Worlds Within: National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing 9780804772501

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worlds within

Cultural Memory in the Present Mieke Bal and Hent de Vries, Editors

Worlds Within National Narratives and Global Connections in Postcolonial Writing

Vilashini Cooppan

stanford university press stanford, california 2009

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2009 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. This book has been published with the assistance of the University of California, Santa Cruz. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cooppan, Vilashini.   Worlds within : national narratives and global connections in postcolonial writing / Vilashini Cooppan.    p.  cm. — (Cultural memory in the present)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-8047-5490-3 (cloth : alk. paper)   1. Nationalism and literature—History—20th century.  2.  Postcolonialism in literature.  3. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN56.N19C66  2009 809’.933581—dc22 2008049942

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xv

1 Introduction: Inner Territories

1

2 National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel

55

3 The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place

98

4 Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon

140

5 New Nations, New Novels

181

6 My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy’s Fantasmatic Cuba

217

Postscript: Remapping the Nation

261

Notes

277

Index

345

For Graham

Acknowledgments

In writing this book, I have been fortunate to have the assistance and encouragement of many people and institutions. A dissertation fellowship at Stanford University’s Humanities Center under the directorship of Charlie Junkerman and Wanda Corn provided a stimulating environment of good company and active thinking in which to begin to test some of these ideas. Herbert Lindenberger and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht in the Stanford Department of Comparative Literature and Ania Loomba in the Department of English insightfully guided the dissertation. Ania followed this project from first word to last, helping me to imagine its future and in turn offering her model of a passionate postcolonial scholarship that thinks beyond borders while keeping race, gender, class, and nation close. Suvir Kaul also lent his keen, meticulous ear to many accounts of this project and regularly reminded me, as only friends can, of its stakes. A University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship, under the warm and thoughtful guidance of Susan Gillman at the University of California at Santa Cruz, allowed me to start to conceive the dissertation as a book. At Yale University, I am grateful to the Morse Junior Faculty Fellowship for a year’s support of writing time and to my colleagues across the university for years of their support, fellowship, and inspiration. In my own Department of Comparative Literature, I thank Pericles Lewis, Ann Gaylin, Alex Woloch, Tyrus Miller, Catherine Labio, Ala Alryyes, Richard Maxwell, and Alex Beecroft for their good companionship as fellow teachers; Michael Holquist for his big vision of world literature and belief that my own capacities could match it; and Roberto GonzálezEchevarría, Peter Brooks, and David Quint for reading parts of this manuscript at the right time, and with the right questions. My friend and colleague Katie Trumpener very generously read all of the manuscript, on

xii   Acknowledgments two occasions, and helped me to see what mattered most in it. Her appetite for new texts, new ideas, and a Comparative Literature to encompass them has been an inspiration. Sara Suleri Goodyear, in whose English classroom I first encountered postcolonial studies, taught me again as a supportive colleague, co-teacher, and gracious reader of an early draft. I am also grateful to Hazel Carby, Michael Denning, Paul Gilroy, Vera Kutzinski, Christopher Miller, Arjun Appadurai, and Carol Breckenridge for in various ways opening the spaces for my thinking, and for reading and listening to my thoughts with acumen, encouragement, and friendship. Alicia Schmidt-Camacho and Stephen Pitti did all this and more; they were the best of comrades. At the University of California at Santa Cruz, I have been fortunate once again to have Susan Gillman as my friend, interlocutor, and reader. Chris Connery also read the manuscript with a salutary sense of the big picture. Rob Wilson read it twice and made each reading count, for which I thank him. David Marriott generously invited me to participate in a symposium on Fanon at The Center for Cultural Studies, offered a sharp reading of a long chapter that helped me to reshape and refine, and has been a companion in many of the questions I have pursued. I also thank many more colleagues in Literature, Carla Freccero especially, other colleagues in the programs in Feminist Studies and the History of Consciousness, and finally my students, for the intelligence, insight, and friendship that have livened the past few years. I owe a special debt to Jody Greene for making both this manuscript and my time in Santa Cruz so much better. I am grateful to the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for again supporting my work, this time as a faculty member at the University of California, and the Institute for Humanities Research at Santa Cruz and the Literature Department for course relief time. The Center for Cultural Studies at Santa Cruz, under the directorship of Chris Connery and Gail Hershatter and now Carla Freccero, and The Center for the Study of the Novel at Stanford, under the directorship of Franco Moretti and Margaret Cohen and now Alex Woloch, created rich local environments that stimulated and supported my thinking. I am grateful to Franco, Margaret, and Alex for reading different parts of my work so generously and to both Centers for invitations to present it. I also thank the other institutions and individuals who have included me in panels,

Acknowledgments   xiii conferences, anthologies, and special journal issues. The careful editing of David Kazanjian, David Eng, Susan Gillman, Alys Weinbaum, Robert Gooding-Williams, and Dwight McBride certainly improved portions of this book. Robert Barsky, David Damrosch, Rob Nixon, Lisa Lowe, and Stathis Gourgouris read the manuscript as well, with kind encouragement and smart, nuanced suggestions. Norris Pope, Emily-Jane Cohen, Sarah Crane Newman, and Tim Roberts at Stanford University Press have been supportive, attentive, and patient in all phases of this process, and Cynthia Lindlof was a meticulous and gracious copyeditor. This book owes a great debt to a group of extraordinary women who have sustained it, and me, for many years. Sandhya Shukla and Debarati Sanyal have been interlocutors, readers, models, and friends whose voices echo throughout my thinking. Linda Garber, Barbara Blinick, Elizabeth Wahl, and Pamela Cheek have been great companions in academia. Noa Wheeler and Sumana Cooppan provided the most material of aid—bibliographic assistance and loving childcare. Several other talented young women also cared for my children over the years and literally made my writing possible. Laurie Grunebaum helped to make it happen, and I thank her. Finally, I thank my parents and grandparents, whose journey from apartheid South Africa to Australia, Canada, the United States, and back to a free South Africa taught me that identity is lived in motion over a global map, and that nations can always change. My sisters, Yashmin and Sumana, my cousin Kalyani, and my children, Kabir and Rohan, provided comfort, distraction, and delight; the best reminder that writing happens while we live. My greatest thanks and deepest love go to my partner, Graham Boyd, for his belief in this book, his care for me, and his extraordinary vision of a world in which all changes are possible.

Acknowledgment of Previous Presentations and Publications Parts of this manuscript were delivered as talks at the Modern Language Association conference (1994); “Écrit/Ecran en Afrique Francophone, Script/Screen in Francophone Africa: Ousmane Sembène, Assia Djebar,” at the University of Victoria, Canada (1994); “Transnational Racializa-

xiv   Acknowledgments tions: Psychoanalysis, Slavery, Post-Coloniality,” at the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California at Santa Cruz (1997); the American Studies Association conference (1999); “One Hundred Years of The Souls of Black Folk,” at Northwestern University (2003); the American Studies Association conference (2003); the American Comparative Literature Association conference (2005); “States of Emergency: Alternative Temporalities and U.S. Studies,” at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (2006); “Fanon: A Symposium,” at The Center for Cultural Studies at Santa Cruz (2006); and as invited lectures at the University of California at Santa Cruz, at Davis, and at Irvine (2003), and at Yale University (1998, 2003). Portions of Chapter 3 appeared in “The Double Politics of Double Consciousness: Nationalism and Globalism in The Souls of Black Folk,” Public Culture 17.2 (2005): 299–318 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), special issue on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Robert Gooding-Williams and Dwight McBride; and in “Move On Down the Line: Domestic Science, Transnational Politics, and Gendered Allegory in Du Bois,” in Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 35–68. Portions of Chapter 5 appeared as “Mourning Becomes Kitsch: The Aesthetics of Loss in Severo Sarduy’s Cobra,” in Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David Kazanjian and David Eng (Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California, The University of California Press, 2003), 251–77. They appear here by permission.

Note on Translations All translations in this book are mine, unless otherwise acknowledged. For the reader’s convenience, where an established English translation exists of a French or Spanish work, I cite both the translation and the original.

Preface

This book explores the realm where the territories of the political meet the terrain of the psyche. Its major concerns, nationalism and psychoanalysis, might well be charged with obsolescence in the contemporary world, the price of an almost myopic focus on the levels of the bounded and the particular (territorial sovereignty, individual psychosexual development) at a moment when, by most accounts, we are going ever more global, connecting ever more intricately to the world outside ourselves, and living our lives in the increasingly larger light—or longer shadow— of global culture. Such indeed, was the import of a question posed to me many years ago, when this project was in its infancy. “But why work with psychoanalysis?” my interlocutor demanded. “It is, after all, a dying field.” The question that began as a demon and persisted as a ghost became, in the end, a gift. For it predicted, long before I knew it, that Worlds Within would find its animating concern in tracing the spectral afterlife of ideas, events, and narratives that, far from dying, are always living on. Psychoanalysis, Jacques Derrida has famously charged, is a body of thought coextensive with the proper name of Sigmund Freud (or, if one admits heretics, Freud and Jacques Lacan), a theory that seeks and finds itself everywhere.1 Like the imperialism with which Derrida links it, psychoanalysis proposes a description of a bounded territory (self rather than colony) and then extends it into a model of worldwide span. But psychoanalysis (again like imperialism) has also been subject, from those very corners in which it took up residence, to contestation of a sort for which “end” is hardly the right term. Freud’s psychoanalysis is not that of the colonial ethnopsychoanalysts who explained empire through the dependency complexes of natives, nor that of Frantz Fanon, feminism, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory. This “historical dynamism,” to borrow a term from Fanon, lends psychoanalysis the uncanny aura of

xvi   Preface something that is outmoded and contemporary, dead yet ghostly alive, gone but not gone.2 If psychoanalysis is dead, it is dead in the same sense that empire is past. As Nicholas Dirks says, “The postcolonial world is one in which we may live after colonialism but never without it.”3 Nationalism, too, lives in this limbo. Critically visible and conceptually potent for much of the past two decades in studies of the nation’s invented traditions, imagined communities, and discursive instantiation, nations and nationalisms have more recently been regularly dismissed as largely residual forms in the era of globalization. Derrida, for example, claims that nationalism, even in its “worst and most sinister manifestations, those that are the most imperialistic and the most vulgarly violent,” has emerged as a “universal philosophical model, a philosophical telos” that today stands arrested, caught at the crossroads between “this intensification of so-called international exchanges, and this exasperation of national identities and identifications.”4 The rapid flows of capital, persons, goods, information cultures, and languages across national borders, coupled with the increasing power of various stateless actors, from the transnational corporation to the regional economic market to the diasporic community to the terrorist cell, have undeniably reshaped the political and imaginative construct of the nation. But just because the global international has altered the nation does not mean it has rendered it obsolete, a mere analytical archaism withering away before our eyes. For as a host of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century political events attest, from the rise of ethnic nationalisms in the new Europe to the spread of newly imperial nationalism in the post–9/11 United States to the ongoing work of decolonization through popular nationalisms in the societies of the South, nation-states remain a major, perhaps inescapable, container for contemporary politics, ambitions, and transformations. More than entombing the nation, the present enjoins on us the task of reanimating it. This means learning to see nations in more places and in more ways, as less bounded by their borders and more inextricably connected to all that seems to lie outside them, as well as all that lies inside: the alien, the unheimlich (uncanny), the other within. Finally, this project entails rethinking what Derrida calls the telos and topology of nationalism, a task for which I have enlisted both psychoanalysis and narrative theory. Beneath the image of a progressivist march of nation-state politics

Preface   xvii congenitally fixed on territoriality and dead-ending now in the flows of the global present lies a history in waiting, the history of how national identities and identifications have themselves been made through movement. Nations, this book argues, are fantasmatic objects knotted together by ambivalent forces of desire, identification, memory, and forgetting, even as they simultaneously move within, across, and beyond a series of spatial and temporal borders (us/them, territory/flow, present/past, life/ death). The space of nations is never simply their own. What the structure of national identification conceives of as the outside—the world beyond the border, the cultural other outside the compact—is in fact always already inside, always already present in the very moment and process of national formation. Worlds Within seeks to recover the structuring presence of both the psychic inside and the global outside within a series of national narratives that range the globe, span the past century, and, not least of all, bring the outside in and the inside out. It further explores how the global is a kind of inside, an imaginary of cross-cultural connection and movement that has been mobilized to express various national identifications and disidentifications, from the adopted imperial Englishness of the Polish émigré Joseph Conrad and the Trinidadian colonial V. S. Naipaul, to the anticolonial nationalism and Third-Worldism of the African American W. E. B. Du Bois, the Martinican Fanon, and the West and East African novelists Chinua Achebe and Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, to the postcolonial national-cosmopolitanism of the Indian writers Salman Rushdie and Amitav Ghosh, the South African writer J. M. Coetzee, and the Cuban writer Severo Sarduy, and the global feminist revisions of anticolonial nationalism in the northern and southern African novelists Assia Djebar and Tsitsi Dangarembga. Several of these writers betray a certain distance from the place into which they were born and a powerful pull toward other places, be they imperial centers, emergent new nations, or regional alignments. The majority of these writers are exiles, border-crossers, migrants, cosmopolitans, and global citizens, while a few stay put and write their nations from within their borders. Regardless of their individual physical locales, all of the writers surveyed here reveal something about the nation’s psychic locale—that incessant movement between distinct spaces, times, and attachments through which national identification (and disidentification)

xviii   Preface comes into being. So Du Bois’s African America is bonded to the preslavery Africa he recalls and the independent Africa he dreams; Fanon’s colonized Martinique is redeemed by his vision of a free Algeria; Sarduy’s image of postrevolutionary Cuba crystallizes from the perspective of his French exile, poststructuralist loyalties, and Indo-Tibetan exotic-erotic; and Conrad’s adopted Thames runs straight to the Congo while, at a later stage, literary descendants of Conrad like Achebe, Naipaul, Dabydeen, Rushdie, and Ghosh think their respective postcolonial localities—Nigeria, Trinidad, Guyana, India—in relation to the metropolitan other of England and English. As a point of attachment, the nation is a moving target. It emerges here across several historical periods, geographical locales, and political histories, always against the backdrop of the global modernity produced by colonialism, imperialism, and their aftermath and always subtended by mobile networks of political desire and identification. Global modernity, like the nation-form it disseminates, is marked by spatial and temporal discontinuity, unevenness, and overlapping. This book explores these breaks and joinings, as well the shifting linkages of the nation concept to the identity categories of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and class, in the interests of situating the nation form itself (more than national literatures or national writers) as the object of comparative criticism. In this effort to world the nation, I have found it necessary to cross several borders, including critical ones. Worlds Within thus traces a series of ghostly encounters, from both sides of the imperial divide, between nationalism, psychoanalysis, narrative textuality, and the deconstruction whose method cuts across them all. I have explored several instances in which it is possible to suture psychoanalytic models of longing to national, and global, discourses of belonging. My aim has not been to present a unified psychoanalytic model of national identification or the nation form, or stand-alone psychoanalytic readings of emblematic national-global texts, but rather to explore how national identification and national narrative work. The reading of the one reveals the operation of the other in all their mutual variety and difference. The work of national identification and the making of that heterogeneous entity, the subject of national desire, is sedimented, I argue, into narrative form. Hence this book’s guiding concern with narrative modes of connection, especially those exploited by the novel.

Preface   xix The book begins with a series of encounters between the critical study of nations and nationalism and globalization theory, between psychoanalysis and nationalism, and between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, in which “the nation” surfaces as an especially contested term. The introductory chapter also traces the temporal structures that emerge from these couplings, focusing on the plots of recursivity and return (psychoanalytic uncanniness, deconstructive spectrality), as well as the linear plots that animate notions of nationalism’s self-actualizing teleology (bildung) and fuel the attachment of the nation form to the genre of the novel and the mode of allegory. Elaborating a model of national desire that cuts across these linear plots, the chapter turns to fantasy, fantasm, mourning, and melancholia in order to explore the range of temporal and spatial connections on which national identification depends. The imperial and postcolonial national novel provides one record of these connections, as I argue in a concluding discussion of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), a national novel in global form. Chapter 2 explores the convergence of imperialism, nationalism, and psychoanalysis through a reading of what is arguably postcolonial criticism’s most iconic allegory, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). The novella shares with the Freudian uncanny an oscillating temporality that renders the present continuous with the past and the self coincident with the other. The convergence of these two fin-de-siècle fables of civilization and its discontents reveals the heart of the West, the soul of Europe expressed in two of its most powerful, most exported, subjectifying stories. But when explored in other places and other times, in conjunction with other narratives about the formation of society and self, their convergence exposes a significantly more diffuse, polycentric, and differentiated zone. Conrad’s discourse of British national imperialism is itself constantly invaded by the space and time of a global elsewhere, while Conrad’s literary descendants uncannily repeat this process in reverse, recasting England from its imperial peripheries. These rewritings of Heart of Darkness further describe the changing forms of both nations and novels, from the resistant realism of Achebe’s portrait of a cultured and deeply historical precolonial Africa in Arrow of God (1964), to the mournfully introspective narration that marks Naipaul’s nostalgia for a lost European imperialism in A Bend in the River (1979), to the narrative discontinuities through

xx   Preface which Dabydeen chronicles a multiethnic, diasporic, and postimperial London in The Intended (1981). If literary texts are subject to a ghostly life of return and reanimation, so too are the narratives of nation and psyche. Du Bois, the subject of Chapter 3, initially translated nineteenth-century German romantic nationalism into his own racial nationalism even as he fractured any symmetry between race and nation with the psychic construct of double consciousness. The pre-psychoanalytic language of the psyche that Du Bois draws on describes a black self located simultaneously within the United States and without it, both in the sense of lacking the nation and lying beyond it, in such extranational places and times as ancient Egypt, precolonial Ethiopia, and the resurgent black world of Du Bois’s dreaming. The divisions and connections of double consciousness are mirrored in the formal strategies of Du Bois’s polygeneric manifesto, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and writ large in his social realist romance, Dark Princess (1928), and final trilogy, The Black Flame (1957–61). Du Bois’s straddling of racialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist, and diasporic allegiances illustrates one of this book’s central tensions: the simultaneous pull between territorialization and deterritorialization, between a concept of identity rendered isomorphic with place and emblematic of race and nation, and identity reconceived as that which evades place per se and constitutes an altogether different kind of being, at once more interiorized and more diffused. Du Bois’s famous figure of a color line that belts the world expresses one vision of this identity,5 strikingly different in its lateral energies and transverse networks from the recursive-repetitive loop of the uncanny, yet ghosted nonetheless by the haunted work of racial memory and the allegorical figuration that is, for Du Bois, one of its formal modes. Fanon also turns to the troubled plots of racial and national time, and similarly considers the range of possible forms through which they may be either surmounted or achieved. Chapter 4 explores the ghostly continuities between Fanon the Martinican-born psychiatrist and Fanon the anticolonial Algerian nationalist. It finds in both a common engagement with the topological limitations of territory, both colony and nation, by means of the oscillatory temporality of consciousness, including the racial consciousness Fanon attempts to get beyond in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and the national consciousness espoused in The Wretched of

Preface   xxi the Earth (1961). The ghostly form of form links Black Skin’s polyvocal, polyphonal interrogation of race in the colony, richly illustrated with colonial and anticolonial novels, poems, plays, and films alongside its case histories and philosophical-psychoanalytic debates, with Wretched ’s invocation of nation in the postcolony. Wretched is both a manifesto and a conjuration, a call for a resistant internationalism born of anti-imperial nationalism yet also coexisting with it in the peculiar style, and form, of the ghost. Through a reading in dialogue with Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), I argue for Fanon’s body of work as a model of fantasmatic nationalism, nationalism that incorporates outside into inside, globe into nation in such a way as to suggest that those externalities were always there from the beginning. Far from tarring Fanon with an outmoded particularism, restoring nationalism to a figure more lately embraced as cosmopolitan, Chapter 4 attempts to account for the ghostly forms, including what I call the ghostly generic forms, through which identitarian desires are expressed in national and global eras. With his heterogeneric writing, Fanon, like Du Bois, brings an expanded sense of the various forms, modes, and styles through which the nation is written. Chapter 5 considers the African novel from independence onward as one genre in which the heterogeneity and heterochronicity of Fanon’s form return. As the work of the Kenyan novelist, playwright, and essayist Ng ˜ugi, the Algerian feminist novelist and filmmaker Djebar, the Zimbabwean feminist novelist Dangarembga, and the postmodern South African novelist Coetzee show, the postcolonial novel has a particular capacity to capture the multiplicity of time, place, and language that is the peculiar cast of the postcolonial nation, in which liberation is still an unfinished project and loss remains the nation’s dominant mode. Chapter 6 returns to the novel of nationalism, as irreverently deconstructed by the expatriate Cuban-turned-French poststructuralist Sarduy. Breaking with a broadly national-allegorical tradition of Latin American literature, Sarduy’s poststructuralist, post-Boom novel Cobra (1972) undermines the discourses of both identity and territory by charting the global wanderings and multiple metamorphoses of a Cuban drag queen en route to India and Tibet. In Sarduy’s playful transculturation of the French nouveau roman (new novel) to the Cuban national novel, and of the theoretical apparatus of Lacanian psychoanalysis to the Spanish language and

xxii   Preface a distinctly orientalist imaginary, lies yet another model of the changing relationship between psychoanalysis, nationalism, and the novel on the global stage. This chapter, like earlier ones, also turns to the Freudian models of mourning and melancholia in order to consider Sarduy’s parodic-performative novelistic kitsch as a different kind of response to national loss and another expression of national desire that gets at its object from afar, in the style of anamorphosis. The book concludes with a postscript devoted to subcontinental portraits of national memory, mourning, and movement in Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988) and Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines (1989). Here, as throughout the book, I consider the possibilities of thinking the nation through the practice of fantasmatic cartography—the mapping of national and global territories of belonging through an analysis of the psychic work of longing. While this work has continuities with the analysis of loss undertaken by trauma theory, it stops short of turning loss into the meaning or outcome of the national project per se. Nations, variously imperial, anticolonial, and postcolonial, are structured by loss, but they nonetheless remain. I have characterized Worlds Within as a book concerned with explanatory ideas, historical events, and cultural narratives that, far from dying, are always living on. The book takes spectral uncanniness both as its theoretical occasion and its formal model. I have organized the argument around the rhythms of repetition and return. Each chapter is conceived as a chronological arc, beginning with a literary or theoretical masterplot (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Du Bois’s double consciousness, Fanon’s divided racial-colonial subject, Sarduy’s vintage nouveau roman) and then proceeding from that point of origin to various reworkings. In the case of Conrad and his postcolonial inheritors, the novel recurs and is reanimated in novelistic form. In other cases, an initial theoretical elaboration is followed by a fictional quickening, as in the transition from the race manifesto of The Souls of Black Folk to the allegorical romance of Dark Princess, or the pairing of Fanon’s theory of nationalism with postcolonial African novels. The passage from Sarduy’s Cobra to the exegeses of its novelistic strategy afforded by Sarduy’s theoretical writings reverses this trajectory. The net effect of these narrative arcs is to confirm the uncanniness of an exemplary body of postcolonial literature, of an implicit historical zone (imperialism and its aftermath), and of a specific narrative of literary

Preface   xxiii history that emerges from this crossing and recrossing of distinct literary spaces and times. I aim to trouble a series of definitional borders, beginning with the line between nationalism’s territories and psychoanalysis’s interiors and extending to those that would divide the national from the global, the fictional from the theoretical, and the novel from the generic ghosts that are the substance of its continued life. Manifesto and romance, epic and tragedy, like the modes of allegory and parody, all surface in these pages. Through tracing their apparitions and their returns across a long twentieth century, I hope to show the many ways in which narrative representation makes political identification possible, particularly the simultaneous coexistence of national and global identifications. Beneath the formal structure and critical preoccupations of this book, with its many movements back and forth and in and out, there also exists a set of questions posed from movement and addressed to method. In answering them, I have thought of movement as method. If the nation, the novel, and psychoanalysis do indeed draw our gaze in two directions at once—inward to their imaginary psychic territories and outward to their global reaches or, on a different axis, backward to their hegemonic histories and forward to their postcolonial afterlives—what can we learn from such double vision? Understood as an epistemological response to the philosophical condition of living after (a condition as old as it is new), and mobilized as a particular lens on literature, politics, and identity in the period stretching from late imperialism to postcolonial diaspora, seeing double is the guiding method of this book. For just as no map, including those of literature’s cartographers, can be drawn with straight lines or single planes alone, so no act of reading can proceed without circling back to familiar territories, times, and texts, and thus retracing the tracks of a different, and double, life for the future.

worlds within

1 Introduction: Inner Territories

Troubled Territory: Thinking the Nation in an Era of Globalization “The history of nations,” writes Étienne Balibar, “beginning with our own, is always already presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject.”1 As defined by Balibar, the nation form owes its existence to a “retrospective illusion,” a fiction of collective identity produced by a regular movement from the present into the past and paralleled by a spatial equivalent. Paraphrasing J. G. Fichte’s foundational essay on becoming national, Addresses to the German Nation [Reden an die Deutsche Nation (1808)], Balibar writes: “the ‘external frontiers’ of the state have to become ‘internal frontiers’ or—which amounts to the same thing—external frontiers have to be imagined constantly as a projection and protection of an internal collective personality, which each of us carries within ourselves and enables us to inhabit the space of the state as a place where we have always been—and always will be—‘at home’ ” (95). For Balibar the legacy of colonialism intensifies this relation as immigration from former colonies into the former metropoles effects a literal “interiorization of the exterior” that reproduces racialized practices of internal exclusion, alongside an “exteriorization of the interior” resulting from the formation of postcolonial states “throughout the immense periphery of the planet” (43). Often invoked to explain such excesses as cultural nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, and new racism, the

   Introduction unification of subject and nation and of interiorization and exteriorization described by Balibar also reorients us to the nation’s other history as a project of plural attachments, including the border-crossing blurring of global and national identifications that has been described as cosmopolitics and linked to projects of liberation.2 Thinking through the subject, and lingering on its propensity to mix up the realms of inside and outside, past and present as it constructs the narrative of identity, can we rethink the nation as an entity made through movement? To do so, we must first revisit the scene of nationalism. Grounded and bounded by the problematics of territory and identity, nationalism seems to find its central tenet in a freezing isomorphism, from European romantic nationalism’s organic symmetry of soil and character, to imperial nationalism’s attempt to consolidate its power by quite literally mapping identity onto space on the conference tables of Europe, to anticolonial nationalism’s call for the restoration of occupied lands to their original inhabitants, to the mystified and mythified “homeland” that articulates postcolonial nationalism at home and in the diasporic abroad. Of course, not all nations can lay claim to a state, by which I understand the governmental, juridical, and economic structures attached to territory, nor can individual states assume the linguistic, religious, ethnic, and cultural homogeneity of those within their borders, or even that all of their subjects will live within their borders. Alternative spaces to the territorialized nation-state exist—the multiethnic cosmopolitan crossroads, the transnational ethnic imaginary, the regional bloc, the world-system, the network, the new social movements based in identities that cross national borders (green, antiglobalization, feminist, queer), others grounded in the local, and, of course, the ubiquitous global sensibility. Just as contemporary globalization theory espouses, in Anthony D. King’s words, “the rejection of the nationally-constituted society as the appropriate object of discourse, or unit of social and cultural analysis, and to varying degrees, a commitment to conceptualising ‘the world as a whole,’ ” these various alternatives to the nation-state reach out to the history of global connection.3 If some critics understand globalization, with its pluralizing flows of culture and capital, to herald what Kenichi Ohmae calls “the end of the nation-state,”4 others argue that the standardizing reign of global capital has created new degrees of inequity among and within nations and ever

Introduction    more virulent forms of nationalism, including state corruption, ethnic genocide, and new imperialism. Paul Smith situates globalization’s mobile utopia, “a kind of isochronic world wherein the constrictions of time and space have been overcome,” as capitalism’s “millennial dream,” a form of capital accumulation that “derives from the moment of direct imperialism and is in many respects the continuation of colonialism and imperialism by other means.”5 Seemingly homogenizing and hegemonizing, a Deleuzian smooth space of flows in which capital finds its mirror image and most potent prefix, the term “global” is for many critics inseparable from the “globalization” and “globality” that together function, in R. Radhakrishnan’s account, as a “descriptive totality that disallows the very chronotope of the ‘outside.’ ” Radhakrishnan, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and others have proposed, by way of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, the terms “world,” “worlding,” and “worldliness” as alternative ways to name the rich heterogeneity, coevality, and interconnectedness of human experience, much as other critics have hastened to rehabilitate cosmopolitanism’s strictly European roots for newly mobile critical uses.6 As I understand it, “global” names the transverse networks of influence and exchange that interrupt and cut across the fictive linearities of national history and the fictive homogeneities of national subjectivity, while also locating those mobile subjectivities and histories within the world-systems of imperialism, nationalism, and capitalism. To use, as this book will, “global” to designate the extranational is both to keep alive the history of modern capital that is the motor of empire and its aftermath, and to resist the notion that capital is the only object that global processes can designate and that wholesale homogenization is the only way in which they can work. If global names the world dreamed by Euro-American capital expansion, it also names a cultural and psychic process of connection, of making sense of some bounded identity, some “home,” by reaching out to something that seems to lie beyond it. The globalization whose economic stranglehold we need to resist is not entirely synonymous with the global we need to theorize. As a process that encompasses both sameness and difference, compression and expansion, convergence and divergence, the concept of the global has less to do with universals than, as Stuart Hall points out, with how “the global/

   Introduction local reciprocally re-organise and re-shape one another.”7 Marked by this kind of relational thinking, the best theories of globalization engage both economic and cultural processes and refuse to antinomize their effects as either heterogenizing or homogenizing. Still less do they imply that globalization entails the wholesale transcendence of national forms and imaginaries, choosing instead to explore how local and national cultural practices contest the putative universalism of transnational capitalism.8 Finally, these theories resituate globalization not as a particular end point in time, modernity’s final form, but rather as a process of connection that regularly intercalates one time and one space with others, reaching all the way back from the present to the nineteenth-century capitalist expansion of imperial nations to the fifteenth-century formation of a world-system dominated by European mercantilist states and divided into core and peripheral zones, for Immanuel Wallerstein, and even earlier to the eras of non-European hegemony under the Chinese, Islamic, Indo-Persian, and Egyptian empires, for scholars such as Andre Gunder Frank. For Hall, globalized timespace is multiply differentiated and conjunctural, cut across by a series of “transverse, transnational, transcultural movements” and “the double inscriptions of colonial and metropolitan times,” while for David Harvey and Ulf Hannerz, globalized timespace is uniformly accelerated and interconnected. Wallerstein and other world systems theorists describe a constant and nonsynchronous collision between the developed and developing world over some five hundred, perhaps five thousand, years of human history.9 For the sociologist Roland Robertson, globalization is a historically deep, conceptually double, cultural process characterized by “the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism,” with the practical result that “the idea of nationalism (or particularism) develops only in tandem with internationalism.”10 This book traces a politics of relationality within which the national and the global are tandem ideas, twinned identifications, and doubled dreams. Even as postcolonial criticism labors to recognize the work of continuing empire in the global movements of capital and culture, it should not cede the concept of the global to hegemony alone. Nor should it dismiss all that is opened by the possibility of reading political ideologies, whether globalization or the nation that globalization is erroneously

Introduction    understood to have ended, precisely as dreams: forms of imagining shaped by the peculiar timespace of memory, fantasy, and desire and structured, as Freud intuited, by a curiously double logic of signification. Writing in his 1918 case history, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” Freud observes how his patient’s dream “puts an imaginary and desirable converse in the place of the historical truth.” “These phantasies, therefore, corresponded exactly to the legends by means of which a nation that has become great and proud tries to conceal the insignificance and failure of its beginnings.”11 Nations, like subjects, say what they wish were true (a glorious past, a childhood in which they reigned supreme), not what is or was true. Following Freud’s injunction to interpret dreamwork by opposites, we might trace the futurity that haunts the nation’s pastness, the differences that subtend the discourses of national unity, and the global affiliations that puncture national borders, not just under late twentiethcentury globalization but over the course of the nation form. This is not an account of some universal structure (all nations, all subjects) but rather an exploration of changing articulations of the logics of interiorization and exteriorization, subjectivity and nationality at distinct moments in the history of imperialism, decolonization, and postcolonialism. Such relational, conjunctural, and double reading charts a middle ground through postcolonial studies, which has often split between those whose postnationalist and postmodernist orientations lead them to privilege cosmopolitanism, diaspora, migration, and hybrid forms of subjectivity, culture, and textuality, and those who voice an oppositional investment in the nation and other besieged particularisms, such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality, operating within and against global capital.12 To recover the nation in its global forms and through its subjective and narrative modes is to engage both these traditions. Finding the different times and spaces, modes and meanings of what has passed as global, whether empire’s sway, anti-imperialism’s Third World, or postcolonial diaspora’s flows into former imperial centers, helps to chart ideologies of nationhood across what I will call, with debts to Giovanni Arrighi, the long postcolonial twentieth century. Defined as “the basic temporal unit in the analysis of world-scale processes of capital accumulation,” Arrighi’s long century names a place and time characterized by three common factors: continuity, change,

   Introduction and flow.13 The four century-cycles of his thesis (fifteenth- to early seventeenth-century Venice, late sixteenth- to eighteenth-century Amsterdam, mid-eighteenth- to early twentieth-century London, and late nineteenthcentury to present-day New York) are each distinguished by (1) a continuity between capitalism and the state; (2) a change born of the fact that each successive state was larger and more powerful than its predecessor; and (3) the structuring flows of capital passing from declining to rising centers. In this accumulative and expansionist mode, Ian Baucom argues, the past finds itself not simply succeeded by the present but incorporated into it, rendered curiously contiguous and contemporaneous in the style of Benjaminian history or Freudian melancholia. Capitalism’s modernity thus becomes a movement in which accumulation and accretion, speculation and melancholy, exchange and repetition provide, in Baucom’s words, “plot and counterplot of the long twentieth century.”14 Elsewhere Baucom defines global form as a “strictly regulated flow dynamics that balances the relentless centrifugal distributions of capital with their inevitable centripetal return to a seat of high finance.”15 In Arrighi’s account of successive rise and decline, Baucom discerns “an end of history that happens not once but serially” and a “spectral counternarrative of the global” formulated as the following law: “expansion contracts . . . contraction enriches . . . and enrichment haunts” (162). This haunting effect is as visible in global finance capital, whose “spaces of flows” find their “dematerializing, dedifferentiating logic of exchange” troubled by the return of cultural, spatial, and temporal difference, as in genre. Glossing Fredric Jameson’s foundational argument in The Political Unconscious (1981), Baucom casts genre as a “cognitive space of flow”: “an epistemological structure that, as it achieves a (generally metropolitan) hegemony, is capable of expanding its range of address and subordinating virtually every corner of the globe to its designs but that, when it does so, and so helps to define the specifically historical ideology of its age, finds its articulations haunted by a ghost language that subordinates its ideology of the present age to the ideology ‘of all the dead generations’ ” (163). Baucom understands Jameson’s historicism, like Derrida’s deconstruction and globalization theory, to function as critical instances of the law of global/generic form, according to which conceptual coinages first expand, then contract, and finally haunt, with the end result of crafting global literary studies themselves in the style of

Introduction    finance capital. With debts to each of these critical models, in this book I attempt to trace a form of being global and thinking globally in which it is the idea of the nation that expands, contracts, and haunts, and in which the ghost language of both nation and genre invites the practice of comparative postcolonial studies. Premised on the interrelation of continuity, change, and flow over a block of time, as well as on an internal logic of return, the long postcolonial twentieth century I envision is predicated on a certain continuity between capitalism, the state, and the nation across the periods of imperialism, anticolonialism and decolonization, neocolonialism, and postcolonial diaspora. Such a century necessarily also describes a change in the nature, reach, and imagined character of the nation form—expanding for empire, aligning for anticolonialism, emerging for decolonization, decaying for neocolonialism, disembodying for postcolonial diaspora. Seen thus, the long postcolonial twentieth century would have to be conceived as a swath of space and time structured by flows. These are flows not just of persons (colonials and revolutionaries, ex-colonials and cosmopolitans) and of capital, but also of ideas, of desires, and of expressive forms, the novel in particular, that combine to create, sustain, and represent nations. To think the nation as a spectralized flow is to go against the grain of its modern ideal, understood as a spirit of collective identity and zone of governmentality bonded to a bounded space, a linearized historical time, and a singular citizen-self. It is also to contest the notion that we are, in the era of globalization, entirely beyond nations and national identifications. Like ghosts, they keep coming back in the course of the still unfinished long twentieth century. As Anne McClintock has observed, the category of the postcolonial too often works by first compressing the distinct historical events of colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, neocolonialism, and neoimperialism; and second, prematurely announcing their collective passing.16 This terminological sleight of hand stages an implicit contest between the past and the post in which the latter, with its emblematic late twentieth-century diasporic movements, hybrid cosmopolises, and global cities, displaces the former, with its national spaces and global capitalist structures. It is certainly true that the postwar influx of racialized and ethnicized immigrants into formerly imperial centers has rendered false the homogeneity,

   Introduction always fictive, of the metropole. But as we explore these increasingly diverse societies, it is equally important to resist the temptation to simplify temporality so that Black Britain, Turkish Germany, Beur France, and the multiethnic United States banish on the terrain of a newly pluralized diasporic culture the harsh, seemingly anterior binarisms of First World and Third World, and their similarly obsolete analytic categories of nations and nationalisms. As Neil Lazarus has aptly pointed out, the nationalism of the First World is often seen as “modernizing, unifying, democratizing,” while the “still unfolding nationalisms” of the Third World connote “atavism, anarchy, irrationality, and power-mongering.”17 Both versions of nationalism are regularly taken to be over, finished, done in the context of globalization (even when they return). I would rather think about the post in postcolonial as a realm in which, as in the Hegelian synthesis or the Freudian case history, the past exists as at once the historical condition, residual trace, and conceptual foil of the present. We can conceive of that past as national and that present as global, but we can also more fruitfully see both times as marked by both spaces. Any reading of the profound historical break between imperialism and postcolonialism also becomes a reading of the continuities between them, particularly their mutual dependence on a notion of nationhood wedded to some version of globalism. From this convergence, an oppositional force emerges. Frantz Fanon, Martinican native, Algerian nationalist, and perhaps postcolonial studies’ most iconic thinker, was both a passionate advocate of national self-determination and the canny observer of the fact that “it is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and comes to life.”18 The revolutionary nationalism often twinned with Fanon’s name has more recently seemed to be displaced by the migration, hybridity, and global cosmopolitanism of which Fanon is also an example. Lazarus calls this postcolonial criticism’s reading of Fanon “back to front,” from the call for liberation in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) to the presciently poststructuralist sense of antiracial, nonparticularist identity in Black Skin, White Masks (1952).19 So enamored have we become with global flows, whether the flows of global capital, the deterritorializing flows of desire, nomadic movement, and rhizomatic branching with which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari propose to counter the ontology of territoriality, the diasporic flows of migrancy, or

Introduction    the espousal of a saving planetary consciousness, that we sometimes forget that nations too are spaces of flows and movement.20 So too do we seem in this era of resurgent national aggressions, of theocratic states, ethnic violence, and new imperialism, to sometimes forget that, absent global institutions with real power, nation-states remain a vital container for the politics of liberation: the right of self-determination; the pursuit of liberty, and the extension of civic equality and fair protection regardless of natality, ethnic origin, religious affiliation, gender, or sexual orientation. This is, as Peter Hallward has termed it, a “strictly political” concept of the nation, grounded in a discourse of rights and claims rather than of origins and particularized identities.21 But its history has not been incompatible with the politics of identity and has indeed often arisen from particularist projects, such as the racial nationalism of a Du Bois or the antiracial nationalism of a Fanon. As the history of those projects shows, the espousal of a certain kind of national subject fuels a new kind of claim to national politics (race equality, decolonization, socialism) alongside global affiliations (Pan-Africanism, Marxism, anticolonial internationalism). When the nation is linked to the ideology of subject formation, it does often turn to particularizing practices. Hence Hallward’s call for a postcolonial theory whose sense of the nation (a sense he deems crucial for oppositional theory) “does not rely upon any notion of community, any kind of cultural proximity, any cultural criteria of sharing or belonging” (126) and whose sense of the subject is a Deleuzean post-subject. But the nation’s linking to subject and culture has also sometimes broken the isomorphic equivalence of identity and territory, natality and nationality. These breaks construct the concept of the nation as much as nationalism’s violent unifications, just as Fanon’s interrogation of psychoanalysis from the place of the racialized colonial subject constructs the concept of psychoanalysis. Against the portrait in A Thousand Plateaus of a psychoanalysis that reduces all desire to Oedipus, all direction to the unconscious, all meaning to the “despotic signifier” of the phallus, and all multiplicities to “the dismal unity of an object declared lost,” Slavoj Žižek asks, “Is the Freudian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpretive appropriation) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the multitude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me matrix: the matrix of the explosive opening up of the subject onto the social space?”22 Where psychoanalysis for Deleuze

   Introduction and Guattari mirrors the linear codings and territorializing ambitions that render the nation and state the agents of “collective subjectification” and “subjection” (456), and where psychoanalysis often seems even less capable than the nation or state of opening itself to potentially deterritorializing flows contained within it, Žižek argues for “Oedipus, the operator of deterritorialization.” Both the nation and the subject, particularly in the ways that psychoanalysis has allowed us to rethink them, need to remain central in postcolonial criticism. This means tracing the history of their various forms, flows, and articulations. A history of change is necessary to make change. Commenting on Hannah Arendt’s call in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for an end of the nation-state as a structure that repeatedly expels its minority populations, Judith Butler reminds us that while Arendt’s view of the nation is “singular and homogeneous, or at least, it becomes so in order to comply with the requirements of the state,” there are nonetheless other complex and heterogeneous modes of national belonging, modes articulated in the figure of a “wanting one” or a national subject of desire who performs her entry into the national compact.23 This book explores the nation’s “wanting one” and further places the nation alongside the impulse toward global connection, understood both as the expansion and standardizing of core capitalist-imperialist structures and as the oppositional alignment against those hegemonies, Fanon’s international or Du Bois’s dark world. Alongside the elaboration of such nonstatist, subnational, transnational, and antinational alternatives as, to cite only a few, Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, Saskia Sassen’s global city, and Arjun Appadurai’s transnation,24 I suggest the possibility of returning to the nation-state, subsequently distinguishing the imaginary, psychic, and representational work of nation formation from the juridical, political, and territorial discourses of the state; exploring nationalism’s frequent articulation to and break from the politics of race; and finally considering the nation, as much as its alternatives, as the product of moving modes across the long postcolonial twentieth century. These are perhaps old categories, but I would like to think them anew and again, recognizing their persistence in the sphere of contemporary politics and imagining the possibility of a discourse of nationhood that opens itself to a range of possible differences.

Introduction   

Disciplines in Motion: World Literature and the Return of the National Both postcolonial studies and comparative literature, the primary fields within which this book situates itself, take the nation, either revolutionary or romantic, as their founding origin. Despite their distinct institutional emergences, their individual approaches to literary studies, and their different historical anatomies of what counts as literature, postcolonial studies and comparative literature were both also foundationally shaped by the intersection between nation-based paradigms and more border-crossing ones. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s expansive vision of weltliteratur (world literature) was as much a part of the birth of comparative literature as the territorial anatomies of national characters and national literatures popularized by such disciplinary fathers (and mothers) as Hippolyte Taine, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Germaine de Staël. As a dream of works yet to be written, in which Goethe foresaw an important place for German authors and the eventual revitalization of German and other national literatures through foreign contact, weltliteratur reflected early nineteenth-century tenets of nationalist thinking, particularly the Herderian concept of national soul embedded in spirit and language. At the same time, weltliteratur constituted an internationalist reaction against the rising tide of ever more aggressive nationalisms in post-Napoleonic Europe.25 The rise of nationalism as a principle of differentiation coincided with a culture of cosmopolitanism; both are distilled into Goethe’s vision of a class of texts that would represent particular national spirits even as they traversed and transcended their national, linguistic, and temporal origins. In a well-known 1986 essay that urges “the reinvention, in a new situation, of what Goethe long ago theorized as ‘world literature’ ” through “some specific engagement with the question of Third-World literature,” Jameson links the latter to the “obsessive return of the national situation itself, the name of the country that returns again and again like a gong.”26 Jameson’s claim that “third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic—necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory,” has been criticized for latently imperial models of understanding the cognitive,

   Introduction characterological, temporal, civilizational, and narrative differences between the West, with its repressed “unconscious” allegories, and the non-West, with its “conscious and overt” allegories (68–69).27 The model doubtless homogenizes a heterogeneric, transnational, and multilingual (often within national borders) corpus of Third World literature. By further placing nationalism at the core of this essay’s definition of the Third World, and thereby consigning globalism to the realm of a hegemonic, imperial, and ultimately depoliticized “global American postmodernist culture,” Jameson binarizes the Third World and the First, not to mention nationalism and globalism (65). Both of these pairs, as I hope to show in this book (in dialogue with Jameson’s otherwise very mobile concepts of allegory and genre), are more complex and more complexly interrelated. The generation of émigré critics who founded the first American departments of comparative literature in the wake of World War II and in the growing shadow of the Cold War, including René Wellek and Werner Friedrich, doubted whether Goethe’s weltliteratur could provide much in the way of a program and espoused the disappearance of “national vanities” through the practice of a far-ranging cosmopolitan comparativism.28 In a 1952 essay Erich Auerbach returned to weltliteratur as a lost ideal worth revisiting in a world choked by the narrow confines of Cold War dichotomies and confronted with a vast increase of literary materials and concepts.29 Alongside the famous article of cosmopolitan faith with which the essay concludes (“our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation”), Auerbach provides the model of a global comparative method (17). As an emblematic instance of the ever-expanding historical synthesis to which weltliteratur must aspire in an age of worldwide contraction, Auerbach conceives the Ansatzpunkt, “a point of departure” or “handle” from which to begin. “The characteristic of a good point of departure is its concreteness and its precision on the one hand, and on the other, its potential for centrifugal radiation” (15). The various points of departure that Auerbach identifies (“semantic interpretation, a rhetorical trope, a syntactic sequence, the interpretation of one sentence, or a set of remarks made at a given time and in a given place”) have in common their capacity to catalyze both localized and diffuse readings, in other words, to catalyze comparison. Taken as itself an Ansatzpunkt, the nation might invite just such analysis, as (1) the mark of a certain locality, particularity,

Introduction    and rootedness; (2) the object of modular radiations that encompass the successive states of Europe, the Americas, and postcolonial Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean; and (3) the coterminous concept to various ideas of the global, what lies within the globe-spanning ideologies of empire, antiimperialism, and postcolonialism. John Pizer has recently seen in Goethe’s weltliteratur an early version of the contemporary transnationalism and globalization now transforming comparative literature.30 The effect of the idea on the last decade’s disciplinary discourse and practice is certainly visible, but weltliteratur alone does not encompass these shifts, nor is that early nineteenth-century vision of a conversation conducted between nations through their most representative, greatest works of literature (at once overflowing national boundaries and reconfirming them) simply prefigurative of the present. To close the gap between the world in weltliteratur, the mid-century earth of Auerbach’s imagining, the globe in U.S.-centered late capitalist globalization, and the transnational, transregional, transcultural, and transethnic connections of the late twentieth century is to obscure the substantial difference between the rise of European nationalism with which comparative literature began and the successive rethinking of the national paradigm that has fed rich new comparative engagements with migration, exile, and diaspora, often against the backdrop of empire.31 Comparative literature has long entwined national and global thinking, but each of those categories has meant something quite specific at different points in time. One aim of the last decade’s turn to world literature is the rethinking of the global to encompass not only spatial but also temporal flows, and not only the standardized, homogenized present Jonathan Arac dubs “Anglo-Globalism”32 but also a discontinuous, heterogeneous, polyglot, and long history. Wai Chee Dimock describes a literary “continuum” that “grants adjacency to any two points in space and time . . . goes forward as well as backward [and] stretches the life of every finite point to a potential infinity.”33 With its Auerbachian centrifugal force and elastic form, literature for Dimock operates in “dimensions of space and time so far-flung and so deeply recessional that they can never be made to coincide with the synchronic plane of the geopolitical map” (182). As a “global process,” reading “mocks the borders of the nation” and “turns literature into the collective life of the planet” (178). Literary territories, she later explains, are productively grasped through the world system of genre, with its fractal

   Introduction patterns, shifting scales, and proliferating forms.34 In David Damrosch’s argument for world literature as a mode of reading, the elliptical circulation of texts beyond their spatiotemporal points of origin produces three simultaneous registers of apprehension: “a sharp difference we enjoy for its sheer novelty; a gratifying similarity that we find in the text or project onto it; and a middle range of what is like-but-unlike—the sort of relation most likely to make a productive change in our own perceptions and practices.”35 “The work of world literature,” Damrosch further suggests, “exists on two planes at once: present in our world, it also brings us into a world very different from ours, and its particular power comes from our doubled experience of both registers together” (164). The deep spatiotemporal connections at the core of world literature’s reading practices argue for a long literary global. If the multiple reworkings of Homer or Euripides or Shakespeare or Conrad or Joyce confirm a powerful critical narrative that holds an original great because it has been so often imitated, what Harold Bloom casts as literary agon,36 these returns also plot literary movement as something other than the simple creeping expansion, the one-way cultural flow, of a particular Western form (epic, drama, novel) that levels local culture in its wake. That may be how we sometimes understand the process of globalization—“McDonaldization” is perhaps the best critical shorthand37—but it simply isn’t how literature and literary history work. Spatially, world literature connects, linking vastly different periods and cultures together. Temporally, it haunts, ghosting new texts with the residual presence of older ones and old texts with the anticipatory presence of new ones. I have elsewhere described world literature as a kind of out-living, whose concentric patterns and looping returns describe multiple and disjunctive centers within the seeming unity of a long literary global.38 In its engagement of the space and time of difference, world literature marks out a zone of the (textual) familiar merged with the unfamiliar, the (canonical) present with the absent, and the (disciplinary) now with the once and the to-come. Freud calls this zone the uncanny, describing a sensation that “leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar”—infantile castration complexes, archaic beliefs in the supernatural, and the even older psychic prehistory of the human race, in which spirit possession, ghosts, doubles, and other forms of animation loom large.39 Extrapolated to world literature, this

Introduction    model would seem to reproduce the autonomous anteriority of some texts and the belatedness of others in a new periphery that cannot help returning to some repressed canonical origin. But the linearity of the model isn’t as clear-cut as that. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), Freud’s uncanny returns as the double of the messianic temporality Derrida calls spectrality. For Derrida, recalling Freud, the uncanny entails three distinct yet entwined levels. Visually, the uncanny appears as the problematic of apparitional knowledge, knowledge that appears, like Hamlet’s father (the guiding figure of Specters), in the guise of a ghost. Temporally, the uncanny emerges in the instant when past and present are linked in an untimely, noncontinuous fashion. Finally, and spatially, the uncanny enacts for Derrida a version of autoimmune incorporation in which a certain outside is introjected into a certain inside. Autoimmunity refers to the process by which a concept, such as justice, forgiveness, or democracy, “exceeds the juridico-political sphere and yet, from the inside and the outside, is bound up with it.”40 As a figure for democracy in Specters and other late writings of Derrida’s, autoimmunity entails both a topological indecidability (inside-outside) and a temporal one (now-future). Issuing from a “nondialectizable antinomy,” democracy in the autoimmune mode operates by means of “a renvoi, a referral or deferral, a sending or putting off.”41 Sending off its others beyond its spatial and civic borders, putting off its future beyond the temporal border of the now, simultaneously conjuring that which it expels, democracy in this mode is rendered noncoincident with itself, other to itself. It is “never itself ” because it is always “to-come” (37). Derrida understands the uncanny, in its autoimmune mode, not as mere return, return in the mode of what Specters calls “repetition automatism,” but rather in terms of the otherness that repeated return injects into the place of the familiar.42 In the uncanny instant, Derrida continues: “the economic or egological home of the oikos, the nearby, the familiar, the domestic, or even the national (heimlich) frightens itself. It feels itself occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most strange, distant, threatening.” Whereas Freud, in Specters’ characterization, hunts ghosts down to psychic prehistory and whereas Marx similarly undertakes what Derrida terms a “ghost hunt” for the curiously animate forms of capital, Derrida proposes the ghost itself as the “cause of the knowledge and the

   Introduction search, the motive of history or of the episteme.”43 As the operative mode of the phenomenon Derrida calls spectrality, haunting lives with the ghost and so exceeds any simple sequencing of before and after, of what belongs within a system and what lies outside it. Derrida thus imagines Marx’s thought coming back for the future in a form (democracy-to-come) that Marx would not altogether have recognized but that is nonetheless implied within Capital ’s ghostly textual logic. Specters has a complicated relationship to Marx and Marxism (which I explore in Chapter 4) and is far from offering a program for politics in the wake of communism’s fall, neoliberalism’s triumph, and globalization’s continued immiseration of the globe. Derrida’s aim in Specters is rather to demonstrate the need to rethink all ontologies of identity in relation to the domains of language (the speech act performative of a promise or prophecy) and of time (the temporality of being in history, being after history, and waiting for history to change). If these investigations play out in a reading of select passages of Marx from the early part of Capital and The German Ideology, they are also quite centrally animated by a reengagement of Freud. Specters indeed confesses in its conclusion: “the subtitle of this address could thus have been: ‘Marx—das Unheimliche.’ ”44 Alongside the encounter staged in Specters between deconstruction and Marxism we must add that between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, two meetings undertaken, as Derrida explains to his critics, with the intent of “analyzing the paradoxical symptoms of a geopolitical mourning, or trying to articulate them with a new logic of the relations between the unconscious and politics.” For this task, he adds, spectral logic “seemed to me indispensable.”45 In the narrative of traces that Derrida calls a “hauntology” and that he argues “belongs to the structure of every hegemony,” the specter produces a strictly uncanny effect. Simultaneously preceding, succeeding, and exceeding each point in which power finds its telos, the specter is visible and invisible, present yet absent, before yet after, the “tangible intangibility of a proper body without flesh, but still the body of someone as someone other.”46 Discourses, as Derrida’s reading of Marx insists, have their specters too, entities they position as other but that return as their selves and their futures. If we (mis)understand the global to imply the wholesale displacement of national borders by the forces of transnational culture and capital, for a disciplinary discourse to “go global,” as so many have recently done,

Introduction    might seem to mean for it simply to supersede national paradigms and to think beyond the nation. But if the global describes a process or perspective of relationality, both spatial and temporal, then a discipline that goes global would be one that refuses to assume the archaism of the national and the particular, and the modernity of the global and the hybrid—as if critical categories were themselves inevitably yoked to the chain of a teleological progress. Reading through spectral and uncanny problematics, we might instead consider an aspiration toward global connection that does not reject or bypass bounded identities so much as coexist with them: a phantom memory of the extranational compass within which national identifications have so often been formed. Nations are produced both by idealized longing for their own territory in the past, present, and future and by affiliative bonding with places outside that territory, through such distinct ideologies of spatial connection as cosmopolitanism (for romantic nationalism), empire (for imperial nationalism), Third Worldism (for antiimperial nationalism), and migrant diaspora (for postcolonial nationalism in the metropole and the periphery). In The Necessary Nation (2001), Gregory Jusdanis correctly describes a premature elision and conceptual flattening of the nation in contemporary critical discourse and wonders whether the “defamation of the nation” may not go “hand in hand with its portrayal as an ideological construct,” that is, “as an invention, a fantasy, or a narration.”47 This book contends otherwise and suggests that to read the spectral presence and fantasy form of the nation and its narratives, and to further grasp fantasy as a structuring element of historical existence and imaginative expression, is precisely to reclaim the nation as a category of contemporary criticism and to understand even better its work across the long postcolonial twentieth century. For Derrida, certainly, the nation-state in the era of globalization is decidedly not spectral. Rather than a phantom presence that comes back from the past to generate the promise of the future (a hauntology), the nation for Derrida is locked in ontopology—the territorialized discourse of place rendered synonymous with being. Specters thus deems the nation a “primitive conceptual phantasm of community . . . much more outdated than ever, in the very ontopology it supposes, by tele-technic dislocation.”48 With seemingly little relevance to the world of differences, disjunctures, and global flows, the nation-state for Derrida cuts against, even crosses out, the

   Introduction promise of democracy-to-come and the new international. Although the nation-state is a “phantasm” and thus, in Derrida’s definition a phantom, a double, and a ghost, it remains at a remove from what, in Monolingualism of the Other (1998), Derrida calls “the semantic and etymological affinity that associates the phantasm to the phanesthai, to phenomenality, but also to the spectrality of the phenomenon.”49 In the preface to Without Alibi’s 2002 collection of essays on the topic of sovereignty, Derrida does admit an alternative. “One can deconstruct it [the nation-state] and combat it on one level, while continuing, for the same reasons, to support it on another. The sovereignty of the nation-state can become, under certain conditions and as long as it does not ally itself with the adversary, a force of resistance and regulation when faced with the cruel savagery of international capital and of a certain mondialisation or ‘globalization.’ ”50 However, this claim is more caveat or exception to a general rule regarding the irredeemable ontopology of the nation-state form, as Pheng Cheah’s careful exegesis of Specters enables us to see very clearly. Cheah’s Spectral Nationality (2003) recasts the nation, especially in its postcolonial forms, as “a specter that haunts global capital and awaits reincarnation, the undecidable neuralgic point that refuses to be exorcised . . . the most apposite figure for freedom today.”51 In my own enlisting of Derrida, I am thinking of a notion of national territory that furthermore understands itself never to have never been purely itself, purely national, but instead as always constituted, in both its imperial and anti-imperial modes, through a co-constitutive relationship with some internal and external other. Despite what Derrida casts as the verities of territories, namely, their tendency toward the grounded and the bounded, ontopology is not the only mode of national expression. And although the nation’s time, from its romantic European origins to its revolutionary iterations to its postcolonial state of abeyance may be, as Cheah argues, incarnational and teleological, the nation also moves in less linear fashion. This suggests the possibility of yet another reading method, elaborated from the inner territories and oscillating temporalities of psychic life—the zone invoked by Derrida as one concern of Specters and largely absent in Cheah’s compelling Spectral Nationality. “The time for producing historically thin ‘theory’ describing the feeling of migrants in pseudopsychoanalytic vocabulary is over,” observes Spivak in Death of a Discipline (2004), as she investigates the intersections

Introduction    between comparative literature, postcolonial studies, and area studies against the backdrop of globalization’s financialization of the globe (85). Spivak urges us to think a difference that is not merely the opposite of hegemonic Euro-American sameness, or the object of what she casts as the “scopic vision” of “Moretti-style comparativism,” “map-making literary criticism,” and the world literature project more generally, but is instead specific and deep, linguistically and culturally inflected, geographically and historically placed. In its expectancy of a Derridean “to-come” accessed in the process of reading, “without guarantees” and without generalities about “others,” the difference Spivak describes is open to cultural and even planetary interconnection (108, 45). This book, I hope, continues this work even as it thinks again about the use of psychoanalytic vocabularies and world literature methods, alongside deconstruction and genre theory, to describe migrant, national, and global feelings and fictions. With the long-standing orientation of both comparative literature and postcolonial studies to the overlapping zone where nation and globe meet as my model, and a world literature that doesn’t imperialize as my further aspiration, I would like to imagine a literary global in intimate contact with the literary national, relationally linked as two concomitant modes of conceptualizing identity across a long postcolonial twentieth century conceived across languages, periods, cultures, and borders. Comparison, however broad ranging, cannot be the global, just as monolingual, territorially delimited inquiries need not necessarily be the national, the cognitive past from which disciplinary futures are sometimes seen to break. Method does not incarnate an object but simply repositions it. Certainly the novel and genre are prime candidates for such ongoing relocation. As Franco Moretti has invigoratingly argued in reopening the project of world literature, the novel is an emblematic, even paradigmatic, instance of the world literary flows of genre, which spread out, diverge, dead-end, and ever so often achieve monopoly.52 As another Ansatzpunkt, “whose interpretation is a radiation out from them and which orders and interprets a greater region than they themselves occupy,”53 genres are dynamic, migrating, and reconstellating forms. They take particular inflections in particular cultures while tracing out cross-cultural, cross-linguistic patterns of transmission and circulation. Readers of Mikhail Bakhtin will recognize this description as the exclusive provenance of the novel, whose heteroglossia,

   Introduction polychronism, and “decentralizing, centrifugal forces” contrast with the monologic, centralizing, characterologically flat, temporally immediate nature of epic.54 But genre is also more generally subject to global flows and historical haunting. “The concept of genre looks forward and backward at the same time,” writes Claudio Guillén, to works yet to come and those from which they derive.55 A “descriptive statement” but also “rather often, a declaration of faith as well,” genre is a concept seeded by a futurity that exceeds the plot of mere progress. In “The Law of Genre” (1980) Derrida specifies genre’s implicit origins, identities, norms, borders, and “line[s] of demarcation” as impossibilities, within which contamination, impurity, and dissemination have already, constitutively, happened.56 It is hard to conceive of literary history, in this unstable form, in the form of a teleological line (the first novel, the last novel) or a spatial line (the national novel within a border, the global novel outside it). Genres are objects in motion and histories in process; if we look only for their most familiar apparitions, we may well miss their transformations. What if beyond being contaminated, with all that implies for the impossibility of pinpointing a given genre’s origins, genre is also haunted? The novelistic archive of the postcolonial twentieth century—of which this book is a very partial and preliminary snapshot—perhaps displaces through its internal generic movement and external connection to other genres of political imagining what some critics, including Spivak, cast as world literature theory’s novelcentric single-mindedness.57 Individually distinct and variously connected, the many worlds surveyed here are cut across in each incarnation by a time that looks forward by looking back. This is the time of genre, and, as we will see, of nation and psychoanalysis too.

Nations and Subjects “As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of ‘forgetting’ the experience of this continuity . . . engenders the need for a narrative of ‘identity.’ In the secular story of the ‘person’ there is a beginning and an end . . . Nations, however, have no clearly identifiable births, and their deaths, if they ever happen, are never natural.”58 In the wake of Benedict Anderson’s influential Imagined Communities (1983),

Introduction    national time has come to denote the steady movement of a politico-cultural entity forward through history and, just as surely, its recession backward into memory in a backsliding progress that allows nationalism to assert radical modernity while expressing serial continuity with antiquity. In The Break-up of Britain (1977) Tom Nairn hazards a similar, in Anderson’s opinion more condescending, analogy. Nationalism, writes Nairn in a passage quoted twice by Anderson, is “the pathology of modern developmental history, as inescapable as ‘neurosis’ in the individual, with much the same essential ambiguity attaching to it, a similar built-in capacity for descent into dementia, rooted in the dilemmas of helplessness thrust upon most of the world (the equivalent of infantilism for societies), and largely incurable.”59 Nationalism, in the pithy formulation of Nairn’s subsequent Two Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (1997), is nothing other than “the id of modernity,” Mr. Hyde to internationalism’s Dr. Jekyll.60 For many of its contemporary critics, nationalism in its “bad” or ethnic version, as opposed to its “good” or civic version, is the dark force of history. Michael Ignatieff sums up the bloody ethnic struggles of the late 1980s and early 1990s in Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Kurdistan, and elsewhere with the claim “the repressed has returned, and its name is nationalism.”61 Nationalism’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality or Janus face provides a figure that allows Nairn, like Anderson, to capture the doubleness of nationalism as a phenomenon that is both progressive and regressive, modernizing and archaicizing, congruent with the principles of national liberation and self-determination, as well as with the excesses of uneven development, fascism, and dictatorship, “healthy and morbid” at the same time.62 And it is the psychological analogy itself that provides the means, whether in the topological figure of two-sidedness or the temporal plot of two steps forward, one step back. “Reculer pour mieux sauter,” writes Nairn, describing nationalism’s return to a retrospective set of historical differentiae like ethnicity, language, and religion so as to transfigure them into a fictively unified “nationality” (141). Nationalism’s present, Nairn implies, like that of consciousness itself, is occupied territory, littered with the half-remembered and half-forgotten traces of the past and ever on the verge of returning to those ancient claims of identity and belonging. In an extended consideration of the parallel between nationalism and the psyche, David Lloyd also suggests “the psychic power of [nationalism’s] cultural forms”

   Introduction derives from its simultaneous incarnation of modernity and instantiation of premodern sentiments and attachments, what he calls nationalism’s “atavism effect.”63 Freudian psychoanalysis is another forward-moving plot that constantly regresses, seeking an ever more originary story of the self (Oedipus, castration, totem, and taboo) while attempting to close the distance between the subject of the present and the subject of the past. Mieke Bal identifies a regressive universalism as the “narrative fallacy” of a method that substitutes collective story and myth for psychic structure.64 Other critics, reading the stories of both psychoanalysis and literature, have emphasized the possibilities of a narrative turn in psychoanalytic criticism that brings other temporalities to light. Commenting on Freud’s 1905 analysis of the patient known as Dora, Philip Rieff argues that the case history “alters the way in which both the novel and history will be written,” thanks to “a mode of presentation calculated to help us see events, remote and near, simultaneously.”65 This is the mode that governs those looping passages in which Freud obliges the reader to conceptualize the distant moment in which a traumatic event occurs, the successive moments in which it resurfaces, and the end point of the analysis, from which all the previous moments are retrospectively reconstructed in the phenomenon he calls Nachträglichkeit (afterwardness). Steven Marcus similarly deems Dora unique for “the virtual Proustian complexity of Freud’s interweaving of the various strands of time.”66 As both a “modern experimental novel” and a clear tribute to the Victorian culture that offered up a bourgeois realist variant as its privileged form, Dora, in Marcus’s reading, reveals the case history as a point where the apotheosis of one form and the emergence of another occupy the same slice of time in a psychoanalytic version of genre’s uncanniness (64). Taking a different tack in the narrative turn, Shoshana Felman links the work of reading to the interpretation of “signifying material” in the analytic scene of transference, while Peter Brooks understands the transference’s “representation and symbolic replay of the past” to open up the possibility of the past’s “eventual revision through the listener’s ‘interventions’ ” and so to model narrative itself as “the movement of reference that takes place in the transference of narrative from teller to listener, and back again.”67 More recently, critics have unearthed a material or, to use McClintock’s term, “situated” history of psychoanalysis connected to the

Introduction    history of nation, race, and sexuality, particularly in their colonial-imperial forms.68 Noting the status of psychoanalysis as “a colonial discipline that reveals to us an ethnography of the West,” Ranjana Khanna calls for its “provincializing,” that is, its resituation as both a Western-colonial narrative and “a national colonialist formation of the East/West/North/ South encounter.”69 However much psychoanalysis (like nationalism and narrative genres) maps its concerns onto the looping circuit of movement forward and back again, psychoanalysis (like them) also has to be understood as something that has moved laterally across the globe and been subjected to various practices of “modularization,” to borrow Anderson’s term for the process by which the nationalism created in Europe and the Americas was taken up elsewhere. Psychoanalysis is both a narrative scene and an ideological construct, whose global movements are evidence of something more than the anti- and postcolonial world’s belated encounter with yet another technology of modernity. There is by now an extensive literature on these subjects, beginning with the gendered and raced imaginary of classical psychoanalysis, engaging the work of colonial ethnopsychoanalysts like Octave Mannoni,70 progressing through the explosive anticolonial critique of Fanon, and pursued in the last two decades by an abundance of feminist, postcolonial, and queer critics who have together remade the subject of psychoanalysis.71 Many of these focus on a Lacanian topology in which, as Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks says, “the unconscious is outside rather than inside, in that it is the discourse of the Other . . . that produces subjective effects.” Reading through this approach, national subjects and national narratives are approached not from the respective revisionism of their stories, their movement forward and back, but rather from their linguistic differences and identificatory dissonances. Both the internal divisions of the signifiers of nationhood and the speaking subjects of nationalism, and the language politics and body politics that constitute and fracture what Lauren Berlant calls “the national symbolic” claim attention.72 In a notable synthesis of Freudian and Lacanian approaches, Homi K. Bhabha’s “DissemiNation” (1994) explores the “ ‘double and split’ time of national representation” as a function of the subject’s own disjunctions at the scene of cultural enunciation.73 In contrast to Anderson’s metaphor of national community, in which the many are made one through diachronic identification with their forebears and synchronic identification with their unknown newspaper- and novel-

   Introduction reading, national-anthem-singing peers, Bhabha insists on the nonserial, nonsynchronous “differential time of the arbitrary sign” as what “singularizes and alienates the holism of the imagined community” (308–9). Bhabha’s model is both psychoanalytic, in its excavation of the processes of memory, desire, identification, splitting, and fantasy that make up the national subject, and Derridean, in its logic of différance and supplementarity as well as in its postnationalist orientation. Bhabha thus presents a male migrant subject (Rushdie’s Gibreel Farishta returning from the margins to a center rendered “less than one and double” by his very presence) as the privileged example of the differential, destabilizing sign (318). The temporal break or time lag through which Bhabha understands the work of the sign to occur and the historical voicing of a largely linguistic agency to emerge is thus also allied to a chronology that puts nation first and globe, in the form of contemporary globalized migrant culture, after. If we are to think the nation through the subject without going through and beyond the nation, we might return to psychic topology, specifically to fantasy’s topology, in which there is no clear before and after, inside and outside. The Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse defines fantasme (German, phantasie; English fantasy or phantasy) as the term coined by Freud’s early French translators from the Greek phantasma (apparition) in order to describe “the imaginary life of the subject and the way in which the subject represents to himself or herself his or her own history or the history of his or her origins.”74 The Freudian case histories recount this process as one of replacing those points where there is no personal experience with fantasized material drawn from somewhere else—the encyclopedia entries and pregnant single aunt that provide the sexual knowledge of a false step that returns in Dora’s symptomatic limp, or the primal scenes and castration threats that the Wolf Man expresses in his dreams, thus “fill[ing] in the gaps in individual truth with prehistoric truth.” 75 The French psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis understand Freud to have in fact fixed the mobile concept of fantasy, beginning with his 1897 abandonment of the seduction hypothesis (positing the objective reality of the primal scene as directly witnessed or experienced by the child) and continuing through his various attempts to find more subjective sources for fantasy. Freud, in their reading, was “the prisoner of a series of theoretical alternatives, subject-object, constitution-event,

Introduction    internal-external, imaginary-real . . . [who] was for a time led to stress the first terms of these ‘pairs of opposites.’ ”76 For Laplanche and Pontalis, by contrast, fantasy is precisely that which never chooses. In the zone they call “une fantasmatique” (a fantasmatic), the unconscious and conscious, internal and external, imaginary and real, individual history and collective history, all interweave, merge, and mingle, alongside primal fantasies (Urphantasien) such as uterine life, the primal scene, and castration, and secondary fantasies such as screen memories. The fantasmatic is not internal to the subject but a kind of structure for the subject, a template or topology organizing the process by which certain elements of unconscious life come into dreams, fantasies, repetition compulsions, and other aspects of imaginary life. Moving and mixing, simultaneously reaching back (to origins) and reaching out (to the liminal zone where oppositions are not mutually exclusive but secretly joined), the fantasmatic describes the very zone through which the discourse of nations, and perhaps imagined narratives of nationhood, come into being. In Stathis Gourgouris’s suggestive formulation the nation “can only ‘exist’ as a phantasmic projection retroactively posed once the desire has been articulated.”77 Nations, in other words, presuppose a desiring national subject, a subject who relates to the nation as if it were simultaneously the subject’s self and its other, that with which the subject longs to be coincident and that which always lies outside, beyond, or before the subject, thanks to the encoding of the national we as, in Gourgouris’s words, “a phantasm (presup)posed continuously both as origin and as aim” (33). If, in Gourgouris’s words, “the Nation is both there and elsewhere all the time . . . both past and present . . . both irredeemable memory and limitless future . . . the point where repression and the return of the repressed take place simultaneously,” then the nation has the structure not only of a fantasy, as Gourgouris and others have argued, but of a fantasmatic (45).78 Fantasmatic nations are not nations that don’t exist but nations that exist in multiple modes, and that regularly reveal the structuring template of particular relations of loss, reparation, and attachment. I hope to detect a history or archive of a species of identification born of desire, governed by the spatiotemporal movement associated with fantasy, and consistently opened to a (global) outside that is always already within. Fantasmatic nations eschew chronologies of passage (from nationalism to globalization)

   Introduction in favor of topographies of interconnection and incorporation, and temporalities of ghostly haunting. Reading Derrida against the grain of Specters’ characterization of the nation as a primitive and outmoded “phantasm” of community, might we not also see the nation as the site of what Derrida elsewhere describes as the “fantasmatic” topology of the crypt? Derrida discusses the crypt in an introduction to Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s 1986 study of Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man, and so in one of several engagements with the psychoanalysis that plays the opposite, sometimes the double, of deconstruction.79 For Abraham and Torok the crypt refers to a topography of inclusion, specifically the incorporation of a loss into the self rather than the moving on from that loss, what Freud calls mourning and Abraham and Torok (borrowing the term from Ferenczi) call introjection. In The Shell and the Kernel (1968) Abraham and Torok call introjection a process and incorporation a fantasy, by which they understand a “secretly perpetuated topography” that undertakes “to transform the world rather than inflecting injury on the subject” (125). Where introjection entails the compensations of language (“learning to fill the emptiness of the mouth is the initial model of introjection,” 128) and a “painful process” of recognizing loss, finding substitutes for loss, and so moving on from loss, incorporation’s fantasy operates within a different domain in which language is “demetaphorized,” taken literally. “So in order not to have to ‘swallow’ a loss, we fantasize swallowing (or having swallowed) that which has been lost, as if it were some kind of thing” (126). As a “denial of a gap,” the gap between losing and having, between metaphor and reality, signifier and signified, incorporation finds its illustrative figure in a closing or closing in, the “erect[ion of] a secret tomb inside the subject” (126). This is the tomb where some correlative of loss, “reconstituted from the memories of words, scenes, and affects,” is “buried alive in the crypt as a full-fledged person, complete with its own topography” (130). This intrapsychical crypt is forever drawing the walls closer in, fusing with its loss in the most literal of ways and with the secondary gain of an intense, exquisite pleasure in pain, effectively becoming its loss so as to deny its loss. In The Wolf Man’s Magic Word Abraham and Torok return to this topography, in which “the crypt works in the heart of the Ego as a special kind of Unconscious,” and further link the symbolic work that sustains

Introduction    the crypt as the place of a “rift,” “tear,” or “partition” within the ego to the work of language (81). Freud’s patient’s famously double language, filled with synonyms of variant meanings or allosemes that guide the analyst’s work of interpreting by opposites, is the ground for Abraham and Torok’s “cryptonomy.” Each symbol is fractured by an internal line and connected to an unconscious cosymbol, traceable through the alloseme, that is also fractured. “A broken symbol has a severed cosymbol as its counterpart; to a torn Ego corresponds a partitioned Id” (81). In this broken topography, a map of halves and (w)holes, there also lies what Abraham and Torok call the Thing. On the side of the cryptic unconscious the Thing exists as a swallowed, demetaphorized body, while on the other side of the partition or rift it exists as a word that originates on the unconscious side but passes around the unconscious and “break[s] through the symbol’s line of fracture . . . provided it is disguised in the synonym of an alloseme, that is, as a cryptonym. The presence of the cryptonym signals the existence of a crypt, a split in the Ego.” Referencing both The Wolf Man’s Magic Word and The Shell and the Kernel, Derrida’s foreword to the former identifies Abraham and Torok’s crypt as “an extraneous or foreign area of incorporation,” the place where the self brings into itself some Thing other than itself, unnamable, mute, but kept alive and preserved in the style of the living dead (xvi). “Fantasmatic, cryptofantasmatic” in form, the “dizzying topology” of the crypt for Derrida establishes “an outcast outside inside the inside” and thus renders “the inside as the outside of the outside, or of the inside; the outside as the inside of the inside, or of the outside” (xix, xiv). Cryptic incorporation, for Derrida, also “marks an effect of impossible or refused mourning,” the failure to fully move on from a lost other by assimilating it and the opening of a disruptive, unruly temporality and textuality that depsychologizes psychoanalysis (xxi). The crypt in The Wolf Man’s Magic Word (which Derrida notes “reads like a novel, a poem, a myth, a drama, the whole thing in a plural translation, productive and simultaneous,” xxv), is the occasion for a style of reading that creates form and language of its own as it analyzes the other. Cryptonomy in Derrida’s understanding can exceed mere catalogue, the fixing of one symbol to another or “the observation of a one-to-one correspondence between terms,” in favor of the restoration of a “functional circuit” in which the genesis of the

   Introduction symbol and the intersubjective relay of it are central (xxix). If pushed beyond its psychoanalytic preference to close the gap between symptomatic sign and cause “along the most economical line or surface,” cryptonymy in Derrida’s account reveals “an angular, if not crystalline structure, like a cut gem” (xlii). “Every word multiplies its faces or its allosemic sides, and multiplies the allosemic multiplication by further crossing formal grafts and combining phonic affinities” (xliii). Cryptonomy, in other words, is where psychoanalysis de(con)structs. As a potential source for the idea of a fantasmatic structure, Derrida’s reading of the crypt’s temporal ghostliness and semantic multiplicity points to a different status for the nation. What lives along the nation in its crypt is the other Thing of the national: the global world, the nonnational them, the time before or after nationtime, the other languages that split the national “we,” even the several genres of national narration that install other times than nation-time and ghost the plot of national becoming with national dissolution, decomposition, and displacement. The discourse of the fantasmatic nation cuts across several definitions of what a phantasm or fantasm is—a scene or a spook, a missing object or a moving trajectory, a topology or a temporality. To pursue this inquiry, I return to the encounter between deconstruction and psychoanalysis, in which “the nation” surfaces as an especially troubled term.

Psychoanalysis and the World In “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘and the rest of the world’ ” (1981) we see an early instance of the nation’s phantom presence in Derrida’s thought. Originally delivered as the opening address to a joint French–Latin American conference in Paris on the institutional politics of psychoanalysis, “Geopsychoanalysis” announces itself as “a reading of psychoanalysis à la carte.”80 The title of the lecture references the first of two declarations by the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) that Derrida reads in order to reveal the institution’s map of the world. As Derrida reminds his audience, the 1977 Constitution adopted in Jerusalem by the thirtieth Congress of the IPA states that “the Association’s main geographical areas are defined at this time as America north of the United States–Mexican border; all America south of that border; and the rest of the world” (327).

Introduction    These three geographical areas are in fact four since, Derrida explains, “the rest of the world” is divided within itself, split between the originary terrain of Europe and other areas of the world where psychoanalysis is rooted, and an “immense territory where, for a variety of very different reasons, l’ homo psychanalyticus is unknown or forbidden” (349). Replacing three with four, turning a triangle into a grid, one of whose squares is decidedly dark (“dark like the dark continent, like the unopened, the unexplored, the feminine, dark also like the female genitalia, dark like the skin of some, dark like evil, dark like the unspeakable horror of violence, torture, and extermination,” 329) reveals the blind spot of the institution, in the characteristic gesture of deconstruction. Derrida’s earlier work regularly aligned the discourse of psychoanalysis with the metaphysics of presence. The trinitarian regimes of mother, father, child, and imaginary, symbolic, real, and the transcendental signifier of the phallus, all of which Derrida claims psychoanalysis finds wherever it looks, are refusals of the division and doubling, dissemination and différance that are for him the circuitous path of the signifier.81 As described in “Geopsychoanalysis,” the institution of psychoanalysis betrays a similar inability to entertain difference, and even a will to repress it. Derrida suggests that the IPA cannot name Latin America as anything other than “all America south of the border” because, for this audience of international analysts, it is literally unassimilable, the trace of a dark history of collaboration between the repressive apparatus of the state, including torture, and the institution of psychoanalysis in a certain Latin American country, namely, Argentina. What’s in a name? A country by any other name, or indeed no name at all, smells even sweeter. And so does an institution. Derrida takes the IPA’s failure either to name Latin America or to entertain a mechanism by which it might be named—for example, a system of absentee voting that would allow those practicing psychoanalysis in Argentina’s repressive regime to weigh in—as the sign of an institutional “axiomatics of presence” that allows the disappearance of other unspeakable things (346). To condemn, as the IPA’s Executive Council declaration does, the “violation of human rights, of the rights of citizens in general and of intellectuals and our colleagues in particular” in “some geographical areas” is, Derrida argues, to piggyback dangerously on a long ethico-political discourse on value and to seek, in the self-interested

   Introduction invocation of certain universalist terms associated with the discourse of human rights, protection from more unsettling questions (335). The unnamed phantom nation at the heart of the IPA’s declaration is, for Derrida, coextensive with everything else psychoanalysis fails to see in seeing only itself, including history, politics, ethics, philosophy, and geopolitics. The absent nation is not the only thing Derrida wishes to conjure into presence by “naming Latin America,” the gesture that opens and closes his lecture, as well as punctuating the vast majority of the statements in between (327, 352). But the spectral presences that the naming of Latin America calls into being—monster states, citizen victims, an institution that plays both parts, and a territorial complex of power and politics that psychoanalysis denies at its peril—all circle back to the nation as their metonymic equivalent. To choose not to live with the ghost of the national, to believe one might, like the ostrich with its head in the sand, banish something by refusing to see or name it is tantamount, in Derrida’s critique, to refusing to live in the world. The nation, in this sense, is the world; it is what psychoanalysis has to see if it is to live at all beyond its globalizing imperatives. In “Psychoanalysis Searches the State of Its Soul,” a more recent installment of a career-long critique of psychoanalysis inflected by his later concerns with the dangers of national-territorial philosophies, Derrida faults psychoanalysis for having had “neither the means nor the right” to condemn the practices of sovereign ambition, including state terror, the death penalty, and other forms of legalized suffering and cruelty. Psychoanalysis, asserts Derrida in this 2000 address to the States General of Psychoanalysis Conference in Paris, is itself dominated by “a certain onto-theological metaphysics of sovereignty (autonomy and omnipotence of the subject—individual or state—freedom, egological will, conscious intentionality or if you will, the ego, the ego ideal, and the superego, etc.).”82 Psychoanalysis stands guilty of a fundamental territorialism that finds its most damning expression in a parochial Europeanism—not the new Europe of the European Union but the old Europe of sovereign nations, the Europe with whose moment the birth of psychoanalysis coincided and which it has never, in Derrida’s opinion, outgrown. Derrida’s addresses deconstruct the geopolitical sense of an institution that makes maps yet misses places, englobes the world yet loses the political,

Introduction    either by occluding the nation or miming it. This critique of psychoanalysis unfolds from the position, as Derrida notes in “Geopsychoanalysis,” of a speaking symptom. A symptom, he well knows, always points backward to a history and forward to a future, to the transformational possibility of life after symptomatic expression, life changed because it has been brought to an awareness of what it once refused to recognize. For psychoanalysis, Derrida implies, the future entails replacing an abstract map devoid of any proper names save its own (Freud, Klein, Jung, Lacan) with the naming, which is also to say the calling—the calling forth, the calling out—of politics. Derrida concludes “Geopsychoanalysis” by reminding his audience of French and Latin American analysts that what is written in capital letters on the Latin American continent could, if projected onto a large screen, just as well reveal what is written in small, even undecipherable, letters in the so-called liberal democracies of Europe and North America (351). In naming Latin America, Derrida implies, one also names the dim and flickering state of human rights in many other parts of the world, including those nations that take for granted their exemplary status. A map, as Derrida reads it, becomes a model of movement. For all that it is grounded in a particular national place and time, the name of Latin America also opens itself to the oscillatory circuits of reference as it simultaneously designates Europe and North America as well, both its own history of abuse and disavowal and some more collective future. Such moving reference is a kind of hope. It imagines a different politics in which nations and institutions, psychoanalysis included, will hold themselves accountable for what is done in their name. The psychoanalysis I take from Derrida’s map of a Latin America is a psychoanalysis willing both to name the national referent and to watch it move. Read further as what Michel de Certeau calls a “strateg[y] of time” that “recognizes the past in the present,” the psychoanalysis with which I am concerned is one that, again in de Certeau’s words, “treats the relation as one of imbrication (one in the place of the other), or repetition (one reproduces the other in another form).”83 Imbrication, repetition, and substitution constitute the structural leitmotif of the narratives of nationalism this book examines, narratives in which the nation is at once itself and other, once and future, self-same and subject to change. The nation in these narratives is variously secret sharer (the national as shadow of the

   Introduction global), ghost (the nation as recurring specter in postcolonial literature and politics), and fetish (the nation as a style of belief that never quite masks the essential lack of the thing itself). To grasp the nation in these various guises is to see it as a particular kind of critical trace. The concept of fantasmatic national identification brings psychoanalysis and deconstruction together in order to mark the coordinates of the national subject whose place is the peculiar timespace of desire. As the setting or stage of the subject, desire is as much the world of the subject as any territory, whether national or global or both. Nationalism is a rhetoric of belonging that is always subtended, and often subverted, by longing. But which desires? Whose desires? How many desires? Desire’s law is local and plural, not general and singular. And desire comes up, in all cases, against the power of the law.

Melancholia’s Map and Genre’s Memory: Models for the Reading of Fantasmatic Nations All national subjects live their nationalism in the mode of loss, for all must contend with the difficult process of identifying with something that is not entirely there, that exists in the present yet recedes into the deep past of national history, and that seems to promise future inclusion but constantly works by present exclusion. Such identification with, and incorporation of, loss is the hallmark of Freudian melancholia. Of course, it is melancholia’s alternative, mourning, that Freud claims is precipitated by the loss either of a loved person or of “some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”84 Mourning’s idealized passage from loss to substitution would seem to provide the psychic plot for national desire. But lately it has been melancholia that yields nationalism’s affective analogue.85 In Freudian melancholia the grieving ego literally takes in, even becomes, the object whose loss it cannot bear. This is a double condition of compensation and loss in which the ego turns back upon itself as substitute lost object, while also returning to the apprehension of that object as still, always, distant from the ego. In Judith Butler’s account, it is a profoundly social outside—the world of others, with their judgments, disappointments, and abandonments as well as their promise of connection—that melancholia draws within the psy-

Introduction    chic inside. The net effect is that social and psychic are knitted together despite being cast as separate in this topography. In other words, the image of a melancholic self turned in upon itself and cut off from the outer world is an account of psychic interiority that melancholia itself precludes. “What melancholia shows,” Butler concludes, “is that only by absorbing the other as oneself does one become something at all . . . The ego comes into being on the condition of the ‘trace’ of the other, who is, at that moment of emergence, already at a distance.”86 It is not mourning’s leaving behind loss (what Freud refers to as the killing of the lost object through disparagement, denigration, and eventual displacement-substitution) but melancholia’s living with loss that becomes, in Butler’s argument, the template for psychosocial life. More recently, Paul Gilroy has proposed a politics of countermemory to counteract “postimperial melancholia,” as he terms white Britain’s condition of “guilt-ridden loathing and depression” brought on by a collective denial of the end of empire and the racial violence it entailed, and an acting out of that very past in xenophobic racism directed against a new generation of Black Britons.87 Caught between the persistence of the imperial past and the need to move beyond it without denying, dismissing, or weakly acknowledging it, Gilroy’s twenty-first-century Britons occupy a position of oscillating identifications that the following pages will uncover in many other moments across the long postcolonial twentieth century. With regard to the history of nations (those histories Balibar claims are always “presented to us in the form of a narrative which attributes to these entities the continuity of a subject”),88 the consequence of linking the theory of subject formation to the processes of nation formation is to look beneath the freezing fix of the analogy (subject to nation, subject as nation) in order to uncover the shifting and shuttling work of identification. In speaking of national identification, I do not mean to suggest that nations, anthropomorphized, are subject to feelings of grief, nostalgia, loss, and melancholy—though certainly these emotions and the monumentalized forms they take in public national life are crucial to the production of national identity. I suggest rather that melancholia is a mode of movement, one of several, in which we see the particular structure and form of national imagining, often linked to a changing idea of race. Melancholia is a kind of two-part harmony where incorporation and externalization, the turn in and the turn out, coexist. Melancholia’s

   Introduction double movement holds out the possibility of evaluating the nation as an entity both present and absent, territorially bounded and deterritorialized, confining and connecting, often in the same moment. For the subject who attempts national identification, the nation serves as a melancholic lost object—an object that lies outside the subject and, for that reason, must be incorporated, be made inner territory. But the subject who looks to incorporate the national object lost to him or her, whether by virtue of geographical distance (for the exile and migrant) or civic exclusion (for the raced, gendered, and queered subject), will find a seemingly nonnational quantity at the very point of national identification, the loss of the national precisely in the moment of its claiming, and a national object ever haunted by a global elsewhere. Is the loss that subtends national identification the loss of the nation itself, the nation as a form either lacking to begin with or now left behind? Khanna’s illuminating consideration of this question in Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003) argues that melancholia “brings to critique a form of critical agency initiated by the inassimilability, indeed the incorporation, of certain losses or ideals,” particularly that of the nation-state, whose inability to be mourned, introjected, and so left behind produces what Khanna calls “the colonialism affect” (261, 29). The colonial affect of haunting traverses the realm of postcolonial identifications and postcolonial linguistic expression, where it surfaces, in a suggestive formulation, as traces left in language and form of “the incorporation of those texts that could never quite be assimilated” (261, 29). As Butler has argued, “identification is a phantasmatic trajectory and resolution of desire; an assumption of place; a territorializing of an object which enables identity through the temporary resolution of desire, but which remains desire, if only in its repudiated form.”89 As a psychic mode in which loss is lived and temporarily redressed, identification joins melancholia and that other topography of inside-outside oscillation, fantasy. Glossing Laplanche and Pontalis, Butler explains how fantasy originates “both to cover and to contain the separation from an original object” and how it further emerges “as a scene in which the recovery installs and distributes the ‘subject’ in the position of both desire and its object . . . seek[ing] to override the distinction between a desiring subject and its object by staging an imaginary scene in which both positions are appropriated and inhabited by the

Introduction    subject.”90 This suggests that the national subject is the nation, even in, perhaps especially in, those moments when the nation as attainable object lies outside that subject’s grasp. Or, as Du Bois puts it: “Would America have been America without her Negro people?”91 There is no one version of national identification, no one incarnation of the political ideal of the nation, any more than there is one fantasy or singular desire in the life of the subject. Caught in perpetual movement, national identification can always come back in another form, from that which seeks to recapture or restore some national or racial essence, to that which seeks to hybridize and globalize national and racial sentiment, to that which imagines the possibility of some version of national identification conceived against the ideologies of the state. Produced as figments or fantasies of nation, certain typologies of race such as imperial raciology, anticolonial nativism, postcolonial multiculturalism, and democratic nonracialism offer yet another area for these investigations of the nation’s fantasmatic structure. Jameson defines a fantasm as an “unconscious master narrative,” an “unstable or contradictory structure, whose persistent actantial functions and events (which are in life restaged again and again with different actors and on different levels) demand repetition, permutation, and the ceaseless generation of various structural ‘resolutions’ which are never satisfactory.”92 For Jameson, original fantasms seek their “(impossible) resolution” in imaginary texts, in the register of fantasy and wish-fulfillment. In the political unconscious of national desire that this book uncovers, what Jameson calls “the great fantasms of the various nationalisms” (79), global dreams (empire, Third World, diaspora) play the absent figure to national grounds of identification. The texts that register the overlapping of the national and the global and that further stage the production of national identification through global identification, and vice versa, momentarily resolve a contradiction whose force subtends the narratives of imperial and postcolonial nationalism, with their fixed and fluid, placed and displaced, bounded and unbounded territories. Ultimately, the national referent that these narratives of nationalism mightily struggle to resolve into view has to be understood, by the terms of its own fantasmatic logic, as something in perpetual movement, repetition, permutation, and return. This movement is, in turn, legible in two related registers: (1) the identificatory life of the national subject, with his or her oscillations of desire, fantasy, trauma,

   Introduction and memory; and (2) the equally haunted and mobile life of the narratives of national representation. Narrative, Moretti has speculated, is a world-system whose motor is “world texts” that carry a “geographical frame of reference [that] is no longer the nation-state, but a broader entity—a continent, or the worldsystem as a whole.”93 If the history of the novel is part of the modern history of nationalism, the impulse toward fantasmatic formation that animates the latter should find expression in the former. On the one hand, nationalism, the novel, and psychoanalysis would seem to be governed by some form of territorial grounding (nationalism’s bounded space, the novel’s implicit coincidence with European nationalism, psychoanalysis’s map of the individual mind). On the other hand, they are all just as shaped by various deterritorializing flows out to globe and world. The novel has always been ghosted by global difference, always open to alterity, not only linguistically, as in Bakhtin’s notion of the novel’s doublevoicedness, but also historically. Both axes and both rubrics are needed to write the uncannily linked history of the novel and empire, those two entities Edward Said has called “unthinkable without each other.”94 As a particular register in which a culture works out its concerns, not to mention a particular object in a larger history, the novel teaches us to read the nation differently. The novel’s history is not entirely that of a prototypically national rise, represented by a series of European firsts (Don Quixote in Spain, La Princesse de Clèves in France, Robinson Crusoe in England), and subsequently followed by a global and postcolonial spread.95 As we understand the extent to which globalism does not follow nationalism but always already cohabits with it (haunts it), we may come to rewrite the story of the novel, and of modern politics too, in a style that requires less choosing between critical categories and more conjoining of them. Certainly Robinson Crusoe can and should be read in terms of the global trajectory of movement and metamorphosis that takes an iconic-canonic story of eighteenth-century Englishness into the twentieth-century hands of Michel Tournier in France, J. M. Coetzee in South Africa, and Derek Walcott in the Caribbean. But the global dimensions of Defoe’s novel do not lie solely in the zone of literary aftershock. They are equally present in the discourse of the novel’s own time and its own far-flung space. Crusoe’s early slave trading in Brazil and enterprising colony creating in

Introduction    an island off the northeastern tip of the South American continent set the global stage for his emergence as a distinctly national type—Puritan in soul, mercantile in spirit, and altogether colonial in ambition. The status of Crusoe’s island as a little England serves as a reminder of the extent to which a global imaginary often serves national imagination, as well as of the unique capacities of novelistic discourse to simultaneously condense and express this contradiction. Contradiction is endemic to the novel, which reaches its formal apotheosis, as Geörgy Lukács observes, in the simultaneous representation of a richly described objective reality and a complexly evoked psychological interiority. In The Theory of the Novel, the novel owes its “inner form” not to the story of “the problematic individual’s journeying towards himself, the road from dull captivity within a merely present reality . . . towards clear self-recognition,” but rather to the process by which an external reality is internalized into the subjective space of the individual.96 Precisely because of its origins in a richly heterogeneous externality, the novel’s production of “subjectivity as interiority” ensures, in Lukács’s words, that “the antagonistic nature of the inner and outer worlds is not abolished but only recognized as necessary; the subject which recognises it as such is just as empirical—just as much part of the outside world, confined in its own interiority—as the characters which have become its objects” (75). Alongside the novel’s wandering movement and incessant thrust out to the object world and into the self—what Lukács calls its “transcendental homelessness” and what we might equally call its melancholy of form—Lukács situates the novel’s inherent formal contradictoriness (85). Drawing from Lukács, Jameson identifies the novel’s registering of the presence of a set of buried or repressed historical realities as a species of contradiction that in turn demands the particular synthesis of Marxism and psychoanalysis that is the dialectical reading practice of the political unconscious.97 As systems in, as Tzvetan Todorov says, “constant transformation,” always inverting, displacing, combining, and remaking earlier forms,98 genres preserve the traces of historical and social changes that usher in changes in the form of particular kinds of telling. This, for example, is Ian Watt’s account of the rise of the novel as a result of the explosive convergence of capitalism, nationalism, and individualism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, or Bakhtin’s story of a series of

   Introduction historical turns away from authoritarianism and toward the dialogism of the word and the polyvocality of the world, arising first in the Hellenistic and late Roman novels and flowering in European realism, or the many contemporary mappings of the global spread of the novel. In an important critique of Watt, Michael McKeon takes the English novel out of the narrative of epistemic rupture in order to relocate it in the shadow realm of ghostly co-presence. “The origins of the English novel entail the positing of a ‘new’ generic category as a dialectical negation of a ‘traditional’ dominance—the romance, the aristocracy—whose character still saturates, as an antithetical but constitutive force, the texture of the category by which it is in the process of being replaced.” Precisely at the moment of the reversal, in McKeon’s argument, the novel dissolves into its antithesis, thereby “encapsulating the dialectical nature of historical process itself at a critical moment in the emergence of the modern world.”99 The historicity of genres is linked to the way in which their pasts, whether historical or formal, a set of structuring circumstances or a code of ordering practices, live on in their presents. Genre theory in this sense is a category that itself moves, something quite unlike what Lukács calls the “soulless and ossified . . . thoroughly bureaucratic classification [that] is meant as a substitute for the living dialectics of history” and that, in the form of bourgeois genre theory, subdivides the novel only to cause its revolutionary traditions to vanish in a formalist faux-scientism.100 Genres for Lukács “must be based upon a specific truth of life” and thus arise when certain facts “could not be adequately reflected in the forms hitherto available” (241). I seek to describe another haunted life for genre, animated by a particular history of identification as well as transformation, against the backdrop of the imperial-colonial system and its aftermath. Subject to double saying and overcoding, genres function as practices of memory, effectively “sedimenting,” to use Jameson’s term, older forms into newer ones. The ideology of the older form in this sense “persists into the later, more complex structure as a generic message which coexists—either as a contradiction or, on the other hand, as a mediatory or harmonizing mechanism—with elements from later stages.”101 So romance and adventure are found embedded into the early European novel, an archaic folk culture is transformed into a nineteenth-century romantic national aesthetic, and nineteenth-century realism, early twentieth-century socialist realism, and

Introduction    postmodern practices of discontinuous narration are partially incorporated into certain postcolonial novels. Reculer pour mieux sauter. This book is in part a history of the postcolonial novel as memory work and of genre as melancholia. Shaped by the entanglement of the seemingly distinct times and spaces it chronicles (empire and after, nation and globe), the postcolonial novel is equally ghosted by the older generic forms and stylistic modes it incorporates, including epic, romance, realism, socialist realism, magical realism, tragedy, comedy, memoir, travelogue, ethnography, history, and the allegory that Jameson has elsewhere taken to epitomize Third World literature. Constant returns of form structure the narratives of nationalism I examine, from Conrad’s imperial romance and its postcolonial rewritings by Achebe, Naipaul, and Dabydeen; to Sarduy’s sublation of the national-allegorical literature of the Latin American “Boom” into a Cuban-Indian antinovel of antinational memory; to such heterogeneric works as Du Bois’s mix of race history and messianic race prophecy in The Souls of Black Folk and his later historical novels or Fanon’s haunting anatomy of colonial and nativist logics of race in The Wretched of the Earth’s call for a nationalism beyond race. Thrusting forward to some kind of future, these narratives of nationalism just as regularly reach backward, returning to the buried or half-finished material of the past so as to move on. Often, their temporal oscillations are accompanied by formal dissonances, particularly the ghostly coexistence of new narrative forms with older ones. Why does the logic of a return that is not mere repetition matter so much in the writing of empire and its aftermath? And what does that logic have to do with genre, understood as itself a kind of memory, return, or haunting, a particular site in which history, literary and otherwise, takes shape? Genre, mode, style, language, and the affects associated with them are not merely the reflection of political-historical structures such as capitalism, imperialism, nationalism, and globalization but their modalities, the expressive forms in which that history is both congealed and exceeded. Like the nation, the novel is a melancholic form that retains its past by way of inventing its present, inheriting a form whose substance it not only incorporates but also turns around, alters, remakes, returns. The postcolonial novel’s seizure and reinhabiting of an established genre constitutes a historical moving on and a formal holding on, a kind of open contract

   Introduction with the past to write the future. Textual formalism, while central to the readings that follow, is only a method, only the beginning of an investigation into the other story that narratives tell. How do fantasy, allegory, uncanniness, spectrality, melancholia, mourning, and fetishism, as they are deployed within the novel and outside it, across a long century of late imperial and postcolonial nationalism, variously ruin and revivify the national mode by connecting it to the global, keeping it at once dead and alive, gone yet not gone? How do these multidirectional modalities direct the task of, as in Jameson’s more dialectical model, thinking opposites (nation-globe, psychic-social, past-present, interior-exterior) “together all at once”; and how do they further point us toward seeing in certain formal responses to the problem of representing the nation’s non-coincidence with itself the fantasmatic structure of national identification itself?102 Writing in his travelogue memoir, An Area of Darkness (1964), Naipaul characterized the Indian novel as “part of the mimicry of the West, the Indian self-violation” that also serves to explain Indian nationalism (“which in the beginning was like a mimicry of the British”).103 Bemused to learn that “the Telugu novel began with Telugu adaptations of The Vicar of Wakefield and East Lynne,” Naipaul adds a passing reflection on Tanizaki’s account of his debts to European novels, followed by some speculative formulations of how the Japanese “way of looking” pervades the Japanese novel and how “an Indian truth” emerges from R. K. Narayan’s sentimental realism, “Indian failings magically transmuted” into an artless art that captures what Naipaul calls the “aimlessness of Indian fiction” (227). This version of the novel’s transcendental homelessness repositions that most elusive of signifiers, cultural difference, as the inner truth of the novel, as of the nation with which it is twinned. Naipaul had himself set out to find an Indian truth, an earlier version of the India that “existed whole in Trinidad” only in its “artefacts”—a string bed “never repaired because there was no one with this caste skill in Trinidad,” a “ruined harmonium,” “the paraphernalia of the prayer-room,” the broken bits of a diasporic culture far from its center (31). Read through the anxious idiom of postcolonial belatedness that suffuses An Area of Darkness and undergirds its notoriously phobic catalogue of Indian filth and sublimity (squatting legions, Himalayan peaks), Naipaul’s India emerges not in the end as truth but as fantasy, a scene the diasporic subject is in yet not in, of but not of, unable to have yet unable to let go of, something that

Introduction    structures a perpetual loss. India is “an area of the imagination” (44), or, as Rushdie will put it a generation later, an India “of the mind.” If Rushdie embraces the hybrid possibilities of the postcolonial Indian novel in a way that Naipaul does not, his account of the Indian nation is nonetheless also suffused by loss and similarly structured by the displacing modalities of a gaze from afar.

National Ends, Global Forms, and the Novel of Postcolonial Cosmopolitanism Midnight’s Children (1981) on the most basic level reproduces Anderson’s model of the realist nineteenth-century national novel, marked by “the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside.”104 Yet Rushdie’s novel repeatedly frustrates these equations through a style that is more magical realist than realist, an aesthetic more fracturing than fusing, and a vision of the novel that has frequently been seen, in politics as in form, more cosmopolitan than national. Midnight’s Children is the breakneck-paced, fractured, highly self-conscious narration by one Saleem Sinai, born at the very second of the independence of India on August 15, 1947, and thus, in his own words, “handcuffed to history.”105 He tells his tale to a listening and interrupting audience of one in a pickle factory, where he preserves fruits and vegetables by day, his story and national history (they are the same thing) by night. Prodded on the one hand by the “what-happened-next-ism” of his listener, Padma; the chronological imperatives of national history; and his own race to tell his story before the end of his life’s line, Saleem is enticed, on the other hand, by the seduction of an analogy that understands time simultaneously, juxtaposing the largest and most public events of political life (war, intrigue, assassination, state terror) with the smallest and most private incidents. In the historical novel, Lukács explains, “certain crises in the personal destinies of a number of human beings coincide and interweave within the determining context of an historical crisis.”106 In Rushdie’s postcolonial variant, the hero is certainly “mediocre,” to borrow Lukács’s characterization of Walter Scott’s archetypal protagonists (36). However, Saleem’s relation to history inverts that earlier model by foregrounding the individual over

   Introduction both the historical-social types of which he stands, in Lukács’s term, as “living human embodiment,” and the historical events that produce such types (35). This inversion of scale produces a reverse referentiality of history to individual. Thus, the announcement of the death of Gandhi interrupts the screening of Saleem’s uncle’s first feature film while Saleem holds his childhood repetition of a Gujarati nonsense rhyme “directly responsible” for the language riots of 1953–56 that led to the partition of the state of Bombay. With characteristic hyperbole, he claims “the hidden purpose of the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 was nothing more nor less than the elimination of my benighted family from the face of the earth” (219, 386). After confessing to an “error in chronology” that has led him to misdate Gandhi’s assassination, Saleem asks: “Am I so far gone in my desperate need for meaning, that I’m prepared to distort everything—to re-write the whole history of my times purely in order to place myself in a central role?” (190). The centripetal version of a national history (and historical novel) fractured, distorted, and collapsed into personal biography better captures the narrative strategy than the metaphor of the mirror offered by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to the infant Saleem. “We will be watching over your life with the closest attention,” reads Nehru’s letter; “it will be, in a sense, the mirror of our own.”107 It is Rushdie’s concern to break apart the imaginary unity of self and nation and to explode the metaphor that is his novel’s guiding conceit, in order to assert the primacy of individuals over nations. This multiplicitous perspective pleads for a minoritarian, not totalitarian, notion of nation. In so doing, Midnight’s Children further establishes a postmodern version of the postcolonial novel, now quite dominant, in which history is supplemented by fiction. “In my India,” Saleem pointedly remarks, “Gandhi will continue to die at the wrong time” (190). As the son of a father who is not his father (he was secretly switched at birth and is in fact the half-English son of Muslim parents), Saleem contradicts a dynastic model of nationhood premised on linear succession. As Saleem’s narrative tries to break away from the inexorable pull of diachronous succession (what-happened-next-ism) and to enter the narcissistic pleasures of synchronous simultaneity, Saleem’s narrative self-consciously turns both nation and person into metaphor, the figure of speech that operates precisely on synchrony’s paradigmatic axis. Yet metaphor is

Introduction    exactly what the larger novel ultimately corrodes.108 Saleem, like his narrative, is both metaphor and metonymy, both a symbolic equivalent of India and a metonymic slippage of Indianness. “In mimicry,” writes Bhabha, “the representation of identity and meaning is rearticulated along the axis of metonymy.” Mimicry, he continues, is “a form of resemblance, that differs from or defends presence by displaying it in part, metonymically.” The presence menaced by the partial resemblance of the mimic finds itself deauthorized, its discourse revealed as “the play of a power that is elusive because it hides no essence, no ‘itself.’ ”109 It is just this kind of deessentialized, even denationalized, counterfeit, and imaginary India that Saleem is made to mirror. There is, for Rushdie, no other possible kind, because to think national identity in terms of a stable one-to-one equivalence between a subject here and a nation there is to succumb to the fictive and fatal logics of national homogeneity, what Derrida would call the phantasm of national presence. The phantom forms of colonial nation and postcolonial nation meet in Methwold’s Estate, a compound of faux-European mansions bearing the names of Versailles, Buckingham, Escorial, and Sans Souci that is home to Saleem’s Muslim family, as well as their Indian and Parsi compatriots. Bound by the departing William Methwold (Saleem’s biological father caught in “an Englishman’s lust for an Indian allegory,” 121) to purchase the villas on the eve of independence, and to throw nothing away, the new inhabitants find themselves gradually, unconsciously, feeding the budgies, playing “Pale Hands I Loved beside the Shalimar” on the pianola, taking evening cocktails in the garden, and generally becoming English at the very moment of their becoming Indian. Living their Indianness through their common Englishness, expressing their nationality through a kind of globalism, the mimics of Methwold’s Estate do less damage to the idea of colonial authority (Methwold wins after all) than to the idea of national identity. Through the metonymic whiteness born of a propinquity to English things, they wind back postcolonial nationalism’s iconic narratives of native autonomy, temporal newness, and historical change. Meanwhile Rushdie’s novel winds down a certain idea of the nation as constituted (destroyed may be a better word) by Indira Gandhi’s Emergency (1975–77). Running on the slogan “India is Indira and Indira is India,” which Saleem typically sees as a logic produced by his own link to India, Nehru’s daughter’s rule witnessed the gutting of the democratic

   Introduction state through the suspension of civil liberties, mass jailings, and press censorship, and the simultaneous seeding of future religious-nationalist movements that worked to desecularize Indian nationalism. The Midnight’s Children Conference, the telepathically linked, heteroglot, multiethnic association of the supernaturally gifted children born in the hour of India’s independence that is metaphorically “a family, of a kind” and allegorically a nation, comes into being in a single individual’s head through the repeated iteration of hundreds of other individuals (260). Like the utopian vision they symbolize, midnight’s children will eventually be destroyed by the campaign of forced sterilization, as the incipient promise of a new nation composed of extraordinary individuals is crushed by the singular-minded logic of the autocratic state.110 It is in their first appearance that the children most clearly model the representational aesthetic with which the novel proposes to answer, and exceed, history. Saleem first hears the midnight’s children in his head as “like calling out to like . . . transmitting simply: ‘I.’ From far to the North, ‘I.’ And the South East West: ‘I.’ ‘I.’ ‘And I’ ” (192). The proliferating sequence of “I’s” outweighs the symmetrical, mirroring, metaphoric claims of “like calling out to like.” Effectively turning his guiding metaphor on its side, transforming simultaneity into succession, metaphor into metonymy, Rushdie’s novel individualizes and pluralizes the collectivist project of national identification to a point where it cannot hold together. This strategy, like the novel’s dominant aesthetic of fragmentary pastiche, seems to want to write a different kind of nation into existence: not the iron-fisted, violently unified Indian state of the Emergency, or the theocratic state of Rushdie’s despised Pakistan, but a heterogeneous, heteroglossic, pluralistic, secular democracy. Saleem, a self-proclaimed “swallower of lives” who is also cracking apart, self-partitioning, eventually to “crumble into (approximately) six hundred and thirty million particles of anonymous, and necessarily oblivious, dust,” operates both as fantasy of national incorporation (swallowing his nation so as to keep and preserve it) and a larger process of national introjection (mourning one failed national ideal so as to move on) (4, 36). If Saleem invites us to think allegorically about cryptic melancholia and ghostly futurity, Midnight’s Children invites us to think generically, specifically through the history of the Indian novel in English embedded into it.

Introduction    Like Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901), Rushdie’s novel turns one individual’s multiplicities and movements into those of India. Where Midnight’s Children renders the parallel through the simultaneous time of being “handcuffed to history,” Kim foregrounds space, placing its marvelously mobile protagonist at the center of a kaleidoscopic India seen from above in the omniscient third-person narration that is the novel’s equivalent of the imperial gaze. “India was awake and Kim was in the middle of it.”111 In his crossings and passings across the ethnic, religious, linguistic, and social divides fixed by the novel’s Orientalist typology of difference, the Irish Indian Kim is the novel’s fantasy object, an identity in perpetual movement who realizes the vision wistfully expressed by his fellow operative, the “monstrous hybri[d]” Hurree Chunder Babu: “but you cannot occupy two places in space simultaneously. That is axiomatic” (313, 328). Like Kim, Kipling’s novel itself exists in two places simultaneously. Kim operates within English while layering the Standard English of the narration with Kim’s Anglo-Indian, the Babu’s parodic Oxbridge locutions, and anglicized renditions of languages marked as Hindi, Pashtu, Urdu, Tibetan, and others. It further scatters the generic codes of British imperial romance and boys’ adventure fiction with hints of Urdu court poetry, Hindu epic, Buddhist wisdom tales, and a polyglot range of street insults and proverbs, all rather painstakingly described rather than fully assimilated into textual dialogism of the sort that Midnight’s Children delights in.112 If the line of descent drawn from Kim to Midnight’s Children suggests a potential imperialism to the latter’s global English and syncretic India in which, as Saleem’s nurse sings to him, “anything you want to be, you kin be / you kin be just what-all you want” (440), it also speaks to the monstrous hybridism of the novel, Bakhtin’s cannibal genre that “incorporate[s] another’s speech in another’s language” (the dominant and minor voices of an era) and so motors a history of constant stylistic innovation through heteroglossia’s diversity of speech (263). The KiplingRushdie line of descent, however, scants several others. Missing is the rich nineteenth-century tradition of Indian novels in vernacular languages through which, as Meenakshi Mukherjee has observed, protonationalist sentiments of dissent emerged, as well as the early to mid-twentiethcentury realist tradition of Indian novelists in English such as Raja Rao and R. K. Narayan, the postwar novelists Kamala Markandaya and Anita

   Introduction Desai, or the modernist set piece of G. V. Desani’s All about H. Hatterr (1948).113 Where Rao’s Kanthapura (1938) proclaimed the indigenization of the English novel by combining realist depictions of an unexceptional village’s life, a social realist bildungsroman of collective national consciousness, and transpositions of Hindu mythology and oral narrative into nationalism’s secular magic in an effort to “convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is not one’s own,” Desani’s novel showcases a citational style of textual incorporations that displaces authenticity with artifice. Hamlet’s ghost returns in the novel’s opening presentation of the opening scene in Shakespeare’s play as the “answer” to the question, “Who is H. Hatterr?” “ ‘Who art thou, fellow? Thou, with thy folio? . . . ’/ (The figure of the feller speaks) / ‘All’s well, friend Master Keeper o’ Literary Conscience! / The name is H. Hatterr, how d’you do!’ ”114 Desani’s Indian novel is haunted by several ghosts, including an uncannily rendered Shakespeare and a broadly parodied Freud, deployed by Hatterr’s interlocutor Banerrji, a selfproclaimed psychoanalyst, to “cure” European businessmen; extending to Babu English, imperial officer club talk, literary jest, and swamispeak; and regularly embedding recognizable vignettes of Bloomsbury aesthetics and Shandyesque commentary. Brought to an epiphany in the wake of his service as a human plate for a circus lion show run by a disreputable Cockney impresario, Hatterr exclaims (in language to match the claim): “I have seen more Life than that feller Shakespeare! Things happen to me with accents on ’em! . . . This is the Twentieth Century! Body, man! Doctor the body, and everything’ll be okey-doke! Be alive! Live! Virility! Vis vitalis!” (95). Rushdie has credited Desani with “show[ing] me that it was possible to break up the language and put it back together in a different way . . . to dislocate the English and let other things into it.”115 In an accented, heteroglossic English produced by parodic borrowings and vernacularized inflections that echo back the familiar in an unfamiliar way, all knitted together by the frenetic pace and syncretizing energy of the narration, All about H. Hatterr takes in history but points to no future, ultimately swallowing the signs of India and nation into an anarchic, selfcontained linguistic universe that led T. S. Eliot to declare, “in all my experience, I have not met with anything quite like it” (8). Announced on its title page as “THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL OF H. HATTERR BEING ALSO A MOSAIC-ORGANON OF Life: viz., A MEDICO-

Introduction    PHILOSOPHICAL GRAMMAR AS TO THIS CONTRAST, THIS HUMAN HORSEPLAY, THIS DESIGN FOR DIAMOND-CUTDIAMOND,” the novel expounds the philosophy of “Life as Contrast” through a precisely cryptic form and language in which, as Derrida points out in Fors, each lexical element “has an angular, if not crystalline, structure, like a cut gem” and so multiplies its meanings (xlii). Beneath the brilliant linguistic excess of Desani’s novel in new, recombinant English lies a landscape of national de-origination, de-authentication, in a phenomenon that perhaps more than any other links Desani to Rushdie. Desani, who worked in England during the decade of Indian independence and who later taught in the United States, and Rao, who relocated to France in 1927 and followed Kanthapura with philosophical novels of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s set in motion between Paris, London, and India, both had cosmopolitan trajectories that shaped their Indian novels. By Midnight’s Children, Rao’s early realism, Desani’s high modernism, and the national ideal of independence and new nationhood are anachronisms subject to practices of postmodern metafictionalization and the global becomes the Indian writer’s decisive locale and a market force in its own right, as witness the exploding popularity of the generation of Indian novelists in English known as “midnight’s children”—Amitav Ghosh, Shashi Tharoor, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Chandra, Githa Hariharan, I. Allen Sealy, Mukhul Kesavan, and others. As Timothy Brennan notes, Midnight’s Children’s conscious parody of official national discourses of information such as newspaper and radio reports; of traditional modes of oral storytelling in the frame-tales of the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and The Tales of the Arabian Nights; and of the realist, modernist, and magical realist novels of Charles Dickens and Laurence Sterne, James Joyce and William Faulkner, Gunter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez, as well as Anglo-Indian historical novels such as E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India and Paul Scott’s A Jewel in the Crown, crafts a form marked by the historical irreverence, stylistic diversity, aesthetic newness, and “international and interlingual contacts and relationships” that Bakhtin deems characteristic of the novel.116 Through its multivoiced parody of the weighted source material of ancient epic, colonial and modernist novel, and the literature and politics of the nationalist movement, Midnight’s Children makes a kind of global sense out of national signification. For Brennan, this “all-inclusiveness finally

   Introduction undermines the ideal of national distinctions themselves” (117). As a species of what Linda Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction,” Rushdie’s novel problematizes the truth-claims of national history through processes of narrativization such as unreliable narration, intertextual allusions and embeddings, parody, and falsification, and a general ideology of plurality and difference in the face of tyrannical singularities. The net effect, in Linda Hutcheon’s words, is that “the epistemological question of how we know the past joins the ontological one of the status of the traces of that past.”117 This formulation of the postmodern mode as one of textual sedimentation and incorporation, albeit of a sort that consistently breaks apart its layers or encryptions, coupled with speculations on the postcolonial as in part defined by this process, what Stephen Slemon calls “the figuration of a reiterative quotation, or intertextual citation, in relation to colonialist ‘textuality,’ ” recasts the trace discourse of novelistic genre as one with a particular purchase on postcolonial politics. It further opens the question, as any trace discourse must, of what future the past can bring about. Here critics differ: where some, including Slemon and Hutcheon, see a subversive edge to Rushdie’s intercalation of postmodern metafictional strategies with elements of local, “Indian,” elements such as oral storytelling, ancient myth, religion, and vernacularized language, others, such as Brennan, Tim Parnell, and Kum Kum Sangari, find that the exuberance of the mode swallows the politics.118 This is a curious version of Partha Chatterjee’s well-known thesis that Indian national identity evolved as a split sustained between the “material” and “spiritual” domains; the former an “outer” shell linked to law, governance, economy, and the nation-state, and the latter an “inner” core comprising culture, language, religion, family, and selfhood.119 The inner territory preserves, in the form of an encrypted tradition, what the outer seeks to dispel through a powerful mimesis of Western modernity. Extrapolated to Rushdie, the model of a Western postmodern shell and an Indian postcolonial kernel doesn’t quite capture the topological instability or leakage, to borrow Rushdie’s own metaphor, between them or between the divided realms of history and fiction, collective and individual, past and present, fact and memory, truth and lie. Nor does it begin fully to exploit the possibilities of thinking the novel as a melancholic mode of memory that turns to mourning, a genre that swallows bits of its past so as to open some kind of future. This can

Introduction    happen in the postmodern mode, as Jameson intuits when in the midst of a general lament for the loss of a sense of history that attends the dominance of postmodern fiction’s “fantastic historiography,” he nonetheless observes the need “not any longer to produce some vivid representation of history ‘as it really happened,’ but rather to produce the concept of history,” a Benjaminian task that can also craft “the figure of a larger possibility of praxis.”120 Producing the concept of history through what Saleem calls “memory’s truth,” the truth that “creates its own reality,” Midnight’s Children recasts the historical, even historicist, problematics of the national novel into an alternative register in which it becomes possible to simultaneously denounce the death-dealing nation-state and recover or hold on to another ideal of India (242). Embracing the novel as a “radically secular genre,” in which the dialogic and heteroglossic capacities lauded by Bakhtin enable the capture of a plurality of languages, viewpoints, and worldviews in a salutary state of movement, translation, and conversion, Neelam Srivastava reads Midnight’s Children as an allegorical novel of secular nationalism, albeit one more Nehruvian in its embrace of the English language, Western modernity, and even the imaginary of the city than a Gandhian novel like Rao’s realist Kanthapura, in which a village is awakened to collective resistance across caste lines.121 If Jameson’s argument for the necessarily national-allegorical dimension of Third World texts assumes that “a certain nationalism is fundamental in the third world,”122 Rushdie’s guiding belief might well be that nationalism is fundamentalist in it. “Does India exist?” he asks, in an essay on the genesis of Midnight’s Children. “If it doesn’t,” he continues, “the explanation is to be found in a single word: communalism. The politics of religious hatred.” Against the ideology of communalism, Rushdie opposes the India of which his novel is a utopian catalogue: an India of “multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity,” a country defined by the crowd (“superabundant, heterogeneous, many things at once”) even as it is allegorized by the individual.123 This is a version of the allegory described by Jameson in “Third-World Literature,” allegory that breaks away from the traditional notion of “an elaborate set of figures and personifications to be read against some one-to-one table of equivalences” and is instead “profoundly discontinuous, a matter of breaks and heterogeneities, of the multiple polysemia of the dream rather

   Introduction than the homogenous representation of the symbol” (73). For Rushdie, as for Jameson, such allegory “is able to open up a concrete perspective on the real future” by unleashing “a complex play of simultaneous and antithetical messages” (77). Writing in the title essay of his 1982 collection Imaginary Homelands, Rushdie claims the fantasmatic space of “imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind” as all that is available to writers like himself: “exiles or emigrants or expatriates, [who] are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt . . . [but who] will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost.”124 Mutation, in the form of Midnight’s Children’s allegorical structure, cosmopolitan intertextuality, metafictional historiography, and a gleefully global English flexible enough to absorb occasional Hindi and Urdu words and phrases and recognizable syntactic patterns of Indian English, is the answer to what Rushdie sees as the freezing, fixing demand of nationalist representation.125 If Anderson employs the analogy of modern persons and nations in order to write what he calls the biography of nations, Rushdie literalizes and allegorizes that analogy in order to write their obituary. Mockingly chronicling the various ways (“actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally,” 273) in which Saleem either altered national history, found himself repeating it, so mirrored it as to become one with it, or felt its force upon him, the novel pushes the analogy of person to nation to a point of such unremitting density, such ubiquitous and hyperbolic symbolism, that the analogy explodes, like Saleem himself (“the bomb in Bombay,” 199), and leaves the nation, fractured beyond the point of recognition, in its wake. In the words of the increasingly fragmenting narrator, “there is, too, a weariness to be mentioned, a general fatigue so profound that the end, when it comes, will be the only solution, because human beings, like nations and fictional characters, can simply run out of steam, and then there’s nothing for it but to finish with them” (374). Rushdie’s subsequent novels indeed reveal an increasingly more cosmopolitan vision, within which cities (London, New York, Mumbai, Florence) take on the imaginary affiliative potential that nations seem to have irrevocably lost, and art holds out the promise of a realm that rejects borders of all kinds while conferring the freedom of the imagination. Though Rushdie has certainly bought this stance honestly,

Introduction    as the victim of state terror in the name of fundamentalist politics, nations don’t end as easily, or with as much finality, as Saleem imagines. Saleem’s indictment of nations is not entirely Rushdie’s; the distance between narrator and author cannot sanction so complete a closure. For all that Midnight’s Children seems to bury the nation, most often in the person and pronouncements of the cracked-up Saleem, the novel is nonetheless deeply committed to a certain idea of India. The Nehruvian secular ideal epitomized in the Congress Party motto “unity in diversity” finds expression in such structures as the Midnight’s Children’s Conference, or the Hindu, Muslim, and Parsi community of bourgeois elite families who inherit Methwold’s Estate. As it chronicles the decay of these protonationalist experiments in cohabitation and communication, the novel signals a crisis in the structure of modern Indian state nationalism. Josna Rege observes that it is by reproducing and critiquing “nationalist dualities” such as “the splits between pragmatism and idealism, the elite and the masses, centralization and federalism, rationalism and spirituality,” that Rushdie opens the possibility of “many Indias” and secures a focus and form for an entire subsequent tradition of “post-Rushdie national narratives” in which “both nationalism and its critique continue to thrive.”126 But Rushdie’s “many Indias” are not all Indias. As Brennan and M. Keith Booker note, the novel seems pointedly to forget crucial episodes in nationalist history, including the entire period of Gandhi’s anticolonialist resistance campaign, the subsequent efforts of such radical nationalists as Subhas Chandra Bose or the Indian trade unionist movement, and the larger history of the Indian Communist Party.127 The Indian history that Midnight’s Children remembers and that which it forgets suggest that nations are made in the movements of memory, collectively imagined and selectively and individually idealized. “I wanted to get India back,” confesses Rushdie, nearly twenty years after the novel’s publication. As Neil ten Kortenaar generously notes, “the cosmopolitan author is also at some level a nationalist.”128 Ten Kortenaar specifies allegory, with its posing of a choice of interpretations, as the mode of this particular duality. “Saleem offers the reader a choice between faith in the nation and doubt. It is because it is a real choice that it has proven possible to read the novel both as giving imaginative form to India . . . and as a cosmopolitan text that exposes the false, ideological

   Introduction basis of the nation-state” (44–45). In a different reading, Michael Reder characterizes Midnight’s Children’s use of allegory as strictly parodic. “By showing the inadequacies of allegory,” Reder claims, “Rushdie shows that reality cannot be read allegorically, it must be created individually.”129 Todd M. Kuchta argues that such idiosyncratic sense is precisely what Rushdie’s “unconventional” use of allegory creates. With its “fragmentary” form, this use of allegory, Kuchta correctly argues, owes less to the classical model of a one-to-one equivalence between symbols than to Benjamin’s theory of allegory as the temporalized figure through which history finds itself represented.130 The “ruins” to which Benjamin compares allegories (“allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things”) are places of memory, monuments through which we look again at the historical past not as totality and sequence but as fragments, breaks, and the ever-present possibility of change.131 As Benjamin writes in “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” “if the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power.”132 In this melancholic mode, the mode of hanging on to an object that is never entirely lost, allegory might be said to revivify the past in the style of the ghost. Allegory collapses the past and the present into a momentary constellation that simultaneously fulfills the promise of messianic time and retains the traces of the temporal discontinuity and fragmentation that ensure that time is never completed. Through allegorical contemplation, the present may look upon the past as that which is still with it. If, in Rushdie’s novel, that past is national, so too is the future. As much as the recollection and reconstruction of the story of the Emergency years threatens to bury the national ideal under the weight of that time’s excesses of state violence, the very project of memory, Rushdie implies, is also the condition and possibility of national regeneration. In the end, nationalism is the “ruin” toward which Midnight’s Children’s allegory points so that it may begin to construct something else under the sign, for Rushdie always both national and global, of “India.” Because national subjects are not the same as national objects, because national subjects and the nations they identify with, and as, exist at some degree of difference from each other, as well as in proximity,

Introduction    analogy, and allegory, a productive gap is opened up. This gap, of which this book is a chronicle, allows for the reimagining of nations: the questioning of who belongs within them and of in whose name, in what ways, and for which ends they are meant to act. It has been my concern to trace what we might call the national remainder in Rushdie’s aggressively global form, as I seek elsewhere in this book to trace the global remainder in national forms. Such residual reading marks the site of a haunted method, a dealing with ghostly traces that seeks to bring back to critical life a conceptual object that seems to have vanished. “The ghost or the apparition,” writes Avery Gordon, “is the principal form by which something lost or invisible or seemingly not there makes itself known or apparent to us.”133 “There was no escape from recurrence,” observes Saleem repeatedly. And “nothing,” his mother later chimes in, “ever seems to go away” (326, 379). In the looping structure of a narration that can only go forward by going back, and that relies for its movement on the ceaseless return of talismanic objects—perforated sheets, washing chests, family curses, the number 1001, and of course the uncanny objects of world literature itself, pickled and swallowed like history in the pages of the novel—Midnight’s Children makes recursivity and repetition the dominant mode of national narration. Told thusly, the stories of nations menaced by terrorizing states cannot be anything other than the story of an endlessly recurring trauma, a form of experience and imagination that wounds its subjects. To save them, Rushdie has gone so far as to suggest, “might now require that all nationalist rhetoric be abandoned”—a fantasy if ever there was one.134 The novel’s guiding aesthetic of fragmentation strains to provide an alternative, a radically atomized and pluralized nation comprised of “shards of memory” and “remains” whose reconstruction Rushdie parallels to the work of archaeology, Freud’s own metaphor for the work of psychoanalysis.135 Like psychoanalysis and like deconstruction, both of whose accounts of haunting and mourning will guide the rest of this book, and like the discourse of nation itself, Midnight’s Children is a ghost story. And like the ghost, it begs us to ask not only where did it come from but what will come after it. I have used Midnight’s Children in order to begin to explore the guiding concern of this book, namely, how writers who are, in Rushdie’s words, “out-of-country,”136 live their entwined nationalism and globalism

   Introduction in the curious timespace of the inner territory, a place that is also a past, a location that is always a loss. As we begin to imagine a history of global flows that does not leave nations in its wake, and as we further haunt the grounded and bounded plot of the nation’s territory with a host of inner and outer zones of identification and affiliation, fantasy and desire (thinking the nation not as the subject but through the subject), we will see another version of the discourse of national modernity. The fantasmatic formation of this discourse ensures that the innermost territories of the nation, the national self, and the national novel often lie at the outer reaches of the globe, just as any end point to the nation’s putatively progressive time, any arrival at the state of being national, is always already inscribed within other circles of temporal repetition and other circuits of spatial connection. The next chapter pursues this argument through a consideration of Conrad’s archetypal account of the national-imperialist self unraveling at the other (or other’s) end of the earth. That account’s uncanniness, by which I understand both its resonance with an early twentieth-century psychoanalytic discourse of haunting and its ghostly reanimation in much of the century’s later postcolonial literature from Europe to the Caribbean, the Americas to Africa, reveals spectral textuality as one of the many modalities in which spectral nationality lives.

2 National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Postcolonial Novel

Empire’s Elsewhere Heart of Darkness is haunted ground. Postcolonial literature and criticism return here as if to the scene of a crime or a prophecy. In the virtual encyclopedia of critical exegesis spawned by Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s expedition into the African jungle has been variously read. For psychoanalytic critics, it is a “night journey into the unconscious and a confrontation of an entity within the self,” an Oedipal fantasy about the mother’s body figured as the Congo River, a revision of Dante’s epic voyage into Hell, and an inspired inquiry into the psychology of the colonizer’s mind.1 For biographically minded critics, Heart of Darkness is, to use Conrad’s own word, the “spoil” of his six-month sail up the Congo River in 1890, as captain on a boat run by the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo, or a transposition of his experience of linguistic and national exile as a Pole who had called the Siberia of imperialist Russia, France, England, and the British Merchant Marine his home.2 For deconstructionists, Marlow’s journey constitutes an allegory of reading in which the inadequacy of language is incessantly revealed, while for literary historians of the period it serves as the zenith of the late Victorian imperialist quest-

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions romance and a brooding record of King Leopold of Belgium’s genocidal exploitation of a million square miles of Congo territory as his personal colony.3 Finally, in the wake of Chinua Achebe’s blistering 1977 denunciation of Heart of Darkness as the work of a racist, postcolonial critics have seen the structuring conditions of expansionist macropolitics in Conrad’s story of European subjects who move, and an unchanging, inchoate, primordial Africa that famously does not.4 Though we now remember and read Heart of Darkness for its image of Africa, the novella is also an image of Europe, and particularly of the England that was home to the globetrotting Conrad. According to Christopher GoGwilt, the writer’s exilic sensibility contributes to “a significant lack of national affiliation informing Conrad’s imaginative and creative work.”5 Heart of Darkness, however, suggests an alternative reading of Conrad’s extranational location. Insofar as it expresses his allegiance to an adopted Englishness channeled through the voice of Marlow, and his subscription to a broader late-imperial sensibility in which the idea of the nation was a crucial component, the novella argues for the relevance of nationalism both to Conrad and to the postcolonial literary history that commences with him.6 Sitting on board the Nellie, on the well-lit banks of the Thames, at the very center of the world’s greatest empire, Marlow begins his narrative by reenvisioning England not as a modern nation but rather as an ancient colony, a remote outpost of another world empire, and “one of the dark places of the earth” (9–10). “Sand-banks, marshes, forests, savages— precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink.” This act of cognitive anamorphosis predicts a whole series of reversals to come. The metropole will become primitivized; civilization’s privileged emissary will become a savage despot; and, in the novella’s closing image, the Thames, that “tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth” will reverse course and “see[m] to lead into the heart of an immense darkness” that is England itself (76). The inversions that provide Heart of Darkness with its formal structure and thematic focus are themselves enabled by the unsettling contact that takes place between the ideology of nation and territory, with its color-coded maps and expansionist ambitions, and the ideology of globe and flow. It is certainly possible to argue that nations crumble before global flows in Heart of Darkness, just as the shining power of the rainbow-colored map Marlow first sees in

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    the Brussels offices of the Belgian Company seems to dissolve in the face of the constant narration of the sheer futility of the project of national territorial sovereignty in Africa. In the context of fin-de-siècle British imperialism’s crisis of anxiety, spurred by military defeats in the colonies and the consolidation of more populist politics at home, Marlow’s Roman England describes a similar intimation both of empire’s mortality and of nation’s fantasmatic spectrality. The defamiliarizing reversal of the national-imperial outward flow of the modern Thames into the distant upriver journey of an ancient Roman trireme takes the English nation outside its own space and time in order to depict, with a kind of lingering resignation, what that nation was (a colony), what it has become (an empire), and what it will continue to be (a tenuous yet curiously tenacious state of mind). Through the flickering intersection of opposites that is the novella’s dominant movement, from first scene to final line, Heart of Darkness repeatedly attests that neither nation nor globe, empire nor colony, past nor present can exist entirely independent of one another. Focusing on this interpenetration charts a middle ground through the divide that characterizes the critical history of the novella. On the one side, encomiums to the formal, aesthetic qualities of the work aim to secure its place in the nationalist-modernist canon and what Marianna Torgovnick calls the “essential, received version of Conrad” as “master stylist, the novelist in the great moral tradition, the chronicler of ‘psychological complexity,’ of the modernist ‘void.’ ”7 On the other side, critiques of the novella’s primitivist imagery aspire to reveal the interdependence between canonical fictions and the profit-based, ideologically sustained, global systems of colonialism and imperialism.8 If Heart of Darkness is, as Achebe scornfully observes, “permanent literature,” one of the gold standards of the English literary tradition, it is equally global literature.9 Read on the axis of both time and space, the novella shows itself to be one of what Moretti calls “world texts” whose globality derives not from their lasting universality but their ongoing traversal of an ever-widening network of transcultural, transnational, and often translingual flows.10 While these movements often chart geopolitical relations of literary power, for example, the spread of the novel from Europe outward in a classically imperial plot, they are by no means completely unidirectional. These textual ebbs and flows, like those of Conrad’s Thames, move out to the

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions peripheries and return to the center, carrying changing notions of place and identity in their wake and recasting literary history as the provenance of global flows, as much as national traditions. Heart of Darkness symptomatizes some of those flows and catalyzes others. If the novella’s formal structure provides one account of empire’s elsewhere, namely, the spatiotemporal zone of alterity through which power recognizes itself, the novella’s textual history offers another—the uncanny afterlife of a work written from the center and regularly, even compulsively, rewritten from, in Naipaul’s memorable phrase, “many corners of the earth which he [Conrad] saw as dark.”11 The relationship of postcolonial writers to their predecessors has been variously glossed in postcolonial criticism as “writing back,” “con-textuality,” and “transculturation.”12 All of these terms share an implicit skirmish with a progenitor paradigm of literary history. This essentially Oedipal logic places postcolonial literature in the position of shadow to a former glory. So J. M. Coetzee’s Foe is merely the South African echo of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe; Aimé Césaire’s Une tempête, George Lamming’s Water with Berries, and Roberto Fernández Retamar’s Caliban just a Caribbean riff on Shakespeare’s Tempest; and Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God, Alejo Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Naipaul’s A Bend in the River, and David Dabydeen’s The Intended the global progeny of Heart of Darkness. It is precisely against such mirrorings that postcolonial theory has formulated its many and diverse models of the colonial encounter. Said’s Orientalism (1978) reads the meeting of colonizer and colonized as the event from which colonial discursive, political, economic, and cultural hegemony derives. Bhabha returns to that scene as an ambivalent textual site on which colonial power struggles and fails to erect its power, and Spivak deconstructs it as an ongoing struggle that partitions the subjectivity of some and the silence of others.13 Abdul JanMohamed discerns in the meeting of colonizer and colonized the initial deployment of a Manichean logic of differentiation that eventually comes to structure all discursive and material aspects of colonialism, while Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus extol it as an originary conflictual moment in whose memory lies the possibility of continued revolution against the forces of neocolonialism and neoimperialism.14 Finally, Madhava Prasad has criticized Parry, JanMohamed, and Said as forming the core of what

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    he calls the “Fanonian tradition” of postcolonial critical discourse, an approach Prasad accuses of focusing on a mystified “primary antagonism at the heart of the colonial relation,” at the expense of accounting for its various and multiple transformations across the long history of colonialism, imperialism, and their aftermath.15 Said’s subsequent discussion in Culture and Imperialism (1992) of contrapuntality, like the related notions of writing back, con-textuality, transculturation, and the “collaborative and appropriative modes” of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “autoethnography,” insists on exactly such transformations, while restricting their sphere to a liberal humanist conception of the novelistic or musical work of art’s capacity to both reflect and transcend its political conditions.16 In contrast to the progenitor’s paradigm’s family romance of literary history, later models generally suggest that postcolonial literature and culture, rather than staging the repetitive return to a single scene, emerges from a dynamic process of negotiation in which subordinate and dominant groups selectively adopt and adapt narrative materials and methods from one another. While subsequent chapters of this book consider how other genres of political imagining reflect this process, this chapter focuses on the novel as an exemplary case of the remaking of a modular form through the process of mutual influence. I consider three successive attempts to transculturate one of the prize objects of European literary history in the contexts of three distinct new nations: Chinua Achebe’s anti-imperial Nigeria, V. S. Naipaul’s neocolonial Zaire (now Congo), and David Dabydeen’s postcolonial England. What comes back gets worked over, and sometimes worked out, but it is never entirely dispelled or merely doubled. By reading the temporal logic first of Heart of Darkness itself and then of three of its literary descendants, I hope to trouble a pair of critical lines: (1) the line that runs from progenitor to progeny in an effort to organize the story of the postcolonial novel; and (2) the line that runs around the nation-state in an attempt to cordon off national from global space. In their place, I consider the possibility of a line troubled by various instances of traveling back and breaking through, a line that moves neither straight nor ahead. This is the line of a time broken open by the apparitional return of certain texts, contexts, and concepts, and of cultural narratives, historical events, and fictionalized pasts that cannot be easily laid to rest nor simply repeated but

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions that come back, as Derrida says of the specter, for the future. Imperialism is one ghostly presence in Heart of Darkness and its literary rewritings. Nationalism is another. How they surface, and to what ends, is the guiding concern of this chapter. The convergence of imperialism and nationalism in late nineteenth-century theories of evolution and devolution offers a starting point from which to trace the plot of time that gives form to Heart of Darkness’s imperial nations and to those other nations, variously emergent, neocolonial, and postcolonial, that are also in a way Conrad’s ghosts.

The Time Line of the Nineteenth Century: Racial Evolution and Imperial Degeneration Like the late nineteenth-century discourses of race and mind with which it coincides, the discourse of nation in Heart of Darkness is initially plotted on the global time line of progress. This particular thinking of time—linear, evolutionary, universal, necessarily advancing from savage to civilized—provided European national imperialism with one of its favored alibis. By virtue of their location on what Johannes Fabian calls “a temporal slope, a stream of Time—some upstream, others downstream,” some peoples were destined to rule, others to be ruled.17 Heart of Darkness ultimately troubles such certainties with its portrait of Kurtz’s moral, racial, and temporal decline, from Europe’s “emissary of pity, and science, and progress” to an African idol and one of the “devils of the land” (28, 49). Since “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz,” his degeneration figures not simply individual moral and mental decline but also the fall of nations (50). Clearly a cosmopolitan, albeit one whose “sympathies were in the right place,” the quarter-English, quarter-French Kurtz counters with his multinational identity (reminiscent of Conrad’s own) the rigidities of the color-coded imperial map, just as he unravels with his devolution the forward-moving time line of social, racial, and national progress. Conrad’s allegory of national-imperial dissolution places a wide variety of cultural and scientific discourses into play. Whether or not we can prove that Conrad read the texts that delineated and popularized the concepts of progress and devolution, the contextualization of Heart of Darkness amid the intellectual currents of its time is crucial if we are to understand (1) the text’s

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    indictment of civilization’s savagery; (2) the use it makes of what Ian Watt has called a “dialectic between progress and atavism” in that indictment;18 and (3) exactly what idea of nation and nationalism survives the story of imperial decline. As energetically espoused by the Victorian era’s most influential political social evolutionist, Herbert Spencer, progress represented the organizing principle and general law of social as well as natural life. For Charles Darwin, the concept of evolution described a process of species transmutation by natural selection that might statistically result in progress but was not controlled by, or desirous of, any progressive tendency. Spencer essentially teleologized Darwin’s evolution and transformed it from a word that occurred not at all in The Origin of Species (1859), and only rarely in later editions, into what one of Spencer’s nineteenth-century reviewers approvingly called “the idea of the age.”19 Perhaps most significantly, Spencer used his synthetic theory of evolutionary progress to distinguish between primitive and civilized social and mental structures, effectively turning to time—specifically what Fabian calls “non-coeval” time20 —in order to explain the meaning of race, nation, and mind. An efficient little essay titled “Progress: Its Law and Cause” (1857) lays it out. For Spencer, everything unfolds according to the “beneficent necessity” of progress, from individual organisms to whole races and nations, from government and industry to language and art, from social ethics to mental capacities.21 Influenced by Lamarck’s philosophy of progress achieved through offspring’s direct biological inheritance of behavioral and physical characteristics acquired by their parents, and late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century embryology’s new model of fetal development as a progressive development from the homogeneous, nondifferentiated tissue of a simple organism to the heterogeneous, differentiated organs of a complex being, Spencer announces the existence of a general law of progress.22 With further debts to Adam Smith, Spencer distinguishes the “minute division of labour” that distinguishes civilized societies (the social equivalent of the evolved organism’s differentiated form) from the wholly undifferentiated structures of “barbarous” communities, in which the king or chief is worshiped simultaneously as god, judge, captain, and priest, and “every man is warrior, hunter, fisherman, tool-maker, builder; every woman performs the same drudgeries.”23 Spencer’s primitive is

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions no Enlightenment idyll of economic self-sufficiency and sexual satisfaction serving to indict civilized society. It represents instead the distant origins from which industrial civilization and modern individuals have evolved by the inexorable mechanisms of progress. Spencer would later reject the term “progress” and its “anthropocentric meaning” in favor of the more cosmic “evolution.” But the “evolutionary optimism,” to borrow Reba Soffer’s term, distilled in “On Progress” remains quite as clear some four decades later in Spencer’s monumental System of Synthetic Philosophy (1860–96).24 In ten volumes, Spencer attempted to integrate the sciences of sociology, biology, psychology, and ethics into an all-encompassing organic philosophy, animated by the rule of evolutionary law. Spencer’s faith in the powerful mechanism of progress was significantly enabled by his concept of primitive mind, understood as the racial-psychological substratum from which all mental and social development proceeded. Though Spencer stood with the monogenist tradition of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists, fellow believers in the common origins of the races and the psychic unity of humankind, he frequently employed ethnographic evidence to show that “the minds of the inferior human races cannot respond to relations of even moderate complexity.”25 “Intellectual evolution,” he would later write, “as it goes on in the human race along with social evolution of which it is at once a cause and a consequence, is . . . under all its aspects, a progress in representativeness of thought.”26 Mental characteristics have moral consequences. Thus, complex, abstract, distant, and “representative” thought is the mark of a potentially cooperative, altruistic, ethical, and civilized individual, while immediate, responsive, rash, and “presentative” thought distinguishes the asocial, inconstant, selfish, superstitious, and primitive individual (and the civilized child). Mired in sense perception rather than abstract reflection, the primitive is further hampered in Spencer’s estimation by a “rude language” incapable of distinctions and prone to confusions. Ancestors nicknamed “the Wolf” or “the Dawn” were liable to be remembered by primitives incapable of abstraction as an actual wolf or the literal dawn who was father or mother to the tribe.27 In a later discussion of primitive language in First Principles (1893), Spencer found the gradual multiplication and differentiation of parts of speech (auxiliary verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, prepositions, articles), as well as of moods, tenses, cases,

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    and persons to reveal a “divergence of those orders, genera, species, and varieties of parts of speech by which civilized races express minute modifications of meaning.”28 Spencerian mental evolution depends on linguistic development, understood as the elaboration of complex and abstract nomination according to the general law of evolution from the simple to the complex. With their elemental utterances (“Catch ’im. Give ’im to us”) and their positioning as people who “still belonged to the beginnings of time—had no inherited experience to teach them as it were,” Conrad’s African cannibals would seem the ideal type of Spencer’s primitive, if not for what Marlow describes as a “dignified and profoundly pensive” attitude that, like their celebrated “restraint,” positions them well within the realm of civilization (42). Surrounded by a handful of white men whom they vastly outnumber, the cannibal crew confine their meals to a dwindling supply of hippo meat. It is Kurtz, the idol of the local tribe, raider of the surrounding territories, and collector of human heads, who “lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts” (57). Kurtz’s degeneration from gentleman adventurer and a privileged representative of the British empire into a solitary and volatile monomaniac, a “soul satiated with primitive emotions,” offers a startlingly precise portrait, in reverse chronological order, of Spencer’s account of the passage from primitive to civilized mind (67). Kurtz’s devolution has a parallel, and even a source, in the late nineteenth-century proliferation of documented instances in which Europeans, tropenkollered (maddened by the tropics) or maddened by an opportunity for unrestrained power, adopted, as if catching a disease, the savage symptoms of indigenous culture.29 Conrad’s reading about Europeans who had gone native in travel memoirs and in the popular British press provided him with a model for Kurtz, and equally important, with a fantasmal repository of savage practices. By repeating and displacing the latter from Africa to Europe, from cannibal to colonialist, Heart of Darkness condemns Belgian colonialism, effectively using a Spencerian representation of savage races in order to challenge the Spencerian model of progress with the specter of a savage civilization. As the nineteenth century advanced, the primitivism of non-Western cultures, once so conveniently imaged as the origins of industrial civilized society, became increasingly conflated with fecundity, both artistic and

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions biological, that Europe already seemed to have lost. Kurtz’s regression in the jungle stands as one of many iterations of the fin-de-siècle fear that time was running backward. Henry Maudsley, for example, foresaw the exhaustion of the sun, the breaking up of nations, and their replacement by ever-increasing primitive peoples and the “savages of a decomposing civilization,” all traveling not the “steep and narrow path that leads to evolution” but the “broad and easy way leading to degeneration, decay and death.”30 Conrad himself considered the Victorian cult of progress to be “an incredible infatuation” and identified a “curse of decay—the eternal decree that will extinguish the sun, the stars one by one, and in another instant shall spread a frozen darkness over the whole universe.”31 By 1899, even Spencer had shifted away from his earlier optimistic conviction that progress tended toward evolutionary perfection, and toward the belief that society was witnessing the “process of re-barbarisation.”32 In the increasing subordination of the British citizen to the hierarchical structures of imperial government, Spencer, like J. A. Hobson and Joseph Schumpeter, saw the dissolution of personal liberty and the devolution of society. Citing the celebration of militaristic force in the contemporary cult of athleticism, the growth of military schools, and the sensationalist fiction of the day— boys’ adventure fiction, books and illustrated papers about the technology of war, travel narratives about encounters with natives and big game, and, most despised of all, the hugely popular Kipling—Spencer found in finde-siècle Britain a “recrudescence of barbaric ambitions, ideas, and sentiments and an unceasing culture of blood-thirst” (213). With the rise in jingoism, state power, and economic and imperial competition, Spencer’s own principles of harmonious, efficient, forward-driven, industrial progress were rapidly exhausting their applicability to what he saw as his increasingly archaizing social world. Time was indeed running backward. In an 1898 indictment of militarism inspired by the American annexation of the Philippines, written in a tone properly described by J. D. Y. Peel as “apocalyptic,” Spencer thundered: Now that the white savages of Europe are overrunning the dark savages everywhere—now that the European nations are vying with one another in political burglaries—now that we have entered upon an era of social cannibalism in which the strong nations are devouring the weaker—now that national interests, national prestige, pluck and so forth are alone thought of, and equity has dropped utterly

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    out of thought, while rectitude is scorned as “unctuous,” it is useless to resist the wave of barbarism. There is a bad time coming and civilized mankind will morally be uncivilized before civilization can again advance.33

In its evocation of a brutal struggle between strong and weak nations, this passage is characteristic of social Darwinism’s application of the laws of natural selection operating from the levels of the individual and the species to the aggregate structures of nations, races, and classes. Combining social Darwinist images of race with the images of atavistic decline so constitutive of fin-de-siècle intellectual, literary, and cultural production, Spencer marshals the savage in a Kurtz-like criticism of civilized nations and even, it seems, of nationalism per se. Spencer’s scorn for the ascendancy of “national interests, national prestige, pluck and so forth” derives from a philosophy of moral altruism that, unpersuaded by the rhetoric of late imperialism, sees little distinction between the worldwide rule of the European powers and “an era of social cannibalism,” and no necessary difference between “the white savages of Europe” and the “dark savages everywhere.” Savagery here is remarkable for the discursive motility with which it is made to jump from its supposed place at one end of evolutionary time (primitive culture) to the apparent end of that line (European modernity). If savagery in this passage marks a specific set of social forms of organization that have risen again in the late nineteenth century from the historical past of the human race (ceremonialism, imperialism, militarism), savagery also inhabits a more conventional set of racialized meanings: darkness, cannibalism, uncivilized barbarism, all that empire aims to conquer. It is the oscillation between these two registers—savagery as the inner soul of empire and savagery as empire’s rhetorical handmaiden—that distinguishes this passage in particular and much late-imperial discourse in general. Spencer’s conversion of imperialist nation into savage cannibal is Conradian, as much in the ontological havoc it wreaks on empire’s selfimage as in its recourse to a primitivist lexicon for social critique.34 Less visibly wracked than either Spencer or Conrad by anxieties over the future, official imperialist policy continued to claim, in the words of Arthur J. Balfour, British prime minister from 1902 to 1905, that “Progress is with the West.”35 It fell to Max Nordau’s popular Degeneration (translated from German into English in 1895) to express with hysterical urgency the fear that progress would give way to animalistic regression.36 Preferring

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions fin-de-race to fin-de-siècle, Nordau catalogues the range of nervous disorders brought about by the century’s modernization (railway brain, hysteria) and connects them to a rising tide of degeneracy. Degenerates, he asserts, “renew intellectually the type of the primitive man of the most remote stone age” (556). Degenerate artistic geniuses suffer from nervous disorders, egomaniacal personalities, and physiological irregularities—the trembling eyeballs of the impressionists; the fevered, morbid, criminal brain of Baudelaire; the long, pointed, atavistic ears of Mallarmé; the mental hallucinations and sexual perversities of Swinburne. Like Spencer, Nordau also employs savage metaphors to tell tales of European horror. In symbolist poetry’s attempt to suggest rather than name the objects it describes, Nordau finds the “cacophony of savages who have been turning over the leaves of an English grammar or a glossary of obsolete words” (117). Similarly, the naturalism of the degenerate and “sexual psychopath” Émile Zola suggests a “primitive” romanticism. “He constantly practices in the most extensive and intensive fashion that atavistic anthropomorphism and symbolism, consequent on undeveloped or mystically confused thought, which is found among savages in a natural form, and among the whole category of degenerates in an atavistic form of mental activity . . . Like Hugo and second class romantics, M. Zola sees every phenomenon monstrously magnified and weirdly distorted. It becomes for him, as for the savage, a fetish to which he attributes evil and hostile designs.”37 Conrad’s Kurtz is at once Nordau’s primitive throwback and his degenerate, savage artist; a writer, painter, musician, and “universal genius” whose message corrupts others (30).38 The Report to the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs that Kurtz writes, as Marlow notes, “before his—let us say—nerves went wrong and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites” is in Marlow’s opinion a “moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment.” “Eloquent, vibrating with eloquence, but too high-strung I think” (50–51). Showcasing its author’s civilized command of language, as well as his more primitive, degenerate, and nervous stresses, the report strikes Marlow in retrospect as “ominous.” Like his report, Kurtz himself initially appears to be imperialism’s best voice. From a magisterial declaimer of “burning, noble words” and a wildly successful collector of its most practical fetish, ivory, Kurtz descends to the status of a fetish-object himself, possessed, Marlow dryly

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    notes, of “the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch-dance in his honour” (51). The fetishistic worship of Kurtz sustains his developmental distinction from the primitives around him, while it is his own hand that most threatens that distinction. In the bald brutality of the report’s scrawled postscript, “Exterminate all the brutes!,” lies the destruction of the entire civilized complex of moral altruism and linguistic niceness, that complete capacity for the expression of “minute modifications of meaning” described by Spencer as the zenith of mental evolution. Kurtz’s dying words, “the horror, the horror,” are a similarly uncivilized lexicon, “language on the verge of reversion to savagery, on the verge of a fall from savagery,” as Brooks puts it.39 Kurtz’s transformation from fount of civilized rhetoric to savage despot inverts the deeper historical transition from old to new imperialism. Chris Bongie describes this shift in terms of the passage from what Lord Macaulay in 1833 called “enlightened and paternal despotism” to the rhetoric (if not the reality) of, in Bongie’s words, “a more ‘civilized’ relationship between metropolitan and peripheral territories.”40 As a document of an emerging “new” imperialist sensibility, Heart of Darkness insists on the bankruptcy of autocratic forms of rule, while seeking the possibility of some closer connection, some “remote kinship,” between imperial Britain and its subjects (38). The intuiting of this connection not only leaves the basic terms of civilization and savagery intact but also produces a phobic repetition of them, suggesting that the difference between old and new imperialism depends less on a break than on a ghostly return. Often cited as the primary mode in which Conrad’s critique of imperialism proceeds, this temporal blurring also narrates a crisis of nationalism. Contemporary critics of the nation regularly note its subjection to a version of the dialectic between progress and atavism identified by Watt as an organizing structure of Heart of Darkness.41 The nation oscillates between the modernity that for some critics it seems to incarnate and the naked premodern group sentiments of tribal loyalty and ethnic hatred that for others nationalism appears to stimulate. Well before contemporary globalization’s doubts about the viability of the national idea, Heart of Darkness evinces grave suspicion about the progress of nations. In the same year that Heart of Darkness was published, the Victorian political theorist Hobson suggested that “imperialism is the expansion of nationality.” If

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions imperialism is the territorial extension of nationalism’s sovereign space and the worldwide metering of nationalism’s putatively evolving time, the critique of imperialism would have to interrupt that time and decenter that space. Conrad’s critique takes this form, undoing the story of European imperialism by repeatedly staging the loss of national coordinates of meaning. What devolves in Heart of Darkness are not only Kurtz and the European imperial project he embodies but also the idea of the nation as a particular container for late nineteenth-century political and psychic identity. Kurtz’s Russian disciple presents just such an unraveling. His clothing, Marlow notes, “was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow,—patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on elbows, on knees; coloured binding around his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers” (53). The harlequin naturally recalls the map that hangs in the Company’s Brussels office and initiates Marlow into the project of territorial sovereignty. “There was a vast amount of red,” Marlow recalls, “good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager-beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the centre” (13). The figure of the harlequin repeats the Company’s color-coded representation of British, French, Dutch, Portuguese, German, and Belgian holdings in Africa, but he repeats it as farce. He is a map without a legend, yet another distorted version of the “readable report” that is one of the novella’s abiding anxieties. In the harlequin, the project of imperial nationalism disappears, dead not in its center but on its geographical and metaphoric edges, as the reassuring expanse of British red is reduced, fetishlike, to the mere footnote of a pair of scarlet-edged trousers. The Russian harlequin’s disturbingly partial Englishness finds further illustration in the episode involving Marlow’s discovery in an abandoned hut of a well-thumbed, much-annotated copy of Towser’s or Towson’s An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship. To Marlow, the book is “unmistakably real,” its appearance a wondrous testimony to the sheer backbone of a national character devoted enough to the idea of good work to study seafaring in the midst of the jungle or, alternatively, stirring evidence of an international brotherhood of mariners bound by the

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    work of the sea. To the manager’s assertion that the book surely belongs to “this miserable trader—this intruder,” Marlow replies only, “He must be English” (39–40). But the marginal notes are written not in cipher, as Marlow first surmises, but in Russian, and the book’s owner is not a displaced Englishman but the Russian harlequin. British character thus surfaces in the jungle only as figment or fantasm or, indeed, fetish, the mistaken projection of a missing object that is national character itself. Like the “unrecognisable tatters of what had been a flag of some sort” flying over the hut where Marlow finds Towson’s Inquiry (39), the castrated nationalism of the French warship’s “limp” ensign as it fires futilely into the continent (17), and the quarter-English, quarter-French, savage idol Kurtz, the harlequin’s illegible patchwork of national identities is a sign of the disintegration of the national principle and its twin imperial idea in the African jungle. “The conquest of the earth,” Marlow initially tells his audience on the deck of the Nellie, is “not a pretty thing . . . What redeems it is the idea only” (9). This idea, linked to an emblematically British “devotion to efficiency,” is quickly reduced in Marlow’s ironic idiom to the most primitive of beliefs, “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to” (10). The rapid conversion of national-imperialist belief into fetish worship provides a miniature version of the novella’s overall plot, in which Europe’s privileged emissary is radically de-Europeanized. If Europe is the space in which nationalism, like national character, is particularized and fetishized—rendered potent and hypervisible in the form of the imperial map—Africa is nationalism’s vanishing point, the place where imperial technologies (impotent warships, abandoned railways) and imperial ideologies (the civilizing mission, the white man’s burden) deadend. Europe gives rise to an idea of the nation plotted temporally, while Africa becomes the site for the gradual destruction of nations and national selves. On the one hand, colonial discourse expresses a teleological faith in the native’s capacity to progress to the level of the helmsman Marlow deems an “improved specimen,” while on the other, colonial discourse monumentalizes the temporal and cultural rift separating colonized from colonizer. As many have noted, Heart of Darkness shares with the Freudian fetish a compulsion to continually express an underlying anxiety about

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions the very existence of difference. In Freud’s account, fetishism names the psychic disavowal of what the (male) subject knows to be true (that women have no penis) by redirecting the gaze and the libido toward a substitute object (a shoe, an undergarment, a bodily part) whose function, as a displacement of value, is to cover over the knowledge of (female) lack.42 For Bhabha, all colonial discourse betrays the logic of the fetish, at once acknowledging the unsettling facts of racial and cultural difference and disavowing or masking them in the fixed form of stereotypes that must be continually returned to and repeated.43 The phobic repetition of the stereotype strains to keep civilization and savagery, progress and atavism separate even as they are anxiously and ambivalently joined. The cannibals’ restraint and Kurtz’s unspeakable rites are examples of just such joinings. In them, we see what William Pietz, in his genealogy of the fetish routed through the circulation of trade objects between the social systems of Christian feudalism, African dynastic rule, and early merchant capitalism along the West African coast during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, identifies as the source of the fetish’s power, namely, its capacity to repeat an “originating act of forging an identity between certain otherwise heterogeneous things.”44 As a principle of repetition-compulsion, the fetish demarcates a psychic zone in which past events acquire what Pietz calls “enduring material form and force.” In the fetish, events are subject to anatomical or geographical territorialization, social reification, and radical personalization as social objects that nevertheless evoke a deeply individual response. My point is not to prove that the imperial nation is a fetish, a particular kind of contradictory belief modeled on male castration anxiety, so much as to trace the changing forms of that belief in a series of specific historical moments, beginning with Conrad’s late imperialism and extending to the new nationalism of Achebe, the national disillusionment of Naipaul, and the diasporic nationalism of Dabydeen. If repetition is what distinguishes the fetish, a reading of the fetishistic structure of Heart of Darkness might center not just on its overinvested canonical value or its repetitive structure of racial and national stereotype but also on the text itself as the traumatic kernel for a whole series of fetishistic repetitions. The postcolonial rewritings of Conrad confirm the power of canonical fiction even as they direct or displace our gaze from it. In these repetitions, it is both the story itself that returns and the particular logics

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    of desire, displacement, and partiality that are the modalities of Heart of Darkness’s national fetishism.

Freud, Fiction, and the Uncanny As a literary treatise on various aspects of what, in nineteenth-century terms, would have been called the primitive and civilized mind, Heart of Darkness has long fascinated psychoanalytic literary critics. They make their case variously, invoking the biographical data of Conrad’s displaced childhood, his early loss of his parents, his suicide attempt at twenty, and his difficult relationships with women; the dreamlike symbolism of the novella’s sexualized landscape of rivers and dark continents (for Freudians) and of its archetypal journeys (for Jungians); and, finally, a serendipitous chronological coincidence between Freud and Conrad.45 Without arguing that Conrad and Freud were familiar with one another’s work, some psychoanalytic critics have nonetheless highlighted the “identical conclusions” about the costs of civilization reached by these “two great minds” in Heart of Darkness and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),46 and the “extraordinary parallelism” linking Freud’s research on dreams in the 1890s with Conrad’s Congo voyage, and the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) with that of Heart of Darkness (1902).47 The critical analogy between a journey into the unconscious and Marlow’s journey into the Congo has proceeded largely on the basis of structural similarities between the primitive instinctual drives that Freud diagnoses embedded within the civilized mind, and the atavistic world of monstrous nature and unrestrained appetites that Marlow finds upriver and recognizes as his own. No less than Freudian psychoanalysis, Heart of Darkness is marked by the conventions of primitivism. Both rely on the tropes of infancy, rampant desire, archaicism, and prehistory in order to represent otherness: psychoanalysis through a masterplot in which repressed primitive desires survive as the complexes and neuroses of civilized persons, and Heart of Darkness through a plot that will ultimately chronicle the reverse.48 In its presentation of the savage as “a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development,” Freud’s Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics (1913) would seem to crystallize the

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions developmentalist plot, teleological temporality, and purely analogical style of reasoning that characterizes psychoanalytic primitivism. Psychoanalytic literary criticism of Heart of Darkness has largely retained this quasi-anthropological notion of psychoanalysis and more or less confined its work to drawing parallels between the genesis and symbology of a literary text and that of a theoretical system. Rather than use psychoanalysis in order to diagnose either Heart of Darkness’s nascent theory of the unconscious or its unequivocally primitivist fantasies (the mirror of psychoanalysis’s own), psychoanalysis might be brought to the text, as Brooks has argued, in order to expose a particular set of narrative logics or forms.49 With its particular emphasis on the power of the past and the force of its multiple and different returns, Freud’s 1919 essay on the uncanny provides a particularly useful model for such reading. More than the opposite of the heimlich (familiar, native, belonging to the home, concealed and kept out of sight), the unheimlich is a resurfacing of it, a return.50 The uncanny temporalizes, and so vastly extends, the phenomenon of the double: those persons who resemble one another physically or are subject to a kind of mental sharing and exchange such that “the one possesses knowledge, feeling, and experience in common with the other, identifies himself with another person, so that his self becomes confounded, or the foreign self is substituted for his own.”51 In making the point that uncanny effect can sometimes be produced by “a recurrence of the same situations, things and events” or by an “involuntary repetition,” Freud refers to physiology; ethnological and anthropological data on primitive culture; an army of examples drawn from poetry, prose, fairy tales, and folklore; and even autobiographical anecdote as he recounts how he once wandered lost through the streets of a small Italian town and returned three times to the same street of prostitutes (389). The uncanny is “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (370). Whether we are dealing with that class of the uncanny in which primitive beliefs we think we have surmounted (spirits, doubles, ghosts) spring to life, or that in which infantile complexes of castration anxiety and womb fantasies have been revived (causing grown men to find unheimlich the most heimlich of places, the female genitalia), the uncanny is ultimately “nothing new or foreign, but something familiar and old-established in the mind that has been estranged only by the process of repression” (399).

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    Although Freud admits that in certain fiction’s realm of suspended disbelief (fairy tales, farce, Dante’s epic, Shakespeare’s tragedies) “many things are not uncanny which would be so if they happened in real life,” things change “as soon as the writer pretends to move in the world of common reality.” Ultimately, “fiction presents more opportunities for creating uncanny sensations than are possible in real life” (404–5). Freud’s essay largely confines the literary dimensions of the uncanny to a set of tropes (phantom presences, haunted houses, dismembered bodies, blinded vision); a sequence of structures (the repetition, recurrence, and return of what has been surmounted or repressed); and a particular generic mode (a realism that “oversteps the bounds of possibility”). The essay’s argument partially turns on the ways in which psychoanalytic models cause a story like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1818) to “become intelligible” (384). Bogeys are fathers; blindness is castration. Psychoanalysis’s pretension to the status of a global narrative also produces the uncanny effect. As Neil Hertz observes, “the point is that the castration complex is not peculiar to Hoffmann but is universal, and because of this universality its veiled presence in the story is capable of creating the effect of the uncanny, of something that ought to have remained secret and yet comes to light.”52 Helène Cixous similarly charges Freud with domesticating literature into Oedipus, condensing and linearizing Hoffman’s gothic tale into “a kind of ‘case history.’ ”53 “We cannot help but think,” she comments, “that Freud has hardly anything to envy in Hoffmann for his ‘art or craftiness’ in provoking the Unheimliche effect” (547). Extended beyond the level of individual texts, Hoffman’s or Freud’s, the uncanny might feed a larger theory of fiction. Postcolonial rewritings of Heart of Darkness, for instance, could be understood as the unsettling exchange between textual doubles, secret sharers that bear relations of such intimacy that it is not altogether clear where the boundaries of one end and those of another begin. Extending the model to world literature, to read the ancient Sumerian epic, the classical Sanskrit epic, or the fourteenthcentury Malian Epic of Sunjata alongside Homer, or an early Japanese novel (if that is what the mixed prose and poetry of the tenth-century Tale of Genji is) alongside Aphra Behn or Madame de Scudéry, could be considered to seek out the uncanny moment in which difference is refracted as the familiar. This begs the question of whether we are simply exporting

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions one dominant set of definitions (epic, novel) to places and times where others hold greater sway, and simply seeing ourselves in and as others, in a version of that “scopic vision” that Spivak charges underlies the world literature project, in which “the others provide the information while we know the whole world.”54 The kind of uncanny reading I have in mind does not aim simply to reveal the other as the self. Nor does it depend only on literal textual returns to describe an otherness whose presence abroad, in the literary periphery, secures its absence at home, in that literary core called a canon. Such an imperializing model is very far from the kind of unsettling work that uncanny apprehension, strictly speaking, performs, unmooring the subject from known referents and obliging it to contemplate some opening to a difference that cannot be entirely domesticated as sameness, in literature of all provenances. In reading uncannily, we neither absorb nor exclude, anteriorize nor posteriorize others, be they other literatures, other histories, or other conceptual frameworks (the national to the global or the global to the national). Uncanny reading simply makes space, in each act of reading, for the return of what seemed to lie outside or beyond a given system of signification but is always already within. A footnote on Freud in Derrida’s “The Double Session” (1981) invokes Freud’s characterization of heimlich as a word whose meaning develops toward, coincides with, and ultimately envelops its opposite, as an instance of what Derrida calls undecidability.55 Lingering on the doubles, repetitions, paradoxes, and incorporations of Freud’s essay (all of which Derrida announces himself “constantly brought back to”), Derrida positions “The ‘Uncanny’ ” slightly to the side of his familiar general charge that psychoanalysis traffics in verities and unities—Oedipus and father, or, for Lacan, symbolic castration and linguistic phallus. Specters of Marx returns to the uncanny as the instant in which, in Derrida’s words, “the economic or egological home of the oikos, the nearby, the familiar, the domestic, or even the national (heimlich) frightens itself. It feels itself occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most strange, distant, threatening.”56 At the outset of this argument, he states: “There is no Dasein of the specter, but there is no Dasein without the uncanniness, without the strange familiarity (Unheimlichkeit) of some specter.”57 The uncanny is the double of spectrality; a mirror model of that process of defamiliarizing return according to which Marx’s thought comes back for

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    the future as democracy-to-come, in a form that Marx would not altogether have recognized or claimed. In the diagnosis of a future alterity within the long familiar, Derrida’s spectral method echoes and perhaps even extends the uncanny’s apprehension of otherness (the repressed past) within sameness (the return of the past in the future). “The ‘Uncanny’ ” thus starts to emerge as the critical ground on which relationships of repressed similarity come to light. It is in effect the unconscious of reading—the point in Freud’s theory where psychoanalysis is understood to encounter its fictionality, its spectral textuality, or, in a final example, its political possibilities. Lars Engle has understood the uncanny to denote moments of breakdown or blockage that result from the encounter between an explanatory system and an object or event that it cannot interpret.58 When the system is South African apartheid and the event black resistance of the 1970s and 1980s, the uncanny refers to that marginal zone in which liberal white writers expressed themselves as “extraordinarily conscious” of black struggle yet prevented by an “ethical bar” from arrogating that experience, or its literary modes, to themselves (115, 110). Barred from the realist sublime of black writing, white writers turned to “the political uncanny,” an expressive form born of their encounter with “dangerous-to-assimilate experiences.” Synonymous neither with fiction’s nature nor spectrality’s work, Engle’s uncanny is the equivalent of the epistemological crisis that comes with the realization that interpretive systems are not stable. Both as a thematic whole and in its structure, Conrad’s novella reads as one of what Engle calls the “uncanny pockets” created by strong explanatory systems on their edges, from which they threaten to disturb and destabilize the whole and ultimately “disclose a forbidden or destructive truth that will leave the investigator with no satisfactory theory at all” (113). Rounding the bend in the river, Marlow discovers that empire’s elsewhere is not only some other place but some other time, long forgotten but still familiar, to the point that it incites descriptive language of both radical alterity and curious similarity. As the steamer makes its way along “the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy,” its progress is arrested by the proliferation of signification that renders primitive behavior about as meaningful as madness (37). “The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse.” At once “too far” from this prehistoric world and too close by means of a “remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar,” the Europeans aboard the steamer who feel the “dim suspicion” of connection position Africa as a thoroughly uncanny object, an origin they cannot bear to acknowledge, any more than Freud’s male patients can bear to look female genitalia in the face. For a generation of feminist psychoanalytic criticism, the Freudian uncanny has been understood to impose, project, or, as Kaja Silverman says, “circumscribe” loss onto the female body.59 In Death of a Discipline Spivak breaks with this tradition to insist that the uncanny effect whereby “what is heimlich thus comes to be unheimlich” is a “defamiliarization of familiar space . . . [whose] substantive type does not have to be the entrance to the vagina.”60 The uncanny, in other words, is not what is in a literary or critical text (gendered figuration) but a unique allegory of reading that turns on metonymic displacement. Thus, Spivak understands Conrad’s narrative of a protonational male community and the loner who breaks away as keeping the uncanny intact in the gendered form of Kurtz’s Intended and his native mistress; while rewritings like Tayeb Salih’s Sudanese novel of reverse sexual colonization, Season of Migration to the North (1969), and Mahasweta Devi’s novella of peripheralized tribal populations who encounter a prehistoric creature in rural India, Pterodactyl (1995), displace the uncanny outside the individual female body to the imaginaries of masculinist anticolonial nationalism, gendered collectivity, and general planetary consciousness.61 Read in this fashion, Season and Pterodactyl cannot be instances of Conrad again or Conrad returned. Instead, they destabilize Conrad’s foundational territorialization of the uncanny (in women, in Africa) in order to envision forms of imagined community other than the patriarchal and the Euro-national. Spivak calls this reading, after Derrida, teleopoiesis: an opening to difference that does not claim to know in advance its form, content, or message. “That is indeed,” adds Spivak, “one of the shocks to the idea of belonging, to affect the distant in a poeisis—an imaginative making—without guarantees, and thus, by definitive predication, reverse its value.”62 As the rest of this chapter will show, the uncanny provides, in the style of teleopoiesis, a moving figure for a series of postcolonial novels that follow suit, oscillating

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    between the future and the past, the familiar and the strange, the oikos and the other, and not least of all, the national and the global. Across this body of writing, the nation itself takes on an uncanny presence as something perpetually estranged but long familiar, the site of a perpetual displacement in the project of postcolonial decolonization.

Conrad’s Ghosts and Achebe’s Arrow of God “I would be quite satisfied,” proclaims Achebe, “if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past—with all its imperfections—was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God’s behalf delivered them.”63 Achebe deems it “the role of the writer in a new nation” to counter images of the primitive, ahistorical African past and, without constructing a naive idyll, to help African people regain their dignity and self-respect “by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost.”64 Like Achebe’s first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), Arrow of God (1964) attempts to destroy the myth of undifferentiated African primitivism through a meticulously detailed portrait of the social fabric of Igbo life in colonial Nigeria. In their effort to chronicle the overdetermined colonial encounter and its various psychic, social, and cultural effects, Achebe’s novels mobilize multiple encounters, including those of European languages and African languages, and of oral tradition and the written novel. African novels emerge out of a variety of national and linguistic contexts that are nevertheless similarly determined by the legacies of colonial rule. These include a preponderance of French and English literacy, as opposed to indigenous-language literacy, the controlling presence of major European and American publishing houses, and the comparative dearth of African-owned and -operated houses, either nationalized or privatized.65 The written novel itself is an imported foreign form, distinct from the traditional genres of the oral folktale, epic, proverb, and poem. As Christopher Miller points out, this distinction has frequently taken temporal form, yielding a putative contradiction between the European novel (“progress and evolution made literature”) and a temporally static, linguistically lacking Africa deemed incompatible with narrative’s most basic premise of, in Miller’s words, “the translation of time into lan-

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions guage.”66 The rise of the novel in Africa alters temporal order by both repeating an originary moment (the coming of colonialism) and unleashing something that exists not merely after it but beyond it, outside its operative logic. The disarticulation of repetition from imitation along the lines of the uncanny or the spectral describes a literary history. This history’s dynamic is less the “implicit conviction that there are no new plots, no primary stories left, only the possibility of repeating others,”67 that Brooks has found characteristic of certain genres of nineteenth-century European fiction, than the belief that in some spheres, notably the postcolonial literatures of independence, that new histories can sometimes speak through old stories. The return of the past in distorted, partial, and unfamiliar form transforms the past for the future. Guyanese writer Denis Williams describes African writers’ attempts to render a foreign form more particular to themselves and more credible to their audience as “knowledgeable disrespect for the novel,” a “deliberate tampering with the limits which define it as a form.”68 For Achebe, the novel is “a kind of catch-all genre.” Though “overrated,” he admits, “it’s new too, so it’s possible to do things with it . . . I think one can do all sorts of things with any genre if one isn’t obsessed with copying, with unities.”69 Arrow of God demonstrates this much-vaunted newness of the novel (a rhetoric as old as the novel) through a style and language that realize the possibility of a nonmimetic relationship to European literature even as it mirrors one of its privileged texts. In Arrow of God, the feeble national signs that express the crisis of European imperial nationalism in Heart of Darkness return in new, nationalized, and Africanized forms. How exactly can the novel, either this one or any of Achebe’s others, show loss, show its African audience “what they lost”? Many postcolonial works borrow fragments of the colonial and precolonial past, some in order to anatomize the horrors of colonialism, others in order to evoke the resiliency of an indigenous culture that preceded European sovereignty and was never completely destroyed by its rule, still others in order to accomplish a deeply textured account of colonial and postcolonial history. Arrow of God attempts to accomplish all of these tasks within the contexts of a rewriting of Heart of Darkness that is less a reproduction of the conventions of Conrad’s text than a return or displacement of its gaze via a dialogic form that supplements the mere delivery of corrective cultural information with an aesthetic of plural perspectives and many voices.

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    The novel describes the Nigeria of the 1920s, a period during which the British sought to establish native West African chiefs as the agents of indirect rule.70 The plot unfolds as a clash between two orders of time: the seasonal cycle of village life, and the regimented and instrumentalized British time that conscripts and confines the Igbo, forcing the young men to work on a new road that “must be finished by June” and imprisoning Ezeulu, priestly guardian of the Igbo deity Ulu and keeper of the community’s calendar of planting and harvest, for more than a month as punishment for refusing to serve as warrant chief.71 Ezeulu’s imprisonment causes him to fall behind in the marking of two months, thus delaying the date on which he can proclaim the consecrated harvest of ripe yams. Unwilling to adapt ritual’s clock, certain that to do so would be to affront the deity he serves, Ezeulu drives his famished community to seek the alternative blessing offered by the local missionary church. “In his extremity,” the novel concludes, “many a man sent his son with a yam or two to offer to the new religion and to bring back the promised immunity. Thereafter any yam harvested in his fields was harvested in the name of the son” (280). The final sentence economically distills the novel’s overarching clash between two systems of belief into a single phrase whose double meanings allow for the simultaneous story of colonial acquisition and native loss. On the one hand, Achebe evokes the bitter triumph of the Christian sign over the Igbo son, of the liturgical “name of the son” over the patrilineal authority that stands in for Igbo culture. On the other hand, the phrase’s traversing of two opposed cultural registers encodes a somewhat different historical model, in which Christianity and colonialism do not bring the word but merely another word to a people who already have their own. Here the conclusion repeats a general novelistic strategy in which language is made to register both the displacing violence of the colonial process and the intricate materiality of the precolonial world. Doubled by this difference, Achebe’s language cannot restore the lost precolonial past without simultaneously registering that past in a later present, be it the colonialism of the novel’s time or the new nationhood of Achebe’s time. With a logic that could well be called uncanny, Achebe’s language situates itself across distinct times, places, and histories. The switches from one to another are as arresting as any apparition. The chapters dedicated to the description of Igbo life and customs boast a richly sensuous, lyrically

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions repetitive prose inundated by oral tradition in the form of proverbs, ritual modes of address, and folktales, while the chapters depicting the British district commander Winterbottom and his fellow officers are reserved, restrained, and dry. The British chapters sometimes introject parodic nuggets of imperial discourse, such as Winterbottom’s Marlow-like musings on “the heart-beat of the African darkness,” or the return of Kurtz’s stirring Report to the Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs in the excerpted final paragraph of the fictional George Allen’s treatise, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger, the conceptualization of which provides the devastating final sentence of Things Fall Apart’s similarly discursively heterogeneous account of Igbo village life at the turn of the century (30). In a departure from the earlier model of Things Fall Apart, the Igbo chapters of Arrow of God refuse to translate the many Igbo words they incorporate and completely dispense with annotation, glossary, and other forms of explanation for the countless Igbo proverbs that appear in English simulation. Achebe’s densely allusive style, more unrelenting in Arrow of God than in his other novels, has frustrated some critics into denouncing the novel as “meaninglessly proverbial,” while leading others to hail “Achebe’s Africanization of English.”72 If Achebe’s novel seems difficult to read, it is the planned difficulty of a work that, as Emmanuel Ngara says, “tries to contain the whole cultural fabric of Igbo society and the various forces threatening it in one volume.” 73 Hence the difficult task of simultaneously chronicling custom, depicting tradition, and sketching the contours of daily existence, and resisting the ethnographic frame of such representation, what might be called the generic conventions of that knowledge. The untranslated words are deflections of a cultural gaze that would know Africa’s lack. At the same time, they are displacements of that desire, new fetishes of an African mystery left in some way intact, at least in a reading that assumes a non-Igbo-speaking reader (99). At various points in the novel, the British and Africans speak to one another, always through a native translator. These scenes juxtapose colonial English, the Africans’ Igbo rendered complexly in Standard English, and a pidgin that mediates between the two while signaling its own impoverishment of expression. “ ‘Sorry sah,’ said the steward, looking very worried. ‘Dey say na dat bad juju man for yonda wey’ ” (155). In the halting

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    diction of this sentence, the “catch ’im, eat ’im” of Conrad’s cannibal returns. Pidgin, however, remains a relatively minor form of expression in a novel that takes as one of its primary tasks the reconstruction of rich and complex African speech in English writing. Writing in the same year that Arrow of God appeared, Achebe identified “a new voice coming out of Africa, speaking of African experience in a world-wide language,” and further specified that voice’s obligation to transform its medium. “The price a world language must be prepared to pay is submission to many different kinds of use. [The African writer] should aim at fashioning out an English which is at once universal and able to carry his peculiar experience.”74 While Achebe’s “Africanized English” is not the fully realized “new English” of a Ben Okri or a Salman Rushdie, and while it depends (as their more global hybrid idioms do not) on a binarization of English English and Africanized English, and a relative discounting of linguistic and cultural interstitiality as the zone of the impoverished pidgin tongue, Achebe’s writing nonetheless represents an important early stage in the gradual decentering of a dominant language. This is becoming global in a different sense than the purely hegemonic cast of the “Global English” phenomenon so powerfully critiqued by, for example, Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o.75 Postdating Nigerian independence by some four years, Arrow of God was published in a period when mounting ethnic tensions between the northern Hausa, western Yoruba, and eastern Igbo were irreversibly building toward secessionist calls for an Igbo Republic of Biafra and subsequent civil war. Though Achebe may well have been, in David Carroll’s phrase, an “Igbo nationalist,” the nature of his nationalism deserves further scrutiny for its simultaneously intranational and international articulation (26). Achebe’s minute depiction of Igbo customs under attack by foreign influences in Arrow of God can be understood as an expression of nationalism in a global sense (Africa vs. Europe, colonial territory vs. colonial power), as well as nationalism in a more local sense (the claims of one subnational ethnic group over another in a battle for land). The scene in which Ezeulu’s mission-educated son is found to have entombed the living python sacred to the Igbo both emblematizes the historical incursion of Christianity and the West into native belief and serves as a figure for the subjection of the Igbo to other ethnic groups in independent Nigeria. Following this early engagement with the canon of European literary history and the

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions fissures of power struggles in ethnically riven nations, later works such as A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) have turned to the tragedy of dictatorship and dependency. To show Nigeria specifically and Africa generally through such known quantities (Isn’t violence always the story of African nations? Isn’t Conrad the father of us all?) is an uncanny gesture, an incorporation or assimilation or recognition of a familiar “truth” whose ultimate effect is to turn knowledge around and produce a historically deep, culturally complex Africa, which may itself be another fantasm of essence, as suggested by subsequent African novels in a postmodern mode. Understood in Achebe’s terms as compensation for the loss of the past, the novel simultaneously recaptures a material history, revises a literary and linguistic history, and remakes the generic form, thus posing the question of form’s own haunted historicity and so contesting the metaphysics of presence that appears to link African presence, African voice, and African being. The Achebe who denounces Conrad as a racist, the Achebe who rewrites Heart of Darkness in a manner both parodic and defiant, dialogized and deconstructed, and the Achebe who aspires in an altogether Conradian fashion to alter the English language from the position of one who does not claim it as his own are three distinct versions of how the postcolonial writer might live with ghosts, neither repeating history nor swallowing it but instead opening it to the future.

Fallen Nationalism in V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River If Achebe renders the canonical familiar subversively strange, V. S. Naipaul’s mirroring of Conrad’s descriptions of a primitive, precultural, degenerating Africa renders it ever more familiar. The parallels between Heart of Darkness and Naipaul’s 1979 novel A Bend in the River, based on a 1975 trip, his third, to Zaire (now Congo) are well known. Although neither Conrad nor his novella is ever named in Naipaul’s novel, their influence, rightly called “ghostly” by Steven Blakemore,76 is everywhere: in the metaphoric incursion of the bush into a land futilely straining toward modernity; in the opposition between civilization and savagery that structures the novel; in the portrait of a black Kurtz in the person of the Big Man, the unnamed president whose monomaniacal excesses threaten

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    to bankrupt the country; and in the fate of the novel’s white Kurtz, one Father Huismans, a white Belgian missionary and collector of African masks and colonial relics who winds up murdered by African hands, his head impaled on a spike and sent floating down the river, in a reversal of the African heads that surround Kurtz’s compound.77 Whereas A Bend in the River tells its story of corruption and state terror in an allegorical vein that precludes the naming of persons and places, Naipaul’s 1975 documentary travelogue, “A New King for the Congo: Mobuto and the Nihilism of Africa,” a startling precise rehearsal for the later novel, offers specific details of Joseph Mobuto’s reign. The essay details the enforcement in the early 1970s of a state ideology of “authenticity,” later “Mobutism,” under which Congolese were ordered to change their European names and industrial and business enterprises were transferred from foreign to domestic owners, leaving the economy in shambles and Mobuto in possession of a personal fortune worth billions. But even as “A New King for the Congo” specifies its postcolonial coordinates—naming the national leader and the newly nationalized cities of Kinshasa (formerly Léopoldville) and Kisangani (formerly Stanleyville)—the essay betrays its deepest debt to an earlier imperial moment for which it evinces a curious nostalgia. Like the Trinidad-born, England-identified Naipaul, the essay and the novel it anticipates are caught between two worlds. Unable to clearly distinguish between imperialism and postcoloniality, they are convinced that the latter is nothing but the farcical, debased return of the former—“black men assuming the lies of white men.”78 Conrad serves as the point of entry for Naipaul’s project to measure the lack of distance between imperialism and postcoloniality. Remarking in “A New King for the Congo” that “the upstream journey that took one month in Conrad’s time now takes seven days; the downstream journey that took a fortnight is now done in five days,” Naipaul observes that the contemporary voyage “is still like a journey through nothingness.” “So little has the vast country been touched: so complete, simple and repetitive still appears the African life through which the traveler swiftly passes.”79 The monotony can be broken at any time by what Naipaul calls “African nihilism,” “a wish to wipe out and undo . . . the rage of primitive men coming to themselves and finding that they have been fooled and affronted” (208). Naipaul gives the example of Pierre Mulele, an independence

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions fighter and Mobuto’s former minister of education who led a postindependence rebellion in Stanleyville and established what Naipaul calls a “reign of terror.” “Everyone who could read and write had been taken out to the little park and shot; everyone who wore a tie had been shot” (209). This Kurtz, Naipaul notes, is “black, and not white; and he had been maddened not by contact with wilderness and primitivism, but with the civilization established by those pioneers who now lie on Mont Ngaliema, above the Kinshasa rapids.” The events are a bitter inversion of Heart of Darkness; a realization of Conrad’s fantasy of devolution catalyzed not by colonialism’s dark heart but by postcolonial nationalism’s. Rob Nixon is led to wish for “a more historical, less belletristic, and less atavistic account of the construction of Zairean nationhood than Naipaul admits.”80 As Nixon recounts, Naipaul’s anecdote about Mulele’s rebellion makes progress antithetical to Africa and completely suppresses the international history that plagued the Congo in the early years of its independence, including the CIA’s overthrow and assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and its installation of Mobuto, Mobuto’s involvement in the death of Mulele, the secession of the nation’s wealthiest province under the instigation of American and Belgian mining interests, and a volatile sequence of interventions, uprisings, and foreign occupations. In Naipaul’s narrative, civilization came to the Congo only to vanish into “lunacy” and “despair,” a wholesale “plundering of the inherited Belgian state” by the African nationalists themselves (213, 216). The many failures of postindependence Congo—its cult of Mobutism and reign of corruption, fake “Africanity” and obsequious press, crumbling state and encroaching bush—produce a powerful sense of nothingness (“the African sense of the void,” 219) in which the nation itself is reduced to blank darkness and hollow meaninglessness. Africa, or its myth, effectively erases Congo. Just as Naipaul cannot imagine Africa as anything other than the fantasmal other of the West, so too he cannot conceive African nations as having a life other than one that endlessly repeats primitive origins. These origins are not the borders drawn on the conference tables of Europe in Conrad’s time, and artificially imposed on the newly independent African nations in Naipaul’s, with lavish disregard for differences of language, ethnicity, and religion. In Naipaul’s narrative, it is not colonialism but a primordial, racialized rage that gives rise to the

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    postcolonial African nation and turns the copying of an inherited form into travesty and failure. The vision of the postcolonial nation-state as a gravely misused imperial legacy lies at the core of a career-long narrative for which Naipaul has been repeatedly vilified. To Said, Naipaul is a voluntary “witness for the Western prosecution,” making empire’s case better than it ever did. To Nixon, he sees through imperial eyes, “carry[ing] forward elements of a suspect generic legacy” that is the imperial travelogue’s strange combination of ethnographic distance and “emotionally entangled” investment. Kwame Anthony Appiah makes him the author of “the Naipaul fallacy”: the habit, grounded in a “postcolonial inferiority complex,” of asking readers to understand the non-European world through the terms of European culture. In Michael Gorra’s pithy summation of the case against him, Naipaul is the “White Man’s Brown Man.”81 Several critics, Gorra included, argue for a more sympathetic interpretation of Naipaul’s pessimistic assessment of the Third World as the product of his deeply internalized anger, ambivalence, and guilt over the imperial project and his own complicity, as an educated British colonial, in it. Sara Suleri Goodyear, for example, charges that Appiah’s “Naipaul fallacy,” like Said’s accusation that Naipaul hires himself out to Western ends, “fails to address Naipaul’s uncanny ability to map the complicity between postcolonial history and its imperial past.” Conrad, in this regard, is Naipaul’s most important precursor, for it is Conrad who, in Suleri Goodyear’s words, “uncannily suggests the adulterated nature of historical plot, the fact that arrival is always the scene of prior disappointment.”82 It is specifically in the migrant’s logic of desire and disappointment, looking to belong only to find that he doesn’t, that Naipaul finds the bitter template for his subsequent journeys from England to India, Trinidad, Congo, and Saudi Arabia and the affective model for their anatomies of national failure. In his 1987 memoir An Enigma of Arrival Naipaul situates the writing of A Bend in the River a decade and a half earlier, as the product of a vertiginous slide back and forth between his adopted England and his native Trinidad: “I had taken to England all the rawness of my colonial’s nerves, and those nerves had more or less remained . . . And just as once at home I had dreamed of being in England, so for years in England I had dreamed of leaving England.”83 But the journey back to Trinidad is

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions a failure; the history he has been working on (The Loss of El Dorado, 1969) is rejected by the publisher and Naipaul returns to England. That journey back to England so mimicked and parodied the journey of nineteen years before, the journey of the young man, the boy almost, who had journeyed to England to be a writer, in a country where the calling had some meaning, that I couldn’t but be aware of all the cruel ironies. It was out of this grief, too deep for tears or rage—grief that began partly to be expressed in the dream of the exploding head—that I began to write my African story, which had come to me as a wisp of an idea in Africa three or four years before. The African fear with which as a writer I was living day after day; the unknown Wiltshire; the cruelty of this return to England, the dread of a second failure; the mental fatigue. All of this, rolled into one, was what lay on the spirit of the man who went on the walks down to Jack’s cottage and past it. (102–3)

Should one derive A Bend in the River’s grim pessimism about the failures of postcolonial nationalism from private demons (the loss of home, the grief of disappointment, the fear of a life lived repetitively as parody, the dread of a second failure)? Or connect the novel’s obsession with Rome as the privileged figure for the civilized imperial past to the Roman ruins that surrounded the remote town of Wiltshire where Naipaul wrote it? Leela Gandhi’s reading of the psychogeography that Naipaul so readily invites relates his “self-loathing” to “his double vision of England itself: simultaneously the scene of desire and lack, faith and agnosticism, creativity and self-denudation.” Naipaul’s England, in other words, is a fetish: “a duplicitous entity—which he believes in, even though he knows it lies.”84 Naipaul’s African story inherits precisely this understanding of the nation. As a systematic unmasking of the fetish of African nationalism, the novel reveals what Naipaul’s writings about England can never quite bear to expose: the lack at the nation’s core. A Bend in the River tells the story of Salim, the descendant of an Indian family that has lived for several generations on the continent’s east coast in a centuries-old center of trade that he describes as “an ArabIndian-Persian-Portuguese place.” It takes an inland journey to “true Africa,” the Africa of ancient bush and new nationhood, for Salim to confront the constitutive violence of the land (10). As a cosmopolitan adrift in a murderously national world, Salim comes to the “ghost town”

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    at the bend of the river, once a European station of some importance, with “no family, no flag, no fetish” (56). To be bereft of flag and fetish (an equivalence on which the novel repeatedly insists) is to be at once alienated and subjectified, shut out from one way of belonging yet for that reason endowed with the ability to perceive the certainty of its ruin. It is, in Naipaul’s imaginary, to be postcolonial. Salim’s self-professed “habit of looking, detaching myself from a familiar scene and trying to consider it as from a distance” is thus the mirror image of Naipaul’s own despairing, diasporic gaze on nations and nationalisms (15). The outsider’s perspective on national identification produces for Salim, as for Naipaul, a sense of unease, uncertainty, insecurity, and panic. For Naipaul, this anxiety of location is expressed as a repeated anxiety of influence, for example in “Conrad’s Darkness” (1974), another essay companion to A Bend in the River. To be a colonial was to know a kind of security; it was to inhabit a fixed world. And I suppose that in my fantasy I had seen myself coming to England as to some purely literary region, where, untrammeled by the accidents of history or background, I could make a romantic career for myself as a writer. But in the new world I felt that ground move below me. The new politics, the curious reliance of men on institutions they were yet working to undermine, the simplicity of beliefs and the hideous simplicity of actions, the corruption of causes, half-made societies that seemed doomed to remain half-made: these were the things that began to preoccupy me. They were not things from which I could detach myself. And I found that Conrad—sixty years before, in the time of a great peace—had been everywhere before me.85

Naipaul’s mournful observation derives its pathos from the opposition between the fixed and secure world of the colonial, in which the notion of the “purely literary” is thinkable, if only as fantasy, and the unfixed, insecure, chaotic world of the postcolonial, in which “new politics” corrupt everything. The passage marks its deepest estrangement from and longing for the older colonial world through reference to a literary forefather who, like Naipaul, had to understand his world and himself in relation to England and empire. For Naipaul, Conrad plays the role of epic origin: he is first, Naipaul belated; his time best, Naipaul’s fallen. A Bend in the River uses epic even more explicitly, evoking it both as the sign of a literary and cultural tradition and the privileged site of that tradition’s profaning in the dark corners of the world.

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions By the dock gates of the town at the bend in the river lie the ruins of a colonial monument bearing a Latin inscription, miscerique probat populos et foedera jungi. Meaningless to Salim, the words are all that remains of a bronze sculpture erected by the French colonial authorities to commemorate the steamer service connecting the town to the capital. The Belgian priest, Father Huismans, translates the phrase as “he approves of the mingling of the peoples and their bonds of union” and explains its provenance in the Aeneid. On his way to found Rome, Aeneas is waylaid in Carthage by the love of Dido. Juno, jealous of Aeneas’s future fame, wishes him to stay there and offers as reason the argument that the Trojans and Carthaginians should unite. Venus, eager to see her son reach Rome, demurs and tells Juno she is unsure if Jupiter would in fact approve of the mingling of the peoples (miscerive probet populos aut foedera jungi, IV.122). The steamship motto changes three words from the original, thereby turning imperial doubt into certainty and leaving Salim appalled. I was staggered. Twisting two-thousand-year-old words to celebrate sixty years of the steamer service from the capital! Rome was Rome. What was this place? To carve the words on a monument beside this African river was surely to invite the destruction of the town. Wasn’t there some little anxiety, as in the original line in the poem? And almost as soon as it had been put up the monument had been destroyed, leaving only bits of bronze and the mocking words, gibberish to the people who now used the open space in front as a market and bivouac, with their goats and crated hens and tethered monkeys (food, like the goats and hens), for the two days or so before the steamer sailed. (63)

To Salim, the transculturation of the words—their excision from an original context and subsequent resignification—represents a betrayal of civilization and a devaluation of one of its treasured relics. In the enumeration of the uncivilized ends to which Virgil has been put, the parenthetical explanation that the monkeys are to be eaten strikes an insistent, almost hysterical, note in a text that has already described this fact in some detail and will do so again (7, 161). The passage becomes an obsessive cataloguing of the differences between the certitudes of the center (“Rome was Rome”) and this barbaric corner of Africa, where poetry is transformed into “gibberish,” food, metonymically linked to cannibalism, takes on the status of abomination, and the “little anxiety” proper to the fixed world of empire gives way to full-scale, destructive nihilism.

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    The repetitive and circular time that traps Naipaul’s Africa in a never-ending history and a never-beginning future has little connection to the imperial continuity promised by Virgil’s Jupiter to Venus. Her son’s line, he explains, will yield a glorious future. “I set no limits to their fortunes / and no time; I give them empire without end” (Aeneid I.400–401). And aged Faith and Vesta, together with the brothers, Romulus and Remus, shall make laws. The gruesome gates of war, with tightly welded iron plates, shall be shut fast. Within, unholy Rage shall sit on his ferocious weapons, bound behind his back by a hundred knots of brass; he shall groan horribly with bloody lips.  (I.418–25)

Despite its boundaryless imperative, Virgil’s empire in fact contains all that Naipaul’s Africa unleashes, namely, rage. Unfettered rage is A Bend in the River’s equivalent of Africa, from the “African rage” that tears away the bronze plaque on the steamship monument to the fury of the postindependence rebels whose attack on a local colonial-era dam betrays “a rage against metal, machinery, wires, everything that was not of the forest and Africa” (81). At the site of the dam, yet another commemorative plaque is “defaced, battered with some heavy metal piece, individual letters filed away,” just as the decorative lampposts that ring the dam have had the name of their Parisian maker obliterated. When Salim later goes to London to escape the disastrous end of his affair with Yvette, the white Frenchwoman married to the president’s former favorite historian, he finds the imperial center itself diminished into “something shrunken and mean and forbidding.” The sovereign and inaccessible England of his childhood fantasies is unmasked as a strangely familiar place, filled with “little stalls, booths, kiosks and choked grocery shops—run by people like myself—[who] traded in the middle of London as they had traded in the middle of Africa” (229–30). Salim finds himself caught between a postcolonial nation that, by the novel’s end, will dispossess and incarcerate him as a suspect foreigner, and a newly diasporic metropolitan nation that uncannily reproduces the mixed and chaotic world he has just left. In a similar scene of diasporic devastation, Salim’s East African Indian friend Indar applies to London’s India House

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions for a diplomatic job and is rejected as “a man of divided loyalties” (152). Indar’s response is to remasculinize by opting out of national identity altogether: “I belonged to myself alone. I was going to surrender my manhood to nobody. For someone like me there was only one civilization and one place—London, or a place like it. Every other kind of life was make believe.” Troped both as a form of fetishistic belief and as the product of a voluntary castration (“We solace ourselves with that idea of the great men of our tribe, the Gandhi and the Nehru, and we castrate ourselves”), nationalism—or at least Third World nationalism—is nothing other than a perpetually lived loss. As a self-proclaimed “man without a side,” Indar creates an academic program that removes African intellectuals from the countries where they cannot work because of political chaos and repression and sends them to others where they can (155). To the cosmopolitan Indar, this “continental interchange” represents the possibility of “the true African revolution,” one in which postcolonial nations are little more than prisons or clearinghouses. A Bend in the River combines the plot of bildungsroman with the ghost of the epic in order to turn the protonational, masculinist story of young men’s arrival into identity into a no less masculine scene of disappointment: postcolonial men betrayed by the (national) objects of their desire. This is a twist on the newness of the novel form asserted by Bakhtin. Not for the novel the epic gaze back to what Bakhtin calls “a world of ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in the national history, a world of fathers and founders of families, of ‘firsts’ and ‘bests.’ ”86 A recognizably global sensibility characterizes Bakhtin’s situation of the emergence of the novel, “the only genre that was born and nourished in a new era of world history” (4). In contrast to the model of “national languages, coexisting but closed and deaf to each other,” the novel registers the moment when “the world becomes polyglot, once and for all and irreversibly” (12). “Drawn toward everything that is not yet completed,” the novel derives its futurity from ceaseless contact with “the spontaneity of the inconclusive present,” a form of temporal immediacy that inverts or, in Bakhtin’s words, “surmounts” the epic’s distance from the past (27–28). Naipaul’s novel curiously reverses this model of the novel, tapping the finished glories of both Conrad and Virgil in order to turn what Bakhtin presents as the novel’s constitutively forward gaze into a backward lament. The

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    narrative of postcolonial disillusionment has its preferred genres as well as its preferred times and spaces. In Naipaul’s novel, all three converge in the global novel of national devolution. Even as Naipaul’s novel demonstrates some of what Bakhtin would deem the prototypically global capacity of the novel to absorb otherness (the teleological time of bildung, the elegiac time of imperial epic, the very occasional gesture to heteroglot languages outside Queen’s English), it marks their presence purely in order to mourn what has succeeded them. What’s left behind in this sorry world are the always abjected, ultimately rejected objects of nation and woman. Salim’s affair with Yvette culminates in a confluence of abjected objects at the most classically uncanny of sites. In their final encounter, Salim repeatedly strikes Yvette, kicks her, and finally “spit[s] on her between the legs until I had no more spit” (220). Yvette in this moment is the Europe that Salim can never have, because it no longer exists, while Salim is the Africa that desecrates Europe. The bodily equivalent of the defiled European word, Yvette provides the territory on which imperial and national aspirations—the myth of old Europe, the hope for a new Africa—crumbles. Woman’s demotion from the subject of nationalism to its figural ground yields the site on which the fetish of nationalism is unmasked. That fetish surfaces in fragmentary form throughout the novel, including Indar’s castrating idea, the twin fetishes of flag and ceremonial walking stick that accompany the president wherever he goes, the presidential portraits that paper the country, and the little green books of presidential Maximes distributed everywhere in the farcical repetition of another book, another color, and another death-dealing nationalism. Constantly displaced, metonymically represented, and fetishistically structured, nationalism in the novel is wholly fantasmal. Only apprehendable in its parts, it is hollow at its core. One fetish deserves another, and so it is to the overvalued European word, European book, and European woman that the novel repeatedly turns in order to express, through their twisting, erasure, or desecration, the rage and ruin that are for Naipaul the affective equivalents of postcolonial nationalism. Though Naipaul’s novel is quick to equate female lack and national lack, as in Indar’s depiction of nationalism as self-castration, these allegorical equivalences are not in themselves the stuff of an uncanny reading. What is properly uncanny, as Spivak observes in her reading of Salih’s and Devi’s rewritings of Conrad, is the

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions way in which “the fixed signification of the type of the uncanny comes to be destabilized.”87 The uncanny in Naipaul’s novel works both by shifting its signs and securing their referents. Hence the uncanny displacement from African nation to European book to white vagina is a trajectory of disappointment (a project failed, a text corrupted, a desire run out) that points, with each successive site, back to national loss. Naipaul’s rewriting of Conrad derives its force by borrowing the broad contours of what the anxiety of influence model would call a strong story, as well as by importing recognizably Conradian models of the world it describes. If Achebe’s incorporated nuggets of Heart of Darkness are parodic, Naipaul’s are prophetic. The most powerful of the objects taken into A Bend in the River are a nationalism equated with fetishism and an Africa that travels back as it moves forward. Salim experiences the uncanny time of African nationalism when he visits a colonial suburb now turned to bush: “To be among the ruins was to have your timesense unsettled. You felt like a ghost, not from the past, but from the future . . . You were in a place where the future had come and gone” (27).88 Reminiscent of Marlow’s journey up the river and back in time, these regressive rhythms describe a world—Naipaul’s world—in which the postcolonial present can never be unmoored from the imperial past it drags behind it. Like that other Saleem who narrates the story of nationalism’s failure, Salim describes a landscape in which individuals must struggle to survive in the face of a political order that threatens to extinguish them. But where Rushdie’s narrator turns to the register of comedy, Naipaul’s narrator adopts a despairing melancholy, a mirror of the postcolonial sense of loss that Naipaul has come to incarnate as against the more utopian celebration of postcolonial newness associated with Rushdie. In a minor moment, Salim spots a fellow passenger on his return journey from London, an old African man wearing a gray hat and blue bathrobe over his suit. About this afterimage of Conrad’s Russian harlequin, Salim says, “No one paid him too much attention. I just noticed his oddity, and thought: He’s using a foreign thing in his own way” (252). If for Rushdie, the patchwork sensibility produced by foreign uses of familiar object is the essence of how newness enters the world, for Naipaul, it is imaginable only as a kind of cultural detritus, the way of the world on its outer edges. Naipaul’s own use of Conrad (no foreigner to him but his own best self) in many ways

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    conforms to the model of postcolonial transculturation but ultimately refuses to admit that newness can come of such encounters.

Changing the Canon: David Dabydeen’s The Intended In his poem “Coolie Odyssey” (1988), Guyanese poet and novelist David Dabydeen crafts a “living dialect” in order to chart an ethnic history that began long ago in the rural villages of India, came “in the packed bowel of a white man’s boat” to a nineteenth-century El Dorado of Caribbean sugarcane plantations and indentured servitude, and was carried by its postcolonial children to a cold country, where they ransack their memories “to make bountiful our minds in an England / Starved of gold.”89 Dabydeen’s semi-autobiographical novel The Intended (1991) takes up where “Coolie Odyssey” leaves off, imagining more fully the England of the 1960s and 1970s to which the migrant children come.90 Like the poem that precedes it, the novel considers the trajectory between a past figured as home and a present marked by dislocation, privation, and alienation. And like the poem, the novel derives much of the pathos of its portrait of displacement from its intertextual citation of earlier and more august journeys of proto-imperial subjects. The journey of the ex-colonial to the former metropole—absent in Achebe’s novel, a minor episode in Naipaul’s—becomes the central focus of Dabydeen’s rewriting of Conrad. The Intended recounts the process by which its unnamed Indian–West Indian narrator becomes English, rising from a richly pan-racial Guyanese childhood through a Dickensian adolescence in a British Boys’ Home and tenement bed-sitters to the gates of an elite university. But The Intended actually dislocates its narrator from the privileged space of the nation, as well as from the bildungsroman plot of national progress, through the oscillatory form of a narrative that constantly shifts between home and away, past and present, national longing and multiethnic belonging. Spaces, times, languages, and identifications are all subject to movement in the novel’s essentially migrant form. The narrator’s AfroCaribbean “Auntie” Clarice bids him farewell from the Guyana of his childhood in Creole, with “a final riddle: ‘you is we, remember, you is we.’ ”91 In England, he encounters Englishes to reject (the Creole in which

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions his mother writes to him and the tentative new English of his Pakistani landlord); Englishes to fear and desire (the coarse sexual slang of his new immigrant friends turned pimps and pornographers); and Englishes to assimilate (the literary language of Milton, Blake, and Conrad, the latter, of course, also an immigrant English).92 In “an England / Starved of gold,” the narrator turns to the gold standards of English literature in his effort to enter the national community. He reads his way into Cambridge, subjecting his friends to lengthy disquisitions on the theme of “suffering and redemption” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as he crams for the “A-level” exams (97). Nowhere directly quoted, Heart of Darkness is present only in its ghostly afterimage as the narrator, his Pakistani Muslim friend Shaz, and his Boys’ Home companion, the Afro-Caribbean Rastafarian Joseph, sling passages against one another. In Heart of Darkness, the aspiring filmmaker Joseph notes, “all the colors struggling to curve against each other like rainbow, but instead the white light want to blot out the black and the green and reduce the world to one blinding color” (98–99). Later Joseph envisions the creation of “a different kind of book” and a “new kind of language,” a film version of Heart of Darkness shot on location in Tooting Bec Common and the “Zanzibar” section of a local amusement park ride, where he corrects the painted backdrop of black men and women interspersed with jungle animals to include white men firing guns and detusking a dead elephant (105, 156). This idea dissolves into a projected treatment of immigrant experience, “half-formed” to the narrator, that Joseph envisions as “a complete statement of the condition of England” told from the point of view of an ant crawling into a white nostril (156). Where A Bend in the River portrays an East African Indian who finds no community with the Africans who surround him and, in its efforts to describe the half-made country in which he finds himself, resorts to a magnified reproduction of Conrad’s catalogue of a primeval Africa, The Intended describes a far more ambiguous terrain of race relations, with Heart of Darkness as its point of departure. For the narrator, the new world of a new England is fraught with division. He fails to reconcile the community he found in Guyana with his Afro-Caribbean “Auntie” Clarice (“you is we, remember, you is we”) with the received stereotypes through which he sees the “noisy West-Indian-ness” of young British blacks on the bus or the “genuinely incompetent” Joseph (177, 107). As the narrator prepares to

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    leave for Cambridge, it falls to his friend Patel, a Gujerati Hindu who has found financial success in pimping his white girlfriend, to celebrate the migrant’s vision of a new England by debasing it. “All they have over us is money . . . and any monkey can make money, once you learn the trick. Soon we’ll have more than them, and England will be one tribe of Patels. English people will have names like Lucinda Patel and Egbert SmythePatel, wait and see boy” (245–46). Patel’s fantasy of an Asian England speaks to the deep historical power of miscegenation, the rooting of ideas of nationalism in the racialized and gendered bodies of national subjects. For Dabydeen, such fantasies are not only inevitable consequences of empire but also the means of its dismantling. He explains, “I don’t think it is sufficient just to curse the master with his own tongue; it would mean you are not progressing beyond retaliation, reaction. I think what you have to do is to revise the myths in a creative way, and in so doing perhaps reveal hidden or original layers of meaning. In other words, it is not sufficient to rape Miranda, because rape is destructive. It is better to love her, the sexual romance peopling the isles with new Prosperos.”93 Rewriting The Tempest as he also rewrites The Odyssey and Heart of Darkness, Dabydeen seeks a creative revision of myth and model that is new in its efforts to reinterpret the past yet somehow sadly old. “Auntie” Clarice’s riddle, “ ‘remember, you is we,’ ” acquires a double resonance, both recalling the bonds of memory and identity that connect the narrator to his intercultural and interracial Guyanese origins, and taking on a second, sexist, life in Shaz’s “parting gift” (221) of his prostitute girlfriend as a mark of the bonds he and the narrator share as a South Asian and West Indian living in a racist England. Postcolonial male diasporic community, like imperial male national community, finds its medium in the bodies, at once hypervalued and devalued, of white English women. If Patel’s vision of an England that is “one tribe of Patels” is the fantasy form of this fetish-logic, Patel’s subsequent response to the narrator’s ridicule of his vision is the fantasy’s traumatic kernel. “Just because you ain’t got a mother,” Patel tells him, “don’t mean that England will mother you, you stupid mother-fucker. All you’re looking for is somebody to mother you. Why don’t you grow up and be yourself instead of mourning for white pussy?” (246). In the conventions of this narrative, the failures of Mother England toward her former imperial subjects can only be troped

   National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions as the transformation of the national idea into the uncanny site that is for Dabydeen, as for Naipaul, its displaced correlative. Shaz’s call to leave off mourning for white pussy holds out the promise of a future beyond the ambivalent incorporation that Gilroy calls postimperial melancholia, in which an England unable to reconcile itself to the loss of the empire or to the knowledge of what was done in empire’s name repeatedly acts out a founding violence against black Britons, in a cyclical repetition of imperial fascism. But rather than representing some working through of the imperial past that traps both white and black Britons in sad cycles of objectification, Shaz’s call, like the “gift” of a woman that precedes it, leaves this portrait of postimperial identification truly half-made; articulating the future of migrant national belonging only on the grounds of a heteronormative masculine complex of desire. To contextualize, as this chapter has done, Conrad’s image of prehistoric, atemporal Africans and their profoundly temporalized European counterparts in terms of the social evolutionism and degeneracy theory that contended for the belief system of the late nineteenth century is not to seek out grounds from which to exonerate Conrad’s racial and national representation as merely the unavoidable trace of its historical moment. I have traced Heart of Darkness against a range of period discourses so as better to discern its later effects. A line of time, a succession of temporal tellings, runs from the sociohistorical discourse of progress and degeneration to the psychic time of the uncanny to the linear time of epic’s firsts and bests to the differential times of the novel, in Dabydeen’s diasporic oscillations, Naipaul’s dystopian devolution, and Achebe’s clash between the differential clocks, signs, and words of the British and the Igbo. Whether describing a futurity already dead (Naipaul’s postcolonial nationalism) or seeking to bring it to life (Achebe’s independent Africa, Dabydeen’s migrant England), the postcolonial novel, like Conrad’s imperial novella, keeps coming back to time. The seizure by the formerly colonized of colonial genres, figures, and plots, and their subsequent reappearance in forms that appear derivative but open themselves to displacement and disruption, produce an uncanny effect. A reading that goes through the uncanny and that lingers on its temporal as well as its topological undecidability (the past made future, the unfamiliar distant made intimately near) enables us to see that the imperial nation Heart of Darkness entombs

National Imaginaries, Global Flows, and Uncanny Repetitions    is also the vampire of imperial and postimperial history. The nation is what is never laid to rest, what is never totally or absolutely confined to its own territories, and what always seeks out its identity through contact and convergence with what lies beyond. The explicit and disjunctive marking of individual nations’ other times and other spaces (rather than their diachronous sequence or synchronous erasure under globalization) is the hallmark of the specific kind of nationalist representation that I have called fantasmatic, for which the uncanny provides one key. In contrast to the binary divisions and progressive teleologies of the progenitor paradigm of literary history, the uncanny effect I have traced through Conrad, Achebe, Naipaul, and Dabydeen describes a more uncertain plot of apparitional return, partial incorporation, and haunting remainders, things left unaccounted for in the yet-unfinished story of postcolonial nationalism. It is with the structure of this story and the blank spots on its map—gender, globality, genre, mode—that the rest of this book is concerned. Gender, as I will read it, is not a binary code of identities but rather an elastic and changing continuum that is cut across by a multiplicity of desires even as it is subjected to the organizing imperatives of normativity. Fluid in its forms, gender regularly allies itself to particular expressive modalities— allegory, fantasy, parody. Gender parody as a means of national representation will be the subject of Chapter 6’s discussion of Sarduy, while fantasies and allegories of gender, as of race and nation, will guide Chapter 4’s reading of Fanon’s heterogeneric narratives of liberation and Chapter 5’s exploration of the postcolonial novels that supplement them. In the next chapter, I focus on allegory in the work of Du Bois. With its preoccupations with the oscillating time and global space of racialized memory, racialized nationalism, and pan-racial Third Worldism, and its tendency to allegorize them through the female body in sociological and historical texts as much as in literary ones, Du Bois’s work recasts the problem of the nation’s political futurity beyond the pages of the novel and, from there, back again.

3 The Soul of Nationhood: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Psychic Politics of Place What is the black man but America’s Belgium? —w. e. b. du bois, “the souls of white folk” (1910)

In a 1924 essay titled “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” and published a year later in Alain Locke’s influential collection of essays, The New Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois denounced Belgium’s colonial policies, as Conrad had done only a quarter century before him. “One might indeed read the riddle of Europe by making its present plight a matter of colonial shadows, speculating on what might happen if Europe became suddenly shadowless—if Asia and Africa and the islands were cut permanently away.”1 The spectral haunting of empire finds another articulation here. Through a catalogue of Portugal, Belgium, France, and England, Du Bois’s essay— “likening and contrasting each land and its far-off shadow”—effects the double vision for which Du Bois is perhaps most famous. Connecting or reaching out from the space of the national to that of the global was, for Du Bois, essential to critiquing and changing the meaning of race and racialized subjection. In the mirror of this method, Du Bois revealed both the dehumanizing reigns of European colonialism and U.S. racism and, through a glass decidedly darkly, an India, Africa, and Asia that together with black America constituted an insurgent “darker world” (409). Born five days after the 1868 Emancipation Proclamation and laid to rest ninety-five years later, on the eve of the 1963 March On Washington

The Soul of Nationhood    for Civil Rights, in the shadow of Castle Osu, once the holding pen of slave traders and now the state residence of newly independent Ghana, Du Bois defined a century of black liberation. The most influential African American intellectual and political figure of the twentieth century was also its most penetrating, prescient, and haunting anatomist of racial subjectivity within and outside the veil of discrimination. He was a sociologist of black culture who stood alone in the early twentieth-century United States; a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and editor of its monthly magazine, The Crisis, for a quarter century; a sometime integrationist who would go on to advocate African American economic, institutional, and cultural selfsufficiency; a nationalist as well as a Pan-Africanist, a socialist, and, in his nineties, a communist. Throughout his life, he was a race leader, an advocate for blacks in the United States and, across the global color line, for what he was wont to call the darker races of the world. Critical discussions of Du Bois have all too often depicted him not as straddling disparate geographies and allegiances so much as migrating, even progressing, from one voice and place to the next. Thus Du Bois’s 1910 departure from Atlanta University and academic sociology for an executive position at the NAACP has been thematized by critics, historians, and Du Bois himself as a farewell to social science in the face of Jim Crow disenfranchisement, white supremacist attacks, and the unmistakable call for social action.2 A world of political difference would thus appear to separate the academic sociology and nationalist bent of early studies of slavery, segregation, and the black community, such as “The Conservation of Races” (1897), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and the Atlanta University Publications (1897–1914), from the global proletarian sympathies and anticolonial, Pan-Africanist politics of later works, such as The Negro (1915), Darkwater (1920), The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924), Dark Princess (1928), Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (1935), Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945), The World and Africa (1947), and The Black Flame (1957–61). Critical narratives of conversion from science to politics, art to ideology, or racial nationalism to Third World globalism no doubt have a certain thematic tidiness and chronological certitude. But they bifurcate at their peril. For as a close examination of Du Bois’s writings reveals, he

   The Soul of Nationhood was shaped not just by the transition from one intellectual and political framework to another but also, possibly more so, by their ongoing contention, collusion, and coexistence.3 From their inception, Du Bois’s national identifications reached outside their boundaries. He was certainly a migrant thinker, both by virtue of a recognizably cosmopolitan path that took him to Berlin as a young doctoral student in the 1890s, to multiple points in Europe and Asia over the first half of the twentieth century as an internationally recognized race leader, and eventually to his adopted Ghana; and by virtue of what might be called his conceptual migrancy. His emblematically mobile set of keywords, race, nation, soul, shuttle back and forth between visible, particularized referents that traditionally territorialize identity within boundaries (color, feature, geography, place) and less material, more intuited referents that deterritorialize identity along more global lines (kinship, common history, shared experience, collective memory). Kwame Anthony Appiah has found a distinct preference for the bounds of identity, in particular the discourses of race and nation, in Du Bois’s earliest writings, while Paul Gilroy and Ross Posnock have understood him as a cosmopolitan advocate of precisely the opposite.4 Rather than claim that Du Bois is more global than national, that his global identifications succeed, “transcend,” to use Gilroy’s term, or sublate his national identifications (a conventionally cosmopolitan plot), this chapter suggests that only because he is the one can he also be the other.5 I use the term “global” in order to circumscribe not only the Du Bois who attended Bandung in 1955, and imagined a world of international affiliations between black America and other existent and emerging Third World nations,6 but also the Du Bois who much earlier imagined the reach back from the present of nations to a transgeographical and transtemporal racial-cultural past, stretching from ancient Egypt and West Africa before the slave trade to the New World. Spivak calls Du Bois’s most well-known work, Souls, “the prototype of the best (nationalist) vision of metropolitan Cultural Studies,” and credits Du Bois with “und[oing] African American continent-think, reversing and displacing the violence and violation of slavery and imperialism” as “in our historical moment, we must try persistently to reverse and displace globalization into planetarity—an impossible figure and therefore calling on teleopoiesis rather than istoria.”7 “Teleopoiesis” is Derrida’s term for the process that

The Soul of Nationhood    underlies what Spivak calls ghost reading, the figural opening up to a difference whose content is not in advance known and whose effect is to reverse a previous value (rather than simply retelling history as truth). Only by connecting to spaces and times outside the Jim Crow United States in which he wrote was Du Bois able to reconceptualize both race and nation. Imagining a dark elsewhere without fully fixing its coordinates or its meaning, he envisioned, if only proleptically, a different place for blacks at home. Diagnosing “The Negro Nation within the Nation” went hand in hand with surveying the extranational expanse of Black Folk Then and Now. Though separated by over three decades (practically the span of a career for anyone other than the long-lived Du Bois), these two titles offer a shorthand account of two complementary tendencies— looking in and reaching out—that were never very far from one another in Du Bois’s writing and, more often than not, appeared yoked together in a single work, a single chapter, even a single sentence. These two analytic foci are connected by the concept of race itself, understood by Du Bois as at once the shattering source of division, difference, and discrimination, and the redemptive site of memory, connection, and affiliation. Filtered through this racial imaginary, Du Bois’s conceptualization of nation cannot help taking on its fundamentally double form. Through a uniquely fantasmatic synthesis of the most outer and inner territories of nationalracial imagining—on the one hand, the “dark world”; on the other, the “Negro mind” and the “black soul”—Du Bois ultimately suggests a complex, mobile, haunting, and heterogeneous notion of nation. Migrancy has already emerged as a central feature of what might be broadly characterized as the deterritorialized Du Bois, a Du Bois who reaches out to cosmopolitan, diasporic, Pan-Africanist, and internationalist affiliations precisely to the extent that he is understood to disassociate himself from particularist and bounded forms of identity. If, however, memory is cast as a form of migrancy, if memory is movement, it points not so much beyond or away from nation and race as, instead, out of them and back again. In this double movement, the familiar plot of the psyche itself, lies the possibility of a concept of migrancy that returns to nation and race as operative, viable, even illuminating categories of contemporary criticism. Understanding nation and race as doubled categories marked by temporal and topological oscillation between past and future, inner and outer,

   The Soul of Nationhood loss and recovery, territorialized longing and a perpetually migrant desire, Du Bois had to find or forge an expressive medium capable of capturing the national-racial object in all its different states of being. Ultimately, this line of inquiry leads to the domain of allegory, that form of literary figuration whose movement between two distinct orders of narrative and meaning serves as the formal equivalent of memory’s and migrancy’s moving modes. This chapter’s tracing of the work of allegory within Du Bois’s general “chronotope,” the timespace that Bakhtin claims “defines genre and generic distinctions,”8 entails a further discussion, beyond the novel that is Bakhtin’s primary focus, of the many other generic-disciplinary forms of Du Bois’s national imaginings. Through the latter a previous history of discrimination is indeed reversed and displaced, in a form that goes far beyond mere recovery of a lost past. With their strikingly consistent formal strategies, Du Bois’s historical narratives, sociological case studies, autobiographical memoirs, political essays, and novels keep us coming back to the plots of national and racial becoming that some would say are fixed but that this heterogeneric corpus reveals to be moving all the time.

Race, Nation, and the Problem of Time For the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Euro-American scientific thought within which Du Bois situated himself, nation and race were frequently interchanged, largely unproblematized categories, practically unimaginable outside the linear typology of temporality that was the favored explanatory mechanism of the age. For U.S. sociology in its formative period in the last few decades of the nineteenth century and through the First World War, Spencerian social evolutionism’s doctrine of progress provided a framework within which to plot the specifically American circumstances of emancipation and urbanization, immigration and assimilation, and racial and ethnic heterogeneity. Progress, although understood by Spencer and his disciples to be a universal law, was by no means universally assured. Widespread acceptance of Spencer’s stagist model of racial development, as well as of the Lamarckian tenets he favored, including environmental adaptation and the biological inheritance of acquired characteristics, underwrote calls to restrict the immigration and integration of those ethnic and national groups considered incapable of adapting

The Soul of Nationhood    to the United States, progressing beyond their arrested level of social and mental development, and reproducing assimilable citizens. In the equally Spencerian tradition of laissez-faire social policy, some evolutionists also recommended that African Americans be hastened toward independence or social Darwinian extinction by the withdrawal of what seemed to them a vast philanthropic net whose protective presence, stretching from slavery through Emancipation and Reconstruction, was understood to have secured whatever gains in economics, education, and culture the race appeared to have made.9 The future president of the American Sociological Society Charles Ellwood blamed both white philanthropy and black imitativeness for creating a population who were emancipated and educated in appearance alone. In Ellwood’s assessment, the black child’s “natural instincts may be modified by training, and perhaps indefinitely in the course of generations; but the race habit of a thousand generations or more is not lightly set aside by the voluntary or enforced imitation of visible models, and there is always a strong tendency to reversion.”10 Against those narratives of revisionist historiography and evolutionist social science that insisted that African American imitation of white culture, whether voluntary or enforced, could never close the fundamental gap between black and white, Du Bois argued that African Americans could in fact lay claim to a culture that was their own, across time, from its African roots through slavery and diaspora. This formulation serves as a useful reminder of Du Bois’s ability to at once confirm and contest, adopt and adapt the organizing paradigms of biology (inheritance), evolution (time), and character (originality) that so dominated turn-of-the-century racial scientific discourse in the United States. Effectively turning Ellwood’s proposition that blacks’ attitudes, habits, and instincts could “never become quite the same as those of the white” back on itself, Du Bois made the inherited quantity of black difference—understood not just as biological difference but as cultural, historical, social, and psychic difference too—into the very source of his claim for white recognition and national belonging. The song, sweat, and spirit that Souls famously describes as Africans’ three gifts to the land to which they were forcibly brought are a form of racial inheritance, the silent reproach of repressed cultural and historical memory to a national narrative that would forget it.

   The Soul of Nationhood As early as his 1897 address to Alexander Crummell’s newly formed American Negro Academy, titled “The Conservation of Races,” Du Bois sought to make sense of race by wrenching it out of the dubious purview of social scientific fact and resituating it within a mystical-historical narrative of once and future cultural achievement. In the 1897 address “a race is a vast family of human beings,” endowed with a common “racial gift” and “racial striving,” and bearing a common racial destiny. In the case of what Du Bois calls the “nation” of the Negro, that future is “not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.”11 Du Bois’s prophetic racial discourse produced a form of nationalism with clear affinities to the earlier European tradition of romantic nationalism promulgated by Fichte and Herder, and wedded to the notion of an isomorphic equivalence between territory and identity, national soil and national characters. Du Bois’s plotting of race through this understanding of nation yielded the characteristic nineteenth-century species of differential thinking that George Fredrickson aptly names “romantic racialism” and that Appiah further charges with rejecting a biological concept of race while retaining an expressive language of blood, lineage, feature, and heritage that brings old-style racialism in the back door.12 But “The Conservation of Races” also finds a way to express a more modernist sensibility in which the categories of race and nation are subject to internal division, temporal fracture, complex articulation, and perpetual movement. A race, Du Bois’s lecture explains, is a grouping of persons “generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses,” and linked furthermore by “deeper, spiritual, psychical differences, undoubtedly based on the physical, but infinitely transcending them” (239–40). In its definitional turn inward “The Conservation of Races” invites comparison with Ernest Renan’s lecture “What Is a Nation?” (1882). Delivered at the Sorbonne only fifteen years before Du Bois’s lecture, in the shadow of France’s 1871 loss of the disputed territory of Alsace-Lorraine to Germany, Renan’s lecture (best known for its claim that “the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things”) discounts race as a factor in group identity. Like language, geography, religion, material interest, and military necessity, race is one of those factors that “invites

The Soul of Nationhood    people to unite, but it does not force them to do so.”13 Such affiliative compulsion is the sole province of an oscillating national temporality reconstituted as a national performative. A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. Two things, which in truth are but one, constitute this soul or spiritual principle. One lies in the past, one in the present. One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form . . .  More valuable by far than common customs posts and frontiers confirming to strategic ideas [in making a nation] is the fact of sharing, in the past, a glorious heritage and regrets, and of having, in the future [a shared] programme to put into effect, or the fact of having suffered, enjoyed, and hoped together . . . Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort. (18–19)

This understanding of nation as “soul,” “spiritual principle,” and even “spiritual family” finds strikingly similar articulation in Du Bois’s early writings, with the signal difference that everything that Renan attributes solely to nations Du Bois applies equally to races. Souls, for example, makes the apprehension of grief, the commonality of memory, and the rhetoric of mourning central to its depiction of black culture even as it also attempts to provide a blueprint for the work of moving on that grief necessarily imposes.14 When this grief is, as in Souls, that of one group for the African culture and history they have largely, though not completely, lost, and the world of American opportunity they have never entered, grief must lead to common effort of a particular kind. What Du Bois’s black subject must remember is what the dominant national subject would forget—the sin of slavery, now returning in new acts of lynching, discrimination, and racial terror, and beyond or behind that, a black past. Among the things that Souls announces lie “buried” within its pages is the curious construct of transgenerational racial memory inherited from the past, too often repressed by the present, and necessary if a future is ever to emerge in which it will be possible “to be both a Negro and an American.”15 The simultaneity promised by the syntactical couplet “both/and” does not in itself liberate the post-Reconstruction black subject from national exclusion. Double being in Du Bois’s early writings is inextricable from double time. So “The Conservation of Races” claims in its plea for national recognition: “We are

   The Soul of Nationhood Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland. We are the first fruits of this new nation, the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day” (245). Prevailing nineteenth-century narratives of racial progress (from black to white) and racial degeneration (from white to black) propounded a temporal color line on which blacks occupied the position of despised origin. Du Bois’s response to the invidious temporalization of the color line is not to claim that color has no time but rather to claim for it an altogether different kind of time, the messianic time of national futurity. This resignifying of color’s time depends on an underlying shift in the meaning of the color line, from social evolutionism’s temporal plotting of racial difference and Jim Crow America’s slicing cut of racial discrimination, both of which placed black and white in separate realms, to the more nationalist notion of line as psychohistorical lineage, reaching simultaneously backward and forward. Nations, writes Anderson in one of several glosses on Renan, “always loom out of an immemorial past, and, still more important, glide into a limitless future.”16 For Du Bois, such analeptic and proleptic temporality—memory’s time—describes what nations are presently understood to be; what race, resignified, can be shown to be; and, most important, what a nation in touch with its racial soul, or a race allowed the dream of national belonging, might someday become. Through the vision of a black tomorrow tempering the whiteness of the Teutonic today, the specter of a divided nation is replaced with the haunting presence of a mixed nation in which, as Souls will later claim, there is nothing alien that is not also familiar, and nothing white that is not in its “very warp and woof” also black (214–15). Finally, “The Conservation of Races” is prophetic of Du Bois’s later work in its conjuring of memory on a spatial axis that shuttles inward and outward, connecting African American identity to an African fatherland in a geographical projection of double time’s double being. Du Bois’s sociological debut, The Philadelphia Negro (1899), is also emblematic of a new, nonlinear perspective on racial progress in its

The Soul of Nationhood    employment of an inductive, empirical method of house-to-house surveys and participant observation in order to mark “wide variations in antecedents, wealth, intelligence, and general efficiency” within the city’s black community—effectively heterogenizing a habitually homogenized and pathologized group.17 The study, Du Bois would later recall, “showed the Negro group as a symptom and not a cause; as a striving, palpitating human group and not an inert, sick body of crime; it traced, analyzed, charted and counted.”18 Against the teleology of Spencerian method, with its guiding biological analogy between the development of the human fetus from simple to complex structures and the social evolution of some races and nations from primitive to civilized status, and against, in Du Bois’s words, Spencer’s “vast generalizations,” “vague statements,” and “fruitless word-twisting,” Du Bois’s early sociological studies sought “the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro and his plight.”19 The practice Du Bois dubbed “my own sociology” included individual studies like The Philadelphia Negro and Souls, as well as the ambitious century-long cycle of studies Du Bois projected as founding director of the Sociological Laboratory at Atlanta University. Though uncompleted, the fourteen published volumes of the Atlanta studies nonetheless comprised a remarkably comprehensive survey of African American life at the turn of the century, animated by what Du Bois called “the idea of a changing developing society rather than a fixed social structure.”20 Focused largely on questions of racial and moral health (in response, Du Bois later explained, to the need to counter a “widespread assumption that the Negro was not adapted to the American climate or to conditions of life under freedom and that he was bound sooner or later to die out”),21 the Atlanta studies also regularly reached out and back to incorporate racial history into their account of African American identity. The Negro American Family (1908), the last of the studies to be edited solely by Du Bois, shared with all of them a concern to depict “the social evolution of the Negro.”22 This task demanded a broad geographical and historical canvas, encompassing preslavery West Africa, Caribbean and American slavery, and contemporary rural and urban areas in Georgia, as well as the new empirical method. If, under slavery, “the recognition of the black family . . . was purely a matter of individual judgment or caprice on the part of the master” (21), the present-day existence of the black family acquires the status of scientific fact,

   The Soul of Nationhood emerging through an array of sociological tables and graphs, architectural plans, household budgets, and minutely observed sketches of individual homes and their inhabitants, including level of education, occupation, the frequency, variety, and presentation of food, degree of personal cleanliness, religious habits, and sexual mores. Few modern groups show a greater internal differentiation of social conditions than the Negro American, and the failure to realize this is the cause of much confusion. In looking for differentiation from the past in Africa and slavery, few persons realize that this involves extreme differentiation in the present. The forward movement of a social group is not the compact march of an army, where the distance covered is practically the same for all, but is rather the straggling of a crowd, where some of whom hasten, some linger, some turn back; some reach far-off goals before others even start, and yet the crowd moves on. (127)

Though Du Bois does not outright reject the vexed schemas of social Darwinist evolution, he exposes them as less definitive in the place to which they assigned African Americans. In the image of a straggling racial crowd that refuses confinement within a single temporal thrust lies not only a critique of dominant social science’s failure to capture the diversity of black experience but also the traces of an environmentalist-culturalist analysis of race and racial achievement, as well as a burgeoning political analysis of the many restraints and obstacles—economic and educational, legal and social, structural and psychic—put in the path of black progress by white culture. Later in the study, retentions from slave culture serve as partial explanation of urban black sexual morality (“their hereditary training in this respect has been lax,” 166) and criminality (“the prevailing weakness of ex-slaves brought up in the communal life of the slave plantation, without acquaintanceship with the institution of private property, is to commit the very crimes which a great centre of commerce like Philadelphia especially abhors,” 249). This history, however, is not the future or even the present. As described in The Negro American Family, the internal differentiation of the sociological object of blackness depends on that particular combination of constancy and fluctuation, connection and discontinuity that characterizes Du Boisean time more generally. For all the impressive scope and minute detail of the Atlanta studies’ collective effort to describe African American social reality, it is in Souls that Du Bois most fully realizes that ambition. Though Souls shares with Du Bois’s oth-

The Soul of Nationhood    er sociological studies a profound dissatisfaction with the law of progress, Souls is uniquely powerful in the ways it circumvents progressivist positivist time. First, Souls undertakes a figurative move into psychic territories that defy linear chronology and instead evoke the looping circuit of trauma and memory, repetition and return. Second, Souls makes a formal move into a modernist narrative style that, in its own migrant movement between voices, disciplines, and genres, itself provides the model for a different ontology of racialized being. Souls’ most well-known figure, as we will see, marshals both moves.

The Double Form of Double Consciousness First published in the August 1897 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, under the title “Strivings of the Negro People,” and reprinted in the first chapter of Souls, Du Bois’s description of double consciousness offers an account of two contending notions of race. In the broadly evolutionist description with which the passage begins, the Negro comes “after the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian,” a “sort of seventh son” whose fate it is to fall last and, in some radical sense, outside of the progressive line of Hegelian world history (5). The line of seven coexists here with the agon of two, as Du Bois immediately and in the same sentence recasts blacks in the United States as the possessors of a uniquely double identity, “born with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world.” Two is in this sense far more than seven. Where seven fixes the meaning of race though apposition, positioning the Negro either as civilization’s origin or afterthought, two opens it through opposition. Although it tragically splits the black subject into “an American, a Negro, two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body,” the oscillating mode of racial twoness refuses to accept their subsequent placing at opposite ends of evolution’s line and in separate realms of national life. Double consciousness divides the black subject precisely in order to imagine the eventual “merge” into a “better and truer self” in which no one half is lost and both coexist in the simultaneous fullness of a national time to come. Only a few pages after the opening description of racial twoness, Du Bois pauses to reconsider Emancipation’s undelivered vision of equality

   The Soul of Nationhood (“physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands,” 11). “Are they all wrong,—all false? No, not that, but each alone was over-simple and incomplete,—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood or the fond imaginings of the other world which does not know and does not want to know our power.” For all the sentence’s implicit allegiance to what I have called the law of seven, the developmentalist doctrines of social evolutionism implied in the figure of “race-childhood,” the sentence is far more indebted to the agon of two, the drama of interlocked self and other that is both the dream and the nightmare of difference. Du Bois is on the surface making a claim, central to Souls, for a combined strategy of equality that will unite bodily integrity under the law, the exercise of the ballot box, and the opportunity of the classroom. This formal claim is also a claiming of form, an exemplary instance of the doublethink on which Du Bois’s thinking of race depends. So in a sentence that is itself a locked embrace of opposites, one race’s dreams of equality are another’s simultaneous desire and fear, recognized in fond imagining precisely because they are denied in fact. “To think dialectically,” explains Jameson in the context of a discussion of that other great stylist of “nascent modernism,” Joseph Conrad, “is to invent a space from which to think . . . two identical yet antagonistic features together all at once.”23 Double consciousness’s doubling of the thing it describes (an American, a Negro) and the form in which it does so is an instance of dialectical thinking, just like the sentence that both parses the divide between the races and locks them together in anticipation of Souls’ concluding apprehension of black and white culture woven together. For all its tragic divisions, double consciousness is also a form of double knowing; sustaining opposites, choosing neither, and thinking through both. Double consciousness’s proleptic time of national belonging, in which it will be “possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American,” significantly goes hand in hand with the analeptic time of global longing, in the form of a racial memory that links blacks in the United States to blacks in Africa. Against the historical depredations of social, spatial, and temporal dislocation (“powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten,” 5) the description of double consciousness opens a project to restore, reconnect, and remember. Through reaching outward to the “mighty Negro past” of

The Soul of Nationhood    Ethiopia and Egypt the black American subject reaches inward into the United States, just as through accessing a global racial memory he or she envisions a different national racial future (6). Double consciousness is not the narrative of globe yielding to nation, nor that of racial identity becoming national identity, another chronological progression from one autonomous entity to another, but an understanding of race, nation, and globe in terms of a quite different plot that takes memory as its mode. Thomas J. Otten credits the popular dissemination of spiritualism and the new psychology of Du Bois’s Harvard mentor William James with providing late nineteenth-century U.S. culture with “the sort of analytical plot that we now think of as Freudian,” in which a “hidden” or lost part of the self is accessed and brought to the surface of consciousness through the painstaking reconstruction of the past.24 In Du Bois’s double consciousness, “the hidden self is thus that part of the personality that preserves the memory of ancient African civilization” (244). “Thus,” Otten concludes, “a psychological theory that seeks to reconstitute the ‘dark,’ ‘shadowy’ layers of the self—a theory that seems to keep faith with traditional African beliefs—becomes the medium for reassessing those ‘shadowy’ parts of the mind hidden deep within dark bodies; thus Africa, the ‘dark’ point of origin, converts into an interior structure through the double self that owes to Africa its powerful gifts.” The simultaneous exteriority and interiority of Africa for Du Bois, its status as a geographical and a psychic place, an outer and an inner territory, begs the question of how such doubled reference can be sustained. The answer lies in Du Bois’s use of the psyche both as the source of a powerful metaphor, in the grand tradition of Freud’s assessment of the “dark continent” of female sexuality, and also as the instantiation of Du Bois’s own analytic method. If the latter frequently metaphorized and feminized Africa, it equally turned to Africa and the racial psyche it symbolized as the means through which to ghost the teleological terms in which both race and nation were thought, thus returning to the past in order to find, or write, a future. This is not to say that Du Bois found freedom from racial evolutionism in race psychology; to the contrary. Double consciousness is not about freedom from one state of being and subsequent entry into another. Instead, double consciousness presents—and this is its peculiar strength— a state of being that is defined by the refusal to choose between opposites.

   The Soul of Nationhood The contending yet colluding discourses I have glossed as the law of seven and the agon of two might equally be named as the structuring copresence of Spencerian progress and Hegelian historical teleology, on the one hand, and Jamesian psychology, on the other. James understood the self to be emblematically split, partially hidden to itself, and subject to various processes of multiplication, fluctuation, and simultaneity as fields and streams of consciousness that offered the very obverse of dominant positivist models of internally homogeneous, comparatively different races and nations each fixed within a particular point or stage.25 James’s treatise The Principles of Psychology (1890) specified no less than four constituents of the self: (1) a “material self,” grounded in the physical body, material possessions, and direct familial relationships; (2) a “spiritual self” whose apparently psychic dimensions also derive from, and are expressed, through the physical world of bodily reflex and response; (3) the “pure Ego,” by which James understood the subject’s sense of continuous, unified personal identity; and (4) a “social self” that is neither material, transcendent, nor stable but instead derives from the changing world of interpersonal relationships. Properly speaking, a man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind . . . We do not show ourselves to our children as to our club-companions, to our customers as to the laborers we employ, to our own masters and employers as to our intimate friends. From this there results what practically is a division of the man into several selves; and this may be a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor, as where one tender to his children is stern to the soldiers or prisoners under his command.26

With its account of the discordant splitting of what we cannot help understanding as a racially privileged social self dispersed across the disparate contexts of social club, home, and place of professional command, James’s description is almost the negative image of Du Bois’s double consciousness. For Du Bois’s split subject, the mental images carried by others—in the myths and falsehoods of postbellum history, politics, and culture; in the generic, homogenizing portraits of late nineteenth-century social science; and in the blind misapprehension produced by the racial veil that rends America in two—all tell a singularly unchanging story of black in-

The Soul of Nationhood    feriority. Within this particular looking glass, the figure of the black can only be the same distortion over and over again: “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”27 Through history, specifically a racialized form of historical memory troped as Africa, Du Bois finds the mechanism by which to represent, if not fully resolve, the discontinuities of the black subject’s misrecognition of himself. Whereas James’s subject lives the privilege of his multiple identities as a form of endlessly proliferating recognition within the single historical moment of his own arrived identity (he is one thing at home, another at work, still another at play), Du Bois’s divided black subject can achieve recognition only by returning to another historical moment (indeed to several, as Souls’ spanning of “a mighty Negro past,” slavery, Emancipation, and Jim Crow suggests). Whether James’s mystical philosophy of mind and being provided a template for Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, as several critics have suggested, or whether, as David Levering Lewis claims, the “psychic purgatory” of Du Bois’s own racial identity was all that was needed to produce a theory of the divided self, one fact remains.28 Divided within itself, linked outside itself, endlessly moving between the space and time of the self and the other, double consciousness is both the ground and the figure, the philosophical condition and the expressive modality, of the double politics for which Souls and Du Bois’s later works are famous. In a stringent counterargument, Adolph Reed charges that the idea of double consciousness “by and large disappeared from Du Bois’s writing after 1903.” Reed credits this fact to Du Bois’s 1904 acknowledgment of August Weismann’s rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and subsequent dismissal of what Du Bois called the “older and cruder doctrine of [Lamarckian] heredity.” “By 1904,” writes Reed, Du Bois “had begun revising his thinking about race in ways that were incompatible with the neo-Lamarckian resonances surrounding the double consciousness idea.”29 In Reed’s narrative, the idea left behind by Du Bois has been perversely reanimated by several generations of political historians, psychologists, philosophers, and literary critics in order to serve their own purposes, ranging from 1920s integrationism to 1960s nationalism to 1980s academic race theory. Scholars in the last group warrant particularly severe criticism for having disconnected double consciousness from the intellectual history of early twentieth-century social science and Progressive-era politics, only to

   The Soul of Nationhood link it through “assertions and intimations,” “inference,” and conjecture to other intellectual genealogies, notably the work of Hegel, Emerson, Royce, and most of all, James, in an effort to foreground the psychological dimensions of Du Bois’s idea.30 Du Bois’s understanding of race at the time of Souls was certainly that of a turn-of-the-century U.S. social scientist, described by George Stocking as hereditarian, Lamarckian, and convinced that “complex cultural phenomena were carried in the ‘blood,’ if only as ‘instincts’ or ‘temperamental proclivities.’ ”31 But while there are clear traces of this social evolutionism and the biologized notion of culture and identity it underwrote in the notion of double consciousness, it is not purely the product of social evolutionist thinking. Double consciousness is less a specter haunting black studies than the blueprint for a spectral method, locked in a dialogue between a thinking of the past and some emergent alternative. Double consciousness thus demands the discernment not only of its famously warring identities but equally of a set of competing, colluding, co-present discourses. The biological and the cultural, the social and the psychic, the material and the metaphoric, the historical and the spiritual, the forward-moving plot of racial progress and the backward-moving gaze of racial memory are all paradoxically and explosively condensed into this fraught figure. Souls’ oftcited polydiscursivity is the dialectical formalism of double consciousness writ large; a persistent twinning of such seemingly opposed yet intimately entwined idioms as the sociological and the literary, the ethnographic and the psychological, the cultural and the economic, the political and the personal, the prophetic and the elegiac, the manifesto and the memoir, and, perhaps most famously, the juxtaposed fragments of European poetry and slave sorrow songs that open every chapter.32 The convergence of so much into so little perhaps explains the staying power of the figure of double consciousness in scholarship on black politics, literature, and culture. Such rhetorical overdetermination and conceptual excess implicitly grasps or forges connections between seemingly separate discourses, ideas, and even distinct zones and times of existence. Double consciousness expresses an idea of the psyche—divided within, connected without—that maps not just racial and national consciousness but global consciousness too. No longer “before” or “after,” “inside” or “outside” one another, nation and globe, like nation and race, operate in a mutually sustaining fluctuation between seemingly opposed yet secretly conjoined states of being. This process is analogous to what

The Soul of Nationhood    Nahum Dimitri Chandler has called Du Bois’s “economy of desedimentation,” by which he understands a process in which a previously essentialized category, namely, “race,” is at once used and altered, deployed and evacuated in such a way as to produce a “double and redoubled discourse” and thus to “elaborate a sense of being that in itself could not be reduced to some simple essence.”33 Race, as Du Bois imagines it, and nation, as he articulates it (both in the expressive sense of giving it voice and the Gramscian sense of linking or constellating it to other categories of being),34 are fantasy objects, kernels around which certain structures of desire take shape. They are also each subject to the kind of formation I have called fantasmatic. Fantasmatic categories are in part hidden to themselves, at once present and absent, bounded and unbounded, within a particular state of being and at or beyond its limits, hence located in one space and time (territorial boundaries, chronological sequence) yet continually expanding out to others. The fantasmatic dimensions of Du Bois’s racial and national identifications are perhaps most clearly visible in the figure of the sphinx with which Souls begins and ends. In its first appearance, at the close of the description of double consciousness, “the shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx” (6). The final pages of Souls similarly turn to the extranational space and time of world history in order to make the point again that the place currently occupied by blacks in the United States cannot be where they are doomed to remain and is not even where they always were. The silently growing assumption of this age is that the probation of races is past, and that the backward races of today are of proven inefficiency and not worth the saving. Such an assumption is the arrogance of peoples irreverent toward Time and ignorant of the deeds of men. A thousand years ago such an assumption would have made it difficult for the Teuton to prove his right to life. Two thousand years ago such dogmatism, readily welcome, would have scouted the idea of blond races ever leading civilization. So wofully [sic] unorganized is sociological knowledge that the meaning of progress, the meaning of “swift” and “slow” in human doing, and the limits of human perfectibility, are veiled, unanswered sphinxes on the shores of science. (214)

For U.S. pro-slavery scientists of the mid- and late nineteenth century, ancient Egypt was a once Caucasian, now diluted and degenerate nation in which blacks were understood to have originally occupied their appropri-

   The Soul of Nationhood ate places as slaves and servants. But for Du Bois and his Ethiopianist contemporaries, Egypt was the very bedrock of black history and the stone sphinx was perhaps its most privileged symbol.35 Blacks’ claim to racial recognition or the permanence of a race decidedly worth the saving rests, in Du Bois’s account, on a familiar tactic of dialectical inversion (what blacks are now is what Teutons once were), as well as on an equally recognizable temporality that looks outside the moment and place of the present. Here, as in many of his other writings, Du Bois can be seen to share with early sociology, anthropology, psychology, and psychoanalysis a complex negotiation of race and time that marshals developmentalist plots of identity and history only to simultaneously disrupt them by reference to what or whom they leave behind.36 These remainders, of which Souls is a veritable catalogue, ghost progress with its others. The sphinxes that open and close Souls similarly replace the inherently racialized time line of progress with an alternative iconography and chronology of race. Via a version of haunted history that relies not on chronological sequence but rather on the temporal oscillation, geographical convergence, and uncanny return associated with the work of the racial psyche, Du Bois’s sphinxes are made to break away from their own place on the world-historical time line and instead to install the imaginative connection that brings Egypt, the territory of racial memory, to America, the territory of national belonging. In this connective reach the sphinxes that flank the pages of Souls also conjure a pair of limit points: (1) the undeniable loss of a once great, now vanished “mighty Negro past”; and (2) the impossibility of any infallible, definitive, eternal knowledge of race through science alone. In representing those limit points the sphinxes open a zone in which what is absent is also fleetingly present and what is lost is also partially restored—if only in the realm of representation. A form of time (memory) and of space (diaspora) that seeks to connect divergent points, the Egyptian sphinxes are also a form of representation, one that takes linkage through movement as its animating principle. The sphinxes, in other words, are allegories. As allegories they reveal the entwined registers of time and space that characterize both double consciousness and Du Bois’s political project more generally. As emblematized in the sphinxes, fantasmatic form is also a question of form as itself a medium of connection.

The Soul of Nationhood   

Memory’s Textuality: The Psychic Work of Allegory Allegory traditionally denotes a form of interpretation in which two parallel, temporally distinct levels of signification are read in such a way that one is understood to provide the key to the other. One level is prior; the other a secondary repetition. Allegory marks the presence of a kind of time in which the past outlives itself, a time that demands the subject return to the past as it surges into, and becomes contemporaneous with, the present. Hence Benjamin’s claim, alongside the characterization of history as “irresistible decay,” that “allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.”37 Allegory’s palimpsestically layered time has a talismanic force in Souls from the Egyptian sphinx onward and in fact forms one of the text’s leitmotifs. Allegory is the expressive modality of Du Bois’s racial psyche, the primary formal structure through which, as Jameson puts it, the “repressed and buried reality of this fundamental history” is “restored to the surface of the text.”38 Souls is indebted to two types of allegory: (1) the classic medieval allegory that, as Benjamin explains, closes the gap between past and present, history and future, the first level of signification and the second; and (2) the allegory Benjamin terms “baroque,” which exploits that gap to reveal a character Benjamin calls “dialectical.”39 Within the first type of allegory, “Egypt” denotes bondage and implies a freedom to come in the prefigurative fulfillment of time. It is in this sense that chapter VII of Souls describes Georgia’s rural Dougherty County, in the heart of the Black Belt, as “the Egypt of the Confederacy,” home to “perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew” (100–101). Now, Du Bois observes, the land is a mere echo of its former self, a ghostly geography of phantoms, remnants, and ruins that serves as a reminder that all that was once there was “built upon a groan” (102). With such foundations a kingdom must in time sway and fall. The masters moved to Macon and Augusta, and left only the irresponsible overseers on the land. And the result is such ruin as this, the Lloyd “home-place”:—great waving oaks, a spread of lawn, myrtles and chestnuts, all ragged and wild; a solitary gate-post standing where once was a castle entrance; an old rusty anvil lying amid rotting bellows and wood in the ruins of a blacksmith shop; a wide rambling old mansion, brown and dingy, filled now with the grandchildren of the slaves who once wait-

   The Soul of Nationhood ed on its tables; while the family of the master has dwindled to two lone women, who live in Macon and feed hungrily off the remnants of an earldom. So we ride on, past phantom gates and falling homes,—past the once flourishing farms of the Smiths, the Gandys, and the Lagores,—and find all dilapidated and half ruined, even there where a solitary white woman, a relic of other days, sits alone in state among miles of Negroes and rides to town in her ancient coach each day. This was indeed the Egypt of the Confederacy. (102)

Although the passage describes the white ruins of the antebellum South, it cannot fail to conjure the larger ruin of Emancipation for blacks. As this chapter and the following one make clear in their portraits of the devastating poverty of sharecropping, wage-labor, and tenancy, passage from the second Egypt has brought only destroyed dreams, broken promises, “the slavery of debt” (128), and the recapitulation of that which had supposedly been left behind. In contrast to medieval allegory’s temporal teleology of prefiguration and fulfillment, the circular rhythms of a slavery that never ends signals the presence of a different kind of allegory, one that is less indebted to eschatology’s time than to memory’s time, the recursive movement that structures Du Bois’s racial psyche. The passage is doubly allegorical as it pits the version of allegory in which Egyptian bondage evokes deliverance against the ruined form of a space in which time moves not teleologically forward but endlessly backward to return, through the repetitive sounding of the lexicon of decay, to the moment of ruination and the word of remembrance. Allegory in Du Bois, as in Benjamin and Jameson, is the vehicle of history. In Du Bois’s case, allegory is furthermore what allows for history’s double life: history as the cause of the decay and disorganization that haunts the black subject (history in the Benjaminian mode of ruin); and history as the very means of that subject’s deliverance (history in the Jamesonian mode of revolution). What the lived history of slavery’s ruination and Jim Crow’s deprivation take away, the remembered history of Ethiopia the Shadowy and Egypt the Sphinx will restore, in the fulfillment and fullness of a time when it will be possible to be both Negro and American, both American and African, and, looking forward to Du Bois’s later pan-racial politics, both African American and part of the global color line that “belts the world.”40 Perhaps the necessary interdependence of history’s two levels—history as what is lived and history as what is

The Soul of Nationhood    remembered/redeemed—is what it finally means to imagine history as allegory. History, in other words, is a form of representation whose two levels or two subjective modes are not chronologically sequenced or hierarchically positioned so much as deeply imbricated with one another. In this sense, history itself might be subject to the double form of double consciousness. In his essay “On the Concept of History” (1940), Benjamin situates the historical past on the knife’s edge between two modes of being in time: on the one hand, the historicist-melancholic fantasy of going back to the past “the way it really was,” telling time in a sequential loop “like the beads of a rosary”; and on the other hand, the historical materialist’s alternative, in which the past periodically breaks into the present in a fashion reminiscent of allegory’s dialectic. “Appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger” and further “grasp[ing] the constellation into which his own era has entered, along with a very specific earlier one,” the historical materialist enters double time or, in Benjamin’s famous phrase, “a conception of the present as now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.”41 Through memory that exceeds mere repetition, the future opens. Another influential discussion of allegory casts further light on the dialectical nature of Souls ’ concept of history as memory. Paul de Man’s 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality” returned to Benjamin’s “Allegory and Trauerspiel ” in order to present allegory as the rhetorical site for a fiction or fantasy of history. De Man contrasts allegory’s failed staging of the desire to live in history’s continuum to irony. Irony comes closer to the pattern of factual experience and recaptures some of the factitiousness of human existence as a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self. Essentially the mode of the present, it knows neither memory nor prefigurative duration, whereas allegory exists entirely within an ideal time that is never here and now but always a past or an endless future. Irony is a synchronic structure, while allegory appears as a successive mode capable of engendering duration as the illusion of a continuity that it knows to be illusionary. Yet the two modes, for all their profound distinctions in mood and structure, are the two faces of the same fundamental experience of time.42

De Man’s essay certainly privileges the rhetorical over the historical to the point of, in Doris Sommer’s excellent account, “disappear[ing] the historical temporality Benjamin associated with allegory as a fiction of rheto-

   The Soul of Nationhood ric.”43 Reading de Man through Du Bois, we cannot help wondering how irony’s simulation of a divided self ’s temporal isolation connects to race, to what extent allegory’s “engendering” of duration in fact depends on gender, and finally, how both allegory and irony, gender and race combine to provide “two faces” of an experience of time that is also an apprehension of history. As the rhetorical mode that, in de Man’s words, “takes us back to the predicament of the conscious subject,” irony is Souls’ preferred register for describing the travails of an explicitly racialized, implicitly masculinized double consciousness. Recall chapter IV’s concluding lament in which Du Bois recounts his return to the rural Tennessee community where he had taught school for two summers only to find a wearying repetition of marriages, births and deaths, the constancy of debt and discrimination, his favorite student killed by overwork and despair, and economic struggle unalleviated for all. “How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies? How many heartfuls of sorrow shall balance a bushel of wheat? How hard a thing is life to the lowly, and yet how human and real! And all this life and love and strife and failure,—is it the twilight of nightfall or the flush of some faint-dawning day? Thus sadly musing, I rode to Nashville in the Jim Crow car” (62). Allegory belongs to Josie, irony to Du Bois. A similar division of labor structures the description of double consciousness, which yokes the divided racial subject’s strictly ironic apprehension of “a peculiar sensation . . . this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” to the imaginary territories of an America to come and an Ethiopia and Egypt that were; forms of allegorical time that find their expression in feminized bodies and geographies.44 Though Souls is punctuated, often piercingly, by an irony that details the sudden falling of the veil over one who imagines he has risen above it, the text is far more indebted to the diachronic sweep of allegory, in which it finds the mirror image of its unceasing temporal fluctuations between a distant racial history and a nascent racial future. Allegory provides a vehicle through which opposites or, as Benjamin puts it, “antinomies” can be sustained,45 both the “twilight of nightfall” into which those left behind by progress fall and “the flush of some faint-dawning” day when black subjects will have meaning beyond that temporalized color

The Soul of Nationhood    line. Some version of this oscillating, allegorical time runs throughout Du Bois’s work, from the “black tomorrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic to-day” in “The Conservation of Races” to the later messianic history of works like The Negro, Darkwater, The Gift of Black Folk, and Black Reconstruction. Even Du Bois’s sociological studies attempt to resignify race by interrupting the temporal line of racial progress with the minutely documented portrait of differential advancement that causes some members of the race to surge ahead while others fall behind, in an empirical version of allegory’s dialectic that never forgets the gendered locus (home, hearth, womb) of racial meaning. The very movement of time that promises to bring new meaning to race for Du Bois is often secured by the deployment of a relatively fixed typology of gendered reproduction. If Souls’ attempt to imagine a new spatiotemporal order for race and nation enlists a distinctively psychic language that voices the split, ironic, and otherwise wounded subjectivity of those (male) racial subjects left unrecognized by progress, the text equally returns to a figural mode that substitutes reproduction or, more precisely, allegories of reproduction for progress as the mark and measure of racial meaning. Through a series of gendered figures and places Souls indicts the social evolutionist time line and the developmentalist model of race it implies and subsequently reimagines a protonationalist, incipiently global color line linked to a different model of race as transgeographical and transhistorical kinship. While Josie emblematizes the former task, her dead body the silent reproach to a progress that moves forward only for some, Du Bois’s deceased great-great-grandmother represents the latter through her lullaby “Do bana coba.” The lullaby is a living retention passed over years and miles from parent to child, the West African coast to the Hudson valley. As described in Souls’ final chapter, the ancestral sorrow song enacts a timespace that is the very obverse of progress—lateral not linear, analeptic not proleptic—yet is nonetheless equally dependent on gender for its expressive medium. In a final example of the oscillation between racial movement and gendered still life that structures Souls, the second chapter punctuates its chronological history of Emancipation’s first decade and the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau with the following tableau.

   The Soul of Nationhood Two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate in his eyes;—and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at that white master’s command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, aye, too, at his behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the world, only to see her dark boy’s limbs scattered to the winds by midnight marauders riding after “cursed Niggers.” These were the saddest sights of that woful [sic] day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing figures of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and hating, their children’s children live today. (26)

What could be more allegorical than this moment of historical condensation and its form of convoluted historical time, returning to the past only to repeat it in the future in a ceaseless cycle of hatred? In their ruined forms and historical uncanniness, these “passing figures of the present-past” recall Benjamin’s model of allegory as the equivalent in the realm of thought to ruins in the realm of things. These figures’ emplotment in the necessarily raced and gendered story of slavery further reveals a peculiar doubleness that is, for Du Bois as for Benjamin and Jameson, the essence of allegorical representation. In the case of the unnatural couple of Southern gentleman and slave mother, allegorical figuration provides the rationale for the “cleft between the white and black South” and, in their mingled blood, suggests the impossibility of such absolute division, simultaneously accounting for distinction and connection in a characteristically Du Boisean gesture. On a more general level, the ideological work of gender in Souls is to allegorize an entire history of past and present dispossession through a series of ravaged and desirous women. Like Josie’s thoughtless sister Lizzie, who “bestowed herself on the tempter, and brought home a nameless child” (58); or the mythological figure of the fleet-footed Atalanta whose surrender to a moment of “lawless lust” with her pursuer Hippomenes provides Du Bois with an allegory for the fatal desire animating the newly industrial, money-hungry city of Atlanta (65); the slave mother who “laid herself low to [her master’s] lust,” is positioned at the heart of those “ideologies of gender” that Hazel Carby has shown to structure Souls from beginning to end.46 As their syntactical guilt suggests (“bestowed herself,”

The Soul of Nationhood    “laid herself low”), these women embody the weakening of the race. Similarly, Booker T. Washington’s acceptance of segregation, disenfranchisement, and strictly industrial education, as opposed to the colleges and universities so dear to Du Bois’s vision of selective racial advancement, could only be adequately condemned through the wholesale feminization of Washington as a collaborator and compromiser who “counsels a silent submission to civic inferiority such as is bound to sap the manhood of any race in the long run” (45). Gender clearly allegorizes racial destruction throughout Souls. Yet as a specific experience of time, structured by incessant movement between past and present, gendered allegories also contain the model of that redemptive history foretold by Egypt the Sphinx, whose recollection allows a masculine racial subject to claim national and global recognition. It is in this regard telling that Du Bois concludes Souls, his own attempt at racial memory as the grounds for future national belonging, with the plea that “this my book fall not still-born into the world-wilderness” (217). If the text begins with Du Bois’s own psychic divisions and double consciousness, it ends with his arrogation of the allegorized discourse of reproductive futurity, his inscription as literal bearer of memory. Du Bois’s simultaneous status as race man and race mother is not the final resolution of the contradictions that structure Souls (division vs. connection, uplift vs. memory, racial psyche vs. gendered allegory) so much as their final doubling, a reminder of the dialectical formalism that is both Souls’ form and its message. In Souls’ racialized version of national allegory, it is race itself that is subject to the “breaks and heterogeneities,” “range of distinct meanings or messages,” and “chang[ing of] places” that Jameson defines as the characteristic structure of modern, as opposed to medieval, allegory.47 But in Souls the changing meaning of race—that category that the text attempts precisely to modernize—is enabled by the fixed figuration of the gendered body.48 If, as Jameson argues, the structure of national allegory is consciously present in Third World texts and unconscious in First World texts, in Souls the structure of national allegory is further subjected to a kind of double consciousness. Split between one order of meaning and another (race and gender but also nation and globe), Du Bois’s national allegory ceaselessly strives to unite them without ever altogether fusing

   The Soul of Nationhood their differences. With what Jenny Sharpe calls allegory’s “superimposed levels of meaning,” distilled into metaphor, and its simultaneously “sequential relation of signs to anterior signs,” distilled into metonymy,49 allegory mirrors the fluctuations of Du Boisean timespace and the version of political identification it invites. I have argued that double consciousness provides the philosophical ground and the expressive figure of Du Bois’s unique blend of national and global identifications. Double consciousness has a second life in Du Bois’s career-spanning figure of the color line, which is also both national and global, both dividing (as the line of racial discrimination within the nation) and connecting (as the line of pan-racial affiliation that belts the world). It is equally possible to read Du Bois’s career-spanning strategy of allegory as inheriting the mantle of double consciousness, allegory as the long formal shadow of the new thinking about race, nation, and globe that double consciousness gestures toward. In Du Bois’s work, from Souls onward, national allegory takes global form. Reading through these conjunctural linkages, we might reconsider the apparent paradox of Souls’ turn to a markedly global, cosmopolitan language in order to express African American national identity. Defined as an ideology of border-crossing, cosmopolitanism shapes Souls’ vision of history (in which ancient Egypt, precolonial Africa, and the early twentieth-century United States are all linked in a racial continuum), of literature (in which the ideal free black subject can aspire, as Du Bois himself does, to sit with Shakespeare and Aurelius “above the veil”), and of literary form itself (Souls is notable for the border-crossing of its multidisciplinary, polygeneric form). Just as allegory is the formal expression of the conjoined nationalism and globalism that is the political unconscious of Souls, so too is the text’s cosmopolitan form the symptom and trace of the same. Cosmopolitan in its form, national in its address, and marked throughout by processes of movement, be they those of migrancy, memory, or the allegory that is their textual double, Souls emerges as a uniquely hybrid national narrative that returns us again to the question of what it means to move on. With its ghostly landscape of loss, from the opening announcement of “buried” material that lies within these pages to the death of Josie to Du Bois’s infant son eulogized in “Of the Passing of the First-Born” to the tragic lynching story “Of the Coming of John” to the final fear of

The Soul of Nationhood    stillbirth, Souls melancholically encrypts loss even as it simultaneously seeks recognition of loss. Anne Anlin Cheng has described the process in which the nonwhite subject incorporates a dominant white other as “racial melancholia.” In this condition, identity entails a slippage between two apparently distinct yet mutually constitutive states of being, namely, being a subject and contemplating oneself as an object. In melancholia, the grieving ego literally takes in and even becomes that object whose loss it cannot bear. For the nonwhite subject who attempts national identification, the dominant national self and the model minority national self are the lost objects that must be taken in, with the end result that, in Cheng’s words, “I am constituted by an other who finally must, and must not, be me.”50 As the racialized subject performs its loss, exteriorizes its loss, it demands a place in national culture. Melancholia thus both objectifies the ego (the ego as the lost national self) and subjectifies it (the ego as the potential claimant of recognition emerging in the very rift of the “disturbance or confusion between the griever and the thing lost-but-taken-inas-the-self,” 122–23). “Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here” (214). Voiced through racial history, racial memory, indeed, through what we can almost call racial time, Du Bois’s plaint of loss and plea for national belonging can seem uncomfortably consonant with some of the more homogenizing histories of cultural nationalism, including those that assert an experiential truth of race. Yet in their melancholic structure Du Bois’s plea and plaint might also be read as something less ontologizing. Writing in the context of Latino/Latina protestors singing the U.S. national anthem in Spanish, Butler evokes a national performative that might “fracture the ‘we’ in such a way that no single nationalism could take hold on the basis of that fracture.”51 That race provides Du Bois the voice through which another “I” speaks, and that this “I” is further constituted as a transhistorical “we” stretching beyond the borders of the nation, suggests that, like nation, race is fractured. Race entails a history of hegemony linked to homogenizing logics as well as a history of contestation in which it is rendered heterogeneous, both topologically and temporally open. Using race to contest racism remains a paradox in contemporary critical theory. The internal volatility of the concept sits uneasily alongside assessments of race as inherently fixed and fixing, what

   The Soul of Nationhood Gilroy in Postcolonial Melancholia calls a “reified” and “totemic” concept of race that prevails in one strand of U.S. oppositional discourse (145). If, in Du Bois’s case, the articulation of racial nationalism went hand in hand with racial globalism, if the “Negro nation within the nation” coincided with the “color line that belts the world,” such doublings have become more difficult to conceive, and not just because contemporary criticism has grown wary of the romance of race. The divided logic that deems nations as territories and globes as flows, nations first and globes after, nations as the past and globes as the future, finds itself confounded by the shape and style of Du Bois’s national-global identifications, which call on the nation to be the very thing exiled to its margins—the internal minority, the external community. As the mark of a mobile style of political imagination, often articulated through the terms of imaginary kinship and common grief, race resembles nation. And like nation, it cannot be entirely excised from contemporary analysis. The fantasmatic structure I have traced in Du Bois’s early writings enables a process through which the black subject identifies as itself through looking back and reaching out to others, to a larger world, and to memory’s world within. To point to the fantasmatic structure of political identities is not to dismiss politics as fantasy but instead to ask how the apparatus of desire structures our experience of the real. To further elucidate the relation between the fantasmatic form of Du Bois’s politics, the psychic structure of racial melancholia, and the formal mode of allegory in which I have detected its work, let us return to Benjamin. In his reflections on the Trauerspiel, or seventeenth-century German mourning play, Benjamin contrasts the “spasmodic chronological progression” of tragedy to the Trauerspiel ’s “spatial continuum.”52 In two subsequent fragments, unpublished during his lifetime and recently translated into English, Benjamin again invokes “the certitude of a higher existence” that sustains earlier religious-eschatological narratives and tragedy’s heroic time of fulfillment (individual deeds, destruction, and death).53 By contrast, in the Trauerspiel: [E]vents are allegorical schemata, symbolic mirror-images of a different game. We are transported into that game by death. The time of the mourning play is not fulfilled, but it is nevertheless finite. It is nonindividual, but without historical universality. The mourning play is in every respect a hybrid form. The universal-

The Soul of Nationhood    ity of its time is spectral, not mythic . . . thus, the mourning play presents us not with the image of a higher existence but only with one of two mirror-images, and its continuation is not less schematic than itself. The dead become ghosts. The mourning play exhausts artistically the historical idea of repetition. (57)

The mourning play exhausts repetition not because it does not repeat the losses of the past but because in repeating them, it does not aim to end them. Death is not its end, as it is for tragedy, but merely the entry point from this world to the next. This “spectral” time finds its mirror image in hybrid form. If tragedy’s individual-sequential “unified drama” fixes time and language, the “nonunified drama” of the mourning play causes the past to return in ghostly forms that point back to the world of loss even as they would messianically redeem it. Where tragedy represents “style, in the sense of a unity beyond feelings,” the mourning play distributes its affective resonances.54 “Sorrow is nothing more than a single tone on the scale of the feelings, and so we may say that there is no mourning play pure and simple, since the diverse feelings of the comic, the terrible, the horrifying, and many others each take their turn on the floor.” Allegory is a further subset of the spectral signification associated with the Trauerspiel and yet another realm in which multiple registers are sustained. Where the Trauerspiel mourns with an eye toward the future, allegory for Benjamin melancholizes. Mourning reanimates the world of loss; Benjaminian allegory contemplates it as ruin. Allegory is the encounter with or embrace of the dead as the dead. As Benjamin explains in “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” “if the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power.”55 Though grounded in a particular time, place, and genre, Benjamin’s model for historical-political consciousness in the Trauerspiel essays can be contrasted to other contexts in which what he calls spectral time organizes national identification. Allegory, as I have tried to trace it in Souls, is a little more subject to the phantom work of mourning, a little more capable of raising the dead, and a little more open to the “spatial continuum” in which, for Benjamin, the dead line of historical repetition can find a new future. Here allegory is also melancholic in the psychoanalytic sense of bringing the outside in and the inside out, the past to the present and

   The Soul of Nationhood the present to the past. More than serving as the formal equivalent of historical time, allegory’s function in Du Bois is to model the linked and disjunctive time and space in which a certain kind of modernist historical figuration finds its code. When this is the modernity understood to have been made by slavery, imperialism, and their aftermath, there is a particularly haunted quality to figuration’s turn to what Benjamin calls a “spatial continuum” in the course of expressing temporal progression. Going forward and backward, reaching inward and outward, to the places of racial memory and of pan-racial decolonization, what in Benjamin’s terms we can call breaking sequence and embracing spatiality, are not only political projects for Du Bois but also formal ones. In them lies what Jameson calls the “ideology of form” and even an ideology of identificatory form in which the “symbolic messages transmitted to us by the coexistence of various sign systems” are the “traces or anticipations” not just of modes of production but of modalities of identification too.56 Here the futuredirected allegory that subtends Du Bois’s Souls demands to be read in dialogue with the genre that hybridizes across the text, with its various forms of history, memoir, manifesto, eulogy, and fiction, and its dominant registers of melancholia and mourning. By way of conclusion, I turn to Du Bois’s novels, in whose more homogeneous generic codes another formal structure of futurity emerges.

Novel History, Novel Politics Du Bois’s favorite of all his works, Dark Princess, is both a self-proclaimed “romance” and a familiar national allegory in novelistic form. Du Bois’s novel certainly shares with the Latin American “national romances” studied by Sommer a nineteenth-century bildung of identity and work and an essentially allegorical plot of two representative lovers in whose union a larger project of national consolidation can be imagined. For young Matthew Towns, recently expelled along with his fellow black classmates from the University of Manhattan medical school and now on his way to Europe, “America had disappeared.”57 The plot of becoming national is narrated by means of a parallel plot of becoming global that culminates in Matthew’s eventual union with a royal-born, socialist-inclined, Indian princess. Dark Princess’s version of what Sommer terms “an erotics of pol-

The Soul of Nationhood    itics” produces not only the “passionate patriotism” she describes but a passionate globalism too, thanks to the allegorical structure or movement of desire (6, 33). By “set[ting] desire into a spiral or zigzagging motion inside a double structure that keeps projecting the narrative into the future as eroticism and patriotism pull each other along,” the foundational novels that Sommer calls “dialectical” and “double-dealing” romances enact a constant shuttling between seemingly opposed yet secretly entwined orders of reference (47, 50, 51). If the novel, in Anderson’s phrase, provided the “technical means for imagining the kind of political community that was the nation,”58 Dark Princess’s union of novel, allegory, and romance provides a similar imaginative medium for the dialectical political forms of a nationalist globalism and a global, pan-racial nationalism. At the Berlin dinner given by Princess Kautilya for a representative sampling of the darker world, including Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Egyptians, and Arabs, Matthew is made to feel his probationary status in this company. Unlike the Princess, who claims “Pan-Africa belongs logically with Pan-Asia,” the other guests openly question Matthew’s claim to culture, whether his own or that of the Europe they so flawlessly assimilate, “talk[ing] art in French, literature in Italian, politics in German, and everything in clear English” (19–20). Intensely wounded by the clear racism these cosmopolitan elites bear toward him and his people, “the shadow of a color line within a color line” (22), Matthew responds with an almost unconscious performance of his own past. “He saw his father in the old log church by the river, leading the moaning singers in the Great Song of Emancipation. Clearly, plainly he heard that mighty voice and saw the rhythmic swing and beat of the thick brown arm. Matthew swung his arm; and beat the table; the silver tinkled. Silence dropped on all, and suddenly Matthew found himself singing” (26). Literally repeating his father, Matthew momentarily restores the phallic voice and body that the dinner conversation, as much as his twenty-five years of American life, have taken from him. Swinging an arm that is his, his father’s, and that of slaves everywhere, Matthew enters the zone that slavery always seems to enforce on Du Bois: the present-past. To universal acclaim he sings, “Go down Moses! / Way down into the Egypt land / Tell Old Pharaoh / To let my people go!” Like the Egyptian sphinxes that flank Souls, the Egypt referenced in Matthew’s “Great Song” offers the redemptively oscillatory

   The Soul of Nationhood time and space of allegorical representation as a response to the imprisoning confines of racial stereotype. Such movement finds its analogue in a host of other moments whose collective work is to place the national and the global in dialectical relationship as the joint conditions of a new racial erotics and politics. Appearing to Matthew first as a “wildly beautiful phantasy,” Kautilya enters the narrative at the crossroads of desire and memory (8). “He could never quite recapture the first ecstasy of the picture, and yet always even the memory thrilled and revived him. Never after that first glance was he or the world quite the same. First and above all came that sense of color: into this world of pale yellowish and pinkish parchment, that absence or negation of color, came, suddenly, a glow of golden brown skin.” The “phantasy” the Princess awakens is the dominant register of the novel, the affective complement to its generic mix of allegory and romance. If the content of the fantasy is color, the dark world that the Princess embodies and speaks for, the structure of the fantasy is time, the time of memory. As Laplanche and Pontalis explain, we are accustomed after Freud to read fantasy in terms of its repressed or unconscious content, that is, to read fantasy as content. To consider instead the form such content takes and the psychic work it does is to enter the realm of the moving zone Laplanche and Pontalis define as the fantasmatic (une fantasmatique).59 As a form of memory, Matthew’s “phantasy” of the Princess is a moment he experiences as perpetually lost yet regularly relived. Given that the Princess is Matthew’s fantasy, the fantasmatic structure of fantasy demands that he, in turn, be hers. Subject must become object and object subject in a relationship of mutual constitution. Toward the end of the novel, one of the Princess’s royal advisors and protectors will make a final attempt to dissuade Matthew from going to her and sullying the bloodline of Bwodpur forever by dismissing the Princess’s love for him as “a self-indulgent phantasy” (299). The repetition of phantasy here (the only other time the word appears in the novel) registers on a textual level what the love plot narrates on an affective level—the lovers’ doubleness. Matthew and Kautilya are mirror images of one another, two halves in whose synthesis lies the possibility of being not only Negro and American but also Negro and Indian, and beyond that, being racial, national, and global all at once. In this story, a familiar one throughout Du Bois’s work, love is the modality in

The Soul of Nationhood    which politics is lived and allegorical romance, naturally, is its form.60 The lovers will be reunited and parted several times in the novel, and each occurrence will cement the fantasmatic structure of a love (can there be another kind?) that causes them to experience their selves as their beloved other. “You and I, apart but eternally one,” Kautilya tells Matthew as they ready themselves to leave one another to work for “the emancipation of the world” (261). Posnock has identified as a “dialectical cosmopolitanism” in Dark Princess, “a cosmopolitanism structured by a dialectic of universal and particular, American and ‘New Negro,’ nationalism and internationalism” (195). For Posnock, Matthew Towns, Exile (as he introduces himself to Kautilya in their first Berlin meeting), and W. E. B. Du Bois, black intellectual, are two sides of the same powerful drive, typical of the modernist individual, to burst the confines of national and racial identities. Read as “a fantasy of release” Dark Princess joins other African American works such as Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Quicksand, and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun as what Posnock terms an “antirace race text,” an expression of yearning for a life beyond the color line that tropes freedom from race and collective racial politics through cosmopolitan aesthetics, particularly “the subjectivism of Du Bois’s modernist technique of a central consciousness,” and equally cosmopolitan pleasures (71, 69, 167). By contrast, I read Dark Princess’s attention to interiority and the inner life of repressed desires—what Posnock glosses as “the psychic work” the novel performs (147)—not as the antithesis of politics or a brief for its sublation into a purely aesthetic-erotic freedom but rather as one of the primary expressive modes of a thoroughly material politics of national and global identification. By virtue of an interiority associated with novelistic focalization, as well as with a form of allegorical figuration linked here to romance but present in a variety of generic forms in Du Bois’s earlier writings and performing its own kind of psychic work, Dark Princess provides an entry into the inner life, the fantasy formation, of politics. The notoriously erotic relationship that is to Posnock the clearest illustration of passion’s depoliticizing effects is, in fact, an equally clear illustration of the libidinal structure of race’s political unconscious. The first morning of their Chicago idyll finds the lovers in Matthew’s

   The Soul of Nationhood garret filled with European culture and oriental objets, of which Kautilya is the most resplendent. The room practically literalizes Du Bois’s earlier dream in Souls to “sit with Shakespeare” (Hamlet indeed figures prominently in Matthew’s self-education). But this place whose eroticized aestheticism seems to release Matthew from the prison house of racial being in fact returns him to another time and place, long forgotten but deeply familiar, the place of racial memory. In the attic’s overdetermined space of metaphorized desire, Kautilya tells Matthew the story of her life, her love for him, and her epochal visit to his mother seven years earlier, unbeknownst to him. Before Kautilya’s story, which will span Asia, Europe, Africa, and the United States, is anywhere, it is first in Virginia. In “the cabin by the wood” where Matthew’s mother lives is housed the uncanny time of memory and the feminized allegorical space of body and home that together ghost Du Bois’s revisionary descriptions of race. In Kautilya’s description of Matthew’s “wonderful mother” as “Kali, the Black One; wife of Siva, Mother of the World!” she is both an allegorical figure of the present-past, a latter version of Souls’ slave mother “black with the mists of centuries,” and a synthesis of Africa and Asia, slavery’s history startlingly transformed into Hinduism’s pantheon (220). The temporal movement of allegorical figuration coincides with the psychogeographical movement we can expect of Du Bois. Later in the novel, Kautilya writes to Matthew from the Virginia cabin where she has gone secretly to await the birth of their child, and urges him to “think . . . take your geography and trace it” (278). “In Virginia you are at the edge of a black world. The black belt of the Congo, the Nile, and the Ganges reaches by way of Guiana, Haiti, and Jamaica, like a red arrow, up into the heart of white America . . . You can work in Africa and Asia right here in America if you work in the Black Belt” (286). The transformation or domestication, we might even say nationalization, of a vast black world into the U.S. South finds its temporal fulfillment and allegorical equivalent at the novel’s end with the birth of their son, Africa and Asia fused again in Virginia. Yet such biographies and geographies cut in two directions, revealing the Du Boisean truth that to be inside a place is also to be outside it and that there is no center that is not touched and transformed by its margins.61 Like the notion of “Africa and Asia right here in America,” the strangely syncretic vision of Matthew’s mother as Kali turns on a notion of

The Soul of Nationhood    geography and identity that is purely fantasmatic. “I am India,” Kautilya tells Matthew, in properly national-allegorical form (228). Matthew’s mother is equally clearly Africa. But the two are also one and the same, fantasy doubles beneath whose allegorical veil we may discern a politics. In the joining of these women, folk mother and aristocratic lover of the same man, lies Du Bois’s blueprint for the joining of races and nations in the linked national-global politics that are the novel’s real romance and deepest desire. Put differently, national-global politics are the “real” contradictions that the novel’s generic form struggles mightily to resolve. What Claudia Tate has called the “messianic masque” of the novel’s conclusion, with its wedding of Matthew and Kautilya in the shadow of the Virginia cabin and the revelation of their newborn son, the “Maharajah of Bwodpur and Maharajah-dhirajah of Sindrabad,” “King of the Snows of Gaurisankar,” “Protector of Ganga the Holy,” “Incarnate Son of the Buddha,” “Grand Mughal of Utter India,” and beyond these nationalist titles, “Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds,” can thus be read in its sheer allegorical weight as final evidence of a political fantasy— purely a fantasy in 1928—of a global color line, linking the independent nations of the Third World and the U.S. “Negro nation within a nation” in a transnational, pan-racial, global alliance of the darker peoples.62 This was a fantasy that would find its fulfillment, or so Du Bois imagined, in decolonization. How far it fell short is a topic for the following chapter’s discussion of Fanon. Let us end this examination of Du Bois with a brief consideration of his final novel. The Black Flame trilogy (1957–1961) brings the differently global affiliations of Du Bois’s later socialism and communism to a saga of African American striving. The Black Flame spans the period from 1876 to 1956, beginning with the lynching of Manuel Mansart’s father, former slave and now South Carolina legislator, on the night of Manuel’s birth in the final year of Reconstruction; proceeding through the terror of lynching and Jim Crow restrictions; encompassing both World Wars and the Korean War; and extending to Mansart’s final galvanizing tour, after a career in black education, of a Europe, Russia, and Asia on the move toward a socialist and communist future. The transitional period of post–Civil War Southern Reconstruction, chronicled in Black Reconstruction (1935), serves here as a historical allegory for two subsequent events: (1) the essentially

   The Soul of Nationhood unfinished story of black enfranchisement through the racial terror of the nadir years and the geopolitics of the World Wars; and (2) the sudden foreclosing of political expression and civic equality for the U.S. left during the Cold War years. It was during the latter period that Du Bois wrote the trilogy, under surveillance and legal harassment by the U.S. government for his anti-imperialist, pro-peace, and pro-labor stances throughout the post–World War II era.63 Six months after publishing the final volume of the trilogy in 1961, Du Bois left for voluntary exile in Ghana. Global political affiliations loom large in this last work published in Du Bois’s lifetime, as do the repeated foundational violence of slavery, the lingering force of white supremacy, and the harsh material economy of the global color line, all set against the story of Mansart’s life. Despite its chaotic “disjunction,” as Brent Hayes Edwards says, The Black Flame offers a final synthesis of Du Bois’s double thinking and a final instance of his turn to the novel as history and politics by other means.64 The first volume of the trilogy, The Ordeal of Mansart (1957), repeats and inverts Dark Princess’s vision of an oppositional dark world with a vision of the South Carolina Cotton Kingdom that had “spread west to Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi until it met decadent French and Spanish empire in Louisiana, and dreamt of a slave empire from the Mississippi to the Amazon and the Atlantic to the Pacific.”65 A bizarre vignette of global white supremacy follows, in which former Confederate commanders and Northern industrialists, British imperialists, Prussian generals, Russian nobles, and other exceptional global types meet and elect Cecil Rhodes their leader. Where Dark Princess espouses a global nationalism of the dark world in response to white power and romance and allegory as the modes in which to imagine it, The Black Flame replaces the rhetoric of nationalism with that of global socialism and turns to romance, as Edwards so clearly shows, and to the historical novel. Following the first volume’s account of the slow decay of the Southern aristocracy, the escalating mob violence terrorizing and lynching blacks, and the rising control of the region by the allied forces of Northern and Southern industry, the second volume turns to education. Mansart Builds a School (1959) plots Mansart’s evolution from student in Du Bois’s own Atlanta University to teacher in a rural Georgia black school to superintendent of black schools in Atlanta and president of a land-grant black college.

The Soul of Nationhood    The final volume, Worlds of Color (1961), uses the device of Mansart’s 1936 world tour across England, France, Germany, China, and Japan to portray the race question and Du Bois’s own socialist-communist answer. In London’s East End Mansart discovers that “white men and women in a civilized country and in the twentieth century could suffer in degradation, helplessness, and crime quite as much as any Negroes,” while from an itinerant Russian he learns that the French Revolution was prepared by centuries of slave revolts in the New World and, with racial inequality still intact, remains a “never finished” revolution (vol. 3, 20, 23). Here, as throughout the trilogy, information is delivered in historical references and historical doubles. Jean Du Bignon, Mansart’s secretary, then college dean, and eventually his wife, is indicted, like Du Bois, on the charge of being the agent of a foreign principal. An echo of Du Bois’s own sociology appears in the massive study of black Americans conceived by Jean: “the largest and most complete, continuous study of the actions of a definite human group which the world anywhere was attempting” (vol. 3, 55). The trilogy embeds history and sociology yet strains to exceed them, in a nineteenth-century form that consciously rejects the reigning aesthetic of high modernism in black letters. Certain stars of the Harlem Renaissance appear and recite their work in volume 2, including James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Hughes’s 1921 poem of global black history along the Euphrates, Nile, Congo, and Mississippi, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” appears both in the “High Harlem” chapter of volume 2 and in Du Bois’s earlier study The World and Africa (1947).66 Though Du Bois understands the poem to capture a rich, varied, and great Africa, and cites it approvingly, the passage in Mansart Builds a School in which the poem appears deems the Harlem Renaissance itself “an abnormal development with abnormal results” (vol. 2, 54). The narrative voice continues: “It was not a nation bursting into selfexpression and applauding those who told its story and feelings best, but rather a group oppressed and despised within a larger group, whose chance for expression depended in large part on what the dominant group wanted to hear and were willing to support.” To Du Bois, the novel seemed to proffer a wider audience, especially in the form of an incipiently nationalist plot turned to the evolution of a global consciousness. As Mark Sanders points out in his afterword, The Black Flame progresses from Mansart’s

   The Soul of Nationhood struggle with Washingtonianism in the first volume to his confrontation of liberalism’s limitations in the second to a final vision of global socialism, in a “bildungsroman trajectory” that aims both at Mansart’s symbolic education and the reader’s own edification (vol. 1, 243). The concept of race is itself practically a character, subject to shifts and turns, rises and falls. Beneath its often conventional plotting and a form that feels antiquated, The Black Flame reveals the changing complexities not only of race but of the gender and class, nation and globe through which race for Du Bois takes shape.67 So there are familiar gendered figures, such as the “black sybil” Aunt Betsy who delivers her grandson Mansart on the eve of her son’s lynching and proclaims the infant “the black flame” of the race in an Africanist ceremony, and occasional female historical figures (vol. 1, 16). Jean Du Bignon, by contrast, is an exceptional new woman, a female intellectual in a man’s world and a near-white black woman who refuses to pass in a racist world. To this crosser of multiple boundaries Du Bois gives one of the trilogy’s strongest statements about race—“race was not color; it was inborn oneness of spirit and aim and wish” (vol. 2, 88). Although it resonates with Du Bois’s earliest romantic notion of racial origins, gifts, and strivings in “The Conservation of Races,” Jean’s epiphany also bears the trace of a later work such as The World and Africa. There Du Bois attempted to tell the history of blackness in Africa while describing an “infinitely varied” continent of black, Arab, Berber, and Asian presences—effectively, in Mahmood Mamdani’s view, “deracializ[ing] the meaning of the African experience in the world.”68 With its scrupulous representation of both black and white protagonists from all registers of society and in all kinds of antagonisms, collaborations, and solidarities, The Black Flame Trilogy marks a shift from the romance of race to the differently racialized politics of Du Bois’s Marxism, in which race never quite disappeared. More than in any of his other novels, The Black Flame advances an understanding of race as class. Here the novel has a blunter edge than The World in Africa’s naming of capitalism’s “sin” (the concealment of the serfdom and slavery that power industry) or the connection of the “disfranchised colonies” of Asia and Africa to the “unfree peoples” of Europe and the United States in Colonies and Peace: Color and Democracy (1945).69 But each of The Black Flame’s racial and gendered actors is undeniably a class protagonist: decaying white aristocrats advocating the “sacred

The Soul of Nationhood    rights of property” (vol. 1, 4) and the white Southern ladies who are chattel, the poor white “disinherited of the South” (vol. 2, 6); the once slave (Mansart’s noble father and old Aunt Betsy); the new aspiring middle-class black and future communist (Mansart and Jean); and the black politician, judge, criminal, and musician (Mansart’s four children with his first wife). Although race in the trilogy seems eventually to be sublated into the politics of global socialism, Mansart’s dying vision also leaves race in America open as a story left unfinished. “I saw China’s millions lifting the soil of the nation . . . the golden domes of Moscow shining on Russia’s millions, yesterday unlettered, now reading the wisdom of the world . . . birds singing in Korea, Viet-Nam, Indonesia and Malaya . . . India and Pakistan united, free; in Paris, Ho Chi Minh celebrated peace on earth; while in New York—” (vol. 3, 240). Beyond the registers of history, that record whose events and actors appear throughout The Black Flame, the trilogy works out changing ideas of race, gender, and class against a national and global sphere of political and social transformation, thus crafting in fiction what remains uncertain or unarrived in fact. Even in Du Bois’s sometimes clumsy hands, the fictional technologies of the novel don’t merely represent already constituted identities and identifications—they help to make them. “Time is running out,” announces Du Bois in the postscript to volume 1 and adds, “I am trying by the method of historical fiction to complete the cycle of history which has for a half century engaged my thought, research and action” (vol. 1, 230). If what Du Bois calls the “fiction of interpretation” allows him to fill in the historical record’s “gaps of knowledge” and to supplement his own historical and sociological enterprises, it also offers the particular resources of the novel, from romance and allegory to bildungsroman and historical fiction. With its genealogically linked central characters, on whom the history of Reconstruction, Jim Crow, the World Wars, the Russian Revolution, and McCarthy-era politics write themselves somewhat awkwardly as the narrative jolts back and forth from micro to macro scales, The Black Flame largely follows what Lukács calls the historical novel’s “law of literary portrayal.” “In order to bring out these social and human motives of behaviour, the outwardly insignificant events, the smaller (from without) relationships are better suited than the great monumental dramas of world history.”70 The novels of Scott and

   The Soul of Nationhood Tolstoy, Lukács observes, thus depict world-historical figures who are no great men but merely small individuals who “concentrate” the problems affecting people in a particular moment (312). The genre of the historical novel thus represents some historical reality “as it actually was” yet exceeds the mere accumulation of historical traits and events by delivering a plastic sense of the structuring interaction between society and individuals (40). A later novel such as The Black Flame encompasses both the narrative concentration of historical events and the actual, weighty delivery of historical data, perhaps confirming Lukács’s argument that as capitalism develops, the novel finds itself increasingly unable “to see into the inner active forces of capitalist society” and increasingly enthralled to causality as a substitute (311). Du Bois’s trilogy also regularly presents actual world-historical figures, such as Booker T. Washington, Thomas Dixon, Theodore Roosevelt, Joel Spingarn, Mary Ovington, others associated with the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Marcus Garvey, later African anticolonial nationalists such as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah, and several figures for Du Bois himself. But in its constant perspectival shift back to the rising consciousness of the unexceptional Mansart, The Black Flame does come to “see into” the history, both capitalist and socialist, that it relates. The novel in this sense enables that very connection between the world outside and subjective interiority that Lukács in The Theory of the Novel takes to define the genre.71 The Black Flame is in one sense an anachronism, a historical novel of the nineteenth century or the socialist realist 1920s and 1930s in which the essential elements of an older form are creakily united to motor a final spin of a career-long vision of national and global equality. But The Black Flame looks forward as it looks back, with something of that oscillating memory that is novelistic genre’s work. It may be that The Black Flame is better read not as Du Bois’s return to the historical fiction of an earlier era than as an instance of that final stage that Lukács, writing The Historical Novel in the years of Hitler’s rise, calls the historical novel of antifascist democratic humanism. In this type of historical novel the struggle is not to look back to a past as it really was but to portray “the prehistory of the present” (337). So the project invented in Scott will find itself not merely “reviv[ed]” or “imitat[ed]” but completed, as “the perspective of the real

The Soul of Nationhood    and permanent liberation of the people alters the perspective which historical novels have of the future [and] gives quite a different emotional accent to their illumination of the past” (349, 347). The fully realized historical novel is a kind of allegory, always pointing beyond itself to some other code of meaning. More than history and more than the future, the ongoing present of the struggle against fascism and imperialism provides the content of this form. This present is the temporal and political compass of Mansart’s dying vision, as of Du Bois’s historical novel generally. In Lukács’s analysis, genre itself cannot be the object of analysis—that is the conclusion of the bourgeois genre theory that elevates form over content. In my reading of The Black Flame and Dark Princess, I have tried to see how historical fiction and historical romance face the unknown, untold story of the past and the still to come story of a different future, resolving their contradictions into formal resolutions that point to political ones. More than settling squarely on one psychic state, say melancholia, as the equivalent for the black subject caught in the grief of an incomplete national recognition, I have wanted to discern a larger movement between the states of melancholia and mourning, as between forms of racial, national, and global identification. These movements surface in Du Bois’s early sociological studies, with their concern to reconstruct a heterogeneous black history and culture, in Souls’ allegories of grief, loss, and redemption, and in Du Bois’s experiments with romance and realism as rivals to a history too vast to be completely recovered “as it actually was” and so demanding some more dialectical form. The supplemental function of memory’s textuality emerges as a potential ground for political identification. In the “melancholy of form,” as Lukács terms the novel’s subjectivization of exterior reality, we find a process of textual incorporation, a swallowing of the historical and the formal past that also creates something new. Lodging the future’s reminder in genre’s remainders, Du Bois’s many texts of memory evoke a politics that, like the forms themselves, both hold onto and move on from the past. In the next chapter’s discussion of Fanon, I consider the manifold generic forms of racial and national signification and again pursue the possibility of haunted time as the ghost that brings them to life.

4 Ghostly Forms: Race, Nation, and Genre in Frantz Fanon

Fanon’s Afterlife Born in colonial Martinique, trained in France, and affiliated for much of his short life with the Algerian revolution, Frantz Fanon died, like Du Bois, at the cusp of decolonization. If their practically contiguous burials in the foreign soil of adopted nations (Fanon in Algeria in 1961; Du Bois in Ghana in 1963) links them by temporal and geographical coincidence, their politics argue for a deeper connection. Intercalating the analysis of individual psychic identity with the difficult collective constructs of race, nation, and globe, and himself inserted within complicated plots of colonial migration and Third World internationalism, Fanon, like Du Bois, is the kind of boundary-crossing intellectual whose thinking produces the discourse of a fantasmatic nation shadowed by the spectral quantity of race. Du Bois’s Souls and Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks, 1952) complicated prevailing evolutionary-biological accounts of race by drawing on a broadly sociocultural paradigm organized through specific disciplinary models and their privileged genres (sociology, psychology, and history for Du Bois; psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and philosophy for Fanon; and the political-personal memoir-manifesto for both). If the anticipatory time through which Du Bois imagined a global anticolonial nationalism to come depended upon historical, sociological, and allegorical references to an imagined transgeographical racial past, as well as to syncretic processes of pan-racial connection, for Fanon

Ghostly Forms    nation cannot emerge from race, however moving its modes. Race precludes what nation promises; race imprisons whereas nation liberates, inventing everything anew, from the structures of familial organization to the language of national community to decolonization’s famous “creation of new men.”1 Fanon’s situation of race as the corrupt ground from which revolutionary nationalism must break free is also, however, a thinking of race as time and a blueprint for the haunting of the postcolonial nation by the racial time it clocks itself against and after. Even where Fanon seems to be at his most new—praising the profound break of decolonization’s time in that prophetic primer of revolutionary nationalism, Les damnés de la terre (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961), calling into being the novel constituencies of an independent Algeria in his earlier writings, and accomplishing the sea change of his own identity from Martinican native to the intellectual comrade eulogized by Algeria’s Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) as “the late brother Frantz Fanon”—older forms persist.2 It is with ghostly remainders that this chapter will be concerned, beginning with that of Fanon himself. Fanon’s critics, that ever-expanding and heteroglot community straddling the divides of Marxism and psychoanalysis, poststructuralist cultural theory and empirical social science, concur in this at least: he is with us still.3 Claimed even on the very occasion of his death by his fellow Martinican and former teacher, the poet-statesman Aimé Césaire, as already “a voice from beyond the grave,” Fanon has continued to haunt the political scene.4 Fanon’s “after-life,” to borrow Stuart Hall’s term,5 is quite literally an outliving, a living beyond not only the particular moment and geography of mid-century anticolonial Third Worldism but also the particular bounded and grounded, nativist and natalist notion of nationalism itself. Césaire indeed took as Fanon’s “final lesson” the claim with which Wretched ’s discussion of national culture concludes: “National consciousness [la conscience nationale], which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension” (DT, 295; WE, 179). Deemed by Homi Bhabha as Fanon’s “most enduring, if problematic, epitaph,”6 the line traces the intersections and divergences between the collective imaginary and state governmentality, and between the specificities of single, territorially bounded struggles and histories and an as yet incomplete articulation of the general, globally connected project of Third Worldism.

   Ghostly Forms In the “heart” of African national consciousness, that “most elaborate form of culture” and incipient mode of continental unity, “international consciousness rises up and comes to life [s’ élève et se vivifie]” (DT, 296; WE, 179). If this metaphor attests to what Cheah calls a “vitalist teleology,” an essentially “biogenetic schema” that runs from Fichte and Kant to Fanon and Cabral and figures the nation-state as dead matter awaiting the organic, life-giving force of populism,7 Fanon’s formulation also locates “consciousness”—a term whose psychic register, nonlinear temporality, and embedded unconscious we should not scant—at the crossing ground of the national, the nationalist, and the international. While I am in agreement with Cheah’s reading of the haunted life-in-death of the postcolonial nation-state, in which Fanon’s “biogenetic schema . . . underscor[es] the organismic character of the sociological opposition between decolonizing nation [living] and state [dead until vitalized by the culture of the people],”8 and while I value the opposition thus opened between nation and state, I am less willing to reduce Fanon’s political thought to the essentially linear narrative of “vitalist teleology.” Fanon’s nation emerges from the intersection of several plots of time. These include (1) the time of race, with its colonial-imperial line of differential progress, its negrophobic fantasies, and its negritudist-nativist miseen-abyme of recuperative return to a romanticized “blackness,” all in all, a time of death; (2) the psychohistorical time of trauma, which subtends without fully explaining or containing the shock of racial difference in the colonial scene (“Look, a Negro!”); (3) the oscillatory time of fantasy and fetish, through which race and nation enter psychic and political life; (4) the linear sequence of becoming that Cheah terms the nation’s “vitalist teleology”; and (5) beyond trauma and the working-through it encompasses, and beyond fantasy and the psychopolitical anatomy it invites, the more uncanny structures of repeated return and unfinished business that I have evoked as the nation’s ghostly life and further connected to genre. In what follows I trace the temporal logic of Fanon’s major works, beginning with Black Skin and continuing to Wretched, with an eye for the formal continuities between the texts rather than what has habitually been described as the historical break between them (from Black Skin to Wretched, from psychoanalysis and psychiatry to politics, from racial-colonial fantasmagoria to messianic nationalism and internationalism).9 What

Ghostly Forms    textual politics of haunting emerges from Fanon’s thematics of time, usefully glossed by David Marriott as a nondialectical “black existential time in which what happened happens and keeps on happening in ways that remain unforeseeable and unknowable but which nonetheless forces us to be responsible at the level of ethics, politics, and will . . . a black orphism beyond identity and alterity, beyond loss and the annihilation of being” that nonetheless leaps, dialectically, into decolonization’s “radical transformation of time”?10 If my reading is practically focused on ghostly remainders and untimely being as the hidden structure of Fanon’s notion of first race, then nation, it is critically engaged by the question of what, in Fanon’s moving, shifting notion of nationhood, keeps coming back to the scene of the present.

Subject to Time, Ghosted by Race “The architecture of this work,” announces the introduction to Black Skin, “is rooted in the temporal. Every human problem must be considered from the standpoint of time. Ideally, the present will always serve to build the future.”11 Intended as a “complete lysis” of the “morbid universe” that relentlessly divides white from black, elevating the former and inferiorizing the latter, Black Skin aims to disalienate blacks from the “massive psychoexistential complex” that turns their life to death (PN, 8, 9; BS, 10, 12). In perhaps the most searing lines of an incendiary text, chapter 5 of Black Skin, “L’expérience vécue du Noir” (The Lived Experience of Blackness), locates the moment of subjective petrification in the instant in which an Antillean black discovers his racial identity in the subways of France, in a French child’s exclamation “Tiens, un nègre! [Hey, a Negro!]” (PN, 90; BS, 111). Repeated three times, the phrase is met by Fanon’s fictionalized self with an initial good-natured amusement that then turns to the realization that to exist in such an interpellation is not to exist at all. Better translated here as “Hey” than “Look,” the “Hey” of “Tiens” is a “Hey, you” from which the “you” has been evacuated, rendering the place of the subject crossed out, negated, invisible. All that is seen is blackness, and blackness has no being. Because the black subject must not only be black but be black before the white (en face du Blanc), the black for Fanon has no being as such, “no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white”

   Ghostly Forms (PN, 88; BS, 110). The little French boy’s exclamation and the terror into which it dissolves (“Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened!”) instantiates a cognitive crisis in which the black subject sees himself as the other sees him (PN, 90; BS, 112). For the black Antillean, who has actively repressed any recognition of himself as “Negro” and who has indeed projected that phobic identity onto other, blacker subjects, this moment is doubly traumatic in returning the subject to a knowledge it does not know it had and that it cannot consciously entertain.12 Face to face with its imago in the fantasmal form of “the Negro,” the black Antillean ego confronts its repressed knowledge of its own body and begins quite literally to disaggregate. “Unable to be outside with the other, the White, who unmercifully imprisoned me, I took myself far off from my own being, very far, making myself an object” (PN, 91; BS, 112). Invaded from without, crushed from within, in a word, “dis-placed [désorienté],” the black self exists in topological crisis. It cannot ground itself exteriorly as a body moving among other bodies nor interiorly as a bodily consciousness, “a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world” (PN, 89; BS, 110). Erupting from the traumatic scene of visual fixing and accompanied by an account of bodily dislocation and subsequent disintegration (explosion, amputation, hemorrhage), the psychic tailspin induced by “Tiens, un nègre! ” entails the instable permeability of several kinds of being. So the corporeal schema, under attack at various points, crumbled and gave way to a racial epidermal schema. In the train, it was no longer a question of being aware of my body in the third person but as a triple person . . . I existed triply: I occupied space. I moved toward the other . . . and the evanescent other, hostile but not opaque, transparent, absent, disappeared. Nausea . . . I was responsible all at once [tout à la fois] for my body, for my race, for my ancestors. I cast over myself an objective gaze and discovered my blackness, my ethnic characteristics— and I was crushed by cannibal drums, mental backwardness, fetish-worship, racial defects, slave-ships, and above all, above all: “Y a bon banania.” (PN, 90; BS, 112)

Fanon’s black subject moves vertiginously through the time and space of race, from an implied Africa of long-ago cannibals and fetishists to the Black Atlantic depths traversed by slave ships to the colonial commodity culture evoked by the final reference to a French breakfast food advertised by a smiling Senegalese face. If the syncopated movement of racial time

Ghostly Forms    carried regenerative possibilities for Du Bois, as in Souls’ thematic alteration between the narratives of racial history and the blueprints of racial uplift or the vision of a “Teutonic today” intermittently softened by a “black to-morrow” in “The Conservation of Races,” for Fanon the nonlinear existence of existing triply is merely the mark of racial objectification. Caught in the chains of race-historical temporality, Fanon’s black subject struggles to move forward and finds himself constantly thrown back, forcibly repatriated to that realm of stereotype and fantasy Fanon calls “the Negro myth.” “The other, the white . . . had woven [tissé] me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (PN, 90; BS, 111). Blackness emerges as an altogether fictional fantasm, the endlessly inventive construction and projection of a story that is always the same. Blackness in Fanon’s analysis is also fantasmatic in the sense of an identificatory category structured by topological and temporal movement, invaded by an outside (the white-authored “Negro myth”) that it then internalizes as its inside. This is the differential with which chapter 5 opens, twinning the descriptors “Dirty nigger!” and “Hey, a Negro!” with a fictionalized, feeling black self ’s self-portrait. “I came into the world anxious to lift a meaning out of things, my soul full of the desire to be at the beginning of the world, and then I discovered I was an object in the midst of other objects” (Pn 88, BS 109). Immediately following the description of the black subject’s enforced triple consciousness, Fanon imagines a possible alternative to this alienated, castrated condition. “I wanted simply to be a man among other men. I wanted to come slick and young into a world that was ours, that together we helped to construct and instruct [édifier]. But I rejected all affective immunization [tétanisation affective]. I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man” (PN, 88; BS, 109). Troped as remasculinization and imagined as disalienation, the change Fanon’s speaker imagines cannot come from the black subject’s mere incorporation of the rhetoric of equality (“a man among other men”). Such “affective immunization,” the taking in of Enlightenment myth as antidote to the Negro myth, merely encrypts the black subject’s loss, walling in the loss experienced by one who finds himself an “object in the midst of other objects” with the fantasy of being “a man among other men.” Before the objectifying gaze of the white child (“Look at the nigger! . . . Mama, a Negro!”) and the Enlightenment mime of the mother (“Pay no attention

   Ghostly Forms sir, he does not know that you are as civilized as we”) Fanon’s speaker finds himself literally undone, de-composed, placed in the position of the living dead. As Abraham and Torok explain, the walls of the intrapsychical crypt are formed to entomb a lost object so that the melancholic subject may continue to deny the loss by secretly and unconsciously having, even being, the lost object. When the walls of the crypt are shaken by a secondary loss, a loss that recalls the first lost object, “the whole of the ego becomes one with the crypt.”13 So with each successive racist interpellation, Fanon’s black speaker entombs the unbearable loss of himself as subject deeper within, ultimately fusing with the objectal correlative of white culture’s image of himself (“nigger!” “Negro!”)—a fusion that is also a rupture, a crack in being. If in Abraham and Torok’s account the subject buries the lost object alive so as to deny its death, its loss, in Fanon’s version what is buried alive is death itself, in the form of the radical nonbeing enforced on the black subject in a racist-colonial culture. Fanon’s speaker experiences himself as “an object in the midst of other objects” because he has fused with himself as object, repeatedly becoming the Negro of racist myth and fantasy, the Negro he thought he had left behind but who rises up to grab him again. Given the bodily axiomatics that Fanon associates with racist myth and fantasy, the black speaker must see himself not only as an object but as a body in parts. “My body was given back to me sprawled out, disjointed, recolored, all covered in black mourning in that white winter day [tout endeuillé dans ce jour blanc d’ hiver]” (PN 91, BS 113). We may recall Abraham and Torok’s further description of how “threatened with the imminent loss of its internal support—the kernel of its being—the ego will fuse with the included object . . . [and] begins the public display of an interminable process of mourning.” Fanon’s body of black mourning is a spectacular exteriorization of a split interior, an interior that cracks precisely along the line fusing the black subject to the black object. The black subject is forced to see itself through the phobic vision of a white ego ideal and in this fusion, reexperiences its ontological loss, its not being, over and over again. “Standing like tombs in the life of the ego,” as Abraham and Torok put it, incorporated objects (like the white image of the black as object) continue “to recall the fact that something else was lost: the desires quelled by repression.” “Like a commemorative monument,” they continue, “the incorporated object betokens the place, the date, and the circumstances in which desires were banished from introjection.”14 This is

Ghostly Forms    the desire Fanon voices in the phrase “I wanted to be a man, nothing but a man,” desire that Black Skin aims not to leave frozen in the mode of loss but to activate, to vivify, to keep alive. Real change for the black subject will entail the refusal of relational being, the expulsion of the incorporated racial myths that are the impossible kernel of black being, and the birth of a new language, a desiring language, of humanism. Black Skin strains to express the form of disalienation, struggling even as it repeats the logics of racism and colonialism to imagine a nondialectizable selfhood beyond them, a selfhood that does not take loss as its structure. Fanon rejects Jean-Paul Sartre’s characterization in “Black Orpheus,” his preface to Léopold Sédar Senghor’s L’anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache (1948), of the black poetic and philosophical movement known as negritude as a “minor term of a dialectical progression . . . a transition and not a conclusion” (PN, 107–8; BS, 133). Sartre, Senghor, and Césaire hover over chapter 5 of Black Skin like ghostly adversaries against whom Fanon issues his own call against history and against race. Suspending or shattering previous plots of temporalized blackness, from the colonial myth of progress to negritude’s fantasy of return to an ancient blackness and even Sartre’s transitionality, in which Fanon’s speaker finds himself, as a self, evacuated, Black Skin envisions its own time beyond race. Hence the conclusion’s simultaneous denunciation of the “black world” as a “Fraud [Ruse]” and assertion that “The black is not. Any more than the White,” in order to claim the ultimate identity of “man” (PN, 186–87; BS, 229–31). For all that blackness is something to be gotten beyond, it somehow keeps returning. Consider, for example, the apparitional appearance of Langston Hughes in chapter 5 of Black Skin. “I have known rivers / ancient dark rivers / my soul has grown deep / like the deep rivers.” This is Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” as quoted by Senghor in a discussion of emotion as a peculiarly “Negro gift,” an excerpt of which Fanon reproduces with palpable distaste (PN, 102; BS, 127). In the final lines of chapter 5 Fanon’s speaker will announce his own feeling of “a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers” and simultaneously refuse race, understood as lack, victimhood, and an “amputation” of being. Imagining himself as a “gift” only to receive the advice to cripple and humble himself (“Je suis don et l’on me conseille l’ humilité de l’ infirme,” PN, 114; BS, 140), wanting to “rise” but falling back with “paralyzed wings,” “straddling Nothingness and Infinity” as he begins to weep,

   Ghostly Forms Fanon’s speaker is caught between a series of impossible choices. By echoing Senghor’s assertion of Negro emotion as “gift [don]” and Senghor’s quotation of Hughes’s “soul grown deep like the deep rivers,” effectively repeating the language of negritude that Fanon’s speaker claims to have left behind, the final lines of chapter 5 are something like a return of the rejected. Surfacing here in the uncanny form of a textual echo, race appears as a ghost forever haunting the text that would exorcise it. Chapter 4 critiques the French psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni’s La psychologie de la colonisation (The Psychology of Colonization, 1950), which deemed the indigenous Malagasy of Madagascar a “backward people” whose unresolved dependency complex had led them to revere the French colonizers as they once revered their ancestors. “Wherever Europeans have founded colonies,” claimed Mannoni, “it can safely be said that their coming was unconsciously expected, even desired by the future subject peoples.”15 Fanon turns to Césaire’s long poem Cahiers d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, 1939) for “proof” of another future. In the passage cited by Fanon, Césaire’s tortured speaker moves from the abjection of his family home, where he lies “at the cusp of dawn, on the far side of my mother and father, the hut cracked open by blisters,” to the resonant figure of “the bed of planks from which my race has risen,” to the call-and-response injunction “Start!” (PN, 77; BS, 96). Leaving mother, father, and child well behind as it reaches out from the individual psychosexual scene of Oedipus to the traumatic collective history of slavery and colonialism and from there to the apocalyptic-messianic call to start “the only thing in the world that is worth the trouble of starting: the end of the world, by God,” the passage from Césaire’s poem for Fanon sounds the note of a thrust forward, the time to come of disalienation. The main work of chapter 4 of Black Skin is indeed that of reclocking racial-colonial time. With regard to the interpretations of seven Malagasy dreams of dependency on which Mannoni’s thesis rests, Fanon announces his intent “to restore the dream to its own time . . . and its own place” (PN, 84; BS, 104). Restoring the dream to an island of four million and a moment when eighty thousand rebelling natives were killed under colonial rule, Fanon equates the dream figure of a soldier with the Senegalese soldiers employed by the French as police torturers. Contra Mannoni, Fanon dryly observes, the soldier’s rifle is not a penis, nor is the dream

Ghostly Forms    figure of a black bull the phallus. The former is “really a Lebel 1916,” the latter “really the eruption, during sleep, of real fantasms” (PN, 86; BS, 105). Saturated by historical forces, Mannoni’s Oedipal triangle cannot close into the form of an explanation for colonialism. For Fanon, in contrast to Mannoni, the psyche is not a universal structure but a historical eruption, a visible wound in the shape of mental disorders whose cure is nothing other than the disalienation of the black subject and the disappearance of colonialism. Corrective etiology is a constant focus in Fanon’s critique of racial time lines, whether the colonialism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy that are Black Skin’s adversaries or the colonialism, anticolonial bourgeois nationalism, and colonial ethnopsychiatry targeted by Wretched and Fanon’s Algerian writings. Based on his own clinical work as chief of staff at Algiers’s Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital between 1953 and 1956, Fanon countered what the French ethnopsychiatrist Antoine Porot figured in the 1920s and 1930s as the native’s ceaseless return to a primitive nature marked by developmental arrest, moral infantilism, and congenital lying, laziness, hysteria, and melancholy. Against this grim loop of racehistorical time, Fanon described the traumatic event-time of colonialism, with its initial shock, recurring effects, and eventual working-through, in the form of revolutionary nationalism. Hence the constant muscular rigidity pathologized by Porot as malformed brain physiology’s “North African syndrome” to Fanon signified “the expression, in muscular form, of the native’s rigidity and his refusal with regard to colonial authority.16 Colonial time trumps racial time in Fanon’s etiology of neurosis, but race itself does not disappear. Race for Fanon is a spectacularly shifting quantity caught between the different times of the racial time line of progress, the crushing now of racist interpellation, the race-historical past of negritude, and the distant future of the black man liberated from the blackness that entombs him. Such oscillations and dissonances are not in themselves salutary. The multiplicity, movement, and heterogeneity of race are not for Fanon, as they were for Du Bois, what secure the promise of the future. It is rather by attempting to pass through race that Fanon points to the possibility of life beyond it. While Fanon’s more cosmopolitan readers would see the future toward which Fanon’s colonial critique strains as one entirely beyond race, I see it as a future still inhabited by race, understood as a

   Ghostly Forms ghostly, or uncanny (to recall Freud), or spectral (to anticipate Derrida) phenomenology in which nothing exists in one time alone. A ghost reading of Fanon eschews critical narratives that strain to preserve absolute distinctions by recourse to teleology, whether the old conversion tale of Fanon’s passage from psychiatric-psychoanalytic anatomist of race to revolutionary advocate of nation or the poststructuralist, postmodernist version that plots his transformation from native to nationalist to what Posnock calls a “cosmopolitan universalist.”17 Ghost reading resists these essentially developmental narratives and recovers an instability at work in Fanon’s concepts of race and nation, both of which find expression in moments of radical temporal discontinuity. Ghost reading also considers form itself as a species of ghost. Literature, in the form of the canon of negritude poetry and plays referenced throughout Black Skin, provides a zone in which Fanon appears to move through a variety of positions and identifications, now claiming negritude’s capacity to speak for him, now rejecting it, now using it to voice a critique of imperialism, now excoriating its assumption that there are such things as “black people’s history,” “Negro nationality,” “Black Empire,” and, most suspect of all, Césaire’s “great Negro cry,” but never entirely or finally laying blackness behind.18 If Fanon understands negritude, with its mystical formulations of racial history and racial being, to be incapable of bringing about the real change of disalienation, understood as liberation from a strictly racial worldview, his multivalent use of negritude’s poetic idiom ensures that race keeps coming back in a variety of guises, both old and new, oppressed and insurgent.19 A future-oriented text that lives alongside and even through its own conceptual past, Black Skin is a case of literally haunted prose. Even those chapters of Black Skin that seem to be more uniform in technique and tone, such as the psychoanalytic debates conducted in chapters 4 and 6, open themselves to the ghostly form of form. Read through their heterogenericism, they too reveal their heterochronicism—their animation by differential plots of racial time that they cannot contain, much less lay to rest, but beyond which they nonetheless strive to pass.

Ghostly Forms   

Fantasy Forms: Race, Culture, and Gender in the Colonial Imaginary Black Skin’s central sixth chapter, “The Negro and Psychopathology,” orbits around the twin poles of negritude and psychoanalysis, the prison houses of the discourses of race and psyche that Fanon seeks to change. His method here is less corrective etiology than uncanny recapitulation. He revisits and relocates the synecdochal concepts of Lacanian, Freudian, and Jungian psychoanalysis (mirror scene, Oedipal fantasy, and collective unconscious) in the colony. In the Antilles (where “97 percent of the families cannot produce one Oedipal neurosis”) the colonial black child confronts a traumatic choice between the family as one site of identification and the colonial nation as the other (PN, 123; BS, 152). Unlike the European child, for whom “the family is a fragment of the nation” (PN, 116; BS, 142), the colonized child experiences no such synecdochal symmetry. “The individual who climbs up [monte] into society—white and civilized—tends to reject his family—black and savage—on the plane of imagination” (PN, 121; BS, 149). For the black colonial subject, the white other holds out the potential transcendence of black selfhood: the white other is the place where blackness longs to go in order to lose itself. For the white subject, the black other in its unincorporable physicality marks the boundaries of white selfhood: the place where whiteness dare not go but goes anyway, usually along the path of racist fantasy. This differential pull of blackness for whiteness and whiteness for blackness undergirds an extended footnote on Lacan’s mirror scene (drawn from the latter’s 1938 article “Les complexes familiaux”) in which Fanon claims, “The real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man. And conversely” (PN, 131; BS, 161).20 If chapter 6’s encounter with psychoanalysis repeatedly takes the form of uncanny doubling (another Oedipus in the Antilles, another mirror scene in the colony), the chapter also lingers on how those doubles displace the cognitive centrality of the model. It further enlists a wide array of representational registers that express what the footnote on Lacan calls the “historical and economic realities” that must accompany the application of psychoanalysis to the black subject (PN, 131; BS, 161). These realities paradoxically emerge in chapter 6’s reading of “the Negro myth,” the complex of stereotype, fear, desire, and fantasy that

   Ghostly Forms exists between whites and blacks and, unthinkably, between blacks and themselves. Racial myth exceeds what Fanon calls “the laws of rational prelogic and affective prelogic: methods of thinking and feeling that call back or call up, resuscitate [rappelant] the age when the unnerving event occurred” (PN, 126; BS, 155). Thus, while the classical phobic needs an original experience of trauma in order to behave in traumatic-neurotic fashion, the racial phobic can simply tap into a vast cultural reservoir of myth disguised as truth. Thanks to a “constellation of postulates, a series of propositions [that] slowly and subtly, with the help of books, newspapers, schools and their texts, advertisements, films, and radio penetrate an individual and mold one’s vision of the world of one’s own group” (what we might call the fictional fantasms of blackness), a black Antillean can fear himself on the basis of some putative knowledge, just as a white person who has met a black man can already fear (and desire) him (PN, 124; BS, 152). To this heterogeneric catalogue, an extension of the earlier formulation of the black “woven out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories” (PN, 90; BS, 111), Fanon appends a recommendation for an experiment for the unconvinced. In the Antilles, Fanon explains, one may observe how a young black viewer will identify himself “de facto with Tarzan against the Negroes” or with the implied French viewer of a documentary film on Africa, laughing excessively at the spectacle of Bushmen and Zulus. In a theater in France, by contrast, the Antillean viewer finds himself “automatically” identified by the white audience with the “savages on the screen.” “Literally petrified” in the French theater, “he has no more possibility of flight: he is at once Antillean, Bushman, and Zulu” (PN, 124; BS, 153). Like the black subject of chapter 5 frozen by the address “Hey, a Negro!” and made “responsible all at once for my body, for my race, for my ancestors” (PN, 90; BS, 112), the black cinema spectator finds himself locked within the disjunctive timespace of the Negro myth, prisoner of someone else’s fantasy about him. In fantasy, explains Torok in a 1959 essay, the ego understands itself as other than itself. Invaded by its own periphery, the ego is obliged “to give up its own self-government for a moment and to be content with observing its own vision like a spectator.”21 A certain disjointedness, misfit, and even “untimeliness” is installed as the broken place of the subject. In contrast to those critics who claim, in the

Ghostly Forms    words of Françoise Vergès, that fantasy “did not belong to his psychological vocabulary,” I suggest that (1) Fanon did make fantasy the grounds of racial subjectivity; (2) he did so via an examination of the world-making and world-destroying power of fantasy forms such as myth, culture, and literature; and (3) Fanon’s theory of fantasy is governed by haunting, the simultaneous coexistence of past, present, and future that structures Fanon’s notion of race and, as we shall later see, of nation too.22 Freud’s essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” (1919) provides the basis for Fanon’s model of racial fantasy. As Laplanche notes, Freud’s fantasy encodes an “indeterminacy, or in any event a reversibility between the active and passive formulations,” such that the subject who observes the child being beaten by the father subsequently becomes that child.23 “Just as the object to be refound is not the lost object, but its metonym, so the ‘scene’ is not that of the memory, but that of the sexual fantasy that follows it” (104). Fantasy is not memory but what follows it, not the lost object but what substitutes for and displaces it. Fantasy’s times, locations, roles, and positions oscillate by definition. In Fanon’s version of the scene described by Freud and glossed by Laplanche, the Negrophobic white woman is the prototypical subject of fantasy and the black man is the inevitable object of fantasy. But the Negrophobic white woman is also the object of her own fantasy, as in Fanon’s notorious observation that “the fantasy of rape by a Negro is a variation of this emotion: ‘I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open’ ” (PN, 145; BS, 180). Diana Fuss notes that “like Freud’s hysteric, Fanon’s phobic can apparently occupy in fantasy two or more positions at once.”24 Leaving to the side the woman of color, about whom Fanon claims to “know nothing,”25 Fanon’s racialized repetition of Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten” in the form “A Negro is raping me” juxtaposes fantasy’s oscillations of position, expressed in the white woman’s wish, with fantasy’s metonymic displacements of racist culture. For Fanon, what ultimately matters is less how Negrophobic fantasy works than where it comes from. First the little girl sees a sibling rival beaten by the father, the libidinal aggressive. At this stage (between five and nine years of age), the father, now the pole of the libido, refuses in a way to take on the aggression that the little girl’s unconscious demands of him. At this point, this free-floating, unsupported aggression calls for an investment. Since the girl is at the age when the child enters the folklore and

   Ghostly Forms the culture through the form [forme] that we know, the Negro becomes the predestined depositary of this aggression. If we enter farther into the labyrinth, we will find that when a woman lives the fantasy of rape by a Negro, it is in some way the fulfillment of a private dream, of a most intimate wish. Accomplishing the phenomenon of turning against the self, it is the woman who rapes herself. (PN, 144; BS, 179)

The residual aggression expressed in the fantasy “A Negro is raping me” is rooted in two distinct causes: (1) the folklore and culture through which the child learns to attach aggression to blackness; and (2) the masochistic impulse that white women obey by nature. White men, on the other hand, are masochistic only as a second stage of their primary sadistic aggression, as Fanon explains in a discussion of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus (1880) just before the discussion of “A Negro is raping me.” In the characteristic gesture of Black Skin’s encounter with psychoanalysis, Fanon proposes another version or uncanny repetition of a previous model, Bernard Wolfe’s 1949 reading of Chandler Harris as a willing participant in “an unconscious orgy of masochism.” To Wolfe, Chandler Harris seeks out the hatred of the black man, in the form of Brer Rabbit’s aggressive insurgency, all the while soliciting the love of the black man, in the enduring, accommodating, and reassuring “grin” of Uncle Remus.26 Fanon responds, “Another solution might be this: There is first of all a sadistic aggression toward the black man, followed by a guilt complex because of the sanction against such behavior by the democratic culture of the country in question. This aggression is then withstood by the black man, thus leading to masochism” (PN, 143; BS, 178). The structuring violence and ongoing presence of racial-colonial law, never very far from Fanon’s encounter with psychoanalysis, produce a powerful collapse of sadism and masochism—the twin poles of fantasy—at the scene of the white male imaginary. The scene thus gains a historical dimension that is then fed back into its psychic structure of racial fantasy. The white man who fears and envies the black man, the white woman who fears and desires the black man, and the black man himself occupy the foreground of these analyses. The fantasies of cross-racial but same-sex desires or black female desires are largely relegated to footnotes, asides, and refusals, the kind of pronounced ignorance whose simultaneous denial, acknowledgment, and covering over of desire suggests the stopping points of Fanon’s analysis, the

Ghostly Forms    points beyond which he cannot, or will not, go.27 Even his express studies of gender in chapters 2 and 3, “The Woman of Color and the White Man” and “The Man of Color and the White Woman,” reveal the same sharp split between the desire he can understand (the altogether tragic love of an alienated black male intellectual, shaped by “inner melancholy,” for a white woman) and the desire he can only pathologize (the woman of color’s purely narcissistic wish for lactification by marriage).28 Fanon’s work with racial fantasy in chapter 6 also leads him to Jung’s collective unconscious—that dizzying, disorienting, vertigo-inducing postulate (donnée vertigineuse) without which, Fanon claims, “we cannot understand a thing” (PN, 118; BS, 144–45). As Fanon gets closer and closer to the psychic structure of the cultural myth of “Negrophobia,” he becomes less interested in Negrophobia’s individual origins in “real traumatism,” that is, the traumatism of the Oedipal event at the core of Freud’s theory of neurosis, and more interested in Negrophobia’s structure as a collective cultural fantasy and its function as “collective catharsis” (PN, 117; BS, 144). Fanon thus recounts the predominantly American cultural outlets through which a society releases its (racial) aggressivity, binds its (racial) anxiety, and misrecognizes its (racial) desire—Tarzan movies, Mickey Mouse shorts, Chester Himes’s novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), and, of course, Uncle Remus. The more the Negrophobic cycle of cultural reproduction tries to discover the secret truth of blackness, the more it entombs or encrypts it, keeping it alive for future reproduction. Like Fanon’s patient, the white French prostitute who heard a story about a woman who went mad after intercourse with a black man and then “attempted furiously to reproduce the situation and to find out this secret that had something of the ineffable” (PN, 138; BS, 171), the Negrophobic neurotic has only to turn to any cultural form—story, anecdote, comic book, film, fable, fiction—in order to fuel racial fantasy with the endlessly recyclable elements of racial myth. The embedded “secret” of racial myth—blackness as the kernel of white culture’s fantasies—is what Fanon tries to expose and demystify. If such a clinical task demands the icy sobriety and slicing clarity of statements like “the real Other for the white man is and will continue to be the black man,” it seems equally to produce the excesses of Fanon’s own melodramatic, hallucinatory, and altogether disorienting style. Seamlessly

   Ghostly Forms and without warning, his account of clinical cases slides into a voicing of the collective cultural-racial unconscious in both its Negrophobic and anti-Semitic forms. The parallel is a nod to Sartre, whose claim that it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew reverberates throughout Black Skin. Chapter 6’s anatomy of Negrophobia is rich in instances of psychoanalytic method, like the three or four years of analytic work in which, with the cognate “Jew-money” as his model, Fanon inserted “Negro” within a series of free associations and brought to light “biology, penis, strong, athletic, potent, boxer, Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Senegalese troops, savage, animal, devil, sin” (PN, 134; BS, 166). A decidedly different stylistic register dominates the subsequent paragraph of the analysis: The Negro symbolizes the biological. First of all, among Negroes puberty begins at the age of nine and they are fathers at the age of ten; they are hot-blooded and their blood is strong; they are sturdy. As a white man remarked to me recently, with a bit of bitterness: “You all have strong constitutions.” What a beautiful race—look at the Senegalese soldiers . . . During the war weren’t they called our Black Devils? . . . But they must be brutal . . . I can’t see them touching my shoulders with those big hands of theirs. It makes me shudder with horror . . . Well aware that in certain cases one must interpret by opposites, I understand this so fragile woman: fundamentally, what she wants most of all is for the sturdy Negro to torture and abuse [martyrisant] her frail shoulders. Sartre says that when one speaks the phrase “a young Jewess,” there is an imaginary reek of rape and pillage . . . Conversely, we might say that the expression “a handsome Negro” contains a “possible” allusion to similar phenomena. (PN, 135; BS, 167, ellipses in original)

Attempting to analyze the Negro myth, Fanon finds himself speaking in its voice. Unable to preserve either clinical description or clinical distance, the language of the passage alternates between various styles and subjects of speech in an instance of what Benita Parry has called “the discord of incompatible testimony” that sounds throughout Fanon’s writing.29 From the whispered intimacies of biological racism to the pained reminiscences of racism’s victims, and from the Negrophobic confessions of a white French female analysand to the professional judgments of the analyst who operates in the shadow of his Sartrean model, Fanon’s narrative ventriloquization (in which orthographic marks only tenuously link positions to statements) provides a dizzying sense of moving from the outside

Ghostly Forms    of stereotypes to their interiors—the stylistic echo of that vertige that is practically a hallmark of Black Skin’s black subject. Fanon’s strategy here seems to respond quite precisely to what Achille Mbembe characterizes as colonial discourse’s hysterical excess of words. Incantatory repetition and saturated sense attempt, in Mbembe’s argument, to simulate the affective sensations of nouns—native, Negro, colonial—that are always in motion, decomposing, fractured by the “ambiguity of the relationship between the colonial vocabulary and what it seeks to designate: its referent.”30 With the manifold fluctuations of a discourse “always in motion,” Fanon’s prose further reveals its similarity to the structure of fantasy. Even as the analyses of Negrophobia’s many forms seem to calcify into quite rigid roles—white women want this, white men want that, white women are this by nature, white men are that by culture, and black men are wanted by everyone—the writing of the analyses opens up a different logic of movement. Fanon’s heteroglossic, heterogeneric style is the formal equivalent of the oscillation of roles, positions, times, and settings that Laplanche and Pontalis take to subtend “the unity of the fantasy whole.”31 Fanon’s form is fantasy. And fantasy is Fanon’s form for the Thing of race. As Žižek explains, glossing Lacan, it is “fantasy itself which, so to speak, provides the co-ordinates of our desire—which constructs the frame enabling us to desire something.”32 If fantasy’s frame moves, and if it does so with particular vertiginousness at the site of racial fantasy, Fanon’s analysis also shows the extent to which the fantasy of race fixes. Though it interchanges positions, though it defies the chronology of causality with the convoluted time of desire, fantasy is never free for Fanon. It is instead the prison house of racial culture. Recognizing the myriad negative associations of blackness, so variously and dizzyingly evoked in Black Skin, Fanon’s black subject can either hate his blackness in the mode of the alienated Antillean and hope others will ignore it, or else love his blackness in the oppositional mode of Césaire and so hope to revalue it. In either case, the black subject is trapped, “compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution that is fed by fantasies, hostile, inhuman.” The only way out, Fanon concludes, lies in rising above the racial choice and “reaching out to the universal” (PN, 159–69; BS, 197). Reiterating the problem as one “situated in the temporal,” the final chapter announces the disalienation of those blacks who “refuse to let themselves be sealed

   Ghostly Forms away in the materialized Tower of the Past” and refuse also “to accept the present as definitive” (PN, 183; BS, 226). Issuing from the meticulous dissection of the dreams and fantasies that provide the formal structure of the racial unconscious—a structure that perpetually returns the black subject to the past—Black Skin’s brief for freedom announces itself as a new kind of historical consciousness expressed, in Ato Sekyi-Otu’s phrase, as a “liberation of time.”33 In Fanon’s subsequent narratives of national liberation the nation emerges as another possibility of freedom figured as new time yet haunted by something quite similar to fantasy’s multiple temporal, spatial, and formal modes.

The Animate Form of the Nation: Fetish as Form The desire that Fanon invests in the revolutionary Algerian nation might well appear to fill the explanatory space created by Black Skin’s dismantling of European philosophy, psychoanalysis, and ethnopsychiatry, as well as of negritude’s romantic-racialist response. A mystified, talismanic object, Fanon’s nation is reinserted at the space of a lack. Such compensatory objects are always the site of a failure, as Albert Memmi implies in his assertion that Fanon’s identification with Algeria “took the place of an unattainable identification with Martinique.”34 Martinique provided Fanon with neither anticolonial revolt nor the seeds of national consciousness, in the wake of President Aimé Césaire’s acceptance of departmental status. Algeria, on the other hand, Memmi writes, “gave him what he had lacked for so long, a cultural patrimony and the conditions for battle.” Despite Fanon’s practice in the psychiatry wards of Algiers’s Blida-Joinville hospital (where between 1953 and 1956 he treated French police torturers by day and their FLN victims by night), his subsequent work as psychiatrist and party propagandist in the FLN’s Tunis headquarters, his appointment as official diplomatic representative of the FLN to Ghana, his regular use of the pronouns “we” and “ours” when speaking of Algeria and Algerians, and his clandestine burial by brother Algerians in the contested soil of French Algeria, Memmi deems Fanon’s attempt at national rebirth a failure. No one, Memmi warns, can “exchange his cultural, historical, and social singularity for another, by a simple act of will—not even in the service of a revolutionary ethic” (28). In a variation of the fetishist’s

Ghostly Forms    formula, Fanon knows he is not Algerian but all the same acts as if he is or can become so.35 Beyond serving a fetishistic function for Fanon himself, Fanon’s nation has also been understood by several of his closest readers to obey fetish-logic. John Mowitt christens the Algerian nation “Fanon’s fetish,” a “resistant body belligerently posed to counter colonial power” whose claim to “a unified national profile” is founded in the disavowal and denial of difference.36 In a similar gesture, Christopher Miller charges Wretched with appropriating, even transmuting, ethnic particularity into national universality.37 An artifice of unity, the nation flattens out, homogenizes, and fetishistically “screens” ethnic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and gender difference and dissonance. Neil Lazarus finds it is Fanon’s “textualist” critics who obey the logic of the fetish by using the psychoanalytic text of Black Skin “against” Fanon’s later works in order to “disavow Fanon’s political commitments and his theorization of ‘the African Revolution.’ ” Ultimately, in Lazarus’s critique, they “disavow nationalism tout court” (75). David Lloyd deems Wretched ’s account of the colonized intellectual who responds to his racial alienation with the plunge back into racial culture to be “in a strict sense fetishistic”—a “disavowal of the intellectual’s cultural mutilation by way of fixation on an apparent prior wholeness.”38 I suggest that Fanon’s nation is a fetish not only because it substitutes for an originary lack, covers over unsettling differences, and seduces others into the dark magic of causing it to disappear through critical disavowal. Fanon’s nation is also a fetish because of other equally characteristic practices. It animates the dead matter of bourgeois nationalism with the life of the people, in a version of what Freudian psychoanalysis figures as the primitive work of fetishism to bring spirits to life. As a principle of repetition-compulsion, the fetish further demarcates a psychic zone in which past events acquire ongoing presence. In this sense, Fanon’s fetish nation depends on a logic of return whose ultimate effect, as we will see, is to structure the nation as a ghost. Finally, Fanon’s nation moves between times and spaces, between living national consciousness and dead bourgeois nationalism, between the territorial plots of nation and the lateral networks of internationalism, thus echoing what William Pietz’s anthropologicalhistorical reading calls the fetish’s capacity to repeat an “originating act of forging an identity between certain otherwise heterogeneous things.”39

   Ghostly Forms Fetishism, argue Laplanche and Pontalis in a more psychoanalytic vein, is precisely oscillation, a mode of epistemological and libidinal movement founded in the movement between two contradictory structures of belief, namely, the simultaneous recognition that women have no penis and the disavowal of that recognition.40 For all that the fetish monumentalizes and territorializes desire, it also keeps desire open to displacement, reattachment, and a constant change of object. Like fantasy, with whose logic the fetish is closely entwined, fetishism is a desire always in movement. In the field of national desire, the fetish thus cuts against the very monumentalizing and territorializing imperatives (national history, national culture, national borders) that it installs. Read as the work of fetishism, national identification is always in the process of looking elsewhere, to the past or to the future, to the world beyond the border or to the blank spots on a map. Here psychoanalysis comes back to nationalism differently, offering its narratives less as the explanation of political ideologies (Fanon well knew the awkwardness of that fit) than as an opening up of the question of political form to the question of political affect. In “Formal Democracy and Its Discontents” (1992) Žižek marshals the logics of fetishism and fantasy in order to conceptualize the “NationThing.” As “the materialization, the embodiment of a lack, of a hole in the Other,” the Nation-Thing is what results when democracy’s empty form is filled with a particular national content.41 Once materialized, the Nation-Thing quickly becomes what “we” have and what “they” want to steal by ruining our way of life, stealing our jobs, and changing our culture. The paradox that “our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the same time threatened by him” reveals to Žižek the structure of castration (165). Faced with the contradictions between democracy’s abstract or empty form and its “pathological” national content, Žižek proposes a stand of “active forgetfulness.” “The democratic attitude is always based upon a certain fetishistic spit: I know very well (that that democratic form is just a form spoiled by stains of ‘pathological’ imbalance), but just the same (I act as if democracy were possible)” (168). In addition to this fetishistic formula, Žižek identifies nationalist fantasy as the form through which the subject relates to the Nation-Thing, and “in a manner proper to each, conceals the impasse of his desire” (157). Each must enter the space of the nationalist fantasy and recognize in it “the

Ghostly Forms    absolutely particular way every one of us structures his or her ‘impossible’ relation to the traumatic Thing [the nation]” (167). In a subsequent essay, “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” (1993), Žižek revisits the context of postcommunist Eastern Europe that inspired his earlier thoughts and speculates that what Eastern Europe needs most now is a “formal” and “empty” state, a state “which would not embody any particular ethnic community’s dream (and thus keep the space open for them all).”42 But Žižek himself queries this vision of Eastern Europe as what cannot live in democracy without first exorcising the “specter of nationalism.” “What is deeply suspicious about this attitude, about the attitude of an antinationalist, liberal Eastern European intellectual, is the already-mentioned obvious fascination exerted on him by nationalism: liberal intellectuals refuse it, mock it, laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination” (212). This is the national specter both as fetish—the site of the fascinated-horrified, compelled-repelled stare—and as fantasy. In contrast to the oscillatory model proposed by Laplanche and Pontalis in their reading of Freud, Žižek describes a Lacanian topology of belief in which fantasy is the “hard kernel” (213). Fantasy is what resists symbolization, what cannot be named but is always there, what cannot be gotten beyond without being, as Lacan says, gone through. Both the liberal Eastern European democrats who disavow nationalism and the nationalists must go through the fantasy, and each, Žižek reminds us, will emerge with a different organization of desire. This is not to say that nationalism is good or bad (fantasy and desire eschew such distinctions), but merely that the nation is what is there as the kernel within the ideological real of the political subject. Žižek’s reading of national fantasy and the fetishistic Nation-Thing urges us to go through the fantasy, the space of enjoyment that can never be fully symbolized, exorcized, or broken down into mere structure, and to see in it not only a pathological content we love to hate but also a fantasmatic form that desire teaches us how to read. It is in this sense that Žižek names the nation’s form spectral. “The ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern nation is the same as that of vampires and other living dead” (222). Far from archaic “leftovers from the past,” the national revenants of contemporary politics occupy “the very break of modernity.” They remain and persist. Fanon’s nation is undead in Žižek’s sense. Positioned between the competing times of life and death,

   Ghostly Forms of coming into being and being overcome, Fanon’s notion of the nation as a political project persists, just as he himself returns to the present with a properly spectral force, as “memory,” “afterlife,” “vampire” (all terms in recent critical discussions of Fanon).43 As we will see, the form of Fanon’s nation contains ghosts of its own.

The Forms of Becoming: Writing the Nation in Studies in a Dying Colonialism and The Wretched of the Earth The revolutionary actors of Fanon’s Algerian writings are subjects who endlessly make themselves new, re-creating social relations, family structures, personal appearance, and linguistic designations as they piece together the “vast epic” that is for Fanon the true form of the anticolonial revolution.44 L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959), translated as Studies in a Dying Colonialism (1967, hereafter cited as SDC) and republished as Sociologie d’une révolution (1968, hereafter cited as SR), makes several further references to epic form. As the Algerian rebels who tune into Frenchlanguage radio broadcasts decipher the truth behind the propaganda and retell that information among themselves “isolated and fragmented acts” gleaned from official accounts shape themselves into “a national and Algerian political thought” just as “scattered acts fit into a vast epic” (SR, 68; SDC, 84). Similarly, the chapter “The Algerian Family” endows the revolutionary Algerian woman “who was writing the heroic pages of Algerian history” with an explicitly epic capacity—not to go back to the past (return is impossible) but to be born again as “a new woman” (SR, 93; SDC, 107). Daughters cast off their veils and leave home to spend weeks with resistance fighters in the mountains where they meet and choose their mates, while wives begin to have revolutionary duties about which they cannot inform their husbands. The struggle witnesses the “simultaneous and effervescent eruption of the citizen, the patriot, the modern spouse” (SR, 100; SDC, 114). Gender for Fanon seems a particularity to be translated with all possible speed into some universality, be it the pathological Negrophobia of the white woman and the woman of color examined in Black Skin or the unity of an insurgent anticolonial nationalism that recognizes gender only to subsume it.

Ghostly Forms    The utopian newness of revolutionary time again turns on generic and gendered distinctions in the most well-known chapter of Studies in a Dying Colonialism. “Algeria Unveiled,” as John Mowitt points out, has an “allegorical character” whose potential to fix woman and nation to one another is waylaid by the “restless shuttling” and “movement” of those signifiers, of the essay’s metonymic logic, and, routing his reading via Derrida’s discussion of the veil, of its guiding figure of unveiling.45 “Algeria Unveiled” opens its analysis of the conflicts over the veil under colonialism by conjuring another moving concept, invoking the formal confrontation between the “tragedy of the colonial situation” and “the epic of the colonized society with its specific ways of existing, in the face of the colonialist hydra” (SR, 22; SDC, 40). As the agent of anticolonialism’s epic, the Algerian woman adopts several roles. In the first phase of resistance she takes up the veil in symbolic refusal of the colonial narrative of Algerian women’s unveiling and liberation at the hands of the French. In the second phase of “mutation” the veil ceases to be a talismanic object of cultural distinction and becomes an “instrument,” either put on to conceal weapons carried through the streets or taken off to distract French soldiers with the image of a woman freed by France or possibly French herself.46 Fanon describes her passage: It is without apprenticeship, without cover stories, without fib or fuss [sans apprentissage, sans récits, sans histoire] that she [the Algerian woman] goes out into the street with three grenades in her handbag or the activity report of an area in her bodice. There is in her no sensation of playing a role she has read about time and again in novels, or seen in the cinema. There is not that coefficient of play, of imitation, that is almost always present in this form of action when we consider a Western woman. This is not the bringing to light of a character known and frequented a thousand times in imagination or in stories. It is an authentic birth, in a pure state, without preliminary instruction. There is no character to imitate. On the contrary, there is an intense dramatization, a lack of any gap between the woman and the revolutionary. The Algerian woman rises right away to the level of tragedy. (SR, 32–33; SDC, 50)

In Fanonian axiomatics imitation is the mark of alienation, instinct the sign of revolutionary action. Because the Algerian woman’s imitation of French femininity is both tactical and untutored, because she is a born

   Ghostly Forms mimic as well as a willed one, her performance ironically confirms her revolutionary uniqueness. Generic distinctions further allow Fanon to characterize the essential distance between the Algerian woman passing as French and the French woman. The latter imitates in the style of bovarysme, borrowing her reality from novels, films, and stories. The Algerian woman’s education, by contrast, is anything but sentimental. Hers is a tragic performance in the classic sense, a knowing practice of mimesis that aims to induce a particular effect by calling up particular affects—not pity and fear but fantasy and desire—so as to evacuate and expel a dangerous presence. If catharsis in the colonial scene is an incomplete project in the Algerian writings, with their insistent temporal orientation to an urgent revolutionary “now,” Fanon’s final work issues from the quite different locale of a postcolonial future. Wretched has relatively little of the earlier writings’ national fervor because its abiding concern is nationalism, the hollow and dead form animated by the administrators, politicians, and businessmen who suck the life of the nation. Yet Wretched too, in Lewis Gordon’s phrase, is a “tragic text about a tragic world.” As Gordon’s careful and classically grounded elaboration establishes, tragedy’s essentially “progressive-regressive” form stages an end that will come back as a beginning. “The revolutionary possibility of tragedy,” Gordon writes, “is thus that its object of degradation, if you will, is always the powerful. But the irony of tragedy is that it promises a form of restoration that can never truly be ‘as things were before.’ ”47 In tragedy’s “progressive-regressive” form there is no pure going back and no simple moving on. Caught between past sins and future hope, between repetition and difference, a certain unconsciousness of self and a peripatetic coming to consciousness, tragedy is an oscillatory structure. As Wretched ’s preferred form for nationalism, tragedy enables Fanon to capture the ambiguities of that political project, with its revolutionary-counterrevolutionary cycles of return, its peculiar alternation between forms of life and forms of death, and its opening, through those very structures, toward something new. In contrast to the more allegorical narratives of nationalism that aim to chronicle either a regenerated racialnational life (as in Du Bois) or a bloody postcolonial national death (as in Rushdie and Naipaul), Fanon’s tragic narrative of nationalism is a more ambiguous genre of the political.

Ghostly Forms    Written, as Nigel Gibson says, “quite literally against time itself,”48 Wretched was completed in ten short weeks while Fanon lay dying from advanced leukemia in a Bethesda, Maryland, hospital. Working in the shadow of his own death and in the wake of such untimely events as the death of Congolese revolutionary statesman Patrice Lumumba and the premature decay of Martinican independence following Césaire’s acceptance of De Gaulle’s offer of departmental status, Fanon intended Wretched as a guide for those who would come after. A preoccupation with time set free dominates the volume, from its opening definition of decolonization as the “creation of new men” (DT, 6; WE, 2) to its denunciation of negritude as the philosophy of the past, the black equivalent of the “dead time [le temps mort] introduced by colonialism” (DT, 101; WE, 30), to its cautionary anatomy of how newness grows old in the hands of a national bourgeois elite who return to colonial plots, to its final urging to “leave behind” a Europe of “stasis”—“frozen movement where little by little dialectics transforms itself into the logic of status quo” (DT, 374; WE, 237). Where Black Skin envisions a future freedom from the standpoint of a subject for whom to live in time—colonial time, racial time—is to live, really to die, in the gaze of the other, Wretched reclocks both colonial and racial time by setting them against that of the nation. But where national time seems new in Fanon’s earlier Algerian writings, in Wretched it is sadly already old. As it meditates on the future Wretched lingers on instances of aborted historical change. If for the Marx of “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” the French Revolution stalled in increasingly farcical repetition, for Fanon the anticolonial revolutions of the Third World are even more subject to stasis. Whereas even “the lowest French peasants benefited substantially from this upheaval,” Wretched ’s first chapter remarks, “for 95 percent of the population of underdeveloped countries, independence has brought no immediate change” (DT, 106; WE, 38). Race is what distinguishes the colonial situation from all others. “When one closely examines the colonial context in its present state, it is evident that what segments the world is first the fact of belonging or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is the effect; one is rich because one is white, one is white because one is rich. This is why Marxist analyses should always be slightly

   Ghostly Forms stretched [distendue] each time one confronts the colonial question” (DT, 70; WE, 5). The residue of racialization in the former colonies ensures continued economic inequity vis-à-vis the West and reproduces it within a rapidly emerging class structure in the new nations. Even as Wretched here asserts the centrality of race to the colonial and postcolonial situation, the general analysis struggles to reshape dominant narratives of race, be they the “zoological terms” with which colonialism consigns the nonwhite world to the “bestiary” (DT, 73; WE, 7), the classical Marxist account of race as an essentially economic identity mystified as a cultural one, or decolonization’s nationalist appeal to race as the basis of national unity. If colonialism is truly to end, Wretched implies, it is not only Marxism but nationalism too that will have to be stretched.49 By way of further unpacking Fanon’s encounter with Marx and the impact it has on Fanon’s formal concerns, let us recall the passage from “The Eighteenth Brumaire” (1852) quoted by Fanon a full century later as the epigraph to the concluding chapter of Black Skin. In the passage that serves as Fanon’s epigraph Marx announces that the social revolution “cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.” “Earlier revolutions relied on memories out of world history in order to drug themselves against their own content [Inhalt]. In order to find their own content, the revolutions of the nineteenth century have to let the dead bury the dead. Before the expression exceeded the content; now the content exceeds the expression” (PN, 181; BS, 223). To “let the dead bury the dead,” in the phrase Marx borrows from Hegel, is to create the conditions for the living history of the social revolution. History lives or dies based on how it negotiates the relationship between form and content. Thus, Marx evokes under the sign of life a possible revolution whose content will exceed its expression, in contrast to those earlier revolutions that allowed their expression to exceed their content and ended up reproducing themselves in the deadlock of historical repetition. In Marx’s famous redaction of Hegelian historical law, history repeats itself first time as tragedy, second time as farce. The latter is the revolution skewered in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” namely, the 1851 coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte in which, Marx claims, Napoleon’s 1799 coup d’état was merely (and badly) replayed.50 In a similar fashion Wretched will denounce the nationalist bourgeoisie of the newly independent nation as “not even the replica of Europe, but its caricature” (DT, 217; WE, 119).

Ghostly Forms    This is a class, for Fanon as for Marx, whose form as parody in no way diminishes its force as tragedy. If Wretched effectively repeats Marx’s diagnosis, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” of revolutions that coexist with their failures, as the Marxist critic Tony Martin has suggested,51 Fanon’s text equally inherits the preoccupation with expressive form and future time that distinguishes this most theatrical and spectral of Marx’s writings. Here another reader of Marx must guide us. In Specters of Marx’s extended reading of the passage from “The Eighteenth Brumaire,” Derrida observes that Marx’s historical time depends on a “conjuration” in which “all the joints give way between form and content.”52 “Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost,” writes Derrida elsewhere in Specters, as he explains (from the standpoint of the ghost of Hamlet’s father) the logic of arrival and return, of coming and coming back that he will go on to detect throughout Marx.53 To deontologize Marx, as Derrida characterizes his project, it is necessary to hauntologize him. This move itself returns to Derrida’s much earlier efforts to reveal within a given discourse’s grounding concepts a silent dependency on what it announces itself against or beyond, even as it infuses that method with the predictive edge and temporal horizon that characterizes Derrida’s later writings on politics. The revolution, in Derrida’s reading of Marx, is the ghost. There is, for Derrida, no Marxism and no revolution that is not spectral, for spectrality is the “fantastic panoply” and “paradoxy” at work across Marx’s major writings (Specters, 119; Spectres, 194). The specter names something (a father’s ghost, a revolution’s future) that can never be entirely traced back to its origin or be fully exorcised. Making multiple appearances and disappearances, conjoining incarnation and evanescence, the specter is always already there and always yet to come. Such “untimeliness” for Derrida renders communism spectral both in the sense of being temporally noncoincident with itself (“it is always still to come”) and in the sense of remaining, like the democracy to which it is opposed, distinct “from every living present understood as plenitude of a presenceto-itself, as a totality of a presence effectively identical to itself” (Specters, 99; Spectres, 162). Derrida’s Marxist readers charge him with producing, in Pierre Macherey’s words, “Marx without social classes, without the exploitation of labor, without surplus-value”; in Spivak’s judgment, “a messianism

   Ghostly Forms without content” that ignores capital’s theory of value and women’s place in it in favor of the ghost; and what Eagleton calls simply “Marxism without Marxism.”54 Eagleton and other readers, including Antonio Negri, Tom Lewis, and Aijaz Ahmad, diagnose a degree of personal nostalgia and mourning in Specters. Finally coming round to Marx in the early 1990s and, in their account, regretting that communism’s end has not been deconstruction’s triumph, Derrida reads himself as Marx’s true inheritor. Derrida responds: “I do not myself mourn, and feel no nostalgia at all, truly none at all, for what has just vanished from the face of the earth after having usurped the figure of communism. But that does not prevent me from analyzing the paradoxical symptoms of a geopolitical mourning, or trying to articulate them with a new logic of the relations between the unconscious and politics.”55 In light of this specified interest, Derrida’s response to what he deems Jameson’s “remarkable” reading of Specters is notable. He agrees with and appreciates Jameson’s recognition of spectrality as “the form of the most radical politicization.” But he draws a sharp line between Jameson’s reading of the messianic as “the spectrality of the future, the other dimension, that answers to the haunting spectrality of the past which is historicity itself” and Specters’ attempt at repoliticization through a less utopian relationship to time.56 Spectrality’s “messianicity without messianism,” Derrida reiterates, is less certain of the arrival of some end. It indeed constitutes a “waiting without waiting, a waiting whose horizon is, as it were, punctured by the event (which is waited for without being awaited)” (251). The radically untimeliness of the specter refuses single being, closed ending, fixed location, and certain knowledge. By virtue of its indeterminacy, what Derrida calls “the essential, general, non-regional possibility of the specter,”57 the specter can be understood as the moving ground of two distinct kinds of knowledge. Spectral knowledge is knowledge already known (“Tiens, un nègre!”). It issues from the phantomatic projection of the racial-colonial law onto an object, the black subject, that is always old even when seen for the first time. But spectral knowledge, Black Skin shows, is also knowledge we cannot yet have, knowledge that remains to come, unknowable and undecidable. Black Skin’s closing plea and final line, “Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions” (PN, 188; BS, 232), is an opening to future living, a recorporealization of the

Ghostly Forms    disjointed, fractured, fragmented, black subject in order to assert some future beyond the racial-epidermal schema. In a similarly spectral fashion, Fanon’s nation in Wretched regularly finds itself out of time and out of place, regularly taking in some end point into its own haunted life. Just as Fanon’s new nation must go beyond the temporal death of anticolonial nationalism’s initial utopianism and the rapacious bourgeois nationalism that is colonialism’s uncanny redux, so too must it breach the spatial limit separating nation from globe. “It is at the heart of national consciousness that international consciousness establishes itself and springs to life [s’ élève et se vivifie]” (DT 295–96, WE 180). Because national consciousness is, in Fanon’s words, “not nationalism,” it is “the only thing that will give us an international dimension.” Thus, the birth of national consciousness in Africa gestures toward a future international consciousness even as it preserves “a strictly contemporaneous connection to African consciousness,” understood not as the prison of racial being but rather an embattled continental solidarity in the face of “still entrenched” colonialism (DT, 295–96; WE, 247). As a species of affiliation that incorporates the international and the continental into the national, Fanon’s national consciousness vitalizes the nation. Animated by national culture’s seemingly endless capacity for regeneration and expressed in organicist tropes like the national family and the new woman, Fanon’s national consciousness also enlists the ghostly form of form to bring life to the nation. In this, Fanon does seem to endow the nation with what Cheah calls “vitalized teleology.”58 Read with an eye to their generic lives, the tragic-farcical form of bourgeois nationalism in Wretched and the tragic action of the Algerian woman in Studies in a Dying Colonialism are clearly nothing alike; the one belongs to death, the other to life. Fatal nationalism; vital nation. Postcolonial theory and literature are rich with demonstrations of the extent to which the death that Fanon foresaw came to pass: the initial flight and subsequent return of foreign capital to newly decolonized nations, the corrupt regimes of the neocolonial bourgeoisie, and the new imperialism of global capital (phenomena that figure in Specters’ ten theses on the new International). But Fanon’s idea of the nation, unlike Derrida’s, also regularly cross-hatches prophetic time and organicized life with a more uncertain apprehension of national temporality, the nation as something that will never be entirely

   Ghostly Forms fulfilled or finished, that will never end because it is always in some sense beginning again. This is not the teleological closing of time but rather its opening in the continuous fashion of the specter, that figure derived, let no one forget, from tragedy. In attempting a spectral reading of Fanon, I have lingered on the relatively hidden quantity of generic form while pursuing the possibility of a hidden convergence between the thought of this adopted Algerian and that of another expatriated Algerian. The pairing is curious given that Fanon’s philosophy depends on two categories to which Derrida has complicated relations: nation and psyche. And yet Derrida himself confessed how, in the Algeria of his youth, France seemed “strange, fantastic, and phantom-like [fantomal]. Deep down, I wonder whether one of my first and most imposing figures of spectrality, of spectrality itself, was not France; I mean everything that bore this name . . . a place of fantasy, therefore, at an ungraspable distance.”59 The logics of phantom, fantasy, and specter cross in an evocation that reads as a colonized subject’s relationship to a colonial nation and, even more, to colonial language, the only “sovereign” Derrida claims ever to have recognized. These echoes of Fanon notwithstanding, there are some signal differences, not the least of which is Derrida’s complete silence about his fellow Algerian. Some of Specters’ Marxist readers charge Derrida with, as Lewis puts it, “circumscribing a therapeutic space in which listeners or readers receive permission to incorporate and to forget ‘Marxism’ all at once.”60 Derrida of course understands Specters as a very different work of mourning, a moving through Marxism and past it, being in it yet not of it, in a fantasmatic topology for which it is precisely a therapeutic language that provides the medium. Responding in Ghostly Demarcations, Derrida betrays some surprise that so few of his Marxist readers have engaged what he describes as the need now for “a different problematic . . . one that, articulating psychoanalysis and politics in a new way—something none of those who respond to me in this book do—takes into consideration the experience of death and mourning, and, therefore, of spectralization. (Need I recall that my book moves in that direction?)” (243). Quite as much as the repoliticization of world politics it invokes, this new politics of theoretical approximation is Specters’ own ghost, that toward which it addresses itself, what surfaces in its pages and will not leave the scene. The buried relationship of Fanon to Derrida is perhaps one locale of the close

Ghostly Forms    encounter between psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and nationalism. We may remember another in Specters’ lingering return, in the context of the ghost hunt played out between Marx and Stirner in The German Ideology, to the Freudian uncanny, defined as the topologically uncertain instant in which “the nearby, the familiar, the domestic, or even the national (heimlich) . . . feels itself occupied, in the proper secret (Geheimnis) of its inside, by what is most strange, distant, threatening” (Specters, 144–45; Spectres, 231). Recalling Derrida’s reminder that Freud specified the ghost as the strongest example of the uncanny, and Derrida’s further specification of the ghost as “the Thing itself, the cause of the very thing one is seeking and that makes one seek,” the ghost in other words not as a demon to exorcise but a revenant to welcome, we may wonder what Derrida would have made of the place of the ghost in Fanon (Specters, 172; Spectres, 257). In what sense would Derrida have grasped the radical untimeliness and porosity of Fanon’s Nation-Thing? Derrida would doubtless have seen Fanon’s idea of the nation as inscribed within the dangerous, outmoded “phantom” of grounded, territorial sovereignty whose passing sounds the first note of his 2003 essay Voyous (Rogues).61 Sovereignty in fact is less a phantom (fantôme) for Derrida than it is a “phantasm” (fantasme) (Specters, 82; Spectres, 136–37). “Primitive” and “archaic,” governed by the logic of autonomy, autotely, and oneness, and generally fusing being and location in what Derrida dismissively terms an “ontopology,” state sovereignty is at odds with the double being of the specter. Like the internationalist democracy-to-come whose privileged figure it is, the specter oscillates between being and not being, presence and absence, what has passed, what arrives, and what has yet to come. So where the logic of state sovereignty must be “eroded” not only in “its principle of indivisibility” but also in “its right to the exception, its right to suspend rights and law, along with the undeniable ontotheology that founds it, even in what are called democratic regimes,” the spectral quantity of democracy-to-come must be perpetually entertained (Rogues, 157; Voyous, 215.) “The to of the ‘to come,’ ” Derrida writes, “hesitates between imperative injunction (call or performative) and the patient perhaps of messianicity (nonperformative exposure to what comes, to what can always not come or has already come).”62 In his discussion of Jameson’s reading of Specters, Derrida announces himself puzzled by the former’s

   Ghostly Forms connection of spectrality to an allegorical understanding of time, class, even of Marx. Derrida is willing to claim affiliation to an understanding defined by a certain play of differences across a field but resists its formal designation (“I am not sure, however, that I understand or, consequently, can accept, the word “allegory” . . . it doubtless calls for clarifications and a debate”).63 Where allegory provides the formal structure of classically messianic time with its promise, however broken, of eschatological closure and divine redemption, the “messianicity without messianism” Derrida derives in part from Benjamin and recharacterizes as spectral prefers the figure of the tearing of time. Through the breach democracy’s “future-tocome [l’ à venir]” emerges not as some conclusion to the present but rather as the opening of the now to a possibility it cannot altogether predict and a form that it may not entirely recognize.64 Hesitating between “two possibilities, two modalities of discourse, two postures,” the contradictory modes of democracy-to-come are spoken in a range of registers. “For democracy opens public space, the publicity of public space, by granting the right to a change of tone [Wechsel der Tone], to irony as well as to fiction, the simulacrum, the secret, literature, and so on” (Rogues, 91–92; Voyous, 132–33). In its polytonal, heterogeneric forms (the inverse of sovereignty’s oneness), in its perpetually deferred arrival (the mark of a time that exceeds itself), and perhaps even in what Derrida calls the “free play of its indetermination” (Rogues, 37; Voyous, 61), democracy-to-come bears some resemblances to what I have characterized as the spectral quantity of Fanon’s national thinking. At the same time, it is practically as an epitaph to Fanon that we might hear Rogues’ claim that the nature of war has slipped our cognitive grasp post–9/11 in the absence of classical international war and well after the historical variant of “resisting territorial occupation, or waging a revolutionary war or a war of independence so as to liberate a colonized state and found another” (Rogues, 106; Voyous, 150). But the voice from beyond the grave—as Césaire eulogized Fanon—still speaks. And the object of its speech, namely, the nation, remains. If Fanon’s nation, shot through with movements of consciousness and unconsciousness, of affect and desire, is a nation open to psychoanalysis, it is also a nation that shares with Derrida’s specter a tearing open of time’s line and space’s heim. Without claiming for nationalism, either in Fanon’s moment or afterward, the constitutive freedom that is for Derrida

Ghostly Forms    the central feature of democracy-to-come, and cognizant that the future of the nation form remains for Derrida washed-up, political detritus on the shores of global currents, I have nonetheless found it useful to read him against the grain in order to detect a series of similarities between the spectral substance of democracy-to-come and the nation I have called fantasmatic. Like democracy-to-come, the fantasmatic nation is in a state of perpetual movement: inscribed in the discourse of a ceaseless adjournment and ceaseless “becoming”; subtended by a general logic of co-constitution, in which the inside is created by its outside; and finally, in excess of the temporal and semantic closures attached to any one, only one, form, tone, mode, or genre of expression. If Fanon’s various accounts of the postcolonial nation have some of that unfulfilled, unanswerable hope for the future that both Derrida and Benjamin take to be the distinguishing characteristic of messianic time, it is a quality that we cannot expect simply to find announced in the messianic form of a manifesto. It will instead have to be detected in such apparitional forms as the generic shifts that thrust Fanon’s nation out of certain plots and open it to others.

Ghostreading Wretched The first chapter of Wretched, “On Violence,” follows its account of the generalized paralysis in which independence leaves the undeveloped world with the observation that this is merely a “kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again” (DT, 106; WE, 35). To illustrate the messianic transformation of this smoldering resentment into emancipating violence, Fanon genre-switches. To the well-known assertion that “the colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence” he appends a reference to Césaire’s 1956 play Et les chiens se taisaient (DT, 118; WE, 44). In that “tragedy,” as Fanon is careful to identify it, the violence that frees the colonized takes on “prophetic significance.” Fanon quotes the concluding passage in which Césaire’s Rebel kills the master who sees him as thoroughly educable, “a good Christian and a good slave.” “I struck, the blood spurted; that is the only baptism that I remember today” (DT, 121; WE, 46). Inserted into Wretched at the moment when Fanon is describing the inevitability of the native’s struggle

   Ghostly Forms against the settler and its historical significance, this passage is the very same one quoted earlier in chapter 6 of Black Skin. There, however, Fanon adds in another line from much earlier in Césaire’s play: “After an unexpected and salutary interior revolution, he now honored his own repulsive ugliness” (PN, 161; BS, 198). Whereas Black Skin cites Césaire’s Rebel in order to point, with no small scorn, to the deadening leap back into race consciousness, Wretched cites the Rebel as the prophetically violent voice of a revolution of a decidedly less interior cast. This war of liberation will have to be fought twice, first against colonialism and then, as Wretched ’s subsequent chapters make clear, against the bourgeois nationalism that replays colonialism’s tragedy as farce. Tempting though it might be to find in these two citations of Césaire evidence of Fanon’s passage from race, the preoccupation of Black Skin, to nation, the central concern of Wretched, it is not the illusory teleology of ideological progress that concerns me so much as the reappearance of the heterogeneric. Like some ghost of the textual past, Césaire’s play and, in Black Skin, poetry rise up at precisely those moments when Fanon’s political writing strains to clock the heterochronic—the differential and disjunctive, dead and alive, recidivist and messianic times of both race and nation. Like race in Black Skin, nation in Wretched is not simply a vitalized form of identity moving forward in history but also a fictionalized, fantasized, psychopolitical object that moves forward by falling back. As something always already past, gone, even dead, nationalism in Fanon’s analysis always confronts the problem of form. “On Violence” pauses in its denunciation of the bourgeois nationalist politicians who inherit and squander the nation to remark how they give only “a vague form” to the demands of the colonized. This mere “outline” (cadre) is national in shape but devoid of any political and social “content” (“Il n’y a pas de contenu, il n’y a pas de programme politique et sociale. Il y a une forme vague mais néanmoins nationale, un cadre”) (DT, 99; WE, 29). Bourgeois nationalism is an empty form fleshed out in fantasy. Politicians “make the people dream” and incite their imagination to “leap outside the colonial order” by using incantatory terms like “we Negroes, we Arabs,” the “national or tribal language” that the revolution “sacralises.” Chapter 4, “The Tribulations of National Consciousness,” similarly eviscerates the bourgeois nationalism that has “come to power in the name of a narrow

Ghostly Forms    nationalism, and in the name of race. “[The bourgeois nationalists] will prove themselves incapable of allowing a program that is even minimally humanist to triumph, despite their voicing of declarations that are very beautiful in their form but completely empty of content, declarations whose phrases come galloping straight out of European treatises on morals and political philosophy in a completely irresponsible fashion” (DT, 204; WE, 109). With a language stolen from history, this rapacious regime of imitators and businessmen milks the country dry after independence while the “party sinks into a spectacular lethargy” and “sloughs off its former skin to reemerge as administration” (DT, 212; WE, 115). Later Fanon will claim the bourgeois leaders “imprison national consciousness in a sterile formalism” (DT, 247; WE, 144). Like those older, stalled revolutions whose form Marx claimed exceeded, took over, their content, independence in Fanon’s analysis promises newness only to bring back the old, reencasing colonialism’s “profiteering regime” in neocolonial skin (DT, 212; WE, 115). The final sentence of Wretched reasserts, “we must slough off old skin, work out a new thinking, and try to set afoot a new man” (DT, 376; WE, 239). Such newness can never come from nationalism, with its essentially tragic-farcical form and its implicit racial basis. “On National Culture,” first presented as an address to the second Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1959, continues the lancing. This chapter of Wretched describes a generation of nativist-nationalist intellectuals who leave the adulation of “that Western culture in which they all risk being swallowed” only to fall into the “unconditional affirmation of African culture” (DT, 255, 258; WE, 148, 151). To liberate themselves from such paralyzing categories, Fanon argues, they must turn away from the wholesale racialization of culture that links colonialism with its Negrophobic fantasies, negritude with its mythified black world, and bourgeois nationalism with its talismanic appeals to “we Negroes, we Arabs,” and instead enter the living domain of a national culture in which other expressive forms will return to life. In contrast to the earlier phases of assimilationist imitation and reactive, racialized return, would-be white writing and defiant black writing, the closing pages of “On National Culture” describe national literature as an altogether new generic species. As what Fanon calls “temporalized will,” the “literature of combat” is the time of genre opened to its full transformative potential. The literature

   Ghostly Forms of combat “informs national consciousness, gives it form and contours and opens it to new and limitless horizons” (DT, 289; WE, 173). It resurrects and recombines the traditional “stories, epics, and songs of the people” and modernizes them to include references to the contemporary struggle. It changes even the lexemes of oral tradition, for example, replacing the formula “This all happened long ago” with “What we are going to recount happened somewhere else, but it could well happen here today or tomorrow.” With the shift from formulaic pasts to messianic futurity, politics takes generic form, even generic life. Comedy and farce “disappear,” drama exceeds the scope of individual tragedy, and popular songs, stories, and visual arts exhibit a “new vigor” and “life” that can only be that of the new nation itself (DT, 289; WE, 175). Both the heterogeneric and the heterochronic surge up in Fanon’s writings when futurity (disalienation, liberation, revolution) is at stake. So in its opening anatomy of the Manichean order of colonial space and time, “On Violence” defines the settler as the “absolute beginning” and the “ceaseless cause” and characterizes his life as “an epic, an Odyssey.” His time is the time that founds, the time of firsts and bests. “If we leave,” Fanon ventriloquizes the epic hero of colonialism, “all is lost, and the land will return to the Middle Ages” (DT, 82; WE, 14). A chronicle of historical progress in a land that has none of its own, the settler’s epic consigns the native to the unchanging past. Eager to put an end to the “immobility to which he is condemned,” the native struggles to write his own, to “bring into existence the history of the nation, the history of decolonization.” The native’s national epic moves forward to liberation in the style of the teleologized journey and powerfully resists the urge to plunge, for any reason, back into the past that colonialism “distort[ed], disfigur[ed], and destroy[ed]” (DT, 256; WE, 149). Even the native’s dream world is located in a time that must be left behind. Filled with “terrifying myths” and “maleficent spirits,” vampires, djinns, zombies, revenants, two-headed horses, and serpent-men all circulating in an “atmosphere of myths and magic,” this dream world is more terrifyingly real in the mind of the native than any colonial outrage (DT, 85–86; WE, 18). To cease to believe in these “extraordinary phantasms” and to recognize instead colonialism’s brute force is to enter a reality where, as Fanon ruthlessly reminds his audience, dreams take on a different cast (DT, 89; WE, 20). “There is no

Ghostly Forms    native who does not dream at least once a day of setting himself up in the place of the settler” (DT, 70; WE, 5); “the native dreams constantly of putting himself in the place of the settler” (DT, 83; WE, 16); “the native is an oppressed person whose perpetual dream is to become the persecutor” (DT, 84; WE, 16). With the advent of national struggle the native breaks away even more. “He discovers reality and transforms it in the movement of his praxis [le mouvement de sa praxis], in the practice of violence, and in his plan for liberation” (DT, 89; WE, 20–21). In the conclusion to a later chapter, “The Tribulations of National Consciousness,” Fanon again claims, “the living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people [la conscience en mouvement de l’ensemble du peuple]” (DT, 247; WE, 144). In contrast to the animation famously called for in “On Violence,” where Fanon exhorts the colonized to resurrect himself over “the rotting corpse of the settler,” movement evokes a different logic of life (DT, 126; WE, 50). As a central trope, along with enlightenment and awakening, for the vitalizing, vivifying work of struggle, movement fulfills the additional function of conjuring national life in the uncertain register of a spectral futurity. Thus, the native intellectual whom Fanon urges to enter the “zone of occult instability [ce lieu de déséquilibre occulte] where the people dwell” does so not to get back to the people (as if they somehow belonged to the past) nor to lead them forward, but rather out of the commitment to “join them in that counter movement [mouvement basculé] which they are just giving birth to, and which, as soon as it has started, will be the signal for everything to be called in question” (DT, 273; WE, 163). The time marked by hidden, occult instability gestures toward a future that is neither repeated, like bourgeois nationalism’s caricatural farce, nor returned to, like negritude’s plunge into the past, nor even apparitionally prefigured, like the ruinous time of decay that Fanon predicts will come with the consolidation of the neocolonial state apparatus and the invasion of foreign capital. The hidden time that the people are “just giving birth to” is a time still-to-come but already existent, for the future yet here now, in its own moment yet ceaselessly opened to others. In “The Commitment to Theory,” Bhabha defines Fanon’s “time of liberation” as “a time of cultural uncertainty, and most crucially, of significatory or representational undecidability.”65 “DissemiNation” subsequently

   Ghostly Forms describes the figure of occult instability as Fanon’s attempt “to locate the people in performative time,” that is, in “various temporalities—modern, colonial, postcolonial, ‘native’ ” that together unsettle the people’s place as the unchanging object of a nationalist pedagogy.66 Bhabha’s reading of Fanon’s people as the split subjects of enunciative, semiotic, temporal, and ultimately cultural difference has seemed to several critics to repress the people’s status as the subjects of national liberation.67 Bhabha does suggest in “The Commitment to Theory” that “the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based . . . on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity” (38). Still elsewhere, he endows occult instability with an uncanny doubling effect that renders the nation other to itself, cut in two by the simultaneous appeal to the national-international, the territorialtopological, and the migrant-diasporic.68 Fanon’s unifying, collectivizing rhetoric of “the people,” the rhetoric that it sometimes seems poststructuralists cannot help deconstructing and Marxists cannot help defending, is certainly a difficult foundation on which to build the edifice of a national internationalism. To read the discontinuities of this rhetoric within form, as much as discourse, is perhaps to begin to close the distance between these two approaches and to diagnose within what Bhabha rightly calls the “moving metaphor” of occult instability the constitutive movement of the nation.69 This is not movement beyond the nation, whether to the paradise of hybrid migrant cosmopolitanism or the utopia of socialist internationalism. It is rather the movement internal to and constitutive of the nation, the movement that I have traced throughout this book. Those who would either teleologize Fanon or diasporize him as onetime nationalist turned migrant subject and race-blind cosmopolitan do so all too often at the expense of an analysis of the extent to which Fanon’s nation lived beyond its borders.70 Fired in the crucible of colonial racism, Fanon’s was a nationalism transformed, but not entirely transmuted, into internationalism. Instead of temporalizing Fanon’s nation as either the end or the beginning of an intellectual life, we would do better to return to the differential forms of time and times of form through which Fanon gives shape to national longing. A version of epic time’s capacity to both remember and anticipate, to chronicle pasts and portend futures ghosts the doubleness that some critics find in Wretched, whether the “bifocal

Ghostly Forms    temporal vision” that Sekyi-Otu identifies,”71 or the “ambivalences” that Bhabha, grounding his reading in Fanon’s temporal disjunctions, takes as the signal gesture of Fanon’s political and psychic projects. Sekyi-Otu’s attentive reading of the formal aspects of Fanon’s writing characterizes even the “narrative structure” of Fanon’s “story of decolonization” as one of “dialectical movement by which the enacted event or figure is compelled to disclose its incompleteness, the fatal shortcoming of its moral consequences, and thereby made to yield to a vision of suppressed or transgressive possibilities” (236). If the moments where Fanon turns the specificities of race or gender, culture or class into an organicized, vitalized nation can be read as instances of the totalizing and homogenizing imperatives of a nationalist discourse that flattens difference, perhaps those moments can also serve as illustrations of the mobility of nation thinking. A certain spectrality effect allows one identity and form of affiliation to be called into being (nation) as another (race, gender) seems to be transcended or, more accurately, transmuted, for it remains uncannily present at the scene of nation formation. Filled with the remainders of the past even as it gestures toward the future, nation thinking finds its double in genre, that form in which a particular past keeps coming back to the present. Genres are distinct kinds, types, or categories of expression that periodically congeal (incarnate) in certain discursive elements, codes, and structures but are equally subject to repetition. For that reason, they are always disaggregating and reaggregating. Genres define a lineage but rarely take the form of a line (the novel’s apocryphal “rise” is a red herring). Genres move forward, but they also spread out, as more and more texts engage the particular rules of a system that is itself in constant transformation. Based on this spectral law of genre, the time of transformation appears only partially congealed in the privileged form of revolution or its emblematic genre, the manifesto. The emergent time of the political, and this is profoundly true in Fanon’s oeuvre, demands a variety of tellings, what I have called Fanon’s heterochronic, heterogeneric writing. Sliding between the manifesto and the dream analysis, the poetic lyric, dramatic narrative, and the revolutionary blueprint, marked by a peculiar kind of generic excess, both Wretched and Black Skin activate a notion of genre that is altogether ghostly—hard to pin down, haunting in their address, and curiously disembodied in their perpetually alternating ventriloquization

   Ghostly Forms of the colonial racist, alienated native, colonized intellectual, revolutionary actor, and bourgeois nationalist. Like the axis of time that provides the key to Fanon’s fundamentally discontinuous (for Bhabha) and dialectical (for Sekyi-Otu) thought, genre offers another category through which to apprehend the “movement of historical becoming” that is Wretched ’s guiding concern, from its opening account of decolonization as historical process to its closing anticipation of the birth of new thinking, new history, and a new man (DT, 66; WE, 36). Both as a formal model of movement and as a process itself made through a ghost logic of certain return, genre gives shape to a nation that is always on the move. If we can come to see nations and national identifications through this problematic, perhaps we will be less quick and certain in declaring them dead and gone. Perhaps we will even be inclined to think about how nations might take on forms for the future, styles of action founded in a sense of their interconnectedness to one another, to the globe, and to all those, citizens and non, nationals and others, who live within the compass of their actions. Through an anatomy of national identificatory form could something like an account of national responsibility emerge? This is one possibility engaged by the tradition of national narration represented by Fanon and continued in other genres of postcolonial expression. It is to that afterlife that the following chapter turns.

5 New Nations, New Novels

Untimely Tellings In the postcolony, writes Mbembe in a political anatomy partially inspired by Fanon and Derrida, “time is not a series but an interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures, each age bearing, altering, and maintaining the previous ones.” “Discontinuities, reversals, inertias, and swings” regularly interpenetrate and enclose one another, and time takes on the structure of entanglement, “a bundle of unforeseen events, of more or less regular fluctuations and oscillations, not necessarily resulting in chaos and anarchy.”1 For Mbembe, in one of several points that link him to Fanon, the postcolony is not simply after the colony but repeats it. The postcolony’s regime of arbitrary violence, depersonalization, and excessive subjectification installed according to the laws of a “burden of fiction” assigned indiscriminately to places, events, and persons reproduces an Africa of saturated sensation, raw physicality, and rampant terror (180). For all that these postcolonial portraits return an African same (chaos and anarchy) to a colonial sender, they also contain the possibility of difference. If power in the postcolony is characterized by a “distinctive style of political improvisation” (102) and a “chaotically pluralistic” system of signs (108), Mbembe shows the genres of political life in the postcolony to follow suit. Volatile and multivalent, they are animated by life beyond their own, be it the phallic body of neocolonial power that the political joke, cartoon, fable,

   New Nations, New Novels and rumor delight in mocking, or the democratic future to which those styles of protest also gesture, or the novels regularly cited by Mbembe as evidence of the postcolony’s doubled domain of death and life, terror and pleasure; what we might call the affective expression of African politics in all their despair and potentiality. Mushrooming across the postcolony as subversive Bakhtinian rejoinders to the self-authenticating, race-essentializing, and future-aggrandizing discourses of the African state, the popular genres of the political devour fear and regurgitate it as mockery, while also registering a plurality of other sensations and affects, none of them readily accessible as a substance (a race, a nation) or a singular time (victimage’s past, liberation’s future) but only as a snapshot of the present in a state of perpetual becoming. “All sharp breaks, sudden and abrupt outbursts of volatility,” time in the postcolony finds its mirror in the rich diversity of self-stylings and generic representations (16). Mbembe’s incandescent account speaks to the many kinds of work that genre does: as what organizes and expresses certain affects of the political (fear, pleasure, desire, despair); or certain times of the political (the past or the future); or certain acts of the political (transgression, parody, subversion, appropriation). By way of conclusion to this chapter, I consider the political function of the novel in Africa (with a brief detour through film) to express all three in a generically specific resolution of the contradictions of postcolonial time. As one historical technology for the process of independence, the bringing out of nation from colony, the novel in Africa registers an evolution that it simultaneously resists. We might say that the novel in Africa is caught in the décalage of nationalism itself, neither fully achieved nor entirely decayed in contemporary Africa. But first, a caveat. The African novel? This is a descriptor in which a continent is carried by a genre, rendered synonymous with a race, and homogenized by a nationalism understood already to have taken place, and failed. For Mbembe, the project to locate race and nation as the central terms in African discourses of identity is recidivist, harkening back to a nativist-nationalist paradigm that had at its core “an intellectual genealogy based on a territorialized identity and a racialized geography.”2 Where for Fanon nativism enslaved and nationalism liberated, for Mbembe the former merely plays indigenous tradition to the latter’s Marxist modernity in a temporal ontology that crushes the possibilities of African being and even produces a “postcolonial paradigm of victimization” in which race and nation are reified as the only possible

New Nations, New Novels    grounds of African identity (251). “The racialization of the (black) nation and the nationalization of the (black) race go hand in hand” (254). Thus nativism and nationalism, the dominant strands of African political discourse, amount to forms of “dead-end historicism” (241). Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o’s Devil on the Cross, Assia Djebar’s L’amour, la fantasia, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, and J. M. Coetzee’s fiction are novels from the east, north, and south of Africa that map a different kind of continental geography, including for Djebar and Coetzee the possibility of nonblack Africanity. In the second lesson of Elizabeth Costello (2003), a previous lecture of Coetzee’s in the invented genre of fictional criticism titled “The Novel in Africa,” a fictional Nigerian novelist describes the sensuous embodiment and oral tradition that so alienates “we Africans” from the novel form, causing his interlocutor, the white Australian novelist Elizabeth Costello, to recoil from the metaphysics of cultural essence and perhaps raising by extension the question of whether Coetzee’s own famously deconstructive works can and should be considered under the rubric of “The Novel in Africa.”3 In all of the novels explored here distinct national spaces are rendered discontinuous with themselves, linked extranationally and extracontinentally to other points of contact, be it the colonial France and colonial Britain that are the ghosts of Djebar’s fantasmagoric Algeria, Coetzee’s allegorized South Africa, and Dangarembga’s realist Zimbabwe or the Euro-U.S. global finance capital that invades and haunts Ng ˜ugi’s Kenyan nation in the mixed social realist and magical realist registers of Devil on the Cross. Within the nations that are these novels’ subjects, the raced and gendered body is a particularly resonant site on which the discontinuities of postcolonial time and space register themselves, imploding into and onto bodies that, if they are allegorical of the nation, are so only insofar as their breaks and heterogeneities are those of the nation itself. Reading these novels is an exercise in the simultaneous location and dislocation of meanings, variously “African,” “socialist,” “Marxist,” “feminist,” “postcolonial,” “nationalist,” “postcolonial.” It is against the closing of reference that ghost work frames a reading, pointing to precisely those textual instances in which, as Spivak puts it, “literature is what escapes the system.”4 That fugitive quantity is the multiplicity that in these novels striates single referents, say, nation, Africa, or novel, with a certain promissory plurality. As a range of racial,

   New Nations, New Novels ethnic, gendered, sexual subjects are interpellated into a polity that their presence helps to transform, these novels rewrite the story of postcolonial nationalism and offer the novel as a genre of futurity. African nationalism initially denoted a racial-continental community in oppositional struggle against imperialism or, as in Du Bois’s antiimperialist writings, a racial-global community. After the wave of independence begun by Ghana in 1957 and continued by Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria, Uganda, Zaire, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Congo, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mali, and others in the 1960s, to be followed in later decades by Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique (from Portuguese colonialism) and Zimbabwe and South Africa (from white rule), nationalism acquired a territorial specificity linked to the inherited lines of colonial maps. For African literature and the African novel particularly, the tensions between continental identity and national identity persisted. Where some African critics in the 1980s and 1990s found the nation-state to be an essentially colonial legacy that papers over the diversity of languages and ethnicities within borders and “national literature” a similarly artificial category, others have, in Miller’s critical phrase, brought nationalism “back to life” as a category of literary analysis.5 This return of nationalism ironically emerges from a broad tradition of postindependence writing in Africa chronicling the failures of state nationalism and decades of coups, dictatorships, civil wars, and economic dependency. The archive includes, in Mali, Ahmadou Kourouma’s Les soleils des indépendences (1968) and En attendant le vote des bêtes sauvages (1998) and Yambo Oulouguem’s Le devoir de violence (1968); in Senegal, Sembène Ousmane’s Le mandat (1965) and Le dernier de l’empire (1981); in Cameroon, Sony Labou Tansi’s La vie et demie (1979), L’ état honteux (1981), L’anté-peuple (1983), and Les yeux du volcan (1988) (all much cited by Mbembe); in Somalia, Nuruddin Farah’s trilogy Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship (1979, 1981, 1983); in Ghana, Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1969) and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy (1977); in Nigeria, the civil war narratives of Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English (1981) and Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra (1982); in Kenya, Grace Ogot’s The Graduate (1980) in English and several subsequent novels in Luo, as well as the essays, novels, and plays of Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o in English and then Gik ˜uy ˜u. While these novels critique neocolonial state nationalism, they do not sublate nationalism itself.

New Nations, New Novels   

Nation and Allegory Reading “radical postcolonial nationalism as a process of Bildung,” Cheah identifies a “remarkable affinity” between the former and the nineteenth-century novel of becoming that traces the rise into identity of a typical hero who mirrors a larger society in transition and transformation.6 Where the European bildungsroman finds its original condition in the rise of industrial capitalism, Cheah understands the combination of global finance capitalism and postcolonial nationalism in its neocolonial stage to provide the conditions for a second generative moment of the genre. What is allegorically expressed now is not the rise of the nation so much as its haunted suspension between conditions of life and death, activist struggle and global capitalist control. The novel that provides Cheah with one example of the neocolonial national bildungsroman, Ng ˜ugi’s Ca˜itaani Mutharaba-Ini (1980, translated by Ng ˜ugi as Devil on the Cross, 1982) combines the temporal architecture of the bildungsroman with the representation of traditional forms of African culture, thus crafting a realistic portrait of Kenyan society two decades after independence and pointing beyond it. The novel traces the development of a village girl, War˜iiinga, from the loss of her parents to a British detention camp for those suspected of rebel sympathies to her initial seduction and abandonment by a greedy old businessman and then through a consciousness-raising taxi journey from city to country in the company of a young intellectual, Gatu˜iria, and other representative workers, prostitutes, and former freedom fighters. War˜iinga and Gatu˜iria eventually unite in a properly national-allegorical joining of intellectual and worker revitalized by nationalist commitment to remake the country they have seen sold off and dismembered by its rulers. On their wedding day, however, War˜iinga discovers that her father-in-law-to-be is the same old businessman who once seduced her. While her fiancé dithers, she shoots the old man and leaves “without looking back,” in one of those inconclusive, arrested, deferred, and yet for all those reasons, possible endings so prevalent in the literature of neocolonial disillusionment. Devil on the Cross looks forward precisely by looking back, crafting a memorialization of the national past itself. The shadow of the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (Mau Mau) rebellion against British rule (1952–56)

   New Nations, New Novels hovers over the novel, as does that of the subsequent Emergency (1956–60), during which the British imprisoned many thousands in detention camps and hung hundreds, effectively galvanizing the movement toward the independence achieved in 1963. Devil on the Cross evokes the colonial past of repression and resistance, as well as its redux in the authoritarian rule of Jomo Kenyatta’s one-party state (which jailed Ng ˜ugi in 1976–77 for crimes against the state) and Daniel Arap Moi’s succession. As M. Keith Booker points out, the history of decolonization is to the African novel what the bourgeois history of industrial capitalism was to the European novel: its animating event.7 Written on toilet paper in Kimiti Maximum Security Prison, Devil on the Cross, like so many novels and films of this period in Africa, chronicles decolonization as an incomplete break, an inheritance of colonial structures of power that merely change hands, not substance. Similarly, in the iconic scene that opens Sembène’s 1974 film Xala, the French flag is lowered and the flag of Senegal raised in public, while behind closed doors a group of French colonial businessmen in suits and ties hand briefcases full of French currency to similarly dressed African elites, who will literally step into their shoes in a replay, a coming true, of Fanon’s warning against the rapacious rule of the national bourgeoisie, “that company of profiteers impatient for their returns” (DT, 212; WE, 115).8 As an instance of what the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino call “Third Cinema,” Xala joins a tradition that recognizes the “anti-imperialist struggle of the peoples of the Third World and of their equivalents inside the imperialist countries” as “the great possibility of constructing a liberated personality with each people as the starting point—in a word, the decolonization of culture.”9 Picking up on this Fanonian formulation, the Ethiopian filmmaker and Third Cinema theorist Haile Gerima calls for a combative “cinema of demystification” that will destroy and replace “these colonial models occupying our optic nerves.”10 Taking Wretched as “the inspirational guide for Third Cinema,” Gerima’s compatriot Teshome Gabriel indexes Fanon’s three stages of national cultures (alienated imitation, nativist return, and revolutionary commitment) to Third Cinema’s passage from (1) dependency on the transnational cultural and economic hegemony of the Hollywood film to (2) national cinemas that promote decolonization but do not decolonize film language to (3) a radical alteration of cinema and cinematic production that achieves liberation.11

New Nations, New Novels    A film like Sembène’s Xala effects the large-scale regional decolonization of culture that is the target of Third Cinema while simultaneously training its gaze on the category of the postcolonial nation in Africa.12 Sembène first began this project as a novelist, writing in Parisian left literary circles of the 1950s where he encountered Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Louis Aragon; well-known francophone African writers such as Ferdinand Oyono, Mongo Béti, Bernard Dadié, and Laye Camara; and statesmen such as Césaire, Lumumba, and Du Bois. In early novels such as Docker noir (1956), based on his years in Marseille working as a docker, union organizer, and French Communist Party member, and Les bouts de bois de Dieu (1960), based on the 1947–48 Bamako-Dakar railway workers’ strike, Sembène evinced a strong proletarian bent that he came to believe could not be realized in a genre and language with such limited audience in Africa. If Sembène’s switch of mediums has been read by Chantal Zabus as “symptomatic of a will to escape, among other constraints, the infernal binarity of a (m)other-tongue bilingualism that cannot be rendered scripturally in the novel,” it equally presents the model of what Mbaye Cham calls “the Sembenization of African writers.”13 Mandabi (1968), the first film made by an African in an African language, epitomizes the process. Sembène first adapted his French-language novel Le mandat (1965) into a screenplay written in French with nonFrench syntax, which the actors then translated into Wolof during shooting.14 Wolof was a “dominated” language with regard to the francophone linguistic policies of Senghor’s government, to borrow the terminology of the French Marxist sociolinguist Louis-Jean Calvet, but “dominant” with regard to the Peul, Sérère, Diola, Bambara, Sarakolé, and Arabic spoken by smaller Senegalese segments.15 Calvet defines a national language as a dialect or language with political power, chosen by a ruling group and imposed on others. In this context the use of local language constitutes, in Calvet’s words, “language as a refuge, language as the privileged site of a denied authenticity, language as the last recourse against colonial alienation, in a word, language as the maquis of the people” (155, my translation). In all of Sembène’s films language politics subtend the resistance to colonialism and anticolonialism. Social realist narratives pit traditional agrarian communities against urban and industrialized economies that stretch all the way to Paris (the Wolof and French film Xala, the French-

   New Nations, New Novels funded Mandabi, released in both French and Wolof, and the earlier French-language films Borom sarret, 1963; La Noire de . . . , 1966; and Taw, 1969). Other films are protest narratives in which colonial power and native resistance clash (Emitai, 1971; Camp de Thiaroye, 1988; Ceddo, 1976, an eighteenth-century prehistory; and Guelwaar, 1992, a neocolonial update). In Emitai’s account of the French military’s extortion of soldiers and provisions from a Senegalese village the minority language Diola is spoken, while in Camp de Thiaroye the African soldiers massacred by the French army following their return from the battlefields of World War II speak français tiraillou, a pidgin French. Sembène’s switch from novel to film and from French to local language parallels Ng ˜ugi’s switch from English to the minority language Gik ˜uy ˜u in Devil on the Cross. In Decolonising the Mind (1986) Ng ˜ugi proclaims that African literature must be written in African languages and “must carry the content of our people’s anti-imperialist struggle to liberate their productive forces from foreign control.”16 Borrowing from popular cultural forms, including music, dance, and oral narrative, as well as from generic film forms such as melodrama, satire, and comedy, and frequently representing a range of dominated languages and a plurality of class, ethnic, religious, and gender identities, Sembène’s films, like Ng ˜ugi’s novels, embrace the discourse of national independence even as they interrogate its unfinished quality. Jameson reads Sembène’s novel Xala (written in French while he was awaiting funding to film) as an account of what happens when “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 postindependence national or comprador bourgeoisie.”17 In the curse, or xala, of impotence visited upon the corrupt businessman El Hadji by a beggar he once dispossessed, Jameson detects a “double historical perspective—archaic customs radically transformed and denatured by the superposition of capitalist relations” (83). The “twin-valenced element” at work is of course the “transferable structure of allegorical reference” (83, 78). Through allegory’s “complex play of simultaneous and antithetical messages,” Jameson argues, Sembène’s novel is able not only to capture the “primordial crime of capitalism,” the theft that underpins its wealth, but also to “open up a concrete perspective on the real future” (84, 77). Critics of the film Xala have read it this way too, as in Marcia Landy’s argument

New Nations, New Novels    that “the polysemous nature of allegory permits the simultaneous treatment of psychological, social, and political issues” and further reveals the interdependency of all sectors in a bourgeois neocolonial economy in which everything is a fetishized form of value, from El Hadji’s car to his houses to his wives; one a traditional woman, one a westernized woman, and one a silent object to-be-looked at, to borrow Laura Mulvey’s phrase for woman as fetish. Mulvey reads Xala as an expression of the fetishistic form of colonialism, a call to recognize a repressed, disavowed content to neocolonial commodity capitalism. El Hadji’s final submission to ritual abjection as the beggars he has mistreated expectorate all over his body seems to contain, in its recognition of the presence (and power) of those he has literally disavowed, the possibility of a decolonization of the bourgeois neocolonial self. But this “speculative realm of the future,” as Landy puts it, in which El Hadji “resur-erects,” as Mulvey says, is left unrepresented as the film ends with a freeze frame and the continued sound of the beggars’ spitting.18 Like Xala, Ng ˜ugi’s earlier fiction bears the burden of national allegory. Weep Not, Child (1964) and A Grain of Wheat (1967) describe the national struggle for independence through the story of symbolic Mau Mau battles for land, education, and equality under colonial rule (the former in a relatively conventional linear plotting, the latter in a style of embedded narration and spatiotemporal oscillation for which Ng ˜ugi credits first Conrad, then Lamming, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gorky, Sholokov, Balzac, and Faulkner).19 Devil on the Cross reorients its allegorical referents to point beyond independence to what Jameson calls the Third World’s “life-and-death struggle” with First World cultural and economic imperialism (68). In the heart of this postcolonial bildungsroman, where allegory intensifies to satiric parody, the taxi driver and his passengers, including the protagonist War˜iinga and her suitor Gatu˜iria, attend “The Devil’s Feast.” A group of businessmen, dressed in suits made out of deutschmarks, pounds, dollars, francs, lire, kroner, and yen, and sporting neon badges that flash “World Bank,” compete over who can imagine the most audacious way to bleed the country dry. The candidates include land speculation, charging peasants for soil and air, and the creation of a means to milk workers’ bodies of their sweat, blood, and brains. “[A] machine will pump [them] to the importing foreign countries, just

   New Nations, New Novels like petroleum oil! The company handling the trade will be called KenyoSaxon Exporters: Human Blood and Flesh” (187). In this tableau of halfliteralized, half-fantasized commodity fetishism, humans are truly things and the central referent is the monstrous status of capitalism as organized, rampant theft. One businessman proposes a society in which rich men will have two mouths, two stomachs, two hearts, two penises. Like the “society of bodiless heads and headless bodies” produced, Ng ˜ugi argues in Decolonising the Mind, by colonial alienation’s “deliberate disassociation” of the language of thought and education from the language of emotion and daily life, the hypertrophic bodies of Devil ’s neocolonial capitalist bourgeoisie are phantom signs of a nation cut off from its own reality and caught in “a reality [that] is stranger than fiction.”20 The task for the African writer is to transform that reality in fiction, enlisting both content and form and always returning to the question of language. Part of the legacy of both French and British colonial rule in Africa has been the creation of situations of multiple language use within the seeming unity of national borders, and the further transformation of colonial and indigenous languages through their contact. As Zabus points out, linguistic hybridization takes place through pidginization, secondgeneration creolization, and relexification. The latter refers to the rendering of African concepts and linguistic features in a European language that has been mastered and subverted such that its syntax is rearranged, its vocabulary rejuvenated, and the language itself revitalized for more extensive dominion.21 Zabus finds stronger traces of linguistic hybridization in the anglophone African novel, thanks to the greater “flexibility of the English language” and the policy of British indirect rule that, unlike French colonial assimilation, retained indigenous languages as viable, if second-class, mediums of education.22 In the gradual “dialogization” of the African novel, to borrow Bakhtin’s term for linguistic hybridization, Devil on the Cross is a late example. The first novel to be written in Gik ˜uy ˜u, it follows foundational texts such as Achebe’s Arrow of God, with its mix of standard English, Nigerian pidgin English, and transliterated (literally translated) Igbo words and expressions, or more radical attempts such as Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, in which the syntactic and semantic structures of Nigerian pidgin dominate the English medium. The multiplicity of “authorial speech, the speech of narrators, inserted

New Nations, New Novels    genres, and the speech of characters” that Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia” and designates as a defining aspect of the novel is intensified in these and other African postcolonial novels, which evolve various strategies for representing the exchanges between colonial languages, indigenous languages, and the pidgins used between colonial Africans and Europeans, as well as between urban Africans of different ethnolinguistic backgrounds.23 When the taxi journey in Devil on a Cross commences, the passengers introduce themselves and set the terms for national dialogism. “My name is War˜iinga. I come from Ilmorog—Njeruca village. When we get to Ilmorog, I’ll try somehow to get the money to pay you back. But I have showered a little saliva on my breast. May you always cultivate fertile fields.” “Don’t worry about my share,” the man in the blue overalls told her. “If we don’t help each other, we’ll become like the beasts. That’s why in the days of Mau Mau we took the oath, swearing: ‘I’ll never eat alone . . . ‘ “ “Even mine . . . I mean, mine also, forget it—sorry, I mean, forget about my share,” Gatu˜iria said. Gatu˜iria was always ashamed of mixing English and Gik u˜ y ˜u words, and he tried hard not to do it. (38)

Italics denote the English the alienated intellectual must resort to while the Gik ˜uy ˜u conversation announces its debt to inserted genres of popular proverb and nationalist slogan. As a writer Ng ˜ugi remains relatively grounded in what Kenneth Harrow characterizes as a realist tradition that uses the resources of “mimetic fiction” to reconstruct a past, a culture, and an identity that colonial and imperial writing about Africa obscured or distorted. Practitioners include Achebe and Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria and Sembène and Aminata Sow Fall in Senegal, while counterexamples appear in less realist francophone African writers, such as Ouologuem and Labou Tansi, or anglophone African writers, such as Soyinka, Amos Tutuola, and Ben Okri.24 Ng ˜ugi can also be seen to blend both traditions in a novel that at once inherits realism and questions its adequacy to the critique of the colonialism and capitalism with which realism, of course, is partially allied. Bakhtin’s notion of the novel’s stylistic capaciousness and flexibility is clearly visible in Devil on the Cross, with its incorporation of such European novelistic genres and modes as the bildungsroman, realism, modernism, social realism, magical realism, satire, and comedy, all inflected by Christian eschatology, allegory, and parable in combination with Marxist theory. The novel also mines a rich diversity of Gik ˜uy ˜u oral tra-

   New Nations, New Novels ditions, beginning with the text’s narration in the voice of the “G˜iccand˜i Player” (an instrument used in performances of Gik ˜uy ˜u oral narratives) and extending to its inclusion of freedom songs, folk proverbs, Christian hymns, the Gik ˜uy ˜u fable of the two-mouthed man-eating ogres who live on human labor, traces of precolonial epic narratives of heroic struggle, and a concurrent fantastic tradition, in which the human, animal, and natural worlds mingle. The national oratorio for hundreds of voices and instruments written by Gatu˜iria is especially emblematic; five fully imagined movements for distinct East African and Western instruments present precolonial “voices from the past,” imperial “foreign voices,” neocolonial “foreign voices, oily, smooth with hypocrisy,” the “voices of slavery,” and “sounds and voices of a new struggle, to rescue the soul of the nation,” all blending in “a single chorus of harmony . . . [to] inspire the people with patriotic love for Kenya” (227–29). Host to a range of historical presences and texts, Ng ˜ugi’s mixed hybrid and many-voiced novel is a version of what we find in novelistic genre itself: a formal sedimentation of pasts that jostle in a continually evolving present. Defining intertextuality as “the meeting of discursive traditions and texts through both form and word,” Harrow notes its capacity to both normalize and consolidate the original by intercalating it into a new text, and to preserve “a continual disturbance to the established norm of the principal text: it disturbs, defamiliarizes, demystifies, regardless of the mystifications upon which it may have originally rested itself” (67–68). If the realist-mimetic mode of an early generation of African fiction in European languages lent itself to this melancholic preservation of the colonial heritage, citational encryption, Devil on the Cross exemplifies a mode that demystifies the colonial origin while leaving the new national one intact, awaiting future reclamation. Cheah’s reading of Devil on the Cross’s landscape of ghosts, demons, and spectral capital asserts “nationalist Bildung is always haunted . . . marked by death.”25 In addition to the teleological time of national becoming and the riven time of spectrality emphasized by Cheah, Ng ˜ugi’s novel can also be seen to reveal the time of genre. This is the haunted, layered, sedimented time evoked in Fanon’s writing of the political and at work here in the heteroglossic form of the novel. Like other nationalist literature of postindependence Africa in which the critique of the neocolonial state looms large, Devil on the Cross returns

New Nations, New Novels    to the past in the style of Fanon’s vision of a nationalist culture redeemed from the potentially nativist reanimation of precolonial expressive forms by the privileging of the nation as content of the new art. Ng ˜ugi indeed characterizes the African literature of the postcolonial and neocolonial period as “really a series of imaginative footnotes to Frantz Fanon.”26 Devil is a satirical portrayal of the rise of the national bourgeoisie that is, in Ng ˜ugi’s phrase, “prophetically summed up” in Wretched. But the African novels of the neocolonial era inherit a form, as much as a content, from Fanon. That temporally saturated or entangled form, what I have called the time of genre, ensures that Ng ˜ugi’s novelistic rendering of Wretched ’s prophecy points backward (to Gik u˜ y ˜u tradition), outward (to European narrative forms), and forward (to a life beyond neocolonialism).

Bodies of Change Zabus captures the heterochronic and multispatial quality of postcolonial novelistic form in her proposal of the palimpsest, technically a tablet or manuscript in which subsequent inscriptions are superimposed, as “the major icon of cross-cultural syncreticity and linguistic métissage in non-Western literature and criticism” (10). The figure of the palimpsest finds particular resonance in the work of the Algerian feminist novelist Assia Djebar. If Djebar emerged, like Kateb Yacine, in the period of the 1950s that Réda Bensmaïa characterizes as “Fanonian” in its rejection of “all compromise, all reconciliation with colonial France” and its mythification of Algeria as the necessary referent of all writing,27 her work even more engages writers for whom the resignification of French becomes an act of liberation. These include, in Algeria, Nabile Farès, Mohammed Dib, Rachid Boujedra, and even Yacine himself; and in Morocco, the writer-philosopher Abdelkebir Khatibi. In La mémoire tatouée (1971) Khatibi redescribes a childhood lived in a “double language” through a series of psychoanalytic scenes (separation, castration, loss, death, identification) and a topography of movement from home to the labyrinthine, parabolic streets, as twisting as a tongue, to which his “nomad memory” returns him.28 Language is spatialized as origin (“the medina and its allegories reverberate in the labyrinth of my sentences”) yet temporalized as a coming to be (the labyrinth of the streets is “where everything could

   New Nations, New Novels burst forth [jaillir]”) (44, 32). This is a masculine embodied sense of language in which the body is “made of words,” and also language split between the French of education, reading, and writing and the Arabic that remains a secret (79). Of his childhood poems in Arabic Khatibi remarks, “I did not sign them” (79). In Maghreb pluriel (1983) Khatibi again considers the split subject of the Arab writer who writes in French. First, maternal dialect structures the infant body, then written Arabic (the language of Islamic law and the name of the father), followed in the colonial era by French that “contests, represses, and replaces.”29 The bilingual situation is further complicated by the bilingualism produced by the movement within each and every language, “movement that never ceases to double and split within itself [se doubler et de se dédoubler].” Throughout all these divisions the mother language remains in the “syntax of the body” (188– 89). Although language might seem to propose territorially defined and delineated identity, the postcolonial situation, as Khatibi reads it, breaks apart such topologies. Language, and more specifically writing, becomes an exercise in cosmopolitan alterity. Maghreb pluriel thus theorizes the existence of a unique space in the Maghreb and, more broadly, Africa in which the interstitial, the bi- or plurilingual, and the syncretic prevail. Khatibi’s “pensée plurielle” draws on both Western and Maghrebi-Arab cultural heritages in order to deconstruct binary systems of knowledge, replacing the fantasms of absolute difference and cultural purity (West vs. non-West, oral vs. written, sacred vs. profane, national vs. extranational) with an account of openness to the other that is, for Khatibi as for Derrida, the fundamental work of language (12–14). In the bilingual text that Khatibi champions, the other tongue and the mother tongue exist in palimpsestic relation, the former above and the latter below, in a relationship he further casts as intimacy.30 Djebar’s project focuses on what Spivak calls “the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism.” This is the narrative whose subtext is what Foucault (who said practically nothing about imperialism) called “subjugated knowledge” or, as Spivak adds, “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity.”31 If the palimpsest provides Spivak with a figure for imperial power/knowledge, with its dominant and subordinate

New Nations, New Novels    discourses, its visible others (Foucault’s prisoners, children, and insane) and its invisible ones (natives, women), for Djebar the palimpsest offers a metaphor for colonial memory, history, and identity. Written after a long hiatus in which Djebar made films and taught history, L’amour, la fantasia (1982) rewrites the history of the war of liberation by cross-cutting it with the history of colonial Algeria, lingering on the unspoken voices of women in both archives. The novel interlaces colonial French records of the conquest of Algiers between 1830 and 1857, including reports, memoirs, and letters written by military officers, journalists, and witnesses, with accounts of letters exchanged a hundred years later by the narrator’s father and mother (in French), as well as the letters exchanged by the narrator’s female cousins, cloistered in a remote village, and young men responding to a pen pal advertisement (in Arabic). Testimonies from female resistance fighters in the war of liberation (1954–62) compose a third section of the novel, whose heteroglossic, heterochronic effect is that of layered histories, interlaced voices, mixed genres, and languages in contact, including French, literary Arabic, colloquial Arabic, and Berber. Djebar’s novel offers palimpsestic form, the sedimented structure of history’s trace, memory’s return, and language’s ceaseless reinscription, as the ghostly medium through which the woman rises up as the resistant subject of both colonial and national histories. In this the novel offers a response, a fictional supplement, to Spivak’s charge that “both as object of colonialist historiography and as subject of insurgency, the ideological construction of gender keeps the male dominant.”32 Spivak concludes “Ghostwriting,” her critical essay on Derrida’s Specters, by citing Djebar as the locus of another logic of the ghost: “an attempt to establish the ethical relation with history as such, ancestors real or imagined . . . [a craving to] let history haunt you as a ghost or ghosts, with the ungraspable incorporation of a ghostly body, and the uncontrollable, sporadic, and unanticipatable periodicity of haunting, in the impossible frame of the absolute chance of the gift of time, if there is any” (71, 78, 70). Djebar’s narrator characterizes her writing as a shroud, woven from French filigreed by Arabic rhythms and figures, and interspersed with the words of those who ordered, executed, and reported on the brutal fumigation in 1845 of several hundred Berber men, women, children, and livestock of the Ouled Riah tribe in the caves to which they had retreated. The

   New Nations, New Novels narrator thanks the French officer Pélissier “for his report that unleashed a political storm in Paris, but which also allows me to reach out today to our dead and raise them with my web of French words . . . Pélissier, who intercedes on behalf of this long death, on behalf of fifteen hundred corpses beneath El Kantara, with their flocks bleating indefinitely at death, hands me his report and I receive this palimpsest to inscribe there now myself the charred passion of my ancestors.”33 Recalling the “lamination of my oral culture in danger of being lost,” the narrator goes on to characterize the French in which she writes as both a layer on top of her oral expression and an “unveiling,” a “stripping naked that strangely returns us to the plundering of the preceding century” (223–24). French, her “stepmother tongue” (298), is also the language of her father (a teacher of French) and of the conqueror. The language of the Berbers’ death becomes the writer’s life, the means of her mobility in space and time and her connection to others. It is to the “silently rebelling women of my youth” (285), as much as the women lost a century earlier to the conqueror’s fires, and Pauline Rolland, a nineteenth-century French woman whose letters from Algeria the novel inserts, that the narrator addresses her collective autobiography. It is written, she adds, in “torch-words that light up my companions, my accomplices; separating me from them once and for all” (203). This is no simple recovery of the past “as it really was,” no speaking for it, no redress of past wrongs. The novel lives instead alongside the past’s remains, in hopes of a different future. With its volatile, recombinant energies and linguistic trace discourses, the postcolonial novel can lead us away from raw sequential histories toward more constellated ones in which a moment in time, a structure of power, formal strategies of representation, and an affective sense of what it is to be in history all converge, only to flash up again somewhere else on the map. In L’amour, la fantasia, as in La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, the dreamlike, nonlinear, fragmentary assemblage of images, songs, and oral testimonies of women resistance fighters that Djebar directed in 1978, time is spectralized. As Bensmaïa puts it, writing about La nouba, “time is above all a ‘force,’ an intensive force essentially made up of miscellaneous events and instants not yet gathered together in a final synthesis or in a teleological concept of the future.”34 Official French history might divide the era spanned in L’amour, la fantasia into a short period of conquest, a

New Nations, New Novels    century of “French” Algeria, and the tumultuous “events” that brought that rule to an end. Official Algerian history would take the war of liberation as the starting point for the nation. Djebar’s novel troubles the sequences of before and after, whether nostalgic or messianic, by layering these histories alongside those of the women only partially incorporated into the identities of “conqueror” or “nationalist.” Djebar retells the encounter between France and the Maghreb as one of perpetual contact through a series of unclosed narratives animated by phantom figures, like the body, voice, cry, and memory of the women doubly silenced by colonialism and nationalism and expressed in the phantom form of the palimpsest’s mix of past and present, history and fiction, first-person narration and collective autobiography. In this story, Fanon’s Algerian woman is revealed as something other than new and her relation to Algeria as something less than unified. If in L’amour, la fantasia Djebar eschews bildung for palimpsestic memory, Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) embraces it in yet another novelistic effort to write independence after Fanon. In the tradition of other African women writers such as Emecheta and Ata Aidoo or, in French, Mariama Bâ, Dangarembga plots the emergence into consciousness of Tambudzai, a young girl from a rural village in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) who acquires the colonial cultural capital of a mission school education in the decade prior to independence in 1980. The bildungsroman quality on which several of the novel’s readers insist speaks to a narrative thrust that traces the rise of its heroine to a consciousness that goes well beyond anticolonial nationalism.35 The novel’s title echoes Sartre’s claim, in the preface to Wretched, that “the status of ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.” With its depiction of Tambu’s English-educated uncle Babamukuru, headmaster of the mission school and head of the family, simultaneously subservient to colonial authority and synonymous with paternal authority, the novel reads as a Fanonian critique of cultural alienation in the colony. But Dangarembga’s novel is also a critique of Fanon himself, an opening up of his talismanic nation to reveal, in the colonial, prenational era, a set of differences and solidarities along the axes of gender, sexuality, and class that the nation cannot simply dispel, defer, or enlist. Babamukuru’s blindness to his own westernized daughter’s

   New Nations, New Novels slow disintegration as she turns the self-assertion he will not brook into self-control exercised in the domain of eating is another kind of alienation, whose cure, the novel implies, is also part of the project of decolonization. A historically minded girl whose reading about global atrocities returns in her nightmares, Nyasha is visited by an illness that the novel presents as a historical symptom, which independence cannot cure. Read as a novelistic transposition of “Medicine and Colonialism,” Wretched ’s final chapter identifying colonialism as the cause of the native’s pathologies, Nervous Conditions seeks a double consciousness of both colonial and gender oppression. The novel refuses to romanticize the indigenous Shona culture that preexists colonial culture, the nationalism that contests it, or the womanhood whose universalization under the sign of common victimhood is also a kind of romance or fantasy. Nervous Conditions depicts a world, in the words of Tambu’s long-suffering mother, “with the poverty of blackness of one side and the weight of womanhood on the other.” And Tambu herself understands her uncle to have made her cousin “a victim of her femaleness” and further understands such victimization to be “universal.”36 Though far less linguistically and formally experimental than L’amour, la fantasia, Nervous Conditions ultimately rejects the fetish category of what Chandra Talpade Mohanty has called “a composite, singular ‘Third World Woman’  by crafting, in the guise of Tambu’s first-person narration, a kind of collective autobiography.37 Tambu, her cousin Nyasha, her aunt Maiguru, her mother Mainini, and her mother’s rebellious sister Lucia together etch a plurality of possibility into the narrative of national bildung, which takes the form here of a circle, opening and closing with Tambu’s same acknowledgment of the four women’s stories that are also her own. With its narrative subplot of trauma and recovery, and its focus on the body of the female colonized subject, Nervous Conditions would seem to situate itself as a rejoinder to Fanon and even a closure: a solving of Fanon’s woman problem. But when the imaginative discourse of the novel turns to the Fanonian terrain of colonial alienation and national becoming, it does not merely proffer the satisfying return or overturn of figures predicted long before, like the masculinist anticolonial nationalist or the brutalizing rogues of the neocolonial state. Nor does it merely dispel the strictly allegorical narrative of national becoming in favor of the migrant

New Nations, New Novels    identities and deterritorialized flows that have sometimes seemed to define the final iteration of the postcolonial novel.38 The postcolonial African novels in which I have detected Fanon’s afterlife attempt, like Fanon himself, to think the nation for the future in a form that, again like Fanon, keeps returning to the past so as to move beyond it. These novels show their nations in movement with other entities and particularities, be they the global capital that shadows the projects of decolonization and neocolonial independence or the gender that is in addition to the nation yet constitutive of it: no add-on but a supplement, pointing back to some lack in the putative universality of the category in the first place. Becoming national in these novels is a process that doesn’t in any way imply the disappearance of particularized identity, the voicing of a subject position from somewhere. By lingering on those points where colony, nation, and body reveal their joints and breaks, these novels capture the discontinuities of postcolonial time and space without dispelling the national project, thus opening both nation and novel to new life. The novel’s capacity to itself supplement Fanon’s powerful anatomy of national identity and identification entails something different from the autonomy that Peter Hallward attributes to “Creative” expression, understood as the work of singularizing individuation, effected by an individual, “not specific to external criteria or frames of reference,” and in its “fully de-specified” form, “immediate to what it perceives, i.e. to its own self-expression” (3). I have hoped instead to explore fiction’s connections to other discourses of identification, such as Fanon’s nationalism, as well as to the collectivities and particularities such discourses sometimes produce or absorb. Is this literature instrumentalized, read through or as politics, with the political as its necessary, submerged content? No, but it is literature as a part of politics rather than literature simply apart. The opening events of the twenty-first century, call them crises in the practice of state power, the reanimation of empire, and the recrudescence of insurgent nationalisms, including ethnic nationalisms within a state, combine to lift Fanon’s midcentury critique out of its time and into another. The prescient predictor of anticolonial nationalism’s rise and its neocolonial fall is now resituated in another conversation, the talk of our time, on globalization, sovereignty, and global terror. Kenya, Algeria, and Zimbabwe remain very much nations in progress and under duress. Kenya

   New Nations, New Novels negotiates fragile power sharing in the wake of contested elections and ethnic violence in the spring of 2008. Algeria is nearly two decades into a bloody battle, in which some one hundred thousand people have died, between a military-backed secular government and an insurgent Islamicistnationalist group recently affiliated with al-Qaeda, in a sobering reminder that nationalist reaches beyond national boundaries are not in themselves a good and that stateless terror can also serve the state. And Zimbabwe, one of the poorest African countries, is struggling out from the long rule of anticolonial nationalist-turned-authoritarian leader Robert Mugabe. If there is no laying to rest of the project of postcolonial nationalism, at least not yet, there is the imperative to keep it on our political, and critical, maps. The time of postcolonial nationalism is a time that ever eludes the grasp yet commands belief, a time entered repeatedly and discontinuously. It is also a time, as Fanon shows, accessed by an emblematic series of detours, both the temporal arrests, delays, and returns of a “post” colonialism still yet to come and the spatial relay to territories beyond the borders of natal origin.

Allegorizing Apartheid: History, Nation, and the Novels of J. M. Coetzee More than any other of the novelists I have discussed, J. M. Coetzee resists the burdens of representation associated with new nationalism or, in his case, emergent nationalism. South Africa in some sense became postcolonial several times over: with the establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 in the wake of the Anglo-Boer war; with the triumph of Afrikaner nationalism and the birth of the apartheid state in 1948; and of course, with the historic elections of 1994 that brought Nelson Mandela’s ANC-led government to power. The farcical nature of the first two “independences” placed pressure on the third to be not only genuinely representative of all national constituencies but also temporally decisive. Not yet, perhaps not ever, over, South African apartheid occupies a limbo zone. So overwhelming still is the raw presence of the past and so unfinished the business of coming to terms with it, redressing it, memorializing it, and changing it that much postapartheid literature finds its necessary form in entanglements, both temporal and formal. Some works orient themselves

New Nations, New Novels    toward postracial national newness in the rainbow nation of black, white, colored, and Indian Africans; some look back at the past from the vantage point of an incompletely achieved racial liberation; and others reproduce nationalist-historicist models of authentic political discourse, returning to the past through narrative models and tropes drawn from the state’s own encounter with history—truth and reconciliation, trauma and memory, confession and forgiveness. Finally, some works of this period seek to go beyond or outside the compass of national-racial signification altogether, even that attached to a new nation’s multiracialism. We see this most emblematically in Coetzee’s novels from Disgrace (1998) onward, with their extranational locales, thinly veiled authorial alter egos, postmodern narration, and striking displacement of apartheid and its aftermath to fictionalized analyses of global evil and global terror, as in the embedded lessons delivered by the celebrity author protagonist in Elizabeth Costello (2003) or the strong opinions of the famous writer C in Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Coetzee’s earlier novels of the 1980s also resist the imperative to national allegory in a manner that sheds further light on the purchase of this figure in the literature of the fantasmatic nation. During the 1980s South African literary criticism commonly distinguished two major strains of national literature. A “resistance” strain associated with Sipho Sephamla, Mongane Serote, Mbulelo Mzamane, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, Es’kia Mphalele, and others reached back to the Black Consciousness movement of the 1970s and also encompassed the flood of black protest poetry, nationalist prose, and realist people’s literature unleashed by the 1976 Soweto uprising. On the other hand, a futurist or apocalyptic largely white strain imagined the end of apartheid, epitomized by such political novels as Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) and, in the different register of the parable or allegory, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1981), Life & Times of Michael K (1983), and Foe (1986).39 To Coetzee’s critics, his penchant for allegory implied a concomitant refusal of the historical imagination or, as Gordimer put it in her review of Michael K, “allegory as a stately fastidiousness; or a state of shock” in which there lies a deeper “revulsion against all political and revolutionary solutions.”40 Gordimer herself advocated a realist, Chekhovian mode for the telling of truth to power, “describ[ing] a situation so truthfully . . . that the reader can no longer evade it.”41 Protesting what he saw as a situation

   New Nations, New Novels in which there was “too much truth for art to hold, truth by the bucketful, truth that overwhelms and swamps every act of the imagination,” Coetzee in turn called for South African writing to escape its “bondage” to reality and realism in his 1987 Jerusalem Prize acceptance speech.42 In “The Novel Today,” a lecture published a year later, Coetzee protested “the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history” and embraced the Kafkaesque form of a narrative that does not record historical truth but instead offers a surreal, distorted, destabilizing version of its own.43 The difference emerges at the point where the play of discourse resists interpretive efforts to corral and catch it in a set of codes as imprisoning as the carapace that Gregor Samsa wakes one day to inhabit or the mimetic prescriptive of a struggle literature that seeks merely to supplement history. Coetzee’s curious brand of national novel regularly rejects such guidelines and elaborates the postmodern possibilities of postcolonial fiction. Foe (1986) represents late apartheid almost in passing, if at all, in the course of breaking apart a foundational set of realist codes. In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) the dominant genres of travelogue, adventure story, Christian conversion tale, confession, how-to manual, and emergent autobiography merge their self-authenticating registers to produce novelistic realism. Foe turns the potentially quite realist-mimetic forms of the memoir, the letter, and first-person narration (all pointedly written by its female narrator) into a narrative that resists rendering truth. Where Defoe’s island is a territory teeming with constructive and nominative possibility, an Edenic colony with Crusoe as its “Adamic monarch,”44 the island onto which Susan Barton is shipwrecked is utterly lacking in natural wonder, desolately bare of things to see or do, build or make, possess or describe. The only sustained activities are executed by its two inhabitants: Friday, who fishes, and Crusoe, who builds empty stone terraces awaiting the arrival of “those who come after us and have the foresight to bring seed.”45 Crusoe’s fruitless labor, like his reference to himself in the past tense and his refusal to admit the slightest changes into the island’s daily regime, could be understood to render him representative of the political order that was beginning to have a sense of its own looming obsolescence in mid-1980s South Africa. But the novel’s concern, as many have noted, is not to establish a national allegorical rendering of apartheid but rather to explore the ethical demands of writing and reading the other in a context

New Nations, New Novels    in which meaning is not found but experienced, created, gone through as we trace language, syntax, symbolism, and the fictional representation of temporality—what Derek Attridge calls the singularity and alterity of literature as an event of reading.46 Crusoe’s death, shortly after the three castaways are rescued, becomes the occasion for Susan to tell her own story. While on the island she urged Crusoe to write his story in a style reminiscent of what Ian Watt calls Robinson Crusoe’s “concrete particularity.” Realist detail, she argues, will capture “the truth that makes your story yours alone . . . when you made your needle (the needle you store in your belt), by what means did you pierce the eye? When you sewed your hat what did you use for thread? Touches like these will one day persuade your countrymen that it is all true, every word.”47 Susan’s own written narrative eschews such authenticating details, while her subsequent effort to turn it into a publishable manuscript, aided by the well-known novelist Daniel Foe, turns into a contest between his insistence that she embed the island episode in a larger plot of “loss, then quest, then recovery; beginning, then middle, then end” and her own conviction that the story cannot be filled out or filled up “till by art we have found a means of giving voice to Friday” (117, 118). Unlike Defoe’s Friday, a Carib Indian transformed into an Enlightenment icon of the educable native, Coetzee’s Friday, a tongueless black slave from Africa, never speaks.48 Reluctant to make the racial other speak (Susan’s efforts notably fail), the novel refuses to enter the domain of his language, his history, and his subjectivity. Instead it prefers what Spivak and others characterize as a Derridean aporia of silence.49 Friday’s story is indeed characterized by Susan as a “hole in the narrative” (121). For Kwaku Larbi Korang, Coetzee’s “eccentric allegory” comes at a high cost: the simultaneous production of Friday as “the limit term of a Western historicist script,” a site of meaning’s own indeterminacy, and a desubjectified, deinteriorized, agentless entity, nothing more and nothing less than “the spectacular essence, the truth, of black victimage.”50 However, what Coetzee refuses his silent Friday is the ventriloquizing or mirroring function that Defoe accords his Friday, the ability to so flawlessly internalize the ideologies and structures of colonial address as to himself perform them. “Take, kill Friday, no send Friday away,” says Defoe’s Friday in response to Crusoe’s offer to return him to his island.51 Issuing a fantasy invitation to

   New Nations, New Novels rule, Defoe’s Friday converts the (barely) speaking subaltern subject into grammar’s and dominion’s object, that on which power inscribes itself, as in the tableau in which Friday first places Crusoe’s foot upon his head in silent submission. These are mirror scenes in which colonialism thinks it is seeing its other but is only seeing itself, reflected back in the image of an other who willingly offers himself for incorporation (“take, kill Friday”) or, in the unassimilable figure of cannibalism (remember the “catch ’im, eat ’im” of Marlow’s crew), cries out for rule. Foe’s silent Friday, by contrast, marks the spot of another relationship of empire to its others in which mimesis no longer rules, whether the imitation of master by slave, of source text by echo, or of truth by fiction. Spivak claims that “Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which engenders Foe, does not exist” (12). Calling up Defoe in order to banish the species of novelistic realism for which he serves as privileged sign, a realism in which fiction poses as fact, Foe illustrates what Hutcheon describes as a process in which “the eighteenth-century concern for lies and falsity becomes a postmodern concern for the multiplicity and dispersion of truth(s), truth(s) relative to the specificity of place and culture.”52 Postmodern intertextuality, Hutcheon continues, “uses and abuses” its sources, “inscribing their powerful allusions and then subverting that power through irony” in a gesture born of “both a desire to close the gap between past and present of the reader and a desire to rewrite the past in a new context” (842). The metafictional techniques of strategic inversion, textual incorporation, and destabilizing displacement that link Foe to Robinson Crusoe, as well as to Defoe’s Roxana (1724), craft an uncanny textual echo that is itself a kind of hole or open gap, a never fully closed equivalence, from which Foe both estranges the priority and authority of the English book and reconfigures the South African national novel. Although Foe clearly privileges signifier over signified, storytelling over history, David Attwell observes that “the signifier itself is localized in allusive ways in order to make this story of storytelling responsive to the conditions that writers like Coetzee are forced to confront.” The signifier of Friday’s silence for Attwell contains at least three distinct traces: “the mark of Coetzee’s unwillingness to receive the canon as the natural breath of life . . . the mark of history, and the mark of South Africa.”53 Like Susan, daughter of an English mother and a French father, Friday

New Nations, New Novels    is the strangely South African progeny of the England in whose foundational novel he first appeared and the France whose philosophy provides the hidden structure of his representation, whether as Derridean aporia or Lacanian lack. As the simultaneous sign of the national and the transnational, Friday’s silence embodies a variant national allegory in which South Africa emerges through its own absence, deferral, or displacement, perpetually shuttled to the side but never wholly erased in what Korang usefully calls “a partial presence” (186). To read Foe as both Korang and I do, as an allegorical narrative of South Africa, is in some sense to read against Coetzee’s protest of “the colonisation of the novel by the discourse of history” and Attridge’s caution that the novel exceeds allegory and so too should our reading.54 But the allegory in question is complex and multivalent; it does not close the gap between one thing and another, one level of interpretation and another, and so becomes useful as a precisely nonmimetic strategy for national literature. Just as the novel seems to approach the historical referents of South Africa and its pariah mode of governance, a self-conscious skepticism about the very possibility of referring in language to history waylays the structure of allegorical equivalence (the island is South Africa, Friday its oppressed majority, Susan the well-intentioned but ineffectual white liberal) and unleashes or frees a further set of meanings that are as wide ranging, as unfixed, and as uninterpretable as the final wordless underwater stream that passes out of the drowned Friday’s open mouth, over the unnamed narrator who recounts the final dream sequence, through the shipwreck, and around the island to run “northward and southward to the ends of the earth” (157). In this wordless place, where “bodies are their own signs” and the sea and sand are “soft, dank, slimy, outside the circulation of the waters . . . like the mud of Flanders, in which generations of grenadiers now lie dead,” the narrator finds the “home of Friday.” Less nonhistorical than literally and figuratively beneath history, Friday’s home is the locale not of his loss but of that of any project that would give his loss meaning, fill in its gaps, declare its equivalencies, in a word, write its history. According to Gordon Teskey, the truth of meaning is the “other” of allegory, that toward which it is directed and in relation to which it performs a violent “capture,” such that the very thing that seems “to escape or to resist the project of meaning—passion, body, irony—is interpreted as

   New Nations, New Novels a further extension of meaning.”55 Foe’s ending unleashes multiple meanings or polysemy, but whereas the latter, as Teskey observes, traditionally “redistribute[s] hierarchically such that one term is placed over the other,” the bubbles that issue from Friday’s mouth and circumnavigate the globe will not fix into meaning (30). Taking distance, not closeness, as its mode, privileging the ever-expanding circuit of difference over the mirror of mimesis, this is allegory that constantly deallegorizes itself. The novel invites the reader to go through an allegorical structure so as to produce the possibility of a nonallegorizable interpretation. As Attridge puts it, “[In] the event of the allegorizing reading . . . one may be doing justice to the singularity and inventiveness of a literary work by responding to its invitation to allegorize, to its quality of what we might call ‘allegoricity,’ because in so doing we are working through the operations of its meaning—irrespective of whether we arrive at some stable allegorical scheme” (61). The fictional form of Coetzee’s 2003 Nobel Prize speech, conceived as a story written by the rescued Robinson Crusoe, similarly summons allegory’s veil in order to rend it. Interwoven with his story is the story Crusoe writes in the persona of his invented “man,” Defoe, in which various elements of Defoe’s own A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) regularly surface. Caught in a self-allegorizing reading, the Crusoe narrator asserts that each of the elements in his man’s story “stands for itself certainly, but stands also as a figure of his, Robinson’s solitude on his island.” For this secret sharing between author and character (“master and slave? . . . brothers, twin brothers? . . . comrades in arms? . . . enemies, foes?”) it is ultimately a spatial figure, an echo of Foe’s final north-south circumnavigation, that serves: two deckhands who pass each other, “the one on a ship sailing west, the other on a ship sailing east.” The two line(r)s “pass close” but never coincide in a figure for the allegory that Coetzee seems never quite to leave behind.56 The earlier novel Life &Times of Michael K and subsequent Age of Iron are set in a recognizable, semi-apocalyptic South Africa that also invites the distinctly allegorical problem of how to bring back the past so as to capture a future. Age of Iron (1990) sets itself in a twilight moment similar to that described by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks and quoted by Gordimer as the epigraph to July’s People: “The old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms.” Elizabeth Curren, dying teacher of a dead language,

New Nations, New Novels    takes in a transient man, Verceuil (his name a ghost of her beloved Virgil), in the hopes that he will deliver the letter that is the novel to her daughter far away. Virgil’s dead epic, whose twisting in a remote corner of Africa is so central to Naipaul’s diagnosis of the death-dealing mode of postcolonial nationalism, is in Age of Iron more alive than the stone-cold, blind voice of the state droning on television, “the slow, truculent Afrikaans rhythms with their deadening closes, like a hammer beating a post into the ground.”57 The liberation struggle is also hard, its children like “iron,” as Elizabeth’s black maid says, and the entire black population what Elizabeth calls an “age of iron waiting to return” (46, 115). Against this landscape of the black dead covering the land, “l[ying] there heavy and obdurate, waiting for my feet to pass, waiting for me to go, waiting to be raised up again,” the novel’s speculation over how the transmission of a story might cheat death and, like the ancient epics, live on conjures some possibility, barely representable, of the future (as the true nature of Verceuil—angel, murderer, other—also remains untold, unfixed). Published seven years earlier, Michael K turns even more decisively on a temporal syntax of the foreclosed future. Like Michael’s harelip that “did not close, or did not close enough,” despite the midwife’s promise at his birth, or the permit he applies for to allow him to accompany his ailing mother to her rural village but never receives, any promise of the future carries its eventual breach.58 Time runs backward in Michael’s passage from the city of Cape Town through a ruined, barren landscape that he enters like one of Kafka’s creatures, burrowing into the earth by night and growing pumpkins by day, and eventually regressing to a state of bare life, from which he is taken by government soldiers tracking potential insurgents. The camps in which K is held are allegorical spaces, the technology of an earlier barbaric modernity presented as the future of apartheid’s regime. Just before he leaves the final camp, the nameless doctor who has interrogated him (the case notes are embedded as another (per)version of Michael’s story) offers him some parting words. Your stay in the camp was merely an allegory, if you know that word. It was an allegory—speaking at the highest level—of how outrageously a meaning can take up residence in a system without becoming a term in it. Did you not notice how, whenever I tried to pin you down, you slipped away? . . . you are a great escape artist, one of the great escapees . . . Let me tell you the meaning of the sacred and alluring garden that blooms in the heart of the desert and produces the food of

   New Nations, New Novels life. The garden for which you are presently heading is nowhere and everywhere except in the camps. It is another name for the only place where you belong, Michaels, where you do not feel homeless. (166)

The garden isolated by Gordimer as Coetzee’s abjuration of the realist imperative to show the urgency of the South African situation emerges in Michael K as a contested object in the war between official state discourse (the doctor’s “sacred and alluring garden”) and its most abject subject (Michael in the barren earth). Misinterpreted and misnamed by the doctor, Michael is done further violence by the doctor’s strictly allegorical narrative, which closes the two signs of garden and camp as two sides of a single experience of time, namely, late apartheid. There is no fulfillment in the eschatological sense here, no prefigurative fullness, but only a time rendered even emptier by the presence of the camp in the colony. The short-circuited future, anticipated but ended, emptied, turned back on itself, is legible only, if at all, in the suspended dailiness of Michael’s gardening or the closing gesture with which he teaches a man even more dispossessed than he how to draw water from the earth so that, in the final words of the novel, “one can live” (184). Time, Coetzee observed in a 1984 interview, had been “extraordinarily static” since “the party of Afrikaner Christian nationalism came to power and set about stopping or even turning back the clock . . . tried to stop dead or turn around a range of developments normal (in the sense of being the norm) in colonial societies . . . instituting a sluggish no-time in which an already anachronistic order of patriarchal clans and tribal despotisms would be frozen in place.”59 In addition to the state’s ghostly landscape of a no-time haunted by its past and unable to fully enter the future, Coetzee’s early work depicts a powerful breach of time, the force of an emergent present that it is the writer’s task to enact. Commenting in the same interview on Franz Kafka’s short story “The Burrow,” and noting the several inconsistencies of verbal tense and aspect that narrate the bunkered creature’s anxious anticipation of external attacks that may come at any moment, Coetzee identifies narrative’s capacity to “create an altered experience of time” (203). In Kafka’s stories, Coetzee subsequently observes, there are no “transition phases . . . there is one moment and then there is another moment; between them is simply a break . . . between the before and the after there is not stage-by-stage development but a sudden

New Nations, New Novels    transformation, Verwandlung, metamorphosis.”60 Constantly in a state of crisis, time in Kafka exists, in Coetzee’s words, as a “repeatedly broken, interrupted iterative present” (229). Something of this breach opens in Michael K and Age of Iron, in which the moment of liberation is conjured only by a small act, living or writing in the present, day to day. Something of it opens again in Coetzee’s 1998 Booker Prize novel, Disgrace, which reconceptualizes the political moment of transition not as apartheid’s vaunted end but as a rupture in progressive temporality altogether. Following an academic career “explaining to the bored youth of the country the distinction between drink and drink up, burned and burnt. The perfective, signifying an action carried through to its conclusion,” and a misstep involving a student for whom he “burned-burnt-burnt up,” David Lurie finds himself “burned, burnt” after his daughter’s farm is attacked, she raped, and he locked in a bathroom and set on fire, as he himself will finally incinerate the corpses of the abandoned dogs that he puts to sleep—“burnt, burnt up.”61 Unlike the perfective tense used to describe its most violent effects, apartheid in Disgrace is an action not yet carried through to its conclusion. Transition lives the difference between the apartheid then and the postapartheid now, not as an either/or choice between the prefigurative fulfillment of an anticipated identity (freedom) and the burial of an obsolete one (the racial totalitarian state), in other words, not as a definitive break but rather as an act, as Mark Sanders says, “without term.”62 So David’s “burned, burnt” scalp slowly grows hair although his scars remain, and the pathos and perfective finality of the final image of the dogs “burnt, burnt up” by a loving hand coexists with Lucy’s decision to bear the biracial child of her rapist. With a nod to Gramsci’s interregnum, Disgrace ends by oscillating between times and states, death and birth, the past of the completed perfective and the unknown future to come. “I am giving him up” (220), says Lurie of the dog he has clung to but will also put to sleep and burn up, in a progressive phrasing that Sanders reminds us, “leaves its meaning suspended between an anticipatory affirmation and a statement about action that is under way” (368). Only through the break of a “repeatedly broken, interrupted iterative present” (the tense Coetzee credits Kafka with) does newness emerge. When it comes, it is small and simple, hard to hold on to, made to give up, without guarantees or securities, far indeed from the stories told by states. In this

   New Nations, New Novels sense the novel, like Coetzee’s larger resistance to the colonization of the novel by history, echoes Derrida’s intuition that literature exists beyond the state. “While literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with ‘jurisdiction,’ with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations, the constitutions of States, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-juridical performatives which occur at the origin of the law, at a certain point it can also exceed them, interrogate them, ‘fictionalize’ them: with nothing, or almost nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose ‘reality’ or duration is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thought-provoking, if that still means something.”63 Literature, in other words, is an excess to the discourses of law, politics, and, indeed, “truth,” an excess that manages to at once look beyond them and inside them, to reveal their logics and to limn their poverties. In the final lesson of Coetzee’s novelistic compendium of several previously given lectures, Elizabeth Costello: Eight Lessons, the literary ghost of Kafka again provides the future’s temporal syntax, a syntax that exceeds both the discourse of the state and the allegorical referentiality of the nation. On trial for her life’s work in an uncannily familiar place, “straight out of Kafka . . . reduced and flattened to a parody,” the novelist Elizabeth Costello imagines she could be “in any of the gulags . . . in any of the camps of the Third Reich” (209, 196–97). Awaiting judgment, she stands before a door made of “the tissue of allegory” in an intertextual timespace that lends itself to equivalencies, the taking of one thing for another, but is ghosted with difference. The lesson recasts Kafka’s parable “Before the Law,” in which a man from the country waits before the door of the law guarded by a doorkeeper who speaks only once, to finally close the door and inform the man that the door existed only for him. When Elizabeth finally approaches her gate, she asks what her chances of passing through are and is told, “We all stand a chance,” “It is a matter for the boards,” and in the final line of the final lesson, “All the time, we see people like you all the time” (224–25). Is this shift from the singularity of Kafka’s formulation (in which the door is only for the man) to the curious collectivity of Coetzee’s, in which the “we” that surveils others is paired with the “we” that stands with them (“We all stand a chance”), a syntactical expression of a certain kind of commonality? Elizabeth, we may remember from lesson two, “The Novel in Africa,” “has never liked we in

New Nations, New Novels    its exclusive form,” as in the Nigerian novelist’s incantatory, mystifying “We Africans,” a ludic but closed community of music, dancing, talking, and eating in which the novel has no natural place (41). We would do well to also read the formal lesson of lesson eight, which continually seeks a break or gap in seemingly closed systems. To approach the gate, Elizabeth must make several statements before a tribunal that judges her. The last of these is, in her words, a “lamentably literary” story of her childhood on the Australian Dulgannon River, where every dry season thousands of frogs burrow underground, “die, so to speak,” then wake come the rains (217). She insists to the judges that her story is “no allegory” to the frogs themselves, no “embod[iment] of the spirit of life,” but simply “the thing itself.” Through the simultaneous presentation and hollowing of allegory Coetzee’s retelling of “Before the Law” opens something akin to what Derrida detects in the parable, namely, “an internal boundary opening on nothing, before nothing, the object of no possible experience” and the force of “an event that succeeds in not happening [un événement qui arrive à ne pas arriver].”64 Elizabeth Costello suggests that this event is the future itself, the future in which Benjamin finds messianic opening, Derrida spectral possibility, and Coetzee a nonnational compass of extraallegorical referentiality that ceaselessly resists any postapartheid literary injunction to write the future, write it now, write it for, and as, us. Allegory, Eric Santner explains, is “the symbolic mode proper to the experience of irremediable exposure to the violence of history, the rise and fall of empires and orders of meaning, the endless cycle of struggles for hegemony; it is furthermore, what defines the posture of melancholy.” Referencing Benjamin’s reading of Kafka’s creatures, Santner adds their melancholic orientation is less a look back at the past than down into the earth, where they discover a deadening, a destructuration, a powerful break between self and world that constitutes a modernist-melancholic suspension of being. The Benjaminian “ruin” of allegory is thus the ruin of a certain philosophy of history and the possibility of another, also present as a ruin but one into which nature has been absorbed, yielding, in Santner’s words, “a sense of life bereft of any secure reference to transcendence.”65 With their lingering considerations of the Kafkaesque interruptive present Michael K and Disgrace, like Elizabeth Costello, explore novelistic futurity through the circuit of a melancholic-allegorical mode that takes shape in

   New Nations, New Novels contrast to the mimetic-realist imperatives of a certain strain of national literature, intensified by the subsequent literature of truth and reconciliation, as well as within the currents of world textuality. Coetzee’s Kafka becomes the sign not only of a particular crisis point in a single national history caught between the demands to supplement history and rival it, but also of the possibility of coming back to national representation by leaving it. Where Benjamin places Kafka’s Gregor Samsa within a larger Kafkaesque “tribe,” all of them “beings in an unfinished state . . . neither members of, nor strangers to, any of the other groups of figures, but rather, messengers from one to the other,” and where he further interprets the peregrinations of this displaced tribe as the effect of the law, “oppressive,” “gloomy,” and inescapable, Deleuze and Guattari take Kafka as the locus not of a textual meaning but a textual process of liberation.66 Kafka must be freed from the “themes” of the power of the law, the interiority of Oedipal guilt, and the subjectivity of enunciation, and recast as the Kafka of minor literature who traces a line of flight in the line itself, in sentences, syntax, and lexicons in which minor and major, the Yiddish of the Prague Ghetto and the German of the fascist state, meet in a deterritorialized “assemblage” of enunciation and desire.67 Deleuze and Guattari’s model of a critical engagement that tries to free the literary text from its interpreters with their themes and symbols, metaphors and allegories, certainly lends itself to the South African context where literary criticism has sometimes seemed to work in apartheid’s shadow, relentlessly binarizing, racializing, temporalizing, and territorializing cultural production first into black writing / white writing and subsequently into late apartheid writing / postapartheid writing, national writing / nonnational writing. But to critically deterritorialize South African writing cannot mean to suspend the national signifier altogether. That national writing often routes through the intertextual global (Gordimer’s Chekhov; Coetzee’s several Kafkas, some linguistic, others allegorical, all only partially tethered to the novel in which they appear) means we must learn to read in the moving, middle ground. Elleke Boehmer’s insightful survey of the endings of late apartheid narratives by white and black writers discerns a common tendency to “shut down on tomorrow,” a “tailing-off, an unwillingness or an inability to comment on what might follow.”68 For example, the final scene of

New Nations, New Novels    Wally Serote’s To Every Birth Its Blood (1981) depicts a woman in labor, and Gordimer’s July’s People (1981) concludes with the white heroine, a survivor of an apocalyptic revolution, simply running toward a landing helicopter bearing undecipherable markings and carrying passengers who are either “saviours or murderers.” Which of the two, we will never know. No less than Serote’s and Gordimer’s realism, for Boehmer Coetzee’s deallegorizing allegory also short-circuits, its “imaginative challenge . . . finally contained within end-stopped structures.” Turning her attention to the emergent literature of postapartheid South Africa, wondering if “the best one can hope for the novel in South Africa is that it will not remain so painfully impaled on that two-pronged fork which is history versus discourse, or reality versus fantasy,” Boehmer calls for a new kind of future-directed writing (53). Writers like Achmat Dangor (Kafka’s Curse, 1997; Bitter Fruit, 2001), Zakes Mda (Ways of Dying, 1997; The Whale Caller, 2005), and Zoe Wicomb (David’s Story, 2000) answer this call in lush, hallucinatory prose that, as Boehmer hopes, “free” words and “juggle and mix generic options” in their mobilizations of the times of memory, fantasy, and trauma alongside the historical narratives and juridical processes of the new South Africa (51). But even in Coetzee’s late-apartheid and early transition-era fiction we can discern an alternative to historicist-realist imperatives to tell history “as it really was” that perhaps does open a future in crafting a particular affective stance before history, and an opening through which the future, perhaps never fully writeable, can nonetheless be glimpsed. In Simon Durrant’s assessment, Foe, Age of Iron, and the earlier Waiting for the Barbarians constitute a “remaining inconsolable before history,” a refusal to translate suffering into a narrative that yields a way of relating to history in the style of perpetually failed mourning.69 Durrant recalls Derrida’s understanding of failed mourning both as melancholic encryption, in his foreword to Abraham and Torok’s The Wolf Man’s Magic Word, and as a refusal of historicist narratives that attempt to provide recognizable forms through which to let go of the past, in Mémoires: For Paul de Man (1986). Coetzee’s Friday, Michael K, and the barbarian girl become for Durrant, reading via Derrida, bodies that cannot be conjured away, the disfigured reminders of a past that must be lived with, just as I would speculate on the deallegorizing allegory of these and other novels as efforts to hold on to the past through the figural modality that Benjamin links with ruin, remnant, and melancholy.

   New Nations, New Novels The novels I have examined work in a melancholic sense as failed mourning not only by refusing to go into the future fully but also by an encryption of national space into a spatial and temporal elsewhere. Michael K, Age of Iron, and Disgrace are of course set “within” a recognizable South Africa, but their fictional temporality splits the national signifier from itself. All the novels work to produce the haunted or spectral, we can also say fantasmatic, space of Coetzee’s South Africa, a place noncoincident with its own geography and its own time, its present always exceeded by its unknowable future. Neither counted forward or thumbed back in the single cycle of repetitive time that Benjamin figured as historicism, nor domesticated within the borders of national space, this is a history that flashes forth in the flickering half-light of a network: the transtextual international or the literary global. The flashpoint is an image of literaryhistorical space, a place for ghosts and specters too (including that of the nation, that form still here in the era of globalization), a place where we can find the footprint for another kind of national literary history that is more than the mere return of prior models, old-style literary influence dressed up as spectral encounter. Spectral encounter, as I understand it, argues for a model of literary influence that thinks outside core and periphery, beyond a proprietary economy of influence and imitation, and in excess of historicist narrative. Perhaps this is what literary history, narrative form, and genre theory enable us to trace, a form of play in which texts are subjected not merely to travel but to transformation, of the sort that makes a future where none is yet. If this story regularly brings me back to the question of allegory, it is because allegory negotiates past/present relations with something of the same temporal instability or oscillation, an inherent capacity for movement, that I have wanted to find in the story of the postcolonial novel, conceived neither as national rise nor global spread but as something else lurking in the interstices and interruptions of those lines. Insofar as allegory and other genres, in Teskey’s words, “capture their monumentality from works that have already established themselves in the realm of the made,” allegory would seem to be inevitably inscribed into the violent dyad of origin and copy and the sequential history that follows from it (162–63). But if allegory is also that system of heterogeneities, breaks, and discontinuities described in Jameson’s “Third-World Literature,” a system

New Nations, New Novels    that “generate[s] a range of distinct meanings or messages, simultaneously, as the allegorical tenor and vehicle change places,” then allegory yields a flickering network in which texts move back and forth between the national and the global, the territorial local and a series of deterritorializing flows, breaks, and conjunctures (74). As a potential version of the world literature that it is the announced concern of Jameson’s essay to return to, this network allows for the reading of the fantasmatic postcolonial nation in its many modes of death and life, its bounded location and border-crossing connections, its national, continental, and regional scales (African literature, literature of the global south, postcolonial literature). Rather than denationalizing these literatures entirely, conglomerating them as instances of some version of the global, be it the curiously placeless concept of what Deleuze and Guattari call “minor literature” or the equally amorphous “Third World,” we need to seek a model that reads national identifications alongside other ones. This would be world literature’s worlding of the nation, and allegory, like spectrality, can model it. “History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, “as a knowledge system is firmly embedded in institutional practices that invoke the nationstate at every step.”70 To provincialize is to consider an entity, say Europe, in relationship to others such that its time (modern) and its space (central) become problematized, and such that there emerge what Chakrabarty calls “other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates” (388). Provincializing that privileged technology of European representation known as the novel entails intercalating the postcolonial novel with spaces of globalism and forms of affiliation that do not always take recognizable spatial or temporal form (nation-state foundationalism or nationalist bildung). Insofar as “the project of provincializing ‘Europe’ cannot be a nationalist, nativist, or atavistic project,” any effort to provincialize the novel has to suspend the nation as a fully given or wholly adequate category. This is the hard, resistant, even sometimes distasteful work of reading Coetzee, who pushes back against the will to national representation with a corpus that, if not quite provincialized, is nonetheless rigorously not national alone. Through history rewritten as memory, through a ghostly web of intertextuality that causes the textual past to

   New Nations, New Novels return with a difference, and through an allegory that opens a gap between the nation and the nationalist state, all the novels I have explored in this chapter trouble the lines of history and the lineages of the state. The anamorphic experience of accessing the national imaginary through a series of retours and detours and the novelistic fictionalization of that not entirely deterritorializing project is the subject of the following chapter’s discussion of the Cuban expatriate novelist and theorist Severo Sarduy.

6 My Nation, My Object: Severo Sarduy’s Fantasmatic Cuba

Cobra’s Roots and Routes Severo Sarduy began his life away from Cuba in 1960 at the age of twenty-three, when he went to Paris to study painting and art history on a scholarship from the new revolutionary government. For Sarduy, the Revolution was “the first truly important thing that had happened to me . . . for youth of my age, Fidel’s landing signified the entry into the world.”1 Revolutions remake their national subjects. In Sarduy’s case that transformation took place outside the boundaries of the nation, on foreign territory and through a spectacularly global sensibility. During the 1960s, as Havana was attracting dissident intellectuals from throughout the hemisphere, staging international cultural festivals and literary prizes, and becoming a vibrant center for cultural politics in the Americas, Sarduy remained in Paris.2 He adopted French citizenship in 1967 and went on to cultivate a career as a prolific novelist, playwright, painter, and theorist, with widespread roots in French poststructuralism and psychoanalysis, Tibetan Buddhism, and quantum physics. Sarduy’s 1972 novel Cobra draws on these many influences. An expatriate fiction, the novel is notable less for the controversial status of its author’s claim to Cuban identity (all expatriates wear their national identities uncomfortably) than for the irreverence, even unrecognizability, of its national nostalgia. Cobra is a novel of national longing that abjures the backward gaze of sentiment altogether, from a mocking introductory footnote that warns readers not to

   My Nation, My Object expect a sweeping historical saga in the tradition of the Latin American novels of the Boom to an overall style whose nouveau romanesque resistant opacity is rivaled only by the near unreadability of the novel’s thematics. A wildly experimental novel on every level, Cobra boasts a cast of continually metamorphosing characters and an elusive series of twists and turns that wittily parody the Lacanian theory of the sujet-en-procès, the subject in the endless state of becoming. The novel’s eponymous protagonist, a male-to-female transvestite dancer in a Havana theater who longs to be a woman, undergoes a series of transformations whose progress must pass for plot. In the course of various meticulously detailed attempts to reduce the size of his/her rather masculine feet, Cobra concocts a drug so potent that it splinters him/ her along with the Señora or Madam of the theater into two versions of themselves, one full size and one dwarf.3 The full-size Señora and the theater’s costume designer travel to India in search of exotic props with which to stage a new production, a Féerie Orientale replete with inflatable Buddhas, celluloid elephants, an array of silks and saris, electric sitars, and “a mound of Indian kitsch” (pacotilla).4 Upon the Señora’s return to Havana, the full-size Cobra departs for India, ostensibly to copy motifs from erotic temple art for his/her interpretation of the starring role in the Féerie Orientale. During Cobra’s absence, the Señora struggles mightily to stretch, twist, or otherwise enlarge the dwarf version of Cobra, named Pup, to a size suitable for stage appearances. The full-size Cobra returns to the Havana theater only to leave again for Tangier, with Pup and the Señora in tow. There, in a sex-change operation performed by the famous Dr. Ktzabob, Cobra loses a penis while the dwarf double Pup fatally gains all the pain of the operation in a parodic literalization of psychoanalytic transference. The postoperative Cobra appears in the text in both female and male guise: as an ornately painted, hardly human woman who runs terrified through the Paris metro, and as a man who falls in with an American motorcycle gang. Into the leather bar where the gang practice tantric rituals and sell drugs, a jaded Indian guru arrives. “I travel by jet, not by elephant,” he announces, before seducing a disciple in the men’s room, dispensing cryptic and clichéd words of enlightenment, and disappearing (101, 178). Cobra subsequently departs, killed by a half-human, half-bird narcotics

My Nation, My Object    officer and mourned by the gang members according to rites from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the final section of the novel, Cobra (now alive) and the gang are transformed into a group of Tibetan lamas who have appeared previously. Exiled from their homeland by the Chinese occupying army, the lamas are now conveying their Living Buddha to the great monastery in Lassa. The gang members-turned-monks journey through a richly, almost hypnotically described India; encounter the Grand Lama, who has only impenetrable advice and black-market religious artifacts to give them; and finally reach Tibet, which they find snow covered and desolate, its monasteries abandoned and its gods vanished, in a final variation on the theme “you can’t go home again.” Prominent members of the avant-garde Parisian journal Tel quel quickly celebrated Cobra as the poststructuralist novel par excellence, marked by an eroticized textuality that none knew better how to describe than Sarduy’s longtime teacher and mentor, Roland Barthes. Cobra is in fact a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull’s eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell-mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again; a marbled, iridescent text, we are gorged with language . . . Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss.5

Hélène Cixous saw in the novel a chaotic textuality and the fascinating failure of a subject’s quest for establishment; in Cobra, she writes, there is “no interpretation, no meaning, no appropriation: but a vigorous, creative, disorganized jungle that branches out and produces an uncontrollable number of textual scintillations, currents, theatricalized cities, anatomized landscapes or bodies.”6 For Cixous, Barthes, and others in the Tel quel circle, as Sarduy’s English translator Suzanne Jill Levine has pithily noted, “the subject of this novel is its discourse.”7 Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the revolutionary Cuban intellectual and critic Roberto Fernández Retamar excoriated Sarduy as “the neoBarthesian homosexual.”8 For Fernández Retamar, Sarduy’s sexual and critical preferences, like his association with the Paris-based, CIA-funded journal Mundo nuevo over the Havana-based journal Casa de las Américas, amounted to acts of national disaffiliation.

   My Nation, My Object Poststructuralist praise for Cobra’s siteless “verbal pleasure” contrasts both Fernández Retamar’s nationalist orthodoxy, which placed Cobra and Sarduy firmly outside Cuba, and more recent critical interpretations, which have found Cuba very much within Cobra, anagrammatically hidden in the novel’s title and undeniably present in thematics that both instantiate and deconstruct the search for a national identity. For Roberto González Echevarría, Sarduy’s “relentless questioning of the bond between language, culture and national identity” must be read in connection with the culturally specific resonances of his use of the concept of “origin,” as spoken by a Cuban expatriate, in a long tradition of Latin American writers in exile, who no longer believes in the recovery of an authentic nation or self.9 In her 1978 essay, “Severo Sarduy o la aventura textual,” Ana María Barrenchea suggests that despite the poststructuralist preference for discours over histoire, signifier over signified, Sarduy’s search for a national self and Cuban identity actually reinstates the referent.10 While Barrenchea restores the problematic of cultural and national identity missing in the French evaluations of Sarduy, she pinpoints the complex search for identity that suffuses Sarduy’s work only to reduce it to a choice between an absent and present referent. Sarduy’s search for impossibly lost identities is not quite so readily resolved, in part because his nation is at once a referent, a unique sign-system, and not least of all, an object. As object, in the psychoanalytic sense that Sarduy took from Lacan, Sarduy’s nation is the point at which the subject comes face to face with loss. Where is Sarduy’s Cuba? Nowhere. And everywhere. For all its stylistic insolence, Cobra seems to be a novel of national mourning. Although Cobra could hardly be said to mourn in a traditional sense, given its keynotes of excess, glee, and wanton oversignification, mourn is what the novel does on a formal and structural level. As what Freud called “the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as fatherland, liberty, an ideal, and so on,” mourning is directed outward to displacement rather than inward to incorporation.11 The former movement provides the model for Sarduy’s uniquely fantasmatic version of national identification. Cobra’s transvestite bodies and orientalist imaginary offer pointedly artificial, abundantly theatrical, partial, and displaced compensation for two distinct orders of loss: (1) the loss through exile of Sarduy’s native Cuba;

My Nation, My Object    and (2) the loss of a foundationalist discourse of national representation that holds nation and culture, gender and ethnicity, as fixed quantities and firm anchors. Between the lost nation and its surrogate objects there is no easy one-to-one correspondence. Indeed, analogical and allegorical readings quickly recede in a novel that finds its most pervasive model in anamorphosis, that species of visual distortion epitomized by Holbein, theorized by Lacan, and adopted by Sarduy, in which an object’s recognition or restoration rests contingent on the viewer’s displacement. As glossed by Žižek, “anamorphosis designates an object whose very material reality is distorted in such a way that a gaze is inscribed into its objective features.”12 The object of anamorphosis takes in the subjective distortion (the displacement of the viewer’s gaze) that allows it to be seen. As a figure for national identification, anamorphosis stages the intimate relation between the national object and the national subject whose “gaze”—and the desire, longing, and belief it entails—inscribes it. Fragments of a theory of the national object and the national subject lay scattered across Cobra’s rapidly changing cast of characters and its equally startling plot devices of wandering, transformation, and dispossession. Cuba here is never restored or worked through, never gotten back or gotten beyond. Sarduy’s national subject in this sense knows what, by Lacanian critical accounts, mourning and melancholia do not: that the (national) object is not something that was once had and has since been lost as a consequence of revolution or exile, political or personal circumstance. It is instead an object that is constitutively lost or, as Lacanian psychoanalysis calls it, lacking, and, Žižek adds, “lacking from the very beginning.”13 In Alessia Ricciardi’s useful characterization, “Freud’s proposal that the subject is comprised of a legible narrative or history of object-loss becomes in Lacan’s revision the parodic image of a subject premised on the prior absence of the lost object, the principle of objet a.”14 For Žižek, the distinction between loss and lack is decisive. Melancholia, in Žižek’s reading, interprets “lack as a loss, as if the lacking object was once possessed and then lost” (659–60). And furthermore, “the melancholic’s refusal to accomplish the work of mourning thus takes the form of its very opposite, a faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning for an object even before this object is lost” (661). Žižek here critiques what he perceives as a critical tendency either to privilege the work of mourning over the pathological

   My Nation, My Object incorporation of melancholia or to argue for a retention of melancholic attachment to such fantasmal objects as lost roots and lost nations (for ethnic and postcolonial subjects) or lost libidinal objects (for queer subjects). Žižek singles out Derrida’s Specters as the ultimate expression of a “melancholic, postsecular thought” that holds on to theology (663). I will take up some of the other arguments implicitly addressed by Žižek’s critique, particularly Judith Butler’s work, later in this chapter, in the context of a reading that seeks to elaborate the distinction between loss and lack, Freudian mourning and melancholia and Lacanian desire, as two possible models for how we might think the national object. Insofar as these two models oppose a notion of a subject constituted by individual or collective historical experience and the power of the past (Freud), and a subject constituted in language and as lack (Lacan), their juxtaposition comes back to the question of the national subject. What does the national subject want, and in what forms does it want it? The formal concerns of the previous chapter return here in another guise as mourning’s and melancholia’s essentially tragedic cast confronts Lacan’s parodic-comedic staging of the subject’s relation through desire to lack.15 This chapter also returns to the novel, as the point where national subject, national object, national desire, and national form meet in everchanging ways. Despite its melancholic refusal of the politics of restoration (you can’t go home again) and its simultaneous, for Žižek equally melancholic, “excessive, superfluous mourning” of its own national loss in the circuit from Cuba to Paris to India to Tibet, Cobra refuses to put the nation (or anything else) at its core. In what we might call this novel structured by national lack, the nation is never quite there to begin with. Still less is it waiting, in some spectral sense, to come into being. If we wish to find Cuba in Cobra, we must turn from the politics of national space and time to the aesthetics of the national gaze (and from Derrida to Lacan). Peter Hallward’s sweeping yet deeply precise discussion of Sarduy’s oeuvre describes an evolution from the national identity and national culture that animate the early novels Gestos (1963) and De donde son los cantantes (1969) to the more nomadic desire of such “fully deterritorialized texts” as Cobra (1972) and Maitreya (1978) to more particularized engagements with gay, autobiographical, and terminally ill identity in the later Colibri (1984), Cocuyo (1990), and Pájaros de la playa (1993).16 Across this

My Nation, My Object    sequence, running from territorialization to deterritorialization to reterritorialization, Hallward further detects a constantly shifting play of desire, the autonomy of “(Creative) expression,” and a “vigorously immediate notion of ‘concreteness,’ meant to be a particular state of condensation of verbal material, or saturation or intensity, of the presence of the signifier to itself” (299). Sarduy’s immediacy, in Hallward’s opinion, cannot be read through the metaphysics of Lacan’s desiring subject, “driven by lack from one signifier to another,” or Derrida’s deferral of presence and signification. “It is Deleuze’s fully affirmative, fully expressive subject or aleatory point that provides the most useful parallel to Sarduy’s work in contemporary French thought. A world without partial objects, yes, but precisely one in which ‘nothing is lacking.’ ”17 If my own reading of Sarduy pursues the analytic of lack and loss, and the discourse of the subject implied by them, it is not in order to fill in his work with lack or loss as its central meaning but rather to read through them in order to understand something about the ways in which national identification keeps coming back. For Hallward, Sarduy evolves from the singular, as he terms the logic that is “involved in its own genesis . . . [and] is self-constituent, an ongoing differentiation,” to the specific, the logic that “yields elements whose individuality can only be discerned through the relations they maintain with themselves, with their environment, and with other individuals” (4). In Hallward’s argument, “Sarduy’s last texts work through positions, through territories, through relations, through experiences, rather than transcend them” (321). But the simultaneously fluid and frozen space of Cobra’s “deterritorialized” textuality also depends on a kind of relationality beneath its glittering surface, in which everything seems to be painted, staged, and set. In my opinion, the particularities of identity (nation, subject, language, gender, geography) are indeed not transcended by Cobra’s aesthetic of artifice, metamorphosis, and textualized desire but they are recast, seen awry, and thus returned as necessary objects of a postcolonial criticism that keeps striving to understand the work of identification. To uncover this is not to turn Cobra into a novel of identity. It is also not to use relationality as the stick with which to beat the dead horse of the French-cum-Cuban high textualists, showing their deeper reliance on such orientalized others as Tel quel ’s Maoist China or Sarduy’s fetishized India. It is not even, in the style of the uncanny and spectral readings

   My Nation, My Object I have previously undertaken, to show how in a putative chronological sequence earlier texts anticipate later ones, quite as much as later ones inherit and transform earlier ones. To bring the analytics of particularity to a novel that seems so powerfully to resist them is less to cut literature to fit a method than it is to fold a method around literature and see where it touches and where it doesn’t, what it explains and what it can’t. I will propose no single alternative candidate for the theorist to whom Sarduy’s work is best analogized, but I will read through several. My reading of Cobra and the theoretical writings that encircle this single novel is best described as comparative, a reading that operates through the tracing of connections. It’s not the straightness of the line linking A to B (or Cobra to Deleuze) that matters, nor the completeness of the chronology (first novel to last), so much as the overall relational network. Identities cannot be simply declared absent along one (early) line or segment and present along another (later) one. The point of a networked reading is precisely the alternative it offers to chronological readings. Identities do not disappear in networks, or at least not in Sarduy’s networks—they just look very different. So what remains of identity in a work understood to have moved beyond it? To start to answer this question, we must, in the style of anamorphosis, undertake a kind of readerly displacement that looks at Sarduy’s Cobra from its outskirts.

Beginnings: New Nations, New Novels, and New Men Only a few decades after Argentina’s independence from Spanish rule, Bartolomé Mitre’s famous preface to Soledad (1847) proclaimed the novel “the highest expression of civilization in a society.” The novel’s rise in a society serves as evidence of a kind of narrative maturity that bypasses the earlier forms of description, chronicle, history, and drama. And, Mitre continues, the novel offers society “a faithful mirror that can reflect and explain everything.”18 It is because of this that we would hope the novel might put down deep roots in the virgin soil of Latin America. This land has no knowledge of its history, its barely-formed customs have not been philosophically studied, and the ideas and feel-

My Nation, My Object    ings that have emerged from its social and political life have not been presented through vivid copies of the society in which we live . . . Like Cooper, [the novel in Latin America] will portray the autochthonous and unknown customs of the diverse peoples of this continent, who so greatly lend themselves to be poeticized, and will make our societies—so deeply troubled, with so many vices and such great virtues—know themselves, representing them in the moment of their transformation, when the chrysalis transforms into a dazzling butterfly. (10)

The sheer organicism of a form that sinks roots into Latin American soil, emerges autochthonously from local life, and tropes its aesthetic power in naturalist terms literally grounds the novel in the nation. In Sommer’s influential argument, romantic novels like Mitre’s Soledad, José Mármol’s Amalia (Argentina, 1851), Jorge Isaacs’s María (Colombia, 1867), Manuel de Jesús Galván’s Enriquillo (Dominican Republic, 1882), and Juan León Mera’s Cumandá (Ecuador, 1879) represented the dialectical process by which eroticism’s rhetoric was nationalized, nationalism’s rhetoric was eroticized, and a distinct genre of nationalist novel was consolidated. A century later, the novels of the Boom turned from romance and realism to myth and magic, seeking a new aesthetic even as they confirmed their predecessors as their own “inescapable” foundation.19 Sarduy dismissed the Boom as a set of rather predictable innovations that merely gesture toward the real future of the novel. “The novel of the future,” in his words, “will thus be parodic, erotic, macaronic, rococo, et cetera. The sentence, that is to say the conventional structure of the sentence, the grounds of our logic, must explode, must unmake itself.”20 If Mitre’s prologue to Soledad is a manifesto for the novel in Latin America, a call to representational arms that mirrors, amplifies, and metaphorizes the struggle for independence, Sarduy’s Cobra would seem to be an elegy. Bereft of the history, organicism, and myth so central to the Latin American novel, from the foundational fictions of the nineteenth century to the magical realism of the twentieth century, and unwilling to subscribe to the notion of a thoroughly mimetic compact between the nation and the novel form, Cobra wrenches nationalist representation out of that discourse of origins that reconsolidates the nation with every telling. Cobra’s alternative order of nationalist representation is less concerned with the assertion of the nation’s claim to existence through manifesto or the restoration of the nation through myth than with the emblematization of the nation as a psychic terrain, a fantasmal object marked by lack and

   My Nation, My Object longing. Though Cobra reads in many ways like a libidinal cartography of the postnationalist novel, what it pretends to exile (the nation) is what it most deeply interiorizes. Cobra thus remains a national novel, albeit one that transforms the reigning ethos of domesticated and heterosexualized national romance, with its allegorical pairs, reproductive imperatives, and linear teleologies, into a strikingly globalized, queered, transnational narrative, marked by the wandering routes traveled by a cast of mixed and doubled characters as they open themselves to a universe of erotic possibility and transcultural affiliation. To further locate Cobra’s brand of national representation, we can turn to a broader continental debate on Latin American identity. In 1891 the Cuban nationalist José Martí published an essay titled “Nuestra América” [Our America]. A poet, essayist, and ardent revolutionary in the battle for independence from Spanish rule, Martí spent much of his life in political exile, teaching and writing in Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Venezuela, and, most extensively, New York. In New York, as a diplomatic representative of Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay, Martí gleaned a firsthand understanding of the interventionist policies that informed the imperial relations of the United States with its southern neighbors. “Nuestra América” is a brief for not just national but also continental independence. Martí figures the yoke of cultural dependency as despicable masquerade, “a vision with the chest of an athlete, the hands of a dandy, and the brain of a child . . . a masquerader in English breeches, Parisian vest, North American jacket, and Spanish cap.”21 Against this continental harlequin, a patchwork of foreign influences, Martí proclaimed the birth of “the real man.” Real men don’t dress in borrowed clothes, nor do they imitate political and literary models generated from afar. Instead they turn to creation, an explicitly virile act of self-knowledge that derives the principles of government and the forms of culture from the indigenous spirit, natural resources, and organic energies of the continent itself. In a 1900 essay titled Ariel: A la juventud de América (Ariel: To the Youth of America), the first Cuban edition of which was to be dedicated to Martí, the Uruguayan writer Enrique Rodó made another plea for Latin American unity and independence from foreign domination. Rodó thematized a conflict between a North American Caliban and a Latin American Ariel: utilitarianism versus spiritualism, irrationality versus

My Nation, My Object    reason, a democracy rendered hollow by its aggressive imperialism versus a Europeanized aristocracy of taste and learning. In the form of a Socratic dialogue, Rodó warned the young elite of Latin America that the emulation of North America can only result in “an America delatinized by its own wishes, without the extortion of conquest, and then reconstituted in the image and semblance of the Northern archetype.”22 Several decades later, the Cuban revolutionary intellectual Fernández Retamar would scorn all imitation in an essay urging Latin Americans to reidentify themselves as Caliban, curse the Prospero to the north, and finally break the cycle of dependency that had made their culture little more than “an apprenticeship, a rough draft, or a copy of European bourgeois culture.”23 Fernández Retamar’s later assessment of Sarduy marked him as a clearly metropolitan artist—an Ariel rather than a Caliban, so in love with the master’s tools that he dismantles the wrong house, giddily destroying the novel form while preserving Western cultural hegemony. Rodó’s Ariel, Martí’s “Nuestra América,” and Fernández Retamar’s essay—which acknowledges its debts to Rodó and Martí in its full title, Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América (Caliban: Notes toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America)—together define a tradition of cultural manifesto in which the search for a unique Latin American identity demands the disavowal of some, if not all, forms of imitation. If Rodó, Martí, and Fernández Retamar saw the emergence in Latin America of a new man, respectively elite, natural, and revolutionary, Sarduy’s Cobra rejects any such foundational claim. There are no new men in Cobra, only a dizzying array of mutating identities whose endless masquerade constitutes a mocking rejoinder to all those narratives that would render identity isomorphic with place. Sarduy’s theoretical affiliations to France would seem, in the tradition defined by Martí and Fernández Retamar, to denationalize him. But the lines of foreign influence running northsouth (Cuba-Paris) and east-west (Cuba-India-Tibet) map another version of national identification that routes the national through the global. In contrast to the cultural theorists who protested imitation as continental enslavement, and to the novelists who romanticized the autochthonous as national origin, Sarduy celebrates free-flowing desire and the ideology of the fake as the only modes through which identity may be lived or narrated.24

   My Nation, My Object In an interview given in the late 1960s, Sarduy announced, in the spirit of the critical times, the absence of anything other than relations among texts. “Everything is repetition, everything is plagiarism . . . nothing precedes, nothing is first or true. There is no origin.”25 Consistent with this observation, Cobra rejoices in unauthorized borrowings and textual and visual impersonations. There appear imitations or actual fragments of astronomical textbooks, Buddhist texts, the Book of Ecclesiastes, Miguel Cervantes, Don Luis de Góngora, Jean-Philippe Rameau’s 1735 operaballet “Les Indes galantes,” the journal of Christopher Columbus, and of course, Lacanian theory. References are made to Caravaggio, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Carreño, and others in scenes acknowledged as copies of particular painterly aesthetics. Sarduy even poaches from himself, repeating certain sentences and paragraphs in Cobra and reproducing characters from an earlier novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967). A description of the Féerie Orientale staged in the Teatro Lírico bears the title “GUSTAVE FLAUBERT” and mimics the minutely detailed, high orientalist style of Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862). We may recall Salammbô as the novel that Lukács dismisses for its treatment of Hannibal’s Carthage as an assemblage of modernized psychologies and violence relayed only for its own sake rather than as a representation of historical struggles between nations and classes. The novel’s dense array of purely ornamental objects that, in Lukács’s opinion, “have nothing to do with the inner life of the characters” and are equally divorced from the “historical development” and “social-historical ensemble” that gives rise to material things makes Salammbô a decadent historical novel.26 Antiquity, Lukács asserts, serves Flaubert merely as the occasion for “a world of historically exact costumes and decorations, no more than a pictorial frame within which a purely modern story is unfolded.” Cobra, which eschews the historical novel in all its forms, elaborates an aesthetic of ornament that Sarduy will renationalize as the Hispanic baroque and a general sensibility of artifice and artificiality, realized in extravagantly costumed bodies and objects that resplendently lack any inner life or historical structure. History is the enemy in Sarduy’s novel, whose perpetually displacing framing of its story obliges us to imagine a national novel outside, and even without, its proper (historical, linear) time and (territorialized, fixed) place. All history is suspect in this project—whether the structuring clash of classes that provides the motor of the historical novel or the messianic history of a future to

My Nation, My Object    come or even a history staged with exactitude and, as Lukács dismisses Salammbô, “the conscientious application of archaeology.” The only possible exception is the literary history that provides the raw material for Sarduy’s plagiarized, parodic, intertextual, and international form. Speaking with Flaubertian style, Sarduy announced to an interviewer: “What we have to do is to sow mines in the very foundation of the bourgeoisie, to explode it and corrode it through parody, that is to say, through the practice of parody.”27 Like those postcolonial novels that appropriate canonical texts for their own ends, Sarduy uses parody to undo the claims of any discourse that positions itself as prior and authoritative. As Julia Kushigian notes in a useful comparison of Sarduy to Bakhtin, there is no primary and secondary discourse in Sarduy’s theory of parody, no first and fallen, but only a destabilizing, entropic field of discursive energy in which “everything is parody.”28 What plagiarism and parody are to the novel, namely, the practices that break it down, Cobra’s transvestites are to the nation. The transvestite’s copying of gendered appearance (the plagiarism of the body or, as Butler puts it, “gender parody”) throws into question the possibility of any originary, natural, or natal identity.29 Anderson identifies as one of nationalism’s “paradoxes” the following contradiction: “the formal universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept—in the modern world everyone can, should, will, ‘have’ a nationality, as he or she ‘has’ a gender—vs. the irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’ nationality is sui generis.”30 We are led to believe in nationality, like gender, as a masterful classificatory mode that will name and fix us as indubitably “something”—man or woman, Cuban or French. In Sarduy’s writing, however, the very modes that promise location become the agents of a perpetual dislocation. Far from the “must-have” elements of identity, nationality and gender are what Sarduy claims we cannot have, what we cannot even be sure of. Cobra’s changes in size, shape, gender, costume, and locale, like his/her transition between living and dead states in the second half of the novel, and the parodic version of Lacan’s split subject offered by Cobra and his/her miniature double, Pup, all work to interrogate the notion of static identity. The Cuban expatriate critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal points out that both Sarduy’s “topoi” of transvestites, erotic theaters, and carnivals, and his narrative “methods” take metamorphosis as

   My Nation, My Object their model.31 As gender and nationality self-destruct in Sarduy’s writing, his novels become (or so it seems) unreadable, difficult, confusing. And yet Cobra’s willed destruction of novelistic form and dissolution of the subject into a parade of identity fragments also offer a quite precise vision of the nation as not quite there, not quite real, dependent for its being on a series of prostheses, including the gender that allegorizes it, the language and culture that claim to unify it, and the organic time that yields the narrative (and often the novel) of its development. In Cobra’s montage sequences of displacement, transformation, fragmentation, and mimicry, notes Cixous, “everything has the same value as a fetish: at once all and nothing.”32 Nationalist discourse frequently covers over the arbitrary invention of the nation with the borrowed clothes of gender (orientalism’s feminized East, imperialism’s mother country, the revolution’s new women and new families).33 When Sarduy scatters Cobra with transvestites and, in the second half of the novel, transsexuals, he exposes gender and the nationality seen through it as precariously partial identities, imagined constructs made real to the extent that subjects invest them with fetishistic belief in a coherence, wholeness, and naturalness that is not there. We cannot “have” the nation as we “have” gender. But perhaps, Cobra suggests, we can “not have” them in similar ways. As the novel proceeds, the scattered triumphs over the centered and the partial over the whole. If culture, as Sarduy once suggested, is a form of curiosity, then what the subject ends up “knowing” is not culture or nation per se but a series of substitute objects, the fragments or fetishes that stand in for something unsymbolizable.34 Sarduy’s Cuba, lost to him by virtue of his French exile, is open to becoming the object of a distinctly fetishistic gaze elsewhere. If the classically Freudian fetishistic gaze attempts to comfort, papering over the traumatic apprehension of female lack with the erotic plenitude of a substitute object, the displacing gaze that Sarduy trains on his missing nation is designed to unsettle. In a 1966 interview, Sarduy cast the problem as one of a necessarily exilic gaze on national being. “When I distanced myself from Cuba, I understood what Cuba was or, at the very least, I posed myself the question, ‘what is Cuba?’ . . . When I was far away, I could begin to formulate this question, the one on which my work has gradually come to center. What I want to know is what are the possibilities—I’ll say it in a slightly presumptuous fashion—the

My Nation, My Object    ontological possibilities of being from my country.”35 Though writing from Paris at this time, Sarduy associates his task with that of other Cubans writing in the wake of the revolution and in response to what he calls “an inquisitive imperative as to what Cubans are. As to what ‘Cubanness’ [la cubanidad ] is.” Sarduy’s writing of la cubanidad does not answer the question of identity, any more than his emigration from Cuba evaded those questions. Migration, like metamorphosis, displaces the nation even as it rewrites it. Sarduy goes to Paris in order to ask himself a string of questions” “¿Qué somos los cubanos? [What are we Cubans?]”; “¿Qué es la cubanidad? [What is Cuban-ness?]”; “¿Qué es lo cubano? [What is the Cuban?]”; “¿Qué es Cuba? [What is Cuba?].” Cuba’s ontology turns out to demand its own epistemology, its own way of knowing and seeing, for which anamorphosis and Lacan’s objet a (more than the Freudian fetish) and the transvestite body provide the model. Transvestism is not merely a cultural metaphor but a subjectifying practice, an individual negotiation of gender identity that cannot be simply fixed into a single meaning of gender fluidity or gender displacement. Following Marjorie Garber’s 1992 study of the transvestite as a narrative and cultural symptom, in which she argues for “an unconscious of transvestism, for transvestism as a language that can be read, and double-read, like a dream, a fantasy, or a slip of the tongue,” gender theorists have called for more specific and, in McClintock’s phrase, “less transhistorical” accounts of gender coding and recoding.36 If I linger on transvestism as a language with a particular relationship to the unconscious, it is not in order to dismiss the lived experiences of those for whom cross-dressing, drag, camp, voguing, passing, and more biological means of gender transformation are ways of life, but rather because I am attempting to follow Sarduy’s own tracks. In contrast to the relentlessly allegorized and fantasized femininity with which Du Bois and Fanon make woman the equivalent of nation, Sarduy offers a textualized, fictionalized, and purely fantasmal femininity and masculinity as the mode of national representation. Sarduy’s marshaling of the transvestite metaphor, for all that it universalizes the meaning of transvestism as fluidity, also has its own local and specific history. In this history, language is not a universal but something understood in different ways at different times and in different places, from the nineteenth-century Latin America of new nationalism to the 1960s Cuba of the revolution to the 1970s Paris of Tel quel, Lacan, and Derrida. In rehearsing some of

   My Nation, My Object these histories, I attempt to lard Sarduy’s transvestite metaphor with the historical content that figuration always carries.

France and “the Mind of Spanish”: Sarduy’s Encounter with Lacan Speaking in the same interview in which he located Cuba at the center of his project, Sarduy added, “This question about Cuba for me has been converted into an interrogation of language. To ask how we speak is to ask what we are [¿Cómo hablamos, es decir, cómo somos?]” (19). In a foundational Latin American debate over this question, Andrés Bello (1781– 1865) and Domingo Faustino Sarmiento (1811–88) clashed in 1842 and for several years afterward over which languages, idioms, cultures, and expressive models were to prevail in the new nations. Bello, a poet, philosopher, journalist, and historian, a scholar of Greek and Latin, the founder of Chile’s national university, and author of the definitive Gramática de la lengua castellana (Dictionary of the Castilian Language, 1847), staunchly defended the purity and uniformity of Spanish in Latin America against a series of threats. These included neologisms, corruptions of meaning, foreign constructions neither Castilian nor Latin American, particularly gallicisms, faulty habits of popular speech, and the eventual rise of a “a multitude of irregular, licentious, and barbaric dialects.”37 Bello’s fears of foreign invasions were dismissed by Sarmiento, a poet, journalist, educator, and the future president of the Argentine republic. Against Bello’s Hispanicization, Sarmiento turned instead to “northamericanization,” specifically French and British romanticism and the discourses of revolution, liberalism, capitalism, progress, and modernity, all of which he imagined would liberate Latin Americans from peninsular domination. Ever the champion of popular speech, which he gleefully declared would “corrupt and adulterate everything,” the self-taught Sarmiento admonished Latin American writers to abjure a restrictive classicism in their efforts to describe their homelands. “Acquire ideas from wherever they come . . . and at once write with love and feeling about what is within your reach, about what strikes your fancy, and let this be good in its essence even if incorrect in its expression.”38 More than a century later, and with something of Sarmiento’s

My Nation, My Object    cosmopolitan omnivorousness, Sarduy again negotiates between France and Latin America in his attempt to answer the question, “What is Cuba?” For Sarduy, as for his classicist and romantic predecessors, it is impossible to think the nation independent of language. Sarduy’s language, however, is not theirs. Speaking in a 1969 interview, he confessed, “Literature came to me alongside eroticism, at the same time; they’re the same thing, something that inheres in the air of Cuba. No one feels eroticism, no one makes something erotic out of the word, like a Cuban.”39 This simultaneous eroticization and nationalization of language, the Cubanizing of the word, lies at the core of Sarduy’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Where previously we have seen a discussion of generic form and allegorical mode as narrative structures of nationhood, with the turn to Sarduy, and through him to Lacan, language emerges as a privileged zone of national being. Language here is not the hallowed ground of national identity as asserted in Bello’s Gramática or Sarmiento’s retort, that is to say, language as what nations and nationals make. Instead, it is the medium through which national subjects encounter their desire. Language, Lacan might say, makes them.40 With his essentially parodic practice, Sarduy’s use of Lacan questions the prior authority of the model even as he takes it over and turns it around. In a 1974 interview, Sarduy describes his project as a “linguistic psychoanalysis” based not on the unconscious of the French language but on the “very different” “unconscious mind of Spanish.” “In the theater, or rather in that factory, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, which is the unconscious mind of Spanish, we find the baroque, with all the residual basis which it implies: its excesses, its extravagance, its gold/excrement, and above all, its continual flux (you can see this in the sentences in Cobra, for example), that no ‘machine,’ to continue with Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, can ever cut through.”41 As an unconscious structured like a particularly ornate and excessive language, Spanish in this account names a culturally specific aesthetic and an especially extravagant desire that, as in the original Lacanian model, continually surpasses need. Sarduy’s 1974 book-length essay Barroco (Baroque) surveys instances of the baroque in economics (the baroque as supplementary excess), astronomy (the baroque as the ellipsis of planetary movement), politics (the baroque as the revolutionary, parodic subversion of bourgeois order), nature (the baroque as an expression of the fecundity of the South American continent), textuality (the baroque as intertextual grafting, citation,

   My Nation, My Object plagiarism, parody, and the elimination of authorial originality), and finally, language. Unlike communicative and functional language, baroque language devotes itself to the unrequited search for an object it can never fix, name, or have as such. Sarduy defines the object that baroque language endlessly seeks to recover to include the maternal breast, excrement and its metaphoric equivalent of gold, the gaze, and the voice. He further urges that these be described as “(a)lterity, in order to mark in the concept the contribution of Lacan, who calls this object precisely (a).”42 In a gesture equally characteristic of his thinking, Sarduy enlists cultural difference to describe the culturally specific aesthetic of the baroque. In a 1972 interview Sarduy cites, as evidence of the baroque’s elimination of the author, some Latin American colonial architecture and the Indian temples of Mahabalipuram, Kanchipuram, and Khajuraho (“that enormous Indian pyramid of copulating figures”).43 These works “have no author . . . the baroque proliferation is so extreme that this type of bubbling up of the signifiers expels all personal ideology, all psychology.” Something like the absence of intent and control, the baroque is “a grammar in proliferation, an exacerbated code which devours everything,” an “over-abundance” or “squandering” of signifiers, and “totally saturated information.” Devoid, like the Lacanian split subject, of a centered, authoritative agent of expression, the unauthored baroque sentence “does not lead us to a pure and simple meaning, but rather, through a series of ellipses, of zig-zags, of detours, carries with it only a floating signifier—empty and polyvalent.”44 In the baroque, signification eclipses loss. As the ground for a particular cultural organization of desire, the baroque enters a larger debate, central to Sarduy’s work, concerning the relationship between psychoanalysis and national identification. As a self-proclaimed practitioner of linguistic psychoanalysis, Sarduy seeks to render Lacan as applicable to “the mind of Spanish” as to the mind of French. But just how translatable is psychoanalysis, and is “translation” even the right term for Sarduy’s encounter with Lacan? The universalist assumptions of Lacan’s rewriting of the Freudian family romance of Oedipus into the subject’s submission to the name of the father, and its regimes of language, law, and lack, begin to emerge when we ask (as Deleuze and Guattari do) whether the name of the father functions differently in different cultures or different times. Scholarship in film,

My Nation, My Object    literature, and cultural theory considers different versions of psychoanalysis’s primal scenes, inflected by the experiences of slavery, colonization, and empire.45 Though Sarduy’s work predates most of these interventions, it seems possible to locate his injection of culturally specific categories, such as the baroque unconscious or the Spanish mind, into the universalist frameworks of Lacanian psychoanalysis as yet one more attack on analytic imperialism. But Sarduy’s playful, parodic encounter with Lacan is less an explicit critique than an uncanny doubling and disruptive decentering.

Look Away, Look Awry: The Visual Politics of National Sentiment As an attempt to turn exile’s ontology (being away) into nation’s epistemology (seeing and knowing the nation from a distance) Sarduy’s theory of the national gaze takes its point of departure from Lacan’s discussion in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis of Hans Holbein’s sixteenth-century painting The Ambassadors. The secret of this painting lies in the moment when, moving away, or, as Žižek puts it, “looking awry,” the viewer sees the spot in the painting’s foreground revealed as a skull. In that moment, writes Lacan, we are brought face-to-face with “our own nothingness” as we are handed an “imaged embodiment” of our castration in the domain of the visual.46 The viewing subject of The Ambassadors stands annihilated before, in Lacan’s words, the “dazzling and spread out” function of the gaze and the subject’s concomitant realization: “the gaze is outside, I am looked at, that is to say, I am a picture” (106). What Lacan terms the painting’s “capture” (92) of the subject reveals both the fundamental lack of a being whose eye sees only from one point but who is looked at from all sides, and the ceaseless circuitry of such a being’s desire. The subject oscillates between the unthinkable place in which it is fixed (object of the gaze, sadly limited by its organ of perception, coincident with the skull’s vanishing point) and the place in which it wishes to be (agent of the gaze, master of the visual domain, owner of all it surveys). Insofar as the gaze has what the subject does not, the gaze serves as what Lacan calls objet a, that object from which the subject has been separated and which therefore comes to symbolize the central lack of desire. As Žižek points out, it is not that objet a is lacking but rather that “in its very

   My Nation, My Object positivity, [it] gives body to a lack.” Objet a is a Kantian “negative magnitude,” a “mere positivization of a void,” a “something that stands for nothing”—the nothing of the desiring subject and of the desired object.47 Elsewhere Žižek calls objet a “the object elevated to the dignity of a Thing, and simultaneously the anamorphic object (in order to perceive its sublime quality, we have to look at it awry, askew—if looked at straight on, it appears as just another object in a series).”48 As a version of objet a, Sarduy’s Cuba embodies the lack both of national desire, which longs for a homeland that in some sense is not there, and national identity, which provisionally places the Nation-Thing somewhere in space and time. Whether physically absent as a consequence of Sarduy’s exile or conceptually uncertain (what might “la cubanidad ” or “Cuban-ness” mean in the context of Cuba’s heterogeneous mix of peoples and histories?), Cuba exists as Žižek’s sublime object of ideology, “the spectral object which has no positive ontological consistency, but merely fills in the gap of a certain constitutive impossibility.”49 Always missing, ever present, Cuba is a stopgap that, if it fills in the lack of national being, does so only on the terms of imminent and perpetual replacement. For Sarduy, what he calls the “ontological possibilities” of being Cuban ultimately depend on a certain deontologization of Cuba, that is, a willingness to think the nation by means of a detour through an altogether different concept of being, grounded on the level not of what is but of what seems to be. The question on which Sarduy claims his work centered once he was far away (“What is Cuba?”) comes into focus only in its continual refraction through something else.50 The question of national identity holds out the promise of territorial location and cultural patrimony. Cobra reveals those somethings as nothings, territorial location as transnational dislocation and cultural patrimony as the wildly syncretic fusion of persons and places, genders and nations, all of which seem to dissolve on contact with one another. In a 1984 interview, Sarduy notes the “inability of the Cuban to come head on at the idea of the national” and proposes by way of solution “to convert the discourse on the Cuban [lo cubano] into a real anamorphosis, that is to say, one in which nothing is seen head on and everything is seen marginally, tangentially.”51 Sarduy’s conversion of lo cubano into anamorphosis posits a framework in which national identity can come

My Nation, My Object    into being only when it displaces itself, like the viewer of The Ambassadors. In a discussion of The Ambassadors in his theoretical study Simulación (Simulation, 1982) Sarduy rejects the simple binary opposition of different vantage points (spot vs. skull, front view vs. tangential view). Instead, he proposes a focus on the excessive, in his terminology “baroque,” energy that operates between spot and skull, converting the one into the other and back again in an endless circuit of decipherment. “Baroque reading is neither shell nor skull—there is no ground for such a thought. The only thing that matters in baroque reading is the energy of conversion and cunning in the decipherment of the opposite—representation’s other. This is the drive of the simulation that in The Ambassadors emblematically unmasks itself and dissolves into death.”52 Transposed into the textual thematics of Cobra, the principle of baroque or, as it could also be called, anamorphic reading, allows us to understand the novel’s own conversion of its most visible material—transvestite bodies, orientalized spaces, metamorphic thematics, kitsch aesthetics, even its famously eroticized textuality—into the image of an absent Cuba. Now you see Cuba; now you don’t; now you see it again. The only way to get to the idea of the national in Cobra is on the rebound, alluding to something else, whether it be Latin American literature, Lacanian psychoanalysis, textual experimentalism, baroque desire, or any of the myriad other things with which Cobra abounds and from which a certain bricolage-like idea of Cuba rebounds. Marked by misrecognition, Sarduy’s nation is what we are asked to recognize in a series of foreign bodies and foreign places with which “Cuba” cannot claim the dim kinship of ancestry, the anonymous camaraderie of simultaneity, or even the proleptic community of a national whole to come. Unlike Anderson, Fanon, or the tradition of Latin American nationalists described by Mitre, Sarmiento, Martí, and Retamar, Sarduy detemporalizes the nation. Taking the nation out of history, refusing its claims to origin while displacing it through desire, Cobra writes national identity and national identification in a strictly imaginary register. As a version of the historical consciousness that so dominates nationalist discourse and that Sarduy so firmly abjures, time is all but excised from Sarduy’s theory of national identity. In its place, we have the gaze. Sarduy’s formulation of Cuba as a version of objet a, like Cobra’s

   My Nation, My Object replacement of the omnipresent Lacanian Other with polysemic others that are sometimes male, sometimes female, sometimes Cuban, sometimes not, or Sarduy’s rethinking of linguistic psychoanalysis through the culturally inflected grammar and desire of the baroque, are all essentially attempts to “look awry” at Lacan, theory in the mode of anamorphosis. Sometimes Sarduy is quite specific in naming his orientation toward Lacan, as in Barroco’s statement that in planetary movement, “the two centers of the ellipse perfectly illustrate the subject in its constitutive division” (78), or the suggestion that the object for which baroque language searches be designated “(a)lterity” (100). In more parodic gestures, Lacan’s split subject is likened to the changing, evanescent self found in Buddhist philosophy,53 mockingly literalized in Cobra’s cast of sexually split, geographically divided, and even doubled characters, and given a winking nod in the form of the mysterious Dr. Ktzabob, the Tangier hack who performs Cobra’s sex-change operation and who bears the name of Lacan’s own analyst. Though the parallels seem to suggest a direct correlation or analogy between Sarduy’s theoretical work and Lacan’s, they are more properly instances of an anamorphic rereading that allows another object to come into view, like the blind spot of national and cultural difference within the project of linguistic psychoanalysis. Like the spectral reading and uncanny reading I have previously elaborated, anamorphic reading entails close attention to the meaning of movement, be it temporal or spatial, libidinal or literary-historical. This is a reading practice that turns close reading into distant reading, training the critical gaze on Sarduy’s practically unrecognizable national novel toward extranovelistic and extranational bodies of material.54 Only in reading Cobra from the points of Sarduy’s aesthetic and psychoanalytic theory, as well as his commentaries on the strategy, sources, and thematics of the novel, does its national character come into view.

Transvestites and the National Body As the practice of movement across the boundaries that separate man from woman, transvestism presents rich material for Sarduy’s project of interrogating the fixities of national and cultural identity, particularly given his connection of the polymorphous motility of transvestism

My Nation, My Object    to the culturally specific symbolic of the baroque, with its tendency to exceed all given norms, whether of appearance, desire, or signification. Transvestism for Sarduy is a particular kind of language infused, like the baroque, with bodily desire, and a peculiar compulsion, a “fatal drive” toward simulation.55 In Simulación Sarduy derives the notion from the work of Roger Caillois. Caillois was a founding member, along with Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris, of the Collège de Sociologie, the Parisian avantgarde group dedicated to reintroducing the sacred and the primitive into modern social life. Drawing on studies by American and French naturalists, Caillois pointed out that the mimetic impulse in animals often backfires, as in the case of the geometer-moth caterpillars who simulate twigs so well that gardeners prune them, or the phyllia insects whose simulation of leaves leads them to eat one another. The biologically inefficient drive toward protective mimicry expresses a deeper drive, as strong as that toward survival, toward the dizzying pleasures of what Caillois called “dangerous luxury.”56 Reinterpreting this drive as animal drag, and routing it through the exorbitant concept of baroque desire, Sarduy finds its human equivalent in transvestism’s drive to disguise, to simulate, to be something else than what one is. As a transvestite, Cobra compels Sarduy (here speaking in an interview) in “his/her passion to transform him/herself . . . his/her compulsion to metamorphosis, his/her terrible need to transform him/herself into another.”57 Cobra’s preoperative impersonation of femininity—modeled, Sarduy explains, on the male actors in the ritual theaters of Japanese Kabuki and Indian Kathakali58 —entails a disparity between the time of preparation and that of display that signals a desire in surplus of its satisfaction, a desire that spills over into waste, a desire that can only be baroque. “All day the mutants slept, imprisoned in machines and gauze, immobilized by threads, lascivious, smeared with white facial creams. The network of her route was concentric, her passage was spiral through the baroque setting [el ecorado barroco] of mosquito nets. She would watch over the hatching of her cocoons, the emerging of the silk, the winged unfolding” (4, 13). This description of the vigil that the Señora of the Teatro Lírico keeps over her dancers as they await the evening’s performance easily captures the excess of the preparations, raiding natural imagery to describe subjects who are anything but. Where Mitre’s nineteenth-century manifesto

   My Nation, My Object heralded the Latin American novel’s capacity to represent new nations “in the moment of their transformation, when the chrysalis transforms into a dazzling butterfly,” Cobra turns butterfly into artifice, and human-made nets into cocoons. The specification of the nets as baroque refers not to the excessive ornamentation of the nets themselves, or even the scene in which they appear, but rather to the regime of desire and identity that the nets install, a regime marked by libidinal and semiotic excess. These sentences in fact themselves produce the boundary-devouring aesthetic effect of the baroque in the way in which they flit between artificial and natural orders of imagery, choosing neither, saturating themselves with both. The transvestite is the bodily form of the baroque sentence, that sentence that “through a series of ellipses, of zig-zags, of detours, carries with it only a floating signifier—empty and polyvalent.”59 As evidence of a “baroque desire within human behavior,” transvestism is both a universal principle and a cultural particular.60 Through its own baroque writing, Sarduy’s Cobra both Hispanicizes the transvestite body, by rendering it the equivalent of the regional-cultural aesthetic of the baroque, and nationalizes it, by turning it into the metaphoric marker of a perennially lost Cuba. As a model of movement across identities (man, woman) as well as across identitarian spaces (region, nation), transvestism troubles territorialism in Sarduy’s writing of the national novel. Gender itself is similarly troubling, as Butler has influentially claimed. Gender, she argues, is “a kind of imitation for which there is no original.”61 Gender is not to sex as culture is to nature, that is, a secondary overlay of a preexistent material substance. Gender instead is a “kind of persistent impersonation that passes as the real” (vii). Though gender is performed, it is also “compelled” by the “regulatory practices of gender coherence” by means of which “a set of repeated acts . . . congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (24, 33). The disruptive effects of the “doing” of gender that Butler calls drag or “gender parody” derive from the displacement of the correspondences between sex, gender, and desire that the regulatory practices of gender coherence assume (24). Gender parody “does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original . . . gender parody reveals that the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin”

My Nation, My Object    (138). The lack that gender masks here is not the phallic lack constitutive of gender identity in classical psychoanalytic theory but instead the lack of gender’s own being. Gender is nowhere; it is neither natural nor originary. It comes to be in culture, through performance. Although the transvestite is an obvious figure for the performative nature of gender, gender performance is by no means synonymous with transvestism. All subjects are called upon to perform their genders, just as they are, as Lacan notes, all called upon to line up on one side or the other of the gender division and to stay there.62 Efforts to categorically limit, define, and police gender are, as Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass say, “prosthetic.”63 They attempt to fix an indeterminacy understood as a natural deficiency. Artificially made and culturally compelled to look real, gender is a fetish whose prosthetic qualities furthermore resemble that of the nation. Both gender and nation are maintained by a willing suspension of disbelief, a voluntary looking away from a fundamentally constructed or invented, imagined or fantasized, canceled-out or crossed-through thing in order that the fiction of its “nature” and the fantasm of its “territory” may be preserved. Looking awry (through Lacan) rather than looking away (through Freud), and seeing gender and nation in all their provisionality and partiality, Sarduy paints a different portrait of the national body. Sarduy’s male-to-female transvestite subjects challenge the notion of stable, continuous, or authentic identity with their many performances, peregrinations, and transformations even as they appear to present the masculine subject as the primary measure of such destabilizing performativity. Some gender theorists interpret the aesthetics of the subset of gender performance known as camp as a specifically gay male preserve, while others read camp as an ironic mode appropriable by lesbians as well.64 Sarduy’s own understanding of camp more resembles that of Susan Sontag’s claim, “To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater.”65 For Sarduy, what is decisive about camp and transvestism more generally is their situation as a “fatal drive” to simulation across the human, animal, and aesthetic worlds. As he explains in Simulación: “The butterfly converted into a leaf, the man converted into a woman, but also anamorphosis and trompe l’oeil, do not copy. They do not define and justify themselves

   My Nation, My Object from the true dimensions of the original. Rather, they make use of their position as observers and indulge in imposture in order to produce the verisimilitude of the model; they incorporate its appearance, they simulate it.”66 Whereas imitation traditionally defines itself as the necessarily fallen copy of a prior model, simulation attempts what Sarduy describes as the deauthorizing “imposture” of the original in a space marked by the canceling out of the thing that is simulated. For Sarduy, “the transvestite does not copy but simulates, for there is no model that invites and attracts its transformation, that decides the metaphor. Rather, it is the non-existence of the being who is mimed that constitutes the space, the region or the support, of this simulation, this concerted imposture” (13). Like Lacan’s statement that “woman” does not exist, Sarduy’s claim for the “non-existence of the being who is mimed” locates gender in the domain of fantasy. Situated at the crossroads of nature and culture, gender and nation, fetish and fantasy, Sarduy’s thematics of transvestite simulation turn imposture into a manifesto for another narrative of national identity. Through the thematic travails of the transvestite and transsexual body caught in the process of endless becoming, Cobra portrays the national sujet-en-procès. Written through the theory of the split subject, the subject crossed through by its own desire, Sarduy’s Cuban Cobra narrates nation, like gender, as the site of a desire that can never be fulfilled or filled up. Another light may be shed on these connections by turning to a critical narrative about gender identity that emerges in tandem with that of performativity, but in several ways seeks to go beyond it. In The Psychic Life of Power (1997) Butler explores gender as a form of melancholia. She asks what might it mean to see heteronormative masculinity and femininity as forms of self-punishment constituted by (1) the declaration of a desired object as lost or impossible (man for the straight man, woman for the straight woman); (2) the subsequent placing of that object “off-limits”; and (3) the necessary incorporation of what one cannot have into what one must then be—“all male” or “real woman.” Such gender identity, Butler claims, “will be haunted by the love it cannot grieve.”67 This holding on to a lost object or ideal, the emergence of identity through incorporation of, and identification with, the lost object, is the defining mark of Freud’s melancholic. In that narrative, “one part of the ego sets itself over against the other, judges it critically, and, as it were, looks upon

My Nation, My Object    it as an object.”68 Butler describes this as “a scene of self-beratement that reconfigures the topography of the ego, a fantasy of internal partition and judgment that comes to structure the representation of psychic life tout court” (180). To the extent that melancholy “interiorizes the psyche, that is, makes it possible to refer to the psyche through such topographical tropes” (170), melancholy in Butler’s argument “produces the possibility for the representation of psychic life” (177). Can the same be true for nations? Can the nation, understood as simultaneously lost to the subject and coincident with it, incorporated into it, produce the very possibility of an inner territory? In other words, does the nation, particularly in the context of global colonialism, imperialism, and their aftermath, subjectify us and structure our representations? This is not to say that there is no subjectivity that is not national subjectivity, no text of modernity or postmodernity that is not overtly or covertly national. But where we find such entities, their reading does reveal a particular cast to psychic life. The shadow of the law that for Butler produces the state of gender melancholia by closing off desires that are then incorporated into the ego, is notably absent from Cobra and Sarduy’s gender theory more broadly. Cobra seems less to melancholically incorporate its lost national object, fusing with it and keeping it close, than to project, expel, display it. This, however, is no moving on in the style of mourning’s displacement. There is no working through or getting beyond the state of national desire, only its repeated performance as the Cuban transvestite body travels the globe from Havana to Tangier to Paris to India to Tibet. As the iconic form of national desire, Cobra’s transvestite body is placed on the stage and on the run, caught in a signifying chain whose logic is that of displacement and movement. Recalling Žižek’s characterization of how the melancholic’s refusal to accomplish mourning “takes the form of its very opposite, a faked spectacle of the excessive, superfluous mourning for an object before this object is lost,”69 we might recast Cobra’s aesthetic of artifice, its significatory excess, and its repeated compulsion to perform loss, to go back to loss even as it moves forward and changes places, as the most likely signs of its melancholic formation. To extend Baucom’s formula that mourning exchanges and melancholy encrypts, Cobra both exchanges and encrypts so as to reveal, in an aggressively antihistoricist register, something of the temporal oscillation, repetition, and return in which Baucom finds

   My Nation, My Object history’s form and form’s history.70 Bhabha, also emphasizing melancholia’s political charge, claims: “The narrative of melancholia preserves the icon of the Ideal—Nation—but by virtue of identifying with it from a position of loss and absence, exile and migration; the signifying act that gives it meaning cannot be contained or incorporated within the sign.” 71 The loss of the national ideal cannot, in Bhabha’s account, help “generat[ing] a narrative of repetition, of metonymic part objects.” Cobra’s transvestite bodies function as such repeating part objects of an ideal nation. The transvestite body marks the convergence of the loss entailed by the performance of an identity one can never altogether possess, and the movement implicit in the negotiation of one’s own self through the identity-space of an other. The sign-system of transvestism thus announces its relevance to the process of national identification and to the narrative mode I have elsewhere in this book associated with it. If metonymy is the signifying effect of transvestism in Cobra and melancholy its hidden affective register, allegory is its referential mode. Drag performance, observes Butler, “allegorizes a loss it cannot grieve, allegorizes the incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is fantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go.”72 Allegory here, as for Benjamin, always points back to loss. As the allegorical function of Cobra’s national novel, drag or, in Sarduy’s terms, “transvestite performance” describes in another register the fantasmatic process at the heart of national identification—a process defined by movement between two states of being. To take something in is simultaneously to hold it ever so slightly apart; to become coincident with an object (or a territory) is at the same time, and in the very moment of that becoming, to reach beyond it. Allegory, recast as a gendered performance of loss, need not fix the nation. That perhaps is the allegorical function of the nineteenth-century Latin American national romances that play history to Cobra’s revolution. But in Cobra, as in Du Bois’s Dark Princess or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Coetzee’s Michael K and Foe, allegory provides the moving mode that unfixes, decenters, and deterritorializes the nation and the national subject. Whereas Jameson distinguishes between the conscious national allegories of Third World texts and the unconscious national allegories of First World texts, as well as between the force of Marx and the nation for the former, and Freud and the globe for the latter, Sarduy’s

My Nation, My Object    Cobra (a Third World national allegory in resplendently unconscious form) troubles all those divides. The structure of allegorical equivalence that Sarduy invites and that, following Butler, I have derived from his concern with performativity, is furthermore a structure from which time, in terms of the classically allegorical plot of prefiguration and fulfillment and the prototypically novelistic plot of national becoming, has been excised. Cobra’s novel of national allegory does not as a consequence resort to pure analogy (Cuba to Cobra, nation to transvestite body). Instead, the novel expresses the shifting conversion, like the conversion a baroque reading performs between spot and skull, between two distinct codes that are never entirely fused. The meaning of the codes in fact emerges from the back-and-forth switches, breaks, discontinuities, and heterogeneities characteristic of modern or, as I have also called it, deallegorizing allegory.73 As national allegory, Cobra presents a nation that, like Cobra’s woman, does not exist, a nation that is not “there” or “real,” “beginning” or “ending,” but instead is performed through the masquerade that is identity. But what of my claim, advanced earlier, that in this novelistic form Sarduy’s national subject knows what mourning and melancholia do not: that the national object is not only something that was once had and has since been lost but also an object constitutively lost, lacking? Cobra is a national allegory of national loss (Cuba lost for Sarduy to revolution, exile, the barring out by the state of the desire of a queer citizen) and of national lack (the nation lost because as objet a, it is merely a stand-in for desire and an embodiment of a void, a something over a nothing). Something else remains here, unanswered as yet and unsettling. It is the question posed by loss to lack by those who cite the capacity of loss to name particular historical experiences, including those of nation-state life and its vicissitudes, against lack’s tendency to universalize itself as, in Ricciardi’s words, “an a priori, ontological condition of psychic life.” 74 Dominick LaCapra has called for a distinction between melancholia’s incorporation of loss and repetition of the past, and mourning’s separation and working-through, on the basis of their different reliance upon absence and loss. Absence, for LaCapra, describes an originary state of lack that includes the passage from plenitude to castration, nature to culture, imaginary to symbolic, Eden to the fall, while loss names a specific historical condition of trauma. When, as in melancholia, loss is “converted” into absence, there can be no

   My Nation, My Object end to grieving. When absence is converted into loss, by contrast, “one increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community.”75 For LaCapra, both Freud and Lacan evidence a “melancholic configuration” that, by converting the subject to its loss and loss to absence, ends up evading history and suppressing the work of mourning through which one comes to terms with history. Khanna adds, with regard to Lacan and Lacanians: “That modernity positions us all in a certain relationship to desire and constitutes desire in a particular fashion is a very general point that causes the loss of nuance in any particular argument, and thus a potential reduction of the postcolonial to the postmodern.”76 Ricciardi’s emphasis on mourning; Butler’s, Khanna’s, Baucom’s, and Bhabha’s on melancholia; and LaCapra’s on the grasping of the distinction between loss (which can be redressed) and absence (which cannot), suggest alternative models for the precise thinking of the localities of history, including war, genocide, apartheid, slavery, and postcolonialism. In the latter, writes Khanna, “the ideal of nation-statehood” is a melancholic remainder, imperfectly assimilated in histories of repeated “losses, traumas, and betrayals” but therefore opened to haunting returns (263, 272). To the critiques that effectively ask, what do we lose by not seeing loss?, let me add, what happens if we see the nation only in one register? In this chapter, as throughout this book, I have sought to bring both registers together, with an eye for historical and geographical differentiation and depth across hemispheric, Atlantic, African, and South Asian postcoloniality, as well as for psychopolitical structures of identification, desire, and fantasy. In the final section of this chapter, I explore these convergences through the gaze that Cobra trains on India, as the displaced image of Cuba. Does this postcolonial nation-state appear in Sarduy’s novel as loss, that is, as history, or as lack?

National Transvestism: Cuba’s Indian Form and the Cultural Aesthetic of Kitsch India is where the novel ends up after it leaves Tangier, the site of Cobra’s sex-change surgery, and Paris, where Cobra dies and is dismembered in rites performed by drugged-out American motorcyclists soon to

My Nation, My Object    be Tibetan monks. The India described and practically hallucinated in the last section of the novel is a rigid national gallery of elephant gods, garlanded bulls, beggars, mystics, celluloid deities, ritual ceremonies, monkeys rioting in temples, bazaars, and orgies. An audacious simulation that reveals the nonexistence of the thing that is simulated, Cobra’s presentation of India turns India and, by displacement’s extension, Cuba, into the stuff of dreams. Replete with the exotic-fantastic and rich with cultural fetishism, Cobra’s India stages the fantasy work that is national identity’s identificatory mode. Read through this fantasy form, the Cuban nation is a perennially lost and constitutively lacking object that cannot be restored once and for all to the national subject but must instead be repositioned, recast, and reclothed, in the changing scene of national desire. The scene of castration that appropriately enough splits part 1 of the novel (Cuba-Cobra) from part 2 (Cuba-India) takes place in a backalley clinic in Tangier. As a conceptual hinge between Occident and Orient, Tangier operates both surgically and semiotically. Cobra’s castration takes place in a city rich in associations with what Garber calls “the Western fantasy of the transvestic, pan-sexualized Middle East, a place of liminality and change.”77 Garber understands transvestism generally as a “mechanism of displacement from one blurred boundary to another” (16). As Judith Halberstam observes, the problem with a model that places the transvestite in the place of the in-between is that it subsequently stabilizes the other two terms (“man” and “woman”), effectively flattening and homogenizing them in order to relocate all fluidity in the category of the transvestite.78 Sarduy escapes this, but at a price. By privileging the analogy between the transvestite’s mobility and the mobility of language, signification, and baroque desire, he fictionalizes transvestism’s fluidity in contrast to what he casts as transsexualism’s rigid retention of gender binaries. Writing in Simulación, he argues: “For the transvestite, the dichotomy and opposition of the sexes remains abolished or reduced to archaic or archaeological criteria; for the transsexual, on the contrary, this opposition is not only maintained but highlighted, accepted; the only difference is that the subject, taking the ‘cut’ literally, has leapt from one side of the bar to the other.”79 Insofar as Cobra’s “cut” in a Tangier sexchange clinic rebinarizes sexual difference in the body of the postoperative transsexual, locale becomes all-important. In Sarduy’s national-cultural

   My Nation, My Object imaginary, the orient has a specific role to play as the setting for what he characterizes as a passage from one system of gender to another. It falls to Tangier, like the India and Tibet to which Tangier leads, to offer in space what the transvestite Cobra once offered in body: a site in which binary oppositions are permeable, distinctions are impermanent, and dichotomy itself is annihilated. Sarduy understands oriental space to resemble Lacan’s Möbius strip, “this band twisted upon itself which converts the interior into the exterior and vice versa.”80 Sarduy’s orient is the moment when difference disappears, opposites convert themselves into one another, and distinction collapses in the face of a vertiginous series of interpenetrations. The novel turns away from static dualities and, in classic anamorphic fashion, toward “the energy of conversion” operating between them.81 As seen awry through oriental space, the imaginary of “lo cubano” does not privilege the opposed terms of “man/woman,” “East/West,” “Cuba/world,” but rather the slash that, more than separating them, for Sarduy conjoins them. Sarduy points to the fallacy of dichotomy when he writes, as it were, from the slash. Turning the shifting movement between identities and places into the equivalent of a cultural free zone, Sarduy is here at his most confounding. Just how liberatory can “oriental space” be? As one of several answers to the dilemma of national representation, Sarduy’s refraction of the national-cultural imaginary through the oriental imaginary is also a whole new order of problem. “The orient of texts” that Sarduy claims first to have discovered in the work of Octavio Paz is quoted and distorted in Cobra, which combines a richly citational, intertextual India with the pointedly static images of its gods, animals, prostitutes, and gurus.82 Roberto González Echevarría claims that Cobra denounces “the way in which the oriental is transformed into a topic of Latin American literature.” The novel’s exposure of the orient as intertextual and psychic construction can be further reduced to a function: “the subconscious of Latin American literature.”83 Whether Cobra represents a hemispheric literary subconscious or, as I have suggested, a national imaginary governed by misrecognition, distortion, and the anamorphic displacement of the gaze, the novel’s central function remains exposure. Cobra thus subjects the topos of the orient, like the narratives of nationalism and psychoanalysis, to a simultaneous imitation and deformation.

My Nation, My Object    Sarduy’s orient rewrites a weighty tradition of orientalist mythmaking in which, as Said has argued, literary, touristic, ethnographic, political, and historiographic narratives dedicated themselves to (1) the projection of Western fantasy onto Eastern objects, landscapes, peoples, and cultures; (2) the demonstration of a hierarchical and fixed difference between East and West; and (3) even the absorption of Eastern difference into Western identity. This was a wholesale invention of the orient by the managed sovereignty of the West, captured for example in Gérard de Nerval’s conclusion, in his 1851 Voyage en Orient, that “Muslims, in fact, are nothing more than a kind of Christian sect.”84 In contrast to the logic of East/West division or the secondary sameness of East to West, Sarduy’s Möbius strip orient sets in motion a constantly mutating difference in which the coordinates of the occidentalized self shift suddenly— and perhaps all too seamlessly—into those of the orientalized other, inside to outside. Sarduy’s poststructuralist orient lends credence to Lisa Lowe’s notion of multiple orientalisms, each shaped by the cultural and historical specificity of their moment and each subjected to discursive instability and multivalent resonances.85 In emphasizing the heterogeneity and instability of the orientalist tradition and individual orientalist works, as well as of orientalist objects themselves, Lowe joins several other critics who have taken up the task of complicating Said’s seminal model.86 In a Latin American context, Julia Kushigian takes the “momentary blending of opposites and interanimation of images grounded in a respect for diversity” as a distinguishing characteristic of a “Hispanic orientalism,” spanning medieval and Golden Age Spanish-Muslim interchanges, the cultural mixings of the New World, and postmodernist Latin American writers who unite Hispanic tradition, Western literary theory, and Eastern philosophy, including Sarduy, Paz, and Borges.87 The sharp difference Kushigian sees between Hispanic orientalism’s cultural syncretism and the Anglo-French orientalism catalogued by Said as “a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” seems less clear in the shadow of grimly subordinating histories,88 such as the conversion and expulsion of the Jews from Golden Age Spain or the genocidal effects of Spanish colonialism in Latin America, Central America, and the Caribbean. In a review of Said’s Orientalism, James Clifford indeed defines that text’s “key theoretical issue” as the status of cultural knowledge and cultural representation in the shadow of colonial history.

   My Nation, My Object “Can one,” Clifford asks, “ultimately escape procedures of dichotomizing, restructuring and textualizing in the making of interpretive statements about foreign cultures and traditions? If so, how?”89 The epistemological dilemma voiced here is precisely that which frames Cobra’s figuration of India, which can in turn be understood as a rather perverse practitioner’s response to the anxious “how” of Clifford’s question. The beginning of the novel establishes several conventions of representation. All privilege “textualizing,” in all its significatory excess, as the means of rendering foreign cultures and traditions. The Indian costume maker who paints the bodies of the dancers in the Teatro Lírico, and who accompanies the Señora to India on her quest for props to stage the Féerie Orientale, serves as the occasion for a proliferating series of narrative digressions. As first introduced: “Let us speak then of a smell of hashish and of curry, of a stumbling basic English and of a tingling trinket music” (6–7, 16–17). The narrative then assigns multiple and contradictory life histories to this “Himalayan artificer”: an elegant artist; a wrestling master in the court of a Kashmiri Maharajah, who went on to run a wrestling school in Benares, a tea emporium in Ceylon, a spice house in Colombo, and an illicit ivory trade in Europe; and an impoverished foreigner discovered by the Señora in a Turkish steam bath in Marseille and later dismissed by her from the Teatro Lírico for his incessant acrobatic sexual games with the dancers. Finally, the authorial voice intervenes again to announce that logic demands that only the first version be true. “Only a moron could swallow the obviously apocryphal comic strip” (12, 26). In its presentation of an excess of images and stories, and the mocking revelation of several, if not all, of them as cartoonish caricatures of a fantasized other, the description of the Indian costume maker miniaturizes Cobra’s narrative strategies more broadly—namely, the refusal of India as the “answer” to the question of national identity. India appears in its nonhermeneutic guise most extensively in the novel’s final section, titled “Diario Indio” (Indian Journal), after the title of Columbus’s diary chronicling his arrival in the New World. Columbus sailed west in order to arrive in the east, and mistook the Indies of the New World for the India he would never reach. Sarduy, on the other hand, goes east to arrive west, to India in order to arrive back at Cuba in a fictional counterpart to those many Indian sojourns that González

My Nation, My Object    Echevarría terms Sarduy’s “mediated returns to Cuba.”90 For the utopian vision of America promulgated by generations of Latin American writers, Sarduy substitutes a vision of Columbus’s America (literalized as the India he thought he found) as a mistake and a misreading, a kind of tragic anamorphosis. The “Diario Indio” section of Cobra reproduces an actual fragment of Columbus’s journal, in which he records the affective tranquility and descriptive abundance of the Indies: “There were dogs that never barked . . . Trees and fruits of marvelous flavor . . . Birds and the singing of crickets throughout the night, which everyone enjoyed” (133, 236). Sarduy’s own depiction of India in the rest of the “Diario Indio” section both rejects and extends Columbus’s ethnographic awe in the face of the other. Although Sarduy refuses any value judgments on what is described, like Columbus, Sarduy makes India an indisputable sign of the fantastic by virtue of the very vastness of its description. In a stream-ofconsciousness narration of some thirty pages (written, Sarduy explains, in a Nepalese monastery while listening to the prayer chants of exiled Tibetan monks),91 the “Diario Indio” section guides the reader through a sacred and profane geography of funeral pyres, Hindu temples, Islamic mosques, Buddhist stupas, brothels, monuments, urban ghettoes, and dusty fields in an attempt to write the unconscious of the very idea of “India.” No idyll, the description deserves quotation at some length. Joining thumb and forefinger in a circle—golden spheres stuck to their nose, celluloid beauty marks on their cheeks, red shadow on their eyelids—fifteen hoarse apsarases [sic] in battle formation, facing the smoking rooms, jump on those sleepers piled on the sidewalks, shredding the shirts of passersby. They’re dancing, that’s for sure: on the bodies, the three flexions. In fluorescent saris, trapped in their superimposed cages, eating peanuts, the whores shriek. A grimy curtain allows one to glimpse the bed and the mats from the top of which the family appraises the panting . . .  Rice on his feet, smeared in red dust, a little monkey-god, in his concrete temple, entertains the village—his eyes glass balls, petals stuck to his nose. Startled like storks hearing nocturnal sounds, three heads watch over him upon a neck: methylene blue, saffron, eggshell white. Necklace of flowers, a mustard bull grazes. A jolting from the turning water wheel. They’re singing—purple turbans in the cloud of dust—; far away, a monkey’s shriek. They flee: bells on ankles, heavy

   My Nation, My Object earrings, hoops on their nostrils. Black signs on their foreheads, the dogs bark differently. (130–31)92

India here combines the baroque and anamorphosis. It is at once a place of dizzying, saturated excess (sexual, visual, demographic, semiotic) and a moment of reading that demands of the reader shifts in space and time, first to Sarduy’s Cuba, for which India serves as surrogate, and second to the Cuba originally mistaken for India by Columbus. In a juxtaposition of images that seems designed to narrate Sarduy’s vision of oriental space as Möbius strip, the place where distinctions collapse, the divine apsaras (heavenly nymphs) mingle with the urban poor, while human prostitutes and wild monkeys are both heard, objects of the same verb, to shriek (chillar). More chaotic than melodious, more gritty than natural, Sarduy’s India is one where even the dogs “bark differently,” their noise a deliberate contradiction of Columbus’s tranquil Indies where “there were dogs that never barked.” On the level of description, Sarduy’s India presents the negative image of Columbus’s India. On the level of identification, however, both Indias converge, twin displacements of a Cuba lost (for Sarduy) and found (for Columbus). As a projection of national loss, Sarduy’s India embraces an over-the-top code of representation. In the cinematic passage, flooded with color and sound, metaphoric and metonymic chains of description substitute certain signifiers for “India” and then displace them into a shifting, metamorphosing series. Their only constant is the referent (“Indian-ness”) with which each signifier, from the mythological to the mundane, the divine to the human, the Technicolor to the animal, claims contact. Like a cultural lightning rod, the chain of signification channels the fetishistic gaze on cultural otherness into a narrative form that is disturbingly stereotypic, consciously parodic, and pointedly devoid of interpretive commentary. If Sarduy’s lost Cuba functions as a version of Lacan’s objet a, that object from which the subject has been and always will be separated, Sarduy’s imagined India functions like the Lacanian Other, (mis)recognition of which enables the self to know itself. Like the Lacanian Other, India offers no guarantees, either of the cohesion of the self who searches or of its own cohesion as the object of the search. In the last pages of the “Diario Indio” section, the motorcyclists-turned-monks find a Grand Lama who sells religious trinkets on the India/Tibet border. In response

My Nation, My Object    to a seeker’s question “What is the true road to Liberation?” the text gives the following response: “THE GRAND LAMA remains silent. A silly giggle (in the next room, on a sofa, his children talk over a red telephone, made of plastic” (147, 259). In this scene of putative revelation the red plastic telephone is out of place, glaringly artificial, a quintessential kitsch object. According to Matei Calinescu, the essence of the kitsch object lies in “a curious semiotic ambiguity” oscillating between the genuine and the fake.93 Kitsch constitutes an appropriate aesthetic for a novel dedicated to the proposition that the genuine is always only ever a myth when it comes to identity. Kitsch’s simultaneous inaccessibility to and simulation of the real in fact governs Cobra’s representation of India. A subsection of the “Diario Indio” section titled “Las Indias Galantes” (The Gallant Indies) presents a special-effects-stage India, pointedly constructed with a many-armed demon (“like a giant electric fan”), mechanical cows, and brimstone flames, yet received as real by the “fanatic” audience who grab for the props as they fall (134–35, 238–39). In a 1969 interview in which he discussed the novel as a work in progress, Sarduy specified Cobra’s India. “[It is] not the India erroneously interpreted by a Western neurosis that attempts the impossible absorption of one spirituality into another, but rather the kitsch India, the India of those Hindi films in which there are constantly people singing in a garden and in which hundred-armed gods resolve the problems of the characters, heavily madeup and gesticulating wildly like the players in a silent film.”94 Both in its stage version and in the Lama’s red plastic telephone, this India frustrates expectations that it will be the mystic site of the answer or the authentic. Unmoored from the eternal traditional, the circular time line that transcends the vicissitudes of history and makes of national identity an everrepeating same, Cobra’s India finds its location in an aesthetic it deems national. But what of this aesthetic’s own place in national history? With its gods and demons, the special-effects India echoes a popular tradition of representation. As explained by the Indian art critics Patricia Uberoi and Tapati Guha Thakurta, the avant-garde style of nineteenthcentury Indian “calendar art” attained the paradoxical status of “authentic Indian ‘kitsch’ ” in the twentieth century.95 Calendar art refers to a particular style of color reproductions created by the late nineteenth-century artist Raja Ravi Varma, who blended the techniques of European oil painting

   My Nation, My Object and the realist genres of life-size portraiture and landscape painting with Indian mythological content. The resultant portraits of Indian deities and panoramas of regional types of Indian womanhood were immensely popular among British colonials and elite anglicized Indians. They were subsequently used to represent mythological, divine, and patriotic motifs on business calendars and religious objects, as well as in the packaging and advertising of various household commodities. In a later era, Ravi Varma’s art was condemned by many Indian art critics as insufficiently Indian, its late Victorian British Indian techniques too distant from more indigenous or nationalist styles of representation and its hybrid genealogy better described as an essential inauthenticity. Indeed, claims Thakurta, the rise of an officially national art “rested centrally on the dismissal and displacement of Ravi Varma’s work as ‘kitsch.’ ”96 This is a familiar story in which an elite colonial technology is first appropriated by the colonized, then resignified and rejected by anticolonial nationalists, only to find a final ironic afterlife in the domain of popular culture at home and in the diasporic abroad, where calendar art still reigns supreme as an image of India. I tell this story in order to suggest that the “hundred-armed gods” that crystallize Sarduy’s kitsch India can reveal a rich historical depth beneath their surface, when they are read from within an Indian context. For Sarduy, this depth is fundamentally inaccessible to Western knowledge. The kitsch aesthetic in this regard amounts to the obverse of depth, the refusal of history, and the waylaying of interpretation. In a 1970 interview, Sarduy situates Cobra’s kitsch representation of India against the hermeneutic fantasies and historical obsessions of the Western subject. “We’re not dealing (in Cobra) with a transcendental, metaphysical, profound India, but on the contrary, an exaltation of its surface and what I would call Indian kitsch [la pacotilla india]. I believe . . . that the only decoding we can perform as Westerners, the only non-neurotic reading of India that is possible from our logocentric position, is that which India’s surface privileges. The rest is Christianizing translation, syncretism, true superficiality.”97 Sarduy’s embrace of the kitsch India suggests that representations of the other can escape replications of ethnocentric fantasy, if they give up on the notion of an unmediated or deep knowledge of the other. In contrast to the ethic of transparency that Said has shown to govern Western gazes upon the orient (“Orientals were rarely seen or looked

My Nation, My Object    at: they were seen through”),98 Sarduy proposes the “exaltation” of surface and the embrace of semiotic excess as a mode of cultural contact. While a rendering of the orient as a site of excess, fantastic wealth, pansexual promise, and nameless multitudes can be and has been incorporated into a Western orientalist mythology of a despotic and decadent orient, excess can also be read as a strategic rejection of a particular mode of orientalist vision. Excess can frustrate the transparency to which the visual pretends by refocusing the eye on the interplay of surface and texture, thereby detracting from the insistent wish to see “underneath” the image or “behind” that veil so synecdochal of the fantasized orient. Sarduy’s formulation of pacotilla theatricalizes the veil rather than lifts it, just as his theatricalization of the transvestite and transsexual body privileges the incessant questions posed by a cross-coded body over the answers that would result from knowing if Cobra is “really” a woman or not. Kitsch is to be distinguished from the fetish, though both are mechanisms of preserving a veil over the object seen. Whereas the fetish disavows knowledge of sexual difference and would lay a screen over phallic lack, kitsch has nothing to hide. There is nothing compensatory about kitsch, which rejoices in its own inadequacy. In its refusal to read or know the other, Sarduy’s kitsch India attempts to frustrate monolithic concepts of difference and identity. Sarduy’s kitsch other is not the Sphinx-like other, mysteriously whole yet subject to the metonymic logic of cultural synecdoche, whereby some thing (a monument, a cultural practice, a traumatic history) becomes representative of the entire group. Unlike this artifactual other, the kitsch other does not figure the whole by means of the part. It renders any claim to know the other inadequate in the face of its sheer proliferation, the fake and genuine twisted and turned into one another. And yet the wildly mutating surface of India in Cobra too often seems to congeal into a series of rigid, static part-objects whose durability is precisely that of the cultural stereotype (garlanded bulls, celluloid deities, screaming monkeys, cryptic gurus, scenes of the bazaar, the temple, the street, and the stage). One wonders if the kitsch India does not silence too much. Doesn’t Sarduy’s insistence that we take kitsch only at its surface value, and his subsequent use of kitsch as a mode of cultural antiknowledge effectively flatten cultural difference, reducing it to a series of iconic, almost fetishlike objects?

   My Nation, My Object Sarduy would, I think, have answered yes to this question and added that those icons and fetishes are all you can ever have. To imagine that you can see deeper into cultural otherness is simply to live the orientalists’ neurotic vision of knowledge as power. Sarduy’s alibi lies in the assertion that Cobra’s India is a strategic response to the force of Western fantasy, less a recuperation of the orientalist imaginary than the conscious seizure of its most privileged tropes and a refusal of its epistemophilic drives. Simulation becomes the only mode of cross-cultural knowledge, in the form of Cobra’s reproduction of the riotous surfaces of the kitsch India. Fusing what Andrew Ross has called the object-category of kitsch and the subjective processes of camp, Cobra’s depiction of a kitsch India seeks, like camp, to undervalue the overvalued (the genuine) and to overvalue the undervalued (the fake).99 While Cobra’s focus on India as a ritual theater of the fake and on Cobra as a transvestite-turned-transsexual-turned-motorcycle gang memberturned-Tibetan monk, serve as the necessary Holbeinesque displacements by which Sarduy suggests the Cuban can “come at” (abordar) a Cuba that remains forever out of focus or lost, this anamorphic gaze refuses the possibility of restoring the lack of the genuine through the visual compensations of the fake. Cuba in fact never does come into focus in Cobra, for the surrogate visual objects of the kitsch India and Cobra’s transvestite/ transsexual/transforming body so privilege the play of their surfaces that they cannot be seen through. There is no genuine Cuba “behind” an authentic India, no Cuba “alongside” or “beneath” Cobra’s ever-shifting, depthless body with its constant play of costume, makeup, and gesture. No interpretation, no explanation, no decoding, no assimilation. Only the object remains in all its opacity. Sarduy’s effort to subject the novel of national identity to the displacing model of anamorphosis, and the kitsch aesthetic that also “looks awry” by refusing to look within, yields a novel that asserts its Cuban-ness not just tangentially or parodically but also in the peculiar register of desire. Lacan characterizes desire as “a relation of being to lack.” He goes on to explain, “it isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists.”100 Sarduy’s entire aesthetics can be seen as a riff on the Lacanian distinction between object and Other in the field of desire. According to Žižek, the Lacanian “big” Other is to be distinguished from

My Nation, My Object    that object that the subject desires: “the object is separated from the Other itself . . . the Other itself ‘hasn’t got it,’ hasn’t got the final answer—that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring . . . There is also a desire of the Other.”101 Though written through the imaginary, the nation in Sarduy’s novelistic-theoretical project is neither imaginary nor symbolic. Instead, it finds its location in the place of the real—“the fantasmatic kernel of the subject’s being” that shows up in one guise or another all around it.102 If Cuba is this fantasmatic kernel in Sarduy’s project, the central lack around which all of his work is structured, then the transvestite body and India are the desired Others. Seemingly the means by which to access the (national) object, ultimately they are only new places from which to apprehend the object’s status as lack, “nothing but the positivization of a void or lack, a purely anamorphic entity that does not exist in itself.”103 Cobra’s body and India’s space are purely imaginary displacements of a desire that never comes home to its object. In this they are the figural equivalents of the national desire whose work, I have argued, is always to exceed its territorial and temporal bounds. Cobra’s body and India’s space stand as their own gendered, global, and willfully impenetrable answers to the questions around which Sarduy claims all of his work has centered. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan has identified the goal of Lacan’s clinic as being “to place a question where an answer had previously stopped up any knowledge of lack.”104 If we could posit such a thing as “Sarduy’s clinic,” its goal might well be to replace the epistemological project of knowing the nation or the national subject with an ontological question (¿Qué somos? [What are we?]; ¿Qué es Cuba? [What is Cuba?]) and its deontologized, deterritorialized answers (mutating bodies, shifting geographies). Like Lacan in his clinic, Sarduy takes on conceptual blockage and, like Lacan, he is content to place a question where an answer once stood. Cobra exposes the fictitious underpinnings of foundationalist narratives that take for granted the isomorphism of identity and territory, not to mention their individual coherence. Instead, Cobra chronicles a state of mind—the bliss of the baroque’s excess, the bliss of disguise, the bliss of metamorphosis, the bliss of the kitsch aesthetic, a series of desires for which there can be no satisfaction and no end. Sarduy’s espousal of fake over authentic, plastic over organic, surface over depth, imitation over autochthony, and change over history disarticulates some of the governing

   My Nation, My Object paradigms of Latin American cultural theory. In their place, he sets up a precarious politics of cultural representation that turns loss and lack alike into an aesthetic. There is little left in place, beyond the gleeful pronouncement to which Cobra serves as a kind of literary coda: “Todo es simulación, todo es apariencia, todo es fake [Everything is simulation, everything is appearance, everything is fake].”105 At once the grounds of identity and its vanishing point, conjured under the names of “the unconscious mind of Spanish” and “lo cubano” as well as of Cobra’s India, cultural difference in Sarduy’s work cannot finally be decoupled from the search for national identity in whose service it is mockingly enlisted. Certainly, Sarduy’s task is not to produce organic accounts of the identitarian politics and liberatory struggles of culture, nation, class, race, and gender in the anticolonial and postcolonial Third World of Central and Latin America. And it is probably a disservice to Sarduy’s work to measure it exclusively against those struggles. But we equally miss the mark if we read Sarduy as having nothing to do with the postcolonial world and its concerns, many of which have found expression in the language of psychoanalysis. With his penchant for parody, his fascination with mimicry, and his unraveling of the premises of collective and/ or oppositional identity, Sarduy is no Fanon, for whom each of these attributes would have denoted an alienated, assimilated, colonized intellectual eager to find himself reflected in metropolitan mirrors. Nonetheless, Sarduy can be understood, along with Fanon, to participate in the ongoing historical process of the transculturation of psychoanalysis and the concomitant transformation of the study of culture. In its highlighting of the impossibility of an unmediated return to a cultural or national home, and in its mocking encounters with the narratives of modern identity, Sarduy’s brand of cultural criticism and his variant national novel resist the call to deploy the tropes of exile and return, loss and displacement on the respective separate terrains of nationalism and psychoanalysis. Instead, they open us to the possibilities of an encounter. The resultant account of a national longing that moves with what Žižek calls desire’s “infinite metonymy” from one object to another reveals a celebratory libertinism and a haunting melancholy, a ceaseless moving on and an inescapable cycling back beneath the surface of Sarduy’s irreverent text.106 Poignant almost against its will, Sarduy’s Technicolor aesthetic of loss and lack explodes the

My Nation, My Object    conventional nostalgia of the expatriate for whom there can be no return home, only to reveal the deeper dilemma of the national subject who lives his or her desire over and over with the difficult knowledge that no object, national or otherwise, can ever answer lack. I am reluctant to end on the single note of lack. Loss remains as the question posed back to lack, as the force of a certain historical immediacy of experience (exile, revolution, colonialism, independence, nationalism) that has been this book’s guiding concern. Can what Ricciardi calls “the spectacularized, aestheticized Other we find metabolized by the Lacanian notion of style” do very much more for us than name a problem that another model must answer?107 In this regard, one might be tempted to place Sarduy’s resplendently silent kitsch other against Derrida’s specter, whose haunting presence and ceaseless demand provide the condition for justice to emerge. Not only is temporality evacuated from Sarduy’s account of national desire but futurity too. So national desire becomes just desire, desire as such, desire in itself, desire as its own space and time, the only one there is. I have argued throughout this book for the multiple spaces and times of national desire, as well as for the political possibilities that such movements might contain. To think the nation-state only as it has been and as it is effectively consigns it to obsolescence. Nationstates remain, and with them the task of engaging not just one narrative but several—mourning and melancholia, loss and lack, uncanniness and spectrality, psychoanalysis and deconstruction—in order to describe their troubled times and possible futures. The postcript of this book takes up these questions, once again on the terrain of the novel, but with a renewed focus on what might be considered the most haunting of the postcolonial nation-state’s many haunting effects, namely, the violence that founds it and repeatedly plagues it.

Postscript: Remapping the Nation The map was in my head.

So announces the unnamed narrator of Amitav Ghosh’s 1988 novel The Shadow Lines, explaining how it is that he could manage to navigate his way through the Hampstead streets that until this moment had existed for him only in the stories told to him by his father’s cousin Tridib, who had lived in London some forty years earlier during the early days of the Blitz. Much later, the narrator will recall another neighborhood, in another city, on another continent, where Tridib met his death twenty-five years after his English sojourn. This place is also known to the narrator through the stories of others, and it similarly becomes a part of what he calls “my own secret map of the world, a map of which only I knew the keys and the co-ordinates.”1 It is indeed to mental maps, to the psychic terrain of memory, trauma, desire, and identification that the novel repeatedly turns in its effort to chronicle the improbable logic and violent consequences of the other, more physical maps of nations and states. As an exercise in what might be considered fantasmatic cartography, The Shadow Lines is emblematic in its suggestion that the lines on a map have an inner, as much as an outer, life. In those lines, the novel further implies, lies not only the history of modern times and what Anderson calls “the biography of nations” but equally the story of the self. Like Midnight’s Children, The Shadow Lines posits an equivalence among all three narratives, and like Rushdie’s novel, it prefers the personal fragment as the form through which to recount such public events as the birth of nations and the deaths they bring. Midnight’s Children careens toward the end of history, nation, and self by virtue of its condensation of all three—linked, as Saleem remarks, “both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively, in what our (ad-

   Postscript mirably modern) scientists might term ‘modes of connection.’ ”2 Saleem’s very face, as a malicious teacher observes, contains “the whole map of India” replete with the bulbous Deccan peninsula and the twin birthmark “stains” of East and West Pakistan (265). His cracking disease will be the nation’s. If Midnight’s Children effectively produces death by allegory, eulogizing national history, national narrator, and the nation-form itself in the same breathless breath, The Shadow Lines exploits the moving mode of a distinctly traumatic memory and a general preference for the spatiotemporal movements of the map in the head over the referential closure of the map on the face, in order to replot national time and space. In this The Shadow Lines is a mournful double to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, with its radically altered and endlessly regenerative migrant cities (London, Bombay, and the fictional Jahilia, birthplace of Islam). Empire and nation in that novel are remnants of a world left behind, altered forever by the metamorphic, protean energies that turn London to Ellowen Deeowen or Babylondon, a place of heterogeneous and literally riotous difference where a demographically and culturally transformed metropolis collides with the racially exclusionist phobia of old-style nationalist politics under Thatcher. In the plotline of the novel associated with the reluctant archangel Gibreel Farishta (whose visions constitute the novel’s surreal journeys outside England), The Satanic Verses presents migrant metamorphosis as what ruptures the logic of national borders and identities, dissolving such iconic spaces as police station, museum, city streets, A-to-Z maps into places and persons that “change shape at will,”3 and constantly doubling the here and now of national locations with the dream spaces of mirror cities and alternative histories. As Simon Gikandi puts it, “the problem posed by The Satanic Verses is not simply that it displaces national histories and their narratives, or even subverts the epistemology of empire. It also valorizes such histories, narratives, and epistemes as the very condition of existence of postcoloniality and migrancy.”4 The novel’s retention of the past as condition for the present shapes its form, in which the logics of inheritance and incorporation coexist with the thematic preoccupation with metamorphosis and moving on. Memory (that category so assiduously evacuated by Sarduy’s postmodern novel of national identity) surfaces to pull away from migrancy in The Satanic Verses. Migrancy thrusts toward newness in the novel’s explosive opening,

Postscript    as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha fall through an English sky trailing “broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home” (4–5). Memory, by contrast, looks to the past, to the India and the father that Chamcha leaves behind and, by the novel’s end, comes back to in a sentimental plot of return and redemption. For Fawzia Afzal-Khan, the novel is “a mishmash of conflicting genres and modes . . . in which the comic and the tragic, the real, the surreal, and the mythic all ‘defuse’ one another, so no one genre can predominate and ‘unify’ the others.”5 If the heteroglossic qualities of Rushdie’s novel posit the hybridity of form as a gleefully resistant response to the harsh binaries of colonial and imperial logic, they also suggest a certain melancholy of form in confrontation with the affective intensities of diasporic identity. As much as the latter expresses the regenerative energies of “newness,” it still finds itself in dialogue with loss and longing, nowhere more so than in the elegiac ending of this metafictional novel of deconstructed national, cultural, religious, and authorial identities. Returning to the very categories—land, belonging, home, empire, nation, territory—it purports to have transcended, lacing its portrait of newness with remnants of the old and, in Gikandi’s words, “insist[ing] on being read as a set of irresolvable oxymorons or as a series of what Fredric Jameson has defined as antinomies” (213), The Satanic Verses reveals something of the haunted form that I have deemed a central feature of postcolonial narratives of nationalism, even those, especially those, that push the nation to its global edges. Though The Satanic Verses generally aligns postcoloniality with migrancy, the national nonetheless returns. It is the zone of the contested Englishness that the novel seeks to remake, and the locale of the syncretic Indianness that Chamcha’s lover Zeeny Vakil reminds him of in the novel’s beginning and welcomes him back into at its end. In Spivak’s formulation, the migrant cosmopolitan and the national are “an aporia for him [Rushdie], an impossible decision between two opposed decidables with two mutually canceling sets of consequences, a decision which gets made, nonetheless, for one set.”6 An aporia closed off, an antinomy indefinitely sustained. These critical figures for oppositions that refuse to be entirely sublated into the narrative of progress, transcendence, and

   Postscript moving on attest to an imbricative structure in The Satanic Verses’ patterns of twin cities, characters, characteristics (London/Bombay, Jahilia/Mecca, angelic Gibreel/devilish Chamcha, sacred/profane) that in turn serves as the formal trace of the always doubled work of national identification. To write the national, even in the putatively antinational or postnational registers of Rushdie’s migrant novel, is necessarily to reconfigure its spatial and temporal borders on some more global map. And vice versa. In contrast to the “citation, reinscription, and rerouting the historical” that Spivak has called the “general mode for the postcolonial” and detected in the parodic and incorporative energies of The Satanic Verses, The Shadow Lines reflects what we might call the dislocational mode of the postcolonial national. In The Shadow Lines the migrant is the national, whether the nations formed by the splitting of land and redistribution of peoples across the subcontinent or the postcolonial England formed by successive generations of Commonwealth migration. Taking the lived experience of shifting borders and coalescing spaces and times as precisely what nations are, The Shadow Lines offers a final example of what I have called the fantasmatic nation, a closing instance of the spatial and temporal movements that link nation to globe across the long postcolonial twentieth century. The Shadow Lines layers four events: (1) the 1947 Partition of the subcontinent in which between one and two million people died and many millions more were uprooted; (2) the return of that event in the 1964 riots that killed the narrator’s beloved uncle Tridib in East Pakistan; (2) the repression of the secondary instance of the event in the absence or disappearance of the 1964 riots from the historical record; and (4) the uncovering of the repressed events in 1979 as the narrator hunts down the traces of the 1964 riots in his childhood memories, in yellowed newspapers, and in the stories of those condemned to relive them. At the same time, and interwoven with the first sequence of events, there unfolds another time line. It begins in 1939 in the Price household where the infant May and her English family and their guests, the young Tridib and his Indian family, all wait out the war. It ends four decades later when the narrator arrives in London to research his Ph.D. thesis and himself becomes acquainted with the Price family, ending with the narrator’s own sexual encounter with his dead uncle Tridib’s former lover, May Price. Spiraling inward and outward, seamlessly interweaving a series of

Postscript    distinct times and places, everything in the story leads up to or away from a central, unspeakable event, a private tragedy inspired by a public incident. For Ghosh’s narrator, the riot is an event that bypasses meaning, something for which he confesses, “I do not have the words” (228). The novel indeed withholds the narrative of the riot until its final pages, where it is told by two eyewitnesses: Tridib’s brother Robi, who constantly reexperiences the memory of his brother’s death in the form of a recurring nightmare, and Tridib’s English lover May Price, whose survivor’s guilt never allows her to let that death go. The narrator’s own silence about the single most significant occurrence in his childhood life is, by his own account, neither “the silence of an imperfect memory” nor “a silence enforced by a ruthless state” (218), neither carelessness’s silence nor censorship’s. It is, rather, the traumatic silence of an event that has expanded to fill the world. Trauma, explains Cathy Caruth, is “not locatable in the simple or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very unassimilated nature—the way it was precisely not known in the first instance—returns to haunt the survivor later on.”7 By their refusal of simple location and their inexorable logic of return, traumatic events place the subject in another kind of space and time, in which the borders that separate past from present or self from world are continually transgressed. What happens when this self is also that of the nation, when trauma becomes the modality in which nationalism is lived? Though on the surface The Shadow Lines would seem to be an anti-, even postnationalist novel, a grim reckoning of the blood shed in nationalism’s name, the novel’s debt to a traumatic structure of remembrance cautions against such nomenclature. For if, as several of its critics observe, the novel exposes the nation as an incipiently violent, essentially imagined, arbitrarily invented entity,8 it does not for all that leave the nation behind so much as continually circle back to it, drawing an ever-larger radius with the problem of nationhood at its core. The work of memory, as Suvir Kaul has observed, generates the thematic and formal structures of The Shadow Lines, both in its obsessive return to “the sites of personal and national trauma” and its “looping, non-linear, wide-ranging narrative technique.”9 Privileging memory’s circle over chronology’s line, The Shadow Lines cannot ultimately come to the end of any event, be it personal or political, the death of a loved

   Postscript one or the end of an ideal. Like the post in postcolonialism, the post in postnationalism marks the place of a mode of governmentality, discourse, and affiliation that we might well live after but will never live without. Something of that same looping temporality inclines me to name this not an epilogue but a postscript, that is to say, not a winding down of the questions that have animated this study but their living on. By way of conclusion, I consider the map represented in the shifting times and places of The Shadow Lines in relation to the map of form, namely, the melancholic form of a postcolonial identity and a postcolonial novel ever haunted by the imperial, nationalist, and neocolonialist pasts. Ghosh’s novel is filled with places of particular spatiotemporal density linked by a doubling mechanism that draws together what seem to lie apart: Calcutta and Dhaka, England and India, Hampstead and Raibajar. At one point, the narrator sits with Ila in the cellar of the Price household in Hampstead and is returned in memory to the cellar of the house of his childhood just outside Calcutta, where he once also sat with his uncle Tridib and his cosmopolitan, globe-trotting cousin Ila, weeping then as she weeps now, over her betrayal by Nick Price. As the times layer and the spaces collide, it seems to the narrator that the cellar in Hampstead fills. “They were all around me, we were together at last, not ghosts at all: the ghostliness was merely the absence of time and distance—for that is all a ghost is, a presence displaced in time” (181). This animation of one place by another, one time by another, has seemed to some critics typical of a novel that wishes to replace the shadow lines of nationalism with the networked connections of globalism and beyond that, a certain kind of perpetual dislocation: the placelessness of the modern metropolitan migrant.10 In an essay titled “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Ghosh characterizes the diaspora as “the mirror in which modern India seeks to know itself” and the relationship between the diaspora and the nation as “an epic relationship.” It is, he continues, “an epic without a text, which is for all the better perhaps, for if that text were ever written it would be a shabby, bedraggled, melancholy kind of epic.”11 India, Ghosh explains, has no sense of cultural and geopolitical centrality to export to its diaspora, no single set of representative practices, no single language or religion, in whose name to measure Indianization. India, in Ghosh’s hopeful formulation, is too multiple and adaptive, too rooted in a “peculiarly subcontinental

Postscript    tradition of complementary difference” for such a narrative of national culture. In contrast to the British imperial model of metropolitan national culture and colonial imitation, India for Ghosh exerts no such hold on the imagination of its diaspora (77). No doubt Britain’s imperial sense of itself was less securely fixed than Ghosh assumes. And no doubt, as The Shadow Lines itself attests, the violence done in the name of India and its neighboring states troubles the tale of an innate subcontinental syncretism. But for all the broadness of its strokes—inevitable in any fable of national character, Ghosh’s essay makes clear the importance of grasping national identification as a phenomenon of local name, habitation, and form. Here he would seem to be in some agreement with the Indian historian Partha Chatterjee’s objection to the Andersonian thesis of nationalism as a “modular” form crafted in the Americas and Western Europe and subsequently adapted by Asian and African elites. If this is true, Chatterjee demands, “what do they have left to imagine?”12 Perhaps The Shadow Lines is a national novel in diasporic form (for a novel need not love the nation to be national). If so, The Shadow Lines provides the measure for a differently imagined notion of the national in which the memory habitually understood to make a nation also comes to be—because it always was—the memory that opens the nation to all that lies outside and inside its announced borders. In the protonational space of the archive, where the narrator searches for some record of the riots he remembers witnessing in Calcutta as a child and the riots across the border in Dhaka that killed his uncle Tridib, the narrator can find no evidence of what his memory tells him to be true. Both events of communal Muslim-Hindu violence were sparked by an episode that occurred some twelve hundred miles away in yet another city: the theft of the sacred hair of the prophet from Srinagar’s Hazratbal mosque. The link between the three events is not easily seen in the national Indian newspapers, which offer practically no account of a ripple as distant as the scattered violence in Dhaka. The narrator’s failure to remember either the date or the month of the Calcutta riots further establishes the difference between memory’s time, in which Calcutta perpetually burns and Tridib dies again and again, and national time, in the emblematic form of the newspaper. It is as if there can be no mirroring between history and memory, nation and person. What the one knows, the other blocks out. “Memory’s truth,”

   Postscript to borrow a phrase from Rushdie’s narrator Saleem, “selects, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality” (242). In Midnight’s Children the truth of individual memory enables the rewriting, which is also to say the undoing, of the official narratives of national history. In memory’s truth lies nation-state’s end, at least the totalitarian state of Gandhi’s Emergency. In The Shadow Lines, however, individual memory is not merely the antithetical alternative to national history but also what opens the nation to other orders of time and space. We might gloss these, borrowing again from Saleem, as “modes of connection,” modes that depend on memory’s oscillatory time even as they extend to globality’s networked space. At first, the narrator’s memory is so separate from the historical record that it affords him no entry, no point of orientation. “Unnerved by the possibility that I had lived for all those years with a memory of an imagined event,” he suddenly recalls a detail that bridges the gap and provides him with the date he needs to locate his evidence (221). The Calcutta riots, he remembers, occurred on the day of a test match with England in which a new Indian wicketkeeper distinguished himself by scoring a maiden century. Aided by his recollection, the narrator manages to locate the proper range of dates for his riot. He combs the newspapers to find only a description on January 10, 1964, of fatal riots that occurred in Khulna, not Calcutta. Combing further back, the narrator uncovers the January 4 episode of the restoration of the stolen hair of the prophet in Srinagar. He marvels at how an event remarkable for its ethnic unanimity in one place (“the theft of the relic had brought together the people of Kashmir as never before,” 225) could turn so divisive in that same day’s violent anti-Muslim and anti-Hindu demonstrations in Calcutta and Dhaka. The cricket that catalyzes what will become the narrator’s realization of the fictitiousness of borders recurs elsewhere in the novel. A “glimpse of a cricket field,” described to him in his uncle Tridib’s stories about his wartime Hampstead stay, finally directs the narrator to the Price home at 44 Lymington Road (48). Earlier in the narrator’s childhood, cricket was the one leisure activity permitted by his nationalist grandmother, Tha’amma. “You can’t build a strong country, she would say, pushing me out of the house, without building a strong body” (8). Cricket is itself a form of colonial memory, a practice synonymous

Postscript    with Englishness and for that very reason, a privileged site for mimicry, resistance, and politics by other means. This is the lesson, for example, of Ashutosh Gowariker’s award-winning film Lagaan (2001), in which a national-allegorical group of late nineteenth-century Indian villagers from diverse religions and castes beat the British occupiers at their game.13 This is also the lesson of Arjun Appadurai’s anthropology of cricket’s indigenization through “a set of complex and contradictory processes that parallel the emergence of an Indian ‘nation’ from the British Empire,” up to and including such postcolonial “pathologies” and “dreams” as the communal cricket wars of India and Pakistan, or the Sharjah cup games played before diasporic audiences of Indian and Pakistani migrant workers in one of the Gulf Emirates.14 Appadurai’s anatomy of “cricket nationalism” (99) can be traced back earlier, across oceans and continents, to C. L. R. James’s Beyond a Boundary (1963), an incandescent mix of intellectual autobiography, cricket hagiography, and West Indian political history. “They are no better than we,” explains the great working-class West Indian champion Learie Constantine to James, a reader of Thackeray, a student of Latin and Greek, and, as a local cricket commentator, a self-styled gatekeeper of the British rules of the game. Constantine’s statement, James realizes, “was a slogan and a banner . . . the politics of nationalism,” and it sets him to thinking. If with all that they were no better than we, then either we were very good indeed or they were very bad. To say that all we needed was the opportunity, was to say nothing. It was precisely the opportunity that only a few of us got. Time would pass, old empires would fall and new ones take their place, the relations of countries and the relations of classes had to change, before I discovered that it is not quality of goods and utility which matter, but movement, not where you are or what you have, but where you have come from, where you are going and the rate at which you are getting there.15

Here is the longue durée of empire in the style of cricket. Certainly cricket, like any other privileged site of imperial culture (the nation, the novel) lends itself to the appropriative energies and styles of “newness,” to echo Rushdie’s term,16 popularly associated with postcolonial practice. Yet cricket, like those other sites, also occupies the terrain of memory. So James describes the devastation experienced by the friends and admirers of Wilton St. Hill, the “greatest of all West Indian batsmen,” believed

   Postscript to “put all white rivals in the shade,” when St. Hill was cut from the 1923 West Indian team. “That wound was never to heal” (94). This is no melancholic impasse in the style of the complex Freud likens to “an open wound . . . draining the ego until it is utterly depleted,” turning its rage inward and emptying out the self.17 For James, the exploits of players like “our boy” St. Hill and his descendants offer the Trinidadian subject an alternative to empire’s own wounding reign, the redemptive chance to learn on another day and another field, the twin lessons—as germane to cricket as to the politics of anticolonial nationalism—that “they are no better than we” and that it is movement that matters. It is under the shadow of the former statement, ever plagued by the suspicion of its untruth, that James’s fellow West Indian Naipaul writes, while it is in the grip of the latter that the mobile transnationalisms of Ghosh or the migrant cosmopolitanism of Rushdie are generated. For these writers, as for James (who wrote Beyond a Boundary from the perspective of a diasporic intellectual returning to a once-colonial, newly national homeland),18 it is indeed movement that matters, movement that allows the reimagining of place and identity. This is the perspective on the nation that I have attempted in this book, a kind of double vision that by repeatedly twinning the nation with its others (imperialism’s empire, anti-imperialism’s Third World, exile’s fantasy homeland, diaspora’s national networks) reveals another kind of nation than the grimly territorial broker in whose name so many have been wounded, dispossessed, and killed. Though the latter is one of the most powerful and common stories of nationalism in the modern world, it is not the only one. Nations, The Shadow Lines darkly implies, think through division. Hence the bizarre boyhood trigonometry that the narrator’s uncle Robi recalls practicing. Told as a child that the old Hindu uncle they went to Dhaka to rescue, on the fatal mission that killed Tridib, was “once so orthodox that he wouldn’t let a Muslim’s shadow pass within ten feet of his food,” the young Robi imagines that the uncle must have “worked it out like a sum: if the Muslim is standing under a twenty-foot building how far is his shadow?” (210). On the same day, the narrator, across the border in Calcutta, sees a rickshaw blocking an empty street and wonders: “Had it been put there to keep Muslims in or Hindus out? At that moment we could read the disarrangement of our universe in the perfectly ordinary angle of an abandoned rickshaw” (203). With their

Postscript    golden rods of division and their inevitable delineation of borders (in or out, pure or unclean, us or them), these national measurements are the foil to the “amazing circle” the narrator later draws on an atlas (231). With its point on Khulna, the site of the riots that killed Tridib, and its pencil tip on Srinagar, where the hair of the prophet was stolen twelve hundred miles away, the compass seems to demarcate a small distance. Yet when the narrator rotates the compass around, he finds its circle encompasses East Pakistan, southern India, Sri Lanka, northern Sumatra, southern Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Inner Mongolia. In this global measure of national space, which he repeats again with Milan as the center, the narrator “learn[s] the meaning of distance.” As ever in the novel, space, like time, becomes a mode of connection. Puzzling over the enormity of his circle’s space and wondering what event might possibly link a city anywhere on its periphery to Milan, the narrator can identify only war, that state of blood that is again and again the equivalent of nation in The Shadow Lines. “Within this circle,” he concludes, “there were only states and citizens; there were no people at all” (231). Nations draw their borders in blood, the novel implies, because only such extremism can force a difference where none exists. Following the narrator’s library researches into the riot that killed Tridib in Dhaka and his slow connection of it to the theft in Srinagar and the riots in Calcutta, the narrator has an epiphanic realization. In all the “four-thousand-year-old history” of the subcontinent’s map, the two cities had never been, he muses, “more closely bound to each other than after they had drawn their lines—so closely that I in Calcutta, had only to look into the mirror to be in Dhaka; a moment when each city was the inverted image of the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to set us free—our lookingglass border” (233). Even as it registers a familiar postcolonial rhetoric of national disappointment in the pained recognition of the nationalist “line that was to set us free” as a mere mirage, this sentence also imagines another life for that line. The ironic freedom of a locked embrace is neither the freedom of living within borders nor without them (neither Tha’mma’s nationalism nor Ila’s soulless globalism) but rather the freedom of a new way of thinking about borders. The looking-glass nationalism in The Shadow Lines is not merely the ideological antithesis of the border, the textual sign and means of

   Postscript what A. N. Kaul calls “Ghosh’s proclamation of the death of nationalism” (303). Though for Kaul, the novel’s “inner trajectory” points away from its “realities” (309), the inward thrust to the zones of memory, loss, desire, fantasy, and identification might just as well be said to reenter the zone of the historical and the political, the national and the global. By this fantasmatic logic, to exist under one set of conditions is simultaneously to be constituted by another seemingly opposed set. Troped as mirroring and realized through memory, the looking-glass nationalism of The Shadow Lines presents another version of the forms of national identification I have traced throughout this book, with regular recourse to the language of psychoanalysis. For the Lacanian subject who is firmly, tragically situated within the symbolic order of language, symbol, law, prohibition, and loss, the mirror stage (the imagined developmental moment when the infant misrecognizes itself as its own reflected image) offers the image of a unified, coherent, whole self that never was—except in fantasy. The dependent, uncoordinated, and fragmented body of the infant receives from the mirror an image whose stability, smoothness, and coherence it does not yet possess, thus, in Lacan’s phrase, “anticipat[ing] in a mirage the maturation of his power.”19 As Jane Gallop puts it, “the self as organized entity is actually an imitation of the cohesiveness of the mirror stage.”20 In other words, by activating the infantile fragmented body as a fantasy (its own prehistory, what came before it) the mirror stage calls the self retroactively into being. As a temporal model, the mirror stage draws attention to the fictive nature of the past and the fantasmal quality of the moments we mark as originary. Beginnings, as any student of national history knows, are impossibly lost moments, retrospective fictions of invented origins to which nations look for some image of themselves. The mirror stage of nations marks that endlessly repeated moment when disparate fragments of custom and myth, language and culture are composed into some kind of fantasmal whole. For Fanon, this is the whole behind negritude’s notion of race, with its unseemly nostalgia for an authentic origin, and bourgeois native nationalism, with its caricatural misrecognition of itself as its European predecessor. Like Fanon, Sarduy seeks to explode the search for origins, its accompanying aesthetic of the autochthonous, and its penchant for backward-looking historical narratives. But whereas Fanon looks beyond

Postscript    the mirror stage of nations, toward a future when the decolonized nation ceases piecing together the fragments of the past and instead embarks on the creation of newness, Sarduy’s imaginary nation remains blissfully caught within the mirror stage, while Ghosh and Rushdie grasp the mirror as a promising, even liberating, model of a sameness that can dispel the bloody logics of difference. Is it then in mirrored sameness that Ghosh’s novel reveals its version of national lack, the nonbeing of national difference? Or is the self who sees Dhaka and Calcutta as inverted images, twin cities alike across a “looking-glass border,” and says, as the narrator does, “I, my own other” (181), one who reveals national difference as lack and the violence done in its name as loss? LaCapra, we may recall, describes melancholia’s conversion of a traumatic loss into the metaphysical state of lack he calls absence and links it with the reverse conversion of absence to a sense of historical loss, which in turn fuels “misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a new totality or fully unified community.”21 To these paralytic psychic and political states, LaCapra suggests the alternative possibility of grasping absence as absence. Absence in this sense is not a state of loss to be incorporated (melancholia), redeemed (messianism), or even endlessly replaced with a surrogate series of “elusive or fantasmatic objects” (708). To acknowledge absence as absence is to admit that the absent exists in its nonexistence. As LaCapra puts it, “paradise absent is different from paradise lost . . . it is not there” (706). In contrast to Sarduy’s metonymic displacement of his lost Cuba to a series of surrogate bodies and geographies, Ghosh’s novel would seem to present the differently melancholic state of a national inability to move beyond the traumatic events of partition, riot, and violence. As one response to this condition of national loss, the novel offers a sense of national absence, exemplified in the narrator’s realization of the symmetry between Dhaka and Calcutta as the nonexistence of “East Pakistan” and “India.” Does The Shadow Lines then owe more to absence than to loss? Or is it better described through mourning than through melancholia, given its staging of a traumatic-therapeutic plot of remembering the past in order to leave it behind, and a nonlinear, looping form that is also, in LaCapra’s words, “a modality of working-through” (714)? Ultimately, I would want to resist the impulse to so closely map psychoanalytic narratives onto

   Postscript literary forms. With its focus on the events of state terror and its tendency, sometimes in the very call for historical specificity, to transhistoricize them, trauma theory runs the risk of too completely folding nation into state in order to produce a narrative in which the nation is always haunted by, in mourning for, working through, or living after a shattering event of loss and violence. We are then back, or close, to nation-state as wound (the original meaning of trauma) and political life after the nation form as cure. As I have hoped to suggest in these pages, there is no getting beyond a national ideal that keeps returning. To return to something is to relive it, to be caught once again and evermore within the moment of an ancient trauma. But to return to something can also be to see it differently, to accord it a different claim than the one it once held. To return to the nation in this sense would be to recognize it not as something to be worked through but as something we live after, and with, in the hopes of another kind of future. In that future, states do not terrorize citizens and nations do not act alone or constitute their polity as purity. Rather than ascribing The Shadow Lines or any other text in this study to a sensibility of melancholic loss in toto, or alternatively, utopian plenitude in the style of imperial braggadocio, decolonizing newness, postcolonial belatedness, or cosmopolitan hybridity, I have wanted to understand national narratives’ movements between states of loss, longing, and affective life at various moments, in various places, and through various forms whose times and spaces always point beyond (memory, migrancy, messianism, allegory, fantasy, desire). Such a mobilization of nationalism’s map is one result of the convergence between the territorialized logic of which nationalism is the expression and the map the motif, and the deterritorializing flows of desire, identification, and memory. This is the central work of the discourse and theory of the psyche in the writing, and reading, of national narratives. As The Shadow Lines can perhaps show, to admit the mirror, and the discourse of desire and identification it echoes, is not to deny the map or to succeed it but to live the map differently. With its joining of memory’s plot and nationhood’s, and its compulsion to discover through ever more mobile maps a series of ever more powerful modes of connection, including those that link psyches to nations, nations to other nations, and localities everywhere to a deep sense of globality, The Shadow Lines reminds us that the territorial imagination is never without its ghosts.

Postscript    In the national novels of global form that this book has surveyed, nation and globe are at odds, in sync, overlapping, unevenly articulated, seemingly opposed, and ever conjoined, in forms that range from empire’s elsewhere to anticolonialism’s Third World to postcolonialism’s mirror cities. To see the shadow of the global in these variant national novels and to further detect in them the historical and historicizing discourse of race, the epics and tragedies, manifestos and memento mori of nationhood, and the fantasy formations of desire, has been in part an exercise in what Jameson calls “cognitive mapping.” This reading practice discerns against the background of a familiar form, say, European modernism, “a new play of absence and presence that at its most simplified will be haunted by the erotic and be tattooed with foreign place names, and at its most intense will involve the invention of remarkable new languages and forms.”22 To imagine that the global might always be the sign of homogenization and hegemonization, always the mirror image of capital’s flows and globalization’s rhetorical universalization and real inequity, or that the national might only and always be territorial, ontopological, fixed, misses the degree to which these terms are themselves subject to flux. If, in the various moments of late imperial sovereignty, anti-imperial revolution, and postcolonial independence the discourse of national modernity has turned on a certain placing of nations and national subjects, it has equally depended on their displacing: their existence at once inside and outside certain topographies and temporalities of identity (the territorial fix, the developmental time line). Always traversing spatial boundaries, forever transgressing temporal borders, and endlessly lost to the citizens who seek, above all, to identify with them, these nations are fantasmatic objects. It would be hard to sum up what feeling national, in the sense this book has considered it, has wrought. At the very least, it has invented remarkable new forms and offered another account of the novel, not only as a technology for imagining the nation but also as a generic mode for interrogating, representing, and sustaining the tensions between the national and the global in late modernity and its aftermath. If the literary map of national narratives haunted, tattooed, and reinvented by the global colonial system has been one guiding concern of this book, the formal reading of that map has been its other. The reading I have undertaken looks neither to the line of the novel’s rise within a single or even regional national tradition nor to its entirely global spread in the

   Postscript ambitious project of world literature. Instead, this comparative survey has focused on moments and places—from England, the United States, and France to Martinique, Cuba, and Latin America to Africa and India—in which the narratives of the national and the global conjoin. India has been a frequent apparition, regularly fractured in visions from the novels of Rushdie, Ghosh, and Naipaul to the predecessor tradition of Kipling or Desani to Du Bois’s Dark Princess and Sarduy’s Cobra. In pushing this particular signifier to its edges in nationalist, globalist, and postnationalist novels, I have wanted to suggest how the moving category of the nation might open a comparative and transnational approach to the question of what counts as national literature. For this emerging spatial framework, or global textual network, I have suggested the topological-temporal uncertainty of the uncanny and the spectral as the legends of choice. Doubled reading has organized this book, animated in each instance by the model of displacement through repetition. I have preferred multiple and repeated versions of psychoanalysis, moving from encounters with Freud and Lacan to engagements with readers of varying degrees of resistance to psychoanalysis (Sarduy, Fanon, Derrida). This book has traced the return of a national idea in many modes—imperial and anticolonial, messianic and failed, racialist, internationalist, and diasporic. The national idea changes in form and changes in address, purporting now to crystallize one kind of longing, now another, usually several simultaneously across the multiple lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Often enlisted to allegorize nations, these lines also pluralize them. Finally, formal modes and generic categories have haunted this book, shadows to its announced concern with psychoanalysis, the nation, and the novel. As the novels of Rushdie and Ghosh again show us, with their diasporic form and national content, the nation is no ghost about which we can comfortably say “but it doesn’t exist” or shouldn’t or soon will not. When it surfaces across the long history of empire and its aftermath, it cannot be expected always to appear in the same guise. For the nation is as territorialized as it is deterritorialized, as bounded as it is unbounded, as turned in to the self as it is opened out to the world, and as shifting in its forms as it is constant in its claims on what it means to think the psychic life of politics.

Notes

preface 1.  Jacques Derrida, “Géopsychanalyse: . . . and the rest of the world,” 1981, in Psyché: Inventions de l’autre (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1987), 327–52, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith as “Geopsychoanalysis: ‘and the rest of the world,’ ” in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 65–90. 2.  Frantz Fanon, Sociologie d’une revolution (Paris: Maspero, 1968), trans. Haakon Chevalier as Studies in a Dying Colonialism (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 24. 3. Nicholas Dirks, “Introduction,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 23. 4.  Jacques Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National-Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” Oxford Literary Review 14 (1992): 10–23, 10, 11, 7. 5.  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” Collier’s Weekly (1906), rpt. in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 42–43. chapter 1 1.  Étienne Balibar, “The Nation Form: History and Ideology,” in Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1991), 86–106, 86. 2. See Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). 3.  Culture, Globalization, and the World-System, ed. Anthony D. King (Binghamton: Department of Art and Art History, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1991), ix. 4.  Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation-State, the Rise of Regional Economies (London: HarperCollins, 1995). 5.  Paul Smith, Millennial Dreams: Contemporary Culture and Capital in the North (New York: Verso, 1997), 13, 19, qtd. in Neil Lazarus, Nationalism and Cul-

   Notes tural Practice in the Postcolonial World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), at 46, 51. For other assessments of global culture’s standardizing effects and reinstantiation of imperial hegemony, see Frederick Buell, National Culture and the New Global System (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); Anthony D. Smith, Nations and Nationalism in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 1995); Masao Miyoshi, “A Borderless World? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State,” and Arif Dirlik, “The Global in the Local,” both in Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 78– 106, 21–45. More utopian variants can be found in Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Iain Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Routledge, 1994). 6. R. Radhakrishnan, “Globality Is Not Worldliness,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 13 (2005): 183–98, 185. For an extended version, see Radhakrishnan, History, the Human, and the World Between (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Methuen, 1987); Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Spivak, Death of a Discipline, The Wellek Library Lectures in Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). With regard to contemporary inflections of “cosmopolitanism,” I am thinking of Homi Bhabha’s “hybrid cosmopolitanism,” as well as those of Anthony K. Appiah, Edward Said, and Paul Gilroy; James Clifford’s “discrepant cosmopolitanisms”; Bruce Robbins’s “comparative cosmopolitanisms”; Rob Wilson’s “material cosmopolitanism”; and Robbins’s and Pheng Cheah’s “cosmopolitics.” The latter offers an especially capacious notion of a condition of multiple attachments that is explicitly not postnational but operates instead as “an area both within and beyond the nation (and yet falling short of ‘humanity’) that is inhabited by a variety of cosmopolitanisms” (Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 12). James Clifford, “Traveling Cultures,” Cultural Studies: Now and in the Future, ed. Larry Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 96–112; Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” and Rob Wilson, “A New Cosmopolitanism Is in the Air: Some Dialectical Twists and Turns,” both in Cheah and Robbins, Cosmopolitics, 246–64; 351–61. 7. Stuart Hall, “When Was ‘the Postcolonial’? Thinking at the Limit,” in The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 242–60, 246.

Notes    8. In addition to Hall and King, Culture, Globalization, see The Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital, ed. David Lloyd and Lisa Lowe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997); and Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990). For a bracing account of these debates that argues for the specifically colonial-imperial formation of global modernity, see Arif Dirlik, Global Modernity: Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007). 9. See Hall, “When Was ‘the Postcolonial’?” 259, and Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in King, Culture, Globalization, 19–39; David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (New York: Blackwell, 1990); Hannerz, Transnational Connections; Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York: Academic, 1974); and World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand? ed. Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills (New York: Routledge, 1993). The latter is helpful in understanding the tensions between Wallerstein’s model of a modern capitalist world-system inaugurated by a decisive break, namely, the rise of Europe, and the larger scope of a longer, non-Eurocentric, world history. There is an orthographic distinction as well: where Wallerstein uses “world-system,” Frank prefers “world system” as a term that evokes a larger, continuous history of regularly shifting centers of power rather than the geographically and historically particularized subsection identified by the hyphenated term. Although my discussion is confined to the period of late European imperial modernity and its aftermath, I want to acknowledge a prehistory in which Europe was not always dominant. I have thus used the hyphen when referring to Wallerstein’s model and the specificities of capitalist modernity but dispensed with it where I have wanted to evoke the broad possibility of worldscale analysis. A useful overview of globalization’s distinct eras can be found in Göran Therborn, “Globalizations: Dimensions, Historical Waves, Regional Effects, Normative Governance,” International Sociology 15 (2000): 151–79. 10. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), 100–103. 11. Sigmund Freud, “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” in Three Case Histories, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Simon & Schuster / Touchstone, 1996), 161– 280, 176–77. 12.  For forceful critiques of the trend from nationalism to cosmopolitanism, migration, and hybridity, see Benita Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 91/92 (1987): 27–58; Parry, “Resistance Theory / Theorising Resistance, or Two Cheers for Nativism,” in Colonial Discourse, Postcolonial Theory, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 172–96; Parry, “Signs of Our Times: A Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture,” Third Text 28/29

   Notes (1994): 5–24; Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (New York: Verso, 1992); Ahmad, “The Politics of Literary Postcoloniality,” Race and Class 36 (1995): 1–20; Arif Dirlik, “The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 328–56; Timothy Brennan, At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); and Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice. I discuss the competing cosmopolitan and national strains of postcolonial theory in Vilashini Cooppan, “W(h)ither Post-colonial Studies? Toward the Transnational Study of Race and Nation,” in Postcolonial Theory and Criticism, The English Association Essays and Studies Series 1999, ed. Laura Chrisman and Benita Parry (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2000), 1–36. 13.  Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994), 6–7. 14. Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 233. 15. Ian Baucom, “Globalit, Inc.; or, The Cultural Logic of Global Literary Studies,” “Globalizing Literary Studies,” ed. Giles Gunn, special issue of PMLA 116 (2001): 158–72, 160. 16.  Anne McClintock, “The Myth of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Post-colonialism,” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 1–15, rev. and rpt. as “Postcolonialism and the Angel of Progress,” in McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 1–18. 17. Neil Lazarus, “Transnationalism and the Alleged Death of the NationState,” in Cultural Readings of Imperialism: Edward Said and the Gravity of History, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearon, Benita Parry, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), 28–48, 29. 18.  Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 295–96, translation mine. 19. Neil Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Research in African Literatures 24 (1993): 69–98, 71. 20.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). For a sampling of work that does explore the nation (primarily England) in and through movement, see Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Sara Suleri Goodyear, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth Century Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Katie Trumpener, Bardic National-

Notes    ism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Michael Gorra, After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 21.  Peter Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (New York: Manchester University Press, 2001), 127. 22. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 28, 30; and Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 83. 23.  Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York, London, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2007), 30–31. 24. See Gilroy, The Black Atlantic; Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Sassen, “Globalization and the Formation of Claims,” in Giving Ground: The Politics of Propinquity, ed. Joan Copjec and Michael Sorkin (New York: Verso, 1999), 96–105; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); and Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography,” in The Geography of Identity, ed. Patricia Yaeger (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), 40–58. 25. The idea of weltliteratur has been pieced from twenty or so allusions in Goethe’s personal journals, public lectures, letters, and reported conversations. See Fritz Strich, Goethe and World Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949); and the excerpts collected in Johann von W. Goethe, “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature,” in Comparative Literature: The Early Years, ed. Hans-Joachim Schulz and Philip Rhein (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 3–11. 26.  Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 13/14 (1986): 65–88, 65. 27. The most stringent critique is Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’ ” in Ahmad, In Theory, 95–122. 28. René Wellek, “The Crisis of Comparative Literature” (1959), in Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), 282–95, 295. For another statement of the impossibility of world literature, particularly in its pedagogical form, see Werner Friederich, “Great Books versus ‘World Literature’ ” (1959) and “The Challenge of Comparative Literature” (1964), in The Challenge of Comparative Literature and Other Addresses, ed. William J. DeSua (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970), 25–50. Both Wellek and Friederich lamented the narrowness of national literary scholarship. But while Friederich, founder of the program in comparative literature at

   Notes the University of North Carolina, analogized programs of comparative literature to the “departments of Foreign Affairs” that “every well-run government” maintains for the “constant scrutiny of its political and cultural relationships with the nations around it” (47, 36, 48), Wellek saw in the espousal of comparativism as politics the bureaucratization of literary study and the loss of literature’s aesthetic quality. 29.  Erich Auerbach, “Philologie der Weltliteratur” (1952), trans. Edward Said and Marie Said as “Philology and Weltliteratur,” in The Centennial Review 13 (Winter 1969): 1–17. On Auerbach’s place in the history of modern comparative literature, with particular emphasis on his exilic and cosmopolitan sensibilities, see Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), especially 5–9; Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic Books, 1975), especially 68–69 and 72–76; Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 131–208; Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach, ed. Seth Lerer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996); Michael Holquist, “The Last European: Erich Auerbach as Precursor in the History of Cultural Criticism,” Modern Language Quarterly 54 (1993): 371–91; Aamir Mufti, “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1998): 95–125; and Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 30.  John Pizer, “Goethe’s ‘World Literature’ Paradigm and Contemporary Cultural Globalization,” Comparative Literature 52.3 (2000): 213–27; and Pizer, The Idea of World Literature: History and Pedagogical Practice (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006). 31. See, for example, Apter, The Translation Zone, and Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Minor Transnationalism, ed. Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Rey Chow’s extensive work, especially Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1993). Especially germane is Chow’s brief for a comparative practice that negotiates historical-geopolitical shifts of power and formal structures and resists turning itself into the model of the global or transnational itself. See Chow, The Age of the World Target: SelfReferentiality in War, Theory, and Comparative Work (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-

Notes    sity Press, 2006). For reflections on some of these shifts in comparative practice, see the last two American Comparative Literature Association decennial reports on the state of the discipline, accompanied by a range of essays and responses, in Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism, ed. Charles Bernheimer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, ed. Haun Saussy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006). 32.  Jonathan Arac, “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review 16 (2002): 35–45. 33.  Wai Chee Dimock, “Literature for the Planet,” PMLA 116 (2001): 173–88, 174. For a series of possible models, see “Remapping Genre,” ed. Dimock, special issue of PMLA 122 (2007): 1377–1651. 34.  Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), especially 72–106. 35. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 12. Damrosch usefully points out that insofar as works that precede the birth of the modern nation “were produced in local or ethnic configurations that have been subsumed into the national traditions within which they are now preserved and transmitted,” the nation remains a category still in play in the larger negotiations of world literature between natal traditions and radical alterity (283). 36. Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). 37. See George Ritzer, The McDonaldization of Society: An Investigation into the Changing Character of Contemporary Social Life (Newbury Park, CA: Pine Forge Press, 1993), and The McDonaldization Thesis: Explorations and Extensions (London: Sage, 1998). 38. See my discussions of world literature, focusing on disciplinary history and pedagogical practice and, most recently, on the place of race in the literary world-system. Vilashini Cooppan, “World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium,” Symploké 9 (2001): 15–43; “Ghosts in the Disciplinary Machine: The Uncanny Life of World Literature,” Comparative Literature Studies 41 (2004): 10–36; and “Hauntologies of Form: Race, Writing, and the Literary World-System,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 13 (2005): 71–87. 39. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” trans. Alix Strachey, in Collected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones (London: Hogarth, 1934), vol. 4, 368–407, 369. 40. See Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 35–38; Voyous: Deux essais sur la raison (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 59–63. For an earlier discussion of autoimmunity, see Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the

   Notes Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 1–78. 41.  “Depending on the governing syntax or grammar, the inevitable renvoi [of democracy] can signify simultaneously or by turns a sending off of the other through exclusion and the sending off or referral to the other, respect for the foreigner or for the alterity of the other. It could be shown concretely, with regard, for example, to the problems of immigration, whether with or without assimilation and integration, that these two contradictory movements of renvoi, of sending off, haunt and autoimmunize one another by turns” (Rogues, 36). Democracy’s renvoi, its double sending off, and sending to, its others (the immigrants within, the “rogue states” outside some democratic entity) is a process that Derrida understands to resemble the work of différance, in particular of “différance as reference or referral [renvoi] to the other, that is, as the undeniable, and I underscore undeniable, experience of the alterity of the other, of heterogeneity, of the singular, the not-same, the different, the dissymmetric, the heteronomous” (38). 42.  Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 144–45; Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle internationale (Paris: Galilée, 1993), 231. Subsequent references cite first the English translation, then the French original. 43. Derrida, Specters, 173; Spectres, 275. 44. Derrida, Specters, 174; Spectres, 276. 45.  Jacques Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999), 213–69, 259. 46. Derrida, Specters, 37, 7; Spectres, 68, 27. 47.  Gregory Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 5. 48. Derrida, Specters, 82; Spectres, 137. 49.  Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 25. It is in the same passage that Derrida declares, “the phantasm is also the phantom, the double, or the ghost.” 50.  Jacques Derrida, Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), xix. Originally published as États d’âme de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000). 51.  Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 395. 52.  Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (2000): 55–67. For a reconsideration of the world-systems model’s applicability to the history of literary form and several thoughts about how peripheral litera-

Notes    tures create hegemonic forms, see Moretti, “More Conjectures,” New Left Review 20 (2003): 73–81. For an exploration of how the reading methods of world literature reorient scholarship beyond the canonical fraction of what gets studied, see Moretti, “The Slaughterhouse of Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000): 207–27. An earlier discussion takes a different tack, finding the model of the centrifugally expanding novel persuasive up until the end of the eighteenth century when, in a curious instance of literary devolution, the epic emerges as the properly “polyphonic form of the modern West” and so seeds the novel’s future. Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to García Márquez, trans. Quentin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1996), 57. For a sociologically and geographically informed study of the European novel’s spread, see Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998). Most recently, Moretti’s important field reshaping has resulted in an ambitious two-volume world literary history of the novel, translated from the five-volume Italian study Il romanzo (2001–3). See The Novel, Volume 1: History, Geography and The Novel, Volume 2: Forms and Themes, ed. Moretti (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 53.  Auerbach, “Philology and Weltliteratur,” 14. 54.  Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Michael J. Holquist and Caryl Emerson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 273. 55.  Claudio Guillén, Literature as System: Essays toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 109. 56.  Jacques Derrida, “The Law of Genre” (1980), rpt. in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992): 221–52. 57. See, for example, Spivak’s critique of Moretti’s “Conjectures”: “Why should the (novel in the) whole world as our object of investigation be the task of every comparativist, who should give up on language learning?” (Death of a Discipline, 108, fn. 1). Christopher Prendergast also critiques the narrowing of the space, time, and language of world literature when the linked forms of nation and novel become its primary signifiers, as in Pascale Casnova’s La république mondiale des lettres (1999). Prendergast, “The World Republic of Letters,” in Debating World Literature, ed. Prendergast (New York: Verso, 2004), 1–25. 58.  Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; New York: Verso, 1991), 205. 59. Tom Nairn, The Break-up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (1977, London: Verso, 1981), 359, qtd. in Anderson, Imagined Communities, at 5, 161. 60. Tom Nairn, Two Faces of Nationalism: Janus Revisited (New York: Verso, 1997), 41. 61.  Michael Ignatieff, Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1993), 5. For an overview of the critical distinction between “good” and “bad” nationalism, see Jusdanis, The Necessary Nation.

   Notes 62. Nairn, Two Faces, 347, 184. 63. David Lloyd, “Nationalisms against the State,” in Lloyd and Lowe, The Politics of Culture, 173–97, 173. 64.  Mieke Bal, “Myth à la lettre: Freud, Mann, Genesis and Rembrandt, and the Story of the Son,” in Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan (New York: Methuen, 1987), 57–89. 65.  Philip Rieff, “Introduction,” in Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 8–9. 66. Steven Marcus, “Freud and Dora: Story, History, Case History,” in In Dora’s Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (1985; New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 56–91. In the same volume, Neil Hertz discusses Dora’s novelistic structure (221–42), while Janet Malcolm interrogates the ways in which the rendering of Dora as a novelistic character highlights, without mitigating, the violence done to the girl by the probing analyst (305–35). For other considerations of Dora’s narrative and novelistic form, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Nadja, Dora, Lol V. Stein: Women, Madness and Narrative,” in Rimmon-Kenan, Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, 124–51; Linda Ruth Williams, Critical Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Literary Subject (New York: Edward Arnold, 1995); and Clare Kahane, Passions of the Voice: Hysteria, Narrative, and the Figure of the Speaking Woman, 1850–1915 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 67. Shoshana Felman, Writing and Madness: Literature/Philosophy/Psychoanalysis, trans. Felman, Martha Noel Evans, and Brian Massumi (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 182; and Peter Brooks, Psychoanalysis and Storytelling, vol. 10 of The Bucknell Lectures in Literary Theory, ed. Michael Payne and Harold Schweizer (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 53, 72. Also see Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1985); Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise, ed. Shoshana Felman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Neil Hertz, The End of the Line (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); and Michael Levine, Writing through Repression: Literature, Censorship, Psychoanalysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 68.  McClintock, Imperial Leather. For a discussion of the ways in which these entwined histories “penetrate the central metapsychological structure of the psychoanalytic project itself,” see David Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 10. 69. Ranjana Khanna, Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 65, 100. On provincializing, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

Notes    70. O. Mannoni, Psychologie de la colonisation (Paris: Seuil, 1950), trans. Pamela Powesland as Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990). On colonial ethnopsychoanalysis in a British context, see W. H. R. Rivers, Instinct and the Unconscious (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); and Rivers, Psychology and Politics and Other Essays (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923). For illuminating critical studies of the historical complicity between psychoanalysis, colonialism, and regimes of racial difference, see Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), especially chap. 5; Sander Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Jacqueline Rose, “Freud in the Tropics,” History Workshop Journal 47 (1999): 49–67; and Khanna, Dark Continents. 71.  Within the broad literature on psychoanalytic feminism, the following are particularly relevant to questions involving race: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 65–81; Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now, If Sigmund Freud’s Wife Was Your Mother: Psychoanalysis and Race,” boundary 2 23 (1996): 75–141; Elizabeth Abel, “Race, Class, and Psychoanalysis? Opening Questions,” in Conflicts in Feminism, ed. Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox-Keller (New York: Routledge, 1990), 184–204; Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1991), especially chap. 4; Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1996), especially chap. 5; Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992); Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), especially chap. 6; Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Kalpana Seshadri Crooks, “The Primitive as Analyst: Postcolonial Feminism’s Access to Psychoanalysis,” Cultural Critique (Fall 1994): 175–217; SeshadriCrooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Recent critical studies produced at the crossroads of psychoanalysis, queer theory, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theory include Eng, Racial Castration; Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literature and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994); Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (New York: Routledge, 2004); Ann Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (New York: Routledge, 1997); José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jan Campbell, Arguing with the Phallus: Feminist, Queer and Postcolonial Theory: A Psychoanalytic Contribution (New York: Zed Books,

   Notes 2000); Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Antonio Viego, Dead Subjects: Toward a Politics of Loss in Latino Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). Postcolonial criticism’s engagements with psychoanalysis have been multiple. For a sampling, see Bhabha, Location of Culture; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Khanna, Dark Continents; Abdul JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78–106; JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); Nandy, The Savage Freud and Other Essays on Possible and Retrievable Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and David Lloyd, Anomalous States: Irish Writing and the Post-colonial Moment (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993). 72. Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness, 24; Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 34. 73. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 291–322, 295. For an alternative critique of Anderson, grounded in a Marxist analysis of capital and class as the structuring conditions of the nation-state framework, see Gopal Balakrishnan, “The National Imagination,” in Mapping the Nation, ed. Balakrishnan (New York: Verso, 1996), 198–213. Anderson himself takes on the question of how territorially bounded Imagined Communities’ model of the nation was in “Exodus,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1994): 314–27; and Anderson, The Spectre of Comparison: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (New York: Verso, 1998), especially chap. 3. 74.  “Fantasme,” in Élisabeth Roudinesco and Michel Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Fayard, 1997), 284–88, 284. 75.  Freud, “Infantile Neurosis,” 256. 76.  Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality” (1964), in Formations of Fantasy, ed. Victor Burgin (New York: Routledge, 1989), 5–34, 14. The original appears as “Fantasme Originaire: Fantasmes des Origines, Origines du Fantasme” (Paris: Hachette, 1985). A condensed version can be found in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1973), 152–59. I note in passing Laplanche and Pontalis’s choice to eschew the post-Kleinian orthography that distinguishes unconscious “phantasy” from the daydream “fantasy” as contrary to Freud’s own thinking. My own spelling follows this convention.

Notes    77. Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 127. 78. On national fantasy, see Berlant, Anatomy of National Fantasy; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989); and Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, The Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1994 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). With debts to psychoanalytic theory but a more anthropological approach, Brian Axel understands national fantasy as what produces a sovereign subject through “a spatial separation between a putative interior and exterior [that] necessitates a temporal production of a ‘before,’ an anteriority, without which the telos of the nation-state cannot progress.” Brian Keith Axel, The Nation’s Tortured Body: Violence, Representation, and the Formation of a Sikh “Diaspora” (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 114–15. For a related claim that “the structure of power is inherently fantasmatic,” illustrated through Lacanian readings of the post-Communist politics of nationalism in Eastern Europe, see Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (New York: Routledge, 1994), especially chaps. 1, 2, 5, quotation at 7. 79.  Jacques Derrida, “Foreword: Fors: The Anglish Words of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok,” trans. Barbara Johnson in Abraham and Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), xi–xlviii. Abraham and Torok’s work builds on their discussion of mourning and melancholia in The Shell and the Kernel (1968). References in what follows refer to The Shell and the Kernel: Renewals of Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. Nicholas Rand (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 80. Derrida, “Geopsychoanalysis,” 329, translation mine. For an English translation, see Lane, Psychoanalysis of Race, 65–90. 81. See Jacques Derrida, “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in L’écriture et la différance (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), trans. Alan Bass as “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 196–231. This essay’s argument that all Freudian concepts belong to the history of metaphysics lays the groundwork for Derrida’s later critique of Lacan in “Le facteur de la vérité,” Poétique (1975), rpt. in La carte postale de Socrate à Freud et audelà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), trans. Alan Bass as “The Purveyor of Truth” in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Derrida’s critique of psychoanalysis distinguishes between Freudian psychoanalysis, which Derrida claims “opens itself to the theme of writing,” and Lacanian psychoanalysis, tarred for Derrida by the “congenital phonologism” of linguistics (“Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 199). 82.  Jacques Derrida, “Psychoanalysis Searches the State of Its Soul: The Impossible Beyond of a Sovereign Cruelty,” in Without Alibi, ed. and trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 238–80, 273, 243–44. Originally published as États d’âme de la psychanalyse (Paris: Galilée, 2000).

   Notes 83.  Michel de Certeau, “Psychoanalysis and Its History,” in Heterologies: Discourse on the Other, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 1–16, 4. 84. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” in General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Rieff, trans. Joan Rivière (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 164– 79, 164. 85.  Patricia Yaeger identifies a state of “spatial melancholia—the unmourned phantoms that still hover, dreaming and cursing, in geography’s thoroughfares” in the introduction to Yaeger, The Geography of Identity, 1–38, 27. This anthology’s fifth section, titled “Phantasmatic Homelands,” contains several useful case studies of melancholic geographies within and beyond the nation. On melancholia as a central condition of national identification, particularly with regard to the negotiation of a traumatic past, see Eric Santner’s discussion of postwar Germany; Julia Kristeva’s description of the French nation as a transitional object on the way to an idealized cosmpolitanism; Rose’s reading of Israel, Palestine, and postapartheid South Africa; Baucom’s consideration of national-imperial desire; Cheng’s discussion of the melancholic structure of racist national culture and of the Asian American subject within it; Viego’s discussion of loss and the Latino subject; and Khanna’s extensive anatomy of “national melancholy” in the colonial scene; as well as Homi Bhabha’s shorter exploration. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Rose, States of Fantasy; Baucom, Out of Place, especially 184–87; Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Viego, Dead Subjects; Khanna, Dark Continents, 145–206; Bhabha, “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States,” in Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory: Thresholds, ed. James Donald (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 89–103. A related vein of criticism tests the viability of melancholia as a model for progressive politics that begins to connect the apprehension of loss to the appreciation of, in Judith Butler’s words, “common human vulnerability.” Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York: Verso, 2004), 30. For essays inspired by Butler’s previous elaborations in The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), see Loss: The Politics of Mourning, ed. David Eng and David Kazanjian (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). For a critique of a perceived “rehabilitation of melancholy” in contemporary criticism, see Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657– 81, 659. I discuss the latter in Chapter 6. 86.  Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 195–96. 87.  Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, The Wellek Library Lectures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 90. 88.  Balibar, “The Nation Form,” 95.

Notes    89.  Butler, Bodies That Matter, 99. 90. Ibid., 268, fn. 7. 91.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin, 1989), 215. 92.  Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 180–81. 93.  Moretti, Modern Epic, 50. 94. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 71. 95. The canonical example of the first trend is Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1957). For imaginative explorations of the second trend, see Said, Culture and Imperialism; Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel and The Novel; Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” in Bhabha, Nation and Narration 44–70; Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre: The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Firdous Azim, The Colonial Rise of the Novel (New York: Routledge, 1993); Michael Valdez Moses, The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and most recently, Joseph P. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Human Rights Law (Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press, 2007). 96.  Geörgy Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 80. 97.  Jameson, Political Unconscious, 139. Also see the discussion of Lukács, particularly his notion of the novel as memory, in Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 171–76. 98. Tzvetan Todorov, Poetics of Prose, trans. Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 15, 18. 99.  Michael McKeon, “Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel,” in Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach,” ed. Michael McKeon (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 382–99, 396. Also see McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 100.  Geörgy Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962), 240. 101.  Jameson, Political Unconscious, 141. 102.  Commenting on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Jameson writes: “To think dialectically is to invent a space from which to think these two identical yet antagonistic features [the revolutionary role of the bourgeoisie, the historical degradation and depersonalization of individuals] together all at once: in that, dialectical thinking is related to tragic thought, or better still, it is the latter’s collective and ‘comic’ inversion” (ibid., 235).

   Notes 103.  V. S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964), 226, 223, 225. 104.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 30. 105. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1991). 106. Lukács, The Historical Novel, 41. 107. Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 139. On the historical novel as the template for the postcolonial novel, see M. Keith Booker, “The Historical Novel in Ayi Kwei Armah and David Caute: African Literature, Socialist Literature, and the Bourgeois Cultural Tradition,” Critique 38 (1997): 235–48. For treatments of Midnight’s Children as historical novel, see Jonathan White, “Politics and the Individual in the Modernist Historical Novel,” in Recasting the World: Writing after Colonialism, ed. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 208–40; and Urmil Talwar, “Midnight’s Children: A Fantasy,” in Contesting Postcolonialisms, ed. Jasbir Jain and Veena Singh (New Delhi: Rawat, 2000), 247–60. For a discussion that builds on Booker to propose Midnight’s Children as that other proto-nationalist genre, the bildungsroman, see Dubravka Juraga, “ ‘The Mirror of Us All’: Midnight’s Children and the Twentieth-Century Bildungsroman,” in Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker (New York: G. K. Hall, 1999), 169–87. For a salutary reading of Rushdie’s novel as a sending up of privileged nationalhistorical genres such as bildungsroman and historical novel that “demands to be read in a multiplicity of manners,” see Michael Reder, “Rewriting History and Identity: The Reinvention of Myth, Epic, and Allegory in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” in Booker, Critical Essays, 225–49, 234. 108.  For an alternative view of metaphor as the guiding strategy of Rushdie’s entire oeuvre, see Jaina C. Sanga, Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001). 109.  Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” in Location of Culture, 85–93, 90. 110.  Many details of the Emergency, as of the events of the Jallianwallah Bagh massacre in Amritsar in 1919, the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947, the coup in Pakistan in 1958, the India-China War of 1962, the India-Pakistan War of 1965, and the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, are borrowed from two introductory textbooks on India. On Rushdie’s use of Stanley Wolpert’s A New History of India, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), see David Lipscomb, “Caught in a Strange Middle Ground: Contesting Rushdie’s History in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children,” Diaspora 1/2 (1991): 163–89. On his use of Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight (New York: Avon, 1976), see Catherine Cundy, Salman Rushdie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). For an alternative assessment of the Emergency’s achievements in particular, and Rushdie’s misrepresentation of them, see Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History,

Notes    and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War,” in Booker, Critical Essays, 283–313. 111. Rudyard Kipling, Kim (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1996), 96. 112.  For a sampling of postcolonial scholarship on Kim, see Benita Parry, “The Content and Discontent of Kipling’s Imperialism,” New Formations 6 (1988): 49– 64; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 132–62; Suleri Goodyear, Rhetoric of English India, 111–31; Bart Moore-Gilbert, Kipling and Orientalism (London: Croom Helm, 1986); and “Reading Kipling, Reading Bhabha,” in Writing India, 1757–1990: The Literature of British India, ed. Moore-Gilbert (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 111–38. 113.  Meenakshi Mukherjee, The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7. On the history of the English novel in India, also see Mukherjee, Realism and Reality: The Novel and Society in India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985); Mukherjee, “The Beginnings of the Indian Novel in India,” in A History of Indian Literature in English, ed. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 92– 102; Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Bishnupriya Ghosh, When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004). For a discussion of the relation between Midnight’s Children and Kim that emphasizes the imperial affiliations produced by the genealogy, see Richard Cronin, “The Indian English Novel: Kim and Midnight’s Children,” Commonwealth Essays and Studies 8 (1985): 57–73. 114. Raja Rao, Kanthapura (New York: New Directions, 1963), vii; and G. V. Desani, All about H. Hatterr (New York: King Penguin, 1982), 29. For an excellent discussion of Rao and Desani, see Leela Gandhi, “Novelists of the 1930s and 1940s,” in Mehrotra, History of Indian Literature, 168–92. For an account of the place of Hamlet in psychoanalysis and in postcolonial melancholia, see Khanna, Dark Continents, 231–68. 115. Salman Rushdie, “Interview,” Helix 19/20 (1984): 56–69, qtd. in Neelam Srivastava, Secularism in the Postcolonial Indian Novel: National and Cosmopolitan Narratives in English (New York: Routledge, 2008), at 143–44. 116.  Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 11; Timothy Brennan, Salman Rushdie and the Third World (London: Macmillan, 1989), 79–85. 117. Linda Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” in McKeon, Theory of the Novel, 830–50, 845. For an extended argument, see Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1989), and A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1990). 118. Tim Parnell, “Salman Rushdie: From Colonial Politics to Postmodern Poetics,” in Moore-Gilbert, Writing India, 236–61, 249, 255; Stephen Slemon, “Modernism’s Last Post,” in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-colonialism and Post-mod-

   Notes ernism (Hemel Hempstead, UK: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 3, 5, qtd. in Parnell at 245, 250; and Kum Kum Sangari, “The Politics of the Possible,” Cultural Critique 7 (1987): 157–86. 119.  Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 26. 120.  Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 1992), 369, 180. 121. Srivastava, Secularism, 42, 45, 30. This discussion of the possibilities of allegory to reconfigure postcolonial history is very much in accord with my own reading of the figure; see especially chaps. 4 and 5. 122.  Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 80. 123. Salman Rushdie, “The Riddle of Midnight: India, August 1987,” in Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 26–33, 27, 32. 124. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” in Imaginary Homelands, 9–21, 10. 125. Rushdie defends English as “the most powerful medium of communication in the world” (and chooses a phrase from All about H. Hatterr as title) in “Damme, This Is the Oriental Scene for You! Indians are writing some of the most adventurous fiction today. Why isn’t it in Hindi (or Assamese, or Bengali, or one of the fifteen other national languages)?” The New Yorker, June 23 and 30, 1997. For a response to what he calls Rushdie’s “Global English” and critique of its globalizing imperatives, see Radhakrishnan, “Globality Is Not Worldliness.” For a reconsideration, see Srivastava, Secularism, 140–56. 126.  Josna E. Rege, “Victim into Protagonist? Midnight’s Children and the Post-Rushdie National Narratives of the Eighties,” in Booker, Critical Essays, 250– 82, 265, 267, 277. 127.  Booker, “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity,” especially 300– 308; Brennan, Rushdie and the Third World, 84–85. 128. Neil ten Kortenaar, Self, Nation, Text in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 6; Rushdie, “A Dream of Glorious Return,” in Step across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992–2002 (Toronto: Knopf, 2002), 180–209, 180, qtd. in Ten Kortenaar, at 6. 129. Reder, “Rewriting History and Identity,” 235. 130. Todd M. Kuchta, “Allegorizing the Emergency: Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” in Booker, Critical Essays, 205–24. 131.  Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977), 178. 132.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 183–84. For additional discussions of Benjamin’s theory of allegory, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 159– 77; J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Allegories,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Mor-

Notes    ton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 355–70; and Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981): 109–22; and Chapter 3 of this book. 133.  Avery Gordon, Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 63. Interestingly, Gordon finds psychoanalysis distinctly less useful than literature in accessing the social reality of haunting because of what she sees as its tendency to choose psychic prehistory over historical trauma, the individual over social, and the explanatory presence of the drives over the haunting absence of all that is disappeared from social life, yet constructs it nonetheless. In the next chapter I attempt to discern the presence of such social realities as nationalism and globalism, racialism, imperialism, and anti-imperialism by means of a reading method that understands haunting as the central structure of psychoanalytic temporality. 134. Rushdie, “The Riddle of Midnight,” 33. 135. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 9–21, 12–13. In “Constructions in Analysis” (1937) Freud describes the analyst’s task to “make out what has been forgotten from the traces which it has left behind, or more correctly, to construct it.” This work, he later adds, “resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice.” The difference, of course, is that “psychical objects are incomparably more complicated than the excavator’s material ones,” and that what is for the archaeologist the end (construction) is for the analyst “only a preliminary labour.” Sigmund Freud, “Constructions in Analysis,” in Therapy and Technique, ed. Philip Rieff, trans. James Strachey (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 273–86, 275, 277. 136. Rushdie, “Imaginary Homelands,” 13. chapter 2 1. References refer, respectively, to Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, excerpt rpt. in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and the Critics, ed. Bruce Harkness (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1960), 110–21, 116; Guerard, introduction, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: The American Library, 1961), 9; Frederick Crews, “Conrad’s Uneasiness—and Ours,” Partisan Review (1967), rpt. in Out of My System: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Critical Method (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 41–62; Robert O. Evans, “Conrad’s Underworld,” in Harkness, Heart of Darkness and the Critics, 137–45; and Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism,” in Conrad Revisited, ed. Ross C. Murfin (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 71–88. 2. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Norman O. Sherry, Conrad’s Eastern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Conrad refers to Heart of Darkness and the short

   Notes story “An Outpost of Progress” as “all the spoil I brought out from the centre of Africa” in the author’s note to Youth. 3.  J. Hillis Miller, “Heart of Darkness Revisited,” in Murfin, Conrad Revisited, 31–51; Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 257–64; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin-de-Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990), 95–104; and David Thorburn, Conrad’s Romanticism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974). 4.  Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” The Massachusetts Review 18 (1977): 782–94, rpt. in Joseph Conrad: Third World Perspectives, ed. Robert D. Hammer (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1990), 119–30. Postcolonial critiques of Achebe’s lack of engagement with the novella’s textual and stylistic dimension include Wilson Harris, “The Frontier on Which Heart of Darkness Stands,” Research in African Literatures 12 (1981): 86–92; C. P. Sarvan, “Racism and the Heart of Darkness,” The International Fiction Review 7 (1980): 6–11; and Frances B. Singh, “The Colonialist Bias of Heart of Darkness,” Conradiana 10 (1978): 41–54. All of these are reprinted, along with Achebe’s essay, in the Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: Norton, 1988). All subsequent references to the novella are to this edition. There is an extensive critical literature on Conrad and imperialism, much of it dedicated to exploring the complexities of a text whose indictment of Belgian colonialism drew accolades from the Congo Reform Association but whose attitude toward British imperialism remains rather more ambiguous. Book-length studies include Robert E. Lee, Conrad’s Colonialism (The Hague: Mouton, 1969); John McClure, Kipling and Conrad: The Colonial Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), especially 85–95; and Jacques Darras, Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire, trans. Anne Luyat and Jacques Darras (London: Macmillan Press, 1982). For a shorter discussion, see Jonah Raskin’s grounding of Conrad’s anticolonialism in his anti-Russian Polish nationalism in “Imperialism: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” The Journal of Contemporary History 2 (April 1967): 113–31. Also see Hunt Hawkins, “Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, and the Congo Reform Movement,” Journal of Modern Literature 9 (1981): 65–80; “Conrad and Congolese Exploitation,” Conradiana 13 (1981): 94–100; and “Conrad’s Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness,” PMLA 94 (1979): 286–99. 5.  Christopher GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double-Mapping of Europe and Empire (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 127, 7. 6.  For a thoughtful discussion of the tensions between nationalism and internationalism in Heart of Darkness against the backdrop of the crisis of English and European liberal nationalism, see Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 97–121. For a discussion

Notes    of the temporal inflections of the novella’s national and extranational coordinates, see Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 173–78. 7.  Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 142. 8.  For exemplary treatments, see Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers (London: Macmillan Press, 1983); Jameson, Political Unconscious, 206–80; and Edward Said’s career-spanning consideration of Conrad in Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); Said, “Literature, Theory, and Commitment, II,” in Crisscrossing Boundaries in African Literature, Annual Selected Papers of the African Literature Association, ed. Ken Harrow, Jonathan Ngaté, and Clarisse Zimra (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press and the African Literature Association, 1991), 65–70; Said, “Intellectuals in the Post-colonial World,” Salmagundi 70 (1986): 44–64; and Said, Culture and Imperialism, 19–30. On the constitutive coupling of modernism and imperialism, see Torgovnick, Gone Primitive; Jameson, “Modernism and Imperialism,” in Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, and Edward Said, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 43–68; and Modernism and the European Unconscious, ed. Peter Collier and Judy Davies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990). For a discussion of Conrad, British imperialism, and the global, see Sanjay Krishnan, Reading the Global: Troubling Perspectives on Britain’s Empire in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 9.  Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” in Hammer, Joseph Conrad, 120. 10.  Moretti, Modern Epic, 5. 11.  V. S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” in Naipaul, The Return of Eva Peron (New York: Vintage, 1981), 223–45, 245. 12. See Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Stephen Slemon, The Empire Writes Back (New York: Routledge, 1989); John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London and New York: Continuum, 2001); Angel Rama, Transculturación en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 1987); and Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunto Cubana (1947; Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978). 13.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books / Random House, 1979); Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” “Sly Civility,” and “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi,” all in Bhabha, Location of Culture; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak? Speculations on Widow Sacrifice” (1985), in Marxist Interpretations of Literature and Culture: Limits, Frontiers, Boundaries, ed. Laurence Grossberg and Cary Nelson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313.

   Notes 14.  Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 78–106; and JanMohamed, Manichean Aesthetics: The Politics of Literature in Colonial Africa (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983); Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”; and Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice. 15.  Madhava Prasad, “The ‘Other’ Worldliness of Postcolonial Discourse: A Critique,” Critical Quarterly 34 (1992): 74–89, 87–88. 16.  Autoethnography occurs when “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways that engage with the colonizer’s own terms.” Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5–7. Rob Nixon identifies a compelling instance of what might be called literary autoethnography in his study of the “repeated, reinforcing, transgressive appropriations” of The Tempest by African and Caribbean intellectuals during the anticolonial nationalist politics of the late 1950s to the early 1970s. Rob Nixon, “Caribbean and African Appropriations of The Tempest,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1987): 557–78, 558. 17.  Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 17. 18.  Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 233. 19. Douglas A. Spalding, “Herbert Spencer’s Psychology,” Nature 7 (1873): 298–300, qtd. in Robert L. Carneiro, introduction, The Evolution of Society: Selections from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), v–lvii, x. For a discussion of the differences between Spencerian and Darwinian concepts of evolution, see George W. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (1968; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 234–69. For useful overviews of the general doctrine of progress and the ideology of social evolutionism, see Francisco J. Ayala, “The Evolutionary Concept of Progress,” in Progress and Its Discontents, ed. Gabriel A. Almond, Marvin Chodorow, and Roy Harvey Pearce (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 106–24; and Kenneth Bock, “Theories of Progress, Development, Evolution,” in A History of Sociological Analysis, ed. Tom Bottomore and Robert Nisbet (New York: Basic Books, 1978), 39–79. Excellent contextualizations of Spencer’s theories in Victorian thought can be found in J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society: A Study in Victorian Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer: The Evolution of a Sociologist (London: Heinemann, 1971); and Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 20.  Fabian uses the phrase “the denial of coevalness” to describe the systematic tendency of discourses like social evolutionism and anthropology to place their referents “in a time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (Time and the Other, 31).

Notes    21. Herbert Spencer, “Progress: Its Law and Cause,” Westminster Review (April 1857), rpt. in Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects by Herbert Spencer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910), 153–97, 160. 22. On Spencer’s Lamarckianism (which he defended to his death despite contrary evidence suggested by the late nineteenth-century rediscovery of Mendelian genetics and the emergence of August Weismann’s germ plasm theory of inheritance), see Stocking, Race, 239–41. On the new embryological model of fetal development and its impact on Spencer, see Peter J. Bowler, “The Changing Meaning of Evolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 36 (1975): 95–111. 23. Spencer, “On Progress,” 163, 160. On Spencer’s debts to Smith, as well as to the biologist Henri Milne-Edwards, who analogized Smith’s concept of the social division of labor to the physiological specialization of organs and functions within the individual organism, see Peel, Herbert Spencer, 137–40; Stanislav Andreski, ed. and introduction, Herbert Spencer: Structure, Function and Evolution (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971); and Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Routledge, 1991), 422–38. 24. Reba N. Soffer, Ethics and Society in England: The Revolution in the Social Sciences, 1870–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 121. Spencer, “The Law of Evolution” in First Principles (1893), rpt. in Andreski, Herbert Spencer, 91–92. 25. Spencer, Principles of Psychology, 1st ed. (1855), vol. 1, 465, and 2nd ed. (1870), vol. 2, 535, qtd. in Peel, Herbert Spencer, at 124. A concise mapping of the differences between the races in terms of mental evolution and a clear correlation of the mental structures of the civilized infant and the “inferior human races” can be found in Spencer’s famous essay “The Comparative Psychology of Man,” Mind 1 (1876), rpt. in Significant Contributions to the History of Psychology, 1750–1920, ed. Daniel N. Robinson (Washington, DC: University Publications of America, 1977), 7–20. For an attempt to clear Spencer of the charges of evolutionary “unilinearism” and the racial hierarchy that its portrait of developmental stages inevitably implied, see Carneiro’s claim that Spencer, unlike other social evolutionists of his day, was more concerned with evolutionary process than stages (Evolution of Society, xlii). Effectively discounting the fundamental racialization of the categories of comparative analysis in Spencer’s work, Carneiro’s selections for this volume excise several of the broadest analogies between organisms and societies, nonscientific ethical speculations, and “occasional passages in which Spencer proposed racial explanations for certain cultural features,” so as to “exclude from the volume interpretations that are no longer tenable” (v). The indictment or exoneration of Spencer (or for that matter, Conrad) as racist seems to me less useful than the exposure of the racialized foundations of their respective works, and analysis of the various uses to which they put the concept of “race” and its corollary terms of “nation” and “mind.”

   Notes 26. Spencer, Principles of Sociology (1876), vol. 1, 38, qtd. in Peel, Herbert Spencer, at 200. 27. Spencer, “The Origin of Animal-Worship,” in Three Essays, vis.; Laws, and the Order of Their Discovery; Origin of Animal Worship; and Political Fetichism, Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 68 (New York: J. Fitzgerald, 1885), 8–20, 10. For an intriguing discussion of Spencer’s views on primitive belief in the context of a broader discourse of “metaphysical phantoms” in modern social theory, see Christopher Herbert, Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Also of note is Freud’s brief discussion of Spencer in Totem and Taboo. Whereas Spencer, in Freud’s words, held “the indefiniteness and incomprehensibility of primitive languages” responsible for the origins of ancestor worship and subsequent totemism, Freud tended away from such sociolinguistic explanation toward a psychocultural genealogy of primitive belief, grounded in the formation of the Oedipus complex and the subsequent repression of the childhood desire to act it out. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. A. A. Brill (1913; New York: Vintage Books, 1946), 144. 28.  First Principles (1893), as excerpted and rpt. in Andreski, Herbert Spencer, 82. 29. Drawing on Norman Sherry’s Conrad’s Western World, Watt cites seven possible sources for Kurtz, including the French officer whom Conrad actually went up the Congo to retrieve in 1890, various British officers who became embroiled in the conflict between the Congolese Arab slave traders and the Belgian and other European powers, a British missionary turned ivory trader, a French mercenary, a German explorer, and that most quintessential of late Victorian explorers, the American Henry M. Stanley. Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 141–46. On the going-native theme, also see McClure, Kipling and Conrad, 132–49. For a useful survey of Stanley’s scopic imperial descriptive style in relation to Conrad and other late imperial writers, see David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993). 30. Henry Maudsley, Body and Will, Being an Essay concerning Will in Its Metaphysical, Psychological and Pathological Aspects (1883), qtd. in Redmond O’Hanlon, Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction (Edinburgh: Salamander Press, 1984), at 47, 45. 31.  Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 106; Joseph Conrad’s Letters to R. B. Cunninghame, 53; both qtd. in Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, at 151–53. 32. Spencer, “Re-barbarisation,” Facts and Comments (1902), rpt. in Andreski, Herbert Spencer, 207–13, 207. 33. Letter to M. D. Conway, rpt. in The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (1908), qtd. in Peel, Herbert Spencer, at 233.

Notes    34. On Conrad’s possible shift from a Spencerian to “post-Spencerian” view, in which the divide between civilized and savage is persistently troubled, see John E. Saveson, “Conrad’s View of Primitive Peoples in Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness,” Modern Fiction Studies 16 (1970): 163–83. For additional discussions of Conrad’s relationship to Spencer, see Hunt Hawkins, “Conrad and the Psychology of Colonialism”; Allan Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism (London: Croom Helm, 1983); and C. T. Watts, A Preface to Conrad (New York: Longman, 1982). Hawkins places Spencer among the texts Conrad read between 1895 and 1900, Hunter traces a Spencerian notion of moral progress in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and Watts argues Conrad turned Darwinism against those political Darwinians, including Spencer, who misappropriated Darwin’s theories on species competition to the imperial battleground between races and nations. 35.  Arthur J. Balfour, Decadence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), 7–8, qtd. in GoGwilt, Invention of the West, at 237. 36.  Max Nordau, Degeneration, ed. George Mosse (New York: Howard Fertig, 1968), 554. For a comprehensive survey of degeneration theory, see R. B. Kershner Jr., “Degeneration: The Explanatory Nightmare,” Georgia Review 40 (1986): 416–44. 37. Nordau, Degeneration, 500, 494. 38.  For critical arguments that Conrad had read Nordau’s Degeneration prior to writing Heart of Darkness, and point-by-point comparisons of Kurtz and Nordau’s gifted degenerate, see Watts, “Nordau and Kurtz: A Footnote to Heart of Darkness,” Notes and Queries 219 (1974): 226–27; and Raskin, “Imperialism,” 125–28. 39.  Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 250. 40.  Chris Bongie, “Exotic Nostalgia: Conrad and the New Imperialism,” in Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature, ed. Jonathan Arac and Harriet Ritvo (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 268–85, 273; and The Works of Lord Macaulay, ed. Lady Trevelyan (London: 1879), vol. 8, 139, qtd. in Bongie, at 271. 41.  Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 233. 42. See Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction” (1914), SE 14: 67–103; Freud, “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes” (1925), SE 19: 248–58; Freud, “Fetishism” (1927), SE 21: 148–57; and Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence” (1938), SE 23: 271–78. For discussions of Heart of Darkness’s several fetishes (ivory, Kurtz, imperial ideology, and Marlow’s lie, a compensatory screen over or disavowal of the knowledge of colonialism’s brutality), see Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness, 261– 64; Parry, Conrad and Imperialism, 35–37; Raskin, “Imperialism,” 126–31; and, for

   Notes the fullest treatment, David Simpson, Fetishism and Imagination: Dickens, Melville, Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). 43.  Bhabha, “The Other Question,” in Location of Culture, 72. 44.  William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish,” pt. I, Res 9 (1985): 5–17, 12. The argument continues in “The Problem of the Fetish,” pt. II, Res 13 (1987): 23–45; and “The Problem of the Fetish,” pt. IIIa, Res 16 (1988): 105–23. For further speculation, see Pietz, “Fetishism and Materialism: The Limits of Theory in Marx” in the excellent volume edited by Pietz and Emily Apter, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 119–51. For a critique, see McClintock, Imperial Leather, especially 184–85. 45.  Psychobiographies include Bernard Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967); Guerard, Conrad the Novelist; and Frederick Karl, Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979). For Jungian approaches, see Bettina Knapp, Exile and the Writer: Exoteric and Esoteric Experiences, a Jungian Approach (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991); Nancy McNeal, “Joseph Conrad’s Voice in Heart of Darkness: A Jungian Approach,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 1 (1979): 1–12; and Gloria Young, “Quest and Discovery: Joseph Conrad’s and Carl Jung’s African Journeys,” Modern Fiction Studies 28 (1982–83): 583–89. Frederick Crews offers both a classically Freudian reading of Marlow’s voyage as a dream-journey back to the primal scene inspired by Conrad’s own relationship to his dead father and his idolization of his mother (“Conrad’s Uneasiness—and Ours”) and a subsequent refutation of all such interpretations (“Conrad by Daylight”). Both are reprinted in Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 46.  John Tessitore, “Freud, Conrad, and Heart of Darkness,” College Literature 7 (1980): 30–40, rpt. in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Modern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987), 91–104, 93. 47.  Frederick R. Karl, “Introduction to the Danse Macabre: Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” Modern Fiction Studies (1968), rpt. in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 123–38, 124. For a further analogy of Freud’s thesis of the death drive in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) to the European scramble for Africa, see Gary Adelman, Heart of Darkness: Search for the Unconscious, Twayne’s Masterwork Studies 5, ed. Robert Lecker (Boston: Twayne Publishers / G. K. Hall, 1987), especially 28. 48.  For wide-ranging explorations of primitivism that inventory both Heart of Darkness and Freud, see Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), especially 150–96; and Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. On Freud’s primitivism, see Seshadri-Crooks,

Notes    “The Primitive as Analyst”; Eng, Racial Castration, especially 6–16; Khanna, Dark Continents, especially chaps. 1 and 2; Edwin R. Wallace IV, Freud and Anthropology (New York: International Universities Press, 1983); Peter L. Rudnytsky, Freud and Oedipus (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); and Ritchie Robertson, “Primitivism and Psychology: Nietzsche, Freud, Thomas Mann,” in Colliers and Davies, Modernism and the European Unconscious, 79–93. For suggestive examinations of the relationship between psychoanalytic primitivism and visual aesthetics, see Doane, Femmes Fatales, 209–48; Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in Modern Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 162–98; and Hal Foster, “ ‘Primitive’ Scenes,” Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 69–102. 49. See Brooks’s outline of such a method in “The Idea of a Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism,” in Psychoanalysis and Storytelling; and Reading for the Plot, especially 90–112. 50. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” in Collected Papers, ed. Ernest Jones, trans. Alix Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1934), vol. 4, 368–407, 369. 51.  Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 386. Otto Rank, The Double: A Psychoanalytic Study by Otto Rank, ed. and trans. Harry Tucker Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971), originally published as Der Doppelganger in Imago (1914). On the double, the uncanny, and psychoanalytic literary criticism, see Clifford Hallam, “The Double as Incomplete Self: Toward a Definition of Doppelganger,” in Fearful Symmetry: Doubles and Doubling in Literature and Film, Papers from the Fifth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, ed. Eugene J. Crook (Tallahassee: University Press of Florida, 1981), 1–31; and Stories of the Double, ed. Albert J. Guerard (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1967). 52. Hertz, End of the Line, 109. 53. Helène Cixous, “Fiction and Its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche (The ‘Uncanny’),” trans. Robert Dennomé, New Literary History 7 (1976): 525–48, 525, 533. 54. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 108, note 1. 55.  Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 173–285, 220, note 32. Sarah Kofman claims that Derrida merely “mimes” an undecidability and disseminatory practice that was already there in “The ‘Uncanny’ ” with Freud’s “infinite chain of substitutes” for the originary place of the uncanny (mother’s body, crypt, haunted house, primitive belief ). Kofman, “Un philosophe ‘unheimlich,’ ” in Écarts: Quatre éssais à propos de Jacques Derrida (Paris: Fayard, 1973), 190, 180, translation mine. 56. Derrida, Specters, 144–45; Spectres, 231. 57. Derrida, Specters, 100; Spectres, 163. 58. Lars Engle, “The Political Uncanny: The Novels of Nadine Gordimer,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (1989): 101–27, 110.

   Notes 59.  Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 20. 60. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 76. 61. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Jonston-Davies (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1970); and Mahasweta Devi, “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha,” in Imaginary Maps, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York: Routledge, 1995), 95–196. 62. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 31; Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso, 1997), 37, qtd. in Spivak, at 31. 63.  Chinua Achebe, “The Novelist as Teacher,” New Statesman (January 29, 1965): 161–62, rpt. in African Writers on African Writing, ed. G. D. Killam (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 1–4, 4. 64.  Chinua Achebe, “The Role of the Writer in a New Nation,” Nigeria Magazine 89 (1966): 118–26, rpt. in Killam, African Writers, 7–13, 8. Achebe’s call to reclaim the African past has been criticized by African Marxists like Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, who insists “it is only in a socialist context that a look at yesterday can be meaningful in illuminating today and tomorrow.” Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, “The Writer and His Past,” in Homecoming: Essays on African and Caribbean Literature, Culture and Politics (London: Heinemann, 1972), 39–46, 45–46. Emmanuel Ngara, criticizing Achebe, claims that it is “no longer sufficient to reject Western notions about the African by singing lyrics about his past as Achebe and Camara Laye had done in Things Fall Apart and The African Child,” while Chidi Amuta writes that “although Arrow of God is a flawless artistic statement on the cultural implications of the colonial conquest, we look in vain for any suggestion of the economic axis of the colonial encounter.” Emmanuel Ngara, Art and Ideology in the African Novel: A Study of the Influence of Marxism on African Writing (London: Heinemann, 1985), 35; and Chidi Amuta, Towards a Sociology of African Literature (Oguta, Nigeria: Zim Pan-African Publishers, 1986), 52. 65. See Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru, Black Writers, White Audience, a Critical Approach to African Literature (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1978). 66.  Christopher Miller, Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 169–70, 179–80. 67.  Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 262. 68. Denis Williams, “The Mbari Publications,” Nigeria Magazine 75 (December 1962): 69; qtd. in Egejuru, Black Writers, at 192. On African writers’ importation and transformation of the novel, see Studies in the African Novel, Modern Essays on African Literature 1, ed. Samuel Omo Asein and Albert Olu Ashaolu (Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 1986); James Snead, “European Pedigrees / African Contagions: Nationality, Narrative, and Communality in Tutuola, Achebe, and Reed,” in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 231–49; Simon Gikandi,

Notes    Reading the African Novel (London: James Currey, 1987); and M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998). 69. Interview of Chinua Achebe by Phanuel Akubueze Egejuru in Egejuru, Towards African Literary Independence: A Dialogue with Contemporary African Writers, Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies 53 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 234. 70. In contrast to the French colonial model of assimilation that extended the promise of Frenchness to an elite subsection of the colonized, the British model of indirect rule assumed a more lasting difference between the cultures of colonizer and colonized. The installation of native leaders, designed to at once preserve indigenous structures of authority and rule and reinsert them into a colonial hierarchy of power, notably failed in the case of the Igbo, whose pluralistic forms of social organization could not be easily translated into single chieftaincies. The warrant chief system led to the 1927 Igbo women’s riot and the subsequent British return to more traditional power structures as the basis for “native administration.” For a useful discussion of this political background, see David Carroll, Chinua Achebe: Novelist, Poet, Critic (1980; London: Macmillan, 1990), especially chaps. 1 and 4. 71.  Chinua Achebe, Arrow of God, 2nd ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1974), 80. 72. Ronald Christ, “Among the Igbo,” New York Times Book Review (December 12, 1967): 22, qtd. in Egejuru, Black Writers, White Audience, at 106; Egejuru, 117. For a discussion of proverbial language, which Achebe claims expresses the character of its speakers in a way that Standard English cannot, see Achebe, “The African Writer and the English Language,” rpt. in Achebe, Morning Yet on Creation Day (London: Heinemann, 1975), 55–62; Ken Harrow, Thresholds of Change in African Literature: The Emergence of a Tradition (London: Heinemann, 1994), 109–38; Simon Gikandi, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: Currey, 1991); and Emmanuel Ngara, Stylistic Criticism and the African Novel: A Study of the Language, Art and Context of African Fiction (London: Heinemann, 1982), 58–80, especially 68–70. 73. Ngara, Stylistic Criticism, 79. 74.  Chinua Achebe, “English and the African Writer,” Transition 7.36 (1968): 31–37, qtd. in Carroll, Chinua Achebe, at 32. 75.  Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986). 76. Steven Blakemore, “ ‘An Africa of Words’: V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River,” The South Carolina Review 18 (1985): 15–23, 15. Suleri Goodyear similarly describes Naipaul’s essay rehearsal for A Bend in the River, “Conrad’s Darkness,” as being addressed to a ghost (Rhetoric of English India, 151).

   Notes 77. On these and other parallels, see Blakemore, ibid.; Elaine Campbell, “A Refinement of Rage: V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River,” World Literature Written in English 18 (1979): 394–406; Lynda Prescott, “Past and Present Darkness: Sources for V. S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River,” Modern Fiction Studies 30 (1984): 547–59; and Susan Andrade, “Upending the River: Surface Equanimity, Submerged Ideology,” in Africa Literature Conference Papers, 12th Meeting, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, pt. II (Baltimore: University of Maryland Press, 1986), 1–7. For an assertion that Naipaul’s novel misses the anti-imperial complexities of Conrad’s novella, see Peter Nazareth, “Out of Darkness: Conrad and Other Third World Writers,” Conradiana 14 (1982): 173–87. 78.  V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (New York: Vintage International–Random House, 1989), 16. 79.  V. S. Naipaul, “A New King for the Congo: Mobuto and the Nihilism of Africa,” in Return of Eva Peron, 183–220, 194. 80. Rob Nixon, London Calling: V. S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 102. 81. See Said, “Intellectuals,” 53; Nixon, London, 15; Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Strictures on Structures: The Prospects for a Structuralist Poetics of African Fiction,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Routledge, 1990), 127–50, 146; and Gorra, After Empire, 72. 82. Suleri Goodyear, Rhetoric, 32, 29. 83.  V. S. Naipaul, An Enigma of Arrival (New York: Random House, 1988), 101. 84. Leela Gandhi, “Made in England: V. S. Naipaul and English Fictions,” in England through Colonial Eyes in Twentieth-Century Fiction, ed. Gandhi, Ann Blake, and Sue Thomas (New York: Palgrave–St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 128–42, 130, 134. For an excellent discussion of Enigma’s postimperial melancholy, also see Baucom, Out of Place, 176–84. 85. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness,” 233. 86.  Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 13. 87. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 77–78. 88. Naipaul’s returns to his own past in books about Trinidad (A House for Mister Biswas, 1961) and India (An Area of Darkness, 1964; India: A Wounded Civilization, 1977; and India: A Million Mutinies Now, 1990) are hardly less pessimistic in their scorn toward “half-made societies” of betrayed expectations and nationalist failures. For a provocative discussion of Naipaul’s representations of India in relation to the experience of indentured diaspora and its specific forms of national and cultural loss, see Vijay Mishra, “Traumatic Memory, Mourning and V. S. Naipaul,” in Peripheral Centres, Central Peripheries: India and Its Diaspora(s), ed. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn (with Vera Alexander), Transcultural Anglophone Studies (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), vol. 1, 129–55. For a discussion of Naipaul’s fiction in

Notes    relation to prior national literary traditions, see John Thieme, The Web of Tradition: Uses of Allusion in V. S. Naipaul’s Fiction (Sydney: Dangaroo Press / Hansib Publications, 1987). 89. David Dabydeen, “Coolie Odyssey,” in Coolie Odyssey: Poems by David Dabydeen (London: Hansib, 1988), 9–13. 90. Dabydeen’s poetry collections include Slave Song (Sydney: Dangaroo, 1984); and Turner (London: Cape, 1994). Novels include Disappearance (London: Secker & Warburg, 1993); The Counting House (London: Vintage, 1996); and A Harlot’s Progress (London: Cape, 1999). He has also written two critical studies: Hogarth’s Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (1985; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987); and The Black Presence in English Literature, ed. Dabydeen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). For an overview of Dabydeen’s work, see Thomas, “Liberating ‘Contrasting Spaces,’ ” in Gandhi, Blake, and Thomas, England through Colonial Eyes, 171–82. 91. David Dabydeen, The Intended (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991), 40. 92.  Margery Fee argues that The Intended, in its oscillation between present and past and its digressive, rambling narrative structure in fact “mimics” the linguistic structure and tenseless syntax of Creole. Margery Fee, “Resistance and Complicity in David Dabydeen’s The Intended,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 24 (1993): 107–26, 122–24. Parry is more critical of the novel’s representation of Creole, which she suggests is ghettoized along with the “broken English” of immigrants into the direct reported speech of certain characters but exiled from the narrator’s own meticulous Standard English. Benita Parry, “David Dabydeen’s The Intended,” Kunapipi 13 (1991): 85–90, 89. For additional discussion of language, with reference to Dabydeen’s “Coolie Odyssey” and Slave Song also, and of Dabydeen’s use of sexual fantasy to skewer “colonialist appetites and practices” while preserving dominant notions of gender intact, see Parry, “Between Creole and Cambridge English: The Poetry of David Dabydeen,” Kunapipi 10 (1988): 1–14, 6, 9. 93. Interview of David Dabydeen by Wolfgang Binder, Journal of West Indian Literature 3 (1989): 67–80, 78–79. chapter 3 1.  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Atheneum, 1968), 385–414, 386. 2. Thus, Charles U. Smith and Lewis Killian describe 1910 as the moment when “Du Bois the sociologist had become Du Bois the ideologist of social protest.” Charles U. Smith and Lewis Killian, “Black Sociologists and Social Protest,” in Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 191–230,

   Notes 195. For a related argument, see Elliot Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois as Sociologist,” in Blackwell and Janowitz, Black Sociologists, 25–55; and Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (New York: Atheneum, 1968). Another critical version of this chronological narrative organizes Arnold Rampersad’s important study, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), which traces the “vocational tension” between Du Bois’s three careers of “historian and sociologist, poet and novelist, and propagandist” (47). Another variation on the theme describes the tension and ultimate transition between Du Bois’s positivistic social science and his messianic mysticism rooted in late nineteenth-century spiritualism. See Cynthia Schrager, “Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bois,” American Quarterly 48 (1996): 551–86. One instance of Du Bois’s own version of this critical narrative can be found in his autobiographical collection Dusk of Dawn, where he recalls his decision to leave Atlanta with the explanation, “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.” Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 67. For a similar characterization of the departure from Atlanta, see Du Bois, “A Pageant in Seven Decades: 1868–1938,” in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: KrausThomson Organization, 1986), 244–74, 252–54. The history of Du Bois’s return to Atlanta University after his nationalist beliefs forced his resignation from the more integrationist NAACP in 1934, followed by his retirement by Atlanta after twelve years, and subsequent return to the NAACP (which soon dismissed him again) further confirms the inadequacy of a strictly chronological narrative of Du Bois’s politics. 3. This, I take it, is the thrust of Thomas C. Holt’s reading of what he calls “Du Bois’s paradoxical positions” as not only “somehow emblematic of the African-American experience generally” but also “necessarily interactive.” Thomas C. Holt, “The Political Uses of Alienation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903–1940,” American Quarterly 42 (1990): 301–23, 305–6. Eric J. Sundquist’s comprehensive study of Du Bois in To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), similarly foregrounds a syncretic impulse in Du Bois’s work. Sundquist thus updates the chronological narrative by identifying both a division within Du Bois’s writing and a link, in the form of later works’ “completion” of earlier works (550). 4.  Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 21–37, rev. and rpt. as “Illusions of Race” in Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28–46; Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge, MA:

Notes    Harvard University Press, 1998); Gilroy, Black Atlantic; and for another elaboration of how the concept of “race” has distorted democracy and democratic culture, Paul Gilroy, Against Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 5.  With regard to Souls, Gilroy claims, “Du Bois’s nationalist impulses coexisted in that book with their transcendence” (Black Atlantic, 120–21). 6.  For rich considerations of this history of contact, see Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Michelle Ann Stephens, Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 7. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 97. 8.  Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 85. 9. On the Spencerian views of racial relations that marked the formative period of U.S. natural and social science, see John S. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution: Scientific Attitudes of Racial Inferiority, 1859–1900 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 121–52; and Stocking, Race, 234–69. In American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870–1920 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), Mark Pittenger explains that even progressive socialists “tended to fall prey to the Spencerian cosmic evolutionism,” an intellectual inheritance that not only laid a complicated groundwork of scientific racism beneath the early U.S. socialist project but also made it possible to imagine as part of socialism’s eventual solution what would have been anathema to Du Bois: the disappearance of race (11, 183). For broad historical context, see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1817–1914 (1971; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987); and Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968). An overview of a countertradition can be found in Stanford Lyman, The Black American in Sociological Thought (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972). 10.  Charles A. Ellwood, “The Theory of Imitation in Social Psychology,” American Journal of Sociology 6 (1901): 731–36, qtd. in Stocking, Race, at 246. Ellwood derived his theory of imitation from the work of U.S. psychologists such as James Mark Baldwin, whose 1897 Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development and 1895 Mental Development in the Child and the Race argued, as part of a broader recapitulationist thesis in turn inspired by the evolutionary psychology of G. Stanley Hall, that some races represented a prehistoric level of mental development. For a survey of imitation theory and the role of the “struggle against mimesis” in U.S. sociology’s early twentieth-century shift from biological models of society toward more psychologically grounded and politically pliable models,

   Notes see Ruth Leys, “Mead’s Voices: Imitation as Foundation, or, The Struggle against Mimesis,” Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 277–307. 11. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races,” 1897, in W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, ed. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 238–49, 240, 241, 243. 12.  Fredrickson, Black Image, 97–129; and Appiah, “Illusions of Race.” For an alternative account of Du Bois’s contributions to the general shift from biological to cultural models of race, see Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896–1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 111–26. For discussions of the scientific racism that was the major adversary of Du Bois’s early theory of race, see Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800–1960 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982); and Nancy Stepan and Sander Gilman, “Appropriating the Idioms of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism, 1870–1920,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72–104; Stocking, Race; and, for a general overview, Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 13.  Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, 8–22, 11, 16. Thom’s essay in the same volume, “Tribes within Nations: The Ancient Germans and the History of Modern France” (23–43), provides helpful contextualization. For a psychoanalytic consideration of the territorial dispute between France and Germany as a model of “national fetishism,” with specific reference to Renan’s lecture, see Jeffrey Mehlman, “Remy de Gourmont with Freud: Fetishism and Patriotism,” in Apter and Pietz, Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, 84–91. 14.  For provocative studies of the work of mourning in contemporary forms of black culture, see Fred Moten, “Black Mo’nin,” in Eng and Kaznjian, Loss: Politics of Mourning, 59–76; Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); and David Marriott, Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). 15.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 1, 5. 16.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 11–12. 17.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; Millwood, NY: KrausThomson Organization, 1973), 309. For a discussion of the U.S. sociological establishment’s failure to acknowledge Du Bois’s innovations, see Dan Green and Edwin Driver, “W. E. B. Du Bois: A Case in the Sociology of Sociological Negation,” Phylon Quarterly 37 (1976): 308–33. 18. Du Bois, “A Pageant in Seven Decades,” 253.

Notes    19. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 50. Du Bois expresses even stronger reservations about the project of social science and Spencer’s “verbal jugglery” and “shadowy outline of the meaning and rhythm of human deed” in “Sociology Hesitant.” For a published version of this essay manuscript in the Du Bois Archives at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, see “Sociology Hesitant: Thinking with W. E. B. Du Bois,” ed. Ronald A. T. Judy, special issue of boundary 2 27 (2000), 37–44, 39. Critics offer differing assessments of Du Bois’s debt to Spencerian sociology. To Rampersad, Du Bois’s sociological studies (influenced by his graduate course work in ethics, history, and political science at Harvard between 1890 and 1892, as well as by his attendance of Gustav von Schmoller’s seminar on sociological method at the University of Berlin between 1892 and 1894) showed an “acceptance of Spencer’s basic beliefs” and a subsequent “faith in the power of empirical sociology” that lasted until he left academic sociology in 1910 to pursue a more literary and, eventually, political career (Art and Imagination, 27). Adolph Reed also points out a distinctly Spencerian evolutionary cast to Du Bois’s thinking in W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 43–47. By contrast, Green, Driver, and Rudwick characterize Du Bois’s relationship to Spencer and sociological doctrine as quite critical of grand theoretical method from very early in his career, while David Levering Lewis describes Du Bois “breaking ranks” with Spencerian sociology and its analogical method in The Philadelphia Negro, and Ronald A. T. Judy connects Du Bois’s distancing of himself from positivist sociology to his realization that its grandiose observations and generalizations “were predicated on a typology of subjective meaning that was in no way ideologically neutral.” Green and Driver, W. E. B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, especially 25–35; Rudwick, “W. E. B. Du Bois as Sociologist,” in Green and Driver, Sociology and the Black Community, 25–55; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), vol. 1, 186–210, 202; and Ronald A. T. Judy, “On W. E. B. Du Bois and Hyperbolic Thinking,” boundary 2 27 (2000): 1–36, 34. 20. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 51. 21.  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Negro Citizen,” speech to the Interracial Conference at Washington, D.C., December 19, 1928, rpt. in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1920–1963, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970), 32–42, 33. 22.  The Negro American Family, Report of a Social Study Made Principally by the College Classes of 1909 and 1910 of Atlanta University (Atlanta: Atlanta University Press, 1908), 9. Other titles in the series include Morality among Negroes in Cities (1896); Social and Physical Conditions of Negroes in Cities (1897); Some Efforts of Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment (1898); The Negro in Business (1899); The College-Bred Negro (1900); The Negro Common School (1901); The Negro Artisan (1902); The Negro Church (1903); Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particularly in

   Notes Georgia (1904); A Select Bibliography of the American Negro (1905); Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906); Economic Co-operation among Negro Americans (1907); The Negro American Family (1908); Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1910). 23.  Jameson, Political Unconscious, 210, 234. 24. Thomas J. Otten, “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self of Race,” ELH 59 (1992): 227–56, 229. For another excellent treatment of Hopkins, race, and the possibilities of a melancholic reading, see Dana Luciano, “Passing Shadows: Melancholic Nationality and Black Critical Publicity in Pauline E. Hopkins’s Of One Blood,” in Kazanjian and Eng, Loss: Politics of Mourning, 148–187. 25. See William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); James, The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), especially “What Psychical Research Has Accomplished.” On James as a revolutionary social scientist whose psychological models of mental processes and human will contradicted deterministic laws of instinct, behavior, heredity, and evolution, see Soffer, Ethics and Society in England, 32–45, 135–61; Ross, Origins of American Social Science, 239–43; and Lewis, Biography of a Race, vol. 1, 87–96. For a general introduction to the “new psychology,” its functionalist concept of the mind as a product of and factor in evolution, and a discussion of James’s contributions, see Robert C. Fuller, Americans and the Unconscious (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), especially chaps. 3 and 4. 26.  James, Principles of Psychology, 279–83, 287–88, 314–16; excerpts rpt. in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993), 171–76. 27. Du Bois, Souls, 5. 28. Levering Lewis, Biography of a Race, vol. 1, 96. Rampersad argues that Jamesian psychology’s uncharted realm of human consciousness effectively “tempered” Du Bois’s faith in social science’s ability to quantify and explain the mysteries of identity (Art and Imagination, 68–90, 73–74). Dickson D. Bruce locates the origins of double consciousness in both a “medical” and a “figurative” tradition, the former derived from James’s psychology as well as early nineteenth-century French and U.S. case histories of multiple personalities, including Alfred Binet’s 1889 study On Double Consciousness (1889); and the latter encompassing European romanticism’s and American transcendentalism’s description of a struggle between world and spirit. Dickson D. Bruce, “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness,” American Literature 64 (1992): 299–309. For additional arguments for the Jamesian roots of double consciousness, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 571–72; Schrager, “Both Sides of the Veil”; Otten, “Hidden Self of Race”; and Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888– 1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 153–68. Posnock provides a de-

Notes    tailed account of James’s influence on Du Bois that focuses primarily on James’s pragmatism, pluralism, and radical openness to the world of experience, all catalyzing factors in the formation of what Posnock calls Du Bois’s cosmopolitan universalism (Color and Culture, 10–11, 18–19, 35–36, 57–58). Du Bois provides his own account of his debt to James in Dusk of Dawn, 578, 590, 770–71. 29. Reed, Du Bois and American Political Thought, 124. Reed refers to Du Bois’s 1904 lecture to the Principals’ Association of the Colored Schools of Washington, D.C., “Heredity and the Public School” (1904), rpt. in Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (White Plains, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1986), 45–52. 30. Reed, Du Bois and American Political Thought, 105 and note 80; 98 and note 44. On Hegel’s influences on Du Bois, Reed cites Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Robert Gooding-Williams, “Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The Souls of Black Folk,” Social Science Information 26 (1987): 106–8; Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 134; Jacqueline Stevens, “Beyond Tocqueville, Please!” American Political Science Review 89 (1995): 987–90. On James’s influence on Du Bois, Reed cites Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 74; Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, 487, 570–71; Kimberly Benston, “I Yam What I Am: The Topos of (Unnaming) in Afro-American Literature,” in Gates, Black Literature and Literary Theory, note 170; and Bruce, “Double Consciousness.” On Royce’s and Emerson’s influence on Du Bois, Reed cites Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 186–88, 249; and Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 142– 43. Where Reed advocates for the “synchronic focus” of contextualizing Du Bois’s thinking within that of his peers and his moment, as opposed to the “diachronic telescopy” that he understands to mark interpretations that advance a “putative chain of influence,” I would urge a reading that thinks through both axes and even through their convergence (107, note 80). 31. Stocking, Race, 251. 32. On Souls’ multigenred and polyphonic qualities, see Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, and Gilroy, Black Atlantic. Zamir usefully suggests that Souls, in contrast to the idealism of “The Conservation of Races” and the empiricism of the sociological studies, finds a more fluid account of racial being that owes as much to Du Bois’s engagement with the opposed strands of Jamesian and Hegelian thought as to the text’s generically hybrid form and “the idea of consciousness embodied in the use of this form” (Dark Voices, 160). On the explicitly “narratival” form of Souls’ many-voiced, “counterfactual” mode, see Russ Castronovo, “Within the Veil of Interdisciplinary Knowledge? Jefferson, Du Bois, and the Negation of Politics,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 781–801, 797–98.

   Notes 33. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “The Economy of Desedimentation: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Discourses of the Negro,” Callaloo 19 (1996): 78–93, 80, 85. 34.  Gramsci reconceptualizes history as a series of kaleidoscopic movements in which distinct subsets of dominant and subaltern classes now join or articulate at their points of commonality to produce hegemony, now break apart along their differences to produce change. For a useful gloss, see Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (1986): 5–27. 35. On the conceptual “multivalence” that produced Egypt as one of Du Bois’s “signature sites,” see Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 186–99. For historical accounts of the uses of Egypt in dominant European and U.S. racial discourse, see Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); and Robert Young, “Egypt in America: Black Athena, Racism and Colonial Discourse,” in Racism, Modernity and Identity: On the Western Front, ed. Ali Rattansi and Sallie Westwood (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1994), 150–69. 36.  For a subtle discussion of race and time in Du Bois, focused on the forward- and backward-moving structure of Black Reconstruction (1935), see Charles Lemert, “The Race of Time: Du Bois and Reconstruction,” boundary 2 27 (2000): 215–48. 37.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 177–78. 38.  Jameson, Political Unconscious, 20. 39.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 171. 40.  W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Color Line Belts the World,” Collier’s Weekly (1906), rpt. in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 42–43. 41.  Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 389–400, 391, 397. References from the sixth thesis and the first appendix. 42.  Paul de Man, “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 187–228, 226. 43. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 44. 44. On the Biblical depiction of Ethiopia “stretching her hands out to God” and its importance to Ethiopianist politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, see Wilson J. Moses, “The Poetics of Ethiopianism: W. E. B. Du Bois and Literary Black Nationalism,” American Literature 47 (1975): 411–26. The gendering of the sphinx is most clear in “Riddle of the Sphinx,” a poem first pub-

Notes    lished as “The Burden of Black Women” in 1907 and republished in Darkwater (1920). 45.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 174–75. 46. Hazel Carby, Racemen: The Body and Soul of Race, Nation, and Masculinity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 44–45. For other important discussions of gendered representation in Du Bois’s writings, see Nellie Y. McKay, “The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 227–43; McKay, “W. E. B. Du Bois: The Black Women in His Writings—Selected Fictional and Autobiographical Portraits,” in Critical Essays on W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. William L. Andrews (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985), 230– 52; Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “The Margin as Center of a Theory of History: African-American Women, Social Change, and the Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois,” in W. E. B. Du Bois: On Race and Culture, ed. Bernard R. Bell, Emily R. Grosholz, and James B. Stewart (New York: Routledge, 1996); Alys Eve Weinbaum, “Reproducing Racial Globality: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sexual Politics of Black Internationalism,” Social Text 19 (2001): 15–41; Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions: Genealogies of Race and Nation in Transatlantic Modern Thought (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 187–226, and Next to the Color Line: Gender, Sexuality, and W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Weinbaum and Susan Gillman (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 47.  Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 73–74. On the notion of the premodern allegorical “master code” uniting earthly and divine, individual and collective history, and its interpretive alternative of the “political unconscious,” within whose terms history is understood to be “inaccessible to us except in textual form,” see Jameson, Political Unconscious, especially 29–35. 48.  A similar picture emerges from Darkwater’s heterogeneric mix of Pan-Africanist political essays and literary fragments, messianic narratives and socialist strategy. The indictment of colonialism as rape in “The Souls of White Folk,” Africa “prostrated, raped, and shamed” in “The Hands of Ethiopia,” a pageant of racial history through iconic black women in “The Damnation of Women,” and allegorical portraits of a black Mary ascending to find a black God (“The Call,” Children of the Moon”) or giving birth to the black Christ (the poem “Riddle of the Sphinx”), all repeat Souls’ guiding figures and strategies on the emphatically global terrain of the imperial world system. “Riddle of the Sphinx” is especially illustrative: the vision of historical change as messianic birth links the poem to a religious allegorical tradition while the imagination of a redemptive transgeographical and pan-racial historical consciousness troped as “manhood,” produced through memory, and expressed through allegory, suggests a characteristically Du Boisean form of representation. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from behind the Veil (Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization, 1975), 37, 39.

   Notes 49.  Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 140. De Man formulates the schema somewhat differently, distinguishing between the world of the symbol, in which the coincidence of image and substance effects a “simultaneity, which, in truth, is spatial” and the world of allegory, in which “time is the originary constitutive category” and everything depends on the noncoincidence of difference. “The meaning constituted by the allegorical sign can then consist only in the repetition . . . of a previous sign with which it can never coincide, since it is of the essence of this previous sign to be pure anteriority” (“Rhetoric of Temporality,” 207). For the purposes of this argument, I prefer Sharpe’s formulation of an allegory that operates both temporally and spatially. 50.  Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 125–26. 51.  Butler, Who Sings the Nation-State? 61. 52.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 95. For an illuminating reading of the ways in which “the collapse of sequence to simultaneity seems to imply both spatiality and figuration” in Benjamin’s essay, see Judith Butler, “Afterword,” in Eng and Kazanjian, Loss: Politics of Mourning, 467–73, 469. 53.  Benjamin, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), vol. 1, 55–57, 56. 54.  Benjamin, “Language in Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” in Selected Writings, ed. Bullock and Jennings, vol. 1, 59–61, 61. 55.  Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 178. For useful discussions of Benjamin’s theory of allegory, see J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Allegories,” in Allegory, Myth, and Symbol, ed. Morton W. Bloomfield (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 355–70; Bainard Cowan, “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory,” New German Critique 22 (1981); Terry Eagleton, Walter Benjamin, or towards a Revolutionary Criticism (London: New Left Books, 1981), 3–24; Susan BuckMorss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 159–77; and Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, especially chap. 1. An overview of the literary figure, with particular attention to its capacity for capturing historical violence, can be found in Gordon Teskey, Allegory and Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). For a rich local and contextual account, see Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 56.  Jameson, Political Unconscious, 76. 57.  W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (1928; Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1995), 3. 58.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 25. 59. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality.” I am indebted to Cheng for the characterization of their essay as an “attempt to turn

Notes    analysis of fantasy away from content to its structure and its function within the psyche.” Cheng, Melancholy of Race, 119–21. 60. I adapt Stuart Hall’s formulation, “race is the modality in which class is lived.” “Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, ed. UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–45. 61. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 311. In a rich alternative argument, Alys Weinbaum reads the final birth as a moment whose internationalist sentiment, usefully described as “the affective logic of racial globality,” ultimately returns Du Bois to the essentially reproductive logic of racial nationalism, thus “making reproduction the motor of black belonging in the world” (Wayward Reproductions, 199–215, 215). In other words, the novel reasserts nationalism at the heart of internationalism. Other discussions, notably Gilroy (Black Atlantic, 44–45) and Posnock (Color and Culture, 176–77), are committed to understanding the birth as a moment whose syncretic and hybrid energies are the mark of cosmopolitan, as opposed to racialist and nationalist, identifications. I am arguing for the simultaneity of the two. 62.  Claudia Tate, introduction, Dark Princess, xxiii. For a broader discussion of the merging of erotics and politics in a tradition of roughly contemporaneous black women’s writing, see Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). For a specifically psychoanalytic reading of Dark Princess, with emphasis on how it activates Du Bois’s “fantasmatic template for encoding racial activism,” see Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 47–85; and “Race and Desire: Dark Princess: A Romance,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line 150–208, 155. In another consideration of the fantasy dimensions of the novel, Posnock reads Matthew’s and Kautilya’s son as a compensation for a loss in his own life. “Thus by staging this rebirth Du Bois permits himself to renew and perfect the bond of identification, indeed the psychic fusion, that he had known with his own infant [the young Burghardt mourned in chapter IX of Souls]” (Color and Culture, 177). Dark Princess’s concluding birth does indeed cement the bonds of identification, but it does not restrict them to the domain of individual biography or psychosexuality. Neither, it seems to me, should a psychoanalytically informed reading of the novel. It is on this basis that I would distinguish my approach from that of Tate and Posnock, as well as from Keith Byerman’s Lacanian reading of Du Bois as “the wronged son” and Dark Princess as a “bourgeois fantasy” that turns on a dialectic of castration and sexual potency and, by casting its vision of a worldwide socialist democracy as allegory, furthermore turns “straightforward, reasoned visions of the future” into “sexualized, violent fantasies of power that reveal despair, narcissism, desire, and anger at the very heart of rational optimism.” Keith Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 196, 134, 137.

   Notes 63. On this history, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000). 64.  Brent Hayes Edwards, “Late Romance,” in Gillman and Weinbaum, Next to the Color Line, 124–49, 135. 65.  W. E. B. Du Bois, The Black Flame Trilogy, 3 vols. with introduction by Brent Edwards and afterword by Mark Sanders, in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), vol. 1, 26. 66. Du Bois, The Black Flame, vol. 2, 53; and W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa and Color and Democracy, with Introductions by Mahmood Mamdani and Gerald Horne, in Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Gates, 61–62. 67. I am indebted to Alexandra White’s argument in her 2008 master’s thesis at the University of California at Santa Cruz, “Exploring Race and Gender in the Late Creative Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois.” 68. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 61; and Mamdani, Introduction to Du Bois, The World and Africa, xxv–xxx, xxix. 69. Du Bois, The World and Africa, 162; and Color and Democracy, 253, 278. 70. Lukács, Historical Novel, 42. 71. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 75. chapter 4 1.  Frantz Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 67, hereafter cited as DT; The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2, hereafter cited as WE. Throughout this chapter, I provide my own translations of Fanon. For the reader’s convenience, each citation is followed by a parenthetical reference first to the original French text and then to the English translation. For critical accounts that compare Fanon’s migrant sensibilities and politics to those of Du Bois, see Anita Haya Goldman, “Comparative Identities: Exile in the Writings of Frantz Fanon and W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Essays in Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies, ed. Mae G. Henderson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 107–32; and Ross Posnock, “How It Feels to Be a Problem: Du Bois, Fanon, and the ‘Impossible Life’ of the Black Intellectual,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 323–49. My own reading seeks to resituate Fanon’s admitted efforts to, as Posnock says, “deracialize culture” (330) and his authenticitytroubling adoption of Algerian national identity somewhat differently, less as the cosmopolitan sublation of the narrow particularisms of nation and race than their uncanny coexistence in a decidedly nonlinear temporality. 2.  Eulogy as qtd. in Irene Gendzier, Frantz Fanon: A Critical Study (1985, New York: Grove Press, 1973), at 237.

Notes    3.  Critics who invoke Fanon’s originary presence in the discourses of Third World liberation include Jack Woddis, New Theories of Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1972); Immanuel Hansen, Frantz Fanon: Social and Political Thought (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1977); Lou Turner and John Alan, Frantz Fanon, Soweto, and American Black Thought (Chicago: News and Letters, 1978); Parry, “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse”; Parry, “Resistance Theory,” rpt. in Rethinking Fanon: The Continuing Dialogue, ed. Nigel Gibson (New York: Prometheus / Humanity Books, 1999), 215–50; Cedric J. Robinson, “The Appropriation of Frantz Fanon,” Race and Class 35 (1993): 79–90; Nigel Gibson, “Fanon and the Pitfalls of Cultural Studies,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, ed. Anthony Alessandrini (New York: Routledge, 1999), 99–125; and Neil Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Research in African Literatures 24 (1993): 69–98, rpt. in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 161–94. For a countertradition marked by a more postmodern, postcolonial, often psychoanalytic, and frequently postnationalist reading, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Critical Fanonism,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 457–70; Posnock, “How It Feels to Be a Problem”; Homi K. Bhabha, “Day by Day . . . with Frantz Fanon,” in The Fact of Blackness, ed. A. Read (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1996); and Stuart Hall, “The AfterLife of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in Read, Fact of Blackness. 4.  Aimé Césaire, “Untitled,” Présence Africaine 40 (1st Trimester, 1962): 120– 22, 121, trans. and cited by John Mowitt in “Breaking Up Fanon’s Voice,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 89–98, 93. 5. Hall, “After-Life of Frantz Fanon,” 12–37, 14. 6. Homi K. Bhabha, “Day by Day,” 186–205, 190. 7.  Cheah, “Spectral Nationality: The Living-On [Sur-Vie] of the Postcolonial Nation in Neocolonial Globalization,” in Becomings: Explorations in Time, Memory, and Futures, ed. Elizabeth Grosz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 176–241, 178. For an extended version, see chap. 4 of Cheah, Spectral Nationality, especially 219–32. 8.  Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 219. 9. See, for example, Irene Gendzier’s biography of Fanon for the argument that he “abandoned” psychiatry for politics and Peter Geismar’s discussion of Fanon’s early work in terms of its emphasis on “psychology rather than politics.” Gendzier, Frantz Fanon, 64; Geismar, Fanon (New York: Dial Press, 1971), 17. Scholars who consider Fanon’s clinical writings keep intact the logic of division even as they describe those writings’ traversal of what Jock McCulloch terms the temporal “gulf ” between Black Skin’s individualistic psychopathology and Wretched ’s revolutionary nationalism. See Jock McCulloch, Black Soul / White Artifact: Fanon’s Clinical Psychology and Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University

   Notes Press, 1983), 3; and Hussein Abdilahi Bulhan, Frantz Fanon and the Psychology of Oppression (New York: Plenum Press, 1985). The chronological imperative remains in a later generation of critics, including some of Fanon’s most incisive readers. Commenting on Bhabha’s 1986 foreword to the Pluto Press edition of Black Skin, Neil Lazarus claims Bhabha, like other “textualist” readers of Fanon, effectively “contrives to read him ‘back to front,’ as it were—that is, from The Wretched of the Earth to Black Skin, White Masks—thereby falsifying the testimony of Fanon’s own evolution as a theorist.” Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 163. Bhabha, “Foreword: Remembering Fanon, Self, Psyche and the Colonial Condition,” in Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), vii–xxv, rev. and rpt. as “Interrogating Identity: Frantz Fanon and the Post-colonial Prerogative,” in Location of Culture, 40–65. More recently, Françoise Vergès has described how the “divided approach” between Fanon’s work as an activist and as a psychiatrist manifests itself in the differential tones of the clinical writings, with their musings on the impossibility of cure, and the political writings, with their “messianic,” “moralistic,” and “populist” address. Vergès, “To Cure and to Free: The Fanonian Project of ‘Decolonized Psychiatry,’ ” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, ed. Lewis R. Gordon, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Cambridge, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 85–99, 95. Fanon, of course, refused to choose. Even after his 1956 resignation as chief of staff in Algiers’s Blida-Joinville psychiatric hospital and his relocation to the Tunisian headquarters of the FLN in the apex of his nationalist commitments to the Algerian revolution, Fanon continued to practice psychiatry and wrote several clinical articles. An entire chapter of Wretched, the text conventionally taken to incarnate the political Fanon, is in fact devoted to “Colonial War and Mental Disorders.” 10.  Marriott, Haunted Life, 234–35, 236. 11.  Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1995), 10, hereafter cited as PN; Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 12, hereafter cited as BS. 12.  For a discussion of “Tiens, un nègre!” as a trauma that recalls the body to a self that represses the body, as well as a provocative exploration of this moment’s tension between memory (representation, Vorstellung) and event (expression, Darstellung), see Ronald A. T. Judy, “Fanon’s Body of Black Experience,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 53–73. 13. Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, “Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation,” in Shell and the Kernel, 136. 14. Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok, “New Perspectives in Metapsychology: Cryptic Mourning and Secret Love,” in Shell and the Kernel, 114. 15. Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban: The Psychology of Colonization, trans. Pamela Powesland (Ann Arbor: Ann Arbor Paperbacks / University of

Notes    Michigan Press, 1990), 114, 86. For discussions of Mannoni in relation to Fanon, see Khanna, Dark Continents, 157–67; and Apter, Continental Drift, 77–98. 16.  Antoine Porot, Annales médico-psychologiques (1918), as qtd. in DT, at 357; in WE, at 300. Fanon, DT, 351; WE 294. Fanon discusses Porot again in the chapter “Medicine and Colonialism” in L’an V de la révolution algérienne (1959, republished as Sociologie d’une revolution [Paris: Maspero, 1968], trans. Haakon Chevalier as Studies in a Dying Colonialism [New York: Grove Press, 1967]), as well as in the chapter “North African Syndrome” in Pour la révolution africaine (Paris: Maspero, 1964), trans. Haakon Chevalier as Towards the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press, 1967). For discussions of Fanon’s North African clinical writings, see McCulloch, Black Soul / White Artifact, 100–105; Bulhan, Psychology of Oppression, 220–32; and Vergès, “To Cure and to Free.” On Porot’s theory of Algerian “pseudomelancholy” as a point of departure for a supple theory of “colonial melancholy,” see Khanna, Dark Continents, 23, 150–52, 177–78. For general discussions of the ethnopsychiatric tradition, see McCulloch, 12–34, 63–82; Bulhan, 193–96, 240; and Alexander Thomas and Samuel Sillen, Racism and Psychiatry (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1972), 59–64. 17.  Posnock, “How It Feels to Be a Problem,” 324. 18.  PN, 161; BS, 199. Fanon refers here to Césaire’s Cahiers. Other sections of chapter 6 incorporate passages from Césaire’s poetry and plays. 19. Treatments of the complexities of Fanon’s relationship to negritude include Parry, “Resistance Literature,” especially 189; Renate Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation [Kolonialismus und Entfremdung, 1969], trans. Wilfried F. Feuser (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 60–73; McCulloch, Black Soul / White Artifact, chap. 2; and Khanna, Dark Continents, 99–144. For general sources on negritude, see Lilyan Kesteloot, Black Writers in French: A Literary History of Negritude, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974); and Abiola Irele, The African Experience in Literature and Ideology (London: Heinemann, 1981). 20.  For a discussion of Fanon’s use of Lacan’s article, which appeared in the Encyclopédie française, see Marriott, Haunted Life, 220; Khanna, Dark Continents, 167–75; and Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 578–96. The more-well known version of Lacan’s essay appeared in 1936 and in a revised version in 1949. See Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7. 21.  Maria Torok, “Fantasy: An Attempt to Define Its Structure and Operation,” in Torok and Abraham, Shell and the Kernel, 27–47, 30. 22.  Françoise Vergès, “Dialogue,” in Read, Fact of Blackness, 133–41, 139. A similar claim of psychoanalysis’s peripherality to Fanon’s psychiatric and political project is made by Vergès in “Chains of Madness, Chains of Colonialism: Fanon

   Notes and Freedom,” in Read, Fact of Blackness, 46–75. In a related argument, E. Ann Kaplan allies fantasy with a Freudian focus on individual psychic processes and a “politics of accommodation or reform” that bears little resemblance to the revolutionary change urged by Fanon and catalyzed by the privileging of trauma, with its collectivizing of history, over fantasy. Kaplan, “Fanon, Trauma and Cinema,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 146–57, 155. “Fantasy,” along with “the unconscious” and “desire,” is the term also evacuated by E. San Juan in his reading of Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled.” E. San Juan Jr., “Fanon: An Intervention into Cultural Studies,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 126–45, 134, 137. Christopher Lane has also argued that fantasy is precisely not what Fanon’s “partial fidelity” to Lacan yields. In Lane’s view, Fanon “Hegelianizes” Lacan and turns the mirror stage’s account of the drama of misrecognition into a quest for racial recognition that finally offers less possibility of a “precise and historically subtle account of group identification and racial fantasy” than Lacan’s own racially unmarked Other as the locus of a generalized lack in being. Lane, “Savage Ecstasy,” in Lane, Psychoanalysis of Race, 282–304, 297. Finally, for a general argument that Fanon evoked psychoanalysis in order to decisively disprove it on the basis of its failure to describe black reality, see Lewis R. Gordon, “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 74–84, especially 80–81. 23.  Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (1976, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 97. 24.  PN, 144–45; BS, 179–80. Diana Fuss, “Interior Colonies: Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Identification,” in Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 141–65, 155. 25. On Fanon’s dismissal of the woman of color, see Mary Ann Doane, Femmes Fatales (New York: Routledge, 1991); and Gwen Bergner, “Who Is That Masked Woman? or, the Role of Gender in Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks,” PMLA 110 (1995): 75–88. For a critique of Doane and Bergner and an especially insightful analysis of the conditions of the woman of color’s absence, see Rey Chow, “The Politics of Admittance: Female Sexual Agency, Miscegenation, and the Formation of Community in Frantz Fanon,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 34–56, 46. 26.  Bernard Wolfe, “L’oncle Remus et son lapin,” in Le temps modernes (1949), qtd. by Fanon in PN, at 141–42; in BS, at 175. 27. See, for some excellent discussions of Fanon’s treatment of same-sex desire, Fuss, Identification Papers, 157–60; Terry Goldie, “Saint Fanon and ‘Homosexual Territory,’ ” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 75–86; Kobena Mercer, “Busy in the Ruins of a Wretched Phantasia,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 195–218; Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 342–51; Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literature and Cultural Theory (New York: Routledge, 1993); and Daniel Boyarin,

Notes    “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” in Lane, Psychoanalysis of Race, 211–40, 224–27. 28.  PN, 63; BS, 78. For discussions of the differential weight Fanon gives to René Maran’s fictional intellectual man of color, Jean Veneuse, and Mayotte Capécia’s autobiographical white-identified (“lactified”) woman of color, see Doane and Bergner. For a related argument that interrogates the inherently racialized terms of Doane’s and Bergner’s feminist critiques of Fanon, see Tracey Denean Sharpley-Whiting, “Fanon and Capécia,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 57–74; and Sharpley-Whiting, “Anti-black Femininity and Mixed-Race Identity: Engaging Fanon to Reread Capécia,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 155–62. Finally, see Marriott’s exploration of these textual relations through the framework of various historical hauntings, in particular Fanon’s debt to postwar discussions of the phobic figure of the Jew by Sartre and others. Marriott, Haunted Life, 33–68. 29.  Parry, “Resistance Theory,” 236. 30.  Achille Mbembe, In the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 175. 31. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality,” in Burgin, Formations of Fantasy, 22. 32.  Žižek, Sublime Object, 118. 33.  Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 75. I have found this study particularly valuable as the most thorough mapping of Fanon’s references to form and time throughout his major writings. 34.  Albert Memmi, “La vie impossible de Frantz Fanon,” Esprit (1971): 248–73, trans. Thomas Cassirer and G. Michael Tooney as “The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon,” Massachusetts Review 14 (1973): 9–39, 17. A related argument is made by Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 578–95. For an excellent discussion of Memmi’s reading of Fanon in relation to the complex identifications of Memmi, a Tunisian Jew, to the discourse of national liberation, see Khanna, Dark Continents, 190–204. 35. The reference is to the patient treated by Octave Mannoni who claims, with regard to his fetishism, “Je sais bien, mais quand même.” Octave Mannoni, Clefs pour l’imaginaire d’une autre scène (Paris: Seuil, 1969), 9–33. 36.  John Mowitt, “Algerian Nation: Fanon’s Fetish,” Cultural Critique 22 (1992): 165–86, 176. 37. See Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans: Francophone Literature and Anthropology in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 31–67, 58. For a critique of Miller, see Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 32–46. 38. Lloyd, “Nationalism against the State,” in Lloyd and Lowe, Politics of Culture, 177.

   Notes 39.  Pietz, “Problem of the Fetish,” 12. On this and other logics of fetishism, also see Chapter 2, notes 42, 43, and 44. 40. See Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973). 41. Slavoj Žižek, “Formal Democracy and Its Discontents,” in Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 154–69, 162. 42. Slavoj Žižek, “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” in Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200–238, 212. 43.  Mowitt, “Breaking Up Fanon’s Voice”; Hall, “Fanon’s After-Life”; and Samira Kawash, “Terrorists and Vampires: Fanon’s Spectral Violence of Decolonization,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 235–57. The latter is an especially illuminating discussion of Žižek’s theory of ideology and Kantian reason in relationship to the figures of the undead, vampires, and violence in Fanon, with further reference to Freud’s uncanny and Benjamin’s philosophy of history. 44. On the reappropriative energies of Studies in a Dying Colonialism, see Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 195–235; Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 190–99; Nigel Gibson, “Jammin’ the Airwaves and Tuning into the Revolution: The Dialectics of the Radio in L’an V de la révolution algérienne,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 273–82. Also useful for a general analysis of Fanon’s use of culture in his political theory is Stephan Feuchtwang, “Fanon’s Politics of Culture: The Colonial Situation and Its Extension,” Economy and Society 14 (1985): 450–73. 45.  John Mowitt, “Reason Thus Unveils Itself,” Mosaic 40 (June 2002): 179– 88, 183. He comments on Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 46. SR, 47; SDC, 63. For an illuminating discussion of the figure of the veil in relation to Fanon’s analysis of the colonial optics of race, see David Theo Goldberg, “In/Visibility and Super/Vision: Fanon on Race, Veils, and Discourses of Resistance,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 179–220. For an important feminist reading of Fanon focused on “Algeria Unveiled,” see McClintock, Imperial Leather, 360–68. Fanon, McClintock argues, considers women’s agency only as a product or offshoot of the nationalist-revolutionary-masculinist zone of the liberation struggle. An alternative reading of Fanon’s recognition of Algerian female agency in the form of the “new woman” can be found in SharpleyWhiting, “Fanon and Capécia,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 53–78. 47. Lewis R. Gordon, “Fanon’s Tragic Revolutionary Violence,” in Gordon, Sharpley-Whiting, and White, Fanon, 297–308, 303. For another discussion of tragedy as the mode of colonial modernity and postcolonial revolution, see David

Notes    Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). 48.  Gibson, “Fanon and the Pitfalls of Cultural Studies,” in Alessandrini, Frantz Fanon, 116. 49.  For discussions of Fanon’s Marxism, see Dennis Forsythe, “Frantz Fanon— the Marx of the Third World,” Phylon 34 (1973): 160–70; Paul Nursey-Bray, “Race and Nation: Ideology in the Thought of Frantz Fanon,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 18.1 (1980): 135–42; Woddis, New Theories of Revolution, chap. 1; McCulloch, Black Soul / White Artifact, chap. 6; Zahar, Frantz Fanon: Colonialism and Alienation, 93–107; and Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization.” For a contentious critique of Fanon’s Marxist critics as “prisoners of a motionless reading” that charges him with reducing class to race and effectively ignores the progressive deconstruction of both those terms in Wretched, see Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 100–156, 110. 50.  Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in The MarxEngels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 594–617, 594–95. 51. Tony Martin, “Rescuing Fanon from the Critics,” African Studies Review 13 (1970): 381–99, rpt. in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel Gibson (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1999), 83–102, 86. 52. Derrida, Specters, 115; Spectres, 188. 53. Derrida, Specters, 10; Spectres, 31. For a reading of Specters of Marx that excavates the figure of Hamlet and his psychoanalytic prehistory as Freud’s modern melancholic, Lacan’s subject caught in the net of language and desire, and Abraham’s red herring (a mistaken focus in a play really about the ghost), see Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 47–59. References are to Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, ed. and trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 298–300; Lacan, “Desire and Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet,” trans. James Hulbert in Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis, 11–52; and Abraham, “The Phantom of Hamlet or The Sixth Act preceded by The Intermission of ‘Truth,’ ” in Abraham and Torok, Shell and the Kernel, 187–205, 188. For a postcolonial inflection, see Khanna’s discussion of Freud, Lacan, Abraham, and Derrida in relation to the Lithuanian psychoanalyst Wulf Sachs’s case study of a South African doctor, Black Hamlet (1937). Khanna, Dark Continents, 231–68. 54.  Pierre Macherey, “Marx Dematerialized, or the Spirit of Derrida,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 17–25, 24; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Ghostwriting,” Diacritics 25 (1995): 65–84, 74; and Terry Eagleton, “Marxism without Marxism,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 83–87. 55. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 213–69, 259.

   Notes 56. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 245; Fredric Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 26–67, 64. 57. Derrida, Specters, 189, note 6; Spectres, 215, note 2. 58.  Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 219. 59.  Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, 42. 60. Tom Lewis, “The Politics of ‘Hauntology’ in Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” in Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations, 134–167, 138. 61.  “What is happening to the notions of the ‘political’ and of ‘war’ (whether world war, war between nation-states, civil war, or even so-called ‘partisan war’)? What happens to the notion of ‘terrorism’ (whether national or international) when the old phantom of state sovereignty loses its credibility?” Derrida, Rogues, xiii; Voyous, 2. For additional elaboration, see “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides,” interview of Jacques Derrida by Giovanna Borradori in Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 85–136, especially 96–100. 62. Derrida, Rogues, 91; Voyous, 132. I have slightly modified the translation, preferring to render “hésiter” as “hesitate” rather than as “waver” in order to capture the strictly temporal cast and messianic charge of democracy’s mode here. 63. Derrida, “Marx & Sons,” 246, 266, note 60. 64.  Benjamin contrasts the transitional, successive, repetitive time of historicism with dialectical materialism’s “now-time shot through with splinters of messianic time.” As a zone in which we recognize the possibility of “a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past,” now-time contains a future other than that predicted by history. Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 396–97, theses XVI, XVIII, and appendix A. For a lucid explication of the distinctions between Derrida and Benjamin, and a compelling articulation of how the specter makes futurity by recognizing the presence of the past in the present as well as the responsibility of the present to the future, see Wendy Brown, Politics out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), especially 138–55. 65.  Bhabha, “The Commitment to Theory,” in Location of Culture, 19–39, 35. 66.  Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in Location of Culture, 139–70, 151, 145. For related discussions of doubling and ambivalence as the most “subaltern” aspects of Fanon’s work, see Bhabha, “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States,” in Donald, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, and Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity,” first published as the foreword to the 1986 Pluto Press edition of Black Skin and rpt. in Location of Culture, 40–65. 67.  For example, Gautam Premnath charges that Bhabha, “relentlessly reinscribing nationalism as bad object . . . must forget the crucial imperative of nationalist organization and intellectual direction in Fanon’s writings.” Gautam Premnath, “Remembering Fanon, Decolonizing Diaspora,” in Postcolonial Theory and

Notes    Criticism, Essays and Studies collected for The English Association, ed. Benita Parry and Laura Chrisman (Cambridge, UK: Brewer, 2000), 57–74, 65. Similar readings can also be found in Parry, “Signs of Our Times: Discussion of Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture,” Third Text 28/29 (1994): 5–23; and Lazarus, “Disavowing Decolonization,” 163–65. The latter is particularly thorough in its interrogation of Fanon’s rhetoric of “the people,” which Lazarus charges with having itself “misread” the basis of the Algerian peasantry’s support for the FLN and thus glossed over several crucial class divides (174–77). 68.  Bhabha, “Day by Day,” in Read, Fact of Blackness, 186–205. Of all Bhabha’s essays on Fanon, this is the one with which my own reading is most in dialogue, particularly around its treatment of questions of spectrality and fantasy in relation to Fanon’s theorization of the time of the political. Ultimately, however, Bhabha here concurs with Derrida’s antipathy to ontopology (the discourse of territorialized identity, frequently in national form) and proposes movement, in the form of transnational migrancy, as its antidote and successor (190–92). 69.  Bhabha, “Commitment to Theory,” 37. 70. Influential accounts of Fanon’s diasporic cosmopolitanism include Bhabha, “Interrogating Identity; Posnock, “How It Feels to Be a Problem”; and Gates, “Critical Fanonism.” In Culture and Imperialism, Said includes Fanon, Césaire, C. L. R. James, and others in a tradition of anticolonial nationalist intellectuals who were simultaneously opposed to narrow nationalisms, while also locating Fanon in a chronological passage from nationalist-particularist to cosmopolitan-humanist. The achievement of Wretched thus becomes for Said “first to represent colonialism and nationalism in their Manichean contest, then to enact the birth of an independence movement, finally to transfigure that movement into what is in effect a trans-personal and trans-national force” (269). 71. Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic, 101. chapter 5 1.  Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 16, 14. 2.  Achille Mbembe, “African Modes of Self-Writing,” trans. Steven Randall, Public Culture 14 (2002): 239–73, 256–57. For another reading of the logic of time, and space, in the death sphere of the postcolony with specific reference to Fanon, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (2003): 11–40, especially 26–35. 3.  J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello (New York: Viking, 2003), 40. 4. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 52. 5.  Christopher L. Miller, Nationalists and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 121.

   Notes 6.  Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 237. On the bildungsroman generally, see Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987). 7.  M. Keith Booker, The African Novel in English: An Introduction (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998), 23. 8. Sembène Ousmane, dir. Xala (1974). 9.  Fernando Solanos and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969), rpt. in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nicols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 44–64, 47. 10. Haile Germina, “Triangular Cinema, Breaking Toys, and Dinknesh vs. Lucy,” in Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1991), 65–89, 72, 79. 11. Teshome Gabriel, Third Cinema in the Third World: The Aesthetics of Liberation (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982), 7–8. For a critique, see Kobena Mercer, “Third Cinema at Edinburgh, Reflections on a Pioneering Event,” Screen 27 (1986): 95–102. 12.  For more on the debate between national and regional aesthetics, see Roy Armes’s claim that global capitalism militates against considering film production in the Third World on a “country by country basis,” and Manthia Diarawa’s conclusion that “there cannot be a viable African cinema on the national level alone,” based on a detailed survey of the material conditions of African cinema, with its history of colonial development; neocolonial financing and production in London, Paris, Brussels, and Berlin; and contemporary Pan-Africanist associations such as the Féderation Panafricaine des Cineastes (1969), the Consortium Interafricain de Distribution Cinématographique (1979), the Centre Interafricain de Production de Films (1979), and Le Collectif L’Oeil Vert (1981). Roy Armes, Third World Film Making and the West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 40; and Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 82. Other surveys include Paulin Soumanou Vieyra, Le cinéma africain: Des origines à 1973, 2 vols. (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1975); Pierre Haffner, Essai sur les fondements du cinéma africain (Abidjan-Dakar: Les Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1978); and, for a semiotic-narratological analysis, André Gardies, Cinéma d’Afrique noire francophone: L’espace-miroir (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1989). 13.  Chantal Zabus, The African Palimpsest: Indigenization of Language in the West African Europhone Novel, Cross/Cultures, Readings in the Post/Colonial Literatures in English (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1991), 92; Mbaye Cham, “Issues and Trends in African Cinema—1989,” in African Cinema Now! Three Essays from the 9th Annual Atlanta Third World Film Festival & Forum, November 2–5, 1980 (Atlanta: The City of Atlanta’s Bureau of Cultural Affairs and The African Studies Association, 1989), 3–6, 5.

Notes    14. Sembène Ousmane, dir. Mandabi (1968). On the making of this and subsequent films, see “Filmmakers Have a Great Responsibility to Our People: An Interview with Ousmane Sembène,” interview of Sembène Ousmane by Harold D. Weaver Jr., trans. Carrie Moore, Cinéaste 6.1 (1973): 27–31. For an excellent introduction to Sembène’s work, see Françoise Pfaff, The Cinema of Ousmane Sembène: A Pioneer of African Film (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984). 15. Louis-Jean Calvet, Linguistique et colonialisme: Petit traité de glottophagie (Paris: Payot, 1974), 220. For a related discussion of linguistic colonialism and heteroglossia in film, see Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “The Cinema after Babel: Language, Difference, Power,” Screen 26 (1985): 35–59. 16.  Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1986), 29. 17.  Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 81. 18.  Marcia Landy, “Political Allegory and ‘Engaged Cinema’: Sembène’s Xala,” Cinema Journal 23 (1984): 31–46, 33, 36; and Laura Mulvey, “Xala, Ousmane Sembène 1976: The Carapace That Failed,” Third Text 16/17 (1991): 19–37, 35. Mulvey discusses “to-be-looked-at-ness” in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975), 6–18. 19. Ng ˜ugi, Decolonising the Mind, 75–76. 20. Ibid., 28, 78. 21.  Zabus, African Palimpsest, 102. 22. Ibid., 23. Novelists such as Kourouma, Djebar, and other North African Maghrebi writers offer exceptions to this anglophone argument. 23.  Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 263. 24.  Kenneth Harrow, Thresholds of Change in African Literature: Emergence of a Tradition (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), 63. 25.  Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 374. 26.  Ng ˜ugi wa Thiong’o, Moving the Center: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1993), 66. 27. Réda Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations: or The Invention of the Maghreb, trans. Alyson Waters (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23. 28.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, La mémoire tatouée: Autobiographie d’un décolonisé (Paris: Les Lettres nouvelles, 1971), 31, 38, translation mine. 29.  Abdelkebir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Édition Denoel, 1983), 187, 188, translation mine. 30. Ibid., 200. Also see Abdelkebir Khatibi, Amour bilingue (N.p.: Fata Morgana, 1983). For an insightful feminist critique of Khatibi’s subversive poetics, see Winifred Woodhull, Transfigurations of the Maghreb: Feminism, Decolonization, and Literatures (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), ix–xxiv. 31. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 281. 32. Ibid., 287.

   Notes 33.  Assia Djebar, L’amour, la fantasia (Paris: Albin Michel, S.A., 1995), 113, 115, translation mine. 34.  Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations, 90. 35. On Nervous Conditions as a bildungsroman, see Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (London: Routledge, 1994); and Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 36. Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions (London: The Women’s Press, 1988), 16, 115. 37.  Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12/14 (1984): 335. 38.  Peter Hallward offers an instructive reading of a writer in the postnational tradition, Edouard Glissant, “the most thoroughly Deleuzian writer in the francophone world.” Documenting the passage from the nation conjured in Glissant’s early criticism and novels as the ground for an independent Martinique to the deterritorialized, rhizomatic concepts of relation, fragment, and “tout-monde” (whole world) in his later writing, Hallward reminds us of the continued viability of another Martinican’s notion of nation. Fanon’s nation remains for Hallward a crucial ground of political possibility, derived as it is from “a common sense of purpose and a solidarity born of radical commitment” rather than older claims rooted in natality, ethnic origin, or “some vague sense of cultural personality.” Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, 67, 127. 39. There are various critical versions of this narrative. See Stephen Clingman, “Revolution and Reality: South African Fiction in the 1980s,” in Rendering Things Visible: Essays on South African Literary Culture, ed. Martin Trump (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1990), 41–60; Perspectives on South African Literature, ed. Michael Chapman, Colin Gardner, and Es’kia Mphahlele (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker, 1992), especially essays by Mphahlele, Chapman, Green, Rabkin, Strauss, Visser, Ndebele, and Kunene; and Michael Vaughn, “Literature and Politics: Currents in South African Writing in the Seventies,” in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Sue Kossew (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 50–65. A concise summary of the period and its racial and textual divisions can be found in David Attwell, J. M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 9–34. 40. Nadine Gordimer, “The Idea of Gardening: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee” (review), New York Review of Books (February 1, 1984): 3–6, rpt. in Critical Essays on J. M. Coetzee, ed. Kossew, 139–44, 139. 41. Nadine Gordimer, “The Essential Gesture,” in The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988), 285–300, 299.

Notes    42.  J. M. Coetzee, “Jerusalem Prize Acceptance Speech,” in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 96–99, 99. A version of this debate also played out in the transitional end of apartheid. In a widely cited 1990 address titled “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” the veteran white ANC stalwart Albie Sachs described a nation trapped in “the multiple ghettoes of the apartheid imagination,” while the black writer and critic Njabulo Ndebele saw South African literature imprisoned by the demands of the spectacular, the superficial, and the slogan—a Manichean world of good and evil, black and white, worker and boss, that refused all depth, interiority, and complexity. Albie Sachs, “Preparing Ourselves for Freedom,” in Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy, 1970–1995, ed. Derek Attridge and Rosemary Jolly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239–48; Njabulo Ndebele, South African Literature and Culture: Rediscovery of the Ordinary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). For other examples and commentary, see Altered State? Writing and South Africa, ed. Elleke Boehmer, Laura Chrisman, and Kenneth Parker (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1994). 43.  J. M. Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” Upstream (South Africa) 6 (1988): 2–5, 3. 44.  Manuel Schonhorn, Defoe’s Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), as qtd. in David Medalie, “Friday Updated: Robinson Crusoe as SubText in Gordimer’s July’s People and Coetzee’s Foe,” Current Writing 9 (1997): 43– 54, 44. 45.  J.M. Coetzee, Foe (New York: Penguin, 1987), 33. 46. See Derek Attridge, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), especially chaps. 2 and 3. 47.  Watt, Rise of the Novel, 29. 48.  Coetzee specifies the racial difference between Defoe’s Friday and his own in “Two Interviews with J. M. Coetzee, 1983 and 1987,” interview with Tony Morphet, Triquarterly (South Africa) 69 (1987): 454–64. 49.  Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Theory in the Margin: Coetzee’s Foe Reading Defoe’s Crusoe /Roxana,” English in Africa 17 (1990): 1–23, and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174–97. Other explorations that connect Friday’s silence and Foe’s debt to French poststructuralism include Attwell; Attridge; Teresa Dovey, The Novels of J. M. Coetzee: Lacanian Allegories (Johannesburg: A. D. Donker, 1988); and Michael Marais, “Little Enough, Less Than Little, Nothing”: Ethics, Engagement and Change in the Fiction of J. M. Coetzee,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 159–82. 50.  Kwaku Larbi Korang, “An Allegory of Re-reading: Postcolonialism, Resistance, and J. M. Coetzee’s Foe,” World Literature Written in English 32/33 (1992– 93), rpt. in Kossew, Critical Essays, 180–97, 188, 193.

   Notes 51. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, Norton Critical Edition, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 163. 52. Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction,” 833. On Robinson Crusoe and realism, see Watt, Rise of the Novel, chaps. 1 and 3; McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, chaps. 3 and 9. 53.  Attwell, J. M Coetzee, 104, 5. 54.  Coetzee, “The Novel Today,” 3–4; Attridge, Ethics of Reading, 49. 55. Teskey, Allegory and Violence, 7. 56.  J. M. Coetzee, “He and His Man,” http://www.nobel.se/literature/laureates/2003/coetzee-lecture-e.html. 57.  J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), 57. 58.  J. M. Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K (New York: Viking, 1985), 3. 59.  J. M. Coetzee, “Interview,” in Attwell, Doubling the Point, 202–10, 209. 60.  J. M. Coetzee, “Time, Tense, and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow,’ ” in Attwell, Doubling the Point, 211–28, 227–28. 61.  J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Viking, 1999), 71, 97, 166, 220. 62.  Mark Sanders, “Disgrace,” interventions 4 (2002): 363–73, 369. 63.  Jacques Derrida, “This Strange Institution Called Literature: An Interview with Jacques Derrida,” interview by Derek Attridge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Attridge (New York: Routledge, 1992), 33–75, 72. 64.  Jacques Derrida, “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronnell and Christine Roulston, in Derrida, Acts of Literature, 181–220, 208. Also see Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’ ” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992), 3–67. For a discussion and alternative interpretation that resists messianic waiting, with reference to Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 49–62. 65.  Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 20, 18. 66.  Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death,” in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 794–818, 799. 67.  Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, foreword by Réda Bensmaïa, Theory and History of Literature 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 18. For critiques of the model of literary nomadism, see “Post/Colonial Conditions: Exiles, Migrations, and Nomadisms,” ed. Françoise Lionnet and Ronnie Scharfman, special issue of Yale French Studies 82 (1993); Caren Kaplan, Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses

Notes    of Displacement (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996); and Lionnet and Shih, Minor Transnationalism. 68.  Elleke Boehmer, “Endings and New Beginnings: South African Fiction in Transition,” in Attridge and Jolly, Writing South Africa, 43–56, 45, 50. 69. Simon Durrant, “Bearing Witness to Apartheid: J. M. Coetzee’s Inconsolable Works of Mourning,” Contemporary Literature 40 (1999): 430–63, 431. For an important and illuminating body of work that explores the melancholic modes of postapartheid South African literature and culture, see Mark Sanders, “Ambiguities of Mourning: Law, Custom, and Testimony of Women before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” in Eng and Kazanjian, Loss: Politics of Mourning, 77–109; “Truth, Telling, Questioning: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Anjtie Krog’s Country of My Skull, and Literature after Apartheid,” Modern Fiction Studies 46 (2000): 13–41; and “Remembering Apartheid,” Diacritics 32 (2002), 60–80. 70. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian’ Pasts?” in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (New York: Routledge, 1995), 383–90, 384. chapter 6 1.  “Sarduy o el idioma que baila,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Silvia Rudni, Primera Plana 256 (November 21, 1967): 70. All translations mine unless otherwise acknowledged. 2. On this history, see Judith Weiss, Casa de las Américas: An Intellectual Review in the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: Estudios de Hispanófila, 1977). 3.  Although it would be more appropriate to the conventions of the transgender community to refer to Cobra as “she,” I will use the construction “he/she.” Though unwieldy, it nonetheless captures and highlights the semantic ambiguity of the situation in a way that I think Sarduy himself might have appreciated. The Spanish text and its English translation refer to Cobra as “she” in the first part and, following the sex-change operation, as “he.” 4. Severo Sarduy, Cobra and Maitreya, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995), 31–32; Severo Sarduy, Cobra (Barcelona: Editorial EDHASA, 1972), 60. I quote throughout from Levine’s translation. For the reader’s convenience, parenthetical references refer first to the translation and second to the Spanish original. For quotations of particular importance, I include the Spanish original in a footnote. Here I have amended Levine’s translation of “a mound of Indian junk,” preferring to render pacotilla as “kitsch.” 5. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 8.

   Notes 6. Hélène Cixous, “O,C,O,B,R,A,B,A,R,O,C,O: A Text-Twister,” Review 74 (1974): 26–31, 27–28. For additional examples of Tel quel’s embrace of Cobra, see Barthes, “Sarduy: La face baroque,” La quinzaine littéraire 28 (1967): 13; Philippe Sollers and Roland Barthes, “Severo Sarduy,” in Severo Sarduy, ed. Jorge Aguilar Mora (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1976), 107–22; and Sollers, “La boca obra,” Tel quel 4 (1970): 35. On Sarduy’s relationship to the Tel quel group, see Marc Blanchard, “Site Unseen: Cuba on the Rue Jacob,” Sites: The Journal of Twentieth Century Contemporary French Studies 5 (2001): 79–88; and Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Severo Sarduy: Prisionero de Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” Claves de razón práctica 121 (2002): 72–74. For Latin American versions of the poststructuralists’ reading of Cobra, see Jorge Aguilar Mora, “Cobra, cobra la boca obra, recobra, barroco”; Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Las metamorfosis del texto”; and Suzanne Jill Levine, “Cobra: El discurso como bricolage,” all in Aguilar Mora, Severo Sarduy, 25–35, 35–62, 123–35. An English version of Levine’s article appears as “Discourse as Bricolage,” Review 74 (1974). 7. Levine, “Discourse as Bricolage,” 34. 8. Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América (Mexico: Editorial Diogenes, 1971), 75. 9. Roberto González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1987), 11. 10.  Ana María Barrenchea, “Severo Sarduy o la aventura textual,” in Textos hispanoamericanos de Sarmiento a Sarduy (Caracas: Monte Avile Editores, 1978), 221–34, 233. 11.  Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 164. 12.  Slavoj Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 657– 81, 659. 13. Ibid., 660. 14.  Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 17–68, 44. This is an especially thorough discussion of the distinctions between Freud’s concept of loss (on whose historical-temporal dimensions Ricciardi rightly insists) and Lacan’s view of lack as an “a priori, ontological condition of psychic life” (27). 15.  Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), qtd. in Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, at 215, note 64. Any detailed discussion of Lacan’s tragicomic aspect would have to route itself through the competing discussions of Hamlet by Freud (who diagnoses his melancholic attachments), Derrida (who emphasizes the opening of mourning to futurity), and Lacan (who stages him as the subject of wit and language caught, as if in a bedroom farce, in the misrecognition of his own desire, mourning Ophelia when it is Gertrude who is his impossible object). For exemplary treatments, see Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 47–59; and Khanna, Dark Continents, 231–68.

Notes    16. Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial, 256. 17. Ibid., 299; Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 60, qtd. in Hallward, Absolutely Postcolonial. 18.  Bartolomé Mitre, Prólogo, Soledad (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Universidad, 1928), 9–11, 9. 19. Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 2. 20.  “Severo Sarduy: Una nebulosa de información,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Yulan M. Washington, Hispania 53 (1970): 1016. 21.  José Martí, “Nuestra América,” in Política de Nuestra América (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1977), 37–43, 41. 22.  José Enrique Rodó, Ariel: A la juventud de América (1900), ed. William F. Rice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929), 75. 23.  Fernández Retamar, Caliban, 11. 24.  A similar national aesthetic of copy and/or kitsch can be found in Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima in Cuba, Luis Rafael Sánchez in Puerto Rico, Augusto Roa Bastos in Paraguay, Manuel Puig in Argentina, and Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru. For discussions, see Lidia Santos, “Kitsch y cultura de masas en la poética de la narrativa neobarroca latinoamericana,” in Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigación del barroco iberoamericano, ed. Petra Schumm (Madrid: Iberoamericana and Frankfurt: Vervuert, 1998), 337–51, 338; and Santos, “Le kitsch comme métalangage: Le récit dans l’amérique latine des années soixante-dix et quatre-vingt,” in Séductions du kitsch: Roman, art et culture, ed. Eva Le Grand (Montréal: XYZ éditeur, 1996), 97–112. 25.  “Entrevista con Severo Sarduy: Una nueva interpretación del barroco,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Basilia Papastamatiu, Imagen (Caracas) 14–15 (1967): 14. 26. Lukács, Historical Novel, 189. 27.  Washington, “Severo Sarduy: Una nebulosa de información,” 1016. 28.  Julia Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition: In Dialogue with Borges, Paz, and Sarduy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 87–95, 91. 29.  Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 24. 30.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, 5. 31.  Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Las metamorfosis del texto,” in Aguilar Mora, Severo Sarduy, 48. 32.  Cixous, “O,C,O,B,R,A,B,A,R,O,C,O,” 29. 33. On the gendering of national discourse, see McClintock, Imperial Leather; Kamala Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Press, 1988); Woman-Nation-State, ed. Flora Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (London: Macmillan, 1989); and Deniz Kandiyoti, “Identity and Its Discontents:

   Notes Women and the Nation,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20 (1991), 429–43, rpt. in Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 376–91. 34.  “Diálogo con Severo Sarduy: Las estructuras de la narración,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Mundo Nuevo (Paris) 2 (1966): 15–26, 15. 35. Ibid., 15. 36.  Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992), 374; McClintock, Imperial Leather, 68. 37.  Andrés Bello, “Prólogo,” Gramática de la lengua castellana (1847), Obras completas, 15 vols. (Santiago: Pedro G. Ramirez, 1883), vol. 4, 1–11, 9. 38. Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, rev. of Ejercicios populares de la lengua castellana, by Pedro Fernández Grafías, El Mercurio (Chile) (April 27, 1842), qtd. in Arturo Torres-Ríoseco, La gran literatura iberoamericana (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, S.A., 1945), at 68; and El Mercurio (May 19, 1842), qtd. in Torres-Ríoseco, at 71, translation mine. 39.  “Severo Sarduy: Cuerpos y libros,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Ernesto Shoo, Primera Plana 336 (1969): 58–59, 58. 40. On Lacan’s linguistic psychoanalysis, see Anthony Wilden’s translation, with editorial notes and commentary, of Lacan’s 1968 Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language: A Reader’s Guide to Écrits (New York: International Universities Press, 1982); and Charles Shepherdson, Lacan and the Limits of Language (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). 41.  Jean Michel Fossey, “From Boom to Big Bang,” Review 74 (1974): 7–12, 10. 42. Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1974), 100. For additional commentary, see Sarduy, “Una nueva interpretación del barroco”; “Conversación con Severo Sarduy,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Revista del Occidente 93 (1970): 315–43, 341–42; Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco,” in America Latina en su literatura, ed. César Fernández Moreno (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1972), 167–84; “Rehearsal for Cobra,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Roberto González Echevarría, Review 74 (1974): 38–43; and Jean Michel Fossey, “Severo Sarduy: Máquina barroca revoluciónaria,” in Aguilar Mora, Severo Sarduy, 15–24. 43.  “Interview / Severo Sarduy,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Roberto González Echevarría, trans. Jane E. French, Diacritics 2 (1972): 41–45, 43. 44. Ibid., 43. 45. In addition to Fanon, see Abel, Axel, Berlant, Bhabha, Eng, Gaines, Khanna, Marriott, McClintock, Pellegrini, Rose, Seshadri-Crooks, Spillers, and Viego.

Notes    46.  Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 85– 90, 88–92. 47. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (New York: Verso, 1997), 76, 81. 48.  Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” 662. 49.  Žižek, Plague, 76. 50. Rodríguez Monegal, “Diálogo con Severo Sarduy,” 15. 51.  “La serpiente en la sinagoga,” interview of Severo Sarduy by Julia Kushigian, Vuelta (Mexico) 89 (1984): 14–20, 20. 52. Severo Sarduy, Simulación (Caracas: Monte Avile Editores, 1982), 27. 53. On the links between the Lacanian self and the Buddhist self, “not single, monolithic, something solid, visible and secure, but rather a surface, a series, something that is constantly changing,” see Sarduy, qtd. in Kushigian, “La serpiente,” at 18. 54.  For a different functional model of “distant reading” as a practice for world literature scholarship, see Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature.” 55. Sarduy, Simulación, 15. 56. Roger Caillois, “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire,” in Le mythe et l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1938), trans. John Shepley as “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,” October 31 (1984): 17–32, 25. For a longer treatment, see Roger Caillois, Le mimétisme animal (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1963). Here Caillois understands the separate phenomena of animals who camouflage themselves according to their environment, animals who intimidate potential predators by particular markings or behaviors that suggest danger, and animals who engage in travesti or species-passing, to be uniformly motivated by a common drive toward “pleasure, luxury, exuberance, vertigo” (102). Caillois’s theory of the subterranean drives of animal mimicry is directly quoted by Sarduy and also cited by Lacan in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (99–100). For another intriguing parallel to Sarduy’s thematics of metamorphosis, see Roger Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía: Identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1987). Like Sarduy, Bartra interrogates national identity and mines the biological sciences for his guiding metaphor of the axolotl, the Mexican salamander whose entirely larval life recalls certain “amphibian” myths, neither fully primitive nor modern, of Mexican national identity, such as the noble indio (Indian), the halfurban, half-agrarian pelado (working peon), and the authentic, violent, emotional, and revolutionary hombre nuevo (new man). 57.  “Los motivos de Cobra,” interview of Severo Sarduy by E. Bustamente, Zona Franca 16 (December 1974): 22–24, 22. 58. Ibid., 22. 59.  González Echevarría, “Interview / Severo Sarduy,” 44. For further explication of the connections between transvestism and writing, see Sarduy, “Escritura/ Travestismo,” Mundo Nuevo 20 (1968): 72–74.

   Notes 60. Sarduy, Simulación, 15. 61.  Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories / Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13–31, 21–22. All subsequent references are to the extended version of this argument in Gender Trouble. For a reworking of several of the problematics of gender performativity, in relationship to the materiality of the body before the models, norms, and utterances compelled by the law (symbolic and cultural), see Butler, Bodies That Matter. 62.  Jacques Lacan, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,” in Écrits, 151. In a related argument, Lacan’s concept of woman as masquerade addresses the notion that even biological women must constantly perform their femininity in order to be read as cultural women. For accounts of Lacan’s theory and important interventions, see Joan Rivière’s 1930 essay “Womanliness as Masquerade,” rpt. in Heath, Formations of Fantasy; and Mary Ann Doane, “Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator,” Screen 23 (1982): 74–88. 63.  Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe,” in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, ed. Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 80–111, 105. 64. On the specifically gay male resonances of camp and drag performances of the discontinuity between gender and sex, see Esther Newton, Mother Camp: Female Impersonators in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972); and Kate Davy, “Fe/Male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 130–44. For a reading of camp as an ironic mode appropriable by lesbians as well as by gay men, see Sue Ellen Case, “Toward a Butch/Femme Aesthetic,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin (New York: Routledge, 1993), 294–306; and Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 238. 65. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, 1967), 280. 66. Sarduy, Simulación, 19. 67.  Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 138. 68.  Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 164, 168. 69.  Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” 661. 70.  Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 257. 71.  Bhabha, “A Question of Survival: Nations and Psychic States,” in Donald, Psychoanalysis and Cultural Theory, 102. 72.  Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 145–46. 73.  Jameson, “Third-World Literature,” 73–74. For discussions of allegory in relation to contemporary postcolonial national narratives, including ones that revolve around cross-dressing, see Bensmaïa, Experimental Nations; and Lisa Lowe,

Notes    “Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism: Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 43–61. 74. Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 27. 75. Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” Critical Inquiry 25 (1999): 696–727, 698. 76.  Khanna, Dark Continents, 185. 77.  Garber, Vested Interests, 336. 78. Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 26. 79. Sarduy, Simulación, 65. On the connection between language, writing, and transvestism, also see Sarduy, “Escritura/Travestismo.” For a different discussion of transsexuality as personal narrative, lived experience, and the search for a gendered “home,” see Jay Prosser, “No Place like Home: The Transgendered Narrative of Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues,” Modern Fiction Studies 41 (1995): 483–514. Prosser critiques Halberstam as an example of the discourse of freedom and mobility that, he claims, queer theory celebrates and transsexual theory eschews in favor of place and location. In an important argument for a female masculinity that does not depend upon or seek biological masculinity, Halberstam responds: “Some bodies are never at home, some bodies cannot simply cross from A to B, some bodies recognize and live with the inherent instability of identity” (Female Masculinity, 164). Sarduy would seem to fall on the second side of what Halberstam further describes as the divide between “a cartography of gender [that] relies on a belief in the two territories of male and female, divided by a flesh border and crossed by surgery and endocrinology” and a “queer cartography” that “prefers the charting of hybridity” and the “recognition of the dangers of investing in comforting but tendentious notions of home.” 80.  Kushigian, “La serpiente,” 15. 81. Sarduy, Simulación, 27. 82.  Kushigian, “La serpiente,” 20. 83.  González Echevarría, La ruta, 166, 171. 84.  Gérard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (Paris: Bossard, 1927), vol. 2, 223, translation mine. 85. Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 136–89. Among the several orientalisms discussed by Lowe, one is of particular relevance to Sarduy’s work, emanating as it does from Sarduy’s colleagues at Tel quel between 1968 and 1975, the period during which Cobra was conceived, written, published, and celebrated. For a salutary backdrop to Sarduy’s Indo-Tibetan romance, see Lowe’s account of the “Chinese Utopias” of Julia Kristeva’s Des Chinoises (1974), Roland Barthes’s Alors la Chine (1975), and Tel quel ’s 1971 declaration of Maoist principles, as texts that constituted China as other to Western signification and thereby trapped themselves within the binary system they sought to escape (136–89).

   Notes 86.  Calls to render the notion of orientalism more attentive to the fissures within imperialist power and discourse, as well as to the variegated processes of appropriation, imitation, intervention, and opposition by which those persons constituted as orientalized other voiced their consent and/or resistance to the ruling order include Dennis Porter, “Orientalism and Its Problems,” in The Politics of Theory: Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, ed. Francis Barker (Colchester, UK: University of Essex Press, 1983), 179–93; Lata Mani and Ruth Frankenberg, “The Challenge of Orientalism,” Economy and Society 14 (1985): 174–92; Aijaz Ahmad, “Orientalism and After: Ambivalence and Metropolitan Location in the Work of Edward Said,” in In Theory, 159–220; and Bhabha, Location of Culture, especially chaps. 3–6. 87.  Kushigian, Orientalism in the Hispanic Literary Tradition, 10, 13. 88. Said, Orientalism, 3. 89.  James Clifford, rev. of Orientalism, by Edward W. Said, History and Theory 19 (1980): 204–23, 209–10. 90.  González Echevarría, La ruta, 53. 91.  Bustamente, “Los motivos de Cobra,” 23. 92.  Juntando en círculo el pulgar y el índice—esferillas de oro pegadas a la nariz, lunares de celuloide en las mejillas, sobre los párpados brilladera roja—, en batallón, quince apsaras de voces roncas, frente a los fumaderos, saltan sobre los que duermen apilados en las aceras, ripiando a los pasantes por la camisa. Danzan, eso sí: en los cuerpos las tres flexiones. En saris de colores fluorescentes, presas en sus jaulas superpuestas, comiendo maní chillan las putas. Una cortina mugrienta deja ver la cama y las esteras desde donde, encaramada, la familia juzga el jadeo . . .  Arroz a los pies, embarrado de polvo rojo, en su templo de cemento, un diosmonito ameniza la aldea—los ojos bolas de vidrio, en el hocico pétalos pegados. Azoradas, como cigüeñas que oyen ruidos nocturnos, tres cabezas lo vigilan sobre un cuello: azul de metileno, azafrán, blanco de cáscara de huevo. Collar de flores, un toro mostaza pace. Traqueto de la noria que gira. Cantan—en la polvareda los turbantes morados—; a lo lejos el chillido de un mono. Huyen: cascabeles en los tobillos, pesados aretes, en las narices aros. Signos negros en la frente, los perros ladran de otro modo (231–32). 93.  Matei Calinescu, The Five Faces of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 251. 94.  “Pero no la India erróneamente interpretada por la neurosis occidental, que intenta la imposible asimilación de una espiritualidad a otra, sino la India de pacotilla, ésa de los films hindúes donde todo el tiempo hay gente que canta en un jardín y las diosas de ciento brazos resuelven los problemas de los protagonistas,

Notes    que gesticulan mucho y están muy pintados, como en el cine mudo.” Sarduy, qtd. in Shoo, “Cuerpos y libros,” at 59. 95.  Patricia Uberoi, “Feminine Identity and National Ethos in Indian Calendar Art,” Economic and Political Weekly (India) (April 28, 1990): 41–48, 43; Tapati Guha Thakurta, “Women as ‘Calendar Art’ Icons: Emergence of Pictorial Stereotype in Colonial India,” Economic and Political Weekly (India) (October 26, 1991): 91–99. On Ravi Varma’s “hybrid” style and appropriation of “the privileged genre of oil painting,” also see Thakurta, “Westernisation and Tradition in South Indian Painting in the Nineteenth Century: The Case of Raja Ravi Varma, 1848–1906,” Studies in History 2 (1986): 165–98. I am grateful to Ania Loomba for directing me to these essays. 96. Thakurta, “ ‘Calendar Art,’ ” 95. 97.  “[Cobra’s India] no se trata de una India transcendental, metafísica profunda, sino al contrario, una exaltación de la superficie y yo diría hasta de la pacotilla india. Yo creo . . . que la única descodificación que podemos hacer en tanto que occidentales, que la única lectura no neurótica de la India que es posible a partir de nuestro logocentrismo es esa que privilegia su superficie. El resto es traducción cristianizante, sincretismo, verdadera superficialidad.” Sarduy, qtd. in Monegal, “Conversación con Severo Sarduy,” at 318. At the time of this interview, Cobra was a work in progress and a number of excerpts had been published in Latin American and French journals. For a parallel discussion of India as kitsch, see Sarduy’s comments in Shoo, “Cuerpos y libros,” 59. 98. Said, Orientalism, 207. 99.  Andrew Ross, “Uses of Camp,” Yale Journal of Criticism 2 (Fall 1988): 1–9. 100.  Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II, 1953–55: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 223. 101.  Žižek, Sublime Object, 122. 102.  Žižek, “Melancholy and the Act,” 681. 103. Ibid., 660. 104.  Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, “Seeking the Third Term: Desire, the Phallus and the Materiality of Language,” in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 40–64, 53. 105.  Kushigian, “La serpiente,” 14. 106.  Žižek, Plague, 81. 107. Ricciardi, Ends of Mourning, 67. postscript 1.  Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal & Permanent Black, 1998), 194.

   Notes 2.  Rushdie, Midnight’s Children, 272. 3. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador / Henry Holt, 1988), 327. 4.  Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 207. 5.  Fawzia Afzal-Khan, Cultural Imperialism and the Indo-English Novel (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 154. 6. Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, 222. 7.  Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 4. Elsewhere Caruth identifies “the central Freudian insight into trauma that the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time.” Cathy Caruth, introduction to Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 8–9. For a critique of Caruth, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 8. On the novel’s dismissal of nations as illusory forms and its concomitant adherence to a romantic philosophy of the powers of individual perception to transform space and time and so to render the real unreal, see A. N. Kaul, “A Reading of The Shadow Lines,” in The Shadow Lines, with Critical Essays by A. N. Kaul, Suvir Kaul, Meenakshi Mukherjee, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ed. A. N. Kaul (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 299–309. 9. Suvir Kaul, “Separation Anxiety: Growing Up Inter/National in The Shadow Lines,” in A. N. Kaul, The Shadow Lines, 268–86, 269. 10. See, for example, Kaul, “A Reading of The Shadow Lines.” For an excellent alternative reading of the novel’s dialectic of globality and locality, see John Clement Ball, Imagining London: Postcolonial Fiction and the Transnational Metropolis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 210–21. 11.  Amitav Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Culture,” Public Culture 2 (1989): 73–78, 78, 76. 12.  Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, 5. 13.  Ashtosh Gorwariker, dir. Lagaan, Aamir Khan Productions, 2001. 14.  Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 90, 109. 15.  C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 113. 16. Rushdie, Satanic Verses, 5. 17.  Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 174. 18.  For discussions of diasporic movement in Beyond a Boundary, see Grant Farred, “The Maple Man: How Cricket Made a Postcolonial Intellectual,” in Rethinking C. L. R. James, ed. Farred (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996), 165–86, especially 177–80; Lazarus, Nationalism and Cultural Practice, 144–95; and Baucom, Out of Place, 135–63.

Notes    19.  Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I,” in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 1–7, 2. 20.  Jane Gallop, Reading Lacan (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 38. For other useful explications of the mirror stage, see Jacqueline Rose, “Introduction II,” Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, ed. J. Rose and Juliet Mitchell, trans. J. Rose (New York: W. W. Norton , 1982), 27–58, especially 30–35; and Fredric Jameson, “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Problem of the Subject,” Yale French Studies 55/56 (1977): 338–95, rpt. in Felman, Literature and Psychoanalysis, 338–95. 21. LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” 698. 22.  Jameson, “Cognitive Mapping,” in Nelson and Grossberg, Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 347–60, 349–50.

Index

Abraham, Nicolas, and Torok, Maria, 26–28, 146, 152 Achebe, Chinua: Heart of Darkness and, 57, 77–78; African novel and, 77–78. Works: Arrow of God, 58, 79–82, 190; Things Fall Apart, 77, 80 Africa: Achebe and, 77–78; African film and, 186–89; African novel and, 77– 78, 183–85, 189, 193; Conrad and, 56, 67–69; Coetzee and, 200–201, 211; Dangarembga and, 197; Djebar and, 193; Khatibi and, 193–94; Du Bois and, 103, 106–7, 111, 135–36; Fanon and, 164–66, 169; Naipaul and, 82–85; Ngugi ˜ and, 185–86, 189–93; postcolonial politics and, 181,183, 199–200 Afzal-Khan, Fawzia, 263 Age of Iron (Coetzee, J. M.), 206–7 All About H. Hatterr (Desani, G.V.), 46–47 Allegory: Derrida and, 172; melancholia and, 52, 119, 124–28, 211–12, 214, 244– 45; nation and, 11, 244–45 (Cobra), 185–86, 189–90, 192 (Devil and the Cross), 201–2, 205–6, 214–16 (Foe, Elizabeth Costello), 49–52 (Midnight’s Children), 117–24 (Souls of Black Folk), 198 (Nervous Conditions); 186–89 (Xala); Teskey and, 205–6, 214; Santer and, 211; world literature and, 11–12, 214–15. Also see Benjamin; Jameson; Nation L’amour, la fantasia (Djebar, Assia), 194–96

Anderson, Benedict, 20, 23, 41, 50, 129, 22 Appadurai, Arjun, 10, 26 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 85, 100 Arac, Jonathan, 13 An Area of Darkness (Naipaul, V. S.), 40–41 Arrighi, Giovanni, 5–6 Arrow of God (Achebe, Chinua), 58, 79–82 Attridge, Derek, 20 Attwell, David, 204 Auerbach, Erich, 12 Bakhtin, Mikhail: on chronotope, 142; Devil on the Cross and, 190–92; Naipaul’s use of epic and, 90, 91; Sarduy’s use of parody and, 229; theory of the novel and, 19–20, 36– 37, 45, 47 Balibar, Étienne, 1, 33 Bal, Mieke, 22 Barrenechea, Ana María, 220 Barthes, Roland, 219 Baucom, Ian, 6, 243, 246, 281n20, 290n85 Bello, Andrés, 232–33 A Bend in the River (Naipaul, V. S.), 82–93 Benjamin, Walter: on allegory, 52, 117– 20, 122, 126–28, 211; on history, 49, 214; on messianic time, 172, 326n64. Works: “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” 52, 117, 126; “Language in Trauerspiel

   Index and Tragedy,” 126; “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” 126; “On the Concept of History,” 117–19 Bensmaïa, Réda, 193, 196 Berlant, Lauren, 23, 289n78 Bhabha, Homi: on Anderson, 23–24; on colonial mimicry, 43; on Fanon, 141, 177–78, 180, 326nn65–69; on nation, 23, 244, 177–78; on melancholia, 244, 246 The Black Flame (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 133–39 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon, Frantz): fantasy in, 151–55; genre in, 155–57; mourning and melancholia in, 146– 47; race in, 143–48, 149–50; time in, 143, 144–45, 148–50 143–58, 168 Bloom, Harold, 14 Boehmer, Elleke, 212 Booker, M. Keith, 51, 186, 292nn107, 110 Brennan, Timothy, 47–8 Brooks, Peter, 22, 78 Brown, Wendy, 326n64 Butler, Judith: on fantasy, desire, and identification, 34; on gender performativity, 240–41; on nationstate, 10, 125; on loss, 244–46; on melancholia, 32–33, 222, 242–43, 290n85 Byerman, Keith, 317n62 Caillois, Roger, 239 Calinescu, Matei, 253 Calvet, Louis-Jean, 187 Carby, Hazel, 122 Caruth, Cathy, 265 Césaire, Aimé, 58, 141, 148, 158, 173–74 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 215, 286n69 Chandler, Nahum Dimitri, 115 Chatterjee, Partha, 48, 267 Cheah, Pheng, 18, 142, 185, 192 Cheng, Anne Anlin, 125, 288n71, 290n85 Cixous, Hélène, 73, 219, 230 Clifford, James, 249–50 Cobra (Sarduy, Severo): antihistorical

novel as, 228–29; Cuba in, 220, 231–31, 233, 236–37; gender and transvestism in, 229–31, 238–42; India as displaced form of Cuba in, 246– 54, 257; intertexuality and parody in, 228–29; kitsch aesthetic and, 253–56; Lacan and, 233–35, 238, 252, 256; language in, 232–33; migrancy in, 217–18, 230–31, 236–38; mourning and melancholia in, 220–22, 243–46; national novel as, 226; Orient in, 248–54; summary of, 218–19 Color and Democracy (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 136 Coetzee, J. M.: allegory and, 200–202, 205–6, 207–8, 210; Kafka and, 208– 12; mourning and melancholia in, 211–12, 213–14; South African history and, 200–202; time of futurity and, 202, 207–8, 212–14. Works: Age of Iron, 206–7; Life and Times of Michael K, 201, 207–9; Foe, 202–6; Disgrace, 209–10; Elizabeth Costello, 210–11; “He and His Man,” 206 Comparison: comparative literature and practice of, 11–13; genre as a unit of, 20, 37–40; reading practices of, 5, 12, 5, 223–24; world literature and, 12–15, 19. See also Global; Reading “The Conservation of Races” (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 104–6 Conrad, Joseph: approaches to, 57, 71–72, 302nn45–47; background of, 55–56; critique of imperialism and, 67–69; idea of progress and, 63, 65. See also Heart of Darkness “Conrad’s Darkness” (Naipaul, V. S.), 87 Cosmopolitanism: critical approaches to, 278n6279n12; Dark Princess and, 131; Fanon and, 178–79; intertextuality as, 45–48, 50 (Midnight’s Children), 262– 63 (Satanic Verses), 124 (Souls of Black Folk); nationalism and, 3, 5, 11–12, 17 Crypt: Abraham and Torok on, 26–27; Black Skin, White Masks and, 146;

Index    cryptonomic language and, 28, 47; Derrida on, 27–28; nation in relation to, 28 Dabydeen, David. Works: “Coolie Odyssey,” 93; The Intended, 93–96 Damrosch, David, 14 Dangarembga, Tsitsi, 197–99 Dark Princess (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 128– 33 De Certeau, Michel, 31 Defoe, Daniel (Robinson Crusoe), 58, 202–3, 206 Degeneration: A Bend in the River and postimperial sense of, 83–85; Heart of Darkness and late Victorian account of, 64–66; Wretched of the Earth and neocolonial bourgeoisie’s version of, 165–67, 174–77 Deleuze, Gilles: flows of deterritorialization in, 3, 8, 212; Kafka and, 212, 215; psychoanalysis and, 9–10; Sarduy and, 223–24, 233 De Man, Paul, 119–20 Derrida, Jacques: Algeria in, 170; autoimmunity and, 15; Fanon and, 167–73; genre and, 20; ghost and, 15–17; on nation, 17–18; 171–73; psychoanalysis and, 15–16, 28–32; uncanny and, 15–16, 74–75. Works: Specters of Marx, 15–16, 26, 167–70; Monolingualism of the Other, 18; Without Alibi, 18; “Fors,” 26, 213; “Geopsychoanalysis,” 28–32; “The Double Session,” 74; “This Strange Institution Called Literature,” 210; “Before the Law,” 211; Mémoires: For Paul de Man, 213 Desani, G. V.: All About H. Hatterr, 46–47 Devil on the Cross (Ng ˜ugi, wa Thiong’o): allegory in, 189–90, bildungsroman in, 185, 189; heteroglossia in, 191– 93; Fanon in relation to, 192–93; summary of, 185–86

Diaspora: global culture and, 7–8; loss and, 40–41; novelistic form and, 92– 95, 263, 266–67 Dimock, Wai-Chee, 13–14 Disgrace (Coetzee, J. M.), 209–10 Djebar, Assia: Maghrebi novel and, 193; politics of memory and language in L’amour, la fantasia, 194–96; La nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, 196 Du Bois, W. E. B.: allegory in, 117– 28: critical approaches to, 99– 101; concept of race in, 104–11, 116–18, 121–23, 125–26, 131, 136; William James and, 112–13; double consciousness as alternative to social evolutionism for, 109–10, 114–15; genre in, 124, 127–38, 313n32; politics of memory and migrancy in, 100– 102, 105–6, 110–11, 118, 124–25; time line of progress critiqued by, 102–6, 108, 115–16, 120–21. Works: The Black Flame, 133–39; Color and Democracy, 136; “The Conservation of Races,” 104–6; Dark Princess, 128–33; The Negro American Family, 107–8; “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” 98; The Philadelphia Negro, 106–7; The Souls of Black Folk, 105, 109–28; The World and Africa, 136 Durrant, Simon, 213 Edwards, Brent Hayes, 134, 309n6 Elizabeth Costello (Coetzee, J. M.), 210–11 Engle, Lars, 75 An Enigma of Arrival (Naipaul, V. S.), 85–86 Fabian, Johannes, 60–61 Fanon, Frantz: Du Bois compared to, 140–41, 149; critical approaches to, 141, 318n1, 319nn3, 9; Derrida and, 167–73; fantasy form of race in, 144, 149, 151–58; fantasy form of nation in,

   Index 158–62; Freud and, 8, 153–55; gender and sexuality in, 153–55, 162–64, 322n24, 25, 28; genre in, 155–57, 162– 64, 173–77, 179–80; Lacan and, 151; Marx and, 165–67; nation in, 141– 43, 158–59, 162–63,169–70,172–73; nationalism and globalism entwined in, 169–70, 178–79; negritude in relation to, 147–48, 150; postcolonial novel and, 197–200; psychoanalysis critiqued by, 148–51, 153, 155, 321n22; time in, 142–50, 177–79. Works: Black Skin, White Masks, 143–58, 168; Studies in a Dying Colonialism, 162–64; The Wretched of the Earth, 164–66, 173–80 Fantasm: Derrida on, 26–27; Jameson on, 35; Fanon’s concept of race and, 143–45 Fantasmatic: African national novels in relation to, 183, 214; Cheng on, 125, 288n71, 290n85; Du Bois’s nation as, 101, 115–16, 126, 130, 133; Fanon’s nation as, 140, 172–73; Ghosh’s nation as, 261, 264, 272–73, 275; nation as, 4–5, 17, 24–28, 35, 40, 97, 115; novel as form of, 275; race in Du Bois as, 114–15, 125–26, 130; race in Fanon as, 161; Rushdie’s nation as, 50, 53–54; Sarduy’s nation as, 220–21, 244, 257 Fantasy: Abraham and Torok on, 26–27; Butler on, 34; Du Bois and, 130–33; Fanon on, 151–58; Freud on, 24, 153; Laplanche and Pontalis on, 24–25, 130, 153; nation and, 25, 28, 31–32, 95– 96, 289n78; narrative and, 35, 131, 133; topography of, 24–28, 32–34, 152–53 Felman, Shoshana, 22 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 58, 219– 20, 227 Fetish: A Bend in the River and, 86, 90– 92; critical models of, 70, 159–60; Dabydeen and, 95–96; Fanon’s nation as, 158–62; Heart of Darkness and,

67–70, 76; nation as, 31–32; Ngu˜ gi and, 189–90; Sarduy’s nation as, 230, 237, 241–42, 255–56; Third World woman as, 198 Flaubert, Gustave, 228–29 Foe (Coetzee, J. M.), 202–6 Freud, Sigmund: national subject in, 5, 24; novel in relation to, 22; theory of world literature and, 14–15, 73–74. Works: “A Child Is Being Beaten,” 153–54; Civilization and its Discontents, 71; “Constructions in Analysis,” 53; Dora, 22, 24; “Fetishism,” 7, 301n42; “From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” 5, 24; “Mourning and Melancholia,” 32–33, 221, 242; Totem and Taboo, 71; “The ‘Uncanny,’” 14–15, 71–77 Friedrich, Werner, 12 Gabriel, Teshome, 186 Gallop, Jane, 272 Gandhi, Leela, 86 Garber, Marjorie, 231, 247 Gender: L’amour, la fantasia in, 195–97; A Bend in the River in, 91–92; Cobra in, 229–31; Du Bois’s national and global allegories of, 120–24, 128–32, 136; Fanon’s use of, 153–55, 162–64; The Intended in, 95–96; melancholia model of and national identification, 242–43; Nervous Conditions in, 198– 99; performativity theory of and national identification, 231, 238–39, 240–44, 247–48 Genre: global flows of, 6, 13–14, 19–20, 36–37; haunted time of, 37–40, 192– 93; postcolony in, 180–82; spectral form of in Du Bois, 126–27; spectral form of in Fanon, 155–57, 162–64, 173–77, 179–80; world system/world literature in, 13–15, 36–40. See also Bakhtin; Memory; Melancholia; Novel “Geopsychoanalysis” (Derrida, Jacques), 28–32

Index    Getino, Octavio, 186 Ghosh, Amitav: diaspora on, 266–67; postnational orientation of, 264, 272–73. See also The Shadow Lines Ghost: genre and, 38–40, 179–80; ghostreading nation, 16–18, 28, 53, 96–97, 143, 150, 161,168–70, 173–80, 192, 195–96, 275–76; ghostreading race, 147–48, 150, 168; postcolonial and world literature in relation to, 14, 16–17, 39–40, 53–54; spectrality and, 15–16. See also Derrida; Spivak; Genre Gibson, Nigel, 165, 319n3 Gikandi, Simon, 262–63, 280n20, 297n6, 305n72 Gillman, Susan, 314n35 Gilroy, Paul, 10, 100, 126, 317n61. Works: The Black Atlantic, 10: Postcolonial Melancholia, 33, 96 Global: comparative, world, and postcolonial literature and, 11–16, 19–20, 214–15, 275–76; concept of connection as, 3–4, 17; local and, 3–4; national entwined with, 1–3, 56–57 (Conrad), 100, 126, 131–37 (Du Bois), 140–42, 169–70, 178–79 (Fanon), 47, 53–54 (Rushdie). See also Comparison; Genre; World Systems Globalization, 2–8, 17–18 Goethe, Johann von W., 11 GoGwilt, Christopher, 56 González Echevarría, Roberto, 220, 248 Gordon, Avery, 53, 295n13 Gordon, Lewis, 164 Gorra, Michael, 85 Gourgouris, Stathis, 25 Guattari, Félix, 8–9, 212, 215 Guillén, Claudio, 20 Gunder Frank, Andre, 4 Halberstam, Judith, 247, 339n79 Hall, Stuart, 3–4, 141 Hallward, Peter, 9, 199, 222–23, 330n38 Hannerz, Ulf, 4 Harrow, Kenneth, 191–92

Harvey, David, 3 Haunting. See Ghost Heart of Darkness (Conrad, Joseph): critical history of, 55–57; nation in, 67–71; national-global tension in, 56– 57; evolution and devolution in, 60, 63–67; primitivism in, 67, 302n48, psychoanalytic approaches to, 69–72, 302nn46–47 Heteroglossia. See under Novel Hughes, Langston, 135, 147 Hutcheon, Linda, 48, 204 Identification: anticolonial structures of, 78, 82; colonial structures of, 34, 146, 150–51; migrant forms of, 93, 96 (Dabydeen), 100–102, 124–26, 139 (Du Bois), 158–59, 177–79 (Fanon), 264, 266–67, 272–73 (Ghosh), 40– 41, 85–87 (Naipaul), 50–51, 262–64 (Rushdie), 217–18, 230–38, 256–59 (Sarduy); national and structure of fantasmatic, 4–5, 17, 24–28, 35, 40, 97, 115; national and Lacanian models, 157, 161, 221–22, 233–38, 256– 59, 272–73; national and structure of melancholia, 32–34, 96, 125–27, 242– 44, 258, 273–74; national and use of psychoanalysis, 20–25, 28–32, 160–61; national and work of mourning, 105, 109, 125–27, 213–14, 220–21, 245–46, 258–59, 273–74. See also Fantasy; Fantasmatic; Loss; Mimicry; Nation Identity. See Gender; Identification; Nation; Psychoanalysis; Race Ignatieff, Michael, 21 JanMohamed, Abdul, 58 James, C. L. R., 269–70 James, William, 112–14, 312nn25, 28 Jameson, Fredric: on allegory, 118, 122, 128; on dialectical thinking, 40, 110; on genre theory, 6, 35, 38–40; on national allegory, 11, 49–50, 123, 188, 214–15, 244; on political

   Index unconscious, 35, 117; on postmodern historiography, 49; on spectrality, 168; on world literature, 11. Works: “Cognitive Mapping,” 275; The Political Unconscious, 6, 37, 40, 110; Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 49; “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” 11, 49–50, 123, 188, 214– 15, 244 Jones, Ann Rosalind, 24 Jusdanis, Gregory, 17, 285n61 Kanthapura (Rao, Raja), 46–49 Kaul, A. N., 272 Kaul, Suvir, 265 Khanna, Ranjana, 23, 34, 246 Khatibi, Abdelkebir, 193–94 Kim (Kipling, Rudyard), 45 King, Anthony D., 2 “A New King for the Congo” (Naipaul, V. S.), 83–84 Kipling, Rudyard, 45, 64 Korang, Kwaku Larbi, 203, 205 Kuchta, Todd, 52, 294n130 Kushigian, Julia, 229, 249 Lacan, Jacques: anamorphosis theory of and national identification, 221–22, 233–38, 256–57; fantasy theory of and national identification, 157, 161; mirror stage theory of and national identification, 151, 272–73; Sarduy and, 233–35, 238, 252, 256. See also Žižek LaCapra, Dominick, 245–46, 273 Landy, Marcia, 189 Language: national identification and, 23, 222; linguistic hybridization and, 45–47, 77–81, 93–94, 187–88, 190, 193–96. Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B., 24– 25, 34, 130, 153, 157, 160, 161. See also Fantasy; Fantasmatic Lazarus, Neil, 8, 58, 159

Levering Lewis, David, 113 Levine, Suzanne Jill, 219 Life and Times of Michael K (Coetzee, J. M.), 201, 207–9 Lloyd, David, 21–22, 159 Loss: national identification and, 26, 32–34 (general); 77 (Achebe); 104–5, 124–28 (Du Bois); 205–6, 213–14 (Coetzee); 145–47 (Fanon); 265– 67, 271–74 (Ghosh); 40–41, 85–87 (Naipaul); 50–53 (Rushdie); 220–23, 242–43, 245–46, 257–58 (Sarduy). See also Mourning; Melancholia; Identification Lowe, Lisa, 249 Lukács, Geörgy, 37–38, 41, 137–39, 228. Works: Theory of the Novel, 37, 138; The Historical Novel, 38, 41, 137–39, 228 Mannoni, O., 23, 148–49 Marcus, Steven, 22 Marriott, David, 143, 310n14 Martí, José, 226–27 Marx, Karl: “The Eighteenth Brumaire” and Fanon, 165–66; Derrida on, 167– 68, 170 Mbembe, Achille, 157, 181–82 McClintock, Anne, 7, 22, 231 McKeon, Michael, 38 Melancholia: Abraham and Torok on, 26–28, 146, 152; allegorical mode and, 52, 119, 124–28, 211–12, 214, 244–45; Bhabha on, 244, 246; Butler on, 32–33, 222, 242–43, 290n85; Cheng on, 125; critical literature on, 290n85; fantasmatic topography of, 32–33, 242; Freud on, 32, 221, 242; generic form and, 37–39 (general), 48–52 (Rushdie), 124–28, 138–39 (Du Bois), 179–80 (Fanon), 211–12, 213–14 (Coetzee), 273–74 (Ghosh); Gilroy on, 33, 96; Khanna on, 245– 46; LaCapra on, 245–46; modernity and, 6–7; national identification and,

Index    32–35, 96, 125–27, 221–22, 242–22, 246, 258, 273–74; Žižek on, 221–22, 243, 290n85 Memory: allegory and, 52, 117–24, 127; Du Bois’s concept of race as, 101, 103–5, 111, 116; Fanon’s concepts of race and nation in relation to, 147– 48, 153, 161, 172, 179; genre as practice of, 36–40; national identity and, 20–22, 100–105, 139, 198, 265–66; novel form and, 39, 48, 51–53, 262–63 (Rushdie), 77–78 (Achebe), 87, 90–91 (Naipaul), 93 (Dabydeen), 130, 132, 138–39 (Du Bois), 194–97 (Djebar), 265–66, 268–70 (Ghosh) Midnight’s Children (Rushdie, Salaman): allegory in, 49–52, 261–62; fantasmatic nation in, 50; heteroglossia in, 44, 46; history in, 41–44, 49; memory in, 48, 51–53; postmodern historiography in, 48– 49; secularism in, 44, 49–51 Miller, Christopher, 77–78, 159, 184 Mimicry: Bhabha on, 43; Caillois on, 239; cricket and postcolonial forms of, 268–70; Du Bois and racial politics of, 103; Fanon and anticolonial critique of, 152, 163–64, 166, 174–75; Midnight’s Children and, 43–44; Naipaul on postcolonial practices of, 40, 83–84, 88–89; Sarduy’s notion of nation and gender in relation to, 229–30, 238–42, 258 Mitre, Bartolomé, 224–25 Mobuto, Joseph, 83–83 Monegal, Emir Rodríguez, 229 Moretti, Franco, 19, 36, 57 Mourning: Benjamin’s Trauerspiel and, 126–27; Freudian theory of, 32–33, 220; nation and work of, 87–90 (Naipaul), 96 (Dabydeen), 105, 109, 125–27 (Du Bois), 146–48, 172–73, 178–79 (Fanon), 213–14 (Coetzee), 220–21, 245–46, 258–59 (Sarduy), 273–74 (Ghosh)

Movement: as critical method, 30–31, 178, 269–70, 274; fantasy as model of, 24–25; genre and genre theory as model of, 20, 38; melancholia as model of, 33; mourning as model of, 220 Mowitt, John, 159, 163 Mulvey, Laura, 189 Naipaul, V. S.: diasporic loss in, 40–41; postcolonial belatedness in, 87–88; postcolonial nationalism critiqued by, 90–92. Works: An Area of Darkness, 40–41; A Bend in the River, 82–93; “Conrad’s Darkness,” 87; An Enigma of Arrival, 85–86 Nairn, Tom, 21 Nation: African literature and, 77–82 (Achebe), 200–15 (Coetzee), 193–97 (Djebar), 197–99 (Dangarembga), 184–93 (Ngu˜ gi); apparent obsolescence of, 2–4, 8, 15, 17, 34, 182–83; Conrad’s imperial model of, 56–57, 60–61, 67–68; Derrida’s critique of, 17–18, 171–73; desire and, 32, 243, 257–58; ghostly persistence of, 16–18, 28, 53, 96–97, 143, 150, 161, 168–73, 178–79, 192, 195–96, 275–76; global phenomena and, 1–5, 7–10, 275; idea of Algeria and, 158–62, 169– 73, 193–97; idea of black America and, 100–102, 105–6, 110–11, 123–25, 132; idea of Cuba and, 220, 231–31, 233, 236–37, 246–54, 257; idea of India and, 41–53, 262–64 (Rushdie), 45 (Kipling), 46–47 (Desani), 264– 74 (Ghosh); national object and, 220–21, 225–26; Nation-Thing and, 27–28, 160–61; postcolonial context of, 7–9; postcolonial disillusionment with, 49–51, 82–86, 90–92, 169–70, 181–83, 220–22, 258, 264, 272–73; psychoanalysis and, 5, 24, 10, 20– 35, 71–77, 158–62, 233–35, 238, 252, 256–59, 272–74; race in relation to,

   Index 60–67, 102–9, 114–16, 121, 125–26, 149–50, 165–66, 174–75, 179, 181–84; relational thinking and, 3–5, 275–76; subject and, 9–10, 20–26, 33–34, 221–22, 242–43. See also Allegory; Fantasmatic; Fantasy; Fetish; Gender; Loss; Melancholia; Memory; Mourning; Novel; Identification Nationalism: anticolonial discourse of, 164–67, 174–79, 184–91; “bad” vs. “good,” 21; entwined with globalisms, 4–5, 35, (general) 53 (Rushdie), 56–57 (Conrad), 99–100, 128–29, 131–37, 141–42 (Du Bois), 169–70, 178–79 (Fanon); neocolonial forms of, 165– 67, 174–77, 184–93; postcolonial violence, trauma, and, 264–66, 273– 74; structure of in relation to psychic temporality, 20–21 The Negro American Family (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 107–8 “The Negro Mind Reaches Out” (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 98 Nerval, Gérard de, 249 Ng ˜ugi, wa Thiong’o. Works: Decolonizing the Mind, 188, 190; Devil on the Cross (see under), 185–86, 189–93; A Grain of Wheat, 189; Weep Not, Child, 189 Nixon, Rob, 85 Nordau, Max, 65–66 Novel: Africa and, 77–81, 83–85, 182–84, 190–91; allegorical romance and, 128–33, 225; bildungsroman and, 90, 93, 185; as genre of futurity, 183–84, 192–93, 198–200; global flows and, 19–20, 36–40, 93; heteroglossia and, 19, 44–47, 77–78, 93–94, 190–92; historical novel and, 41–43, 134–39, 228; India and, 41–53, 264–74; Latin America and, 224–26; melancholia of form and, 37–39, 48, 52; postmodern forms of, 48–49, 204, 212–14, 228–32; theory of, 36–40; tool of

decolonization as, 45–46, 77–78, 184– 93, 197–200, 215–16. See also Allegory; Bakhtin; Lukács; Melancholia; Memory; Mourning; Nation Ohmae, Kenichi, 2 Ontopology, 17. See also Derrida Orientalism: models and critiques of, 50, 248–50, 254–55, 340n86; Sarduy and, 247–56 Otten, Thomas J., 111 Parnell, Tim, 48 Parry, Benita, 58, 156, 279n12, 297n8, 307n92 Paz, Octavio, 248 The Philadelphia Negro (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 106–7 Pietz, William, 159 Pizer, John, 13 Pontalis, J.B., see Laplanche, Jean Posnock, Ross, 100, 131, 150, 317n61 Postcolonial: comparative method and, 11–16; long postcolonial twentieth century, 7–10, 19–20; nation’s importance to, 1–10, 270, 274–76; national-global tensions and, 4–5, 35–36; novel and approaches to, 19–20, 36, 39–40, 58–59, 76–79, 92, 96–97, 181–85, 214–15; psychoanalysis and, 22–24, 34. See also Allegory; Melancholia; Nation; Nationalism; Novel; Temporality Prasad, Madhava, 58–59 Pratt, Mary Louise, 59 Psychoanalysis: critical literature on in relation to feminist, postcolonial, and critical race studies, 287, n71; deconstruction and, 15–16, 28–32; Deleuze and, 9–10; nation in relation to, 5, 20–35, 71–77, 160–62, 233– 35, 238, 252, 256–59, 272–74; novel and, 22, 37–40; provincializing of, 23. See also Fanon; Fantasmatic; Fantasy; Fetish; Freud; Identification; Mourning; Melancholia; Lacan;

Index    Laplanche; Loss; Sarduy; Žižek Race: fractured concept of, 125–26; nation in relation to, 60–67, 102–9, 114–16, 121, 125–26, 149–50, 165–66, 174–75, 179, 181–84; time in relation to, 60–62 (Conrad), 102–9, 111, 117– 18, 122–25 (Du Bois), 143–50, 157–58, 165–66, 174–75 (Fanon), 157, 181–83 (Mbembe) Radhakrishnan, R., 3 Ragland-Sullivan, Ellie, 257 Rao, Raja, 46–47 Reading: anamorphic and baroque models of, 236–38; comparative, postcolonial, and world models of, 11–17, 19–20, 223–24; double consciousness as dialectical model of, 114–15; encounter model of, 58–59; uncanny model of, 14–15, 71–77, 91– 92, 96–97, 214. Also see Ghost Reder, Michael, 52, 292n107 Reed, Adolph, 113–14, 313nn29–30 Rege, Josna, 51, 294n126 Renan, Ernest, 104–5 Ricciardi, Alessia, 221, 245, 259 Robertson, Roland, 4 Rodó, Enrique, 226–27 Rushdie, Salman: Indian novel in English and, 45–47, 293n113; national and cosmopolitan tensions in, 44, 47, 49–51. Works: Midnight’s Children (see under); The Satanic Verses, 262– 64 Said, Edward: novel and imperialism on, 36, 59; orientalism on, 58, 249, 254– 55, 340n86; Naipaul on, 85 Sanders, Mark, 135, 209 Sangari, Kum Kum, 48 Santner, Eric, 290n85 Sarduy, Severo: desire and nation in, 256–59; French poststructuralism and, 219–20; Fanon compared to, 258; gender and nation in, 229–31, 238–39, 247; migrancy and, 217–

18, 236–37; Lacan and, 233–35, 238, 252, 256. Works: Cobra (see under); Barroco, 233–34, 238; Simulación, 237, 239, 241, 247 Sarmiento, Domingo Faustino, 232–33 Saro-Wiwa, Ken, 190 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 147, 197 Sassen, Saskia, 10 The Satanic Verses (Rushdie, Salman), 262–64 Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 158, 179–80 Sembène, Ousmane, 186–88 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana, 23, 287n71 The Shadow Lines (Ghosh, Amitav): diaspora and, 265, 267; fantasmatic cartography in, 261, 264–65, 267, 270, 274; Lacan and, 272–73; memory and, 265–66, 268–70 Sharpe, Jenny, 124 Slemon, Stephen, 48 Solanos, Fernando, 186 Sommer, Doris, 119–20, 128–29 Sontag, Susan, 241 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois, W. E. B.): allegory in, 115–25; double consciousness in, 109–15; genre in, 124, 128; memory in, 105, 109, 115– 18, 121–22, 128; national and global entwined in, 114–15, 124–26; race in, 109–11, 121, 125–6 Smith, Paul, 3 Spectrality. See Ghost; Derrida Spencer, Herbert: critical discussions of, 298n19, 299n23; Du Bois critique of, 103, 107–8; idea of progress and imperial devolution in, 61–65; racialism and primitivism in, 62, 299n25, 300n27; role of in U.S. social evolutionism, 102–3 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: world literature critiqued by, 3,18–19; on Du Bois, 100; on Foe, 203–4; on ghostreading, 183, 194–95; on Heart of Darkness and uncanny reading, 74, 76, 91; on Satanic Verses, 263–64

   Index Srivastava, Neelam, 49, 293n115 Stallybrass, Peter, 241 Studies in a Dying Colonialism (Fanon, Frantz), 162–64 Suleri-Goodyear, Sara, 85, 280n20 Tate, Claudia, 133 Temporality: fantasy’s structure of, 24– 25; genre as, 13–14, 19–20, 37–40, 137–39, 150, 163–64, 179–80; national novel and, 53, 67–69, 59–60, 90–91, 132, 135, 138, 185, 192, 194–96, 206–9, 212–15, 237, 228–29, 266–68; national plots of, 20–22, 142–3,165–67, 174– 77, 184–93; postcolony and, 181–82; spectral and uncanny forms of, 14–17, 71–77, 96–97, 150, 168–72, 178–79, 181–82, 214; structure of flow as, 5–8; time line of racial and national progress in Victorian thought, 60–62; U.S. social science and, 102–9. Also see Allegory; Degeneration; Memory; Nation Ten Kortenaar, Neil, 51 Territoriality: fantasmatic structure of, 25–26; nation form and, 1–2, 9–10; psychic structures and, 32–33; psychoanalysis and, 30–32 Teskey, Gordon, 205–6, 214 Thakurta, Tapati Guha, 253 Todorov, Tzvetan, 37 Trauma, 53, 265, 273–74

Uberoi, Patricia, 253 Uncanny: Freud on, 14; model for world literature, 14–15; model for postcolonial literature, 71–77, 96–97, 214; Derrida on, 15–16, 74–75, 171; Spivak on, 6, 91–92 Varma, Ravi, 253–54 Vergès, Françoise, 153, 321nn20, 22 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 4, 279n9 Watt, Ian, 37, 61, 67, 203, 291n95, 295n2 Weinbaum, Alys, 317n61 Wellek, René, 12 Weltliteratur, 12–13 The World and Africa (Du Bois, W. E. B.), 136 World literature, 11–14, 73–74, 275–76 World system, 3–6, 13–15, 36–40, 279n9 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon, Frantz): genre in, 173–4, 176, 179–80; national and global entwined in, 169–70, 178–79; spectral time in, 161–62, 164–70, 173–79; race in, 165– 66, 174–75; nation in, 159, 164–66, 173–80 Zabus, Chantal, 187, 190, 193 Žižek, Slavoj: on anamorphosis, 221–22, 235–36; critique of melancholia by, 221–22, 243, 290n85; on Deleuze, 9–10; on desire, 258; on fantasy, 157; on lack and loss, 256–57, 243; on Nation-Thing, 160–61, 236

Cultural Memory    in the Present

Josef Früchtl, The Impertinent Self: A Heroic History of Modernity Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History Frank Ankersmit, Ewa Domanska, and Hans Kellner, eds., Re-Figuring Hayden White Stéphane Mosès, The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, and Carel Smith, eds., The Rhetoric of Sincerity Alexandre Lefebvre, The Image of the Law: Deleuze, Bergson, Spinoza Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition: Reform, Rationality, and Modernity Diane Perpich, The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas Marcel Detienne, Comparing the Incomparable François Delaporte, Anatomy of the Passions René Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1959–2005 Richard Baxstrom, Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia Jennifer L. Culbert, Dead Certainty: The Death Penalty and the Problem of Judgment Samantha Frost, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker: Hobbesian Reflections on Ethics and Politics Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature Ranjana Khanna, Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present Esther Peeren, Intersubjectivities and Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond Eyal Peretz, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses Diana Sorensen, A Turbulent Decade Remembered: Scenes from the Latin American Sixties

Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy Asja Szafraniec, Beckett, Derrida, and the Event of Literature Sara Guyer, Romanticism after Auschwitz Alison Ross, The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy Gerhard Richter, Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life Bella Brodzki, Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory Rodolphe Gasché, The Honor of Thinking: Critique, Theory, Philosophy Brigitte Peucker, The Material Image: Art and the Real in Film Natalie Melas, All the Difference in the World: Postcoloniality and the Ends of Comparison Jonathan Culler, The Literary in Theory Michael G. Levine, The Belated Witness: Literature, Testimony, and the Question of Holocaust Survival Jennifer A. Jordan, Structures of Memory: Understanding German Change in Berlin and Beyond Christoph Menke, Reflections of Equality Marlène Zarader, The Unthought Debt: Heidegger and the Hebraic Heritage Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors Gyanendra Pandey, Routine Violence: Nations, Fragments, Histories James Siegel, Naming the Witch J. M. Bernstein, Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting Theodore W. Jennings, Jr., Reading Derrida / Thinking Paul: On Justice Richard Rorty and Eduardo Mendieta, Take Care of Freedom and Truth Will Take Care of Itself: Interviews with Richard Rorty Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine Renaud Barbaras, Desire and Distance: Introduction to a Phenomenology of Perception Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art Ban Wang, Illuminations from the Past: Trauma, Memory, and History in Modern China

James Phillips, Heidegger’s Volk: Between National Socialism and Poetry Frank Ankersmit, Sublime Historical Experience István Rév, Retroactive Justice: Prehistory of Post-Communism Paola Marrati, Genesis and Trace: Derrida Reading Husserl and Heidegger Krzysztof Ziarek, The Force of Art Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy: The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary Cecilia Sjöholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire Jacques Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . : A Dialogue Elisabeth Weber, Questioning Judaism: Interviews by Elisabeth Weber Jacques Derrida and Catherine Malabou, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul Jean-Luc Marion, The Crossing of the Visible Eric Michaud, An Art for Eternity: The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany Anne Freadman, The Machinery of Talk: Charles Peirce and the Sign Hypothesis Stanley Cavell, Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes Stuart McLean, The Event and Its Terrors: Ireland, Famine, Modernity Beate Rössler, ed., Privacies: Philosophical Evaluations Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses Alessia Ricciardi, The Ends of Mourning: Psychoanalysis, Literature, Film Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Gil Anidjar, The Jew, The Arab: A History of the Enemy Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb, eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking, edited by Simon Sparks Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, edited by Rolf Tiedemann Patricia Pisters, The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity Dorothea von Mücke, The Rise of the Fantastic Tale Marc Redfield, The Politics of Aesthetics: Nationalism, Gender, Romanticism

Emmanuel Levinas, On Escape Dan Zahavi, Husserl’s Phenomenology Rodolphe Gasché, The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant’s Aesthetics Michael Naas, Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction Herlinde Pauer-Studer, ed., Constructions of Practical Reason: Interviews on Moral and Political Philosophy Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy Martin Stokhof, World and Life as One: Ethics and Ontology in Wittgenstein’s Early Thought Gianni Vattimo, Nietzsche: An Introduction Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, ‒, ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg Brett Levinson, The Ends of Literature: Post-transition and Neoliberalism in the Wake of the “Boom” Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, eds., Religion and Media Niklas Luhmann, Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. and introd. William Rasch Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays Michel Henry, I Am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity Gil Anidjar, “Our Place in Al-Andalus”: Kabbalah, Philosophy, Literature in ArabJewish Letters Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils F. R. Ankersmit, Historical Representation F. R. Ankersmit, Political Representation Elissa Marder, Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media Hubert Damisch, A Childhood Memory by Piero della Francesca Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting Jean-Luc Nancy, The Speculative Remark (One of Hegel’s Bons Mots)

Jean-François Lyotard, Soundproof Room: Malraux’s Anti-Aesthetics Jan Patocˇka, Plato and Europe Hubert Damisch, Skyline: The Narcissistic City Isabel Hoving, In Praise of New Travelers: Reading Caribbean Migrant Women Writers Richard Rand, ed., Futures: Of Derrida William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradox of System Differentiation Jacques Derrida and Anne Dufourmantelle, Of Hospitality Jean-François Lyotard, The Confession of Augustine Kaja Silverman, World Spectators Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation: Expanded Edition Jeffrey S. Librett, The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans in the Epoch of Emancipation Ulrich Baer, Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan Samuel C. Wheeler III, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy David S. Ferris, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity Rodolphe Gasché, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation Sarah Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud: Expanded Edition Aris Fioretos, ed., The Solid Letter: Readings of Friedrich Hölderlin J. Hillis Miller / Manuel Asensi, Black Holes / J. Hillis Miller; or, Boustrophedonic Reading Miryam Sas, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism Peter Schwenger, Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning Didier Maleuvre, Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia Niklas Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy Mieke Bal, ed., The Practice of Cultural Analysis: Exposing Interdisciplinary Interpretation Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion