty and Nation: China, South east Asia and Au stralia (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1992), 1-10; "Patterns of Chinese Migration in Historical Perspective," and "Southeast Asian Huaqiao in Chinese History-writing," China and the Chinese O verseas, 1-21 and 2 2 -4 0 respectively. Wang notes that Sun Yat-sen claimed that "the Huaqiao were the mother of the revolution" (246).

40.

See Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 176: "The term Huaqiao became closely linked with the expanding emotions about the Chinese nation and the new republican state which all patriotic Chinese were called upon to support."

41.

See Wang, "The Study of Chinese Identities in Southeast Asia," in Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 200-201.

42.

Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 138.

43.

Ibid., 199.

44.

For instance, in 1966, the Indonesian government prohibited use of the Chinese language. Chinese schools were shut, Chinese characters were forbidden, and Chinese newspapers were banned following accusations that the Beijing-supported Indonesian Communist Party was behind the October coup. All ethnic Chinese became suspect. Suharto's aim was to depoliticize the ethnic Chinese so that they could devote themselves to moneymaking. For a more thorough discussion, see Benedict Anderson's suggestion in "Old State, New Society: Indonesia's New Order in Comparative Historical Perspective," in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

167

Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), that this ghettoization of the Chinese "increases the economic resources available to the state without the need for any cession of political power. The more pariah 'the Chinese' become, the more they are dependent on the apparatus" (116). See also James Mackie, "Towkays and Tycoons: The Chinese in Indonesian Economic Life in the 1920s and 1980s," Indonesia (1991): 83-96. 45.

For a discussion of the heterogeneity of the diasporic Chinese in Malaysia, see Donald Nonini, "Shifting Identities, Positioned Imaginaries: Transnational Traversals and Reversals by Malaysian Chinese," in Ong and Nonini, Ungrounded Empires, 203-27.

46.

Ong, Flexible Citizenship, 72.

47.

Wang, "Among Non-Chinese," 131-32, emphasis added.

48.

Chris GoGwilt, "Pramoedya's Fiction and History: An Interview with Pramoedya Ananta Toer," Kabar Seberang 24/25, Essays to Honour Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 70th Year (1995): 14.

49.

Ninotchka Rosea, State of War (New York: Norton, 1988), 192,

50.

Ibid., 149.

51.

Anna's great grandmother puts it this way: "Soon we will forget

52.

Ibid., 291.

53.

Ibid., 292.

54.

The third and fourth volumes give an account of the anti-Chinese

336-37.

everything . . . and if we forget, how are we to proceed?" (ibid., 186).

boycotts and riots of 1912 and the enmity between the Chinese and the Sarekat Islam, the m ost important organization within the native awakening. For a brief account of the events that culminate in the suspension of the Sarekat's activities on August 10,1912, see Takashi Shiraishi, An Age in Motion: Popular Radicalism in Java, 1912-1916 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), 45-48. 55.

See Rumah Kaca (Kuala Lumpur: Wira Karya, 1990), 124-25; House

56.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Child of All Nations, trans. Max Lane

57.

Ibid., 87.

58.

Ibid., 87. Khouw also describes the Filipinos as "great teachers for

of Glass, trans. Max Lane (Victoria, Australia: Penguin, 1992), 117. (New York: Penguin, 1996), 85.

the other conquered peoples of Asia. They were the founders of the first Asian republic" (88).

168

59.

PHENGCHEAH

Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Footsteps, trans. Max Lane (Victoria, A ustralia: Penguin, 1990), 52.

60.

The PRC became more wary of the term huaqiao after Bandung in 1955 and has distinguished between foreign Chinese and overseas Chinese, i.e., foreign nationals of Chinese descent and the small number of Chinese nationals who live abroad. Taiwan, however, has retained the broad sense of huaqiao. See Wang, China and the Chinese Overseas, 223, 287-90. For a schematic account of the relationship between the PRC government and the Chinese overseas until the present period, see Wang Gungwu, "Greater China and the Chinese Overseas," China Quarterly, no. 136 (December 1993): 938-39.

61.

This is my gloss on Wang Gungwu's interesting argument that mercantilism has always been the fundamental feature of Chinese em igration, and that huaqiao cosmopolitanism was only a temporary blurring of this basic pattern that reemerged as dominant with the decline of the latter. See China and the Chinese Overseas, 10-12. For an account of the spectacular contemporary use of Overseas Chinese voluntary associations to create and maintain transnational business networks as well as strengthening the ties of the Southeast Asian Chinese diaspora with their ancestral hometowns, which are the sites of foreign investment, see Hong Liu, "Old Linkages, New Networks: The Globalization of Overseas Chinese Voluntary Associations andTts Implications," China Quarterly, no. 155 (September 1998): 582-609.

62.

For a succinct general description of these inflows to Southeast Asia and its contribution to the financial crisis of the late 1990s, see Benedict Anderson, "Sauve Qui Peut," in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 299-317.

63.

Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969).

64.

It is interesting to observe that Chinese m obilization in postSuharto Indonesia seeks to reverse the previous three decades of depoliticization and discrimination. The Partai Reformasi Tionghua Indonesia takes pains to distance itself from ethnic Chinese tycoons and conglomerates who lived off the largesse of Suharto. "The party's economic proposals include establishing cooperatives and holding companies involving both Chinese and pribumis. These

CHINESE COSMOPOLITANISM IN TWO SENSES

169

would be vehicles for transferring business skills to pribumis, for example through apprenticeship and mentoring programmes" (Far Eastern Economic Review, July 30,1998,14). Is this a partial revival of the generosity of huaqiao cosmopolitanism? 65.

In his famous visit to South China in January 1992, Deng Xiaoping called for the construction of a few Hong Kongs. After 1992, overseas Chinese investment, which had earlier been concentrated in the South China Economic Periphery, expanded into the interior provinces of Hubei and Sichuan and the northeast beyond Beijing. See Wang, "Greater China and the Chinese Overseas," 930-31.

66.

Aihwa Ong notes this and other contradictory views of the overseas Chinese held by mainlanders in Flexible Citizenship, 46-48.

This page intentionally left blank

6 THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM New Stories, Old Stages UNA CHAUDHURI

[Ijdentity is always in part a narrative. Identity is not something that is formed outside and then we tell stories about it. It is what is narrated in one's own self. I will say something about that in terms of m y own narration of identity in a m o m e n t— you know, that wonderful m om ent where Richard II says, "Come let us sit down and tell stories about the death of kings." Well, I am going to tell you a story and ask you to tell one about yourself. — Stuart Hall, "The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity"

"C o s m o p o lita n ism /' writes Bruce Robbins in the in tro duction to his new coedited volum e on the subject, "has a new cast of characte rs ."1 The theatrical m e ta p h o r seems ideally suited to ren der the m odality of the transfo rm ation th at is the point of departure for so m a n y recent re form ulatio ns of cosm opolitanism 2: the recognition th a t significant and sustained experience of cultures o th e r th a n one's own is no longer the optional privilege of a small W estern elite b u t ra th e r the often com pulsory condition of vastly different and variously situated groups, such as (to quote Robbins again), " N o r t h A m e r ic a n m e r c h a n t sailors, C arib b e an au pairs in th e U nited States, Egyptian guest w orkers in Iraq, Japanese w o m en wh o take gaijin lovers."3 The evocative specificities of this brief

172

UNA CHAUDHURI

allusive list4 (which has, of course, been extended considerably in the past two decades' literature on diaspora5) suggest vast theatrical potential: brave new worlds of fascinating characters and unfamiliar stories, innovative plots thick with unexpected intercultural encounters and uncommon complications. Although the critical literature on cosmopolitanism and diaspora makes virtually no reference to theater, the fact is that the displacements of contemporary "traveling culture"—the ubiquitous phenomena of diaspora, immigration, migration, and refugeehood—are frequently felt to be inherently dramatic. In a recent New York Times article, for instance, the Israeli emigre theater Gesher was characterized as trying "to express the reality of a people whose life is a drama/'6 At the same time, the political realities underlying so much travel today give the old theatrum mundi metaphor an acute new application. Ngugi wa Thiong'o writes, "All the World is a stage, said Shakespeare in As You Like It, with many players having their exits and entrances. The nation-state sees the entire territory as its performance area; it organizes the space as a huge enclosure, with definite places of entrance and exit. These exits and entrances are manned by companies of workers they call im m igration officials.. . . The nation-state performs its being relentlessly with the use of passports, visa, and flags."7 My point of departure for this paper is the question of how theater itself responds to diaspora. What kinds of pressure are the complex and dynamic "ethnoscapes"8 of our time putting on the established protocols of theatrical representation? Does the theatricality of diaspora (as evoked by the texts I have cited and many others) enable a meaningful theater of diaspora or thwart it? Can the theater accommodate not only a new cast of characters but an infinitely more complicated scene of action and communication? One immediate answer to this question is suggested by the protagonist of Chay Yew's recent play A Beautiful Country. An immigrant drag queen from Malaysia named Miss Visa Denied, she articulates a vision both ironic and utopian of how theater fig-

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

173

ures in diaspora, what it offers to that new cast of characters that throngs the contemporary cultural scene: everytim e m y feet find this stage everytim e the light drenches the skin I am strangely hom e . . . m y foundation m y mascara m y new face m y lipsynch life m y m akeover life in America this theatre this is m y hom e m y between hom e betw een the port of penang and the port of los angeles living in two worlds living in two worlds forever belonging to none.9

Miss Visa Denied claims the theater as her home in the context of a "makeover life," an identity constructed in transit and translation. But the potential for theater to function as a laboratory for observing the new dynamics of identity formation, and for testing the identities they generate, also derives from a fortuitous congruence between the protocols of theater-making and the structuring ambivalences of the new cosmopolitanisms. As new cosmopolitanisms are being theorized against and beyond the unsatisfactory binaries of global/local, center/periphery, East/ West, Third World/First World,10 they approximate the condition of theater performance as theorized today beyond the limiting binaries of text/performance, page/stage.11 The intrinsic doubleness of theater, the fact that it produces and reproduces something

174

UNA CHAUDHURI

that is prior to it (the script), makes for an inherent displacement and temporalization12 that resemble the defining displacements and ceaseless temporalizations of diasporic experience. Putting its material into play again and again, from rehearsal to rehearsal and then from night to night, the theater is a space of creative reinscription, a space where meaning, like deterritorialized identity, is not merely made but remade, negotiated out of silence, stasis, and incomprehension. My point about theater and identity politics is different from, though complementary to, the one on which Josephine Lee has based her pathbreaking study of Asian-American theater, namely that the " 'liveness' or 'presence' of theater suggests an immediate, visceral response to the physicality of race---- The physical response of the spectator to the body of the actor complicates any abstraction of social categories. The theater does not let us forget that questions of racial difference concern our most basic gut reactions, experiences, and sensations."13 But because theater is not completely contained within the registers of liveness and presence, and because theatrical meaning must always chart a perilous course from fiction to physicality, from page to stage, theater mirrors not only the physicality of race but also the instability and misapprehension of racial and ethnic interactions. This is why it holds out promise not merely for increasingly accurate and responsible representations of ethnic diversity but for a direct, performative intervention into the cultural discourse on race and ethnicity. Counteracting this apparently utopian potentiality and agency, however, is the theater's unusually rigid semiosis. Theater is a heavily institutionalized cultural practice, implicated in specifically situated and complex economic, financial, and commercial networks. It is subject to powerful validating contexts, many of which have over time inscribed themselves as semiotic codes guiding— and redirecting14—meaning production. As Ngugi wa Thiong'o has argued recently, the theater is never the perfectly "empty space" of Peter Brook's famous formulation:15 "Bare, yes, open,

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

175

yes, but never empty. It is always the site of physical, social, and psychic forces in society/'16 A powerful example, which also bears directly on the issue at hand, is the representation of foreignness in Western theater. The figure of the foreigner has been connected mainly to comedy, with foreign speech (in the form of language or accent) joining outlandish garb and highly codified makeup17 as signs not so much of specific national identity but rather of the very category of outsider, out of and against which the theater achieves what I would call its community effect, a kind of antialienation effect that provides a given production's horizon of expectations.18 The gradual recoding of foreign speech from the register of comedy to that of verisimilitude followed the development of the practice of international touring, with its commercial need to forge cohesion and achieve recognition among culturally diverse groups.19 Needless to say this particular semiotic transformation— the use of different languages in a play for other than comic purposes— has far-reaching implications for any theater practice dedicated to "thinking and feeling beyond the nation," but in contemporary Western theater it is closely linked to the prospects for staging the "new stories" of immigrant communities in ways that renew the theater as both a form and an institution. William W orthen has argued recently that "[although] the politics of theater is irreducibly local, taking place here, tonight, with these performers and this audience ... the immediacy of theatrical performance is dialectically related to the history of forms, both literary and performance forms."20 I would suggest that the noncomic representation of foreignness that I have just mentioned belongs to the evolving history of a cosmopolitan com munity effect, which in turn challenges playwrights and performers to do representational justice to the complex realities of diasporic experience, not only for its spectators but for its subjects. For when Chay Yew's Miss Visa Denied identifies the theater as her home, she does so not as a solution or a fait accompli but as a challenge

176

UNA CHAUDHURI

both to the theater and to the community that it reflects, and which it produces. To examine the theater's response to this challenge, I will focus on a central trope of contemporary multicultural theater that I shall call, simply, the trope of the new story After briefly describing the structure of this trope, I will examine its prehistory in the movement known as interculturalism, when several of its distinctive features and main problematics were established. I will then analyze one example of the current predicament of the new story as it attempts to take the stage of Western drama and alter the terms of the community effect as they are guarded and enforced by powerful commercial interests in mainstream theater. I will conclude with some examples of a theater practice that understands the value and safeguards the trajectories of the new stories by recognizing and staging their critique of mainstream realist theater. The new story, the fresh fragment of narrative plucked from the myths and experiences of newly arrived people from distant lands and unfamiliar cultures, is a primary trope of both multicultural theater and theory. In his important new play The Street of the Sun, Latino playwright José Rivera thematizes the double-edged seduction of the new story, showing how its necessity to the representational agendas of immigrants and immigrant communities is offset by its potential commodification by a voracious mass media. As Rivera's characters— all sophisticated, sell-out screenwriters from the Hollywood trenches— recognize, the media endlessly retails one story at the expense of so many others: "I think it's sick how you watch TV or see a movie and see the absolute smallest trivia, the minutiae of Anglo life celebrated and immortalized,—but the archetypal events of Latino life? They never deal with them __ I mean, the stories of bodega-owners and abuelitas and campesinos and Chicano cops and housewives and nannies from Guatemala." 21 But of course the ethnic representation gap is hardly the only problem. Forestalling any simple call for more representation is

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

177

the rapacious and trivializing mass media, waiting to cannibalize the identity-bearing myths and legends of newcomers. Rivera's main character, a Puerto Rican writer named Jorge Cienfuegos who is trying to break into Hollywood, has an idea for a movie that is based on a story his grandmother, now dead, once told him. The story tells of a young girl who fell in love with the sun and bore him a child. Jorge suspects that the story is in fact a m yth of his ancestral culture, it feels like a myth, but he has never succeeded in tracking it down: no one he's asked has ever heard of it, and "It's not in any books."22 "Is the story mine now?" wonders Jorge. "I might be the only person she ever told it to. The only person who remembers it. Does that make it mine?" The cultural problematic that the trope of the new story opens up comes in the next questions: "Do I own it? Can I sell it?" When Jorge confides to a friend that he feels "guilty about ripping off my heritage," the friend replies, "C'mon, what's a heritage for?"23 The question of what a heritage is for is complicated in the case of a multicultural theater practice that must transpire—as Rivera's play does— in the relentlessly stereotyping and commodifying wake of Hollywood. It is further complicated by the brazen antihistoricism of American popular culture, devaluing the very stories with which a new community effect might eventually be achieved. This antihistoricism is lightly touched on in David Henry Hwang's new play Golden Child, another im portant m ulticultural play about new stories (this time actually being told, as the main action of the play, by the onstage ghost of a grandmother). Here the past must force itself upon the present, for when the protagonist is asked if he thinks he can raise a child without the gifts of his ancestors, he replies, "Absolutely! This is America. Everyone's ashamed of their ancestors!"24 The stage figure of the im migrant (or child of immigrants), caught as she is among several conflicting relationships to the animating discourses of her national identity—relationships of need, greed, and shame—can be a productive site for the current inquiry

178

UNA CHAUDHURI

into "nation and narration/' Her arrival on the Western stage is signaled by the large number of recent experiments in what M arvin Carlson calls "macaronic theatre." These multilingual plays are an index of cosmopolitanism's growing challenge to W estern theater, especially to the traditional hierarchy of its sign-system, dominated by language. The experiments range from seamless bilingualism like the Gesher's to dense multilingualism like that of the highly regarded British Théâter de Complicité, whose extremely physical (almost acrobatic) performance style enables and supports its multilingualism.25 In such internationally acclaimed productions as The Three Lives of Lucie Chabrol and The Street of Crocodiles, Complicité has proved that nonverbal sign-systems (especially movement) are capable of producing extraordinarily complex theatrical meaning, to which multilingual dialogue, far from damaging intelligibility, adds layers of emotion and meaning. Working exclusively with European actors and languages, however, Complicité avoids the kind of political challenges that attend a wider theatrical cosmopolitanism, extending beyond the West. The controversial theater movement known as interculturalism, whose most famous practitioners are Peter Brook and Ariane Mnouchkine, worked not only with international casts but with international performance traditions, synthesizing various theater techniques and diverse dramatic materials to achieve a "transnational" theater style. At one stage of their experimentation, Brook's company even attempted to create a "universal" language of pure sound called Orghast, a project that has come to exemplify the naive universalism for which Brook is often criticized, especially by postcolonial critics. Yet interculturalism like Brook's need not, I think, be summarily dismissed from discussions of progressive cosmopolitan theater, because the representational space that it actually produces is the very image of the "discrepant" cosmopolitanisms that are being theorized currently. For when the stage is inhabited by the diversely marked and variously performative bodies of an international (and internationally trained)

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

179

cast, then the theater is, willy-nilly, holding a mirror up to the culture of diaspora, and mapping a new cosmopolitan geography onto that most archaic space of representation, the stage.26 But of course the "automatic" cosmopolitanism produced by intercultural theater practice like Brook's cannot readily be called (to use Robbins's inspiring neologism) cosmopolitical. Not only do its universalist convictions seem to place it securely in the camp of the old, rootless, cosmopolitanism, but another and opposite feature keeps it from being the "strategic universalism" argued by some critics: 27 namely, its unwitting but decisive essentializing of cultural and racial identity, revealed in its preference for the traditional over the modern performance forms of the cultures it synthesizes. When, for his India project, Brook chooses as his primary intertext the Mahabharata— rather than, say, Midnight's Children, much less a Bollywood classic—it is because he (like many other Western theater practitioners and scholars28) wants his India ancient and unchanging, uncontaminated by history. By contrast, the theater I want to consider in this paper engages the fundamental instability of national identity while at the same time recognizing its weight, value, and necessity in the contexts of globalization and diaspora. By staging (though not resolving) that tension between fixity and flexibility, which has characterized the past decade's discourse on identity, this theater opens an experimental space for performing the cosmo political. That space is characterized by a multivocality that might be called choral— recalling the most distinctive and compelling feature of ancient Greek theater—were it not for the high quotient of interruption, overlapping, and sheer misunderstanding that it carries. Even when produced by a single performer identified with a single ethnic group, such as Anna Deveare Smith, John Leguizamo, Han Ong, or Aasif Mandavi, the drama of new stories is characterologically dispersed and multivocal. It stages multiethnicity by rewriting the intensely focused script of realist theater, expanding

180

UNA CHAUDHURI

its close-knit casts and hence disrupting the closure of its community effect. Exploding the drama of the nuclear family, it shows us how the account of meaningful social interaction encoded by that drama has implicitly discounted—indeed ignored—all interactions occurring across ethnic and racial boundaries. Beyond one-person shows, however, the search for a complex and dynamic multiethnic representation is remarkably difficult in the current institutional landscape of American theater. W hen David Henry Hwang, the most successful "ethnic" playwright in America, was asked what he hoped to see in the near future of American theater, he replied, "Work that transcends category ... [and] transgresses these different little boxes we've been put into as writers and performers."29 Hwang's gentle shorthand term for the constraints imposed upon the expressivity of so-called ethnic playwrights and their access to audiences belies the anguish caused by the ideological closure of American theater practice, which relegates all but the most Eurocentric work to margins at various degrees of separation from the mecca of Broadway. For example, Hwang's latest play, Golden Child, is only the second of his plays to reach Broadway, ten years after his M. Butterfly became the first Asian-American play ever to achieve that status. Framing a supposedly multicultural decade in American culture, Hwang's two Broadway plays actually trace a disturbing trajectory away from his dream of an ethnically transgressive, cosmopolitical theater that can begin to unpack the little boxes in which America's racial and ethnic expressions have been contained. Ironically, the image of little boxes resonates with the stage set of the first production of Golden Child, where the biblical image of a house with many mansions was literalized to moving effect in the three pavilions of the Chinese protagonist's three wives, each of whom take different positions on the main issue of the play, their husband's decision to convert to Christianity. As designed by Tony Straiges, the pavilions exemplified the characteristic tension in multicultural theater, between the desire to render the complex

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

181

specificities of other cultures and the need to achieve readability within Western theatrical codes that are still, on the whole, Orientalist. As well as ornate Chinese boxes, the pavilions in Golden Child looked like small stages upon the larger stage. In the latter guise, they literally staged the multiplicity within a national past and a family history presumed to be linear, singular, and stable. However, this heterogenization of the diasporic past was seriously undercut by their other aspect, as Chinese boxes, which, along with the gorgeous costumes and elegant background, referred the historical and cultural space of the play to a well-established orientalist norm, reclaiming it for that paradoxical construct, the Familiar Other. That Familiar Other continues to haunt the stage on which the "new cast of characters" is confronting an equally tenacious abstraction, the Authentic Ethnic. In a brief essay titled "The Myth of Immutable Cultural Identity," Hwang argues that those who have pursued the "Holy Grail" of an authentic Asian-American identity m ust finally recognize that nothing can emerge u n changed from the "abyss of the American melting pot."30 Hwang's wonderful mixed metaphor itself enacts the terror of cliches and stereotypes, a subject that Hwang has long explored in his plays, most famously in M. Butterfly but also—though significantly, with much less success—in his last assault on Broadway prior to Golden Child, a play entitled Face Values. This ambitious satire on the Miss Saigon casting controversy may have been beyond Broadway's limited powers of self-reflection, and closed out of town. It is tempting to speculate whether the fate of Face Values was in part responsible for the playwright's switch over to more personal, indeed autobiographical, subject matter for his next play, which did make it to Broadway Golden Child is Hwang's most conventional play, and changes that were made to it over the course of its journey to Broadway made it even more conventional.31 One of the major changes affected the frame of the play, which, though brief, is ideologically decisive, since it stages the contem porary perspective on the

182

UNA CHAUDHURI

historical material of the main play. In the original version of the play, the frame depicted its main character, Andrew Kwong, as one of those cell-phone-toting frequent-flyer cosmopolitans who seem to be the prophets of a postethnic-postmodern world, one of those about whom contemporary identity is being theorized as a matter of "aerials, not roots." His alienation from any narratives of origin and homeland was literalized in his location at the play's start: he was in a taxicab, stuck in traffic on his way to JFK Airport for a business trip. He had smoked a joint, to which he first attributed the apparition that comes to disturb him: the loquacious ghost of his grandmother, bent on telling him the family history that will be the subject of the main play. In the rewritten version Andrew is no longer a deracinated, "inauthentic" Asian-American businessman, but that much more familiar, indeed normative, figure of the old cosmopolitanism: a self-searching writer, struggling with an anguished exilic consciousness. He is not uncomfortably trapped on a highway but comfortably at home, in bed beside his sleeping pregnant wife (played by the same actress who plays the beautiful third wife in the inner play). And finally, he is far more welcoming of the insistent ghost of his grandmother. In concert with her, he surveys his family history and emerges prepared to greet his child-to-be with a more optimistic attitude to his hyphenated identity. The relocation from airport to home— from the exemplary site of globalization32 to the nostalgic site of fixed identity—shifts the very grounds of Hwang's inquiry, the position from which the "new stories" are heard and interpreted, the position that would either reinforce or reconstruct the community effect of contemporary theater. The relocation also removes all irony and relativism from the character's confident claims, at play's end, to having solved the dilemma of deterritorialized identity, which he does by individualizing the trope of the new story and then projecting it, thus atomized and dispersed, into a smoothly unfolding future: "And on each face, a story, some which I have been told, some I can

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

183

only imagine, and some that I will never know at all.... And I realize that my face too will one day be added to this constellation, that in the imagination of our descendants, I may also one day be born again" (62). (The irony that Hwang's protagonist's epiphany involves "faces" was probably lost on the Broadway audience, who has not had the opportunity to see— and perhaps reject— Face Values for themselves.) Not only has Hwang uncharacteristically written one of those generational dramas about whose essentializing effects Lisa Lowe has warned,33 but his revisions have had the effect of collapsing historical and geographical distance, suggesting an exemplary and ameliorative repetition, even a coming to fruition34 between the two diasporic experiences, past and present. Andrew's quest appears to repeat and complete his male ancestors' search for a belief system congenial to his displaced condition. The grandfather, on the threshold of the diasporic century, had "found" Christianity; the grandson, adrift in the fully diasporic present, finds a secular, metaphorical version of ancestor worship. The neat parallelism sentimentally ignores the difficult truth of diasporic experience that family and community are not givens, not stable entities waiting to supply meaning and identity as needed. Rather, as R. Rad‫־־‬ hakrishnan has put it, "The very organicity of the family and the community, displaced by travel and dislocation, must be renegotiated and redefined. The two generations have different starting points and different givens."35 In many articles that accompanied Golden Child's Broadway opening, the play's narrative of historical retrospection was characterized as autobiographical, reinforcing the implication of the revised frame, that the work of cultural reproduction, the "task" of the ethnic writer, begins with a family history and an ancestral encounter. Yet nowhere in all the accounts of Hwang's personal journey into his family history was any mention made of the fact that the real-life "golden child," the playwright's son who prompted this identity-quest, is not only Asian American but also of mixed

184

UNA CHAUDHURI

race and ethnicity, since Hwang's wife, the child's mother, is white. The elision of this literal (i.e., biological) hybridity from Hwang's admittedly autobiographical play seems to quietly reinstate the "little boxes" the playwright otherwise longs to transgress. It also suggests the current limits imposed by the regimes of theater production on staging a dynamically cosmopolitical ethnoscape, a world where, as Arjun Appadurai puts it, the "genealogies of cosmopolitanism are not likely to be the same as its histories."36 The "abyss of the American melting pot" appears to have subtly conveyed to the most successful ethnic playwright in America that his access to Broadway is conditional on muting his critique of racism and orientalism in favor of an intensely privatized meditation on family history. This is disturbing, suggesting that not even the most successful (and therefore presumably the most unfettered) of theater practitioners is safe from the alchemy of the melting pot, which turns new stories into old ones. The two plays I want to discuss in conclusion suggest several ways of safeguarding the trajectories of the new stories from the universalizing regimes of mainstream theatrical representation. Both plays are examples of a new "macaronic" theater, giving literal and multiple voice to diasporic cultural experience while reflexively staging the effects of the new stories on the space of the stage and on its production of community. David Edgar's 1994 play Pentecost is to diasporic realities what Tony Kushner's Angels in America was to gay life: an epic mimesis that decisively transfers its subject from the register of spectacle to that of performance. Unlike Golden Child, which stages (and "solves") diaspora for the West, Pentecost stages (and interrogates) the West from the perspective of diaspora, diaspora in its contemporary—multiple and discrepant— forms, with its vast new cast of characters. The play concerns the fate of a quite spectacularly diverse group of people whose lives converge unexpectedly in a distinctly uncosmopolitan part of the world: an abandoned church in a remote part of "an unnamed south-east European country."37

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

185

A British art historian named Oliver Davenport has been brought to the church by Gabriella Pecs, a curator of the unnamed country's National Museum. The church, which will be the play's sole set, has one striking feature: one of its walls is a palimpsestic record of the fact that even "here, of all places," history has done its work of destruction and inscription. The wall is mainly covered by a mural depicting the heroic revolutionary masses, who, as Gabriella mockingly puts it, are marching, along with their "allies in cooperative peasantry and forward-viewing technical intelligentsia . .. towards radiant future in which everybody's quite as primitive and backwards clods as everybody else" (3-4). But the mural is only the top layer of the wall's several inscriptions, the most important of which is the discovery that has brought Oliver and Gabriella here. Removing a few bricks, Gabriella reveals portions of a painting that closely resembles Giotto's Lamentation in the Arena Chapel in Padua. What makes this discovery remarkable is the evidence, from historical and literary sources, that suggests that the painting predates Giotto by at least a century. The implication, that single-point perspective was discovered and used a hundred years earlier than previously thought, and that therefore this painting represents the "starting pistol for the next 600 years," makes this "the biggest art find since the unearthing of Pompeii" (25). That this momentous discovery should occur, as Oliver says, "here, of all places," is the key to the play's parable: for if the history of modern art—indeed the history of Western rationalism, as symbolized by the discovery of perspective—could suddenly be proved to have begun here, at this margin, then not only would this long-derogated and peripheralized part of the world move up the cultural ladder (and in so doing vastly enhance its prospects for a share in the many advantages of First World membership), but it would also disrupt the particular model of center-andperiphery that has dominated the cultural life of the world for so long. It is a utopian vision, in which "here, of all places" would be transformed into a miraculously egalitarian "here, like all places."

186

UNA CHAUDHURI

But it is also a warning about the impact of new stories on the structures of power and meaning. In the course of the play, the trope of new stories is tested against the representational claims of the stage, its claim to be able to be like all places, a claim that this particular stage has already made explicitly by showing how its surfaces can be peeled, like an onion, to reveal new inscriptions, new stories, new versions of history. Another characteristic of the theatrical apparatus that this particular stage foregrounds is its identity as a space of cultural negotiation, a place where various languages and stories can assert their positions on an invisible cultural ladder associated with economic rewards and political gains. And indeed ladders are a major visual element of the play, dominating and defining the vertical axis of the stage space as they are used for two apparently unrelated purposes: the work of restoration on the hidden painting, and later to monitor access to the church itself. The ladder is also a central literary image in the play, related in a complex way to the play's thematization of cosmopolitics as linguistic negotiation. The church in which the painting has been discovered is named for Saint John Climacus, author of a treatise entitled "The Ladder of Divine Ascent," and therefore named from the Greek word for ladder, klimax. A key piece of evidence in support of the find hinges on the Italian translation of the church's name (which also links it to one of Europe's great theater institutions): San Giovanni della Scala— (scala, Italian for "staircase"). This resonant image gets connected to the play's meditation on transnationalism when one of the characters refers to "Babel's Stairway," saying, "Is it not Babel, where God invent all different languages, to stop mankind build stairway to heaven?" W hen corrected and told that "it's Babel's Tower/' the first speaker, who happens to be the unnamed country's minister of culture, says, "O f course. I'm thinking of Led Zeppelin," an American popcultural allusion that the English-speaking Oliver fails to get! Translation—both linguistic and cultural translation—is a central

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

187

trope of Pentecost, which explores transnational experience through a modern staging of both the story of the Tower of Babel and that other notable linguistic event in the Bible, the speaking in tongues at Pentecost. As staged here, translation is necessary, and impossible, and inevitable, a feature of cultural space as it has evolved into the present. A portion of this evolution (of cultural space into a space of translation) occurs in the play itself: the comic bilingualism of act 1 is expanded in act 2 into a degree of politically charged multilingualism rarely if ever put on stage before. As the church is occupied by an international group of refugees who take the art historians hostage and demand political asylum in Europe, the local politics that had heatedly framed the debate over the history and fate of the painting are replaced by a rather different set of concerns— less abstract, more urgent, equally complex. The disparate backgrounds and stories of the refugees are conveyed by their different languages, which include Arabic, Azeri, Russian, Turkish, Sinhalese, Polish, and Bulgarian. Unlike the bilingual group in act 1, who did share a language ("we can all be good Europeans, speaking in American" [17]), the characters who enter in act 2 have no common language, but most of them understand at least one or two of the other languages, thus setting up a sort of translation relay, in which meaning passes, like the refugees themselves, across successive borders of incomprehension. Just as the acoustic space of the play expands to become more multivoiced and multiethnic, to become in fact a uniquely dense scene of communication, so also physical and geographical space changes in ways that show diaspora to be a set of very precise challenges to established theater practice. The marked ill‫־‬location of the play's action, a quality alluded to repeatedly by the European characters, is the first element— the ground, as it were— of the play's analysis of the problematics of and the prospects for a new, cosmopolitical perspective on diasporic experience. By setting his play in an obviously marginal cultural space, Edgar interrogates

188

UNA CHAUDHURI

the theater's capacity not only for representing new identities and affiliations but also for identifying new conceptual and cultural sites on which to locate them, from which to represent them.38 In the many roles it has played in the past, Edgar's abandoned church literalizes the semiotic density of cultural space. As Gabriella puts it, "As well as warehouse, church is used by heroic peasantry for store potatoes__ And before potatoes, Museum of Atheism and Progressive People's Culture. And before museum, prison___ Transit Center.' German Army." Even as a church, it has sustained various identities: "When we are Hungary, it Catholic, when we are holy Slavic people, Orthodox. W hen we have our friendly Turkish visitor drop by for few hundred years, for while is mosque. W hen Napoleon pass through, is house for horses" (5). When the church is occupied by the refugees in act 2, a priest who has entered as a hostage negotiator is asked by one of the refugees: "Is this your church, Father?" to which he bitterly responds, "It is your church. As is surely clear to everyone" (90). But of course it is not: the bitter truth the play makes clear is that the hyper-diaspora of the present has no "church," no space of ritual observance or celebration. In spite of the poignant claim of Chay Yew's protagonist Miss Visa Denied that the theater can be an "in between home" for the displaced, neither Pentecost nor indeed A Beautiful Country offers this view of theater as anything but utopian fantasy. The multitude of new stories staged in both these plays, while they provide partial and provisional alliances, ultimately can neither reconfigure nor even preserve the existing structure of this stage and all that it represents (and fails to represent). Pentecost ends with the unnamed country's police ramming a bulldozer through the back wall of the church, destroying the painting that has by now come to symbolize the conflict of histories and ideologies inevitably engaged by any effort to open a new space of representation. This apocalyptic assault on the borders of theatrical representation recalls Kushner's famous angel coming through the ceiling in another ironic commentary on the limita-

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

189

tions of the dram aturgy of the fourth wall. Kushner's angel referred to—and helped to discredit39— realism's vaunted omniscience, which, like the old cosmopolitanism's "free-floating view from above,"40 denies the significance of discrepancies and difference in its accounts of social life. In José Rivera's Street of the Sun, too, the protocols of realism are put under pressure by a veritable eruption of new stories. Like Pentecost, this play is structured as a search for a space capable of accommodating the new cast of characters, which includes in this case such distinctly nonrealistic figures as the Greek god Apollo and a Big Hairy Man who turns out to be the Los Angeles earthquake, the "big one." Carrying their many stories with them, Rivera's characters initially move desperately through the cultural overdeterminations of Los Angeles, "the nation's premier psychic embodiment," as Joseph Boone writes "of racial diversity and ethnic hybridity, . .. of the Pacific Rim's meeting point of Asia and America and, as recent im m igration controversies have hig hlighted, the m eeting point of N orth and South Americas."41 Through a series of nightmarish encounters with the Hollywood image makers, the characters learn the crucial difference between "pitching" a story and telling it, a distinction that the play renders kinesthetically and spatially. Act 1 stages Los Angeles as a "labyrinth" of frenetic movements, where all encounters disappoint and disorient. Here stories circulate like commodities, and hearts are literally ripped from people's chests as all sacrifice their most precious narratives to the god of success. In act 2, however, the cast attains an unexpected synoptic perspective on what it now recognizes as a "city of stories," waiting to be told. From the top of the Griffith Park Observatory the characters literally reclaim the "view from above," not for a transcendent perspective (in fact, the god Apollo leaves, disgusted) but for the production of a locality within which a multiethnic community can be represented. Like Pentecost, The Street of the Sun makes clear that the new stories will register at the level of scenic discourse, with stage space

190

UNA CHAUDHURI

transformed and a new cast of characters challenging the closure of theater's established com m unity effect. Like Pentecost again, Rivera's play ends with the stage space in ruins, the image of a world destroyed. Then slowly, emerging from complete darkness, the sky fills with stars, and the stage with survivors of the earthquake. The earlier unremitting noise of city traffic is replaced by sounds of distant coyotes, the long-forgotten natural world reasserting its claims on the lives of human beings, perhaps even on their modes of representation. This latter possibility emerges when the stage, thus refilled and reconnected, seems to be pregnant with a new choral potential, promising a theater of many stories, stories capable of comforting a traumatized community, which has now spilled over into the audience.42 It seems to me uniquely fitting, then, that it would be to an ancient Greek model of theater's community effect that José Rivera indirectly traces his inspiration, by way, interestingly, of one of the most challenging or recent experiments in multiracial representation: Anna Deveare Smith's piece Twilight: Los Angeles 1996, a performance crafted from eyewitness accounts of the Los Angeles race riots. When he saw the multiethnic, multivocal Twilight, says Rivera, the experience recalled one that has long occupied an originary position in popular theater history and hence a privileged, even mythological status among theater practitioners: "I felt I was in something like an ancient Greek situation, where a poet was bringing the events of a city back to the very people who those events had happened to."43 As a model for staging the new cast of characters, this one may be utopian, but it is also appropriately metropolitan, interactive, and ambitious. NOTES 1.

Bruce Robbins, "Introduction, Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism," in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Bruce Robbins and Pheang Cheah (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 1.

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

2.

191

For example: Arjun Appadurai, M o d e rn ity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard U niversity Press, 1997); Homi Bhabha, "Unsatisfied N otes on Vernacular C osmopolitanism," in Text and Narration, ed. Peter C. Ffeiffer and Laura Garcia-Moreno (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1996), 191-207.

3.

Robbins, "Introduction, Part I."

4.

Robbins is alluding to the follow ing studies: Marcus Rediker, Between the D ev il and the Deep Blue Sea: M erc hant Seamen, Pirates, and the An g lo-A m e ric a n M aritim e World, 17 00 -17 50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Bruce Robbins, "Upward Mobility in the Post-Colonial Era: Kinciad, Mukherjee, and the Postcolonial Au Pair," M o d e r n i s m /M o d e r n i ty 1, no. 2 (1994): 133-51; Amitav Ghosh, In an An tique Land (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993); Karen Kelsky, "Flirting with the Foreign: Interracial Sex in Japan's 'International' Age," in Global/Local: Cultural Production in the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob W ilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

5.

Including a new journal, Diaspora, devoted to cultural and political studies of all contemporary and historical diasporas, in relation to themselves, to each other, and to their "host" and "home" cultures.

6.

Serge Schmemann, "Israelis Now, but Carrying on a Russian Flair for Fireworks," New York Times, 5 July 1998, section 2, p. 2 (empha-

7.

sis added). Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space," TDR: The Drama Review 41, no. 3 (fall 1997): 17.

8.

See Appadurai, Modernity at Large, especially chapters 2 and 3.

9.

Chay Yew, A Beautiful Country, (manuscript, 16 June 1998), 59.

10.

For discussions of this debate, see "Traveling Theorists," chap. 3 in Caren Kaplan, Q uestions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displa cem en t (Durham, N.C.: Duke U niversity Press, 1996), 101-42; as well as Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, "Introduction: Tracking the Global/Local," in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Im aginary (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996), 1-18.

11.

For an historical overview of this issue, see Marvin Carlson, "Illustration, Translation, Fulfillment, Supplement," Theatre Journal 35 (March 1985): 5-11.

192

12.

UNA CHAUDHURI

See Una Chaudhuri, "When's the Play? Time and the Theory of Drama," Theater, summer-fall 1991, 46-61.

13.

Josephine Lee, Performing Asian America: Race and Ethnicity on the Contemporary Stage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 7.

14.

For a recent example of the way institutional frameworks subtly undermine the ideological impact of progressive, even radical, m ulticultural plays, see Mayte Gomez, " 'Coming Together' in Lift Off! '93: Intercultural Theatre in Toronto and Canadian Multiculturalism," Essays in Theatre/Etude Theatrales 13, no. 1 (November 1994): 45-59. Gomez writes, "While the content of many plays presented [in the festival Lift Off '93] subverted to a large degree the ideology of acculturation, the form of dramaturgical development chosen in the workshops served to reproduce and embrace it, a contradiction that was also present in most of the festival's conditions of production" (46).

15.

"I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage." Peter Brook, The Empty Space (New York: Avon: 1968), 9.

16.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o, "Enactments of Power," 13.

17.

Josephine Lee discusses, among other manuals on stage makeup, Lee Baygan's Makeup for Theatre, Stage and Television, in which "a believable Oriental appearance" is illustrated with images of a geisha and a coolie. One midcentury makeup manual brazenly notes that "of all make-up, the transformation of European into Orientals is one of the most difficult. Producers realize this and with the passing of time seem to have practically eliminated the necessity for its u s e .. . . the musical comedy is one of the few fields left for the presentation of Oriental types." Yoti Lane, Stage Make-Up (Minneapolis: Northwestern Press, 1950), 80; cited in Lee, Performing Asian America, 223.

18.

See Brian Singleton, "The Pursuit of Otherness for the Investigation of Self," Theatre Research International 22, no. 2 (1997). Singleton writes, "From Aeschylus to Artaud, from Kabuki's Okuni to Yeats's Noh, from the rural folk rituals of traditional societies to the urbanized aesthetics of Western high culture, the appropriation of another 'distant' culture has been a recurring trend in the evolution of performance" (93).

19.

"As commedia companies spread out across Europe, their tours to non-Italian speaking communities provided a new motivation for

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

193

mixed language productions, a motivation almost the opposite of that of traditional comedy. An important part of comedy from its origins has been laughter at the expense of the outsider, and one such outsider has always been the linguistic outsider, a reliable source of entertainment for the group of insiders who attended the theatre. W hen however, the theatre began to seek audiences among those outsider communities, their alien language turned from a source of ridicule to a valued mode of connection/' Marvin Carlson, "The Macaronic Stage," paper delivered at Ludwig-Maximilians Universtidt, Munich, 22 January 1999, 5. 20.

William Worthen, "Convicted Reading: The Island, Hybridity, Performance," in Crucibles of Crisis: Performing Social Change, ed. Janelle Reinelt (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1996), 167.

21.

José Rivera, The Street of the Sun, unpublished manuscript, 23.

22.

Ibid., 3.

23.

Ibid., 19.

24.

David Henry Hwang, Golden Child, manuscript (early draft), 2. Quoted by permission of the author.

25.

"The London-based Théâtre de Complicité represents a rare case of artistic brilliance and political engagement, rarer still for escaping both the provincialism of the local and the false promise of "world culture." Russ Rehn, "Lives of Resistance: Théâtre de Complicité: An Appreciation," Theatre Forum, no. 6 (winter/spring 1995): 88.

26.

For a full discussion of Brook's intended interculturalism as effective multiculturalism, see m y article, "Working Out (of) Place: Brook's Mahabharata and the Problematics of Intercultural Performance," in Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theatre, ed. Jenny Spencer and Jeanne Colleran (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 77-97.

27.

Julie Stone Peters has argued that "the invocation of a global humanism is not necessarily complicit with an overwhelming hegemonic order. The acknowledgement of cross-cultural similarities may produce a coercive flattening of that which is 'foreign.' But it may also, if rightly used, produce conversations that grow into a multi-vocal political agenda: it may produce a strategic universalism . . . necessary to linking those who are committed to change, allowing them to move beyond the boundaries of a single insular neighborhood." "Intercultural Performance, Theatre Anthropology, and the Imperialist Critique: Identities, Inheritances and N ew -

194

UNA CHAUDHURI

Orthodoxies," in Imperialism and Theatre: Essays on World Theatre, Drama, and Performance, 1795-1900, ed. J. Ellen Gainor (London: Routledge, 1999), 207. 28.

For the pernicious effects of the interest that Western practitioners and scholars have taken in traditional Asian theaters, see A. J. Gunawardana, "Is It the End of History for Asia's Modern Theatres?" Theatre Research International 22, no. 1 (1993): 73-80. Gunawardana writes, "For Western scholars, Asia's pre-modern theatres are a storehouse of dramaturgical and performance resources that are either totally unknown to their own cultures or have vanished from their theatrical landscape. The traditional theatres of Asia have become a pathway to the occasionally obscure roots of theatre and performance. Asia's pre-modern theatres have been happy hunting grounds for practitioners seeking new acting techniques and presentational modes" (73).

29.

Dorrine Kondo, "Interview with David Henry Hwang," in About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theatre (New York: Routledge, 1997), 220.

30.

David Henry Hwang, "The Myth of Immutable Cultural Identity," in Asian-American Drama: Nine Plays from the Multiethnic Landscape, ed. Brian Nelson (New York: Applause, 1997), vii.

31.

For a description of that journey, see the preface to the published version of the play, entitled "Bringing Up Golden Child." David Henry Hwang, Golden Child (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998).

32.

See Marc Auge, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of

33.

Lisa Lowe, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Marking Asian

Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995), 75-115. American Differences," Diaspora 1, no. 1 (spring 1991): 24-44. 34.

One of Hwang's reasons for giving Andrew an Asian-American rather than an Anglo wife was that he "thought there was som ething lovely about Andrew's wife and Third Wife being played by the same actress, as if this unfulfilled love in the past could finally be realized in the present." David Henry Hwang, personal communication, 23 July 1998.

35.

R. Radhakrishnan, Diasporic Mediations: Between Home and Loca-

36.

Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 64.

37.

Its setting makes the play part of a surprisingly large group of recent

tions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 206.

THEATER AND COSMOPOLITANISM

195

British plays set in post-Cold War Eastern Europe. As Stanton Garner, Jr., has pointed out, the very specific cosmopolitanism of this subgenre has ironical and historical resonance: "After the demoralization of over a decade of Thatcherite Conservatism, with its attacks on the Left and its political culture, a generation of dramatists whose political voice was shaped by the radicalism of the sixties and seventies was clearly mesmerized by the unexpected spectacle of social transformation on Europe's other fringe, even as they recognized its very different ideological trajectories___As John Osborne's Look Back in Anger illustrates,. . . British dissident theatre originated in the aftermath of empire and the loss of its grand national mission. There is historical irony, then, in the image of dramatists from this post-imperial site bearing witness to the twilight and dissolution of Europe's last empire (the fact that this theatrical consumption of faraway, less-developed places may slip into its own form of cultural neo-colonialism only complicates the irony)." "Rewriting Europe: Pentecost and the Crossroads of Migration," Essays in Theatre/Etudes theatrales 16, no. 1 (November 1997): 4. 38.

Stuart Hall reminds us, "Modern theories of enunciation always oblige us to recognize that enunciation comes from somewhere. It cannot be unplaced, it cannot be unpositioned, it is always positioned in a discourse. It is when a discourse forgets that it is placed that it tries to speak everybody else___That is the moment when it m istakes itself as a universal language" (36).

39.

The angel's dramatic appearance is immediately deflated when a character reviews it as "Very Steven Spielberg!" Tony Kushner, Angels in America: Part One: Millenium Approaches (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1992), 118.

40.

Robbins, "Introduction, Part I," 1.

41.

Joseph Boone, "Go West," in Queer Frontiers (Madison: University

42.

David Roman, review of The Street of the Sun, by José Rivera,

43.

José Rivera and David Roman, "An Interview with José Rivera,"

of Wisconsin Press, forthcoming). Theatre Journal 50, no. 1 (March 1998): 95-97. Performing Arts, May 1997, 6.

This page intentionally left blank

7 COSMOPOLITAN READING K. ANTHONY APPIAH

Not long ago, I was talking to a class, as I often do, about the history of the idea of race, and I observed en passant, as I also often do, that it would be a mistake to think that Shakespeare's use of the word race involved anything like our contemporary notion. Skeptical looks all round. "Which plays of Shakespeare's," I asked, "would you look at to see whether I was right?" Well, fairly swiftly, as you might expect, they mentioned The Tempest. "But," I told them, "the very word race occurs only once in The Tempest" (drawing on an ancient memory), "and it just can't mean what we mean by it: it's used by Miranda to refer to Caliban."1 More skeptical stares. "Who is Caliban?" I asked. His mother, someone recalled, was Sycorax, a witch, who ruled the island before Prospero. "And his father?" Nobody remembered that his father wasn't hum an at all. A devil, actually "When Miranda calls Caliban a 'demi-devil,' " I said, as the sweet girl certainly does, "this is not a figure: she is speaking literally."

198

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

So then we began to discuss the play's plot and, occasionally, its language. The Tempest wasn't required reading for the class— which was, as it happens, at a law school—and I probably haven't read it properly or seen it myself for a couple of decades.2 But these were smart people, recent graduates of American colleges to a woman and man, and I found m yself taking pleasure in the prospect of reconstructing between us most of the dramatis personae, some of the plot, and a little of the language of the play. A couple of minutes into this happy season of sharing—one of those E. D. Hirsch moments, so to speak, that are supposed to define an "us" for an American "we"—one of the students interrupted. "Excuse me," she said, "but would you mind telling me what we are talking about? This play of Shakespeare's, this Tempest, what happens in it? Who are Prospero and Miranda and Caliban? W hy are they on this island?" Good questions, all of them. Which, somewhat embarrassedly, we answered for her. I was reminded of my first year's teaching in this country, and the discovery—after equally puzzled questions— that I couldn't assume familiarity with basic biblical narratives in this supposedly Judeo-Christian society. Who is this Job? What was he patient about? Really, some guy actually kissed Jesus? That kind of thing. Moments like these—we can all produce them— emblematize our classroom situation today. My student wanted to know about this play of Shakespeare's; she wasn't doubting its relevance. But she had come thus far without hearing much about it, and she was not embarrassed to admit it. I imagine that in a similar moment at, say, the Harvard law school fifty years ago, while there might well have been people who couldn't tell their Ariel from their Alonso, if anyone had thought to bring up The Tempest, it would not have been thought proper to admit to ignorance of its plot. In this gathering, a gathering of literary scholars who teach, at least sometimes, texts in English, I doubt that we could find anyone who was unable to reconstruct some of The Tempest's plot (not

COSMOPOLITAN READING

199

least because Caliban is such a figure in the field of the postcolonial). And certainly, if there is such a person, they might well feel disinclined to speak up. But if there is such a person here, I can reassure you that nothing that I am going to say from now on depends on your knowing anything about Shakespeare. To admit to your ignorance in these circumstances would be an act of moral narcissism. And the fact is that, in the ten years that I have been coming to the English Institute, I can think of very few papers that have required one to arrive with a real familiarity with any literary texts. Nothing more substantial, say, than what I have assumed about The Tempest, which, if you think about it, is almost nothing at all. Allusions, of course, are a commonplace of our style; and it is important to recognize the borrowed phrase, subtly adapted, if you are to catch all the jokes, follow all the arguments. But a detailed knowledge, let alone a settled interpretation of a play or novel or poem? Not often, not as I remember it. I suspect that some of you think you know where I am going: you expect me now to contrast the lack of a shared body of examples with the familiarity with new theory that we have now come to expect. You might even expect me to m utter something about how new theory usually means theory that was new in France fifteen years ago. But I want to go in a different direction. W hy have we talked to each other about literature, lo, these many years, while having so little shared literature to talk about? Once upon a time, at least as I imagine the fairy-tale world of the academy before I entered it, the conversation of literary academics circled back again and again to a class of reputedly central authors and texts. They were authors and texts that everyone would have read in graduate school, if not as undergraduates. Your own doctoral work, your specialty, might have focused on what used to be called a minor writer, a cottage in the landscape in which Milton

200

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

and Shakespeare had erected their palaces, or you might have traveled along the back corridors rather than through the grand vestibules of a major writer's literary edifice. But you could talk about grand themes in Shakespeare, Milton's Satan as a character, the significance of that great white American whale. It would have been discourteous in those days to refer to a work worth referring to and then to add, "a play by a seventeenth-century writer called Marlowe, in which a Jew by the name of Barabas ..." That would have been as charmless as explaining to your taxi driver that by Bill Clinton you mean the current president of the United States. Some impulses in the debates about the canon can, I think, be understood as driven by the wish to be able to have such conversations. I was going to write, "to have such conversations again," but my "once upon a time" reflects the fact that I simply do not know whether there really was once such a core on which to rely, or if there was, how widely diffused was the community that relied on it. (Certainly the critics who wrote for each other forty years ago assumed an audience that had access to this core.) One thing I know for sure, though, is that many, many more people are having conversations about literature than did so forty years ago; more people are going to college, doing doctoral degrees, and teaching literature at the college level than did then; and so a greater number of people is going out into the world after college equipped with the belief that they have learned something about literature and are entitled to speak about it. And they are reading, on trains and airplanes and beaches. Perhaps what they are reading is as uncanonical as much of our conversation at the English Institute: but it probably reflects, at least to some degree, the books on the syllabi of the colleges to which they went. And what books are those? Well, the subject matter of our conferences notwithstanding, many of them have "done" Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Austen. But they will also, many of them, have read texts in English (sometimes in translation) by writers from far-

COSMOPOLITAN READING

201

away places— places not just far away in miles (which would include England and France) but also more distant on the literary map defined by our old imaginary canons. And the reason, of course, is that those syllabi, like our institute, have been influenced by currents of critique of the older syllabus (and the older curriculum in which it was embedded) that focus on its exclusions. The creators of the old curriculum would have been surprised to learn that "exclusionary" should have been a term of critique. They meant to be exclusionary: finding the grain meant excluding the chaff. (Think of Frederick Crewe's parody of F. R. Leavis.) But, of course, the critique often opposed exclusions on grounds that the older criticism would have regarded as wildly extraliterary, un- or even anti-aesthetic, crudely political. Whatever the worth of the arguments for opening up the reading of college students— and their merits have been, to put it gently, disparate—its effect has been undeniable. Serious reading— which means, in practice, reading under the guidance and at the instance of teachers—in English departments is now more open not only (as we all know) to texts from "within" Britain and the United States by people and in genres previously unattended to, but also to texts that are, from the point of view of various traditional topographies, outside. In expanding the range of reading, we have also resisted, as I say, the appeal of hierarchies among texts: the result is that there is no ground for an argument that there are books that everyone must have read or even that books (as opposed to other systems of signs) are the ones most worth "reading." There has therefore been plenty of scope for the new spirit of inclusiveness (whose sources I do not have time to discuss) to operate in the syllabus: serious reading has also become more international (and, at the same time, more diverse in ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual orientation,3 which is what the "inclusive" impulses that lead to a more international reading produce at home). As more texts from elsewhere have entered the syllabus, we are

202

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

naturally drawn to congratulating ourselves by describing our reading practices as more cosmopolitan. I hope the end of this conference is not too late a point to make my contribution to our extended discussion of what this might mean. The figure of the cosmopolitan, if etymology is to be our guide, is, as we have regularly reminded ourselves, the image of the citizen of the world: we cosmopolitans make the whole globe our πόλι ς, our κοσμος is a community. But the world we imagine is more than a world of fellow citizens. Otherwise we should have to account all universalisms as cosmopolitan: a capitalism that aimed to produce us all as consumers of the same goods—the universalism of Mammon—or a religious evangelism that claimed us all for the one truth (God's universalism, or Allah's) would have to be paradigms of the cosmopolitan. But while cosmopolitanism is indeed about seeing yourself as belonging to a world of fellows, the cosmopolitan's fellows are living lives in their own style, and the cosmopolitan rejoices in the fact that "their" styles need not be "ours." Cosmopolitanism is, to reach a formula, universalism plus difference. It is thus one of the two possible poles of humanism: it thinks nothing hum an alien, but not because it imagines all humanity in its own image. A cosmopolitan reading practice is, presumably, one that would be apt for such a citizen. Many contemporary advocates of cosmopolitanism have focused on the fellow feeling of fellow citizens, urging on us a concern for all our fellow humans at least as substantial as a concern for our fellow citizens. We have also pointed out that we can display this concern both for our fellow citizens and for other fellow humans without demanding of them that they be or become like ourselves. And so we have insisted, like the "old French officer" in Laurence Sterne's Sentimental Journey, that "Le POUR, et le CONTRE se trouvent en chaque nation; there is a balance, said he, of good and bad every where; and nothing but the knowing it is so can emancipate one half of the world from the

COSMOPOLITAN READING

203

prepossessions which it holds against the other—that the advantage of travel, as it regarded the sgavoir vivre, [sic] was by seeing a great deal of men and manners; it taught us mutual toleration; and mutual toleration, concluded he, making me a bow, taught us mutual love."4 The new cosmopolitan reading practices are often undergirded by the same instinct: we travel in books to learn "mutual toleration," even the sympathy and concern for others— the aya^r! or caritas (if I may permit my theological upbringing to show through for a moment) that Sterne must have meant by the word love. I want to argue that the novel, the genre to which Sterne's work rather precariously belongs, has a special role to play in the extension of sympathy that Sterne was adverting to: and I begin with this English writer of the old canon writing in English but also French about a journey to France at a time when she was at war with England, to remind you at the start that the novel is cosmopolitan in its very beginnings. "Beginnings?" I imagine you asking in pectore, adopting the same skeptical look that inhabited the faces of my students. To speak of the origins of a genre is to invite questions of definition; questions that become even more substantial when you aim to take a generic term from its "home" in European letters and into an African context. My points about the cosmopolitanism of the novel will be drawn largely from some African writing that I happen both to enjoy and to admire. And that might seem to invite the question, W hy do you call these books novels? Well, despite— or perhaps because of—my philosophical training, I am not particularly a fan of attempts at definition. However exactly you decide to draw the boundaries of the genre, there are things to be said about the connections between what is inside and what is outside the boundary. If we chose to begin with Defoe and Richardson or Don Quixote or the Princesse de Cleves, there will be people who point us back to Petronius. And if we insist that the

204

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

form is essentially invented in western Europe, there will be others who point us to the Dream of the Red Chamber. I like the spirit of an observation of Randall Jarrell's to the effect that a novel is a piece of expository prose with something wrong with it. Still, however you settle these questions of genre definition, the fact remains that the word novel was first applied to a piece of subSaharan African writing only in this century (sub-Saharan, I write, remembering that Apuleius was an African and that the canonical story of Cupid and Psyche is, as Carol Gilligan has recently taught me, an African old wives' tale). What we now call African novels have almost all been published since World War II by people whose introduction to the very idea of the novel came from reading French and English novels in the course of a colonial (and latterly a postcolonial) education. There is much to be said about the relations between these African novels in English and French and Portuguese and earlier forms of language art: Chinua Achebe has always insisted on his debt to the storytelling of one of his aunts, whose style was nourished by Igbo traditions. But he is also the first to insist how much he owes to his reading of an English literary tradition, to the forms of the realist novel, and to the language of the King James translation of the Christian Bible. And, famously, he has seen as one of his tasks the unwriting of the Africa of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. There are a few candidates for being the first African novel in English before Achebe's Things Fall Apart: as a Ghanaian, I suppose I would put in a plug for J. E. Casley Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound, which was published earlier in the century; and I think it can certainly count as a novel if Tristram Shandy does. (But then almost anything can count as a novel if Tristram Shandy does: you can't think playful formal experimentation in the novel is what distinguishes modernism and postmodernism unless you've only read nineteenth-century realism. It is, as Jameson has always insisted, the "social functionality"5 of these formal features that differentiates them.)6

COSMOPOLITAN READING

205

So far in fact as novels in English go, I can claim to have grown up with the African novel, then, since Achebe's first novel—which is, emblematically, number one in the Heinemann African Writers' Library, the canon of modern African writing in English—was published after my birth, and was one of the very first works of adult fiction that I read. These early novels of the 1950s and 1960s are widely seen as sharing certain fundamental traits: they are preoccupied with the construction, against the colonial and early postcolonial background, as Achebe has often said, of a "usable past," an account of African traditions that lifts them up in the face of their derogation by the colonizers. Precisely because the authors of these novels were masters of French or of English, they came from the class of colonially educated Africans, whose intensive exposure to a Westernstyle education made them particularly aware of the framing disrespect for their own peoples and histories that informed a frankly racist Western understanding: if they were not to succumb to an inferiority complex, they had to seek to understand the historical identities of their own people in a way that ran counter to their educations. And that is what they did. Paradoxically, therefore, the exploration of an African past was also a forward-looking nationalist gesture. And these early novels, despite their obvious respect for African traditions, are the works of confident modernizing intellectuals. It is also widely agreed that this first wave of novels was followed pretty swiftly by a series of works reflecting the disillusion that followed the enormous confidence and enthusiasm of the decades around independence. With the exception of the white settler societies in southern Africa, almost all of sub-Saharan Africa achieved independence between the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, with a great number of independences occurring in the early 1960s. Within a short while, with the growth of political intolerance in Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana, the first military coups, and the disappointing performance of the political class that inherited the

206

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

colonial state, writers who had been nationalist modernizers began to write novels of a second stage, both in English and French, that reflected a growing disillusion. That process is already clear in the work of Yambo Ouologuem's brilliant novel Le Devoir de violence/ but the disillusion has continued, and you will find it still in the work of more recent anglophone writers as well, in, for example, the extraordinary novel The Famished Road of the Anglo-Nigerian writer Ben Okri.8 Both Okri and Ouologuem have written novels that are in many ways formally quite postmodern looking. Ouologuem's use of pastiche, for example, and his borrowing and echoing of a wide range of French writing; or what some have called the "magic realism" of Okri's novel, and the modernist difficulty of his prose. And these are not particularly surprising features in the writing of someone like Ouologuem who wrote as a student at the Ecole Normale in Paris; or of Okri, who lives and works in London in the literary world of metropolitan postcoloniality. If the disillusion was rooted in African social and political experience, there is no doubt that the strategies of narration were borrowed eclectically from a wider world than Africa. This history and these exemplars should do to establish my first point: the African novel, at least as it has been produced for us cosmopolitan readers in Europe and North America, does not come from some faraway place "outside" "our" "West." They were written by readers of English, French, and American novels, raised with a colonial canon in which, to put the matter crudely, narrative is the short story or the novel and literariness is something you learn about, in the anglophone world, by reading English Romantic poetry. If we read them in a cosmopolitan spirit, voyaging to expand our knowledge of "men and manners" elsewhere, we must recognize that the form in which our travel comes is not the moment of the first encounter, an ethnographic ground zero, but is rather the literary equivalent of the safari: the world we meet here

COSMOPOLITAN READING

207

was made for readers who know Sterne or Austen or Conrad, not in the sense that we are its imagined audience, but because it is the narrative forms inherited from the tradition that produced those writers that have been taken up to represent an African reality. I have said before that cosmopolitanism of the sort I would care to defend admits to enjoying tourism :9 "safari" is not, in my mouth, a term of condescension. Let me dig myself deeper (though I hope that this doesn't become a focus of discussion): I do not believe there is anything intrinsically wrong with the safari. But we do need to be clear when we travel in the cosmopolitan spirit, the spirit that celebrates and respects difference, that sometimes the ease with which we find ourselves taking pleasure in that difference—the cosmopolite's jouissance— reflects the fact that it has been produced in forms we have learned chez nous. I am going to turn in a moment to an African novel. In the world I have described, you will understand why I shall have to spend a little time writing about it as if you have not read it: let me apologize in advance to those who have. I want to use the novel to explore the possibilities of a cosmopolitan reading: and, since you are used to the moralism of philosophy, it will not surprise you that some of those conclusions will be ethical. I am going, in fact, to give an account of the novel as a form that explains why it is possible—even, I shall suggest, desirable—that we should attend to novels morally, while at the same time holding on to some of the insights of philosophical postmodernism. Since those insights are usually constructed as a critique of Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment is one of the sources of contemporary cosmopolitanism, I may seem, in accepting the postmodern critique, to be putting my cosmopolitanism at risk. But I am going to urge us to see the novel as a testing ground for a distinction between cosmopolitanism, with its emphasis on dialogue among differences, and a different more monological form of humanism: both of these traditions have Enlightenment roots, but

208

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

I am going to urge on us an acceptance, in the face of postmodern arguments, of the more dialogical universalism, which I am going to claim is the heart of cosmopolitanism. And so, to the text. "I was not sorry when my brother died."10 This is the first sentence of a Zimbabwean novel, whose author is described in these words on the back of my American edition: "Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Tsitsi Dangarembga studied medicine and psychology before turning to writing full-time. In addition to Nervous Conditions, she has written a play entitled She No Longer Weeps. Any contemporary reading of this first sentence is bound to be conditioned by the fact that its first-person protagonist is a women. The meaning of a sister who is not saddened by her brother's death is different from the meaning of a brother who is in the same way careless. You will probably find that your reading of the sentence is conditioned, too, by the thought that its author is an African woman, writing in the latter half of the twentieth century: for this will mean that you draw on a "knowledge" that women are not well treated in Africa, so that a sister's hatred for her brother— W hat else but hatred could justify such callousness?—is perhaps in these circumstances more natural than a brother's would be. Reactions such as these are plainly anticipated by our author. For the next few sentences read: N or am I apologizing for m y callousness, as yo u m ay define it, m y lack of feeling. For it is not that at all. I feel m any things these days, m uch more than I was able to feel in the days w hen I was y ou n g and m y brother died, and there are reasons for this more than the consequence of age. Therefore I shall not apologize but begin by recalling the facts as I remember them that led up to m y brother's death, the ev en ts that put m e in a p o sitio n to w rite th is account. For thou gh the event of m y brother's passing and the events of m y

COSMOPOLITAN READING

209

story cannot be separated, m y story is not after all about death, but about m y escape and Lucia's; about m y m other's and Maiguru's entrapment; and about N yasha's rebellion— N yasha, far-minded and isolated, m y uncle's daughter, w hose rebellion m ay not in the end have been successful. I was thirteen years old w hen m y brother died. It happened in

1968. (1) Let me ask the obvious question: Who is the reader who "may define" our protagonist as callous? For that, I think, will tell something about the space of operations of the novel. But to answer this question I must say a little more about our protagonist and her story. Our protagonist is Tambudzai—Tambu for short—and we learn swiftly that her uncle is headmaster of the Mission school in Umtali, to which he has taken her brother for his education. There her brother learns to despise the village, just as he had learned in the village to despise his sisters. Understanding that her brother's education is a way out and up, and knowing her uncle's wife, Maiguru—who has, like her husband, completed her education abroad—Tambu begins to ask her father why she, too, cannot be educated. He replies, "Can you cook books and feed them to your husband ?"(16). And Tambu goes to complain to her mother: "Baba says I do not need to be educated," I told her scornfully. "He says I m ust learn to be a good wife. Look at Maiguru," I continued, unaware h ow viciously. "She is a better w ife than you." M y m other was too old to be disturbed b y m y childish nonsense. She tried to d iffu se so m e o f it b y tellin g m e m a n y thin gs, b y explaining how m y father was right because even M aiguru knew how to cook and clean and grow vegetables. "This business of w o m anhood is a heavy burden," she said. "How could it not be? Aren't w e the ones w ho bear children? W hen it is like that you can't just decided [sic] today I want to do this, tomorrow I want to do that, the

210

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

n ext day I w ant to be educated! W h en there are sacrifices to be made, yo u are the one w ho has to make them . A nd these things are not easy; you have to start learning them early, from a very early age. The earlier the better so that it is easy later on. Easy! A s if it is ever easy. A nd these days it is worse, w ith the poverty of blackness on one side and the w eight of wom anhood on the other. Aiwa! W hat w ill help you , m y child, is to learn to carry y ou r burdens w ith strength." (16)

But Tambu is not persuaded, preferring to ask for seed to grow maize to sell at the market, so that she can pay the fees that her father will not pay. This struggle for learning is transformed when her brother is carried away by some unspecified disease. There being no other brothers, education into a Western modernity is suddenly available to Tambu, the oldest girl. The situation is very clearly set up: the brother's death is the condition of the sister's emancipation. From now on we watch as Tambu, grateful to her Western-educated uncle for her transformation from a peasant girl to an educated "sophisticate," struggles to integrate the moral order of her village upbringing with a constantly growing sense of the injustice of her position as a woman. This developing awareness is driven not only by her own experience but by the lives of the women around her: her mother, fatalistic and self-giving; her uncle's wife, an educated woman, frustrated by her husband's inability to respect her opinions; her mother's sister, an adult woman who follows her own way, negotiating between Tambu's father and her lover. And through this process of discovery Tambu is guided by her cousin, Nyasha, whose experiences in England (where both her parents acquired their postgraduate degrees) have forever alienated her vision: Nyasha rejects the absoluteness of her father's claims ťo authority; insists on reading what she wants—including, emblematically, Lady Chatterley's Lover; believes that her educated mother is wasting herself as the helpmeet of her domineering father. Yet

COSMOPOLITAN READING

211

Nyasha's resistance has a price: in her search for bodily perfection (conceived of in a most unShona way in terms of an ideal of thinness) she becomes first bulimic and then anorexic, ending up in the hands of a white psychiatrist in Salisbury, where "with the aid of doses of Largactil and the practical attention of her aunts who lived in the city, my cousin's condition improved" (202). Tambu's mother, Mainini, has a diagnosis: "It's the Englishness," she said. "It'll kill them all if they aren't careful," and she snorted. "Look at them . That b oy Chido can barely speak a word of his ow n mother's tongue, and you 'll see, his children w ill be worse. R unning around w ith that w hite one, isn't he, the m issionary's daughter? His children w ill disgrace us. You'll see. A nd himself, to look at him he m ay look all right, but there's no te llin g w hat price he's paying." She w ou ld n 't say m uch about N yasha. "About that one w e don't even speak. It's speaking for itself. Both of them , it's the Englishness. It's a w onder it hasn't affected the parents too." (202-3)

The anxiety that her mother may be right worries Tambu for a few days. True, she has triumphed again, receiving one of the two places in the highly competitive (and largely white) convent school of the Sacred Heart, where she is being trained by the nuns. And she enjoys its challenges, is looking forward to returning. But she has days of bad dreams, about her dead brother, and about Nyasha and Nyasha's brother, who have both "succumbed" to Englishness. Finally, however, she "banishes" the suspicion that Englishness will place her, too, in a nervous condition. I was y o u n g then and able to banish things, but seeds do grow. A lthough I was not aware of it then, no longer could I accept Sacred Heart and w hat it represented as a sunrise on m y horizon. Quietly, unobtrusively and extrem ely fitfully, som ething in m y m ind began to assert itself, to question thin gs and refuse to be brainwashed,

212

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

bringing m e to this tim e w hen I can set down this story. It was a long and painful process for me, that process of expansion. It was a process w h o se events stretched over m an y years and w ould fill another volum e, but the story I have told here, is m y ow n story, the story of four w om en w hom I loved, and our men, this story is how it all began. (203-4)

And so the novel ends. I can return now to the question, Who is the "you" addressed in the first paragraph of the novel, the you who is expected to judge Tsitsi Dangarembga's protagonist "callous"? The usual answer, of course, is that the postcolonial African novel is addressed to a Western reader. Here, that is, according to the usual narrative, is a safari moment: an Africa constructed exactly for the moral tourist. There are many issues here to disentangle. We can concede that most postcolonial African novels are published, like Dangarembga's, by British, French, and American publishers, and appear through the filter of a Western editing and selection. (Alice Walker, whose comments appear on the back cover of the book, is not white, of course, but she is Western.) But to proceed further here requires an approach to reading; and let me admit that my own is, frankly, pragmatist. I do not know how to answer the question of how a text is addressed, except as the question how productive it is to read it as addressed to one reader rather than another, how assuming different readers opens up ways of understanding it. And so I will say that there is, in this case, a good deal that we will miss in our reading of Dangarembga's novel if we treat it as addressed to a "Western" reader. First of all, at the most basic level, Dangarembga's novel does not have the telltale marks of the author addressing an Other from Elsewhere. The Shona words used, the Shona titles assumed by various members of the family, the food, the greetings: none of them bears an explanatory gloss. Indeed, the author goes to con-

COSMOPOLITAN READING

213

siderable lengths to make it plain that her protagonist, far from addressing a Western Other, is not even particularly at ease with that Other. "Another thing that was different about the mission was that there were many white people there." So begins chapter 6. And later on the same page: Today there are fewer w hite people on the m ission. T h ey are called expatriates, not missionaries, and can be seen living in unpainted brick houses. But they are deified in the same w ay as the m issio n aries w ere because th ey are w hite so that their com ing is still an honour. I am told that w hether y o u are called an expatriate or a m issio n a ry depends on h o w and b y w h o m y o u w ere recruited. A lthough the distinction was told to m e by a reliable source, it does not stick in m y mind since I have not observed it m yself in m y dealings w ith these people. (303)

These are not the words of a character talking to an Other; indeed, though the author's irony here presupposes a reader who knows how to use the words expatriate and missionary—and thus, I think, draws attention to the possibility that it will be read by a white reader—this passage is in no way friendly to that reader. If a reader who is one of these "white people" is acknowledged here, it is not directly by the protagonist but indirectly by the author. Second, and equally importantly, the novel, though naturally read as a bildungsroman, fails to observe certain elementary conventions of that Euro-American genre: it stops, for example, as we have seen, at a moment when the protagonist is still in the midst of changes, at a point when Tambu the character, living in the 1970s under the rebel regime of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in what was then Rhodesia, and Tambu the narrator, our contemporary, do not yet have a single vision. (The novel also stops without achieving narrative closure: it offers no answer to the question, W hat happens to Nyasha? as if, somehow, that is not our business.) Despite the first-person mode and the thematic of

2U

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

education, what we are watching is not the formation of a single self but the development of a community, and fundamentally, of a community of women. The final sentence is only half true. This is, indeed, "the story of four women whom I loved"; but it is only derivatively, only barely, a tale of "our men." And third, and finally, so it seems to me, the central moral issue of the book— the question of how the postcolonial W esterneducated woman and her sisters, daughters, mothers and aunts, peasants or workers, wage earners or wives, shall together find ways to create meaningful lives, escaping the burdens of their oppression as women, but also as black people, as peasants, and as workers—is not an issue that directly concerns Euro-American readers, whether women or men, because this question is so richly embedded in a context from which such readers are alien. What marks this central issue as one in which a reader like Alice Walker is an observer rather than a participant is that the text assumes that these concerns, which arise from that situation, are shared in an immediate and concrete way between the protagonist and her silent and invisible hearer. Nevertheless, and this is a crucial point, while not specifically addressed to a Western readership, or at least not so addressed in the normal ways, the problems of racial and gender equity the text raises are not in any way unfamiliar to us. Nor does Dangarembga ever suggests that her readers—whoever they may be— should judge her life by standards different from their own: despite the distancing of her first paragraph— "Nor am I apologizing for my callousness, as you may define it"— she does not presuppose that she lives in a separate moral sphere. She challenges us to hear the story that leads up to her brother's death because she believes that once we have heard it, we shall not find her callous or unfeeling. In terms of the opposition I suggested earlier between a homogenizing or monological universalism and the dialogical universality of cosmopolitanism, in fact, you might suppose at first that Dangarembga is here on the anticosmopolitan side. Shouldn't we

COSMOPOLITAN READING

215

read her as appealing implicitly to universal feminist values, for example, in her implicit critique of Shona patriarchy, or to universal rights in her rejection of Rhodesian racism? I don't think so. Her mother, we can agree, is certainly not making a cosmopolitan argument. The Englishness is, after all, otherness as disease, a nervous condition. W hat Nyasha's mother, Mainini, is defending is a form of nativism.11 Englishness, in Mainini's view, is wrong for Nyasha because she is Shona. Mainini has no quarrel with Englishness for the English. Englishness for her is not only out of place in her niece, it is also boring. But the novel doesn't endorse— I might rather fussily say "isn't best read as endorsing"—that interpretation of things: our protagonist seems to have found a way of accepting her Europeanstyle education and remaining connected with her Shona identity: she seems, in fact, exactly the image of the cosmopolitan, secure in her difference, but also open to the difference of others. If we read Nervous Conditions as a cosmopolitan gesture, it returns to us from its pages an equally cosmopolitan gaze. Nervous Conditions raises, that is, within its pages a debate between two responses to Englishness (which we have the unfamiliar experience of having to treat as a figure for otherness), one cosmopolitan, the other nativist. But the novel also raises exactly the problems of universalism and relativism that are to be found in much recent philosophy in these parts. If Tambu isn't relying on feminist principles or on universal rights, is she perhaps relying on Shona values of some sort, drawn from her village life and the traditions of her people? And if so, how are we to situate ourselves in relation to those traditions? Should we, after the m anner of Sterne's French officer, just recognize the pro and the con of each nation, developing tolerance for other ways of going on? Our way into these questions must start by situating the skepticism that grounds so many recent antiuniversalist gestures. We are all familiar with the skeptical antiuniversalism of Dick Rorty, undergirded as it is by what he calls "ironism," the acknowledgment of

216

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

the historical contingency of our own central beliefs and desires— what he calls our "final vocabulary"—combined with "radical and continuing doubts" about our own starting points. I think we all recognize in this ironism a pretty regular feature of the contemporary academy even if it is also as well to remember that the world is full of people (inside the university as well as outside) whose doubts, if any, about the grounding of their own moral positions are, to put it mildly, far from manifest. R orty's ironism is grounded in the experience of being "impressed by other vocabularies ... taken as final by people or books" one has encountered and the conviction that nothing in his own final vocabulary can either "underwrite or dissolve" these doubts, because his vocabulary is no closer to reality than anyone else's.12 It is grounded, then, in a skeptical response to every exposure to those other nations with which the cosmopolitan venture begins. This skeptical antiuniversalism is not, of course, just Rorty's: it is reflected in Lyotard's m eta-narrative of the end of m etanarratives and, in my view, in the formal fragmentation of postmodern literary texts. All of these moves have been glossed in various ways as rejections of Enlightenment. And in such a context an older humanism, with the notion of a human essence, a human nature, that grounds the universality of human rights, has indeed come to seem to many simply preposterous. But the argum ent here has not always managed to avoid muddle. A critique of Enlightenment on Rorty's grounds— one that combines antirealism in metaphysics and skepticism in epistemology—has been combined, dare I say, inconsistently with a critique whose foundations are, so to speak, "plus universaliste que le roi." Often, that is, attacks on something called "Enlightenm ent humanism" have been attacks not on the universality of Enlightenment pretensions but on the Eurocentrism of their real bases: Hume's or Kant's or Hegel's inability to imagine that a "Negro" could achieve anything in the sphere of "arts and letters"

COSMOPOLITAN READING

217

is objectionable not because it is hum anist or universalist but because it is neither. A large part of the motivation for this recent antiuniversalism has been a conviction that past universalism was a projection of European values and interests: this is a critique grounded in the idea that the actually existing Enlightenment was not enlightened, not in the notion that Enlightenment was the wrong project. If you want, as I do, to hold on to the idea that the ethnocentrism of the Enlightenment was wrong, but still share the radical and continuing doubts of Rorty's ironist, you must find a different response than his to the cosmopolitan experience of being "impressed by other vocabularies." I prefer, that is, to speak with the Enlightenment: to think of dialogue—all dialogue, not just the dialogue across nations that cosmopolitans favor— as a shared search for truth and justice. But the justification for that way of thinking must come in what it yields (I share Rorty's pragmatism, here). So before I come to my own solution, I will acknowledge that some of what it will yield will be yielded too by Rorty's approach. At the end of his essay "Justice as a Larger Loyalty," Rorty writes, "I think that discarding the residual rationalism that we inherit from the Enlightenment is advisable for many reasons. Some of these are theoretical and of interest only to philosophy professors__ Others are more practical. One practical reason is that getting rid of rationalistic rhetoric would permit the West to approach the non-West in the role of someone with an instructive story to tell, rather than in the role of someone purporting to be making better use of a universal human capacity."13 The "universal human capacity" in question is "reason": and what Rorty wants "us" to do in "our" dialogue with the "non-West," rather than trying to show them that our "Western" use of the universal capacity of reason has revealed more truths and a better way to live, is to suggest instead that among our "shared beliefs and desires there may be enough resources to permit agreement on how to coexist

218

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

w ithout violence" (55). That, then, is Rorty's proposal. I shall return to it after sketching my own. Dangarembga's part of the world is different from yours and from mine, but it engages our moral attention, showing us the "balance of good and bad" in a particular position, engaging our sympathy. In the past, in a humanist narrative, this would have been glossed as the discovery of our common humanity: and a cosmopolitan reading would then have been defended in that tradition as a source of insight into our common humanity: "Yes, they are different and we rejoice in that: but we can rejoice in it, in the end, only because it is human difference." (Strains of the "Ode to Joy" in the background here . . . "Alle Menschen werden Brüder," und so weiter.) This— I agree with Rorty here—is the wrong conclusion. To find the right one, let me begin by filling in the caricature of the view that we have both rejected. On that older view, there was an objective human nature: there were objective needs and interests, grounded in both our animal and our rational natures, and it was in these common natures that our common human rights were somehow based. The task one faced, then, in addressing a society other than one's own—a people whose moral views were Other— was to point out to them that common nature and show how it grounded these moral claims. Principles were universal: what was local was their application. This was a form of moral realism, the view that the universe, not human sentiment, determines what is right and good. And for the moral realist, of course, if the universe is on my side, it will naturally be opposed to those Others who disagree with me. Many problems have been identified over the years with this project. One was that it appeared to commit what G. E. Moore dubbed the "naturalistic fallacy," the mistake Hume purportedly identified in trying to derive an "ought" from an "is," confusing facts and values, the True and the Good. After two centuries of Humean philosophy we are now being urged from many philo-

COSMOPOLITAN READING

219

sophical directions to give up the fact-value opposition and accept some form of moral realism. Moral facts, on these views, are in as good a shape as facts about the birds and the bees. Rorty seems to want to go the other way here, giving up the idea that the universe determines what the facts are, so that values are in no worse shape than facts. This is a philosopher's debate that I have a stake in. About this I think he is wrong. But the debates over realism about the True and the Good carry no special weight in the context of a dialogue between Rorty's "West" and the "non-West." If the naturalistic fallacy is a mistake, then the old humanist argument is a bad foundation for belief in human rights, even within the West. "Of course," the hum anist will agree, "if my moral realism is mistaken, I have no argument to make to these Others for the correctness of my views; but that is because, if moral realism is incorrect, nobody has any reason to believe in human rights, not even me." I believe the real problem for dialogue across societies arises even if moral realism is correct: it arises for debate about all topics, moral and not. And if the position I am caricaturing as the older hum anism had ever seriously faced real other societies, a less purely theoretical problem—a problem of interest to more than philosophers—would have reared its ugly head. I happen to believe that there is such a thing as a universal human biology, that there is a biological human nature. I would say, for example, that it is defined by the more than 99 percent of our genes that we all share, by the fact that our closest common ancestor lived about 100,000 years ago. Such central events as the old triad of "birth, copulation, and death" are in obvious ways reflections of that biology. So I don't think what's wrong with the older argument is the appeal to a human essence. The problem that becomes clear in real cases is that the interests that people have in virtue of our shared biology do not exist outside their symbolic contexts. We give birth not to organisms but to kin; we copulate not with other bodies but with lovers and spouses;

220

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

and the end of the organic life has a meaning that depends crucially not only on questions of fact—Is there a life beyond?—but also on questions of value— Do we have, in our society, the notion of a life that is in some sense completed? A shared biology, a natural hum an essence, does not give us, in the relevant sense, a shared ethical nature. And once you enter into a genuine dialogue with people who hold views other than your own about these matters, you are going to discover that there is no non-question-begging way of settling on a basis of facts, w hether moral or nonmoral, from which to begin to discuss. There are no guaranteed foundations. It does no good here to say, with the moral realist, that whether we can persuade people of the correctness of our view of the good for them is a separate issue from whether our view is correct. I too think that is right; but that is, so far, just a theoretical question, an issue for philosophers. Making that distinction does not free us from the problem I am trying to delineate, which is, as I want to insist, a practical problem. In real life, ethical judgments are intimately tied up with metaphysical and religious belief and with beliefs about the natural order. And these are matters about which agreement may be difficult to achieve. (It's hard to persuade people there are no quarks or no witches.) Real dialogue will quickly get stymied in these circumstances because interlocutors who disagree at this level are likely to treat each other's claims as "merely hypothetical," and are thus not likely to engage with them seriously. The result is that if we in fact take up dialogue across gaps of belief, experience, imagination, or desire, we will end up unable to find real agreements at the level of principle—Tambu in Dangarembga's novel and I do not have the same account of what is wrong with the treatment of her mother by her father; and, more than this, we shall often end up failing to agree not about principle but about what is to be done. A disagreement of principle about why we should save this child from drowning does not practically

COSMOPOLITAN READING

221

have to be resolved, if in fact we agree that the child must be saved. But what if you believe that the child is meant to die because an ancestor has called her, and I do not? What novels like Dangarembga's demonstrate, however, is that something was wrong with the original picture of how dialogue should be grounded. It was based on the idea that we must find points of agreement at the level of principle: here is human nature, here is what human nature dictates. W hat we learn from these novels is that we can identify points of agreement that are much more local and contingent than this. We can agree, for example, that what happens to Nyasha, the thing we call anorexia, is bad: that it would be better if it had not happened; that part of what is wrong with what happens to her is that she ends up in a hospital. We can agree, in fact, with many moments of judgment in many novels, even if we do not share the framework within which those judgments are made, even if we cannot identify a framework, even if there are no principles articulated at all. And to the extent that we have problems finding our way into novels, they can occur just as easily with the novel round the corner as they do with novels from far away. Rorty doesn't notice this, I think, because he supposes that debates within the West are different from debates across a Western non-Western divide. And that is because he believes—as his provocative articulation of his position as "ethnocentrism" suggests—that something called Western culture (Rorty's "we," without qualification, is almost always "the West") does for conversations within the West what the universe was supposed to do for my humanist. For Rorty, what he calls "Western culture," historically contingent as it may be, is what "we" all share; it is the sea "we" navigate together, the air "we" all breathe. I have managed to speak until now of cosmopolitanism and of reading without using the word culture, except twice in the last few sentences to invoke a notion that Rorty uses, which brings the word in only in quotation marks. And I have been able to do so

222

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

because I have become increasingly convinced that culture, like the luminiferous ether of nineteenth-century physics, doesn't do much work. I wrote above, "Dangarembga's part of the world is different from yours and from mine," and perhaps you thought this was just a periphrastic way of saying that she has one culture, and you and I have another. Perhaps this is true. But then it is also true of Sterne's part of the world, of Alice Walker's, of Ouologuem's, or Okri's, or Shakespeare's. Treating inter-national difference, between what Rorty called "the West" and "the non-West," as a specially profound kind of something called "cultural difference" is, in my view, a specially profound and characteristically modern mistake. I reread Sentimental Journey as I was thinking about what to say today, and it struck me as a much stranger book than Dangarembga's; it was harder work, it needed more footnotes, there were more sentences I had to read twice. The sexual politics of Sterne's casual libertinage (the libertinage, I should remind you, of a priest of the Church of England) is stranger to me than anything in Chinua Achebe's gender politics. How does it help, in these circumstances, to speak of W estern culture as something that undergirds a reading "here" of Sterne? It would be a long task to think through why we have come to invoke "culture" as the name for the gap between us here and them there. But we should acknowledge how much our sense of "th em "— the Shona of Dangarembga's narrative, the Igbo of Achebe's—is the product of a disciplinary artifact. Anthropology, our source of narratives of otherness, has a professional bias toward difference. Who would want to go out for a year of fieldwork in the bush to announce, They do so many things just as we do? We don't hear about cross-cultural sameness for the same reason we don't hear about all those noncarcinogenic substances in our environment: sameness is the null result. I want to defend a kind of cosmopolitanism—but not as the name for a dialogue among static, closed cultures, each of which is

COSMOPOLITAN READING

223

internally homogenous and different from all the others. If we are going to do cultural studies, let us at least do it without cultures. The humanism I have caricatured was right in thinking that what we share is important. But it was wrong, I think, about what we share. Far from relying on a common understanding of our common human nature or a common articulation (through principles) of a moral sphere, we respond to Dangarembga's narrative with shared judgments about particular cases. We readers in our settings are able to find many moments where we share with novels from different settings a sense that something has gone right or gone wrong. What we find in the novel, which is always a message in a bottle from some other position, even if it was written and published last week in your hometown, derives not from a theoretical understanding of us as having a commonly understood common nature—not, then, from an understanding that we (readers and writers) all share—but from an invitation to respond in imagination to narratively constructed situations. In short, what makes the cosmopolitan experience possible—in reading as elsewhere—is not that we share beliefs and values because of our common capacity for reason: in the novel, at least, it is not "reason" but a different human capacity that grounds our sharing: namely, the grasp of a narrative logic that allows us to construct the world to which our imaginations respond. That capacity is to be found up the Amazon, the Mississippi, the Congo, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers, just as it is found on the banks of the Avon and the Dordogne. I am insisting on agreement about particulars rather than about universais and on the role of the narrative imagination in our response to Dangarembga's novel, then, because I see them as neglected elements in our accounts of our responses to all fiction. I do not deny that agreement about universais occurs, too. Nor do I agree with Rorty that the gift for narrative is the only one, or the most important one, that we share. Here is a point, in fact, where our disagreement about rationalism makes a difference: for

224

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

"rationalistic rhetoric" claims that in all encounters human beings are struggling with similar mental apparatus to understand a single world. Not only do I believe, unlike Rorty, that this is just how things are, I think, despite Rorty, that thinking this way helps in disagreements with others, w hether those others are down the street today or across oceans or centuries from ourselves. Rorty supposes that the rationalist is bound to think that "we" are right and "they" are wrong: but if there is one world only, then it is also possible that they might be right. We can only learn from each other's stories, if we share both hum an capacities and a single world: relativism about either is a reason not to converse but to fall silent. Rorty wants to speak to others, to enlarge our "Western" sympathies: discarding what he calls our "residual rationalism" strikes me as no help in this project we share. Even on pragmatist grounds, he ought, I think, to be on my side. Cosmopolitan reading presupposes a world in which novels (and music and sculptures and other significant objects) travel between places where they are understood differently, because people are different and welcome to their difference. Cosmopolitan reading is worthwhile because there can be common conversations about these shared objects, the novel prom inent among them. Cosmopolitan reading is possible because those conversations are possible. But what makes the conversations possible is not always shared culture (though, if the word culture is to be kept for anything, there will no doubt be shared cultures, and conversations based on them); not even, as the older humanists imagined, universal principles or values (though sometimes people from far away can discover that their principles meet); nor shared understanding (though sometimes people with very different experiences end up agreeing about the darndest things). W hat is necessary to read novels across gaps of space, time, and experience is the capacity to follow a narrative and conjure a world: and that,

COSMOPOLITAN READING

225

it turns out, there are people everywhere more than willing to do. The cosmopolitan agenda focuses on conversations among places: but the case for those conversations applies for conversations among cities, regions, classes, genders, races, sexualities, across all the dimensions of difference. For we do learn something about humanity in responding to the worlds people conjure with words in the narrative framework of the novel: we learn about the extraordinary diversity of human responses to our world and the myriad points of intersection of those various responses. If there is a critique of the Enlightenm ent to be made, it is not that the philosophes believed in human nature, or the universality of reason: it is rather that they were so dismally unimaginative about the range of what we have in common. NOTES 1.

Abhorred slave, Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race— Though thou didst learn— had that in't which good natures Cannot abide to be with. — The Tempest, I.ii.350-59 This is Miranda's first speech to Caliban.

2.

Since I once played Prospero and went to most of the rehearsals, when I was a teenager I knew most of the text by heart.

3.

I am skeptical about the idea that what we are bringing in, when we read texts by African Americans or Native Americans or immigrants or gay people, is diverse "cultures": so I have avoided the word m ulticultural here, which is the usual shorthand for this diversity of identities. See m y "The Multicultural Misunderstanding," N ew York Review of Books 44, no. 15 (October 9,1997): 30-36; excerpted

226

K. ANTHONY APPIAH

as ‫״‬The Multicultural Mistake," Utne Reader, no. 85 (January/ February 1998): 24-27. 4.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental ]ourney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 62-63.

5.

"High modernism, whatever its overt political content, was oppositional and marginal within a middle-class Victorian or philistine or gilded age culture. Although postmodernism is equally offensive in all the respects enumerated (think of punk rock or pornography), it is no longer at all 'oppositional' in that sense; indeed, it constitutes the very dominant or hegemonic aesthetic of consumer society itself and significantly serves the latter's commodity production as a virtual laboratory of new forms and fashions. The argument for a conception of postmodernism as a periodizing category is thus based on the presupposition that, even if all the formal features enumerated above were already present in the older high modernism, the very significance of those features changes when they become a cultural dominant with a precise socio-economic functionality." Frederic Jameson, The Ideologies of Theory: Essays, 1971-1986, vol 2, Syntax and History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 195-96.

6.

Modern francophone African literature begins, it is true, with the rise of the Negritude movement in the decades before World War II, but Negritude's first decades produced almost exclusively poetry; and René Maran's Batouala, which was certainly set in Africa and written by a black man, was the work of a citizen of the French Antilles. It is Camara Laye's L'Enfant Noir that seems to many the starting point of the modern African novel in French, and that too is a product of the postwar period.

7.

Yambo Ouologuem, Le Devoir de violence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1968); translated by Ralph Mannheim as Bound to Violence (London: Heinemann Educational Books, 1968).

8.

Ben Okri, The Famished Road (New York: Doubleday, Nan A. Talese, 1992). See m y review, "Spiritual Realism," Nation 255, no. 4 (1992): 146-48; reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism (Chicago: Gale Research, 1995).

9.

"Cosmopolitan Patriots," Critical Inquiry 23 (spring 1997): 617-39. Reprinted in Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, eds., Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (Minneapolis: University

COSMOPOLITAN READING

227

of Minnesota Press, 1998), 91-114. The remark about tourism is on page 91. 10.

Tsitsi Dangarembga, N ervous Conditions (New York: The Seal Press, 1989), 1.

11.

Nativism, like cosmopolitanism, is friendly to difference; but it is unlike cosmopolitanism in being antiuniversalist.

12.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 73.

13.

Richard Rorty, "Justice as a Larger Loyalty," in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 57.

This page intentionally left blank

CONTRIBUTORS

is professor of Afro-American Studies and philosophy at Harvard University. His contributions to philosophy include Assertion and Conditionals (1985), For Truth in Semantics (1986), and Necessary Questions (1989). His cultural criticism is collected in In M y Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (1992), and he is the coauthor, with Amy Gutmann, of Color Conscious: The Political Morality of Race (1996). He has coedited, with Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Michael Vazquez, The Dictionary of Global Culture (1996); and, with Gates, Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience (1999) and the Microsoft Encarta Africana 2000 (1999). Among his novels are Avenging Angels (1990), Nobody Likes Letitia (1994), and Another Death in Venice (1995). K w a m e A n t h o n y A p p ia h

is professor of English and Chair of the Department of Drama at New York University. She is the author of No Man's Stage: A Semiotic Study of Jean Genet's Plays (1986) and Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama (1996). She has coedited two forthcoming books, Theatre and Landscape: Views of the Twentieth Century and Rachel's Brian and Other Storms: Performance-Scripts of Rachel Rosenthal. Her articles have appeared in Theatre Journal Modern Drama, and Theater, and she has served as the guest editor of Theater's special issue Theater and Ecology. U na C haudhuri

teaches in the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the coeditor, with Bruce Robbins, P eng C heah

230

CONTRIBUTORS

of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998), and has coedited two issues of Diacritics, on Luce Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference (with Elizabeth Grosz), and on the work of Benedict Anderson (with Jonathan Culler). His articles on critical theory, human rights, and culture in neocolonial globalization have appeared in Diacritics, boundary 2, and Public Culture. He is currently working on a book on spectral nationality and a collection of essays on global financialization and the inhuman. is associate professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Twenty-nine Modern Indian Poems (1990); Sunday at the Lodi Gardens (1994), a book of poems; and two forthcoming books, Cosmopolitans after Colonialism: Contemporary Indian Writers and Writing and English in India and Indian Literature in English: A Short Critical History, 1580-2000. He has coedited The Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (1994) and The Collected Poems of A. K. Ramanujan (1995), and is the general editor of The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan (1999). He is also the editor of The Columbia Book of South Asian Poetry: From 1000 B.C.-A.D. 2000 (forthcoming). V in a y D h a r w a d k e r

is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of The Montecassino Passion and the Poetics of Medieval Drama (1977), The Dream of Chaucer: Representation and Reflection in the Early Narratives (1989), and Ratio and Invention: A Study of Medieval Lyric and Narrative (1989). He has edited and translated The Poetry of Guido Guinizelli (1987), and has edited John Lydgate's Troy Book: Selections (1998) and Siege of Thebes (forthcoming). He has also edited or coedited The Old Daunce: Love, Friendship, Sex, and Marriage in the Medieval World (1991), Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative (1994), and Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society (1995). He is the editor in chief of Comparative Literature Studies. R o b e r t R. E d w a r d s

CONTRIBUTORS

231

is professor of geography at Johns Hopkins University. Among his contributions to urban geography, social and economic theory and political and cultural criticism are Social Justice and the City (1973), The Limits of Capital (1982), Consciousness and the Urban Experience (1985), The Urbanization of Capital (1985), The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1990), Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (1996), and Spaces of Hope (2000). D a v id H a r v e y

is associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury literature and culture has appeared in PMLA and differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies, among other journals. She is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-century Paris and London (1999), and is currently working on a book about female homoeroticism in Victorian literature. S h aron M arcus

is professor of English and comparative literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993), and Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999). He is the editor of Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993), and the coeditor, with Pheng Cheah, of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998). He is a member of the editorial collective of Social Text. B r u c e R o b b in s