Postcolonialism: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies [2] 0415193621, 0415193605

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POSTCOLONIALISM

POSTCOLONIALISM Critical concepts in literary and cultural studies

Edited by Diana Brydon Volume II

Routledge

Taylor &. Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

To maintain the integrity of the original articles, references which refer the reader to text not included within these volumes have been retained. However, figures and any reference to them within the text, have been omitted.

First published 2000 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Selection and editorial material © 2000 Diana Brydon; individual owners retain copyright in their own material Typeset in Times by Wearset, Boldon, Tyne and Wear All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Postcolonialism: critical concepts in literary and cultural studies / edited by Diana Brydon. p. cm. Collection of previously published articles, essays, etc. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-19360-5 (set) — ISBN 0-415-19361-3 (v. 1) — ISBN 0^115-19362-1 (v. 2) — ISBN 0-415-19363-X (v. 3) — ISBN 0-415-19364-8 (v. 4) — ISBN 0-415-19367-8 (v. 5) 1. Postcolonialism. I. Brydon, Diana. JV51.P67 2000 325'.3—dc21

99-0599119

The publishers have made every effort to contact authors/copyright holders of works reprinted in Postcolonialism. This has not been possible in every case, however, and we would welcome correspondence from those individuals/companies whom we have been unable to trace. ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19360-3 (set) ISBN 13: 978-0-415-19362-7 (hbk) (volume 2)

CONTENTS

VOLUME II PART 4 National, Third World and Postcolonial Identities

441

4.1

443

On National Culture FRANTZ F A N O N

4.2

National Liberation and Culture

471

AMILCAR CABRAL

4.3

Nationalism and the Third World

488

R E N A T O CONSTANTINO

4.4

Cross-Cultural Poetics

495

EDOUARD GLISSANT

4.5

Towards a New Oceania

502

ALBERT WENDT

4.6

The Language of African Literature

514

N G U G I WA T H I O N G ' O

4.7

Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism

541

FREDRIC JAMESON

4.8

Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the "National Allegory"

565

AIJAZ AHMAD

4.9

A Brief Response

589

F R E D R I C JAMESON

4.10

Census, Map, Museum

592

BENEDICT ANDERSON

V

CONTENTS 4.11

DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation

610

HOMI K. BHABHA

4.12

Is There A Third World Aesthetic?

645

ROBERTO SCHWARZ

4.13

Unapproved Roads: Ireland and Post-Colonial Identity

647

LUKE GIBBONS

4.14

Modern Ireland: Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions?

658

LIAM K E N N E D Y

PART 5 Colonial Discourse Analysis

673

5.1

675

The Great Family of Man ROLAND BARTHES

5.2

Preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized

678

ALBERT MEMMI

5.3

Mythical Portrait of the Colonized

684

ALBERT MEMMI

5.4

Preface to the English Edition and Apology for Duckology

690

ARIEL DORFMAN AND ARMAND MATTELART

5.5

Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism

694

GAYATRI C H A K R A V O R T Y SPIVAK

5.6

Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse

714

BENITA PARRY

5.7

White Mythologies

748

ROBERT YOUNG

5.8

The Primitivist and the Postcolonial

774

NICHOLAS THOMAS

5.9

Colonial Studies and the History of Sexuality ANN LAURA STOLER

vi

797

Part 4 NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES

4.1

ON N A T I O N A L CULTURE Frantz Fanon From Constance Farrington (trans.) The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, 1963, 206—48. Originally published as Les damnes de la terre, Maspero, 1961.

To take part in the African revolution it is not enough to write a revolutionary song; you must fashion the revolution with the people. And if you fashion it with the people, the songs will come by themselves, and of themselves. In order to achieve real action, you must yourself be a living part of Africa and of her thought; you must be an element of that popular energy which is entirely called forth for the freeing, the progress, and the happiness of Africa. There is no place outside that fight for the artist or for the intellectual who is not himself concerned with and completely at one with the people in the great battle of Africa and of suffering humanity —SekouToure.1

Each generation must out of relative obscurity discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it. In underdeveloped countries the preceding generations have both resisted the work or erosion carried by colonialism and also helped on the maturing of the struggles of today. We must rid ourselves of the habit, now that we are in the thick of the fight, of minimizing the action of our fathers or of feigning incomprehension when considering their silence and passivity. They fought as well as they could, with the arms that they possessed then; and if the echoes of their struggle have not resounded in the international arena, we must realize that the reason for this silence lies less in their lack of heroism than in the fundamentally different international situation of our time. It needed more than one native to say "We've had enough"; more than one peasant rising crushed, more than one demonstration put down before we could today hold our own, certain in our victory. As for we who have decided to break the back of colonialism, our historic mission is to sanction all revolts, all desperate actions, all those abortive attempts drowned in rivers of blood. In this chapter we shall analyze the problem, which is felt to be 443

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fundamental, of the legitimacy of the claims of a nation. It must be recognized that the political party which mobilizes the people hardly touches on this problem of legitimacy. The political parties start from living reality and it is in the name of this reality, in the name of the stark facts which weigh down the present and the future of men and women, that they fix their line of action. The political party may well speak in moving terms of the nation, but what it is concerned with is that the people who are listening understand the need to take part in the fight if, quite simply, they wish to continue to exist. Today we know that in the first phase of the national struggle colonialism tries to disarm national demands by putting forward economic doctrines. As soon as the first demands are set out, colonialism pretends to consider them, recognizing with ostentatious humility that the territory is suffering from serious underdevelopment which necessitates a great economic and social effort. And, in fact, it so happens that certain spectacular measures (centers of work for the unemployed which are opened here and there, for example) delay the crystallization of national consciousness for a few years. But, sooner or later, colonialism sees that it is not within its powers to put into practice a project of economic and social reforms which will satisfy the aspirations of the colonized people. Even where food supplies are concerned, colonialism gives proof of its inherent incapability. The colonialist state quickly discovers that if it wishes to disarm the nationalist parties on strictly economic questions then it will have to do in the colonies exactly what it has refused to do in its own country. It is not mere chance that almost everywhere today there flourishes the doctrine of Cartierism. The disillusioned bitterness we find in Cartier when up against the obstinate determination of France to link to herself peoples which she must feed while so many French people live in want shows up the impossible situation in which colonialism finds itself when the colonial system is called upon to transform itself into an unselfish program of aid and assistance. It is why, once again, there is no use in wasting time repeating that hunger with dignity is preferable to bread eaten in slavery. On the contrary, we must become convinced that colonialism is incapable of procuring for the colonized peoples the material conditions which might make them forget their concern for dignity. Once colonialism has realized where its tactics of social reform are leading, we see it falling back on its old reflexes, reinforcing police effectives, bringing up troops, and setting a reign of terror which is better adapted to its interests and its psychology. Inside the political parties, and most often in offshoots from these parties, cultured individuals of the colonized race make their appearance. For these individuals, the demand for a national culture and the affirmation of the existence of such a culture represent a special battlefield. While the politicians situate their action in actual present-day events, men of 444

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culture take their stand in the field of history. Confronted with the native intellectual who decides to make an aggressive response to the colonialist theory of pre-colonial barbarism, colonialism will react only slightly, and still less because the ideas developed by the young colonized intelligentsia are widely professed by specialists in the mother country. It is in fact a commonplace to state that for several decades large numbers of research workers have, in the main, rehabilitated the African, Mexican, and Peruvian civilizations. The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is uncontested. I am ready to concede that on the plane of factual being the past existence of an Aztec civilization does not change anything very much in the diet of the Mexican peasant of today. I admit that all the proofs of a wonderful Songhai civilization will not change the fact that today the Songhais are underfed and illiterate, thrown between sky and water with empty heads and empty eyes. But it has been remarked several times that this passionate search for a national culture which existed before the colonial era finds its legitimate reason in the anxiety shared by native intellectuals to shrink away from that Western culture in which they all risk being swamped. Because they realize they are in danger of losing their lives and thus becoming lost to their people, these men, hotheaded and with anger in their hearts, relentlessly determine to renew contact once more with the oldest and most pre-colonial springs of life of their people. Let us go further. Perhaps this passionate research and this anger are kept up or at least directed by the secret hope of discovering beyond the misery of today, beyond self-contempt, resignation, and abjuration, some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others. I have said that I have decided to go further. Perhaps unconsciously, the native intellectuals, since they could not stand wonderstruck before the history of today's barbarity, decided to back further and to delve deeper down; and, let us make no mistake, it was with the greatest delight that they discovered that there was nothing to be ashamed of in the past, but rather dignity, glory, and solemnity. The claim to a national culture in the past does not only rehabilitate that nation and serve as a justification for the hope of a future national culture. In the sphere of psycho-affective equilibrium it is responsible for an important change in the native. Perhaps we have not sufficiently demonstrated that colonialism is not simply content to impose its rule upon the present and the future of a dominated country. Colonialism is not satisfied merely with holding a people in its grip and emptying the native's brain of all form and content. By a kind of perverted logic, it 445

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turns to the past of the oppressed people, and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it. This work of devaluing pre-colonial history takes on a dialectical significance today. When we consider the efforts made to carry out the cultural estrangement so characteristic of the colonial epoch, we realize that nothing has been left to chance and that the total result looked for by colonial domination was indeed to convince the natives that colonialism came to lighten their darkness. The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives' heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality. On the unconscious plane, colonialism therefore did not seek to be considered by the native as a gentle, loving mother who protects her child from a hostile environment, but rather as a mother who unceasingly restrains her fundamentally perverse offspring from managing to commit suicide and from giving free rein to its evil instincts. The colonial mother protects her child from itself, from its ego, and from its physiology, its biology, and its own unhappiness which is its very essence. In such a situation the claims of the native intellectual are not a luxury but a necessity in any coherent program. The native intellectual who takes up arms to defend his nation's legitimacy and who wants to bring proofs to bear out that legitimacy, who is willing to strip himself naked to study the history of his body, is obliged to dissect the heart of his people. Such an examination is not specifically national. The native intellectual who decides to give battle to colonial lies fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its splendor, is not necessarily that of his own country. Colonialism, which has not bothered to put too fine a point on its efforts, has never ceased to maintain that the Nergo is a savage; and for the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian, for he simply spoke of "the Negro." For colonialism, this vast continent was the haunt of savages, a country riddled with superstitions and fanaticism, destined for contempt, weighed down by the curse of God, a country of cannibals—in short, the Negro's country. Colonialism's condemnation is continental in its scope. The contention by colonialism that the darkest night of humanity lay over pre-colonial history concerns the whole of the African continent. The efforts of the native to rehabilitate himself and to escape from the claws of colonialism are logically inscribed from the same point of view as that of colonialism. The native intellectual who has gone far beyond the domains of Western culture and who has got it into his head to proclaim the existence of another culture never does so in the name of Angola or of Dahomey. The culture which is affirmed is African culture. The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realize that history points out a 446

ON NATIONAL CULTURE

well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a Negro culture exists. And it is only too true that those who are most responsible for this racialization of thought, or at least for the first movement toward that thought, are and remain those Europeans who have never ceased to set up white culture to fill the gap left by the absence of other cultures. Colonialism did not dream of wasting its time in denying the existence of one national culture after another. Therefore the reply of the colonized peoples will be straight away continental in its breadth. In Africa, the native literature of the last twenty years is not a national literature but a Negro literature. The concept of negritude, for example, was the emotional if not the logical antithesis of that insult which the white man flung at humanity. This rush of negritude against the white man's contempt showed itself in certain spheres to be the one idea capable of lifting interdictions and anathemas. Because the New Guinean or Kenyan intellectuals found themselves above all up against a general ostracism and delivered to the combined contempt of their overlords, their reaction was to sing praises in admiration of each other. The unconditional affirmation of African culture has succeeded the unconditional affirmation of European culture. On the whole, the poets of negritude oppose the idea of an old Europe to a young Africa, tiresome reasoning to lyricism, oppressive logic to high-stepping nature, and on one side stiffness, ceremony, etiquette, and scepticism, while on the other frankness, liveliness, liberty, and —why not?—luxuriance: but also irresponsibility. The poets of negritude will not stop at the limits of the continent. From America, black voices will take up the hymn with fuller unison. The "black world" will see the light and Busia from Ghana, Birago Diop from Senegal, Hampate Ba from the Soudan, and Saint-Clair Drake from Chicago will not hesitate to assert the existence of common ties and a motive power that is identical. The example of the Arab world might equally well be quoted here. We know that the majority of Arab territories have been under colonial domination. Colonialism has made the same effort in these regions to plant deep in the minds of the native population the idea that before the advent of colonialism their history was one which was dominated by barbarism. The struggle for national liberty has been accompanied by a cultural phenomenon known by the name of the awakening of Islam. The passion with which contemporary Arab writers remind their people of the great pages of their history is a reply to the lies told by the occupying power. The great names of Arabic literature and the great past of Arab civilization have been brandished about with the same ardor as those of the African civilizations. The Arab leaders have tried to return to the famous Dar El Islam which shone so brightly from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. Today, in the political sphere, the Arab League is giving palpable form to this will to take up again the heritage of the past and to bring it to 447

NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES

culmination. Today, Arab doctors and Arab poets speak to each other across the frontiers, and strive to create a new Arab culture and a new Arab civilization. It is in the name of Arabism that these men join together, and that they try to think together. Everywhere, however, in the Arab world, national feeling has preserved even under colonial domination a liveliness that we fail to find in Africa. At the same time that spontaneous communion of each with all, present in the African movement, is not to be found in the Arab League. On the contrary, paradoxically, everyone tries to sing the praises of the achievements of his nation. The cultural process is freed from the indifferentiation which characterized it in the African world, but the Arabs do not always manage to stand aside in order to achieve their aims. The living culture is not national but Arab. The problem is not as yet to secure a national culture, not as yet to lay hold of a movement differentiated by nations, but to assume an African or Arabic culture when confronted by the all-embracing condemnation pronounced by the dominating power. In the African world, as in the Arab, we see that the claims of the man of culture in a colonized country are allembracing, continental, and in the case of the Arabs, worldwide. This historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley. Let us take for example the case of the African Cultural Society. This society had been created by African intellectuals who wished to get to know each other and to compare their experiences and the results of their respective research work. The aim of this society was therefore to affirm the existence of an African culture, to evaluate this culture on the plane of distinct nations, and to reveal the internal motive forces of each of their national cultures. But at the same time this society fulfilled another need: the need to exist side by side with the European Cultural Society, which threatened to transform itself into a Universal Cultural Society. There was therefore at the bottom of this decision the anxiety to be present at the universal trysting place fully armed, with a culture springing from the very heart of the African continent. Now, this Society will very quickly show its inability to shoulder these different tasks, and will limit itself to exhibitionist demonstrations, while the habitual behavior of the members of this Society will be confined to showing Europeans that such a thing as African culture exists, and opposing their ideas to those of ostentatious and narcissistic Europeans. We have shown that such an attitude is normal and draws its legitimacy from the lies propagated by men of Western culture, but the degradation of the aims of this Society will become more marked with the elaboration of the concept of negritude. The African Society will become the cultural society of the black world and will come to include the Negro dispersion, that is to say the tens of thousands of black people spread over the American continents. 448

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The Negroes who live in the United States and in Central or Latin America in fact experience the need to attach themselves to a cultural matrix. Their problem is not fundamentally different from that of the Africans. The whites of America did not mete out to them any different treatment from that of the whites who ruled over the Africans. We have seen that the whites were used to putting all Negroes in the same bag. During the first congress of the African Cultural Society which was held in Paris in 1956, the American Negroes of their own accord considered their problems from the same standpoint as those of their African brothers. Cultured Africans, speaking of African civilizations, decreed that there should be a reasonable status within the state for those who had formerly been slaves. But little by little the American Negroes realized that the essential problems confronting them were not the same as those that confronted the African Negroes. The Negroes of Chicago only resemble the Nigerians or the Tanganyikans in so far as they were all defined in relation to the whites. But once the first comparisons had been made and subjective feelings were assuaged, the American Negroes realized that the objective problems were fundamentally heterogeneous. The test cases of civil liberty whereby both whites and blacks in America try to drive back racial discrimination have very little in common in their principles and objectives with the heroic fight of the Angolan people against the detestable Portuguese colonialism. Thus, during the second congress of the African Cultural Society the American Negroes decided to create an American society for people of black cultures. Negritude therefore finds its first limitation in the phenomena which take account of the formation of the historical character of men. Negro and African-Negro culture broke up into different entities because the men who wished to incarnate these cultures realized that every culture is first and foremost national, and that the problems which kept Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. In the same way certain Arab states, though they had chanted the marvelous hymn of Arab renaissance, had nevertheless to realize that their geographical position and the economic ties of their region were stronger even than the past that they wished to revive. Thus we find today the Arab states organically linked once more with societies which are Mediterranean in their culture. The fact is that these states are submitted to modern pressure and to new channels of trade while the network of trade relations which was dominant during the great period of Arab history has disappeared. But above all there is the fact that the political regimes of certain Arab states are so different, and so far away from each other in their conceptions, that even a cultural meeting between these states is meaningless. Thus we see that the cultural problem as it sometimes exists in colonized countries runs the risk of giving rise to serious ambiguities. The lack 449

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of culture of the Negroes, as proclaimed by colonialism, and the inherent barbarity of the Arabs ought logically to lead to the exaltation of cultural manifestations which are not simply national but continental, and extremely racial. In Africa, the movement of men of culture is a movement toward the Negro-African culture or the Arab-Moslem culture. It is not specifically toward a national culture. Culture is becoming more and more cut off from the events of today. It finds its refuge beside a hearth that glows with passionate emotion, and from there makes its way by realistic paths which are the only means by which it may be made fruitful, homogeneous, and consistent. If the action of the native intellectual is limited historically, there remains nevertheless the fact that it contributes greatly to upholding and justifying the action of politicians. It is true that the attitude of the native intellectual sometimes takes on the aspect of a cult or of a religion. But if we really wish to analyze this attitude correctly we will come to see that it is symptomatic of the intellectual's realization of the danger that he is running in cutting his last moorings and of breaking adrift from his people. This stated belief in a national culture is in fact an ardent, despairing turning toward anything that will afford him secure anchorage. In order to ensure his salvation and to escape from the supremacy of the white man's culture the native feels the need to turn backward toward his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous people. Because he feels he is becoming estranged, that is to say because he feels that he is the living haunt of contradictions which run the risk of becoming insurmountable, the native tears himself away from the swamp that may suck him down and accepts everything, decides to take all for granted and confirms everything even though he may lose body and soul. The native finds that he is expected to answer for everything, and to all comers. He not only turns himself into the defender of his people's past; he is willing to be counted as one of them, and henceforward he is even capable of laughing at his past cowardice. This tearing away, painful and difficult though it may be, is however necessary. If it is not accomplished there will be serious psycho-affective injuries and the result will be individuals without an anchor, without a horizon, colorless, stateless, rootless—a race of angels. It will be also quite normal to hear certain natives declare, "I speak as a Senegalese and as a Frenchman . . ." "I speak as an Algerian and as a Frenchman . . ." The intellectual who is Arab and French, or Nigerian and English, when he comes up against the need to take on two nationalities, chooses, if he wants to remain true to himself, the negation of one of these determinations. But most often, since they cannot or will not make a choice, such intellectuals gather together all the historical determining factors which have conditioned them and take up a fundamentally "universal standpoint." 450

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This is because the native intellectual has thrown himself greedily upon Western culture. Like adopted children who only stop investigating the new family framework at the moment when a minimum nucleus of security crystallizes in their psyche, the native intellectual will try to make European culture his own. He will not be content to get to know Rabelais and Diderot, Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe; he will bind them to his intelligence as closely as possible: La dame n'etait pas seule Elle avail un mari Un mari tres comme il faut Qui citait Racine et Corneille Et Voltaire et Rousseau Et le Pere Hugo et le jeune Musset Et Gide et Valery Et tant d'autres encore.2 But at the moment when the nationalist parties are mobilizing the people in the name of national independence, the native intellectual sometimes spurns these acquisitions which he suddenly feels make him a stranger in his own land. It is always easier to proclaim rejection than actually to reject. The intellectual who through the medium of culture has filtered into Western civilization, who has managed to become part of the body of European culture—in other words who has exchanged his own culture for another—will come to realize that the cultural matrix, which now he wishes to assume since he is anxious to appear original, can hardly supply any figureheads which will bear comparison with those, so many in number and so great in prestige, of the occupying power's civilization. History, of course, though nevertheless written by the Westerners and to serve their purposes, will be able to evaluate from time to time certain periods of the African past. But, standing face to face with his country at the present time, and observing clearly and objectively the events of today throughout the continent which he wants to make his own, the intellectual is terrified by the void, the degradation, and the savagery he sees there. Now he feels that he must get away from the white culture. He must seek his culture elsewhere, anywhere at all; and if he fails to find the substance of culture of the same grandeur and scope as displayed by the ruling power, the native intellectual will very often fall back upon emotional attitudes and will develop a psychology which is dominated by exceptional sensitivity and susceptibility. This withdrawal, which is due in the first instance to a begging of the question in his internal behavior mechanism and his own character, brings out, above all, a reflex and contradiction which is muscular. 451

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This is sufficient explanation of the style of those native intellectuals who decide to give expression to this phase of consciousness which is in the process of being liberated. It is a harsh style, full of images, for the image is the drawbridge which allows unconscious energies to be scattered on the surrounding meadows. It is a vigorous style, alive with rhythms, struck through and through with bursting life; it is full of color, too, bronzed, sunbaked, and violent. This style, which in its time astonished the peoples of the West, has nothing racial about it, in spite of frequent statements to the contrary; it expresses above all a hand-to-hand struggle and it reveals the need that man has to liberate himself from a part of his being which already contained the seeds of decay. Whether the fight is painful, quick, or inevitable, muscular action must substitute itself for concepts. If in the world of poetry this movement reaches unaccustomed heights, the fact remains that in the real world the intellectual often follows up a blind alley. When at the height of his intercourse with his people, whatever they were or whatever they are, the intellectual decides to come down into the common paths of real life, he only brings back from his adventuring formulas which are sterile in the extreme. He sets a high value on the customs, traditions, and the appearances of his people; but his inevitable, painful experience only seems to be a banal search for exoticism. The sari becomes sacred, and shoes that come from Paris or Italy are left off in favor of pampooties, while suddenly the language of the ruling power is felt to burn your lips. Finding your fellow countrymen sometimes means in this phase to will to be a nigger, not a nigger like all other niggers but a real nigger, a Negro cur, just the sort of nigger that the white man wants you to be. Going back to your own people means to become a dirty wog, to go native as much as you can, to become unrecognizable, and to cut off those wings that before you had allowed to grow. The native intellectual decides to make an inventory of the bad habits drawn from the colonial world, and hastens to remind everyone of the good old customs of the people, that people which he has decided contains all truth and goodness. The scandalized attitude with which the settlers who live in the colonial territory greet this new departure only serves to strengthen the native's decision. When the colonialists, who had tasted the sweets of their victory over these assimilated people, realize that these men whom they considered as saved souls are beginning to fall back into the ways of niggers, the whole system totters. Every native won over, every native who had taken the pledge not only marks a failure for the colonial structure when he decides to lose himself and to go back to his own side, but also stands as a symbol for the uselessness and the shallowness of all the work that has been accomplished. Each native who goes back over the line is a radical condemnation of the methods and of the regime; and the native intellectual finds in the scandal he gives rise to a justification and an encouragement to persevere in the path he has chosen. 452

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If we wanted to trace in the works of native writers the different phases which characterize this evolution we would find spread out before us a panorama on three levels. In the first phase, the native intellectual gives proof that he has assimilated the culture of the occupying power. His writings correspond point by point with those of his opposite numbers in the mother country. His inspiration is European and we can easily link up these works with definite trends in the literature of the mother country. This is the period of unqualified assimilation. We find in this literature coming from the colonies the Parnassians, the Symbolists, and the Surrealists. In the second phase we find the native is disturbed; he decides to remember what he is. This period of creative work approximately corresponds to that immersion which we have just described. But since the native is not a part of his people, since he only has exterior relations with his people, he is content to recall their life only. Past happenings of the byegone days of his childhood will be brought up out of the depths of his memory; old legends will be reinterpreted in the light of a borrowed estheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies. Sometimes this literature of just-before-the-battle is dominated by humor and by allegory; but often too it is symptomatic of a period of distress and difficulty, where death is experienced, and disgust too. We spew ourselves up; but already underneath laughter can be heard. Finally in the third phase, which is called the fighting phase, the native, after having tried to lose himself in the people and with the people, will on the contrary shake the people. Instead of according the people's lethargy an honored place in his esteem, he turns himself into an awakener of the people; hence comes a fighting literature, a revolutionary literature, and a national literature. During this phase a great many men and women who up till then would never have thought of producing a literary work, now that they find themselves in exceptional circumstances—in prison, with the Maquis, or on the eve of their execution—feel the need to speak to their nation, to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action. The native intellectual nevertheless sooner or later will realize that you do not show proof of your nation from its culture but that you substantiate its existence in the fight which the people wage against the forces of occupation. No colonial system draws its justification from the fact that the territories it dominates are culturally nonexistent. You will never make colonialism blush for shame by spreading out little-known cultural treasures under its eyes. At the very moment when the native intellectual is anxiously trying to create a cultural work he fails to realize that he is utilizing techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country. He contents himself with stamping these instruments with a 453

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hallmark which he wishes to be national, but which is strangely reminiscent of exoticism. The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner. Sometimes he has no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people; but the ideas that he expresses and the preoccupations he is taken up with have no common yardstick to measure the real situation which the men and the women of his country know. The culture that the intellectual leans toward is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments. And these outer garments are merely the reflection of a hidden life, teeming and perpetually in motion. That extremely obvious objectivity which seems to characterize a people is in fact only the inert, already forsaken result of frequent, and not always very coherent, adaptations of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed. The man of culture, instead of setting out to find this substance, will let himself be hypnotized by these mummified fragments which because they are static are in fact symbols of negation and outworn contrivances. Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. The desire to attach oneself to tradition or bring abandoned traditions to life again does not only mean going against the current of history but also opposing one's own people. When a people undertakes an armed struggle or even a political struggle against a relentless colonialism, the significance of tradition changes. All that has made up the technique of passive resistance in the past may, during this phase, be radically condemned. In an underdeveloped country during the period of struggle traditions are fundamentally unstable and are shot through by centrifugal tendencies. This is why the intellectual often runs the risk of being out of date. The peoples who have carried on the struggle are more and more impervious to demagogy; and those who wish to follow them reveal themselves as nothing more than common opportunists, in other words, latecomers. In the sphere of plastic arts, for example, the native artist who wishes at whatever cost to create a national work of art shuts himself up in a stereotyped reproduction of details. These artists who have nevertheless thoroughly studied modern techniques and who have taken part in the main trends of contemporary painting and architecture, turn their backs on foreign culture, deny it, and set out to look for a true national culture, setting great store on what they consider to be the constant principles of national art. But these people forget that the forms of thought and what it feeds on, together with modern techniques of information, language, and dress have dialectically reorganized the people's intelligences and that the constant principles which acted as safeguards during the colonial period are now undergoing extremely radical changes. 454

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The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace are in fact the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all. But the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge. Before independence, the native painter was insensible to the national scene. He set a high value on non-figurative art, or more often specialized in still lifes. After independence his anxiety to rejoin his people will confine him to the most detailed representation of reality. This is representative art which has no internal rhythms, an art which is serene and immobile, evocative not of life but of death. Enlightened circles are in ecstasies when confronted with this "inner truth" which is so well expressed; but we have the right to ask if this truth is in fact a reality, and if it is not already outworn and denied, called in question by the epoch through which the people are treading out their path toward history. In the realm of poetry we may establish the same facts. After the period of assimilation characterized by rhyming poetry, the poetic tom-tom's rhythms break through. This is a poetry of revolt; but it is also descriptive and analytical poetry. The poet ought however to understand that nothing can replace the reasoned, irrevocable taking up of arms on the people's side. Let us quote Depestre once more: The lady was not alone; She had a husband, A husband who knew everything, But to tell the truth knew nothing, For you can't have culture without making concessions. You concede your flesh and blood to it, You concede your own self to others; By conceding you gain Classicism and Romanticism, And all that our souls are steeped in.3 The native poet who is preoccupied with creating a national work of art and who is determined to describe his people fails in his aim, for he is not yet ready to make that fundamental concession that Depestre speaks of. The French poet Rene Char shows his understanding of the difficulty when he reminds us that "the poem emerges out of a subjective imposition and an objective choice. A poem is the assembling and moving together of determining original values, in contemporary relation with someone that these circumstances bring to the front."4 455

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Yes, the first duty of the native poet is to see clearly the people he has chosen as the subject of his work of art. He cannot go forward resolutely unless he first realizes the extent of his estrangement from them. We have taken everything from the other side; and the other side gives us nothing unless by a thousand detours we swing finally round in their direction, unless by ten thousand wiles and a hundred thousand tricks they manage to draw us toward them, to seduce us, and to imprison us. Taking means in nearly every case being taken: thus it is not enough to try to free oneself by repeating proclamations and denials. It is not enough to try to get back to the people in that past out of which they have already emerged; rather we must join them in that fluctuating movement which they are just giving a shape to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called in question. Let there be no mistake about it; it is to this zone of occult instability where the people dwell that we must come; and it is there that our souls are crystallized and that our perceptions and our lives are transfused with light. Keita Fodeba, today Minister of Internal Affairs in the Republic of Guinea, when he was the director of the "African Ballet" did not play any tricks with the reality which the people of Guinea offered him. He reinterpreted all the rhythmic images of his country from a revolutionary standpoint. But he did more. In his poetic works, which are not well known, we find a constant desire to define accurately the historic moments of the struggle and to mark off the field in which were to be unfolded the actions and ideas around which the popular will would crystallize. Here is a poem by Keita Fodeba which is a true invitation to thought, to de-mystification, and to battle:

African dawn (Guitar music) Dawn was breaking. The little village, which had danced half the night to the sound of its tom-toms, was waking slowly. Ragged shepherds playing their flutes were leading their flocks down into the valley. The girls of the village with their canaries followed one by one along the winding path that leads to the fountain. In the marabout's courtyard a group of children were softly chanting in chorus some verses from the Koran. (Guitar music) Dawn was breaking—dawn, the fight between night and day. But the night was exhausted and could fight no more, and slowly died. A few rays of the sun, the forerunners of this victory of the day, still hovered on the horizon, pale and timid, while the last stars 456

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gently glided under the mass of clouds, crimson like the blooming flamboyant flowers. (Guitar music) Dawn was breaking. And down at the end of the vast plain with its purple contours, the silhouette of a bent man tilling the ground could be seen, the silhouette of Naman the laborer. Each time he lifted his hoe the frightened birds rose, and flew swiftly away to find the quiet banks of the Djoliba, the great Niger river. The man's gray cotton trousers, soaked by the dew, flapped against the grass on either side. Sweating, unresting, always bent over he worked with his hoe; for the seed had to be sown before the next rains came. (Cora music) Dawn was breaking, still breaking. The sparrows circled amongst the leaves announcing the day. On the damp track leading to the plain a child, carrying his little quiver of arrows round him like a bandolier, was running breathless toward Naman. He called out: "Brother Naman, the headman of the village wants you to come to the council tree." (Cora music) The laborer, surprised by such a message so early in the morning, laid down his hoe and walked toward the village which now was shining in the beams of the rising sun. Already the old men of the village were sitting under the tree, looking more solemn than ever. Beside them a man in uniform, a district guard, sat impassively, quietly smoking his pipe. (Cora music) Naman took his place on the sheepskin. The headman's spokesman stood up to announce to the assembly the will of the old men: "The white men have sent a district guard to ask for a man from the village who will go to the war in their country. The chief men, after taking counsel together, have decided to send the young man who is the best representative of our race, so that he may go and give proof to the white men of that courage which has always been a feature of our Manding." (Guitar music) Naman was thus officially marked out, for every evening the village girls praised his great stature and muscular appearance in musical couplets. Gentle Kadia, his young wife, overwhelmed by the news, suddenly ceased grinding corn, put the mortar away under the barn, and without saying a word shut herself into her 457

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hut to weep over her misfortune with stifled sobs. For death had taken her first husband; and she could not believe that now the white people had taken Naman from her, Naman who was the center of all her new-sprung hopes. (Guitar music) The next day, in spite of her tears and lamentations, the full-toned drumming of the war tom-toms accompanied Naman to the village's little harbor where he boarded a trawler which was going to the district capital. That night, instead of dancing in the marketplace as they usually did, the village girls came to keep watch in Naman's outer room, and there told their tales until morning around a wood fire. (Guitar music) Several months went by without any news of Naman reaching the village. Kadia was so worried that she went to the cunning fetishworker from the neighboring village. The village elders themselves held a short secret council on the matter, but nothing came of it. (Cora music) At last one day a letter from Naman came to the village, to Kadia's address. She was worried as to what was happening to her husband, and so that same night she came, after hours of tiring walking, to the capital of the district, where a translator read the letter to her. Naman was in North Africa; he was well, and he asked for news of the harvest, of the feastings, the river, the dances, the council tree . . . in fact, for news of all the village. (Balafo music) That night the old women of the village honored Kadia by allowing her to come to the courtyard of the oldest woman and listen to the talk that went on nightly among them. The headman of the village, happy to have heard news of Naman, gave a great banquet to all the beggars of the neighborhood. (Balafo music) Again several months went by and everyone was once more anxious, for nothing more was heard of Naman. Kadia was thinking of going again to consult the fetish-worker when she received a second letter. Naman, after passing through Corsica and Italy, was now in Germany and was proud of having been decorated. (Balafo music) But the next time there was only a postcard to say that Naman

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had been made prisoner by the Germans. This news weighed heavily on the village. The old men held council and decided that henceforward Naman would be allowed to dance the Douga, that sacred dance of the vultures that no one who has not performed some outstanding feat is allowed to dance, that dance of the Mali emperors of which every step is a stage in the history of the Mali race. Kadia found consolation in the fact that her husband had been raised to the dignity of a hero of his country. (Guitar music) Time went by. A year followed another, and Naman was still in Germany. He did not write any more. (Guitar music) One fine day, the village headman received word from Dakar that Naman would soon be home. The mutter of the tom-toms was at once heard. There was dancing and singing till dawn. The village girls composed new songs for his homecoming, for the old men who were the devotees of the Douga spoke no more about that famous dance of the Manding.

(Tom-toms)

But a month later, Corporal Moussa, a great friend of Naman's, wrote a tragic letter to Kadia: "Dawn was breaking. We were at Tiaroye-sur-Mer. In the course of a widespread dispute between us and our white officers from Dakar, a bullet struck Naman. He lies in the land of Senegal." (Guitar music) Yes; dawn was breaking. The first rays of the sun hardly touched the surface of the sea as they gilded its little foam-flecked waves. Stirred by the breeze, the palm trees gently bent their trunks down toward the ocean, as if saddened by the morning's battle. The crows came in noisy flocks to warn the neighborhood by their cawing of the tragedy that was staining the dawn at Tiaroye with blood. And in the flaming blue sky, just above Naman's body, a huge vulture was hovering heavily. It seemed to say to him "Naman! You have not danced that dance that is named after me. Others will dance it." (Cora music) If I have chosen to quote this long poem, it is on account of its unquestioned pedagogical value. Here, things are clear; it is a precise, forwardlooking exposition. The understanding of the poem is not merely an intellectual advance, but a political advance. To understand this poem is to 459

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understand the part one has played, to recognize one's advance, and to furbish up one's weapons. There is not a single colonized person who will not receive the message that this poem holds. Naman, the hero of the battlefields of Europe, Naman who eternally ensures the power and perenniality of the mother country, Naman is machine-gunned by the police force at the very moment that he comes back to the country of his birth: and this is Setif in 1945, this is Fort-le-France, this is Saigon, Dakar, and Lagos. All those niggers, all those wogs who fought to defend the liberty of France or for British civilization recognize themselves in this poem by Keita Fodeba. But Keita Fodeba sees further. In colonized countries, colonialism, after having made use of the natives on the battlefields, uses them as trained soldiers to put down the movements of independence. The exservice associations are in the colonies one of the most anti-nationalist elements which exist. The poet Keita Fodeba was training the Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Guinea to frustrate the plots organized by French colonialism. The French secret service intend to use, among other means, the ex-servicemen to break up the young independent Guinean state. The colonized man who writes for his people ought to use the past with the intention of opening the future, as an invitation to action and a basis for hope. But to ensure that hope and to give it form, he must take part in action and throw himself body and soul into the national struggle. You may speak about everything under the sun; but when you decide to speak of that unique thing in man's life that is represented by the fact of opening up new horizons, by bringing light to your own country, and by raising yourself and your people to their feet, then you must collaborate on the physical plane. The responsibility of the native man of culture is not a responsibility vis-a-vis his national culture, but a global responsibility with regard to the totality of the nation, whose culture merely, after all, represents one aspect of that nation. The cultured native should not concern himself with choosing the level on which he wishes to fight or the sector where he decides to give battle for his nation. To fight for national culture means in the first place to fight for the liberation of the nation, that material keystone which makes the building of a culture possible. There is no other fight for culture which can develop apart from the popular struggle. To take an example: all those men and women who are fighting with their bare hands against French colonialism in Algeria are not by any means strangers to the national culture of Algeria. The national Algerian culture is taking on form and content as the battles are being fought out, in prisons, under the guillotine, and in every French outpost which is captured or destroyed. We must not therefore be content with delving into the past of a people in order to find coherent elements which will counteract colonialism's attempts to falsify and harm. We must work and fight with the same 460

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rhythm as the people to construct the future and to prepare the ground where vigorous shoots are already springing up. A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people's true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the everpresent reality of the people. A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence. A national culture in underdeveloped countries should therefore take its place at the very heart of the struggle for freedom which these countries are carrying on. Men of African cultures who are still fighting in the name of African-Negro culture and who have called many congresses in the name of the unity of that culture should today realize that all their efforts amount to is to make comparisons between coins and sarcophagi. There is no common destiny to be shared between the national cultures of Senegal and Guinea; but there is a common destiny between the Senegalese and Guinean nations which are both dominated by the same French colonialism. If it is wished that the national culture of Senegal should come to resemble the national culture of Guinea, it is not enough for the rulers of the two peoples to decide to consider their problems— whether the problem of liberation is concerned, or the trade-union question, or economic difficulties—from similar viewpoints. And even here there does not seem to be complete identity, for the rhythm of the people and that of their rulers are not the same. There can be no two cultures which are completely identical. To believe that it is possible to create a black culture is to forget that niggers are disappearing, just as those people who brought them into being are seeing the breakup of their economic and cultural supremacy.5 There will never be such a thing as black culture because there is not a single politician who feels he has a vocation to bring black republics into being. The problem is to get to know the place that these men mean to give their people, the kind of social relations that they decide to set up, and the conception that they have of the future of humanity. It is this that counts; everything else is mystification, signifying nothing. In 1959, the cultured Africans who met at Rome never stopped talking about unity. But one of the people who was loudest in the praise of this cultural unity, Jacques Rabemananjara, is today a minister in the Madagascan government, and as such has decided, with his government, to oppose the Algerian people in the General Assembly of the United Nations. Rabemananjara, if he had been true to himself, ought to have resigned from the government and denounced those men who claim to incarnate the will of the Madagascan people. The ninety thousand dead of Madagascar have not given Rabemananjara authority to oppose the 461

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aspirations of the Algerian people in the General Assembly of the United Nations. It is around the people's struggles that African-Negro culture takes on substance, and not around songs, poems, or folklore. Senghor, who is also a member of the Society of African Culture and who has worked with us on the question of African culture, is not afraid for his part either to give the order to his delegation to support French proposals on Algeria. Adherence to African-Negro culture and to the cultural unity of Africa is arrived at in the first place by upholding unconditionally the people's struggle for freedom. No one can truly wish for the spread of African culture if he does not give practical support to the creation of the conditions necessary to the existence of that culture; in other words, to the liberation of the whole continent. I say again that no speech-making and no proclamation concerning culture will turn us from our fundamental tasks: the liberation of the national territory; a continual struggle against colonialism in its new forms; and an obstinate refusal to enter the charmed circle of mutual admiration at the summit.

Reciprocal bases of national culture and the fight for freedom Colonial domination, because it is total and tends to oversimplify, very soon manages to disrupt in spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered people. This cultural obliteration is made possible by the negation of national reality, by new legal relations introduced by the occupying power, by the banishment of the natives and their customs to outlying districts by colonial society, by expropriation, and by the systematic enslaving of men and women. Three years ago at our first congress I showed that, in the colonial situation, dynamism is replaced fairly quickly by a substantification of the attitudes of the colonizing power. The area of culture is then marked off by fences and signposts. These are in fact so many defense mechanisms of the most elementary type, comparable for more than one good reason to the simple instinct for preservation. The interest of this period for us is that the oppressor does not manage to convince himself of the objective nonexistence of the oppressed nation and its culture. Every effort is made to bring the colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture which has been transformed into instinctive patterns of behavior, to recognize the unreality of his "nation," and, in the the last extreme, the confused and imperfect character of his own biological structure. Vis-a-vis this state of affairs, the native's reactions are not unanimous. While the mass of the people maintain intact traditions which are com462

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pletely different from those of the colonial situation, and the artisanal style solidifies into a formalism which is more and more stereotyped, the intellectual throws himself in frenzied fashion into the frantic acquisition of the culture of the occupying power and takes every opportunity of unfavorably criticizing his own national culture, or else takes refuge in setting out and substantiating the claims of that culture in a way that is passionate but rapidly becomes unproductive. The common nature of these two reactions lies in the fact that they both lead to impossible contradictions. Whether a turncoat or a substantialist, the native is ineffectual precisely because the analysis of the colonial situation is not carried out on strict lines. The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field. Within the framework of colonial domination there is not and there will never be such phenomena as new cultural departures or changes in the national culture. Here and there valiant attempts are sometimes made to reanimate the cultural dynamic and to give fresh impulses to its themes, its forms, and its tonalities. The immediate, palpable, and obvious interest of such leaps ahead is nil. But if we follow up the consequences to the very end we see that preparations are being thus made to brush the cobwebs off national consciousness, to question oppression, and to open up the struggle for freedom. A national culture under colonial domination is a contested culture whose destruction is sought in systematic fashion. It very quickly becomes a culture condemned to secrecy. This idea of a clandestine culture is immediately seen in the reactions of the occupying power which interprets attachment to traditions as faithfulness to the spirit of the nation and as a refusal to submit. This persistence in following forms of cultures which are already condemned to extinction is already a demonstration of nationality; but it is a demonstration which is a throwback to the laws of inertia. There is no taking of the offensive and no redefining of relationships. There is simply a concentration on a hard core of culture which is becoming more and more shrivelled up, inert, and empty. By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress, and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression, and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependence. This is why it is of capital importance to follow the evolution of these relations during the struggle for national freedom. The negation of the native's culture, the contempt for any manifestation of culture 463

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whether active or emotional, and the placing outside the pale of all specialized branches of organization contribute to breed aggressive patterns of conduct in the native. But these patterns of conduct are of the reflexive type; they are poorly differentiated, anarchic, and ineffective. Colonial exploitation, poverty, and endemic famine drive the native more and more to open, organized revolt. The necessity for an open and decisive breach is formed progressively and imperceptibly, and comes to be felt by the great majority of the people. Those tensions which hitherto were non-existent come into being. International events, the collapse of whole sections of colonial empires and the contradictions inherent in the colonial system strengthen and uphold the native's combativity while promoting and giving support to national consciousness. These new-found tensions which are present at all stages in the real nature of colonialism have their repercussions on the cultural plane. In literature, for example, there is relative overproduction. From being a reply on a minor scale to the dominating power, the literature produced by natives becomes differentiated and makes itself into a will to particularism. The intelligentsia, which during the period of repression was essentially a consuming public, now themselves become producers. This literature at first chooses to confine itself to the tragic and poetic style; but later on novels, short stories, and essays are attempted. It is as if a kind of internal organization or law of expression existed which wills that poetic expression become less frequent in proportion as the objectives and the methods of the struggle for liberation become more precise. Themes are completely altered; in fact, we find less and less of bitter, hopeless recrimination and less also of that violent, resounding, florid writing which on the whole serves to reassure the occupying power. The colonialists have in former times encouraged these modes of expression and made their existence possible. Stinging denunciations, the exposing of distressing conditions and passions which find their outlet in expression are in fact assimilated by the occupying power in a cathartic process. To aid such processes is in a certain sense to avoid their dramatization and to clear the atmosphere. But such a situation can only be transitory. In fact, the progress of national consciousness among the people modifies and gives precision to the literary utterances of the native intellectual. The continued cohesion of the people constitutes for the intellectual an invitation to go further than his cry of protest. The lament first makes the indictment; and then it makes an appeal. In the period that follows, the words of command are heard. The crystallization of the national consciousness will both disrupt literary styles and themes, and also create a completely new public. While at the beginning the native intellectual used to produce his work to be read exclusively by the oppressor, whether with the intention of charming him or of denouncing him through ethnic or subjectivist means, now the 464

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native writer progressively takes on the habit of addressing his own people. It is only from that moment that we can speak of a national literature. Here there is, at the level of literary creation, the taking up and clarification of themes which are typically nationalist. This may be properly called a literature of combat, in the sense that it calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation. It is a literature of combat, because it molds the national consciousness, giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons; it is a literature of combat because it assumes responsibility, and because it is the will to liberty expressed in terms of time and space. On another level, the oral tradition—stories, epics, and songs of the people—which formerly were filed away as set pieces are now beginning to change. The storytellers who used to relate inert episodes now bring them alive and introduce into them modifications which are increasingly fundamental. There is a tendency to bring conflicts up to date and to modernize the kinds of struggle which the stories evoke, together with the names of heroes and the types of weapons. The method of allusion is more and more widely used. The formula "This all happened long ago" is substituted with that of "What we are going to speak of happened somewhere else, but it might well have happened here today, and it might happen tomorrow." The example of Algeria is significant in this context. From 1952-53 on, the storytellers, who were before that time stereotyped and tedious to listen to, completely overturned their traditional methods of storytelling and the contents of their tales. Their public, which was formerly scattered, became compact. The epic, with its typified categories, reappeared; it became an authentic form of entertainment which took on once more a cultural value. Colonialism made no mistake when from 1955 on it proceeded to arrest these storytellers systematically. The contact of the people with the new movement gives rise to a new rhythm of life and to forgotten muscular tensions, and develops the imagination. Every time the storyteller relates a fresh episode to his public, he presides over a real invocation. The existence of a new type of man is revealed to the public. The present is no longer turned in upon itself but spread out for all to see. The storyteller once more gives free rein to his imagination; he makes innovations and he creates a work of art. It even happens that the characters, which are barely ready for such a transformation—highway robbers or more or less antisocial vagabonds—are taken up and remodeled. The emergence of the imagination and of the creative urge in the songs and epic stories of a colonized country is worth following. The storyteller replies to the expectant people by successive approximations, and makes his way, apparently alone but in fact helped on by his public, toward the seeking out of new patterns, that is to say national patterns. Comedy and farce disappear, or lose their attraction. As 465

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for dramatization, it is no longer placed on the plane of the troubled intellectual and his tormented conscience. By losing its characteristics of despair and revolt, the drama becomes part of the common lot of the people and forms part of an action in preparation or already in progress. Where handicrafts are concerned, the forms of expression which formerly were the dregs of art, surviving as if in a daze, now begin to reach out. Woodwork, for example, which formerly turned out certain faces and attitudes by the million, begins to be differentiated. The inexpressive or overwrought mask comes to life and the arms tend to be raised from the body as if to sketch an action. Compositions containing two, three, or five figures appear. The traditional schools are led on to creative efforts by the rising avalanche of amateurs or of critics. This new vigor in this sector of cultural life very often passes unseen; and yet its contribution to the national effort is of capital importance. By carving figures and faces which are full of life, and by taking as his theme a group fixed on the same pedestal, the artist invites participation in an organized movement. If we study the repercussions of the awakening of national consciousness in the domains of ceramics and pottery-making, the same observations may be drawn. Formalism is abandoned in the craftsman's work. Jugs, jars, and trays are modified, at first imperceptibly, then almost savagely. The colors, of which formerly there were but few and which obeyed the traditional rules of harmony, increase in number and are influenced by the repercussion of the rising revolution. Certain ochres and blues, which seemed forbidden to all eternity in a given cultural area, now assert themselves without giving rise to scandal. In the same way the stylization of the human face, which according to sociologists is typical of very clearly defined regions, becomes suddenly completely relative. The specialist coming from the home country and the ethnologist are quick to note these changes. On the whole such changes are condemned in the name of a rigid code of artistic style and of a cultural life which grows up at the heart of the colonial system. The colonialist specialists do not recognize these new forms and rush to the help of the traditions of the indigenous society. It is the colonialists who become the defenders of the native style. We remember perfectly, and the example took on a certain measure of importance since the real nature of colonialism was not involved, the reactions of the white jazz specialists when after the Second World War new styles such as the be-bop took definite shape. The fact is that in their eyes jazz should only be the despairing, broken-down nostalgia of an old Negro who is trapped between five glasses of whiskey, the curse of his race, and the racial hatred of the white men. As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must 466

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without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States. And it is not Utopian to suppose that in fifty years' time the type of jazz howl hiccuped by a poor misfortunate Negro will be upheld only by the whites who believe in it as an expression of negritude, and who are faithful to this arrested image of a type of relationship. We might in the same way seek and find in dancing, singing, and traditional rites and ceremonies the same upward-springing trend, and make out the same changes and the same impatience in this field. Well before the political or fighting phase of the national movement, an attentive spectator can thus feel and see the manifestation of new vigor and feel the approaching conflict. He will note unusual forms of expression and themes which are fresh and imbued with a power which is no longer that of invocation but rather of the assembling of the people, a summoning together for a precise purpose. Everything works together to awaken the native's sensibility and to to make unreal and inacceptable the contemplative attitude, or the acceptance of defeat. The native rebuilds his perceptions because he renews the purpose and dynamism of the craftsmen, of dancing and music, and of literature and the oral tradition. His world comes to lose its accursed character. The conditions necessary for the inevitable conflict are brought together. We have noted the appearance of the movement in cultural forms and we have seen that this movement and these new forms are linked to the state of maturity of the national consciousness. Now, this movement tends more and more to express itself objectively, in institutions. From thence comes the need for a national existence, whatever the cost. A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover hardly justifiable, is to try to find cultural expressions for and to give new values to native culture within the framework of colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a colonized country the most elementary, most savage, and the most undifferentiated nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending national culture. For culture is first the expression of a nation, the expression of its preferences, of its taboos and of its patterns. It is at every stage of the whole of society that other taboos, values, and patterns are formed. A national culture is the sum total of all these appraisals; it is the result of internal and external tensions exerted over society as a whole and also at every level of that society. In the colonial situation, culture, which is doubly deprived of the support of the nation and of the state, falls away and dies. The condition for its existence is therefore national liberation and the renaissance of the state. The nation is not only the condition of culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal, and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of 467

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creation. Later on it is the nation which will ensure the conditions and framework necessary to culture. The nation gathers together the various indispensable elements necessary for the creation of a culture, those elements which alone can give it credibility, validity, life, and creative power. In the same way it is its national character that will make such a culture open to other cultures and which will enable it to influence and permeate other cultures. A non-existent culture can hardly be expected to have bearing on reality, or to influence reality. The first necessity is the reestablishment of the nation in order to give life to national culture in the strictly biological sense of the phrase. Thus we have followed the breakup of the old strata of culture, a shattering which becomes increasingly fundamental; and we have noticed, on the eve of the decisive conflict for national freedom, the renewing of forms of expression and the rebirth of the imagination. There remains one essential question: what are the relations between the struggle—whether political or military—and culture? Is there a suspension of culture during the conflict? Is the national struggle an expression of a culture? Finally, ought one to say that the battle for freedom however fertile a posteriori with regard to culture is in itself a negation of culture? In short, is the struggle for liberation a cultural phenomenon or not? We believe that the conscious and organized undertaking by a colonized people to re-establish the sovereignty of that nation constitutes the most complete and obvious cultural manifestation that exists. It is not alone the success of the struggle which afterward gives validity and vigor to culture; culture is not put into cold storage during the conflict. The struggle itself in its development and in its internal progression sends culture along different paths and traces out entirely new ones for it. The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people's culture. After the conflict there is not only the disappearance of colonialism but also the disappearance of the colonized man. This new humanity cannot do otherwise than define a new humanism both for itself and for others. It is prefigured in the objectives and methods of the conflict. A struggle which mobilizes all classes of the people and which expresses their aims and their impatience, which is not afraid to count almost exclusively on the people's support, will of necessity triumph. The value of this type of conflict is that it supplies the maximum of conditions necessary for the development and aims of culture. After national freedom has been obtained in these conditions, there is no such painful cultural indecision which is found in certain countries which are newly independent, because the nation by its manner of coming into being and in the terms of its existence exerts a fundamental influence over culture. A 468

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nation which is born of the people's concerted action and which embodies the real aspirations of the people while changing the state cannot exist save in the expression of exceptionally rich forms of culture. The natives who are anxious for the culture of their country and who wish to give to it a universal dimension ought not therefore to place their confidence in the single principle of inevitable, undifferentiated independence written into the consciousness of the people in order to achieve their task. The liberation of the nation is one thing; the methods and popular content of the fight are another. It seems to us that the future of national culture and its riches are equally also part and parcel of the values which have ordained the struggle for freedom. And now it is time to denounce certain pharisees. National claims, it is here and there stated, are a phase that humanity has left behind. It is the day of great concerted actions, and retarded nationalists ought in consequence to set their mistakes aright. We however consider that the mistake, which may have very serious consequences, lies in wishing to skip the national period. If culture is the expression of national consciousness, I will not hesitate to affirm that in the case with which we are dealing it is the national consciousness which is the most elaborate form of culture. The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension. This problem of national consciousness and of national culture takes on in Africa a special dimension. The birth of national consciousness in Africa has a strictly contemporaneous connection with the African consciousness. The responsibility of the African as regards national culture is also a responsibility with regard to African Negro culture. This joint responsibility is not the fact of a metaphysical principle but the awareness of a simple rule which wills that every independent nation in an Africa where colonialism is still entrenched is an encircled nation, a nation which is fragile and in permanent danger. If man is known by his acts, then we will say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to build up his nation. If this building up is true, that is to say if it interprets the manifest will of the people and reveals the eager African peoples, then the building of a nation is of necessity accompanied by the discovery and encouragement of universalizing values. Far from keeping aloof from other nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation to play its part on the stage of history. It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows. And this two-fold emerging is ultimately only the source of all culture. Statement made at the Second Congress of Black Artists and Writers, Rome, 1959 469

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Notes 1

"The political leader as the representative of a culture." Address to the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Rome, 1959. 2 The lady was not alone; she had a most respectable husband, who knew how to quote Racine and Corneille, Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Mussel, Gide, Valery and as many more again. (Rene Depestre: "Face a la Nuit.") 3 Rene Depestre: "Face a la Nuit." 4 Rene Char, Partage Formel. 5 At the last school prize giving in Dakar, the president of the Senegalese Republic, Leopold Senghor, decided to include the study of the idea of negritude in the curriculum. If this decision was due to a desire to study historical causes, no one can criticize it. But if on the other hand it was taken in order to create black self-consiousness, it is simply a turning of his back upon history which has already taken cognizance of the disappearance of the majority of Negroes.

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NATIONAL LIBERATION AND CULTURE 1 Amilcar Cabral From Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings, Monthly Review Press, 1979,138-54

It is a great honour to take part in this ceremony held in homage to our companion in struggle and worthy son of Africa, the late lamented Dr. Eduardo Mondlane, former President of FRELIMO, who in a cowardly way was assassinated on 3 February 1969, in Dar-es-Salaam by the Portuguese colonialists and their allies. We should like to thank Syracuse University and particularly the Programme of Eastern African Studies, directed by the scholar and teacher Marshall Segall, for this initiative. It is evidence not only of the respect and admiration you feel for the unforgettable personality of Dr Eduardo Mondlane, but also of your solidarity with the heroic struggle of the Mozambican people and of all the peoples of Africa for national liberation and progress. In accepting your invitation - which we regard as addressed to our people and our combatants - we wanted once more to demonstrate our militant friendship and our solidarity with the people of Mozambique and their beloved leader, Dr Eduardo Mondlane, to whom we were linked by fraternal ties in the common struggle against the most retrograde of all colonialisms, Portuguese colonialism. Our friendship and solidarity are most sincere, even though we did not always agree with our comrade Eduardo Mondlane, whose death was moreover a loss for our people too. Other speakers have already had the chance to draw a portrait and to give a well-deserved eulogy of Dr Eduardo Mondlane. We should merely like to reaffirm our admiration for the figure of the African patriot and eminent man of culture that he was. Similarly we should like to say that Eduardo Mondlane's great merit was not his decision to struggle for his people's liberation. His greater merit was being able to integrate himself in 471

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his country's reality, to identify with his people and to acculturate himself by the struggle he led with courage, wisdom and determination. Eduardo Chivambo Mondlane, an African man who came from a rural background, a son of peasants and of a tribal chief, a child educated by missionaries, a black pupil in white schools of colonial Mozambique, a university student in racist South Africa, helped in youth by an American foundation, scholarship student of a United States university, with a doctorate from Northwestern University, a senior official of the United Nations, a professor at Syracuse University, president of the Mozambique Liberation Front, fallen as a combatant for the freedom of his people. The life of Eduardo Mondlane is, in fact, singularly rich in experience. If we consider the brief period during which he worked as an apprenticelabourer on an agricultural holding, we find that his life-cycle encompasses practically all the categories of colonial African society: from the peasantry to the assimilated 'petty bourgeoisie', and on the cultural level from the village universe to a universal culture opened towards the world, its problems, contradictions and prospects for evolution. The important thing is that, after this long course, Eduardo Mondlane was able to achieve the return to the village, in the personality of a fighter for the liberation and progress of his people, enriched by the often overwhelming experiences of today's world. In this way he was given a fruitful example: facing up to all the difficulties, fleeing the temptations, freeing himself from the compromises or engagements of cultural (hence political) alienation, he was able to rediscover his own roots, identify with his people and dedicate himself to the cause of national and social liberation. This is what the imperialists have not forgiven him. Instead of limiting ourselves to the more or less significant questions of the common struggle against the Portuguese colonialists, let us focus our lecture on an essential question: dependent and reciprocal relations between the national liberation struggle and culture. If we manage to persuade the African freedom fighters and all those concerned for freedom and progress of the African peoples of the conclusive importance of this question in the process of struggle, we shall have paid significant homage to Eduardo Mondlane. A cruel dilemma for colonialism: elimination or assimilation? When Goebbels, the brain behind Nazi propaganda, heard the word 'culture', he reached for his pistol. This shows that the Nazis - who were and are the most tragic expression of imperialism and of its thirst for domination - even if they were all degenerates like Hitler, had a clear idea of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination. History teaches us that, in certain circumstances, it is very easy for the 472

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foreigner to impose his domination on a people. But it likewise teaches us that, whatever the material aspects of this domination, it can be maintained only by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people concerned. Implantation of domination can be ensured definitively only by physical elimination of a significant part of the dominated population. In fact, to take up arms to dominate a people is, above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least to neutralize and to paralyse their cultural life. For as long as part of that people can have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation. At a given moment, depending on internal and external factors determining the evolution of the society in question, cultural resistance (indestructible) may take on new (political, economic and armed) forms, in order fully to contest foreign domination. The ideal for foreign domination, whether imperialist or not, lies in this alternative: either to eliminate practically all the population of the dominated country, thereby excluding the possibilities of a cultural resistance: or to succeed in imposing itself without damage to the culture of the dominated people, that is, to harmonize economic and political domination of these people with their cultural personality. The first hypothesis implies genocide of the indigenous population and creates a void which empties foreign domination of its content and its object: the dominated people. The second hypothesis has not, until now, been confirmed by history. The broad experience of mankind enables us to postulate that it has no practical viability: it is not possible to harmonize the economic and political domination of a people, whatever the degree of their social development, with the preservation of their cultural personality. In order to escape this alternative - which might be called the dilemma of cultural resistance - imperialist colonial domination has tried to create theories which, in fact, are only crude formulations of racism, and which, in practice, are translated into a permanent state of siege for the aboriginal populations, on the basis of racist dictatorship (or democracy). This, for example, is the case with the supposed theory of progressive assimilation of native populations, which is no more than a more or less violent attempt to deny the culture of the people in question. The unmistakable failure of this 'theory', put into practice by several colonial powers, including Portugal, is the most evident proof of its non-viability, if not of its inhuman character. It reaches the highest degree of absurdity in the Portuguese case, where Salazar asserts that Africa does not exist. This is likewise the case with the supposed theory of apartheid, created, applied and developed on the basis of the economic and political domination of the people of southern Africa by a racist minority, with all the crimes against humanity that this entails. The practice of apartheid takes the form of unrestrained exploitation of the labour force of the African 473

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masses, incarcerated and cynically repressed in the largest concentration camp mankind has ever known. National liberation, an act of culture These examples give a measure of the drama of foreign domination in the face of the cultural reality of the dominated people. They also show the close, dependent and reciprocal connexion existing between the cultural factor and the economic (and political) factor in the behaviour of human societies. In fact, at every moment of the life of a society (open or closed), culture is the result, with more or less awakened consciousness, of economic and political activities, the more or less dynamic expression of the type of relations prevailing within that society, on the one hand between man (considered individually or collectively) and nature, and, on the other hand, among individuals, groups of individuals, social strata or classes. The value of culture as an element of resistance to foreign domination lies in the fact that culture is the vigorous manifestation, on the ideological or idealist level, of the material and historical reality of the society that is dominated or to be dominated. Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people's history and a determinant of history, by the positive or negative influence it exerts on the evolution of relations between man and his environment and among men or human groups within a society, as well as between different societies. Ignorance of this fact might explain the failure of several attempts at foreign domination as well as the failure of some national liberation movements. Let us examine what national liberation is. We shall consider this phenomenon of history in its contemporary context, that is national liberation in the face of imperialist domination. The latter is, as we know, distinct both in form and content from preceding types of foreign domination (tribal, military-aristocratic, feudal and capitalist domination in the age of free competition). The principal characteristic, common to every kind of imperialist domination, is the denial of the historical process of the dominated people by means of violent usurpation of the freedom of the process of development of the productive forces. Now, in a given society, the level of development of the productive forces and the system of social utilization of these forces (system of ownership) determine the mode of production. In our view, the mode of production, whose contradictions are manifested with more or less intensity through class struggle, is the principal factor in the history of any human whole, and the level of productive forces is the true and permanent motive force of history. For every society, for every human group considered as a dynamic whole, the level of the productive forces indicates the status reached by the society and each of its components in the face of nature, its capacity to 474

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act or react consciously in relation to nature. It indicates and conditions the type of material relations (expressed objectively or subjectively) existing between man and his environment. The mode of production, which at every stage of history represents the result of the ceaseless search for a dynamic equilibrium between the level of productive forces and the system of social utilization of these forces, indicates the status reached by a given society and each of its components before itself and before history. In addition, it indicates and conditions the type of material relations (expressed objectively or subjectively) existing between the various elements or groups which constitute the society in question: relations and types of relations between man and nature, between man and his environment; relations and types of relations between the individual or collective components of a society. To speak about this is to speak of history but it is likewise to speak of culture. Culture, whatever the ideological or idealist characteristics of its expression, is thus an essential element of the history of a people. Culture is, perhaps, the resultant of this history just as the flower is the resultant of a plant. Like history, or because it is history, culture has as its material base the level of the productive forces and the mode of production. Culture plunges its roots into the humus of the material reality of the environment in which it develops, and it reflects the organic nature of the society, which may be more or less influenced by external factors. History enables us to know the nature and extent of the imbalances and the conflicts (economic, political and social) that characterize the evolution of a society. Culture enables us to know what dynamic syntheses have been formed and set by social awareness in order to resolve these conflicts at each stage of evolution of that society, in the search for survival and progress. Just as occurs with the flower in a plant, the capacity (or responsibility) for forming and fertilizing the germ which ensures the continuity of history lies in culture, and the germ simultaneously ensures the prospects for evolution and progress of the society in question. Thus it is understood that imperialist domination, denying to the dominated people their own historical process, necessarily denies their cultural process. It is further understood why the exercise of imperialist domination, like all other foreign domination, for its own security requires cultural oppression and the attempt at direct or indirect destruction of the essential elements of the culture of the dominated people. Study of the history of liberation struggles shows that they have generally been preceded by an upsurge of cultural manifestations, which progressively harden into an attempt, successful or not, to assert the cultural personality of the dominated people by an act of denial of the culture of the oppressor. Whatever the conditions of subjection of a people to foreign domination and the influence of economic, political and social 475

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factors in the exercise of this domination, it is generally within the cultural factor that we find the germ of challenge which leads to the structuring and development of the liberation movement. In our view, the foundation of national liberation lies in the inalienable right of every people to have their own history, whatever the formulations adopted in international law. The aim of national liberation is therefore to regain this right, usurped by imperialist domination, namely: the liberation of the process of development of the national productive forces. So national liberation exists when, and only when the national productive forces have been completely freed from all kinds of foreign domination. The liberation of productive forces and consequently of the ability freely to determine the mode of production most appropriate to the evolution of the liberated people, necessarily opens up new prospects for the cultural process of the society in question, by returning to it all its capacity to create progress. A people who free themselves from foreign domination will not be culturally free unless, without underestimating the importance of positive contributions from the oppressor's culture and other cultures, they return to the upwards paths of their own culture. The latter is nourished by the living reality of the environment and rejects harmful influences as much as any kind of subjection to foreign cultures. We see therefore that, if imperialist domination has the vital need to practise cultural oppression, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture.

The class character of culture On the basis of what has just been said, we may regard the liberation movement as the organized political expression of the struggling people's culture. Thus the leadership of that movement must have a clear notion of the value of culture in the framework of struggle and a profound knowledge of the culture of their people, whatever the level of economic development. Nowadays, it has become a commonplace to assert that every people has its culture. The time is past when, in an attempt to perpetuate the domination of peoples, culture was regarded as an attribute of privileged peoples or nations and when, out of ignorance or bad faith, culture was confused with technical skill, if not with the colour of one's skin or the shape of one's eyes. The liberation movement, as representative and defender of the culture of the people, must be conscious of the fact that, whatever the material conditions of the society it represents, the society is the bearer and the creator of culture. The liberation movement must in addition understand the mass character, the popular character of culture, which is not and could not be an attribute of one sector or of some sectors of society. 476

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In the thorough analysis of social structure which every liberation movement must be able to make, by virtue of the imperatives of struggle, the cultural characteristics of each social category have a place of prime importance. For, while culture has a mass character, it is not uniform, it is not evenly developed in all sectors of society. The attitude of each social category towards the struggle is dictated by its economic interests, but is also profoundly influenced by its culture. We may even admit that the differences in cultural levels explain the differing behaviour towards the liberation movement of individuals within the same socio-economic category. It is at this point that culture reaches its full significance for each individual: understanding and integration in his environment, identification with the fundamental problems and aspirations of society, acceptance of the possibility of change in the direction of progress. In the specific conditions of our country - and we should say of Africa the horizontal and vertical distribution of levels of culture is somewhat complex. In fact, from the villages to the towns, from one ethnic group to another, from the peasant to the artisan or to the more or less assimilated indigenous intellectual, from one social class to another, and even, as we have said, from individual to individual within the same social category, there are significant variations in the quantitative and qualitative level of culture. It is a question of prime importance for the liberation movement to take these facts into consideration. In the societies with a horizontal structure, like the Balanta society, for example, the distribution of cultural levels is more or less uniform, variations being linked solely to individual characteristics and to age groups. In the societies with a vertical structure, like that of the Fula for example, there are important variations from the top to the bottom of the social pyramid. This shows once more the close connexion between the cultural factor and the economic factor, and also explains the differences in the overall or sectoral behaviour of these two ethnic groups towards the liberation movement. It is true that the multiplicity of social and ethnic categories somewhat complicates the determining of the role of culture in the liberation movement. But it is vital not to lose sight of the decisive significance of the class character of culture in development of the liberation struggle, even in the case when a category is or appears to be still embryonic. The experience of colonial domination shows that, in an attempt to perpetuate exploitation, the colonizer not only creates a whole system of repression of the cultural life of the colonized people, but also provokes and develops the cultural alienation of a part of the population, either by supposed assimilation of indigenous persons, or by the creation of a social gulf between the aboriginal elites and the mass of the people. As a result of this process of division or of deepening the divisions within the society, it follows that a considerable part of the population notably the urban or 477

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peasant 'petty bourgeoisie', assimilates the colonizer's mentality, and regards itself as culturally superior to the people to which it belongs and whose cultural values it ignores or despises. This situation, characteristic of the majority of colonized intellectuals, is crystallized to the extent that the social privileges of the assimilated or alienated group are increased with direct implications for the behaviour towards the liberation movement by individuals in this group. A spiritual reconversion - of mentalities - is thus seen to be vital for their true integration in the liberation movement. Such reconversion - re-Africanization in our case - may take place before the struggle, but is completed only during the course of the struggle, through daily contact with the mass of the people and the communion of sacrifices which the struggle demands. We must, however, take into consideration the fact that, faced with the prospect of political independence, the ambition and opportunism from which the liberation movement generally suffers may draw into the struggle individuals who have not been reconverted. The latter, on the basis of their level of education, their scientific or technical knowledge, and without losing any of their class cultural prejudices, may attain the highest positions in the liberation movement. On the cultural as well as the political level vigilance is therefore vital. For in the specific and highly complex circumstances of the process of the phenomenon of the liberation movements, all that glitters is not necessarily gold: political leaders - even the most famous - may be culturally alienated. But the class character of culture is still more noticeable in the behaviour of privileged groups in the rural environment, notably where ethnic groups with a vertical social structure are concerned, where nevertheless the influences of assimilation or cultural alienation are nil or virtually nil. This is the case of the Fula ruling class, for example. Under colonial domination, the political authority of this class (traditional chiefs, noble families, religious leaders) is purely nominal, and the mass of the people are aware of the fact that the real authority lies with and is wielded by the colonial administrators. However, the ruling class retains in essence its cultural authority over the mass of the people in the group, with very important political implications. Knowing this reality, colonialism, which represses or inhibits significant cultural expression at the grass roots on the part of the mass of the people, supports and protects the prestige and cultural influence of the ruling class at the summit. It installs chiefs whom it trusts and who are more or less accepted by the population, gives them various material privileges including education for their eldest children, creates chiefdoms where they did not exist, establishes and develops cordial relations with religious leaders, builds mosques, organizes journeys to Mecca, etc. Above all, by means of the repressive organs of colonial administration, it ensures the economic and social privileges of the ruling class in relation to the mass of the 478

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people. All this does not remove the possibility that, among these ruling classes, there may be individuals or groups of individuals who join the liberation movement, although less frequently than in the case of the assimilated 'petty bourgeoisie'. Several traditional and religious leaders join the struggle from the start or in the course of its unfolding, making an enthusiastic contribution to the cause of liberation. But there again vigilance is vital: holding strongly onto their class cultural prejudices, individuals in this category generally see in the liberation movement the only valid means for using the sacrifices of the mass of the people to eliminate colonial oppression of their own class and hence to re-establish their complete cultural and political domination over the people. In the general framework of challenge to imperialist colonial domination and in the specific circumstances to which we are referring, it can be seen that among the oppressor's most faithful allies are found some senior civil servants and assimilated intellectuals from the liberal professions, and a significant number of representatives of the ruling class in the rural areas. This fact gives some measure (negative or positive) of the influence of culture and of cultural prejudices on the question of the political option towards the liberation movement. It likewise shows the limits of this influence and the supremacy of the class factor in behaviour of the various social categories. The senior civil servant or the assimilated intellectual, characterized by total cultural alienation, identifies in the political option with the traditional or religious leader, who has experienced no significant foreign cultural influence. For these two categories set above all factors or demands of a cultural nature - and against the aspirations of the people their own economic and social privileges, their class interests. That is a truth which the liberation movement cannot ignore, on pain of betraying the economic, political, social and cultural aims of the struggle. Towards a definition of national culture As on the political level and without minimizing the positive contribution which privileged classes or strata may make to the struggle, the liberation movement must, on the cultural level, base its action on popular culture, whatever the diversity of cultural levels in the country. The cultural challenge to colonial domination - the primary phase of the liberation movement - can be effectively envisaged only on the basis of the culture of the mass of workers in the countryside and the towns, including the (revolutionary) nationalist 'petty bourgeoisie', which has been re-Africanized or is disposed towards a cultural reconversion. Whatever the complexity of this cultural panorama at the base, the liberation movement must be capable of distinguishing within it the essential from the secondary, the positive from the negative, the progressive from the reactionary in order to characterize the key line of progressive definition of national culture. 479

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For culture to play the important role which falls to it in the framework of development of the liberation movement, the movement must be able to conserve the positive cultural values of every well-defined social group, of every category, and to achieve the confluence of these values into the stream of struggle, giving them a new dimension - the national dimension. Faced with such a necessity, the liberation struggle is, above all, a struggle as much for the conservation and survival of the cultural values of the people as for the harmonizing and development of these values within a national framework. The political and moral unity of the liberation movement and of the people it represents and leads implies the achievement of the cultural unity of the decisive social categories for the struggle. This unity takes the form on the one hand of total identification of the movement with the environmental reality and with the problems and fundamental aspirations of the people and on the other hand of progressive cultural identification of the various social categories which take part in the struggle. The latter process must harmonize divergent interests, resolve contradictions and define common aims in the search for liberty and progress. If broad strata of the population become aware of these aims and this is shown in determination in the face of all the difficulties and all the sacrifices, it is a great political and moral victory. The same result is likewise a decisive cultural achievement for the further development and success of the liberation movement. Cultural bankruptcy of colonialism The greater the differences between the culture of the dominated people and that of the oppressor the more possible such a victory becomes. History shows that it is much less difficult to dominate and preserve domination over a people whose culture is similar or analogous to that of the conqueror. It could perhaps be asserted that Napoleon's failure, whatever the economic and political motives of his wars of conquest, lay in his not having had the wisdom (or ability) to limit his ambitions to the domination of peoples whose culture was more or less similar to that of France. The same could be said of other ancient, modern or contemporary empires. One of the most serious mistakes, if not the most serious mistake, made by the colonial powers in Africa, may have been to ignore or underestimate the cultural strength of African peoples. This attitude is particularly clear in the case of Portuguese colonial domination, which was not content with denying absolutely the existence of cultural values of the African and his condition as a social being, but has persisted in forbidding him any kind of political activity. The people of Portugal, who have not even enjoyed the wealth usurped from African peoples, but the majority of whom have assimilated the imperial mentality of the country's ruling classes, are 480

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paying today a high price in three colonial wars for the mistake of underestimating our cultural reality. The political and armed resistance of the peoples of the Portuguese colonies, as of other countries or regions of Africa, was crushed by the technical superiority of the imperialist conqueror, with the complicity of or betrayal by some indigenous ruling classes. The elites who were faithful to the history and to the culture of the people were destroyed. Entire populations were massacred. The colonial kingdom was installed with all the crimes and exploitation that characterize it. But cultural resistance of the African people was not destroyed. African culture, though repressed, persecuted and betrayed by some social categories who compromised with colonialism, survived all the storms, by taking refuge in the villages, in the forests and in the spirit of generations of victims of colonialism. Like the seed which long awaits conditions favourable for germination, in order to conserve survival of the species and its evolution, the culture of African peoples flourishes again today across the continent in the struggles for national liberation. Whatever the forms of these struggles, their successes and failures and the length of their development, they mark the beginning of a new phase in the continent's history and are in form and content the most significant cultural factor in the life of African peoples. As the fruit and the proof of cultural vigour, the liberation struggle of African peoples opens up new prospects for the development of culture, in the service of progress.

Cultural wealth of Africa The time is past when it was necessary to seek arguments to prove the cultural maturity of African peoples. The irrationality of the racist 'theories' of a Gobineau or a Levy-Bruhl neither interests nor persuades anyone but racists. In spite of colonial domination (and perhaps because of this domination) Africa has been able to impose respect for her cultural values. She has even been shown to be one of the richest of continents in cultural values. From Carthage or Giza to Zimbabwe, from Meroe to Benin and Ife, from the Sahara or Timbuctoo to Kilwa, across the immensity and the diversity of the continent's natural conditions, the culture of African peoples is an undeniable fact: in works of art as in oral and written traditions, in cosmogony as in music and dances, in religions and creeds as in dynamic equilibrium of economic, political and social structures that African man has been able to create. If the universal value of African culture is now an incontestable fact, it should not, however, be forgotten that African man, whose hands, as the poet said, 'have laid the foundation stones of the world', has developed his culture in often, if not always, hostile conditions: from deserts to equatorial forests, from coastal marshes to the banks of great rivers subject to 481

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frequent flooding, through and against all the difficulties, including scourges which destroy not only plants and animals but man as well. In agreement with Basil Davidson and other researchers of African societies and cultures, we can say that the accomplishments of the African genius on the economic, political and cultural levels, in the light of the inhospitable character of the environment, are an achievement to be ranked with the major historical examples of the greatness of man. The dynamic of culture Obviously, this reality constitutes a motive for pride and stimulus for those who struggle for the freedom and progress of African peoples. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that no culture is a perfect, finished whole. Culture, like history, is necessarily an expanding and developing phenomenon. Even more important, we must bear in mind that the fundamental characteristic of culture is its close, dependent and reciprocal connexion with the economic and social reality of the environment, with the level of productive forces and the mode of production of the society which created it. Culture, as the fruit of history, reflects at all times the material and spiritual reality of the society, of man-the-individual and man-the social-being, faced with conflicts which set them against nature and the imperatives of life in common. It follows from this that any culture contains essential and secondary elements, strengths and weaknesses, virtues, defects, positive and negative aspects, factors for progress and stagnation or for regression. It follows likewise that culture - a creation of the society and a synthesis of the checks and balances society devises to resolve the conflicts that characterize it at each stage of history - is a social reality independent of men's will, the colour of their skin or the shape of their eyes. A profound analysis of cultural reality removes the supposition that there can be continental or racial cultures. This is because, as with history, culture develops in an uneven process, at the level of a continent, a 'race' or even a society. The co-ordinates of culture, like those of any developing phenomenon, vary in space and time, whether they be material (physical) or human (biological and social). The fact of recognizing the existence of common and special traits in the cultures of African peoples, independently of the colour of their skin, does not necessarily imply that one and only one culture exists on the continent. In the same way that from the economic and political point of view one can note the existence of various Africas, so there are also various African cultures. Without any doubt, underestimation of the cultural values of African peoples, based upon racist feelings and the intention of perpetuating exploitation by the foreigner, has done much harm to Africa. But in the face of the vital need for progress, the following factors or behaviour 482

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would be no less harmful to her: unselective praise; systematic exaltation of virtues without condemning defects; blind acceptance of the values of the culture without considering what is actually or potentially negative, reactionary or regressive; confusion between what is the expression of an objective and historical material reality and what appears to be a spiritual creation or the result of a special nature; absurd connexion of artistic creations, whether valid or not, to supposed racial characteristics; and finally non-scientific or ascientific critical appreciation of the cultural phenomenon. The important thing is not to waste time in more or less hair-splitting debates on the specificity or non-specificity of African cultural values, but to look upon these values as a conquest by a part of mankind for the common heritage of all mankind, achieved in one or several phases of its evolution. The important thing is to proceed to critical analysis of African cultures in the light of the liberation movement and the demands of progress - in the light of this new stage in the history of Africa. We may be aware of its value in the framework of universal civilization, but to compare its value with that of other cultures, not in order to decide its superiority or its inferiority, but to determine, within the general framework of the struggle for progress, what contribution African culture has made and must make and contributions it can or must receive. The liberation movement must, as we have said, base its action on thorough knowledge of the culture of the people and be able to assess the elements of this culture at their true worth, as well as the different levels it reaches in each social category. It must likewise be able to distinguish within the totality of the people's cultural values the essential and secondary, the positive and negative, the progressive and reactionary, the strengths and weaknesses. This is necessary by virtue of the demands of the struggle and in order to be able to centre its action on the essential without forgetting the secondary, to instigate development of positive and progressive elements and to fight, with subtlety but strictness, negative and reactionary elements; finally so that it can make effective use of strengths and remove weaknesses, or transform them into strengths. National culture, a condition for development of the struggle The more one becomes aware that the major goal of the liberation movement goes beyond the conquest of political independence to put itself on the superior plane of total liberation of productive forces and the building of the people's economic, social and cultural progress, the more evident becomes the need to proceed to a selective analysis of the values of the culture within the framework of the struggle. The negative values of the culture are generally an obstacle to the development of the struggle and to 483

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the building of that progress. The need for analysis becomes more acute in the cases where, in order to face up to colonialist violence, the liberation movement must mobilize and organize the people under the leadership of a strong and disciplined political organization, with the aim of resorting to liberating violence - the armed struggle for national liberation. In this perspective, the liberation movement must be able, beyond the analysis mentioned above, to achieve, step by step but surely, as its political action develops, the confluence of the cultural levels of the various social categories available for the struggle. The movement must be able to transform them into the national cultural force which serves as a basis for development of the armed struggle and is a condition for it. It should be noted that the analysis of cultural reality already gives a measure of the strengths and weaknesses of the people, faced with the demands of the struggle, and therefore represents a valuable acquisition for the strategy and tactics to be followed both on the political and military level. But only in the cause of struggle, launched from a satisfactory base of political and moral unity, is the complexity of cultural questions raised in its full range. This frequently requires successive adaptations of strategy and tactics to the realities which only the struggle can reveal. Experience of the struggle shows how Utopian and absurd it is to seek to apply schemes developed by other peoples in the course of their liberation struggle and solutions which they found to the questions with which they were or are confronted, without considering local reality (and especially cultural reality). It might be said that at the start of the struggle, whatever the degree of preparation, both the leadership of the liberation movement and the mass of militants and of the people are not clearly aware of the weight of influence of cultural values in the development of the struggle. They do not know what possibilities it creates, the limits it imposes and principally, how and how much culture is for the people an inexhaustible source of courage, of material and moral support, of physical and psychic energy, which enables them to accept sacrifices and even to do 'miracles'. But likewise, in some respects they do not know how much it is a source of obstacles and difficulties, of erroneous conceptions of reality, of deviations in the fulfilment of duty and of limitation on the rhythm and efficiency of the struggle in the face of the political, technical and scientific demands of a war.

Armed struggle, an instrument for unification and cultural progress The armed struggle for liberation, launched in response to aggression by the colonialist oppressor, turns out to be a painful but effective instrument for developing the cultural level both for the leadership strata of the liber484

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ation movement and for the various social categories who take part in the struggle. The leaders of the liberation movement, drawn from the 'petty bourgeoisie' (intellectuals, employees) or from the background of workers in the towns (labourers, drivers, salaried workers in general), having to live day by day with the various peasant strata, among the rural population, come to know the people better. They discover at its source the wealth of their cultural values, (philosophical, political, artistic, social and moral) acquire a clearer awareness of the economic realities of the country; of the difficulties, sufferings and aspirations of the mass of the people. The leaders realize, not without a certain astonishment, the wealth of spirit, the capacity for reasoning and clear statement of ideas, the facility for comprehension and assimilation of concepts on the part of populations who only yesterday were forgotten if not despised and regarded by the colonizer, and even by some nationals, as incompetent beings. The leaders thus enrich their culture - they cultivate the mind and free themselves from complexes, strengthening their capacity, to serve the movement in the service of the people. On their side, the mass of workers and, in particular, the peasants, who are generally illiterate and have never moved beyond the confines of the village or region, in the contact with other categories shed the complexes which constrained them in their relations with other ethnic and social groups. They understand their situation as determining elements of the struggle: they break the fetters of the village universe to integrate gradually into the country and the world; they acquire an infinite amount of new knowledge, of use to their immediate and future activity within the framework of the struggle; and they strengthen their political awareness, by absorbing the principles of national and social revolution postulated by the struggle. They thus become fitter to play the decisive role as the principal force of the liberation movement. As we know, the armed liberation struggle demands the mobilization and organization of a significant majority of the population, the political and moral unity of the various social categories, the efficient use of modern weapons and other means of warfare, the gradual elimination of the remnants of tribal mentality, and the rejection of social and religious rules and taboos contrary to development of the struggle (gerontocracy, nepotism, social inferiority of women, rites and practices which are incompatible with the rational and national character of the struggle, etc.). The struggle brings about many other profound changes in the life of the populations. The armed liberation struggle implies, therefore, a veritable forced march along the road to cultural progress. We should add to these inherent features of an armed liberation struggle: the practice of democracy, of criticism and self-criticism, the growing responsibility of populations for the management of their life, literacy 485

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teaching, the creation of schools and health care, the training of cadres from peasant and labourer backgrounds - and other achievements. We should thus find that the armed liberation struggle is not only a product of culture but also a factor of culture. This is without doubt for the people the prime recompense for the efforts and sacrifices which are the price of war. In the light of this perspective, it behoves the liberation movement to define clearly the aims of cultural resistance, as an integral and determining part of the struggle.

The aims of cultural resistance From all that we have just said, it can be concluded that in the framework of the conquest of national independence and in the perspective of building the economic and social progress of the people, these aims must be at least the following: Development of a people's culture and of all aboriginal positive cultural values Development of a national culture on the basis of history and the conquests of the struggle itself Constant raising of the political and moral awareness of the people (of all social categories) and of patriotism, spirit of sacrifice and devotion to the cause of independence, justice and progress Development of the technical and technological scientific culture, compatible with the demands of progress Development, on the basis of a critical assimilation of mankind's conquests in the domains of art, science, literature, etc., of a universal culture, aiming at perfect integration in the contemporary world and its prospects for evolution Constant and generalized raising of feelings of humanism, solidarity, respect and disinterested devotion to the human being. The achievement of these aims is indeed possible for, under the specific conditions of life of the African peoples, facing the imperialist challenge, the armed liberation struggle is an act of making history bear fruit, the highest expression of our culture and of our African-ness. At the moment of victory, it must be translated into a significant leap forward of the culture of the people who are liberating themselves. If this does not happen, then the efforts and sacrifices made during the struggle will have been in vain. The struggle will have failed in its aims, and the people will have missed an opportunity for progress in the general framework of history. When we celebrate the memory of Dr Eduardo Mondlane at this ceremony, we are paying homage to the political man, to the freedom fighter 486

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and particularly to the man of culture. It was a culture that was not only acquired during his personal life and on university benches, but principally in the midst of his people, in the framework of his people's liberation struggle. One might say that Eduardo Mondlane was savagely assassinated because he was capable of identifying with the culture of his people, with their deepest aspirations, through and against all attempts or temptations for the alienation of his personality as an African and a Mozambican. Because he had forged a new culture in the struggle, he fell as a combatant. It is easy enough to accuse the Portuguese colonialists and the agents of imperialism, their allies, of the abominable crime committed against the person of Eduardo Mondlane, against the people of Mozambique and against Africa. It was they who cravenly assassinated him. But it is necessary for all men of culture, all freedom fighters, all spirits eager for peace and progress - all the enemies of colonialism and racism - to have the courage to bear on their shoulders part of the responsibility as behoves them for this tragic death. For, if Portuguese colonialism and imperialist agents can still with impunity murder a man like Dr Eduardo Mondlane, it is because something putrid continues to decay in the heart of mankind: imperialist domination. It is because men of good will, defenders of the culture of peoples, have not yet accomplished their duty over our planet. In our view, that gives a measure of the responsibilities of our audience in this temple of culture in regard to the liberation movement of the oppressed peoples.

Note 1 The Eduardo Mondlane Memorial Lecture, delivered at Syracuse University, New York (Programme of Eastern African Studies), 20 February 1970.

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4.3

NATIONALISM AND THE THIRD WORLD Renato Constantino From The Nationalist Alternative, Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1979, 84-90

The concept of nationalism can be an internal unifying force not only for the Philippines but also for other countries similarly situated. It can also serve as a collective strategy of escape from the clutches of imperialism. In this sense, nationalism gains an internationalist aspect as Third World countries begin to see its value as a common way out of their predicament. The problem of the less developed states cannot be solved in isolation nor by each country acting alone, and especially not without political awareness and militant action by the peoples of the Third World. Concerted and coherent programs are vital. Cooperation among developing countries, perhaps starting only with limited demands, will inevitably progress to enhance people's demands for the pooling of resources and for the coordination of policies against their continuous economic subordination to global corporations.1 The collective strength of the Third World has not been realized because of divisions within its ranks. These divisions are incited and encouraged by the Trilateral World with carrot-and-stick tactics. Close consultation and collaboration among Third World countries is rendered all the more necessary by the fact that the developed capitalist states are so well organized; their actions are efficiently coordinated by a permanent machinery, the most important part of which is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) based in Paris. In contrast, the developing countries only have the Group of 77 within the UNCTAD which does not meet regularly and which has no mechanism for sustained research and immediate action. It is therefore not surprising that the call for a new international economic order made five years ago has hardly made any headway. 488

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Collective self-reliance The rich capitalist states will not budge an inch if the developing countries do not unite and exert strong pressure on them. It is therefore imperative that a Third World consciousness be developed based on the underlying principles of the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order and the Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States. A new type of internationalism among the poverty-stricken nations can be built around the Arusha Programme for Collective Self-Reliance and Framework for Negotiations formulated by the Fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Group of 77 held in Arusha, United Republic of Tanzania in February, 1979 in preparation for UNCTAD V. In the Arusha document, the participants Recognize that developing countries need to enhance ther collective bargaining strength and exercise their countervailing power, thereby creating the compulsions which would make the developed countries willing to negotiate the desired changes in the international economic system; Reaffirm that such countervailing power flows from the individual countries, and that the basis of collective self-reliance rests on the intensification and strengthening of economic linkages among developing countries; Underline the vital importance of initiatives which member governments of the Group of 77 take to accelerate the development and transformation of their economies through the process of collective self-reliance which include an intensification of their joint and concerted efforts to mobilize their resources and markets for building a structure of genuine economic interdependence and complementarity between their economies and explore areas of communality of interest as well as the strengthening of their solidarity in their negotiations with the developed countries for the establishment of the New International Economic Order; One form of collective self-reliance is that of the raw material cartel as exemplified by OPEC. Instead of disastrous competition among themselves to sell the largest volume of crude oil to the biggest buyer, the petroleum-exporting countries banded together to set the most favorable price for their product. In this manner, they get fairer returns for their raw material which used to be gobbled up so quickly and so cheaply by the industrialized economies of the West. Another form of collective self-reliance is the Andean Code formulated by several South American countries to limit the operations of foreign 489

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investments within their territories. Restrictions include those imposed on repatriation of profits, reinvestment, and re-export of capital. In addition, foreign investments are allowed only in areas where they will not compete with domestic industry. There are also stipulations that local majority control of certain foreign-owned enterprises will take place within a definite period. Transfer of technology is another area where collective self-reliance can operate. Third World countries such as India and Mexico which have attained a certain level of technological advancement can share their knowledge and skills with other developing nations in need of these.

Transformation of ASEAN Third World countries know from experience how shrewdly imperial powers coopt valid Third World aspirations and turn these to their own advantage. They should therefore be wary of massive projects being proposed on a regional basis. It is possible that these projects which utilize the rhetoric of Third World basic needs, and cater to Third World hopes of modernization are in reality transnational plans to better utilize the resources of these countries. An example is ASEAN. More and more, ASEAN is becoming a platform for the regional schemes of global corporations. Collective self-reliance based on individual nationalist goals by ASEAN countries can only be realized by transforming the association into a real regional grouping based on the needs of the peoples of the region and not an appendage of foreign corporate giants. To achieve real solidarity as a regional institution, ASEAN should encourage the participation of the Indochinese states. Initially, this means that ASEAN countries should resist the temptation of being drawn into intra-regional animosities encouraged by imperialist powers and their new-found allies. Reaching out to the Indochinese countries rather than ostracizing them would make the region one that could play a positive role in world affairs and assure peace in the area. Listening to the propaganda wrought by the enemies of these states would only result in a weak regional grouping of the five ASEAN members and this weakening would make them easy victims for the transnational corporations and the states that support and back them. Pooling their resources and talents for the good of their peoples and not relying on foreign conglomerates would go a long way to the attainment of regional and individual self-sufficiency. The ASEAN countries are in command of resources which if not surrendered to the transnationals would go a long way to real development for their peoples. This would mean real neutrality and a natural relationship with all states within the region. The region should not be divided by foreign intrigues. A unified region would be a self-reliant entity that could speak as one for all the peoples of the area. This would be the starting point for real 490

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development and assurance of real peace for the peoples of this part of the world. National self-reliance Collective self-reliance, however, must be reinforced by individual selfreliance and vice-versa. The clearest example of their interrelation is the objective of establishing some form of raw material cartel following the OPEC model. The great obstacle to the realization of such a plan is the control of the transnationals themselves over the raw material resources of many Third World countries. Clearly, before the first steps towards collective self-reliance can be taken, a measure of individual selfreliance must be achieved. Individual self-reliance, requires the changing of national priorities and the restructuring of society to eliminate sectors, institutions and outlooks that have been the deliberate products of transnational and imperialist thrusts. There is no use talking about increasing production without focusing on the people who produce and consume. What is the point of having miraculous increases in GNP and export earnings if production is not for the consumption of the producers, if the goods and services produced cater only to a wealthy ten per cent? Modernization merely of certain enclaves run and operated by foreigners and catering to a narrow sector of the population is not a desirable end. What is needed is escape from the various traps imposed by colonialism and later by neocolonialism through a sustained struggle for economic independence which involves the practice of both individual and collective self-reliance on the part of developing countries.

Explaining Third World reality The development of Third World consciousness rests on a concrete understanding and correct appraisal of Third World reality. The role of Third World scholars and intellectuals in this endeavor is an important one because their output will form the basis of collective action. Unfortunately, however, there are influences and limitations which prevent many of them from being useful and effective. One is the preoccupation with particular issues, such as trade and unequal exchange, without relating them to general trends. This leads to segmental views and analyses. Facets of international economic relations cannot be appreciated properly without the realization that they are the results of the social transformation that imperialism has imposed. These transformations involve production, trade, class formation, politics and the psychology of the subjugated people. As one respected scholar observed: 491

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The focus on private investment, trade, the multinational corporation in the study of imperialism is useful but not adequate for these economic activities and organizations operate within a universe which is not explainable by the behavior and activity of these units. To understand where, when, and how capital expanded into the periphery in a period of substantial political upheavals and class conflict, one must look to the role of the imperial state.2 Whatever the particular focus of a study, it must not fail to consider the many-faceted activities of imperial states which are continuously trying to provide for themselves "access points" in Third World countries which will enable them to influence policy priorities and class formation to benefit imperialist interests. Such state activity in behalf of its giant corporations is most useful to the latter when they first enter a country, when they wish to expand their investments, and when they want to prevent the imposition of restrictive policies and the restoration of national rights over resources and indigenous control over primary economic activities. Another limitation of scholars is the fondness for abstract theories such as dependency, dominance or inequality, which fail to take into consideration the concrete societies and institutions of different Third World countries within a specific historical context. Thus, their analysis lacks precise descriptions of the mode of production which forms the basis of exploitation. Since imperialism is the apex of worldwide capitalist development, capital accumulation - where it occurs and where it goes - is at the heart of the exploitative process in the Third World. As one Latin American critic of abstract theories maintained: The analysis therefore requires primarily an understanding of the contemporary characteristics of the world capitalist system, [including] the emergence of the United States as the undisputed hegemonic power in the capitalist world, the challenge of the growing socialist bloc, and its attendant creation of new demands on the capitalist world if its systems were to be maintained, the decolonization of Africa and Asia, and the beginning of the process of the transnationalization of capitalism.3 According to him, dependent industrialization under the aegis of foreign capital becomes possible in the Third World countries under the new international division of labor. Thus, he continued: The effort of analysis should be oriented towards the elaboration of concepts capable of explaining how the general trends in capitalist expansion are transformed into specific relationships 492

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between men, classes and states, how these specific relations in turn react upon the general trends of the capitalist system, how internal and external processes of political domination reflect one another, both in their compatibilities and their contradictions.4 Already, the preoccupation with abstractions has taken its toll. Some left intellectuals become "academic guerrillas" using Aesopian language for survival as well as convenience, having no time nor patience to conduct the detailed research necessary for the "concrete analysis of concrete conditions." Others busy themselves with concrete, detailed research but avoid analysis in order to escape the dangers of stating conclusions unpalatable to the establishment. Some academicians try to retain and enhance their conventional stature by adhering to accepted norms which sacrifice relevance to methodology. Others even become establishment mandarins to partake of the boons offered by the state while using their theoretical writings to salve their consciences.5 Too many of the intellectual left are divorced from the mass movement because their work is removed from experience by abstraction. In the Philippines, the alienation which abstraction engenders is deepened by the use of a foreign language, this piece itself being a case in point. On the other hand, many activists within the mass movement tend to oversimplify, to disdain analysis and rely on formulas derived from foreign experiences. Their separation can be bridged only when mechanisms are created by which intellectuals and activists can learn from each other under a broad political umbrella where all progressive elements are welcome.

Nationalism and liberation Imperialist exploitation is central to Third World reality. Liberation from underdevelopment means liberation from imperialism. This, however, cannot take place without awakening and activating the peoples of the Third World in the struggle for emancipation. For the present, the only animating force in this process of mass mobilization is nationalism expressed on different levels and using various terminologies: as a national program for economic independence, as concrete measures undertaken in the spirit of individual and collective self-reliance, as stirring declarations for a new international economic order which form the basis of Third World consciousness, unity and action. National liberation, however, is only an instrument for the further development of man and society; in other words, it is a necessary transitional stage towards social liberation. As mentioned earlier, the task of mass nationalism is to establish the unity of all anti-imperialist forces and to surmount the contradictions among these various sectors. Some of these contradictions will have to be 493

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faced eventually but others will probably disappear in the course of the struggle. For ultimately, the politicization of many of those involved in a mass nationalist movement will impel them to give up their original sectoral goals in favor of the larger interest of the entire people. On the other hand, the elevation of mass consciousness resulting from the struggle against imperialism will deprive former hegemonic classes of the advantages that an ignorant, passive mass had allowed them. Nationalists who already see the movement's long-range goals should try to win over those narrow nationalists who may become impediments to the social liberation of the people because to a certain extent they are still captives and beneficiaries of imperialism. After the defeat of the principal enemy, the concentration of the national effort will be on the social struggle for equality, progress and freedom for all citizens. Nationalism is the ideological base for national liberation, but national liberation is only a step toward real liberation which will do away with all forms of oppression and exploitation. Nationalism in a Third World country confronts an international system, no longer a single metropolitan power. Therefore, contemporary nationalism should be part of a larger internationalism of oppressed countries, part of the wider struggle against global control by state and corporate forces that seek the continuation of a system which consigns the peoples of the Third World to a life of poverty, ignorance and underdevelopment.6

Notes 1 See Renato Constantino, "Global Enterprises and the Transfer of Technology," op. cit. 2 James Petras, Critical Perspectives on Imperialism and Social Class in the Third World (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1978) pp. 48^9. 3 Gabriel Palma, "Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?" World Development (Great Britain: Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978) pp. 881-924. 4 Ibid. 5 See Petras, op. cit., pp. 186-189. 6 See Renato and Letizia Constantino, The Continuing Past, op. cit., pp. 343-344.

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CROSS-CULTURAL POETICS Edouard Glissant From Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Virginia University Press, 1989, 134^}2, J. Michael Dash (trans.). From Le Discours Antillais. © 1981 Les Editions du Seuil.

The epic of the Zulu Emperor Chaka, as related by Thomas Mofolo,1 seems to me to exemplify an African poetics. Evidence of parallels with Western epic forms is not lacking: depiction of a tyrannical tendency (ambition), involvement of the Zulu community in the hero's tragedy, the rise and fall of the hero. You could not consider the magical aspect (origin of the warrior, importance of medicine men, practices and rites) as a particularly African theme. All epics that relate how peoples advance make this appeal to divine intervention. The oral form is not peculiar either; after all, Homer's poems were meant to be sung, recited, or danced. There are two specific features that make Chaka particularly interesting. It is an epic that, while enacting the "universal" themes of passion and man's destiny, is not concerned with the origin of a people or its early history. Such an epic does not include a creation myth. On the contrary, it is related to a much more dangerous moment in the experience of the people concerned, that of its forthcoming contact with conquerors coming from the North. One is struck by the similarity between the experiences of these great, fugitive African rulers, who created from a village or tribe huge empires and all ended up in prison, exile, or dependent. (Their experience is repeated as caricature in the ambitions of these pseudoconquerors who appeared as a postcolonial phenomenon, former subordinates or officers in colonial armies, who cause so much ridicule or indignation in the West, which created them and gave them authority.) All the great African conquerors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were haunted in this way by the approach of the white man. It is to the latter that Chaka refers when he is assassinated by those close to him. It seems that his life, his actions, and his work are the ultimate barrier with which he tries to prevent their intrusion, and only he understands. African 495

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poets will also be haunted by this fate, and their poems will chronicle these experiences. We in Martinique were touched by this obsession when the King of Dahomey, Behanzin, was deported here. The epic of these conquered heroes, which was also that of their peoples or tribes, sometimes of their beliefs, is not meant, when recounted, to reassure a community of its legitimacy in the world. They are not creation epics, great "books" about genesis, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Old Testament, the sagas, and the chansons de geste. They are the memories of cultural contact, which are put together collectively by a people before being dispersed by colonization. There is no evidence therefore of that "naive consciousness" that Hegel defines as the popular phase of the epic, but a strangled awareness that will remain an underlying element in the life of African peoples during the entire period of colonization.2 (In my reading of transcriptions of African epics [those of the Segou Empire among the Bambaras, for example, compiled and translated by African researchers and Lilyan Kesteloot], I am aware of a certain "suspension" of the narrative: as if, while composing his discourse, the poet seems to be waiting for something that he knows he cannot stop. The succession of kings does not give rise to [nor is it based on] a theory of legitimacy. The epic is disruptive. History comes to an abrupt end. Memory becomes secretive, it must be forced to the surface. The white man ultimately intrudes and forces it into the open. The secret fire of the communal palaver is dispersed in the wind. The foresight of the epic is to have always known that this contact with another culture would come. This anticipation of cultural contact has been interpreted by O. Mannoni as a dependency complex: "Wherever Europeans have founded colonies of the type we are considering, it can safely be said that their coming was unconsciously expected—even desired—by the future subject peoples."3 Frantz Fanon denounced this interpretation—Black Skin, White Masks. European peoples, while being aggressive concerning the cross-cultural process, could not understand its poetics, which to them represented weakness and surrender.4 M. Mannoni made this blindness the basis for his theory.) The other characteristic derives from a basic feature of the epic narrative, which has disappeared almost completely from Western literature: I call it the poetics of duration. At no point does language in the African epic claim to delight, surprise, or dazzle. It does not harangue the listener; it appeals to him; it captivates him; it leads him through its dense accretions in which little by little its message is outlined. To my mind, the creation of distinct literary genres has facilitated the disappearance of such a poetics in Western literatures. The existence of the novel and its specific conventions has increasingly caused all exploration of time and all related techniques to be restricted to this genre. At the same time the poem became the realm of the unsayable: that which is dazzling is its conciseness, the brilliance of its revelations, the extreme edge of clairvoyance. A 496

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poetics of the moment. But to discriminate in this manner between the genres and to confine them to poetics so diametrically opposed neutralize these poetics in relation to each other, and subject them henceforth to their conventions instead of allowing the latter to be challenged. In the poetics of the oral African text everything can be said. The dense mystery that surrounds the figure of Chaka does not originate in what the epic narrative hides from us but from the process of accumulation. The poetically unsayable seems to me tied, in the West, to what one calls the dignity of the human being, in turn surpassed since the historical appearance of private property. This daring leap allows us to argue that poetic passion, inso-far as it requires a self, assumes, first, that the community has abandoned its basic right to be established and has been organized around the rights of the private individual. The poetically unsayable reflects the ultimate manifestation of the economics of the right to property. Paradoxically, it is characterized by transparency and not by obscurity. I have constantly contrasted this keen awareness of the individual with the no less intense feeling for the dignity of the group, that appears to be characteristic of many non-Western civilizations. In contrast to the progression: private property—dignity of the individual—the poetically unsayable, I placed another that seemed to me equally fundamental: indivisibility of the land—dignity of the community—the explicitness of song. Such an opposition between civilizations also helped to explain the ruptures in Caribbean culture, in which the African heritage (the feeling for the dignity of the group) came up against an impossible circumstance (the collective nonpossession of the land) and in which the explicitness of the song (the traditional oral culture) was impeded by Western education (the initiation into the poetically unsayable). We have surrendered to a fascination with poetic obscurity that it is long and painful to get rid of: Rimbaud did more than trade in Abyssinia. And I have known so many young French Caribbean poets, desperately unable to accommodate this obscurity and yet fascinated by the success of Aime Cesaire in this area, who exhausted themselves in negotiating its dazzling power, without knowing that they had the potential for creating another way of organizing language. Neutralized, made impotent by this dream of poetic brilliance, they paid no heed to the throbbing within them of the notion of time that had to be possessed. But these kinds of parallel oppositions are as well founded as they are misleading. I think, for instance, that from the distinction between collective ownership of the land (in Africa) and private property (in the West), one has been able to construct the theory of African Socialism, which would appear to be more natural (and thus more "human"), whereas Western Socialism would not have been anything but a reaction against the received idea of private property. These theories that emphasize the 497

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natural (always more attractive than a reaction) are justifiably reassuring. We know the amazing misdeeds, ideological as well as physical, of this African Socialism, in those countries where it has become established as a principle as much as a reality.5 I maintain, however, that there is a profound relationship between the poetics of the moment and the belief that emphasizes the dignity of the human individual, and also the shaping influence of private property. The logic of these ideas contains implicitly the limitation of individual interests. It is difficult to separate theoretically the notion of individual dignity from the oppressive reality of private property. This makes sublimation necessary. This explains why Western philosophy and ideology all aim for a generalizing universality. (Even today, the part of M. Leopold Senghor's formulations most easily recognized in Western intellectual circles is that of the general idea of Universal Civilization.) A generalizing universality is ambitious enough to allow for the sublimation of individual dignity based on the reality of private property. It is also the ultimate weapon in the process of depersonalizing a vulnerable people. The first reaction against this generalizing universality is the stubborn insistence on remaining where you are. But for us this place is not only the land where our people were transplanted, it is also the history they shared (experiencing it as nonhistory) with other communities, with whom the link is becoming apparent today. Our place is the Caribbean. Caribbeanness, an intellectual dream, lived at the same time in an unconscious way by our peoples, tears us free from the intolerable alternative of the need for nationalism and introduces us to the cross-cultural process that modifies but does not undermine the latter. What is the Caribbean in fact? A multiple series of relationships. We all feel it, we express it in all kinds of hidden or twisted ways, or we fiercely deny it. But we sense that this sea exists within us with its weight of now revealed islands. The Caribbean Sea is not an American lake. It is the estuary of the Americas. In this context, insularity takes on another meaning. Ordinarily, insularity is treated as a form of isolation, a neurotic reaction to place. However, in the Caribbean each island embodies openness. The dialectic between inside and outside is reflected in the relationship of land and sea. It is only those who are tied to the European continent who see insularity as confining.6 A Caribbean imagination liberates us from being smothered. It is true that, among Caribbean cultures, we in Martinique have only been allowed access, and for historic reasons, to language. We have so many words tucked away in our throats, and so little "raw material" with which to execute our potential. This is perhaps why I was so moved when I discovered the rhetorical power of black American speech. I remember having heard, at Tufts Uni498

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versity, an expose on Afro-American literature and having discovered with great surprise and feeling the spectacle of this audience that, rhythmically swaying, turned the lecturer's text into melody. I also saw the television film on Martin Luther King and discovered the doubling of the voice, the echo placed behind the speaker to repeat and amplify his speech. As in the tragic text, here repetition is not gratuitous. Therein lies a new management of language. And just as poetic brilliance is the supreme state in exalting the self, I can also speculate that repetition in speech is a response to the group. But this group is not a form of transcendence. One can even state with justification that by its very nature it is derived from that basic symptom of the cross-cultural process that is Creolization. If we speak of creolized cultures (like Caribbean culture, for example) it is not to define a category that will by its very nature be opposed to other categories ("pure" cultures), but in order to assert that today infinite varieties of creolization are open to human conception, both on the level of awareness and on that of intention: in theory and in reality. Creolization as an idea is not primarily the glorification of the composite nature of a people: indeed, no people has been spared the crosscultural process. The idea of creolization demonstrates that henceforth it is no longer valid to glorify "unique" origins that the race safeguards and prolongs. In Western tradition, genealogical descent guarantees racial exclusivity, just as Genesis legitimizes genealogy. To assert peoples are creolized, that creolization has value, is to deconstruct in this way the category of "creolized" that is considered as halfway between two "pure" extremes. It is only in those countries whose exploitation is barbaric (South Africa, for instance) that this intermediary category has been officially recognized. This is perhaps what was felt by the Caribbean poet who, in response to my thoughts on creolization in Caribbean cultures, said to me: "I understand the reality, I just do not like the word." Creolization as an idea means the negation of creolization as a category, by giving priority to the notion of natural creolization, which the human imagination has always wished to deny or disguise (in Western tradition). Analyses of the phenomena of acculturation and deculturation are therefore sterile in conception. All societies undergo acculturation. Deculturation is able to be transformed into a new culture. Here it is important to stress not so much the mechanisms of acculturation and deculturation as the dynamic forces capable of limiting or prolonging them. We realize that peoples who are most "manifestly" composite have minimized the idea of Genesis. The fact is that the "end" of the myth of Genesis means the beginning of this use of genealogy to persuade oneself that exclusivity has been preserved. Composite peoples, that is, those who could not deny or mask their hybrid composition, nor sublimate it in the notion of a mythical pedigree, do not "need" the idea of Genesis, because 499

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they do not need the myth of pure lineage. (The only traces of "genesis" identifiable in the Caribbean folktale are satirical and mocking. God removed the White man [pale] too soon from the oven of Creation; the Black man [burnt] too late; this version would lead us to believe that the mulatto—with whom the Caribbean would therefore wish to identify—is the only one to be properly cooked. But another version of these three baked creatures claims that the first was in fact not dark enough, the second not sufficiently cooked [mulattoes], and the third just right [blacks]. The Martinican consciousness is always tormented by contradictory possibilities. These parodies of genesis do not seriously claim, in any case, to offer an explanation for origins; they imply a satirical attitude to any notion of a transcendental Genesis.) The poetics of creolization is the same as a cross-cultural poetics: not linear and not prophetic, but woven from enduring patience and irreducible accretions. Also a cross-cultural poetics could not constitute a science, that is, to be generalized by laws and definitions of distinct processes. It is not known; only recognizable. Neither the formula from Parmenides, "Being never changes," nor the related view by Heraclitus, "All is in a state of flux," through which Western metaphysics were conceived, but a transphysical poetics that could be briefly expressed as—that which is (that which exists in a total way) is open to change. Total existence is always relative. It is not certain that in the West materialism does not sometimes appear as the metaphysical adjunct of idealism. Since it is the same view of history, it can support the most intolerant form of transcendentalism. Any transphysical poetics of creolization contributes to undermining this blind solidarity. This means that creolization and history could not lead us to any belief in cultural exclusivity, nor be expressed in terms of its poetics. Because the poetics of the cross-cultural imagination turns up in a plowing up of phenomena that acquire significance when put together, and in the domain of the unseen of which we represent the constantly shifting background. The accumulation of the commonplace and the clarification of related obscurity, creolization is the unceasing process of transformation.

Notes 1 Thomas Mofolo, Chaka (London and Nairobi: Heinemann, 1981). 2 A popular series brings back to life today these historical figures from Africa. Almost each volume insists on this encounter between the African chiefs and the inevitable colonizer, who appears as the very embodiment of their destiny. (In the series Les Grandes Figures Africaines ) 500

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3 Dominique O. Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (New York: Praeger, and London: Methuen, 1956), p. 86. 4 The West continues to be today the most dynamic agent of cross-cultural contact, through the frightening technological capacity that enables it to control systems of communication all over the globe and to manage the wealth of the world. It is beginning, however, to realize its power, and to that extent to go further than M. Mannoni. 5 These variations on Socialism are not to be scorned, however, or rejected categorically. In his study of Indianness, the Mexican anthropologist Guillermo Bonfil Batalla ("La nueva presencia politica de los Indies," Casa de las Americas, October 1979) distinguishes four ideologies in his version of the future of South America: Restoration of the past, by excluding Western civilization; the reformist position, which adapts the existing system; Indian Socialism, which applies the model of Indian societies modified by the universal elements provided by the West; and finally, Pluralist Socialism, a revolutionary transformation of the capitalist mode of production. 6 Both on the Right and on the Left, there are those who will claim that you "vegetate" in these islands; they will seek, preferably in Paris, to improve their minds. 7 "Cross-cultural contact" has also become an argument for assimilationist propaganda. Young Martinicans are told in 1980: "It is the age of cultural exchange"—which implies: "Do not isolate yourselves therefore in an outmoded and inflexible nationalism, etc."

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4.5 TOWARDS A NEW OCEANIA Albert Wendt From Mana Review 1.1 (January, 1976): 49-60

1. A rediscovery of our dead 'These islands rising from wave's edge— blue myth brooding in orchid, fern and banyan, fearful gods awaiting birth from blood clot into stone image and chant— to bind their wounds, bury their journey's dead, as I watched from shadow root, ready for birth generations after....' (from 'Inside Us the Dead') I belong to Oceania—or, at least, I am rooted in a fertile portion of it—and it nourishes my spirit, helps to define me, and feeds my imagination. A detached/objective analysis I will leave to the sociologist and all the other 'ologists who have plagued Oceania since she captivated the imagination of the Papalagi in his quest for El Dorado, a Southern Continent, and the Noble Savage in a tropical Eden. Objectivity is for such uncommitted gods. My commitment won't allow me to confine myself to so narrow a vision. So vast, so fabulously varied a scatter of islands, nations, cultures, mythologies and myths, so dazzling a creature, Oceania deserves more than an attempt at mundane fact; only the imagination in free flight can hope—if not to contain her—to grasp some of her shape, plumage, and pain. I will not pretend that I know her in all her manifestations. No one— not even our gods—ever did; no one does (UNESCO 'experts and consultants' included); no one ever will because whenever we think we have captured her she has already assumed new guises—the love affair is endless, even her vital statistics, as it were, will change endlessly. In the 502

T O W A R D S A NEW O C E A N I A final instance, our countries, cultures, nations, planets are what we imagine them to be. One human being's reality is another's fiction. Perhaps we ourselves exist only in one another's dreams. In our various groping ways, we are all in search of that heaven, that Hawaiki, where our hearts will find meaning; most of us never find it, or, at the moment of finding it, fail to recognise it. At this stage in my life I have found it in Oceania: it is a return to where I was born, or, put another way, it is a search for where I was born: One day I will reach the source again There at my beginnings another peace will welcome me (from The River Flows Back by Kumalau Tawali, Manus, Papua New Guinea) Our dead are woven into our souls like the hypnotic music of bone flutes: we can never escape them. If we let them they can help illuminate us to ourselves and to one another. They can be the source of new-found pride, self-respect, and wisdom. Conversely they can be the aitu that will continue to destroy us by blinding us to the beauty we are so capable of becoming as individuals, cultures, nations. We must try to exorcise these aitu both old and modern. If we can't do so, then at least we can try and recognise them for what they are, admit to their fearful existence and, by doing so, learn to control and live honestly with them. We are all familiar with such aitu. For me, the most evil is racism: it is the symbol of all repression. Chill you're a bastard . . . You have trampled the whole world over Here your boot is on our necks, your spear into our intestines Your history and your size make me cry violently for air to breathe (from The Reluctant Flame by John Kasaipwalova, Trobriands) Over the last two centuries or so, that most fearful chill, institutionalised in colonialism, was our perpetual cross in Oceania: Kros mi no wandem yu Cross I hate you Yu kilim mi You are killing me Yu sakem aot ol You are destroying We blong mi My traditions Mi no wandem yu Kros I hate you Cross (from Kros by Albert Leomala, New Hebrides)

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The chill continues to wound, transform, humiliate us and our cultures. Any real understanding of ourselves and our existing cultures calls for an attempt to understand colonialism and what it did and is still doing to us. This understanding would better equip us to control or exorcise it so that, in the words of the Maori poet Hone Tuwhare, we can dream good dreams again, heal the wounds it inflicted on us and with the healing will return pride in ourselves—an ingredient so vital to creative nation-building. Pride, self-respect, self-reliance will help us cope so much more creatively with what is passing or to come. Without this healing most of our countries will remain permanent welfare cases not only economically but culturally. (And cultural dependency is even more soul-destroying than economic dependency). Without it we will continue to be exploited by vampires of all colours, creeds, fangs. (Our home-grown species are often more rapacious). Without it the tragic mimickry, abasement, and humiliation will continue, and we will remain the often grotesque colonial caricatures we were transformed into by the chill. As much as possible, we, mini in size though our countries are, must try and assume control of our destinies, both in utterance and in fact. To get this control we must train our own people as quickly as possible in all fields of national development. Our economic and cultural dependency will be lessened according to the rate at which we can produce trained manpower. In this, we are failing badly. In a flash he saw in front of his eyes all the wasted years of carrying the whiteman's cargo. (from The Crocodile by Vincent Eri, Papua, Papua New Guinea) If it has been a waste largely, where do we go from here? My body is tired My head aches I weep for our people Where are we going mother (from Motherland by Mildred Sope, New Hebrides) Again, we must rediscover and reaffirm our faith in the vitality of our past, our cultures, our dead, so that we may develop our own unique eyes, voices, muscles, and imagination. 2. Some questions and possible answers In considering the Role of Traditional Cultures in Promoting National Cultural Identity and Authenticity in Nation-Building in the Oceanic Islands (whoever thought up this mouthful should be edited out of the English language!) the following questions emerged: 504

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(a) Is there such a creature as traditional culture? (b) If there is, what period in the growth of a culture is to be called traditional? (c) If traditional cultures do exist in Oceania, to what extent are they colonial creations? (d) What is authentic culture? (e) Is the differentiation we usually make between the culture(s) of our urban areas (meaning foreign) and those of our rural areas (meaning traditional) a valid one? Are not the life-styles of our towns simply developments of our traditional life-styles, or merely sub-cultures within our national cultures? Why is it that many of us condemn urban life-styles (sub-cultures) as being foreign and therefore evil forces contaminating/corrupting the purity of our true cultures (whatever this means)? (f) Why is it that the most vocal exponents of preserving our true cultures live in our towns and pursue life-styles which, in their own terminology, are alien and impure? (g) Are some of us advocating the preservation of our cultures not for ourselves but for our brothers, the rural masses, and by doing this ensure the maintenance of a status quo in which we enjoy privileged positions? (h) Should there be ONE sanctified/official/sacred interpretation of one's culture? And who should do this interpreting? These questions (and others which they imply) have to be answered satisfactorily before any realistic policies concerning cultural conservation in Oceania can be formulated. The rest of this section is an attempt to answer these questions. Like a tree a culture is forever growing new branches, foliage, and roots. Our cultures, contrary to the simplistic interpretation of our romantics, were changing even in pre-papalagi times through inter-island contact and the endeavours of exceptional individuals and groups who manipulated politics, religion, and other people. Contrary to the utterances of our elite groups, our pre-papalagi cultures were not perfect or beyond reproach. No culture is perfect or sacred even today. Individual dissent is essential to the healthy survival, development, and sanity of any nation— without it our cultures will drown in self-love. Such dissent was allowed in our pre-papalagi cultures: what can be more dissenting than using war to challenge and over-throw existing power—and it was a frequent occurrence. No culture is ever static and can be preserved (a favourite word with our colonisers and romantic elite brethren) like a stuffed gorilla in a museum. 505

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There is no state of cultural purity (or perfect state of cultural goodness) from which there is decline: usage determines authenticity. There was no Fall; no sun-tanned Noble Savages existing in South Seas paradises, no Golden Age, except in Hollywood films, in the insanely romantic literature and art by outsiders about the Pacific, in the breathless sermons of our elite vampires, and in the fevered imaginations of our selfstyled romantic revolutionaries. We, in Oceania, did not/and do not have a monopoly on God and the ideal life. I do not advocate a return to an imaginary pre-papalagi Golden Age or Utopian womb. Physically, we are too corrupted for such a re-entry! Our quest should not be for a revival of our past cultures but for the creation of new cultures which are free of the taint of colonialism and based firmly on our own pasts. The quest should be for a new Oceania. Racism is institutionalised in all cultures, and the desire to dominate and exploit others is not the sole prerogative of the papalagi. Even today, despite the glib tributes paid to a Pacific Way, there is much racial discrimination between our many ethnic groups, and much heartless exploitation of one group by another. Many of us are guilty—whether we are aware of it or not—of perpetuating the destructive colonial chill, and are doing so in the avowed interest of preserving our racial/cultural purity (whatever this means). Maintaining the status quo using this pretext is not only ridiculous but dangerous. The only valid culture worth having is the one being lived out now, unless of course we attain immortality or invent a time machine that would enable us to live in the past or future. Knowledge of our past cultures is a precious source of inspiration for living out the present. (An understanding also of other peoples and their cultures is vital). What may have been considered true forms in the past may be ludicrous now: cannibalism and human sacrifice are better left in the history books, for example. Similarly, what at first may have been considered foreign are now authentic pillars of our cultures: Christianity and the Rule of Law, for instance. It won't do to over-glorify the past. The present is all that we have and we should live it out as creatively as possible. Pride in our past bolsters our self-respect which is necessary if we are to cope as equals with others. However, too fervent or paranoid an identification with one's culture—or what one deems to be that culture—can lead to racial intolerance and the like. Hitler too had a Ministry of Culture! This is not to claim that there are no differences between cultures and peoples. Or to argue that we abolish these differences. We must recognise and respect these differences but not use them to try and justify our racist claims to an imaginary superiority. All of us have individual prejudices, principles, and standards by which we judge which sub-cultures in our national cultures we want to live in, and those features of our national cultures we want conserved and those we want discarded. To advocate that in order to be a true Samoan, for 506

T O W A R D S A NEW O C E A N I A example, one must be fully-blooded Samoan and behave/think/dance/ talk/dress/and believe in a certain prescribed way (and that the prescribed way has not changed since time immemorial) is being racist, callously totalitarian, and stupid. This is a prescription for cultural stagnation, an invitation for a culture to choke in its own body odeur, juices, and excreta. Equally unacceptable are outsiders (and these come in all disguises including the mask of adviser or expert) who try to impose on me what they think my culture is and how I should live it and go about preserving it. The colonisers prescribed for us the roles of domestic animal, amoral phallus, the lackey, the comic and lazy and happy-go-lucky fuzzy-haired boy, and the well-behaved colonised. Some of our own people are trying to do the same to us, to turn us into servile creatures they can exploit easily. We must not consent to our own abasement. There are no true interpreters or sacred guardians of any culture. We are all entitled to our truths, insights, and intuitions into and interpretations of our cultures. No national culture is homogenous. Even our small pre-papalagi cultures were made up of sub-cultures. In Polynesia, for instance, the lifestyles of priests and ariki/alii were very different from those of the commoners, women, and children. Contact with papalagi and Asian cultures (which are made up of numerous sub-cultures—and we, in Oceania, tend to forget this) has increased the number of sub-cultures or life-styles within our cultures. Many urban life-styles are now just as much part of our cultures as more traditional ones. To varying degrees, we as individuals all live in limbo within our cultures: there are many aspects of our ways of life we cannot subscribe to or live comfortably with; we all conform to some extent, but the life-blood of any culture is the diverse contributions of its varied sub-cultures. Basically, all societies are multi-cultural. And Oceania is more so than any other region on our sad planet. 3. Colonialism: the wounds Let me take just two facets of our cultures and show how colonialism changed us. (a) Education Kidnapped I was six when Mama was careless She sent me to school alone five days a week 507

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One day I was kidnapped by a band of Western philosophers armed with glossy-pictured textbooks and registered reputations 'Holder of B.A. and M.A. degrees' I was held in a classroom guarded by Churchill and Garibaldi pinned up on one wall and Hitler and Mao dictating from the other

Guevara pointed a revolution at my brains from his 'Guerilla Warfare' Each three-month term they sent threats to my Mama and Papa Mama and Papa loved their son and paid ransom fees each time Each time Mama Papa and grew poorer and poorer and my kidnappers grew richer and richer I grew whiter and whiter On my release fifteen years after I was handed [among loud applause from fellow victims] a piece of paper to decorate my walls certifying my release (by Ruperake Petaia, Western Samoa) 508

T O W A R D S A NEW O C E A N I A This remarkable poem aptly describes what can be called the whitefication of the colonised by a colonial education system. What the poem does not mention is that this system was enthusiastically welcomed by many of us, an d is still being continued even in our independent nations—a tragic irony! The basic function of Education in all cultures is to promote conformity and obedience and respect, to fit children into roles society has determined for them. In practice it has always been an instrument of domesticating humankind with. The typical formal educational process is like a lobotomy operation or a relentless life-long dosage of tranquillisers. The formal education systems (whether British/New Zealand/Australian/American/or French) that were established by the colonisers in our islands all had one main feature in common: they were based on the arrogantly mistaken racist assumption that the cultures of the colonisers were superior (and preferable) to ours. Education was therefore devoted to civilising us, to cutting us away from the roots of our cultures, from what the colonisers viewed as darkness, superstition, barbarism, and savagery. The production of bourgeois papalagi seemed the main objective; the process was one of castration. The missionaries, irrespective of whatever colonial nationality or brand of Christianity they belonged to, intended the same conversion. Needless to say, the most vital strand in any nation-building is education but our colonial education systems were not programmed to educate us for development but to produce minor and inexpensive cogs, such as clerks/glorified office boys/officials/and a few professionals, for the colonial administrative machine. It was not in the colonial interests to encourage industries in our countries: it was more profitable for them that we remained exporters of cheap raw materials and buyers of their expensive manufactured goods. So the education was narrowly academic and benefited mainly our traditional elite groups who saw great profit in serving our colonial masters who, in turn, propped them up because it was cheaper to use them to run our countries. The elitist and academic nature of this education was not conducive to training us to service in our own cultures. Colonial education helped reduce many of us into a state of passivity, undermined our confidence and self-respect, and made many of us ashamed of our cultures, transformed many of us into Uncle Toms and reconants and what V. S. Naipaul has called mimic men, inducing in us the feeling that only the foreign is right or proper or worthwhile. Let us see how this is evident in architecture. (b) Architecture A frightening type of papalagi architecture is invading Oceania: the super-stainless/super-plastic/super-hygienic/super-soulless structure very similar to modern hospitals, and its most nightmarish form is the new type

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tourist hotel—a multi-storied edifice of concrete/steel/chromium/and airconditioning. This species of architecture is an embodiment of those bourgeois values I find unhealthy/soul-destroying: the cultivation/worship of mediocrity, a quest for a meaningless and precarious security based on material possessions, a deep-rooted fear of dirt and all things rich in our cultures, a fear of death revealed in an almost paranoic quest for a superhygienic cleanliness and godliness, a relentless attempt to level out all individual differences in people and mould them into one faceless mass, a drive to preserve the status quo at all costs, and ETC. These values reveal themselves in the new tourist hotels constructed of dead materials which echo the spiritual, creative, and emotional emptiness in modern man. The drive is for deodorised/sanitized comfort, the very quicksand in which many of us are now drowning, willingly. What frightens me is the easy/unquestioning acceptance by our countries of all this without considering their adverse effects on our psyche. In my brief lifetime, I have observed many of our countries imitating what we consider to be papalagi culture (even though most of us will swear vehemently that we are not!). It is just one of the tragic effects of colonialism— the aping of colonial ways/life-styles/attitudes/and values. In architecture this has led and is leading to the construction of dog-kennel-shaped papalagi houses (mainly as status symbols, as props to one's lack of selfconfidence). The change from traditional dwelling to box-shaped monstrosity is gathering momentum: the mushrooming of this bewildering soulless desert of shacks and boxes is erupting across Oceania because most of our leaders and style-setters, as soon they gain power/wealth, construct opulent dog-kennels as well. Our governments' quest for the tourist hotel is not helping matters either; there is a failure to understand what such a quest is bringing. It may be bringing money through the middle-aged retired tourist, who travels from country to country through a variety of climates, within his cocoon of air-conditioned America/Europe/N.Z./Australia/Molochland, but it is also helping to bring these bourgeois values, attitudes, and life-styles which are compellingly attractive illnesses that kill slowly, comfortably, turning us away from the richness of our cultures. I think I know what such a death is like: for the past few years I have watched myself (and some of the people I admire) dying that death. In periods of unavoidable lucidity, I have often visualised the ultimate development of such an architecture—air-conditioned coffins lodged in air-conditioned mausoleums. 4. Diversity, a valued heritage The population of our region is only just over 5 million but we possess a cultural diversity more varied than any other in the world. There is also a 510

T O W A R D S A NEW O C E A N I A multiplicity of social, economic, and political systems all undergoing different stages of decolonisation, ranging from politically independent nations (Western Samoa/Fiji/Papua New Guinea/Tonga/Nauru) through selfgoverning ones (the Solomons/the Gilberts/Tuvalu) and colonies (mainly French and American) to our oppressed aboriginal brothers in Australia. This cultural, political, social, and economic diversity must be taken into account in any overall programme of cultural conservation. If as yet we may not be the most artistically creative region on our spaceship, we possess the potential to become the most artistically creative. There are more than 1200 indigenous languages plus English, French, Hindi, Spanish, and various forms of pidgin to catch and interpret the Void with, reinterpret our past with, create new historical and sociological visions of Oceania with, compose songs and poems and plays and other oral and written literature with. Also numerous other forms of artistic expression: hundreds of dance styles; wood and stone sculpture and carvings; artifacts as various as our cultures; pottery, painting, and tattooing. A fabulous treasure house of traditional motifs, themes, styles, material which we can use in contemporary forms to express our uniqueness, identity, pain, joy, and our own visions of Oceania and earth. Self-expression is a prerequisite of self-respect. Out of this artistic diversity has come and will continue to come our most worthwhile contribution to humankind. So this diversity must be maintained and encouraged to flourish. Across the political barriers dividing our countries an intense artistic activity is starting to weave firm links between us. This cultural awakening, inspired and fostered and led by our own people, will not stop at the artificial frontiers drawn by the colonial powers. And for me, this awakening is the first real sign that we are breaking from the colonial chill and starting to find our own beings. As Marjorie Crocombe of the Cook Islands and editor of MANA Magazine has written: Denigrated, inhibited and withdrawn during the colonial era, the Pacific people are again beginning to take confidence and express themselves in traditional forms of expression that remain part of a valued heritage, as well as in new forms and styles reflecting the changes within the continuity of the unique world of our Island cultures . .. The canoe is afloat... the volume and quality increase all the time. One of the recent highlights of this awakening was the 1972 South Pacific Festival of Arts during which we came together in Fiji to perform our expressive arts; much of it was traditional, but new voices/new forms, especially in literature, were emerging. Up to a few years ago nearly all the literature about Oceania was written by papalagi and other outsiders. Our islands were and still are a goldmine for romantic novelists and film makers, bar-room journalists and semi-literate tourists, sociologists and Ph.D. students, remittance men and sailing evangelists, UNO experts, and colonial administrators and their

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well-groomed spouses. Much of this literature ranges from the hilariously romantic through the pseudo-scholarly to the infuriatingly racist; from the noble savage literary school through Margaret Mead and all her comings of age, Somerset Maugham's puritan missionaries/drunks/and saintly whores and James Michener's rascals and golden people, to the stereotyped childlike pagan who needs to be steered to the Light. The Oceania found in this literature is largely papalagi fictions, more revealing of papalagi fantasies and hang-ups, dreams and nightmares, prejudices and ways of viewing our crippled cosmos, than of our actual islands. I am not saying we should reject such a literature, or that papalagi should not write about us, and vice versa. But the imagination must explore with love/honesty/wisdom/and compassion; writers must write with aroha/ aloha/alofa/loloma, respecting the people they are writing about, people who may view the Void differently and who, like all other human beings, live through the pores of their flesh and mind and bone, who suffer, laugh, cry, copulate, and die. In the last few years what can be called a South Pacific literature has started to blossom. In New Zealand, Alistair Campbell, of Cook Island descent, is acknowledged as a major poet; three Maori writers—Hone Tuwhare (poet), Witi Ihimaera (novelist), and Patricia Grace (short stories) have become extremely well-known. In Australia, the aboriginal poets Kathy Walker and Jack Davis continue to plot the suffering of their people. In Papua New Guinea, The Crocodile by Vincent Eri—the first Papuan novel to be published—has already become a minor classic. Also in that country poets such as John Kasaipwalova, Kumalau Tawali, Alan Natachee, and Apisai Enos, and playwrights like Arthur Jawodimbari are publishing some powerful work. Papua New Guinea has established a very forward looking Creative Arts Centre, which is acting as a catalyst in the expressive arts movement, a travelling theatre, and an Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies. KOVAVE Magazine, put out by a group of Papua New Guinea writers, is already a respected literary journal. MANA Magazine and MANA Publications, established by the South Pacific Creative Arts Society (owned/operated by some of us), have been a major catalyst in stimulating the growth of this new literature, especially in countries outside Papua New Guinea. Already numerous young poets, prose writers, and playwrights have emerged; some of them, we hope, will develop into major writers. One thinks of Seri, Vanessa Griffen, and Raymond Pillai of Fiji; of Eti Saaga, Ruperake Petaia, Sano Malifa, Ata Maiai, and Till Peseta of Western Samoa; of Albert Leomala and Mildred Sope of the New Hebrides; of Celestine Kulagoe of the Solomons; of Maunaa Itaia of the Gilberts; of Makiuti Tongia of the Cook Islands; of Konai Helu Thaman of Tonga. I am proud to be also contributing to this literature. Most of us know one another personally; if we don't, we know one another's work well. Our ties transcend barriers of culture, race, petty 512

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nationalism, and politics. Our writing is expressing a revolt against the hypocritical/exploitative aspects of our traditional/commercial/and religious hierachies, colonialism and neo-colonialism, and the degrading values being imposed from outside and by some elements in our societies: But they cannot erase my existence For my plight chimes with the hour And my blood they drink at cocktail parties Always full of smiling false faces Behind which lie authority and private interests (from Uncivil Servants by Konai Helu Thaman, Tonga) As I walk this rich suburb full of white and black chiefs I hear the barking of a dog I listen to its calls knowing I am that dog picking what it can from the overflowing rubbish tins. I say to you chiefs bury the scraps you can't eat So no hungry dog will come to eat at your locked gate. Chiefs, beware of hungry dogs! (from Beware of Dog by Makiuti Tongia, Cook Islands) In the traditional visual arts there has been a tremendous revival, that revival is also finding contemporary expression in the work of Maori artists such as Selwyn Muru, Ralph Hotere, Para Matchitt, and Buck Nin; in the work of Aloi Pilioko of Wallis and Futuna, Akis and Kauage of Papua New Guinea, Aleki Prescott of Tonga, Sven Orquist of Western Samoa, Kuai of the Solomons, and many others. The same is true in music and dance. The National Dance Theatres of Fiji and The Cook Islands are already well-known throughout the world. This artistic renaissance is enriching our cultures further, reinforcing our identities/self-respect/and pride, and taking us through a genuine decolonisation; it is also acting as a unifying force in our region. In their individual journeys into the Void, these artists, through their work, are explaining us to ourselves and creating a new Oceania.

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THE L A N G U A G E OF AFRICAN LITERATURE NgugT wa Thiong'o From Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Heinemann, 1986,4-33

I

The language of African literature cannot be discussed meaningfully outside the context of those social forces which have made it both an issue demanding our attention and a problem calling for a resolution. On the one hand is imperialism in its colonial and neo-colonial phases continuously press-ganging the African hand to the plough to turn the soil over, and putting blinkers on him to make him view the path ahead only as determined for him by the master armed with the bible and the sword. In other words, imperialism continues to control the economy, politics, and cultures of Africa. But on the other, and pitted against it, are the ceaseless struggles of African people to liberate their economy, politics and culture from that Euro-American-based stranglehold to usher a new era of true communal self-regulation and self-determination. It is an ever-continuing struggle to seize back their creative initiative in history through a real control of all the means of communal self-definition in time and space. The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe. Hence language has always been at the heart of the two contending social forces in the Africa of the twentieth century. The contention started a hundred years ago when in 1884 the capitalist powers of Europe sat in Berlin and carved an entire continent with a multiplicity of peoples, cultures, and languages into different colonies. It seems it is the fate of Africa to have her destiny always decided around conference tables in the metropolises of the western world: her submergence from self-governing communities into colonies was decided in 514

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Berlin; her more recent transition into neo-colonies along the same boundaries was negotiated around the same tables in London, Paris, Brussels and Lisbon. The Berlin-drawn division under which Africa is still living was obviously economic and political, despite the claims of bible-wielding diplomats, but it was also cultural. Berlin in 1884 saw the division of Africa into the different languages of the European powers. African countries, as colonies and even today as neo-colonies, came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of Europe: English-speaking, Frenchspeaking or Portuguese-speaking African countries.1 Unfortunately writers who should have been mapping paths out of that linguistic encirclement of their continent also came to be defined and to define themselves in terms of the languages of imperialist imposition. Even at their most radical and pro-African position in their sentiments and articulation of problems they still took it as axiomatic that the renaissance of African cultures lay in the languages of Europe. I should know! II

In 1962 I was invited to that historic meeting of African writers at Makerere University College, Kampala, Uganda. The list of participants contained most of the names which have now become the subject of scholarly dissertations in universities all over the world. The title? 'A Conference of African Writers of English Expression'.2 I was then a student of English at Makerere, an overseas college of the University of London. The main attraction for me was the certain possibility of meeting Chinua Achebe. I had with me a rough typescript of a novel in progress, Weep Not, Child, and I wanted him to read it. In the previous year, 1961,1 had completed The River Between, my first-ever attempt at a novel, and entered it for a writing competition organised by the East African Literature Bureau. I was keeping in step with the tradition of Peter Abrahams with his output of novels and autobiographies from Path of Thunder to Tell Freedom and followed by Chinua Achebe with his publication of Things Fall Apart in 1959. Or there were their counterparts in French colonies, the generation of Sedar Senghor and David Diop included in the 1947/48 Paris edition of Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie negre et malgache de langue franqaise. They all wrote in European languages as was the case with all the participants in that momentous encounter on Makerere hill in Kampala in 1962. The title, 'A Conference of African Writers of English Expression', automatically excluded those who wrote in African languages. Now on looking back from the self-questioning heights of 1986, I can see this contained absurd anomalies. 1, a student, could qualify for the meeting on the basis of only two published short stories, 'The Fig Tree (Mugumo)' in a 515

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student journal, Penpoint, and 'The Return' in a new journal, Transition. But neither Shabaan Robert, then the greatest living East African poet with several works of poetry and prose to his credit in Kiswahili, nor Chief Fagunwa, the great Nigerian writer with several published titles in Yoruba, could possibly qualify. The discussions on the novel, the short story, poetry, and drama were based on extracts from works in English and hence they excluded the main body of work in Swahili, Zulu, Yoruba, Arabic, Amharic and other African languages. Yet, despite this exclusion of writers and literature in African languages, no sooner were the introductory preliminaries over than this Conference of 'African Writers of English Expression' sat down to the first item on the agenda:. 'What is African Literature?' The debate which followed was animated: Was it literature about Africa or about the African experience? Was it literature written by Africans? What about a non-African who wrote about Africa: did his work qualify as African literature? What if an African set his work in Greenland: did that qualify as African literature? Or were African languages the criteria? OK: what about Arabic, was it not foreign to Africa? What about French and English, which had become African languages? What if an European wrote about Europe in an African language? If ... if . . . i f . . . this or that, except the issue: the domination of our languages and cultures by those of imperialist Europe; in any case there was no Fagunwa or Shabaan Robert or any writer in African languages to bring the conference down from the realms of evasive abstractions. The question was never seriously asked: did what we wrote qualify as African literature? The whole area of literature and audience, and hence of language as a determinant of both the national and class audience, did not really figure: the debate was more about the subject matter and the racial origins and geographical habitation of the writer. English, like French and Portuguese, was assumed to be the natural language of literary and even political mediation between African people in the same nation and between nations in Africa and other continents. In some instances these European languages were seen as having a capacity to unite African peoples against divisive tendencies inherent in the multiplicity of African languages within the same geographic state. Thus Ezekiel Mphahlele later could write, in a letter to Transition number 11, that English and French have become the common language with which to present a nationalist front against white oppressors, and even 'where the whiteman has already retreated, as in the independent states, these two languages are still a unifying force'.3 In the literary sphere they were often seen as coming to save African languages against themselves. Writing a foreword to Birago Diop's book Contes d'Amadou Koumba Sedar Senghor commends him for using French to rescue the spirit and style of old African fables and tales. 'However while rendering them into French 516

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he renews them with an art which, while it respects the genius of the French language, that language of gentleness and honesty, preserves at the same time all the virtues of the negro-african languages.'4 English, French and Portuguese had come to our rescue and we accepted the unsolicited gift with gratitude. Thus in 1964, Chinua Achebe, in a speech entitled 'The African Writer and the English Language', said: Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else's? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it.5 See the paradox: the possibility of using mother-tongues provokes a tone of levity in phrases like 'a dreadful betrayal' and 'a guilty feeling'; but that of foreign languages produces a categorical positive embrace, what Achebe himself, ten years later, was to describe as this 'fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature'.6 The fact is that all of us who opted for European languages - the conference participants and the generation that followed them - accepted that fatalistic logic to a greater or lesser degree. We were guided by it and the only question which preoccupied us was how best to make the borrowed tongues carry the weight of our African experience by, for instance, making them 'prey' on African proverbs and other peculiarities of African speech and folklore. For this task, Achebe (Things Fall Apart; Arrow of God), Amos Tutuola (The Palmwine Drinkard; My life in the Bush of Ghosts, and Gabriel Okara (The Voice) were often held as providing the three alternative models. The lengths to which we were prepared to go in our mission of enriching foreign languages by injecting Senghorian 'black blood' into their rusty joints, is best exemplified by Gabriel Okara in an article reprinted in Transition: As a writer who believes in the utilization of African ideas, African philosophy and African folklore and imagery to the fullest extent possible, I am of the opinion the only way to use them effectively is to translate them almost literally from the African language native to the writer into whatever European language he is using as medium of expression. I have endeavoured in my words to keep as close as possible to the vernacular expressions. For, from a word, a group of words, a sentence and even a name in any African language, one can glean the social norms, attitudes and values of a people. In order to capture the vivid images of African speech, I had to eschew the habit of expressing my thoughts first in English. It was difficult at first, but I had to learn. I had to study each Ijaw 517

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expression I used and to discover the probable situation in which it was used in order to bring out the nearest meaning in English. I found it a fascinating exercise.7 Why, we may ask, should an African writer, or any writer, become so obsessed by taking from his mother-tongue to enrich other tongues? Why should he see it as his particular mission? We never asked ourselves: how can we enrich our languages? How can we 'prey' on the rich humanist and democratic heritage in the struggles of other peoples in other times and other places to enrich our own? Why not have Balzac, Tolstoy, Sholokov, Brecht, Lu Hsun, Pablo Neruda, H. C. Anderson, Kim Chi Ha, Marx, Lenin, Albert Einstein, Galileo, Aeschylus, Aristotle and Plato in African languages? And why not create literary monuments in our own languages? Why in other words should Okara not sweat it out to create in Ijaw, which he acknowledges to have depths of philosophy and a wide range of ideas and experiences? What was our responsibility to the struggles of African peoples? No, these questions were not asked. What seemed to worry us more was this: after all the literary gymnastics of preying on our languages to add life and vigour to English and other foreign languages, would the result be accepted as good English or good French? Will the owner of the language criticise our usage? Here we were more assertive of our rights! Chinua Achebe wrote: I feel that the English language will be able to carry the weight of my African experience. But it will have to be a new English, still in full communion with its ancestral home but altered to suit new African surroundings.8 Gabriel Okara's position on this was representative of our generation: Some may regard this way of writing English as a desecration of the language. This is of course not true. Living languages grow like living things, and English is far from a dead language. There are American, West Indian, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand versions of English. All of them add life and vigour to the language while reflecting their own respective cultures. Why shouldn't there be a Nigerian or West African English which we can use to express our own ideas, thinking and philosophy in our own way?9 How did we arrive at this acceptance of 'the fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature', in our culture and in our politics? What was the route from the Berlin of 1884 via the Makerere of 1962 to what is still the prevailing and dominant logic a hundred years 518

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later? How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonization? Berlin of 1884 was effected through the sword and the bullet. But the night of the sword and the bullet was followed by the morning of the chalk and the blackboard. The physical violence of the battlefield was followed by the psychological violence of the classroom. But where the former was visibly brutal, the latter was visibly gentle, a process best described in Cheikh Hamidou Kane's novel Ambiguous Adventure where he talks of the methods of the colonial phase of imperialism as consisting of knowing how to kill with efficiency and to heal with the same art. On the Black Continent, one began to understand that their real power resided not at all in the cannons of the first morning but in what followed the cannons. Therefore behind the cannons was the new school. The new school had the nature of both the cannon and the magnet. From the cannon it took the efficiency of a fighting weapon. But better than the cannon it made the conquest permanent. The cannon forces the body and the school fascinates the soul.10 In my view language was the most important vehicle through which that power fascinated and held the soul prisoner. The bullet was the means of the physical subjugation. Language was the means of the spiritual subjugation. Let me illustrate this by drawing upon experiences in my own education, particularly in language and literature. Ill

I was born into a large peasant family: father, four wives and about twenty-eight children. I also belonged, as we all did in those days, to a wider extended family and to the community as a whole. We spoke Gikuyu as we worked in the fields. We spoke Gikuyu in and outside the home. I can vividly recall those evenings of story-telling around the fireside. It was mostly the grown-ups telling the children but everybody was interested and involved. We children would re-tell the stories the following day to other children who worked in the fields picking the pyrethrum flowers, tea-leaves or coffee beans of our European and African landlords. The stories, with mostly animals as the main characters, were all told in Gikuyu . Hare, being small, weak but full of innovative wit and cunning, was our hero. We identified with him as he struggled against the brutes of prey like lion, leopard, hyena. His victories were our victories and we learnt that the apparently weak can outwit the strong. We followed the 519

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animals in their struggle against hostile nature - drought, rain, sun, wind a confrontation often forcing them to search for forms of co-operation. But we were also interested in their struggles amongst themselves, and particularly between the beasts and the victims of prey. These twin struggles, against nature and other animals, reflected real-life struggles in the human world. Not that we neglected stories with human beings as the main characters. There were two types of characters in such human-centred narratives: the species of truly human beings with qualities of courage, kindness, mercy, hatred of evil, concern for others; and a man-eat-man two-mouthed species with qualities of greed, selfishness, individualism and hatred of what was good for the larger co-operative community. Co-operation as the ultimate good in a community was a constant theme. It could unite human beings with animals against ogres and beasts of prey, as in the story of how dove, after being fed with castor-oil seeds, was sent to fetch a smith working far away from home and whose pregnant wife was being threatened by these man-eating two-mouthed ogres. There were good and bad story-tellers. A good one could tell the same story over and over again, and it would always be fresh to us, the listeners. He or she could tell a story told by someone else and make it more alive and dramatic. The differences really were in the use of words and images and the inflexion of voices to effect different tones. We therefore learnt to value words for their meaning and nuances. Language was not a mere string of words. It had a suggestive power well beyond the immediate and lexical meaning. Our appreciation of the suggestive magical power of language was reinforced by the games we played with words through riddles, proverbs, transpositions of syllables, or through nonsensical but musically arranged words.11 So we learnt the music of our language on top of the content. The language, through images and symbols, gave us a view of the world, but it had a beauty of its own. The home and the field were then our pre-primary school but what is important, for this discussion, is that the language of our evening teach-ins, and the language of our immediate and wider community, and the language of our work in the fields were one. And then I went to school, a colonial school, and this harmony was broken. The language of my education was no longer the language of my culture. I first went to Kamaandura, missionary run, and then to another called Maanguuu run by nationalists grouped around the Gikuyu Independent and Karinga Schools Association. Our language of education was still Gikuyu. The very first time I was ever given an ovation for my writing was over a composition in Gikuyu. So for my first four years there was still harmony between the language of my formal education and that of the Limuru peasant community. It was after the declaration of a state of emergency over Kenya in 1952 520

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that all the schools run by patriotic nationalists were taken over by the colonial regime and were placed under District Education Boards chaired by Englishmen. English became the language of my formal education. In Kenya, English became more than a language: it was the language, and all the others had to bow before it in deference. Thus one of the most humiliating experiences was to be caught speaking Gikuyu in the vicinity of the school. The culprit was given corporal punishment - three to five strokes of the cane on bare buttocks - or was made to carry a metal plate around the neck with inscriptions such as i AM STUPID or i AM A DONKEY. Sometimes the culprits were fined money they could hardly afford. And how did the teachers catch the culprits? A button was initially given to one pupil who was supposed to hand it over to whoever was caught speaking his mother tongue. Whoever had the button at the end of the day would sing who had given it to him and the ensuing process would bring out all the culprits of the day. Thus children were turned into witch-hunters and in the process were being taught the lucrative value of being a traitor to one's immediate community. The attitude to English was the exact opposite: any achievement in spoken or written English was highly rewarded; prizes, prestige, applause; the ticket to higher realms. English became the measure of intelligence and ability in the arts, the sciences, and all the other branches of learning. English became the main determinant of a child's progress up the ladder of formal education. As you may know, the colonial system of education in addition to its apartheid racial demarcation had the structure of a pyramid: a broad primary base, a narrowing secondary middle, and an even narrower university apex. Selections from primary into secondary were through an examination, in my time called Kenya African Preliminary Examination, in which one had to pass six subjects ranging from Maths to Nature Study and Kiswahili. All the papers were written in English. Nobody could pass the exam who failed the English language paper no matter how brilliantly he had done in the other subjects. I remember one boy in my class of 1954 who had distinctions in all subjects except English, which he had failed. He was made to fail the entire exam. He went on to become a turn boy in a bus company. I who had only passes but a credit in English got a place at the Alliance High School, one of the most elitist institutions for Africans in colonial Kenya. The requirements for a place at the University, Makerere University College, were broadly the same: nobody could go on to wear the undergraduate red gown, no matter how brilliantly they had performed in all the other subjects unless they had a credit - not even a simple pass! - in English. Thus the most coveted place in the pyramid and in the system was only available to the holder of an English language credit card. English was the official vehicle and the magic formula to colonial elitedom. 521

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Literary education was now determined by the dominant language while also reinforcing that dominance. Orature (oral literature) in Kenyan languages stopped. In primary school I now read simplified Dickens and Stevenson alongside Rider Haggard. Jim Hawkins, Oliver Twist, Tom Brown - not Hare, Leopard and Lion - were now my daily companions in the world of imagination. In secondary school, Scott and G. B. Shaw vied with more Rider Haggard, John Buchan, Alan Paton, Captain W. E. Johns. At Makerere I read English: from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot with a touch of Graham Greene. Thus language and literature were taking us further and further from ourselves to other selves, from our world to other worlds. What was the colonial system doing to us Kenyan children? What were the consequences of, on the one hand, this systematic suppression of our languages and the literature they carried, and on the other the elevation of English and the literature it carried? To answer those questions, let me first examine the relationship of language to human experience, human culture, and the human perception of reality.

IV Language, any language, has a dual character: it is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture. Take English. It is spoken in Britain and in Sweden and Denmark. But for Swedish and Danish people English is only a means of communication with non-Scandinavians. It is not a carrier of their culture. For the British, and particularly the English, it is additionally, and inseparably from its use as a tool of communication, a carrier of their culture and history. Or take Swahili in East and Central Africa. It is widely used as a means of communication across many nationalities. But it is not the carrier of a culture and history of many of those nationalities. However in parts of Kenya and Tanzania, and particularly in Zanzibar, Swahili is inseparably both a means of communication and a carrier of the culture of those people to whom it is a mother-tongue. Language as communication has three aspects or elements. There is first what Karl Marx once called the language of real life,12 the element basic to the whole notion of language, its origins and development: that is, the relations people enter into with one another in the labour process, the links they necessarily establish among themselves in the act of a people, a community of human beings, producing wealth or means of life like food, clothing, houses. A human community really starts its historical being as a community of co-operation in production through the division of labour; the simplest is between man, woman and child within a household; the more complex divisions are between branches of production such as those who are sole hunters, sole gatherers of fruits or sole workers in metal. Then there are the most complex divisions such as those in modern facto522

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ries where a single product, say a shirt or a shoe, is the result of many hands and minds. Production is co-operation, is communication, is language, is expression of a relation between human beings and it is specifically human. The second aspect of language as communication is speech and it imitates the language of real life, that is communication in production. The verbal signposts both reflect and aid communication or the relations established between human beings in the production of their means of life. Language as a system of verbal signposts makes that production possible. The spoken word is to relations between human beings what the hand is to the relations between human beings and nature. The hand through tools mediates between human beings and nature and forms the language of real life: spoken words mediate between human beings and form the language of speech. The third aspect is the written signs. The written word imitates the spoken. Where the first two aspects of language as communication through the hand and the spoken word historically evolved more or less simultaneously, the written aspect is a much later historical development. Writing is representation of sounds with visual symbols, from the simplest knot among shepherds to tell the number in a herd or the hieroglyphics among the Agfkuyu gicaandi singers and poets of Kenya, to the most complicated and different letter and picture writing systems of the world today. In most societies the written and the spoken languages are the same, in that they represent each other: what is on paper can be read to another person and be received as that language which the recipient has grown up speaking. In such a society there is broad harmony for a child between the three aspects of language as communication. His interaction with nature and with other men is expressed in written and spoken symbols or signs which are both a result of that double interaction and a reflection of it. The association of the child's sensibility is with the language of his experience of life. But there is more to it: communication between human beings is also the basis and process of evolving culture. In doing similar kinds of things and actions over and over again under similar circumstances, similar even in their mutability, certain patterns, moves, rhythms, habits, attitudes, experiences and knowledge emerge. Those experiences are handed over to the next generation and become the inherited basis for their further actions on nature and on themselves. There is a gradual accumulation of values which in time become almost self-evident truths governing their conception of what is right and wrong, good and bad, beautiful and ugly, courageous and cowardly, generous and mean in their internal and external relations. Over a time this becomes a way of life distinguishable from other ways of life. They develop a distinctive culture and history. Culture 523

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embodies those moral, ethical and aesthetic values, the set of spiritual eyeglasses, through which they come to view themselves and their place in the universe. Values are the basis of a people's identity, their sense of particularity as members of the human race. All this is carried by language. Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people's experience in history. Culture is almost indistinguishable from the language that makes possible its genesis, growth, banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next. Language as culture also has three important aspects. Culture is a product of the history which it in turn reflects. Culture in other words is a product and a reflection of human beings communicating with one another in the very struggle to create wealth and to control it. But culture does not merely reflect that history, or rather it does so by actually forming images or pictures of the world of nature and nurture. Thus the second aspect of language as culture is as an image-forming agent in the mind of a child. Our whole conception of ourselves as a people, individually and collectively, is based on those pictures and images which may or may not correctly correspond to the actual reality of the struggles with nature and nurture which produced them in the first place. But our capacity to confront the wctrld creatively is dependent on how those images correspond or not to that reality, how they distort or clarify the reality of our struggles. Language as culture is thus mediating between me and my own self; between my own self and other selves; between me and nature. Language is mediating in my very being. And this brings us to the third aspect of language as culture. Culture transmits or imparts those images of the world and reality through the spoken and the written language, that is through a specific language. In other words, the capacity to speak, the capacity to order sounds in a manner that makes for mutual comprehension between human beings is universal. This is the universality of language, a quality specific to human beings. It corresponds to the universality of the struggle against nature and that between human beings. But the particularity of the sounds, the words, the word order into phrases and sentences, and the specific manner, or laws, of their ordering is what distinguishes one language from another. Thus a specific culture is not transmitted through language in its universality but in its particularity as the language of a specific community with a specific history. Written literature and orature are the main means by which a particular language transmits the images of the world contained in the culture it carries. Language as communication and as culture are then products of each other. Communication creates culture: culture is a means of communication. Language carries culture, and culture carries, particularly through orature and literature, the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world. How people perceive themselves affects how they look at their culture, at their politics and at the 524

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social production of wealth, at their entire relationship to nature and to other beings. Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relationship to the world. V

So what was the colonialist imposition of a foreign language doing to us children? The real aim of colonialism was to control the people's wealth: what they produced, how they produced it, and how it was distributed; to control, in other words, the entire realm of the language of real life. Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others. For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people's culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser. The domination of a people's language by the languages of the colonising nations was crucial to the domination of the mental universe of the colonised. Take language as communication. Imposing a foreign language, and suppressing the native languages as spoken and written, were already breaking the harmony previously existing between the African child and the three aspects of language. Since the new language as a means of communication was a product of and was reflecting the 'real language of life' elsewhere, it could never as spoken or written properly reflect or imitate the real life of that community. This may in part explain why technology always appears to us as slightly external, their product and not ours. The word 'missile' used to hold an alien far-away sound until I recently learnt its equivalent in Gikuyu, ngurukuhi, and it made me apprehend it differently. Learning, for a colonial child, became a cerebral activity and not an emotionally felt experience. But since the new, imposed languages could never completely break the native languages as spoken, their most effective area of domination was the third aspect of language as communication, the written. The language of an African child's formal education was foreign. The language of the books he read was foreign. The language of his conceptualisation was foreign. Thought, in him, took the visible form of a foreign language. So the written language of a child's upbringing in the school (even his spoken 525

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language within the school compound) became divorced from his spoken language at home. There was often not the slightest relationship between the child's written world, which was also the language of his schooling, and the world of his immediate environment in the family and the community. For a colonial child, the harmony existing between the three aspects of language as communication was irrevocably broken. This resulted in the disassociation of the sensibility of that child from his natural and social environment, what we might call colonial alienation. The alienation became reinforced in the teaching of history, geography, music, where bourgeois Europe was always the centre of the universe. This disassociation, divorce, or alienation from the immediate environment becomes clearer when you look at colonial language as a carrier of culture. Since culture is a product of the history of a people which it in turn reflects, the child was now being exposed exclusively to a culture that was a product of a world external to himself. He was being made to stand outside himself to look at himself. Catching Them Young is the title of a book on racism, class, sex, and politics in children's literature by Bob Dixon. 'Catching them young' as an aim was even more true of a colonial child. The images of this world and his place in it implanted in a child take years to eradicate, if they ever can be. Since culture does not just reflect the world in images but actually, through those very images, conditions a child to see that world in a certain way, the colonial child was made to see the world and where he stands in it as seen and defined by or reflected in the culture of the language of imposition. And since those images are mostly passed on through orature and literature it meant the child would now only see the world as seen in the literature of his language of adoption. From the point of view of alienation, that is of seeing oneself from outside oneself as if one was another self, it does not matter that the imported literature carried the great humanist tradition of the best in Shakespeare, Goethe, Balzac, Tolstoy, Gorky, Brecht, Sholokhov, Dickens. The location of this great mirror of imagination was necessarily Europe and its history and culture and the rest of the universe was seen from that centre. But obviously it was worse when the colonial child was exposed to images of his world as mirrored in the written languages of his coloniser. Where his own native languages were associated in his impressionable mind with low status, humiliation, corporal punishment, slow-footed intelligence and ability or downright stupidity, non-intelligibility and barbarism, this was reinforced by the world he met in the works of such geniuses of racism as a Rider Haggard or a Nicholas Monsarrat; not to mention the pronouncement of some of the giants of western intellectual and political establishment, such as Hume ('. . . the negro is naturally inferior to the whites . . .'),13 Thomas Jefferson ('. . . the blacks . . . are inferior 526

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to the whites on the endowments of both body and mind . . .'),14 or Hegel with his Africa comparable to a land of childhood still enveloped in the dark mantle of the night as far as the development of self-conscious history was concerned. Hegel's statement that there was nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in the African character is representative of the racist images of Africans and Africa such a colonial child was bound to encounter in the literature of the colonial languages.15 The results could be disastrous. In her paper read to the conference on the teaching of African literature in schools held in Nairobi in 1973, entitled 'Written Literature and Black Images',16 the Kenyan writer and scholar Professor Micere Mugo related how a reading of the description of Gagool as an old African woman in Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines had for a long time made her feel mortal terror whenever she encountered old African women. In his autobiography This Life Sydney Poitier describes how, as a result of the literature he had read, he had come to associate Africa with snakes. So on arrival in Africa and being put up in a modern hotel in a modern city, he could not sleep because he kept on looking for snakes everywhere, even under the bed. These two have been able to pinpoint the origins of their fears. But for most others the negative image becomes internalised and it affects their cultural and even political choices in ordinary living. Thus Leopold Sedar Senghor has said very clearly that although the colonial language had been forced upon him, if he had been given the choice he would still have opted for French. He becomes lyrical in his subservience to French: We express ourselves in French since French has a universal vocation and since our message is also addressed to French people and others. In our languages [i.e. African languages] the halo that surrounds the words is by nature merely that of sap and blood; French words send out thousands of rays like diamonds.17 Senghor has now been rewarded by being anointed to an honoured place in the French Academy - that institution for safe-guarding the purity of the French language. In Malawi, Banda has erected his own monument by way of an institution, The Kamuzu Academy, designed to aid the brightest pupils of Malawi in their mastery of English. It is a grammar school designed to produce boys and girls who will be sent to universities like Harvard, Chicago, Oxford, Cambridge and Edinburgh and be able to compete on equal terms with others elsewhere. 527

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The President has instructed that Latin should occupy a central place in the curriculum. All teachers must have had at least some Latin in their academic background. Dr Banda has often said that no one can fully master English without knowledge of languages such as Latin and French .. ,18 For good measure no Malawian is allowed to teach at the academy - none is good enough - and all the teaching staff has been recruited from Britain. A Malawian might lower the standards, or rather, the purity of the English language. Can you get a more telling example of hatred of what is national, and a servile worship of what is foreign even though dead? In history books and popular commentaries on Africa, too much has been made of the supposed differences in the policies of the various colonial powers, the British indirect rule (or the pragmatism of the British in their lack of a cultural programme!) and the French and Portuguese conscious programme of cultural assimilation. These are a matter of detail and emphasis. The final effect was the same: Senghor's embrace of French as this language with a universal vocation is not so different from Chinua Achebe's gratitude in 1964 to English - 'those of us who have inherited the English language may not be in a position to appreciate the value of the inheritance'.19 The assumptions behind the practice of those of us who have abandoned our mother-tongues and adopted European ones as the creative vehicles of our imagination, are not different either. Thus the 1962 conference of 'African Writers of English expression' was only recognising, with approval and pride of course, what through all the years of selective education and rigorous tutelage, we had already been led to accept: the 'fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature'. The logic was embodied deep in imperialism; and it was imperialism and its effects that we did not examine at Makerere. It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues.

VI The twenty years that followed the Makerere conference gave the world a unique literature - novels, stories, poems, plays written by Africans in European languages - which soon consolidated itself into a tradition with companion studies and a scholarly industry. Right from its conception it was the literature of the petty-bourgeoisie born of the colonial schools and universities. It could not be otherwise, given the linguistic medium of its message. Its rise and development reflected the gradual accession of this class to political and even economic dominance. But the petty-bourgeoisie in Africa was a large class with different strands in it. It ranged from that section which looked forward to a 528

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permanent alliance with imperialism in which it played the role of an intermediary between the bourgeoisie of the western metropolis and the people of the colonies - the section which in my book Detained: A Writer's Prison Diary I have described as the comprador bourgeoisie - to that section which saw the future in terms of a vigorous independent national economy in African capitalism or in some kind of socialism, what I shall here call the nationalistic or patriotic bourgeoisie. This literature by Africans in European languages was specifically that of the nationalistic bourgeoisie in its creators, its thematic concerns and its consumption.20 Internationally the literature helped this class, which in politics, business, and education, was assuming leadership of the countries newly emergent from colonialism, or of those struggling to so emerge, to explain Africa to the world: Africa had a past and a culture of dignity and human complexity. Internally the literature gave this class a cohesive tradition and a common literary frame of references, which it otherwise lacked with its uneasy roots in the culture of the peasantry and in the culture of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. The literature added confidence to the class: the petty-bourgeoisie now had a past, a culture and a literature with which to confront the racist bigotry of Europe. This confidence - manifested in the tone of the writing, its sharp critique of European bourgeois civilisation, its implications, particularly in its negritude mould, that Africa had something new to give to the world - reflects the political ascendancy of the patriotic nationalistic section of the petty-bourgeoisie before and immediately after independence. So initially this literature - in the post-war world of national democratic revolutionary and anti-colonial liberation in China and India, armed uprisings in Kenya and Algeria, the independence of Ghana and Nigeria with others impending - was part of that great anti-colonial and anti-imperialist upheaval in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Caribbean islands. It was inspired by the general political awakening; it drew its stamina and even form from the peasantry: their proverbs, fables, stories, riddles, and wise sayings. It was shot through and through with optimism. But later, when the comprador section assumed political ascendancy and strengthened rather than weakened the economic links with imperialism in what was clearly a neo-colonial arrangement, this literature became more and more critical, cynical, disillusioned, bitter and denunciatory in tone. It was almost unanimous in its portrayal, with varying degrees of detail, emphasis, and clarity of vision, of the post-independence betrayal of hope. But to whom was it directing its list of mistakes made, crimes and wrongs committed, complaints unheeded, or its call for a change of moral direction? The imperialist bourgeoisie? The petty-bourgeoisie in power? The military, itself part and parcel of that class? It sought another audience, principally the peasantry and the working class or what was generally 529

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conceived as the people. The search for new audience and new directions was reflected in the quest for simpler forms, in the adoption of a more direct tone, and often in a direct call for action. It was also reflected in the content. Instead of seeing Africa as one undifferentiated mass of historically wronged blackness, it now attempted some sort of class analysis and evaluation of neo-colonial societies. But this search was still within the confines of the languages of Europe whose use it now defended with less vigour and confidence. So its quest was hampered by the very language choice, and in its movement toward the people, it could only go up to that section of the petty-bourgeoisie - the students, teachers, secretaries for instance - still in closest touch with the people. It settled there, marking time, caged within the linguistic fence of its colonial inheritance. Its greatest weakness still lay where it has always been, in the audience - the petty-bourgeoisie readership automatically assumed by the very choice of language. Because of its indeterminate economic position between the many contending classes, the petty-bourgeoisie develops a vacillating psychological make-up. Like a chameleon it takes on the colour of the main class with which it is in the closest touch and sympathy. It can be swept to activity by the masses at a time of revolutionary tide; or be driven to silence, fear, cynicism, withdrawal into self-contemplation, existential anguish, or to collaboration with the powers-that-be at times of reactionary tides. In Africa this class has always oscillated between the imperialist bourgeoisie and its comprador neo-colonial ruling elements on the one hand, and the peasantry and the working class (the masses) on the other. This very lack of identity in its social and psychological make-up as a class, was reflected in the very literature it produced: the crisis of identity was assumed in that very preoccupation with definition at the Makerere conference. In literature as in politics it spoke as if its identity or the crisis of its own identity was that of society as a whole. The literature it produced in European languages was given the identity of African literature as if there had never been literature in African languages. Yet by avoiding a real confrontation with the language issue, it was clearly wearing false robes of identity: it was a pretender to the throne of the mainstream of African literature. The practitioner of what Janheinz Jahn called neoAfrican literature tried to get out of the dilemma by over-insisting that European languages were really African languages or by trying to Africanise English or French usage while making sure it was still recognisable as English or French or Portuguese. In the process this literature created, falsely and even absurdly, an English-speaking (or French or Portuguese) African peasantry and working class, a clear negation or falsification of the historical process and reality. This European-language-speaking peasantry and working class, existing only in novels and dramas, was at times invested with the vacillating mentality, the evasive self-contemplation, the existential anguished 530

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human condition, or the man-torn-between-two-worlds-facedness of the petty-bourgeoisie. In fact, if it had been left entirely to this class, African languages would have ceased to exist - with independence!

VII But African languages refused to die. They would not simply go the way of Latin to become the fossils for linguistic archaeology to dig up, classify, and argue about at international conferences. These languages, these national heritages of Africa, were kept alive by the peasantry. The peasantry saw no contradiction between speaking their own mother-tongues and belonging to a larger national or continental geography. They saw no necessary antagonistic contradiction between belonging to their immediate nationality, to their multinational state along the Berlin-drawn boundaries, and to Africa as a whole. These people happily spoke Wolof, Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Arabic, Amharic, Kiswahili, Gikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Shona, Ndebele, Kimbundu, Zulu or Lingala without this fact tearing the multi-national states apart. During the anti-colonial struggle they showed an unlimited capacity to unite around whatever leader or party best and most consistently articulated an anti-imperialist position. If anything it was the petty-bourgeoisie, particularly the compradors, with their French and English and Portuguese, with their petty rivalries, their ethnic chauvinism, which encouraged these vertical divisions to the point of war at times. No, the peasantry had no complexes about their languages and the cultures they carried! In fact when the peasantry and the working class were compelled by necessity or history to adopt the language of the master, they Africanised it without any of the respect for its ancestry shown by Senghor and Achebe, so totally as to have created new African languages, like Krio in Sierra Leone or Pidgin in Nigeria, that owed their identities to the syntax and rhythms of African languages. All these languages were kept alive in the daily speech, in the ceremonies, in political struggles, above all in the rich store of orature - proverbs, stories, poems, and riddles. The peasantry and the urban working class threw up singers. These sang the old songs or composed new ones incorporating the new experiences in industries and urban life and in working-class struggle and organisations. These singers pushed the languages to new limits, renewing and reinvigorating them by coining new words and new expressions, and in generally expanding their capacity to incorporate new happenings in Africa and the world. The peasantry and the working class threw up their own writers, or attracted to their ranks and concern intellectuals from among the pettybourgeoisie, who all wrote in African languages. It is these writers like 531

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Heruy Walda Sellassie, Germacaw Takla Hawaryat, Shabaan Robert, Abdullatif Abdalla, Ebrahim Hussein, Euphrase Kezilahabi, B. H. Vilakazi, Okot p'Bitek, A. C. Jordan, P. Mboya, D. O. Fagunwa, Mazisi Kunene and many others rightly celebrated in Albert Gerard's pioneering survey of literature in African languages from the tenth century to the present, called African Language Literatures (1981), who have given our languages a written literature. Thus the immortality of our languages in print has been ensured despite the internal and external pressures for their extinction. In Kenya I would like to single out Gakaara wa Wanjau, who was jailed by the British for the ten years between 1952 and 1962 because of his writing in GTkuyu. His book, Mwandlki wa Mau Mau Ithaatriirioinl, a diary he secretly kept while in political detention, was published by Heinemann Kenya and won the 1984 Noma Award. It is a powerful work, extending the range of the Gikuyu language prose, and it is a crowning achievement to the work he started in 1946. He has worked in poverty, in the hardships of prison, in post-independence isolation when the English language held sway in Kenya's schools from nursery to University and in every walk of the national printed world, but he never broke his faith in the possibilities of Kenya's national languages. His inspiration came from the mass anti-colonial movement of Kenyan people, particularly the militant wing grouped around Mau Mau or the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, which in 1952 ushered in the era of modern guerrilla warfare in Africa. He is the clearest example of those writers thrown up by the mass political movements of an awakened peasantry and working class. And finally from among the European-language-speaking African petty-bourgeoisie, there emerged a few who refused to join the chorus of those who had accepted the 'fatalistic logic' of the position of European languages in our literary being. It was one of these, Obi Wali, who pulled the carpet from under the literary feet of those who gathered at Makerere in 1962 by declaring in an article published in Transition (10, September 1963), 'that the whole uncritical acceptance of English and French as the inevitable medium for educated African writing is misdirected, and has no chance of advancing African literature and culture', and that until African writers accepted that any true African literature must be written in African languages, they would merely be pursuing a dead end. What we would like future conferences on African literature to devote time to, is the all-important problem of African writing in African languages, and all its implications for the development of a truly African sensibility. Obi Wali had his predecessors. Indeed people like David Diop of Senegal had put the case against this use of colonial languages even more strongly. 532

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The African creator, deprived of the use of his language and cut off from his people, might turn out to be only the representative of a literary trend (and that not necessarily the least gratuitous) of the conquering nation. His works, having become a perfect illustration of the assimilationist policy through imagination and style, will doubtless rouse the warm applause of a certain group of critics. In fact, these praises will go mostly to colonialism which, when it can no longer keep its subjects in slavery, transforms them into docile intellectuals patterned after Western literary fashions which besides, is another more subtle form of bastardization.22 David Diop quite correctly saw that the use of English and French was a matter of temporary historical necessity. Surely in an Africa freed from oppression it will not occur to any writer to express, otherwise than in his rediscovered language, his feelings and the feelings of his people.23 The importance of Obi Wali's intervention was in tone and timing: it was published soon after the 1962 Makerere conference of African writers of English expression; it was polemical and aggressive, poured ridicule and scorn on the choice of English and French, while being unapologetic in its call for the use of African languages. Not surprisingly it was met with hostility and then silence. But twenty years of uninterrupted dominance of literature in European languages, the reactionary turn that political and economic events in Africa have taken, and the search for a revolutionary break with the neo-colonial status quo, all compel soul-searching among writers, raising once again the entire question of the language of African literature. VIII The question is this: we as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro-America. Right. But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages? While we were busy haranguing the ruling circles in a language which automatically excluded the participation of the peasantry and the working class in the debate, imperialist culture and African reactionary forces had a field day: the Christian bible is available in unlimited quantities in even the tiniest African language. The comprador ruling cliques are also quite 533

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happy to have the peasantry and the working class all to themselves: distortions, dictatorial directives, decrees, museum-type fossils paraded as African culture, feudalistic ideologies, superstitions, lies, all these backward elements and more are communicated to the African masses in their own languages without any challenges from those with alternative visions of tomorrow who have deliberately cocooned themselves in English, French, and Portuguese. It is ironic that the most reactionary African politician, the one who believes in selling Africa to Europe, is often a master of African languages; that the most zealous of European missionaries who believed in rescuing Africa from itself, even from the paganism of its languages, were nevertheless masters of African languages, which they often reduced to writing. The European missionary believed too much in his mission of conquest not to communicate it in the languages most readily available to the people: the African writer believes too much in 'African literature' to write it in those ethnic, divisive and underdeveloped languages of the peasantry! The added irony is that what they have produced, despite any claims to the contrary, is not African literature. The editors of the Pelican Guides to English literature in their latest volume were right to include a discussion of this literature as part of twentieth-century English literature, just as the French Academy was right to honour Senghor for his genuine and talented contribution to French literature and language. What we have created is another hybrid tradition, a tradition in transition, a minority tradition that can only be termed as Afro-European literature; that is, the literature written by Africans in European languages.24 It has produced many writers and works of genuine talent: Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, Sembene Ousmane, Agostino Neto, Sedar Senghor and many others. Who can deny their talent? The light in the products of their fertile imaginations has certainly illuminated important aspects of the African being in its continuous struggle against the political and economic consequences of Berlin and after. However we cannot have our cake and eat it! Their work belongs to an Afro-European literary tradition which is likely to last for as long as Africa is under this rule of European capital in a neo-colonial set-up. So Afro-European literature can be denned as literature written by Africans in European languages in the era of imperialism. But some are coming round to the inescapable conclusion articulated by Obi Wali with such polemical vigour twenty years ago: African literature can only be written in African languages, that is, the languages of the African peasantry and working class, the major alliance of classes in each of our nationalities and the agency for the coming inevitable revolutionary break with neo-colonialism.

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IX I started writing in Gikuyu language in 1977 after seventeen years of involvement in Afro-European literature, in my case Afro-English literature. It was then that I collaborated with Ngugi wa Mm in the drafting of the playscript, Ngaahika Ndeenda (the English translation was / Will Marry When I Want). I have since published a novel in Gikuyu, Caitaani Mutharabainl (English translation: Devil on the Cross) and completed a musical drama, Maitu NjugTra, (English translation: Mother Sing for Me); three books for children, Njamba Nene na Mbaathi i Mathagu, Bathitoora ya Njamba Nene, Njamba Nene na Cibu King'ang'i, as well as another novel manuscript: Matigari Ma Njiruungi. Wherever I have gone, particularly in Europe, I have been confronted with the question: why are you now writing in Gikuyu? Why do you now write in an African language? In some academic quarters I have been confronted with the rebuke, 'Why have you abandoned us?' It was almost as if, in choosing to write in Gikuyu, I was doing something abnormal. But Gikuyu is my mother tongue! The very fact that what common sense dictates in the literary practice of other cultures is being questioned in an African writer is a measure of how far imperialism has distorted the view of African realities. It has turned reality upside down: the abnormal is viewed as normal and the normal is viewed as abnormal. Africa actually enriches Europe: but Africa is made to believe that it needs Europe to rescue it from poverty. Africa's natural and human resources continue to develop Europe and America: but Africa is made to feel grateful for aid from the same quarters that still sit on the back of the continent. Africa even produces intellectuals who now rationalise this upside-down way of looking at Africa. I believe that my writing in Gikuyu language, a Kenyan language, an African language, is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist struggles of Kenyan and African peoples. In schools and universities our Kenyan languages - that is the languages of the many nationalities which make up Kenya - were associated with negative qualities of backwardness, underdevelopment, humiliation and punishment. We who went through that school system were meant to graduate with a hatred of the people and the culture and the values of the language of our daily humiliation and punishment. I do not want to see Kenyan children growing up in that imperialistimposed tradition of contempt for the tools of communication developed by their communities and their history. I want them to transcend colonial alienation. Colonial alienation takes two interlinked forms: an active (or passive) distancing of oneself from the reality around; and an active (or passive) identification with that which is most external to one's environment. It starts with a deliberate disassociation of the language of conceptualisation, of thinking, of formal education, of mental development, from the 535

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language of daily interaction in the home and in the community. It is like separating the mind from the body so that they are occupying two unrelated linguistic spheres in the same person. On a larger social scale it is like producing a society of bodiless heads and headless bodies. So I would like to contribute towards the restoration of the harmony between all the aspects and divisions of language so as to restore the Kenyan child to his environment, understand it fully so as to be in a position to change it for his collective good. I would like to see Kenya peoples' mother-tongues (our national languages!) carry a literature reflecting not only the rhythms of a child's spoken expression, but also his struggle with nature and his social nature. With that harmony between himself, his language and his environment as his starting point, he can learn other languages and even enjoy the positive humanistic, democratic and revolutionary elements in other people's literatures and cultures without any complexes about his own language, his own self, his environment. The all-Kenya national language (i.e. Kiswahili); the other national languages (i.e. the languages of the nationalities like Luo, Gfkuyu, Maasai, Luhya, Kallenjin, Kamba, Mijikenda, Somali, Galla, Turkana, Arabic-speaking people, etc.); other African languages like Hausa, Wolof, Yoruba, Ibo, Zulu, Nyanja, Lingala, Kimbundu; and foreign languages - that is foreign to Africa - like English, French, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish will fall into their proper perspective in the lives of Kenyan children. Chinua Achebe once decried the tendency of African intellectuals to escape into abstract universalism in the words that apply even more to the issue of the language of African literature: Africa has had such a fate in the world that the very adjective African can call up hideous fears of rejection. Better then to cut all the links with this homeland, this liability, and become in one giant leap the universal man. Indeed I understand this anxiety. But running away from oneself seems to me a very inadequate way of dealing with an anxiety [italics mine]. And if writers should opt for such escapism, who is to meet the challenge?25 Who indeed? We African writers are bound by our calling to do for our languages what Spencer, Milton and Shakespeare did for English; what Pushkin and Tolstoy did for Russian; indeed what all writers in world history have done for their languages by meeting the challenge of creating a literature in them, which process later opens the languages for philosophy, science, technology and all the other areas of human creative endeavours. But writing in our languages per se - although a necessary first step in the correct direction - will not itself bring about the renaissance in African 536

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cultures if that literature does not carry the content of our people's antiimperialist struggles to liberate their productive forces from foreign control; the content of the need for unity among the workers and peasants of all the nationalities in their struggle to control the wealth they produce and to free it from internal and external parasites. In other words writers in African languages should reconnect themselves to the revolutionary traditions of an organised peasantry and working class in Africa in their struggle to defeat imperialism and create a higher system of democracy and socialism in alliance with all the other peoples of the world. Unity in that struggle would ensure unity in our multi-lingual diversity. It would also reveal the real links that bind the people of Africa to the peoples of Asia, South America, Europe, Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the U.S.A. But it is precisely when writers open out African languages to the real links in the struggles of peasants and workers that they will meet their biggest challenge. For to the comprador-ruling regimes, their real enemy is an awakened peasantry and working class. A writer who tries to communicate the message of revolutionary unity and hope in the languages of the people becomes a subversive character. It is then that writing in African languages becomes a subversive or treasonable offence with such a writer facing possibilities of prison, exile or even death. For him there are no 'national' accolades, no new year honours, only abuse and slander and innumerable lies from the mouths of the armed power of a ruling minority - ruling, that is, on behalf of U.S.-led imperialism - and who see in democracy a real threat. A democratic participation of the people in the shaping of their own lives or in discussing their own lives in languages that allow for mutual comprehension is seen as being dangerous to the good government of a country and its institutions. African languages addressing themselves to the lives of the people become the enemy of a neo-colonial state.

Notes 1 'European languages became so important to the Africans that they defined their own identities partly by reference to those languages. Africans began to describe each other in terms of being either Francophone or English-speaking Africans. The continent itself was thought of in terms of French-speaking states, English-speaking states and Arabic-speaking states.' Ali A. Mazrui, Africa's International Relations, London: 1977, p. 92. Arabic does not quite fall into that category. Instead of Arabic-speaking states as an example, Mazrui should have put Portuguese-speaking states. Arabic is now an African language unless we want to write off all the indigenous populations of North Africa, Egypt, Sudan as not being Africans. And as usual with Mazrui his often apt and insightful descriptions, observations, and comparisons of the contemporary African realities as affected by Europe are, unfortunately, often tinged with approval or a sense of irreversible inevitability.

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2 The conference was organized by the anti-Communist Paris-based but American-inspired and financed Society for Cultural Freedom which was later discovered actually to have been financed by CIA. It shows how certain directions in our cultural, political, and economic choices can be masterminded from the metropolitan centres of imperialism. 3 This is an argument often espoused by colonial spokesmen. Compare Mphahlele's comment with that of Geoffrey Moorhouse in Manchester Guardian Weekly, 15 July 1964, as quoted by Ali A. Mazrui and Michael Tidy in their work Nationalism and New States in Africa, London: 1984. 'On both sides of Africa, moreover, in Ghana and Nigeria, in Uganda and in Kenya, the spread of education has led to an increased demand for English at primary level. The remarkable thing is that English has not been rejected as a symbol of Colonialism; it has rather been adopted as a politically neutral language beyond the reproaches of tribalism. It is also a more attractive proposition in Africa than in either India or Malaysia because comparatively few Africans are completely literate in the vernacular tongues and even in the languages of regional communication, Hausa and Swahili, which are spoken by millions, and only read and written by thousands.' (My italics) Is Moorhouse telling us that the English language is politically neutral vis-avis Africa's confrontation with neo-colonialism? Is he telling us that by 1964 there were more Africans literate in European languages than in African languages? That Africans could not, even if that was the case, be literate in their own national languages or in the regional languages? Really is Mr Moorhouse tongue-tying the African? 4 The English title is Tales of Amadou Koumba, published by Oxford University Press. The translation of this particular passage from the Presence Africaine, Paris edition of the book was done for me by Dr Bachir Diagne in Bayreuth. 5 The paper is now in Achebe's collection of essays Morning Yet on Creation Day, London: 1975. 6 In the introduction to Morning Yet on Creation Day Achebe obviously takes a slightly more critical stance from his 1964 position. The phrase is apt for a whole generation of us African writers. 7 Transition No. 10, September 1963, reprinted from Dialogue, Paris. 8 Chinua Achebe 'The African Writer and the English Language', in Morning Yet on Creation Day. 9 Gabriel Okara, Transition No. 10, September 1963. 10 Cheikh Hamidou Kane L'aventure Ambigue. (English translation: Ambiguous Adventure). This passage was translated for me by Bachir Diagne. 11 Example from a tongue twister: 'Kaana ka Nikoora koona koora koora: na ko koora koona kaana ka Nikoora koora koora.' I'm indebted to Wangui wa Goro for this example. 'Nichola's child saw a baby frog and ran away: and when the baby frog saw Nichola's child it also ran away.' A Glkuyu speaking child has to get the correct tone and length of vowel and pauses to get it right. Otherwise it becomes a jumble of k's and r's and na's. 12 'The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas etc. - real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to 538

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13 14 15

16 17

these, up to its furthest form.' Marx and Engels, German Ideology, the first part published under the title, Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks, London: 1973, p. 8. Quoted in Eric Williams A History of the People of Trinidad and Tobago, London 1964, p. 32. Eric Williams, ibid., p. 31. In references to Africa in the introduction to his lectures in The Philosophy of History, Hegel gives historical, philosophical, rational expression and legitimacy to every conceivable European racist myth about Africa. Africa is even denied her own geography where it does not correspond to the myth. Thus Egypt is not part of Africa; and North Africa is part of Europe. Africa proper is the especial home of ravenous beasts, snakes of all kinds. The African is not part of humanity. Only slavery to Europe can raise him, possibly, to the lower ranks of humanity. Slavery is good for the African. 'Slavery is in and for itself injustice, for the essence of humanity is freedom', but for this man must be matured. The gradual abolition of slavery is therefore wiser and more equitable than its sudden removal.' (Hegel The Philosophy of History, Dover edition, New York: 1956, pp. 91-9.) Hegel clearly reveals himself as the nineteenth-century Hitler of the intellect. The paper is now in Akivaga and Gachukiah's The Teaching of African Literature in Schools, published by Kenya Literature Bureau. Senghor, Introduction to his poems, 'Ethiopiques, le 24 Septembre 1954', in answering the question: 'Pourquoi, des lors, ecrivez-vous en francais?' Here is the whole passage in French. See how lyrical Senghor becomes as he talks of his encounter with French language and French literature. Mais on me posera la question: 'Pourquoi, des lors, ecrivez-vous en fran9ais?' parce que nous sommes des metis culturels, parce que, si nous sentons en negres, nous nous exprimons en francais, parce que le fran£ais est une langue a vocation universelle, que notre message s'adresse aussi aux Fran§ais de France et aux autres hommes, parce que le fran§ais est une langue 'de gentillesse et d'honnetete'. Qui a dit que c'etait une langue grise et atone d'ingenieurs et de diplomates? Bien sur, moi aussi, je 1'ai dit un jour, pour les besoins de ma these. On me le pardonnera. Car je sais ses ressources pour 1'avoir goute, mache, enseigne, et qu'il est la langue des dieux. Ecoutez done Corneille, Lautreamont, Rimbaud, Peguy et Claudel. Ecoutez le grand Hugo. Le francais, ce sont les grandes orgues qui se pretent a tous les timbres, a tous les effets, des douceurs les plus suaves aux fulgurances de 1'orage. II est, tour a tour ou en meme temps, flute, hautbois, trompette, tamtam et meme canon. Et puis le franc.ais nous a fait don de ses mots abstraits - si rares dans nos langues maternelles -, ou les larmes se font pierres precieuses. Chez nous, les mots sont naturellement nimbes d'un halo de seve et de sang; les mots du francais rayonnent de mille feux, comme des diamants. Des fusees qui eclairent notre nuit. See also Senghor's reply to a question on language in an interview by Armand Guiber and published in Presence Africaine 1962 under the title, Leopold Sedar Senghor: II est vrai que le francais n'cst pas ma langue maternelle. J'ai commence de 1'apprendre a sept ans, par des mots comme 'confitures' et 'chocolat'. Aujourd'-hui, je pense naturellement en Francais, et je 539

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comprend le Fran§ais - faut-il en avoir honte? Mieux qu'aucune autre langue. C'est dire que le Fran§ais n'est plus pour moi un 'vehicule etranger' mais la forme d'expression naturelle de ma pensee. Ce qui m'est etrange dans le fran§ais, c'est peut-etre son style: Son architecture classique. Je suis naturellement porte a gonfler d'image son cadre etroit, sans la poussee de la chaleur emotionelle. 18 Zimbabwe Herald August 1981. 19 Chinua Achebe 'The African Writer and the English Language' in Morning Yet on Creation Day p. 59. 20 Most of the writers were from Universities. The readership was mainly the product of schools and colleges. As for the underlying theme of much of that literature, Achebe's statement in his paper, 'The Novelist as a Teacher', is instructive: 'If I were God I would regard as the very worst our acceptance - for whatever reason - of racial inferiority. It is too late in the day to get worked up about it or to blame others, much as they may deserve such blame and condemnation. What we need to do is to look back and try and find out where we went wrong, where the rain began to beat us. 'Here then is an adequate revolution for me to espouse - to help my society regain belief in itself and put away the complexes of the years of denigration and self-abasement.' Morning Yet on Creation Day, p. 44.

22 23 24

25

Since the peasant and the worker had never really had any doubts about their Africanness, the reference could only have been to the 'educated' or the petty-bourgeois African. In fact if one substitutes the words 'the pettybourgeois' for the word 'our' and 'the petty-bourgeois class' for 'my society' the statement is apt, accurate, and describes well the assumed audience. Of course, an ideological revolution in this class would affect the whole society. David Diop 'Contribution to the Debate on National Poetry', Presence Africaine 6,1956. David Diop, ibid. The term 'Afro-European Literature' may seem to put too much weight on the Europeanness of the literature. Euro-African literature? Probably, the English, French, and Portuguese components would then be 'Anglo-African literature', 'Franco-African literature' or 'Luso-African literature'. What is important is that this minority literature forms a distinct tradition that needs a different term to distinguish it from African Literature, instead of usurping the title African Literature as is the current practice in literary scholarship. There have even been arrogant claims by some literary scholars who talk as if the literature written in European languages is necessarily closer to the Africanness of its inspiration than similar works in African languages, the languages of the majority. So thoroughly has the minority 'Afro-European Literature' (EuroAfrican literature?) usurped the name 'African literature' in the current scholarship that literature by Africans in African languages is the one that needs qualification. Albert Gerard's otherwise timely book is titled African Language Literatures. Chinua Achebe 'Africa and her Writers' in Morning Yet on Creation Day. p. 27.

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THIRD-WORLD LITERATURE IN THE ERA OF MULTINATIONAL CAPITALISM Fredric Jameson From Social Text 15 (Fall 1986): 65-88

Judging from recent conversations among third-world intellectuals, there is now an obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country that returns again and again like a gong, the collective attention to "us" and what we have to do and how we do it, to what we can't do and what we do better than this or that nationality, our unique characteristics, in short, to the level of the "people." This is not the way American intellectuals have been discussing "America," and indeed one might feel that the whole matter is nothing but that old thing called "nationalism," long since liquidated here and rightly so. Yet a certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world (and also in the most vital areas of the second world), thus making it legitimate to ask whether it is all that bad in the end.1 Does in fact the message of some disabused and more experienced first-world wisdom (that of Europe even more than of the United States) consist in urging these nation states to outgrow it as fast as possible? The predictable reminders of Kampuchea and of Iraq and Iran do not really seem to me to settle anything or suggest by what these nationalisms might be replaced except perhaps some global American postmodernist culture. Many arguments can be made for the importance and interest of noncanonical forms of literature such as that of the third world,2 but one is peculiarly self-defeating because it borrows the weapons of the adversary: the strategy of trying to prove that these texts are as "great" as those of the canon itself. The object is then to show that, to take an example from another non-canonical form, Dashiell Hammett is really as great as Dostoyevsky, and therefore can be admitted. This is to attempt dutifully to 541

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wish away all traces of that "pulp" format which is constitutive of subgenres, and it invites immediate failure insofar as any passionate reader of Dostoyevsky will know at once, after a few pages, that those kinds of satisfactions are not present. Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to conclude that "they are still writing novels like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson." A case could be built on this kind of discouragement, with its deep existential commitment to a rhythm of modernist innovation if not fashionchanges; but it would not be a moralizing one—a historicist one, rather, which challenges our imprisonment in the present of postmodernism and calls for a reinvention of the radical difference of our own cultural past and its now seemingly old-fashioned situations and novelties. But I would rather argue all this a different way, at least for now3: these reactions to third-world texts are at one and the same time perfectly natural, perfectly comprehensible, and terribly parochial. If the purpose of the canon is to restrict our aesthetic sympathies, to develop a range of rich and subtle perceptions which can be exercised only on the occasion of a small but choice body of texts, to discourage us from reading anything else or from reading those things in different ways, then it is humanly impoverishing. Indeed our want of sympathy for these often unmodern third-world texts is itself frequently but a disguise for some deeper fear of the affluent about the way people actually live in other parts of the world—a way of life that still has little in common with daily life in the American suburb. There is nothing particularly disgraceful in having lived a sheltered life, in never having had to confront the difficulties, the complications and the frustrations of urban living, but it is nothing to be particularly proud of either. Moreover, a limited experience of life normally does not make for a wide range of sympathies with very different kinds of people (I'm thinking of differences that range from gender and race all the way to those of social class and culture). The way in which all this affects the reading process seems to be as follows: as western readers whose tastes (and much else) have been formed by our own modernisms, a popular or socially realistic third-world novel tends to come before us, not immediately, but as though alreadyread. We sense, between ourselves and this alien text, the presence of another reader, of the Other reader, for whom a narrative, which strikes us as conventional or naive, has a freshness of information and a social interest that we cannot share. The fear and the resistance I'm evoking has to do, then, with the sense of our own non-coincidence with that Other reader, so different from ourselves; our sense that to coincide in any adequate way with that Other "ideal reader"—that is to say, to read this text 542

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adequately—we would have to give up a great deal that is individually precious to us and acknowledge an existence and a situation unfamiliar and therefore frightening—one that we do not know and prefer not to know. Why, returning to the question of the canon, should we only read certain kinds of books? No one is suggesting we should not read those, but why should we not also read other ones? We are not, after all, being shipped to that "desert island" beloved of the devisers of great books lists. And as a matter of fact—and this is to me the conclusive nail in the argument—we all do "read" many different kinds of texts in this life of ours, since, whether we are willing to admit it or not, we spend much of our existence in the force field of a mass culture that is radically different from our "great books" and live at least a double life in the various compartments of our unavoidably fragmented society. We need to be aware that we are even more fundamentally fragmented than that; rather than clinging to this particular mirage of the "centered subject" and the unified personal identity, we would do better to confront honestly the fact of fragmentation on a global scale; it is a confrontation with which we can here at least make a cultural beginning. A final observation on my use of the term "third world." I take the point of criticisms of this expression, particularly those which stress the way in which it obliterates profound differences between a whole range of non-western countries and situations (indeed, one such fundamental opposition—between the traditions of the great eastern empires and those of the post-colonial African nation states—is central in what follows). I don't, however, see any comparable expression that articulates, as this one does, the fundamental breaks between the capitalist first world, the socialist bloc of the second world, and a range of other countries which have suffered the experience of colonialism and imperialism. One can only deplore the ideological implications of oppositions such as that between "developed" and "underdeveloped" or "developing" countries; while the more recent conception of northern and southern tiers, which has a very different ideological content and import than the rhetoric of development, and is used by very different people, nonetheless implies an unquestioning acceptance of "convergence theory"—namely the idea that the Soviet Union and the United States are from this perspective largely the same thing. I am using the term "third world" in an essentially descriptive sense, and objections to it do not strike me as especially relevant to the argument I am making. * * * In these last years of the century, the old question of a properly world literature reasserts itself. This is due as much or more to the disintegration of our own conceptions of cultural study as to any very lucid awareness of the great outside world around us. We may therefore—as "humanists"— acknowledge the pertinence of the critique of present-day humanities by 543

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our titular leader, William Bennett, without finding any great satisfaction in his embarrassing solution: yet another impoverished and ethnocentric Graeco-Judaic "great books list of the civilization of the West," "great texts, great minds, great ideas."4 One is tempted to turn back on Bennett himself the question he approvingly quotes from Maynard Mack: "How long can a democratic nation afford to support a narcissistic minority so transfixed by its own image?" Nevertheless, the present moment does offer a remarkable opportunity to rethink our humanities curriculum in a new way—to re-examine the shambles and ruins of all our older "great books," "humanities," "freshman-introductory" and "core course" type traditions. Today the reinvention of cultural studies in the United States demands the reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as "world literature." In our more immediate context, then, any conception of world literature necessarily demands some specific engagement with the question of third-world literature, and it is this not necessarily narrower subject about which I have something to say today. It would be presumptuous to offer some general theory of what is often called third-world literature, given the enormous variety both of national cultures in the third world and of specific historical trajectories in each of those areas. All of this, then, is provisional and intended both to suggest specific perspectives for research and to convey a sense of the interest and value of these clearly neglected literatures for people formed by the values and stereotypes of a first-world culture. One important distinction would seem to impose itself at the outset, namely that none of these cultures can be conceived as anthropologically independent or autonomous, rather, they are all in various distinct ways locked in a life-and-death struggle with first-world cultural imperialism—a cultural struggle that is itself a reflexion of the economic situation of such areas in their penetration by various stages of capital, or as it is sometimes euphemistically termed, of modernization. This, then, is some first sense in which a study of third-world culture necessarily entails a new view of ourselves, from the outside, insofar as we ourselves are (perhaps without fully knowing it) constitutive forces powerfully at work on the remains of older cultures in our general world capitalist system. But if this is the case, the initial distinction that imposes itself has to do with the nature and development of older cultures at the moment of capitalist penetration, something it seems to me most enlightening to examine in terms of the marxian concept of modes of production.5 Contemporary historians seem to be in the process of reaching a consensus on the specificity of feudalism as a form which, issuing from the break-up of the Roman Empire or the Japanese Shogunate, is able to develop directly into capitalism.6 This is not the case with the other modes of production, which in some sense must be disaggregated or destroyed by violence, before 544

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capitalism is able to implant its specific forms and displace the older ones. In the gradual expansion of capitalism across the globe, then, our economic system confronts two very distinct modes of production that pose two very different types of social and cultural resistance to its influence. These are so-called primitive, or tribal society on the one hand, and the Asiatic mode of production, or the great bureaucratic imperial systems, on the other. African societies and cultures, as they became the object of systematic colonization in the 1880s, provide the most striking examples of the symbiosis of capital and tribal societies; while China and India offer the principal examples of another and quite different sort of engagement of capitalism with the great empires of the so-called Asiatic mode. My examples below, then, will be primarily African and Chinese; however, the special case of Latin America must be noted in passing. Latin America offers yet a third kind of development—one involving an even earlier destruction of imperial systems now projected by collective memory back into the archaic or tribal. Thus the earlier nominal conquests of independence open them at once to a kind of indirect economic penetration and control—something Africa and Asia will come to experience only more recently with decolonization in the 1950s and 60s. Having made these initial distinctions, let me now, by way of a sweeping hypothesis, try to say what all third-world cultural productions seem to have in common and what distinguishes them radically from analogous cultural forms in the first world. All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. Let me try to state this distinction in a grossly oversimplified way: one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx. Our numerous theoretical attempts to overcome this great split only reconfirm its existence and its shaping power over our individual and collective lives. We have been trained in a deep cultural conviction that the lived experience of our private existences is somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science and political dynamics. Politics in our novels therefore is, according to Stendhal's canonical formulation, a "pistol shot in the middle of a concert." I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis such categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between them are wholly different in third-world culture. Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested 545

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with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private Individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public thirdworld culture and society. Need I add that it is precisely this very different ratio of the political to the personal which makes such texts alien to us at first approach, and consequently, resistant to our conventional western habits of reading? I will offer, as something like the supreme example of this process of allegorization, the first masterwork of China's greatest writer, Lu Xun, whose neglect in western cultural studies is a matter of shame which no excuses based on ignorance can rectify. "Diary of a Madman" (1918) must at first be read by any western reader as the protocol of what our essentially psychological language terms a "nervous breakdown." It offers the notes and perceptions of a subject in intensifying prey to a terrifying psychic delusion, the conviction that the people around him are concealing a dreadful secret, and that that secret can be none other than the increasingly obvious fact that they are cannibals. At the climax of the development of the delusion, which threatens his own physical safety and his very life itself as a potential victim, the narrator understands that his own brother is himself a cannibal and that the death of their little sister, a number of years earlier, far from being the result of childhood illness, as he had thought, was in reality a murder. As befits the protocol of a psychosis, these perceptions are objective ones, which can be rendered without any introspective machinery: the paranoid subject observes sinister glances around him in the real world, he overhears tell-tale conversations between his brother and an alleged physician (obviously in reality another cannibal) which carry all the conviction of the real, and can be objectively (or "realistically") represented. This is not the place to demonstrate in any detail the absolute pertinence, to Lu Xun's case history, of the pre-eminent western or first-world reading of such phenomena, namely Freud's interpretation of the paranoid delusions of Senatsprasident Schreber: an emptying of the world, a radical withdrawal of libido (what Schreber describes as "world-catastrophe"), followed by the attempt to recathect by the obviously imperfect mechanisms of paranoia. "The delusion-formation," Freud explains, "which we take to be a pathological product, is in reality an attempt at recovery, a process of reconstruction."7 What is reconstructed, however, is a grisly and terrifying objective real world beneath the appearances of our own world: an unveiling or deconcealment of the nightmarish reality of things, a stripping away of our conventional illusions or rationalizations about daily life and existence. It is a process comparable, as a literary effect, only to some of the processes of western modernism, and in particular of existentialism, in which narrative is employed as a powerful instrument for the experimental exploration of 546

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reality and illusion, an exploration which, however, unlike some of the older realisms, presupposes a certain prior "personal knowledge." The reader must, in other words, have had some analogous experience, whether in physical illness or psychic crisis, of a lived and balefully transformed real world from which we cannot even mentally escape, for the full horror of Lu Xun's nightmare to be appreciated. Terms like "depression" deform such experience by psychologizing it and projecting it back into the pathological Other; while the analogous western literary approaches to this same experience—I'm thinking of the archetypal deathbed murmur of Kurtz, in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," "The horror! the horror!"— recontains precisely that horror by transforming it into a rigorously private and subjective "mood," which can only be designated by recourse to an aesthetic of expression—the unspeakable, unnameable inner feeling, whose external formulation can only designate it from without, like a symptom. But this representational power of Lu Xun's text cannot be appreciated properly without some sense of what I have called its allegorical resonance. For it should be clear that the cannibalism literally apprehended by the sufferer in the attitudes and bearing of his family and neighbors is at one and the same time being attributed by Lu Xun himself to Chinese society as a whole: and if this attribution is to be called "figural," it is indeed a figure more powerful and "literal" than the "literal" level of the text. Lu Xun's proposition is that the people of this great maimed and retarded, disintegrating China of the late and post-imperial period, his fellow citizens, are "literally" cannibals: in their desperation, disguised and indeed intensified by the most traditional forms and procedures of Chinese culture, they must devour one another ruthlessly to stay alive. This occurs at all levels of that exceedingly hierarchical society, from lumpens and peasants all the way to the most privileged elite positions in the mandarin bureaucracy. It is, I want to stress, a social and historical nightmare, a vision of the horror of life specifically grasped through History itself, whose consequences go far beyond the more local western realistic or naturalistic representation of cut-throat capitalist or market competition, and it exhibits a specifically political resonance absent from its natural or mythological western equivalent in the nightmare of Darwinian natural selection. Now I want to offer four additional remarks about this text, which will touch, respectively, on the libidinal dimension of the story, on the structure of its allegory, on the role of the third-world cultural producer himself, and on the perspective of futurity projected by the tale's double resolution. I will be concerned, in dealing with all four of these topics, to stress the radical structural difference between the dynamics of thirdworld culture and those of the first-world cultural tradition in which we have ourselves been formed. 547

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I have suggested that in third-world texts such as this story by Lu Xun the relationship between the libidinal and the political components of individual and social experience is radically different from what obtains in the west and what shapes our own cultural forms. Let me try to characterize this difference, or if you like this radical reversal, by way of the following generalization: in the west, conventionally, political commitment is recontained and psychologized or subjectivized by way of the public-private split I have already evoked. Interpretations, for example, of political movements of the 60s in terms of Oedipal revolts are familiar to everyone and need no further comment. That such interpretations are episodes in a much longer tradition, whereby political commitment is re-psychologized and accounted for in terms of the subjective dynamics of ressentiment or the authoritarian personality, is perhaps less well understood, but can be demonstrated by a careful reading of anti-political texts from Nietzsche and Conrad all the way to the latest cold-war propaganda. What is relevant to our present context is not, however, the demonstration of that proposition, but rather of its inversion in third-world culture, where I want to suggest that psychology, or more specifically, libidinal investment, is to be read in primarily political and social terms. (It is, I hope, unnecessary to add that what follows is speculative and very much subject to correction by specialists: it is offered as a methodological example rather than a "theory" of Chinese culture.) We're told, for one thing, that the great ancient imperial cosmologies identify by analogy what we in the west analytically separate: thus, the classical sex manuals are at one with the texts that reveal the dynamics of political forces, the charts of the heavens at one with the logic of medical lore, and so forth.8 Here already then, in an ancient past, western antinomies—and most particularly that between the subjective and the public or political—are refused in advance. The libidinal center of Lu Xun's text is, however, not sexuality, but rather the oral stage, the whole bodily question of eating, of ingestion, devoration, incorporation, from which such fundamental categories as the pure and the impure spring. We must now recall, not merely the extraordinary symbolic complexity of Chinese cuisine, but also the central role this art and practice occupies in Chinese culture as a whole. When we find that centrality confirmed by the observation that the very rich Chinese vocabulary for sexual matters is extraordinarily intertwined with the language of eating; and when we observe the multiple uses to which the verb "to eat" is put in ordinary Chinese language (one "eats" a fear or a fright, for example), we may feel in a somewhat better position to sense the enormous sensitivity of this libidinal region, and of Lu Xun's mobilization of it for the dramatization of an essentially social nightmare—something which in a western writer would be consigned to the realm of the merely private obsession, the vertical dimension of the personal trauma. A different alimentary transgression can be observed throughout Lu 548

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Xun's works, but nowhere quite so strikingly as in his terrible little story, "Medicine." The story potrays a dying child—the death of children is a constant in these works—whose parents have the good fortune to procure an "infallible" remedy. At this point we must recall both that traditional Chinese medicine is not "taken," as in the west, but "eaten," and that for Lu Xun traditional Chinese medicine was the supreme locus of the unspeakable and exploitative charlatanry of traditional Chinese culture in general. In his crucially important Preface to the first collection of his stories,9 he recounts the suffering and death of his own father from tuberculosis, while declining family reserves rapidly disappeared into the purchase of expensive and rare, exotic and ludicrous medicaments. We will not sense the symbolic significance of this indignation unless we remember that for all these reasons Lu Xun decided to study western medicine in Japan—the epitome of some new western science that promised collective regeneration—only later to decide that the production of culture—I am tempted to say, the elaboration of a political culture—was a more effective form of political medicine.10 As a writer, then, Lu Xun remains a diagnostician and a physician. Hence this terrible story, in which the cure for the male child, the father's only hope for survival in future generations, turns out to be one of those large doughy-white Chinese steamed rolls, soaked in the blood of a criminal who has just been executed. The child dies anyway, of course, but it is important to note that the hapless victim of a more properly state violence (the supposed criminal) was a political militant, whose grave is mysteriously covered in flowers by absent sympathizers of whom one knows nothing. In the analysis of a story like this, we must rethink our conventional conception of the symbolic levels of a narrative (where sexuality and politics might be in homology to each other, for instance) as a set of loops or circuits which intersect and overdetermine each other—the enormity of therapeutic cannibalism finally intersecting in a pauper's cemetery, with the more overt violence of family betrayal and political repression. This new mapping process brings me to the cautionary remark I wanted to make about allegory itself—a form long discredited in the west and the specific target of the Romantic revolution of Wordsworth and Coleridge, yet a linguistic structure which also seems to be experiencing a remarkable reawakening of interest in contemporary literary theory. If allegory has once again become somehow congenial for us today, as over against the massive and monumental unifications of an older modernist symbolism or even realism itself, it is because the allegorical spirit is profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather than the homogeneous representation of the symbol. Our traditional conception of allegory—based, for instance, on stereotypes of Bunyan—is that of an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences: this is, so to speak, a 549

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one-dimensional view of this signifying process, which might only be set in motion and complexified were we willing to entertain the more alarming notion that such equivalences are themselves in constant change and transformation at each perpetual present of the text. Here too Lu Xun has some lessons for us. This writer of short stories and sketches, which never evolved into the novel form as such, produced at least one approach to the longer form, in a much lengthier series of anecdotes about a hapless coolie named Ah Q, who comes to serve, as we might have suspected, as the allegory of a certain set of Chinese attitudes and modes of behavior. It is interesting to note that the enlargement of the form determines a shift in tone or generic discourse: now everything that had been stricken with the stillness and emptiness of death and suffering without hope—"the room was not only too silent, it was far too big as well, and the things in it were far too empty"11—becomes material for a more properly Chaplinesque comedy. Ah Q's resiliency springs from an unusual—but we are to understand culturally very normal and familiar— technique for overcoming humiliation. When set upon by his persecutors, Ah Q, serene in his superiority over them, reflects: " 'It is as if I were beaten by my own son. What is the world coming to nowadays . . .' Thereupon he too would walk away, satisfied at having won."12 Admit that you are not even human, they insist, that you are nothing but an animal! On the contrary, he tells them, I'm worse than an animal, I'm an insect! There, does that satisfy you? "In less than ten seconds, however, Ah Q would walk away also satisfied that he had won, thinking that he was after all 'number one in self-belittlement,' and that after removing the 'self-belittlement' what remained was still the glory of remaining 'number one.' "13 When one recalls the remarkable self-esteem of the Manchu dynasty in its final throes, and the serene contempt for foreign devils who had nothing but modern science, gunboats, armies, technology and power to their credit, one achieves a more precise sense of the historical and social topicality of Lu Xun's satire. Ah Q is thus, allegorically, China itself. What I want to observe, however, what complicates the whole issue, is that his persecutors—the idlers and bullies who find their daily pleasures in getting a rise out of just such miserable victims as Ah Q—they too are China, in the allegorical sense. This very simple example, then, shows the capacity of allegory to generate a range of distinct meanings or messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places: Ah Q is China humiliated by the foreigners, a China so well versed in the spiritual techniques of selfjustification that such humiliations are not even registered, let alone recalled. But the persecutors are also China, in a different sense, the terrible self-cannibalistic China of the "Diary of a Madman," whose response to powerlessness is the senseless persecution of the weaker and more inferior members of the hierarchy. 550

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All of which slowly brings us to the question of the writer himself in the third world, and to what must be called the function of the intellectual, it being understood that in the third-world situation the intellectual is always in one way or another a political intellectual. No third-world lesson is more timely or more urgent for us today, among whom the very term "intellectual" has withered away, as though it were the name for an extinct species. Nowhere has the strangeness of this vacant position been brought home to me more strongly than on a recent trip to Cuba, when I had occasion to visit a remarkable college-preparatory school on the outskirts of Havana. It is a matter of some shame for an American to witness the cultural curriculum in a socialist setting which also very much identifies itself with the third world. Over some three or four years, Cuban teenagers study poems of Homer, Dante's Inferno, the Spanish theatrical classics, the great realistic novels of the 19th-century European tradition, and finally contemporary Cuban revolutionary novels, of which, incidentally, we desperately need English translations. But the semester's work I found most challenging was one explicitly devoted to the study of the role of the intellectual as such: the cultural intellectual who is also a political militant, the intellectual who produces both poetry and praxis. The Cuban illustrations of this process—Ho Chi Minh and Augustino Nieto—are obviously enough culturally determined: our own equivalents would probably be the more familiar figures of DuBois and C. L. R. James, of Sartre and Neruda or Brecht, of Kollontai or Louise Michel. But as this whole talk aims implicitly at suggesting a new conception of the humanities in American education today, it is appropriate to add that the study of the role of the intellectual as such ought to be a key component in any such proposals. I've already said something about Lu Xun's own conception of his vocation, and its extrapolation from the practice of medicine. But there is a great deal more to be said specifically about the Preface. Not only is it one of the fundamental documents for understanding the situation of the third world artist, it is also a dense text in its own right, fully as much a work of art as any of the greatest stories. And in Lu Xun's own work it is the supreme example of the very unusual ratio of subjective investment and a deliberately depersonalized objective narration. We have no time to do justice to those relationships, which would demand a line-by-line commentary. Yet I will quote the little fable by which Lu Xun, responding to requests for publication by his friends and future collaborators, dramatizes his dilemma: Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast sleep inside who will shortly die of suffocation. But you know that since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the 551

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agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?14 The seemingly hopeless situation of the third-world intellectual in this historical period (shortly after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, but also after the bankruptcy of the middle-class revolution had become apparent)—in which no solutions, no forms of praxis or change, seem conceivable—this situation will find its parallel, as we shall see shortly, in the situation of African intellectuals after the achievement of independence, when once again no political solutions seem present or visible on the historical horizon. The formal or literary manifestation of this political problem is the possibility of narrative closure, something we will return to more specifically. In a more general theoretical context—and it is this theoretical form of the problem I should now like at least to thematize and set in place on the agenda—we must recover a sense of what "cultural revolution" means, in its strongest form, in the marxist tradition. The reference is not to the immediate events of that violent and tumultuous interruption of the "eleven years" in recent Chinese history, although some reference to Maoism as a doctrine is necessarily implicit. The term, we are told, was Lenin's own, and in that form explicitly designated the literacy campaign and the new problems of universal scholarity and education: something of which Cuba, again, remains the most stunning and successful example in recent history. We must, however, enlarge the conception still further, to include a range of seemingly very different preoccupations, of which the names of Gramsci and Wilhelm Reich, Frantz Fanon, Herbert Marcuse, Rudolph Bahro, and Paolo Freire, may give an indication of their scope and focus. Overhastily, I will suggest that "cultural revolution" as it is projected in such works turns on the phenomenon of what Gramsci called "subalternity," namely the feelings of mental inferiority and habits of subservience and obedience which necessarily and structurally develop in situations of domination—most dramatically in the experience of colonized peoples. But here, as so often, the subjectivizing and psychologizing habits of first-world peoples such as ourselves can play us false and lead us into misunderstandings. Subalternity is not in that sense a psychological matter, although it governs psychologies; and I suppose that the strategic choice of the term "cultural" aims precisely at restructuring that view of the problem and projecting it outwards into the realm of objective or collective spirit in some non-psychological, but also non-reductionist or non-economistic, materialistic fashion. When a psychic structure is objectively determined by economic and political relationships, it cannot be dealt with by means of purely psychological therapies; yet it equally cannot be dealt with by means of purely objective transformations of the economic and political situation itself, since the habits remain and exercise 552

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a baleful and crippling residual effect.15 This is a more dramatic form of that old mystery, the unity of theory and practice; and it is specifically in the context of this problem of cultural revolution (now so strange and alien to us) that the achievements and failures of third-world intellectuals, writers and artists must be replaced if their concrete historical meaning is to be grasped. We have allowed ourselves, as first-world cultural intellectuals, to restrict our consciousness of our life's work to the narrowest professional or bureaucratic terms, thereby encouraging in ourselves a special sense of subalternity and guilt, which only reinforces the vicious circle. That a literary article could be a political act, with real consequences, is for most of us little more than a curiosity of the literary history of Czarist Russia or of modern China itself. But we perhaps should also consider the possibility that as intellectuals we ourselves are at present soundly sleeping in that indestructible iron room, of which Lu Xun spoke, on the point of suffocation. The matter of narrative closure, then, and of the relationship of a narrative text to futurity and to some collective project yet to come, is not, merely a formal or literary-critical issue. "Diary of a Madman" has in fact two distinct and incompatible endings, which prove instructive to examine in light of the writer's own hesitations and anxieties about his social role. One ending, that of the deluded subject himself, is very much a call to the future, in the impossible situation of a well-nigh universal cannibalism: the last desperate lines launched into the void are the words, "Save the children . . . " But the tale has a second ending as well, which is disclosed on the opening page, when the older (supposedly cannibalistic) brother greets the narrator with the following cheerful remark: "I appreciate your coming such a long way to see us, but my brother recovered some time ago and has gone elsewhere to take up an official post." So, in advance, the nightmare is annulled; the paranoid visionary, his brief and terrible glimpse of the grisly reality beneath the appearance now vouchsafed, gratefully returns to the realm of illusion and oblivion therein again to take up his place in the space of bureaucratic power and privilege. I want to suggest that it is only at this price, by way of a complex play of simultaneous and antithetical messages, that the narrative text is able to open up a concrete perspective on the real future. * * * I must interrupt myself here to interpolate several observations before proceeding. For one thing, it is clear to me that any articulation of radical difference—that of gender, incidentally, fully as much as that of culture— is susceptible to appropriation by that strategy of otherness which Edward Said, in the context of the Middle East, called "orientalism." It does not matter much that the radical otherness of the culture in question is praised or valorized positively, as in the preceding pages: the essential operation is that of differentiation, and once that has been accomplished, 553

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the mechanism Said denounces has been set in place. On the other hand, I don't see how a first-world intellectual can avoid this operation without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism: it seems to me that one of our basic political tasks lies precisely in the ceaseless effort to remind the American public of the radical difference of other national situations. But at this point one should insert a cautionary reminder about the dangers of the concept of "culture" itself: the very speculative remarks I have allowed myself to make about Chinese "culture" will not be complete unless I add that "culture" in this sense is by no means the final term at which one stops. One must imagine such cultural structures and attitudes as having been themselves, in the beginning, vital responses to infrastructural realities (economic and geographic, for example), as attempts to resolve more fundamental contradictions—attempts which then outlive the situations for which they were devised, and survive, in reified forms, as "cultural patterns." Those patterns themselves then become part of the objective situation confronted by later generations, and, as in the case of Confucianism, having once been part of the solution to a dilemma, then become part of the new problem. Nor can I feel that the concept of cultural "identity" or even national "identity" is adequate. One cannot acknowledge the justice of the general poststructuralist assault on the so-called "centered subject," the old unified ego of bourgeois individualism, and then resuscitate this same ideological mirage of psychic unification on the collective level in the form of a doctrine of collective identity. Appeals to collective identity need to be evaluated from a historical perspective, rather than from the standpoint of some dogmatic and placeless "ideological analysis." When a third-world writer invokes this (to us) ideological value, we need to examine the concrete historical situation closely in order to determine the political consequences of the strategic use of this concept. Lu Xun's moment, for example, is very clearly one in which a critique of Chinese "culture" and "cultural identity" has powerful and revolutionary consequences—consequences which may not obtain in a later social configuration. This is then, perhaps, another and more complicated way of raising the issue of "nationalism" to which I referred earlier. As far as national allegory is concerned, I think it may be appropriate to stress its presence in what is generally considered western literature in order to underscore certain structural differences. The example I have in mind is the work of Benito Perez Galdos—the last and among the richest achievements of 19th century realism. Galdos' novels are more visibly allegorical (in the national sense) than most of their better-known European predecessors:16 something that might well be explained in terms of Immanuel Wallerstein's world-system terminology. 17 Although 19th century Spain is not strictly peripheral after the fashion of the countries we 554

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are here designating under the term third world, it is certainly semi-peripheral in his sense, when contrasted with England or France. It is therefore not terribly surprising to find the situation of the male protagonist of Fortunata y Jacinta (1887)—alternating between the two women of the title, between the wife and the mistress, between the women of the uppermiddle classes and the woman of the "people"—characterized in terms of the nation-state itself, hesitating between the republican revolution of 1868 and the Bourbon restoration of 1873.18 Here too, the same "floating" or transferable structure of allegorical reference detected in Ah Q comes into play: for Fortunata is also married, and the alternation of "revolution" and "restoration" is likewise adapted to her situation, as she leaves her legal home to seek her lover and then returns to it in abandonment. What it is important to stress is not merely the wit of the analogy as Galdos uses it, but also its optional nature: we can use it to convert the entire situation of the novel into an allegorical commentary on the destiny of Spain, but we are also free to reverse its priorities and to read the political analogy as metaphorical decoration for the individual drama, and as a mere figural intensification of this last. Here, far from dramatizing the identity of the political and the individual or psychic, the allegorical structure tends essentially to separate these levels in some absolute way. We cannot feel its force unless we are convinced of the radical difference between politics and the libidinal: so that its operation reconfirms (rather than annuls) that split between public and private which was attributed to western civilization earlier in our discussion. In one of the more powerful contemporary denunciations of this split and this habit, Deleuze and Guattari argue for a conception of desire that is at once social and individual. How does a delirium begin? Perhaps the cinema is able to capture the movement of madness, precisely because it is not analytical or regressive, but explores a global field of coexistence. Witness a film by Nicholas Ray, supposedly representing the formation of a cortisone delirium: an overworked father, a high-school teacher who works overtime for a radio-taxi service and is being treated for heart trouble. He begins to rave about the educational system in general, the need to restore a pure race, the salvation of the social and moral order, then he passes to religion, the timeliness of a return to the Bible, Abraham. But what in fact did Abraham do? Well now, he killed or wanted to kill his son, and perhaps God's only error lies in having stayed his hand. But doesn't this man, the film's protagonist, have a son of his own? Hmmm. . . . What the film shows so well, to the shame of psychiatrists, is that every delirium is first of all the investment of a field that is social, economic, political, cultural, racial and racist, pedagogical, and 555

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religious: the delirious person applies a delirium to his family and his son that overreaches them on all sides.19 I am not myself sure that the objective consequences of this essentially social and concrete gap, in first-world experience, between the public and the private can be abolished by intellectual diagnosis or by some more adequate theory of their deeper interrelationship. Rather, it seems to me that what Deleuze and Guattari are proposing here is a new and more adequate allegorical reading of this film. Such allegorical structures, then, are not so much absent from first-world cultural texts as they are unconscious, and therefore they must be deciphered by interpretive mechanisms that necessarily entail a whole social and historical critique of our current first-world situation. The point here is that, in distinction to the unconscious allegories of our own cultural texts, third-world national allegories are conscious and overt: they imply a radically different and objective relationship of politics to libidinal dynamics. * ** Now, before turning to the African texts, I remind you of the very special occasion of the present talk, which is concerned to honor the memory of Robert C. Elliott and to commemorate his life's work. I take it that the very center of his two most important books, The Power of Satire and The Shape of Utopia,20 is to be found in his pathbreaking association of satire and the Utopian impulse as two seemingly antithetical drives (and literary discourses), which in reality replicate each other such that each is always secretly active within the other's sphere of influence. All satire, he taught us, necessarily carries a Utopian frame of reference within itself; all Utopias, no matter how serene or disembodied, are driven secretly by the satirist's rage at a fallen reality. When I spoke of futurity a moment ago, I took pains to withhold the world "Utopia," which in my language is another word for the socialist project. But now I will be more explicit and take as my motto an astonishing passage from the novel Xala, by the great contemporary Senegalese novelist and film-maker Ousmane Sembene. The title designates a ritual curse or affliction, of a very special kind, which has been visited on a prosperous and corrupt Senegalese businessman at the moment in which, at the height of his fortune, he takes to himself a beautiful young (third) wife. Shades of The Power of Satirel, the curse is of course, as you may have guessed, sexual impotence. The Hadj, the unfortunate hero of this novel, desperately explores a number of remedies, both western and tribal, to no avail, and is finally persuaded to undertake a laborious trip into the hinterland of Dakar to seek out a shaman of reputedly extraordinary powers. Here is the conclusion of his hot and dusty journey in a horse-drawn cart: As they emerged from a ravine, they saw conical thatched roofs, grey-black with weathering, standing out against the horizon in 556

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the middle of the empty plain. Free-ranging, skinny cattle with dangerous-looking horns fenced with one another to get at what little grass there was. No more than silhouettes in the distance, a few people were busy around the only well. The driver of the cart was in familiar territory and greeted people as they passed. Screen Mada's house, apart from its imposing size, was identical in construction with all the others. It was situated in the center of the village whose huts were arranged in a semi-circle, which you entered by a single main entrance. The village had neither shop nor school nor dispensary; there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact [Ousmane concludes, then he adds, as if in afterthought, this searing line:] There was nothing at all attractive about it in fact. Its life was based on the principles of community interdependence.21 Here, then, more emblematically than virtually any other text I know, the space of a past and future Utopia—a social world of collective cooperation—is dramatically inserted into the corrupt and westernized money economy of the new post-independence national or comprador bourgeoisie. Indeed, Ousmane takes pains to show us that the Hadj is not an industrialist, that his business is in no sense productive, but functions as a middle-man between European multinationals and local extraction industries. To this biographical sketch must be added a very significant fact: that in his youth, the Hadj was political, and spent some time in jail for his nationalist and pro-independence activities. The extraordinary satire of these corrupt classes (which Ousmane will extend to the person of Senghor himself in The Last of the Empire) is explicitly marked as the failure of the independence movement to develop into a general social revolution. The fact of nominal national independence, in Latin America in the 19th century, in Africa in the mid-20th, puts an end to a movement for which genuine national autonomy was the only conceivable goal. Nor is this symbolic myopia the only problem: the African states also had to face the crippling effects of what Fanon prophetically warned them against—to receive independence is not the same as to take it, since it is in the revolutionary struggle itself that new social relationships and a new consciousness is developed. Here again the history of Cuba is instructive: Cuba was the last of the Latin American nations to win its freedom in the 19th century—a freedom which would immediately be taken in charge by another greater colonial power. We now know the incalculable role played in the Cuban Revolution of 1959 by the protracted guerrilla struggles of the late 19th century (of which the figure of Jose Marti is the emblem); contemporary Cuba would not be the same without that laborious and subterranean, one wants to say Thompsonian, experience of the mole of 557

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History burrowing through a lengthy past and creating its specific traditions in the process. So it is that after the poisoned gift of independence, radical African writers like Ousmane, or like Ngugi in Kenya, find themselves back in the dilemma of Lu Xun, bearing a passion for change and social regeneration which has not yet found its agents. I hope it is clear that this is also very much an aesthetic dilemma, a crisis of representation: it was not difficult to identify an adversary who spoke another language and wore the visible trappings of colonial occupation. When those are replaced by your own people, the connections to external controlling forces are much more difficult to represent. The newer leaders may of course throw off their masks and reveal the person of the Dictator, whether in its older individual or newer military form: but this moment also determines problems of representation. The dictator novel has become a virtual genre of Latin American literature, and such works are marked above all by a profound and uneasy ambivalence, a deeper ultimate sympathy for the Dictator, which can perhaps only be properly accounted for by some enlarged social variant of the Freudian mechanism of transference.22 The form normally taken by a radical diagnosis of the failures of contemporary third-world societies is, however, what is conventionally designated as "cultural imperialism," a faceless influence without representable agents, whose literary expression seems to demand the invention of new forms: Manuel Puig's Betrayed by Rita Hayworth may be cited as one of the most striking and innovative of those. One is led to conclude that under these circumstances traditional realism is less effective than the satiric fable: whence to my mind the greater power of certain of Ousmane's narratives (besides Xala, we should mention The MoneyOrder) as over against Ngugi's impressive but problematical Petals of Blood. With the fable, however, we are clearly back into the whole question of allegory. The Money-Order mobilizes the traditional Catch-22 dilemma— its hapless protagonist cannot cash his Parisian check without identity papers, but since he was born long before independence there are no documents, and meanwhile the money-order, uncashed, begins to melt away before an accumulation of new credits and new debts. I am tempted to suggest, anachronistically, that this work, published in 1965, prophetically dramatizes the greatest misfortune that can happen to a third-world country in our time, namely the discovery of vast amounts of oil resources—something which as economists have shown us, far from representing salvation, at once sinks them incalculably into foreign debts they can never dream of liquidating. On another level, however, this tale raises the issue of what must finally be one of the key problems in any analysis of Ousmane's work, namely the ambiguous role played in it by archaic or tribal elements. Viewers may 558

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perhaps remember the curious ending of his first film, The Black Girl, in which the European employer is inconclusively pursued by the little boy wearing an archaic mask; meanwhile such historical films as Ceddo or Emitai seem intent on evoking older moments of tribal resistance either to Islam or to the west, yet in a historical perspective which with few exceptions is that of failure and ultimate defeat. Ousmane cannot, however, be suspected of any archaizing or nostalgic cultural nationalism. Thus it becomes important to determine the significance of this appeal to older tribal values, particularly as they are more subtly active in modern works like Xala or The Money-Order. I suspect that the deeper subject of this second novel is not so much the evident one of the denunciation of a modern national bureaucracy, but rather the historical transformation of the traditional Islamic value of alms-giving in a contemporary money economy. A Muslim has the duty to give alms—indeed, the work concludes with just such another unfulfilled request. Yet in a modern economy, this sacred duty to the poor is transformed into a frenzied assault by free-loaders from all the levels of society (at length, the cash is appropriated by a westernized and affluent, influential cousin). The hero is literally picked clean by the vultures; better still, the unsought for, unexpected treasure fallen from heaven at once transforms the entire society around him into ferocious and insatiable petitioners, in something like a monetary version of Lu Xun's cannibalism. The same double historical perspective—archaic customs radically transformed and denatured by the superposition of capitalist relations— seems to me demonstrable in Xala as well, in the often hilarious results of the more ancient Islamic and tribal institution of polygamy. This is what Ousmane has to say about that institution (it being understood that authorial intervention, no longer tolerable in realistic narrative, is still perfectly suitable to the allegorical fable as a form): It is worth knowing something about the life led by urban polygamists. It could be called geographical polygamy, as opposed to rural polygamy, where all the wives and children live together in the same compound. In the town, since the families are scattered, the children have little contact with their father. Because of his way of life the father must go from house to house, villa to villa, and is only there in the evenings, at bedtime. He is therefore primarily a source of finance, when he has work.23 Indeed, we are treated to the vivid spectacle of the Hadj's misery when, at the moment of his third marriage, which should secure his social status, he realizes he has no real home of his own and is condemned to shuttle from one wife's villa to the other, in a situation in which he suspects each of them in turn as being responsible for his ritual affliction. But the passage I 559

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have just read shows that—whatever one would wish to think about polygamy in and of itself as an institution—it functions here as a twinvalenced element designed to open up historical perspective. The more and more frenzied trips of the Hadj through the great city secure a juxtaposition between capitalism and the older collective tribal form of social life. These are not as yet, however, the most remarkable feature of Xala, which can be described as a stunning and controlled, virtually text-book exercise in what I have elsewhere called "generic discontinuities."24 The novel begins, in effect, in one generic convention, in terms of which the Hadj is read as a comic victim. Everything goes wrong all at once, and the news of his disability suddenly triggers a greater misfortune: his numerous debtors begin to descend on someone whose bad luck clearly marks him out as a loser. A comic pity and terror accompanies this process, though it does not imply any great sympathy for the personage. Indeed it conveys a greater revulsion against the privileged new westernized society in which this rapid overturning of the wheel of fortune can take place. Yet we have all been in error, as it turns out: the wives have not been the source of the ritual curse. In an abrupt generic reversal and enlargement (comparable to some of the mechanisms Freud describes in "The Uncanny"), we suddenly learn something new and chilling about the Hadj's past: "Our story goes back a long way. It was shortly before your marriage to that woman there. Don't you remember? I was sure you would not. What I am now" (a beggar in rags is addressing him) "what I am now is your fault. Do you remember selling a large piece of land at Jeko belonging to our clan? After falsifying the clan names with the complicity of people in high places, you took our land from us. In spite of our protests, our proof of ownership, we lost our case in the courts. Not satisfied with taking our land you had me thrown into prison."25 Thus the primordial crime of capitalism is exposed: not so much wage labor as such, or the ravages of the money form, or the remorseless and impersonal rhythms of the market, but rather this primal displacement of the older forms of collective life from a land now seized and privatized. It is the oldest of modern tragedies, visited on the Native Americans yesterday, on the Palestinians today, and significantly reintroduced by Ousmane into his film version of The Money-Order (called Mandabi), in which the protagonist is now threatened with the imminent loss of his dwelling itself. The point I want to make about this terrible "return of the repressed," is that it determines a remarkable generic transformation of the narrative: suddenly we are no longer in satire, but in ritual. The beggars and the lumpens, led by Screen Mada himself, descend on the Hadj and require 560

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him to submit, for the removal of his xala, to an abominable ceremony of ritual humiliation and abasement. The representational space of the narrative is lifted to a new generic realm, which reaches back to touch the powers of the archaic even as it foretells the Utopian destruction of the fallen present in the mode of prophecy. The word "Brechtian," which inevitably springs to mind, probably does inadequate justice to these new forms which have emerged from a properly third-world reality. Yet in light of this unexpected generic ending, the preceding satiric text is itself retroactively transformed. From a satire whose subject-matter or content was the ritual curse visited on a character within the narrative, it suddenly becomes revealed as a ritual curse in its own right—the entire imagined chain of events becomes Ousmane's own curse upon his hero and people like him. No more stunning confirmation could be adduced for Robert C. Elliott's great insight into the anthropological origins of satiric discourse in real acts of shamanistic malediction. I want to conclude with a few thoughts on why all this should be so and on the origins and status of what I have identified as the primacy of national allegory in third-world culture. We are, after all, familiar with the mechanisms of auto-referentiality in contemporary western literature: is this not simply to be taken as another form of that, in a structurally distinct social and cultural context? Perhaps. But in that case our priorities must be reversed for proper understanding of this mechanism. Consider the disrepute of social allegory in our culture and the well-nigh inescapable operation of social allegory in the west's Other. These two contrasting realities are to be grasped, I think, in terms of situational consciousness, an expression I prefer to the more common term materialism. Hegel's old analysis of the Master-Slave relationship26 may still be the most effective way of dramatizing this distinction between two cultural logics. Two equals struggle each for recognition by the other: the one is willing to sacrifice life for this supreme value. The other, a heroic coward in the Brechtian, Schweykian sense of loving the body and the material world too well, gives in, in order to continue life. The Master—now the fulfillment of a baleful and inhuman feudal-aristocratic disdain for life without honor—proceeds to enjoy the benefits of his recognition by the other, now become his humble serf or slave. But at this point two distinct and dialectically ironic reversals take place: only the Master is now genuinely human, so that "recognition" by this henceforth sub-human form of life which is the slave evaporates at the moment of its attainment and offers no genuine satisfaction. "The truth of the Master," Hegel observes grimly, "is the Slave; while the truth of the Slave, on the other hand, is the Master." But a second reversal is in process as well: for the slave is called upon to labor for the master and to furnish him with all the material benefits befitting his supremacy. But this means that, in the end, only the slave knows what reality and the resistance of matter really are; only the slave 561

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can attain some true materialistic consciousness of his situation, since it is precisely to that that he is condemned. The Master, however, is condemned to idealism—to the luxury of a placeless freedom in which any consciousness of his own concrete situation flees like a dream, like a word unremembered on the tip of the tongue, a nagging doubt which the puzzled mind is unable to formulate. It strikes me that we Americans, we masters of the world, are in something of that very same position. The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated monads, to dying individual bodies without collective pasts or futures bereft of any possibility of grasping the social totality. This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the "nightmare of history," but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the "projections" of private subjectivity. All of this is denied to third-world culture, which must be situational and materialist despite itself. And it is this, finally, which must account for the allegorical nature of third-world culture, where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself. I hope I have suggested the epistemological priority of this unfamiliar kind of allegorical vision; but I must admit that old habits die hard, and that for us such unaccustomed exposure to reality, or to the collective totality, is often intolerable, leaving us in Quentin's position at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, murmuring the great denial, "I don't hate the Third World! I don't! I don't! I don't!" Even that resistance is instructive, however; and we may well feel, confronted with the daily reality of the other two-thirds of the globe, that "there was nothing at all attractive about it in fact." But we must not allow ourselves that feeling without also acknowledging its ultimate mocking completion: "Its life was based on the principles of community interdependence." Notes 1 The whole matter of nationalism should perhaps be rethought, as Benedict Anderson's interesting essay Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), and Tom Nairn's The Breakup of Britain (London: New Left Books, 1977) invite us to do. 2 I have argued elsewhere for the importance of mass culture and science fiction. See "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text no. 1 (1979), 130-148. 3 The essay was written for an immediate occasion—the third memorial lecture in honor of my late colleague and friend Robert C. Elliot at the University of California, San Diego. It is essentially reprinted as given.

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4 William Bennett, "To Reclaim a Legacy." Text of a report on the Humanities, Chronicle of Higher Education, XXIX, 14 (Nov. 28,1984), pp. 16-21. 5 The classic texts are F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) and the earlier, but only more recently published section of Marx's Grundrisse, often called "Pre-capitalist economic formations," trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: NLB/Penguin, 1973), pp. 471-514. See also Emmanuel Terray, Marxism and "Primitive" Societies, trans. M. Klopper, (New York: Monthly Review, 1972); Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975); and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, "Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men," in Anti-Oedipus, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, H. R. Lane, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 139-271. Besides mode-of-production theory, whose validity is in any case widely debated, there have also appeared in recent years a number of important synthesizing works on third-world history as a unified field. Three works in particular deserve mention: Global Rift, by L. S. Stavrianos (Morrow, 1981); Europe and the People without History, by Eric R. Wolf (California, 1982), and The Three Worlds, by Peter Worsley (Chicago, 1984). Such works suggest a more general methodological consequence implicit in the present essay but which should be stated explicitly here: first, that the kind of comparative work demanded by this concept of third-world literature involves comparison, not of the individual texts, which are formally and culturally very different from each other, but of the concrete situations from which such texts spring and to which they constitute distinct responses; and second, that such an approach suggests the possibility of a literary and cultural comparatism of a new type, distantly modelled on the new comparative history of Barrington Moore and exemplified in books like Theda Skocpol's States and Social Revolutions or Eric Wolf's Peasant Revolutions of the 20th Century. Such a new cultural comparatism would juxtapose the study of the differences and similarities of specific literary and cultural texts with a more typological analysis of the various socio-cultural situations from which they spring, an analysis whose variables would necessarily include such features as the inter-relationship of social classes, the role of intellectuals, the dynamics of language and writing, the configuration of traditional forms, the relationship to western influences, the development of urban experience and money, and so forth. Such comparatism, however, need not be restricted to third-world literature. 6 See for example, Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974), pp. 435-549. 7 Sigmund Freud, "Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia," trans. James Strachey, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1958), Volume XII, p. 457. 8 See for example Wolfram Eberhard, A History of China, trans. E. W. Dickes, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), p. 105: "When we hear of alchemy, or read books about it we should always keep in mind that many of these books can also be read as books of sex; in a similar way, books on the art of war, too, can be read as books on sexual relations." 9 Lu Xun, Selected Stories of Lu Hsun, trans. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1972), pp. 1-6. 10 Ibid., pp. 2-3. 11 Ibid., p. 40. 12 Ibid., p. 72. 563

NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES 13 Ibid. I am indebted to Peter Rushton for some of these observations. 14 Ibid., p. 5. 15 Socialism will become a reality, Lenin observes, "when the necessity of observing the simple, fundamental rules of human intercourse" has "become a habit." (State and Revolution [Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1973], p. 122.) 16 See the interesting discussions in Stephen Oilman, Galdos and the Art of the European Novel: 1867-1887 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). 17 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974). 18 For example: "El Delfln habia entrado, desde los ultimos dias del 74, en aquel periodo sedante que seguia infaliblemente a sus desvarios. En realidad, no era aquello virtud, sino casancio del pecado; no era el sentimiento puro y regular del orden, sino el hastio de la revolution. Verificabase en el lo que don Baldomero habla dicho del pais: que padecia fiebres alternativas de libertad y de paz." Fortunata y Jacinta (Madrid: Editorial Hernando, 1968), p. 585 (Part III, chapter 2, section 2). 19 Deluze and Guattari, op. cit, p. 274. 20 Princeton University Press, 1960; and University of Chicago Press, 1970, respectively. 21 Sembene Ousmane, Xala, trans. Clive Wake, (Westport, Conn.: Lawrence Hill, 1976), p. 69. 22 I am indebted to Carlos Blanco Aguinaga for the suggestion that in the Latin American novel this ambivalence may be accounted for by the fact that the archetypal Dictator, while oppressing his own people, is also perceived as resisting North American influence. 23 Xala, op. cit., p. 66. 24 "Generic Discontinuities in Science Fiction: Brian Aldiss' Starship," Science Fiction Studies #2 (1973), pp. 57-68. 25 Xala, op. cit., pp. 110-111. 26 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. A. V. Miller, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977): Section B, Chapter IV, Part A-3, "Lordship and Bondage," pp. 111-119. The other basic philosophical underpinning of this argument is Lukacs' epistemology in History and Class Consciousness according to which "mapping" or the grasping of the social totality is structurally available to the dominated rather than the dominating classes. "Mapping" is a term I have used in "Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism," (New Left Review #146 [July-August, 1984], pp. 53-92). What is here called "national allegory" is clearly a form of just such mapping of the totality, so that the present essay—which sketches a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature—forms a pendant to the essay on postmodernism which describes the logic of the cultural imperialism of the first world and above all of the United States.

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JAMESON'S RHETORIC OF OTHERNESS AND THE "NATIONAL ALLEGORY" Aijaz Ahmad From Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 3-25

In assembling the following notes on Fredric Jameson's "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital," I find myself in an awkward position. If I were to name the one literary critic/theorist writing in the US today whose work I generally hold in the highest regard, it would surely be Fredric Jameson. The plea that generates most of the passion in his text—that the teaching of literature in the US academy be informed by a sense not only of "western" literature but of "world literature": that the so-called literary canon be based not upon the exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste but upon an inclusive and opulent sense of heterogeneity—is of course entirely salutary. And, I wholly admire the knowledge, the range of sympathies, he brings to the reading of texts produced in distant lands. Yet this plea for syllabus reform—even his marvelously erudite reading of Lu Xun and Ousmane—is conflated with, indeed superseded by, a much more ambitious undertaking which pervades the entire text but which is explicitly announced only in the last sentence of the last footnote: the construction of "a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third-world literature." This "cognitive aesthetics" rests, in turn, upon a suppression of the multiplicity of significant difference among and within both the advanced capitalist countries and the imperialised formations. We have, instead, a binary opposition of what Jameson calls the "first" and the "third" worlds. It is in this passage from a plea for syllabus reform to the enunciation of a "cognitive aesthetics" that most of the text's troubles lie. These troubles are, I might add, quite numerous. There is doubtless a personal, somewhat existential side to my 565

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encounter with this text, which is best clarified at the outset. I have been reading Jameson's work now for roughly fifteen years, and at least some of what I know about the literatures and cultures of Western Europe and the US comes from him; and because I am a marxist, I had always thought of us, Jameson and myself, as birds of the same feather even though we never quite flocked together. But, then, when I was on the fifth page of this text (specifically, on the sentence starting with "All third-world texts are necessarily .. ." etc.), I realized that what was being theorised was, among many other things, myself. Now, I was born in India and I am a Pakistani citizen; I write poetry in Urdu, a language not commonly understood among US intellectuals. So, I said to myself: "All? . . . necessarily?" It felt odd. Matters got much more curious, however. For, the farther I read the more I realized, with no little chagrin, that the man whom I had for so long, so affectionately, even though from a physical distance, taken as a comrade was, in his own opinion, my civilizational Other. It was not a good feeling. I

I too think that there are plenty of very good books written by African, Asian and Latin American writers which are available in English and which must be taught as an antidote against the general ethnocentricity and cultural myopia of the humanities as they are presently constituted in these United States. If some label is needed for this activity, one may call it "third-world literature." Conversely, however, I also hold that this phrase, "the third world," is, even in its most telling deployments, a polemical one, with no theoretical status whatsoever. Polemic surely has a prominent place in all human discourses, especially in the discourse of politics, so the use of this phrase in loose, polemical contexts is altogether permissible. But to lift the phrase from the register of polemics and claim it as a basis for producing theoretical knowledge, which presumes a certain rigor in constructing the objects of one's knowledge, is to misconstrue not only the phrase itself but even the world to which it refers. I shall argue, therefore, that there is no such thing as a "third-world literature" which can be constructed as an internally coherent object of theoretical knowledge. There are fundamental issues—of periodisation, social and linguistic formations, political and ideological struggles within the field of literary production, and so on—which simply cannot be resolved at this level of generality without an altogether positivist reductionism. The mere fact, for example, that languages of the metropolitan countries have not been adopted by the vast majority of the producers of literature in Asia and Africa means that the vast majority of literary texts from those continents are unavailable in the metropoles, so that a literary theorist who sets out to formulate "a theory of the cognitive aesthetics of third566

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world literature" shall be constructing ideal-types, in the Weberian manner, duplicating all the basic procedures which orientalist scholars have historically deployed in presenting their own readings of a certain tradition of "high" textuality as the knowledge of a supposedly unitary object which they call "the Islamic civilization." I might add that literary relations between the metropolitan countries and the imperialised formations are constructed very differently than they are among the metropolitan countries themselves. Rare would be a literary theorist in Europe or the US who does not command a couple of European languages other than his/her own; and the frequency of translation, back and forth, among European languages creates very fulsome circuits for the circulation of texts, so that even a US scholar who does not command much beyond English can be quite well grounded in the various metropolitan traditions. Linguistic and literary relations between the metropolitan countries and the countries of Asia and Africa, on the other hand, offer three sharp contrasts to this system. Rare would be a modern intellectual in Asia or Africa who does not know at least one European language; equally rare would be, on the other side, a major literary theorist in Europe or the United States who has ever bothered with an Asian or African language; and the enormous industry of translation which circulates texts among the advanced capitalist countries comes to the most erratic and slowest possible grind when it comes to translation from Asian or African languages. The upshot is that major literary traditions—such as those of Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, Telegu and half a dozen others from India alone—remain, beyond a few texts here and there, virtually unknown to the American literary theorist. Consequently, the few writers who happen to write in English are valorized beyond measure. Witness, for example, the characterization of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children in the New York Times as "a Continent finding its voice"—as if one has no voice if one does not speak in English. Or, Richard Poirier's praise for Edward Said in Raritan Quarterly which now adorns the back cover of his latest book: "It is Said's great accomplishment that thanks to his book, Palestinians will never be lost to history." This is the upside-down world of the camera obscura: not that Said's vision is itself framed by the Palestinian experience but that Palestine would have no place in history without Said's book! The retribution visited upon the head of an Asian, an African, an Arab intellectual who is of any consequence and who writes in English is that he/she is immediately elevated to the lonely splendour of a "representative"—of a race, a continent, a civilization, even the "third world." It is in this general context that a "cognitive theory of third-world literature" based upon what is currently available in languages of the metropolitan countries becomes, to my mind, an alarming undertaking. I shall return to some of these points presently, especially to the point about the epistemological impossibility of a "third-world literature." 567

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Since, however, Jameson's own text is so centrally grounded in a binary opposition between a first and a third world, it is impossible to proceed with an examination of his particular propositions regarding the respective literary traditions without first asking whether or not this characterization of the world is itself theoretically tenable, and whether, therefore, an accurate conception of literature can be mapped out on the basis of this binary opposition. I shall argue later that since Jameson defines the socalled third world in terms of its "experience of colonialism and imperialism," the political category that necessarily follows from this exclusive emphasis is that of "the nation," with nationalism as the peculiarly valorized ideology; and, because of this privileging of the nationalist ideology, it is then theoretically posited that "all third-world texts are necessarily . . . to be read as ... national allegories." The theory of the "national allegory" as the metatext is thus inseparable from the larger Three Worlds Theory which permeates the whole of Jameson's own text. We too have to begin, then, with some comments on "the third world" as a theoretical category and on "nationalism" as the necessary, exclusively desirable ideologyII

Jameson seems aware of the difficulties in conceptualising the global dispersion of powers and populations in terms of his particular variant of the Three Worlds Theory ("I take the point of criticism," he says). And, after reiterating the basic premise of that theory ("the capitalist first world"; "the socialist bloc of the second world"; and "countries that have suffered colonialism and imperialism"), he does clarify that he does not uphold the specifically Maoist theory of "convergence" between the United States and the Soviet Union. The rest of the difficulty in holding this view of the world is elided, however, with three assertions; that he cannot find a "comparable expression"; that he is deploying these terms in "an essentially descriptive way"; and that the criticisms are at any rate not "relevant." The problem of "comparable expression" is a minor matter, which we shall ignore; "relevance," on the other hand, is the central issue and I shall deal with it presently. First, however, I want to comment briefly on the matter of "description." More than most critics writing in the US today, Jameson should know that when it comes to a knowledge of the world, there is no such thing as a category of the "essentially descriptive"; that "description" is never ideologically or cognitively neutral; that to "describe" is to specify a locus of meaning, to construct an object of knowledge, and to produce a knowledge that shall be bound by that act of descriptive construction. "Description" has been central, for example, in the colonial discourse. It was by assembling a monstrous machinery of descriptions—of our bodies, our 568

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speech-acts, our habitats, our conflicts and desires, our politics, our socialities and sexualities—in fields as various as ethnology, fiction, photography, linguistics, political science—that the colonial discourse was able to classify and ideologically master the colonial subject, enabling itself to transform the descriptively verifiable multiplicity and difference into the ideologically felt hierarchy of value. To say, in short, that what one is presenting is "essentially descriptive" is to assert a level of facticity which conceals its own ideology and to prepare a ground from which judgments of classification, generalisation and value can be made. As we get to the substance of what Jameson "describes," I find it significant that first and second worlds are defined in terms of their production systems (capitalism and socialism, respectively), whereas the third category—the third world—is defined purely in terms of an "experience" of externally inserted phenomena. That which is constitutive of human history itself is present in the first two cases, absent in the third one. Ideologically, this classification divides the world between those who make history and those who are mere objects of it; elsewhere in the text, Jameson would significantly re-invoke Hegel's famous description of the master/slave relation to encapsulate the first/third world opposition. But analytically, this classification leaves the so-called third world in a limbo; if only the first world is capitalist and the second world socialist, how does one understand the third world? Is it pre-capitalist? Transitional? Transitional between what and what? But then there is also the issue of the location of particular countries within the various "worlds." Take, for example, India. Its colonial past is nostalgically rehashed on US television screens in copious series every few months, but the India of today has all the characteristics of a capitalist country: generalised commodity production, vigorous and escalating exchanges not only between agriculture and industry but also between Departments I and II of industry itself, technical personnel more numerous than that of France and Germany combined, and a gross industrial product twice as large as that of Britain. It is a very miserable kind of capitalism, and the conditions of life for over half of the Indian population (roughly 400 million people) are considerably worse than what Engels described in Conditions of the Working Class in England. But India's steel industry did celebrate its hundredth anniversary a few years ago, and the top eight of her multinational corporations are among the fastest growing in the world, active as they are in numerous countries, from Vietnam to Nigeria. This economic base is combined, then, with unbroken parliamentary rule of the bourgeoisie since independence in 1947, a record quite comparable to the length of Italy's modern record of unbroken bourgeoisdemocratic governance, and superior to the fate of bourgeois democracy in Spain and Portugal, two of the oldest colonising countries. This parliamentary republic of the bourgeoisie in India has not been without its 569

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own lawlessnesses and violences, of a kind and degree now not normal in Japan or Western Europe, but a bourgeois political subjectivity has been created for the populace at large. The corollary on the left is that the two communist parties (CPI and CPM) have longer and more extensive experience of regional government, within the republic of the bourgeoisie, than all the eurocommunist parties combined, and the electorate that votes ritually for these two parties is probably larger than the communist electorates in all the rest of the capitalist world. So, does India belong in the first world or the third? Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa? And .. .? But we know that countries of the Pacific rim, from South Korea to Singapore, constitute the fastest growing region within global capitalism. The list could be much longer, but the point is that the binary opposition which Jameson constructs between a capitalist first world and a presumably pre- or non-capitalist third world is empirically ungrounded. Ill

I have said already that if one believes in the Three Worlds Theory, hence in a "third world" defined exclusively in terms of "the experience of colonialism and imperialism," then the primary ideological formation available to a leftwing intellectual shall be that of nationalism; it will then be possible to assert, surely with very considerable exaggeration but nonetheless, that "all third-world texts are necessarily ... national allegories" (emphases in the original). This exclusive emphasis on the nationalist ideology is there even in the opening paragraph of Jameson's text where the only choice for the "third world" is said to be between its "nationalisms" and a "global American postmodernist culture." Is there no other choice? Could not one join the "second world," for example? There used to be, in the marxist discourse, a thing called socialist and/or communist culture which was neither nationalist nor postmodernist. Has that vanished from our discourse altogether, even as the name of a desire? Jameson's haste in totalising historical phenomena in terms of binary oppositions (nationalism/postmodernism, in this case) leaves little room for the fact, for instance, that the only nationalisms in the so-called third world which have been able to resist US cultural pressure and have actually produced any alternatives are the ones which are already articulated to and assimilated within the much larger field of socialist political practice. Virtually all others have had no difficulty in reconciling themselves with what Jameson calls "global American postmodernist culture"; in the singular and sizeable case of Iran (which Jameson forbids us to mention on the grounds that it is "predictable" that we shall do so), the anticommunism of the Islamic nationalists has produced not social regeneration but clerical fascism. Nor does the absolutism of that opposition 570

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(postmodernism/nationalism) permit any space for the simple idea that nationalism itself is not some unitary thing with some pre-determined essence and value. There are hundreds of nationalisms in Asia and Africa today; some are progressive, others are not. Whether or not a nationalism will produce a progressive cultural practice depends, to put it in Gramscian terms, upon the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it and utilises it, as a material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony. There is neither theoretical ground nor empirical evidence to support the notion that bourgeois nationalisms of the so-called third world will have any difficulty with postmodernism; they want it. Yet, there is a very tight fit between the Three Worlds Theory, the over-valorization of the nationalist ideology, and the assertion that "national allegory" is the primary, even exclusive, form of narrativity in the so-called third world. If this "third world" is constituted by the singular "experience of colonialism and imperialism," and if the only possible response is a nationalist one, then what else is there that is more urgent to narrate than this "experience"; in fact, there is nothing else to narrate. For, if societies here are defined not by relations of production but by relations of intra-national domination; if they are forever suspended outside the sphere of conflict between capitalism (first world) and socialism (second world); if the motivating force for history here is neither class formation and class struggle nor the multiplicities of intersecting conflicts based upon class, gender, nation, race, region and so on, but the unitary "experience" of national oppression (if one is merely the object of history, the Hegelian slave) then what else can one narrate but that national oppression? Politically, we are Calibans, all. Formally, we are fated to be in the poststructuralist world of repetition with difference; the same allegory, the nationalist one, re-written, over and over again, until the end of time: "all third-world texts are necessarily .. ."

IV But one could start with a radically different premise, namely the proposition that we live not in three worlds but in one; that this world includes the experience of colonialism and imperialism on both sides of Jameson's global divide (the "experience" of imperialism is a central fact of all aspects of life inside the US from ideological formation to the utilisation of the social surplus in military-industrial complexes); that societies in formations of backward capitalism are as much constituted by the division of classes as are societies in the advanced capitalist countries; that socialism is not restricted to something called the second world but is simply the name of a resistance that saturates the globe today, as capitalism itself does; that the different parts of the capitalist system are to be known not in terms of a binary opposition but as a contradictory unity, with differences, yes, but 571

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also with profound overlaps. One immediate consequence for literary theory would be that the unitary search for "a theory of cognitive aesthetics for third-world literature" would be rendered impossible, and one would have to forego the idea of a meta-narrative that encompasses all the fecundity of real narratives in the so-called third world. Conversely, many of the questions that one would ask about, let us say, Urdu or Bengali traditions of literature may turn out to be rather similar to the questions one has asked previously about English/American literatures. By the same token, a real knowledge of those other traditions may force US literary theorists to ask questions about their own tradition which they have heretofore not asked. Jameson claims that one cannot proceed from the premise of a real unity of the world "without falling back into some general liberal and humanistic universalism." That is a curious idea, coming from a marxist. One should have thought that the world was united not by liberalist ideology—that the world was not at all constituted in the realm of an Idea, be it Hegelian or humanist—but by the global operation of a single mode of production, namely the capitalist one, and the global resistance to this mode, a resistance which is itself unevenly developed in different parts of the globe. Socialism, one should have thought, was not by any means limited to the so-called second world (the socialist countries) but a global phenomenon, reaching into the farthest rural communities in Asia, Africa and Latin America, not to speak of individuals and groups within the United States. What gives the world its unity, then, is not a humanist ideology but the ferocious struggle of capital and labor which is now strictly and fundamentally global in character. The prospect of a socialist revolution has receded so much from the practical horizon of so much of the metropolitan left that the temptation for the US left intelligentsia is to forget the ferocity of that basic struggle which in our time transcends all others. The advantage of coming from Pakistan, in my own case, is that the country is saturated with capitalist commodities, bristles with US weaponry, borders on China, the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, suffers from a proliferation of competing nationalisms, and is currently witnessing the first stage in the consolidation of the communist movement. It is difficult, coming from there, to forget that primary motion of history which gives to our globe its contradictory unity: a notion that has nothing to do with liberal humanism. As for the specificity of cultural difference, Jameson's theoretical conception tends, I believe, in the opposite direction, namely, that of homogenisation. Difference between the first world and the third is absolutised as an Otherness, but the enormous cultural heterogeneity of social formations within the so-called third world is submerged within a singular identity of "experience." Now, countries of Western Europe and North America have been deeply tied together over roughly the last two hundred years; capitalism itself is so much older in these countries; the cultural 572

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logic of late capitalism is so strongly operative in these metropolitan formations; the circulation of cultural products among them is so immediate, so extensive, so brisk that one could sensibly speak of a certain cultural homegeneity among them. But Asia, Africa, and Latin America? Historically, these countries were never so closely tied together; Peru and India simply do not have a common history of the sort that Germany and France, or Britain and the United States, have; not even the singular "experience of colonialism and imperialism" has been in specific ways same or similar in, say, India and Namibia. These various countries, from the three continents, have been assimilated into the global structure of capitalism not as a single cultural ensemble but highly differentially, each establishing its own circuits of (unequal) exchange with the metropolis, each acquiring its own very distinct class formations. Circuits of exchange among them are rudimentary at best; an average Nigerian who is literate about his own country would know infinitely more about England and the United States than about any country of Asia or Latin America or indeed about most countries of Africa. The kind of circuits that bind the cultural complexes of the advanced capitalist countries simply do not exist among countries of backward capitalism, and capitalism itself, which is dominant but not altogether universalised, does not yet have the same power of homogenisation in its cultural logic in most of these countries, except among the urban bourgeoisie. Of course, great cultural similarities also exist among countries that occupy analogous positions in the global capitalist system, and there are similarities in many cases that have been bequeathed by the similarities of socio-economic structures in the pre-capitalist past. The point is not to construct a typology that is simply the obverse of Jameson's, but rather to define the material basis for a fair degree of cultural homogenisation among the advanced capitalist countries and the lack of that kind of homogenisation in the rest of the capitalist world. In context, therefore, one is doubly surprised at Jameson's absolute insistence upon difference and the relation of otherness between the first world and the third, and his equally insistent idea that the "experience" of the "third world" could be contained and communicated within a single narrative form. By locating capitalism in the first world and socialism in the second, Jameson's theory freezes and de-historicises the global space within which struggles between these great motivating forces actually take place. And, by assimilating the enormous heterogeneities and productivities of our life into a single Hegelian metaphor of the master/slave relation, this theory reduces us to an ideal-type and demands from us that we narrate ourselves through a form commensurate with that ideal-type. To say that all thirdworld texts are necessarily this or that is to say, in effect, that any text originating within that social space which is not this or that is not a "true" narrative. It is in this sense above all, that the category of "third-world 573

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literature" which is the site of this operation, with the "national allegory" as its metatext as well as the mark of its constitution and difference, is, to my mind, epistemologically an impossible category. V

Part of the difficulty in engaging Jameson's text is that there is a constant slippage, a recurrent inflation, in the way he handles the categories of his analysis. The specificity of the first world, for example, seems at times to be predicated upon the postmodernist moment, which is doubtless of recent origin, but at other times it appears to be a matter of the capitalist mode of production, which is a much larger, much older thing; and, in yet another range of formulations, this first world is said to be coterminal with "western civilization" itself, obviously a rather primordial way of being, dating back to antiquity ("Graeco-Judaic," in Jameson's phrase) and anterior to any structuration of productions and classes as we know them today. When did this first world become first, in the pre-Christian centuries, or after World War II? And, at what point in history does a text produced in countries with "experience of colonialism and imperialism" become a third-world textl In one kind of reading, only texts produced after the advent of colonialism could be so designated, since it is colonialism/imperialism which constitutes the third world as such. But, in speaking constantly of "the west's other"; in referring to the tribal/tributary and the Asiatic modes as the theoretical basis for his selection of Lu Xun (Asian) and Sembene (African) respectively; in characterising Freud's theory as a "western or first-world reading" as contrasted with ten centuries of specifically Chinese distributions of the libidinal energy which are said to frame Lu Xun's texts—in deploying these broad epochal and civilizational categories, Jameson suggests also that the difference between the first world and the third is itself primordial, rooted in things far older than capitalism as such. If, then, the first world is the same as "the west" and the "Graeco-Judaic," one has an alarming feeling that the Bhagvad Geeta, the edicts of Manu, and the Quran itself are perhaps third-world texts (though the Judaic elements of the Quran are quite beyond doubt, and much of the ancient art in what is today Pakistan is itself Graeco-Indic). But there is also the question of space. Do all texts produced in countries with "experience of colonialism and imperialism" become, by virtue of geographical origin, third-world texts? Jameson speaks so often of "all" third-world texts, insists so much on a singular form of narrativity for third-world literature, that not to take him literally is to violate the very terms of his discourse. Yet, one knows of so many texts from one's own part of the world which do not fit the description of "national allegory" that one wonders why Jameson insists so much on the category "all." 574

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Without this category, of course, he cannot produce a theory of thirdworld literature. But is it also the case that he means the opposite of what he actually says: not that "all third-world texts are to be read . . . as national allegories" but that only those texts which give us national allegories can be admitted as authentic texts of third-world literature, while the rest are excluded by definition? Hence, one is not quite sure whether one is dealing with a fallacy ("all third-world texts are" this or that) or with the Law of the Father (you must write this if you are to be admitted into my theory). These shifts and hesitations in denning the objects of one's knowledge are based, I believe, on several confusions, one of which I shall specify here. For, if one argues that the third world is constituted by the "experience of colonialism and imperialism," one must also recognise the two-pronged action of the colonial/imperialist dynamic: the forced transfers of value from the colonialised/imperialised formations, and the intensification of capitalist relations within those formations. And if capitalism is not merely an externality but also a shaping force within those formations, then one must conclude also that the separation between the public and the private, so characteristic of capitalism, has occurred there as well, at least in some degree and especially among the urban intelligentsia which produces most of the written texts and which is itself caught in the world of capitalist commodities. With this bifurcation must have come, at least for some of the producers of texts, the individuation and personalisation of libidinal energies, the loss of access to "concrete" experience, and the consequent experience of self as isolated, alienated entity incapable of real, organic connection with any collectivity. There must be texts, perhaps numerous texts, that are grounded in this desolation, bereft of any capacity for the kind of allegorisation and organicity that Jameson demands of them. The logic of Jameson's own argument (i.e., that the third world is constituted by "experience of colonialism and imperialism") leads necessarily to the conclusion that at least some of the writers of the third world itself must be producing texts characteristic not of the so-called tribal and Asiatic modes but of the capitalist era as such, much in the manner of the so-called first world. But Jameson does not draw that conclusion. He does not draw that conclusion at least partially because this socalled third world is to him suspended outside the modern systems of production (capitalism and socialism). He does not quite say that the third world is pre- or non-capitalist, but that is clearly the implication of the contrast he establishes, as for example in the following formulation: . . . one of the determinants of capitalist culture, that is, the culture of the western realist and modernist novel, is a radical split between the private and the public, between the poetic and the 575

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political, between what we have come to think of as the domain of sexuality and the unconscious and that of the public world of classes, of the economic, and of secular political power: in other words, Freud versus Marx.... I will argue that, although we may retain for convenience and for analysis such categories as the subjective and the public or political, the relations between them are wholly different in thirdworld culture. It is noteworthy that "the radical split between the private and the public" is distinctly located in the capitalist mode here, but the absence of this split in so-called third-world culture is not located in any mode of production—in keeping with Jameson's very definition of the Three Worlds. But Jameson knows what he is talking about, and his statements have been less ambiguous in the past. Thus, we find the following in his relatively early essay on Lukacs: In the art works of a preindustrialized, agricultural or tribal society, the artist's raw material is on a human scale, it has an immediate meaning. . . . The story needs no background in time because the culture knows no history; each generation repeats the same experiences, reinvents the same basic human situations as though for the first time. . . . The works of art characteristic of such societies may be called concrete in that their elements are all meaningful from the outset... in the language of Hegel, this raw material needs no mediation. When we turn from such a work to the literature of the industrial era, everything changes . . . a kind of dissolution of the human sets in. ... For the unquestioned ritualistic time of village life no longer exists; there is henceforth a separation between public and private . . . (Marxism And Form, pp. 165-67.) Clearly, then, what was once theorised as a difference between the preindustrial and the industrialized societies (the unity of the public and the private in one, the separation of the two in the other) is now transposed as a difference between the first and third worlds. The idea of the "concrete" is now rendered in only slightly different vocabulary: "third-world culture . . . must be situational and materialist despite itself." And it is perhaps that other idea—namely that "preindustrialized . . . culture knows no history; each generation repeats the same experience"—which is at the root of now suspending the so-called third world outside the modern modes of production (capitalism and socialism), encapsulating the experience of this third world in the Hegelian metaphor of the master/slave relation, and postulating a unitary form of narrativity (the 576

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national allegory) in which the "experience" of this third world is to be told. In both texts, the theoretical authority that is invoked is, predictably, that of Hegel. Likewise, Jameson insists over and over again that the national experience is central to the cognitive formation of the third-world intellectual and that the narrativity of that experience takes the form exclusively of a "national allegory," but this emphatic insistence on the category "nation" itself keeps slipping into a much wider, far less demarcated vocabulary of "culture," "society," "collectivity" and so on. Are "nation" and "collectivity" the same thing? Take, for example, the two statements which seem to enclose the elaboration of the theory itself. In the beginning we are told: All third-world texts are necessarily, I want to argue, allegorical, and in a very specific way: they are to be read as what I will call national allegories, even when, or perhaps I should say, particularly when their forms develop out of predominantly western machineries of representation, such as the novel. But at the end we find the following: .. . the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the experience of the collectivity itself. Are these two statements saying the same thing? The difficulty of this shift in vocabulary is that one may indeed connect one's personal experience to a "collectivity"—in terms of class, gender, caste, religious community, trade union, political party, village, prison—combining the private and the public, and in some sense "allegorizing" the individual experience, without involving the category of "the nation" or necessarily referring back to the "experience of colonialism and imperialism." The latter statement would then seem to apply to a much larger body of texts, with far greater accuracy. By the same token, however, this wider application of "collectivity" establishes much less radical difference between the so-called first and third worlds, since the whole history of realism in the European novel, in its many variants, has been associated with ideas of "typicality" and "the social," while the majority of the written narratives produced in the first world even today locate the individual story in a fundamental relation to some larger experience. If we replace the idea of the nation with that larger, less restricting idea of collectivity, and if we start thinking of the process of allegorisation not in nationalistic terms but simply as a relation between private and public, personal and communal, then it also becomes possible to see that 577

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allegorisation is by no means specific to the so-called third world. While Jameson overstates the presence of "us," the "national allegory," in the narratives of the third world, he also, in the same sweep, understates the presence of analogous impulses in US cultural ensembles. For, what else are, let us say, Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow or Ellison's The Invisible Man but allegorisations of individual—and not so individual—experience? What else could Richard Wright and Adrienne Rich and Richard Howard mean when they give to their books titles like Native Son or Your Native Land, Your Life or Alone With America! It is not only the Asian or the African but also the American writer whose private imaginations must necessarily connect with experiences of the collectivity. One has only to look at black and feminist writing to find countless allegories even within these postmodernist United States.

VI I also have some difficulty with Jameson's description of "third-world literature" as "non-canonical," for I am not quite sure what that means. Since the vast majority of literary texts produced in Asia, Africa and Latin America are simply not available in English, their exclusion from the US/British "cannon" is self-evident. If, however, one considers the kind of texts Jameson seems to have in mind, one begins to wonder just what mechanisms of canonisation there are from which this body of work is so entirely excluded. Neruda, Vallejo, Octavio Paz, Borges, Fuentes, Marquez et al. (i.e., quite a few writers of Latin American origin) are considered by the American academy as major figures in modern literature. They, and even their translators, have received the most prestigious awards (the Nobel for Marquez, for instance, or the National Book Award for Eshleman's translation of Vallejo) and they get taught quite as routinely in literature courses as their German or Italian contemporaries might be, perhaps more regularly in fact. Soyinka was recently canonised through the Nobel Prize and Achebe's novels are consistently more easily available in the US book market than are, for example, Richard Wright's. Edward Said, a man of Palestinian origin, has had virtually every honor the US academy has to offer, with distinct constituencies of his own; Orientalism, at least, gets taught widely, across several disciplines—more widely, it seems, than the work of any other leftwing literary/cultural critic in this country. V. S. Naipaul is now fully established as a major English novelist, and he does come from the Caribbean; he is, like Borges, a "third-world writer." Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children was awarded the most prestigious literary award in England and Shame was immediately reviewed as a major novel, almost always favorably, in virtually all the major newspapers and literary journals in Britain and the US. He is a major presence on the 578

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British cultural scene and a prized visitor to conferences and graduate departments on both sides of the Atlantic. The blurbs on the Vintage paperback edition of Shame—based partly on a quotation from the New York Times—compare him with Swift, Voltaire, Stern, Kafka, Grass, Kundera and Marquez. I am told that a PhD dissertation has been written about him at Columbia already. What else is canonisation, when it comes to modern, contemporary, and in some cases (Rushdie, for example) relatively young writers? My argument is not that these reputations are not well-deserved (Naipaul is of course a different matter), nor that there should not be more such canonisations. But the representation of this body of work in Jameson's discourse as simply "non-canonical" (i.e., as something that has been altogether excluded from the contemporary practices of high textuality in the US academy) does appear to over-state the case considerably. Jameson later speaks of "non-canonical forms of literature such as that of the third world," compares this singularized form to "another noncanonical form" in which Dashiell Hammett is placed, and then goes on to say: Nothing is to be gained by passing over in silence the radical difference of non-canonical texts. The third-world novel will not offer the satisfactions of Proust or Joyce; what is more damaging than that, perhaps, is its tendency to remind us of outmoded stages of our own first-world cultural development and to cause us to conclude that "they are still writing novels like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson." Now, I am not sure that realism, which appears to be at the heart of Jameson's characterization of "third-world literature" in this passage, is quite as universal in that literature or quite as definitively superseded in what Jameson calls "first-world cultural development." Some of the most highly regarded US fictionists of the present cultural moment, from Bellow and Malamud to Grace Paley and Robert Stone, seem to write not quite "like Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson" but surely within the realist mode. On the other hand, Cesaire became so popular among the French surrealists because the terms of his discourse were contemporaneous with their own, and Neruda has been translated by some of the leading poets of the US because he is even formally not "outmoded." Novelists like Marquez or Rushdie have been so well received in the US/British literary circles precisely because they do not write like Dreiser or Sherwood Anderson; the satisfactions of their outrageous texts are not those of Proust or Joyce but are surely of an analogous kind, delightful to readers brought up on modernism and postmodernism. Cesaire's Return to the Native Land is what it is because it combines what Jameson calls a 579

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"national allegory" with the formal methods of the Parisian avant-garde of his student days. Borges is of course not seen in the US any longer in terms of his Latin American origin; he now belongs to the august company of the significant moderns, much like Kafka. To say that the canon simply does not admit any third-world writers is to misrepresent the way bourgeois culture works, i.e., through selective admission and selective canonisation. Just as modernism has now been fully canonised in the museum and the university, and as certain kinds of marxism have been incorporated and given respectability within the academy, certain writers from the "third world" are also now part and parcel of the literary discourse in the US. Instead of claiming straightforward exclusion, it is perhaps more useful to inquire as to how the principle of selective incorporation works in relation to texts produced outside the metropolitan countries.

VII I want to offer some comments on the history of Urdu literature, not in the form of a cogent narrative, less still to formulate a short course in that history, but simply to illustrate the kind of impoverishment that is involved in the a priori declaration that "all third-world texts are necessarily . . . to be read as national allegories." It is, for example, a matter of some considerable curiosity to me that the Urdu language, although one of the youngest linguistic formations in India, had nevertheless produced its first great poet, Khusrow, in the 13th century, so that a great tradition of poetry got going, but then it waited roughly six centuries before beginning to assemble the first sizeable body of prose narratives. Not that prose itself had not been there; the earliest prose texts in Urdu date back to the 8th century, but those were written for religious purposes and were often mere translations from Arabic or Farsi. Non-seminarian and non-theological narratives—the ones that had to do with the pleasures of reading and the etiquettes of civility—began appearing much, much later, in the last decade of the 18th century. Then, over two dozen of them got published during the next ten years. What inhibited that development for so long, and why did it happen precisely at that time? Much of that has to do with complex social developments that had gradually led to the displacement of Farsi by Urdu as the language of educated, urban speech and of prose writing in certain regions of Northern India. That history we shall ignore, but a certain material condition of that production can be specified: many, though by no means all, of those prose narratives of the 1810s got written and published for the simple reason that a certain Scotsman, John Gilchrist, had argued within his own circles that employees of the East India Company could not hope to administer 580

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their Indian possessions on the basis of Persian alone, and certainly not English, so that Fort William College was established in 1800 for the education of the British in Indian languages, mainly in Urdu of which Gilchrist was a scholar and exponent. He hired some of the most erudite men of his time and got them to write whatever they wanted, so long as they wrote in accessible prose. It was a stroke of genius, for what came out of that enterprise was the mobilisation of the whole range of vocabularies existing at that time—the range of vocabularies were in keeping with the pedagogical purpose—and the construction of narratives which either transcribed the great classics of oral literature or condensed the fictions that already existed in Arabic or Farsi and were therefore part of the cultural life of the North Indian upper classes. Thus, the most famous of these narratives, Meer Amman's Bagh-o-Bahar, was a condensation, in superbly colloquial Urdu, of the monumental Qissa-e-Chahar Dervish, which Faizi, the great scholar, had composed some centuries earlier in Farsi, for the amusement of Akbar, the Mughal king who was almost an exact contemporary of the British Queen, Elizabeth. But that was not the only impulse and the publishing house of Fort William College was in any case closed within a decade. A similar development was occurring in Lucknow, outside the British domains, at exactly the same time; some of the Fort William writers had themselves come from Lucknow, looking for alternative employment. Rajab Ali Beg Saroor's Fasana-e-A'jaib is the great classic of this other tradition of Urdu narrativity (these were actually not two different traditions but parts of the same, some of which got formed in the British domains, some not). In 1848, eight years before it fell to British guns, the city of Lucknow had twelve printing presses, and the consolidation of the narrative tradition in Urdu was inseparable from the history of those presses. The remarkable thing about all the major Urdu prose narratives which were written during the half century in which the British completed their conquest of India is that there is nothing in their contents, in their way of seeing the world, which can be reasonably connected with the colonial onslaught or with any sense of resistance to it. By contrast, there is a large body of letters and even of poetry which documents that colossal carnage. It is as if the establishment of printing presses and the growth of a reading public for prose narratives gave rise to a kind of writing whose only task was to preserve in books at least some of that Persianized culture and those traditions of orality which were fast disappearing. It is only in this negative sense that one could, by stretching the terms a great deal, declare this to be a literature of the "national allegory." The man, Pandit Naval Kishore, who gave to the language its first great publishing house, came somewhat later, however. His grandfather had been employed, like many upper caste Hindus of the time, in the Mughal ministry of finance; his own father was a businessman, genteel and affluent 581

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but not rich. Naval Kishore himself had a passion for the written word; but like his father and grandfather, he also understood money. He started his career as a journalist, then went on to purchasing old hand-written manuscripts and publishing them for wider circulation. Over time, he expanded into all sorts of fields, all connected with publishing, and gave to Urdu its first great modern archive of published books. Urdu, in turn, showered him with money; at the time of his death in 1895, his fortune was estimated at one crore rupees (roughly a hundred million British pounds). He had to publish, I might add, more than national allegories, more than what came out of the experience of colonialism and imperialism, to make that kind of money. But let me return to the issue of narration. It is a matter of some interest that the emergence of what one could plausibly call a novel came more than half a century after the appearance of those early registrations of the classics of the oral tradition and the re-writing of Arabic and Farsi stories. Sarshar's Fasana-e-Azad, the most opulent of those early novels, was serialised during the 1870s in something else that had begun emerging in the 1830s: regular Urdu newspapers for the emergent middle classes. Between the traditional tale and the modern novel, then, there were other things, such as newspapers and sizeable reading publics, much in the same way as one encounters them in a whole range of books on English literary history, from Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel to Lennard J. Davis' more recent Factual Fictions. And I have often wondered, as others have sometimes wondered about Dickens, if the structure of Sarshar's novel might not have been very different had it been written not for serialisation but for direct publication as a book. Those other books, independent of newspapers, came too. One very prolific writer, whose name as it appears on the covers of his books is itself a curiosity, was Shams-ul-Ulema Deputy Nazir Ahmed (1831-1912). The name was actually Nazir Ahmed; "Shams-ul-Ulema" literally means a Sun among the scholars of Islam and indicates his distinguished scholarship in that area; "Deputy" simply refers to the fact that he had no independent income and had joined the Colonial Revenue Service. His training in Arabic was rigorous and immaculate; his knowledge of English was spotty, since he had had no formal training in it. He was a prolific translator, of everything: the Indian Penal Code, the Indian Law of Evidence, the Quran, books of astronomy. He is known above all as a novelist, however, and he had one anxiety above all others: that girls should get modern education (in which he represented the emergent urban bourgeoisie) and that they nevertheless remain good, traditional housewives (a sentiment that was quite widespread, across all social boundaries). It was this anxiety that governed most of his fictions. It is possible to argue, I think, that the formative phase of the Urdu novel and the narratives that arose alongside that novel, in the latter part 582

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of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, had to do much less with the experience of colonialism and imperialism as such and much more with two other kinds of pressures and themes: (a) the emergence of a new kind of petty bourgeois who was violating all established social norms for his own pecuniary ends (Nazir Ahmed's own Ibn-ul-Vaqt—"TimeServer," in rough English approximation—is a classic of that genre); and (b) the status of women. Nazir Ahmed of course took conservative positions on both these themes and was prolific on the latter. But there were others as well. Rashid-ul-Khairi, for example, established a very successful publishing house, the Asmat Book Depot, which published hundreds of books for women and children, as well as the five journals that came into my family over two generations: Asmat, Khatoon-e-Mashriq, Jauhar-eNisvan, Banat, and Nau-Nehal. English approximations for the latter four titles are easier to provide: "Woman of the East," "Essence of Womanhood," "Girls" (or "Daughters"), and "Children." But the first of these titles, Asmat, is harder to render in English, for the Urdu usage of this word has many connotations, from virginity to honor to propriety, in a verbal condensation which expresses inter-related preoccupations. That these journals came regularly into my family for roughly forty years is itself significant, for mine was not, in metropolitan terms, an educated family; we lived in a small village, far from the big urban centers, and I was the first member of this family to finish high school or drive an automobile. That two generations of women and children in such a family would be part of the regular readership of such journals shows the social reach of this kind of publishing. Much literature, in short, revolved around the issues of femininity and propriety, in a very conservative sort of way. But then there were other writers as well, such as Meer Hadi Hassan Rusva who challenged the dominant discourse and wrote his famous Umrao Jan Ada about those women for whom Urdu has many words, the most colorful of which can be rendered as "women of the upper chamber": women to whom men of property in certain social milieux used to go for instruction in erotic play, genteel manner, literary taste, and knowledge of music. The scandal of Rusva's early 20th-century text is its proposition that since such a woman depends upon no one man, and because many men depend on her, she is the only relatively free woman in our society. He obviously did not like Nazir Ahmed's work, but I must also emphasize that the ironic and incipient "feminism" of this text is not a reflection of any westernisation. Rusva was a very traditional man and was simply tired of certain kinds of moral posturing. Meanwhile, the idea that familial repressions in our traditional society were so great that the only women who had any sort of freedom to make fundamental choices for themselves were the ones who had no "proper" place in that society—that subversive idea was to re-appear in all kinds of ways when the next major break came in the forms of Urdu narrativity, in the 1930s, under the 583

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banner not of nationalism but of the Progressive Writers Union which was a cultural front of the Communist Party of India and had come into being directly as a result of the united front policy of the Comintern after 1935. Critical realism became the fundamental form of narrativity thereafter, for roughly two decades. "Nation" was certainly a category used in this narrative, especially in the non-fictional narrative, and there was an explicit sense of sociality and collectivity, but the categories that one deployed for that sense of collectivity were complex and several, for what critical realism demanded was that a critique of others (anti-colonialism) be conducted in the perspective of an even more comprehensive, multifaceted critique of ourselves: our class structures, our familial ideologies, our management of bodies and sexualities, our idealisms, our silences. I cannot think of a single novel in Urdu between 1935 and 1947, the crucial year leading up to decolonisation, which is in any direct or exclusive way about "the experience of colonialism and imperialism." All the novels that I know from that period are predominantly about other things: the barbarity of feudal landowners, the rapes and murders in the houses of religious "mystics," the stranglehold of moneylenders upon the lives of peasants and the lower petty bourgeoisie, the social and sexual frustrations of school-going girls, and so on. The theme of anti-colonialism is woven into many of those novels but never in an exclusive or even dominant emphasis. In fact, I do not know of any fictional narrative in Urdu, in the last roughly two hundred years, which is of any significance and any length (I am making an exception for a few short stories here) and in which the issue of colonialism or the difficulty of a civilizational encounter between the English and the Indian has the same primacy as, for example, in Forster's A Passage To India or Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet. The typical Urdu writer has had a peculiar vision, in which he/she has never been able to construct fixed boundaries between the criminalities of the colonialist and the brutalities of all those indigenous people who have had power in our own society. We have had our own hysterias here and there, far too many in fact, but there has never been a sustained, powerful myth of a primal innocence, when it comes to the colonial encounter. The "nation" indeed became the primary ideological problematic in Urdu literature at the moment of independence, for our independence too was peculiar: it came together with the partition of our country, the biggest and possibly the most miserable migration in human history, the biggest bloodbath in the memory of the subcontinent: the gigantic fratricide conducted by Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communalists. Our "nationalism" at this juncture was a nationalism of mourning, a form of valediction, for what we witnessed was not just the British policy of divide and rule, which surely was there, but our own willingness to break up our civilizational unity, to kill our neighbors, to forego that civic ethos, that moral bond with 584

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each other, without which human community is impossible. A critique of others (anti-colonial nationalism) receded even further into the background, entirely overtaken now by an even harsher critique of ourselves. The major fictions of the 50s and 60s—the shorter fictions of Manto, Bedi, Intezar Hussein; the novels of Qurrat ul Ain, Khadija Mastoor, Abdullah Hussein—came out of that refusal to forgive what we ourselves had done and were still doing, in one way or another, to our own polity. There was no quarter given to the colonialist; but there was none for ourselves either. One could speak, in a general sort of way, of "the nation" in this context, but not of "nationalism." In Pakistan, of course, there was another, overriding doubt: were we a nation at all? Most of the leftwing, I am sure, said No. VIII Finally, I also have some difficulty with the way Jameson seems to understand the epistemological status of the dialectic. For, what seems to lie at the heart of all the analytic procedures in his text is a search for, the notion that there is, a unitary determination which can be identified, in its splendid isolation, as the source of all narrativity: the proposition that the "third world" is a singular formation, possessing its own unique, unitary force of determination in the sphere of ideology (nationalism) and cultural production (the national allegory). Within a postmodernist intellectual milieu where texts are to be read as the utterly free, altogether hedonistic plays of the signifier, I can well empathise with a theoretical operation that seeks to locate the production of texts within a determinate, knowable field of power and signification. But the idea of a unitary determination is in its origins a pre-marxist idea. I hasten to add that this idea is surely present in a number of Marx's own formulations as well as in a number of very honorable, highly productive theoretical formations that have followed, in one way or another, in Marx's footsteps. It is to be seen in action, for example, even in so recent a debate as the one that followed the famous DobbSweezy exchange and which came to be focused on the search for a "prime mover" (the issue of a unitary determination in the rise of the capitalist mode of production in Western Europe). So, when Jameson implicitly invokes this particular understanding of the dialectic, he is in distinguished company indeed. But there is, I believe, a considerable space where one could take one's stand between (a) the postmodernist cult of utter non-determinacy and (b) the idea of a unitary determination which has lasted from Hegel up to some of the most modern of the marxist debates. For, the main thrust of the marxist dialectic, as I understand it, is comprised of a tension (a mutually transformative relation) between the problematic of a final 585

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determination (of the ideational content by the life-process of material labor, for example) and the utter historicity of multiple, interpenetrating determinations, so that, in Engels' words, the "outcome" of any particular history hardly ever corresponds to the "will" of any of those historical agents who struggle over that outcome. Thus, for example, I have said that what constitutes the unity of the world is the global operation of the capitalist mode of production and the resistance to that mode which is ultimately socialist in character. But this constitutive fact does not operate in the same way in all the countries of Asia and Africa. In Namibia, the imposition of the capitalist mode takes a directly colonial form, whereas the central fact in India is the existence of stable and widespread classes of capitalist society within a post-colonial bourgeois polity; in Vietnam, which has already entered a post-capitalist phase, albeit in a context of extreme devastation of the productive forces, the character of this constitutive dialectic is again entirely different. So, while the problematic of a "final determination" is surely active in each case it is constituted differently in different cases, and literary production must, on the whole, reflect that difference. What further complicates this dialectic of the social and the literary is that most literary productions, whether of the "first world" or of the "third," are not always available for that kind of direct and unitary determination by any one factor, no matter how central that factor is in constituting the social formation as a whole. Literary texts are produced in highly differentiated, usually very over-determined contexts of competing ideological and cultural clusters, so that any particular text of any complexity shall always have to be placed within the cluster that gives it its energy and form, before it is totalised into a universal category. This fact of over-determination does not mean that individual texts merely float in the air, or that "totality" as such is an impossible cognitive category. But in any comprehension of totality, one would always have to specify and historicize the determinations which constitute any given field; with sufficient knowledge of the field, it is normally possible to specify the principal ideological formations and narrative forms. What is not possible is to operate with the few texts that become available in the metropolitan languages and then to posit a complete singularization and transparency in the process of determinacy, so that all ideological complexity is reduced to a single ideological formation and all narratives are read as local expressions of a metatext. If one does that, one shall produce not the knowledge of a totality, which I too take to be a fundamental cognitive category, but an idealization, either of the Hegelian or of the positivist kind. What I mean by multiple determinations at work in any text of considerable complexity can be specified, I believe, by looking briefly at the problem of the cultural location of Jameson's own text. This is, ostensibly, 586

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a first-world text; Jameson is a US intellectual and identifies himself as such. But he is a US intellectual of a certain kind; not everyone is able to juxtapose Ousmane and Deleuze so comfortably, so well; and he debunks the "global American culture of postmodernism" which he says is the culture of his country. His theoretical framework, moreover, is marxist, his political identification socialist—which would seem to place this text in the second world. But the particular energy of his text—its thematics, its relation with those other texts which give it its meaning, the very narrative upon which his "theory of cognitive aesthetics" rests—takes him deep into the third world, valorizing it, asserting it, filiating himself with it, as against the politically dominant and determinant of his own country. Where do /, who do not believe in the Three Worlds Theory, in which world should I place his text: the first world of his origin, the second world of his ideology and politics, or the third world of his filiation and sympathy? And, if "all third-world texts are necessarily" this or that, how is it that his own text escapes an exclusive location in the first world? I—being who I am—shall place it primarily in the global culture of socialism (Jameson's second world—my name for a global resistance) and I shall do so not by suppressing the rest (his US origins, his third world sympathies) but by identifying that which has been central to all his theoretical undertakings for many years. These obviously are not the only determinations at work in Jameson's text. I shall mention only two others, both of which are indicated by his silences. His is, among other things, a gendered text. For, it is inconceivable to me that this text could have been written by a US woman without some considerable statement, probably a full-length discussion, of the fact that the bifurcation of the public and the private, and the necessity to reconstitute that relation where it has been broken, which is so central to Jameson's discussion of the opposition between first-world and thirdworld cultural practices, is indeed a major preoccupation of first-world women writers today, on both sides of the Atlantic. And, Jameson's text is determined also by a certain racial milieu. For, it is equally inconceivable to me that this text could have been written by a black writer in the US who would not also insist that black literature of this country possesses this unique third-world characteristic that it is replete with national allegories (more replete, I personally believe, than is Urdu literature). I point out the above for three reasons. One is to strengthen my proposition that the ideological conditions of a text's production are never singular but always several. Second, even if I were to accept Jameson's division of the globe into three worlds, I would still have to insist, as my references not only to feminism and black literature but to Jameson's own location would indicate, that there is right here, within the belly of the first world's global postmodernism, a veritable third world, perhaps two or three of them. Third, I want to insist that within the unity that has been 587

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bestowed upon our globe by the irreconcilable struggle of capital and labour, there are increasingly those texts which cannot be easily placed within this or that world. Jameson's is not a first-world text, mine is not a third-world text. We are not each other's civilizational Others.

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4.9

A BRIEF RESPONSE Fredric Jameson From Social Text 17 (Fall 1987): 26-7

I can understand many of Aijaz Ahmad's reactions to my essay without, finally, losing the feeling that it was worth doing and that these things were worth saying. The essay was intended as an intervention into a "firstworld" literary and critical situation, in which it seemed important to me to stress the loss of certain literary functions and intellectual commitments in the contemporary American scene. It seemed useful to dramatize that loss by showing the constitutive presence of those things—what I called narrative allegory (namely the coincidence of the personal story and the "tale of the tribe," as still in Spenser) and also the political role of the cultural intellectual—in other parts of the world. To be sure, one then returns to show that US literature also includes its own "third-world" cultures (which escape the categories in which one describes hegemonic culture); and equally clearly, the classical cultures of the East (for example) are no more to be thought of as third-world cultures than the English Renaissance is to be thought of as a first-world one. As for such categories, they are meant to stimulate the perception of difference by imposing comparisons and comparative operations that do not always suggest themselves automatically in our present academic division of labor, where Lu Xun belongs to Chinese departments and Ousmane (if to anything) to French departments. I believe that we have every interest in developing a kind of comparative cultural study (on the model, say, of Barrington Moore's comparative sociology) in which such disparate texts are juxtaposed, not to turn both into "the same thing," but rather with a view towards establishing radical situational difference in cultural production and meanings. The methodological problem is that such differences can only be established within some larger preestablished identity; if there is nothing in common between two cultural situations, then clearly the establishment of difference is both pointless and given in advance. What this means is that 589

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if Identity and Difference are fixed and eternal opposites, we have either a ceaseless alternation, or a set of intolerable choices: presumably there would be no great advantage gained by junking the category of "third world" if the result is that North America then becomes "the same" as the subcontinent, say. But nothing is to be done with sheer random difference either, which either leaves us back in Boasian anthropology or in the empiricist history of "one damned thing after another." The claim of the dialectic as a distinct mode of thought is to set categories like those of Identity and Difference in motion, so that the inevitable starting point is ultimately transformed beyond recognition; whether this claim can be honored cannot, of course, be decided in advance. A great many other important issues are raised in this paper, which I can scarcely touch on now, let alone answer. The concept of "national allegory," for example, was not meant as an endorsement of nationalism, although I believe that a certain nationalism does not always play an exclusively negative and harmful role in some socialist revolutions. As for the term "first world," I hope it is not necessary to say that the priority it implies is not a social one (the burden of my paper was to argue virtually the opposite position), nor is it an intellectual one (particularly given our Roman eclecticism—currently expanding, I'm happy to say, to include a keen interest in contemporary Indian theory), nor is it even, God knows, a matter of production: it is based, far more even than military power, on the fact that American bankers hold the levels of the world system. As for one's feeling that this system, late capitalism, is the supreme unifying force of contemporary history, such a belief—which has been characterized as "monotheism" by some—confirms the descriptions of the Grundrisse and does seem to me to correspond to a fact of life. I don't, however, see how my argument can be taken for an endorsement of this gravitational force, which it would be well, however, to take into account if one plans to try to resist it. I think I can detect some final implication here that "theory" is, in the very nature of the beast, repressive and an exercise of power—although I can't be sure whether Aijaz Ahmad would endorse the full "theoretical" form of this particular position about theory. My own feeling is that such anxiety is particularly misplaced in a situation in which the "role" of the intellectual (and the very category itself) has never been less influential and in which anti-intellectualism is deeply ingrained in the very spirit of the culture. It seems to me much more productive to insist, as he also does, on the way in which we are all situated and determined socially and ideologically by our multiple class positions—something I hope I never seemed to deny. But even speaking from that position (as I could not but do), I still think my intervention was a positive and progressive one, whose implications (on any number of levels) include: the necessity for teaching third-world literatures; the recognition of the challenge they pose to even 590

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the most advanced contemporary theory; the need for a relational way of thinking global culture (such that we cannot henceforth think "firstworld" literature in isolation from that of other global spaces); the proposal for a comparative study of cultural situations (which I have been clearer about here, perhaps, but for which my code word, in the essay in question, was the slogan, "mode of production"); and finally, the suggestion (which Ahmad seems to endorse) that when we get done with all that we may want to entertain the possibility that we also need a (new) theory of second-world culture as well.

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4.10 CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM Benedict Anderson From Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn, Verso, 1991,163-85

In the original edition of Imagined Communities I wrote that 'so often in the "nation-building" policies of the new states one sees both a genuine, popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative regulations, and so forth.'1 My short-sighted assumption then was that official nationalism in the colonized worlds of Asia and Africa was modelled directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe. Subsequent reflection has persuaded me that this view was hasty and superficial, and that the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state. At first sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial states were typically antinationalist, and often violently so. But if one looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the grammar in which, from the mid nineteenth century, they were deployed, the lineage becomes decidedly more clear. Few things bring this grammar into more visible relief than three institutions of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth century, changed their form and function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum: together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion - the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry. To explore the character of this nexus I shall, in this chapter, confine my attention to Southeast Asia, since my conclusions are tentative, and my claims to serious specialization limited to that region. Southeast Asia does, however, offer those with comparative historical interests special advantages, since it includes territories colonized by almost all the 'white' imperial powers - Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the United States - as well as uncolonized Siam. Readers with 592

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greater knowledge of other parts of Asia and Africa than mine will be better positioned to judge if my argument is sustainable on a wider historical and geographical stage. The census In two valuable recent papers the sociologist Charles Hirschman has begun the study of the mentalites of the British colonial census-makers for the Straits Settlements and peninsular Malaya, and their successors working for the independent conglomerate state of Malaysia.2 Hirschman's facsimiles of the 'identity categories' of successive censuses from the late nineteenth century up to the recent present show an extraordinarily rapid, superficially arbitrary, series of changes, in which categories are continuously agglomerated, disaggregated, recombined, intermixed, and reordered (but the politically powerful identity categories always lead the list). From these censuses he draws two principal conclusions. The first is that, as the colonial period wore on, the census categories became more visibly and exclusively racial.3 Religious identity, on the other hand, gradually disappeared as a primary census classification. 'Hindoos' - ranked alongside 'Klings,' and 'Bengalees' - vanished after the first census of 1871. 'Parsees' lasted until the census of 1901, where they still appeared packed in with 'Bengalis,' 'Burmese,' and 'Tamils' - under the broad category Tamils and Other Natives of India.' His second conclusion is that, on the whole, the large racial categories were retained and even concentrated after independence, but now redesignated and reranked as 'Malaysian,' 'Chinese,' 'Indian,' and 'Other.' Yet anomalies continued up into the 1980s. In the 1980 census 'Sikh' still appeared nervously as a pseudoethnic subcategory - alongside 'Malayali' and 'Telegu,' 'Pakistani' and 'Bangladeshi,' 'Sri Lankan Tamil,' and 'Other Sri Lankan' - under the general heading 'Indian.' But Hirschman's wonderful facsimiles encourage one to go beyond his immediate analytical concerns. Take, for example, the 1911 Federated Malay States Census, which lists under 'Malay Population by Race' the following: 'Malay,' 'Javanese,' 'Sakai,' 'Banjarese,' 'Boyanese,' 'Mendeling' (sic), 'Krinchi' (sic), 'Jambi,' 'Achinese,' 'Bugis,' and 'Other.' Of these 'groups' all but (most) 'Malay' and 'Sakai' originated from the islands of Sumatra, Java, Southern Borneo, and the Celebes, all parts of the huge neighboring colony of the Netherlands East Indies. But these extra-FMS origins receive no recognition from the census-makers who, in constructing their 'Malays,' keep their eyes modestly lowered to their own colonial borders. (Needless to say, across the waters, Dutch census-makers were constructing a different imagining of 'Malays,' as a minor ethnicity alongside, not above, 'Achinese,' 'Javanese,' and the like.) 'Jambi' and 'Krinchi' refer to places, rather than to anything remotely identifiable as 593

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ethnolinguistic. It is extremely unlikely that, in 1911, more than a tiny fraction of those categorized and subcategorized would have recognized themselves under such labels. These 'identities,' imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible. One notices, in addition, the census-makers' passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence their intolerance of multiple, politically 'transvestite,' blurred, or changing identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, under each racial group, of 'Others' - who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to be confused with other 'Others.' The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one - and only one - extremely clear place. No fractions. This mode of imagining by the colonial state had origins much older than the censuses of the 1870s, so that, in order fully to understand why the late-nineteenth-century censuses are yet profoundly novel, it is useful to look back to the earliest days of European penetration of Southeast Asia. Two examples, drawn from the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagoes, are instructive. In an important recent book, William Henry Scott has attempted meticulously to reconstruct the class structure of the preHispanic Philippines, on the basis of the earliest Spanish records.4 As a professional historian Scott is perfectly aware that the Philippines owes its name to Felipe II of 'Spain,' and that, but for mischance or luck, the archipelago might have fallen into Dutch or English hands, become politically segmented, or been recombined with further conquests.5 It is tempting therefore to attribute his curious choice of topic to his long residence in the Philippines and his strong sympathy with a Filipino nationalism that has been, for a century now, on the trail of an aboriginal Eden. But the chances are good that the deeper basis for the shaping of his imagination was the sources on which he was compelled to rely. For the fact is that wherever in the islands the earliest clerics and conquistadors ventured they espied, on shore, principales, hidalgos, pecheros, and esclavos (princes, noblemen, commoners and slaves) - quasi-estates adapted from the social classifications of late mediaeval Iberia. The documents they left behind offer plenty of incidental evidence that the 'hidalgos' were mostly unaware of one another's existence in the huge, scattered, and sparsely populated archipelago, and, where aware, usually saw one another not as hidalgos, but as enemies or potential slaves. But the power of the grid is so great that such evidence is marginalized in Scott's imagination, and therefore it is hard for him to see that the 'class structure' of the precolonial period is a 'census' imagining created from the poops of Spanish galleons. Wherever they went, hidalgos and esclavos loomed up, who could only be aggregated as such, that is 'structurally,' by an incipient colonial state. For Indonesia we have, thanks to the research of Mason Hoadley, a detailed account of an important judicial case decided in the coastal port 594

C E N S U S , M A P ,M U S E U M of Cirebon, Java, at the end of the seventeenth century.6 By luck, the Dutch (VOC) and local Cirebonese records are still available. If the Cirebonese account only had survived, we would know the accused murderer as a high official of the Cirebonese court, and only by his title Ki Aria Marta Ningrat, not a personal name. The VOC records, however, angrily identify him as a Chinees - indeed that is the single most important piece of information about him that they convey. It is clear then that the Cirebonese court classified people by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like 'race.' There is no reason whatever to think that the accused murderer - whose high status attests to his and his ancestors' long integration into Cirebonese society, no matter what their origins - thought of himself as 'a' Chinees. How then did the VOC arrive at this classification? From what poops was it possible to imagine Chinees! Surely only those ferociously mercantile poops which, under centralized command, roved ceaselessly from port to port between the Gulf of Mergui and the mouth of the Yangtze-kiang. Oblivious of the heterogeneous populations of the Middle Kingdom; of the mutual incomprehensibility of many of their spoken languages; and of the peculiar social and geographic origins of their diaspora across coastal Southeast Asia, the Company imagined, with its trans-oceanic eye, an endless series of Chinezen, as the conquistadors had seen an endless series of hidalgos. And on the basis of this inventive census it began to insist that those under its control whom it categorized as Chinezen dress, reside, marry, be buried, and bequeath property according to that census. It is striking that the much less farfaring and commercially minded Iberians in the Philippines imagined a quite different census category: what they called sangley. Sangley was an incorporation into Spanish of the Hokkien sengli - meaning 'trader.'7 One can imagine Spanish proto-census men asking the traders drawn to Manila by the galleon trade: 'Who are you?', and being sensibly told: 'We are traders.'8 Not sailing the seven Asian seas, for two centuries the Iberians remained in a comfortably provincial conceptual fog. Only very slowly did the sangley turn into 'Chinese' - until the word disappeared in the early nineteenth century to make way for a VOC-style chino. The real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not in the construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in their systematic quantification. Precolonial rulers in the Malayo-Javanese world had attempted enumerations of the populations under their control, but these took the form of tax-rolls and levy-lists. Their purposes were concrete and specific: to keep track of those on whom taxes and military conscription could effectively be imposed - for these rulers were interested solely in economic surplus and armable manpower. Early European regimes in the region did not, in this respect, differ markedly from their predecessors. But after 1850 colonial authorities were using increasingly sophisticated administrative means to enumerate populations, including 595

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the women and children (whom the ancient rulers had always ignored), according to a maze of grids which had no immediate financial or military purpose. In the old days, those subjects liable for taxes and conscription were usually well aware of their numerability; ruler and ruled understood each other very well, if antagonistically, on the matter. But by 1870, a nontaxpaying, unlevyable 'Cochin-Chinese' woman could live out her life, happily or unhappily, in the Straits Settlements, without the slightest awareness that this was how she was being mapped from on high. Here the peculiarity of the new census becomes apparent. It tried carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. Given the exclusive nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself, a 'Cochin-Chinese' had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable series of replicable 'Cochin-Chinese' - within, of course, the state's domain. The new demographic topography put down deep social and institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions. Guided by its imagined map it organized the new educational, juridical, public-health, police, and immigration bureaucracies it was building on the principle of ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always understood in terms of parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created 'traffic-habits' which in time gave real social life to the state's earlier fantasies. Needless to say, it was not always plain sailing, and the state frequently bumped into discomforting realities. Far and away the most important of these was religious affiliation, which served as the basis of very old, very stable imagined communities not in the least aligned with the secular state's authoritarian grid-map. To different degrees, in different Southeast Asian colonies, the rulers were compelled to make messy accommodations, especially to Islam and Buddhism. In particular, religious shrines, schools, and courts - access to which was determined by individual popular self-choice, not the census - continued to flourish. The state could rarely do more than try to regulate, constrict, count, standardize, and hierarchically subordinate these institutions to its own.9 It was precisely because temples, mosques, schools and courts were topographically anomalous that they were understood as zones of freedom and - in time fortresses from which religious, later nationalist, anticolonials could go forth to battle. At the same time, there were frequent endeavours to force a better alignment of census with religious communities by - so far as was possible - politically and juridically ethnicizing the latter. In the Federated States of colonial Malaya, this task was relatively easy. Those whom the regime regarded as being in the series 'Malay' were hustled off to the courts of 'their' castrated Sultans, which were in substantial part administered according to Islamic law.10 'Islamic' was thus treated as really just another name for 'Malay.' (Only after independence in 1957 were efforts 596

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made by certain political groups to reverse this logic by reading 'Malay' as really another name for 'Islamic'). In the vast, heterogeneous Netherlands Indies, where by the end of the colonial era an array of quarrelling missionary organizations had made substantial conversions in widely scattered zones, a parallel drive faced much more substantial obstacles. Yet even there, the 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of 'ethnic' Christianities (the Batak Church, the Karo Church, later the Dayak Church, and so on) which developed in part because the state allocated proselytizing zones to different missionary groups according to its own census-topography. With Islam Batavia had no comparable success. It did not dare to prohibit the pilgrimage to Mecca, though it tried to inhibit the growth of the pilgrims' numbers, policed their travels, and spied on them from an outpost at Jiddah set up just for this purpose. None of these measures sufficed to prevent the intensification of Indies Muslim contacts with the vast world of Islam outside, and especially the new currents of thought emanating from Cairo.11

The map In the meantime, however, Cairo and Mecca were beginning to be visualized in a strange new way, no longer simply as sites in a sacred Muslim geography, but also as dots on paper sheets which included dots for Paris, Moscow, Manila and Caracas; and the plane relationship between these indifferently profane and sacred dots was determined by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated flight of the crow. The Mercatorian map, brought in by the European colonizers, was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians. In a recent, brilliant thesis the Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul has traced the complex processes by which a bordered 'Siam' came into being between 1850 and 1910.12 His account is instructive precisely because Siam was not colonized, though what, in the end, came to be its borders were colonially determined. In the Thai case, therefore, one can see unusually clearly the emergence of a new state-mind within a 'traditional' structure of political power. Up until the accession, in 1851, of the intelligent Rama IV (the Mongkut of The King and I), only two types of map existed in Siam, and both were hand-made: the age of mechanical reproduction had not yet there dawned. One was what could be called a 'cosmograph,' a formal, symbolic representation of the Three Worlds of traditional Buddhist cosmology. The cosmograph was not organized horizontally, like our own maps; rather a series of supratcrrestrial heavens and subterrestrial hells wedged in the visible world along a single vertical axis. It was useless for any journey save that in search of merit and salvation. The second type, wholly profane, consisted of diagrammatic guides for military campaigns 597

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and coastal shipping. Organized roughly by the quadrant, their main features were written-in notes on marching and sailing times, required because the mapmakers had no technical conception of scale. Covering only terrestrial, profane space, they were usually drawn in a queer oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawers' eyes, accustomed from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye-level, nonetheless were influenced subliminally by the verticality of the cosmograph. Thongchai points out that these guide-maps, always local, were never situated in a larger, stable geographic context, and that the bird's-eye view convention of modern maps was wholly foreign to them. Neither type of map marked borders. Their makers would have found incomprehensible the following elegant formulation of Richard Muir:13 Located at the interfaces between adjacent state territories, international boundaries have a special significance in determining the limits of sovereign authority and defining the spatial form of the contained political regions.... Boundaries . . . occur where the vertical interfaces between state sovereignties intersect the surface of the earth.... As vertical interfaces, boundaries have no horizontal extent.... Boundary-stones and similar markers did exist, and indeed multiplied along the western fringes of the realm as the British pressed in from Lower Burma. But these stones were set up discontinuously at strategic mountain passes and fords, and were often substantial distances from corresponding stones set up by the adversary. They were understood horizontally, at eye level, as extension points of royal power; not 'from the air.' Only in the 1870s did Thai leaders begin thinking of boundaries as segments of a continuous map-line corresponding to nothing visible on the ground, but demarcating an exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties. In 1874 appeared the first geographical textbook, by the American missionary J. W. Van Dyke - an early product of the printcapitalism that was by then sweeping into Siam. In 1882, Rama V established a special mapping school in Bangkok. In 1892, Minister of Education Prince Damrong Rajanuphab, inaugurating a modern-style school system for the country, made geography a compulsory subject at the junior secondary level. In 1900, or thereabouts, was published Phumisat Sayam [Geography of Siam] by W. G. Johnson, the model for all printed geographies of the country from that time onwards.14 Thongchai notes that the vectoral convergence of print-capitalism with the new conception of spatial reality presented by these maps had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai politics. Between 1900 and 1915, the traditional words krung and muang largely disappeared, because they imaged dominion in terms of sacred capitals and visible, discontinuous 598

CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM population centers.15 In their place came prathet, 'country,' which imaged it in the invisible terms of bounded territorial space.16 Like censuses, European-style maps worked on the basis of a totalizing classification, and led their bureaucratic producers and consumers towards policies with revolutionary consequences. Ever since John Harrison's 1761 invention of the chronometer, which made possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the entire planet's curved surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes.17 The task of, as it were, 'filling in' the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers, surveyors, and military forces. In Southeast Asia, the second half of the nineteenth century was the golden age of military surveyors - colonial and, a little later, Thai. They were on the march to put space under the same surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on persons. Triangulation by triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the alignment of map and power proceeded. In the apt words of Thongchai:18 In terms of most communication theories and common sense, a map is a scientific abstraction of reality. A map merely represents something which already exists objectively 'there.' In the history I have described, this relationship was reversed. A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. In other words, a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent. . . . It had become a real instrument to concretize projections on the earth's surface. A map was now necessary for the new administrative mechanisms and for the troops to back up their claims. . . . The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served. By the turn of the century, with Prince Damrong's reforms at the Ministry of the Interior (a fine mapping name), the administration of the realm was finally put on a wholly territorial-cartographic basis, following earlier practice in the neighboring colonies. It would be unwise to overlook the crucial intersection between map and census. For the new map served firmly to break off the infinite series of 'Hakkas,' 'Non-Tamil Sri Lankans,' and 'Javanese' that the formal apparatus of the census conjured up, by delimiting territorially where, for political purposes, they ended. Conversely, by a sort of demographic triangulation, the census filled in politically the formal topography of the map. Out of these changes emerged two final avatars of the map (both instituted by the late colonial state) which directly prefigure the official nationalisms of twentieth century Southeast Asia. Fully aware of their interloper status in the distant tropics, but arriving from a civilization in which the legal inheritance and the legal transferability of geographic space had long

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been established,19 the Europeans frequently attempted to legitimize the spread of their power by quasi-legal methods. Among the more popular of these was their 'inheritance' of the putative sovereignties of native rulers whom the Europeans had eliminated or subjected. Either way, the usurpers were in the business, especially vis-a-vis other Europeans, of reconstructing the property-history of their new possessions. Hence the appearance, late in the nineteenth century especially, of 'historical maps,' designed to demonstrate, in the new cartographic discourse, the antiquity of specific, tightly bounded territorial units. Through chronologically arranged sequences of such maps, a sort of political-biographical narrative of the realm came into being, sometimes with vast historical depth.20 In turn, this narrative was adopted, if often adapted, by the nation-states which, in the twentieth century, became the colonial states' legatees.21 The second avatar was the map-as-logo. Its origins were reasonably innocent - the practice of the imperial states of coloring their colonies on maps with an imperial dye. In London's imperial maps, British colonies were usually pink-red, French purple-blue, Dutch yellow-brown, and so on. Dyed this way, each colony appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this 'jigsaw' effect became normal, each 'piece' could be wholly detached from its geographic context. In its final form all explanatory glosses could be summarily removed: lines of longitude and latitude, place names, signs for rivers, seas, and mountains, neighbours. Pure sign, no longer compass to the world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series, available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born.22 Modern Indonesia offers us a fine, painful example of this process. In 1828 the first fever-ridden Dutch settlement was made on the island of New Guinea. Although the settlement had to be abandoned in 1836, the Dutch Crown proclaimed sovereignty over that part of the island lying west of 141 degrees longitude (an invisible line which corresponded to nothing on the ground, but boxed in Conrad's diminishing white spaces), with the exception of some coastal stretches regarded as under the sovereignty of the Sultan of Tidore. Only in 1901 did The Hague buy out the Sultan, and incorporate West New Guinea into the Netherlands Indies just in time for logoization. Large parts of the region remained Conradwhite until after World War II; the handful of Dutchmen there were mostly missionaries, mineral-prospectors - and wardens of special prisoncamps for diehard radical Indonesian nationalists. The swamps north of Merauke, at the extreme southeastern edge of Dutch New Guinea, were selected as the site of these facilities precisely because the region was 600

CENSUS, MAP, MUSEUM regarded as utterly remote from the rest of the colony, and the 'stone-age' local population as wholly uncontaminated by nationalist thinking.23 The internment, and often interment, there of nationalist martyrs gave West New Guinea a central place in the folklore of the anticolonial struggle, and made it a sacred site in the national imagining: Indonesia Free, from Sabang (at the northwestern tip of Sumatra) to - where else but? Merauke. It made no difference at all that, aside from the few hundred internees, no nationalists ever saw New Guinea with their own eyes until the 1960s. But Dutch colonial logo-maps sped across in the colony, showing a West New Guinea with nothing to its East, unconsciously reinforced the developing imagined ties. When, in the aftermath of the bitter anticolonial wars of 1945^49, the Dutch were forced to cede sovereignty of the archipelago to a United States of Indonesia, they attempted (for reasons that need not detain us here) to separate West New Guinea once again, keep it temporarily under colonial rule, and prepare it for independent nationhood. Not until 1963 was this enterprise abandoned, as a result of heavy American diplomatic pressure and Indonesian military raids. Only then did President Sukarno visit for the first time, at the age of sixty-two, a region about which he had tirelessly orated for four decades. The subsequent painful relations between the populations of West New Guinea and the emissaries of the independent Indonesian state can be attributed to the fact that Indonesians more or less sincerely regard these populations as 'brothers and sisters,' while the populations themselves, for the most part, see things very differently.24 This difference owes much to census and map. New Guinea's remoteness and rugged terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary linguistic fragmentation. When the Dutch left the region in 1963 they estimated that within the 700,000 population there existed well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages.25 Many of the remoter 'tribal' groups were not even aware of one another's existence. But, especially after 1950, Dutch missionaries and Dutch officials for the first time made serious efforts to 'unify' them by taking censuses, expanding communications networks, establishing schools, and erecting supra-'tribal' governmental structures. This effort was launched by a colonial state which, as we noted earlier, was unique in that it had governed the Indies, not primarily via a European language, but through 'administrative Malay.'26 Hence West New Guinea was 'brought up' in the same language in which Indonesia had earlier been raised (and which became the national language in due course). The irony is that bahasa Indonesia thus became the lingua franca of a burgeoning West New Guinean, West Papuan nationalism.27 But what brought the often quarrelling young West Papuan nationalists together, especially after 1963, was the map. Though the Indonesian state changed the region's name from West Nieuw Guinea, first to Irian Barat (West Irian) and then to Irian Jaya, it read its local reality from the

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colonial-era bird's-eye atlas. A scattering of anthropologists, missionaries and local officials might know and think about the Ndanis, the Asmats, and the Baudis. But the state itself, and through it the Indonesian population as a whole, saw only a phantom 'Irianese' (orang Irian) named after the map\ because phantom, to be imagined in quasi-logo form: 'negroid' features, penis-sheaths, and so on. In a way that reminds us how Indonesia came first to be imagined within the racist structures of the earlytwentieth-century Netherlands East Indies, an embryo 'Irianese' national community, bounded by Meridian 141 and the neighboring provinces of North and South Moluccas, emerged. At the time when its most prominent and attractive spokesman, Arnold Ap, was murdered by the state in 1984, he was curator of a state-built museum devoted to 'Irianese' (provincial) culture. The museum The link between Ap's occupation and assassination is not at all accidental. For museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political. That his museum was instituted by a distant Jakarta shows us how the new nation-state of Indonesia learned from its immediate ancestor, the colonial Netherlands East Indies. The present proliferation of museums around Southeast Asia suggests a general process of political inheriting at work. Any understanding of this process requires a consideration of the novel nineteenth-century colonial archaeology that made such museums possible. Up until the early nineteenth century the colonial rulers in Southeast Asia exhibited very little interest in the antique monuments of the civilizations they had subjected. Thomas Stamford Raffles, ominous emissary from William Jones's Calcutta, was the first prominent colonial official not merely to amass a large personal collection of local objets d'art, but systematically to study their history.28 Thereafter, with increasing speed, the grandeurs of the Borobudur, of Angkor, of Pagan, and of other ancient sites were successively disinterred, unjungled, measured, photographed, reconstructed, fenced off, analysed, and displayed.29 Colonial Archaeological Services became powerful and prestigious institutions, calling on the services of some exceptionally capable scholar-officials.30 To explore fully why this happened, when it happened, would take us too far afield. It may be enough here to suggest that the change was associated with the eclipse of the commercial-colonial regimes of the two great East India Companies, and the rise of the true modern colony, directly attached to the metropole.31 The prestige of the colonial state was accordingly now intimately linked to that of its homeland superior. It is noticeable how heavily concentrated archaeological efforts were on the restoration of imposing monuments (and how these monuments began to 602

C E N S U S , M A P ,M U S E U M be plotted on maps for public distribution and edification: a kind of necrological census was under way). No doubt this emphasis reflected general Orientalist fashions. But the substantial funds invested allow us to suspect that the state had its own, non-scientific reasons. Three immediately suggest themselves, of which the last is surely the most important. In the first place, the timing of the archaeological push coincided with the first political struggle over the state's educational policies.32 'Progressives' - colonials as well as natives - were urging major investments in modern schooling. Against them were arrayed conservatives who feared the long-term consequences of such schooling, and preferred the natives to stay native. In this light, archaeological restorations - soon followed by state-sponsored printed editions of traditional literary texts - can be seen as a sort of conservative educational program, which also served as a pretext for resisting the pressure of the progressives. Second, the formal ideological programme of the reconstructions always placed the builders of the monuments and the colonial natives in a certain hierarchy. In some cases, as in the Dutch East Indies up until the 1930s, the idea was entertained that the builders were actually not of the same 'race' as the natives (they were 'really' Indian immigrants).33 In other cases, as in Burma, what was imagined was a secular decadence, such that contemporary natives were no longer capable of their putative ancestors' achievements. Seen in this light, the reconstructed monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural poverty, said to the natives: Our very presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable of either greatness or selfrule. The third reason takes us deeper, and closer to the map. We have seen earlier, in our discussion of the 'historical map,' how colonial regimes began attaching themself to antiquity as much as conquest, originally for quite straightforward Machiavellian-legalistic reasons. As time passed, however, there was less and less openly brutal talk about right of conquest, and more and more effort to create alternative legitimacies. More and more Europeans were being born in Southeast Asia, and being tempted to make it their home. Monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state to appear as the guardian of a generalized, but also local, Tradition. The old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their ancient prestige (which, if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers. This paradoxical situation is nicely illustrated by the fact that the reconstructed monuments often had smartly laid-out lawns around them, and always explanatory tablets, complete with datings, planted here and there. Moreover, they were to be kept empty of people, except for perambulatory tourists (no religious ceremonies or pilgrimages, so far as possible). Museumized this way, they were repositioned as regalia for a secular colonial state.

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But, as noted above, a characteristic feature of the instrumentalities of this profane state was infinite reproducibility, a reproducibility made technically possible by print and photography, but politico-culturally by the disbelief of the rulers themselves in the real sacredness of local sites. A sort of progression is detectable everywhere: (1) massive, technically sophisticated archaeological reports, complete with dozens of photographs, recording the process of reconstruction of particular, distinct ruins; (2) Lavishly illustrated books for public consumption, including exemplary plates of all the major sites reconstructed within the colony (so much the better if, as in the Netherlands Indies, Hindu-Buddhist shrines could be juxtaposed to restored Islamic mosques).34 Thanks to printcapitalism, a sort of pictorial census of the state's patrimony becomes available, even if at high cost, to the state's subjects; (3) A general logoization, made possible by the profaning processes outlined above. Postage stamps, with their characteristic series - tropical birds, fruits, fauna, why not monuments as well? - are exemplary of this stage. But postcards and schoolroom textbooks follow the same logic. From there it is only a step into the market: Hotel Pagan, Borobudur Fried Chicken, and so on. While this kind of archaeology, maturing in the age of mechanical reproduction, was profoundly political, it was political at such a deep level that almost everyone, including the personnel of the colonial state (who, by the 1930s, were in most of Southeast Asia 90 per cent native) was unconscious of the fact. It had all become normal and everyday. It was precisely the infinite quotidian reproducibility of its regalia that revealed the real power of the state. It is probably not too surprising that post-independence states, which exhibited marked continuities with their colonial predecessors, inherited this form of political museumizing. For example, on 9 November 1968, as part of the celebrations commemorating the 15th anniversary of Cambodia's independence, Norodom Sihanouk had a large wood and papiermache replica of the great Bayon temple of Angkor displayed in the national sports stadium in Phnom Penh.35 The replica was exceptionally coarse and crude, but it served its purpose - instant recognizability via a history of colonial-era logoization. 'Ah, our Bayon' - but with the memory of French colonial restorers wholly banished. French-reconstructed Angkor Wat, again in 'jigsaw' form, became, as noted in Chapter 9, the central symbol of the successive flags of Sihanouk's royalist, Lon Nol's militarist, and Pol Pot's Jacobin regimes. More striking still is evidence of inheritance at a more popular level. One revealing example is a series of paintings of episodes in the national history commissioned by Indonesia's Ministry of Education in the 1950s. The paintings were to be mass-produced and distributed throughout the primary-school system; young Indonesians were to have on the walls of 604

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their classrooms - everywhere - visual representations of their country's past. Most of the backgrounds were done in the predictable sentimentalnaturalist style of early-twentieth-century commercial art, and the human figures taken either from colonial-era museum dioramas or from the popular wayang orang pseudohistorical folk-drama. The most interesting of the series, however, offered children a representation of the Borobudur. In reality, this colossal monument, with its 504 Buddha images, 1,460 pictorial and 1,212 decorative stone panels, is a fantastic storehouse of ancient Javanese sculpture. But the well-regarded artist imagines the marvel in its ninth century A.D. heyday with instructive perversity. The Borobudur is painted completely white, with not a trace of sculpture visible. Surrounded by well-trimmed lawns and tidy tree-lined avenues, not a single human being is in sight.36 One might argue that this emptiness reflects the unease of a contemporary Muslim painter in the face of an ancient Buddhist reality. But I suspect that what we are really seeing is an unselfconscious lineal descendant of colonial archaeology: the Borobudur as state regalia, and as 'of course, that's it' logo. A Borobudur all the more powerful as a sign for national identity because of everyone's awareness of its location in an infinite series of identical Borobudurs. Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate the late colonial state's style of thinking about its domain. The 'warp' of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state's real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore - in principle countable. (The comic classificatory and subclassificatory census boxes entitled 'Other' concealed all real-life anomalies by a splendid bureaucratic trompe I'oeil). The 'weft' was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative of a series, and was to be handled in this light. This is why the colonial state imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist series before the appearance of any nationalists. No one has found a better metaphor for this frame of mind than the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who entitled the final volume of his tetralogy on the colonial period Rumah Kaca - the Glass House. It is an image, as powerful as Bentham's Panopticon, of total surveyability. For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this 'visibility' was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number.37 This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of 605

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the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of the deep driving power of capitalism. Map and census thus shaped the grammar which would in due course make possible 'Burma' and 'Burmese,' 'Indonesia' and 'Indonesians.' But the concretization of these possibilities - concretizations which have a powerful life today, long after the colonial state has disappeared - owed much to the colonial state's peculiar imagining of history and power. Archaeology was an unimaginable enterprise in precolonial Southeast Asia; it was adopted in uncolonized Siam late in the game, and after the colonial state's manner. It created the series 'ancient monuments,' segmented within the classificatory, geographic-demographic box 'Netherlands Indies,' and 'British Burma.' Conceived within this profane series, each ruin became available for surveillance and infinite replication. As the colonial state's archaeological service made it technically possible to assemble the series in mapped and photographed form, the state itself could regard the series, up historical time, as an album of its ancestors. The key thing was never the specific Borobudur, nor the specific Pagan, in which the state had no substantial interest and with which it had only archaeological connections. The replicable series, however, created a historical depth of field which was easily inherited by the state's postcolonial successor. The final logical outcome was the logo - of 'Pagan' or 'The Philippines,' it made little difference - which by its emptiness, contextlessness, visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility in every direction brought census and map, warp and woof, into an inerasable embrace.

Notes 1 See above, pp. 113-14. 2 Charles Hirschman, 'The Meaning and Measurement of Ethnicity in Malaysia: An Analysis of Census Classifications,' J. of Asian Studies, 46:3 (August 1987), pp. 552-82; and 'The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology', Sociological Forum, 1:2 (Spring 1986), pp. 330-62. 3 An astonishing variety of 'Europeans' were enumerated right through the colonial era. But whereas in 1881 they were still grouped primarily under the headings 'resident,' 'floating,' and 'prisoners,' by 1911 they were fraternizing as members of a (white) race'. It is agreeable that up to the end, the censusmakers were visibly uneasy about where to place those they marked as 'Jews.' 4 William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, chapter 7, 'Filipino Class Structure in the Sixteenth Century.' 5 In first half of the seventeenth century, Spanish settlements in the archipelago came under repeated attack from the forces of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the greatest 'transnational' corporation of the era. For their survival, the pious Catholic settlers owed a great debt to the arch-heretical Protector, who kept Amsterdam's back to the wall for much of his rule. Had the VOC been successful, Manila, rather than Batavia [Jakarta], might have become the centre of the 'Dutch' imperium in Southeast Asia. In 1762, London seized Manila from Spain, and held it for almost two years. It is entertaining to note

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6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20

21 22

that Madrid only got it back in exchange for, of all places, Florida, and the other 'Spanish' possessions east of the Mississippi. Had the negotiations proceeded differently, the archipelago could have been politically linked with Malaya and Singapore during the nineteenth century. Mason C. Hoadley, 'State vs. Ki Aria Marta Ningrat (1696) and Tian Siangko (1720-21)' (unpublished ms., 1982). See, e.g., Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850-1898, chapters 1 and 2. The galleon trade - for which Manila was, for over two centuries, the entrepot exchanged Chinese silks and porcelain for Mexican silver. See chapter 7, above (p. 125) for mention of French colonialism's struggle to sever Buddhism in Cambodia from its old links with Siam. See William Roff, The Origins of Malay Nationalism, pp. 72—4. See Harry J. Benda, The Crescent and the Rising Sun, chapters 1-2. Thongchai Winichakul, 'Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of Siam' (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Sydney, 1988). Richard Muir, Modern Political Geography, p. 119. Thongchai, 'Siam Mapped,' pp. 105-10, 286. For a full discussion of old conceptions of power in Java (which, with minor differences, corresponded to that existing in Old Siam), see my Language and Power, chapter 1. Thongchai,'Siam Mapped,'p. 110. David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, chapter 9. 'Siam Mapped,' p. 310. I do not mean merely the inheritance and sale of private property in land in the usual sense. More important was the European practice of political transfers of lands, with their populations, via dynastic marriages. Princesses, on marriage, brought their husbands duchies and petty principalities, and these transfers were formally negotiated and 'signed.' The tag Bella gerant alii, tu, felix Austria, nube! would have been inconceivable for any state in precolonial Asia. See Thongchai, 'Siam Mapped,' p. 387, on Thai ruling class absorption of this style of imagining. 'According to these historical maps, moreover, the geobody is not a modern particularity but is pushed back more than a thousand years. Historical maps thus help reject any suggestion that nationhood emerged only in the recent past, and the perspective that the present Siam was a result of ruptures is precluded. So is any idea that intercourse between Siam and the European powers was the parent of Siam.' This adoption was by no means a Machiavellian ruse. The early nationalists in all the Southeast Asian colonies had their consciousnesses profoundly shaped by the 'format' of the colonial state and its institutions. See chapter 7 above. In the writings of Nick Joaquin, the contemporary Philippines, preeminent man of letters - and an indubitable patriot - one can see how powerfully the emblem works on the most sophisticated intelligence. Of General Antonio Luna, tragic hero of the anti-American struggle of 1898-99, Joaquin writes that he hurried to 'perform the role that had been instinctive in the Creole for three centuries: the defense of the form of the Philippines from a foreign disrupter.' A Question of Heroes, p. 164 (italics added). Elsewhere he observes, astonishingly, that Spain's 'Filipino allies, converts, mercenaries sent against the Filipino rebel may have kept the archipelago Spanish and Christian, but they also kept it from falling apart;' and that they 'were fighting (whatever the Spaniards may have intended) to keep the Filipino one.' Ibid., p. 58. 607

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23 See Robin Osborne, Indonesia's Secret War, The Guerrilla Struggle in Irian Jaya, pp. 8-9. 24 Since 1963 there have been many bloody episodes in West New Guinea (now called Irian Jaya - Great Irian), partly as a result of the militarization of the Indonesian state since 1965, partly because of the intermittently effective guerrilla activities of the so-called OPM (Organization for a Free Papua). But these brutalities pale by comparison with Jakarta's savagery in ex-Portuguese East Timor, where in the first three years after the 1976 invasion an estimated onethird of the population of 600,000 died from war, famine, disease and 'resettlement'. I do not think it a mistake to suggest that the difference derives in part from East Timor's absence from the logos of the Netherlands East Indies and, until 1976, of Indonesia's. 25 Osborne, Indonesia's Secret War, p. 2. 26 See above, p. 110. 27 The best sign for this is that the anti-Indonesian nationalist guerrilla organization's name, Organisasi Papua Merdeka (OPM), is composed of Indonesian words. 28 In 1811, the East India Company's forces seized all the Dutch possessions in the Indies (Napoleon had absorbed the Netherlands into France the previous year). Raffles ruled in Java till 1815. His monumental History of Java appeared in 1817, two years prior to his founding of Singapore. 29 The museumizing of the Borobudur, the largest Buddhist stupa in the world, exemplifies this process. In 1814, the Raffles regime 'discovered' it, and had it unjungled. In 1845, the self-promoting German artist-adventurer Schaefer persuaded the Dutch authorities in Batavia to pay him to make the first daguerrotypes. In 1851, Batavia sent a team of state employees, led by civil engineer F. C. Wilsen, to make a systematic survey of the bas-reliefs and to produce a complete, 'scientific' set of lithographs. In 1874, Dr. C. Leemans, Director of the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, published, at the behest of the Minister of Colonies, the first major scholarly monograph; he relied heavily on Wilsen's lithographs, never having visited the site himself. In the 1880s, the professional photographer Cephas produced a thorough modern-style photographic survey. In 1901, the colonial regime established an Oudheidkundige Commissie (Commission on Antiquities). Between 1907 and 1911, the Commission oversaw the complete restoration of the stupa, carried out at state expense by a team under the civil engineer Van Erp. Doubtless in recognition of this success, the Commission was promoted, in 1913, to an Oudheidkundigen Dienst (Antiquities Service), which kept the monument spick and span until the end of the colonial period. See C. Leemans, Boro-Boudour, pp. ii-lv; and N. J. Krom, Inleiding tot de Hindoe-Javaansche Kunst, I, chapter 1. 30 Viceroy Curzon (1899-1905), an antiquities buff who, writes Groslier, 'energized' the Archaeological Survey of India, put things very nicely: 'It is ... equally our duty to dig and discover, to classify, reproduce and describe, to copy and decipher, and to cherish and conserve.' (Foucault could not have said it better). In 1899, the Archaeological Department of Burma - then part of British India - was founded, and soon began the restoration of Pagan. The previous year, the Ecole Fran9aise d'Extreme-Orient was established in Saigon, followed almost at once by a Directorate of Museums and Historical Monuments of Indochina. Immediately after the French seizure of Siemreap and Battambang from Siam in 1907, an Angkor Conservancy was established to Cur/onize Southeast Asia's most awe-inspiring ancient monuments. See Bernard Philippe Groslier, Indochina, pp. 155-7, 174-7. As noted above, the 608

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31

32

33

34

35 36 37

Dutch colonial Antiquities Commission was founded in 1901. The coincidence in dates - 1899, 1898,1901 - shows not only the keenness with which the rival colonial powers observed one another, but sea-changes in imperialism under way by the turn of the century. As was to be expected, independent Siam ambled along more slowly. Its Archaeological Service was only set up in 1924, its National Museum in 1926. See Charles Higham, The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia, p. 25. The VOC was liquidated, in bankruptcy, in 1799. The colony of the Netherlands Indies, however, dates from 1815, when the independence of The Netherlands was restored by the Holy Alliance, and Willem I of Orange put on a Dutch throne first invented in 1806 by Napoleon and his kindly brother Louis. The British East India Company survived till the great Indian Mutiny of 1857. The Oudheidkundige Commissie was established by the same government that (in 1901) inaugurated the new 'Ethical Policy' for the Indies, a policy that for the first time aimed to establish a Western-style system of education for substantial numbers of the colonized. Governor-General Paul Doumer (1897-1902) created both the Directorate of Museums and Historical Monuments of Indochina and the colony's modern educational apparatus. In Burma, the huge expansion of higher education - which between 1900 and 1940 increased the number of secondary-school students eightfold, from 27,401 to 233,543, and of college students twentyfold, from 115 to 2,365 - began just as the Archaeological Department of Burma swung into action. See Robert H. Taylor, The State in Burma, p. 114. Influenced in part by this kind of thinking, conservative Thai intellectuals, archaeologists, and officials persist to this day in attributing Angkor to the mysterious Khom, who vanished without a trace, and certainly have no connection with today's despised Cambodians. A fine late-blooming example is Ancient Indonesian Art, by the Dutch scholar, A. J. Bernet Kempers, self-described as 'former Director of Archaeology in Indonesia [sic].' On pages 24-5 one finds maps showing the location of the ancient sites. The first is especially instructive, since its rectangular shape (framed on the east by the 141st Meridian) willy-nilly includes Philippine Mindanao as well as British-Malaysian north Borneo, peninsular Malaya, and Singapore. All are blank of sites, indeed of any naming whatsoever, except for a single, inexplicable 'Kedah.' The switch from Hindu-Buddhism to Islam occurs after Plate 340. See Kambuja, 45 (15 December 1968), for some curious photographs. The discussion here draws on material analysed more fully in Language and Power, chapter 5. An exemplary policy-outcome of Glass House imaginings - an outcome of which ex-political prisoner Pramoedya is painfully aware - is the classificatory ID card that all adult Indonesians must now carry at all times. This ID is isomorphic with the census - it represents a sort of political census, with special punchings for those in the sub-series 'subversives' and 'traitors.' It is notable that this style of census was only perfected after the achievement of national independence.

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4.11 DISSEMINATION Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation1 Homi K. Bhabha From Homi K. Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990,291-322

(In memory of Paul Moritz Strimpel (1914-87): Pforzheim Paris - Zurich - Ahmedabad - Bombay - Milan - Lugano.)

The time of the nation The title of my essay - DissemiNation - owes something to the wit and wisdom of Jacques Derrida, but something more to my own experience of migration. I have lived that moment of the scattering of the people that in other times and other places, in the nations of others, becomes a time of gathering. Gatherings of exiles and emigres and refugees, gathering on the edge of 'foreign' cultures; gathering at the frontiers; gatherings in the ghettos or cafes of city centres; gathering in the half-life, half-light of foreign tongues, or in the uncanny fluency of another's language; gathering the signs of approval and acceptance degrees, discourses, disciplines; gathering the memories of underdevelopment, of other worlds lived retroactively; gathering the past in a ritual of revival; gathering the present. Also the gathering of the people in the diaspora: indentured, migrant, interned; the gathering of incriminatory statistics, educational performance, legal statutes, immigration status - the genealogy of that lonely figure that John Berger named the seventh man. The gathering of clouds from which the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish asks 'where should the birds fly after the last sky?' In the midst of these lonely gatherings of the scattered people, their myths and fantasies and experiences, there emerges a historical fact of singular importance. More deliberately than any other general historian, Eric Hobsbawm2 writes the history of the modern western nation from the per610

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spective of the nation's margin and the migrants' exile. The emergence of the later phase of the modern nation, from the mid-nineteenth century, is also one of the most sustained periods of mass migration within the west, and colonial expansion in the east. The nation fills the void left in the uprooting of communities and kin, and turns that loss into the language of metaphor. Metaphor, as the etymology of the word suggests, transfers the meaning of home and belonging, across the 'middle passage', or the central European steppes, across those distances, and cultural differences, that span the imagined community of the nation-people. The discourse of nationalism is not my main concern. In some ways it is the historical certainty and settled nature of that term against which I am attempting to write of the western nation as an obscure and ubiquitous form of living the locality of culture. This locality is more around temporality than about historicity: a form of living that is more complex than 'community'; more symbolic than 'society'; more connotative than 'country'; less patriotic than patrie; more rhetorical than the reason of state; more mythological than ideology; less homogeneous than hegemony; less centred than the citizen; more collective than 'the subject'; more psychic than civility; more hybrid in the articulation of cultural differences and identifications - gender, race or class - than can be represented in any hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism. In proposing this cultural construction of nationness as a form of social and textual affiliation, I do not wish to deny these categories their specific historicities and particular meanings within different political languages. What I am attempting to formulate in this essay are the complex strategies of cultural identification and discursive address that function in the name of 'the people' or 'the nation' and make them the immanent subjects and objects of a range of social and literary narratives. My emphasis on the temporal dimension in the inscription of these political entities - that are also potent symbolic and affective sources of cultural identity - serves to displace the historicism that has dominated discussions of the nation as a cultural force. The focus on temporality resists the transparent linear equivalence of event and idea that historicism proposes; it provides a perspective on the disjunctive forms of representation that signify a people, a nation, or a national culture. It is neither the sociological solidity of these terms, nor their holistic history that gives them the narrative and psychological force that they have brought to bear on cultural production and projections. It is the mark of the ambivalence of the nation as a narrative strategy - and an apparatus of power - that it produces a continual slippage into analogous, even metonymic, categories, like the people, minorities, or 'cultural difference' that continually overlap in the act of writing the nation. What is displayed in this displacement and repetition of terms is the nation as the measure of the liminality of cultural modernity. 611

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Edward Said aspires to such secular interpretation in his concept of 'wordliness' where 'sensuous particularity as well as historical contingency . . . exist at the same level of surface particularity as the textual object itself (my emphasis).3 Fredric Jameson invokes something similar in his notion of 'situational consciousness' or national allegory, 'where the telling of the individual story and the individual experience cannot but ultimately involve the whole laborious telling of the collectivity itself'.4 And Julia Kristeva speaks perhaps too hastily of the pleasures of exile - 'How can one avoid sinking into the mire of common sense, if not by becoming a stranger to one's own country, language, sex and identity?'5 - without realizing how fully the shadow of the nation falls on the condition of exile which may partly explain her own later, labile identifications with the images of other nations: 'China', 'America'. The nation as metaphor: Amor Patria\ Fatherland', Pig Earth; Mothertongue; Matigari; Middlemarch; Midnight's Children; One Hundred Years of Solitude; War and Peace; I Promessi Sposi; Kanthapura; Moby Dick; The Magic Mountain; Things Fall Apart. There must also be a tribe of interpreters of such metaphors - the translators of the dissemination of texts and discourses across cultures - who can perform what Said describes as the act of secular interpretation. 'To take account of this horizontal, secular space of the crowded spectacle of the modern nation . . . implies that no single explanation sending one back immediately to a single origin is adequate. And just as there are no simple dynastic answers, there are no simple discrete formations or social processes'.6 If, in our travelling theory, we are alive to the metaphoricity of the peoples of imagined communities - migrant or metropolitan - then we shall find that the space of the modern nation-people people is never simply horizontal. Their metaphoric movement requires a kind of 'doubleness' in writing; a temporality of representation that moves between cultural formations and social processes without a 'centred' causal logic. And such cultural movements disperse the homogeneous, visual time of the horizontal society because 'the present is no longer a mother-form [read mother-tongue or mother-land] around which are gathered and differentiated the future (present) and the past (present) . . . [as] a present of which the past and the future would be but modifications'.7 The secular language of interpretation then needs to go beyond the presence of the 'look', that Said recommends, if we are to give 'the nonsequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity its appropriate narrative authority. We need another time of writing that will be able to inscribe the ambivalent and chiasmatic intersections of time and place that constitute the problematic 'modern' experience of the western nation. How does one write the nation's modernity as the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal? The language of national belonging comes laden with atavistic apologues, which has led Benedict Anderson to ask: 612

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'But why do nations celebrate their hoariness, not their astonishing youth?'8 The nation's claim to modernity, as an autonomous or sovereign form of political rationality, is particularly questionable if, with Partha Chatterjee, we adopt the post-colonial perspective: Nationalism . . . seeks to represent itself in the image of the Enlightenment and fails to do so. For Enlightenment itself, to assert its sovereignty as the universal ideal, needs its Other; if it could ever actualise itself in the real world as the truly universal, it would in fact destroy itself.9 Such ideological ambivalence nicely supports Gellner's paradoxical point that the historical necessity of the idea of the nation conflicts with the contingent and arbitrary signs and symbols that signify the affective life of the national culture. The nation may exemplify modern social cohesion but Nationalism is not what it seems, and above all not what it seems to itself . . . The cultural shreds and patches used by nationalism are often arbitrary historical inventions. Any old shred would have served as well. But in no way does it follow that the principle of nationalism . . . is itself in the least contingent and accidental.10 The problematic boundaries of modernity are enacted in these ambivalent temporalities of the nation-space. The language of culture and community is poised on the fissures of the present becoming the rhetorical figures of a national past. Historians transfixed on the event and origins of the nation never ask, and political theorists possessed of the 'modern' totalities of the nation - 'Homogeneity, literacy and anonymity are the key traits'11 - never pose, the awkward question of the disjunctive representation of the social, in this double-time of the nation. It is indeed only in the disjunctive time of the nation's modernity - as a knowledge disjunct between political rationality and its impasse, between the shreds and patches of cultural signification and the certainties of a nationalist pedagogy - that questions of nation as narration come to be posed. How do we plot the narrative of the nation that must mediate between the teleology of progress tipping over into the 'timeless' discourse of irrationality? How do we understand that 'homogeneity' of modernity - the people - which, if pushed too far, may assume something resembling the archaic body of the despotic or totalitarian mass? In the midst of progress and modernity, the language of ambivalence reveals a politics 'without duration', as Althusser once provocatively wrote: 'Space without places, time without duration.' 12 To write the story of the nation demands that we articulate that archaic 613

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ambivalence that informs modernity. We may begin by questioning that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion - the many as one shared by organic theories of the holism of culture and community, and by theorists who treat gender, class, or race as radically 'expressive' social totalities. Out of many one: nowhere has this founding dictum of the political society of the modern nation - its spatial expression of a unitary people found a more intriguing image of itself than in those diverse languages of literary criticism that seek to portray the great power of the idea of the nation in the disclosures of its everyday life; in the telling details that emerge as metaphors for national life. I am reminded of Bakhtin's wonderful description of a 'national' vision of emergence in Goethe's Italian Journey, which represents the triumph of the realistic component over the Romantic. Goethe's realist narrative produces a national-historical time that makes visible a specifically Italian day in the detail of its passing time, 'The bells ring, the rosary is said, the maid enters the room with a lighted lamp and says: Felicissima notte!... If one were to force a German clockhand on them, they would be at a loss.'13 For Bakhtin it is Goethe's vision of the microscopic, elementary, perhaps random tolling of everyday life in Italy that reveals the profound history of its locality (Lokalitat), the spatialization of historical time, 'a creative humanization of this locality, which transforms a part of terrestrial space into a place of historical life for people'.14 The recurrent metaphor of landscape as the inscape of national identity emphasizes the quality of light, the question of social visibility, the power of the eye to naturalize the rhetoric of national affiliation and its forms of collective expression. There is, however, always the distracting presence of another temporality that disturbs the contemporaneity of the national present, as we saw in the national discourses with which I began. Despite Bakhtin's emphasis on the realist vision in the emergence of the nation in Goethe's work, he acknowledges that the origin of the nation's visual presence is the effect of a narrative struggle. From the beginning, Bakhtin writes, the realist and Romantic conceptions of time co-exist in Goethe's work, but the ghostly (Gespenstermassiges), the terrifying (Unerfreuliches), and the unaccountable (Unzuberechnendes) are consistently 'surmounted' by the structural aspects of the visualization of time: 'the necessity of the past and the necessity of its place in a line of continuous development. . . finally the aspect of the past being linked to a necessary future'.15 National time becomes concrete and visible in the chronotope of the local, particular, graphic, from beginning to end. The narrative structure of this historical surmounting of the 'ghostly' or the 'double' is seen in the intensification of narrative synchrony as a graphically visible position in space: 'to grasp the most elusive course of pure historical time and fix it through unmediated contemplation'.16 But what kind of 'present' is this if 614

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it is a consistent process of surmounting the ghostly time of repetition? Can this national time-space be as fixed or as immediately visible as Bakhtin claims? If in Bakhtin's 'surmounting' we hear the echo of another use of that word by Freud in his essay on The Uncanny, then we begin to get a sense of the complex time of the national narrative. Freud associates surmounting with the repressions of a 'cultural' unconscious; a liminal, uncertain state of cultural belief when the archaic emerges in the midst or margins of modernity as a result of some psychic ambivalence or intellectual uncertainty. The 'double' is the figure most frequently associated with this uncanny process of 'the doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self'.17 Such 'double-time' cannot be so simply represented as visible or flexible in 'unmediated contemplation'; nor can we accept Bakhtin's repeated attempt to read the national space as achieved only in the fullness of time. Such an apprehension of the 'double and split' time of national representation, as I am proposing, leads us to question the homogeneous and horizontal view familiarly associated with it. We are led to ask, provocatively, whether the emergence of a national perspective - of an elite or subaltern nature - within a culture of social contestation, can ever articulate its 'representative' authority in that fullness of narrative time, and that visual synchrony of the sign that Bakhtin proposes. Two brilliant accounts of the emergence of national narratives seem to support my suggestion. They represent the diametrically opposed world views of master and slave which between them account for the major historical and philosophical dialectic of modern times. I am thinking of John Barrell's18 splendid analysis of the rhetorical and perspectival status of the 'English gentleman' within the social diversity of the eighteenthcentury novel; and of Huston Baker's innovative reading of the 'new national modes of sounding, interpreting and speaking the Negro in the Harlem Renaissance'.19 In his concluding essay Barrell surveys the positions open to 'an equal, wide survey' and demonstrates how the demand for a holistic, representative vision of society could only be represented in a discourse that was at the same time obsessively fixed upon, and uncertain of, the boundaries of society, and the margins of the text. For instance, the hypostatized 'common language' which was the language of the gentleman whether he be Observer, Spectator, Rambler, 'Common to all by virtue of the fact that it manifested the peculiarities of none'20 - was primarily defined through a process of negation - of regionalism, occupation, faculty - so that this centred vision of 'the gentleman' is so to speak 'a condition of empty potential, one who is imagined as being able to comprehend everything, and yet who may give no evidence of having comprehended anything'.21 A different note of liminality is struck in Baker's description of the 'radical maroonage' that structured the emergence of an insurgent 615

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Afro-American expressive culture in its expansive, 'national' phase. Baker's sense that the 'discursive project' of the Harlem Renaissance is modernist is based less on a strictly literary understanding of the term, and more appropriately on the agonistic enunciative conditions within which the Harlem Renaissance shaped its cultural practice. The transgressive, invasive structure of the black 'national' text, which thrives on rhetorical strategies of hybridity, deformation, masking, and inversion, is developed through an extended analogy with the guerilla warfare that became a way of life for the maroon communities of runaway slaves and fugitives who lived dangerously, and insubordinately, 'on the frontiers or margins of all American promise, profit and modes of production'. From this liminal, minority position where, as Foucault would say, the relations of discourse are of the nature of warfare, emerges the force of the people of an AfroAmerican nation, as Baker 'signifies upon' the extended metaphor of maroonage. For warriors read writers or even 'signs': these highly adaptable and mobile warriors took maximum advantage of local environments, striking and withdrawing with great rapidity, making extensive use of bushes to catch their adversaries in cross-fire, fighting only when and where they chose, depending on reliable intelligence networks among non-maroons (both slave and white settlers) and often communicating by horns.22 Both gentleman and slave, with different cultural means and to very different historical ends, demonstrate that forces of social authority and subalternality may emerge in displaced, even decentred, strategies of signification. This does not prevent them from being representative in a political sense, although it does suggest that positions of authority are themselves part of a process of ambivalent identification. Indeed the exercise of power may be both more politically effective and psychically affective because their discursive liminality may provide greater scope for strategic manoeuvre and negotiation. It is precisely in reading between these borderlines of the nation-space that we can see how the 'people' come to be constructed within a range of discourses as a double narrative movement. The people are not simply historical events or parts of a patriotic body politic. They are also a complex rhetorical strategy of social reference where the claim to be representative provokes a crisis within the process of signification and discursive address. We then have a contested cultural territory where the people must be thought in a double-time; the people are the historical 'objects' of a nationalist pedagogy, giving the discourse an authority that is based on the pre-given or constituted historical origin or event; the people are also the 'subjects' of a process of signification that must erase any prior or originary presence of the nation-people 616

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to demonstrate the prodigious, living principle of the people as that continual process by which the national life is redeemed and signified as a repeating and reproductive process. The scraps, patches, and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into the signs of a national culture, while the very act of the narrative performance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects. In the production of the nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative temporality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performative. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modern society becomes the site of writing the nation.

The space of the people The tension between the pedagogical and the performative that I have identified in the narrative address of the nation, turns the reference to a 'people' - from whatever political or cultural position it is made - into a problem of knowledge that haunts the symbolic formation of social authority. The people are neither the beginning or the end of the national narrative; they represent the cutting edge between the totalizing powers of the social and the forces that signify the more specific address to contentious, unequal interests and identities within the population. The ambivalent signifying system of the nation-space participates in a more general genesis of ideology in modern societies that Claude Lefort has described so suggestively. For him too it is 'the enigma of language', at once internal and external to the speaking subject, that provides the most apt analogue for imagining the structure of ambivalence that constitutes modern social authority. I shall quote him at length, because his rich ability to represent the movement of political power beyond the blindness of Ideology or the insight of the Idea, brings him to that liminality of modern society from which I have attempted to derive the narrative of the nation and its people. In Ideology the representation of the rule is split off from the effective operation of it. ... The rule is thus extracted from experience of language; it is circumscribed, made fully visible and assumed to govern the conditions of possibility of this experience. . . . The enigma of language - namely that it is both internal and external to the speaking subject, that there is an articulation of the self with others which marks the emergence of the self and which the self does not control - is concealed by the representation of a place 'outside' - language from which it could be generated. . . . We encounter the ambiguity of the representation as soon as the rule is stated; for its very exhibition undermines the power that the rule claims to introduce into practice. This exorbitant power 617

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must, in fact, be shown, and at the same time it must owe nothing to the movement which makes it appear. . . . To be true to its image, the rule must be abstracted from any question concerning its origin; thus it goes beyond the operations that it controls. . . . Only the authority of the master allows the contradiction to be concealed, but he is himself an object of representation; presented as possessor of the knowledge of the rule, he allows the contradiction to appear through himself. The ideological discourse that we are examining has no safety catch; it is rendered vulnerable by its attempt to make visible the place from which the social relation would be conceivable (both thinkable and creatable) by its inability to define this place without letting its contingency appear, without condemning itself to slide from one position to another, without hereby making apparent the instability of an order that it is intended to raise to the status of essence... . [The ideological] task of the implicit generalisation of knowledge and the implicit homogenization of experience could fall apart in the face of the unbearable ordeal of the collapse of certainty, of the vacillation of representations of discourse and as a result of the splitting of the subject.23 How do we conceive of the 'splitting' of the national subject? How do we articulate cultural differences within this vacillation of ideology in which the national discourse also participates, sliding ambivalently from one enunciatory position to another? What comes to be represented in that unruly 'time' of national culture, which Bakhtin surmounts in his reading of Goethe, Gellner associates with the rags and patches of everyday life, Said describes as 'the nonsequential energy of lived historical memory and subjectivity' and Lefort re-presents again as the inexorable movement of signification that both constitutes the exorbitant image of power and deprives it of the certainty and stability of centre or closure? What might be the cultural and political effects of the liminality of the nation, the margins of modernity, which cannot be signified without the narrative temporalities of splitting, ambivalence, and vacillation? Deprived of the unmediated visibility of historicism - 'looking to the legitimacy of past generations as supplying cultural autonomy'24 - the nation turns from being the symbol of modernity into becoming the symptom of an ethnography of the 'contemporary' within culture. Such a shift in perspective emerges from an acknowledgement of the nation's interrupted address, articulated in the tension signifying the people as an a priori historical presence, a pedagogical object; and the people constructed in the performance of narrative, its enunciatory 'present' marked in the repetition and pulsation of the national sign. The pedagogical founds its narrative authority in a tradition of the people, described by Poulantzas 25 618

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as a moment of becoming designated by itself, encapsulated in a succession of historical moments that represents an eternity produced by selfgeneration. The performative intervenes in the sovereignty of the nation's self-generation by casting a shadow between the people as 'image' and its signification as a differentiating sign of Self, distinct from the Other or the Outside. In place of the polarity of a prefigurative self-generating nation itself and extrinsic Other nations, the performative introduces a temporality of the 'in-between' through the 'gap' or 'emptiness' of the signifier that punctuates linguistic difference. The boundary that marks the nation's selfhood interrupts the self-generating time of national production with a space of representation that threatens binary division with its difference. The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal form of social representation, a space that is internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations. This double-writing or dissemi-nation, is not simply a theoretical exercise in the internal contradictions of the modern liberal nation. The structure of cultural liminality - within the nation - that I have been trying to elaborate would be an essential precondition for a concept such as Raymond Williams' crucial distinction between residual and emergent practices in oppositional cultures which require, he insists, a 'non-metaphysical, non-subjectivist' mode of explanation. Such a space of cultural signification as I have attempted to open up through the intervention of the performative, would meet this important precondition. The liminal figure of the nation-space would ensure that no political ideologies could claim transcendent or metaphysical authority for themselves. This is because the subject of cultural discourse - the agency of a people - is split in the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contestation of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the performative. This disjunctive temporality of the nation would provide the appropriate time-frame for representing those residual and emergent meanings and practices that Williams locates in the margins of the contemporary experience of society. Their designation depends upon a kind of social ellipsis; their transformational power depends upon their being historically displaced: But in certain areas, there will be in certain periods, practices and meanings which are not reached for. There will be areas of practice and meaning which, almost by definition from its own limited character, or in its profound deformation, the dominant culture is unable in any real terms to recognize.26

When Edward Said suggests that the question of the nation should be put on the contemporary critical agenda as a hermeneutic of 'worldliness', he 619

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is fully aware that such a demand can only now be made from the liminal and ambivalent boundaries that articulate the signs of national culture, as 'zones of control or of abandonment, of recollection and of forgetting, of force or of dependence, of exclusiveness or of sharing' (my emphasis).27 Counter-narratives of the nation that continually evoke and erase its totalizing boundaries - both actual and conceptual - disturb those ideological manoeuvres through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities. For the political unity of the nation consists in a continual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space, bounded by different, even hostile nations, into a signifying space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the nation's modern territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of Traditionalism. Quite simply, the difference of space returns as the Sameness of time, turning Territory into Tradition, turning the People into One. The liminal point of this ideological displacement is the turning of the differentiated spatial boundary, the 'outside', into the unified temporal territory of Tradition. Freud's concept of the 'narcissism of minor differences'28 - reinterpreted for our purposes - provides a way of understanding how easily that boundary that secures the cohesive limits of the western nation may imperceptibly turn into a contentious internal liminality that provides a place from which to speak both of, and as, the minority, the exilic, the marginal, and the emergent. Freud uses the analogy of feuds that prevail between communities with adjoining territories - the Spanish and the Portuguese, for instance - to illustrate the ambivalent identification of love and hate that binds a community together: 'it is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left to receive the manifestation of their aggressiveness'.29 The problem is, of course, that the ambivalent identifications of love and hate occupy the same psychic space; and paranoid projections 'outwards' return to haunt and split the place from which they are made. So long as a firm boundary is maintained between the territories, and the narcissistic wounded is contained, the aggressivity will be projected onto the Other or the Outside. But what if, as I have argued, the people are the articulation of a doubling of the national address, an ambivalent movement between the discourses of pedagogy and the performative? What if, as Lefort argues, the subject of modern ideology is split between the iconic image of authority and the movement of the signifier that produces the image, so that the 'sign' of the social is condemned to slide ceaselessly from one position to another? It is in this space of liminality, in the 'unbearable ordeal of the collapse of certainty' that we encounter once again the narcissistic neuroses of the national discourse with which I began. The nation is no longer the sign of modernity under which cultural differences are homogenized in the 'horizontal' view of society. The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating 620

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representation, the ethnography of its own historicity and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference. The people turn pagan in that disseminatory act of social narrative that Lyotard defines, against the Platonic tradition, as the privileged pole of the narrated, 'where the one doing the speaking speaks from the place of the referent. As narrator she is narrated as well. And in a way she is already told, and what she herself is telling will not undo that somewhere else she is told'.30 This narrative inversion or circulation - which is in the spirit of my splitting of the people - makes untenable any supremacist, or nationalist claims to cultural mastery, for the position of narrative control is neither monocular or monologic. The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between 'here' and 'somewhere else', and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject. The significance of this narrative splitting of the subject of identification is borne out in Levi-Strauss' description of the ethnographic act.31 The ethnographic demands that the observer himself is a part of his observation and this requires that the field of knowledge - the total social fact - must be appropriated from the outside like a thing, but like a thing which comprises within itself the subjective understanding of the indigenous. The transposition of this process into the language of the outsider's grasp - this entry into the area of the symbolic of representation/signification - then makes the social fact 'three dimensional'. For ethnography demands that the subject has to split itself into object and subject in the process of identifying its field of knowledge; the ethnographic object is constituted 'by dint of the subject's capacity for indefinite self-objectification (without ever quite abolishing itself as subject) for projecting outside itself ever-diminishing fragments of itself. Once the liminality of the nation-space is established, and its 'difference' is turned from the boundary 'outside' to its finitude 'within', the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of 'other' people. It becomes a question of the otherness of the people-as-one. The national subject splits in the ethnographic perspective of culture's contemporaneity and provides both a theoretical position and a narrative authority for marginal voices or minority discourse. They no longer need to address their strategies of opposition to a horizon of 'hegemony' that is envisaged as horizontal and homogeneous. The great contribution of Foucault's last published work is to suggest that people emerge in the modern state as a perpetual movement of 'the marginal integration of individuals'. 'What are we to-day?'32 Foucault poses this most pertinent ethnographic question to the west itself to reveal the alterity of its political rationality. He suggests that the 'reason of state' in the modern nation must be derived from the heterogeneous and differentiated limits of its territory. The nation cannot be conceived in a state of equilibrium between several elements coordinated, and maintained by a 'good' law. 621

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Each state is in permanent competition with other countries, other nations . . . so that each state has nothing before it other than an indefinite future of struggles. Politics has now to deal with an irreducible multiplicity of states struggling and competing in a limited history . . . the State is its own finality.33 What is politically significant is the effect of this finality of the state on the liminality of the representation of the people. The people will no longer be contained in that national discourse of the teleology of progress; the anonymity of individuals; the spatial horizontality of community; the homogeneous time of social narratives; the historicist visibility of modernity, where 'the present of each level [of the social] coincides with the present of all the others, so that the present is an essential section which makes the essence visible'.34 The finitude of the nation emphasizes the impossibility of such an expressive totality with its alliance between an immanent, plenitudinous present and the eternal visibility of a past. The liminality of the people - their double inscription as pedagogical objects and performative subjects - demands a 'time' of narrative that is disavowed in the discourse of historicism where narrative is only the agency of the event, or the medium of a naturalistic continuity of Community or Tradition. In describing the marginalistic integration of the individual in the social totality, Foucault provides a useful description of the rationality of the modern nation. Its main characteristic, he writes, is neither the constitution of the state, the coldest of cold monsters, nor the rise of bourgeois individualism. I won't even say it is the constant effort to integrate individuals into the political totality. I think that the main characteristic of our political rationality is the fact that this integration of the individuals in a community or in a totality results from a constant correlation between an increasing individualisation and the reinforcement of this totality. From this point of view we can understand why modern political rationality is permitted by the antinomy between law and order.35 From Discipline and Punish we have learned that the most individuated are those subjects who are placed on the margins of the social, so that the tension between law and order may produce the disciplinary or pastoral society. Having placed the people on the limits of the nation's narrative, I now want to explore forms of cultural identity and political solidarity that emerge from the disjunctive temporalities of the national culture. This is a lesson of history to be learnt from those peoples whose histories of marginality have been most profoundly enmeshed in the antinomies of law and order - the colonized and women. 622

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Of margins and minorities The difficulty of writing the history of the people as the insurmountable agonism of the living, the incommensurable experiences of struggle and survival in the construction of a national culture, is nowhere better seen than in Frantz Fanon's essay On National Culture.^ I start with it because it is a warning against the intellectual appropriation of the culture of the people (whatever they may be) within a representationalist discourse that may be fixed and reified in the annals of History. Fanon writes against that form of historicism that assumes that there is a moment when the differential temporalities of cultural histories coalesce in an immediately readable present. For my purposes, he focuses on the time of cultural representation, instead of immediately historicizing the event. He explores the space of the nation without immediately identifying it with the historical institution of the state. As my concern here is not with the history of nationalist movements, but only with certain traditions of writing that have attempted to construct narratives of the imaginary of the nation-people, I am indebted to Fanon for liberating a certain, uncertain time of the people. The knowledge of the people depends on the discovery, Fanon says, 'of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed', a structure of repetition that is not visible in the translucidity of the people's customs or the obvious objectivities which seem to characterize the people. 'Culture abhors simplification', Fanon writes, as he tries to locate the people in a performative time: 'the fluctuating movement that the people are just giving shape to'. The present of the people's history, then, is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a 'true' national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype. Such pedagogical knowledges and continuist national narratives miss the 'zone of occult instability where the people dwell' (Fanon's phrase). It is from this instability of cultural signification that the national culture comes to be articulated as a dialectic of various temporalities - modern, colonial, postcolonial, 'native' - that cannot be a knowledge that is stabilized in its enunciation: 'it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation. It is the present act that on each of its occurrences marshalls in the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the "I have heard" and "you will hear" '.37 I have heard this narrative movement of the post-colonial people, in their attempts to create a national culture. Its implicit critique of the fixed and stable forms of the nationalist narrative makes it imperative to question those western theories of the horizontal, homogeneous empty time of the nation's narrative. Does the language of culture's 'occult instability' have a relevance outside the situation of anti-colonial struggle? Does the incommensurable act of living - so often dismissed as ethical or empirical 623

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- have its own ambivalent narrative, its own history of theory? Can it change the way we identify the symbolic structure of the western nation? A similar exploration of political time has a salutary feminist history in Women's Time?38 It has rarely been acknowledged that Kristeva's celebrated essay of that title has its conjunctural, cultural history, not simply in psychoanalysis and semiotics, but in a powerful critique and redefinition of the nation as a space for the emergence of feminist political and psychic identifications. The nation as a symbolic denominator is, according to Kristeva, a powerful repository of cultural knowledge that erases the rationalist and progressivist logics of the 'canonical' nation. This symbolic history of the national culture is inscribed in the strange temporality of the future perfect, the effects of which are not dissimilar to Fanon's occult instability. In such a historical time, the deeply repressed past initiates a strategy of repetition that disturbs the sociological totalities within which we recognize the modernity of the national culture - a little too forcibly for, or against, the reason of state, or the unreason of ideological misrecognition. The borders of the nation are, Kristeva claims, constantly faced with a double temporality: the process of identity constituted by historical sedimentation (the pedagogical); and the loss of identity in the signifying process of cultural identification (the performative). The time and space of Kristeva's construction of the nation's finitude is analogous to my argument that it is from the liminality of the national culture that the figure of the people emerges in the narrative ambivalence of disjunctive times and meanings. The concurrent circulation of linear, cursive, and monumental time, in the same cultural space, constitutes a new historical temporality that Kristeva identifies with psychoanalytically informed, feminist strategies of political identification. What is remarkable is her insistence that the gendered sign can hold such exorbitant historical times together. The political effects of Kristeva's multiple, and splitting, women's time leads to what she calls the 'demassification of difference'. The cultural moment of Fanon's 'occult instability' signifies the people in a fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, so that postcolonial time questions the teleological traditions of past and present, and the polarized historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern. These are not simply attempts to invert the balance of power within an unchanged order of discourse. Fanon and Kristeva seek to redefine the symbolic process through which the social imaginary - nation, culture, or community - become subjects of discourse, and objects of psychic identification. In attempting to shift, through these differential temporalities, the alignment of subject and object in the culture of community, they force us to rethink the relation between the time of meaning and the sign of history within those languages, political or literary, which designate the people 'as one'. They challenge us to think the question of community and communication 624

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without the moment of transcendence; their excessive cultural temporalities are in contention but their difference cannot be negated or sublated. How do we understand such forms of social contradiction? Cultural identification is then poised on the brink of what Kristeva calls the 'loss of identity' or Fanon describes as a profound cultural 'undecidability'. The people as a form of address emerge from the abyss of enunciation where the subject splits, the signifier 'fades', the pedagogical and the performative are agonistically articulated. The language of national collectivity and cohesiveness is now at stake. Neither can cultural homogeneity, or the nation's horizontal space be authoritatively represented within the familiar territory of the public sphere: social causality cannot be adequately understood as a deterministic or overdetermined effect of a 'statist' centre; nor can the rationality of political choice be divided between the polar realms of the private and the public. The narrative of national cohesion can no longer be signified, in Anderson's words, as a 'sociological solidity'39 fixed in a 'succession of plurals' - hospitals, prisons, remote villages - where the social space is clearly bounded by such repeated objects that represent a naturalistic, national horizon. Such a pluralism of the national sign, where difference returns as the same, is contested by the signifier's 'loss of identity' that inscribes the narrative of the people in the ambivalent, 'double' writing of the performative and the pedagogical. The iterative temporality that marks the movement of meaning between the masterful image of the people and the movement of its sign interrupts the succession of plurals that produce the sociological solidity of the national narrative. The nation's totality is confronted with, and crossed by, a supplementary movement of writing. The heterogeneous structure of Derridean supplementarity in writing closely follows the agonistic, ambivalent movement between the pedagogical and performative that informs the nation's narrative address. A supplement, according to one meaning, 'cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention, etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function' (pedagogical).40 The double entendre of the supplement suggests, however, that 'It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of. . . . If it represents and makes an image it is by the anterior default of a presence . . . the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance. . . . As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief. . . . Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself... only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy' (performative).41 It is in this supplementary space of doubling - not plurality - where the image is presence and proxy, where the sign supplements and empties nature, that the exorbitant, disjunctive times of Fanon and Kristeva can be turned into the discourses of emergent cultural identities, within a non-pluralistic politics of difference. This supplementary space of cultural signification that opens up - and 625

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holds together - the performative and the pedagogical, provides a narrative structure characteristic of modern political rationality: the marginal integration of individuals in a repetitious movement between the antinomies of law and order. It is from the liminal movement of the culture of the nation - at once opened up and held together - that minority discourse emerges. Its strategy of intervention is similar to what parliamentary procedure recognizes as a supplementary question. It is a question that is supplementary to what is put down on the order paper, but by being 'after' the original, or in 'addition to' it, gives it the advantage of introducing a sense of 'secondariness' or belatedness into the structure of the original. The supplementary strategy suggests that adding 'to' need not 'add up' but may disturb the calculation. As Gasche has succinctly suggested, 'supplements .. . are pluses that compensate for a minus in the origin'.42 The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism by radically changing their mode of articulation. In the metaphor of the national community as the 'many as one', the one is now both the tendency to totalize the social in a homogenous empty time, and the repetition of that minus in the origin, the less-than-one that intervenes with a metonymic, iterative temporality. One cultural effect of such a metonymic interruption in the representation of the people, is apparent in Julia Kristeva's political writings. If we elide her concepts of women's time and female exile, then she seems to argue that the 'singularity' of woman - her representation as fragmentation and drive - produces a dissidence, and a distanciation, within the symbolic bond itself which demystifies 'the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalises and equalises'.43 The minority does not simply confront the pedagogical, or powerful master-discourse with a contradictory or negating referent. It does not turn contradiction into a dialectical process. It interrogates its object by initially withholding its objective. Insinuating itself into the terms of reference of the dominant discourse, the supplementary antagonizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological solidity. The questioning of the supplement is not a repetitive rhetoric of the 'end' of society but a meditation on the disposition of space and time from which the narrative of the nation must begin. The power of supplementarity is not the negation of the preconstituted social contradictions of the past or present; its force lies - as we shall see in the discussion of Handsworth Songs that follows - in the renegotiation of those times, terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history. Handsworth Songs44 is a film made by the Black Audio Collective during the uprisings of 1985, in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, England. Shot in the midst of the uprising, it is haunted by two moments: the arrival of the migrant population in the 1950s, and the emergence of a black British peoples in the diaspora. And the film itself is part of the 626

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emergence of a black British cultural politics. Between the moments of arrival and emergence is the incommensurable movement of the present; the filmic time of a continual displacement of narrative; the time of oppression and resistance; the time of the performance of the riots, cut across by the pedagogical knowledges of state institutions, the racism of statistics and documents and newspapers, and then the perplexed living of Handsworth songs, and memories that flash up in a moment of danger. Two memories repeat incessantly to translate the living perplexity of history, into the time of migration: the arrival of the ship laden with immigrants from the ex-colonies, just stepping off the boat, always just emerging - as in the phantasmatic scenario of Freud's family romance - into the land where the streets are paved with gold. Another image is of the perplexity and power of an emergent peoples, caught in the shot of a dreadlocked rastaman cutting a swathe through a posse of policemen. It is a memory that flashes incessantly through the film: a dangerous repetition in the present of the cinematic frame; the edge of human life that translates what will come next and what has gone before in the writing of History. Listen to the repetition of the time and space of the peoples that I have been trying to create: In time we will demand the impossible in order to wrestle, from it that which is possible, In time the streets will claim me without apology, In time I will be right to say that there are no stories . . . in the riots only the ghosts of other stories. The symbolic demand of cultural difference constitutes a history in the midst of the uprising. From the desire of the possible in the impossible, in the historic present of the riots, emerge the ghostly repetition of other stories, other uprisings: Broadwater Farm, Southall, St. Paul's, Bristol. In the ghostly repetition of the black woman of Lozells Rd, Handsworth, who sees the future in the past: There are no stories in the riots, only the ghosts of other stories, she told a local journalist: 'You can see Enoch Powell in 1969, Michael X in 1965'. And from that gathering repetition she builds a history. From across the film listen to another woman who speaks another historical language. From the archaic world of metaphor, caught in the movement of the people she translates the time of change into the ebb and flow of language's unmastering rhythm: the successive time of instaneity, battening against the straight horizons and the flow of water and words: I walk with my back to the sea, horizons straight ahead Wave the sea away and back it comes,

Step and I slip on it. Crawling in my journey's footsteps When I stand it fills my bones. 627

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The perplexity of the living must not be understood as some existential, ethical anguish of the empiricism of everyday life in 'the eternal living present', that gives liberal discourse a rich social reference in moral and cultural relativism. Nor must it be too hastily associated with the spontaneous and primordial presence of the people in the liberatory discourses of populist ressentiment. In the construction of this discourse of 'living perplexity' that I am attempting to produce we must remember that the space of human life is pushed to its incommensurable extreme; the judgement of living is perplexed; the topos of the narrative is neither the transcendental, pedagogical Idea of history nor the institution of the state, but a strange temporality of the repetition of the one in the other - an oscillating movement in the governing present of cultural authority. Minority discourse sets the act of emergence in the antagonistic inbetween of image and sign, the accumulative and the adjunct, presence and proxy. It contests genealogies of 'origin' that lead to claims for cultural supremacy and historical priority. Minority discourse acknowledges the status of national culture - and the people - as a contentious, performative space of the perplexity of the living in the midst of the pedagogical representations of the fullness of life. Now there is no reason to believe that such marks of difference - the incommensurable time of the subject of culture - cannot inscribe a 'history' of the people or become the gathering points of political solidarity. They will not, however, celebrate the monumentality of historicist memory, the sociological solidity or totality of society, or the homogeneity of cultural experience. The discourse of the minority reveals the insurmountable ambivalence that structures the equivocal movement of historical time. How does one encounter the past as an anteriority that continually introduces an otherness or alterity within the present? How does one then narrate the present as a form of contemporaneity that is always belated? In what historical time do such configurations of cultural difference assume forms of cultural and political authority? Social anonymity and cultural anomie The narrative of the modern nation can only begin, Benedict Anderson suggests in Imagined Communities, once the notion of the 'arbitrariness of the sign' fissures the sacral ontology of the medieval world and its overwhelming visual and aural imaginary. By 'separating language from reality' (Anderson's formulation), the arbitrary signifier enables a national temporality of the 'meanwhile', a form of 'homogenous empty time'; the time of cultural modernity that supersedes the prophetic notion of simultaneity-along-time. The narrative of the 'meanwhile' permits 'transverse, cross-time, marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and calendar'.45 Such a form of 628

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temporality produces a symbolic structure of the nation as 'imagined community' which, in keeping with the scale and diversity of the modern nation, works like the plot of a realist novel. The steady onward clocking of calendrical time, in Anderson's words, gives the imagined world of the nation a sociological solidity; it links together diverse acts and actors on the national stage who are entirely unaware of each other, except as a function of this synchronicity of time which is not prefigurative but a form of civil contemporaneity realized in the fullness of time. Anderson historicizes the emergence of the arbitrary sign of language and here he is talking of the process of signification rather than the progress of narrative - as that which had to come before the narrative of the modern nation could begin. In decentring the prophetic visibility and simultaneity of medieval systems of dynastic representation, the homogeneous and horizontal community of modern society can emerge. The people-nation, however divided and split, can still assume, in the function of the social imaginary, a form of democratic 'anonymity'. However there is a profound ascesis in the sign of the anonymity of the modern community and the time - meanwhile - of its narrative consciousness, as Anderson explains it. It must be stressed that the narrative of the imagined community is constructed from two incommensurable temporalities of meaning that threaten its coherence. The space of the arbitrary sign, its separation of language and reality, enables Anderson to stress the imaginary or mythical nature of the society of the nation. However, the differential time of the arbitrary sign is neither synchronous nor serial. In the separation of language and reality - in the process of signification - there is no epistemological equivalence of subject and object, no possibility of the mimesis of meaning. The sign temporalizes the iterative difference that circulates within language, of which meaning is made, but cannot be represented thematically within narrative as a homogeneous empty time. Such a temporality is antithetical to the alterity of the sign which, in keeping with my account of the supplementary nature of cultural signification, singularizes and alienates the holism of the imagined community. From that place of the 'meanwhile', where cultural homogeneity and democratic anonymity make their claims on the national community, there emerges a more instantaneous and subaltern voice of the people, a minority discourse that speaks betwixt and between times and places. Having initially located the imagined community of the nation in the homogeneous time of realist narrative, towards the end of his essay Anderson abandons the 'meanwhile' - his pedagogical temporality of the people. In order to represent the collective voice of the people as a performative discourse of public identification, a process he calls unisonance, Anderson resorts to another time of narrative. Unisonance is 'that special kind of contemporaneous community which language alone suggests',46 and this patriotic speech-act is not written in the synchronic, novelistic 629

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'meanwhile', but inscribed in a sudden primordiality of meaning that 'looms up imperceptibly out of a horizonless past' (my emphasis).47 This movement of the sign cannot simply be historicized in the emergence of the realist narrative of the novel. It is at this point in the narrative of national time that the unisonant discourse produces its collective identification of the people, not as some transcendent national identity, but in a language of incommensurable doubleness that arises from the ambivalent splitting of the pedagogical and the performative. The people emerge in an uncanny simulacral moment of their 'present' history as 'a ghostly intimation of simultaneity across homogeneous empty time'. The weight of the words of the national discourse comes from an 'as it were - Ancestral Englishness'.48 It is precisely this repetitive time of the alienating anterior rather than origin - that Levi-Strauss writes of, when, in explaining the 'unconscious unity' of signification, he suggests that 'language can only have arisen all at once. Things cannot have begun to signify gradually.'49 In that sudden timelessness of 'all at once', there is not synchrony but a break, not simultaneity but a spatial disjunction. The 'meanwhile' is the barred sign of the processual and performative, not a simple present continuous, but the present as succession without synchrony - the iteration of the arbitrary sign of the modern nation-space. In embedding the meanwhile of the national narrative, where the people live their plural and autonomous lives within homogeneous empty time, Anderson misses the alienating and iterative time of the sign. He naturalizes the momentary 'suddenness' of the arbitrary sign, its pulsation, by making it part of the historical emergence of the novel, a narrative of synchrony. But the suddenness of the signifier is incessant, instantaneous rather than simultaneous. It introduces a signifying space of repetition rather than a progressive or linear seriality. The 'meanwhile' turns into quite another time, or ambivalent sign, of the national people. If it is the time of the people's anonymity it is also the space of the nation's anomie. How are we to understand this anteriority of signification as a position of social and cultural knowledge, this time of the 'before' of signification, which will not issue harmoniously into the present like the continuity of tradition - invented or otherwise? It has its own national history in Renan's 'Qu'est ce qu'une nation?' which has been the starting point for a number of the most influential accounts of the modern emergence of the nation - Kamenka, Gellner, Benedict Anderson, Tzvetan Todorov. It is the way in which the pedagogical presence of modernity — the Will to be a nation - introduces into the enunciative present of the nation a differential and iterative time of reinscription that interests me. Renan argues that the non-naturalist principle of the modern nation is represented in the will to nationhood - not in the identities of race, language, or territory. It is the will that unifies historical memory and secures present-day consent. The will is, indeed, the articulation of the nation-people: 630

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A nation's existence is, if you will pardon the metaphor, a daily plebiscite, just as an individual's existence is a perpetual affirmation of life. . . . The wish of nations, is all in all, the sole legitimate criteria, the one to which one must always return.50 Does the will to nationhood circulate in the same temporality as the desire of the daily plebiscite? Could it be that the iterative plebiscite decentres the totalizing pedagogy of the will? Kenan's will is itself the site of a strange forgetting of the history of the nation's past: the violence involved in establishing the nation's writ. It is this forgetting - a minus in the origin - that constitutes the beginning of the nation's narrative. It is the syntactical and rhetorical arrangement of this argument that is more illuminating than any frankly historical or ideological reading. Listen to the complexity of this form of forgetting which is the moment in which the national will is articulated: 'yet every French citizen has to have forgotten [is obliged to have forgotten] Saint Bartholomew's Night's Massacre, or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century.'51 It is through this syntax of forgetting - or being obliged to forget - that the problematic identification of a national people becomes visible. The national subject is produced in that place where the daily plebiscite - the unitary number - circulates in the grand narrative of the will. However, the equivalence of will and plebiscite, the identity of part and whole, past and present, is cut across by the 'obligation to forget', or forgetting to remember. This is again the moment of anteriority of the nation's sign that entirely changes our understanding of the pastness of the past, and the unified present of the will to nationhood. We are in a discursive space similar to that moment of unisonance in Anderson's argument when the homogenous empty time of the nation's 'meanwhile' is cut across by the ghostly simultaneity of a temporality of doubling and repetition. To be obliged to forget - in the construction of the national present - is not a question of historical memory; it is the construction of a discourse on society that performs the problematic totalization of the national will. That strange time - forgetting to remember - is a place of 'partial identification' inscribed in the daily plebiscite which represents the performative discourse of the people. Kenan's pedagogical return to the will to nationhood is both constituted and confronted by the circulation of numbers in the plebiscite which break down the identity of the will - it is an instance of the supplementary that 'adds to' without 'adding up'. May I remind you of Lefort's suggestive description of the ideological impact of suffrage in the nineteenth century, where the danger of numbers was considered almost more threatening than the mob: 'the idea of number as such is opposed to the idea of the substance of society. Number breaks down unity, destroys identity.'52 It is the repetition of the national sign as numerical succession rather than synchrony that reveals that strange temporality of disavowal 631

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implicit in the national memory. Being obliged to forget becomes the basis for remembering the nation, peopling it anew, imagining the possibility of other contending and liberating forms of cultural identification. Anderson fails to locate the alienating time of the arbitrary sign in his naturalized, nationalized space of the imagined community. Although he borrows his notion of the homogeneous empty time of the nation's modern narrative from Walter Benjamin, he fails to read that profound ambivalence that Benjamin places deep within the utterance of the narrative of modernity. Here, as the pedagogies of life and will contest the perplexed histories of the living people, their cultures of survival and resistance, Benjamin introduces a non-synchronous, incommensurable gap in the midst of storytelling. From this split in the utterance, from the unbeguiled, belated novelist there emerges an ambivalence in the narration of modern society that repeats, uncounselled and unconsolable, in the midst of plenitude: The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounselled and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living.53 It is from this incommensurability in the midst of the everyday that the nation speaks its disjunctive narrative. It begins, if that's the word, from that anterior space within the arbitrary sign which disturbs the homogenizing myth of cultural anonymity. From the margins of modernity, at the insurmountable extremes of storytelling, we encounter the question of cultural difference as the perplexity of living, and writing, the nation.

Cultural difference Despite my use of the term 'cultural difference', I am not attempting to unify a body of theory, nor to suggest the mastery of a sovereign form of 'difference'. I am attempting some speculative fieldnotes on that intermittent time, and intersticial space, that emerges as a structure of undecidability at the frontiers of cultural hybridity. My interest lies only in that movement of meaning that occurs in the writing of cultures articulated in difference. I am attempting to discover the uncanny moment of cultural difference that emerges in the process of enunciation: Perhaps it is like the over-familiar that constantly eludes one; those familiar transparencies, which, although they conceal 632

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nothing in their density, are nevertheless not entirely clear. The enunciative level emerges in its very proximity.54 Cultural difference must not be understood as the free play of polarities and pluralities in the homogeneous empty time of the national community. It addresses the jarring of meanings and values generated in-between the variety and diversity associated with cultural plenitude; it represents the process of cultural interpretation formed in the perplexity of living, in the disjunctive, liminal space of national society that I have tried to trace. Cultural difference, as a form of intervention, participates in a supplementary logic of secondariness similar to the strategies of minority discourse. The question of cultural difference faces us with a disposition of knowledge or a distribution of practices that exist beside each other, Abseits, in a form of juxtaposition or contradiction that resists the teleology of dialectical sublation. In erasing the harmonious totalities of Culture, cultural difference articulates the difference between representations of social life without surmounting the space of incommensurable meanings and judgements that are produced within the process of transcultural negotiation. The effect of such secondariness is not merely to change the 'object' of analysis - to focus, for instance, on race rather than gender or native knowledge rather than metropolitan myths; nor to invert the axis of political discrimination by installing the excluded term at the centre. The analytic of cultural difference intervenes to transform the scenario of articulation - not simply to disturb the rationale of discrimination. It changes the position of enunciation and the relations of address within it; not only what is said but from where it is said; not simply the logic of articulation but the topos of enunciation. The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the 'other' that resists totalization - the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. The identity of cultural difference cannot, therefore, exist autonomously in relation to an object or a practice 'in-itself, for the identification of the subject of cultural discourse is dialogical or transferential in the style of psychoanalysis. It is constituted through the locus of the Other which suggests both that the object of identification is ambivalent, and, more significantly, that the agency of identification is never pure or holistic but always constituted in a process of substitution, displacement or projection. Cultural difference does not simply represent the contention between oppositional contents or antagonistic traditions of cultural value. Cultural difference introduces into the process of cultural judgement and interpretation that sudden shock of the successive, nonsynchronic time of 633

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signification, or the interruption of the supplementary question that I elaborated above. The very possibility of cultural contestation, the ability to shift the ground of knowledges, or to engage in the 'war of position', depends not only on the refutation or substitution of concepts. The analytic of cultural difference attempts to engage with the 'anterior' space of the sign that structures the symbolic language of alternative, antagonistic cultural practices. To the extent to which all forms of cultural discourse are subject to the rule of signification, there can be no question of a simple negation or sublation of the contradictory or oppositional instance. Cultural difference marks the establishment of new forms of meaning, and strategies of identification, through processes of negotiation where no discursive authority can be established without revealing the difference of itself. The signs of cultural difference cannot then be unitary or individual forms of identity because their continual implication in other symbolic systems always leaves them 'incomplete' or open to cultural translation. What I am suggesting as the uncanny structure of cultural difference is close to Levi-Strauss' understanding of 'the unconscious as providing the common and specific character of social facts . . . not because it harbours our most secret selves but because . . . it enables us to coincide with forms of activity which are both at once ours and other'.55 Cultural difference is to be found where the 'loss' of meaning enters, as a cutting edge, into the representation of the fullness of the demands of culture. It is not adequate simply to become aware of the semiotic systems that produce the signs of culture and their dissemination. Much more significantly we are faced with the challenge of reading, into the present of a specific cultural performance, the traces of all those diverse disciplinary discourses and institutions of knowledge that constitute the condition and contexts of culture. I use the word 'traces' to suggest a particular kind of discursive transformation that the analytic of cultural difference demands. To enter into the interdisciplinary of cultural texts - through the anteriority of the arbitrary sign - means that we cannot contextualize the emergent cultural form by explaining it in terms of some pre-given discursive causality or origin. We must always keep open a supplementary space for the articulation of cultural knowledge that are adjacent and adjunct but not necessarily accumulative, teleological, or dialectical. The 'difference' of cultural knowledge that 'adds to' but does not 'add up' is the enemy of the implicit generalization of knowledge or the implicit homogenization of experience, to borrow Lefort's phrase. Interdisciplinary, as the discursive practice of cultural difference, elaborates a logic of intervention and interpretation that is similar to the supplementary question that I posed above. In keeping with its subaltern, substitutive - rather than synchronic - temporality, the subject of cultural difference is neither pluralistic nor relativistic. The frontiers of cultural difference are always belated or secondary in the sense that their hybridity is 634

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never simply a question of the admixture of pre-given identities or essences. Hybridity is the perplexity of the living as it interrupts the representation of the fullness of life; it is an instance of iteration, in the minority discourse, of the time of the arbitrary sign - 'the minus in the origin' - through which all forms of cultural meaning are open to translation because their enunciation resists totalization. Interdisciplinary is the acknowledgement of the emergent moment of culture produced in the ambivalent movement between the pedagogical and performative address, so that it is never simply the harmonious addition of contents or contexts that augment the positivity of a pre-given disciplinary or symbolic presence. In the restless drive for cultural translation, hybrid sites of meaning open up a cleavage in the language of culture which suggests that the similitude of the symbol as it plays across cultural sites must not obscure the fact that repetition of the sign is, in each specific social practice, both different and differential. It is in this sense that the enunciation of cultural difference emerges in its proximity; to traduce Foucault, we must not seek it in the 'visibility' of difference for it will elude us in that enigmatic transparency of writing that conceals nothing in its density but is nevertheless not clear. Cultural difference emerges from the borderline moment of translation that Benjamin describes as the 'foreignness' of languages.56 Translation represents only an extreme instance of the figurative fate of writing that repeatedly generates a movement of equivalence between representation and reference, but never gets beyond the equivocation of the sign. The 'foreignness' of language is the nucleus of the untranslatable that goes beyond the transparency of subject matter. The transfer of meaning can never be total between differential systems of meaning, or within them, for 'the language of translation envelops its content like a royal robe with ample folds.... [it] signifies a more exalted language than its own and thus remains unsuited to its content, overpowering and alien'.57 It is too often the slippage of signification that is celebrated, at the expense of this disturbing alienation, or overpowering of content. The erasure of content in the invisible but insistent structure of linguistic difference does not lead us to some general, formal acknowledgement of the function of the sign. The ill fitting robe of language alienates content in the sense that it deprives it of an immediate access to a stable or holistic reference 'outside' itself - in society. It suggests that social conditions are themselves being reinscribed or reconstituted in the very act of enunciation, revealing the instability of any division of meaning into an inside and outside. Content becomes the alien raise en scene that reveals the signifying structure of linguistic difference which is never seen for itself, but only glimpsed in the gap or the gaping of the garment. Benjamin's argument can be elaborated for a theory of cultural difference. It is only by engaging with what he calls the 'purer linguistic air' - the anteriority of the sign - that the reality-effect of 635

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content can be overpowered which then makes all cultural languages 'foreign' to themselves. And it is from this foreign perspective that it becomes possible to inscribe the specific locality of cultural systems - their incommensurable differences - and through that apprehension of difference, to perform the act of cultural translation. In the act of translation the 'given' content becomes alien and estranged; and that, in its turn, leaves the language of translation Aufgabe, always confronted by its double, the untranslatable - alien and foreign. The foreignness of languages At this point I must give way to the vox populi: to a relatively unspoken tradition of the people of the pagus - colonials, postcolonials, migrants, minorities - wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation. They are Marx's reserve army of migrant labour who by speaking the foreignness of language split the patriotic voice of unisonance and become Nietzsche's mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms. They articulate the death-in-life of the idea of the 'imagined community' of the nation; the worn-out metaphors of the resplendent national life now circulate in another narrative of entry permits and passports and work permits that at once preserve and proliferate, bind and breach the human rights of the nation. Across the accumulation of the history of the west there are those people who speak the encrypted discourse of the melancholic and the migrant. Theirs is a voice that opens up a void in some ways similar to what Abraham and Torok describe as a radical antimetaphoric: 'the destruction in fantasy, of the very act that makes metaphor possible - the act of putting the original oral void into words, the act of introjection'.58 The lost object - the national Heim - is repeated in the void that at once prefigures and pre-empts the 'unisonant', which makes it unheimlich; analogous to the incorporation that becomes the daemonic double of introjection and identification. The object of loss is written across the bodies of the people, as it repeats in the silence that speaks the foreignness of language. A Turkish worker in Germany: in the words of John Berger: His migration is like an event in a dream dreamt by another. The migrant's intentionality is permeated by historical necessities of which neither he nor anybody he meets is aware. That is why it is as if his life were dreamt by another. . . . Abandon the metaphor. . . . They watch the gestures made and learn to imitate them . . . the repetition by which gesture is laid upon gesture, precisely but inexorably, the pile of gestures being stacked minute by minute, 636

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hour by hour is exhausting. The rate of work allows no time to prepare for the gesture. The body loses its mind in the gesture. How opaque the disguise of words. . . . He treated the sounds of the unknown language as if they were silence. To break through his silence. He learnt twenty words of the new language. But to his amazement at first, their meaning changed as he spoke them. He asked for coffee. What the words signified to the barman was that he was asking for coffee in a bar where he should not be asking for coffee. He learnt girl. What the word meant when he used it, was that he was a randy dog. Is it possible to see through the opaqueness of the words?59 Through the opaqueness of words we confront the historical memory of the western nation which is 'obliged to forget'. Having begun this essay with the nation's need for metaphor, I want to turn now to the desolate silences of the wandering people; to that 'oral void' that emerges when the Turk abandons the metaphor of a heimlich national culture: for the Turkish immigrant the final return is mythic, we are told, 'It is the stuff of longing and prayers . . . as imagined it never happens. There is no final return'.60 In the repetition of gesture after gesture, the dream dreamt by another, the mythical return, it is not simply the figure of repetition that is unheimlich, but the Turk's desire to survive, to name, to fix - which is unnamed by the gesture itself. The gesture continually overlaps and accumulates, without adding up to a knowledge of work or labour. Without the language that bridges knowledge and act, without the objectification of the social process, the Turk leads the life of the double, the automaton. It is not the struggle of master and slave, but in the mechanical reproduction of gestures a mere imitation of life and labour. The opacity of language fails to translate or break through his silence and 'the body loses its mind in the gesture'. The gesture repeats and the body returns now, shrouded not in silence but eerily untranslated in the racist site of its enunciation: to say the word 'girl' is to be a randy dog, to ask for coffee is to encounter the colour bar. The image of the body returns where there should only be its trace, as sign or letter. The Turk as dog is neither simply hallucination or phobia; it is a more complex form of social fantasy. Its ambivalence cannot be read as some simple racist/sexist projection where the white man's guilt is projected on the black man; his anxiety contained in the body of the white woman whose body screens (in both senses of the word) the racist fantasy. What such a reading leaves out is precisely the axis of identification — the desire of a man (white) for a man (black) - that underwrites that utterance and produces the paranoid 'delusion of reference', the man-dog that confronts the racist language with its own alterity, its foreignness. 637

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The silent Other of gesture and failed speech becomes what Freud calls that 'haphazard member of the herd',61 the Stranger, whose languageless presence evokes an archaic anxiety and aggressivity by impeding the search for narcissistic love-objects in which the subject can rediscover himself, and upon which the group's amour propre is based. If the immigrants' desire to 'imitate' language produces one void in the articulation of the social space - making present the opacity of language, its untranslatable residue - then the racist fantasy, which disavows the ambivalence of its desire, opens up another void in the present. The migrant's silence elicits those racist fantasies of purity and persecution that must always return from the Outside, to estrange the present of the life of the metropolis; to make it strangely familiar. In the process by which the paranoid position finally voids the place from where it speaks, we begin to see another history of the German language. If the experience of the Turkish Gastarbeiter represents the radical incommensurability of translation, Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses attempts to redefine the boundaries of the western nation, so that the 'foreignness of languages' becomes the inescapable cultural condition for the enunciation of the mother-tongue. In the 'Rosa Diamond' section of The Satanic Verses Rushdie seems to suggest that it is only through the process of dissemiNation - of meaning, time, peoples, cultural boundaries and historical traditions - that the radical alterity of the national culture will create new forms of living and writing: 'The trouble with the English is that their history happened overseas, so they don't know what it means'.62 S. S. Sisodia the soak - known also as Whisky Sisodia - stutters these words as part of his litany of 'what's wrong with the English'. The spirit of his words fleshes out the argument of this essay. I have suggested that the atavistic national past and its language of archaic belonging marginalizes the present of the 'modernity' of the national culture, rather like suggesting that history happens 'outside' the centre and core. More specifically I have argued that appeals to the national past must also be seen as the anterior space of signification that 'singularizes' the nation's cultural totality. It introduces a form of alterity of address that Rushdie embodies in the double narrative figures of Gibreel Farishta/Saladin Chamcha, or Gibreel Farishta/Sir Henry Diamond, which suggests that the national narrative is the site of an ambivalent identification; a margin of the uncertainty of cultural meaning that may become the space for an agonistic minority position. In the midst of life's fullness, and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the profound perplexity of the living. Gifted with phantom sight, Rosa Diamond, for whom repetition had become a comfort in her antiquity, represents the English Heim or homeland. The pageant of a 900 year-old history passes through her frail translucent body and inscribes itself, in a strange splitting of her language, 'the well-worn phrases, unfinished business, grandstand view, made her 638

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feel solid, unchanging, sempiternal, instead of the creature of cracks and absences she knew herself to be'.63 Constructed from the well-worn pedagogies and pedigrees of national unity - her vision of the Battle of Hastings is the anchor of her being - and, at the same time, patched and fractured in the incommensurable perplexity of the nation's living, Rosa Diamond's green and pleasant garden is the spot where Gibreel Farishta lands when he falls out from the belly of the Boeing over sodden, southern England. Gibreel masquerades in the clothes of Rosa's dead husband, Sir Henry Diamond, ex-colonial landowner, and through this post-colonial mimicry, exacerbates the discursive split between the image of a continuist national history and the 'cracks and absences' that she knew herself to be. What emerges, at one level, is a popular tale of secret, adulterous Argentinian amours, passion in the pampas with Martin de la Cruz. What is more significant and in tension with the exoticism, is the emergence of a hybrid national narrative that turns the nostalgic past into the disruptive 'anterior' and displaces the historical present - opens it up to other histories and incommensurable narrative subjects. The cut or split in enunciation underlining all acts of utterance - emerges with its iterative temporality to reinscribe the figure of Rosa Diamond in a new and terrifying avatar. Gibreel, the migrant hybrid in masquerade, as Sir Henry Diamond, mimics the collaborative colonial ideologies of patriotism and patriarchy, depriving those narratives of their imperial authority. Gibreel's returning gaze crosses out the synchronous history of England, the essentialist memories of William the Conqueror and the Battle of Hastings. In the middle of an account of her punctual domestic routine with Sir Henry - sherry always at six - Rosa Diamond is overtaken by another time and memory of narration and through the 'grandstand view' of imperial history you can hear its cracks and absences speak with another voice: Then she began without bothering with once upon atime and whether it was all true or false he could see the fierce energy that was going into the telling . . . this memory jumbled rag-bag of material was in fact the very heart of her, her self-portrait. . . . So that it was not possible to distinguish memories from wishes, guilty reconstructions from confessional truths, because even on her deathbed Rosa Diamond did not know how to look her history in the eye.64 And what of Gibreel Farishta? Well he is the mote in the eye of history, its blind spot that will not let the nationalist gaze settle centrally. His mimicry of colonial masculinity and mimesis allows the absences of national history to speak in the ambivalent, ragbag narrative. But it is precisely this 'narrative sorcery' that established Gibreel's own re-entry into 639

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contemporary England. As the belated post-colonial he marginalizes and singularizes the totality of national culture. He is the history that happened elsewhere, overseas; his postcolonial, migrant presence does not evoke a harmonious patchwork of cultures, but articulates the narrative of cultural difference which can never let the national history look at itself narcissistically in the eye. For the liminality of the western nation is the shadow of its own finitude: the colonial space played out in the imaginative geography of the metropolitan space; the repetition or return of the margin of the postcolonial migrant to alienate the holism of history. The postcolonial space is now 'supplementary' to the metropolitan centre; it stands in a subaltern, adjunct relation that doesn't aggrandise the presence of the west but redraws its frontiers in the menacing, agonistic boundary of cultural difference that never quite adds up, always less than one nation and double. From this splitting of time and narrative emerges a strange, empowering knowledge for the migrant that is at once schizoid and subversive. In this guise as the Archangel Gibreel he sees the bleak history of the metropolis: 'the angry present of masks and parodies, stifled and twisted by the insupportable, unrejected burden of its past, staring into the bleakness of its impoverished future'.65 From Rosa Diamond's decentred narrative 'without bothering with once upon a time' Gibreel becomes however insanely - the principle of avenging repetition: 'These powerless English! - Did they not think that their history would return to haunt them? - "The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor" (Fanon). . . . He would make this land anew. He was the Archangel, Gibreel - And I'm back'.66 If the lesson of Rosa's narrative is that the national memory is always the site of the hybridity of histories and the displacement of narratives, then through Gibreel, the avenging migrant, we learn the ambivalence of cultural difference: it is the articulation through incommensurability that structures all narratives of identification, and all acts of cultural translation. He was joined to the adversary, their arms locked around one another's bodies, mouth to mouth, head to tail. . . . No more of these England induced ambiguities: those Biblical-satanic confusions . . . Quran 18:50 there it was as plain as the day. . . . How much more practical, down to earth comprehensible. . . . Iblis/Shaitan standing for darkness; Gibreel for the light. . . . O most devilish and slippery of cities. . . . Well then the trouble with the English was their, Their - In a word Gibreel solemnly pronounces, that most naturalised sign of cultural difference. . . . The trouble with the English was their . . . in a word . . . their weather.67 640

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The English weather To end with the English weather is to invoke, at once, the most changeable and immanent signs of national difference. It encourages memories of the 'deep' nation crafted in chalk and limestone; the quilted downs; the moors menaced by the wind; the quiet cathedral towns; that corner of a foreign field that is forever England. The English weather also revives memories of its daemonic double: the heat and dust of India; the dark emptiness of Africa; the tropical chaos that was deemed despotic and ungovernable and therefore worthy of the civilizing mission. These imaginative geographies that spanned countries and empires are changing; those imagined communities that played on the unisonant boundaries of the nation are singing with different voices. If I began with the scattering of the people across countries, I want to end with their gathering in the city. The return of the diasporic; the postcolonial. Handsworth Songs; Fanon's manichean colonial Algiers; Rushdie's tropicalized London, grotesquely renamed Ellowen Deeowen in the migrant's mimicry: it is to the city that the migrants, the minorities, the diasporic come to change the history of the nation. If I have suggested that the people emerge in the finitude of the nation, marking the liminality of cultural identity, producing the double-edged discourse of social territories and temporalities, then in the west, and increasingly elsewhere, it is the city which provides the space in which emergent identifications and new social movements of the people are played out. It is there that, in our time, the perplexity of the living is most acutely experienced. In the narrative graftings of my essay I have attempted no general theory, only a certain productive tension of the perplexity of language in various locations of living. I have taken the measure of Fanon's occult instability and Kristeva's parallel times into the 'incommensurable narrative' of Benjamin's modern storyteller to suggest no salvation, but a strange cultural survival of the people. For it is by living on the borderline of history and language, on the limits of race and gender, that we are in a position to translate the differences between them into a kind of solidarity. I want to end with a much translated fragment from Walter Benjamin's essay, The Task of the Translator. I hope it will now be read from the nation's edge, through the sense of the city, from the periphery of the people, in culture's transnational dissemination: Fragments of a vessel in order to be articulated together must follow one another in the smallest details although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of making itself similar to the meaning of the original, it must lovingly and in detail, form itself according to the manner of meaning of the original, to make them both recognisable as the broken 641

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fragments of the greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel.68

Notes 1 In memory of Paul Moritz Strimpel (1914-87): Pforzheim - Paris - Zurich Ahmedabad - Bombay - Milan - Lugano. 2 I am thinking of Eric Hobsawm's great history of the 'long nineteenth century', especially The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975) and The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). See especially some of the suggestive ideas on the nation and migration in the latter volume, ch. 6. 3 E. Said, The World, The Text and The Critic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 39. 4 F. Jameson, 'Third World literature in the era of multinational capitalism', Social Text, (Fall 1986). 5 J. Kristeva, 'A new type of intellectual: the dissident', in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 298. 6 E. Said, 'Opponents, audiences, constituencies and community', in Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1983), p. 145. 7 J. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 210. 8 B. Anderson, 'Narrating the nation', The Times Literary Supplement. 9 P. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986). 10 E. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 56. 11 ibid., p. 38. 12 L. Althusser, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (London: Verso, 1972), p. 78. 13 M. Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, ed. C. Emerson and M. Holquist, trans. V. W. McGee (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1986) p. 31. 14 ibid., p. 34. 15 ibid., p. 36 and passim. 16 ibid., pp. 47-9. 17 S. Freud, 'The Uncanny', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1955), p. 234. See also pp. 236, 247. 18 John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-80 (London: Hutchinson 1983). 19 Houston A. Baker Jr, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), esp. chs. 8-9. 20 Barrell, op. cit., p. 78. 21 ibid., p. 203. 22 Richard Price, Maroon Societies quoted in Baker op. cit., p. 77. 23 Claude Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1986), pp. 212-14, my emphasis. 24 A. Giddcns. The Nation State and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 1985), p. 216. 25 N. Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (London: Verso, 1980), p. 113. 26 R. Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), p. 43. I must thank Prof. David Lloyd of the University of California, Berkeley, for reminding me of Williams' important concept.

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DISSEMINATION 27 E. Said, 'Representing the colonized', Critical Inquiry, vol. 15, no. 2 (Winter 1989). 28 S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, Standard Edition (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 114. 29 Freud, op. cit., p. 114. 30 J.-F. Lyotard and J.-L. Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), p. 41. 31 C. Levi-Strauss, Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans. Felicity Baker (London: Routledge, 1987). Mark Cousins pointed me in the direction of this remarkable text. See his review in New Formations, no. 7 (Spring 1989). What follows is an account of Levi-Strauss' argument to be found in Section 11 of the essay, pp. 21-44. 32 M. Foucault, Technologies of the Self, ed. H. Gutman et al. (London: Tavistock, 1988). 33 ibid., pp. 151-4.1 have abbreviated the argument for my convenience. 34 L. Althusser, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1972), pp. 122-32. I have, for convenience, produced a composite quotation from Althusser's various descriptions of the ideological effects of historicism. 35 Foucault, op.cit, pp. 162-3. 36 F. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969). My quotations and references come from pp. 174-90. 37 J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 22. 38 Moi, op.cit., pp. 187-213. This passage was written in response to the insistent questioning of Nandini and Praminda in Prof. Tshome Gabriel's seminar on 'syncretic cultures' at the University of California, Los Angeles. 39 Anderson, op.cit., p. 35. 40 J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G. C. Spivak (Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 144-5. Quoted in R. Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 208. 41 ibid., p. 145. 42 Gasche, op.cit., p. 211. 43 Moi, op.cit., p. 210. I have also referred here to an argument to be found on p. 296. 44 All quotations are from the shooting script of Hands-worth Songs, generously provided by the Black Audio and Film Collective. 45 Anderson, op.cit., p. 30. 46 ibid., 132. 47 ibid. 48 ibid. 49 Levi-Strauss, op.cit., p. 58. 50 This collection, ch. 2, pp. 19-20. 51 ibid., p. 11. 52 Lefort, op.cit., p. 303. 53 W. Benjamin, 'The storyteller', in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Cape, 1970), p. 87. 54 M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock, 1972), p. 111. 55 C. Levi-Strauss, op.cit., p. 35. 56 Benjamin, op.cit. p. 75. 57 W. Benjamin 'The Task of the Translator', Illuminations (London: Cape, 1970). p. 75.

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NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES 58 N. Abraham and M. Torok, 'Introjection - Incorporation', in S. Lebovici and D. Widlocher (eds), Psychoanalysis in France (London: International Universities Press, 1980), p. 10. 59 J. Berger, A Seventh Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975). I have composed this passage from quotations that are scattered through the text. 60 Berger, op.cit, p. 216. 61 S. Freud, Group Psychology and the Ego, Standard Edition vol. XVIII (London: Hogarth, 1961), p. 119. 62 S. Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 337. 63 ibid., p. 130. 64 ibid., p. 145. 65 ibid., p. 320. 66 ibid., p. 353. 67 ibid., p. 354.1 have slightly altered the presentation of this passage to fit in with the sequence of my argument. 68 Timothy Bahti and Andrew Benjamin have translated this much-discussed passage for me. What I want to emphasize is a form of the articulation of cultural difference that Paul de Man clarifies in his reading of Walter Benjamin's complex image of amphora. [Benjamin] is not saying that the fragments constitute a totality, he says that fragments are fragments, and that they remain essentially fragmentary. They follow each other metonymically, and they never constitute a totality. Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), p. 91

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4.12 IS THERE A THIRD WORLD AESTHETIC? Roberto Schwarz From John Gledson (ed.) Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, Verso, 1992, 173^4. This essay was first published as 'Existe uma estetica do Terceiro Mundo?' Leia Livros, 15 December 1980.

Unless I'm mistaken, the status of 'Third Worldism' was linked to enthusiastic support for struggles for national liberation, and to reservations about the Soviet Union. And in fact, nothing could be more welcome than a historical movement in which anti-imperialism and anti-Stalinism were joined together. But, however well-founded these sentiments might have been, did they open up a a new way forward for humanity? Headed by such national leaders as Nehru, Nasser or Castro, who deliberately resisted classification, Third Worldism gave many people the impression that it was a new road, better than capitalism or communism. That's what explains the climate of prophetic power and of a genuine avant-garde which communicated itself to a whole group of artists, and gave breadth and aesthetic and political excitement to their work. This is not to deny their naivete and demagogy, which will also come down to posterity, though only as a document of that time. To our Brazilian public, provincial in the very nature of things, these artists presented the vital spectacle of an intellectual making his mark right in the heart of the modern world. And to First World intellectuals, paralysed by the upsurge of capitalism at the time, and by successive revelations about Soviet life, they presented the pleasing spectacle of a society in movement, where audacity, improvisation and above all the intellectual himself could do something. But now, when the cycle of decolonization is more or less over and the idea of a painless industrialization has been rejected as an illusion by the Third World leaders themselves, what is left of the prestige the idea once had? The Third World mystique covers up class conflict and gives a naive, though violent view of conflicts between nations, and above all of their interdependence. The aesthetics it inspires does exist, and inherits retrograde aspects of nationalism. It is a relative question, however - it should 645

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be pointed out that there is no such thing as the aesthetic of the Third World. As for the socialist countries, the existence of an official aesthetic is undeniable: what is doubtful is whether it benefits the arts. Thus, if even in countries where reality is much more tolerable, the work of art owes its strength to negativity, I can't see why we should give a positive meaning, one of national identity, to relations of oppression, exploitation and restriction. These things are the reality of the Third World, but they do not constitute superiority. Or better, since reality is to a degree common to exploiters and exploited, it is understandable that these relations should be a motive for satisfaction, as well as embarrassment, to the former. In aesthetics as in politics, the Third World is an organic part of the contemporary scene. Its presence is the living proof of the iniquitous nature of the organization of the world, both in terms of production and of life itself. And any charm that 'backwardness' may have for someone who doesn't suffer from it is another proof of dissatisfaction with the forms that progress has taken - forms, however, to which the Third World aspires and for which no one can see alternatives. Summing up - a difficult state of affairs, which cannot be understood or resolved with myths.

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4.13 U N A P P R O V E D ROADS Ireland and Post-Colonial Identity Luke Gibbons From Trisha Ziff (ed.) Distant Relations: Chicano/Irish/Mexican Art and Critical Writing, Smart Ass Press, 1995; rpt in Luke Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, Cork University Press in Association with Field Day, 1996,171-80

There might be more to be learned through a careful tracing, along paths not already guarded by the intellectual patrols of neo-imperialism, of the border lines where comparative experiences of imperial victimization and resistance meet and separate. These paths and borders, of course, are not to be found on any Cartesian plane, nor will they stay in the same place as we change our relation to them. Jonathan Boyarin, Storm from Paradise

In 1948, the Irish humorous journal Dublin Opinion published a cartoon depicting the removal of the statue of Queen Victoria from in front of Leinster House, the Irish seat of parliament. 'Begob, Eamon', the dejected Queen commiserates with de Valera who had just lost office in a general election, 'there's great changes around here!' This was indeed true, for the removal of the statue was a prologue to the official declaration of an Irish Republic in 1949, an act which formally severed the imperial connection that reached its apotheosis during her reign in the nineteenth century. Yet the queen, for all her legendary absence of humour, may have had the last laugh. Early in 1995, a public controversy ensued when University College, Cork, as part of its 150th anniversary celebrations, decided to exhume a statue of Queen Victoria which had been buried in the grounds of the college since the 1930s, and put it on public display. This, it was argued, was doing no more than setting the historical record straight, a public acknowledgement of the fact that the university (originally called Queen's College, Cork) was founded under a Victorian administration. 647

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But this is not the way history, or rather memory, operates in a culture with a colonial past; for 1845 was not only the year in which the Queen's Colleges were established, it also marked the beginning of a more painful reminder of Victorian rule, the Great Famine (1845-8).1 At the opening of the exhibition in which the statue was included, a protester was arrested for interrupting the proceedings with shouts of 'What about the Famine?' Though dismissed by some as a nationalist crank, the protester was also seeking to register a profound loss of memory, a traumatic episode in Irish history that was no less effectively buried by officialdom, both before and after independence, than Queen Victoria's moving statues.2 How is it possible to accommodate these disparate legacies of the Victorian era within the narratives of Irish identity? According to one influential strand in contemporary cultural theory, the answer lies in post-colonial strategies of cultural mixing, that is, embracing notions of 'hybridity' and 'syncretism' rather than obsolete ideas of nation, history or indigenous culture. This, after all, is what is meant by the designation 'post'-colonialism, and all its works and pomps, is deemed to be over and done with (if, indeed, it ever existed in the first place), and the time has come to draw a line over the past. In his highly schematic but instructive overview of the four stages of culture formation mapped out by postcolonial theory, Thomas McEvilley identifies, first, the idyllic pre-colonial period, the subject of much subsequent nationalist nostalgia; second, the ordeal of conquest, of alienation, oppression and internal colonization; third, the nationalist reversal 'which not only denigrates the identity of the colonizer, but also redirects . . . attention to the recovery and reconstitution of [a] once scorned and perhaps abandoned identity',3 and fourth, the stage ushered in by the generation born after the departure of the colonizing forces, which is less concerned with opposition to the colonial legacy a situation which arose in India and Africa 'about 25 years after the withdrawal of colonialist armies and governments'. It is this latter phase which lends itself to the free play of hybridity and cultural mixing - and also to the distancing project of the diaspora in which immigrants from excolonies renegotiate their ancestral ties in terms of the global demands of their new host culture. But while the past may be a distant country, it is not so different for those cultures engaged in a centuries-old struggle against western colonization. The belief that the restoration of Queen Victoria's statue was an inoffensive gesture in the context of an historical arc spanning 1845—1995 could only make sense if the Great Famine in Ireland was a thing of the past, a phase of history that could now be safely consigned to the communal Prozac of the heritage industry. But can the wounds inflicted by a social catastrophe be so easily cauterized? Would anyone seriously suggest that the traumatic lessons of the Holocaust shouldn't be as pertinent in a hundred years time as they are today? Or - to take an example that 648

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touches directly on colonialism and the displacement of the diaspora - that novels such as Toni Morrison's Beloved are valuable merely for their recreation of the ordeal of slavery as it was endured 150 years ago but have little to do with the lived experience of the African-American population in the contemporary United States? What we are dealing with here are different registers of memory, one that is contained and legitimized within the confines of the monument and the museum, and the other having to do with the endangered traces of collective memory, as transmitted by popular culture, folklore, ballads, and so on. In this respect, the contestation of museum space in Philip Napier's exhibit, Ballad, at the 'Beyond the Pale' exhibition in the Irish Museum of Modern Art (1994-5) is remarkable.4 It features an accordion mounted on a wall whose intake and expelling of air allows it to double up as an artificial lung attached to the barely decipherable image of the republican hunger-striker, Bobby Sands. The blown-up photogravure effect of the image is achieved through small nails, a reminder of the aura of martyrdom which surrounded Sands' death on hunger strike in 1981. The wheezing moans of the accordion extend beyond the individual body, however, evoking some of the more discordant strains in Irish vernacular culture. Not only do the eerie sounds waft through museum space like the wail of the mythical banshee in Irish folklore5 but the instrument itself signifies traditional music, more particularly the street singer and the popular ballads that were repeatedly targeted by the authorities as cultural expressions of insurgency. By linking the famished body with mourning and collective memory, the off-key image becomes, in effect, a living monument for the Famine and the dark shadow which it cast on the lung of the Irish body politic. The mythic resonances of the banshee and vernacular culture are also evident in the figurations of hair and long female tresses central to Alice Maher's recent work. Although the banshee is more often heard than seen, sightings of the phantom figure portray her as an old woman, combing her long white hair as she laments. In Alice Maher's Familiar series, undulating braids of hair are given an additional historical twist by being recreated through the medium of flax - a material, according to the artist, that is 'interwoven with a thousand meanings and histories'.6 One of the meanings is the association with women's work and the relative financial independence which cottage industry afforded for women in pre-Famine Ireland. Another historical connection, however, derives from the destruction of the once thriving Irish wool trade by British colonial policy, and its replacement by a linen industry, based mainly in northern Ireland. The 'hybridity' of these exhibits is clear from their indeterminate boundaries: between organic and fabricated materials, nature and culture, native and newcomer. Of course, there are proponents of hybridity who refuse to consider 649

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Ireland as a suitable case for post-colonial treatment at all. Though the authors of one 'comprehensive study' find the term 'post-colonial' expensive enough to include not only the literatures of India, Africa, and the Caribbean but also Canada, Australia, and even the United States, no place is found for Irish literature. The reason for this becomes apparent later on, when Irish, Welsh, and Scottish literatures are discussed 'in relation to the English "mainstream" ': While it is possible to argue that these societies were the first victims of English expansion, their subsequent complicity in the British imperial enterprise makes it difficult for colonized peoples outside Britain to accept their identity as post-colonial.7 This remarkable statement (which does not appear to include Ireland as one of those countries 'outside Britain') only makes sense if one identifies the Irish historically with the settler colony in Ireland, the ruling AngloIrish interest, thus erasing in the process the entire indigenous population - a view closer, in fact, to 'Commonwealth' than post-colonial literature.8 This indiscriminate application of the term 'post-colonial' is indeed a recurrent feature of The Empire Writes Back, with the result that Patrick White and Margaret Atwood are considered post-colonial in the same way as Derek Walcott or Chinua Achebe.9 This is not to say, of course, that some Catholic or indigenous Irish did not buy into hegemonic forms of racism in the United States and Australia when they themselves managed to throw off the shackles of slavery or subjugation. But it is important to recognize this for what it is, a process of identifying with the existing supremacist ideologies, derived mainly from the same legacy of British colonialism from which they were trying to escape. In Charles Gavan Duffy's words, commenting on the upward mobility of some of the Irish Catholic diaspora in Australia: To strangers at a distance who read of Barrys, MacMahons and Fitzgeralds in high places, it seemed the paradise of the Celts but they were Celts whose forefathers had broken with the traditions and creed of the island [i.e. Ireland].10 This is an important corrective to the essentialist myth that racist attitudes were already present in Irish emigrants - by virtue of their 'whiteness', their backwardness, or 'national character' - before they emigrated to Britain, the United States or Australia.11 What the immigrant Irish brought with them from the homeland were not the habits of authority fostered by the colonizer but, in fact, a bitter legacy of servitude and ignominy akin to that experienced by native and African Americans. Indeed, from the colonial perspective, the racial labels 'white/non-white' 650

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did not follow strict epidermal schemas of visibility or skin colour so that, in an important sense, the Irish historically were classified as 'non-white', and treated accordingly. The widespread equation of the 'mere Irish' with the native Americans in the seventeenth century served as a pretext for wholesale confiscations and plantations, and more ominous expressions of genocidal intent as in Edmund Spenser's advice to Queen Elizabeth that 'until Ireland can be famished, it cannot be subdued'.12 The transportation of the Irish to the New World featured prominently in the 'white slave trade' in the seventeenth century, and throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Penal code which systematically excluded Catholics from citizenship and political life rendered them, in Edmund Burke's phrase, foreigners in their native land. There was no need to go abroad to experience the 'multiple identities' of the diaspora valorized in post-colonial theory: the uncanny experience of being a stranger to oneself was already a feature of life back home. As David Roediger remarks of the ambivalence of Irish attitudes to racism in America, 'shared oppression need not generate solidarity but neither must it necessarily breed contempt of one oppressed group for another'.13 The need to define themselves as white presented itself as an urgent imperative to the degraded Irish who arrived in the United States after the Famine, if they were not to be reduced to servitude once more. This was the political climate in which Ralph Waldo Emerson could write: I think it cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all the other races have quailed and done obeisance.14

It was in these circumstances that many Irish sought to identify with the manifest destiny of whiteness, finding in the anti-abolitionist Democratic party a vehicle for their social and political aspirations. This, in effect, meant an uneasy accommodation with what Reginald Horsman describes as 'American racial Anglo-Saxonism' and, as Roediger comments, 'under other circumstances, Irish American Catholics might not have accepted so keenly the "association of nationality with blood - but not ethnicity", which racially conflated them with the otherwise hated English'. But, he continues: within the constrained choices and high risks of antebellum American politics such a choice was quite logical. The ways in which the Irish competed for work and adjusted to industrial morality in 651

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IDENTITIES

America made it all but certain that they would adopt and extend the politics of white unity offered by the Democratic party.15 The point of drawing attention to the unhealthy intersection of Irish Catholicism with supremacist Anglo-Saxon ideals of whiteness in the United States is to underline the risks inherent in uncritical adulations of 'hybridity' as an empowering strategy for diasporic or post-colonial identity - particularly when it involves accommodation with the values of powerful expansionist cultures already built on racism. As Ella Shohat and Robert Stam put it, undue haste in deconstructing essentialist notions of identity 'should not obscure the problematic agency of "post-colonial hybridity" '. A celebration of syncreticism and hybridity per se, if not articulated with questions of historical hegemonies, risks sanctifying the fait accompli of colonial violence. For oppressed people, even artistic syncreticism is not a game but a sublimated form of historical pain, which is why Jimi Hendrix played the 'Star Spangled Banner' in a dissonant mode, and why even a politically conservative performer like Ray Charles renders 'America the Beautiful' as a moan and a cry. As a descriptive catch-all term, 'hybridity' fails to discriminate between diverse modalities of hybridity: colonial imposition, obligatory assimilation, political cooption, cultural mimicry and so forth.16 It is in this context that one should consider Willie Doherty's photographic triptychs Fading Dreams (1989) and Evergreen Memories (1989). In Fading Dreams we see redolent details of imposing Georgian architecture dating from the period in the eighteenth century when the majority Catholic population was kept in bondage, and then the obsequious 'hybridity' of reclaiming this heritage for a nationalist present by placing a brass harp on a panelled door. The green letters overlaid on the images, however, suggest that nostalgia - the 'fading dreams' and 'hospitable' welcome - for imperial splendour is not restricted to the relics of the old order but is possibly shared by the new 'nationalist' dispensation, notwithstanding its official condemnations (it is not clear, for this reason, to whom 'Depraved' and 'Unknown Depths' refers). As against this, Evergreen Memories shows another neo-classical building which has been more violently reclaimed by nationalist memory, the General Post Office in the centre of Dublin, scene of the 1916 rebellion which declared an Irish republic. On the one hand, this founding site of the state is an object of awe and reverence ('Evergreen memories'1 of 'Resolute' revolutionaries); but the site is also one of disavowal and rejection (it is not clear whether the overlaid 'Psychopath' and 'Cursed Existence' emanate from the imper652

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ial building itself, or from its new custodians, the postcolonial state intent on forgetting its violent origins).17 In a similar vein, John Kindness's satirical panels for the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) trains show the colonial mimicry of the consumerist Irish state as evidenced by the green bottle on the dinner table containing DE sauce (as in D ail E ireann [i.e. the Government of Ireland], and perhaps Eamon de Valera?). This craven hybridity is an imaginary rip-off of the original HP sauce bottle (as in Houses of Parliament) which adorns so many British dinner tables. The kind of homely ideology lodged in domestic details is again apparent in Kindness's recent Belfast Frescoes which depict, in comic-book fashion, scenes from an upbringing in Protestant Belfast. The affectionate memory of the father's cigarette moving around the room in the dark before breakfast is counterpointed by the imagery on the teapot and cup of the ill-fated Titanic, the pride of the loyalist shipyards, which was sunk by an iceberg on its maiden voyage in 1912. (In a later picture, a teapot displays the rose and thistle, emblems of the union between England and Scotland which initially constituted modern Britishness.) The link between the innocent detail of the cigarette and the imperial icon of the ocean liner is forged by the sustained visual pun in the border of the image in which the smoke of the cigarette is gradually transformed into the fog and mist which concealed the iceberg on the ship's fatal journey. The tigers, elephants and kangaroos in the borders of subsequent images also harbour imperial fantasies, as when the young boys are shown embarking on safari hunts in their neighbourhood in Belfast. In a later sequence, the closed culture of loyalism is characterized by an image of a unionist election poster blocking out labour and nationalist posters, and the young narrator and his friend being contemptuously labelled as 'Fenian-lovers', not because they are nationalists but merely because, as working-class children, they are not overtly unionist and supported labour. If Ireland does not quite conform to the post-colonial condition, it is not for the reasons outlined by some critics - namely, that because it is 'white' and situated in Europe, therefore it cannot have been subject to colonization.18 Anne McClintock is nearer the mark when she advises that: the term 'post-colonialism' is, in many cases, prematurely celebratory: Ireland may, at a pinch, be 'post-colonial', but for the inhabitants of British-occupied Northern Ireland, not to mention the Palestinian inhabitants of the Israeli Occupied Territories and the West Bank, there may be nothing 'post' about colonialism at all.19 'Post', in this context, signifies a form of historical closure, but it is precisely the absence of a sense of an ending which has characterized the national narratives of Irish history. This has less to do with the 'unfinished 653

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business' of a united Ireland than with the realization that there is no possibility of undoing history, of removing all the accretions of conquest - the English language, the inscriptions of the Protestant Ascendency on the landscape and material culture, and so on. For this reason, there is no prospect of restoring a pristine, pre-colonial identity: the lack of historical closure, therefore, is bound up with a similar incompleteness in the culture itself, so that instead of being based on narrow ideals of racial purity and exclusivism, identity is open-ended and heterogeneous. But the important point in all of this is that the retention of the residues of conquest does not necessarily mean subscribing to the values which originally governed them: as Donald Home has argued, even the sheer survival of cultural artefacts from one era to another may transform their meaning, so that the same building (or, perhaps, even the same statue) 're-located' in a new political era becomes, in a sense, a radically different structure.20 From this it follows that openness towards other cultures does not entail accepting them solely on their own terms, all the more so when a minority or subaltern culture is attempting to come out from under the shadow of a major colonial power. As Friedrich Engels remonstrated with those English comrades in the First International who objected to the formation of Irish national branches in England on the grounds that this was betraying the 'universal' ideals of internationalism, this proposal was seeking: not internationalism, but simply prating submission [on the part of the Irish]. If the promoters of the motion were so brimful of the truly international spirit, let them prove it by removing the seat of the British Federal Council to Dublin and submit to a Council of Irishmen.21 What Engels is pointing to here is the hidden asymmetry of many calls for internationalism - or its post-colonial counterpart, hybridity - emanating from the heartlands of colonialism. The need to address the other, and the route of the diaspora, is invariably presented as a passage from the margins to the metropolitan centre, but the reverse journey is rarely greeted with much enthusiasm. In fact, those who go in the opposite direction are invariably derided as 'going native', as slumming it when they should really be getting on with the business of persuading the natives to adopt their master's voice.22 Yet it is only when hybridity becomes truly reciprocal rather than hierarchical that the encounter with the culture of the colonizer ceases to be detrimental to one's development. Another way of negotiating identity through an exchange with the other is to make provision, not just for 'vertical' mobility from the periphery to the centre, but for 'lateral' journeys along the margins which shortcircuit the colonial divide. This is the rationale for the present welcome 654

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cultural exchange between Irish and Mexican culture in the 'Distant Relations' exhibition of the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Hybridity need not always take the high road: where there are borders to be crossed, unapproved roads might prove more beneficial in the long run than those patrolled by global powers. So far from rejecting universal values, moreover, this may be the most productive way, as Engels recognized, of taking the Enlightenment to the limit.

Notes 1 See one correspondent's view in a letter to the Irish Times: 'As the college must share its special year with events commemorating the Famine, the highlighting of Queen Victoria - who stood almost aloof from the Great Hunger of the people at that time - is an unfortunate choice. Her association with the university could have been adequately recognized in a less dramatic way.' (T. J. Maher, 'Queen Victoria's Statue', 30 January 1995). It is important to point out, however, that the statue was not restored to its former site but was rather 'reframed' by the curators of the exhibition behind a glass case in the corner of a display room, as part of a more general exhibition. As I argue below, this changes significantly the 'meaning' of the statue, and certainly calls into question its previous imperious position. 2 The factors which influenced the Irish government's failure to commemorate the centenary of the Famine are discussed in Mary E. Daly, 'Why the Great Famine got Forgotten in the Dark 1940s', Sunday Tribune, 22 January 1995. For the neglect of the Famine by academic historians, see Cormac O'Grada's valuable introduction to the re-issue of R. Dudley Edwards and T. Desmond Williams, eds., The Great Famine (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1995), first published in 1956. 3 Thomas McEvilley, 'Here Comes Everybody', Beyond the Pale: Art and Artists on the Edge of Consensus (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 13. 4 At the Irish Museum of Modern Art, 1994-5. 5 The banshee (literally, 'female fairy') was a harbinger of death for certain families, and her wail struck terror into all those who heard it. 6 Cecile Bourne, 'Interview [with Alice Maher]', Familiar: Alice Maher (Dublin: The Douglas Hyde Gallery, 1995), p. 23. 7 Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Methuen, 1989), p. 33. 8 In one of the few discussions of the Irish contribution to colonialism, Hiram Morgan points out that in relation to India 'those Irish who received commissions and commands were from the Protestant elite' and argues that the same holds in relation to Australia: 'In Australia the Catholic Irish were numerous but it was the Anglo-Irish "imperial class" who exercised most influence . . . The Catholic Charles Gavan Duffy did become Prime Minister of Victoria in 1871-2 but he was a rare bird in his day.' (Hiram Morgan, 'Empire-Building; An Uncomfortable Irish Heritage', The Linen Hall Review, vol. 10, no. 3, Autumn 1993, pp. 8, 9.) 9 As Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge point out in their trenchant review of The Empire Writes Back, 'What an undifferentiated concept of post-colonialism overlooks are the very radical differences in response and the unbridgeable

655

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10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17 18

chasms that existed between white and non-white colonies . . . there is, we feel, a need to make a stronger distinction between the post-colonialism of settler and non-settler countries.' (Vijay Mishra and Bob Hodge, 'What is PostColonialism?', in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], pp. 285, 288.) As I argue below (note 18), there is also a need in an Irish context to show the radical differences within white societies, and particularly to question the assumption which equates whiteness with the settler community, or the culture of the colonizer. Morgan, op. cit, p. 9. As Mishra and Hodge point out, 'complicit postcolonialism' is that which does not challenge the standards of the imperial centre but rather seeks to emulate them, gaining admittance to the canon (p. 289). That the most considerable achievements in Irish literature derived their impetus from resisting the canon is the argument of David Lloyd's Nationalism and Minor Literature: James Clarence Mangan and the Emergence of Irish Cultural Nationalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) - a book, significantly, not included in the extensive reader's guide and bibliography to The Empire Writes Back. Considered in this light, there may well be some truth in the observation that the only reason the Irish are not racist at home is that there are not enough racial minorities or non-Europeans in the country to make immigration a social problem. The key question here, however, is why Ireland is in this situation? The answer is clear: because it itself is in the anomalous position of being the only ex-colony in the European Union, and hence is not advanced enough industrially to act as an economic magnet for immigrants from developing countries. This is a radically different proposition from the naive assumption that certain peoples or cultures are inherently bigoted, and only lack the opportunity for their racism to assert itself. Edmund Spenser, 'A Briefe Note on Ireland' (1598), cited in Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, vol. 1 (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 63, 210. Spenser's advice to the Queen was a follow-up to the Lord President's suggestion that 'the Irish should be constrained first to taste some great calamity, so as to render them more assured and dutiful thereafter'. See Pauline Henley, Spenser in Ireland (Cork: Cork University Press, 1928), p. 164. It is this historical backdrop which gave such force to accusations of genocidal intent with regard to the nineteenth-century Great Famine. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), p. 134. Cited in McEvilley, 'Here comes Everybody', p. 21. Roediger, op. cit., p. 144. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981). Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 42. In this connection, the amnesia shown by the Irish state towards the Famine in 1945 was matched by the embarrassing fifteen-minute ceremony which passed for a commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the Rising, in 1991. As Theodore Allen argues in the related context of slavery, such judgements betray an assumption that, somehow, colonization is more suitable for 'ThirdWorld' countries: 'It is only a "white" habit of mind that reserves "slave" for the African-American and boggles at the term "Irish slave trade" ' (Allen, p. 258).

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19 Anne McClintock, The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term "Post-colonialism" ', in Williams and Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, p. 294. 20 Donald Home, The Public Culture (London: Pluto Press, 1986), p. 154. 21 Cited in James M. Blaut, The National Question: Decolonising the Theory of Nationalism (London: Zed Books, 1987), p. 144. 22 For some pertinent comments on this, see Shohat and Stam, op. cit, p. 43.

657

4.14 MODERN IRELAND Post-Colonial Society or Post-Colonial Pretensions? Liam Kennedy From Colonialism, Religion and Nationalism in Ireland, Institute of Irish Studies, 1996, 167-81

Introduction 'And I speak without exaggeration', claimed Charles Stewart Parnell to an American audience in 1880, 'when I say that the condition of the negro slave of the South was far better than that which has been the constant condition of the tenant farmers, or, at all events, the majority of the tenant farmers of Ireland.'1 Patrick Pearse, a generation later, was to suggest some parallels between the condition of Ireland under the Crown and that of a society dominated by slavery. It would be unfair to say that either Pearse or Parnell took these comparative claims very seriously. Such polemical flights of fancy are best interpreted as allusions to a colonial relationship linking Ireland and Britain. Historians of Ireland, with the notable exception of writers in the 'green' marxist tradition, have generally found colonial concepts of limited or little value in charting the course of social and economic change in Ireland after 1800. In recent times, however, there has been an upsurge of intellectual interest in categorising Ireland as a postcolonial society, with the implication that pre-independence Ireland functioned much as British colonies elsewhere in Africa and Asia. The Third World perspective is quite deliberate. 'Ireland is, supposedly, a modern Western country. . . . But, in fact, there are striking parallels between many aspects of Irish society - in our economy, politics and culture - and the situation in the so-called 'Third World' countries. Given our shared histories of colonialism, this is hardly surprising. What is surprising is how rarely those parallels are drawn.' 2 658

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The critic Fredric Jameson, writing of early-twentieth century Ireland, sees a 'national situation which reproduces the appearance of First World social reality and social relationships . . . but whose underlying structure is in fact much closer to that of the Third World, or of colonised daily life.' Set in its appropriate colonial context, Joycean Dublin is revealed as 'an underdeveloped village.'3 Let's begin, therefore, from the assumption that Ireland is indeed a post-colonial society. Let's engage in some systematic comparative analysis, with the firm expectation that major similarities will emerge. These should be particularly evident in relation to economic structure, living conditions and quality of life indicators. Pre-independence Ireland One approach might be to compare Ireland and its Third World counterparts on the eve of emergence from colonial dependency. This historical moment occurs: for Ireland in the second decade of this century; for India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka just before midcentury; and for many African countries in the early 1960s. For the Portuguese African colonies the timing is roughly a decade later, while the white racist regimes of Rhodesia and South Africa are perhaps cases apart. Dealing with the Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese colonies in Central and South America is more of a problem. For one thing, their origins lie in colonial settler societies, with 'independence' meaning little more than a break on the part of these settler elites from their European overlords. The empirical problem of assembling relevant data from the early nineteenth century for Latin America is compounded by the theoretical problem of whether it makes much sense to compare countries separated in time by a century, or more. So, for the purposes of these threshold-of-independence comparisons, I have confined the field to Ireland and selected African and Asian countries. The usual depiction of colonial societies sees these as overwhelmingly dependent on the production of primary commodities, in particular foodstuffs and other agricultural produce. The other side of this lop-sided development is a weak industrial sector, particularly in the realm of factory industry. The distribution of labour between different sectors, as shown in Table 4.14.1, is a good indication of the structure of an economy and the extent of industrialisation. Here, as elsewhere in this section, I am attempting to present figures which relate to the period just before independence, though in some instances it is necessary to make do with a rougher sense of timing. It may also be added that the quality of the data varies between countries, but as this exercise is being conducted with broad brush strokes, this fact alone is unlikely to invalidate any conclusions reached. 659

NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES Table 4.14.1 Economic structure: share of the labour force (%) in agriculture and industry around the time of independence Country Agriculture Industry 72% India (1950) 10% Pakistan (1961) 76% 9% 68% 10% Malaysia (1947) Ghana (1960) 68% 10% Belgian Congo (1955) 90% 7% 88% 5% Algeria (1954) Ireland (1911) 43% 25% Sources: International Labour Organisation, Year book of labour statistics (Geneva, various years); Census of Ireland, 1911 (BPP, 1912-1913, cxviii).

Two points are abundantly clear from the table. Firstly, the African and Asian countries show remarkable similarity in terms of dependence on agriculture and the weakness of their industrial sectors. Secondly, there is a marked discontinuity between the Irish and these other experiences. Irish dependence on agriculture was only half that reported for Algeria, for example. Differences in the degree of industrialisation are also apparent. Moreover, these differences are understated, in that the extent of modern industry, and especially factory industry, is not adequately conveyed by these figures. (An alternative measure, the proportion of national product accounted for by the industrial sector, would bring out more clearly the technologically-advanced nature of the Irish shipbuilding, engineering, textiles and brewing industries.) A much more relevant reference point for Ireland would be the contemporary continental European countries. Ireland was situated in the mainstream of the European experience, even to the extent of having a spatially uneven distribution of industry.4 From the angle of industrial history, therefore, it is quite unexceptional that much of the manufacturing activity was concentrated in Ulster. This is also an irrelevance from the viewpoint of the colonial argument, since the island of Ireland, and not some fraction thereof, is held to be the natural unit of enquiry. I turn now to measures of economic welfare, which may prove more favourable to the colonial thesis. One of the most frequently used indexes, for all its deficiencies, is Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per head of population. In the following table GDP is expressed in terms of United States dollars, at 1960 price levels. The conclusion is inescapable: average incomes in Ireland, even a half century earlier in time than in the case of African and Asian countries, belonged to a quite different economic league. That league was a West European one, with Ireland enjoying much the same average living standards as countries like Spain, Norway, Finland, Italy. While lagging behind

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Table 4.14.2 Gross domestic product per head of population for selected Third World Countries in 1960 and, for Ireland, in 1913

$ India Pakistan Sri Lanka Nepal Chad (1963) Ethiopia

74 83 142 53 67 47

$ Portuguese Timor Algeria (1963) Angola (1963) Ghana Belgian Congo Gambia

6 248 170 198 91 83

Ireland (1913) $655 Sources: United Nations, Yearbook of national accounts statistics, 1971 (New York, 1973), table 1 A: P. Bairoch and M. Levy-Leboyers eds., Disparities in economic development since the industrial revolution (London, 1981), p. 10.

world leaders such as Britain and Germany, Ireland was comfortably ahead of Greece, Portugal and Hungary. There are other indicators of the well-being, or otherwise, of a society. Health is one of the most fundamental. Infant mortality is of particular interest as it is sensitive, not only to the absolute level of income and wealth within a society but to the distribution of these resources as well. The following table shows the evidence from a variety of countries, where the number of child deaths is expressed relative to each 1,000 live births. The comparative point is brought out more sharply perhaps through the medium of index numbers, using Ireland as the reference point and setting its level equal to one hundred. The time periods vary: for the Asian countries the data refer to the period 1945-49; for Algeria and the black South African population the sub-period used is 1960-64; and for Ireland it is an average for the years 1914-18. A more local, if less exotic comparison with England, Wales and Scotland indicates that in the decade before independence infant death rates were actually lower in Ireland than elsewhere in these islands. In terms of health, and health facilities more generally, an enormous gap is apparent between pre-independence Ireland and these other countries. Thus Pakistan had 33,500 people per physician in 1948; Sri Lanka had 13,200; India, in its first year of independence had 6,300; Ghana had, in 1960, 21,400; while Algeria emerges as relatively privileged with only 5,400 people per physician in 1961.5 The roughly comparable figure for Ireland in 1911 was just under 2,000. One could go on to use other indicators such as literacy, educational facilities, women's status and the extent of political participation, but the point is surely established. The condition of Ireland prior to its partial breakaway from Britain bore little relationship to that of African and Asian societies at the historic moment of decolonisation in these continents. A West European comparative framework fits the Irish case far more effectively.

661

NATIONAL, THIRD WORLD AND POSTCOLONIAL IDENTITIES Table 4.14.3 Health as a social indicator: infant mortality rates in selected countries Country

Rate per 1,000

Relative to Ireland

India Pakistan Sri Lanka Aden South Africa Algeria

138 138 111 172 125 90

159 159 128 198 144 103

87

100

Ireland

Sources: United Nations, Demographic yearbook, 1966 (New York, 1967); Fifty-fifth annual report of the registrar general of marriages, births and deaths in Ireland 1918 (B.P.P., 1919, x).

The contemporary world It may be that some peculiar conjuncture of historical forces is somehow obscuring the true picture in the Irish case. If contemporary Ireland is a post-colonial society in much the same way that India or Ghana are postcolonial societies, then this may have become more apparent over time. In other words, the heritage of colonialism may have had latent dimensions, and the malign effects may have only revealed themselves in the fullness of time, possibly several decades after independence. In order to test this possibility, Table 4.14.4 presents a wide range of indicators, relating to living standards, economic structure, health and education. Agriculture in the table refers to the share of GNP accounted for by the primary sector. Calories are per capita per day, while adult illiteracy refers to females only and is for the year 1985. Life expectancy, which is counted in years, also relates to women. This is important. Meaney, for example, has asserted a commonality of experience between Irish women and women in the Third World, with Arabs as perhaps the most appropriate reference group.6 Information on economic inequality within the various societies might also be provided, but the data are cumbersome: suffice it to say that income inequality in Ireland is much the same as in the developed OECD countries and less acute than in Third World countries generally.7 Like a good photograph, the figures speak volumes. Suffice it to say that Ireland inhabits a world other than the Third World. Ireland: a colony once again Even if Ireland, North or South, is not a post-colonial society in any obvious Third World sense, perhaps the Irish Republic is, nonetheless, a neocolony of some kind. This is a perspective espoused by ultranationalists, among others. According to Mr Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein, 'Britain developed a neo-colonial relationship in which it was 662

MODERN IRELAND Table 4.14.4 Ireland in Third World perspective: economic and social indicators, 1989 GNPpc $

Agric %

Calories per day

Life Expectancy

Infant Mortality

Adult Illiteracy

India Pakistan Sri Lanka Nepal Ethiopia Algeria Angola Ghana Zaire Peru El Salvador Brazil

340 370 430 180 120 2,230 610 390 260 1,010 1,070 2,540

30 27 26 58 42 16 49 30 8 12 9

2,104 2,200 2,319 2,078 1,658 2,726 1,725 2,209 2,304 2,269 2,415 2,709

59 55 73 51 49 66 47 56 54 64 67 69

95 106 20 124 133 69 132 86 94 79 55 59

71 81 17 88 63 57 55 22 31 24

Ireland

8,710

11

5,699

77

8

-

Source: World Bank, World development report 1991 (Oxford, 1991).

possible to protect their (sic) economic and strategic interest without the nuisance of having to occupy, garrison and administer the 26 counties.'8 The argument is an old one, derived from traditional nationalist interpretations and coloured by the wider literature on neo-colonialism. What is a neo-colony, and how adequately does this idea explain the twentiethcentury Irish experience? Exponents of the neo-colonial notion are not always noted for their analytical rigour. But the following strands can be identified across a range of writers. Neo-colonial status involves continuing domination of the former colony, mainly through economic and diplomatic means, after national independence. Political subordination is facilitated by the existence in the former colony of an indigenous comprador class, serving the interests of the bourgeoisie in the imperial country. The major mechanisms of domination are, however, rooted in economic relationships. It may be, and frequently is the case at independence that the means of production are foreign owned. In addition to this domination by foreign capital, production and trading relationships between the former colony and the metropolitan centre involve elements of monopoly. Unequal bargaining power results in exploitation - the extraction of economic surplus from the mass of the newly-liberated peoples. As well as its political role, the comprador class benefits from, and plays an active role in the process of economic exploitation. It should be said immediately that at independence the bulk of the means of production, that is the land and the industrial resources, were owned (not just serviced) by an Irish agrarian and urban bourgeoisie. There is nothing in the economic history of the 1920s, or of the post-war 663

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period, to suggest the use of monopoly power to extract agricultural or other produce from Ireland at less than the prevailing market price. During the 1930s, it is true, the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom engaged in bilateral monopoly bargaining as regards some imports and exports. It was, however, the Irish government - according to neo-colonial theory a necessarily subservient regime - which initiated this action, with de Valera declaring 'economic war' on Britain.9 The eventual Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1938 was distinctly favourable to Ireland in terms of trading arrangements. When the Irish Republic shifted to outward-oriented economic policies, following the publication of Economic Development in 1958, there is little sign of any British interest, still less input to the process. When foreign multinationals established subsidiary companies across the face of Ireland, from Malin Head to Bantry Bay, during the 1960s and the 1970s, the major source of this manufacturing capital was not Britain but the United States, Japan and continental European countries.10 There may have been a hitherto-undiscovered, multilingual comprador class at work, opening up Ireland to new forms of domination by a rainbow alliance of outside capitalists, and simultaneously suppressing domestic opposition to their acts of collaboration. If so, its existence has yet to be established by historians and social scientists. Neo-colonial theory assumes that structured relationships of inequality link the colonial and ex-colonial countries through a variety of mechanisms, from trade, technology and capital flows to cultural influences. The last is not discussed here, though if the material bases for neo-colonialist notions, as applied to Ireland, are so weakly founded, then some scepticism on this score may be warranted also. If Ireland had been enmeshed in a systematic relationship of dependency and exploitation with Britain since 1921, this would have reflected itself in real outcomes - incomes, living standards, economic and industrial growth rates. Otherwise, we are in the realm of metaphysics. The fact is that Ireland compared favourably with Britain in terms of economic growth, industrial expansion and growth in income per worker over the twentieth century. Both economies have suffered periodically from a variety of economic and social crises but these have been qualitatively different from those in the Third World.

There are colonies and colonies The two sets of empirical enquiries conducted earlier led to a clear conclusion: attempting to place Ireland in a Third World perspective turned out to be a largely empty enterprise. Treating the Irish Republic as a neocolony was only marginally more successful. But why are the post-colonial models so unilluminating? This brings us to the heart of the matter: the nature of Irish-British relations before independence. Obviously it is not 664

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possible to touch on more than a few of the issues here. But a preliminary statement might run as follows. It is crude and unhistorical to see the Anglo-Irish relationship as fixed and unchanging through time, not least as it stretched across many centuries. It is true, for instance, that in the mid-seventeenth century many of the lordships and chieftainships of Ireland were destroyed and the whole island reduced to the status of a colony of England. That was less than exceptional. Other regions of Europe, in the early modern period and subsequently, were being annexed by powerful neighbouring regions, in the process of the formation of the modern nation states. One thinks immediately of Brittany, Provence, Catalonia, Hanover, Schleswig-Holstein, Alsace and Lorraine. Of the 150 or so officially-designated regions of the European community today, it would be difficult to think of many regions which do not have some experience of colonialism in some sense or other. To suggest, however, that the essence of their history and contemporary status can be apprehended by reference to the idea of a post-colonial region, or a post-colonial society, would be far-fetched. To go further, and sketch superficial parallels between, say, Hanover and Namibia, would amount to little more than nonsense strutting on theoretical stilts. In the case of Ireland during the century and a half after the Cromwellian conquest, the effects of the Restoration and Glorious Revolution, the evolution of the Irish and British parliamentary systems (culminating in the mildly-autonomous Grattan's Parliament), as well as deeper processes of economic and social change succeeded in transforming Anglo-Irish relationships. Under the Act of Union the ethnicallydistinct region of Ireland was absorbed into a multi-ethnic, multi-regional British state. By the standards of the time, political representation and the political franchise were liberal. In some periods, particularly in the later nineteenth century, Irish influence in the Westminster parliament was wholly disproportionate, as indeed was Irish representation (in the sense of the number of M.P.s in relation to population). Members of the Irish gentry and middle classes participated willingly in the administration of the imperial system world-wide. Thousands of Irish officers and soldiers manned its defences. Ireland, in effect, was a junior partner in that vast exploitative enterprise known as the British Empire. There were of course variations within Ireland. Protestant Ireland was far more enthusiastic in the pursuit of imperial projects, Catholic Ireland's commitment being more passive, except in one significant respect. Catholic Ireland participated with full Victorian vigour in the task of cultural imperialism, bringing European religious and cultural values to 'Darkest Africa', and beyond. The emerging Ireland had a high degree of cultural autonomy, long before it seceded from the United Kingdom. The primary school system, introduced as early as 1831, fell fairly quickly under denominational 665

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control. Local control of cultural institutions was even more pronounced in the sphere of the printed media where a press hostile to Britain, and all its pretensions, flourished, largely without hindrance. The Gaelic revival, in its sporting, linguistic, dancing and literary forms, added a further layer of indigenous cultural institutions.11 The church of the majority (the Irish Catholic church), from at least the second quarter of the nineteenth century onwards, enjoyed an autonomy that was remarkable by the standards of continental European countries such as France, Spain and Portugal. The French Catholic writer, L. Paul-Dubois, was moved to write in 1908 that 'in no country does the secular arm show more respect for religion, and its ministers.'12 In some respects the opportunities for freedom of thought and expression were more developed before rather than after 1920. When independence was achieved by what might be loosely termed Catholic nationalist Ireland, this was no war of liberation, in a classic Third World sense. The complementary struggles of Griffith and Collins bore little resemblance to the mass uprisings and bloody retribution which occurred in Algeria, Cambodia, Vietnam or Mozambique. What happened was secession. Again the most relevant parallels are to be found in Europe, in the secession of Belgium from the Netherlands before the midnineteenth century, in the attempted secession of the Basque provinces from the Spanish state in recent decades, and, closer home, in the secessionist tendencies within the United Kingdom centring on Scottish demands for independence. All of this historical commentary, it may be worth emphasising, is consistent with the view that the pursuit of national independence was both good and desirable. Its point is to gain some understanding of the quality of the Anglo-Irish relationship before and after independence. To do otherwise, to reduce complex reality to a simple dichotomy between coloniser and colonised, in a manner which transcends historical time, is to do violence to the lived experiences of the Irish peoples.

The colonial concept The last point may be developed a little further, and in more general terms. The indiscriminate use of an ill-defined, umbrella term like colonialism, when reconstructing the past, can distort as well as illuminate. The specificity of the historical experiences of different countries and regions must be respected. Even where there are formal similarities in phenomena across space or time, differences of degree may be all-important. Shaking a fist in an opponent's face, or helping push a Jewish child into a Nazi gas chamber, might each be categorised as acts of violence. But the difference of degree makes the two acts incommensurable. At a theoretical level, there are problems in applying undifferentiated 666

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notions of colonialism. In relation to Ireland in the century before independence, for instance, what particular theoretical model or models are being applied? Is it classic military imperialism, free-trade imperialism, or Lenin's famous formulation of imperialism as a stage - the highest - in the development of capitalism.13 Perhaps we are dealing with models of internal colonialism, or Andre Gunder Frank's dialectic of development and under-development? Or perhaps we are in the realm of one of the many variations of dependency theory?14 Usually, we are not told. Hence, the category of thought labelled post-colonial becomes even fuzzier, because its logically-entailed antecedent is itself so ill-defined.

Posting Ireland Ireland is a post-colonial society. It is a post-peasant society. It is a postGaelic society. It is a post-Devotional Revolution society. Northern Ireland represents a type of post-industrial society. Ireland can be posted in many ways. Presumably the use of the 'post' formulation is meant to convey the insight that, for the particular purposes in hand, the post-X state can be explained mainly or exclusively by the cluster of variables associated with X. In other words, we are not dealing simply with a dating or chronological device. We are claiming strong notions of linkage and causation. These need to be demonstrated, not simply assumed. And they need to be assessed relative to other, sometimes competing explanations. These might range from changing patterns of family formation to processes of industrialisation. There is little evidence that the evangelists of the post-colonial paradigm have critically assessed either the theoretical or historical materials they exploit. It would be invidious to cite examples, but one thinks in particular of conference papers on literary subjects where the 'post-colonial' adjective is applied liberally and in passing, seemingly with little relevance to argument or context. Perhaps this use of language has little serious intent, merely contributing to atmosphere and emphasis in a manner not unlike the use of 'fucking' in the dialogue of working-class Dubliners, as reconstructed in the novels of Roddy Doyle. More seriously, while it is commonplace, and indeed intuitively appealing, when developing interpretative accounts, to begin with the most generalised set of explanations and then descend in steps of increasing specificity, it is easy to confuse generality with high explanatory power. In fact, location in the hierarchy of explication may contain no clues as to relative significance or explanatory weight. Thus, in terms of the colonial/post-colonial debate, one needs to show precisely how this model illuminates our understanding of past and present, and the relative importance of any insights gained. The latter means placing colonial influences within an overall framework of causal relationships. 667

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Why? If, as appears to be the case, the pursuit of a Third World identity for Ireland is a somewhat fatuous exercise, then why should it command the attention of sections of the Irish intelligentsia? Here one is on to the marshy ground of speculation, but a few hypotheses may be in order. For the Field Day tendency in cultural politics there may be emotional satisfaction, even inspiration, in the exploitation of loose images and metaphors which seem to have some resonance in the context of the continuing agonies of Northern Ireland. For ultra-nationalists the threadbare quality of traditional rhetoric can be seemingly modernised and given a patina of legitimacy through identification with genuine liberation struggles in the Third World. Moreover, the traditional preoccupation with 'England', as the never-failing source of all Irish ills, can be given an enhanced shelf life through the medium of the post-colonial additive. In short, the image-making forms part of a political agenda in which Anglophobia and anti-Unionism are to the fore.15 Academic writers may be moved by other, or further considerations. After all, we are not dealing with a purely Irish phenomenon. The surge of post-colonialist thought owes much to the influence of Canadian writers, though the notion that one of the richest countries in the world is a victim and exemplar of post-colonialism partakes of the surreal. Like jackdaws to shiny objects, literary and cultural critics seem to be drawn to labels and packaging. Assertion becomes a low-cost substitute for evidence. Metaphors masquerade as theory. And theory is a good thing, particularly for homo academicus on the make. As Bourdieu suggests, the academic game is a status-driven and competitive one, in which a variety of strategies may be deployed in pursuit of reputation and preferment.16 Conclusion The argument of this essay is not that Ireland escaped colonisation nor that there is no colonial heritage to be explored. But it is arguing that an understanding of twentieth-century Ireland is only weakly aided by reference to such a perspective. There are a number of reasons why, when subjected to empirical inquiry, the colonial and post-colonial notions fit the Irish experience so poorly. Partly, it is a matter of indulging superficial parallels too readily. But mainly it is due to a failure of historical interpretation, in relation to Ireland and other societies. By misconstruing the evolving character of Irish-British relationships, in their economic, political and social totality, it is hardly surprising that the predictions of the 'theory' fail to materialise, either on the eve of independence or subsequently. A much more fruitful comparative perspective - illuminating issues of industrialisation, urbanisation, demography, sectarian and ethnic 668

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tensions, and secessionist politics - may be derived from the experiences of Ireland's European neighbours.17 This means also getting away from the time-worn and almost exclusive preoccupation with comparisons with Britain. On every significant economic and social indicator Ireland - North and South - is positioned among the richest countries of the world. It is part of the First World. I do not mean this in a passive sense. It is not simply that Ireland happens to find itself included in the top 20%, as measured by the living standards of its inhabitants. Mirroring its role in the nineteenth century as a part of the core of the British Empire, Ireland today is an integral part of the developed world. Through its involvement in various international treaties and frameworks, it defends its own interests against Third World countries (as Northern Ireland does not have external policies. I am referring here to the Irish Republic only.) The Irish state, through its membership of the European Community, actively promotes policies of agricultural protectionism which discriminate strongly against Third World imports. It also participates in schemes to dump European surplus output, produced under conditions of EC subsidy, onto world markets, thereby undercutting the prices of Third World producers. The story does not end there. During the last thirty years, while tariffs have been progressively reduced, non-tariff barriers to trade have been used ever-more widely by First World countries to filter out exports from developing countries. These measures include quotas, 'voluntary' export restraints, the Multi-Fibre Arrangement (alone estimated by the World Bank to have cut $75 billion off potential sales of textiles from the developing world), and other protectionist devices. The European Community, of which Ireland is a full member and a junior decision maker, was a far bigger offender in this respect than other rich countries such as the United States or Japan.18 Ireland's stance on official aid to the Third World is also in line with this hard-headed approach. Ireland committed itself to the United Nation's target of giving 0.7% of its Gross National Product as aid to developing countries. It managed a level of 0.16% of GNP in 1980, 0.28% in 1986, and even this miserly level was pared back to 0.17 in the years that followed. Viewed comparatively, Ireland donated less in official aid than most other West European societies during the last decade. One can't help thinking that developing countries might have wished for something more tangible from Ireland than protestations of a shared identity. This essay has assembled a variety of statistical measures to pin down some key issues in the debate on Ireland as a Third World Country. Lest the lives which lie behind the statistics may have become obscured, it is well to remind ourselves of the intensity of the horror of being poor in the real Third World. 669

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The 40,000 who will die today of malnutrition and disease won't be dying quickly and dramatically. Most of them will have been dying since the moment they were born and what will kill them off will be either a cumulative process of malnourishment or a stupid, insignificant disease, a fever or diarrhoea that could be prevented for the cost of a box of matches. The starving are not nice. . . . They decide that to pay their mortgage and keep their land, they must let one, maybe two, of their children - preferably daughters - die. They beg, they steal, they want to sell razor blades and shoelaces to smart foreigners who have electric razors and whose shoes would be insulted by the cheap, shoddy laces, probably made from recycled rags, that the hungry hold up in front of their noses.19 The attempt to equate life in contemporary Ireland, colonial heritage or not, with such conditions is not only misconceived. It is to trivialise the suffering of hundreds of millions of the world's peoples.

Notes 1 Wisconsin State Journal, 26 Febr. 1880. 2 Conference Programme, Is Ireland a third world country? (April 1991). The Conference papers were later published in a book of the same title, edited by Therese Cahery et al, (Belfast, 1992). 3 Fredrik Jameson, Nationalism, colonialism and literature: modernism and imperialism (Field Day Pamphlet no. 14, Derry, 1988). 4 Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest (Oxford, 1981) 5 United Nations, Statistical yearbook (New York, various years). 6 Gerardine Meaney, Sex and nation: women in Irish culture and politics (Dublin, 1991). With relief, this writer can report no references to female circumcision in such autobiographical accounts of Irish rural life as Peig Sayer's An Old Woman's Reflections. 1 K. A. Kennedy et al., The economic development of Ireland in the twentieth century (London, 1988) p. 129. 8 Gerry Adams, The politics of Irish freedom (Brandon, 1986). 9 D. S. Johnson, The interwar economy in Ireland (Dublin, 1985); Ronan Fanning, The Irish Department of Finance, 1922-58 (Dublin, 1978), pp. 276-307. 10 Liam Kennedy, The modern industrialisation of Ireland, 1940-88 (Dublin, 1989). 11 In part this was a process of invention. Compare Eric Hobsbawm and Terry Ranger eds., The invention of tradition (Cambridge, 1989) and David McCrone, Stephen Kendrick & Pat Straw eds., The making of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1989). 12 L. Paul-Dubois, Contemporary Ireland (Dublin, 1908). 13 Alan Hodgart, The economics of European imperialism (London, 1977); V.I. Lenin, Imperialism: the highest stage of capitalism (Peking, 1975). 14 Ian Roxborough, Theories of underdevelopment (London, 1979). 15 Some unionists have begun to put together their own colonial act. Note, for example, Gavin Adams et al., Ulster: the internal colony (Belfast, 1989). 670

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16 17 18 19

Pierre Bourdieu, Homo academicus (Cambridge, 1988). [A beginning in this direction is made in the final essay of this collection. World Bank, World development report 1991 (Oxford, 1991). Fintan O'Toole, Irish Times, 23 Nov. 1989.

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5.1 THE GREAT FAMILY OF MAN Roland Barthes From Annette Lavers (Selected and trans, from the French Mythologies, Editions du Seuil, 1957) Mythologies, Jonathan Cape, 1972,100-102

A big exhibition of photographs has been held in Paris, the aim of which was to show the universality of human actions in the daily life of all the countries of the world: birth, death, work, knowledge, play, always impose the same types of behaviour; there is a family of Man. The Family of Man, such at any rate was the original title of the exhibition which came here from the United States. The French have translated it as: The Great Family of Man. So what could originally pass for a phrase belonging to zoology, keeping only the similarity in behaviour, the unity of a species, is here amply moralized and sentimentalized. We are at the outset directed to this ambiguous myth of the human 'community', which serves as an alibi to a large part of our humanism. This myth functions in two stages: first the difference between human morphologies is asserted, exoticism is insistently stressed, the infinite variations of the species, the diversity in skins, skulls and customs are made manifest, the image of Babel is complacently projected over that of the world. Then, from this pluralism, a type of unity is magically produced: man is born, works, laughs and dies everywhere in the same way; and if there still remains in these actions some ethnic peculiarity, at least one hints that there is underlying each one an identical 'nature', that their diversity is only formal and does not belie the existence of a common mould. Of course this means postulating a human essence, and here is God re-introduced into our Exhibition: the diversity of men proclaims his power, his richness; the unity of their gestures demonstrates his will. This is what the introductory leaflet confides to us when it states, by the pen of M. Andre Chamson, that 'this look over the human condition must somewhat resemble the benevolent gaze of God on our absurd and 675

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sublime-ant-hill'. The pietistic intention is underlined by the quotations which accompany each chapter of the Exhibition: these quotations often are 'primitive' proverbs or verses from the Old Testament. They all define an eternal wisdom, a class of assertions which escape History: 'The Earth is a Mother who never dies, Eat bread and salt and speak the truth, etc.' This is the reign of gnomic truths, the meeting of all the ages of humanity at the most neutral point of their nature, the point where the obviousness of the truism has no longer any value except in the realm of a purely 'poetic' language. Everything here, the content and appeal of the pictures, the discourse which justifies them, aims to suppress the determining weight of History: we are held back at the surface of an identity, prevented precisely by sentimentality from penetrating into this ulterior zone of human behaviour where historical alienation introduces some 'differences' which we shall here quite simply call 'injustices'. This myth of the human 'condition' rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins (but why not ask the parents of Emmet Till, the young Negro assassinated by the Whites what they think of The Great Family of Man!), one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature. Progressive humanism, on the contrary, must always remember to reverse the terms of this very old imposture, constantly to scour nature, its 'laws' and its 'limits' in order to discover History there, and at last to establish Nature itself as historical. Examples? Here they are: those of our Exhibition. Birth, death? Yes, these are facts of nature, universal facts. But if one removes History from them, there is nothing more to be said about them; any comment about them becomes purely tautological. The failure of photography seems to me to be flagrant in this connection: to reproduce death or birth tells us, literally, nothing. For these natural facts to gain access to a true language, they must be inserted into a category of knowledge which means postulating that one can transform them, and precisely subject their naturalness to our human criticism. For however universal, they are the signs of an historical writing. True, children are always born: but in the whole mass of the human problem, what does the 'essence' of this process matter to us, compared to its modes which, as for them, are perfectly historical? Whether or not the child is born with ease or difficulty, whether or not his birth causes suffering to his mother, whether or not he is threatened by a high mortality rate, whether or not such and such a type of future is open to him: this is what your Exhibitions should be telling people, instead of an eternal lyricism of birth. The same goes for death: must we really celebrate its essence once more, and thus risk forgetting that there is still so much we can do to fight it? It is this very young, far too young power that we must exalt, and not the sterile identity of 'natural' death. 676

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And what can be said about work, which the Exhibition places among great universal facts, putting it on the same plane as birth and death, as if it was quite evident that it belongs to the same order of fate? That work is an age-old fact does not in the least prevent it from remaining a perfectly historical fact. Firstly, and evidently, because of its modes, its motivations, its ends and its benefits, which matter to such an extent that it will never be fair to confuse in a purely gestural identity the colonial and the Western worker (let us also ask the North African workers of the Goutte d'Or district in Paris what they think of The Great Family of Man). Secondly, because of the very differences in its inevitability: we know very well that work is 'natural' just as long as it is 'profitable', and that in modifying the inevitability of the profit, we shall perhaps one day modify the inevitability of labour. It is this entirely historified work which we should be told about, instead of an eternal aesthetics of laborious gestures. So that I rather fear that the final justification of all this Adamism is to give to the immobility of the world the alibi of a 'wisdom' and a 'lyricism' which only make the gestures of man look eternal the better to defuse them.

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PREFACE 1965 Albert Memmi From Howard Greenfeld (trans.) The Colonizer and the Colonized, Orion, 1965, vii-xvii

It would be untrue to say that I foresaw the full significance of this book in 1957 when I wrote it. I had written a first novel, The Pillar of Salt, a life story which was in a sense a trial balloon to help me find the direction of my own life. However, it became clear to me that a real life for a cultured man was impossible in North Africa at that time. I then tried to find another solution, this time through the problems of a mixed marriage, but this second novel, Strangers, also led me nowhere. My hopes then rested on the "couple," which still seems to me the most solid happiness of man and perhaps the only real answer to solitude. But I discovered that the couple is not an isolated entity, a forgotten oasis of light in the middle of the world; on the contrary, the whole world is within the couple. For my unfortunate protagonists, the world was that of colonization. I felt that to understand the failure of their undertaking, that of a mixed marriage in a colony, I first had to understand the colonizer and the colonized, perhaps the entire colonial relationship and situation. All this was leading me far from myself and from my own problems, but their explanation became more and more complex; so without knowing where I would end up, I had to at least try to put an end to my own anguish. It would be equally untrue to say that my ambition in painting this portrait of one of the major oppressions of our time was to describe oppressed peoples in general; it was not even my intention to write about all colonized people. I was Tunisian, therefore colonized. I discovered that few aspects of my life and my personality were untouched by this fact. Not only my own thoughts, my passions and my conduct, but also the conduct of others towards me was affected. As a young student arriving at the Sorbonne for the first time, certain rumors disturbed me. As a Tunisian, would I be allowed to sit for the examinations in philosophy? I went to see 678

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the president of the jury. "It is not a right," he explained. "It is a hope." He hesitated, a lawyer looking for the exact words. "Let us say that it is a colonial hope." I have yet to understand what that meant in fact, but I was unable to get anything more out of him. It can be imagined with what serenity I worked after that. Thus, I undertook this inventory of conditions of colonized people mainly in order to understand myself and to identify my place in the society of other men. It was my readers—not all of them Tunisian—who later convinced me that this portrait was equally theirs. My travels and conversations, meetings and books convinced me, as I advanced in my work on the book, that what I was describing was the fate of a vast multitude across the world. As I discovered that all colonized people have much in common, I was led to the conclusion that all the oppressed are alike in some ways. Nonetheless, while I was writing this book, I preferred to ignore these conclusions that today I maintain are undeniable. So many different persons saw themselves in this portrait that it became impossible to pretend that it was mine alone, or only that of colonized Tunisians, or even North Africans. I was told that in many parts of the world the colonial police confiscated the book in the cells of militant nationalists. I am convinced that I gave them nothing they did not already know, had not already experienced; but as they recognized their own emotions, their revolt, their aspirations, I suppose they appeared more legitimate to them. Above all, whatever the truthfulness of this description of our common experience, it struck them less than the coherence of ideas which I put forward. When the Algerian war was about to break out, I predicted first to myself and then to others the probable dynamism of events. The colonial relationship which I had tried to define chained the colonizer and the colonized into an implacable dependence, molded their respective characters and dictated their conduct. Just as there was an obvious logic in the reciprocal behavior of the two colonial partners, another mechanism, proceeding from the first, would lead, I believed, inexorably to the decomposition of this dependence. Events in Algeria confirmed my hypothesis; I have often verified it since then in the explosion of other colonial situations. The sum of events through which I had lived since childhood, often incoherent and contradictory on the surface, began to fall into dynamic patterns. How could the colonizer look after his workers while periodically gunning down a crowd of the colonized? How could the colonized deny himself so cruelly yet make such excessive demands? How could he hate the colonizers and yet admire them so passionately? (I too felt this admiration in spite of myself.) I needed to put some sort of order into the chaos of my feelings and to form a basis for my future actions. By temperament and education I had to do this in a disciplined manner, following the consequences as far as possible. If I had not gone all the way, trying to find 679

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coherence in all these diverse facts, reconstructing them into portraits which were answerable to one another, I could not have convinced myself and would have remained dissatisfied with my effort. I saw, then, what help to fighting men the simple, ordered description of their misery and humiliation could be. I saw how explosive the objective revelation to the colonized and the colonizer of an essentially explosive condition could be. It was as if the unveiling of the fatality of their respective paths made the struggle the more necessary and the delaying action the more desperate. Thus, the book escaped from my control. I must admit I was a bit frightened of it myself. It was clear that the book would be utilized by well-defined colonized people—Algerians, Moroccans, African Negroes. But other peoples, subjugated in other ways—certain South Americans, Japanese and American Negroes—interpreted and used the book. The most recent to find a similarity to their own form of alienation have been the French Canadians. I looked with astonishment on all this, much as a father, with a mixture of pride and apprehension, watches his son achieve a scandalous and applauded fame. Nor was all this uproar totally beneficial, for certain parts of the book of great importance to me were obscured—such as my analysis of what I call the Nero complex; and that of the failure of the European left in general and the Communist Party in particular, for having underestimated the national aspect of colonial liberation; and above all, the importance, the richness, of personal experience. For I continue to think, in spite of everything, that the importance of this endeavor is its modesty and initial particularity. Nothing in the text is invented or supposed or even hazardously transposed. Actual experience, co-ordinated and stylized, lies behind every sentence. If in the end I have consented to a general tone, it is because I know that I could, at every line, every word, produce innumerable concrete facts. I have been criticized for not having constructed my portraits entirely around an economic structure, but I feel I have repeated often enough that the idea of privilege is at the heart of the colonial relationship—and that privilege is undoubtedly economic. Let me take this opportunity to reaffirm my position: for me the economic aspect of colonialism is fundamental. The book itself opens with a denunciation of the so-called moral or cultural mission of colonization and shows that the profit motive in it is basic. I have often noted that the deprivations of the colonized are the almost direct result of the advantages secured to the colonizer. However, colonial privilege is not solely economic. To observe the life of the colonizer and the colonized is to discover rapidly that the daily humiliation of the colonized, his objective subjugation, are not merely economic. Even the poorest colonizer thought himself to be—and actually was—superior to the colonized. This too was part of colonial privilege. The Marxist discovery of the importance of the economy in all oppressive relationships is 680

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not to the point. This relationship has other characteristics which I believe I have discovered in the colonial relationship. But, one might ask, in the final analysis, don't these phenomena have a more or less hidden economic aspect? Isn't the motivating force of colonization economic? The answer is maybe—not certainly. We don't actually know what man is, or just what is essential to him; whether it is money or sex or pride. . . . Does psychoanalysis win out over Marxism? Does all depend on the individual or on society? In any case, before attacking this final analysis I wanted to show all the real complexities in the lives of the colonizer and the colonized. Psychoanalysis or Marxism must not, under the pretext of having discovered the source or one of the main sources of human conduct, preempt all experience, all feeling, all suffering, all the byways of human behavior, and call them profit motive or Oedipus complex. I put forward another example which will probably go against my cause; but I believe that as a writer I must state everything, even that which can be used against me. My portrait of the colonized, which is very much my own, is preceded by a portrait of the colonizer. How could I have permitted myself, with all my concern about personal experience, to draw a portrait of the adversary? Here is a confession I have never made before: I know the colonizer from the inside almost as well as I know the colonized. But I must explain: I said that I was a Tunisian national. Like all other Tunisians I was treated as a second-class citizen, deprived of political rights, refused admission to most civil service departments, etc. But I was not a Moslem. In a country where so many groups, each jealous of its own physiognomy, lived side by side, this was of considerable importance. The Jewish population identified as much with the colonizers as with the colonized. They were undeniably "natives," as they were then called, as near as possible to the Moslems in poverty, language, sensibilities, customs, taste in music, odors and cooking. However, unlike the Moslems, they passionately endeavored to identify themselves with the French. To them the West was the paragon of all civilization, all culture. The Jew turned his back happily on the East. He chose the French language, dressed in the Italian style and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans. (This, by the way, is what all colonized try to do before they pass on to the stage of revolt.) For better or for worse, the Jew found himself one small notch above the Moslem on the pyramid which is the basis of all colonial societies. His privileges were laughable, but they were enough to make him proud and to make him hope that he was not part of the mass of Moslems which constituted the base of the pyramid. It was enough to make him feel endangered when the structure began to crumble. The Jews bore arms side by side with the French in the streets of Algiers. My own relations with my fellow Jews were not made any easier when I decided to join the colonized, but it was necessary for me to denounce colonialism, even though it was not as hard on the Jews as it was on the others. 681

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Because of this ambivalence I knew only too well the contradictory emotions which swayed their lives. Didn't my own heart beat faster at the sight of the little flag on the stem of the ships that joined Tunis to Marseille? All this explains why the portrait of the colonizer was in part my own— projected in a geometric sense. My model for the portrait of the colonizer of good will was taken in particular from a group of philosophy professors in Tunis. Their generosity was unquestionable; so, unfortunately, was their impotence, their inability to make themselves heard by anyone else in the colony. However, it was among these men that I felt most at ease. While I was virtuously busy debunking the myths of colonization, could I complacently approve of the counter-myths fabricated by the colonized? I could but smile with my friends at their halting assurance that Andalusian music is the most beautiful in the world; or that Europeans are fundamentally bad (the proof being that they are too harsh with their children). Naturally the result was suspicion on the part of the colonized. And this in spite of the immense good will of this type of French colonizer and the fact that these Frenchmen were already despised by the rest of the French community. I understood only too well their difficulties, their inevitable ambiguity and the resulting isolation; more serious still, their inability to act. All this was a part of my own fate. Shall I go even further? Though I could not approve of them, I understood even the hard-core colonizers (pieds noirs)—they were more simple in thought and action. As I have stated repeatedly, a man is a product of his objective situation; thus I had to ask myself if I would have condemned colonization so vigorously if I had actually benefited from it myself. I hope so, but to have suffered from it only slightly less than the others did has made me more understanding. The most blindly stubborn pied noir was, in effect, my born brother. Life has treated us differently; he was the legitimate son of France, heir to privileges which he would defend at any price whatsoever; I was a sort of half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one. This book has caused as much anguish and anger as it has enthusiasm. On the one hand, people saw it as an insolent provocation; on the other, a flag to which to rally. Everyone agreed on its militant aspect. It seemed to be an arm in the war against colonization, and indeed it has become one. But nothing seems more ridiculous to me than to boast of borrowed courage and feats never accomplished. I have mentioned how relatively naive I was when I wrote this book. Then I simply wanted to understand the colonial relationship to which I was bound. I am not saying that my philosophy was alien to my search, my anger and, in a way, my whole life. I am unconditionally opposed to all forms of oppression. For me, oppression is the greatest calamity of humanity. It diverts and pollutes the best energies of man—of oppressed and oppressor alike. For if colonization 682

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destroys the colonized, it also rots the colonizer. Be that as it may, provocation was not the object of my work. The effectiveness of the material came gratuitously by the sole virtue of truth. It was probably sufficient to describe with precision the facts of colonization, the manner in which the colonizer was bound to act, the slow and inevitable destruction of the colonized, to bring to light the absolute iniquity of colonization; and, at the same time, to unveil the fundamental instability of it and predict its demise. My only merit was to have endeavored, over and above my own uneasiness, to describe an unbearable, therefore unacceptable, aspect of reality, one which was destined to provoke continuing upheavals, costly for everyone. Instead of reading this book for its scandalous content or as a permanent provocation to revolt, I hope the reader will calmly examine why these conclusions were reached, conclusions which continue to be reached spontaneously by so many people in similar situations. Is this not simply because these two portraits are faithful to their models? They don't have to recognize themselves in my mirror to discover all by themselves the most useful course of action in their lives of misery. Everyone knows the confusion which still exists between the artist and his subject. Instead of being irritated by what writers say, and accusing them of trying to create disturbances which they only describe and announce, it would be better to listen more attentively and take their warnings more seriously. Do I not have the right, after so many disastrous and useless colonial wars, to think that this book could have been useful to the colonizer as well as to the colonized? A.M. PARIS, 1965

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5.3 MYTHICAL PORTRAIT OF THE COLONIZED Albert Memmi From Howard Greenfeld (trans.) The Colonizer and the Colonized, Orion Press, 1965, 79-89. From Portrait du Colonise precede du Portrait du Colonisateur, Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1957.

Just as the bourgeoisie proposes an image of the proletariat, the existence of the colonizer requires that an image of the colonized be suggested. These images become excuses without which the presence and conduct of a colonizer, and that of a bourgeois, would seem shocking. But the favored image becomes a myth precisely because it suits them too well. Let us imagine, for the sake of this portrait and accusation, the oftencited trait of laziness. It seems to receive unanimous approval of colonizers from Liberia to Laos, via the Maghreb. It is easy to see to what extent this description is useful. It occupies an important place in the dialectics exalting the colonizer and humbling the colonized. Furthermore, it is economically fruitful. Nothing could better justify the colonizer's privileged position than his industry, and nothing could better justify the colonized's destitution than his indolence. The mythical portrait of the colonized therefore includes an unbelievable laziness, and that of the colonizer, a virtuous taste for action. At the same time the colonizer suggests that employing the colonized is not very profitable, thereby authorizing his unreasonable wages. It may seem that colonization would profit by employing experienced personnel. Nothing is less true. A qualified worker existing among the colonizers earns three or four times more than does the colonized, while he does not produce three or four times as much, either in quantity or in quality. It is more advantageous to use three of the colonized than one European. Every firm needs specialists, of course, but only a minimum of them, and the colonizer imports or recruits experts among his own kind. In addition, there is the matter of the special attention and legal protection required by a European worker. The colonized, however, is only asked for 684

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his muscles; he is so poorly evaluated that three or four can be taken on for the price of one European. From listening to him, on the other hand, one finds that the colonizer is not so displeased with that laziness, whether supposed or real. He talks of it with amused affability, he jokes about it, he takes up all the usual expressions, perfects them, and invents others. Nothing can describe well enough the extraordinary deficiency of the colonized. He becomes lyrical about it, in a negative way. The colonized doesn't let grass grow under his feet, but a tree, and what a tree! A eucalyptus, an American centenarian oak! A tree? No, a forest! But, one will insist, is the colonized truly lazy? To tell the truth, the question is poorly stated. Besides having to define a point of reference, a norm, varying from one people to another, can one accuse an entire people of laziness? It can be suspected of individuals, even many of them in a single group. One can wonder if their output is mediocre, whether malnutrition, low wages, a closed future, a ridiculous conception of a role in society, does not make the colonized uninterested in his work. What is suspect is that the accusation is not directed solely at the farm laborer or slum resident, but also at the professor, engineer or physician who does the same number of hours of work as his colonizer colleagues; indeed, all individuals of the colonized group are accused. Essentially, the independence of the accusation from any sociological or historical conditions makes it suspect. In fact, the accusation has nothing to do with an objective notation, therefore subject to possible changes, but of an institution. By his accusation the colonizer establishes the colonized as being lazy. He decides that laziness is constitutional in the very nature of the colonized. It becomes obvious that the colonized, whatever he may undertake, whatever zeal he may apply, could never be anything but lazy. This always brings us back to racism, which is the substantive expression, to the accuser's benefit, of a real or imaginary trait of the accused. It is possible to proceed with the same analysis for each of the features found in the colonized. Whenever the colonizer states, in his language, that the colonized is a weakling, he suggests thereby that this deficiency requires protection. From this comes the concept of a protectorate. It is in the colonized's own interest that he be excluded from management functions, and that those heavy responsibilities be reserved for the colonizer. Whenever the colonizer adds, in order not to fall prey to anxiety, that the colonized is a wicked, backward person with evil, thievish, somewhat sadistic instincts, he thus justifies his police and his legitimate severity. After all, he must defend himself against the dangerous foolish acts of the irresponsible, and at the same time—what meritorious concern!—protect him against himself! It is the same for the colonized's lack of desires, his ineptitude for 685

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comfort, science, progress, his astonishing familiarity with poverty. Why should the colonizer worry about things that hardly trouble the interested party? It would be, he adds with dark and insolent philosophy, doing him a bad turn if he subjected him to the disadvantages of civilization. After all, remember that wisdom is Eastern; let us accept, as he does, the colonized's wretchedness. The same reasoning is also true for the colonized's notorious ingratitude; the colonizer's acts of charity are wasted, the improvements the colonizer has made are not appreciated. It is impossible to save the colonized from this myth—a portrait of wretchedness has been indelibly engraved. It is significant that this portrait requires nothing else. It is difficult, for instance, to reconcile most of these features and then to proceed to synthesize them objectively. One can hardly see how the colonized can be simultaneously inferior and wicked, lazy and backward. What is more, the traits ascribed to the colonized are incompatible with one another, though this does not bother his prosecutor. He is depicted as frugal, sober, without many desires and, at the same time, he consumes disgusting quantities of meat, fat, alcohol, anything; as a coward who is afraid of suffering and as a brute who is not checked by any inhibitions of civilization, etc. It is additional proof that it is useless to seek this consistency anywhere except in the colonizer himself. At the basis of the entire construction, one finally finds a common motive; the colonizer's economic and basic needs, which he substitutes for logic, and which shape and explain each of the traits he assigns to the colonized. In the last analysis, these traits are all advantageous to the colonizer, even those which at first sight seem damaging to him. The point is that the colonized means little to the colonizer. Far from wanting to understand him as he really is, the colonizer is preoccupied with making him undergo this urgent change. The mechanism of this remolding of the colonized is revealing in itself. It consists, in the first place, of a series of negations. The colonized is not this, is not that. He is never considered in a positive light; or if he is, the quality which is conceded is the result of a psychological or ethical failing. Thus it is with Arab hospitality, which is difficult to consider as a negative characteristic. If one pays attention, one discovers that the praise comes from tourists, visiting Europeans, and not colonizers, i.e., Europeans who have settled down in the colony. As soon as he is settled, the European no longer takes advantage of this hospitality, but cuts off intercourse and contributes to the barriers which plague the colonized. He rapidly changes palette to portray the colonized, who becomes jealous, withdrawn, intolerant and fanatical. What happens to the famous hospitality? Since he cannot deny it, the colonizer then brings into play the shadows and describes the disastrous consequences. This hospitality is a result of the colonized's irresponsibility and extrava686

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gance, since he has no notion of foresight or economy. From the wealthy down to the fellah, the festivities are wonderful and bountiful: but what happens afterward? The colonized ruins himself, borrows and finally pays with someone else's money! Does one speak, on the other hand, of the modesty of the colonized's life? Of his not less well known lack of needs? It is no longer a proof of wisdom but of stupidity—as if, then, every recognized or invented trait had to be an indication of negativity. Thus, one after another, all the qualities which make a man of the colonized crumble away. The humanity of the colonized, rejected by the colonizer, becomes opaque. It is useless, he asserts, to try to forecast the colonized's actions ("They are unpredictable!" "With them, you never know!"). It seems to him that strange and disturbing impulsiveness controls the colonized. The colonized must indeed be very strange, if he remains so mysterious after years of living with the colonizer. Another sign of the colonized's depersonalization is what one might call the mark of the plural. The colonized is never characterized in an individual manner; he is entitled only to drown in an anonymous collectivity ("They are this." "They are all the same."). If a colonized servant does not come in one morning, the colonizer will not say that she is ill, or that she is cheating, or that she is tempted not to abide by an oppressive contract. (Seven days a week; colonized domestics rarely enjoy the one day off a week granted to others.) He will say, "You can't count on them." It is not just a grammatical expression. He refuses to consider personal, private occurrences in his maid's life; that life in a specific sense does not interest him, and his maid does not exist as an individual. Finally, the colonizer denies the colonized the most precious right granted to most men: liberty. Living conditions imposed on the colonized by colonization make no provision for it; indeed, they ignore it. The colonized has no way out of his state of woe—neither a legal outlet (naturalization) nor a religious outlet (conversion). The colonized is not free to choose between being colonized or not being colonized. What is left of the colonized at the end of this stubborn effort to dehumanize him? He is surely no longer an alter ego of the colonizer. He is hardly a human being. He tends rapidly toward becoming an object. As an end, in the colonizer's supreme ambition, he should exist only as a function of the needs of the colonizer, i.e., be transformed into a pure colonized. The extraordinary efficiency of this operation is obvious. One does not have a serious obligation toward an animal or an object. It is then easily understood that the colonizer can indulge in such shocking attitudes and opinions. A colonized driving a car is a sight to which the colonizer refuses to become accustomed; he denies him all normality. An accident, even a serious one, overtaking the colonized almost makes him laugh. A machine-gun burst into a crowd of colonized causes him merely to shrug 687

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his shoulders. Even a native mother weeping over the death of her son or a native woman weeping for her husband reminds him only vaguely of the grief of a mother or a wife. Those desperate cries, those unfamiliar gestures, would be enough to freeze his compassion even if it were aroused. An author was recently humorously telling us how rebelling natives were driven like game toward huge cages. The fact that someone had conceived and then dared build those cages, and even more, that reporters had been allowed to photograph the fighting, certainly proves that the spectacle had contained nothing human. Madness for destroying the colonized having originated with the needs of the colonizer, it is not surprising that it conforms so well to them, that it seems to confirm and justify the colonizer's conduct. More surprising, more harmful perhaps, is the echo that it excites in the colonized himself. Constantly confronted with this image of himself, set forth and imposed on all institutions and in every human contact, how could the colonized help reacting to his portrait? It cannot leave him indifferent and remain a veneer which, like an insult, blows with the wind. He ends up recognizing it as one would a detested nickname which has become a familiar description. The accusation disturbs him and worries him even more because he admires and fears his powerful accuser. "Is he not partially right?" he mutters. "Are we not all a little guilty after all? Lazy, because we have so many idlers? Timid, because we let ourselves be oppressed." Willfully created and spread by the colonizer, this mythical and degrading portrait ends up by being accepted and lived with to a certain extent by the colonized. It thus acquires a certain amount of reality and contributes to the true portrait of the colonized. This process is not unknown. It is a hoax. It is common knowledge that the ideology of a governing class is adopted in large measure by the governed classes. Now, every ideology of combat includes as an integral part of itself a conception of the adversary. By agreeing to this ideology, the dominated classes practically confirm the role assigned to them. This explains, inter alia, the relative stability of societies; oppression is tolerated willy-nilly by the oppressed themselves. In colonial relationships, domination is imposed by people upon people but the pattern remains the same. The characterization and role of the colonized occupies a choice place in colonialist ideology; a characterization which is neither true to life, or in itself incoherent, but necessary and inseparable within that ideology. It is one to which the colonized gives his troubled and partial, but undeniable, assent. There is only a particle of truth in the fashionable notions of "dependency complex," "colonizability," etc. There undoubtedly exists—at some point in its evolution—a certain adherence of the colonized to colonization. However, this adherence is the result of colonization and not its cause. It arises after and not before colonial occupation. In order for the colonizer to 688

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be the complete master, it is not enough for him to be so in actual fact, but he must also believe in its legitimacy. In order for that legitimacy to be complete, it is not enough for the colonized to be a slave, he must also accept this role. The bond between colonizer and colonized is thus destructive and creative. It destroys and re-creates the two partners of colonization into colonizer and colonized. One is disfigured into an oppressor, a partial, unpatriotic and treacherous being, worrying only about his privileges and their defense; the other, into an oppressed creature, whose development is broken and who compromises by his defeat. Just as the colonizer is tempted to accept his part, the colonized is forced to accept being colonized.

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PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION AND APOLOGY FOR DUCKOLOGY Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart From David Kunzle (trans.) How To Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, International General, 1975, 9-10, 25-6. First published as Para Leer al Pato Donald Ediciones Universitarias de Valparaiso, 1971.

Preface to the English Edition To say that this book was burnt in Chile should not come as a surprise to anyone. Hundreds of books were destroyed, and thousands more prohibited and censored. It was written in the middle of 1971, in the middle of the Chilean revolutionary process. Copper had been rescued, the land was being returned to the peasantry, the whole Chilean people were recovering the industries that during the twentieth century had been the means of enrichment for Mr. Rockefeller, Grace, Guggenheim, and Morgan. Because this process was intolerable to the United States government and its multinational corporations, it had to be stopped. They organized a plan, which at the time was suspected, and since has been confirmed by Mr. Kissinger, Ford and Colby to have been directed and financed by the United States intelligence services. Their objective: to overthrow the constitutional government of Chile. To realize their objective, an "invisible blockade" was imposed: credits were denied, spare parts purchased for industrial machinery were not sent, and later, the Chilean State bank accounts in the U.S. were blocked, and an embargo preventing the sale of Chilean copper throughout the world was organized. There were, however, two items which were not blocked: planes, tanks, ships and technical assistance for the Chilean armed forces; and magazines, TV serials, advertising, and public opinion polls for the Chilean 690

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mass media, which continued, for the most part, to be in the hands of the small group which was losing its privileges. To maintain them, with those of the U.S., their media prepared the climate for the bourgeois insurrection which finally materialized some years later on the llth of September 1973. Each day, with expert U.S. advice, in each newspaper, each weekly, each monthly magazine, each news dispatch, each movie, and each comic book, their arsenal of psychological warfare was fortified. In the words of General Pinochet, the point was to "conquer the minds," while in the words of Donald Duck (in the magazine Disneylandia published in December 1971, coinciding with the first mass rallies of native fascism, the so-called "march of the empty pots and pans") the point was to "restore the king." But the people did not want the restoration of the king nor of the businessman. The popular Chilean cultural offensive, which accompanied the social and economic liberation, took multiple forms: wall paintings, popular papers, TV programs, motion pictures, theater, songs, literature. In all areas of human activity, with differing degrees of intensity, the people expressed their will. Perhaps the most important arm of this offensive, was the work of the State Publishing House "Quimantu," a word meaning "Sunshine of Knowledge" in the language of the native Chilean Mapuche indians. In two and a half years it published five million books; twice the amount which had been published in all of Chile during the past seventy years. In addition, it transformed the content of some of the magazines it had inherited from before the Popular Unity government, and created new ones. It is in this multi-faceted context, with a people on the march to cultural liberation - a process which also meant criticizing the "mass" cultural merchandise exported so profitably by the U.S. to the Third World - that How to Read Donald Duck was generated. We simply answered a practical need; it was not an academic exercise. For the mad dog warriors on that September llth, there were no paintings on the walls. There were only enormous "stains" which dirtied the city and memory. They, using the fascist youth brigades, whitewashed all the singing, many-colored walls of the nation. They broke records, murdered singers, destroyed radios and printing presses, emprisoned and executed journalists, so that nothing would be left to remind anybody of anything about the struggle for national liberation. But it was not enough to clean these cultural "stains" from the street. The most important task was to eliminate all those who bore the "stain" inside themselves, the fighters, workers, peasants, employees, students, and patriotic soldiers, to eliminate these creators of a new life, to eliminate this new life which grew, and for which we all created. This book, conceived for the Chilean people, and our urgent needs, produced in the midst of our struggle, is now being published far from Chile in the uncleland of Disney, behind the barbed wire network of ITT. 691

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Mr. Disney, we are returning your Duck. Feathers plucked and wellroasted. Look inside, you can see the handwriting on the wall, our hands still writing on the wall: Donald, Go Home! Dorfman and Mattelart January 1975, in exile

Apology in Duckology The reader of this book may feel disconcerted, not so much because one of his idols turns out to have feet of clay, but rather because the kind of language we use here is intended to break with the false solemnity which generally cloaks scientific investigation. In order to attain knowledge, which is a form of power, we cannot continue to endorse, with blinded vision and stilted jargon, the initiation rituals with which our spiritual high priests seek to legitimize and protect their exclusive privileges of thought and expression. Even when denouncing prevailing fallacies, investigators tend to fall with their language into the same kind of mystification which they hope to destroy. This fear of breaking the confines of language, of the future as a conscious force of the imagination, of a close and lasting contact with the reader, this dread of appearing insignificant and naked before one's particular limited public, betrays an aversion for life and for reality as a whole. We do not want to be like the scientist who takes his umbrella with him to go study the rain. We are not about to deny scientific rationalism. Nor do we aspire to some clumsy popularization. What we do hope to achieve is a more direct and practical means of communication, and to reconcile pleasure with knowledge. The best critical endeavor incorporates, apart from its analysis of reality, a degree of methodological self-criticism. The problem here is not one of relative complexity or simplicity, but one of bringing the terms of criticism itself under scrutiny. Readers will judge this experiment for themselves, preferably in an active, productive manner. It results from a joint effort; that of two researchers who until now have observed the preordained limits of their respective disciplines, the humanistic and social sciences, and who found themselves obliged to change their methods of interpretation and communication. Some, from the bias of their individualism, may rake this book over sentence by sentence, carving it up, assigning this part to that person, in the hopes of maybe restoring that social division of intellectual labor which leaves them so comfortably settled in their armchair or university chair. This work is not to be subjected to a letter-by-letter breakdown by 692

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some hysterical computer, but to be considered a joint effort of conception and writing. Furthermore, it is part of an effort to achieve a wider, more massive distribution of the basic ideas contained in this book. Unfortunately, these ideas are not always easily accessible to all of the readers we would like to reach, given the educational level of our people. This is especially the case since the criticism contained in the book cannot follow the same popular channels which the bourgeoisie controls to propagate its own values. We are grateful to the students of CEREN (Centre de Estudios de la Realidad Nacional, Center for the Study of Chilean Society, at the Catholic University), and to the seminar on "Subliterature and Ways to Combat it" (Department of Spanish, University of Chile) for the constant individual and collective contributions to our work. Ariel Dorfman, member of the Juvenile and Educational Publications Division of Quimantu, was able to participate in the development of this book thanks to the assignment offered to him by the Department of Spanish at the University of Chile. Armand Mattelart, head of Quimantii's Investigation and Evaluation of the Mass Media Section, and Research Professor of CEREN, participated in the book thanks to a similar dispensation. 4 September 1971, First anniversary of the triumph of the Popular Unity Government

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THREE W O M E N ' S TEXTS AND A CRITIQUE OF IMPERIALISM Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak From Critical Inquiry 12 (Autumn 1985): 243-61

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The role of literature in the production of cultural representation should not be ignored. These two obvious "facts" continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. If these "facts" were remembered, not only in the study of British literature but in the study of the literatures of the European colonizing cultures of the great age of imperialism, we would produce a narrative, in literary history, of the "worlding" of what is now called "the Third World." To consider the Third World as distant cultures, exploited but with rich intact literary heritages waiting to be recovered, interpreted, and curricularized in English translation fosters the emergence of "the Third World" as a signifier that allows us to forget that "worlding," even as it expands the empire of the literary discipline.1 It seems particularly unfortunate when the emergent perspective of feminist criticism reproduces the axioms of imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration for the literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America establishes the high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an information-retrieval approach to "Third World" literature which often employs a deliberately "nonmeoretical" methodology with self-conscious rectitude. In this essay, I will attempt to examine the operation of the "worlding" 694

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of what is today "the Third World" by what has become a cult text of feminism: Jane Eyre.2 I plot the novel's reach and grasp, and locate its structural motors. I read Wide Sargasso Sea as Jane Eyre's, reinscription and Frankenstein as an analysis—even a deconstruction—of a "worlding" such as Jane Eyre's.3 I need hardly mention that the object of my investigation is the printed book, not its "author." To make such a distinction is, of course, to ignore the lessons of deconstruction. A deconstructive critical approach would loosen the binding of the book, undo the opposition between verbal text and the bio-graphy of the named subject "Charlotte Bronte," and see the two as each other's "scene of writing." In such a reading, the life that writes itself as "my life" is as much a production in psychosocial space (other names can be found) as the book that is written by the holder of that named life—a book that is then consigned to what is most often recognized as genuinely "social": the world of publication and distribution.4 To touch Bronte's "life" in such a way, however, would be too risky here. We must rather strategically take shelter in an essentialism which, not wishing to lose the important advantages won by U.S. mainstream feminism, will continue to honor the suspect binary oppositions—book and author, individual and history—and start with an assurance of the following sort: my readings here do not seek to undermine the excellence of the individual artist. If even minimally successful, the readings will incite a degree of rage against the imperialist narrativization of history, that it should produce so abject a script for her. I provide these assurances to allow myself some room to situate feminist individualism in its historical determination rather than simply to canonize it as feminism as such. Sympathetic U.S. feminists have remarked that I do not do justice to Jane Eyre's subjectivity. A word of explanation is perhaps in order. The broad strokes of my presuppositions are that what is at stake, for feminist individualism in the age of imperialism, is precisely the making of human beings, the constitution and "interpellation" of the subject not only as individual but as "individualist."5 This stake is represented on two registers: childbearing and soul making. The first is domestic-society-throughsexual-reproduction cathected as "companionate love"; the second is the imperialist project cathected as civil-society-through-social-mission. As the female individualist, not-quite/not-male, articulates herself in shifting relationship to what is at stake, the "native female" as such (within discourse, as a signifier) is excluded from any share in this emerging norm.6 If we read this account from an isolationist perspective in a "metropolitan" context, we see nothing there but the psychobiography of the militant female subject. In a reading such as mine, in contrast, the effort is to wrench oneself away from the mesmerizing focus of the "subjectconstitution" of the female individualist. To develop further the notion that my stance need not be an accusing 695

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one, I will refer to a passage from Roberto Fernandez Retamar's "Caliban."7 Jose Enrique Rodo had argued in 1900 that the model for the Latin American intellectual in relationship to Europe could be Shakespeare's Ariel.8 In 1971 Retamar, denying the possibility of an identifiable "Latin American Culture," recast the model as Caliban. Not surprisingly, this powerful exchange still excludes any specific consideration of the civilizations of the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, or the smaller nations of what is now called Latin America. Let us note carefully that, at this stage of my argument, this "conversation" between Europe and Latin America (without a specific consideration of the political economy of the "worlding" of the "native") provides a sufficient thematic description of our attempt to confront the ethnocentric and reverse-ethnocentric benevolent double bind (that is, considering the "native" as object for enthusiastic information-retrieval and thus denying its own "worlding") that I sketched in my opening paragraphs. In a moving passage in "Caliban," Retamar locates both Caliban and Ariel in the postcolonial intellectual: There is no real Ariel-Caliban polarity: both are slaves in the hands of Prospero, the foreign magician. But Caliban is the rude and unconquerable master of the island, while Ariel, a creature of the air, although also a child of the isle, is the intellectual. The deformed Caliban—enslaved, robbed of his island, and taught the language by Prospero—rebukes him thus: "You taught me language, and my profit on't/Is, I know how to curse." ["C," pp. 28,11] As we attempt to unlearn our so-called privilege as Ariel and "seek from [a certain] Caliban the honor of a place in his rebellious and glorious ranks," we do not ask that our students and colleagues should emulate us but that they should attend to us ("C," p. 72). If, however, we are driven by a nostalgia for lost origins, we too run the risk of effacing the "native" and stepping forth as "the real Caliban," of forgetting that he is a name in a play, an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text.9 The stagings of Caliban work alongside the narrativization of history: claiming to be Caliban legitimizes the very individualism that we must persistently attempt to undermine from within. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in an article on history and women's history, shows us how to define the historical moment of feminism in the West in terms of female access to individualism.10 The battle for female individualism plays itself out within the larger theater of the establishment of meritocratic individualism, indexed in the aesthetic field by the ideology of "the creative imagination." Fox-Genovese's presupposition will guide us into the beautifully orchestrated opening of Jane Eyre. 696

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It is a scene of the marginalization and privatization of the protagonist: "There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. . . . Out-door exercise was now out of the question. I was glad of it," Bronte writes (JE, p. 9). The movement continues as Jane breaks the rules of the appropriate topography of withdrawal. The family at the center withdraws into the sanctioned architectural space of the withdrawing room or drawing room; Jane inserts herself—"I slipped in"—into the margin—"A small breakfast-room adjoined the drawing room" (JE, p. 9; my emphasis). The manipulation of the domestic inscription of space within the upwardly mobilizing currents of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in England and France is well known. It seems fitting that the place to which Jane withdraws is not only not the withdrawing room but also not the dining room, the sanctioned place of family meals. Nor is it the library, the appropriate place for reading. The breakfast room "contained a book-case" (JE, p. 9). As Rudolph Ackerman wrote in his Repository (1823), one of the many manuals of taste in circulation in nineteenth-century England, these low bookcases and stands were designed to "contain all the books that may be desired for a sitting-room without reference to the library."11 Even in this already triply off-center place, "having drawn the red moreen curtain nearly close, I [Jane] was shrined in double retirement" (JE, pp. 9-10). Here in Jane's self-marginalized uniqueness, the reader becomes her accomplice: the reader and Jane are united—both are reading. Yet Jane still preserves her odd privilege, for she continues never quite doing the proper thing in its proper place. She cares little for reading what is meant to be read: the "letter-press." She reads the pictures. The power of this singular hermeneutics is precisely that it can make the outside inside. "At intervals, while turning over the leaves of my book, I studied the aspect of that winter afternoon." Under "the clear panes of glass," the rain no longer penetrates, "the drear November day" is rather a one-dimensional "aspect" to be "studied," not decoded like the "letter-press" but, like pictures, deciphered by the unique creative imagination of the marginal individualist (JE, p. 10). Before following the track of this unique imagination, let us consider the suggestion that the progress of Jane Eyre can be charted through a sequential arrangement of the family/counter-family dyad. In the novel, we encounter, first, the Reeds as the legal family and Jane, the late Mr. Reed's sister's daughter, as the representative of a near incestuous counter-family; second, the Brocklehursts, who run the school Jane is sent to, as the legal family and Jane, Miss Temple, and Helen Burns as a counter-family that falls short because it is only a community of women; third, Rochester and the mad Mrs. Rochester as the legal family and Jane and Rochester as the illicit counter-family. Other items may be added to the thematic chain in this sequence: Rochester and Celine 697

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Varens as structurally functional counter-family; Rochester and Blanche Ingram as dissimulation of legality—and so on. It is during this sequence that Jane is moved from the counter-family to the family-in-law. In the next sequence, it is Jane who restores full family status to the as-yetincomplete community of siblings, the Riverses. The final sequence of the book is a community of families, with Jane, Rochester, and their children at the center. In terms of the narrative energy of the novel, how is Jane moved from the place of the counter-family to the family-in-law? It is the active ideology of imperialism that provides the discursive field. (My working definition of "discursive field" must assume the existence of discrete "systems of signs" at hand in the socius, each based on a specific axiomatics. I am identifying these systems as discursive fields. "Imperialism as social mission" generates the possibility of one such axiomatics. How the individual artist taps the discursive field at hand with a sure touch, if not with transhistorical clairvoyance, in order to make the narrative structure move I hope to demonstrate through the following example. It is crucial that we extend our analysis of this example beyond the minimal diagnosis of "racism.") Let us consider the figure of Bertha Mason, a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism. Through Bertha Mason, the white Jamaican Creole, Bronte renders the human/animal frontier as acceptably indeterminate, so that a good greater than the letter of the Law can be broached. Here is the celebrated passage, given in the voice of Jane: In the deep shade, at the further end of the room, a figure ran backwards and forwards. What it was, whether beast or human being, one could not. .. tell: it grovelled, seemingly, on all fours; it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal: but it was covered with clothing, and a quantity of dark, grizzled hair, wild as a mane, hid its head and face [JE, p. 295] In a matching passage, given in the voice of Rochester speaking to Jane, Bronte presents the imperative for a shift beyond the Law as divine injunction rather than human motive. In the terms of my essay, we might say that this is the register not of mere marriage or sexual reproduction but of Europe and its not-yet-human Other, of soul making. The field of imperial conquest is here inscribed as Hell: "One night I had been awakened by her yells . . . it was a fiery West Indian night... . " 'This life,' said I at last, 'is hell!—this is the air—those are the sounds of the bottomless pit! / have a right to deliver myself from it if I can.. .. Let me break away, and go home to God!'. . . 698

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"A wind fresh from Europe blew over the ocean and rushed through the open casement: the storm broke, streamed, thundered, blazed, and the air grew pure. . . . It was true Wisdom that consoled me in that hour, and showed me the right path.... "The sweet wind from Europe was still whispering in the refreshed leaves, and the Atlantic was thundering in glorious liberty.... " 'Go,' said Hope, 'and live again in Europe. . . . You have done all that God and Humanity require of you.' " [JE, pp. 310-11; my emphasis] It is the unquestioned ideology of imperialist axiomatics, then, that conditions Jane's move from the counter-family set to the set of the family-inlaw. Marxist critics such as Terry Eagleton have seen this only in terms of the ambiguous class position of the governess.12 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, on the other hand, have seen Bertha Mason only in psychological terms, as Jane's dark double.13 I will not enter the critical debates that offer themselves here. Instead, I will develop the suggestion that nineteenth-century feminist individualism could conceive of a "greater" project than access to the closed circle of the nuclear family. This is the project of soul making beyond "mere" sexual reproduction. Here the native "subject" is not almost an animal but rather the object of what might be termed the terrorism of the categorical imperative. I am using "Kant" in this essay as a metonym for the most flexible ethical moment in the European eighteenth century. Kant words the categorical imperative, conceived as the universal moral law given by pure reason, in this way: "In all creation every thing one chooses and over which one has any power, may be used merely as means; man alone, and with him every rational creature, is an end in himself." It is thus a moving displacement of Christian ethics from religion to philosophy. As Kant writes: "With this agrees very well the possibility of such a command as: Love God above everything, and thy neighbor as thyself. For as a command it requires respect for a law which commands love and does not leave it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle."14 The "categorical" in Kant cannot be adequately represented in determinately grounded action. The dangerous transformative power of philosophy, however, is that its formal subtlety can be travestied in the service of the state. Such a travesty in the case of the categorical imperative can justify the imperialist project by producing the following formula: make the heathen into a human so that he can be treated as an end in himself.15 This project is presented as a sort of tangent in Jane Eyre, a tangent that escapes the closed circle of the narrative conclusion. The tangent narrative is the story of St. John Rivers, who is granted the important task of concluding the text. 699

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At the novel's end, the allegorical language of Christian psychobiography—rather than the textually constituted and seemingly private grammar of the creative imagination which we noted in the novel's opening—marks the inaccessibility of the imperialist project as such to the nascent "feminist" scenario. The concluding passage of Jane Eyre places St. John Rivers within the fold of Pilgrim's Progress. Eagleton pays no attention to this but accepts the novel's ideological lexicon, which establishes St. John Rivers' heroism by identifying a life in Calcutta with an unquestioning choice of death. Gilbert and Gubar, by calling Jane Eyre "Plain Jane's progress," see the novel as simply replacing the male protagonist with the female. They do not notice the distance between sexual reproduction and soul making, both actualized by the unquestioned idiom of imperialist presuppositions evident in the last part of Jane Eyre: Firm, faithful, and devoted, full of energy, and zeal, and truth, [St. John Rivers] labours for his race. . . . His is the sternness of the warrior Greatheart, who guards his pilgrim convoy from the onslaught of Apollyon. . . . His is the ambition of the high masterspirit^] . . . who stand without fault before the throne of God; who share the last mighty victories of the Lamb; who are called, and chosen, and faithful. [JE, p. 455] Earlier in the novel, St. John Rivers himself justifies the project: "My vocation? My great work? . . . My hopes of being numbered in the band who have merged all ambitions in the glorious one of bettering their race—of carrying knowledge into the realms of ignorance—of substituting peace for war—freedom for bondage—religion for superstition—the hope of heaven for the fear of hell?" (JE, p. 376). Imperialism and its territorial and subject-constituting project are a violent deconstruction of these oppositions. When Jean Rhys, born on the Caribbean island of Dominica, read Jane Eyre as a child, she was moved by Bertha Mason: "I thought I'd try to write her a life."16 Wide Sargasso Sea, the slim novel published in 1965, at the end of Rhys' long career, is that "life." I have suggested that Bertha's function in Jane Eyre is to render indeterminate the boundary between human and animal and thereby to weaken her entitlement under the spirit if not the letter of the Law. When Rhys rewrites the scene in Jane Eyre where Jane hears "a snarling, snatching sound, almost like a dog quarrelling" and then encounters a bleeding Richard Mason (JE, p. 210), she keeps Bertha's humanity, indeed her sanity as critic of imperialism, intact. Grace Poole, another character originally in Jane Eyre, describes the incident to Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea: "So you don't remember that you attacked this gentleman with a 700

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knife? . . . I didn't hear all he said except 'I cannot interfere legally between yourself and your husband'. It was when he said 'legally' that you flew at him' " (WSS, p. 150). In Rhys' retelling, it is the dissimulation that Bertha discerns in the word "legally"—not an innate bestiality—that prompts her violent reaction. In the figure of Antoinette, whom in Wide Sargasso Sea Rochester violently renames Bertha, Rhys suggests that so intimate a thing as personal and human identity might be determined by the politics of imperialism. Antoinette, as a white Creole child growing up at the time of emancipation in Jamaica, is caught between the English imperialist and the black native. In recounting Antoinette's development, Rhys reinscribes some thematics of Narcissus. There are, noticeably, many images of mirroring in the text. I will quote one from the first section. In this passage, Tia is the little black servant girl who is Antoinette's close companion: "We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. . . . When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it. ... We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking glass" (WSS, p. 38). A progressive sequence of dreams reinforces this mirror imagery. In its second occurrence, the dream is partially set in a hortus condusus, or "enclosed garden"—Rhys uses the phrase (WSS, p. 50)—a Romance rewriting of the Narcissus topos as the place of encounter with Love.17 In the enclosed garden, Antoinette encounters not Love but a strange threatening voice that says merely "in here," inviting her into a prison which masquerades as the legalization of love (WSS, p. 50). In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Narcissus' madness is disclosed when he recognizes his Other as his self: "Iste ego sum."18 Rhys makes Antoinette see her self as her Other, Bronte's Bertha. In the last section of Wide Sargasso Sea, Antoinette acts out Jane Eyre's conclusion and recognizes herself as the so-called ghost in Thornfield Hall: "I went into the hall again with the tall candle in my hand. It was then that I saw her—the ghost. The woman with streaming hair. She was surrounded by a gilt frame but I knew her" (WSS, p. 154). The gilt frame encloses a mirror: as Narcissus' pool reflects the selfed Other, so this "pool" reflects the Othered self. Here the dream sequence ends, with an invocation of none other than Tia, the Other that could not be selfed, because the fracture of imperialism rather than the Ovidian pool intervened. (I will return to this difficult point.) "That was the third time I had my dream, and it ended. . . . I called 'Tia' and jumped and woke" (WSS, p. 155). It is now, at the very end of the book, that Antoinette/Bertha can say: "Now at last I know why I was brought here and what I have to do" (WSS, pp. 155-56). We can read this as her having been brought into the England of Bronte's novel: "This 701

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cardboard house"—a book between cardboard covers—"where I walk at night is not England" (WSS, p. 148). In this fictive England, she must play out her role, act out the transformation of her "self" into that fictive Other, set fire to the house and kill herself, so that Jane Eyre can become the feminist individualist heroine of British fiction. I must read this as an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer. At least Rhys sees to it that the woman from the colonies is not sacrificed as an insane animal for her sister's consolidation. Critics have remarked that Wide Sargasso Sea treats the Rochester character with understanding and sympathy.19 Indeed, he narrates the entire middle section of the book. Rhys makes it clear that he is a victim of the patriarchal inheritance law of entailment rather than of a father's natural preference for the firstborn: in Wide Sargasso Sea, Rochester's situation is clearly that of a younger son dispatched to the colonies to buy an heiress. If in the case of Antoinette and her identity, Rhys utilizes the thematics of Narcissus, in the case of Rochester and his patrimony, she touches on the thematics of Oedipus. (In this she has her finger on our "historical moment." If, in the nineteenth century, subject-constitution is represented as childbearing and soul making, in the twentieth century psychoanalysis allows the West to plot the itinerary of the subject from Narcissus [the "imaginary"] to Oedipus [the "symbolic"]. This subject, however, is the normative male subject. In Rhys' reinscription of these themes, divided between the female and the male protagonist, feminism and a critique of imperialism become complicit.) In place of the "wind from Europe" scene, Rhys substitutes the scenario of a suppressed letter to a father, a letter which would be the "correct" explanation of the tragedy of the book.20 "I thought about the letter which should have been written to England a week ago. Dear Father . . ." (WSS, p. 57). This is the first instance: the letter not written. Shortly afterward: Dear Father. The thirty thousand pounds have been paid to me without question or condition. No provision made for her (that must be seen to). . . . I will never be a disgrace to you or to my dear brother the son you love. No begging letters, no mean requests. None of the furtive shabby manoeuvres of a younger son. I have sold my soul or you have sold it, and after all is it such a bad bargain? The girl is thought to be beautiful, she is beautiful. And y e t . . . [WSS, p. 59] This is the second instance: the letter not sent. The formal letter is uninteresting; I will quote only a part of it: 702

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Dear Father, we have arrived from Jamaica after an uncomfortable few days. This little estate in the Windward Islands is part of the family property and Antoinette is much attached to it. ... All is well and has gone according to your plans and wishes. I dealt of course with Richard Mason.. .. He seemed to become attached to me and trusted me completely. This place is very beautiful but my illness has left me too exhausted to appreciate it fully. I will write again in a few days' time. [WSS, p. 63] And so on. Rhys' version of the Oedipal exchange is ironic, not a closed circle. We cannot know if the letter actually reaches its destination. "I wondered how they got their letters posted," the Rochester figure muses. "I folded mine and put it into a drawer of the desk. . . . There are blanks in my mind that cannot be filled up" (WSS, p. 64). It is as if the text presses us to note the analogy between letter and mind. Rhys denies to Bronte's Rochester the one thing that is supposed to be secured in the Oedipal relay: the Name of the Father, or the patronymic. In Wide Sargasso Sea, the character corresponding to Rochester has no name. His writing of the final version of the letter to his father is supervised, in fact, by an image of the loss of the patronymic: "There was a crude bookshelf made of three shingles strung together over the desk and I looked at the books, Byron's poems, novels by Sir Walter Scott, Confessions of an Opium Eater . . . and on the last shelf, Life and Letters o f . . . The rest was eaten away" (WSS1, p. 63). Wide Sargasso Sea marks with uncanny clarity the limits of its own discourse in Christophine, Antoinette's black nurse. We may perhaps surmise the distance between Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea by remarking that Christophine's unfinished story is the tangent to the latter narrative, as St. John Rivers' story is to the former. Christophine is not a native of Jamaica; she is from Martinique. Taxonomically, she belongs to the category of the good servant rather than that of the pure native. But within these borders, Rhys creates a powerfully suggestive figure. Christophine is the first interpreter and named speaking subject in the text. "The Jamaican ladies had never approved of my mother, 'because she pretty like pretty self Christophine said," we read in the book's opening paragraph (WSS, p. 15). I have taught this book five times, once in France, once to students who had worked on the book with the wellknown Caribbean novelist Wilson Harris, and once at a prestigious institute where the majority of the students were faculty from other universities. It is part of the political argument I am making that all these students blithely stepped over this paragraph without asking or knowing what Christophine's patois, so-called incorrect English, might mean. 703

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Christophine is, of course, a commodified person. " 'She was your father's wedding present to me' " explains Antoinette's mother, " 'one of his presents' " (WSS, p. 18). Yet Rhys assigns her some crucial functions in the text. It is Christophine who judges that black ritual practices are culture-specific and cannot be used by whites as cheap remedies for social evils, such as Rochester's lack of love for Antoinette. Most important, it is Christophine alone whom Rhys allows to offer a hard analysis of Rochester's actions, to challenge him in a face-to-face encounter. The entire extended passage is worthy of comment. I quote a brief extract: "She is Creole girl, and she have the sun in her. Tell the truth now. She don't come to your house in this place England they tell me about, she don't come to your beautiful house to beg you to marry with her. No, it's you come all the long way to her house— it's you beg her to marry. And she love you and she give you all she have. Now you say you don't love her and you break her up. What you do with her money, eh?" [And then Rochester, the white man, comments silently to himself] Her voice was still quiet but with a hiss in it when she said "money." [WSS, p. 130] Her analysis is powerful enough for the white man to be afraid: "I no longer felt dazed, tired, half hypnotized, but alert and wary, ready to defend myself" (WSS, p. 130). Rhys does not, however, romanticize individual heroics on the part of the oppressed. When the Man refers to the forces of Law and Order, Christophine recognizes their power. This exposure of civil inequality is emphasized by the fact that, just before the Man's successful threat, Christophine had invoked the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica by proclaiming: "No chain gang, no tread machine, no dark jail either. This is free country and I am free woman" (WSS, p. 131). As I mentioned above, Christophine is tangential to this narrative. She cannot be contained by a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native. No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self.21 The Caliban of Retamar, caught between Europe and Latin America, reflects this predicament. We can read Rhys' reinscription of Narcissus as a thematization of the same problematic. Of course, we cannot know Jean Rhys' feelings in the matter. We can, however, look at the scene of Christophine's inscription in the text. Immediately after the exchange between her and the Man, well before the con704

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elusion, she is simply driven out of the story, with neither narrative nor characterological explanation or justice. " 'Read and write I don't know. Other things I know.' She walked away without looking back" (WSS, p. 133). Indeed, if Rhys rewrites the madwoman's attack on the Man by underlining of the misuse of "legality," she cannot deal with the passage that corresponds to St. John Rivers' own justification of his martyrdom, for it has been displaced into the current idiom of modernization and development. Attempts to construct the "Third World Woman" as a signifier remind us that the hegemonic definition of literature is itself caught within the history of imperialism. A full literary reinscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only Truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the "native" as self-consolidating Other. In the Indian case at least, it would be difficult to find an ideological clue to the planned epistemic violence of imperialism merely by rearranging curricula or syllabi within existing norms of literary pedagogy. For a later period of imperialism—when the constituted colonial subject has firmly taken hold—straightforward experiments of comparison can be undertaken, say, between the functionally witless India of Mrs. Dalloway, on the one hand, and literary texts produced in India in the 1920s, on the other. But the first half of the nineteenth century resists questioning through literature or literary criticism in the narrow sense, because both are implicated in the project of producing Ariel. To reopen the fracture without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the literary critic must turn to the archives of imperial governance. In conclusion, I shall look briefly at Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a text of nascent feminism that remains cryptic, I think, simply because it does not speak the language of feminist individualism which we have come to hail as the language of high feminism within English literature. It is interesting that Barbara Johnson's brief study tries to rescue this recalcitrant text for the service of feminist autobiography.22 Alternatively, George Levine reads Frankenstein in the context of the creative imagination and the nature of the hero. He sees the novel as a book about its own writing and about writing itself, a Romantic allegory of reading within which Jane Eyre as unself-conscious critic would fit quite nicely.23 I propose to take Frankenstein out of this arena and focus on it in terms of that sense of English cultural identity which I invoked at the opening of this essay. Within that focus we are obliged to admit that, although Frankenstein is ostensibly about the origin and evolution of man in society, it does not deploy the axiomatics of imperialism. Let me say at once that there is plenty of incidental imperialist sentiment in Frankenstein. My point, within the argument of this essay, is that 705

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the discursive field of imperialism does not produce unquestioned ideological correlatives for the narrative structuring of the book. The discourse of imperialism surfaces in a curiously powerful way in Shelley's novel, and I will later discuss the moment at which it emerges. Frankenstein is not a battleground of male and female individualism articulated in terms of sexual reproduction (family and female) and social subject-production (race and male). That binary opposition is undone in Victor Frankenstein's laboratory—an artificial womb where both projects are undertaken simultaneously, though the terms are never openly spelled out. Frankenstein's apparent antagonist is God himself as Maker of Man, but his real competitor is also woman as the maker of children. It is not just that his dream of the death of mother and bride and the actual death of his bride are associated with the visit of his monstrous homoerotic "son" to his bed. On a much more overt level, the monster is a bodied "corpse," unnatural because bereft of a determinable childhood: "No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing" (F, pp. 57, 115). It is Frankenstein's own ambiguous and miscued understanding of the real motive for the monster's vengefulness that reveals his own competition with woman as maker: I created a rational creature and was bound towards him to assure, as far as was in my power, his happiness and well-being. This was my duty, but there was another still paramount to that. My duties towards the beings of my own species had greater claims to my attention because they included a greater proportion of happiness or misery. Urged by this view, I refused, and I did right in refusing, to create a companion for the first creature. [F, p. 206] It is impossible not to notice the accents of transgression inflecting Frankenstein's demolition of his experiment to create the future Eve. Even in the laboratory, the woman-in-the-making is not a bodied corpse but "a human being." The (il)logic of the metaphor bestows on her a prior existence which Frankenstein aborts, rather than an anterior death which he reembodies: "The remains of the half-finished creature, whom I had destroyed, lay scattered on the floor, and I almost felt as if I had mangled the living flesh of a human being" (F, p. 163). In Shelley's view, man's hubris as soul maker both usurps the place of God and attempts—vainly—to sublate woman's physiological prerogative.24 Indeed, indulging a Freudian fantasy here, I could urge that, if to give and withhold to/from the mother a phallus is the male fetish, then to give and withhold to/from the man a womb might be the female fetish.25 706

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The icon of the sublimated womb in man is surely his productive brain, the box in the head. In the judgment of classical psychoanalysis, the phallic mother exists only by virtue of the castration-anxious son; in Frankenstein's judgment the hysteric father (Victor Frankenstein gifted with his laboratory—the womb of theoretical reason) cannot produce a daughter. Here the language of racism—the dark side of imperialism understood as social mission—combines with the hysteria of masculism into the idiom of (the withdrawal of) sexual reproduction rather than subject-constitution. The roles of masculine and feminine individualists are hence reversed and displaced. Frankenstein cannot produce a "daughter" because "she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate . . . [and because] one of the first results of those sympathies for which the demon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror" (F, p. 158). This particular narrative strand also launches a thoroughgoing critique of the eighteenth-century European discourses on the origin of society through (Western Christian) man. Should I mention that, much like Jean-Jacques Rousseau's remark in his Confessions, Frankenstein declares himself to be "by birth a Genevese" (F, p. 31)? In this overly didactic text, Shelley's point is that social engineering should not be based on pure, theoretical, or natural-scientific reason alone, which is her implicit critique of the utilitarian vision of an engineered society. To this end, she presents in the first part of her deliberately schematic story three characters, childhood friends, who seem to represent Kant's three-part conception of the human subject: Victor Frankenstein, the forces of theoretical reason or "natural philosophy"; Henry Clerval, the forces of practical reason or "the moral relations of things"; and Elizabeth Lavenza, that aesthetic judgment—"the aerial creation of the poets"—which, according to Kant, is "a suitable mediating link connecting the realm of the concept of nature and that of the concept of freedom . . . (which) promotes . . . moral feeling" (F, pp. 37, 36).26 This three-part subject does not operate harmoniously in Frankenstein. That Henry Clerval, associated as he is with practical reason, should have as his "design . . . to visit India, in the belief that he had in his knowledge of its various languages, and in the views he had taken of its society, the means of materially assisting the progress of European colonization and trade" is proof of this, as well as part of the incidental imperialist sentiment that I speak of above (F, pp. 151-52). I should perhaps point out that the language here is entrepreneurial rather than missionary: He came to the university with the design of making himself complete master of the Oriental languages, as thus he should open a 707

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field for the plan of life he had marked out for himself. Resolved to pursue no inglorious career, he turned his eyes towards the East as affording scope for his spirit of enterprise. The Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit languages engaged his attention. [F, pp. 66-67] But it is of course Victor Frankenstein, with his strange itinerary of obsession with natural philosophy, who offers the strongest demonstration that the multiple perspectives of the three-part Kantian subject cannot cooperate harmoniously. Frankenstein creates a putative human subject out of natural philosophy alone. According to his own miscued summation: "In a fit of enthusiastic madness I created a rational creature" (F, p. 206). It is not at all farfetched to say that Kant's categorical imperative can most easily be mistaken for the hypothetical imperative—a command to ground in cognitive comprehension what can be apprehended only by moral will— by putting natural philosophy in the place of practical reason. I should hasten to add here that just as readings such as this one do not necessarily accuse Charlotte Bronte the named individual of harboring imperialist sentiments, so also they do not necessarily commend Mary Shelley the named individual for writing a successful Kantian allegory. The most I can say is that it is possible to read these texts, within the frame of imperialism and the Kantian ethical moment, in a politically useful way. Such an approach presupposes that a "disinterested" reading attempts to render transparent the interests of the hegemonic readership. (Other "political" readings—for instance, that the monster is the nascent working class—can also be advanced.) Frankenstein is built in the established epistolary tradition of multiple frames. At the heart of the multiple frames, the narrative of the monster (as reported by Frankenstein to Robert Walton, who then recounts it in a letter to his sister) is of his almost learning, clandestinely, to be human. It is invariably noticed that the monster reads Paradise Lost as true history. What is not so often noticed is that he also reads Plutarch's Lives, "the histories of the first founders of the ancient republics," which he compares to "the patriarchal lives of my protectors" (F, pp. 123, 124). And his education comes through "Volney's Ruins of Empires" which purported to be a prefiguration of the French Revolution, published after the event and after the author had rounded off his theory with practice (F, p. 113). It is an attempt at an enlightened universal secular, rather than a Eurocentric Christian, history, written from the perspective of a narrator "from below," somewhat like the attempts of Eric Wolf or Peter Worsley in our own time.27 This Caliban's education in (universal secular) humanity takes place through the monster's eavesdropping on the instruction of an Ariel—Safie, the Christianized "Arabian" to whom "a residence in Turkey was abhor708

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rent" (F, p. 121). In depicting Safie, Shelley uses some commonplaces of eighteenth-century liberalism that are shared by many today: Safie's Muslim father was a victim of (bad) Christian religious prejudice and yet was himself a wily and ungrateful man not as morally refined as her (good) Christian mother. Having tasted the emancipation of woman, Safie could not go home. The confusion between "Turk" and "Arab" has its counterpart in presentday confusion about Turkey and Iran as "Middle Eastern" but not "Arab." Although we are a far cry here from the unexamined and covert axiomatics of imperialism in Jane Eyre, we will gain nothing by celebrating the time-bound pieties that Shelley, as the daughter of two antievangelicals, produces. It is more interesting for us that Shelley differentiates the Other, works at the Caliban/Ariel distinction, and cannot make the monster identical with the proper recipient of these lessons. Although he had "heard of the discovery of the American hemisphere and wept with Safie over the helpless fate of its original inhabitants," Safie cannot reciprocate his attachment. When she first catches sight of him, "Safie, unable to attend to her friend [Agatha], rushed out of the cottage" (F, pp. 114 [my emphasis], 129). In the taxonomy of characters, the Muslim-Christian Safie belongs with Rhys' Antoinette/Bertha. And indeed, like Christophine the good servant, the subject created by the fiat of natural philosophy is the tangential unresolved moment in Frankenstein. The simple suggestion that the monster is human inside but monstrous outside and only provoked into vengefulness is clearly not enough to bear the burden of so great a historical dilemma. At one moment, in fact, Shelley's Frankenstein does try to tame the monster, to humanize him by bringing him within the circuit of the Law. He "repair[s] to a criminal judge in the town and . . . relate[s his] history briefly but with firmness"—the first and disinterested version of the narrative of Frankenstein—"marking the dates with accuracy and never deviating into invective or exclamation. . . . When I had concluded my narration I said, "This is the being whom I accuse and for whose seizure and punishment I call upon you to exert your whole power. It is your duty as a magistrate' " (F, pp. 189, 190). The sheer social reasonableness of the mundane voice of Shelley's "Genevan magistrate" reminds us that the absolutely Other cannot be selfed, that the monster has "properties" which will not be contained by "proper" measures: "I will exert myself [he says], and if it is in my power to seize the monster, be assured that he shall suffer punishment proportionate to his crimes. But I fear, from what you have yourself described to be his properties, that this will prove impracticable; and thus, while every proper measure is pursued, you should make up your mind to disappointment." [F,p. 190] 709

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In the end, as is obvious to most readers, distinctions of human individuality themselves seem to fall away from the novel. Monster, Frankenstein, and Walton seem to become each others' relays. Frankenstein's story comes to an end in death; Walton concludes his own story within the frame of his function as letter writer. In the narrative conclusion, he is the natural philosopher who learns from Frankenstein's example. At the end of the text, the monster, having confessed his guilt toward his maker and ostensibly intending to immolate himself, is borne away on an ice raft. We do not see the conflagration of his funeral pile—the self-immolation is not consummated in the text: he too cannot be contained by the text. In terms of narrative logic, he is "lost in darkness and distance" (F, p. 211)—these are the last words of the novel—into an existential temporality that is coherent with neither the territorializing individual imagination (as in the opening of Jane Eyre) nor the authoritative scenario of Christian psychobiography (as at the end of Bronte's work). The very relationship between sexual reproduction and social subject-production—the dynamic nineteenth-century topos of feminism-in-imperialism—remains problematic within the limits of Shelley's text and, paradoxically, constitutes its strength. Earlier, I offered a reading of woman as womb holder in Frankenstein. I would now suggest that there is a framing woman in the book who is neither tangential, nor encircled, nor yet encircling. "Mrs. Saville," "excellent Margaret," "beloved Sister" are her address and kinship inscriptions (F, pp. 15, 17, 22). She is the occasion, though not the protagonist, of the novel. She is the feminine subject rather than the female individualist: she is the irreducible recipient-function of the letters that constitute Frankenstein. I have commented on the singular appropriative hermeneutics of the reader reading with Jane in the opening pages of Jane Eyre. Here the reader must read with Margaret Saville in the crucial sense that she must intercept the recipient-function, read the letters as recipient, in order for the novel to exist.28 Margaret Saville does not respond to close the text as frame. The frame is thus simultaneously not a frame, and the monster can step "beyond the text" and be "lost in darkness." Within the allegory of our reading, the place of both the English lady and the unnamable monster are left open by this great flawed text. It is satisfying for a postcolonial reader to consider this a noble resolution for a nineteenth-century English novel. This is all the more striking because, on the anecdotal level, Shelley herself abundantly "identifies" with Victor Frankenstein.29 I must myself close with an idea that I cannot establish within the limits of this essay. Earlier I contended that Wide Sargasso Sea is necessarily bound by the reach of the European novel. I suggested that, in contradistinction', to reopen the epistemic fracture of imperialism without succumbing to a nostalgia for lost origins, the critic must turn to the archives 710

THREE WOMEN'S TEXTS of imperialist governance. I have not turned to those archives in these pages. In my current work, by way of a modest and inexpert "reading" of "archives," I try to extend, outside of the reach of the European novelistic tradition, the most powerful suggestion in Wide Sargasso Sea: that Jane Eyre can be read as the orchestration and staging of the self-immolation of Bertha Mason as "good wife." The power of that suggestion remains unclear if we remain insufficiently knowledgeable about the history of the legal manipulation of widow-sacrifice in the entitlement of the British government in India. I would hope that an informed critique of imperialism, granted some attention from readers in the First World, will at least expand the frontiers of the politics of reading.

Notes 1 My notion of the "worlding of a world" upon what must be assumed to be uninscribed earth is a vulgarization of Martin Heidegger's idea; see "The Origin of the Work of Art," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York, 1977), pp. 17-87. 2 See Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (New York, 1960); all further references to this work, abbreviated JE, will be included in the text. 3 See Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (Harmondsworth, 1966); all further references to this work, abbreviated WSS, will be included in the text. And see Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (New York, 1965); all further references to this work, abbreviated F, will be included in the text. 4 I have tried to do this in my essay "Unmaking and Making in To the Lighthouse" in Women and Language in Literature and Society, ed. Sally McConnell-Ginet, Ruth Borker, and Nelly Furman (New York, 1980), pp. 310-27. 5 As always, I take my formula from Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," "Lenin and Philosophy" and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971), pp. 127-86. For an acute differentiation between the individual and individualism, see V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik, Studies in Language, vol. I (New York, 1973), pp. 93-94 and 152-53. For a "straight" analysis of the roots and ramifications of English "individualism," see C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford, 1962). I am grateful to Jonathan Ree for bringing this book to my attention and for giving a careful reading of all but the very end of the present essay. 6 I am constructing an analogy with Homi Bhabha's powerful notion of "notquite/not-white" in his "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambiguity of Colonial Discourse," October 28 (Spring 1984): 132. I should also add that I use the word "native" here in reaction to the term "Third World Woman." It cannot, of course, apply with equal historical justice to both the West Indian and the Indian contexts nor to contexts of imperialism by transportation. 7 See Roberto Fernandez Retamar, "Caliban: Notes towards a Discussion of Culture in Our America," trans. Lynn Garafola, David Arthur McMurray, and Robert Marquez, Massachusetts Review 15 (Winter-Spring

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

1974): 7-72; all further references to this work, abbreviated "C," will be included in the text. See Jose Enrique Rodo, Ariel, ed. Gordon Brotherston (Cambridge, 1967). For an elaboration of "an inaccessible blankness circumscribed by an interpretable text," see my "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Marxist Interpretations of Culture, ed. Gary Nelson (Urbana, 111., forthcoming). See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "Placing Women's History in History," New Left Review 133 (May-June 1982): 5-29. Rudolph Ackerman, The Repository of Arts, Literature, Commerce, Manufactures, Fashions, and Politics, (London, 1823), p. 310. See Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontes (London, 1975); this is one of the general presuppositions of his book. See Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 360-62. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, The "Critique of Pure Reason," the "Critique of Practical Reason" and Other Ethical Treatises, the "Critique of Judgement" trans. J. M. D. Meiklejohn et al. (Chicago, 1952), pp. 328, 326. I have tried to justify the reduction of sociohistorical problems to formulas or propositions in my essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" The "travesty" I speak of does not befall the Kantian ethic in its purity as an accident but rather exists within its lineaments as a possible supplement. On the register of the human being as child rather than heathen, my formula can be found, for example, in "What Is Enlightenment?" in Kant, "Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals" "What Is Enlightenment!" and a Passage from "The Metaphysics of Morals" trans, and ed. Lewis White Beck (Chicago, 1950). I have profited from discussing Kant with Jonathan Ree. Jean Rhys, in an interview with Elizabeth Vreeland, quoted in Nancy Harrison, An Introduction to the Writing Practice of Jean Rhys: The Novel as Women's Text (Rutherford, N. J., forthcoming). This is an excellent, detailed study of Rhys. See Louise Vinge, The Narcissus Theme in Western European Literature Up to the Early Nineteenth Century, trans. Robert Dewsnap et al. (Lund, 1967), chap. 5. For a detailed study of this text, see John Brenkman, "Narcissus in the Text," Georgia Review 30 (Summer 1976): 293-327. See, e.g., Thomas F. Staley, Jean Rhys: A Critical Study (Austin, Tex. 1979), pp. 108-16; it is interesting to note Staley's masculist discomfort with this and his consequent dissatisfaction with Rhys' novel. 1 have tried to relate castration and suppressed letters in my "The Letter As Cutting Edge," in Literature and Psychoanalysis; The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (New Haven, Conn., 1981), pp. 208-26. This is the main argument of my "Can the Subaltern Speak?" See Barbara Johnson, "My Monster/My Self," Diacritics 12 (Summer 1982): 2-10. See George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, 1981), pp. 23-35. Consult the publications of the Feminist International Network for the best overview of the current debate on reproductive technology. For the male fetish, see Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London, 1953-74), 21:152-57. For a more "serious" 712

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26 27

28

29

Freudian study of Frankenstein, see Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This Text?" New Literary History 14 (Autumn 1982): 117-41. My "fantasy" would of course be disproved by the "fact" that it is more difficult for a woman to assume the position of fetishist than for a man; see Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Screen 23 (Sept.-Oct. 1982): 74-87. Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York, 1951), p. 39. See [Constantin Francois Chasseboeuf de Volney], The Ruins; or, Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires, trans, pub. (London, 1811). Johannes Fabian has shown us the manipulation of time in "new" secular histories of a similar kind; see Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983). See also Eric R. Wolf. Europe and the People without History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982), and Peter Worsley, The Third World, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1973); I am grateful to Dennis Dworkin for bringing the latter book to my attention. The most striking ignoring of the monster's education through Volney is in Gilbert's otherwise brilliant "Horror's Twin: Mary Shelley's Monstrous Eve," Feminist Studies 4 (June 1980): 48-73. Gilbert's essay reflects the absence of race-determinations in a certain sort of feminism. Her present work has most convincingly filled in this gap; see, e.g., her recent piece on H. Rider Haggard's She ("Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness," Partisan Review 50, no. 3 [1983]: 444-53). "A letter is always and a priori intercepted, . . . the 'subjects' are neither the senders nor the receivers of messages. . . . The letter is constituted . . . by its interception" (Jacques Derrida, "Discussion," after Claude Rabant, "II n'a aucune chance de 1'entendre," in Affranchissement: Du transfer! et de la lettre, ed. Rene Major [Paris, 1981], p. 106; my translation). Margaret Saville is not made to appropriate the reader's "subject" into the signature of her own "individuality." The most striking "internal evidence" is the admission in the "Author's Introduction" that, after dreaming of the yet-unnamed Victor Frankenstein figure and being terrified (through, yet not quite through, him) by the monster in a scene she later reproduced in Frankenstein's story, Shelley began her tale "on the morrow . . . with the words 'It was on a dreary night of November' " (F, p. xi). Those are the opening words of chapter 5 of the finished book, where Frankenstein begins to recount the actual making of his monster (see F, p. 56).

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5.6

PROBLEMS IN CURRENT THEORIES OF COLONIAL DISCOURSE Benita Parry From Oxford Literary Review 9.1-2 (1986): 27-58

Writing of the disparate projects that seek to establish alternative protocols in disciplinary studies, Edward Said finds their common feature to be that all work out of a secular, marginal and oppositional consciousness, posits 'nothing less than new objects of knowledge . . . new theoretical models that upset or at the very least radically alter the prevailing paradigmatic norms', and are 'political and practical in as much as they intend . .. the end of dominating, coercive systems of knowledge'.1 The policy of letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend, which is condensed in this ecumenical scan of contemporary dissident criticism, can act as a caution against the tendency to disown work done within radical traditions other than the most recently enunciated heterodoxies, as necessarily less subversive of the established order. Said's own critique of Orientalism, directed at 'dismantling the science of imperialism', has fed into and augmented colonial discourse analysis, itself engendered where literary theory converged with the transgressive writings of women, blacks and anti-imperialists in the metropolitan world, and post-colonial interrogations of western canons. The construction of a text disrupting imperialism's authorized version was begun long ago within the political and intellectual cultures of colonial liberation movements, and the counter-discourse developed in this milieu which is known to western academies, read by black activists in the USA and transcribed as armed struggle in the other hemisphere, was written way back in the 1950s by Frantz Fanon, psychiatrist and polemicist, theoretician and guerilla. Although critics now developing a critique of colonialism do invoke Fanon, this can be a ceremonial gesture to an exemplary and exceptional 714

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radical stance where the adversarial rhetoric spoken by the individual is inseparable from participation in collective action, or a theoretical engagement with writings that combine political analysis with representative psycho-autobiography; it does not necessarily validate a problematic enlisting an epistemology of dialectical process, replete with notions of alienation, existential freedom and authentic human experience, nor does it invariably read the texts as discourses of emancipation. The theoretical co-ordinates to Fanon's thinking were phenomenology and a left-existentialism penetrated by Marxism, and in his writings Hegelian categories are historicized and politically engaged to expose the construction and structure of colonialist ideology. By disclosing the social and cultural positioning of the pre-constituted and metaphysical poles of white and black, Fanon's writing is directed at liberating the consciousness of the oppressed from its confinement in 'the white man's artefact'. To this end, the dichotomy construed by colonialist thought, white as the sovereign law and black as its transgression, with its attendant chain of naturalized antitheses, is shown to be axiologically fixed in discourse ('Good-Evil, Beauty-Ugliness, White-Black: such are the characteristic pairings . . . that we shall call "manicheism delirium" '),2 while existentially it operates to deform the dialogical interaction of self with other selves, constitutive of and indispensable to being, and coterminous with consciousness, into the conflictual self-other colonial relationship. To those concerned with deconstructing the texts of colonialism, Fanon's offensive strategy repossessing the signifying function appropriated by colonialist representation could appear as a necessary but insufficient intervention. Critics working from such a position might concede that a procedure identifying the loaded oppositions used to organize colonialism's discursive field does demystify the rhetorical devices of its mode of construction; however, they could argue, a reverse discourse replicating and therefore reinstalling the linguistic polarities devised by a dominant centre to exclude and act against the categorized, does not liberate the 'other' from a colonized condition where heterogeneity is repressed in the monolithic figures and stereotypes of colonialist representation, and into a free state of polymorphous native 'difference'. To dismantle colonialist knowledge and displace the received narrative of colonialism's moment written by ruling-class historiography and perpetuated by the nationalist version, the founding concepts of the problematic must be refused. Thus Homi Bhabha rejects the notion of the colonial relationship as a symmetrical antagonism on the grounds that the ambivalence of the colonial presence and the object it constitutes 'makes the boundaries of colonial positionality—the division of self/other—and the question of colonial power—the differentiation of coloniser/colonised—different from both the master-slave dialectic or the phenomenological projection of "otherness" '.3 In a related vein, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states: 'I am critical 715

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of the binary opposition coloniser/colonised. I try to examine the heterogeneity of "colonial power" and to disclose the complicity of the two poles of that opposition as it constitutes the disciplinary enclave of the critique of imperialism'.4 The strategies used in effecting a change of terrain are: to expose how power secretly inheres in colonialism's system of 'natural' differentiations and to show that in the process of producing meaning, these dualisms are undermined and repositioned as interdependent, conjunct, intimate; to decentre the native as a fixed, unified object of colonialist knowledge through disclosing how colonialism's contradictory mode of address constitutes an ambivalently positioned colonial subject; to dislodge the construct of a monolithic and deliberative colonial authority by demonstrating the dispersed space of power and a disseminated apparatus, wielded by diverse agents and effecting multiple situations and relations; and to dispel the representation of brute, institutional repression by making known the devious techniques of obligation and persuasion with which the native colludes but simultaneously resists. In the territory cleared of metaphysical divisions, undifferentiated identity categories and ontological absolutes providing the ideological justifications for colonialism's system, criticism then reveals for analysis the differential, variously positioned native—for some critics a self-consolidating other, for others an unconsenting and recalcitrant self—and in place of the permanently embattled colonial situation constructed by anti-colonialist theory, installs either a silent place laid waste by imperialism's epistemic violence, or an agonistic space within which unequally placed contestants negotiate an imbalance of power. How then do these deconstructions of colonialism's signifying system act more radically to disrupt the hegemonic discourse than does Fanon's method of exposing, through defamiliarization, the taxonomy of colonialist knowledge in order to break its hold over the oppressed? And what are the politics of projects which dissolve the binary opposition colonial self/colonized other, encoded in colonialist language as a dichotomy necessary to domination, but also differently inscribed in the discourse of liberation as a dialectic of conflict and a call to arms? In Fanon's writings the colonized as constructed by colonialist ideology is the very figure of the divided subject posited by psychoanalytic theory to refute humanism's myth of a unified self. Denied the right to subjectivity, internalizing and refracting the colonizer's address to its other as darkness and negation, alienated from a ravaged natal culture, the colonized is condemned to exist in an inauthentic condition: To speak is to exist absolutely for the other. . . . To speak . . . means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. . . . Every colonized people—in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by 716

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the death and burial of its local cultural originality—finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. . . . To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. (BSWM, 17,18, 38). The problem Fanon addresses is the constitution of a self-identity where native difference is validated and which empowers the native to rebel. Thus although distancing himself from a rediscovery of tradition which instead of reconceiving and dynamizing the autochthonous culture from within, violently reaffirms customs and beliefs and resumes the worship of ancestors, Fanon argues that such a resurgence assumes an incomparable subjective importance in effecting a break with the colonized condition: 'On emerging from these passionate espousals, the native will have decided . . . to fight all forms of exploitation and of alienation of man.. . . The plunge into the chasm of the past is the condition and source of freedom'.5 Here Fanon's writings intercede to promote the construction of a politically-conscious, unified revolutionary Self, standing in unmitigated antagonism to the oppressor, occupying a combative subject position from which the wretched of the earth are enabled to mobilize an armed struggle against colonial power: Decolonisation is the meeting of two forces, opposed to each other by their very nature. . . . Decolonisation is the veritable creation of new men . . . the primary Manicheism which governed colonial society is preserved intact during the period of decolonisation; that is to say, the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown.. . . The immobility to which the native is condemned can only be called into question if the native decides to put an end to the history of colonisation— the history of pillage—and to bring into existence the history of the nation—the history of decolonisation.6 That a radically subversive move can be effected through the inversion and active alteration of categories by which the hegemonic ideology produces and marginalizes a dominated or deviant group, has been argued by Jonathan Dollimore: Jacques Derrida reminds us that binary oppositions are 'a violent hierarchy' where one of the two terms forcefully governs the other. A crucial stage in their deconstruction involves an overturning, an inversion 'which brings low what was high'. The political effect of ignoring this stage, of trying to jump beyond the hierarchy into a world quite free of it, is simply to leave it intact in 717

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the only world we have. Both the reversal of the authentic/inauthentic opposition . . . and the subversion of authenticity itself . . . are different aspects of overturning in Derrida's sense. Moreover, they are stages in a process of resistance.7 Such a process of resistance is initiated by Fanon's oppositional discourse when the definition colonizer/colonized conceived under the old regime of thought, is displaced by a different usage of the same term, one invoking implacable enmity both as analysis of a political condition and as a galvanizing political slogan. This gloss on Fanon's theory would not be acceptable to Homi Bhabha who in his Foreword to a new edition of Black Skin, White Masks, 'Remembering Fanon', locates the insurgency in his writings elsewhere.8 Because for Bhabha no interventionary strategy can derive from an inversion of colonialist Manicheanism, he dissents from Fanon's reinscription of the colonial self/colonized other ('he is too quick to name the Other, to personalize its presence in the language of colonial racism' (xix)), while valorizing those inscriptions when that 'familiar alignment of colonial subjects—Black/White, Self/Other—is disturbed . . . and the traditional grounds of racial identity are dispersed' (ix). In a deconstruction of Fanon's text which criticizes Fanon's recourse to Hegelian concepts, the phenomenological affirmation of self and other and the Marxist dialectic, Bhabha proffers Fanon as a premature poststructuralist: It is through image and fantasy—those orders that figure transgressively on the borders of history and the unconscious—that Fanon most profoundly evokes the colonial condition. In articulating the problem of colonial cultural alienation in the psychoanalytic language of demand and desire, Fanon radically questions the formation of both individual and social authority as they come to be developed in the discourse of Social Sovereignty . . . In shifting the focus of cultural racism from the politics of nationalism to the politics of narcissism, Fanon opens up a margin of interrogation that causes a subversive slippage of identity and authority. (xiii, xxiv) This reading rescues Fanon as theorist of the ideology of cultural representation as well as retrieving his radical insights into the politics of race/sexuality and the 'complexity of psychic projections in the pathological colonial relationship' (xx) from appropriations which would claim him as the author of univocal propaganda tracts. But does it not also annex Fanon to Bhabha's own theory? By displacing Fanon's work from 'one political moment or movement', relegating the extent to which it 'historicizes the colonial experience' and privileging the agonism and uncertainty of the colonial relationship over Fanon's specifications of relentless con718

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flict, Bhabha's construction shifts the political charge of the text from inscriptions urging the colonized to insurrection in the uncertain hope of an-other condition beyond the imperialist world order—a revolutionary impulse which Bhabha reads as Fanon's 'desperate, doomed search for a dialectic of deliverance' (x)—to Fanon's meditation on the ambivalent identification, black skin, white masks, which makes it possible 'to redeem the pathos of cultural confusion into a strategy of political subversion' (xxii). Such a reading where aspects of BSWM congenial to Bhabha's deconstructive practice are abstracted from the body of Fanon's writings— within which this privileged mode can be seen as a provisional engagement with exploring the colonial syndrome that was subsequently directed, with the poetry intact, towards cultural analysis and programmes for political action—obscures Fanon's paradigm of the colonial condition as one of implacable enmity between native and invader, making armed opposition both a cathartic and a pragmatic necessity. Fanon's anti-colonialist critique read as a text of resistance and liberation, is the principal landmark from which Abdul JanMohamed's Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa9 takes its theoretical bearings, and the divide between the problematic within which his study is developed, and the work of poststructuralist critics who propose a model of colonialism at critical points incommensurable with the terms of Fanon's theory, can be used to bring different analyses of colonial discourse into focus. Here the proviso must be that neither JanMohamed's mode of ideological analysis nor the work of Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak which will be discussed as instances of deconstructive practice, are to be taken as representative, but rather as particular performances of methods with divergent notions of textual politics and criticism's emancipatory role. Because those engaged in deconstructing colonialist knowledge necessarily connect the signifying system to social forces, and overtly ally their writings with the victims of imperialism's violence, the charge of political quietism cannot be levelled against their work, which like ideological criticism positions itself as implementing a politics of reading.10 What then is the politics, on the one hand, of a criticism that sets out to identify both the dominant and oppositional ideologies embedded in texts as expressions, transformations and functions of an extra-linguistic situation, and on the other, of textual paradigms where discourse is privileged as the primary form of social praxis and which seek to expose the making, operation and effects of ideology by stirring up and dispersing the sedimented meanings dormant in texts? There is moreover a further political question to be asked of colonial discourse theory itself as it is now constituted: can a practice which is predominantly concerned with the text of colonial authority, which does not address itself to imperialism's culture and neglects to engage with its heterogeneous system of knowledge, 719

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produce, as it claims, a critique displacing the West's 'white mythology'? Since this essay questions the parameters within which colonial discourse analysis works, it seems imperative to acknowledge its signal achievement in moving the discussion of the colonialist text as an authentic portrayal of reality, to the system of ideological representation which such writing produced. Before the intervention of this analysis—and despite the protests of a long-standing scholarship exposing the Westerncentric images and suppositions of the 'ethnographical novel'11—the study of colonialist writing was ruled over by a liberal criticism which from an untold landmass had carved out a territory it named The Literature of Empire or The Colonial Fiction, to hold in thrall generations of self-professed anti-colonialist scholars and students in both the metropolitan and post-colonial worlds. Affiliated to the hegemonic explanatory order and written within the same ideological code as the discourse of colonialism, this putative oppositional discussion rebuked colonialism as the unacceptable face of Western civilization, while endorsing the affirmations and prohibitions authorized by the culture pursuing and implementing colonial power. The commentaries of this school thus succeeded both in splitting the notion of colonialism from that of an expansionist Western capitalism, and in underwriting a way of dividing the world invented by imperialist discourse. Mimeticism was the name of its interpretative mode; establishing the historical accuracy, psychological truthfulness and humanist perceptions of the fictions, its game. The verisimilitude was checked out against other fabrications—the books, reports, surveys, treatises and ruminations written by western scholars, colonial civil servants, army officers, missionaries, journalists, explorers and travellers; the ethics were judged by the effort to understand the incomprehensible ways of the native, or the censure delivered at colonialist unkindness and insensitivity. Because the critics shared the cultural assumptions and commitments of the fictions they were discussing, they were unable in their gloss to distance themselves from inscriptions of the colonial worlds as deviant; and by colluding in displacing a conflictual political relationship with a metaphysical and moral contest, their exegesis constituted itself as yet another discourse of colonialism. A contiguous disciplinary mode of occluding the structure of domination in an embattled colonialist past and of mystifying the continuing asymmetrical nexus between the hegemonic centres and their peripheries, has been procured by 'commonwealth studies' and its progeny 'commonwealth literature', where the choice of an anodyne name denoting a multi-cultural community existing in perfect harmony, acts to suggest that there exists an association of diverse peoples joined together in a past of common endeavour and a present of shared purpose. Having freed the study of colonialist writing from an empiricist criticism and a liberal politics to disclose the ideological construction of colonial720

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ism's objects of knowledge, colonial discourse analysis has generated its own theoretical difficulties. One problem, I would suggest, hinges on a model of colonial discourse overwhelmingly concerned with processes of othering that is luxated from the more extensive, multivalent and motile discursive practices of imperialism. When the writing of an alternative history of colonialism on theoretical grounds refuses the authority of official western historiography, rejects a Marxist version charged with 'reducing out imperialism-as-history', and distances itself from liberationist histories accused of weaving a seamless narrative, but does not produce its own account of change, discontinuity, differential periods and particular social conflicts, there is a danger of distinctive moments being homogenized. Thus colonialism as a specific, and the most spectacular, mode of imperialism's many and mutable states, one which preceded the rule of international finance capitalism and whose formal ending imperialism has survived, is treated as identical with all the variable forms. Since the colonial space is taken to be co-extensive with imperialism's entire discursive zone, the constitution of the European Self, by defining and encoding its colonies as Other, is privileged over Europe's diverse modes of self-presentation that were re-assembled in the triumphalist culture of imperialism, and in permuted form has persisted in a cultural hegemony where Western norms and values are equated with Universal forms of thought. For Spivak the 'axiomatics of imperialism', are an unspecified 'territorial and subject constituting project'; and Bhabha's engagement with the civil discourse of England's liberal conservative imperialist culture is restricted to examining how the text of postenlightenment civility alienated its own language in normalizing the colonial state or subject. The other notable absence in theorizing colonial discourse is a necessary consequence of analytical strategies which in focusing on the deconstruction of the colonialist text, either erase the voice of the native or limit native resistance to devices circumventing and interrogating colonial authority. Positions against the nostalgia for lost origins as a basis for counter-hegemonic ideological production (Spivak), or the self-righteous rhetoric of resistance (Bhabha), have been extended to a downgrading of the anti-imperialist texts written by national liberation movements; while the notion of epistemic violence and the occluding of reverse discourses have obliterated the role of the native as historical subject and combatant, possessor of an-other knowledge and producer of alternative traditions. I

The work of Spivak and Bhabha will be discussed to suggest the productive capacity and limitations of their different deconstructive practices, and to propose that the protocols of their dissimilar methods act to constrain 721

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the development of an anti-imperialist critique. It will be argued that the lacunae in Spivak's learned disquisitions issue from a theory assigning an absolute power to the hegemonic discourse in constituting and disarticulating the native. In essays that are to form a study on Master Discourse/ Native Informant,12 Spivak inspects 'the absence of a text that can "answer one back" after the planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project' (ROS, 131), and seeks to develop a strategy of reading that will speak to the historically-muted native subject, predominantly inscribed in Spivak's writings as the non-elite or subaltern woman. A refrain, 'One never encounters the testimony of the women's voice-consciousness', 'There is no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak', 'The subaltern as female cannot be heard or read', 'The subaltern cannot speak' (CSS, 122, 129, 130), iterates a theoretical dictum derived from studying the discourse of Sati, in which the Hindu patriarchal code converged with colonialism's narrativization of Indian culture to efface all traces of woman's voice. What Spivak uncovers are instances of doubly-oppressed native women who, caught between the dominations of a native patriarchy and a foreign masculist-imperialist ideology, intervene by 'unemphatic, ad hoc, subaltern rewriting(s) of the social text of Sari-suicide' (CSS, 129): a nineteenth century Princess who appropriates 'the dubious place of the free will of the sexed subject as female' (ROS, 144) by signalling her intention of being a Sati against the edict of the British administration; a young Bengali girl who in 1926 hanged herself under circumstances that deliberately defied Hindu interdicts (CSS). From the discourse of Sati, Spivak derives large, general statements on woman's subject constitution/object formation in which the subaltern woman is conceived as a homogeneous and coherent category, and which culminate in a declaration on the success of her planned disarticulation. Even within the confines of this same discourse, it is significant that Lata Mani does find evidence, albeit mediated, of woman's voice.13 As Chandra Talpade Mohanty argues in her critique of western feminist writings on 'Third World Women',14 discourses of representation should not be confused with material realities. Since the native woman is constructed within multiple social relationships and positioned as the product of different class, caste and cultural specificities, it should be possible to locate traces and testimony of women's voice on those sites where women inscribed themselves as healers, ascetics, singers of sacred songs, artizans and artists, and by this to modify Spivak's model of the silent subaltern. If it could appear that Spivak is theorizing the silence of the doublyoppressed subaltern woman, her theorem on imperialism's epistemic violence extends to positing the native, male and female, as an historically-muted subject. The story of colonialism which she reconstructs is of an interactive process where the European agent in consolidating the 722

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imperialist Sovereign Self, induces the native to collude in its own subject(ed) formation as other and voiceless. Thus while protesting at the obliteration of the native's subject position in the text of imperialism, Spivak in her project gives no speaking part to the colonized, effectively writing out the evidence of native agency recorded in India's 200 year struggle against British conquest and the Raj—discourses to which she scathingly refers as hegemonic nativist or reverse ethnocentric narrativization. The disparaging of nationalist discourses of resistance is matched by the exorbitation of the role allotted to the post-colonial woman intellectual, for it is she who must plot a story, unravel a narrative and give the subaltern a voice in history, by using 'the resources of deconstruction "in the service of reading" to develop a strategy rather than a theory of reading that might be a critique of imperialism' (ISD, 230). Spivak's 'alternative narrative of colonialism' through a series of brilliant upheavals of texts which expose the fabrications and exclusions in the writing of the archive, is directed at challenging the authority of the received historical record and restoring the effaced signs of native consciousness, and it is on these grounds that her project should be estimated. Her account, it is claimed, disposes of the old story by dispersing the fixed, unitary categories on which this depended. Thus it is argued that for purposes of administration and exploitation of resources, the native was constructed as a programmed, 'nearly-selved' other of the European and not as its binary opposite. Furthermore, the cartography that became the 'reality' of India was drawn by agents who were themselves of heterogeneous class origin and social status and whose (necessarily) diversified maps distributed the native into differential positions which worked in the interest of the foreign authority—for example, a fantasmatic race-differentiated historical demography restoring 'rightful' Aryan rulers, and a class discourse effecting the protoproletarianization of the 'aborigines'. Instead of recounting a struggle between a monolithic, neardeliberative colonial power and an undifferentiated oppressed mass, this reconstruction displays a process more insidious than naked repression, since here the native is prevailed upon to internalize as self-knowledge, the knowledge concocted by the master: 'He (the European agent) is worlding their own world, which is far from mere uninscribed earth, anew, by obliging them to domesticate the alien as Master', a process generating the force 'to make the "native" see himself as "other"' (ROS, 133). Where military conquest, institutional compulsion and ideological interpellation was, epistemic violence and devious discursive negotiations requiring of the native that he rewrite his position as object of imperialism, is; and in place of recalcitrance and refusal enacted in movements of resistance and articulated in oppositional discourses, a tale is told of the selfconsolidating other and the disarticulated subaltern. 723

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This raw and selective summary of what are complex and subtle arguments has tried to draw out the political implications of a theory whose axioms deny to the native the ground from which to utter a reply to imperialism's ideological aggression or to enunciate a different self: No perspective critical of imperialism can turn the Other into a self, because the project of imperialism has always already historically refracted what might have been the absolutely Other into a domesticated Other that consolidates the imperialist self. . . . A full literary inscription cannot easily flourish in the imperialist fracture or discontinuity, covered over by an alien legal system masquerading as Law as such, an alien ideology established as only truth, and a set of human sciences busy establishing the 'native' as self-consolidating Other'. (TWT, 253, 254) In bringing this thesis to her reading of Wide Sargasso Sea15 as Jane Eyre's reinscription, Spivak demonstrates the pitfalls of a theory postulating that the Master Discourse preempts the (self) constitution of the historical native subject. When Spivak's notion is juxtaposed to the question Said asks in Orientalism, 'how can one study other cultures and peoples from a libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective?',16 and Jean Rhys' novel examined for its enunciation (despite much incidental racism) of just such a perspective which facilitates the transformation of the Other into a Self, then it is possible to construct a re-reading of WSS iterating many of Spivak's observations while disputing her founding precepts. Spivak argues that because the construction of an English cultural identity was inseparable from othering the native as its object, the articulation of the female subject within the emerging norm of feminist individualism during the age of imperialism, necessarily excluded the native female, who was positioned on the boundary between human and animal as the object of imperialism's social-mission or soul-making. In applying this interactive process to her reading of WSS, Spivak assigns to Antoinette/Bertha, daughter of slave-owners and heiress to a post-emancipation fortune, the role of the native female sacrificed in the cause of the subject-constitution of the European female individualist. Although Spivak does acknowledge that WSS is 'a novel which rewrites a canonical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interest of the white Creole rather than the native' (TWT, 253), and situates Antoinette/Bertha as caught between the English imperialist and the black Jamaican, her discussion does not pursue the text's representations of a Creole culture that is dependent on both yet singular, or its enunciation of a specific settler discourse, distinct from the texts of imperialism. The dislocations of the Creole position are repeatedly spoken by Antoinette, the 'Rochester' 724

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figure and Christophine; the nexus of intimacy and hatred between white settler and black servant is written into the text in the mirror imagery of Antoinette and Tia, a trope which for Spivak functions to invoke the other that could not be selved: We had eaten the same food, slept side by side, bathed in the same river. As I ran, I thought, I will live with Tia and I will be like her. . . . When I was close I saw the jagged stone in her hand but I did not see her throw it.... I looked at her and I saw her face crumble as she began to cry. We stared at each other, blood on my face, tears on hers. It was as if I saw myself. Like in a looking-glass. (WSS, 24) But while themselves not English, and indeed outcastes, the Creoles are Masters to the blacks, and just as Bronte's book invites the reader via Rochester to see Bertha Mason as situated on the human/animal frontier ('One night I had been awakened by her yells. . . . It was a fierce West Indian night . . . those are the sounds of a bottomless pit', quoted TWT, 247-8), so does Rhys' novel via Antoinette admit her audience to the regulation settler view of rebellious blacks: 'the same face repeated over and over, eyes gleaming, mouth half-open', emitting 'a horrible noise . . . like animals howling but worse' (WSS, 32 and 35). The idiosyncrasies of an account where Antoinette plays the part of 'the woman from the colonies' are consequences of Spivak's decree that imperialism's linguistic aggression obliterates the inscription of a native self: thus a black female who in WSS is most fully selved, must be reduced to the status of a tangential figure, and a white Creole woman (mis)construed as the native female produced by the axiomatics of imperialism, her death interpreted as 'an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer' (TWT, 251). While allowing that Christophine is both speaking subject and interpreter to whom Rhys designates some crucial functions, Spivak sees her as marking the limits of the text's discourse, and not, as is here argued, disrupting it. What Spivak's strategy of reading necessarily blots out is Christophine's inscription as the native, female, individual Self who defies the demands of the discriminatory discourses impinging on her person. Although an exslave given as a wedding-present to Antoinette's mother and subsequently a caring servant, Christophine subverts the Creole address that would constitute her as domesticated Other, and asserts herself as articulate antagonist of patriarchal, settler and imperialist law. Natural mother to children and surrogate parent to Antoinette, Christophine scorns patriarchal authority in her personal life by discarding her patronymic and refusing her sons' fathers as husbands; as Antoinette's protector she impugns 725

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ANALYSIS

'Rochester' for his economic and sexual exploitation of her fortune and person and as female individualist she is eloquently and frequently contemptuous of male conduct, black and white. A native in command of the invaders' language—'She could speak good English if she wanted to, and French as well as patois' (WSS, 18)—Christophine appropriates English to the local idiom and uses this dialect to deride the post-emancipation rhetoric which enabled the English to condemn slavery as unjust while enriching themselves through legitimized forms of exploitation: 'No more slavery! She had to laugh! These new ones have Letter of the Law. Same thing. They got Magistrate. They got fine. They got jail house and chain gang. They got tread machine to mash up people's feet. New ones worse than old ones—more cunning, that's all' (WSS, 22-3). And as obeah woman, Christophine is mistress of another knowledge dangerous to imperialism's official epistemology and the means of native cultural disobedience.17 Christophine's defiance is not enacted in a small and circumscribed space appropriated within the lines of dominant code, but is a stance from which she delivers a frontal assault against antagonists, and as such constitutes a counter-discourse. Wise to the limits of post-emancipation justice, she is quick to invoke the protection of its law when 'Rochester' threatens her with retribution: 'This is free country and I am free woman' (WSS, 131)—which is exactly how she functions in the text, her retort to him condensing her role as the black, female individualist: 'Read and write I don't know. Other things I know' (WSS, 133; emphasis added). In Spivak's reconstruction, Christophine's departure from the story after this declaration and well before the novel's end, is without narrative and characterological explanation or justice. But if she is read as the possessor and practitioner of an alternative tradition challenging imperialism's authorized system of knowledge, then her exit at this point appears both logical and entirely in character: 'England,' said Christophine, who was watching me. 'You think there is such a place?' 'How can you ask that? You know there is.' T never see the damn place, how I know?' 'You do not believe that there is a country called England?'... 'I don't say I don't believe, I say I don't know. I know what I see with my eyes and I never see it.' (W55, 92) This articulation of empiricism's farthest reaches spoken by a black woman who knows from experience that her powders, potions and maledictions are effective in the West Indies, undoes through its excess the rationalist version valorized by the English, while at the same time acknowledging the boundaries to the power of her knowledge. Officially 726

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condemned and punishable in Jamaica—'Rochester' tries to intimidate Christophine with mention of magistrates and police—this other wisdom of the black communities is assimilated into Creole culture—Antoinette calls on and has faith in its potency. But when the novel transfers to England, Christophine must leave the narrative, for there her craft is outlawed, which is why after making her statement, 'She walked away, without looking back' (WSS, 133). Spivak's deliberated deafness to the native voice where it is to be heard, is at variance with her acute hearing of the unsaid in modes of Western feminist criticism which, while dismantling masculist constructions, reproduce and foreclose colonialist structures and imperialist axioms by 'performing the lie of constituting a truth of global sisterhood where the mesmerizing model remains male and female sparring partners of generalizable or universalizable sexuality who are the chief protagonists in that European contest' (ISD, 226). Demanding of disciplinary standards that 'equal rights of historical, geographical, linguistic specificity' be granted to the 'thoroughly stratified larger theatre of the Third World' (238), Spivak in her own writings severely restricts (eliminates?) the space in which the colonized can be written back into history, even when 'interventionist possibilities' are exploited through the deconstructive strategies devised by the post-colonial intellectual. Homi Bhabha on the other hand, through recovering how the master discourse was interrogated by the natives in their own accents, produces an autonomous position for the colonial within the confines of the hegemonic discourse, and because of this enunciates a very different 'polities'. The sustained effort of writings which initially concentrated on deconstituting the structure of colonial discourse, and which latterly have engaged with the displacement of this text by the inappropriate utterances of the colonized, has been to contest the notion Bhabha considers to be implicit in Said's Orientalism, that 'power and discourse is possessed entirely by the coloniser'.18 Bhabha reiterates the proposition of anti-colonialist writing that the objective of colonial discourse is to construe the colonized as a racially degenerate population in order to justify conquest and rule. However because he maintains that relations of power and knowledge function ambivalently, he argues that a discursive system split in enunciation, constitutes a dispersed and variously positioned native who by (mis) appropriating the terms of the dominant ideology, is able to intercede against and resist this mode of construction. In dissenting from analysis ascribing an intentionality and unidirectionality to colonial power which, in Said's words, enabled Europe to advance unmetaphorically upon the Orient, Bhabha insists that this not only ignores representation as a concept articulating both the historical and the fantasmatic, but unifies the subject of colonial enunciation in a fixed position as the passive object of discursive domination. By revealing the 727

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multiple and contradictory articulations in colonialism's address, Bhabha as contemporary critic seeks to demonstrate the limits of its discursive power and to countermand its demand 'that its discourse (be) nondialogic, its enunciation unitary' (STW, 100); and by showing the wide range of stereotypes and the shifting subject positions assigned to the colonized in the colonialist text, he sets out to liberate the colonial from its debased inscription as Europe's monolithic and shackled Other, and into an autonomous native 'difference'.19 However, this reappropriation although effected by the deconstructions of the post-colonial intellectual, is made possible by uncovering how the master-discourse had already been interrogated by the colonized in native accents. For Bhabha, the subaltern has spoken, and his readings of the colonialist text recover a native voice. Through transferring psychoanalytic propositions on the constitution of the subject to the composition of the text, Bhabha deconstructs the conflictual economy of colonial discourse to expose its recognition and disavowal of racial/historical/cultural difference; and by using Foucault's notion of an apparatus of power within which relations of knowledge and power are always a strategic response to an urgent need at a given historical moment, Bhabha specifies the force of colonial discourse as the need 'to contest singularities of difference and to articulate modes of differentiation' (DDDC, 201). The production of the colonial as a fixed reality, at once other and knowable, is interpreted as analogous to the Freudian fable of fetishism, while the field of identification within which the stereotype is located as an arrested, fetishistic mode of representation, is correlated with the Lacanian schema of the Imaginary: The construction of colonial discourse is then a complex articulation of the tropes of fetishism—metaphor and metonymy—and the forms of narcissistic and aggressive identification available to the Imaginary. . . . One has then a repertoire of conflictual positions that constitute the subject in colonial discourse. The taking up of any one position, within a specific discursive form, in a particular historical conjuncture, is then always problematic—the site of both fixity and fantasy. (DDDC, 204) In this account relations of power are theorized in terms of psychoanalytic categories, and native resistance is limited to its returning the look of surveillance as the displacing gaze of the disciplined. Bhabha has subsequently extended the ground of the discussion to examining the textual production of difference by introducing the notion of 'mimicry' as both 'a strategy of colonial subjection through reform, regulation and discipline, which "appropriates" the Other', and the native's inappropriate 728

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imitations of this discourse which has the effect of menacing colonial authority.20 Here Bhabha reconstructs a two-fold process of displacement. In the slippage between the enunciation of the western sign and its colonial significance, the strategies of colonialist knowledge are undermined. As the civil discourse of a culturally cohesive community is mutated into the text of a civilizing mission, its enunciatory assumptions are revealed to be in conflict with its means of social control, so that the incompatibility of the ideas of English liberty and the idea of British imperialism is exposed: 'in "normalizing" the colonial state or subject, the dream of postEnlightenment civility alienates its own language of liberty and produces another knowledge of its norms' (OMM, 126). The process of deconstructing the text of colonial authority is completed by the product of this discourse. Where Spivak in inspecting the absence of a text that can answer back after the planned epistemic violence of the imperialist project, finds pockets of non-cooperation in 'the dubious place of the free will of the (female) sexed subject' (ROS, 144), Bhabha produces for scrutiny a discursive situation making for recurrent instances of transgression performed by the native from within and against colonial discourse. Here the autocolonization of the native who meets the requirements of colonialist address, is coextensive with the evasions and 'sly civility' through which the native refuses to satisfy the demand of the colonizer's narrative. This concept of mimicry has since been further developed in the postulate of 'hybridity' as the problematic of colonial discourse. Bhabha contends that when re-articulated by the native, the colonialist desire for a reformed, recognizable, nearly-similar other, is enacted as parody, a dramatization to be distinguished from the exercise of dependent colonial relations through narcissistic identification. For in the 'hybrid moment' what the native re-writes is not a copy of the colonialist original, but a qualitatively different thing-in-itself, where mis-readings and incongruities expose the uncertainties and ambivalences of the colonialist text and deny it an authorizing presence. Thus a textual insurrection against the discourse of colonial authority is located in the natives' interrogation of the English book within the terms of their own system of cultural meanings, a displacement which is read back from the record written by colonialism's agents and ambassadors: Through the natives' strange questions it is possible to see, with historical hindsight, what they resisted in questioning the presence of the English—as religious mediation and as cultural and linguistic medium. . . . To the extent to which discourse is a form of defensive warfare, then mimicry marks those moments of civil disobedience within the discipline of civility: signs of spectacular resistance. When the words of the master become the site of 729

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hybridity—the warlike sign of the native then we may not only read between the lines, but even seek to change the often coercive reality that they so lucidly contain. (STW, 101,104) Despite a flagrantly ambivalent presentation which leaves it vulnerable to innocent misconstruction, Bhabha's theorizing succeeds in making visible those moments when colonial discourse already disturbed at its source by a doubleness of enunciation, is further subverted by the object of its address; when the scenario written by colonialism is given a performance by the native that estranges and undermines the colonialist script. The argument is not that the colonized possesses colonial power, but that its fracturing of the colonialist text by re-articulating it in broken English, perverts the meaning and message of the English book ('insignia of colonial authority and signifier of colonial desire and discipline', STW, 89), and therefore makes an absolute exercise of power impossible. A narrative which delivers the colonized from its discursive status as the illegitimate and refractory foil to Europe, into a position of 'hybridity' from which it is able to circumvent, challenge and refuse colonial authority, has no place for a totalizing notion of epistemic violence. Nor does the conflictual economy of the colonialist text allow for the unimpeded operation of discursive aggression: 'What is articulated in the doubleness of colonial discourse is not the violence of one powerful nation writing out another [but] a mode of contradictory utterance that ambivalently reinscribes both coloniser and colonised'.21 The effect of this thesis is to displace the traditional anti-colonialist representation of antagonistic forces locked in struggle, with a configuration of discursive transactions: 'The place of difference and otherness, or the space of the adversarial, within such a system of "disposal" as I've proposed, is never entirely on the outside or implacably oppositional' (STW, 95). Like Spivak's alternative narrative, Bhabha's interrogation of received historical authority takes place on the territory of colonial discourse itself, and since colonial power is theorized here as a textual function, it follows that the proper form of combat for a politically engaged critical practice is to disclose the construction of the signifying system and thereby deprive it of its mandate to rule: If the effect of colonial power is seen to be the production of hybridisation rather than the hegemonic command of colonial authority or the silent repression of native traditions, then an important change of perspective occurs. It reveals the ambivalence at the source of traditional discourse and enables a form of subversion founded on that uncertainty, that turns the discursive conditions of dominance into the grounds of intervention. (STW, 97) 730

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Those who have been or are still engaged in colonial struggles against contemporary forms of imperialism could well read the theorizing of discourse analysts with considerable disbelief at the construction this puts on the situation they are fighting against and the contest in which they are engaged. This is not a charge against the difficulty of the analyses but an observation that these alternative narratives of colonialism obscure the 'murderous and decisive struggle between two protagonists' (Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 30), and discount or write out the counterdiscourses which every liberation movement records. The significant differences in the critical practices of Spivak and Bhabha are submerged in a shared programme marked by the exorbitation of discourse and a related incuriosity about the enabling socio-economic and political institutions and other forms of social praxis. Furthermore, because their theses admit of no point outside of discourse from which opposition can be engendered, their project is concerned to place incendiary devices within the dominant structures of representation and not to confront these with another knowledge. For Spivak, imperialism's epistemic bellicosity decimated the old culture and left the colonized without the ground from which they could utter confrontational words; for Bhabha, the stratagems and subterfuges to which the native resorted, destabilized the effectivity of the English book but did not write an alternative text—with whose constitution Bhabha declines to engage, maintaining that an anti-colonialist discourse 'requires an alternative set of questions, techniques and strategies in order to construct it' (DDDC, 198). Within another critical mode which also rejects totalizing abstracts of power as falsifying situations of domination and subordination, the notion of hegemony is inseparable from that of a counter-hegemony. In this theory of power and contest, the process of procuring the consent of the oppressed and the marginalized to the existing structure of relationships through ideological inducements, necessarily generates dissent and resistance, since the subject is conceived as being constituted by means of incommensurable solicitations and heterogeneous social practices. The outcome of this agonistic exchange, in which those addressed challenge their interlocutors, is that the hegemonic discourse is ultimately abandoned as scorched earth when a different discourse, forged in the process of disobedience and combat, occupying new, never-colonized and 'Utopian' territory, and prefiguring other relationships, values and aspirations, is enunciated. At a time when dialectical thinking is not the rage amongst colonial discourse theorists, it is instructive to recall how Fanon's dialogical interrogation of European power and native insurrection reconstructs a process of cultural resistance and cultural disruption, participates in writing a text that can answer colonialism back, and anticipates another condition beyond imperialism: 731

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Face to face with the white man, the Negro has a past to legitimate, a vengeance to extract. . . . In no way should I dedicate myself to the revival of an unjustly unrecognized Negro civilization. I will not make myself a man of the past. . . . I am not a prisoner of history . . . it is only by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom. (BSWM, 225-6, 229, 231) The enabling conditions for Fanon's analysis are that an oppositional discourse born in political struggle, and at the outset invoking the past in protest against capitulating to the colonizer's denigrations, supersedes a commitment to archaic native traditions at the same time as it rejects colonialism's system of knowledge: The colonialist bourgeoisie . . . had in fact deeply implanted in the minds of the colonised intellectual that the essential qualities remain eternal in spite of all the blunders men may make: the essential qualities of the West, of course. The native intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and deep down in his brain you could always find a vigilant sentinel ready to defend the Greco-Latin pedestal. Now it so happens that during the struggle for liberation, at the moment that the native intellectual comes into touch again with his people, this artificial sentinel is turned into dust. All the Mediterranean values,—the triumph of the human individual, of clarity and of beauty—become lifeless, colourless knick-knacks. All those speeches seem like collections of dead words; those values which seemed to uplift the soul are revealed as worthless, simply because they have nothing to do with the concrete conflict in which the people is engaged. (The Wretched of the Earth, 37-8) While conceding the necessity of defending the past in a move away from unqualified assimilation of the occupying power's culture, Fanon recognizes the limitations on the writer and intellectual who utilize 'techniques and language which are borrowed from the stranger in his country'. Such transitional writing reinterpreting old legends 'in the light of a borrowed aestheticism and of a conception of the world which was discovered under other skies', is for Fanon but a prelude to a literature of combat which 'will . . . disrupt literary styles and themes . . . create a completely new public' and mould the national consciousness, 'giving it form and contours and flinging open before it new and boundless horizons'.22 Fanon's theory projects a development inseparable from a community's engagement in combative social action, during which a native contest initially

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enunciated in the invaders' language, culminates in a rejection of imperialism's signifying system. This is a move which colonial discourse theory has not taken on board, and for such a process to be investigated, a cartography of imperialist ideology more extensive than its address in the colonialist space, as well as a conception of the native as historical subject and agent of an oppositional discourse is needed. Ill

The problem has been recognized by Abdul JanMohamed in his essay 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature', where he argues that because the indigenous peoples during colonialism's dominant period were subjugated by military coercion and bureaucratic control, the ideological function of such writing 'must be understood . . . in terms of the exigencies of domestic, that is European and colonialist politics and culture' (62-3). If such a perspective condemns the colonized in the age of imperialist conquest and consolidation to a condition of 'passive consent', it does serve as a necessary reminder that imperialism was a protean phenomenon and its epistemic violence inseparable from material and institutional force. Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa, however, which studies the Anglophone fiction of colonial Africa in the hegemonic phase, and is itself open to the charge of collapsing imperialism into colonialism, belongs with colonial discourse analysis. As such its contribution to the area study will be discussed as a mode of ideological analysis seeking to make known the relations of the text to the objective conditions within which it is produced, and concerned to demonstrate the generation of counter-hegemonic discourses interrogating European representations. Fanon's account of colonialism's manichean and conflictual structure provides the theoretical ground on which JanMohamed constructs a thesis of the 'manichean allegory' as the central trope of the discursive field within which colonialist literature is written and African fiction initiates its antagonistic dialogue. Rejecting the insistence of liberal criticism on parity between English and African writing, JanMohamed maintains that each fulfils a different ideological function, the one 'solving' contradictions in order to secure a coherent colonialist world and thereby justify the established ascendancy, the other making known the conflicts afflicting this world and through realist representations of Africa's cultures, wiping out the negative and derogatory images purveyed by European literature. Both Spivak and Bhabha have repudiated efforts to rebut colonialist misconstructions with valorizations of native traditions. For Spivak, the 'nativist' attempt driven by 'nostalgia for lost origins' to restore the sovereign self of the colonies, cannot provide grounds for counter-hegemonic ideological production and is not a model for interventionist practice.23 In 733

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a related but different argument Bhabha maintains that a nationalistic criticism which takes over from 'universalist' criticism the mimetic view of the text's transparent relationship to a pre-constituted reality, represses the ideological and discursive construction of difference, reducing the problem of representing difference to the demand for different and more favourable representations.24 Where Spivak and Bhabha deny the radical force of transgressive appropriations in a reverse discourse that contests the master text on its own terrain, JanMohamed argues for the power of positive representations subverting through inversion the received colonialist version. Thus according to his thesis, the ideological mission of African writing is to retrieve the value and dignity of a past insulted by European representation, and to counter the eternal verities and universalities of a liberal criticism which either deforms colonial difference to make it conform with western notions of intelligibility, or reproves it as deviant. The means of fulfilling this emancipatory role is realism. For colonized and post-colonial cultures traumatized by imperialism, subjected to a 'peripeteia of values' culminating in 'historical catalepsy', a fiction that recuperates Africa's autonomous resources and re-constitutes the fragmented colonial subject makes an active contribution to the collective aspiration of regaining a sense of direction and identity. Such remembrance does not encourage a passive yearning for reinstalling an unrecoverable past, but is an intervention winning back a zone from colonialist representation: 'Achebe's nostalgia must be distinguished from the romantic ethnology of the Negritude movement, for unlike the latter, he neither portrays an idealized, monolithic, homogenized, and pasteurized "African" past, nor does he valorize indigenous cultures by reversing the old colonial manichean allegory as, for instance, Leopold Senghor does' (181). Where European fiction fabricated a traditional Africa (the fabulous and simplified country of Joyce Gary's racial romances, or the natives of Blixen/Dinesen tales who are literally the edenic land in flesh and blood), African writers reacted with realist representations of African existence, thinking, perceptions and values. Where the hegemonic fiction contrived apologias for colonialism, African novels answered with a story of social havoc and psychic damage inflicted by the white invasion. By representing the dialectical relationship between 'man-as-individual' and 'man as-social-being' proposed by Lukacs in his writings on realism, such fiction restores to the dislocated colonial the image of the collective subject, of the integrated self in vital interactions with an authentic cultural community. In affirming the radical potential of historical memory to the anticolonialist struggle, JanMohamed resorts to appropriations of hegemonic values, since he implies that to recover from the assaults of an expansionist and belligerent bourgeois occupation, the colonial and post-colonial cultures must aspire to possess the ideals of bourgeois humanism. Absent 734

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from JanMohamed's exposition is Fanon's grasp of the paradoxes and pitfalls of 'rediscovering tradition' and re-presenting it within a western system of meanings. What for Fanon is a transitional process of liberating the consciousness of the oppressed into a new reality, JanMohamed treats as the arrival of the definitive oppositional discourse. His argument is crucially different from Walter Benjamin's construction (also by-passed by Spivak and Bhabha) of the 'fight for the oppressed past . . . nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors' which when reinscribed in the present 'completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden'25—a position Julian Roberts describes as positing 'absolute discontinuity between the conditions of our present historical existence and those that will follow after messianic transformation'.26 Thus while JanMohamed's reading does validate the significance of authenticating the past in producing a counter-discourse, his account of an alternative is without a 'visionary gaze' that displaces received constructions, a lack that can be attributed both to his chosen material and his method. To argue his case on African writing as a challenge to European representation, he discusses English-language, social/psychological realist novels where the politics is foregrounded in the subject matter, which in most cases privilege a dominant discourse, and do not project Utopian perspectives. In this sense his model is already self-circumscribing since the area he studies is largely populated by writings which manipulate but do not break with established fictional forms. All the same, by treating both 'realist' (sometimes monologic), as well as 'modernist' (always dialogic) fictions, both African and European, within a referential mode of criticism as portrayals and interpretations of the existential world, Manichean Aesthetics produces a politics of content which neglects textual polyphony when it does operate to enunciate contradictory meanings, and where it is not present, omits to explain its absence.27 A commitment to mimeticism further constrains the examination of the problems inherent in politically heterodox texts working within the structures and redeploying the procedures of modes that naturalize authorized norms and values. Thus Alex La Guma's books are acknowledged for their graphic portraits of the marginalized worlds of South Africa's 'coloured people', a veracity ascribed to arbitrary and circumstantial plots enacting the characters' inability to control their lives or shape their destinies. What is not discussed is how the recycling of stale or purple language, of received narrative practices and exhausted modes of address, normalize the fictions' ex-centric material and defuse a confrontational stance. A declared project of defining 'modes of relationship between a society and its literature' through examining 'the ideological structure which provides the common denominator between socio-economic and literary structures' (265), is one which this study amply realizes in analyses of theme and genre which succeed in giving access to the disjunctive and 735

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internally contradictory fictional universes of English and African colonial writing. However it is also the stated intention of the book to implement that more complex critical mode enunciated and performed by Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious: the rewriting of the literary text in such a way that the latter may itself be seen as the rewriting or restructuration of a prior historical or ideological subtext, it being always understood that that 'subtext' is not immediately present as such, not some commonsense external reality . . . but rather must itself always be (re)constructed after the fact.28 While JanMohamed's work does engage with the 'strategies of containment' inscribed in narrative form and aesthetic convention (the mythic consciousness of the Blixen/Dinesen stories, the preoccupation with messianic emancipation, prophecy and salvation in the early writings of Ngugi wa Thiong'o), there is a tendency to establish one-to-one relationships between text and context. If, as JanMohamed in following Jameson argues, the object of criticism is to grasp the work as a symbolic practice where 'subtext' is both a product and a projection of 'context', as well as a textual construction, then it is necessary to address the representations not as transformations or mediations of an existing condition, but as fabrications; and in taking the worlds the novels make to be reproductions of an anterior reality and not 'original' works, his study does not produce the scenario it previews. When discussing Nadine Gordimer's novels, JanMohamed reads their enunciation of the white liberal consciousness negotiating the splits of South African society as an authentic articulation of an existential condition, and not as a contrivance bearing an interpretation of a crisis which occludes alternative and emergent discourses of dissent. That there is no significant connection in Gordimer's fiction between the white and black worlds, is attributed by JanMohamed to the restraints on a socially formed and positioned author; while the 'objective narration' of African culture is ascribed to the writer's awed refusal to violate its rhythms, meanings and mysteries. Here explanations derived from the author intentionally mediating her own historical situation and social inhibitions, is substituted for an examination of the fictional conventions and narrative forms which repress such a dialogue and attenuate what 'African' discourse is enunciated. For whereas the Africans are speaking subjects, the voices of servants, intellectuals and political activists alike, are all written as 'heard' by their white interlocutors, so that multiple difference is erased by a generic otherness. Writing information about the author into readings of the texts leads JanMohamed to infer that the fictions disclose a 'liberating rupture between Gordimer and bourgeois culture'. Gordimer's integrity and 736

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courage are abundantly manifest in her personal posture and public statements—how many self-professed white radicals would say, as she did in a television interview with Susan Sontag, that there is nothing of white South Africa she wanted to preserve? But in the face of novelistic practices which make intelligible and celebrate, even while interrogating, the ideology of the personal, and which are bound in their affirmations and aspirations to Western systems of meaning, it is difficult to sustain this assertion of an ideological break with the hegemonic culture, or to confirm that the fundamental thrust of her fiction is 'a deliberate dissolution and reconstruction of white consciousness that will allow it to transcend the manichean bifurcations of the present and to work towards a more integrated and coherent future' (144). The importance of JanMohamed's book is that it sets out to study literature as a cultural text and rhetorical practice produced and performed within determinate historical, social and political conditions which enable and constrain the construction of meaning. As such it does read the fictions against the grain, and by bringing to the discussion the story of colonialism's military conquest, coercive institutions and conflictual relationships, marginalized in some analyses of colonialist discourse, it restores to these texts a sense of their historical density and effectivity. But because the argument propounding a symbiotic relationship between discursive and material practices has not been formulated in dialogue with theories which have rendered mimeticism and referentiality problematic, there are difficulties in assessing the particular mode of ideological analysis brought to Manichean Aesthetics. What is missing is an engagement with the manifold and conflicting textual inscriptions—the discontinuities, defensive rhetorical strategies and unorthodox language challenging official thought, the disruptions of structural unity effected by divergent and discordant voices—as the location and source of the text's politics. When JanMohamed reiterates this critical stance in 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory', the proposition that writing is infused by and implicated in an extrinsic situation is presented as an axiom where the objective condition is the cause of an utterance, and discourse the malleable mediator of its producer's intentions: 'We can . . . understand colonial discourse . . . through an analysis that maps its ideological function in relation to actual imperialist practices. Such an examination reveals that any evident "ambivalence" is in fact a product of deliberate, if at times, subconscious, imperialist duplicity' (61). The causal nexus proposed here returns us to a text/context paradigm where the writing is 'determined' and 'controlled' by political and economic imperatives and changes 'external to the field itself, where the acquiescent discourse, already dictated by ideology, performs the automatic service of 'articulating and justifying' the aims of the colonialist. 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory' situates itself as in dispute with 737

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both a liberal criticism and discourse analysis for 'severely bracketing the political context of culture and history' (59), and outlines a programme for restoring the worldly situation of texts. But since writing is theorized as the instrument of material practices, there is no place for discourse as the fount of ideology or for emergent discourses initiating new modes of address to construct not-yet-existing conditions, while the notion of a counter-discourse is bound by its role as a defensive, reactive reply to the hegemonic construction delivered within the frontiers of its terms: 'The Third World literary dialogue with Western cultures is marked by two broad characteristics: its attempt to negate the prior European negation of colonized cultures and its adoption and creative modification of Western languages and artistic forms in conjunction with indigenous languages and forms' (84-5). Analysis of this dialogue, it is proposed, will demonstrate that 'the domain of literary and cultural syncretism belongs not to the colonialist and neocolonialist writers but increasingly to Third World artists' (85). This affirmation of 'syncretism', which I take to be the resolution of colonialism's cultural manicheanism in the harmonization of alterities, appears to underwrite the goal of a cultural esperanto assembled out of existing modes, and is one that JanMohamed himself countermands in his important essay, 'Humanism and Minority Literature: Toward a Definition of Counter-Hegemonic Discourse',29 where the making of an alternative post-colonial tradition is posited as the outcome of an ambivalent dialectic between the hegemonic culture and 'Third World' writers. Here the argument is that it is the responsibility of a 'minority criticism' to rescue this literature from the ideological ascendancy of Western liberal humanism by cultivating and celebrating 'marginality': If minority literature repeatedly explores the political, collective and marginal aspects of human experience, then minority criticism must also systematically avoid the temptation of a seductively inclusive, apolitical humanism: it must articulate and help to bring to consciousness those elements of minority literature that oppose, subvert, or negate the power of the hegemonic culture. (298-9) What this project endorses is not the 'syncretism' which JanMohamed elsewhere commends, but the affirmation of multiple forms of native 'difference'.

IV The perspective on imperialist culture as a Western system of representation and exclusion constructed by the imperialist powers to police the 738

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globe in the name of white values, tradition and civilization, elaborated by Fanon but common to the literature of anti-colonialism, points up the failure of colonial discourse analysis to engage with the range and effectivity of imperialism's triumphalist address. This omission is repeated by other radical criticisms, and Said's observation that the literary-cultural establishment has declared the serious study of imperialism and culture off-limits,30 can more readily be accounted for than the neglect by the left in the homeland of empire to produce work on imperialist ideology and discourse—a significant absence which is now being recognized by the left as a suitable case for theoretical enquiry.31 When wide-ranging projects in cultural materialism addressed the processes by which meanings are socially constructed and historically transformed, socialist theorists paid scant attention to the making and articulation of England's imperialist culture.32 Raymond Williams' influential Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961) which spanned the years of colonial conquest and the consolidation of empire, found no place for this narrative,33 and not until The Country and the City (1973) did Williams write of England as the centre of political economic and cultural power, standing in the same relationship to the peripheries as did the city to the country within the boundaries of the European nation state. (We will return to the suggestive connection Williams was subsequently to make between imperialist ideology and its mode of production.) More recently, Francis Mulhern has proposed that a 'socialist politics of literature' be constructed from the writings of western women.34 This exorbitant demand on the work of first world women to effect the subversion of the west's cultural hegemony— that Mulhern's schema includes Afro-American women writers does not compensate for what it omits—displays a parochial perspective on the sources of 'alternative' literary modes which is indifferent to the implosions being made into the traditions of western writing by post-colonial literary cultures, and suggests an insularity that has no place in radical theory. The eurovision of the metropolitan left has been attributed by critics engaged in dismantling the West's dominative system of knowledge to the endemic co-existence of 'historicism' and 'universalism' in Marxism's homogenizing and monocultural narrative of world history, where the non-synchronous experiences of Europe's Others are incorporated into a story of unilinear processes.35 Certainly the perdurable perspective on imperialism's trajectory as subjugation and liberation, dislocation and reconstruction, rests on Western definitions of meaning and value,36 and is an instance of what Spivak refers to as 'the willed (auto)biography of the West (masquerading) as disinterested history' (ROS, 131). However, critiques confronting the problem of constructing alternative analyses, where imperialism no longer features as the 'necessary' catalyst of world history, are being produced from within Marxism. In Marx and the End of 739

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Orientalism,31 a study he describes as 'a work of personal de-colonisation', Bryan Turner argues the need for new theoretical readings to replace the historicist and Ideological versions of Marxism which in treating history as a series of invariable stages in modes of production, privilege the Western route as the norm and place the colonial world outside of history. Spivak's just rebuke of varieties of radical criticism where 'the narrative of historyas-imperialism' is reduced out is the occasion for her censuring Jameson's project for restoring an 'uninterrupted narrative', a 'fundamental history' as the attempt to rewrite an 'originary text'. This criticism which is aimed at all legitimizing narratives of progress and liberation, repudiates 'the story of capital logic' for repressing the discontinuous native version of colonialism that is yet to be told, while itself repressing how the continuities, constellations and traditions revealed by historical materialism can accommodate plural forms of resistance and insurrection against nonidentical systems of power within 'the unity of a single great collective story . . . sharing a single fundamental theme—for Marxism, the collective struggle to wrest a realm of Freedom from a realm of Necessity' (The Political Unconscious, 19). A theory of colonial discourse which refuses both a eurocentric world history underwriting the West's cultural hegemony and nationalist narratives of liberation has turned in on itself and away from redrawing the map of the world drawn by the texts of imperialism. It is not accidental that whereas projects deconstructing colonialist knowledge have not as yet delivered their promised critiques of imperialism, they have stimulated studies which by extending 'colonization' as an explanatory notion applicable to all situations of structural domination, are directed at formulating a grand theory valid for each and every discursive system of discrimination and oppression. The Announcement of the 1984 Essex Sociology of Literature Conference, Europe and Its Others, from which 'imperialism' is conspicuously absent, stated that the objective of the conference was to produce 'a general archaeology of europocentric discourses' which would identify strategies of discrimination and control and engage with theories of the psychological constitution of the subject. Following this conference, a Group for the Critical Study of Colonial Discourse was formed, with the purpose of linking those whose work critically examines historical and analytic discourses of domination where these address cultural and racial differences: 'while for many of us the focus of our work is primarily the colonial context, others in the network are extending their enquiry to excolonial societies, the colonial legacy in the West, and contemporary systems of domination where race, class, ethnicity, gender and/or sexuality intersect'.38 This trend towards conflating distinct and specific modes of oppression is one against which Spivak has warned: 'the critique of imperialism is not identical, and cannot be identical, within the critique of racism. Nor is our own effort to see the identification of the constitution of 740

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race within first world countries, identical with the problem of capitalist territorial imperialism in the context of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' (Block, 7). Here Spivak could be seen to be marching under the banner bearing Jameson's slogan: 'Always historicize!', an allegiance which when brought to the discourses of imperialism in its colonialist moment would engage in deconstructing an histrionic and hyperbolic rhetoric innovating representations addressed to both the native and the metropolitan subject. John Mackenzie's Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960),39 a work dense in empirical research and thin on analysis, collates the staggering range and quantity of printed and visual material produced by state institutions and civil agencies to present and promote imperialism—a body of texts distinct from the official writings of imperialism, its 'scientific' discourses, travellers' tales, memoirs and fiction. Despite theoretical oversimplifications, this study establishes that a vast and complicated machinery operated to solicit the metropolitan individual as subject and agent of imperialism. Through its network of cultural affirmations and denigrations, imperialist discourse offered to the English an imaginary mapping of their situation within the domestic social formation and of their relationship to the peripheries, and it did so in a language of social inclusiveness, linking people to rulers in a faith described by Hugh Cunningham as 'above class, loyal to established institutions and resolute in the defence of the country's honour and interest'.40 In invoking working-class women as proud mothers of Empire and working-class men as natural rulers of lower races, imperialism's address invited the subject simultaneously constituted by class and gender discourses to reposition her/himself within an ethnic community, a solicitation inducing social conformity and class deference at home, and racial arrogance and bellicosity abroad. (The resistance to this address is another story yet to be told.) On a level more fundamental because it seeks to establish 'that deeply symbiotic relationship . . . between modern Western imperialism and its culture' and to make connections between imperialist ideology in the centre and the peripheries, Edward Said has pointed the study towards constructing an archaeology for 'knowledge whose actualities lie considerably below the surface hitherto assumed to be the true texture, and textuality, of what we study as literature, history, culture, and philosophy'. As an instance of such work, Said cites the researches of Gauri Viswanathan which have uncovered the political origins of modern English studies, and located them in the system of colonial education imposed on natives in the nineteenth century India . . . what has conventionally been thought of as a discipline created entirely by and for British youth was first created by colonial administrators for the 741

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ideological pacification and re-formation of a potentially rebellious Indian population, and then imported into the metropolitan center for a very different but related use there. (Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World, 63-4) Deconstructing the texts of late nineteenth-century imperialism will reveal the ingenious use and permutation of race, class, sexual, ethical and nationalist discourses in the West's representations of itself as possessing a knowledge and a moral authority that was its entitlement to exercise global power: a race/class/ethical discourse—Europe's right and duty to appropriate the bounty of nature wasted by the natives to benefit its industrial classes and feed its hungry; a utilitarian discourse joined to a teleological one—Europe's obligation to exploit the world's natural and labour resources in the interests of promoting international progress; a racial/sexual discourse—the natives' unfitness for organizing a rational society and exercising self-government because of their teeming sexual proclivities and unlicensed sexual performance (this representation also provided a sanctioned pornography for metropolitan consumption); a nationalist/Utopian discourse—the divinely ordained task of Europeans to rule, guide and elevate backward peoples as a trust for civilization. That the language of ascendancy in these virtuoso texts was shared by the spokesmen of empire and their 'critics' suggests its hegemony; where the utterances of the first declaimed racial power, a conquering nation and a belligerent civilization, the apologias of the liberal anti-imperialists deplored the linguistic excesses of their opponents while conceding that because of its progressive culture, the West was indeed able to offer the colonized the benefits of both its industrial skills and its moral and intellectual qualities. This magniloquent self-representation, with its messianic notions of subjugation and its mystical conception of exploitation, is condensed in Conrad's laconic remark on 'the temperament of a Puritan [joined] with an insatiable imagination of conquest', and 'the misty idealism of the Northerners, who at the smallest encouragement dream of nothing less than the conquest of the earth' (Nostromo). To analyse the texts of imperialism is to confront a discourse of triumphalism valorizing gladiatorial skills. Said has drawn attention to Orientalism, with its routine representations of the Orient's feminine penetrability, supine malleability and fertile riches, as 'a praxis of the same sort, albeit in different territories, as male gender dominance, or patriarchy, in metropolitan society' ('Orientalism Reconsidered', 23). For Said, this discursive practice which produces the 'configurations of sexual, racial and political asymmetry underlying mainstream modern western culture', makes it possible to perceive 'the narrow correspondence between suppressed Victorian sexuality at home, its fantasies abroad, and the tightening hold on the male late nineteenth century imagination of imperialist 742

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ideology' (23^). This same congruence 'contextualized' within the material practices of an expansionist capitalism, is registered in Raymond Williams' observation that the basic concepts of capitalist and imperialist ideology, 'limitless and conquering expansion, reduction of the labour process to the appropriation and transformation of raw material', repeats the triumphalist version of 'man's conquest of nature', an analogy to which he returns when identifying the capitalist drive to mastery over nature as the foundation of the dominative tendencies pervading capitalist social relations from labour to sexuality.41 In the taxonomy of values enunciated by imperialist discourse—virility, mastery, exploitation, performance, action, leadership, technology, progress—it may be possible to read the strident affirmation of a 'modernity' from which 'modernism' recoiled, a tension that can be studied in the writings of those old favourites of Literature and Empire criticism, Kipling and Conrad. Here different languages produce disjunctive cultural spaces and ideological sites, since the positivism of tales celebrating modernity's thrust to external control and underwriting its freight of moral confidence and certainty (hymned by Kipling as Law, Order, Duty and Restraint, Obedience, Discipline), are disrupted by the ambiguities, doubts, anxieties and alienations of a stylistic modernism. These conflicting inscriptions act to consolidate and disown imperialism's ideological tenets and social aspirations, and to the extent that such texts are discourses of imperialism, they are also the location of an internal interrogation. The labour of producing a counter-discourse displacing imperialism's dominative system of knowledge rests with those engaged in developing a critique from outside its cultural hegemony, and in furthering a contest begun by anti-colonial movements, theorists of colonial discourse will need to pursue the connections between imperialism's material aggression and its epistemic violence, and disclose the relationships between its ideological address to the colonial world and the imperialist culture of the metropolitan powers.

Notes 1 Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', Europe and its Others Vol 1: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1984 (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985), 23-4. This essay also appears in Race and Class 27:2 (Autumn 1985) and Cultural Critique 1 (Fall 1985). 2 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952) tr. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 183. References in text abbreviated as BSWM. 3 Homi Bhabha, 'Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority Under a Tree Outside Delhi, May 1817', Europe and Its Others Vol 1, 93^ abbreviated as STW. This essay also appears in Critical Inquiry: ' "Race", Writing and Difference' 12:1 (Autumn 1985). 4 Angela McRobbie, 'Strategies of Vigilance: An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak', Block 10 (1985), 9. 743

COLONIAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 5 Frantz Fanon, 'Racism and Culture', Toward the African Revolution (1964) tr. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 43. 6 Frantz Fanon, 'Concerning Violence', The Wretched of the Earth (1961) tr. Constance Farrington (London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1965), 30, 40, 41. 7 Jonathan Dollimore, The dominant and the deviant: a violent dialectic', Critical Quarterly 28:1-2 (Spring/Summer 1986), 190. 8 More recent work on Fanon includes Stephan Feuchtwang, 'Fanon's politics of culture: the colonial situation and its extension', Economy and Society 14:4 (November 1985) and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, the T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures, Kent University 1985, forthcoming. For a survey of Fanon's life and writing, see Irene L. Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (London: Wildwood House, 1973). See also L. Adele Jinadu, Fanon: In Search of the African Revolution (London: K.P.I., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986) for a discussion of Fanon's political analyses and their influence on African politics. 9 Abdul JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983). 10 Cf. papers given at the 1984 MLA Convention Meeting on 'Representations of Colonization: Race, Class, Gender and the Fate of the Humanities' which in directing the discussion into representation as colonization signal the will of critics to self-destruct the area study. For sceptical views on the politics of deconstruction, see Barbara Foley, 'The Politics of Deconstruction', Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), Terry Eagleton, 'Marxism, Structuralism and Post-Structuralism', Diacritics 15:4 (Winter 1985) and Nancy Fraser, 'The French Derrideans: Politicizing Deconstruction or Deconstructing the Political?', New German Critique 33 (Fall 1984). 11 For a recent study in this mode, see David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 12 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'The Rani of Sirmur', Europe and Its Others Vol. 1, abbreviated as ROS, Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism', Critical Inquiry 12:1, abbreviated as TWT, 'Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow-Sacrifice', Wedge 7/8 (Winter/Spring 1985) (issue entitled The Imperialism of Representation The Representation of Imperialism), abbreviated as CSS, and 'Imperialism and Sexual Difference', Oxford Literary Review 8:1-2 (1986) Sexual Difference, abbreviated as ISO. 13 Lata Mani, The Production of an Official Discourse on Sati in Early Nineteenth-Century Bengal', Europe and Its Others, Vol 1. 14 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses', Boundary 2 12:3-13:1 (Spring/Fall 1984). See also Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1986). 15 Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), abbreviated as WSS. 16 Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 24. 17 For a discussion of the correlation, see Sandra Gilbert, 'Rider Haggard's Heart of Darkness', Partisan Review 50:3 (1983). 18 Homi Bhabha, 'Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism', The Politics of Theory, Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, July 1982 (Colchester: University of Essex, 1983), 200, abbreviated as DDDC. A revised version of this essay appears as The Other Question . . .', Screen 24:6 (1983). For a discussion on Said's neglect of alternatives to 744

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19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Orientalism, see Dennis Porter, 'Orientalism and Its Problems', The Politics of Theory. The charge made by Abdul JanMohamed in 'The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature', Critical Inquiry 12:1, that Bhabha's work rests on the assumption of 'the unity of the "colonial subject" ', would seem to rest on a misreading of Bhabha's argument. Homi Bhabha, 'Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse', October 28 (Spring 1984), 126, abbreviated as OMM. 'Sly Civility', October 34 (Fall 1985), 74. Frantz Fanon, 'On National Culture', The Wretched of the Earth, 179-80,193. Spivak does however acknowledge that the luminous, blazing, fighting, familial image of the Mother Durga erased by imperialist representation, was restored in the hegemonic nationalist account: 'Can the Subaltern Speak?', 129. Homi Bhabha, 'Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism', The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984). Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, tr. Hary Zohn (London: Fontana/Collins, 1973), 262-3,265. Julian Roberts, Walter Benjamin (London: Macmillan, 1982), 205. For discussion of the problems in criticism which by dealing with 'Third World' literature on a mimetic level represses colonial difference, see Homi Bhabha, 'Representation and the Colonial Text': 'To represent the colonial subject is to conceive of the subject of difference, of an-other history and an-other culture . . . the practical criticism of Scrutiny denies the cultural and historical basis of the literary. . . . Consequently it denies the grounds on which to pose the question of the 'colonial' in literary representation. For that is fundamentally a problem of the signification of historical and historical difference. . . . The crisis in literary and cultural values that would ensue from a reading based on questions of historical, cultural difference and racial discrimination as 'racist' or 'culturally imperialist' or 'neo-colonial', within the Great Tradition, generally throws such a regime of criticism and culture into disarray. Differences of class, gender, and race and contradictions as evinced in the struggle for hegemony, which constitute the text of politics and history are always superceded in the quest for universal meanings'. (98, 101, 102) Bhabha's own assay in practical criticism offers a compelling reading of V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas where a narrative enunciation discontinuous with the Great Tradition of literary realism is revealed: 'It would be possible to see the tropes of the text as metonymy and repetition instead of metaphor, and its mode of address as the "uncanny" rather than irony. For the text abounds with references to loss, circularity and the demonical'. (115) Henry Louis Gates, 'Criticism in the jungle', Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates (London: Methuen, 1984), discusses how 'mimetic and expressive theories of black literature continue to predominate over the sorts of theories concerned with discrete uses of figurative language', since the concern with the possible functions of black texts in non-literary arenas, takes precedence over their internal structures as acts of language and their formal status as works of art: 'Because of this curious valorization of the social and polemical functions of black literature, the structure of the black text has been repressed and treated as if it were transparent. The black literary work of art has stood at the centre of a triangle of relations (M. H. Abrams's 'universe', 'artist' and 'audience'), but as the very thing not to be explained, as if it were invisible, or literal, or a one-dimensionai document'. (5-6) 745

COLONIAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS 28 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), 81. 29 Abdul JanMohamed, 'Humanism and Minority Literature: Towards a Definition of a Counter-Hegemonic Discourse', Boundary 2 12:3-13:1 (Spring/Fall 1984). The problem of colonial and post-colonial literature written in the language of the invaders is not discussed by JanMohamed. On this see Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), and for a dissenting view see Al-Amin M. Mazrui, 'Ideology or pedagogy: the linguistic indigenisation of African literature', Race and Class XXXVII: 1 (Summer 1986). 30 Edward Said, Orientalism, 13. See also Edward Said, 'Reflections on American "left" Literary Criticism', The World, the Text and the Critic (London: Faber, 1984) where he questions 'why so few "great" novelists deal directly with the major social and economic facts of their existence—colonialism and imperialism—and why, too, critics of the novel have continued to honour this remarkable silence' (177). 31 In a review article, 'British and European Imperialism', History Workshop 16 (Autumn 1983), Prebon Kaarsholm writes that despite common knowledge of the importance of the nation's empire, 'it is astonishing how little energy has gone into the exploration of the foundations and functioning of imperialist ideology in Britain', and suggests that there is work to be done in examining the structure and dynamics of imperialism's discourses by using the methods of literary analysis (58-9). 32 For a retrospect on this work, see Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972-9 (London: Hutchinson, 1980). 33 See Edward Said, 'Intellectuals in the Post-Colonial World', Salmagundi 70-1 (Spring/Summer, 1986) for comment on this exclusion: 'One of the canonical topics of modern intellectual history has been the development of dominant discourses and disciplinary traditions in the main fields of scientific, social or cultural inquiry. Without any exceptions that I know of, the paradigms for this topic have been drawn from what is considered exclusively Western sources. Foucault's work is one instance of what I mean as, in another domain, is Raymond Williams'. I mention these two formidable scholars because in the main I am in almost total sympathy with their genealogical discoveries to which I am inestimably indebted. Yet for both of them the colonial experiences is quite irrelevant and that theoretical oversight has become the norm in all cultural and scientific disciplines except in occasional studies of the history of anthropology' (62). 34 Francis Mulhern, 'Writing for the Future: the politics of literature', New Statesman, 22 March, 1985, 24-6. 35 See Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', 22-3. 36 As an example, see the circumlocutory remarks of a socialist with a long and honourable record in the movement for colonial freedom: 'My own impression, for what it is worth is that the quality of life in pre-industrial societies was seldom, taken all round, even passably good . . . All this does seem to waft us towards the conclusion, unpalatable as it may be, that conquest by Europe, however sordid its motives, might be to the advantage of its victims, or their descendants'. V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: European attitudes to the outside world in the imperial age (1969) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), xxv-xxvi. 37 Bryan Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1978). See also Tom Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain (London: Verso, 1981).

746

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38

39 40 41

For a criticism of eurocentric theories of imperialism, see Thomas Hodgkin, 'Some African and Third World Theories of Imperialism', Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. Roger Owen and Bob Sutcliffe (London: Longman, 1972). Inscriptions 1 (December 1985), Santa Cruz Workshop, Colonial Discourse Group, University of California at Santa Cruz. See also Robert Stam and Louise Spence, 'Colonialism, Racism and Representation', Screen 24:2 (1983): 'Our analysis draws from, and hopefully applies by extension to, the analysis of other oppressions such as sexism, class subordination and anti-semitism, to all situations, that is, in which difference is transformed into "otherness" and exploited or penalised by and for power' (3). John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880-1960, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Hugh Cunningham, 'The Language of Patriotism 1750-1914', History Workshop 12 (Autumn 1981), 24. Raymond Williams, 'Problems of Materialism', Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980) and Towards 2000 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1983).

747

5.7

WHITE MYTHOLOGIES Robert Young From White Mythologies: Writing History and the West, Routledge, 1990, 1-20

If so-called 'so-called poststructuralism' is the product of a single historical moment, then that moment is probably not May 1968 but rather the Algerian War of Independence - no doubt itself both a symptom and a product. In this respect it is significant that Sartre, Althusser, Derrida and Lyotard, among others, were all either born in Algeria or personally involved with the events of the war. But let us begin instead with Helene Cixous's remarkable account of what it was like to grow up as an Algerian French Jewish girl at that time: I learned everything from this first spectacle: I saw how the white (French), superior, plutocratic, civilized world founded its power on the repression of populations who had suddenly become 'invisible', like proletarians, immigrant workers, minorities who are not the right 'colour'. Women. Invisible as humans. But, of course, perceived as tools - dirty, stupid, lazy, underhanded, etc. Thanks to some annihilating dialectical magic, I saw that the great, noble, 'advanced' countries established themselves by expelling what was 'strange'; excluding it but not dismissing it; enslaving it. A commonplace gesture of History: there have to be two races - the masters and the slaves.1 Cixous has been criticized for lacking a politics and a theory of the social.2 According to some criteria perhaps, but if so they would have to exclude from 'the political' considerations such as those described here. Which is precisely the point: if there is a politics to what has become known as poststructuralism, then it is articulated in this passage which unnervingly weaves capitalist economic exploitation, racism, colonialism, sexism, together with, perhaps unexpectedly, 'History' and the structure of the Hegelian dialectic. 748

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A lot has been said already in the English-speaking world about poststructuralism and politics, much of it in the accusatory mode voiced from the opposing class-based verities of 'tradition' or 'History'. Such apparently secure grounds of objection amount to two narratives: their intriguing similarity brings out the extent to which poststructuralism challenges not just the politics and institutions of the right but also the politics and theoretical systems of the left. Disturbing conventional assumptions about what constitutes 'the political', poststructuralism is correspondingly difficult to place itself. In the passage just cited for example it is striking that Cixous includes the Hegelian dialectic in the forms of political oppression which she describes. It is not a question of showing that such an allegation misinterprets or simplifies Hegel's texts.3 Of course it does. The problem involves rather the ways in which Hegel has been read, absorbed and adapted. Nor is it just the Hegelian dialectic as such: Cixous includes 'History', and by implication therefore Marxism as well. This cannot simply be dismissed as another New Right invocation of the Gulag, for Cixous is arguing something much more specific: that Marxism, insofar as it inherits the system of the Hegelian dialectic, is also implicated in the link between the structures of knowledge and the forms of oppression of the last two hundred years: a phenomenon that has become known as Eurocentrism. To this extent, Marxism's universalizing narrative of the unfolding of a rational system of world history is simply a negative form of the history of European imperialism: it was Hegel, after all, who declared that 'Africa has no history', and it was Marx who, though critical of British imperialism, concluded that the British colonization of India was ultimately for the best because it brought India into the evolutionary narrative of Western history, thus creating the conditions for future class struggle there.4 Such an arrogant and arrogating narrative means that the story of 'world history' not only involves what Fredric Jameson describes as the wresting of freedom from the realm of necessity but always also the creation, subjection and final appropriation of Europe's 'others'. This is why 'History', which for Marxism promises liberation, for Cixous also entails another forgotten story of oppression: Already I know all about the 'reality' that supports History's progress: everything throughout the centuries depends on the distinction between the Selfsame, the ownself . . . and that which limits it: so now what menaces my-own-good . . . is the 'other'. What is the 'Other'? If it is truly the 'other', there is nothing to say; it cannot be theorized. The 'other' escapes me. It is elsewhere, outside: absolutely other. It doesn't settle down. But in History, of course, what is called 'other' is an alterity that does settle down, that falls into the dialectical circle. It is the other in a 749

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hierarchically organized relationship in which the same is what rules, names, defines, and assigns 'its' other. With the dreadful simplicity that orders the movement Hegel erected as a system, society trots along before my eyes reproducing to perfection the mechanism of the death struggle: the reduction of a 'person' to a 'nobody' to the position of 'other' - the inexorable plot of racism. There has to be some 'other' - no master without a slave, no economico-political power without exploitation, no dominant class without cattle under the yoke, no 'Frenchmen' without wogs, no Nazis without Jews, no property without exclusion - an exclusion that has its limits and is part of the dialectic. (70-1) Not that Hegel himself is responsible. Rather the problem, Cixous argues, is that unfortunately Hegel wasn't inventing things. The entire Hegelian machinery simply lays down the operation of a system already in place, already operating in everyday life. Politics and knowledge have worked according to the same Hegelian dialectic, with its 'phallo-logocentric Aufhebung' - whether it be Marxism's History, Europe's colonial annexations and accompanying racism or orientalist scholarship, or, in a typical conflation of patriarchy and colonialism, Freud's characterization of femininity as the dark unexplored continent ('within his economy, she is the strangeness he likes to appropriate' [68]). For even Freud, according to Cixous, has not helped in any project to separate history from the history of appropriation or that of phallocentrism. The patriarchal structures of psychoanalytic theory have often been defended on the grounds that they only describe the current customs of a patriarchal society. But this does not alter the fact that psychoanalysis therefore repeats the same masculine 'Empire of the Selfsame', and that as soon as such descriptions become institutionalized - as a structure of knowledge, or as psychoanalytic practice - then they become agents of the system they describe.5 The point is to change it. But why this emphasis on Hegel? The problem of the Hegelian model, particularly of a historicism which presupposes a governing structure of self-realization in all historical process, is by no means confined to postwar French Marxism, but the dominance of Hegelian Marxism from the thirties to the fifties does explain the particular context for the French post-structuralist assault.6 Here it is not a question of suggesting that Hegel is somehow answerable for the excesses of capitalism or even socialism in the past two hundred years: rather what is at stake is the argument that the dominant force of opposition to capitalism, Marxism, as a body of knowledge itself remains complicit with, and even extends, the system to which it is opposed. Hegel articulates a philosophical structure of the appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge which uncannily simu750

WHITE MYTHOLOGIES

lates the project of nineteenth-century imperialism; the construction of knowledges which all operate through forms of expropriation and incorporation of the other mimics at a conceptual level the geographical and economic absorption of the non-European world by the West. Marxism's standing Hegel on his head may have reversed his idealism, but it did not change the mode of operation of a conceptual system which remains collusively Eurocentric. It is thus entirely appropriate that Hegelian Marxism has become generally known as 'Western Marxism'. As Cixous suggests, the mode of knowledge as a politics of arrogation pivots at a theoretical level on the dialectic of the same and the other. Such knowledge is always centred in a self even though it is outward looking, searching for power and control of what is other to it. Anthropology has always provided the clearest symptomatic instance, as was foreseen by Rousseau from the outset. History, with a capital H, similarly cannot tolerate otherness or leave it outside its economy of inclusion. The appropriation of the other as a form of knowledge within a totalizing system can thus be set alongside the history (if not the project) of European imperialism, and the constitution of the other as 'other' alongside racism and sexism. The reaction against this structure has produced forms of politics that do not fit into traditional political categories. Here the problem rests on the fact that for orthodox Marxism there can be only one 'other', that of the working class, into which all other oppressed groups, so-called 'minorities', must in the last instance be subsumed. Such a position is by no means confined to a Marxism of a Stalinist past. In Making History, published in 1987, for example, Alex Callinicos argues that the so-called poststructuralist critique of the category of the subject can be avoided by shifting the subject out of the problematic realm of consciousness into a theory of human agency. This provides something closer to historical Marxism, although it does mean that he quickly becomes involved in assumptions about rationality and intentionality, and has to propose a 'Principle of Humanity', that is a common human nature, to hold them all together. Perhaps not unexpectedly, the 'Principle of Humanity' also turns out to involve the assumption that class is the primary form of collective agency, because, we are told, it is more fundamental than any other interests or forms of social power. Callinicos writes: Feminists and black nationalists [sic] often complain that the concepts of Marxist class theory are 'gender-blind' and 'race-blind'. This is indeed true. Agents' class position derives from their place in production relations, not their gender or supposed race. But of itself this does not provide grounds for rejecting Marxism, since its chief theoretical claim is precisely to explain power-relations and forms of conflict such as those denoted by the terms 'nation', gender' and 'race' in terms of the forces and relations of 751

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production. The mere existence of national, sexual and racial oppression does not refute historical materialism, but rather constitutes its explanandum. The only interesting question is whether or not Marxism can actually explain these phenomena.7 The only interesting question? So as long as gender and race can be satisfactorily subordinated to class then Marxism does not need refuting, and history can be reasserted as the single narrative of the Third International.8 Conversely, as Callinicos implicitly recognizes, the problem with contemporary politics for the left is that the dialectic of class depends on a historicist History and vice versa; any failure of the former necessarily also involves a waning of the latter. Marxism's inability to deal with the political interventions of other oppositional groups has meant that its History can no longer claim to subsume all processes of change. The straightforward oppositional structure of capital and class does not necessarily work any more: if we think in terms of Hegel's master/slave dialectic, then rather than the working class being the obvious universal subject-victim, many others are also oppressed: particularly women, black people, and all other so-called ethnic and minority groups. Any single individual may belong to several of these, but the forms of oppression, as of resistance or change, may not only overlap but may also differ or even conflict. As soon as there is no longer a single master and no single slave, then the classic Hegelian reversal model on which Marxism depends and on which it bases its theory of revolution (literally, an overturning) is no longer adequate. In fact it is arguable whether such dualistic conditions ever existed anyway: marginal groups which could not be assimilated into the category of the working class were merely relegated by Marx to the Lumpenproletariat. Even the formulation of a dualistic class division, Laclau and Mouffe have argued persuasively, is itself nothing less than a nostalgic attempt to recreate for the nineteenth century the imagined simplicity of the conditions of the aristocracy/bourgeoisie conflict of the French Revolution which has originally inspired Hegel.9 A similarly straightforward opposition also provides much of the attraction which has fuelled the recent growth of interest in the historical analysis of colonialism - in which you apparently have the simple binary of master and slave, colonizer and colonized. With colonialism it's easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, which makes it tempting to substitute the colonized for the lost working class. Already in 1957 Roland Barthes was claiming that 'today it is the colonized peoples who assume the full ethical and political condition described by Marx as being that of the proletariat'.'0 But politics today are much more complex, much more difficult to disentangle. The dialectical structure of oppositional politics no longer works for the micro-politics of the post-war period in the West. This is the context of Foucault's critique of what he calls the 752

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sovereign model of power, of the idea that power has a single source in a master, king, or class - and can thus easily be reversed. This shift from a conflictual dyadic political structure is not simply a question of historical change, of the recent appearance of 'minorities': after all the slave was already constituted simultaneously according, to different groups (for example male or female), the Lumpenproletariat always had to be excluded. The problem begins at a conceptual level with the initial division between master and slave as such, as if relations of power work according to the binary opposition of Hegel's fight to the death between two individuals.11 This structure is not, as might at first be imagined, derived from a fantasy of power relations modelled on a medieval joust but from the phenomenological account of the constitution of knowledge that works according to the structure of a subject perceiving an object, a same/other dialectic in which the other is first constituted by the same through its negation as other before being incorporated within it. No possibility of dialogue or exchange here. As Cixous argues, nor can there be any place in this schema for the other as other, unless it becomes, like God, an absolute other, literally unknowable. The difficulties which arise from this structure are familiar from the debates in feminism, where 'woman' seems to be offered an alternative of either being the 'other' as constituted by man, that is, conforming to the stereotypes of patriarchy, or, if she is to avoid this, of being an absolute 'other' outside knowledge, necessarily confined to inarticulate expressions of mysticism or jouissance. The only way to side-step these alternatives seems to be to reject the other altogether and become the same, that is, equal to men - but then with no difference from them. Exactly the same double bind is encountered in any theorization of racial difference. In his influential Le Meme et I'autre Vincent Descombes has described the entire history of twentieth-century philosophy in France as a succession of moves which attempt to get out of this Hegelian dialectic: the recent phenomenon of poststructuralism is part of a long philosophical story and distinguished only by what appears to be a certain success, or at least an avoidance of failure to the extent that it has at least managed to keep the game with Hegel in play.12 The real difficulty has always been to find an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic - difficult because strictly speaking it is impossible, insofar as the operation of the dialectic already includes its negation. You cannot get out of Hegel by simply contradicting him, any more than you can get out of those other Hegelian systems, Marxism and psychoanalysis, by simply opposing them: for in both your opposition is likewise always recuperable, as the workings of ideology or psychic resistance. Nor can you get away from Hegel by simply removing him, like the excision of Trotsky from the side of Lenin in certain official Soviet photographs. This is the lesson of Althusser. Althusser's historical interest 753

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derives from the fact that he represents the only orthodox Marxist theorist who has tried to get out of Hegel while remaining a Marxist - though for many Marxists he did sacrifice Marxism in the process, which only suggests how closely Marxism and Hegelianism are intertwined. Althusser's theoretical interest, on the other hand, is that he demonstrates the impossibility of any attempt simply to exclude, excise or extirpate Hegel. Other strategies are required. I Historicism and imperialism Metaphysics - the white mythology which reassembles and reflects the culture of the West: the white man takes his own mythology, Indo-European mythology, his own logos, that is, the mythos of his idiom, for the universal form of that he must still wish to call Reason. Jacques Derrida13 If poststructuralism has involved an attempted disruption or reworking of Hegelianism through the detection of its own fissures, it is not by any means unique in such an enterprise. For, as Foucault argued in 1978, the work of the Frankfurt School could also be regarded as a reassessment of Hegelianism and the metaphysics of dialectical thought.14 However, it is too simplistic a reaction to suggest that French poststructuralism can therefore be invalidated by judging it against the claims of a comparable endeavour in Germany, a procedure which can only operate by turning the former into a failed version of the latter, which obviously leaves open the possibility of exactly the reverse argument being made.15 Though the two may have isolated similar problems, the political and intellectual context of their work was by no means the same. The key Frankfurt School text in this regard is obviously Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment of 1944.16 The date, and the exiled place of composition of its authors, suggests tellingly that the situation with which it attempts to deal is the phenomenon of fascism which seemed to have stopped in its tracks the long march of the progress of reason, and its liberating enlightenment ideals, of which Marxism was the fullest political development. Horkheimer and Adorno therefore pose the question: how has the dialectic deviated into fascism? Why has History gone wrong? Their answer, briefly, was that reason had always contained a measure of irrationality, which, despite its best intentions, had led to its involvement with tyranny and domination: 'Enlightenment is totalitarian'.17 The very powers of rationality which enabled modern man to free himself from nature and control it had also become an instrumental device to dominate him. If nature had been modelled by man into productive commodities, man's 754

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own subjectivity had also become reified into a self-identical instrument; man had become an empty and passive consumer. The project, therefore, was to return to the enlightenment in the wake of fascism, to excise the forms of instrumental rationality that had produced this self-defeating and, ironically, irrational dialectical structure of domination, and to redefine reason and the forms of identity thinking that had defined the individual simply as an indistinguishable element in the collective. In this way the autonomy and spontaneity of the individual subject that had been the original goal of enlightenment might be retrieved. If for the Frankfurt School the problem to be dealt with was the relation of the phenomena of fascism, and particularly Auschwitz, to the ideals of the enlightenment and the progress of reason, for the French poststructuralists the historical perspective was similarly long. But it comprised, rather, a history of the West in which fascism was itself merely a symptom, and included not only the history of European imperialism but also the defeats of the European colonial powers by Japan in World War II, the subsequent French (and American) defeat in South-East Asia, the war in Algeria, as well as the many other colonial wars of national liberation. From this point of view the French have never regarded fascism as an aberration, concurring rather with Cesaire and Fanon that it can be explained quite simply as European colonialism brought home to Europe by a country that had been deprived of its overseas empire after World War I. French poststructuralism, therefore, involves a critique of reason as a system of domination comparable to that of the Frankfurt School, but rather than setting up the possibility of a purged reason operating in an unblocked, ideal speech situation as a defence against tyranny and coercion in the manner of a Habermas, it reanalyses the operations of reason as such. Here the focus is placed not so much upon the continued presence of irrationality, for irrationality after all is simply reason's own excluded but necessary negative other, but rather on the possibility of other logics being imbricated within reason which might serve to undo its own tendency to domination. Here we have a major difference from the historical pessimism of Adorno's negative dialectics which in certain respects poststructuralism might appear to resemble. Another such project was initiated by Adorno's contemporary JeanPaul Sartre, whose attempt to define a new form of Hegelian Marxism via a reworked philosophy of consciousness in many ways more closely resembled that of the Frankfurt School. In both cases revisionary work of this kind was embodied in a historical and political analysis of the relation of individual consciousness to society, from within the aegis of an Hegelian Marxism in some respects still impossibly bound to its own enlightenment heritage. This meant that Adorno in particular tended to project science as something exterior and exclusively instrumental; he reacted against it, as well as 'objective' reason generally, by trying to retrieve the individual 755

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subject as the means to salvation. In France, however, there also existed a very different tradition, that of the history of the sciences, a tradition in which Foucault has placed himself. Having been overshadowed since the war by Sartrean Marxism, in the crises of the 1960s it emerged as the more influential of the two. Foucault traces its history back to Husserl's Cartesian Meditations (1929) and the Crisis of the European Sciences (1936) - in which Husserl 'posed the question of the relations between the "Western" project of a universal deployment of reason, [and] the positivity of the sciences and the radicality of philosophy'.18 This enabled the establishment of a critical position in relation to science which for Adorno remained so elusive. In larger terms, however, the questions posed in the French tradition were comparable to those of the Frankfurt School, particularly the interrogation of rationality in its claims to universality. As Foucault puts it: In the history of the sciences in France, as in German critical theory, it is a matter at bottom of examining a reason, the autonomy of whose structures carries with it a history of dogmatism and despotism - a reason, consequently, which can only have an effect of emancipation on condition that it manages to liberate itself from itself. (54) The final emancipatory gesture of enlightenment thought would thus be its own liberation from itself, so that it is no longer recognizable as reason. But what was it that brought about the return of the question of the enlightenment to contemporary philosophical enquiry? Foucault identifies three reasons: first of all the ever-increasing importance of technology, secondly the place of rationalism in the optimism attached to the notion of 'revolution' - as well as in the despotism that so often followed its realization - and thirdly: the movement which, at the close of the colonial era, led it to be asked of the West what entitles its culture, its science, its social organization, and finally its rationality itself, to be able to claim universal validity: was this not a mirage associated with economic domination and political hegemony? Two centuries later, the Enlightenment returns: but not at all as a way for the West to take cognizance of its present possibilities and of the liberties to which it can have access, but as a way of interrogating it on its limits and on the powers which it has abused. Reason as despotic enlightenment. (54) 756

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Foucault's account is particularly useful insofar as it gives a good indication of the characteristic French, as opposed to German, emphasis on the relation of Marxism to enlightenment rationality and the questioning of enlightenment claims to the universality of its values. The first element, the role of science, is common to both, though they approach the question from opposite perspectives. The second, the role of enlightenment thinking in the subsequent history of European despotism, is the particular focus of interest for the German critical theorists, most memorable and most forcibly articulated in Benjamin's 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. It is the third element, however, which represents the special interest of the French, whether of the Sartrean or Foucauldian tradition: the relation of the enlightenment, its grand projects and universal truth-claims, to the history of European colonialism. This need not necessarily involve a direct analysis of the effects of colonialism as such, but can also consist of a relentless anatomization of the collusive forms of European knowledge. For Foucault this has comprised a vigorous critique of historicism, including Marxist historicism, and its relation to the operations of knowledge and power. It is from this perspective that it becomes possible to understand the basis of the distrust of totalizing systems of knowledge which depend upon theory and concepts, so characteristic of Foucault or Lyotard, both of whom have been predominantly concerned with the attempt to isolate and foreground singularity as opposed to universality.19 This quest for the singular, the contingent event which by definition refuses all conceptualization, can clearly be related to the project of constructing a form of knowledge that respects the other without absorbing it into the same. It is in the work of Edward Said that we can find the problematic of historicist forms of knowledge linked most forcibly to the question of European imperialism. He writes: So far as Orientalism in particular and European knowledge of other societies in general have been concerned, historicism meant that one human history uniting humanity either culminated in or was observed from the vantage point of Europe, or the West. . . . What . . . has never taken place is an epistemological critique at the most fundamental level of the connection between the development of a historicism which has expanded and developed enough to include antithetical attitudes such as ideologies of Western imperialism and critiques of imperialism on the one hand, and on the other, the actual practice of imperialism by which the accumulation of territories and population, the control of economies, and the incorporation and homogenisation of histories are maintained.20 757

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This was the difficult project of his own book, Orientalism (1978), which we shall later be examining in detail. For the moment let us focus on Said's subsequent point that if Orientalism and anthropology derive from historicism, this is by no means a thing of the past: of more recent sciences, Said singles out in particular that of world history as practised by Braudel, Wallerstein, Anderson and Wolf, which he contends is still derived from the enterprise of Orientalism and its colluding companion anthropology, and which has refused to encounter and to interrogate its own relationship as a discipline to European imperialism. For Said, the problem amounts simply to historicism and 'the universalising and self-validating that has been endemic to it': the theories of accumulation on a world scale, or the capitalist world state, or lineages of absolutism depend (a) on the same displaced percipient and historicist observer who had been an Orientalist or colonial traveller three generations ago; (b) they depend also on a homogenising and incorporating world historical scheme that assimilated non-synchronous developments, histories, cultures, and peoples to it; and (c) they block and keep down latent epistemological critiques of the institutional, cultural and disciplinary instruments linking the incorporative practice of world history with partial knowledges like Orientalism on the one hand, and on the other, with continued 'Western' hegemony of the nonEuropean, peripheral world (22) A new type of knowledge, Said contends, must be produced that can analyse plural objects as such rather than offering forms of integrated understanding that simply comprehend them within totalizing schemas. Already across a wide range of different activities he points to advances in the process of 'breaking up, dissolving and methodologically as well as critically reconceiving the unitary field ruled hitherto by Orientalism, historicism, and what could be called essentalist universalism'. In this last phrase, Said thus links his critique of Orientalism to other critiques, such as those of racism or of patriarchy. The more difficult question remains of what form this new kind of knowledge can take. Here we return to the theoretical problem of how the other can be articulated as such. How can we represent other cultures? asks Said, as Levi-Strauss had done before him. His own dismissal of deconstruction as a merely textual practice means that he is himself at a loss when faced with the complex conceptual dialectics of the same and the other. As will be demonstrated with respect of Orientalism itself, Said cannot get out of the Hegelian problematic that he articulates, and indeed tends himself to repeat the very processes that he criticizes. His advocacy of an analytic pluralism in itself does not solve, or even address, the conceptual problems. 758

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Nevertheless, Said's comments suggest the wider significance of his project. The demise of an orthodox Marxism may have left theory with a sense that everything is now in flux, that the old verities have gone, but it has also involved the important realization, articulated so forcibly by writers such as Foucault or Said, of the deep articulation of knowledge with power. The politics of poststructuralism forces the recognition that all knowledge may be variously contaminated, implicated in its very formal or 'objective' structures. This means that in particular colonial discourse analysis is not merely a marginal adjunct to more mainstream studies, a specialized activity only for minorities or for historians of imperialism and colonialism, but itself forms the point of questioning of Western knowledge's categories and assumptions. In the same way, Fanon suggests that at the political level the so-called 'Third World' constitutes the disruptive term for the European political dialectic of capitalism and socialism. Everyone feels the need nowadays to qualify the term 'Third World', stating quite correctly that it should not be taken to imply a homogeneous entity. The inadequateness of the term, however, insofar as it offers a univocal description of an extremely heterogeneous section of the world, also means that a suitable alternative general category cannot by definition be produced. In this situation, abject apologies in some respects remain complicit with the patronizing attitudes from which they attempt to disassociate themselves. For the 'Third World' was invented in the context of the 1955 Bandung Conference, on the model of the French Revolution's Third Estate', and incorporating equally revolutionary ideals of providing a radical alternative to the hegemonic capitalist-socialist power blocks of the post-war period.21 The Third World as a term needs to retrieve this lost positive sense - even if today the political order has changed so that to some extent the various forms of Islamic fundamentalism have taken over the role of providing a direct alternative to First and Second World ideologies.22 Third World' will, therefore, be used in this book without (further) apology, or scare quotes, as a positive term of radical critique even if it also necessarily signals its negative sense of economic dependency and exploitation. II The philosophical allergy Although Said rejects them, and Foucault characteristically does not mention them, the most effective ploys that have recently been played in this project of articulating another form of knowledge, of redefining the basis of knowledge as such, derive from a different although related body of work to that which Foucault describes - namely the phenomenological tradition of Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida, which, seemingly like all twentieth-century European philosophy, also traces its apparent origins back to Husserl. As we have seen, the fundamental problem concerns the 759

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way in which knowledge - and therefore theory, or history - is constituted through the comprehension and incorporation of the other. This has led to a series of attempts to reinscribe a place for, and a relation with, the other as other, outside the sphere of mastery and therefore, logically speaking, both infinite and beyond the scope of knowledge. Emmanuel Levinas, for example, whose career has been long enough to have introduced Husserl to Sartre in the thirties and to have been able to reply to Derrida in the seventies, proposes a rather different critique of such models of knowledge to those which we have encountered so far.23 According to Levinas, Western philosophy coincides with the disclosure of the other where the other, in manifesting itself as a being, loses its alterity. From its infancy philosophy has been struck with a horror of the other that remains other - with an insurmountable allergy. . . . Hegel's philosophy represents the logical outcome of this underlying allergy of philosophy.24 Levinas objects to the implicit violence in the process of knowledge which appropriates and sublates the essence of the other into itself. But as we can see, he does not just blame Hegel here, for according to Levinas ontology itself is the problem. Concerned to find a way to allow the other to remain as other, Levinas therefore rejects not only Hegel but Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre also, and abjures ontology altogether. Because ontology involves an ethico-political violence towards the other, always to some degree seen as a threat, Levinas proposes ethics in its place, substituting a respect for the other for a grasping of it, and a theory of desire not as negation and assimilation but as infinite separation. In Totality and Infinity (1961), a book self-consciously written under the shadow of two 'world' wars in which Europe, at the limit of its attempt to devour the world, turned in on itself in two violent acts of selfconsummation, Levinas questions the accepted relation between morality and politics.25 It must always, he suggests, be possible to criticize politics from the point of view of the ethical. As Althusser was keen to emphasize, according to Marx morality works simply as a form of ideological control, and Levinas concurs that 'everyone will readily agree that it is the highest importance to know whether we are not duped by morality' (21). But, he argues, the placing of politics - 'the art of foreseeing war and of winning it by every means' - before morality overlooks the extent to which war constitutes the philosophical concept of being itself. For being is always defined as the appropriation of either difference into identity, or of identities into a greater order, be it absolute knowledge, History, or the state. For its part, violence involves not just physical force, injuring or annihilating persons, but also 760

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interrupting their continuity, making them play roles in which they no longer recognize themselves, making them betray not only commitments but their own substance. . . . Not only modern war but every war employs arms that turn against those who wield them. It establishes an order from which no one can keep his distance; nothing henceforth is exterior. (21) War, then, is another form of the appropriation of the other, and underpins all ontological thinking with its violence.26 Its corollary, or 'visage', is the concept of totality, which, as Levinas observes, has dominated Western philosophy in its long history of desire for Unity and the One. Through the totality, itself a kind of rational self writ large, the individual takes on meaning; the present is sacrificed to a future which will bring forth an ultimate, objective meaning when the totality of history is realized. The objection therefore to totalization is not founded on any simple analogy with totalitarianism - though neither can this be excluded - but rather on the implicit violence of ontology itself, in which the same constitutes itself through a form of negativity in relation to the other, producing all knowledge by appropriating and sublating the other within itself. As Levinas puts it, 'the idea of truth as a grasp on things must necessarily have a non-metaphorical sense somewhere'.27 In Western philosophy, when knowledge or theory comprehends the other, then the alterity of the latter vanishes as it becomes part of the same. This 'ontological imperialism', Levinas argues, goes back at least to Socrates but can be found as recently as Heidegger. In all cases the other is neutralized as a means of encompassing it: ontology amounts to a philosophy of power, an egotism in which the relation with the other is accomplished through its assimilation into the self. Its political implications are clear enough: Heidegger, with the whole of Western history, takes the relation with the Other as enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples, the possessors and builders of the earth. Possession is preeminently the form in which the other becomes the same, by becoming mine. (46) Ontology, therefore, though outwardly directed, remains always centred in an incorporating self: 'this imperialism of the same', Levinas suggests, 'is the whole essence of freedom' (87). For freedom is maintained by a selfpossession which extends itself to anything that threatens its identity. In this structure European philosophy reduplicates Western foreign policy, where democracy at home is maintained through colonial or neocolonial oppression abroad. Levinas opposes freedom, based on self-interest, to 761

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justice, which respects the alterity of the other and can only be proposed through the asymmetry of dialogue.28 This also implies an interrogation of the imperialism of theory itself. For theory, as a form of knowledge and understanding of the spectator, is constitutively unable to let the other remain outside itself, outside its representation of the panorama which it surveys, in a state of singularity or separation.29 This will also be true of any concept, because by definition the concept 'cannot capture the absolutely-other'; and, to the extent that it must invoke a form of generality, of language itself. Any conventional form of understanding must appropriate the other, in an act of violence and reduction. This leads Levinas to denounce the inability of theory, in its drive to comprehension and representation, to do justice to any radical exteriority.30 But how can we know and respect the other? Is there a means of bridging the gap between knowledge and morality that avoids the problems of Kant's recourse to the aesthetic but also resists Lyotard's argument that the two are simply incommensurable?31 How can Levinas' ethics work differently from ontology? Against the egotism of the preoccupation of being with itself, he posits a relation of sociality, whereby the self instead of assimilating the other opens itself to it through a relation with it. In the place of the correlation of knowledge with vision and light, the visual metaphor by which the adequation of the idea with the thing has been thought from Plato to Heidegger, Levinas proposes language, which in the form of speech enables a kind of invisible contact between subjects that leaves them both intact. Language, however, should take the form of dialogue: whereas the universality of reason means that it must necessarily renounce all singularity, and whereas language's function in conceptualizing thought is to suppress the other and bring it within the aegis of the same, in dialogue language maintains the distance between the two; 'their commerce', as Levinas puts it, 'is ethical'. Dialogism allows for 'radical separation, the strangeness of the interlocutors, the revelation of the other to me' (73). The structure of dialogue, moreover, disallows the taking up of any position beyond the interlocutors from which they can be integrated into a larger totality. The relation between them, therefore, is not oppositional, nor limitrophe, but one of alterity. Dialogue, face to face conversation, maintains a non-symmetrical relation, a separation through speech. In so doing it breaches any totality, including History: To say that the other can remain absolutely other, that he enters only into the relationship of conversation, is to say that history itself, an identification of the same, cannot claim to totalise the same and the other. The absolutely other, whose alterity is overcome in the philosophy of immanence on the allegedly common 762

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plane of history, maintains his transcendence in the midst of history. The same is essentially identification within the diverse, or history, or system. It is not I who resist the system, as Kierkegaard thought; it is the other. (40) The thesis of the primacy of History, Levinas argues, forms part of the imperialism of the same. For 'totalization is accomplished only in history' when the historiographer assimilates all particular existences and punctual moments into the time of universal history, whose chronological order, it is assumed, 'outlines the plot of being in itself, analogous to nature' (55). If History claims to incorporate the other within a larger impersonal spirit or idea, albeit the ruse of reason, Levinas contends that 'this alleged integration is cruelty and injustice, that is, [it] ignores the Other' (52). History is the realm of violence and war; it constitutes another form by which the other is appropriated into the same. For the other to remain other it must not derive its meaning from History but must instead have a separate time which differs from historical time.32 Whereas for Heidegger time and history are the horizon of Being, for Levinas 'when man truly approaches the Other he is uprooted from history' (52). Time itself involves the 'relationship to unattainable alterity', an absolute past.33 It is in temporality, in anteriority, that we find an otherness beyond being. Levinas calls the relation in which an infinite distance is maintained from the other 'metaphysics'. Metaphysics, he writes, 'transcendence, the welcoming of the other by the same, of the other by me, is concretely produced as the calling into question of the same by the other, that is, as the ethics that accomplishes the critical essence of knowledge' (43). Metaphysics therefore precedes ontology. Though a troubling term, metaphysics for Levinas names a counter-tradition in philosophy in which the idea of infinity breaches all totality because 'it is a relationship with a surplus always exterior to the totality' (22). This surplus is the effect of the radical alterity of the other, whether as 'face' or as death, which prevents the totality from being constituted as such. As might be expected, it is the possibility of this absolute otherness, and the ability to excise all violence in the relation with it, which Derrida questions in the first of his discussions of Levinas.34 Whereas Levinas, like Habermas, posits an authentic language of expression which abhors the distortions of 'rhetoric', Derrida argues that such alterity is constituted not through dialogue but rather through the operation of language itself: Levinas' transcendence-assurplus is therefore redefined as a Derridean supplement. This would mean that there can never be an authentic speech of the other as such, a position which certainly troubles Levinas' fundamental argument.35 Despite their differences, Derrida's keen interest in Levinas, as Christopher Norris has argued in scrupulously non-Derridean terms, points to 763

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'the ultimately ethical nature of his enterprise'.36 The early essay on Levinas, dating from 1964, shows the extent to which Derrida has been implicated in such questions from the first - though, contra Norris, he has always shown that the conditions of 'writing' that make ethics possible also makes them impossible. Certain orientations of his work can be affiliated to Levinas' attempt to shift the relation to alterity from an appropriation by the same into its totality to a respect for the other's heterogeneity. Derrida has even described the critique of logocentrism as 'above all else the search for the "other" '.37 This can be related to the concern in Derrida's work with the politics of feminism and other positions which contest institutional and political appropriation and exclusion. In recent years Levinas has himself articulated more explicitly his account of the relation of the ethical to the political. If there were just two, as in the face-to-face dialogue, then the ethical would preside as the injunction of responsibility for the other. But as soon as there are three, he suggests, then the ethical moves into politics. 'We can never', Levinas concedes to Derrida, 'completely escape from the language of ontology and politics'.38 But this does not mean that the ethical has to renounce the moral order in the political world of the third person - of justice, of government, institutions, or the law. The political can retain an ethical foundation: Levinas finds his example for this, unexpectedly, in Marx's famous comment on idealist philosophers - that the point is not to describe the world but to change it: In Marx's critique we find an ethical conscience cutting through the ontological identification of truth with an ideal intelligibility and demanding that theory be converted into a concrete praxis of concern for the other.39 From this perspective Levinas proposes the possibility that the much lamented 'subject' be brought back not as the ontological subject which seeks to reduce everything to itself but as an ethical subject defined in relation to the other: 'Ethics redefines subjectivity as this heteronomous responsibility in contrast to autonomous freedom'.40 We might compare this ethical relation to Cixous' remarks about the need to love the other or Kristeva's recent preoccupation with love which, from this perspective, hardly involves the sudden apostasy of which she has been accused, but rather as for Levinas consists of a way of formulating a 'responsibility for the Other, being-for-the-other'.41 In each case these writers can be shown to be trying to place the other outside the sphere of mastery rather than in a relation of negation or of reduplication of the self. Unlike a conventional ethics of altruism, such a relation remains one of alterity. There will always be some return for the self in any gift - unless it can be articulated in an economy of ingratitude, a 764

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movement without return. Unless, that is, philosophy can become dissemination: 'a work conceived radically is a movement of the same unto the other which never returns to the same'?2 To the story of Ulysses, Levinas opposes that of Abraham who leaves his fatherland for ever, never to return. This figure of the diaspora returns us to one of the most important aspects of Levinas' formulation of the relation of the ethical to the political, that is the connections which he makes between the structure of ontology and Eurocentrism, the latter 'disqualified', as he puts it, 'by so many horrors'.43 He connects the form of knowledge that is self-centred but directed outwards, philosophy as 'egology', quite explicitly with the appropriating narcissism of the West. So in the past few hundred years Europe has been, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has suggested, constituted and consolidated as 'sovereign subject, indeed sovereign and subject'. Just as the colonized has been constructed according to the terms of the colonizer's own self-image, as the 'self-consolidating other', so Europe consolidated itself as sovereign subject by defining its colonies as 'Others', even as it constituted them, for purposes of administration and the expansion of markets, into programmed near-images of that very sovereign self.44 It is this sovereign self of Europe which is today being deconstructed, showing the extent to which Europe's other has been a narcissistic selfimage through which it has constituted itself while never allowing it to achieve a perfect fit. This can be allied to Derrida's critique of 'a certain fundamental Europeanization of world culture'.45 Derrida has sometimes been criticized for the generality of phrases such as 'the history of the West', or the claim that his work involves a critique of 'Western metaphysics'. Although one of the earliest questions put to him in England concerned this category of 'the West', in the subsequent fervour that accompanied the transformation of Derrida's work into the method of deconstruction, this problem tended to slip out of view.46 In its largest and perhaps most significant perspective, deconstruction involves not just a critique of the grounds of knowledge in general, but specifically of the grounds of Occidental knowledge. The equation of knowledge with 'what is called Western thought, the thought whose destiny is to extend its domains while the boundaries of the West are drawn back' involves the very kind of assumption that Derrida is interrogating - and this is the reason for his constant emphasis on its being the knowledge of the West; in the same way Foucault also emphasizes that he is specifically discussing the 'Western episteme'.41 The assertion that Derrida's work incurs a form of relativism is thus exactly to the point, though its implications are rather different from those generally assumed in such a complaint. 765

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For we can say that deconstruction involves the decentralization and decolonization of European thought - insofar as it is 'incapable of respecting the Being and meaning of the other', and to the extent that its philosophical tradition makes 'common cause with oppression and with the totalitarianism of the same'.48 This has been the significance of Levinas' thought for Derrida. As he puts it in Writing and Difference, at the very moment when the fundamental conceptual systems of Europe are in the process of taking over all of humanity, Levinas leads us instead to 'an inconceivable process of dismantling and dispossession'. For Levinas' thought seeks to liberate itself from the Greek domination of the Same and the One . . . as if from oppression itself - an oppression certainly comparable to none other in the world, an ontological or transcendental oppression, but also the origin or alibi of all oppression in the world.49 This is the context in which to set Derrida's own intervention in OfGrammatology. Everyone knows that that book is a critique of 'logocentrism'; what is less often recalled is that the terms of the critique with which it opens announce the design of focusing attention on logocentrism's 'ethnocentrism' which, Derrida suggests, is 'nothing but the most original and powerful ethnocentrism, in the process of imposing itself upon the world'.50 It is this preoccupation which accounts for Derrida's choice, and forceful interrogation, of the privileged examples of Saussure - where he focuses on the 'profound ethnocentrism' of his exclusion of writing Rousseau and Levi-Strauss.51 In the case of the latter, Derrida's interest also focuses particularly on the way in which Levi-Strauss produces his knowledge of a non-European civilization according to a doubled but noncontradictory logic which evades identity-thinking. The well-known deconstruction carried out in 'Structure, Sign, and Play' shows how the constitution of anthropological knowledge, though often paraded as scientific and objective, is nevertheless governed by a problematic of which it remains unaware: the philosophical category of the centre - which Derrida then proceeds to articulate with the problem of Eurocentrism.52 The analysis of the dialectics of the centre and the margin can thus operate geographically as well as conceptually, articulating the power relationships between the metropolitan and the colonial cultures at their geographical peripheries. This is not to suggest, however, that deconstruction in any sense brings another knowledge to bear: rather it involves a critique of Western knowledge that works by exploiting the ambivalent resources of Western writing, as if Marxism were to produce a critique of ideology without the advantage of its science (which, given the current ambiguous status of Marxist science is not a possibility to be dismissed lightly). If one 766

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had to answer, therefore, the general question of what is deconstruction a deconstruction of, the answer would be, of the concept, the authority, and assumed primacy of, the category of 'the West'. If deconstruction forms part of a more widespread attempt to decolonize the forms of European thought, from this perspective Derrida's work can be understood as characteristically postmodern. Postmodernism can best be defined as European culture's awareness that it is no longer the unquestioned and dominant centre of the world. Significantly enough one of the very earliest uses of the term 'postmodern', dating from the time of the Second World War, was that of Arnold Toynbee in his A Study of History. He used it to describe the new age of Western history which, according to Toynbee, began in the f 870s with the simultaneous globalization of Western culture and the re-empowerment of non-Western states.53 If this new period brought with it a phase of Spenglerian pessimism after the long years of Victorian optimism, Toynbee did not himself assume that the West was in decline as such, but rather that paradoxically the globalization of Western civilization was being accompanied by a selfconsciousness of its own cultural relativization, a process to which Toynbee's own equally totalizing and relativizing history was designed to contribute. Reviewing the genesis of his whole project, he recounts that his history was written against a current Late Modern Western convention of identifying a parvenue and provincial Western Society's history with 'History', writ large, sans phrase. In the writer's view this convention was the preposterous off-spring of a distorting egocentric illusion to which the children of a Western Civilisation had succumbed like the children of all other known civilisations and known primitive societies.54 Postmodernism, therefore, becomes a certain self-consciousness about a culture's own historical relativity - which begins to explain why, as its critics complain, it also involves the loss of the sense of an absoluteness of any Western account of History. Today, if we pose the difficult question of the relation of poststructuralism to postmodernism, one distinction between them that might be drawn would be that whereas postmodernism seems to include the problematic of the place of Western culture in relation to non-Western cultures, poststructuralism as a category seems not to imply such a perspective. This, however, is hardly the case, for it rather involves if anything a more active critique of the Eurocentric premises of Western knowledge. The difference would be that it does not offer a critique by positioning itself outside 'the West', but rather uses its own alterity and duplicity in order to effect its deconstruction. In this context, we may note, attempts to account for poststructuralism in terms of the 767

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aftermath of the events of May 68 seem positively myopic, lacking the very historical perspective to which they lay claim. Contrary, then, to some of its more overreaching definitions, postmodernism itself could be said to mark not just the cultural effects of a new stage of 'late' capitalism, but the sense of the loss of European history and culture as History and Culture, the loss of their unquestioned place at the centre of the world.55 We could say that if, according to Foucault, the centrality of 'Man' dissolved at the end of the eighteenth century as the 'Classical Order' gave way to 'History', today at the end of the twentieth century, as 'History' gives way to the 'Postmodern', we are witnessing the dissolution of 'the West'.

Notes 1 Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 70. Further references will be cited in the text. For Derrida's childhood memories of violence, fear and racism in colonial Algeria see 'Derrida 1'insoumis', Le Nouvel Observateur 9th September 1983 (translated in Derrida and Difference, eds David Wood and R. Bernasconi [Warwick: Parousia Press, 1985], 107-27); Lyotard's writings on Algeria have recently been collected as La Guerre des algeriens: Ecrits 1956-1963, ed. Mohammed Randani (Paris: Galilee, 1989). 2 For example, Rachel Bowlby, 'The Feminine Female', Social Text 7 (1983), 67. The question that follows is to what extent the concerns expressed here significantly affect Cixous' work. 3 The general argument, for example, of Gillian Rose's Dialectic of Nihilism. Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984). 4 In The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (London: The Colonial Press, 1899), Hegel concludes his brief discussion of Africa with the comment, 'at this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit' (99). Marx, in The Future Results of the British Rule in India' (1853), comments: Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history. What we call its history is but the history of its successive intruders who founded their empires on the passive basis of that unresisting and unchanging society.... England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia. (Surveys from Exile, ed. David Fernbach [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973], 320); compare also Said's comments on 'World history', section II, below. For an Althusserian alternative to the orthodox Marxist view see Brian Turner, Marx and the End of Orientalism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978); Eric Wolfs Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982) attempts an anthropological account of the relation of European history to that of the rest of the world. 5 cf. Jacques Derrida, 'Le Facteur de la verite', in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 480-2n. 6 For a recent account of Hegelian Marxism in France, see Michael S. Roth, 768

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7 8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18

Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Alex Callinicos, Making History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), 177. The same difficulties could be demonstrated for Habermas' attempt to shift the basis of the subject from consciousness to intersubjectivity - which necessarily means that he is even more dependent on presupposing a category of normativity that has to repress difference. Such a move forms part of a strategy designed to enable a reaffirmation of a progressive schema of world history. See Jiirgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 1: Reason and the Rationalisation of Society, trans. Thomas McCarthy (London: Heinemann, 1985), Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). For a critique of the notion of normativity as a form of imperialism, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Differend. Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 142-5, and, with respect to Habermas in particular, see my 'Not Revolutionary - But Communicating', Oxford Literary Review 11 (1989), 224-5. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985), 149-52. JeanFrancois Lyotard makes a similar point in relation to narratives of emancipation in The Differend. Phrases in Dispute, trans. George Van Den Abbeele (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 161. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 148. Particularly apparent in the opening description of The Communist Manifesto (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1952), 40-2. Translated as Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. ScottFox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Jacques Derrida, 'White Mythology' (1971), in Margins - of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982), 213. Michel Foucault, 'Georges Canguilhem: Philosopher of Error', Ideology and Consciousness 7 (1980), 53-4. Foucault discusses his own relation to the Frankfurt School in 'Critical Theory/Intellectual History', in Michel Foucault: Philosophy, Politics, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Routledge, 1988), 17^6; see also David Couzens Hoy, 'Power, Repression, Progress: Foucault, Lukes, and the Frankfurt School', in Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David Couzens Hoy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 123^7. Thus Peter Dews, for example, in Logics of Disintegration: Post-Structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (London: Verso, 1987), consistently sets the Frankfurt School against poststructuralism in a simple relation of truth to illusion. For a more productive comparison, see Rainer Nagele, 'The Scene of the Other: Theodor W. Adorno's Negative Dialectic in the Context of Poststructuralism', in Jonathan Arac, ed., Postmodernism and Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 91-111. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Gumming (New York: Continuum, 1982). Dialectic of Enlightenment, 6. Lyotard discusses Adorno's analysis of Auschwitz in The Differend, 86-106. Foucault, 'Georges Canguilhem', 53. Further references will be cited in the text. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), and The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental

769

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19

20 21

22

23

24 25 26

27

Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970). Husserl was, of course, also important in different ways for both Sartre and Adorno. For further discussion of this project in Foucault, see Chapter 5, below. With regard to Lyotard, Geoffrey Bennington notes that 'perhaps the most coherent view of Lyotard's work as a whole is that it strives to respect the event in its singularity, and has experimented with various ways of achieving that respect. Such a stress on a singularity which is not an individual is itself not individual to Lyotard, of course, and he has even suggested that it might be taken as a guiding thread of what in the English-speaking countries is known as "poststructuralism" ' (Geoffrey Bennington, Lyotard. Writing the Event [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988], 9). Edward Said, 'Orientalism Reconsidered', in Europe and Its Others, ed. Francis Barker et aL, 2 vols (Colchester: University of Essex, 1985) 1, 22. Further references will be given in the text. For an account of 'Third Worldism' see Nigel Harris, The End of the Third World: Newly Industrializing Countries and the Decline of an Ideology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), 11-29; see also Peter Worsley, The Third World, 2nd ed. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967). In Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature: Modernism and Imperialism (Derry: Field Day Pamphlets 14, 1988), Fredric Jameson, on the other hand, recalls Levi-Strauss' contention in Tristes tropiques that Islam amounts to 'the last and most advanced of the great Western monotheisms' (17). On Islam as an anti-colonial revolutionary force see Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), 171; on Islamic fundamentalism, see Bruno Etienne, L'Islamisme radical (Paris: Hachette, 1987). Emmanuel Levinas, Theorie de I'intuition dans la phenomenologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan, 1930), and 'Jacques Derrida: tout autrement', in Les Dieux dans la cuisine: vingt ans de la philosophie en France, ed. Jacques Brochier (Paris: Aubier, 1975), reprinted in Noms prop res (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1975). Emmanuel Levinas, 'The Trace of the Other', in Deconstruction in Context, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 346-7. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity. An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, [1969]), 21ff. Further references will be cited in the text. Compare Michel Foucault's analysis of power in terms of war in The History of Sexuality. Volume One: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (London: Allen Lane, 1979), 93, and in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon et al. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 123. Emmanuel Levinas, 'Beyond Intentionality', in Philosophy in France Today, ed. Alan Montefiore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 103. Martin Jay suggests that the critique of a Lukacsian holism also derived from the post-war identification of totality with totalitarianism. However, as Jay points out, among French Marxists, even before Sartre, there was already a stress on open rather than closed totalities, for example in the work of Lefebvre (Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to Habermas [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 296-7). For further discussion of the totality/totalitarian equation, in the context of a presentation by Fredric Jameson, see Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan, 1988), 358-9. 770

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28 Levinas' ideas about justice can be compared to those of Lyotard for whom justice is also a question of respecting alterity and conflictual diversity rather than their resolution through universal laws. See in particular The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minnesota: Minnesota University Press, 1984), and Jean-Fran$ois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming [Au juste], trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1985). 29 Levinas' account of the role of theory as vision, and its claim in Plato to a disinterested contemplation of being is discussed in detail by Derrida in 'Violence and Metaphysics. An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas', in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 84-92. 30 Compare Lyotard again, who contests the status of theory in Economic libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974) and denounces it as terror in Rudiments pa'iens, genre dissertatif (Paris: Union generate d'editions, 1977). 31 See Paul de Man, 'Kant's Materialism', in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), and Lyotard and Thebaud, Just Gaming. In The Differend, however, Lyotard returns to the Kantian problematic of the aesthetic and the sublime (161-71). 32 An example of an attempt to write such a history would be Foucault's account of the history of madness; though as Foucault found to his cost, any history as representation, even the history of the Other, must always run the risk of becoming the history of the same. See his Preface to The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), xxiv, discussed in Chapter 5. 33 Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity. Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 61; Levinas' sustained discussion of time comes in Le Temps et I'Autre (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1979). In Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), Derrida specifically relates his concept of 'trace to what is at the centre of the latest work of Emmanuel Levinas and his critique of ontology: relationship to the illeity as to the alterity of a past that never was and can never be lived in the originary or modified form of presence' (70). 34 In addition to 'Violence and Metaphysics', Derrida has also written on Levinas in 'En ce moment meme dans cet ouvrage me void', in Textes pour Emmanuel Levinas, ed. Fran?ois Laruelle (Paris: Galilee, 1980), reprinted in Jacques Derrida, Psyche: Inventions de I'autre (Paris: Galilee, 1987), 159-202. See also 'Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy', Oxford Literary Review 6:2 (1984), 3-37. 35 For the difficulties inherent in the idea of an authentic speech of the other, see my discussion of Bakhtin in The Culture of Institutions (forthcoming). 36 Christopher Norris, Derrida (London: Fontana, 1987), 230. Norris' essay usefully counters the widespread assumption that the concern with ethics is a recent development; for example, in Logics of Disintegration, Peter Dews suggests that in the 'late 1970s onwards' it became possible to pose philosophical questions about ethics which would, he claims, have been 'unthinkable during the heady years of "anti-humanist" and "post-philosophical" experimentation' (xii). This becomes somewhat less plausible to the extent that the 'post-philosophical' itself involves the posing of ethical questions to philosophy. On Derrida and ethics, see also Robert Bernasconi, 'Deconstruction and the Possibility of Ethics', in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques 111

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37 38

39 40 41

42

43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52 53

54

Derrida, ed. John Sallis (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 122-39. Lacan's important Seminar on ethics, given in 1959-60, is available as Le Seminare VIII: L'Ethique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1986). Richard Kearney, Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers. The Phenomenological Heritage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 123. Kearney, Dialogues, 58. Levinas here endorses the more Derridean position, in which he sees ontology and metaphysics as necessarily interdependent, first proposed in his Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981). Kearney, Dialogues, 69. Kearney, Dialogues, 63. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 52. On love see also Totality and Infinity, 254-5; Helene Cixous, 'An Exchange with Helene Cixous', in Verena Andermatt Conley, Helene Cixous: Writing the Feminine (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 143; Julia Kristeva, Histoires d'amour (Paris: Denoel, 1983). For Kristeva's discussions of ethics, see 'The Ethics of Linguistics', in Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 23-35, and 'Stabat Mater', in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 160-86. Levinas, 'The Trace of the Other', 348. On the gift, and the related notion of the debt, see Derrida, 'Des Tours de Babel', in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 165-205, and Glas, trans. John P. Leavey and Richard Rand (Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 1986), 242a-5a. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 117. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'The Rani of Sirmur', in Europe and Its Others, I, 128. Jacques Derrida and Christie V. McDonald, 'Choreographies', Diacritics 12:2 (1982), 69. Oxford Literary Review seminar held with Derrida, Oxford 1979. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 4; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, xxii-iv and passim. In Of Grammatology Derrida sets up the category of the West in an explicit binary opposition with the East: '[writing] is to speech what China is to Europe' (25). The force of his argument, however, is to question the distinctness of these categories. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 91. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 83. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 3. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 120. Derrida, 'Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' in Writing and Difference, 278-93. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934—61). Toynbee's early use of the term 'postmodern' is cited by Charles Jencks in What is Post-Modernism? (London: Academy Editions, 1986), 3. Today we can find this perspective in Eric Hobsbawm's work, particularly The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985) and The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987). Toynbee, A Study of History, IX, 410. For an early critique of Toynbee's positivism, see R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1946), 159-65.

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WHITE MYTHOLOGIES 55 cf. Paul Virilio et al., Le Pourissement des societes (Paris: Union generale d'editions, 1975). The loss of European cultural dominance gives a more significant context to Dick Hebdige's argument in Subculture. The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979), that all post-war subcultural phenomena in Britain have been responses to, or identifications with, British Afro-Caribbean culture. For a different view, see Simon During, 'Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today', Textual Practice 1:1 (1987), 32-47. Since writing this book, I have come across Wlad Godzich's Foreword ('The Further Possibility of Knowledge') to the English translation of a collection of Michel de Certeau's essays, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1986). Godzich's Foreword puts de Certeau's work into a context comparable to that sketched out in this introductory chapter, and is recommended to anyone interested in its general argument.

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5.8 THE PRIMITIVIST AND THE POSTCOLONIAL Nicholas Thomas From Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government, Princeton University Press, 1994,170-95

Of the forms that colonialism takes in the present, the development projects and military interventions on the part of First World states are perhaps the most conspicuous. Though development takes many forms, some of which are no doubt as constructive as others are pernicious, and though arguments about the Gulf war or Panama might be rather different to those around Vietnam, both military interventions and 'economic assistance' are manifestly linked with investments and spheres of informal political control. If global power has certainly undergone numerous displacements and destabilizations over the second half of the twentieth century, its dynamics and asymmetries remain recognizably imperialist; if this colonialism seeks to convert 'newly industrialized' or 'less developed' economies, rather than pagan souls, it nevertheless retains the intrusive character that missionary interventions always possessed, even when local people had their own reasons for adopting whatever introduced practices or discourses were at issue. This chapter explores neither economic neo-colonialism nor the New World Order that cost so many Iraqi lives.1 I pass over these topics partly because they have been extensively discussed by many others, but mostly because I wish to focus on forms of contemporary cultural colonialism which left-liberal culture in the West is not dissociated from, but deeply implicated in. It is easy to denounce government policies and bodies such as the IMF, but perhaps more difficult to explore constructions of the exotic and the primitive that are superficially sympathetic or progressive but in many ways resonant of traditional evocations of others. Though these, in their time, may similarly have appeared enlightened, they often now look restrictive and exploitative. One of the tasks of cultural critique 774

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can be an exposure of the tension between the apparent strategic value of these rhetorical forms and their underlying or longer-term limitations. I have argued that colonialism's culture should not be seen as a singular enduring discourse, but rather as a series of projects that incorporate representations, narratives and practical efforts. Although competing colonizing visions at particular times often shared a good deal, as the racist discourses of one epoch superficially resembled those of others, these projects are best understood as strategic reformulations and revaluations of prior discourses, determined by their historical, political and cultural contexts, rather than by allegedly eternal properties of self-other relations, or by any other generalized discursive logic. Accordingly, contemporary primitivisms possess a good deal in common with earlier reifications and fetishizations of nationally simple ways of life, but have a distinctive character that derives from the politics of identity in the present. The primitivist discourses I describe here cannot be straightforwardly located in particular, institutionally circumscribed colonizing projects such as that of the Australasian Methodist mission or the British administration in Fiji; rather, like the capital-I Imperialism which Rhodes, Buchan and Milner championed, contemporary primitivism is diffused through consumer culture and a variety of class and interest groups. However, the variants that I am concerned to explore are located in societies of a distinct type, that is, settler colonies. While eighteenth-century primitivism is associated mainly with French and British Enlightenment writers who were reflecting on accounts from remote America or the South Pacific, whites in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and elsewhere are now idealizing indigenous peoples in similar terms, but with reference to Australian Aborigines, Maori and native Americans.2 The key question is whether affirmations of native spirituality and harmony with the environment (of the sort exemplified by the furniture mentioned in chapter 1) actually entail a consequential revaluation of indigenous culture (or in what contexts, and for whom?), or whether they instead merely recapitulate appropriations familiar from the history of settler colonies, in which Australians and others have defined themselves as 'natives' by using boomerang motifs and Aboriginal designs and by claiming similar attachments to land. These issues are rendered more complicated by the range of indigenous statements in the debate. 'Primitivist' idealizations are advanced not only by whites but also by some Aborigines and some Maori, and their evident strategic value in advancing the recognition of indigenous cultures clearly precludes any categorical rejection of the whole discourse. What is at issue is not whether current representations match some check-list of what is or is not politically correct, but the play between essentialist and hybridized identities in a field of affirmations and contests. My main reason for concluding Colonialism's Culture with these themes is that they loom large in public debate around the scene of its 775

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composition. However, a book about the directions and techniques of colonial cultural studies might have another reason for privileging the construction of indigenous identities in this way: because it redresses the marginalization of these issues - and these people - in the contemporary discourses of critical multiculturalism and postcolonial theory, especially as they are fashioned in the United States, which (despite all the talk of 'decentering') remains the key arena for the legitimization and the marketing of scholarship and theory. It is understandable, but regrettable, that debates about race, minority identities, representations of ethnicity and cognate questions are almost always about Afro-Americans, Hispanics and other immigrant people of colour within the United States or about histories of colonialism in other regions. In US journals that address race,3 more reference is made to racism and colonial conflicts elsewhere - in South Africa or Britain - than to native American struggles, and there is no widely read theoretical text that speaks from the indigenous perspective in the way that the work of Gates, bell hooks, Cornel West and many others speak from Afro-American experience, or as Said's Orientalism and Spivak's work presents the positions of diasporic intellectuals from the Middle East and south Asia respectively. If this is readily explicable on the grounds of the limited presence of native Americans in the academy, it is in other ways puzzling: native Americans and narratives of conquest are prominent in major popular genres such as Hollywood Westerns, but scarcely enter into the literature on colonial discourse and the 'representation of the other'. While the blindness may have been partially ameliorated by the debates around native American issues in the Quincentenary year, it remains to be seen whether contemporary issues and localized protests receive as much enduring attention as work on the conquest itself by prominent theorists such as Stephen Greenblatt. It is notable that Marvelous Possessions relates the violence and wonder of cross-cultural contact gesturally to Zionism, and in more detail to the paradigmatically exotic Bali, but not to the encounter that continues between the indigenous peoples and the dominant society within North America.4 It is no doubt desirable for the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century histories to be reinterpreted, but it is a pity if an emphasis on that period paradoxically reinforces the marginalization of contemporary native Americans.5 There thus seems scope for the marginal societies of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, in which indigenous assertions and identities are far more powerfully present, to write something back into the debates in the United States. This is simply that American societies are settler societies too, and that indigenous perspectives and histories cannot be equivalized with those of other 'others'. Although the 'primitive' and the 'exotic' are sometimes conflated, exoticism has more to do with difference and strangeness than an antithetical 776

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relation to modernity. The Middle East, India and China were often constructed as 'feudal' or otherwise pre-modern, but their significance in Western representation tended to derive from emblematic customs such as the harem, caste, footbinding and so on, rather than from their archaism as such. The importance of difference - as opposed to sheer inversion - is manifest for instance in the interest in Indian architecture shown in Salt's engraving, reproduced in chapter 2 (plate 3). The potential disconnection of exoticism from evolutionary time is marked also by the fact that Japan, Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong remain exotic for Europeans and Americans, even though their modernity can hardly be in doubt. The primitive, on the other hand, is not generally significant because of some specific attributes that say Australian Aborigines possess and 'Hottentots' do not, but above all because of an originary, socially simple and natural character. Even in eighteenth-century expressions, this simplicity can be understood in terms of a lack of the material possessions by which Europeans are corrupted or dulled, rather than enhanced. [N]ature in her more simple modes is unable to furnish a rich European with a due portion of pleasurable sensations. He is obliged to have recourse to masses of inert matter, which he causes to be converted into a million of forms, far the greatest part solely to feed that incurable craving known by the name of vanity. All the arts are employed to amuse him, and expel the tedium vita, acquired by the stimulus of pleasure being used till it will stimulate no more; and all the arts are insufficient. Of this disease, which you are here so terribly afflicted, the native Americans know nothing. When war and hunting no longer require their exertions, they can rest in peace. After satisfying the more immediate wants of nature, they dance, they play; - weary of this, they bask in the sun, and sing. If enjoyment of existence be happiness, they seem to possess it; not indeed so high raised as yours sometimes, but more continued and more uninterrupted.6 'Primitivism', typified by this sort of contrast, is something more specific than an interest in the primitive: it attributes an exemplary status to simple or archaic ways of life, and thus frequently shares the progressivist understanding of tribal society as an original and antecedent form, but revalues its rudimentary character as something to be upheld. At this level of generality, it is the conformity of contemporary primitivism with the longer tradition that seems striking. In Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreaming (1991), Robert Lawlor argues that Aboriginal culture is everything that the West is not. In particular, he emphasizes that Aboriginal dreaming 777

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constructs the world as a unified field of psychic energy, and that in many fundamental respects this worldview has been conducive to higher forms of happiness and sociality than those 'we' are able to experience. Western civilization, associated with the 'puritanical oppression' of Christianity, colonialism, 'capitalism and its socialistic variations', scientific thinking and so on amounts to a massive detour from healthy human development; it is fortunately one that we appear now to be in a position to rectify. Although Lawlor had earlier pursued his interests in ancient civilization in south India, living among 'Dravidian people whose language and way of life had remained virtually unchanged for the last four thousand years', he was drawn away from that 'land blanketed with layers of history and burdened with overpopulation' toward 'the most ancient of all cultures'.7 Not content with the standard archaeological view that Aborigines have been in Australia for 40,000 or 50,000 years, or even the more speculative claim that occupation may extend back to around 150,000 years before the present, Lawlor finds mounting evidence for an Australian origin for humanity; the facts have been neglected by archaeologists predisposed to look to Africa. Aborigines are seen to have developed a kind of pre-Stone Age wood-based culture, which has persisted to the present day without evolving perhaps 'because their revelations, or Dreamtime laws, prevented them from doing so.' In many respects, for Lawlor, 'The Australian Aborigines seem to be a predecessor or prototype in that they exhibit, throughout their populations, distinctive characteristics of all the other four major races.'8 Some points of Lawlor's argument lend themselves more readily to quotation than paraphrase. It is as if the Aborigines are the quintessence of the primary fourfold division of the races [White, Yellow, Black, and Red, or Caucasian, Mongoloid, Negroid, and Capoid] . . . It may seem to be a coincidence that modern astronomers have designated the four major phases in the life cycles of stars as black holes, red giants, white dwarfs, and yellow suns. However, their respective qualities are related to and consistent with other symbologies of the four colors.9 Aboriginal culture is thus original in a radical and absolute sense. Lawlor asserts again and again that what can be witnessed of Aboriginal life in the present expresses and recapitulates a truth that humanity has otherwise lost: a typical caption to an 1890s photograph reproduced by Lawlor reads 'The ceremonies of the Aborigines call us back to the primal origins of creation.' Many particular aspects of Aboriginal sociality thus compare favourably with Western practices because the former preserve a sense of the interconnectedness of all things. Even the domain of gender relations, generally thought to entail domination and a variety of social 778

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and ritual asymmetries across most of the continent, illustrates for Lawlor the superiority of 'early societies' that escaped 'the crackdown on fertility rites by state religions'. He finds that 'The bestowal of women in Aboriginal society supports a stable social order based on nonpossessive attitudes. It also fulfills a more positive function than the repressive pornographic forms found in our own society.'10 While the idea that 'our society' possesses any unitary form of sexuality is untenable (where would this place the voguing of Jenny Livingston's film Paris is Burning?) the idea that non-European sexualities might be preferable to the objectifications of pornography and advertising is entirely reasonable, as is the thesis that non-industrial forms of production make the obscenity of pollution and overproduction visible. This is commonplace, of course, but may be justified if juxtaposition with other societies somehow adds rhetorical force to the denunciation of modernity; we need not only to see that Los Angeles would be nicer if there were fewer cars, but also that Aborigines got on very well without cars at all. If this was only silly it would hardly warrant discussion. What is problematic is the extent to which this New Age primitivism reiterates the negative as well as the potentially positive features of the archaism attributed to Aborigines. Constructing them as culturally stable since the beginning of humanity does imply an historical existence, an inability to change and an incapacity to survive modernity; this essentialism also entails stipulations about what is and what is not appropriately and truly Aboriginal, which marginalizes not only urban Aboriginal cultures, but any forms not closely associated with traditional bush gathering. The book's interest in contemporary Aboriginality may be judged from the fact that nearly all the photographs of people are from the Baldwin Spencer collection of outback images from the turn of the century, that are said to provide 'an authentic glimpse into the oldest known human society.'11 The other images include exploration-period engravings and numerous drawings based on colonial images, and a range of colour photographs of dot and xray animal paintings (it nowhere being made explicit that these are distinctively modern styles). Other recent photographs feature the landscape, the desert, kangaroos and other wildlife; only one is of an Aboriginal person, a head-and-torso portrait of a girl, dots painted across her forehead, apparently not wearing any European clothing, and naturalized by a bird standing on her hand. The caption reads 'Wild birds bring messages from unknown realms.' The anthropologist Spencer's images are thus decontextualized from the history of contact between the people depicted and Europeans; despite the fact that some were clearly posed on Spencer's request, what we see reflects not a particular population, but a generic Aboriginal culture which has existed since the beginning of time. Lawlor is, of course, ignoring the archaeological evidence for various shifts in technology, art and 779

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production systems - evidence which is often frustratingly inconclusive, but which presumably reflects wider social and cultural changes and a larger dynamism. But it is hardly surprising to find this undiscussed: were the historical vigour of Aboriginal societies acknowledged, their prelapsarian status would of course be prejudiced. Being radically anti-modern, it is not surprising that Aborigines are profoundly threatened by modernity. The worn and misleading 'fatal impact' thesis is aired again in passing allusions such as those to the destructive effects of alcohol and to an old man who is 'the last member of his tribe' still able to make stone tools. More problematically, it is asserted that the Tasmanian Aborigines (especially attractive to Lawlor because of their ecologically sound nudity and alleged inability to light fires) were in fact eliminated: 'by 1850, the extermination of this primeval people had swept from the earth the last rituals of human innocence.'12 This kind of statement is of course offensive to modern indigenous Tasmanians (though no doubt from Lawlor's point of view they are half-castes and hence not 'real' Aborigines). Aboriginality can thus be cherished only in so far as it is a stable form that can be made to correspond with New Age metaphysics; Aboriginal history contributes to the picture only by showing that the relation of white Western culture of Aboriginal life was purely destructive. In so far as histories might establish that Aborigines resisted colonization, or accommodated themselves to it, or appropriated Christianity, Western art styles and other objects, discourses and institutions to serve Aboriginal needs and ends, they are irrelevant, and are occluded. This celebration of Aboriginality is thus limited to the traditional, and presents contemporary Aboriginal life through works of art that can be construed as traditional by a primarily American readership unfamiliar with the postwar history of Aboriginal painting. Though alluding to the oppressed and damaged character of Aboriginal society, the book has no space for Aboriginal political movements, not even for the Land Rights struggle which in fact establishes the enduring importance of attachments to country. Is it possible to avoid concluding that this evocation is little more than a rip-off, that the 'Aboriginal Dreamtime' here is like the woman in the glossy pornographic photograph, construed 'appreciatively' in terms specified by the imagemaker? * ** Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves was more than just another movie. It was widely applauded; its sympathetic treatment of American Indians was regarded as unprecedented;13 it took a lion's share of the 1991 Oscars; and despite being long and very predictable, it was rereleased in a director's cut with an additional 40 minutes of footage in late 1991.14 In production, the film was in fact progressive to the extent that native American actors, rather than white stars, took the Indian parts. Beyond this, and the realist 780

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POSTCOLONIAL

device of presenting subtitled speech in the native languages, the film is strikingly unoriginal in its reiteration of primitivist tropes and the stereotypic understanding of colonial histories that I evoked in chapter 1. As several commentators have pointed out, Dances, like a number of earlier 'liberal' Westerns, merely inverts the Manichean oppositions associated with the more conventional triumph of 'how the West was won'.15 The frontier whites are degenerate and evil; the Indians are noble and courageous, and live in harmony with the land and with one another. What is remarkable is not the reappearance of these terms in a Hollywood film, or the New Age re-emphasis on indigenous spirituality, but the way in which the master-caption of Costner's voice-over reduces the complexities and ambiguities of characters to categorical truths. In fact, there is some tension within the Lakota Sioux community which the alienated Lieutenant Dunbar joins, between Indians favouring hostile and more accommodating responses to whites, and though this energizes much of the film's implicit emotional dynamism, the voice-over resists the implication that the native community is divided by any inequity or conflict: 'It seems every day ends with a miracle here . . . I've never known a people so eager to laugh, so devoted to family, and so dedicated to each other, and the only word that came to mind was harmony.' This reinforces the sense noted earlier in which primitivism, unlike exoticism, is concerned less with difference than sheer inversion and juxtaposition: the specificity of Indian cultures (marked by the canonical teepees and feather headdresses) serves no narrative function, but merely authenticates a portrait of a type of society opposed to our own, which possesses virtues that are plainly absent from a rapacious and expanding white modernity. This primitivism is therefore distinct from the anthropological tradition dedicated to the itemization of cultural difference, which informed a colonial governmentality that operated in Fiji and elsewhere upon the various native societies or cultures that it defined. While neutralizing those difference through idealization, primitivism however shares with that anthropological project a legislation of authenticity: others are acceptable in so far as they conform to their proper natures, but are degenerate and improper in 'acculturated' or hybridized forms. Dances refrains from presenting the inauthentic Indian, but accords with familiar primitivist logic in displacing the negative attributes of savagery onto another tribal population, in this case the Pawnee, whose characterization as lawless barbarians has been overlooked by those who celebrate the film. Hence, as with the Cook voyage responses to Pacific islanders, discussed in chapter 3, it is not the case that a romantic noble savage discourse has been opposed to another set of representations that denigrated ignoble savages; rather a unitary discourse could deploy both figures in different contexts or for different narrative purposes. The ambiguity that Marianna Torgovnick noted in very different Western reflections on the primitive is 781

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again manifest: while overtly aiming to displace ideas of savagery and white superiority, liberal texts air and deploy the very notions that they notionally question, and in the end perhaps do more to reaffirm than subvert them.16 Dances naturalizes the Sioux by revealing them within a remarkable, brilliantly photographed landscape. The 'big screen' is as crucial here as it is in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, creating an image of heroic proportions, a cinematic equivalent to the history painting that, despite the film's unoriginality, is not remotely to be seen as a succession of generic allusions or postmodern ironies, but a fatal-impact narrative saturated with human meaning, morality and tragedy. The lamentation of the fatal impact is perhaps the film's profoundest subterfuge. The idealization of the Sioux entails their incompatability with colonial society and makes their elimination inevitable. Dunbar explains near the beginning that he wants 'to see the frontier . . . before it's gone', and though the viewer is spared any horrific massacre, the closing text frames, over the smouldering fires of an abandoned camp, record that 'Thirteen years later, their homes destroyed, their buffalo gone, the last band of free Sioux submitted to white authority at Port Robinson, Nebraska. The great horse culture of the Plains was gone and the American frontier was soon to pass into history.' This conclusion thus affirms what Dunbar's initial statement anticipates, and privileges the indigenized Dunbar as a resourceful backwoodsman, striding off into the snow with his wife and child, in a principled action aimed to draw the military's attention away from the tribe that has hosted him. The evocation of the native Americans has a conditional quality: not 'here they are', but 'here is their passing'. As in E. S. Curtis's classic images of noble Indians vanishing into the mists, the landscape or their own melancholy, so also in Lindt's studio portrait, Raffles's print of the Papuan slave staring toward his homeland and many settler-colonial representations of 'The last of the . . .', this fading to absence is determined by the presence of another figure, a white protagonist who is in some cases a settler, in others a writer able to record the truth of an extinguished culture.17 While Dances denigrates actual settlers and is not centrally preoccupied with ethnographic authority, it does ennoble the figure that Lieutenant Dunbar exemplifies. In its allegory of accomplishment and identity, the film may possess a singularity which its conformity with a long and diversified primitivist lineage would leave us unprepared for. In other words, and in terms of the argument I have advanced earlier in this book, the film is not merely another specimen of an enduring colonialist discourse, but a distinctive project that resonates with wider peculiarities of the present. One of the more powerful sections of the film is the opening display of the sheer insanity of the Civil War, which is followed by the corruption and cowardice of frontier officers Dunbar encounters on his way into 782

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Sioux country. Just as the Vietnam experience has been revealed cinematically as a debased madness from which nationalist truths of emancipation and military honour had been evacuated, both the Union's war and the civilizing mission in the West are exposed as struggles devoid of principled motive and expression, as corruptions from which Dunbar can only be alienated. Though initially deeply disorientated and confused, he is therefore not so much an agent of conquest, as a traveller; unlike Crawfurd in Prester John, he goes not to bring a people within the ambit of colonial order and power, but to prejudice his own customary truths, to transgress and experiment. With help from firearms appropriated from the military outpost he has abandoned, Dunbar aids his community in fighting off Pawnee raiders; as the chaos of the conflict subsides around him, Dunbar's voice-over tells us: It was hard to know how to feel. I'd never been in a fight like this one . . . there was no dark political objective . . . It had been fought to preserve the foodstores that would see us through the winter . . . I gradually began to look at it in a new way. I felt a pride I'd never felt before. I'd never really known who John Dunbar was. Perhaps the name itself had no meaning. As I heard my Sioux name being called over and over, I knew for the first time who I really was. Dunbar's nominal indigenization is also a moment of conquest in two senses. Not only does he help defeat the Pawnee, but he establishes himself as a champion among the Sioux, who recognize the power of the weapons he has introduced and make him the hero of the moment, calling his name over and over. This interpellation does not identify Dunbar as a Sioux, and this is not what his self-discovery consists in. Instead, his prior self-recognition as a soldier in battles possessing 'dark' political significance is transmuted into his recognition by the Sioux as a heroic warrior; he never becomes a common member of their community, but retains the privilege of the colonizer to act forcefully and with historical effect, yet his individual heroism is stripped of its associations with conquest and authenticated by the Sioux. This is, in fact, the only narrative work that the Indians can accomplish; everything else in the story is done to them or for them. The simultaneity of Dunbar's self-assertion and partial indigenization is allegorized by his 'dancing with wolves', his mystical association with an intractably wild creature that he paradoxically succeeds in partially domesticating and feeding, that becomes a kind of mascot and guardian spirit, occasionally visible and audible even after it is callously shot by the soldiers attempting to police Dunbar's dereliction of duty and reabsorb him to their side of the frontier. Costner/Dunbar, dissociated from the flaws of 783

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modernity and white society, as an indigenized white man, is a profoundly different figure to the acculturated Indian; while the latter can only acquire the corruption of white society and the half-caste morality typified by Henriques in Prester John, the white traveller retains the authority of presence that the passing Indian perforce lacks, while substituting integrity and an identification with the land for the discredited expansionist narratives of conquest and environmental destruction. What Dances with Wolves re-dresses is not history but a dominant masculine identity, and it does this not by narrating the other side of the story, but through the appropriation of Indian garb that lacks the stains of discarded uniforms. At any time a plethora of narratives of national identity are no doubt circulating in a conflicted field. It would be unwise to claim any emblematic status for Dances with Wolves, but the film may typify a liberal response to the declining appeal of modernization, patriotism and civic conservatism. With the rise and institutionalization of multiculturalism, 'identity' is associated increasingly with cultural difference and minority status, which is unavailable to the dominant culture, or at least to men. Liberal men, who cannot take the option of overtly denigrating minority identities and reaffirming the value of imperialism, environmentally destructive modernization and so on, are therefore prompted to reconstruct their own identities on the model of a minority. This curious, recursive reformulation, or moment of 'symbolic obviation' in Roy Wagner's terms, seems to lie behind such projects as the New Age redefinition of male sexuality, the 'Men's Movement' presided over by primitivist intellectuals like Robert Ely and the refashioned American individual of Dances with Wolves. Kevin Costner, dissociated from the Vietnam-Civil War, having discovered the Sioux in himself, and sanctimoniously lamented their departure from a land that now constitutes a vacant space for his own achievements, can re-emerge as a crusader for honesty and freedom in Oliver Stone's JFK. This marks another sense in which 'the primitive' is profoundly different from 'the exotic'. The force of the primitive in Costner's appropriation, and in similar operations in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand culture, derives precisely from the fact that the native is not foreign but indigenous: self-fashioning via the Sioux or the Aborigines does not exoticize oneself, but makes one more American or more Australian. (This is precisely what Paul Hogan, the folkloricized Australian hero, does in Crocodile Dundee, as is manifested particularly by his participation in a corroboree.) In this mode, primitivism has something in common with the long tradition of white settler appropriations of indigenous names and motifs - the use of the boomerang as an Australian emblem, for example but augments these by defining ethos and being, rather than merely the icons of identity, through indigenous models. If the legitimacy of traditional narratives of nationhood is destabilized to the point that the epoch 784

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can be characterized as 'posthistorical', primitivism can now serve not only the generalized New Age interest in spirituality and new masculinity, but also a specifically national truth. * ** It is difficult to tell this tale without recapitulating the vanishing trick that Dances with Wolves itself performs upon native Americans. The cultural dynamic seems to establish the permanence of colonial asymmetry, the fact that dominant white cultures seem to abandon one form of exploitation only to proceed to another: having stolen Aboriginal land, Australians are now stealing the Dreamtime. Depressingly plausible as it is, this pessimism might leave us unprepared for the distinct dynamics of these transactions, and the potentially empowering aspect of even their 'New Age' manifestations. The example of Aotearoa New Zealand reinforces the argument that there is a new appropriative dynamic of nationalized indigenous identity, but would undermine the view that this is no more than a further tactic of white dominance. New Zealand, like Australia, is a 'postcoloniaP society in the sense that it is no longer formally a British colony. It is also conspicuous that Maori culture now possesses a degree of prestige and legitimacy unprecedented in the period of colonization: even over a period of right-wing backlash and National (conservative) Party government, the notion that New Zealand should be a 'biculturaP society is gaining acceptance. But in what form is Maori culture recognized and celebrated? One telling expression is the projection of Maori identity in major exhibitions of taonga (valuables or treasures); the success of the Te Maori exhibition in New York in 1984 was regarded as a major boost for the Maori 'cultural renaissance' of the last decade, and a subsequent, related exhibition, Taonga Maori, more recently toured Australia and formed a long-term display in the National Museum in Wellington. What is striking about this collection of fine carvings, weaving, featherwork and nephrite is a radical aesthetic decontextualization that excludes non-traditional contexts of production, colonial processes and European influences of all kinds. Despite the fact that most of the material was nineteenth century, and was therefore made and collected during a period of intensive contact and rapid change, it was unambiguously associated through display captions and in the catalogue with a stable, authentic and radically different social universe that is characterized particularly by its holism, archaism and spirituality. Being a Maori, therefore, is knowing who we are and where we come from. It is about our past, present and future. Our kinship ties and descent expressed through our whakapapa (genealogy) are what binds us to our past and to our ancestors, and where our mana (power), ihi (prestige), wehi (fear) and 785

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tapu (sacredness) come from. This is our identity; without it we have no foundation, no refuge. It is expressed in the following words: He mana Maori motuhake He mana tuku iho ki a tatou. (Maori spirituality set apart A spirituality that has been handed down to us). The answer to the question 'Who are the Maori people?' is about the separation of ... the two primal parents of the M a o r i . . . It is about the many tribal traditions, myths, and stories which provide a solid foundation for our lives . . . it is about love and respect for our culture, our fellow man, and our environment.18 On the face of it, this evocation has a good deal in common with the discourse of Voices of the First Day. A number of objections to its content might be rehearsed, but it is important then to consider what the effect of Taonga Maori has been in its context. Certainly, the catalogue's larger description of Maori culture cannot be seen as an unproblematic self-presentation on the part of Maori: the section on kinship, for example, is highly reminiscent of anthropological systematizations, such as those of Sir Raymond Firth, that happen to be consistent with the projection of a cohesive kin-structured world because they emphasize the nesting together of descent lines, clans, and tribes. Similarly, though it should not be denied that categories such as mana and tapu were important notions in precolonial Maori culture, the descriptions in the catalogue do owe something to the traditional colonialist and anthropological representations, and on the whole they lean toward a construction of Maoriness as mystical and spiritual: 'The Maori psyche revolves around tribal roots, origins, and identity.'19 George French Angas, in New Zealanders Illustrated (1847), in his captions to depictions of a variety of artefacts, carvings, weapons and the like often alluded to the 'sacred' character of particular objects but associated this with irrational and constrained superstition: some tiki represented 'the supposed taniwa or river god'; 'so strict is the law of tapu that no one dare touch these valuable relics.'20 The Taonga Maori catalogue reproduces this emphasis on the mystical associations of the objects, supplanting a rationalist progressivism with white society's craving for non-industrial authenticity. The critique that might be put forward is not that this projection of identity is merely a derivative discourse, but that it partakes of a cultural essentialism that construes Maoriness primarily in terms of its difference from pakeha (white New Zealander) identity, and thus reduces it to terms that complement white society's absences: against the alienations of modernity are 'intimate connections' that constitute 'roots, origins, and 786

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identity'. In the discussion of the marae, the meeting ground that was and is the site of various formal celebrations, that is generally central to tribal affairs, it is stated that the marae 'is intimately connected with the ceremonial experiences in life crises such as birth, death, and marriage. To return to the marae from the brashness of urban life is to return to a simpler time, to a place of enduring human values.'21 What is oddly elided here is one of the most significant developments of the Maori renaissance, namely the great expansion of urban marae to serve the interests of Maori now remote from rural tribal homelands. The Maoriness evoked here, like some representations of Aboriginality, is available to white settlers seeking to establish national identities that are not merely impoverished versions of Britishness or limited to the pioneer experience to which relatively few can directly relate.22 The Taonga Maori show was part of a surge of interest that received particular impetus in the mid-1980s from the earlier Te Maori exhibition and the success of Keri Hulme's Booker-Prizewinning novel, The Bone People. The exhibitions might be criticized through similar arguments to those I adduced against Lawlor's Voices of the First Day. the construction of authentic spirituality marginalizes most Maori who, though not part of a homogeneous pakeha society, must negotiate identities in urban contexts, with non-traditional social relations, institutions, jobs and so on. In relation to folkloricized identities such as that paraded in the Taonga Maori exhibition, they stand as poor copies of a correct ethnic authenticity that is at once inaccessible to many urban Maori and inappropriate in so far as it is associated strongly with the past, rather than with the contemporary circumstances within which they, like everyone else, have to operate. In the specific domain of art, this excludes or marginalizes innovations, non-traditional media and any forms of modernist style: the few contemporary pieces that figured in the Taonga Maori exhibition were either modern examples of wholly traditional forms, such as weavings and carvings, or other works that manifested the persistence of traditional patterns and designs.23 The extensive body of modernist and postmodernist Maori art was excluded. In the Maori case, however, this kind of critique would neglect the extent to which characterizations of Maori tradition, spirituality and mythology have played a crucial empowering role in a wider struggle that has not been limited to the legitimization of traditional culture. This struggle has involved many campaigns against the desecration of tribal lands, against development or for compensation, and for better services and funding for Maori development and education programmes, such as Kohanga Reo, which aims to reverse the long-term decline in Maori language use through teaching programmes directed especially at primary school children.24 These efforts have ranged from occupations of land and direct action against anti-Maori racists to lobbying and bureaucratic reforms. In many cases the issues and objectives are not directly linked 787

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with tribes or with Maori culture and language, but nevertheless draw inspiration and legitimacy from the same range of symbols and traditions that seem to be reprimitivized in exhibitions such as Taonga Maori. In Alan Duff's remarkable novel Once were Warriors, an urban Maori population devastated by alcohol and violence is shown to redeem itself through the organization of pragmatic local projects that are not themselves essentially or peculiarly indigenous, but that derive their coherence from a sense of continuity with Maori ways, and are inspired by the dignity and power of the elders' oratory.25 The issue here resonates with one raised earlier, in chapter 1.1 referred to James Clifford's criticisms of Edward Said, whose rejection of the Orientalist postulate of radical difference between East and West was seen to rest sometimes upon the evocation of a 'real' Orient and common humanity. Clifford suggests that Said's work 'frequently relapses into the essentializing modes it attacks' and proposes that Said's hybridized position as an Arab-American intellectual typifies the question that needs now to be explored: 'What processes rather than essences are involved in present experiences of cultural identity?'26 For his part, Said has more recently attacked nativism on much the same grounds that I have criticized primitivism: it reinforces the imperialist notion that there is a clear-cut and absolute difference between ruler and ruled by merely devaluating the weaker or subservient partner'. He claims that such manifestations of nativism as Leopold Senghor's negritude, Wole Soyinka's explorations of the African past and Rastafarianism lead to 'compelling but often demagogic assertions about a native past, history, or actuality that seems to stand free not only of the colonizer but of worldly time itself. He accuses this 'abandonment of history' of degenerating into millenarianism, craziness and 'an unthinking acceptance of stereotypes'.27 What both these critiques pass over is the extent to which humanism and essentialism have different meanings and effects in different contexts. Clifford writes as though the problem were merely intellectual: difference and hybridity are more appropriate analytically to the contemporary scene of global cultural transposition than claims about human sameness or bounded types. I would agree, but this does not bear upon the uses that essentialist discourses may have for people whose projects involve mobilization rather than analysis. Said might be able to argue that nativism as a political programme or government ideology has been largely pernicious, but nativist consciousness cannot be deemed undesirable merely because it is ahistorical and uncritically reproduces colonialist stereotypes. The main problem is not that this imposes academic (and arguably ethnocentric) standards on non-academic and non-Western representations, but that it paradoxically essentializes nativism by taking its politics to be historically uniform. On the contrary, I suggest that representations of identity such as the Taonga Maori exhibition, which certainly inverts 788

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colonialist stereotypes and reproduces the idea of essential difference, have different meanings at different times, and for different audiences. My initial response to the show arose from an aesthetic similar to Clifford's: I was disturbed by its fetishization of an unacculturated authenticity. However, the exhibition, and more particularly the broader reputation of its predecessor Te Maori, was clearly enabling and empowering for many Maori. Just as Aboriginal art and the Dreamtime mythology helped promote the legitimacy of Aboriginal culture at a time when it was not widely respected by the dominant population, this essentialism played a progressive role by capitalizing on white society's primitivism and creating a degree of prestige and power for Maori that did not exist before the 1980s. Discourses of this kind must thus be understood as ambiguous and historically mutable instruments, as projects that possess one value at one time and another subsequently. In the 1970s and 1980s the gains produced by nativism were probably more significant than the drawbacks arising from the recapitulation of a restrictive primitivism; complemented by other political movements and discourses concerned more directly with contemporary indigenous lives and needs, essentialist constructions of native identity are likely to continue to play a part in gaining ground for indigenous causes among conservative populations, whose ideas of authenticity are generally still defined by the 'anthropological' tradition traced in chapter 3: particular peoples are the bearers of distinct characters or cultures, and hybridized natives (unless models of perfect assimilation) are seen as degenerate and untrue to their natures. Nativism may remain even more important for native Americans in the United States, who remain considerably more marginal than Australian Aborigines, Maori and native Americans within Canada. Nativist-primitivist idealizations can only be politically productive, however, if they are complemented by here-and-now concerns, and articulated with histories that do not merely recapitulate the 'imperialist nostalgia' of the fatal-impact narrative. Thus, for all its elisions, Taonga Maori can be empowering, while the positive effects of Dances with Wolves seem limited to the point of being negligible. Like James Clifford, Paul Gilroy is attracted to a pluralist view of identity - specifically in the context of black diasporic cultural creativity - but points out that both essentialist and pluralist identities have limitations. The latter, which emphasizes divisions internal to ethnicities based on 'class, sexuality, gender, age and political consciousness', tends towards an 'uneasy but exhilarating' libertarianism. The emphasis on the constructed and shifting character of race 'has been insufficiently alive', Gilroy suggests, 'to the lingering power of specifically 'racial' forms of power and subordination.'28 While this is a comment specifically on the British scene, it perhaps has the broader correlate that a preoccupation with divisions 789

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and hybridity may often be more compatible with individual artistic creativity than the forms of collective representation and mobilization that remain crucial in many political domains. These difficulties however seem less significant in the present than those arising from the opposed position. An 'over-integrated sense of cultural and ethnic particularity' has led in Gilroy's view to 'a volkish political outlook', particularly among artists and middle-class blacks claiming to speak for communities while mystifying the differences within them.29 Again, the specific observations resonate with problems which arise elsewhere: like most other codifications, such as the colonial administration's representation of Fijian sociality, constructions of indigenous identities almost inevitably privilege particular fractions of the indigenous population who correspond best with whatever is idealized: the chiefly elites of certain regions, bush Aborigines rather than those living in cities, even those who appear to live on ancestral lands as opposed to groups who migrated during or before the colonial period. Such asymmetries are transposed in various ways from colonial discourses to nativist assertions, frequently through being opportunistically refashioned by the privileged codifiers of nativist identity. These constructions notably often rigidify gender and age relationships that were formerly more fluid; in Aotearoa New Zealand, for example, despite the evidence concerning nineteenthcentury practice, it has become traditionalist dogma that women were not permitted to speak at marae. This 'fact' of Maori culture has been significant not only for contemporary practice on those meeting grounds but has been drawn into other domains: conservative Maori clerics, for instance, have used it to oppose the ordination of women. Similarly, while elders gain prestige from the nativist representation of Maori culture, others find the association with archaism problematic and constricting: 'Being Maori doesn't come from my heart. I think that in Maoritanga everything is going backwards instead of going forwards. I just want to go forward.'30 * ** I have suggested that modern colonial discourses have represented native peoples in a number of ways: as heathens but potential Christians, as savages to be wished away, as primitives defined through the negation of modernity and as distinct 'races' or 'cultures' possessing particular natures. While the evangelists purveying the first of these constructions were often racist or at least paternalistic and ethnocentric in their attitudes, it is significant that the basic model was anti-essentialist: the mutability of people, not a fixity in their character, was pivotal to its narrative of conversion and improvement. It is, of course, this anti-essentialism which makes it possible for Christianity to be appropriated by anti-racist movements, such as the struggle against apartheid. Both primitivism and anthropological typification, in contrast, are deeply essentialist, and the projects that Gilroy refers to, that affirm identities in non-nativist, pluralistic terms, are 790

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at the same time struggles against the fixed types projected by colonial cultures. Just as colonial culture needs to be understood, not as an essence, but as a plurality of projects including, most recently, the primitivist renovation of white identity via indigenous culture, anti- and postcolonial culture cannot be taken as a unitary set of meanings or a stable position. The ways of subverting limiting constructions of Maoriness and Aboriginality are thus as diverse as the practices, media and genres through which such subversions are effected. While colonialist preoccupations with fixed boundaries and authentic types were once undone by millennial movements which appropriated European symbols, books, banknotes and rituals, hybridized performances that assert above all the positions and presence of indigenous actors can be expressed through graffiti, tattoos and reggae music, or novels, theatre, photography and painting. One such performance is Bran Nue Dae, a remarkable, very funny and very sexy musical written by Jimmy Chi of the Aboriginal community of Broome, in the far northwest of Western Australia, and performed mostly by actors from that community.31 In a range of parodic and amusing but sometimes also haunting songs, the story works through mission station experiences, presided over by terrifyingly orderly German Lutherans, and presents a series of people coming back together in their country. Tadpole has been in and out of gaol - 'I bin drovin' I bin drinkin' I bin Christian I bin everything and now it's time I gotta go home see old people'; young Willie has been brought up on the mission and knows little of bush life. They meet up with an urban dropout, Marijuana Annie, and her German hippy boyfriend Slippery, both of whom discover that they are in fact partAborigines who had been fostered into white society during the notorious period of assimilation in the 1950s and 1960s. Slippery, it turns out, is son of the German missionary: 'Ich bin Ine Aborigine!!' he proclaims, mimicking to ambiguous effect Kennedy's famous assertion in Berlin. The Broome community is an unusually hybrid one, reflecting various phases of Asian immigration associated with fishing and pearling, as well as white settlement, but Bran Nue Dae presents histories and predicaments that have counterparts across Australia. In particular it defines Aboriginality through the experience of assimilation and its rejection, as something that can be recovered through self-identification, rather than a quantity that 'authentic' Aborigines possess more of than others. The musical evoked not stable cultural differences but experiential predicaments, some of which (to do with drugs and drink) are rendered through the character of Marijuana Annie to belong to urban youth rather than one 'race' or the other. Through its north Australian kriol (Aboriginal English), the performance had an unmistakable cultural location, but appealed to commonalities and shared aspirations rather than differences. As Tadpole says, 'He's a Christian, I'm a Christian, she's a Christian. We all bloody Christian'; 791

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and as the chorus concludes 'On the way to a Bran Nue Dae, everybody, everybody say.' The sheer zest of Bran Nue Dae is difficult to convey in a text of this kind (suffice it to say that rather than merely advocating safe sex in one song, the chorus facilitated it by distributing condoms to the audience). Against the humourlessness of colonialist and nativist codifications of identity alike, Chi's work conveys truths of biography and identity that stabilized cultures cannot. I return briefly to the three terms of my subtitle. Travel appears a less ambiguous instrument than Said's evocation of the highest form of academic freedom might lead us to expect; it is too often the appropriative project effected by Dunbar, that re-empowers a dominant subject even if it destabilizes his customary truths. Despite Said's reference to 'a realistic sense of the terrain', the image evokes movement that is inspired by curiosity rather than constrained by structures of power. Said's own writing suggests instead that travel needs to be written about more than it should be performed, and that writing within and against colonial texts can only proceed more anxiously and reactively than images of transgression and discovery suggest. I have suggested that what might loosely be called an 'anthropological' perspective on colonialism and colonial representation is more adequate than theories that approach these as global, unhistorical terms. All this really means is that colonialism is examined through localized, practically mediated expressions, through projects constituted through discursive agency rather than by either individual historical actors or dehistoricized discourses. This need not be called an 'anthropological' approach; what is appealing about doing so is the paradox that is generated, since anthropology - like travel, collecting, ethnography and curiosity - is more conspicuously part of the problem than part of a solution. An 'anthropology of colonialism' cannot situate 'the colonial' as an external object of study; this lack of comfortable distance from the power structures and the discourses being analysed seems appropriate, given the continuing energy of various colonial forms, such as those of settler primitivism exhibited in Dances with Wolves. Government, manifest in cultural domains through the operations of anthropological typification, seems likely to long outlast more literal kinds of colonial rule, but has always been irrelevant or ineffective for some, such as Vernon Lee Walker, and does not now proceed uncontested. Tracey Moffatt's sequence Some Lads could be seen as a response, not only to the studio portraits that she alludes to, and that my frontispiece to this book exemplifies, but also to much of the other colonial representation discussed here. Andrew's image of Fijian cannibalism, the British appreciations of Indian architecture and Buchan's legislation of the authentic savage are of course not literally studio products, but they are all 792

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constructions in which others are reified in surroundings that specify their attributes and our appropriate responses to them. If a studio can be defined theoretically as a frame for representation that permits a photographer or narrator to surround decontextualized bodies with meanings of his choice, the studio portrait is, in this loose and extended sense, the paradigmatic form of colonial representation. What I have argued, for postEnlightenment discourses, is that essentialized typifications acquired increasing salience, even though the nature of essentialism - national, racial or cultural - and the attendant content of typifications, shifted over time. Anthropological evocations of other cultures have partaken of this studio logic by constructing cultures that were abstracted from the dynamics of interactions between colonizers and colonized, which were thus rendered singular and authentic, and which were construed in terms of Western absences and the viewers' interests; picturesque Bali may amount to an unusually clear expression of this tendency, but in form it is not unique or even particularly atypical. It would, of course, be illogical to expect a Western photographer or narrator to construct another culture in terms that had no relation to some sort of Western agenda; if meanings enter into circulation in a particular cultural domain, they must have some salience within that domain that can hardly be true to their origins or to a radically autonomous set of values. Postcoloniality cannot privilege a chimera of some radical alterity that can be represented by 'Westerners' or by others in 'Western' contexts, but that magically eludes some 'Western' inflection. Postcoloniality, however, is not an inaccessible condition, but rather one that can be worked through by replacing identities in the experiences constitutive of contemporary indigenous life; put more theoretically, this fractures authenticities and reconstitutes events and encounters and biographies through an anti-essentialist, anti-teleological history that Prakash has called postfoundationalist.32 Bran nue dae's narration of Aboriginality and mockery of assimilationism lyricizes pluralized identities that emerge through historical dislocations rather than from a stable ethnicity. Critique can also become postcolonial by turning its attention to the logic of representation, to the business of establishing studios: typifications can only be undone if their historical contingency and mutability are exposed. The 'Arab' or the 'Javan' is not naturally this or that; such types are not natural entities, but constructions that travellers, governors and anthropologists have struggled to articulate and specify, particularly over the last 300 years. This is not to say that Middle Eastern or southeast Asian peoples do not have their own ethnic representations that are no more or less real than those of colonizers' imaginings. Indeed, the Maori exhibition and similar presentations of other native peoples suggest that indigenous groups sometimes put themselves in studios, in a fashion which may - or may not - subvert the colonialist discourse that is imitated. 793

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I have rejected the idea that we can complacently situate ourselves in a postcolonial epoch. To do that, we would need to have transcended the cultural forms and procedures associated with colonial dominance, and this is something that liberal films like Dances with Wolves, that exhibitions such as Taonga Maori, have not done. But this is not to say that contemporary cultures and cultural projects are locked within an impervious discourse, that lacks internal contradiction or redundancy. Colonial cultural studies can draw attention to these fissures and failures most effectively by evading total objects such as 'colonial discourse' that obscure the multiplicity of colonizing projects and the plurality of potential subversions of them. If the time and consciousness of whole societies cannot be characterized as postcolonial, then particular critiques, images and narratives can be. Moffatt's Some Lads mocks and transforms the studio portrait; in this book I have tried to undo the naturalized characterization that such portraits exemplified. These efforts are postcolonial because they disfigure the workings of colonialism's culture; but postcoloniality necessarily follows, and is highly engaged with colonialism. If we had transcended colonial images and narratives more comprehensively, perhaps we would not need to discuss them at all - but there is no emptiness at present in which such a confident silence can be heard.

Notes * 'The concept behind this series of studio portraits of black male dancers came about in reaction to images of black Australian people I was continually seeing presented around me by photographers in books, magazines, and galleries. These images tended always to fit into the realist documentary mode usually reserved for the "ethnographic subject". 'Such examples of this style of representation of indigenous groups exist in all European-colonised countries, e.g. North America, Brazil, etc. Thus this "record them now before they die out" mentality has never been exclusive to Australia. 'Some Lads takes the utmost example of such a preoccupation - being the mid-nineteenth century scientific studio studies of Aborigines by early pioneer photographers - but changes the intentions. 'Here I use a studio situation, the lighting flat, and a similar blank backdrop. The voyeuristic quality remains . . . Here I encourage my subjects to enjoy the staring camera (in contrast to the uncomfortable glaring in the earlier century photographs), to intentionally pose and show off. In an attempt to dispense with the seriousness and preciousness, it captures a lyricism and rarely assigned bold sensuality' (Tracey Moffatt, 1987). Tracey Moffatt's comments are quoted in Helen Ennis, Australian Photography: the 1980s (Canberra: Australian National Gallery, 1988), p. 28. 1 For the critical literature on 'development', see Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin, eds, Introduction to the Sociology of 'Developing Societies' (London: Macmillan, 1982). Though it seems hardly necessary to cite commentaries on the Gulf war, some comments that relate to the theoretical perspectives I have discussed in this book appear in Public Culture (section entitled 'War talk', 3 794

THE PRIMITIVIST AND THE POSTCOLONIAL (2), (1991), 119-64); see also W. J. T. Mitchell's 'Culture wars', London Review of Books, 23 April 1992,7-10. 2 It might be noted in passing that Marianna Torgovnick's useful and readable discussion of twentieth-century primitivism (Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)) neglects representations of contemporary native peoples, focusing instead on literary and ethnographic discourses such as the writing of Michel Leiris, Bronislaw Malinowski, D. H. Lawrence and Roger Fry. The issue that I am concerned with, of the significance of representations of native peoples in (former) colonies of settlement, thus does not enter into her discussion. 3 In the new series of Transition, for example, the first five numbers (51-5) range widely over postcolonial literature and film, AIDS, southern Africa, the Caribbean, Britain, Israel, Lebanon, Japan and so on, but included no articles whatsoever on native Americans. Gates's collection, 'Race', writing, and difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) did slightly better in including one essay, Jane Tompkins's ' "Indians": textualism, morality, and the problem of history'. 4 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), pp. ix, 3-5. 5 An honourable exception is Clifford's chapter on 'Identity in Mashpee' in The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). There is of course an enormous range of other literature in the ethnohistory and anthropology of native Americans; what I am drawing attention to is their marginalization in cultural studies and critical theory, not of course a total absence from current discourse. 6 Robert Bage, Hermsprong, or Man as He is Not (London: William Lane, 1796), ii, p. 21. 7 Robert Lawlor, Voices of the First Day: Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreaming (Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions International, 1991), pp. 19, 51-9, 20, 10. 8 Ibid., p. 30. 9 Ibid., p. 30-1. 10 Ibid., pp. 211, 213. It is important to note that Australian patterns of gender relations varied considerably: see Diane Bell, Daughters of the Dreaming (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble and Allen and Unwin, 1983) and Fay Gale, ed., Woman's Role in Aboriginal Society (Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, 1970). 11 Lawlor, Voices of the First Day, p. x. 12 Ibid., p. 137. 13 A caption to an article in Le Monde entitled 'Hollywood focus on the real Indians' read 'The film showed the American Indians in their true light for the first time' (Guardian Weekly, 5 July 1992, p. 15). 14 For one of the few more critical comments in the mainstream press, see Michael Dorris, 'Indians in Aspic', New York Times, 24 February 1991, section 4, p. 17. 15 See for example, Jean Fisher, 'Dancing with words and speaking with forked tongues', Third Text 14 (1991), pp. 29-30. Although Fisher offers a somewhat different argument to that presented here, I have drawn on this useful article at several points. It should be pointed out that while the revisionist view of frontier history seems an unsophisticated inversion from some points of view, it nevertheless remains contentious, as was attested by the controversy over the 1991 exhibition, 'The West as America - Reinterpreting Images of

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16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

the Frontier', at the Smithsonian Institution (see Martin Walker, 'Westward Oh!', Guardian Weekly, 30 June 1991, pp. 25-6). Torgovnick, Gone Primitive, pp. 88-9. See Florence Curtis Graybill and Victor Boesen, Edward Sherriff Curtis: Visions of a Vanishing Race (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976). Taonga Maori: Treasures of the New Zealand Maori People (Sydney: Australian Museum, 1989), pp. 20-1. Ibid., p. 25. George French Angas, New Zealanders Illustrated (London: Thomas M'Lean, 1847), caption to pi. xxxiv. Taonga Maori, p. 27. Cf. Ruth Brown, 'Maori spirituality as Pakeha construct', Meanjin 48 (2) (1989), 252-8. Taonga Maori, pp. 62-3. For a useful overview see Ranginui Walker, Ka Whaiwhai Tonu Matou: Struggle without End (Auckland: Penguin, 1990). Alan Duff, Once were Warriors (St. Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1991). Clifford, Predicament of Culture, pp. 271,275. Edward W. Said, 'Yeats and decolonization', in Remaking History, ed. Barbara Kruger (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), pp. 15-16. Paul Gilroy, 'It ain't where you're from, it's where you're at: the dialectics of diasporic identification', Third Text 13 (1990), 5. Gilroy, 'It ain't where you're from', 3-6. See also Paul Gilroy, There ain't no Black in the Union Jack (London: Hutchinson, 1987; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Maori woman quoted in Toon van Meijl, 'Political paradoxes and timeless traditions: ideology and development among the Tainui Maori, New Zealand', PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1990, p. 140. Published as Bran nue dae: a musical journey, by Jimmy Chi and Kuckles (Sydney: Currency Press/Broome: Magabala Books, 1991). Tom Zubrycki made a film about the musical, also entitled Bran nue dae, released through Ronin Films, Canberra, 1991. Gyan Prakash, 'Writing post-Orientalist histories of the third world: perspectives from Indian historiography', Comparative Studies in Society and History 32 (1990), 398-402. See also Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook's critique, 'After Orientalism: culture, criticism, and politics in the third world', Comparative Studies in Society and History 34 (1992), 141-67, and Prakash's reply, 'Can the Subaltern ride?', ibid., 168-84.

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5.9

COLONIAL STUDIES AND THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY Ann Laura Staler From Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things, Duke University Press, 1995,1-18

There are several possible ways to think about a colonial reading of Foucault. And at one level, anthropologists and historians have been doing such readings for some time. No single analytic framework has saturated the field of colonial studies so completely over the last decade as that of Foucault. His claims for the discursive construction of regimes of power have prompted us to explore both the production of colonial discourses and their effects;1 inspired, in part, by Edward Said's forceful lead, students of colonialism have traced the ties that bound the production of anthropological knowledge to colonial authority, to trace the disciplinary regimes that have produced subjugated bodies and the sorts of identities created by them. Some have sought to describe how discourses on hygiene, education, confession, architecture, and urbanism have shaped the social geography of colonies and specific strategies of rule.2 Nor have we done so in blind faith. Our ethnographic sensibilities have pushed us to challenge the limits of Foucault's discursive emphasis and his diffuse conceptions of power, to flesh out the localized, quotidian practices of people who authorized and resisted European authority, to expose the tensions of that project and its inherent vulnerabilities.3 These readings, for the most part, have been of a particular kind: by and large, applying the general principles of a Foucauldian frame to specific ethnographic time and place, drawing on the conceptual apparatus more than engaging the historical content of his analysis.4 This sort of passion for Foucault's general strategies is apparent in readings of his specific texts as well—particularly in treatments of volume I of 797

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The History of Sexuality. His book engages a disarmingly simple thesis: if in nineteenth-century Europe sexuality was indeed something to be silenced, hidden, and repressed, why was there such a proliferating discourse about it? Foucault argues that we have gotten the story wrong: that the "image of the imperial prude . . . emblazoned on our restrained, mute and hypocritical sexuality" (HS:3) misses what that regime of sexuality was all about: not restriction of a biological instinct, a "stubborn drive" to be overcome, nor an "exterior domain to which power is applied" (HS:152). Sexuality was "a result and an instrument of power's design," a social construction of a historical moment (HS:152). For Foucault, sexuality is not opposed to and subversive of power. On the contrary, sexuality is a "dense transfer point" of power, charged with "instrumentality" (HS:103). Thus, "far from being repressed in [nineteenth-century] society [sexuality] was constantly aroused" (HS:148). This is no dismissal of repression as a "ruse" of the nineteenth-century bourgeois order or a denial that sex was prohibited and masked, as critics and followers have sometimes claimed (HS:12). Foucault rejected, not the fact of repression, but the notion that it was the organizing principle of sexual discourse, that repression could account for its silences and prolific emanations. At the heart of his enquiry are neither sexual practices nor the moral codes that have given rise to them. Foucault's questions are of a very different order. Why has there been such a protracted search for the "truth" about sex? Why should an identification and assessment of our real and hidden selves be sought in our sexual desires, fantasies, and behavior? Not least why did that search become such a riveting obsession of the nineteenth-century bourgeois order, and why does it remain so tenacious today? His answer is one that reconceives both the notion of power and how sexuality is tied to it. For Foucault, the history of sexuality is defined, not as a Freudian account of Victorian prudery would have it, by injunctions against talk about sex and specific sexual couplings in the bourgeois family, but by patterned discursive incitements and stimulations that facilitated the penetration of social and self-disciplinary regimes into the most intimate domains of modern life. Nor was that discourse initially designed to sublimate the sexual energy of exploited classes into productive labor, but first and foremost to set out the distinctions of bourgeois identity rooted in the sexual politics of the home. Central to Foucault's account of proliferating sexualities and discourses about them is the emergence of "biopower," a political technology that "brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations and made knowledge/power an agent of transformation of human life" (HS:143). In its specific nineteenthcentury form, the disciplining of individual bodies and the regulations of the life processes of aggregate human populations "constituted the two poles around which the organization of power over life was deployed" 798

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(HS:139). Within this schema, technologies of sex played a critical role; sex occupied the discursive interface, linking the life of the individual to the life of the species as a whole (HS:146). While we have caught the gist of that message well—that discourses of sexuality and specific forms of power are inextricably bound, engagement with The History of Sexuality has been more formal than substantive, more suggestive than concrete. This is not to say that the parallels between the management of sexuality and the management of empire have been left unexplored.5 Many students of colonialism have been quick to note that another crucial "Victorian" project—ruling colonies—entailed colonizing both bodies and minds. A number of studies, including my own, have turned on a similar premise that the discursive management of the sexual practices of colonizer and colonized was fundamental to the colonial order of things. We have been able to show how discourses of sexuality at once classified colonial subjects into distinct human kinds, while policing the domestic recesses of imperial rule.6 But again, such readings take seriously the fact of a relationship between colonial power and the discourses of sexuality, without confirming or seriously challenging the specific chronologies Foucault offers, his critique of the repressive hypothesis, or the selective genealogical maps that his work suggests. In taking up each of these themes, this book both draws on Foucault and extends his analysis.7 On the one hand, I look to how his insights play out in a colonial setting; on the other, I suggest that a wider imperial context resituates the work of racial thinking in the making of European bourgeois identity in a number of specific ways. While many historians have dismissed Foucault's empirical work as hopelessly wrong, and anthropologists, as well as other social analysts, taken with his theoretical insights have tended to treat his specific historical claims as less relevant, I question whether issues of historiography and theory can be so neatly disengaged. I pursue here a critique of Foucault's chronologies, a species of the empirical, not to quibble over dates but rather to argue that the discursive and practical field in which nineteenth-century bourgeois sexuality emerged was situated on an imperial landscape where the cultural accoutrements of bourgeois distinction were partially shaped through contrasts forged in the politics and language of race. I trace how certain colonial pre-figurings contest and force a reconceptualizing of Foucault's sexual history of the Occident and, more generally, a rethinking of the historiographic conventions that have bracketed histories of "the West." Clearly the latter is not my venture alone. A collective impulse of the last decade of post-colonial scholarship has been precisely to disassemble the neat divisions that could imagine a European history and its unified collectivities apart from the externalized Others on whom it was founded and which it produced. And Foucault's metatheory has played no small part in that project, animating a critique of how specific and competing 799

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forms of knowledge have carved out the exclusionary principles of imperial power in the first place. What is striking is how consistently Foucault's own framing of the European bourgeois order has been exempt from the very sorts of criticism that his insistence on the fused regimes of knowledge power would seem to encourage and allow.8 Why have we been so willing to accept his story of a nineteenth-century sexual order that systematically excludes and/or subsumes the fact of colonialism within it? To say that Foucault was a product of his discipline, his locale, his time may be generous, but beside the point. Colonial studies in the 1970s in England, the U.S., and France may have had little as yet to say about the relationship between colonial power and sexuality, but it had a lot to say about western imperial expansion, culture, and the production of disciplinary knowledge.9 Several basic questions remain. What happens to Foucault's chronologies when the technologies of sexuality are refigured in an imperial field? Was the obsessive search for the "truth about sex" in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries directly culled from earlier confessional models, as Foucault claims, or was this "truth about sex" recast around the invention of other truth claims, specifically those working through the language of race? While we might comfortably concur with Foucault that a discourse of sexuality was incited and activated as an instrument of power in the nineteenth century, we might still raise a basic question: a discourse about whom! His answer is clear: it was a discourse that produced four "objects of knowledge that were also targets and anchorage points of the ventures of knowledge" (HS:105), with specific technologies around them: the masturbating child of the bourgeois family, the "hysterical woman," the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult. But students of empire would surely add at least one more. Did any of these figures exist as objects of knowledge and discourse in the nineteenth century without a racially erotic counterpoint, without reference to the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized—reference points of difference, critique, and desire? At one level, these are clearly contrapuntal as well as indexical referents, serving to bolster Europe's bourgeois society and to underscore what might befall it in moral decline. But they were not that alone. The sexual discourse of empire and of the biopolitic state in Europe were mutually constitutive: their "targets" were broadly imperial, their regimes of power synthetically bound. My rereading of The History of Sexuality thus rests on two basic contentions, central to much recent work in colonial studies. First, that Europe's eighteenth—and nineteenth-century discourses on sexuality, like other cultural, political, or economic assertions, cannot be charted in Europe alone. In short-circuiting empire, Foucault's history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that 800

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provided the contrasts for what a "healthy, vigorous, bourgeois body" was all about. Europe's eighteenth-century discourses on sexuality can— indeed must—be traced along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to nineteenth-century technologies of sex. They were refracted through the discourses of empire and its exigencies, by men and women whose affirmations of a bourgeois self, and the racialized contexts in which those confidences were built, could not be disentangled. I thus approach The History of Sexuality through several venues by comparing its chronologies and strategic ruptures to those in the colonies and by looking at these inflections on a racially charged ground. But, as importantly, I argue that a "comparison" between these two seemingly dispersed technologies of sex in colony and in metropole may miss the extent to which these technologies were bound. My second contention is that the racial obsessions and refractions of imperial discourses on sexuality have not been restricted to bourgeois culture in the colonies alone. By bringing the discursive anxieties and practical struggles over citizenship and national identities in the nineteenth century back more squarely within Foucault's frame, bourgeois identities in both metropole and colony emerge tacitly and emphatically coded by race. Discourses of sexuality do more than define the distinctions of the bourgeois self; in identifying marginal members of the body politic, they have mapped the moral parameters of European nations. These deeply sedimented discourses on sexual morality could redraw the "interior frontiers" of national communities, frontiers that were secured through—and sometimes in collision with—the boundaries of race. These nationalist discourses were predicated on exclusionary cultural principles that did more than divide the middle class from the poor. They marked out those whose claims to property rights, citizenship, and public relief were worthy of recognition and whose were not. Nationalist discourse drew on and gave force to a wider politics of exclusion. This version was not concerned solely with the visual markers of difference, but with the relationship between visible characteristics and invisible properties, outer form and inner essence. Assessment of these untraceable identity markers could seal economic, political, and social fates. Imperial discourses that divided colonizer from colonized, metropolitan observers from colonial agents, and bourgeois colonizers from their subaltern compatriots designated certain cultural competencies, sexual proclivities, psychological dispositions, and cultivated habits. These in turn defined the hidden fault lines—both fixed and fluid—along which gendered assessments of class and racial membership were drawn. Within the lexicon of bourgeois civility, self-control, self-discipline, and selfdetermination were defining features of bourgeois selves in the colonies. These features, affirmed in the ideal family milieu, were often transgressed by sexual, moral, and racial contaminations in those same European 801

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colonial homes. Repression was clearly part of this story, but as Foucault argues, it was subsumed by something more. These discourses on selfmastery were productive of racial distinctions, of clarified notions of "whiteness" and what it meant to be truly European. These discourses provided the working categories in which an imperial division of labor was clarified, legitimated, and—when under threat—restored. If this rerouting of the history of sexuality through the history of empire makes analytic sense, then we must ask whether the racial configurations of that imperial world, rather than being peripheral to the cultivation of the nineteenth-century bourgeois self, were not constitutive of it. In this perspective, racism in the nineteenth century may not have been "anchored" in European technologies of sex as Foucault claims. If sexuality and the social taxonomies of race were mutually built out of a "more comprehensive history of exclusive biological categories,"10 as Tom Laqueur claims, then we should see race and sexuality as ordering mechanisms that shared their emergence with the bourgeois order of the early nineteenth century, "that beginning of the modern age."11 Such a perspective figures race, racism, and its representations as structured entailments of post-enlightenment universals, as formative features of modernity, as deeply embedded in bourgeois liberalism, not as aberrant offshoots of them.12 My concern here is not to isolate racism's originary moment, much less to claim that all racisms are fundamentally the same. On the contrary, I grant slippage among the projects that modernity, the enlightenment and bourgeois liberalism embraced to make another sort of point, one that appreciates both how racial thinking harnesses itself to varied progressive projects and shapes the social taxonomies defining who will be excluded from them. My colonial reading is of a particular kind, neither definitive nor comprehensive. It is not a reading of alternative cultural conceptions of sexuality, nor an encyclopedic account of how colonized bodies were shaped by the sexual policies of colonial states. It does not track the subversive ways in which different segments of colonized populations have appropriated the civilities imposed upon them and reread those moral injunctions against their European grain, a task that others have done so well.13 My task is more specifically focused and constrained. It is an effort to see what Foucault's work adds to our understanding of the bourgeois casting of European colonials and their categories of rule and in turn what ways the political configurations of European colonial cultures might bring a new understanding to The History of Sexuality, In exploring the making of a European colonial bourgeois order, I draw primarily on a colonial context with which I am most familiar: the Dutch East Indies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But Dutch colonial anxieties over the meanings of "Dutchness" and its bourgeois underpinnings also provide a touchstone for wider claims. Well aware of 802

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the peculiarities that distinguish Dutch, French, and British notions of what it meant to be bourgeois, I am nevertheless convinced that the construction of bourgeois sensibilities in these varied contexts are comparable in some fundamental ways. In chapter 4, I argue that each defined their unique civilities through a language of difference that drew on images of racial purity and sexual virtue. That language of difference conjured up the supposed moral bankruptcy of culturally dissonant populations, distinguishing them from the interests of those who ruled. For each, bourgeois morality was strategically allied with the moral authority of nineteenth-century liberal states. European bourgeois orders produced a multiplicity of discourses that turned on the dangers of "internal enemies," of class, sexual and racial origin, an argument that Foucault will also make as he traces the genealogy of racism in his College de France lectures. As Geoff Eley notes, in nineteenth-century Europe's bourgeois discourse citizenship was "a faculty to be learned and a privilege to be earned."14 These discourses were peopled with surreptitious invaders in the body politic, "fictive" Frenchmen, "fabricated" Dutchmen, anglicized but not "true" British citizens who threatened to traverse both the colonial and metropolitan "interior frontiers" of nation-states.15 In short, that discourse on bourgeois selves was founded on what Foucault would call a particular "grid of intelligibility," a hierarchy of distinctions in perception and practice that conflated, substituted, and collapsed the categories of racial, class and sexual Others strategically and at different times. Nor is this attention to the working of race through the language of class as dissonant with Foucault's project as his published legacy of writings might suggest. In his College de France lectures discussed in chapter 3. Foucault traces the derivation of a nineteenthcentury language of class from an earlier discourse of races as a key element in the changing historiography of Europe itself. In outlining some of the genealogical shifts eclipsed in Foucault's tunnel vision of the West, I focus on certain specific domains in which a discourse of sexuality articulated with the politics of race. I use the Indies to illustrate—and really only to hint at here—how a cultivation of the European self (and specifically a Dutch bourgeois identity) was affirmed in the proliferating discourses around pedagogy, parenting, children's sexuality, servants, and tropical hygiene: micro-sites where designations of racial membership were subject to gendered appraisals and where "character," "good breeding," and proper rearing were implicitly raced. These discourses do more than prescribe suitable behavior; they locate how fundamentally bourgeois identity has been tied to notions of being "European" and being "white" and how sexual prescriptions served to secure and delineate the authentic, first-class citizens of the nation-state. Crucial to my argument, and distinct from Foucault's self-referential conception of bourgeois identity, I stress the relational terms in which bourgeois selves have been conceived. 803

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In short, I make three sorts of arguments. The first concerns chronology: why Foucault situates "the birth of racism" in the late nineteenth century and what the consequences of that placement are. Part of the answer can be found in The History of Sexuality, but more of it in the lectures delivered in 1976 at the College de France when that volume was in press. Second, I argue that an implicit racial grammar underwrote the sexual regimes of bourgeois culture in more ways than Foucault explored and at an earlier date. Here, I cast a wide net drawing on an emergent post-colonial scholarship whose forays into what were once construed as the margins of Western historiography have begun to unravel its core. I draw my argument in part from the Dutch colonial archival record. In that record, the ambiguities of racial categories and the uncertainties of Dutch identity in the nineteenth-century Indies were explicitly debated in terms setting out the racial dangers of desire, the class coordinates of "true" Europeans, and the cultural competencies which the conferral of European status required. Third, in attending to "tensions of empire" that cut across the dichotomies of colonizer and colonized, colony and core, I reconnect a range of domains that have been treated discretely in colonial scripts, divisions that students of colonialism have often subscribed to themselves. How, for example, have Dutch historians come to think that the racial mapping of state-funded relief for poor whites in the Indies is irrelevant to liberal discourse on poor relief in nineteenth-century Holland? What allows French historians to dissect the anxieties over French national identity at the turn of the century without tackling the heated debates waged over the legal category of mixed-bloods in French Indochina in the same period? Why have both students of European and colonial histories treated bourgeois "civilizing missions" in metropole and colony as though they were independent projects for so long? One might argue, as Robert Young does, that the collective vision in Euro-American scholarship has been blurred by "white mythologies" of history writing in the West.16 But what would constitute a successful effort to write against those mythologies is not self-evident. It could not, for example, merely "compare" metropolitan and colonial reform to show that their political meanings are the same. It would not be to assume that the discourse on paternity suits in Haiphong and Paris and the debates over "child abandonment" in Amsterdam and Batavia have the same political valence. Rather, I think we should ask, as Foucault did in other contexts, how seemingly shared vocabularies of sexual and social reform may sometimes remain the same and sometimes diverge and/or transpose into distinct and oppositional political meanings. Foucault turns to this process in The History of Sexuality with respect to the discourses of sexuality and again even more boldly as he traces the strategic mobility of racial discourses in his lectures. In each of these projects, Foucault offers ways to 804

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rethink the colonial order of things, ways that challenge—and sometimes derive from—him.

Tracking empire in The History of Sexuality For a long time, the story goes, we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality. (HS:III) Students of empire have shown little interest in the historical ruptures and periodicities in which new technologies of sex develop and in Foucault's rejection of Freud's repressive hypothesis. If anything, as I show later, we have had contradictory allegiances on the one hand, to a Foucauldian perspective on power, and on the other, to implicit Freudian assumptions about the psychodynamics of empire, the sexual energies "released," and the ways such regimes extend and work. We have been profoundly silent on the "four strategic unities" that Foucault placed at the core of eighteenth-century technologies of sex: the hysterizing of women's bodies, the pedagogic expertise applied to children's sexuality, the socialization of procreative life, and the psychiatric analytics of perverse pleasure (HS:104-105). Are these intense sites of power relevant to imperial history or beside the point? And, if they are relevant, why has so little been said about them? More strikingly, in a thematic close to the ethnological turf of kinship, Foucault identifies an eighteenth-century shift from a "deployment of alliance" to a "deployment of sexuality" that marks the modern character of power. Yet this too has fallen quietly and nearly without comment on an anthropological audience. Some of the problems reside in Foucault's work, some are lodged in our own. The History of Sexuality at one level seems to impede such a venture. Foucault explicitly traces the deployment of sexuality within an analytic field confined to the metropole—to "modern western sexuality." We are offered a distinction between "erotic art" (ars erotica) of the Orient, and a "science of sexuality" (scientia sexualis) of the West. (HS:70-71) The image of the "imperial prude" in the opening paragraph, cited earlier, of volume I, is the first and only reference to the fact of empire. For Foucault, the image of the prude is a mainstay of our misguided reading of nineteenth-century sexuality. Empire is a backdrop of Victorian ideology, and contemporary stories about it, easily dismissed and not further discussed.17 The "prude" is replaced; empire disappears along with its caricature. The incitement to sexual discourse in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe historicizes a European matter tout court. Foucault traces the biopolitics that emerged in the early 1700s and flourished 805

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in nineteenth-century Europe along axes that are sui generis to Europe, what Gayatri Spivak rightly has dismissed as a self-contained version of history, only about the West.18 James Clifford's observation that Foucault was "scrupulously ethnocentric"19 might give some confidence that he assiduously confined himself to the epistemic field of Europe, but when dealing with the issue of race, such careful containment should give us pause. His genealogies of nineteenth-century bourgeois identity are not only deeply rooted in a self-referential western culture but bounded by Europe's geographic parameters.20 Such origin myths of European culture are less credible today, as the bracketed domain of European history has been pried open, its sources reassessed, its boundaries blurred. Nearly two decades after The History of Sexuality first appeared, as colonial studies has moved from a delimited concern with colonialism's consequences for the colonized to tensions that cut across metropolitan and colonial sites of imperial rule, we are prompted to query whether the shaping of nineteenth-century bourgeois subjects can be located outside those force fields in which imperial knowledge was promoted and desiring subjects were made. It was after all Foucault who placed the connections among the production of specific knowledges, forms of power, and expressions of desire at the center of his work.21 Armed with Foucault's impulse to write a history of Western desire that rejects desire as biological instinct or as a response to repressive prohibitions, we should be pushed to ask what other desires are excluded from his account, to question how shifts in the imperial distributions of desiring male subjects and desired female objects might reshape that story as well.22 As we have begun to explore the colonies as more than sites of exploitation but as "laboratories of modernity," the genealogical trajectories mapping what constitutes metropolitan versus colonial inventions have precipitously shifted course.23 With this redirection, the hallmarks of European cultural production have been sighted in earlier ventures of empire and sometimes in the colonies first. Thus, Sidney Mintz has suggested that the disciplinary strategies of large-scale industrial production may have been worked out in the colonies before they were tried out in European contexts.24 Timothy Mitchell has placed the panopticon, that supreme model institution of disciplinary power, as a colonial invention that first appeared in the Ottoman Empire, not Northern Europe.25 French policies on urban planning were certainly experimented with in Paris and Toulouse, but as both Gwendolyn Wright and Paul Rabinow have each so artfully shown, probably in Rabat and Haiphong first.26 Mary Louise Pratt stretches back further and argues that modes of social discipline taken to be quintessentially European may have been inspired by seventeenthcentury imperial ventures and only then refashioned for the eighteenthcentury bourgeois order.27 Nicholas Dirks has raised the possibility that 806

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the very concept of "culture is a colonial formation."28 These reconfigured histories have pushed us to rethink European cultural genealogies across the board and to question whether the key symbols of modern western societies—liberalism, nationalism, state welfare, citizenship, culture, and "Europeanness" itself—were not clarified among Europe's colonial exiles and by those colonized classes caught in their pedagogic net in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and only then brought "home."29 In sorting out these colonial etiologies of Western culture and its reformist gestures, one cannot help but ask whether Foucault's genealogy of bourgeois identity and its biopolitics might also be traced through imperial maps of wider breadth that locate racial thinking and notions of "whiteness" as formative and formidable coordinates of them. In an interview in 1976, responding to a question posed by the Italian journalist, Duccio Trombadori, as to whether he saw his books as a set of "teachings," as a "discourse that prescribes," Foucault answered: In my case it's another matter entirely; my books don't have this kind of value. They function as invitations, as public gestures, for those who may want eventually to do the same thing, or something like it, or, in any case, who intend to slip into this kind of experience.30 The History of Sexuality is a schematic blueprint for what Foucault had intended to write but chose not to complete. Thus even more than The Order of Things which Foucault hoped would be read as an "open site," in volume 1 he extends that invitation for openness more explicitly than in many of his other works.31 However prescriptive that may be, it leaves us with more provocations than closely crafted arguments and a surprising number of conventions to wade through should we accept his invitation. My own response to Foucault's "public gesture" has been to do "something like it," something which, as he might have anticipated, would not come out at all the same. In rereading The History of Sexuality in an unexplored colonial light, "off center court" as Ben Anderson once put it, I suppose there is some implicit desire to cast this book as an opening, as a provocation, as an invitation of my own.32 In that spirit, I turn in the beginning of chapter 2, to the proliferation of sexualities and racisms that underwrote Europe's nineteenth-century bourgeois orders in an effort to address a basic question: how Foucault could write an effective history of sexuality, one that earmarks racism as one of its crucial products, but that has had so little resonance for theorizing racial formations today. The bulk of that chapter attends to the place of racism in volume 1 and offers a colonial mapping of it. Chapter 3 focuses almost exclusively on his 1976 lectures on race at the College de 807

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France. I look at how the lectures inform his treatment of racism in The History of Sexuality and in what unexpected ways they allow a rethinking of his broader analytic project. Chapter 4 takes up one of Foucault's central concerns in The History of Sexuality; namely, his claim that technologies of sexuality were a core component in the making and cultivation of the bourgeois self. I question less that assumption than the racialized making of it.33 Chapter 5 expands on a theme to which Foucault had planned to devote an entire volume; namely, the discourse on masturbating children and why it so concerned the bourgeoisie. I take up the discourse on masturbation with a different emphasis than Foucault's that in turn leads my discussion toward another end. The colonial variant of that discourse on children and their sexual desires was more about the cultural transgressions of women servants and native mothers than about children themselves, less about the pedagogy surrounding children's sexuality than the racialization of it. Chapter 6 engages Foucault and colonial studies on a subject which at once underwrites The History of Sexuality and is absent from it: namely, the production of desire. My interest is in the distributions of desire, an issue which Foucault's apparent dismissal of Freud's focus on sexual desire would seem to preclude. In the concluding chapter, I pose two sorts of questions: first, how The History of Sexuality and the lectures on race might be differently located within Foucault's broader projects, and second, how such locations inform new ways we might write "effective histories of the present" in colonial studies today.

Notes 1 I use "us" and "we" throughout this book to identify students of colonialism, whether they be anthropologists, historians, specialists in comparative literature or none of the above. Differences in profession and geopolitical locale are less central to my analysis than the fact of an overwhelming response that Foucault has elicited from those in a wide range of political locations. Where appropriate, I identify the "we" as Euro-American scholars although some of my generalizations about the nature of colonial studies apply to a wider shared community of scholarship than those who would identify themselves with that which is Euro-American. 2 Among those studies of colonial history and historiography that draw on various Foucauldian concepts to different (and varying critical) degrees see, for example, Jean Comaroff, Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and history of a South African People (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985); Ann Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra's Plantation Belt, 1870-1987 (New Haven, Yale UP, 1985); Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987); Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline (Binghamton: SUNY Press, 1987); Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988); Guari Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia UP, 1989); Lamont Lindstrom, Knowledge and Power in a South Pacific Society (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990); Jean and John 808

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3

4

5

6

7

Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991); Tim Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991); Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991); David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley: U of California P, 1993): Dipesh Chakrabarty, "Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for the 'Indian' Pasts?" Representations 37 (Winter 1992): 1-26. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1994); David Scott, Formations of Ritual: Colonial and Anthropological Discourses on the Sinhala Yaktovil (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994). See Megan Vaughan, Curing their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (London: Polity Press, 1991) x. Vaughan makes an explicit effort "to explore the limitations of a Foucauldian account of 'biopower' " with respect to the discourse of colonial medicine. In addition to the citations above see, for example, Ranjait Guha and Gayatri Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford UP, 1988), where the final two articles by Partha Chatter] ee and David Arnold are grouped under the rubric "Developing Foucault." Chatterjee's otherwise excellent piece makes only implicit reference to Foucault, while Arnold's Foucauldian impulse is defined by his attention to bodies, discourse, and power. The engagement is conceptual, not historical, while the "development" of Foucault is unclear. Arnold's analysis of the distinctive response of the Indian middleclasses to the plague for example makes no effort to address how "cultivation" of an Indian bourgeois identity did or did not conform to Foucault's European model. An important exception is Paul Rabinow's French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment (Cambridge: MIT, 1989), that "continues the exploration, in its own way, of some of the contours of modern power and knowledge Foucault had begun to map" on colonial terrain (8-9). See, for example, John Kelly, Politics of Virtue: Hinduism, Sexuality, and Countercolonial Discourse in Fiji (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1991); Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990); Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London: Verso, 1992); Luise White, Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1990); and my own work on the sexual politics of Europeans in colonial Southeast Asia, "Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Gender, Race and Morality in Colonial Asia" in Micaela di Leonardo, ed., Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in a Postmodern Era (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991): 51-101, and "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers: European Identities and the Cultural Politics of Exclusion in Colonial Southeast Asia," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.2 (July 1992): 514-51. Also see Asuncion Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989); Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992) esp. chapter 5; and Vincente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) that deals specifically with sexuality and confession in the Philippines under Spanish rule. While more clarity might have been achieved by separating out these efforts, I have chosen to treat them simultaneously throughout this book, signaling where appropriate my different stances vis-a-vis Foucault's analysis: where I

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8

9

10

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think his analysis opens or precludes a discussion of racism, where he allows for it but does not pursue it himself, and where my analysis challenges his own. Although Edward Said, for example, notes that "Foucault ignores the imperial context of his own theories," his critique of Foucault's "imagination of power" and its "minimization of resistance" takes on the theoretical imbalances of the work less than the historical skewing of his European-bound frame. See "Foucault and the Imagination of Power," Foucault: A Critical Reader, ed. David C. Hoy (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986). Similarly, Robert Young's carefully argued assault on "white mythologies" of the West graciously lets Foucault off the hook by suggesting that his "position on the relations of Western humanism to colonialism would no doubt be similar to that outlined in his discussion of the relation of ethnography to colonialism in The Order of Things" (376-7). Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1990) 195. For others who draw on Foucault's discursive analysis for treating empire and its discourses of sexuality without querying the specific historicity assumed for those discourses see Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991); Sara Mills, Discourses of Differences: An Analysis of Women's Travel Writing and Colonialism (London: Routledge, 1991); and Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexual Opportunity (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1991). See, among others, Dell Hymes, ed. Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Random House, 1969); Talal Asad, ed. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (New York: Humanities Press, 1973); Gerard LeClerc, Anthropologie et Colonialisme (Paris: Fayard, 1972); and Gerald Berreman, The Politics of Truth: Essays in Critical Anthropology (New Delhi: South Asian Publishers, 1981), especially chapter 2, written in 1970. Tom Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990) 155. Also see Collette Guillaumin's "The Idea of Race and its Elevation to Autonomous Scientific and Legal Status," Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), which makes a similar point while arguing more generally that the historical rise of legal individuality gave rise to the legal notion of race, see esp. 46-49. Foucault, The Order of Things xxii. See Henry Louis Gates, Jr., introduction, "Race," Writing, and Difference (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986) 3; Michael Banton, The Idea of Race (London: Tavistock, 1977) esp. chapter 2, "The intellectual inheritance," 12-26: Collette Guillaumin, "Idea of Race"; George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1978); Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalist Ideas in Europe (London: Heineman, 1974); Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989). Many of these arguments have been recently synthesized by David Goldberg in Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). While in this project colonialism is seen through a European optic but not determined by it, it is still a limitation imposed by the particular circuits I have set out to view. For a different treatment that more fully explores imperial taxonomies and their colonized appropriations see my introduction with Frederick Cooper, "Between metropole and colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda," Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, eds. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: U of California P, forthcoming) and Ann Stoler, "In Cold Blood: Hierarchies of Credibility and the Politics of Colonial Narratives," Representations 37 (1992): 151-189. It is important to 810

COLONIAL STUDIES AND THE HISTORY OF SEXUALITY

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underscore that I am making no claim that Foucault's history of European bourgeois sexuality nor my reworking of his genealogy of that history is generalizable to other cultural contexts, or could be mapped on to the histories of sexuality, power, and truth claims about the self among specific subjugated populations in the nineteenth-century colonized world. Those histories cannot be "read off" European ones. This does not mean, however, that consideration of these imperial articulations are irrelevant to these other cultural and political configurations. On the contrary, the particular distribution of differences that helped construct what was dominant and bourgeois for imperial Europe may be important for understanding how colonized populations claimed entitlements and strategically moved against the colonial state. It is not these imperial framings that are mirrored but the ways that concepts are organized within them that become available for oppositional political projects. Partha Chatterjee's analyses of such appropriations in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (London: Zed, 1986) and The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993) are obvious and exemplary cases in point. See Geoff Eley's "Liberalism, Europe, and the Bourgeoisie" in David Blackburn and Richard Evans, eds., The German Bourgeoisie (London: Routledge, 1991) 300. See Etienne Balibar, "Paradoxes of Universality" in David Goldberg, ed., Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1990), where he discusses how racism "embarks on the obsessive quest for a [national] 'core,' " based largely on "criteria of social class," 284-5. Also see Balibar, "Fichte and the Internal Border: On Addresses to the German Nation" in Masses, Classes, Idea: Studies on Politics and Philosophy before and after Marx (London: Routledge, 1994) 61-86 where the political ambiguities of Fichte's notion of an "interior frontier" are spelled out. Young, White Mythologies. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993) where he explores this presence/absence of empire in European literature. Gayatri Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak" in Gary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988). James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) 265. It is not only that empire is excluded, but Europe itself is defined by those powerfully situated within it, i.e. by its northern European parameters. Thus Spain and Portugal are sometimes eclipsed while Europe largely refers to England, Germany and France. See Fernando Coronil's "Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories," Cultural Anthropology (forthcoming) where he deals with the skewed geopolitics that has constituted what we conceive of as "Europe" and the proper domain of European history. Also see Deny Hay, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1957). As Arnold Davidson notes in "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality," Critical Inquiry 17 (1987): 16-48. Feminist critics of Foucault have posed this question more generally, but without specific reference to empire. See, for example, Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (London: Routledge, 1990); Biddy Martin, "Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault," New German Critique 27 (Fall 1987): 3-30; Edith 811

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Kurzweil, "Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality as Interpreted by Feminists and Marxists," Social Research 53.4 (Winter 1986); 647-63; Caroline Ramazanoglu, ed., Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions between Foucault and Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1993); Lois McNay, Foucault and Feminism (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1992); Jana Sawicki, Discipling Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991). See Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991) and Paul Rabinow's French Modern (Berkeley: U of California P, 1989) for different elaborations of this notion. Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Viking, 1985). Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: U of California P, 1991) 35. Wright, The Politics of Design; Rabinow, French Modern. Pratt, Imperial Eyes'. 36. Nicholas Dirks, Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1991) 3. On liberalism and British India see Uday Mehta's "Liberal Strategies of Exclusion," Politics and Society 18.4 (Dec. 1990): 427^54; on "culture as a colonial formation" see Nicholas Dirks, "Introduction: Colonialism and Culture" in Colonialism and Culture', on urban planning see Rabinow, French Modern and Wright, Politics of Design; on empire, citizenship and emergent welfare politics see my "Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers," Comparative Studies in Society and History 34.2 (July 1992): 514-51 and "The Politics of Mothercare: Poor Whites and the Subversion of the Colonial State," Chapter 5 of Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Bourgeois Civilities and the Cultivation of Racial Categories in Colonial Southeast Asia (Berkeley: U of California P, forthcoming); on nationalism see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983) and "Fax Nationalism" (manuscript); on Europeanness see Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13.1 (1989): 134-61 and Daniel Segal, " 'The European': Allegories of Racial Purity," Anthropology Today 7.5 (Oct. 1991): 7-9. On the flattened histories that "occidentalism" has produced (with Sidney Mintz's and Eric Wolfs work offered as striking examples) see Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Non-Imperial Geohistorical Categories," Cultural Anthropology (forthcoming). Foucault, Remarks on Marx (New York: Semiotext(e), 1991) 40. Foucault, The Order of Things, xii. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Foucault uses the term "bourgeoisie," "bourgeois class," and "bourgeois affirmation of self" throughout volume 1 of The History of Sexuality without ever defining what he means by those terms. I use these terms as well but resist the impulse to fill in for Foucault or provide a fixed alternative definition on the argument that what constituted the "bourgeois self" and its "self affirmation" was relational and tied to historically specific notions of gender, nation, and race, not class alone. This book may be seen as an effort to identify the changing parameters of a bourgeois self that were contingent on a racially, sexually, and morally distinct range of other human kinds. While this may be frustrating to the reader, it serves to underscore the mobile discourses of dominance in which bourgeois priorities were defined and defended and in which cultural and economic vulnerabilities were perceived.

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