Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts 2020032639, 2020032640, 9789004428058, 9789004437456

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Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts

Cross/Cultures Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English Edited by Bénédicte Ledent Delphine Munos Co-founding editors †Hena Maes-Jelinek Gordon Collier †Geoffrey Davis

volume 213

asnel/GAPS Papers asnel Papers appear under the auspices of the Gesellschaft für Anglophone Postkoloniale Studien (gaps) Association for Anglophone Postcolonial Studies Cecile Sandten GAPS President Chemnitz University of Technology

volume 23

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/asne

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts Edited by

Katja Sarkowsky and Mark U. Stein

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: ©Felipe Espinoza Garrido and Caroline Koegler. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sarkowsky, Katja, editor. | Stein, Mark, 1966- editor. Title: Ideology in postcolonial texts and contexts / edited by Katja Sarkowsky and Mark U. Stein. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill Rodopi, 2021. | Series: ASNEL paper ; volume 23 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020032639 (print) | LCCN 2020032640 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004428058 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004437456 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Postcolonialism. | Ideology. | Postcolonialism in literature. Classification: LCC JV51 .I44 2020 (print) | LCC JV51 (ebook) | DDC 325/.3–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032639 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020032640

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0924-1426 isbn 978-90-04-42805-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-43745-6 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents

List of Figures vii List of Tables viii Notes on Contributors ix



Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts—an Introduction 1 Katja Sarkowsky and Mark U. Stein

part 1 Postcolonialism and Ideology 1

Ideologiekritik—a Critique 15 Michael Freeden

2

“A Crude, Empty, Fragile Shell?”—Postcolonial Consciousness in an Era of Global Capitalism 30 Laura Chrisman

3

The Market as a Dimension of Practice—Commodification, Ideology, and Postcolonial Studies 43 Caroline Koegler

part 2 Ideology in Postcolonial Contexts 4

Haggling and Postcolonial Phonological Constructs in Nigeria 59 Taiwo Soneye

5

Standard Language Ideology Revisited—the Case of Newscasters in St. Vincent and the Grenadines 86 Eva Canan Hänsel

6

Imagining Pasts, Writing Lives—Familial Narratives, Memory, and the ‘Ideological I’ in Imbi Paju’s Memories Denied 106 Andreas Athanasiades

vi Contents 7

Promoting the Exotic?—the Ideological Mechanisms of Literary Prizes 127 Simon Rosenberg

part 3 Continuities, Complications, Critique 8

Reflections of Lusáni Cissé—Imperial Images and Sentient Critique 147 Lars Eckstein

9

The Ambivalence of the Veil in Contemporary British Culture 162 Ana Sobral

10

Crime and the Censor—the Production and Reception of Crime Fiction in Apartheid and Post-apartheid South Africa 182 Elizabeth le Roux

11

National Allegories in the Age of Globalization—Prologue to an Analysis of Contemporary Canadian Young Adult Fiction 204 Mavis Reimer

12

Bone to Bone, Spirit to Spirit—Sovereign Matriarchy, Asian/Indigenous Relations, and the Work of Directed Re-membering 223 Larissa Lai



Index 259

Figures 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 5.1 5.2 5.3

7.1 8.1 8.2 and 8.3 8.4 and 8.5 8.6

“Now” in the phonology of haggling in Nigeria 66 Nigerians’ intonation of now as a plea or an appeal (fall-rise-↖↗) 66 British intonation of now (Falling tune╲) 66 Better in Nigerian Pidgin Accent (Not necessarily comparative) “You no be better man” means you are not a good man 69 Is this blue or black? (Text 11) 71 You are putting it on scale? (Text 2) 71 Rates of realizations of prototypical American variants 93 Rates of monophthong realizations of the vowel in words of the goat and face sets as well as rates of word-initial voiced TH stopping 96 Rates of back and rounded realizations of the vowel in words of the strut and nurse sets as well as rates of the realization of word-final (-ing) as [ɪn] 96 Standard procedure of the Booker Prize 134 Lusáni Cissé, 1916, digital archive of the Frobenius Institute 150 Lusáni Cissé, 1916, analogue print, in exhibition catalogue Gefangene Bilder 152 Lusáni Cissé, 1918, in Josef Weninger, Morphologisch-anthropologische Studie, Tafel xxxviii 154 Detail of fig. 8.2, reflection in the iris of Lusáni Cissé, 1916 158

Tables Background information on the newscasters 90 Overview of the variables analyzed and their American and Caribbean variants as well as alternative variants 91 5.3 Mean percentages of realization of American variants 93 5.4 Mean percentages of realization of Caribbean variants 95 7.1 Properties of the three most popular British book prizes 131 5.1 5.2

Notes on Contributors Andreas Athanasiades is Adjunct Lecturer in English at the University of Cyprus. He has published book chapters with various colleagues as well as articles in the Journal of Postcolonial Studies, Auto/Fiction, the Journal of Mediterranean Studies and Indi@ Logs among others, on a range of topics such as desire, sexuality, memory and postmemory, life writing and trauma, Islamic fundamentalism, and postcolonial identity in Hanif Kureishi’s work. He is currently working as a contributor in Brian Bergen-Aurand and Andrew Grossman’s upcoming Encyclopaedia of Queer Cinema. Laura Chrisman is Nancy K. Ketcham Endowed Chair of English at the University of Washington, where she teaches African, black diaspora, and postcolonial studies, as well as modern literatures in English. Her publications include Postcolonial Contraventions: Cultural Readings of Race, Imperialism and Transnationalism (Manchester UP, 2003)  and Rereading the Imperial Romance:  British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner and Plaatje (Oxford UP, 2000). Edited and co-edited publications include “The Rendez-Vous of Conquest”: Rethinking Race and Nation (Lawrence and Wishart, 2001); Postcolonial Theory and Criticism. Essays and Studies, volume 52, 2000; (with Benita Parry); Transcending Traditions: Afro-American, African Diaspora and African Studies (Special issue of The Black Scholar, 2000, with Farah Griffin and Tukufu Zuberi); Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Harvester, 1993, with Patrick Williams). She is currently preparing a book on transnational relations between black South Africa and black America in the late 19th- and early 20th- centuries. Lars Eckstein is Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at the University of Potsdam. He is the author of The Making of Tupaia’s Map, with Anja Schwarz (jph, 2019), Postcolonial Literatures in English, with Anke Bartels, Dirk Wiemann and Nicole Waller (Metzler, 2019), Reading Song Lyrics (Brill, 2010), and Re-Membering the Black Atlantic (Brill, 2006). Among his edited works are Remembering German-Australian Colonial Entanglements, with Andrew Hurley (Routledge, 2020), Postcolonial Justice, with Anke Bartels, Dirk Wiemann and Nicole Waller (Brill, 2017), and Postcolonial Piracy, with Anja Schwarz (Bloomsbury, 2014). He is co-spokesperson of the rtg minor cosmopolitanisms.

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Michael Freeden is Emeritus Professor of Politics, University of Oxford. His books include The New Liberalism (1978), Ideologies and Political Theory (1996), The Political Theory of Political Thinking (2013) (all Oxford University Press), Conceptual History in the European Space (co-edited with W. Steinmetz and J. Fernández-Sebastián, Berghahn, 2017), and In Search of European Liberalisms (co-edited with J. Fernández-Sebastián and J. Leonhard, Berghahn, 2019). He is the founder-editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies. He has been awarded the Sir Isaiah Berlin Prize for Lifetime Contribution to Political Studies by the UK Political Studies Association, and the Medal for Science, Institute of Advanced Studies, Bologna University. Eva Canan Hänsel is a research assistant at the chair of variation linguistics in the English Department at wwu Muenster, where she earned a B.A. and an M.Ed. in English and Spanish. Currently, she is working on a PhD thesis on English in secondary and tertiary educational institutions in Grenada. Her research interests include varieties of English with a focus on Caribbean Englishes, English in education and news media, as well as language attitudes. Caroline Koegler is Assistant Professor of British Literary and Cultural Studies at wwu Muenster. She is author of Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market (Routledge 2018) and, with Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Deborah Nyangulu and Mark Stein, co-editor of Locating African European Studies: Interventions-Intersections-Conversations (Routledge 2020). Other current publications include “Queer Home-Making and Black Britain. Claiming, Ageing, Living” (Interventions, 2020), “Follow the Hatred: The Production of Negative Feeling in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847)” (NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, forthcoming), the special issue “Writing Brexit:  Colonial Remains” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing; with Marlena Tronicke, Pavan Malreddy, forthcoming), and Law, Literature and Citizenship (DeGruyter; co-edited with Jesper Reddig, Klaus Stierstorfer, forthcoming). Larissa Lai is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Calgary, having been Assistant Professor in Canadian Literature at ubc (2007–2014). She is author of novels When Fox Is A Thousand (Press Gang, 1995; Arsenal Pulp, 2004), Salt Fish Girl (Thomas Allen, 2002) and The Tiger Flu (Arsenal Pulp, 2019); poetry books Sybil Unrest (with Rita Wong; LINEbooks,

Notes on Contributors

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2008; New Star, 2013), Automaton Biographies (Arsenal Pulp, 2009), and Iron Goddess of Mercy (forthcoming Arsenal Pulp, 2021); and a monograph, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s (wlup, 2014). Elizabeth le Roux is Associate Professor in Publishing Studies at the University of Pretoria. She is co-editor of the journal Book History, and author of A Social History of the University Presses in Apartheid South Africa (Brill, 2016) and A Survey of South African Crime Fiction, with Sam Naidu (ukzn Press, 2017). Her history of the anti-apartheid publisher Ravan Press will shortly be published by Cambridge University Press. Mavis Reimer is Professor of English and Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Winnipeg. She was awarded a Canada Research Chair in Young People’s Texts and Cultures from 2005 to 2015 and serves as a director of the Centre for Research in Young People’s Texts and Cultures. She has published widely in the field of texts for young readers, including the co-edited volumes Girls, Texts, Cultures (with Clare Bradford; Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2015) and Seriality and Texts for Young Peoples: The Compulsion to Repeat (with Nyala Ali, Deanna England, and Melanie Dennis Unrau; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Simon Rosenberg worked as teaching and research assistant at the Institut für Buchwissenschaft & Textforschung. From 2016 to 2020 he was Akademischer Oberrat at the English Department of wwu Muenster, taking on teaching and administrative duties of the vacant chair of book studies. He has published articles on the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2018), the authority of typography (2012, 2016) and has co-edited the liber amicorum Material Moments in Book Cultures (2014) with Sandra Simon. He is the author of the monograph Book Value Categories and the Acceptance of Technological Changes in English Book Production (2020). Ana Sobral is Assistant Professor of Global Literatures in English at the University of Zurich. Her publications include articles and book chapters on rap and poetry in the Global South, Islamic feminism, the performative aspects of the Arab Spring, and the links between popular music, migration and cosmopolitanism, as well as the monograph Opting Out: Deviance and Generational Identities in American Post-War Cult Fiction (Brill, 2012).

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Katja Sarkowsky is Chair of American Studies at Augsburg University. Her research focuses on literary citizenship studies, life writing, and Indigenous literatures in Canada and the United States. Her publications include the monographs AlterNative Spaces:  Constructions of Space in Native American and First Nations Literatures (Winter, 2007)  and Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature (Palgrave, 2018) as well as the edited volumes “Cranes on the Rise”: Metaphors in Life Writing (De Gruyter, 2018) and Nachexil/Post-Exile (with Bettina Bannasch, forthcoming). Taiwo Soneye is a Professor of English Language at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Nigeria. She teaches phonology, phonetics and applied linguistics and researches identity, voice and ideology in the pronunciations of English, Pidgin and Nigerian Indigenous languages. She has authored and co-authored several works including, ‘We just don’t even know’: The Usage of the Pragmatic Focus Particles Even and Still in Nigerian English, English World Wide (2013) and “A Review of David Jowitt’s Nigerian English.” Folia Linguistica. 53(2), (2019). She is the founder of the Association of Phoneticians and Phonologists in Nigeria (appn). Mark U. Stein is Chair of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies at wwu Muenster (ptts. wwu.de) where he runs the National and Transnational Studies programme. His research interests include diaspora, transnational, and postcolonial studies with a focus on phenomena such as porosity and translocation in Anglophone cultural production. Publications include the monograph Black British Literature: Novels of Transformation (2004, Ohio State UP), and, ed. with Susheila Nasta, The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing (cup 2020), ed. with Tobias Döring, Edward Said’s Translocations (Routledge, 2012), ed. with Lyn Innes, African Europeans (Wasafiri, 2008), and, ed. with Susanne Reichl, Laughter and the Postcolonial (Rodopi, 2005).

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts—an Introduction Katja Sarkowsky and Mark U. Stein Since its earliest usage, ‘ideology’ has been a heavily contested term. Initially emerging in the context of the French Revolution, referring to Destutt de Tracy’s “science of ideas” (1796), the meaning of ‘ideology’ shifted when Napoleon Bonaparte used it in a political context to disparage his opponents as ‘the ideologues’ (cf. Porter; Freeden Ideologies and Political Theory). While its meaning fluctuated throughout the nineteenth century, Marx and Engels (1840s) likewise employed a critical notion of ideology—as ‘false consciousness’—which would later prove influential for the Frankfurt School. But among Marxist intellectuals, the meaning of the term has not always been entirely negative: Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and his critique of economism are a crucial contribution to a Marxist theory of ideology (see Mouffe 1979). For Louis Althusser (1970), it is ideology that “interpellates” individuals as subjects. For both Gramsci and Althusser, ‘ideology’ is clearly bound to the preservation of oppressive class structures but both also allow for its integrative function (Freeden Ideologies and Political Theory 19). Despite such differentiation, the term has retained its negative connotation of ‘close-mindedness’ in everyday parlance; calling a political opponent ‘ideological’ continues to be a widespread attempt at discrediting political enemies. More recently, the concept of ideology has itself come under scrutiny from a range of disciplinary locations. This not only entails the proposition of the “end of ideology” (see Bell) and, indeed, the notion of a post-ideological age (e.g. Fukuyama). Slavoj Žižek pointedly rejects post-ideology as a “cynical, ‘sober’ attitude that advocates liberal ‘openness’ in the matter of ‘opinions’ ” (Žižek 15) and suggests that post-ideological claims finally underscore the heightened efficacy of ideology (17). While such meta-critiques of ideology as a concept have thus gained currency, the criticism of specific ideologies remains a powerful analytical approach; however, both approaches tend to reproduce notions of ‘ideology’ as a distorting conception of social realities. Terry Eagleton distinguishes roughly between two lineages of ideology, one “preoccupied with ideas of true and false cognition,” the other “concerned more with the function of ideas within social life than with their reality or unreality”; both, he argues, have found resonance in Marxist conceptions (3), and, it might be added, postcolonial studies. With a slightly different emphasis, Robert Porter notes that analyses

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of ideology (both of the concept ‘as such’ and of specific manifestations) tend to fall in either of two categories: those that allow for a pre-ideological standpoint from which to criticize ideological structures and those that hold that all standpoints are necessarily ideological (12). The first variant—exemplified for Porter not only by an orthodox Marxist understanding of ‘false consciousness’ but also by Habermas, Žižek, and Deleuze—conceptualizes ideology as contraposed to a notion of the un- or pre-ideological real; in the second—Porter uses Ricœur and Freeden as examples—ideologies are inevitable frameworks that, as Freeden has it, “map the political and social worlds for us. We simply cannot do without them because we cannot act without making sense of the worlds we inhabit” (Freeden Ideology 2). From this perspective, while not every framework is ideological by default, ideology as a framework provides an important matrix to understand the world and “enable collective action in furthering or impeding the goals of a society” (Freeden “Ideology” 14). It is this enabling of collective action that distinguishes ideological from non-ideological frameworks, an understanding that, in addition to a Marxist notion of ideology, has also found its way into postcolonial and cultural studies, e.g. as proposed by Lawrence Grossberg, who points to ideology “as broader systems of beliefs, ideas and attitudes that have direct implications for political commitments and actions” (177; see also Rosenberg in this volume). Connected to this juxtaposition of the ‘ideological’ and the ‘real’ is another distinction crucial for postcolonial debates: the distinction between those conceptions that see ideology as necessarily repressive and as an instrument of a ruling class or group to uphold a status quo to its advantage (through economic relations, institutions, etc.) and those that regard ideology as a phenomenon that exists in marginalized as well as hegemonic groups; in short, the specific relation between ideology and power. In light of his own conceptualization of ideologies as “ubiquitous forms of political thinking,” Freeden points out that as such they “are inevitably associated with power, though not invariably with the threatening or exploitative version of power” (Ideologies and Political Theory 22–23); more broadly, ideologies legitimize or delegitimize the distribution of power within and between societies (Freeden in this volume, p. 22). In this assessment of a generalized understanding of the relation between ideology and power across the different notions of ideology, there is a rare overlap between Freeden’s position and Terry Eagleton’s. “The force of the term ideology,” argues Eagleton, “lies in its capacity to discriminate between those power struggles which are somehow central to a whole form of social life, and those which are not” (8). If this capacity distinguishes ‘ideology’ potentially from the concept of ‘discourse,’ it nevertheless does not resolve the issue of the means by which such distinctions become or fail to become effective.

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts—an Introduction

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It can be stated fairly safely that in postcolonial studies there is a strong tendency to regard ideology as a form of manipulative distortion that serves to uphold and perpetuate oppressive power structures between and within societies and cultures. Criticisms of both colonial and post-independence ideological formations have played a central role and linked the field to similar theoretical developments in, for example, cultural studies, feminist studies, and Marxist criticism as well as more recently in the critique of settler ideology in Indigenous studies. However, the deconstruction of colonial ideologies and their political and cultural manifestations have also met with criticism from within and outside the discipline, as the ideological foundations of the field itself have come under scrutiny. As Robert Young asked in his editorial to the launch issue of Interventions over twenty years ago: “Is postcolonialism a critique or is it itself an ideology, and if the latter, what are the ideologies of post-colonial writing, whether literary, cultural, or critical/theoretical?” (5) This key question is far from settled and touches upon one of the central aspects of an otherwise highly multifarious debate about ideology: the critique of specific ideologies (understood mostly as hegemonic) and the analytical scrutiny of ideology/ideologies (understood as manifestations of a ubiquitous political form). Much of postcolonial studies’ engagement with ideology/ideologies has been a critique of specific ideologies (imperial, colonial, settler, etc.) in a long-standing tradition of identifying, unmasking, and criticizing power structures—forms of Ideologiekritik, as Michael Freeden critically discusses this type of approach in the opening chapter of this volume. Linking Ideologiekritik to critical discourse analysis (and hence to colonial discourse analysis), Freeden argues that they both aim at “uncover[ing] and identify[ing] distortions and misrepresentations that undermine the autonomy, personhood, and social cohesiveness of individuals in society” (p. 15 in this volume). While as a tool of ethical criticism it clearly has had a “powerful and productive impact in sensitizing us to the overt and hidden assumptions that percolate into the social and ideational environments in which we are located,” the narrow understanding of ideology as harmful distortion also in Freeden’s view fails to recognize ideologies as indispensable to political thought and “contributes to distorted social analysis and blocks out much of the complexity of the world and our thoughts about it” (p. 16 in this volume). Freeden’s criticism of Ideologiekritik raises important questions for postcolonial studies that reflect on two crucial lines of conceptual disagreement regarding ideology discussed above:  ideology as a distortion of a generally perceivable reality vs. ideology as an indispensable framework for interpreting a reality that cannot be accessed from a ‘neutral’ position; and ideology as a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful vs. ideology as a ubiquitous

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form of political thinking also underlying resistant thought and action by marginalized subjects and groups. ‘Settler ideology,’ ‘colonial ideology,’ or ‘neoliberal ideology’ serve as widely used shorthand for oppressive structures in postcolonial criticism; ‘postcolonial ideology,’ however, is used—if at all—by those critical of postcolonial theory and practice. Freeden’s criticism is certainly warranted in the sense that postcolonial critics who at times rely too strongly on such established shorthand thereby contribute to a perpetuation of a seemingly easy understanding of ideology as ‘false consciousness’ and as necessarily oppressive; the gesture of critique as a form of (or, put polemically, a replacement for) political action—a charge Julie Peters has brought against the law and literature movement and that applies to some manifestations of postcolonial criticism as well—is certainly part of the field. But as Rahul Rao shows in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (2013) that is also cited by Freeden, the development of postcolonial theory can be productively understood as a history of ideological struggles, prominently between Marxist conceptions and post-structuralism. Referencing Anne McClintock’s and Neil Lazarus’ fundamental critiques of postcolonialism as examples, Rao identifies a shift from postcolonialism’s ‘post’ as ‘past’ to ‘post’ as ‘anti’ and hence how “a periodizing or historical term has become an ideological concept” (271). In this light, the broad definition of postcolonialism promoted by Ashcroft, Griffith, and Tiffin in their influential The Empire Writes Back (1989) and the ensuing discussion are indications for what Rao calls a “ ‘fight’ between postcolonialism and its ideological antagonists” (271). While this does not identify postcolonialism as a rigid and closed ideology, it clearly classifies postcolonialism as an ideological framework, however heterogeneous in its specific manifestations. What do these debates mean for postcolonial analyses and critiques of power structures within and across societies? What do they imply for inquiries that regard themselves as part of a struggle for global justice? How much hinges, theoretically and politically, on a juxtaposition of the ideological and the non-ideological and hence on the possibility of a ‘truer’ position from which to criticize oppressive structures? As the contributions to this volume clearly bear out, the current engagement with ideologies and ideology in postcolonial studies is itself highly diversified and while it retains a strong focus in postcolonial studies, this engagement is not exclusively focused on Ideologiekritik. Analyses of ideological formations—even where they tend to understand ideologies as oppressive and distorting—do take into account their complexities and malleability; also, very much resonating with Young’s question cited above and Rao’s take on the issue, postcolonialism has become an object of critique as ideology.

Ideology in Postcolonial Texts and Contexts—an Introduction

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In light of this diversification of the discussion, section one of this volume, Postcolinialism and Ideadology, focuses on the complex relation between postcolonialism, postcolonial theory, and conceptualizations of ideology. Michael Freeden’s contribution “Ideologiekritik: A Critique” already referred to above, criticizes postcolonialism’s historically strong understanding of ‘ideology’ in its focus on the exposure and deconstruction of oppressive structures such as imperialism, colonialism, or racism in a larger context of Ideologiekritik and critical discourse analysis. While such critique “has had a powerful and productive impact in sensitizing us to the overt and hidden assumptions that percolate into the social and ideational environments in which we are located” and thus also “serves as an ethical tool to combat marginalization, alienation, exploitation, unjustifiable inequality, or cultural domination” (p. 16 in this volume), the underlying assumption about ideologies as smoke screens that can be dissolved to see the ‘true nature’ of human power relations on which such critique rests severely limits the understanding of ideologies as competing manifestations of political thought. Discussing what he considers seven central misconceptions about ideology, Freeden urges scholars and activists to take ideologies seriously as “an integral feature of political thought and thinking, an ineluctable aspect of social life” (p. 28), a stance that he regards as absolutely central if the pervasive power of such thought and thinking is to be grasped in all its complexity, specificity, and consequences. In “ ‘A Crude, Empty, Fragile Shell?’ Postcolonial Consciousness in an Era of Global Capitalism,” Laura Chrisman revisits the publication of Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, the first collection of seminal texts in postcolonial studies, which she co-edited with Patrick Williams in 1994. Highlighting her agenda for this volume as a “critical intervention, one that offered a materialist counterweight to the dominant post-structuralist strains of postcolonial theory, crystallised in what was then widely termed the “Holy Trinity” writings of Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak” (p. 30 in this volume), Chrisman reflects on the ideological concerns of the volume to retrace more strongly materialist (as well as nationalist) traditions in postcolonial thought. Asking “in what ways have postcolonial critical practices, texts and ideological contexts changed since 1992 [the year of Aijaz Ahmad’s landmark materialist critique of postcolonialism, In Theory]? Have culturalist and idealist models of post-structuralism receded, or transmogrified? Are materialist approaches still part of the ideological periphery?” (p. 32), Chrisman draws on the field’s journals to trace developments in postcolonial theory and its diversification, that is, the shifting prominence of poststructuralist approaches to postcolonialism and the increasing eclecticism of theoretical concerns, before discussing the ongoing impact of Fanon’s thought on postcolonialism

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and what Chrisman identifies “as a movement away from the rigid temporal divisions that have structured postcolonial studies” (p. 37), given the increasing prominence of Black transnational studies to the field. In the third and final contribution to this section, “The Market as a Dimension of Practice: Commodification, Ideology, and Postcolonial Studies,” Caroline Koegler discusses the relation of Postcolonial studies to the terms ‘capitalism’ and ‘commodification’. Postcolonial studies scholars, she argues, tend to use both terms analogously to ‘ideology’ “in popular parlance, where calling something ‘ideology’ instantly discredits an idea or practice without further examination” (p. 47). Juxtaposing capitalism and commodification to notions of incorruptness, naturalness, and authenticity, they implicate these terms in a number of taken-for-granted binary oppositions which effectively consigns the former to a position of ethical and epistemological inferiority vis-à-vis postcolonialism. Such largely unexamined discursive manoeuvres, continues Koegler, rest on an implicit and basically romantic understanding of the market as opposed to individual autonomy and creativity—and since Romanticism have implied the dilemma of reconciling commodification’s vilification with postcolonial critics’ reliance on the market to disseminate their own ideas. Against this background, Koegler suggests a modified understanding of commodification and the market that applies postcolonial critics’ deconstruction of binaries and of naturalized power structures to its own conceptual usage of such terms by understanding them with regard to their valorisation and branding functions as part of an academic debate. While section one thus focuses on overarching theoretical questions regarding the link between postcolonialism and ideology, section two, Ideology in Postcolonial Contexts, focuses on ideological formations that manifest themselves in very specific postcolonial contexts, highlighting the potential continuities between colonial and postcolonial ideologies. In her chapter “Haggling and Postcolonial Phonological Constructs in Nigeria,” Taiwo Soneye analyses ‘haggling’ as a practice in a multilingual context in which language choice and accent have significant ideological implications for identity formation. Asking about the relation between British English and Nigerian indigenous languages, the specific manifestations of accents and their functions, the expressed ideologies, and the function and deployment of multilingual resources in haggling for the construction of postcolonial identities, Soneye looks at audio-recorded negotiations between thirty-four buyers and sellers in south-western Nigeria. “Nigerian Spoken English in haggling,” she concludes, “has very little connection with its roots, which is the bequeathed British English. Although English is very much in the domain of haggling in Nigeria, it is the English that is garnished with the rhythm of its indigenous languages and saturated with the beats of

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home-grown pidgin as seen in the texts on haggling” (p. 74). While ‘sounding English’ was once an advantage, this is no longer the case, she concludes. Eva Canan Hänsel’s contribution “Standard Language Ideology Revisited: The Case of Newscasters in St. Vincent and the Grenadines” explores the question of language standard in a specific postcolonial context in terms of the very idea of a standard as an ideology, with “group-based ideologies in turn shap[ing] individual speakers’ attitudes to different language varieties” (p. 86). The discussion of whether in the anglophone Caribbean there is a tendency towards national standards or rather towards a Caribbean Standard English has also raised questions regarding the role of American and British English respectively as norm-providing varieties in these developments. Hänsel investigates spoken Standard English in news casting in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (svg), asking whether “newscasters in svg use a fairly homogeneous standard accent” and whether they “strive for a fairly homogeneous standard accent” (p. 89). Based on telephone interviews with Vincentian newscasters, Hänsel comes to the conclusion that there is both a high tolerance towards different accents among the newscasters and, given tourism and television, a surprisingly low influence of American English on Vincentian newscasters and a comparatively low authority of both American and British English generally. In the following chapter “Imagining Pasts, Writing Lives. Familial Narratives, Memory, and the Ideological “I” in Imbi Paju’s Memories Denied,” Andreas Athanasiades takes a different approach to the question of ideology. In the context of a broader discussion about the applicability of postcolonial theories to the study of literatures produced in the context of post-Soviet decolonization processes, Athanasiades analyses the depiction of trauma and post-memory in Imbi Paju’s Memories Denied (2009, orig. 2007), the account of her mother’s experience under Estonia’s occupation first by Nazi and then by Soviet forces and her deportation to a labour camp in Siberia. The text, he argues, provides a complex example of individual, transgenerational, and collective identity formation. Drawing on Sidonie Smith’s and Julia Watson’s concept of the ‘ideological I’ (2010) as a discursively available narrative position that complements the historical, the narrating and the narrated I  in autobiographical writing, Athanasiades proposes “that not in spite of, but because of the unpredictability and unreliability of an “I” which is informed by past memories through projective fantasy, one can open a space of possibilities, hitherto uncharted, to understand the beginnings, real and fictional, of the text and the lives associated with them” (p. 106). These spaces, as he sets out to show, provide no definitive autobiographical truths but highlight the fragmentary character of both experience and memory. As such, these spaces are not merely individual but potentially open to those of Paju’s generation.

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If the previous chapters each focus on a specific national context (Nigeria, svg, Estonia), the final contribution in this section considers the ideological implications of international literature prizes. In “Promoting the Exotic? The Ideological Mechanisms of Literary Prizes,” Simon Rosenberg analyses the mechanisms governing the selection of literary prizes with a specific focus on the Man Booker Prize which is not only the most prestigious UK literary award but, significantly, is closely intertwined with Britain’s colonial past and postcolonial present. Building on David Grossberg’s broad definition of ideology as an expansive system of beliefs and attitudes (not false consciousness), Rosenberg argues that “ideological frameworks of literary prizes can be, and usually are, exploited in a way that may conflict with the perceived official goals of the prize: promoting literature exclusively on aesthetic grounds” (p. 129). Taking a view on literary prizes informed by Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field, he highlights the de facto social, representative, and cultural and political functions of literary prizes. Identifying a shift towards, in Graham Huggan’s terms, the ‘postcolonial exotic’ in the Man Booker Prize, Rosenberg not only gauges the symbolic capital for the prize-winners but also analyses marketing strategies deployed not only in the wake of the prize’s long and short lists but also in response to controversies surrounding the selection process. While literary merit is clearly not irrelevant when it comes to the Man Booker, this contribution embeds selected examples from the prize’s more recent past in processes of market consideration and their ideological implications. While the chapters of the second section focus on manifestations of ideology in specific regional and historically post-colonial contexts as well as their impact on transnational circulation, section three, Continuities, Complications, Critique, expands the nexus of postcolonial ideology and thereby further highlights the complexities of ideological formations in postcolonial constellations. The explorations range from palimpsestic readings of colonial photography to considering veiling as potentially both ideological practice and individual resistance; from aesthetics as ideology to the popular as political; from genre ideology to home as ideological construct; to, finally displacing colonial settler ideology by grounded, matriarchal, creative and metaphorical engagement. In the opening chapter, Lars Eckstein heads to Wünsdorf, outside Berlin, in order to visit the site of Germany’s very first mosque, only to find that the ongoing construction of a refugee reception camp has all but obliterated its traces. During World War i, on the grounds of Half Moon Camp, the mosque had been part of Germany’s strategy to placate its c. 4.000 predominantly Muslim pows from French and British colonies in Africa and Asia, aiming to turn colonial battalions against their respective colonizers, thereby to foment anti-colonial rebellion against their rivals upon the prisoners’ release. Following

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the “affective surge across colonial and historical differences” and an “enchanted agency” of a colonial photograph, “Reflections of Lusáni Cissé—Imperial Images and Sentient Critique” engages with the powerful and enduring reflections of the imprisoned Cissé in the archives of colonial photography and the ideological work to which these images have been put. Proposing sentient critique as a way of accounting for the ongoing magic of the imperial image, this chapter underscores the wide range of epistemic positions—and the possibility of movement across them—as opposed to ideological closure: “Sentient critique must acknowledge and appreciate a plurality of epistemic positions across the colonial difference in the spirit of postcolonial justice, even while promoting and sustaining a community across that difference, an open community that is inherently political, yet operates beyond the need for singular ideological identification” (Eckstein, p. 159 in this volume). The next chapter seeks to open up and pluralize the significations of the cultural practice of veiling. In “The Ambivalence of the Veil in Contemporary British Culture,” Ana Sobral carefully reads representations of veiled Muslim women in contemporary UK literature and culture, heeding the contexts of production, performance, and reception. Aided by Miriam Cooke’s neologism Muslimwoman, a concept that draws attention to the erasure of complexity by an identification co-created externally by non-Muslims as well as Muslim men and that meshes gender and religion, Sobral points to the instrumentalization of Muslim women for political and ideological purposes. Gauging the scope for resistance in cultural production, she finds modes of emancipation offered in and through the texts and performances she analyses—by Monica Ali, Leila Aboulela, and the rap duo Poetic Pilgrimage. In distinct ways, celebrating hybridity, subverting the cliché of the oppressed Muslim woman, claiming and acclaiming the veil as a source of liberation, these texts defamiliarize the trope of the Muslimwoman, constructing diverse ways of being a Muslim woman in the West. Given their potential for exploration and social critique, the following chapter considers popular fiction generally and crime fiction specifically as sites of ideological contestation. According to Gramsci, culture “is the sphere in which ideologies are diffused and organized, in which hegemony is constructed and can be broken and reconstructed” (Forgacs 216 qtd. in le Roux 182 in this volume). With a focus on South Africa and the function of censorship, a practice that here dates back to the 1700s, Elizabeth le Roux analyses crime fiction published both during and since apartheid, finding that titles critical of apartheid were sometimes published if their ‘highbrow’ nature seemed to insulate them from broad readership. She examines the regime’s ideological stance against crime fiction and the continuities and discontinuities of this position, with a

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focus on Wessel Ebersohn’s apartheid and post-apartheid work. Critical of the conventional highbrow/lowbrow divide and of the politics vs. aesthetics binary, she suggests that it is the cultural embedding of crime in popular fiction which makes the genre valuable; it tells the critic about the publishing industry and the market, about readers and society at large. Though sales and popular appeal are vital, le Roux warns that to disregard “political aspects of popular fiction in favour of the aesthetic is in itself an ideological position” (p. 182 in this vol.), arguing that a focus on the publishing and reception of crime fiction can move us beyond the normative judgements of both the censors and the literary critics. The next chapter unravels the implications of the high number of homeless children represented in Canadian Young Adult (ya) narratives published since the 1990s. Mavis Reimer demonstrates how the genre constitutes a productive site for engaging, challenging, and transforming metaphorical discourses of the nation in the context of globalization’s condition for subjecthood. Her “National Allegories in the Age of Globalization” draws on Fredric Jameson who noted in The Political Unconscious that inasmuch as models of narrative genre allow readers “to register a given text’s specific deviation from them,” genre-based criticism can and must gauge “the more dialectical and historical issue of this determinate formal difference” (Jameson 113 qtd. in Reimer in this vol. p. 205– 206). In ya fiction, home conventionally signifies at different levels, not just as plot element and narrative trope but also home as nation. The “world of the novel” is “in principle an analogue of the nation” (Culler 23 qtd. by Reimer p. 218 in this volume), inviting and potentially enabling readers to become insiders, as Jonathan Culler suggests with reference to Anderson’s Imagined Community. However, under globalization, “identity and belonging become detached from the national home,” Reimer writes (p. 218 in this vol.). Home in crisis no longer fulfils readers’ genre expectations and the potential for lateral identification of the imagined community is disrupted, both of which have consequences for the production and reproduction of the nation. The chapter concludes that this corpus of texts not only points to current family dysfunction and failing social safety nets but also renders visible a nation undergoing a profound challenge to finding its “new being-in-the-world” in an age of globalization. Larissa Lai’s chapter concludes section 3 and the entire volume, exploring matriarchal principles in relations between Asian Canadian and indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island (North America, here Canada specifically); she advocates the reception of Asian/Indigenous cultural work in conversation, “interrelated rather than comparative” (p. 224 in this vol.). Lai specifically engages with Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua’s “argument that people of colour are settlers and must be accountable for that subject position” (Lai p. 223 in this

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vol.). In “Bone to Bone, Spirit to Spirit:  Sovereign Matriarchy, Asian/Indigenous Relations, and the Work of Directed Re-membering,” Lai then performs criticism as “Chinese Canadian literary/critical written storytelling” enacting “a kind of literary nationalism, not in the sense of producing ‘the best of all that has been thought and said’ in my culture or connecting my storytelling to ‘blood and soil.’ Rather, in recognizing the experiential, sedimented cultural specificity of my being, I seek a kind of metaphoric antidote for the historically and nationally specific cultural violence I have inherited. This is a creative act, a critical act, and an act of directed memory” (Lai p. 256 in this vol.). This claim for nationalism and for sovereignty re-valences both concepts poetically in the process. Her response to Lee Maracle and sky Lee takes up cultural channels among women instead of following the logic of state-to-state relationships. Favouring what she terms a “contingent nationalism,” Lai advocates—and practices—“literary, critical and creative thinking” (p. 256). The contributors to this volume, addressing a range of different materials from their various disciplinary locations, impressively demonstrate the productive uses to which concepts of ideology are put in postcolonial texts and contexts. While most of the contributions do engage in Ideologiekritik in some form and highlight the normativising and often oppressive character of ideological formations, they nevertheless also show the importance of a self-reflexive and self-critical assessment of approaching such formations. This not only avoids conflating ‘ideology’ with ‘false consciousness’ but also seeks to do justice to the complexity of ideologies as important manifestations of political thought that need to be taken seriously if they are to be understood and, if necessary, effectively countered. Acknowledging the specificity of positionality is key in postcolonial theory; and it serves as a reminder that there is no ‘outside’ beyond epistemological frameworks. The critique of ideological mani­ festations takes place within a complex constellation of competing notions of how social, political, and cultural structures work, a constellation in which each position is in itself potentially ‘ideological,’ but in which these notions also compete in a highly asymmetrical field of power relations. Not only is the study of ideology instructive for postcolonial studies; postcolonial studies, in turn, also contribute important insights to the study of ideology.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the contributors for their commitment to the volume and their patience; much gratitude goes also to Ljubica Samardzic and Taimi Schalle for their diligent copy-editing, to both Sara Fedrich and

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M. Faiq Lodhi for carefully checking quotations, and to M. Faiq Lodhi for providing the Index.

References

Bell, David. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the 1950s. 2nd ed. Harvard UP, 2000. Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. Verso, 1991. Freeden, Michael. Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach. Clarendon P, 1996. Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2003. Freeden, Michael. “Ideology and Political Theory.” Journal of Political Ideologies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2006, pp. 3–22. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. 2nd ed. Free P, 2006. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Ideology.” New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris, Blackwell Publ., 2005, pp. 175–178. Mouffe, Chantal. “Hegemony and Ideology in Gramsci.” Gramsci and Marxist Theory, edited by Chantal Mouffe, Routledge, 1979, pp. 168–204. Porter, Robert. Ideology: Contemporary Social, Political and Cultural Theory. U of Wales P, 2006. Rao, Rahul. “Postcolonialism.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 271–289. Young, Robert. “Ideologies of the Postcolonial.” Interventions, vol. 1, no. 1, 1998, pp. 4–8. Žižek, Slavoj. “Introduction:  The Spectre of Ideology.” Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verson, 1994, pp. 1–33.

pa rt 1 Postcolonialism and Ideology

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­c hapter 1

Ideologiekritik—a Critique Michael Freeden The study of ideology still remains a controversial and unsettling area of debate and scholarship. Above all, persistent antagonism to the phenomena it is thought to embrace has all too frequently exiled it to the periphery of reputable research or positioned its detractors as unremitting disparagers of the social and cultural damage inflicted by certain ideas. Its most salient expression, particularly on the European mainland, has been through the coining of a phrase—Ideologiekritik—to denote a sphere of mainly hostile intellectual and scholarly activity. The grammatical structure of the German language combines two separate concepts into a word that resists separation into its distinct components, with the consequent loss of finesse and discernment, as well as the building up of prejudgement. Indeed, combining the two concepts in such a manner should itself be interpreted as an ideological practice, creating an a priori bias against other conceptualizations of ideology, or other forms of investigating it. Specifically, Ideologiekritik typically identifies a mismatch between modes of thinking and the real world, caused by socio-economic relations generated preponderantly by capitalist modes of production.1 Unfair, oppressive and hence ethically unsustainable manifestations of power both inside a society and by means of colonial enterprises are singled out in an endeavour to expose and then eliminate them. Indeed, as Rahul Rao has noted, “there is some irony here in that while postcolonialism, as it emerged in the work of its leading practitioners under the sign of colonial discourse analysis, began as a tool for the analysis of ideology, its professed normative commitments have made it available as an object for ideological analysis” (271–272). Ideologiekritik thus latches on to postcolonial studies as well as to critical discourse analysis in order to uncover and identify distortions and misrepresentations that undermine the autonomy, personhood and social cohesiveness of individuals in society. Inasmuch as all ideologies are attempts to compete over the control of political language, texts, utterances and visual stimuli, as well as material practices, become the focus of attention. For proponents of 1 For some representative analyses see Adorno; and Geuss.

16 Freeden Ideologiekritik, they all carry a strong probability—to say the least—of distortion, falsehood and partiality. Regrettably, Ideologiekritik is more of a constraint on, than a facilitator of, our understanding of ideologies. It is supposed to remove the smokescreens of manipulated and disjointed views of the world and reveal that world as it is. That will enable individuals and societies to correct defective and malicious social practices obscured by the current and past thinking patterns they create and ostensibly legitimate. Instead, Ideologiekritik contributes to distorted social analysis and blocks out much of the complexity of the world and our thoughts about it. Undoubtedly, Ideologiekritik has had a powerful and productive impact in sensitizing us to the overt and hidden assumptions that percolate into the social and ideational environments in which we are located. Not least, it serves as an ethical tool to combat marginalization, alienation, exploitation, unjustifiable inequality or cultural domination—ends it shares with its cousin, critical discourse analysis. And if, in the Marxist framework, being conditions consciousness, it reveals the quality and morality of the ideas to which we subscribe as dependent entirely on the wholesomeness of social and material relationships. But those worthy aims cannot simply be achieved by labelling ideologies as the bogeymen, the perpetrators of warped beliefs, or the operational arm of the bourgeoisie, and they may be further impeded by an exaggerated negativity about human experience. In short, the concept of ideology is split between its dismissal as a harmful practice and recognition of its centrality to political thought and action. Ideologiekritik was not the first approach to assume a derogatory position towards ideology. Significantly, Napoleon had already belittled the original “ideologues” as appealing to a metaphysics of first causes detached from human nature and from history. But his, tellingly, was a reaction to Antoine Destutt de Tracy’s attempt to establish ideology as a science of ideas. Hence the emergence of ideology as a scholarly tool for understanding human thought preceded its debunking. Significantly, also, Napoleon condemned the notion of ideology—as yet applied to a method rather than a type of political language—not for distortion but for its pretentious aspiration to the rank of a positivist science through over-abstraction (Mannheim 72–74; Lichtheim 5). If Napoleon thought ideology was insufficiently scientific, the grand tradition of Ideologiekritik denied it any scientific status altogether. It was not over-abstraction that concerned them, but the absence of truth. Yet it is inescapable that action-oriented political ideas, serving to promote, criticize or oppose public policy and sharing some identifiable features, or family-resemblances, do exist. And if they exist, the task of students of society and political theorists is to take them seriously. It is not good enough to pursue only

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normatively attractive, let alone ‘true,’ options if one wishes to understand the social world. And that is precisely what Marx and Engels did not do. They contributed to the tendency of Ideologiekritik, as well as of vernacular usages of ideology in political discourse, particularly in the cut and thrust of political debate and in political journalism, to ignore some of the most fundamental aspects of ideology. Consequently, in its exclusionary perspective Ideologiekritik has perpetuated seven misconceptions about ideology. 1. Ideologies are false or distorted consciousness: There is a world of difference between some of the characteristics of ideologies and falsehood or distortion. For Marx and Engels, German philosophers, even socialists, “have abandoned the realm of real history and returned to the realm of ideology,” in which they “fabricate some fantastic relationship” removed from material conditions as they should, and will, be (47, 94, 119). Engels famously wrote that “Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness.” To generalize about the invariably distortive nature of ideology in current forms of abstracted consciousness is to imply the possibility of undistorted consciousness once ideology is anchored in real human relationships. But no external empirical standard of reality exists for the establishment of such pure embeddedness of thought in ‘actual life-processes.’ Those who have claimed to possess the key to such knowledge in the social and human sciences unsurprisingly turn out to have competing versions of such truths. Yet multiple truths immediately acquire the features of ideological contests. Ideologies certainly are simplifiers, but that is a cultural and psychological necessity in conveying and interpreting both facts and interpretations. Ideologies provide maps of the social and political terrains that they address, and maps are unquestionably stylized abbreviations, both in scale and in the representation of the worlds they reflect. Although of course ideologies may be, and have been, manipulative, unreasonably biased, instruments of political action, that is not their whole story, nor is it inevitable. Their analysis as failing to convey social truths and reality decenters their far more patent value as containers of meaning, without which the social world cannot be decoded. 2. Ideology will wither away:  The assertion that ideology has an end, and presumably also a beginning, has sustained a fundamental optimism among ideology-detractors. If the phenomenon of ideology was born of a catastrophic discrepancy between the means of production and the relations of production, if ideology is a non-material equivalent of the material alienation of human beings from themselves, each other and their environment, and if ideology is synonymous with partial consciousness, the elimination of impoverished human relationships and the abolition of alienation of human beings from themselves and others will ipso facto negate the warped thinking that springs from

18 Freeden that most dehumanized of human conditions—capitalism (Marx 97; passim). In that unique but misguided sense socialism or communism are promoted both as non-ideological in content and post-ideological in time. Significantly, one did not have to be a Marxist to assert the imminent end of ideology. That particular thesis was espoused in the 1950s and 1960s for reasons that were bred within the framework of a capitalist logic. The very success of capitalist societies, so went the argument, produced prosperity and consumer-oriented societies that would set ideological strife aside. In an ironic twist on Marxist theories of ideology, the end of ideology proponents maintained that economic convergence—with its similarity of living conditions—would render the kind of total ideological conflict of the interwar years superfluous.2 Not least, the chimera of social and political consensus was prominent in welfare state discourse and policy. Indeed, end of ideology arguments now largely emerge not from the left but from conservative circles, from people hostile to what they think are superimposed social blueprints detached from reality, or overarching attempts to reconstruct society in the face of its ‘natural’ and ‘organic’ heritage and continuities. However, ideological convergence—assuming that it existed, which it never did—does not equate to ideological termination. Confluence does not annihilate; it consolidates. It narrows the differences between some ideological positions even when significant distinctions remain. For even were we to assume that different ideologies merged into one, that would still be one ideology. Only the model of ideological conflict between two warring sides—a known historical occurrence but nonetheless not the norm of ideological configurations— would hold that the end of ideological conflict meant the end of ideology: the end of contextualized and preferred views of the social and political world, the end of social imagination, the end of prescribing specific policies designed to implement certain collective arrangements (Freeden Ideologies 17–19). Currently many observers argue that so-called neoliberalism has reached globalizing proportions, sweeping aside any ideological differences that stand in its way. What such conclusions ignore is that the rise of economically-assertive groups operating in ostensibly unencumbered competitive conditions of a free market is itself a mythologized and highly exaggerated ideological viewpoint. Moreover, it takes place within culturally and socially specific circumstances that cut it down to size, restrict its range, and play out within very different regulatory governmental systems. The strange thing, rather, is the persistence

2 A major exponent of that view was Daniel Bell, in his The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties.

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and tenacious hold of neoliberal discourses, frequently obscuring a far more complex state of affairs. Stickiness, oversimplification and wishful thinking are of course unavoidable and often pivotal features of ideologies. 3. Ideology is a monolithic, undifferentiated term: Throughout the history of the word, both critics and users of ideology have chiefly employed it in the singular. Of course, the singular form is generally an apt one for a concept. There are many variants of liberalism, meriting the term ‘liberalisms,’ but there is one broad family, however loose, that can be referred to under the umbrella of liberalism. With ideology the issue is more complicated for two reasons. First, because the diverse usages of ‘ideology’ are not just sub-variants of a more inclusive phenomenon. They point in very different directions and are to some extent mutually incompatible. That comment runs as a Leitmotif throughout this text. Second, and more specifically, there is a logic to employing ideology in the singular among Marxists and Ideologiekritik exponents. It relates to their complete lack of interest in the minutiae of that kind of thinking as a type, focusing as they do on the strong case they claim to make for expunging it simpliciter. For those who regard ideology as a pejorative epiphenomenon it follows that there is no need to delve into its arguments, to unfold its reasoning, or to distinguish among different ideological families. As ideology serves only one purpose, why waste time and energy on the small print if the entire text is superfluous and about to be discarded? Post-Marxists adopt a rather different view, as in the Laclau and Mouffe version. For them ideology performs an articulatory role, holding disparate elements together, forging flexible social identities that create a temporary unity (see Laclau and Mouffe). The disruptive and antagonistic role of ideology is understated in all those approaches, the (unsustainable) assumption being that ideology supports a power system rather than also defying it. In contradistinction to the above, the morphological analysis of ideologies supports very different conclusions (see Freeden “Morphological Analysis”). Building up from the micro to a differentiated macro, its modus operandi is to investigate ideologies, not ideology, underscoring the multiple, fluid and constantly changing nature of the components that combine in ideologies-formation. The morphological approach commences by postulating the concept as the basic ideological unit. Crucially concepts themselves consist of competing conceptions, and none of those conceptions is uncontroversial or incontestable. In other words, there is no correct way of defining a concept or, as Walter Bryce Gallie put it, concepts are essentially contested (see Gallie). Thus the concept of equality, present in so many ideological families, may indicate mathematical identity, similarity, shared metaphysical or theological worth, equality of opportunity, of need or of merit. It cannot indicate all those

20 Freeden conceptions simultaneously—indeed, some of them are incompatible with others—and therefore, in each working definition, some conceptions have to be abandoned. The choice as to what to retain or omit is logically arbitrary, but culturally and contextually of huge significance. Thus, one variant of the concept of liberty may stress the capacity for reflective autonomy, another for monadic independence, a third for developing individuality, and a fourth for arbitrary action. ‘Ascending’ from the conceptions of a concept to the concept, the third level—central to a comprehension of ideologies—comprises a cluster of concepts. For concepts never exist in monadic form; they always interact, intertwine and cut across other concepts that inhabit their proximity. Whereas the singular concept of ideology suggests a mass whose internal structure is irrelevant, the morphological view involves two moves:  the plastic interrelationships that obtain within a concept, allocating different weight to each component; and the field of intersecting concepts that constitute an ideology and that combine its conceptual profile—in part durable, in part shifting— in a plethora of competing arrangements. In that sense the pluralization of the notion of ideology offers a decisive additive to a set of quasi-contingent patterns in which each concept contained by the ideology in question adopts certain meanings from among a possible range, and then the relations among the concepts themselves exhibit varying degrees of relative durability or malleability, but never closed fixity. All ideologies need to decontest the essentially contested, and hence indeterminate, meanings their concepts exhibit; otherwise no decision could ever be made, even though decontestations are ephemeral and may not stand tests of time and space. That identifies them as strategies designed to manage the inherent pluralism, even messiness, of political ideas in any society. Once we appreciate ideologies as pliable patterns changing at variable speeds, encompassing a series of fluctuating conceptual relationships, and reflecting temporal and spatial contingencies and parochialisms, the permanent, if patterned, differentiation of ideologies emerges as the key to their understanding (Freeden Ideologies 55–91). Ideologies may then be seen as continuously rearranging and redistributing the significance of the complex socio-political ideas they process. 4. Ideologies should be unmasked, not decoded:  Destutt de Tracy’s endeavour to the contrary, the insistence on ideologies as deliberately deceptive has been a significant anchor point in 20th century scholarship on the topic. No more is that evident than in the analysis of propaganda, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the systematic dissemination of information, esp. in a biased or misleading way, in order to promote a political cause or point of view” (“Propaganda”). Often, that is linked to a massive state machinery that

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pushes an official line in order either to mobilize the subjects of a polity or to hold them in check. Indeed, for many members of a state that is the experience of government with which they are most familiar. Much critical discourse analysis (cda) identifies such processes as far subtler and far more diffuse. According to its practitioners, ordinary language at all levels of articulation is suffused with unrecognized biases, social stereotypes and the denigration, marginalization or exclusion of certain groups. Whereas the notion of ideology as propaganda or manipulation has lent it much of its pejorative reputation, as yet another expression of ‘dirty-hands’ politics, cda begins with pervasive “grass-roots” instances that are commonly ingrained in speech and text. The purpose of these explorations is to demonstrate the prevalence not necessarily of partial thinking arising out of Marxist-type alienation but of the partiality and one-sidedness that popular culture contains, especially on issues of race, gender and disability.3 In both cases, however, a scholarly ‘exposé’ culminates in unmasking or, at least, in rendering certain ideas and preconceptions public, thus opening the way for a restorative critique devised to clear away the debris of prejudice and misrepresentation. In some approaches to unmasking, such as Slavoj Žižek’s—inspired by Lacanian psychoanalysis—the mask is not peeled off to disclose the true face, but to uncover further masks, the removal of which in turn reveals a void, the ‘unfaceable.’ In that sense, ideology fulfils the psychological need of papering over the terrifying unknown. All that is bypassed by understanding the study of ideology as a decoding enterprise; bypassing not in the sense of being dismissive but in the sense of posing an entirely different set of questions on which investigating ideologies can focus. The scholar now dons the mantle of a curious social scientist, not that of a disapproving ethicist or a philosopher confronting fundamental social malaise and disruption, and not that of a Marxist bent on demystifying dissimulative conduct. If we foreground examining human practices, and thought-practices, if we ask what work they perform in constructing our views of the world, it matters not whether they be ‘true’ or ‘false.’ Moreover, all-too often what is considered to be true is contextually contingent. Decoding is an act of piecing together meaning from among a larger pool of what speechacts, ideas, artefacts, public spectacles and so on, might signify. Here the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s reference to the drawing of social maps becomes central. Maps are vital for orientation and navigation, without which human beings lack a compass and points of anchorage through which to make sense of their social environments. Maps, like ideologies, are simplifiers; and maps, 3 For notable examples see Van Dijk; and Wodak.

22 Freeden like ideologies, are normally considered authoritative for their holders, even though they may occasionally fail you, lead you astray, and have to be replaced. The study of ideologies, then, involves the practice of decoding. But there is a crucial difference to decoding a map. The reality that a map attempts to symbolize is fixed, or changes slowly and incrementally and usually, in the short run, imperceptibly. But ideologies do not contain a single code—or truth—that is there to be unlocked or deciphered. They offer up a multiplicity of codes, each of which reveals a diverse pattern. To an extent it all depends on what the analyst of ideologies focuses, a chief distinction being that between what ideologies do and what they are. Ideologiekritik, as well as the related Marxist approach to ideology, also offer a specific interpretation: What ideologies do is to distort, conceal, manipulate or falsify. What ideologies are is of lesser or no concern to critical theorists, unless one singles out their form—in the Marxist tradition as a social and ideational partition that screens reality from the correct human perception and disregards their content; or unless their content is pronounced to be misleading and frequently harmful, as in the cda tradition. But there are influential alternatives to the decoding of ideologies both as function and as substance. In their functional mode, ideologies play indispensable political roles, irrespective of whether these are central to the concerns of ethical and philosophical analysis. They mobilize and recruit support or opposition to political bodies and movements; they integrate or decouple the cohesion that societies evince; they rank priorities for political action; they provide legitimacy or delegitimacy accounts of the distribution of power; they serve as a mechanism through which social order or disorder is handled and promoted; and they offer collective visions that inspire, animate, disturb, or shock their consumers. cda is noteworthy for examining the details and particulars of language when applied to social issues. In analyzing discourses and texts it focuses on the control of contexts, on the way issues are categorized, on metaphors, repetition, the choice of topics, styles and modifiers, on illustrations and photographs, and on absences. Clearly, ideologies can be approached from all those perspectives, using the various tools that cda places at the disposal of researchers. But ideologies, lest we forget, are chiefly forms of political thinking and they consequently demand methods of decoding appropriate to that domain of human practices. We can understand ideologies as part of an accumulative—and disrupted—set of traditions that stretches across social radicalism, liberalism, conservatism and the totalitarianisms of the right and the left. We can understand them as aggregations of grass-roots opinions that can be classified on the basis of psychological dispositions. And we can interrogate them as complex conceptual amalgams of the units that make up

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political thought. That latter approach involves a different, morphological, kind of micro-analysis. 5. Ideologies are dominant or hegemonic power structures: In one version of ideology, it is superimposed by those who control and monopolize social and political power. In classical Marxist understandings, the ideas of the dominant class, the bourgeoisie, become tools through which to dominate and oppress the proletariat, not least by means of naturalizing and normalizing social and economic practices that benefit the rulers and further their capitalist interests. In another version, closely associated with the name of Antonio Gramsci, ideological hegemony is not simply an up-down phenomenon but a complex amalgam of cultural goods, partly produced by intellectuals (wielding a very different power to that of the state, namely one of articulating thought within a ‘social bloc’), and partly a seemingly spontaneous creation of subordinate groups applying their ‘common sense.’ Its hallmark is a co-ordinated and unified hegemonic force, the outcome of diverse social and ideational practices and moral and cultural norms in which most people participate (see Gramsci). Unquestionably, ideologies are forms of power. But that observation comes with two major caveats. First, they are not merely forms of power—that would be to impoverish a rich set of thought-practices. Ideologies are extraordinary means of human communication, of social imagination and of collective commitment to and engagement with the world. Second, power is not only domineering, oppressive or stultifying, nor is it simply imposed externally on subalterns. Power is ubiquitous and it is indispensable. A society, indeed a human relationship, bereft of power is in a state of collapse and paralysis. Power is not limited to the domains of suppression, force, manipulation and violence. It equally, perhaps more commonly, entails enabling, facilitating, doing, acting, accomplishing, organizing, making something happen that otherwise would not occur. In feminist discourse the concept of empowering is closely associated with successfully claiming autonomy and taking possession of one’s own life. In particular, ideologies are instances of language—oral, written and visual—and whatever else languages are, they are also expressions of power. Beyond the roles that class, gender or ethnicity play, which all relate to the exercise of power through language, power resides universally in language, though its concrete manifestations differ from case to case. Language has an impact both on the utterer and the recipient; it is an attempt to make a difference. That attempt may fail, in which case it becomes an unsuccessful exercise of power, or it may have unintended consequences, in which case the desired effect is replaced with an alternative one. All this is especially pertinent to ideologies, because they are action-oriented types of language that aim at preserving, changing or criticizing social and political arrangements. Power

24 Freeden in language adopts the forms of persuasion, emotional appeals, threats and the particular cadences of rhetoric that enjoy cultural resonance in a given society (Freeden Political Theory 277–309). There is however little to suggest that societies host patently dominant or hegemonic power structures. First, the theory of hegemony overlooks the internal fissures, fractures and divergences that are constantly in play. Ideologies are far more fragmented and vulnerable than Marx or even Gramsci suggested—after all, theories of class and alienation tend to draw broad brushstrokes deriving from dualist methodological origins and, as noted above, eschew the minutiae as irrelevant to the arguments they marshal. Even outside the Marxist family of ideas, there exist theories of consensus, of co-ordination and of compromise that iron out the profound differences that still obtain in a movement of convergence, and that ignore the distinction between an external rhetoric of agreement and the rhetorics of variance applied internally to home populations. Indeed, theories of hegemony themselves carry ideological import and intent, as they have recourse to a worldview in which the order provided by hierarchy and the maldistribution of power are unfortunate manifestations of a fundamental human disorder. Second, most societies and cultures are sites of incessant competition and positioning among different ideological standpoints, which confront each other in a continuous succession, even a melee, of rising and falling power relationships. As the tempo of political discourse has dramatically increased, partly as a result of mass media, digitalization and ‘spin’ and the short life accorded to political memoranda, policies and programmes, ideologies have become the equivalent of ‘fast-food’ with a limited shelf-life. The role of grand theory, constitutionally endemic to conventional ideologies and associated with some of the pioneering individuals who helped to shape them, has been largely replaced by slogans, soundbites and simplistic messages generated by professional and technical experts in communication alongside socially informed and active intellectuals in universities and the field of journalism. Although Gramsci was aware of the multiple sources that came together in the making of an ideology, this view of ideologies is looser, more pluralist and disjointed, and identifies a number of social elites that participate in their creation and dissemination. 6. Ideologies are deliberate and conscious ideational constructs: Clearly, ideologies possess a large degree of intentional design, functioning as suggested solutions to socio-political challenges. Within political party systems they offer overt choices among Weltanschauungen and policy alternatives. In general, their leading texts constitute a body of political arguments that can be employed on a comprehensive social scale, though more modest ideological

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debates and perspectives always exist at the margins of public discourse. But—as cda has emphasized—ideologies also operate at unconscious, quasi-conscious and unpremeditated levels. That is at least as significant a feature of ideologies as their overt articulation and dissemination, and it indicates, contra those who regard ideologies as instruments of dominating power, that ideologies exhibit a notable lack of control over the messages they convey. That occurs mainly on two levels. The one has to do with what Paul Ricoeur has brilliantly called the surplus of meaning. The messages transmitted by a writer, speaker or artist contain elements unintended by and invisible to them. The language we emit includes components of which we are unaware, yet may be plainly discernible to others. When Machiavelli wrote about beating and ill-using Fortuna because she was a woman, he intended to advise princes on how to master their fates, but today the misogyny involved in that analogy overrides any other impact that advice might have. That, one may assume, was not Machiavelli’s intention, but the surplus and core meanings are now interpreted by some as reversing their roles. When Marx wrote about the dangers of human alienation from nature, he was concerned with the re-humanization of people through their optimizing of resources that could aid their flourishing, and he was pursuing a holistic understanding of interactions with various environments, social as well as natural. But he has been interpreted by ecologists as superimposing human labour on nature, as seeing nature as instrumental to human beings and the object of mastery by them, inasmuch as material progress was central to the 19th century mind-frame—although the rawness of that viewpoint may be unintentional. The second level is familiar to literary critics: no author can control the reception of the text or artefact they produce. If ideologies are often fragmented and fragile clusters of ideas loosely held together when generated, this is all the more evident in their path to consumption. Some components of an ideology are picked up, others discarded, and others again are lost. Ideologies undergo constant de- and re-contextualization, even at the same place and time. They are misunderstood, vulgarized, recrafted, elaborated on and open to continuous interpretation. That is of course the great strength of ideologies—their adaptability ensures longevity and social relevance. Ossified and rigid ideologies will crumble and disintegrate, whereas those open to reinterpretation may have a better chance of survival. That is not to suggest that all interpretation is advantageous or successful, but plural consumption at various levels of social communication is the norm rather than the exception in the life of ideologies. To lay emphasis on the unintentionality of ideologies is a very different matter from claiming that they have covert, underground lives where manipulation and subterfuge can operate unhindered. For it is their unconscious

26 Freeden existence that often shields them from deliberate falsification. Some analysts of ideology argue that invisibility is a symptom of the naturalization of an ideology, its ‘self-evidence,’ and that is accordingly a mark of its insidiousness. Obviously, unconscious or culturally internalized messages may be unpalatable and harmful, but they may equally be attractive, attesting to styles of civilized deliberation or to implicit norms of mutual respect or of public commitment, without the author(s) being aware of the implied predisposition. 7. Ideologies are abstract, doctrinaire, and dogmatic: In common parlance, in the language of politicians and of journalists—and regrettably, of quite a few academics as well—the characterization and investigation of ideologies have fallen victim to a number of clichéd misconceptions and stereotypes. A particular species of the family of ideologies, one that is far from representative, has been expanded to pertain to the genus in toto. Many factors may account for that. One is the prejudice that people engaged in so-called worldly affairs entertain against intellectualization, against experimenting with ideas, and against generalized and overarching theorizing about the human condition. Another has been the view that radical ideas emerge from the political left and are aimed at subverting the social order, offering unrealizable and potentially dangerous dreams, as distinct from the professed down-to-earth practicality of the conservative centre-right who—as it insists—does not ideologize at all but is firmly rooted in experience. One typical manifestation of that view is the peculiar expression ‘the facts speak for themselves.’ Facts, notwithstanding, are completely silent; it is their interpreters who impose ‘voice’ on them! Conspicuous in that category of arguments is the hackneyed contrast between ‘ideological’ and ‘pragmatic,’ as if so-called pragmatic policies are bereft of ideological content. When someone labels a proposal or policy as pragmatic, they usually mean instrumental, utilitarian, result-oriented, practical or lacking a guiding principle. But the choice among the ‘practical’ paths of action is channelled through ideological predilections in the broad sense: a preference for speed, or for the quick exercise of authority, or for economic viability, or a respect for authoritative solutions. In addition, all “pragmatic” social policies make decisions that relate to social justice issues and to prioritizing certain demands ahead of others—in short, invoking the typical political and ideological practices of ranking and future-orientation. The opposition between ideology and pragmatism results, once again, from the association of ideology with an inflexible adherence to ideas, irrespective of their applicability to concrete situations. It overlooks the gradation of ideological intensity that characterizes all ideologies. A third explanation for the putative association of ideologies with doctrinaire ideational intransigence is historical. Twentieth century European

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political thinking was traumatically fashioned by interwar experiences as a result of which a specific model of ideology became dominant. The dual assault of fascism and communism on democratic culture and practices cast a shadow over future expectations of what characterized ideologies. Totalitarian, or at least total, in their embrace, demanding complete allegiance, obdurate in their precepts and consequent policies, directed by a monopolistic and elitist political party ostensibly representing the true social will, wedded to myths of superiority, and applying terror and coercion—that paradigm of ideology caused not only horrific concrete damage to those affected, but intellectual and scholarly damage to the survival chances of subtler and omnipresent forms of ideology. Alternatively, the term ‘isms’ is often used disparagingly. The “triumph of the isms” (Golob vii), as one historian called it, reifies the image of a large scale and rather uniform conflict between self-contained Weltanschauungen. A residue of that narrow and partial view of ideology was resurrected in the “end of ideology” debates of the 1950s and 1960s, discussed above, in which ideology would be eliminated through shared technologies and living styles. The producers and purveyors of ideology were also accorded special attention. An ideologist is usually a proponent of an ideology, or a member of the group formulating one, although in its older connotation it can still signify a speculator or someone over-wedded to theorizing impractically. An ideologue, however, is a dogmatic and uncompromising proponent of an ideology (“Ideologue”), usually employed in a pejorative sense. The error of those approaches derives from the unwillingness of many analysts, commentators and ordinary-language users to recognize that ideology, like all linguistic and ideational constructs, exhibits semantic fluidity and diversity. Ideologies are often directly related to the domain of political parties, implying a one-to-one relationship between party and ideology, rather than acknowledging that ideologies are generated far more saliently in extra-party discourses and that political parties, far from being the ideological vanguard, simply make up the rear, reflecting broader ideological changes emanating from the intelligentsia, the press, certain professional groups, and the everyday vernacular—as usual in different modes and languages of expression. Even more significantly, the common tendency to assign clear boundaries to ideologies, demarcating, say, liberalism from socialism or conservatism, seriously underplays the porousness and intertwining of the concepts that comprise any ideology, indicating the sharing and overlap that characterize those permeable fields. In recent years truncated ideological positions have proliferated, their incompleteness and impermanence bolstered by the thirst of the media for accelerated change, by the splintering of political views and their frequent recombination in fleeting coalitions of mutual support, as witnessed by the

28 Freeden many incarnations of populisms of left and right, or by the way environmentalism cuts across older ideological families. For many, that is the ‘new normal.’ The morphology of ideologies, as noted above, allows for such multiple combinations and interpretations, for rotating and mutable sets of political ideas that belie the existence of immutable and rigid doctrines. Ideologies are no sideshow but an integral feature of political thought and thinking, an ineluctable aspect of social life. Both scholars and practitioners need to get comfortable with that notion and embrace it as normal, intriguing and illuminating. That will contribute significantly to the quality of understanding and of research we can apply to our experiences of the political world, and it will enrich the interaction among all disciplines concerned with the life of the mind in a social context.

References

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund. “Cultural Criticism and Society.” Prisms, translated by Samuel and Sherry Weber, mit Press, 1967, pp. 17–34. Bell, Daniel. The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Collier Books, 1962. Engels, Friedrich. “Letter to Franz Mehring,” 14 July, 1893, Marxists.org, www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/1893/letters/93_07_14.htm. Accessed May 14, 2019. Freeden, Michael. Ideologies and Political Theory:  A Conceptual Approach. Oxford UP, 1996. Freeden, Michael. “The Morphological Analysis of Ideology.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 115–137. Freeden, Michael. The Political Theory of Political Thinking: The Anatomy of a Practice. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 277–309. Gallie, Walter Bryce. “Essentially Contested Concepts.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 56, 1955–6, pp. 167–198. Geertz, Clifford. “Ideology as a Cultural System.” Ideology and Discontent, edited by David Ernest Apter, The Free Press, 1964, pp. 47–76. Geuss, Raymond. The Idea of a Critical Theory. Cambridge UP, 1981. Golob, Eugene O. The “Isms”: A History and Evaluation. Harper & Brothers, 1954. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from Prison Notebooks, edited by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Newell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart, 1971. “Ideologue.” OED Online, Oxford UP, www.oed.com/view/Entry/91015?rskey=iTmLfO&result=1#eid. Accessed May 14, 2019.

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Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Verso Books, 1985. Lichtheim, George. The Concept of Ideology and Other Essays. Vintage Books, 1967. Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1936. Marx, Karl. Selected Writings, 2nd ed., edited by David McLellan, Oxford UP, 2000. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, edited by Christopher J. Arthur, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974. “Propaganda.” OED Online, Oxford UP, www.oed.com/view/Entry/152605?rskey=c8h0rB&result=1#eid. Accessed May 14, 2019. Rao, Rahul. “Postcolonialism.” The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies, edited by Michael Freeden, Lyman Tower Sargent, and Marc Stears, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 271–289. Van Dijk, Teun A. Discourse Studies:  A Multidisciplinary Introduction, 2nd ed., Sage Publications, 2011. Wodak, Ruth. The Discourse of Politics in Action. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Žižek, Slavoj. “The Spectre of Ideology.” Mapping Ideology, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 1994, pp. 1–33.

­c hapter 2

“A Crude, Empty, Fragile Shell?”—Postcolonial Consciousness in an Era of Global Capitalism Laura Chrisman It is now over 25 years since the publication of Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader, which I co-edited with Patrick Williams.1 That volume was the first anthology of postcolonial studies. That the book has remained continuously in print, and circulates widely as a research and teaching resource, suggests that it retains intellectual currency in the twenty-first century. In considering the concerns of this volume, a retrospective glance at the ideological concerns driving our anthology’s production may provide further perspective on our present moment, and what future may await us. The project had a number of intellectual and pedagogical objectives, some set by the publisher Harvester Wheatsheaf, some by my collaborator Patrick Williams and myself. My personal goal was not only to create a textbook but also to make a critical intervention, one that offered a materialist counterweight to the dominant post-structuralist strains of postcolonial theory, crystallised in what was then widely termed the ‘Holy Trinity’ writings of Edward Said, Homi K.  Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak. I  wanted to expand beyond theoretical perspectives that construed imperialism as primarily an exercise of epistemological, cultural, or social domination. Such perspectives bracketed or occluded its exploitation of labour and raw resources, production of new markets and proletariats, and its dynamics of capital accumulation. The Reader accordingly published not only representative articles by Said, Bhabha and Spivak, but also accounts, by Aijaz Ahmad, Dennis Porter, Anne McClintock, Ania Loomba, Vijay Mishra, and Bob Hodge, that highlight the material conditions in which ideologies come into being, and consider what is lost when such conditions are hidden from the horizon of knowledge production. Our attempt to diversify the field took a number of directions. One was geographical. Both literary and theoretical academic discussion up to that point had largely centred on ‘the Orient’ as a matrix for social and cultural production. Accordingly, we supplemented the model of Orientalism, and analysis of 1 See Williams and Chrisman.

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South Asian cultural production, in our inclusion of materials generated by and focused on African, Caribbean, Latin American, black British, and black American experience. The diversification was disciplinary too; alongside practitioners of literary theory and analysis, we included sociologists (Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Anthony Giddens, Stuart Hall, and Paul Gilroy), cultural anthropologists (Arjun Appadurai), and film theorists (Teshome Gabriel). We included creative writers who also published non-fictional works of theory—Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Aimé Césaire, and Léopold Senghor. As this reveals, we sought to diversify not only geography, and discipline, but also historical reach by respecting a generation of activist thinkers who emerged to prominence in the mid-twentieth century, during and shortly after formal decolonization. In addition to these luminaries, we represented this generation by works from Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. I considered it crucial to signal that the critical theorisation of European domination did not begin with Said’s 1978 Orientalism. That earlier generations, mostly operating outside of the academy, often within anti-colonial political movements, had already created an enormous archive, and intellectual resource, for the understanding of colonialism, nationalism, and decolonization, that was largely overlooked within the academy as insufficiently ‘theoretical,’ or dismissed on the erroneous grounds of its irrelevance to contemporary global social configurations. Many of the anthology’s earlier generation of contributors were socialists or Marxists with a strong investment in the liberatory possibilities of nationalism. Not that there was any uniformity in their views. Demonstrating the heterogeneity of anticolonial era thought was also part of my agenda. Thus I selected both Ngugi and Achebe’s contrasting, yet equally nationalist, arguments regarding the political, aesthetic and psychological significance of African use of European languages. Similarly, I sought to situate Fanon’s ambivalent account of culture’s relationship to national liberation alongside Amilcar Cabral’s insistence on national culture as not only an instrument but also a stimulus for political transformation. Against the growing institutional disparagement of nationalist movements and cultures as all uniformly essentialist, dominatory, and exclusionary, as well as routine allegations of Marxism’s reductive economism, I wanted to alert students to the existence of more varied approaches to these phenomena, that had largely emerged from within the foment of social liberation movements themselves. That political activism engendered the work of such theorists was itself part of the Reader’s argument. There was a further argument embedded here: that political resistance, not only of the past, but also (by implication) of the present moment, from within the metropoles as well as the ‘peripheries’ of the

32 Chrisman global South, regularly accompanies imperial and neo-colonial exploitation, pushing them into crisis and, at times, defeat. I should add that the Reader was by no means the first publication to cast a materialist eye on the dominant tendencies of this newly established field. Benita Parry’s pathbreaking essay “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse” had appeared in 1987, five years before our anthology.2 Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory was a book length interrogation that came out in 1992.3 By 1998, Arif Dirlik and E. San Juan, Jr., among others, had published major books of critique that also developed alternative, materialist formulations of postcoloniality as a phenomenon.4 So, we might ask, in what ways have postcolonial critical practices, texts and ideological contexts changed since 1992? Have culturalist and idealist models of post-structuralism receded, or transmogrified? Are materialist approaches still part of the ideological periphery? I will not offer any firm answers, merely a few observations, contentions, and suggestions. Looking at the contemporary metrics of postcolonial journals can only get one so far, but does offer interesting food for thought. I have consulted the listing of ‘most frequently read articles’ from three Routledge journals that are prominent in Anglophone postcolonial academia: Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing (formerly known as World Literature Written in English). The last has a more exclusively literary focus, while Interventions and Postcolonial Studies are broader in their disciplinary reach. From this evidence, which is based on scholarly practices over the last three years, it looks as if Bhabha, Spivak, and Said continue to occupy a significant place in postcolonial cultural and social studies but that in literary studies, their function may be more uneven and less pronounced. Their possible attenuation in literary studies is suggested by the most heavily read article from Postcolonial Writing (an article that has had over 3,500 views). Its author is Peter Morey, and his focus is on Mohsin Hamid’s 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist.5 (It is worth noting that this same novel is the subject of several other highly read articles also, published over the last six years). Morey’s references include no writings by Spivak, Bhabha, or Said. Neither does the majority of the other nineteen most read articles from this journal. In fact, as a whole they give rather more attention to trauma studies theorists such as Cathy Caruth; trauma and terrorism are generally the most 2 See Parry. 3 See Ahmad. 4 See Dirlik; San Juan. 5 See Morey.

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recurrent topics of literary concern. That the presence of Spivak, Said, and Bhabha in postcolonial literary studies may be thinning is also suggested by the 2013 volume Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres, edited by Walter Goebel and Saskia Schabio.6 That book’s index makes no mention of Bhabha, lists only three references to Spivak, has fewer than ten references to Said, and rather more to Frantz Fanon. The articles that top the ‘most frequently read’ lists of Postcolonial Studies and Interventions provide an interesting contrast. These articles stage dialogues between postcolonial studies and other cognate fields. In Interventions, the top ranking article by Jodi A. Byrd and Michael Rothberg, “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity,” places Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak” in critical conversation with American Indian studies, and focuses more on points of contrast than convergence.7 That American Indian theorisations of indigeneity emerge from contemporary conditions of overt colonization, both local and national, is a critical difference with which the authors are concerned. The Journal of Postcolonial Studies published Gurminder K.  Bhambra’s article “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues,” as recently as December 2014.8 By May 2015 the article already had over 2,400 views, placing it above even Spivak’s own 2006 article “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular.”9 Bhambra explains and juxtaposes the work of Said, Spivak, and Bhabha with that of the coloniality/modernity theorists Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, and Maria Lugones. He develops an even-handed overview that concludes with an affirmation of Said and Bhabha as deconstructors of European narratives of universalism. These two articles by Byrd/Rothberg and Bhambra indicate that the one-time ‘Holy Trinity’ retains a substantial academic presence. However, it is also significant that both of these pieces engage postcolonial theorists within a comparative and dialogic perspective. The currency of Bhabha, Spivak, and Said is now, it appears, assuming a more relative value, that stations them as major interlocutors rather than as all-powerful authorities. However varied the evidence and its interpretability, it is safe to conclude that the postcolonial fields—both literary and cultural—have become considerably more eclectic in their critical concerns, and in their theoretical sources and resources, than was the case when Patrick Williams and I produced our Reader. To that extent our desire to diversify the conceptual constituents of the field beyond the equation with three thinkers has been handsomely realised. 6 7 8 9

See Goebel and Schabio. See Byrd and Rothberg. See Bhambra. See Spivak.

34 Chrisman What I want to consider now is how far the radical work of Frantz Fanon has penetrated into contemporary postcolonial studies. It would appear that the Fanon of The Wretched of the Earth circulates far more widely than he did in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when such thinkers as Bhabha, and Stuart Hall, recognized only the Fanon of Black Skin, White Masks, and pressed that text into postmodern service. The 2004 translation by Richard Philcox, of Wretched, featured a foreword “Framing Fanon” by Homi Bhabha. While I welcome this renewed interest in Fanon’s book and applaud its accessibility in a more accurate translation, I am inclined to characterise this particular edition as less an acceptance, and more a revision, of Fanonian materialism. Indeed, Bhabha recasts Fanon’s revolutionary socialism as a gentle call for “equitable development,” that has influenced “social institutions committed to debt relief … reformist bodies that seek to restructure international trade and tariffs, and democratize the governance of global financial institutions”; the legitimate heirs of Fanon become, in Bhabha’s view, “ngo s, human rights organizations, international legal or educational bodies” (xviii). Fanon’s insistence that capitalism is “incapable of allowing us to achieve our national and universal project … Capitalist exploitation, the cartels and monopolies, are the enemies of the underdeveloped countries,” his contention that “the wealth of the imperialist nations is also our wealth … Europe is literally the creation of the Third World” ([translated by Philcox] 55–6, 58), is purged, by Bhabha, of its militancy. Fanon becomes the proponent of a liberal “civil society” whose humanism involves prioritizing the psycho-affective realm over that of economic development (Bhabha xviii-xix). Despite Bhabha’s regard for Fanon’s insights into “psycho-affectivity,” he presents Fanon as fundamentally misguided in advocating violence as an empowering force of psychological and political liberation, be it with regards to the particularity of Algerian decolonisation (Fanon’s particular concern) or in general. To advance this view, Bhabha gives as much weight to Algerian internecine violence as he does to French anti-Algerian violence, presenting a theoretical corrective in the guise of historical contextualisation (xxiii-xxxiv). Bhabha concludes that violence offers not the praxis of self-actualisation but merely “a mirage” that cannot “slake [the dispossessed]’s thirst” (xl). More extreme in his instrumentalization of Fanon for an agenda radically at odds with Fanon’s own is Paul Gilroy, in his 2004 book Between Camps (published in the USA with the alternative title of Against Race). Gilroy’s work attacks what he sees as the prison house of racial and nationalist thinking, arguing instead for a planetary humanism.10 He enlists Fanon to this end. Fanon 10

For a fuller discussion of Gilroy’s use of Fanon, see Chrisman, ‘The Vanishing Body of Frantz Fanon in Paul Gilroy’s Against Race and After Empire.’

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was indeed a humanist, but he sought to create the conditions for a new and international humanity through socialist revolutionary nationalism, one of the “camps” that Gilroy condemns. New humanity’s creation, for Fanon, rests upon the rejection of “Western” culture and values: [During decolonization] … when the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed … mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him … and vomit[s]‌them up. (Fanon 4311) The termination of European influence is a necessary condition for the birth of a global humanity: It is a question of the Third World starting a new history of Man … So comrades, let us not pay tribute to Europe by creating states, institutions, and societies which draw their inspiration from her … For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (Fanon 315-316) Fanon’s conclusion notwithstanding, Gilroy construes his agenda as calling for: The institution of an anticolonial and nonracial universalism [that] … reveals his links to the modern political traditions of the Western world … His words articulate a reminder that between the fortified encampments of the colonizers and the quarters of the colonized there were other locations. These in-between locations represent … opportunities for greater insight into the opposed worlds that enclosed them. (Gilroy 70-71; emphasis added) Gilroy removes Fanon from the colonized “camp” to an intermediary location from where he mediates each “camp” to the other. Gilroy removes Fanon from his ideological mooring within anti-colonial nationalism. What is more, he borrows Fanon’s own language to affect this removal and denounce Fanon’s erstwhile home, when he argues that: 11

This and the following quotations from Wretched of the Earth are drawn from the Constance Farrington translation (Grove Press, 1963). This was the translation that was current when Gilroy prepared his book.

36 Chrisman Inside the nation’s fortifications, culture is required to assume an artificial texture and an impossibly even consistency. The national camp puts an end to any sense of cultural development. Culture as process is arrested. Petrified and sterile, it is impoverished by the national obligation not to change but to recycle the past continually in an essentially unmodified mythic form. Tradition is reduced to simple repetition. (Gilroy 84) It is powerful and lyrical rhetoric. Compare it to Fanon’s own condemnation of colonialism: The colonial situation calls a halt to national culture in almost every field … By the time a century or two of exploitation has passed there comes about a veritable emaciation of the stock of national culture. It becomes a set of automatic habits, some traditions of dress and a few broken-down institutions. Little movement can be discerned in such remnants of culture; there is no real creativity and no overflowing life. The poverty of the people, national oppression and the inhibition of culture are one and the same thing. After a century of colonial domination we find a culture which is rigid in the extreme, or rather what we find are the dregs of culture, its mineral strata. The withering away of the reality of the nation and the death-pangs of the national culture are linked to each other in mutual dependence. (Fanon 237, 238) Gilroy borrow Fanon’s own nationalist phrasing to reposition him into an ­anti-nationalist domain. For Fanon, only revolutionary nationalism can overcome the social morbidity that concerns him and Gilroy alike. It confers upon national culture the same mutability and vitality as the political struggle for nationhood itself: “The struggle for freedom does not give back to the national culture its former value and shapes; this struggle which aims at a fundamentally different set of relations between men cannot leave intact either the form or the content of the people’s culture” (Fanon 245–246). The contentious revisionism of Bhabha and Gilroy is only one contemporary response, however, to colonised-era writers and activists. The twenty-first century has generated many others. Postcolonial scholarship and theory of the new millennium has made visible a wide range of nineteenth-, and twentieth- century intellectuals and creative writers critically engaged with colonial modernity, racism, and imperialist capitalism. This is in many respects exactly what our Postcolonial Theory Reader hoped to facilitate. This scholarship has not simply brought neglected thinkers to light. It has also articulated new ways to conceptualise the historical framework of

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postcolonial analysis. I see this as a movement away from the rigid temporal divisions that have structured postcolonial studies. With this new work, the absolute ‘epistemic’ demarcations between ‘modern/colonial’ and ‘contemporary/postindependent’ epochs appear to be losing or at least sharing ground with other understandings of modernity, and globalisation, as operating across a long twentieth-century. See, for example, Philip Zachernuk’s Colonial Subjects: an African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas, which explores over a century of South Nigerian thinkers from 1840 through to political independence, as they debate and contest an evolving colonial modernity.12 Olakunle George’s Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters is another example, that, like Zachernuk, explores early West African anti-colonial writers—whom he presents as simultaneously, and inextricably, theorists and artists--but continues his fascinating enquiry into the post-independence moment.13 Or, to take an example from South Africa, Jennifer Wenzel’s book Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond charts the ways in which the “great cattle killing” phenomenon of 1856–57—a millenarian expression of black South African self-regeneration through ostensible self-destruction—has provided an intertext and metaphor for modern black liberationist expressive cultures within South Africa and in the diaspora, at different political moments, over the last 150 years.14 An expanded spatial understanding of anticolonial agency accompanies this historical reconceptualisation. Postcolonial studies largely, in the twentieth century, concentrated its energies on two axes of power: that of the settler coloniser and colonised; and that of the imperial metropole and colonial periphery. The twenty-first century sub-field of black international and transnational studies—of particular interest to me—owes a large debt to Gilroy’s model of the Black Atlantic, which has encouraged scholars to think beyond European colonial governments and imperial metropole as the only centre to which the colonised writes back, or as the primary matrix of nationalist cultural identity formation. Now scholars are highlighting the dynamic relationships with other colonised or racialised populations, and social movements, as a constitutive feature in the subjectivities, and political cultures, of modern black anti-colonialism. This is the thrust, for instance, of such impressive work as Michelle Stephens’ Black Empire. The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean 12 13 14

See Zachernuk. See George. As a side note, George’s book contains one of the best critiques of Bhabha and Spivak that I have come across. See Wenzel.

38 Chrisman Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962 (2005), which focuses on the writings of Marcus Garvey, CLR James, and Claude McKay, and Ifeoma Nwankwo’s Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (2005), which considers such writers as Frederick Douglass and Mary Prince in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.15 And it is the intellectual foundation of Brent Hayes Edwards’ widely lauded The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. And yet there is an unnecessary ideological restriction to these new studies. That is their reification, even essentialisation, of transnationalism as the only arena of social liberation; the suggestion that the primary contribution of these anti-colonialist thinkers is their crossing of national boundaries. Brent Hayes Edwards, for instance, begins with a persuasive argument about the political potency of black anti-colonial periodicals, contending that “black periodicals were a threat above all because of the transnational and anti-imperialist linkages and alliances they practiced: carrying ‘facts’ from one colony to another, from the French colonial system to the British, from Africa to the United States” (9). His discussion slides, subtly, into an unqualified affirmation of imperial metropoles, as the crucial zone of black transnationalism and intellectual liberation. The empire is still writing back to the imperial centre, but this time, to other diasporic intellectuals who have elected to base themselves within it. Edwards avers that “the metropolitan situation allowed contacts and collaborations that would have been ‘unthinkable’ in the colonial world … In this sense, these many moves ‘across boundaries’ (from colony to metropole, from one colonial system to another) were the real threat to colonialism, which is a discourse articulated first of all as singular and inescapable” (242). Having reinstated the metropole as the only proper hub of liberation, Edwards dismisses the project of national self-determination. He suggests that “black internationalism is not a supplement to revolutionary nationalism, the ‘next level’ of anti-colonial agitation. On the contrary, black radicalism necessarily emerges through boundary crossing--black radicalism is an internationalization” (243). The sentences segue from internationalism to radicalism before conflating the two. Border crossing is always-already radical, and black radicalism can only qualify as such in an international metropolitan arena. Rather than supplement anti-colonial nationalism, black internationalism supplants it. 15

See Stephens; Nwankwo; Edwards.

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Elsewhere I have criticised categorical anti-nationalism in postcolonial, and black Atlantic, studies, as an essentialism that refuses to differentiate between the plethora of nationalisms—bourgeois, anti-colonial, subaltern, ethnic, imperialist, revolutionary, patriarchal—that have historically emerged and structured different social structures, subjectivities, and expressive cultures.16 As Aijaz Ahmed suggests, in In Theory, “whether … a nationalism will produce a progressive cultural practice depends … upon the political character of the power bloc which takes hold of it and utilises it, as a material force, in the process of constituting its own hegemony” (102). And as Fanon warns, a potentially progressive anti-colonial nationalism can easily become the instrument of neo-colonial capitalism if it does not transition from an exclusively nationalist to social and economic consciousness, that is, function as a means, not an end, of human liberation. Instead of recognising the mutable potential, and frequently contradictory practices, of anticolonial nationalism, Edwards casually peppers his erudite book with formulaic ideological assumptions, and, like Gilroy, deploys a simple binaristic thinking that makes transnationalism and nationalism mutually exclusive, almost Manichean oppositions. I have been exploring how far the materialist and historicist ideological concerns of the Postcolonial Theory Reader have been met over the last twenty-odd years of postcolonial studies, and suggesting that the results are uneven. New millennial articulations, and critical applications, of transnationalism are not necessarily any more helpful than those of hybridity, so popular in the twentieth-century, were, in providing postcolonial studies with the means to develop intellectually complex, rigorous cultural analyses. One important area of investigation that Patrick Williams and I did not anticipate, and probably should have, concerns what is now loosely termed the history of the book: the critical study of postcolonial print cultural production, commodification, and insertion into the literary prize industries. The innovative analyses of the production of Anglophone postcolonial literature as a capitalist commodity have opened the door to the theoretical and archival exploration of the linkages between capitalist production of postcolonial culture and its production of other commodities (such as oil) through global extraction of raw resources and its exploitative organisation of wage labour. And if these connected systems of production, and consumption, are now receiving academic attention, so too are the ways in which literary forms—such as the novel—and styles—such as ‘magic realism’—are themselves intertwined with 16

See Chrisman, “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies.”

40 Chrisman imperialist articulations of political economy. Postcolonial critics are starting to engage in a more Jamesonian enquiry as to how literary texts register global capitalism as a representational dilemma, in style, and subject matter, obliquely and directly offering commentary and insight into the modernity in which they partake. I am thinking here, for example, of Jennifer Wenzel’s suggestive article “Petro-magic-realism: toward a political ecology of Nigerian literature.”17 I am thinking also of the Warwick Research Collective (WReC) and its individual members Sharae Deckard, Neil Lazarus, Benita Parry, Pablo Mukherjee, Nick Lawrence, Steve Schapiro, and Graeme McDonald, who separately and together are publishing in this area.18 Central to their theorisation is the late works of Marx, and the writings of Trotsky, that posit capitalism as a modern world system predicated on combined and unequal development. The literary object of WReC’s concern is world literature, rather than postcolonial literature, but the questions that they pose, the methodologies they engage, may also be harnessed within a postcolonial framework. WReC and Wenzel are still in the minority as practitioners of an approach that takes seriously the capitalist dimensions of colonial and postcolonial aesthetics, one which conjoins micrological and macrological perspectives. This is so even where the literary material makes it almost impossible to ignore the thematics of capitalism—as is the case in Ayi Kwei Armah’s mid-century novel The Beautyful Ones are Not Yet Born. Armah’s critique of postcolonial seduction by the “gleam” of consumerism, epitomised in the Atlantic Caprice hotel and assorted imported commodities, has not escaped critical notice. Yet such notice typically fixes only on these objects whose significance is signposted by the author. The resulting critical engagement mirrors the logic of reification by isolating and fetishizing those commodities, divorcing them from the complex network—local and global—of capitalism that Armah so subtly maps. The meaningfulness—and alienation—of labour can more fruitfully be traced to the many examples that Armah provides, from prostitutes to stevedores to latrine cleaners to the protagonist himself, a government employee whose administrative work for the national railway system generates at once loneliness and utopian potential, seen in the beautiful coloured charts of train services that he reconfigures daily, and in the morse code through which he shares personal communication with anonymous employees stationed in the hinterland. That Armah has a global understanding of Ghana’s neocolonial

17 18

See Wenzel. See Sharae Deckard et al.

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economy—and a dialectical sense of its positive transformability—is suggested by his understated but recurrent investment in the recreational spaces of the beach, the port as the nexus for capitalist commodity export and import, and in boats themselves as corrupt commodities and potential vehicles for the development of a new global humanity. That same dystopian/utopian, material and ideological global understanding informs Armah’s use of the radio, through which black American, Congolese, and “dirge like” European organ music flow, and frame the social relationships of his alienated characters. Are we to conclude, then, that the critical consciousness of postcolonial studies is becoming, in Fanon’s phrase, “a crude, empty, fragile shell?” His expression, of course, is directed at the deformation of national consciousness when it becomes an instrument of neocolonial capitalism rather than the means to create a new international humanism. On the whole, postcolonial studies is heading in the opposite direction, towards more inclusive, and expansive, humanistic practices, increasingly attuned to the material conditions that inform and structure cultural and intellectual production. What we must be wary of, however, is the continued ability of old, idealist, orthodoxies to appropriate and subvert the gains of the twenty-first century; the threat of stasis in the face of dynamic transformation.

References

Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. Verso, 1992. Bhabha, Homi K. Foreword:  Framing Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, Grove Press, 2004, pp. xii–xli. Bhambra, Gurminder K. “Postcolonial and Decolonial Dialogues.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 17, no. 2, 2014, pp. 115–121. Byrd, Jodi A., and Michael Rothberg. “Between Subalternity and Indigeneity.” Interventions, vol. 13, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–12. Chrisman, Laura. “Nationalism and Postcolonial Studies.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies, edited by Neil Lazarus, Cambridge UP, 2004. Chrisman, Laura. “The Vanishing Body of Frantz Fanon in Paul Gilroy’s Against Race and After Empire.” The Black Scholar, vol. 41, no. 4, 2011, pp. 18–30. Dirlik, Arif. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Westview Press, 1997. Deckard, Sharae, et al. as Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of World-literature. Liverpool UP, 2015. Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Harvard UP, 2003.

42 Chrisman Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004. George, Olakunle. Relocating Agency: Modernity and African Letters. suny Press, 2003. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race. Routledge, 2004. Goebel, Walter, and Saskia Schabio, editors. Locating Postcolonial Narrative Genres. Routledge, 2013. Morey, Peter. “ ‘The Rules of the Game Have Changed’: Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Post‐9/11 Fiction.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 2, 2011, pp. 135–146. Nwankwo, Ifeoma. Black Cosmopolitanism:  Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas. U of Pennsylvania P, 2005. Parry, Benita. “Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Oxford Literary Review, vol. 9, no. 1–2, 1987, pp. 27–58. San Juan, Jr. E. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Spivak, Gayatri C. “Scattered Speculations on the Subaltern and the Popular.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 8, no. 4, 2005, pp. 475–486. Stephens, Michelle. Black Empire. The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914–1962. Duke UP, 2005. Wenzel, Jennifer. Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anti-Colonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond. U of Chicago P, 2009. Wenzel, Jennifer. “Petro-magic-realism: toward a political ecology of Nigerian literature.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 9, no. 4, 2006, pp. 449–464. Williams, Patrick, and Laura Chrisman, editors. Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. Columbia UP, 1994. Zachernuk, Philip. Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas. U of Virginia P, 2000.

­c hapter 3

The Market as a Dimension of Practice— Commodification, Ideology, and Postcolonial Studies Caroline Koegler In her introductory section to The Postcolonial Cultural Industry. Icons, Markets, Mythologies, and reflecting on her own relationship with the market and the “postcolonial cultural industry,” Sandra Ponzanesi poses the following questions: “Where do I position myself concerning the operations of the cultural industry: as a critical outsider capable of perceiving its deceit and seduction, or as a consumer and active participant in the meaning making of objects circulating in the global circuit?” (46) She continues: If we want to position ‘the postcolonial cultural industry’ as inspired by Adorno, but as having moved along more interconnected and sophisticated principles of production and consumption—which are no longer based in clear-cut, top-down ideological models nor in easily identifiable operations and locations of resistance and subversion—where do I stand and what is the added value of defining the ‘postcolonial cultural industry’ as separate, somewhat distinct and unique from cultural industries in general? (Ponzanesi 46; my emphasis) The first part of this quote sees Ponzanesi pit two opposite conceptions of intellectual work against one another:  The formulation “a critical outsider capable of perceiving its deceit and seduction” picks up on a long tradition of left-wing criticism, from the enlightenment to the Frankfurt School, in which the critic’s position is considered to be autonomous. With “a consumer and active participant in the meaning making of objects circulating in the global circuit,” Ponzanesi indulges a postmodern framework in which the critic’s position is one of automatic complicity in a multiplicity of forces and powers. Dissatisfied with this binary, and honouring the existence of more diversified models, Ponzanesi inquires: At a time when claims to critical autonomy, resistance, and subversion seem increasingly implausible, where do critics stand? If

44 Koegler critics are, somehow, implicated in processes of production and consumption, what kinds of value do they produce? In raising these questions, Ponzanesi employs a good dose of irony—not unlike Graham Huggan in his seminal Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins. While Huggan speaks, for example, of an “exoticist machinery” (262), Ponzanesi invokes some dramatic biblical language. In the immediately preceding passage, Ponzanesi has summarised Huggan’s approach in the following terms: “Even though Huggan presents a sceptical scene for postcolonialism and its entangled future with capitalism, there is a chance to escape the devilish pact” (46; my emphasis). In combination with her formulation “deceit and seduction,” “devilish pact” evokes images of heaven and hell in which a sexualised devil seduces critics into taking a bite of the rotten fruit of commodification. It thus emerges that Ponzanesi’s “critical outsider, capable of perceiving [the cultural industry’s] deceit and seduction” can be read as an idealised Jesus-figure who will clear the temple of literary and cultural criticism by turning the tables on its “cultural brokers.”1 Thus ironically distancing herself from the autonomy/complicity binary, and also joining Sarah Brouillette in rejecting Huggan’s deflection of “guilt” onto a generalised “global reader” (Ponzanesi 45),2 it seems that Ponzanesi is aiming for a more straightdown-the-line approach in which the critic is acknowledged as actively navigating “the postcolonial cultural industry,” participating in “added value” (46) production. If we pursue this strand of thought further—in contrast to Ponzanesi who swiftly turns to her main concern:  an analysis of literature and literary writers—we must pose the following questions: What is the interrelationship between postcolonial critique and commodification? Is it possible that the autonomy/complicity binary, ironically conceded by Huggan and Ponzanesi, points to a larger, unresolved, and in many ways now-crystallising epistemological-cum-ideological struggle in the field, as critics are realising that the programmatic notion of distance toward commodification and the market is untenable? If the notion of such distance is becoming brittle, then how does postcolonial critique ­incorporate commodification and the market as a dimension of practice?

1 “Cultural brokers” is a term used by Huggan to paraphrase Kwame Anthony Appiah’s suggestion that there is “a relatively small-scale, western-style, western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery.” See Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins, viii, and Appiah, “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” 2 Brouillette makes this succinct argument in Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace, p. 17.

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The Value of Commodification

At the beginning of such an investigation, it is necessary to inquire into commodification’s multiple discursive constructions, functions, and indeed values. The term commodity, on which the much more recent concept of commodification is based,3 is defined by Karl Marx as something that is attributed ‘exchange value’ (Capital). This is a type of value that is not representative of a thing’s inherent value, which would correspond to the amount of (physical) labour spent in its production (‘labour-theory of value’). In immediate contrast to value as produced by the natural, breathing body of humanity, commodities are presupposed by Marx to be symptomatic of alienation and exploitation.4 Both Marx’s understanding of ‘commodity’ and his labour-theory of value are thus built on the notion of naturalism, where authenticity is attributed to a value that reflects the investment of human bodies whereas alienation, artifice, and fetishism5 are attributed to the idea of a value that arises in commerce. Clearly, this position exhibits strong commonalities with the Romantics who reacted, like Marx, with distaste toward industrialisation and the rise of technology (see Soper 29–30). For example, in their poetry and other writings, both Dorothy and William Wordsworth spell out their desires for a nature and, indeed, for a human condition unspoiled by economy and technology—an ‘original state’ of being (see e.g. Robinson 82).6 In their celebration of natural bodies, both Romantic poetry and Marx’s labour-theory of value represent something of a continuation of the myth of the Garden of Eden, a space in which natural bodies can roam uninhibited by the greed and lusts that have long been attributed to commerce, including commodity fetishism. The imaginative power of these conceptions, of capitalism and commerce as forms of corruption that undermine and destroy (human) nature, remain highly current. Both commodity and commodification are frequently posited 3 The first record of ‘commodification’ in the oed is from 1975. See Oxford English Dictionary Online, “commodification.” 4 See e.g. the section “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret” in Marx, Capital. Volume 1, pp. 163–177, and “Estranged Labor” in Marx, The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 5 See “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret.” 6 These notions also come out in travel writing, such as in Dorothy Wordsworth’s writings about a trip to Scotland. See Bohls, and Duncan, pp. 167–177. In trying to protect ‘nature,’ Wordsworth was also politically active, repeatedly writing letters to the Board of Trade and making personal statements against the project of building a trainline in the Lake District. See Hall, pp. 85–114. For commonalities between Wordsworth and Marx, and more generally Wordsworth’s position toward what is now called ‘commodification,’ see Simpson.

46 Koegler in an overt binary against nature, and this occurs not only in general public discourse but also in Postcolonial Studies. A  prominent example of the former is the definition of commodification in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The action of turning something into, or treating something as, a (mere) commodity; commercialization of an activity, etc., that is not by nature commercial.” (“Commodification”; my emphasis). This definition contains three intriguing aspects: First, “turning something into” sets up a binary distinction between an original state and a transformed state, between being and becoming, where a particular action or process is needed to produce the commodity state. I will later ask whether this binary distinction holds. The second aspect is a value judgement. The insertion of the qualifier “mere” indicates that, by ‘becoming’ a commodity or entering the commodity state, something is degraded and reduced in value. This logic is significant as it sets up the idea of two different, competing frameworks of value: One is based on the notion of an inherent or essential value; the other is based on the notion of an artificial, de-authenticated value. Clearly, the former conception is presented as more valuable than the latter. The third aspect is the nature/commerce binary contained in the definition:  Commodification means a “commercialization of an activity, etc., that is not by nature commercial.” Not only does this binary imply that commodification ‘denaturalises’ but also, that ‘to commodify’ might be an action that is itself unnatural, and itself degrading. In this way, superiority is located in the concept of an essential value (which is based on the notion of an inherent goodness and natural qualities) whilst inferiority is located in the concept of commodification (which is associated with commerce, corruption, and the perversely unnatural). As would be expected from a classic essentialist definition, these two conceptions of value are presented as mutually exclusive. Whilst Ponzanesi’s concept of “the postcolonial cultural industry” and her question of its “added value” (46)7 rather uniquely suggest that commodification and commerce might indeed not be categorically corrupt and degrading, these binary notions of value remain highly influential in postcolonial discourse. As Robert Young has prominently claimed: Postcolonialism resists all forms of exploitation (environmental as well as human) and all oppressive conditions that have been developed solely for the interests of corporate capitalism. It challenges corporate

7 See my initial quote from her study The Postcolonial Cultural Industry:  Icons, Markets, Mythologies.

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capitalism’s commodification of social relations and the doctrine of individualism that functions as the means through which this is achieved. (Young Postcolonialism 113) Here, postcolonialism is situated in direct opposition to capitalism and commodification, in a framework in which a personified “corporate capitalism” ‘commits’ the act of commodifying “social relations.” “Social relations” seem to represent authentic and highly valuable ties between human beings which are under direct threat from “the doctrine of individualism,” “doctrine” indicating an artificial construct rather than a natural existence. Functioning as a marker of something that is categorically negative, “corporate capitalism,” its deeds and doctrines, are placed as postcolonialism’s categorical opponent and Other. Young’s personification of ‘capitalism’ is individualising (the system ‘acts’ like an individual), whilst it simultaneously turns a diverse multiplicity of lives, practices, and organisations into one dehumanised, homogenous, and obscure conglomerate. Finally, this is a naturalised construction and relation, as Young takes the negative qualities of “corporate capitalism” and “commodification” for granted—they are naturally negative—and they are thus entities to which postcolonialism is equally naturally opposed. In sum, Young can be seen as deploying ‘capitalism’ and ‘commodification’ as one might use ‘ideology’ in popular parlance, where calling something ‘ideology’ instantly discredits an idea or practice without further examination. This is usually done from a position of assumed epistemological superiority, whose artificiality ‘ideology’ effectively conceals. In Young’s usage, ‘capitalism’ and ‘commodification’ obtain the same discursive function: Based on a claim of self-evidence, the application of these terms facilitates a blanket rejection whilst simultaneously producing a sense of moral high ground. Thinking back to Ponzanesi’s initial consideration of “added value” (46), it is clear that Young is effectively trying to generate value for the idea of postcolonialism and those associated with it. Young thus engages in the commodification of commodification, a practice in which the idea of commodification is turned into a site of symbolic capital accumulation. In this configuration, ‘commodification,’ though painted as inherently degrading, acquires exchange value as it becomes Young’s vehicle of amassing symbolic capital for “postcolonialism” and its critics—a case of supreme irony. 2

The Impact of Commodification

The concept of commodification thus frequently attains a double function, in postcolonial discourse but also more broadly. Commodification serves not

48 Koegler only as a signifier of particular practices, processes, or frameworks of value; in its essentialised definition as something unnatural, corrupt, and degrading it also obtains a strategic function that serves distinction processes and symbolic capital accumulation. As further scrutiny also reveals, these two functions and their discursive powers are upheld by a range of Enlightenment dichotomies. Considering a list of such dichotomies—subject/object, mind/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, public/private, and economic/non-economic—it becomes clear that it is in particular ‘economic/non-economic’ that doggedly persists in attempts at distanciation from ‘commodification.’ This is unexpected as many of the dichotomies that have informed and complemented the dichotomy of ‘economic/non-economic,’ such as ‘public/private,’ ‘male/female,’ and ‘nature/culture,’ have long been questioned. In other words, it seems that ‘commodification’ frequently triggers distinction practices whose figurative designs draw direct links to the past. Like the negative and essentialised treatment of ‘economy’ itself, strategic distanciation from economic motivations has a long history. It can be observed even, or perhaps particularly, in contexts in which practice depends very much on commerce, which is true not least of Young’s fairly highly commercialised format Postcolonialism. A  Very Short Introduction in which he makes the statement quoted above. To also take Romanticism once more as an example, when Romantic poetry emerged in celebration of ‘nature’ (not economy), the very same Romantic poets jostled for both monetary and symbolic capital in the emerging literary marketplace of the eighteenth century. Here, ‘original genius’ was a high-impact brand narrative8 that facilitated claims to intellectual property whilst simultaneously expressing a distance from the economic realm.9 In other words, in rewarding notions of inspiration and ‘nature,’ Romanticism’s discursive economy promoted figurative distance from ‘the economic’ as a source of symbolic capital accumulation, 8 In Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market, I define ‘brand narratives’ as powerful narratives that are told of the self, one’s group, or others, and that function as interventions in what I call symbolic valuation regimes (performativities of valuation structured by discursive conventions). Brand narratives reinforce and potentially also modify valuation regimes, which will vary across different social and cultural contexts. Brand narratives are often, though not always, condensed narratives that (strategically) reduce specific contents to a series of symbolically powerful images. 9 As Brouillette has suggested, commercialism functioned as “a negative subtext for a variety of romantic-era works.” Indeed, for Brouillette, “romantic-era literature is thought to have been the first to express a systematic denial of the economic motivations for authorship.” See Brouillette, pp. 104–107.

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which translated into notions of authenticity and credibility and thus into higher numbers of published volumes and monetary capital. This success is indicative that at least some Romantic writers navigated ‘commodification’ and ‘commerce’ rather efficiently, not only expressing ‘natural’ inspiration but also resonating with readers’ desires for an epistemology removed from ‘commerce.’ Both symbolic and monetary success remain frequent rewards of ‘commodification’ whenever it is utilised to stress an epistemological and moral distance between those who wield the term and those things or people to which it is applied. In the context of Postcolonial Studies, ‘economic/non-economic’ has been diversified into a more nuanced set of dichotomies, such as: Commodified Corrupt Determination False consciousness Capitalism/Commodification

Humane/Natural Pristine/Pure Autonomy/Resistance Right consciousness Postcolonialism

These dichotomies are frequently utilised to keep ‘the economic’ at arm’s length, safeguarding the notion of critical autonomy even as both ‘commodification’ and ‘critical autonomy’ become sites of commodification. Whilst therefore practically implausible, it is also possible to see why this discursive practice remains an appealing one. Not only symbolically profitable, it has also been reassuring to think that critical distanciation is possible in the first place, and the reason for this lies in postcolonial critique itself: ‘Capitalism’ and ‘commodification’ have so long been treated as absolute metaphors signifying an essential monstrosity rather than concrete human practices, that distanciation becomes a self-preserving move. The monstrosity needs to be kept in check; it must either be excluded from the subject and become abject, or it must be domesticated, both of which are attempts at control. These attempts, however, are bound to fail. The relevant dichotomies have to be continually reinforced in an effort to veil the actual omnipresence of commodification in discourse and human practice, inside and outside of academia. I would therefore like to suggest that attempts at situating ‘capitalism’ or ‘commodification’ outside of academia, or outside of Postcolonial Studies, are primarily symptomatic of a continuous haunting, as critics struggle to sustain an image of scholarship whose foundation is questionable.10 10

See also my introduction to Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market.

50 Koegler There are several consequences of treating ‘capitalism’ and ‘commodification’ as such absolute metaphors. First of all, any actual inquiry into scholars’ own entanglement in commodification or ‘the market’ (a term I prefer over ‘capitalism’), is discouraged. Identification with an abject monstrosity is something that few critics enjoy. It makes sense then that, where the relationship of postcolonial critics and the market is discussed against all the odds, critics such as Ponzanesi and Huggan find it necessary to employ irony. In the absence of an overt rejection of ‘capitalism,’ and instead in the presence of acknowledgment of critics’ own entanglement in “market forces” (Huggan 12), irony offers a distanciation from the utterance in which this relationship is described. In these discussions, then, irony functions as a mechanism that deflects some of the implications of this acknowledgment. Therefore, whilst both Huggan and Ponzanesi crucially render visibility to critics’ inextricable relationship with commodification and the market, they also (if perhaps unintentionally) give voice to the discomfort triggered by the uneasy idea of these crossovers and their closer investigation. A second consequence is the complication of interdisciplinary projects between scholars active in the field of Postcolonial Studies and scholars that are situated in fields that are more closely associated with the concept of ‘economy,’ including Business Studies and Political Economy. In their essay “Managing Postcolonialism,” published in Anna Bernard et  al.’s What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, Mrinalini Greedharry and Pasi Ahonen tackle this uneasy disciplinary relationship and make the case for intensifying the cooperation between postcolonial critics and scholars from Organisation and Management Studies. This, they suggest, will enrich postcolonial critics’ understanding of their own positionality in the institutional and organisational contexts of Postcolonial Studies that is increasingly marketised. In carving out their own positions, the authors register the following concerns: [I]‌t bears emphasizing again … that a turn to management and organization perspectives is not a turn to managerialism or a backhanded way of slipping the objectives of neo-liberal management of higher education into humanities research. We emphasize this because our experience presenting these arguments to various audiences in the humanities suggests that humanities scholars persistently understand any discussion of management and organization as inevitably aligned with the neo-liberal discourse that informs the structural changes many of us experience on a daily basis in our institutional work lives. (greedharry and ahonen 59)

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Greedharry and Ahonen describe here their experience with Humanities audiences and the automatic assumptions that they encounter regarding their disciplinary backgrounds (Ahonen is a Management scholar; Greedharry is in Literary and Cultural Studies). These assumptions situate Management and Organisation Studies as monoliths that are considered, if anything, as sources of corruption for the Humanities and their ‘naturally’ more refined and more ethical approaches. Aggravated by recent ‘structural changes’ in the university landscape, scholarship from Business Schools is rejected as spurious, a reaction which, if applied to literature, would mean that literature should be dismissed in its entirety because books have been used for demagogic purposes. It is indeed astonishing that few scholars in Literary and Cultural Studies are aware that Business Schools tend to harbour not only mainstream U.S. American Management approaches but also a range of heterodox fields that can range from Critical Management Studies (who are already working with postcolonial theory) to Feminist and Islamic Economics. For the specific context of Postcolonial Studies in which Greedharry and Ahonen are publishing their essay, the additional problem is that critics seem quite happy not only to sustain images of a homogenously evil ‘capitalism’ or ‘commodification,’ but also the idea of corrupt and homogenously ‘right-wing’ disciplines. At a Postcolonial Studies conference in Birmingham a few years ago, I attended a session in which the presenter jokingly asked: “Do you know any right-wing postcolonial critic? I don’t” which was followed by a round of appreciative laughter. Management and Organisation Studies would of course be understood as ‘right-wing’ and thus unfit for postcolonialists, which has continually been Greedharry and Ahonen’s experience. In an effort to refrain from calling such assumptions and reactions ‘ideology,’ I will instead suggest that a deconstruction of the dichotomies listed above, and indeed of the concept ‘capitalism,’ is much needed in Postcolonial Studies. ‘Capitalism’ continues to be used as the marker of a fetishized exotic, and one that is exceptionally powerful: Not only does it situate entire groups, organisations, and practices as morally corrupt, unnatural, and driven by a false consciousness, but it also continues to invite problematic assumptions about people and their scholarly and/or moral integrity. In therefore trying to reach beyond the framework of ‘capital,’ I will suggest in the following section a modified framework and terminology. 3

Commodification and the Economy of Discourse

To reach beyond the ‘naturalism’ of commodification/nature dichotomies, it is necessary to think about how processes of valuation intersect with

52 Koegler epistemology. This is why, in Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market, I  develop Foucault’s concept of an “ ‘economy’ of discourses.” Foucault’s usage of ‘economy’ remains vague, signalling that discourses’ “intrinsic technology, the necessities of their operation, the tactics they employ, the effects of power which underlie them and which they transmit—this, and not the system of representations is what determines the essential features of what they have to say” (Foucault 68–69). Notable is that Foucault does not clarify the status of the economic in his conceptualisation, and that by using single inverted commas (“ ‘economy’ ”) he marks ‘economy’ both as displaced in his theory of discourse and, possibly, as having a metaphorical (rather than properly theorised and directly applicable) function. Adaptations of Foucault’s ‘discursive economy’ terminology have built on the metaphorical dimension (speaking for example of “investments” in statements and their “dividends”; see e.g. Campbell 7), but have remained similarly unspecific.11 In Critical Branding, I  seek to shed new light on the role of economy (particularly branding and the market) in human practice in general and postcolonial studies in particular, and conceptualise what I call ‘the market as a dimension of practice.’ I go beyond figurative usages of ‘economy’ in discourse theory, instead defining discourse as already imbued with valorisation/devalorisation. I suggest the term ‘valuation regimes’ for those discursive structures that produce not only particular valorisations and devalorisations according to specific discursive conventions, but also a “performativity of valorisation/ devalorisation,” i.e. valorisation/devalorisation as the foundation for a performative market (Koegler 53). In this context, commodification becomes a “social process, enabled through language” and “a discursive mechanism that produces value judgments.” Ultimately, it is in and through commodification and branding that statements, ideas, and identities; behaviours and emotions; academic fields and ideologies; are produced—are rendered visible and salient—in the symbolic economy of discourse. This understanding of the market as a dimension of practice also builds on Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “commoditization”12 which he outlines in 11

12

Campbell writes: “Some statements and depictions come to have greater value than others … For in a discursive economy, investments have been made in certain interpretations; dividends can be drawn by those parties that have made the investments; representations are taxed when they confront new and ambiguous circumstances; and participation in the discursive economy is through social relations that embody an unequal distribution of power” (7). ‘Commodification,’ not ‘commoditisation,’ is emerging as the more commonly used term, which is why I  choose it. See for example the recent interdisciplinary branch of Law and Culture Studies for theorisations of “commodification theory.” Carol M.  Rose,

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his classic essay “Commodities and the Politics of Value.”13 Appadurai rejects what he perceives as an “overdrawn series of contrast” between “[g]‌ifts, and the spirit of reciprocity, sociability, and spontaneity in which they are typically exchanged” and commodity exchange (11). He takes issue with dichotomies such as “market exchange” vs. “reciprocity,” suggesting that they “parody both poles and reduce human diversities artificially” (13), particularly given that a long-term perspective frequently reveals not “disinterestedness” but a “calculative dimension” in human practice (11, 13). Appadurai then establishes a series of hypotheses: opening up Marx’s focus on commodities as products of (human) production, he suggests that anything can take the “phase” of a commodity (6–13). Further, he repudiates the determinism of the Frankfurt School by positing commodity exchange as an open-ended social practice, based on a process of continuous (re-)creation and negotiation of meaning. Finally, he moves beyond common perceptions of commoditisation as routed in Western capitalism and positions commoditisation and commodity exchange as having emerged in different cultural contexts (11–12). While I have endorsed Appadurai’s deconstruction of essential binaries between, for example, the notion of ‘the market’ and the idea of ‘reciprocity,’ and while I have also welcomed his decidedly diversifying approach, I have also suggested that Appadurai’s hypotheses are too focussed on a commodification of things (Koegler 55). Even where Appadurai focuses on how human-beings are turned into commodities (he refers to women who become part of a marriage transaction) (15), this is presented as an objectification of subjects. By contrast, I have suggested that commodification functions at a much deeper level, structuring human sociality through (embodied) interactions and transactions in symbolic circuits (Chapters 2, 49–79, & 5, 117–153). Differently put, commodification goes hand in hand with epistemology. In performativities of valorisation and devalorisation, human interactions and transactions arise not least as symbolic exchanges, triggered and/or policed by valuation regimes. Thus producing embodied experiences, behaviours, and emotions; social spaces and situations; ideas and concepts, commodification can neither be limited to processes of objectification, nor does it apply only when there is a perceivable “calculative dimension.” While it is true that people may engage in commodification in overt and intentional ways (e.g. when promoting themselves and/or their convictions; their backgrounds or academic fields),

13

“Afterword:  Whither Commodification?” in, Rethinking Commodification:  Cases and Readings in Law and Culture, p. 403. Again, see my study Critical Branding for a more fleshed-out discussion on which the following argument is based.

54 Koegler a “calculative dimension” implies a level of intentionality that is frequently absent from social interaction. In other words, as a discursive mechanism and social practice, commodification is not always a consciously employed strategy. However, whether conscious or not, the effects and outcomes of commodification are necessarily diverse and potentially uneven. Whilst there is of course room for negative repercussions, such as exploitation or alienation, the effects of symbolic exchanges can also be positive where they inspire increases in respect or trust, love or friendship, because reciprocal ­valorisation—­valorisation that is returned—strengthens social and emotional bonds. My understanding of commodification and the market as performative challenges the dichotomies listed in the previous section to a considerable extent. It suggests that whether scholars are ‘conferencing,’ launching their ideas, or trying to secure jobs, whether they consider themselves as individuals or as parts of collectives, commodification plays an important part in realising pursuits, ranging from career goals to political goals and to moral claims. Young, in the statement quoted above, seeks to valorise ‘postcolonialism’ by distancing it (and by implication himself) from ‘capitalism’ and ‘commodification.’ He thus seeks a profitable symbolic exchange to the advantage of ‘postcolonialism’ and ultimately attempts to brand ‘postcolonialism’ as a crucial scholarly as well as activist project. This has wider applicability: Regardless of specific goals or motivations, successfully and at times strategically navigating the economy of discourse, and engaging in commodification and self-commodification, are necessities, both within and beyond Postcolonial Studies. 4

The Market as a Dimension of (Postcolonial) Practice

Taking up again Ponzanesi’s initial question—“Where do I  position myself …?” (46)—it is clear that academic scholarship and commodification are intimately bound up with one another. In academia, as in other areas of engagement, valuation regimes produce value judgments, commodification, and self-commodification, branding and self-branding, and as such structures and strategies of empowerment and disempowerment. Postcolonial Studies can squarely be placed in this framework of the market, not only because the field thrives—as ultimately any successful political and scholarly project does— through valuation practices, branding, and symbolic capital accumulation, but also because it has functioned very successfully as “a revalorisation and rebranding project, intervening in and countering colonial and neo-colonial

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valuation regimes in which racial, cultural, and gender hierarchies have moulded perceptions of others, producing them as others” (Koegler 56; emphasis in the original). Indeed, as I stress in Critical Branding, it is an historic achievement that Postcolonial Studies has encouraged meta-reflection on and resistance against (neo-)colonial regimes of valuation, calling into question the legitimacy of these regimes as natural orders, and endeavouring to engineer their collapse. These struggles have not been detached from valuation, from commodification and branding, but have rested on these practices and structures as central pillars of political strategy. They have not been conducted from a position that is (morally) superior to or autonomous from the market, but through intimate negotiations of the market’s various productions, normativities, and performativities—negotiations through which powerful ideas must first of all emerge to make their mark in the symbolic economy of discourse. Whilst Postcolonial Studies has frequently been critiqued and questioned, a process through which it has grown and matured, the field has also continually been turned, and very legitimately so, into a site of commodification. Critics, Young in particular (see Young “Postcolonial Remains”), have sought to valorise the field in meta-discursive debates and, given its historical importance, for good reasons. In other words, Postcolonial Studies’ multiple agendas have prospered, have found their pathways of publication and promotion, with and through the market as a dimension of practice. This is a relationship made up of confluence and intimacy, rather than of essential difference, and this relationship is in great need not only of acknowledgement but also critical interrogation. This is true of any field, but particularly for those fields that advertise critical self-awareness and self-reflection as central to their ethico-political foundations, something for which Postcolonial Studies has often set the standard. In sum, my suggestion is to question the dichotomies, essentialisms, and ideological barriers that have been erected around the idea of economy, and to engage critically with the market’s diverse practices and effects that proliferate in Postcolonial Studies and through which Postcolonial Studies itself proliferates. After all, markets arise inside and not outside of representation, and they are symptomatic of social relations between people. Social relations and commodification are not, as Young would have us believe (Postcolonialism 113), mutually exclusive; neither is commodification inherently problematic. This means that we need to de-link the concept of the market from both Marxism and a narrow sense of commerce, in which commodification relates only to things, objectification, and alienation, or indeed to institutions such as companies, corporations, or departments. It means understanding the market as a dimension of practice.

56 Koegler

References

Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge UP, 1986. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post- in Postcolonial?” Critical Inquiry, vol. 17, no. 2, 1991, pp. 336–357. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1343840?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents. Accessed June 20, 2015. Bohls, Elizabeth A., and Ian Duncan. Travel Writing 1700–1830: An Anthology. Oxford UP, 2005. Brouillette, Sarah. Postcolonial Writers and the Global Literary Marketplace. 2007. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Campbell, David. Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity. 1992. U of Minnesota P, 1998. “Commodification.” Oxford English Dictionary Online, www.oed.com/view/Entry/37198?redirectedFrom=commodification#eid. Accessed May 9, 2016. Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality:  1. The Will to Knowledge, translated by Robert Hurley. 1976. Penguin, 1998. Greedharry, Mrinalini, and Pasi Ahonen. “Managing Postcolonialism.” What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, edited by Anne Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray, Routledge, 2016, pp. 49–66. Hall, Dewey W. Romantic Naturalists, Early Environmentalists:  An Ecocritical Study, 1789–1912. Routledge, 2016. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic. Marketing the Margins, Routledge, 2001. Koegler, Caroline. Critical Branding. Postcolonial Studies and the Market. Routledge, 2018. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, translated by Martin Milligan. 1844. Dover, 2007. Marx, Karl. Capital. Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes. 1867. Penguin, 1990. Ponzanesi, Sandra. The Postcolonial Cultural Industry. Icons, Markets, Mythologies. Palgrave, 2014. Robinson, Daniel. William Wordsworth’s Poetry. Continuum, 2010. Rose, Carol M. “Afterword:  Whither Commodification?” Rethinking Commodification: Cases and Readings in Law and Culture, edited by Martha M. Ertman and Joan C. Williams, New York UP, 2005, pp. 402–428. Simpson, David. Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity. Cambridge UP, 2009. Soper, Kate. What is Nature. Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human. 1995. Blackwell, 2004. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2003. Young, Robert. “Postcolonial Remains.” New Literary History, vol. 43, no. 1, 2012, pp. 19– 42. Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/477476. Accessed June 24, 2015.

pa rt 2 Ideology in Postcolonial Contexts

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­c hapter 4

Haggling and Postcolonial Phonological Constructs in Nigeria Taiwo Soneye 1

Introduction

Haggling is an essential type of discourse which occurs in everyday life of the Nigerian people and strongly impacts their linguistic climate (Alo and Soneye 44). However, phonological research of social situations such as haggling is uncommon. Investigating the day-to-day language use in economically-compelling situations such as haggling could enable a robust process of defining postcolonial notions especially within the ambience of the new Englishes. The purpose of this essay therefore is to assess the “legacy of connection” (Said 282) between the bequeathed British English and the Nigerian indigenous languages, including Nigerian Pidgin. The research sets out to examine issues on Nigerian English accent, the ideologies that hagglers express and their deployment of multilingual resources in the construction of postcolonial identities. 1.1 Haggling as Social Discourse Haggling is a process of price formation through which both buyers and sellers negotiate and eventually establish acceptable prices. It is the normal method among the Yoruba, a constant cause of brawling in Igbo markets, and a perpetrator of folk ethics ideology in Dahomey (Uchendu 37–39). Haggling over prices of goods and services is an essential part of Nigerian life. It is an age-long phenomenon in human societies that is increasingly assuming new dimensions in English as a Second Language (esl) environments. Nigeria, by composition, is multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic. Its market settings are often very unique, with robust interactions among the indigenous languages, the Nigerian Pidgin and the English language. Terence Frederick Mitchell described the language of haggling as one “that expresses: thoughts, emotions, conveys information, (and) influences behaviour in others” (165). Researchers in different contexts have enunciated the discourse strategies such as euphemism, cajoling, flattery, flirting, code-mixing, code-switching, honorific, and face and politeness strategies often employed in haggling in

60 Soneye multilingual settings (see Ayoola; Moseri; Alo and Soneye). But research has paid very little attention to the relevance of accent in the process of buying and selling. Some authors have examined haggling from the economic, political and sociological perspectives. These writers variously expressed the requisite (verbal and non-verbal) skills required of the shrewd buyer such as thoroughly examining goods and services, consulting with by-standers and surrogate buyers or sellers, pretending to be king and wearing disdainful expressions while examining wares (see Metraux; Underwood; Uchendu). Efurosibina Adegbija’s work on language choice and use in Nigerian markets (Multilingualism) was quite enriching. Despite this, studies on how hagglers in multilingual settings like Nigeria employ phonological features such as accents to construct or negotiate identity are still scarce. This is the gap that the current study intends to fill. English and Postcolonial Identity Construction in Multi-ethnic Nigerian Markets In consonance with the notions of some scholars on postcolonialism, Nigerians perhaps are beginning to see issues of accents differently, with their survival (interest) coming first. Robert Young observed that “postcolonialism offers you a way of seeing things differently, a language and a politics in which your interest comes first” (2). The emerging language phenomena, some of which will be discussed in subsequent sections of this study, attest the notions of Young, and John McLeod, about postcolonialism. According to the latter, “there is no singular postcolonialism … postcolonialism can be productively articulated in different ways … it can describe a way of thinking, a mode of perception, an aesthetic practice …” (4). Several issues, especially, economic and political, are beginning to impact the use of English accents in Nigeria with emerging peculiarities that suggest a redefining of identity in a postcolonial era. Nigeria’s contact with the English language (English-based pidgin), began in the 17th century with trading along its shores. Later, with the British conquest and colonisation, the language became the conquerors’ influential code that Nigerians strove to speak. Ayo Bamgbose described English as the language with “non-equal opportunity … discriminator … a minority language for all practical purposes” (322). On the English language in Nigeria, Efurosibina Adegbija said “it is the language of a powerful Nigerian elite” (15). At the time of his writing, Nigerians made deliberate effort to equate the British accent. He said further that “there is a love-hate attitude towards the English language in Nigeria” (21). The author did not expatiate on this, but a reader could deduce 1.2

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from subsequent chapters what the “love-hate attitude” means. For instance, on haggling, Adegbija said: Language solidarity at the market … is … the easiest strategy for obtaining a seller’s mercy for the pocket … To speak the educated variety of Nigerian English in many markets … could often easily result in commercial exploitation … English largely occupies the back seat in the Commercial domain … to speak English … functions in a separatist role … which also to many “market people,” implies being rich … English occupies a last position as far as conveying or establishing ethnic solidarity through language in the market goes … (Adegbija 80–82) A lot has happened to the English language in Nigeria since its inception via trade and colonialism. The colonial history of conglomerate Nigeria, her multi-ethnic nature and the emerging globalisation effects have occasioned discourses on identity (Oni et al.). The relationship between English and the Nigerian indigenous languages across educational, ethnic, regional and cultural strata has continued to elicit new discoveries after Adegbija’s observations, more than a decade ago. For instance, there has consistently been an increase in the number of Nigerian children who, though not having gone beyond the shores of Nigeria, have English as their first language (L1) (see Soneye and Ayoola). This set of Nigerians (some of whom were interviewed for this research) haggle over bus or taxi fares, cobblers’ fees and hair-do prices to mention a few. Besides, among the Nigerian youths, Nigerian Pidgin rather than their mother tongues, is fast becoming the language of socialisation, especially with the growth of hip-hop music (see Akande) and stand-up comedies. Christine Ofulue described the steady influence of Nigerian Pidgin on identity creation. She stated that: “Nigerian Pidgin … has slowly developed into a variety that is an integral part of Nigerian socialisation. It participates in the process of creating identity … Nigerian Pidgin has come to be used to resolve identity conflicts by not identifying the user with any particular ethnic group” (123). One of the reasons for the growth and acceptance of Nigerian Pidgin among the rich and the poor, the educated and the uneducated etc. might be the uniqueness of its accent. Language choice is crucial to socialisation but accent seems much more crucial. Sara Abercrombie in Meagan Hoff’s study enunciated the strength of accent when she stated that “when we speak, we communicate more than the sum of our words. Interlocutors give and interpret information including ethnic and cultural affiliations through those first syllables and sounds of an utterance” (1).

62 Soneye Ethnicity and accent play pivotal roles in Nigeria’s economic domain, where prices of goods and services are unendingly negotiated. The relationship between ethnicity and identity has been of interest in several studies (see Jenkins; Miller; Bartimole). William B. Gudykunst and Karen Schmidt described phonological features as integral for listeners to be able to gather information and categorise speakers. For Nigerians, accent and language choice are vital tools for purchases. English is domiciled within several indigenous languages in Nigeria. Some authors quoted that Nigerian indigenous languages are about between 200 and 396 (Bamgbose), some speculated between 400 and 450 languages (Adegbija) and some 505 (Grimes and Grimes) with about 250 ethnic groups. Little wonder that English in Nigeria is said by various scholars to have been domesticated, indigenised, acculturated and nativised (see Gut; Jowitt; Simo-Bobda). Interestingly though, no known linguistic study to date has systematically investigated or considered identity creation and its relationship with language accents in Nigerian markets. Today, what we now have as Nigeria is a conglomeration of several (ethnic) groups with diverse cultural and linguistic orientations. Inya-A. Eteng described “Nigeria as the brain child of British colonialism” (38–39). He quoted Rupert Emerson as having concluded that Nigeria is “a notoriously precarious lumping together of peoples of separate identities” (39). He also noted that there has been a steady growth and consolidation of communal allegiances and sociocultural identities among various ethnic groups in pursuit of competing material values, since the 1950s. Language and in particular accent, have been integral to the consolidation of these communal allegiances in pursuit of material gains. The strong desire of several Nigerians within and immediately after colonialism to speak English like the British colonisers, seems to have faded. One of the reasons responsible for this might be the interference syndrome characteristic of second language learners, that often occasion acculturation discussed in Munzali Jibril’s “Regional Variation in Nigerian Spoken English” and Ayo Banjo’s “Towards a Definition of Standard Nigerian Spoken English.” However, the aspect that has been largely unresolved is the conscious attempt of Nigerian speakers of English to decolonise their speech despite the several decades of near-native English phonology in our classrooms. This spoken variety of English that is in close contact with one’s ethnic and cultural affiliation is regarded by some as “degenerate” (Anchimbe and Anchimbe 13) but this description seems to be politically motivated. According to Karuvannur Puthanveettil Mohanan: “Mimicking the accent of some other community or social class is a symptom of the desire to be viewed as belonging to that community or social class. The rejection of rp as the model in classrooms … is a symbolic rejection of British colonialism” (112).

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1.3 Research Questions This study emphasises linguistic issues that fall within its purview and these will be considered in subsequent sections. In particular, the study intends to answer four main questions which are as follows: (1) What connections exist between the bequeathed British English and the Nigerian indigenous languages, including Nigerian Pidgin? (2) What are the features that mark Nigerian English accent in hagglers’ rendition? (3) What are the ideologies that hagglers express? (4) How do hagglers’ deploy multilingual resources in the construction of postcolonial identities? 2

Data and Research Methods

The primary data comprised an audio-recorded spoken corpus of 2,000 words of negotiations among 34 buyers/sellers (12 spoken texts) in 3 markets in 3 states located in southwest Nigeria, namely Lagos, Ogun and Osun States. One of the markets, by virtue of its location, services about 25,000 university students and staff. Previous data and speech items of selected artisans such as taxi drivers and their customers were also employed. Non-structured interviews were conducted with about 15 willing buyers and sellers (apart from the initial 34) to elicit information on the choice of language and accent usage in haggling. Participant observation and expository genre like personal testimonials were also used. Some of the recordings were surreptitiously done to prevent the truncation of interactants’ negotiations. The majority of the hagglers have acquired at least secondary school education. Their ethnic orientations include Igbo, Efik, Hausa, Edo, Igbira and Yoruba and their ages fall between 18 and 60. The conversations were annotated and analysed, using wasp version 1.54; the 2013 model designed at University College London was adopted for the comparison drawn between British and Nigerian pronunciations. The study included both auditory and instrumental analyses. 3

Findings and Discussion on Findings

The British English Adverbial “Now” /nɑʊ/ in Nigerian Market Discourse Syllable prominence and unique accentuation of adverbials constituted peculiar culture markers of Nigerian market discourse. The word now in British 3.1

64 Soneye English is often regarded as a discourse marker. It is one of the eleven discourse markers examined by Deborah Schiffrin, and Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge. Now in British English means “at the present time/moment” to express command, request, or admonition or to introduce an important point or indicate a transition (as of ideas). Its phonological features are that the pitch rises then falls, [↗↘], with a vocalic element that is a closing diphthong /ɑʊ/. “Now” in Nigerian English variety that is spoken by both the educated and the non-educated Nigerians means much more than this, as exemplified in the excerpt (Text 6) below: Text 6: (A buyer and a seller haggling over the price of a pleated skirt) buyer: This pleated skirt here, how much is it? seller: erm … just pay me one-five buyer: Ha ha madam, why now, this skirt ke? Please take eight hundred seller: ha ha haba! That is too low now, I no fit sell am for 800, ha ha customer why are you doing like this now buyer: Madam now, a beg (Madam please, I  beg) okay how about like one thousand? seller: A no see am buy like that, a beg give me one-three (I didn’t buy at that price, I beg give me one thousand and three) buyer: madam take one-two seller: A no fit collect one-two my sister (I can’t sell at the price of one thousand-two hundred naira) buyer: E gba one-two now (accept one-thousand-two hundred naira, please) seller: my sister bring am one-three (My sister bring one thousand and three hundred naira) buyer: madam e joo now, one-two-fifty (Madam please accept one thousand and two fifty naira) In Text 6, above, now is used as a plea or an appeal, especially by the buyer to entreat the seller to sell the goods. In all six cases, the pitch rises rather than falls, even when it was not intended to be a question. In British English the pitch rises and falls except when it acts as a question. Figure  4.1 shows the percentages of usage and the extended meanings of now in Nigerian English. The pitch height of now as an appeal is displayed in Figure 4.2 and Figure 4.3, respectively. It is not likely that the hagglers’ use of now with a different meaning is borne out of the presence of similar lexical items in their indigenous languages. “Naa” in Yoruba represents a definite article, as in “omo naa” (the

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child), and it has a level tone. Its acoustic measurement does not resemble that of now as used by the hagglers. “Na” is very common in pidgin and its meaning is often dependent on the sentential or grammatical context. This word, Na, is highlighted in Texts 1, 11 and 12 below: Text 1:   seller 1:  Na your word make hungry, dey come o (It is your word that made me hungry, begin to come) buyer 1: Obilo na my paddy (spoke loudly to the person on phone) (Obilo, is my friend) Obilo na your paddy dey here! (Obilo, it is your friend that is here) Text 11:    seller 2:  Na eight-five, last (eight thousand five hundred naira is the last price) buyer: This woman na so you be? (This woman, is this how you are?) seller 1:  Na dollar make me be like that (It is the dollar that has made me be like that) Text 12:   seller 1: This one na two-two-X (This size is double extra-large) buyer: But all of them na slim fit (But all of them are slim fit) It suffices to say that there is yet neither an acoustic nor syntactic evidence that suggests that na in Nigerian Pidgin influences the pronunciation or stylistic usage of “now” in Nigerian spoken English. The empirical and spectrographic analyses (Figure 4.1 & Figure 4.2) reveal the stylistic usage of now in Nigerian market discourse. The meaning of the English word now as used in market discourse has extended meanings. For instance, in 2 (17%) out of the 12 recorded texts now signalled shock, anxiety or frustration. Only within 3 texts (25%) was now used strictly in the British sense, while in 7 (58%) out of the 12 texts recorded, hagglers used now as an entreaty, a plea or an appeal. 3.2 Pidginising English in the Nigerian Markets Some hagglers speak in tones that repudiate the fixed binary theories which stabilise meaning and representation (Hall 397) of “the poor and the rich” or the educated and the uneducated. This happens often when Nigerians are angry or excited. Five interviewees on the current study were of the opinion that the ‘daintiness’ of English, especially the British English, cannot sometimes bear the weight or import of discourse like Nigerian Pidgin (see section on pt 2 of this study). The personal testimonials (henceforth pt) vividly attest the existence of this phenomenon.

66 Soneye

­f igure 4.1  “Now” in the phonology of haggling in Nigeria

­f igure 4.2  Nigerians’ intonation of now as a plea or an appeal (fall-rise-↖↗)

­f igure 4.3  British intonation of now (Falling tune╲)

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Personal testimonial (pt) 1:   (A university student haggling with a taxi driver over taxi fare in Edo state, Nigeria) commuter (hailing): Taxi /taksi/ Ogborikoko? (Daintily with a rising tone – Indicative of a question and retaining /k/ in the pronunciation of taxi like a native English speaker) taxi driver: 500 naira commuter: Wetin? (What?) Ogborikoko? (Pronounced with level tone and syllable isochronous, as is characteristic of Nigerian indigenous languages) taxi driver: Oh-gbo-ri-kho-kho na 500 naira, but O-gbori-ko-ko na 30 naira (The driver mimicked a native English user’s pronunciation in the first and pronounced the second with prominence on every syllable the way the indigenes of the town pronounce the name of the place) Certain (menial) jobs, such as trading and driving taxis, have been categorised by some Nigerians as belonging to the uneducated or the less educated, while the white-collar jobs are believed to be undertaken by the educated. Recent happenings in Nigeria corroborated by this empirical analysis have proven that university graduates in Nigeria have taken to commercial activities such as trading (in not-so-elegant-shops and environments) just to survive. They seem to be angry with those, who to them, seem to pose that they do not understand or speak English very fluently, especially with a near-native accent. Text 10 below was recorded in Lagos, in the area known as Balogun-Idumota, the heart of economic transactions. In this area, sometimes, one can find as many as four sellers in one shop and a minimum of two, usually the Igbo people, hence the designation of such as Seller 1 and Seller 2) as exemplified in Text 10 below: Text 10: (2 Igbo clothes sellers/2 Yoruba buyers) buyer 1: You can hear Yoruba (You understand Yoruba?) seller 1: I am not deaf, I can hear buyer 2: small time we go dey see orisirisi   (Soon, we will begin to see strange behaviours) buyer 1: naa only skirt I want (It is only skirt that I want) seller 1: sebi you wan take am abi? (Do you really want to take it?)

68 Soneye buyer 1: I’m talking of a matching colour seller 1: Talking to Seller 2 (in Igbo) buyer 2: Your wife dey try as you dey tight face (Your wife must have endurance as you are frowning) seller 1: A beg na money A need (please, it is money that I need) In Text 10 above, there were two buyers indicative of the long-standing practice of buyers often requiring escorts to commercial areas. The reason for this might be because they are not skilful in pricing and they also speak the educated variety of English. Even when such buyers attempt to “decolonise” their English, sellers still see them as the rich and the educated to be exploited. Buyer 1 in Text 10, attempted speaking the Nigerian Pidgin in order to develop a rapport with the sellers but seller 1, perhaps, wanted to prove that he was also educated with the collocation of “hear” with “deaf” (I am not deaf, I can hear). Buyer 1 could not sustain the interaction in pidgin, so relapsed into educated Nigerian English, “I’m talking of a matching colour” (especially in the accent that made the two sellers to immediately use a coded message in Igbo); they seemed to have said “this one is rich, she is Oyinbo” (well-read). Utterances indicative of the need for survival, money and not a flowery language like English, are highlighted. Seller 1 said to the buyers “A beg na money A need” (Please, it is money that I need). The pronunciation of “money” in the final utterance of Seller 1 in Text 10 above, is neither an equivalent of the British English pronunciation of “money” /mʌnɪ/ nor like the Nigerian English variety /mɔːni/. It was the Nigerian Pidgin pronunciation. The difference is not just the absence of the vocalic element /ʌ/ which is also not present in the Nigerian indigenous languages’ systems or the inability of educated Nigerians to equate the stress isochronous nature of the word. The pronunciation of the word money in pidgin signifies a conscious accentuation that is indicative of the seriousness of the subject matter. The pronunciation of such words has assumed secondary connotation in Nigeria. Some of these are explained further in pt 2: pt: 2 (two hagglers arguing over a damaged or fake product, previously purchased from the seller’s shop and the buyer now requesting a replacement) buyer: Please give me a better (comparative) one (spoken in educated Nigerian English- native like accent) seller: Oga, na the one wey dey be dat (Sir, that is the available one) buyer: (angrily) Then bring my money seller: (despitefully) Money? Money? (Hissed)

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buyer: You no be better man! (You are not a good man), (buyer left in anger) The first “better” in line 1 of pt 2 was pronounced the near-native British way by the buyer; with prominence only on the first syllable. The buyer also pronounced “money” in a similar way. However, the buyer’s final utterance (in Nigerian Pidgin) and pronunciation of the word “better” revealed the import of his infuriation. Both syllables of the bi-syllabic word [bett-er] in “You no be better man” were pronounced with prominence, but the second syllable, louder [be-ta] and rising instead of falling, as in British English. Surprisingly, 60% of the buyers fall within the youth category of between age 20 and 30 and 50% of that population supported the view that the stress pattern of English disyllabic words as in better/ˈbetə/, matter/ˈmætə/ and sister/ˈsɪstə/ are unable to bear the weight of our economic space (business transactions). Better and matter in the hagglers’ utterances that could be regarded as Nigerian Decolonised Pronunciation (ndp) are explained via wasp in Figure 4.4, below: In this sense, the pitch height is significant and the vocalic elements elongated with prominence on both syllables but louder pitch on the second syllable instead of the stressed/unstressed pattern of the British better with prominence only on the initial syllable. Twenty-eight out the thirty-four hagglers, that is, 82% of the entire participants used English in their transactions. But they did not sound British. Two more features are also worth discussing in this study. These are hagglers’ use of declarative tone instead of interrogative tone and the preponderant use of interjections which are likely to be exclusively Nigerian.

­f igure 4.4  Better in Nigerian Pidgin Accent (Not necessarily comparative) “You no be better man” means you are not a good man

70 Soneye Hagglers’ Yes/No Questions (Rising Pitch in British English but Falling or Declarative Tone in Nigerian English) In this section, the highlighted utterances were the interrogatives which the hagglers used as declaratives. In British English certain interrogatives end on a rising tune [↗], rather than on a falling [↘] tune. In Nigerian Pidgin however, interrogatives can be produced with a level or falling tone, without a rise in the final tune as in “Se you don give am the money?” (Have you given him the money?). This feature has wider implication for meaning in Nigerian discourse. Nicholas Asher and Brian Reese opined that “aspects of phonology relevant to interpretation include final tune and nuclear pitch accent” (5). 3.3

Text 1: ( negotiations among 4 interactants  – 2 Igbo clothes sellers and 2 Yoruba buyers) buyer 1: Do you have round neck? (Seller presents goods) buyer 1: Is this the only one you have? Text 2: (Grocery shop: Hausa seller/Yoruba buyer) seller: Is not too much? Walahi is too much. All this one for three-fifty? buyer:  You are putting it on scale? Text 7: ( Two hagglers- a Yoruba suits seller and a Yoruba buyer) seller: Which one sir? Italian or Dubai? buyer: How much is Italian or Dubai? Text 11: (Two Igbo suit sellers/ one Yoruba buyer) buyer:  Is this blue or black? Below in Figure 4.5 is the pitch track for the question “Is this blue or black?” The question was asked during negotiations (Text 11) by a Yoruba suit buyer with the final tune on “black” falling instead of rising. Also, in Figure 4.6 below is the pitch track for the pitch accent of a Yoruba meat buyer who was asking the meat seller if he would weigh the meat for which they had already negotiated a price. If it were in standard British English, the final tune on scale would be a rise instead of a fall. There is absolutely no room or reason for sounding educated or worse still, British, in the Nigerian market. 3.4 Phoneme Deletion: an Attempt to Pidginise or Indigenise English? There is a preponderant use of a non-native English variety that bears little or no semblance with the educated variety of Ayo Banjo (“Towards a Definition”)

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­f igure 4.5  Is this blue or black? (Text 11)

­f igure 4.6  You are putting it on scale? (Text 2)

even by the educated hagglers. Some of these features have been said to exist in Nigerian English variety. One of them is the deletion of the final consonant especially in triple coda consonant cluster words (see Gut; Bobda; Soneye and Ayoola). In the excerpts below (Texts 5, 10 and 11), the highlighted word “wan” is pidgin, which means “want” in English. Text 5: (A Hausa Barbecue operator/Yoruba buyer) buyer: A wan suya, a wan suya, give me tasting naa (I want suya, I want suya, give me some to have a taste) seller: Which one? How much you wan pay (How much do you want to pay?) buyer: This one? seller: How much you wan pay (How much do you want to pay?)

72 Soneye buyer: tell me now, how much you wan make I pay? (Tell me please, how much you want me to pay) A go tell you how much a get. (I will tell you how much I can afford to pay) Text 10: 2 Igbo clothes sellers/2 Yoruba buyers buyer 1: na only skirt a wan (I want only skirt) seller 1: sebi you wan take am abi? (You really want to have it, isn’t it?) Text 11:   buyer: En na de money for welcome you wan take now!   (Yes, it is the money for the welcome that you want to take now) Another observed phenomenon as regards phoneme deletion which characterises the discourse of haggling is the reduction of certain diphthongs. It was observed during an interview session with some of the hagglers that they have excellent ability to articulate the diphthong /ɑɪ/ but would not, as that would give their pidgin expression an educated English flavour. Hagglers, generally, do not think it is expedient to pronounce “I” as /ɑɪ/. They rather would say /ɑ/ as we have in Text 1 and Text 2. However, in Text 4, the hagglers spoke English rather than pidgin and were able to pronounce a diphthongal “I” /ɑɪ/. All through the speeches as exemplified in Texts 1 and 2, below “I” /ɑɪ/ was consistently pronounced as /a/, when hagglers used pidgin. However, when hagglers used Nigerian English, as exemplified in Text 4 “I” was pronounced as a closing diphthong rather than as a monophthong. The diphthong /ɑɪ/, seems the easiest of the eight English diphthongs for Nigerian English speakers to articulate. It is common in Hausa language and not complex for Igbo and Yoruba people to articulate. However, any attempt to glide in pidgin will make the accent sound English rather than indigenous. This does not seem desirable to hagglers! Text 1:    seller 2: Se make A call Obilo (Should I call Obilo?) Text 2:    seller 1:  A come from Kaduna to make money o. A no get wife, you fit give me? (I came from Kaduna to prosper, I don’t have a wife, and could you give me one?) Text 4:    buyer: 200 naira per one; if I want to buy about fifty of that sachet, I hope there will be discount

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seller: Yes, I can give you discount, fifty will be two thousand, five hundred naira so far as you are buying fifty, I can sell it at the rate of hem … two-thousand two-hundred buyer: Thank you ma. I will contact you later seller: Okay you are welcome There were other phoneme deletions in words like vex /veks/ and six, /ѕɪκѕ/ in which the voiceless velar plosive /k/ was not pronounced, also expensive / ekspentsɪʋ/ pronounced as /espensɪf/. Such deletions provide Nigerian Pidgin with its flavour and ease of articulation. Results from the interviews revealed that some of the hagglers had acquired the educated variety but chose to speak differently as a persuasive strategy and identity negotiation gimmick. This might be for the purpose of ensuring reasonable bargaining and ethnic neutralisation. This perspective was corroborated by Mungai Mutonya, who discussed the attitude of the L2 speakers of English in “Language Attitudes towards African Englishes.” The author wrote that “in Nigeria … speakers who like to speak like L1 speakers of English are considered snobbish” (7). In a separate non-structured interview I conducted with 15 buyers (all university undergraduates) and all students taking courses in my department, 13 of them, that is 87%, are of the opinion that a near-native accent is to be totally avoided to prevent exploitation; 6 of them, that is 40%, said those who speak a L1-like variety in the market are “fake.” Four of them, about 27%, said English was their L1 and Yoruba and Edo their L2. Out of the fifteen persons, 10, that is 67%, prefer and actually speak Nigerian Pidgin fluently in other to shield their identity as belonging to the learned group. Four of them were of the opinion that it is easier to express oneself very freely in pidgin instead of bothering about grammaticality or dainty pronunciations. Surprisingly, some of the pidgin words used during haggling such as “bros” (Text 3) and “anti” /ant/ were once in the English language lexicon. Bros used to be the plural form of brother (soul brother), often used informally as a term of address in 1938.1 The deletion of /h/ in “how are you” [a.wa ju] for [hau ə ju] was also observed. Exclamations and Interjections that are Exclusively Nigerian and African The infiltration of certain expressions into formal discourses is significant. Prominent among these expressions are interjections and exclamations. The 3.5

1 See Merriam-Webster 2006 for details.

74 Soneye presence of such expressions wades off any ambivalence in recognising the variety of English we speak as Nigerian English or African English. Examples of interjections that belong to native English origin are Alas! Ouch! Phooey! Ugh! Oh! What! These expressions, even though indicative of emotional outburst, do not have equal loudness, pitch height and prominence in discourse like the ones observed in this study. Interjections such as ha ha, ah! Haba! (Text 1), Kai! (Text 2) and Chai! (Text 6) indigenised the discourse as being African. 4

Conclusion

This study has considered the connection between the bequeathed British English and the Nigerian indigenous languages, including Nigerian Pidgin. The research has also examined features of the Nigerian English accent and the attendant ideologies that hagglers express. The observations from this research are that Nigerian Spoken English in haggling has very little connection with its roots, which is the bequeathed British English. Although English is very much in the domain of haggling in Nigeria, it is the English that is garnished with the rhythm of its indigenous languages and saturated with the beats of homegrown pidgin as seen in the texts on haggling. The relic of the greatest legacy of the British to Nigeria, rp pronunciation, is no longer in the “phonology classes,” as Olusegun Victor Awonusi observed in “The Social Vicissitudes of rp …” stating that rp is more than 100 years obsolete (2–5) and it is itself evolving. There seems to be a widely acceptable ideology that non-native speakers that strive to sound English stress their pockets and compromise their identity. Sounding English was once admirable but is no longer desirable. Even if it is desirable, it is no longer attainable because the town (the markets) rejects the English language accent that the gown (citadels of higher learning) strives to acquire. Yet the town (market) is the practical and consistent context for the application of the text (language).

Appendix Text 1: ( 4 interactants: 2 Igbo clothes’ sellers and 2 Yoruba buyers) buyer 1: Do you have round neck? seller 2: Is it three- in-one or singlet? buyer 1: How many? Seller 2: Is it three-in-one or what?

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seller 2: one-thousand five hundred naira buyer 1: Oye ko gba one thousand now, yes (You ought to accept, one thousand naira, please, yes) buyer 2: like underwear round-neck, like the Police, en (yes) now seller 2: This is three-in-one, a sey one-five (This is the three-in-one singlet, I said, one thousand and five hundred naira) buyer 1: Ah ah now (Really! Please!) buyer 1 & buyer 2: How much is the last price? (What is the last price?) seller 2: Okay bring one-four (okay pay one thousand and four hundred naira) buyer 1: Assuming Obilo is around, I  would give him nine hundred naira seller 2: Se make a call Obilo (Should I call Obilo?) seller 2: Uncle, ah eh! Ebi ti pa mi o (Uncle ah! Eh! I am hungry) buyer 1: Why? Go eat now, (Then, go and eat) (“now” signalled frustration or shock in this context, not a plea) ah ah! Sister you de eat? (Sister, you are eating?) seller 1: na your word make hungry dey come o (It is your words that are making me hungry) buyer 1: En! (Yes) there is food at your side seller 2: How much do you want to pay? buyer 1: We have nine hundred with us. Is this the only one you have? So sister let’s talk now … (So sister, let us talk please) Seller 2: unless you want single buyer 1: (to Seller 1) Oga o-o ye ko gba one thousand and Obilo naa my Paddy   (Master, you ought to accept one thousand and Obilo is my friend) seller 1: (speaking with seller elsewhere- spoke in Igbo) buyer 1: eleyi make sense (This one is okay) (speaking to Buyer 2) buyer 1: What of this one? (to Buyer 2) seller 1: one-five buyer 2: Ah ah everything na one-five (What? Everything is one thousand five hundred naira) seller 2: (Spoke Igbo with someone on Phone) buyer 1: Obilo na my paddy (Obilo is my friend) (spoke loudly to the person on phone) Obilo na your paddy dey here! (Obilo it is your friend that is here)

76 Soneye buyer 1: (to Seller 2) You talk Ibo now, I hear 500, you don talk lie, sebi you understand Yoruba? O gbo Yoruba (You spoke Igbo now, I heard 500, you have lied, you understand Yoruba.) seller 2: A no hear (I don’t understand) buyer 1: You hear, (You understand) na Yoruba guys we be, (We are Yoruba boys) Give me my change, en-en this girl na Yoruba, we go come back come marry You (This girl is Yoruba, we are coming back to marry you) seller 1: A don marry, a be the wife (I am married, I am the wife of Obilo) buyer 1: En-en (Really?) When Obilo come tell am say he fuck up, he did something like dis e no tell me, (When Obilo returns tell him he messed up to have gotten married without inviting us) okay, bye-bye o Text 2: (4 interactants: 1 Hausa grocery seller with S2 & 2 Yoruba buyers) buyer: Sebi you don say make we pay 350 now? (Haven’t you asked us to pay three hundred and fifty naira, now?) seller: Walahi! Mama no do this (Swearing in Hausa language) (Mama, don’t do this) buyer: We have already say we go pay three-fifty, now (We have said we would pay three hundred and fifty naira, please) seller: all this one for three-fifty? buyer: Is not too much Seller: Is not too much? Walahi is too much buyer: If you take us as customer we go come back o, (seller weighing the grocery) Aha! You still want to weigh it, (laughs) you are putting it on scale? seller: Kai customer, gasikiya customer, walahi customer you don langaress me (What! Customer, have mercy, customer) buyer: We don …? (not understanding the seller’s expression) seller: Walahi! You don langaress me (Indeed, you have cheated me) buyer: We don’t like you? (Not understanding the expression “langaress,” sought clarification) seller: You don..; langaress me (You have cheated me) buyer: We don …? (still seeking clarification) seller: langaress me (Cheated me) (A new expression known only to the seller) buyer: We don langaress you? Which one be langaress? seller: You don langaress me as in, you don cheat me buyer: We don langaress you (all laughed heartily) Na wa o, so you no get garlic?   (So you don’t have garlic?)

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seller: Walahi, garlic don finish (Indeed, garlic is exhausted) buyer: So, when will you get, today is Saturday (so will it be available today or tomorrow?) seller: Tomorrow be Sunday, may be Monday (Tomorrow is Sunday, perhaps on Monday) buyer: How much is our money now? Three-fifty? (How much are we paying now? Three-fifty?) seller: Walahi, your mouth sabi (Indeed, you are eloquent) buyer: (to Seller 2) you no even talk, oya give us change (You have been quiet, alright, let’s have our change) buyer 2: im be cashier (He is the cashier) seller: (spoke Yoruba to the other seller) buyer: So you understand Yoruba Seller:  A understand, die-die-(I understand, very little) you know die die Alhaji for Abuja (Do you know little-by-little Alhaji in Abuja?) buyer: That be a place for Abuja? You don get wife? seller: A come from Kaduna to make money o, A no get wife, you fit give me (I came from Kaduna to prosper, I don’t have a wife; could you give me one?) buyer: Shine your eyes now! (Be vigilant please) (Laughed heartily) okay bye-bye Text 3: (2 interactants: seller and buyer (both Yoruba)) buyer: E rora sir (Greetings Sir) Seller: Bros take am for 7 (talking to another buyer) seller: e ku se (Well done), (to substantive buyer) e ku African Republic (Greetings in African Republic) buyer: e lo ni extension box (How much is this extension box) seller: Nine-fifty Buyer: A a fifty naira tan. Mi o ni to one thousand lowo o, kile le se fun mi? (What? A whole fifty naira? I don’t have up to one thousand naira on me, what assistance can you render to me?) seller: Bros, oja won ni jare (Brother, it is just that products are expensive) buyer: But se original ni sa (but I hope it is original) seller: a o wa pa, (Ah! It is excellent) buyer: se ko gba six-fifty (What about paying six-hundred and fifty naira?) seller: Ko gba eight-ninety, mo ni ke mu ni nine hundred (I won’t sell it for eight hundred and ninety naira, I have asked you to take it for nine hundred naira)

78 Soneye buyer: E lo ni hot plate yen, se olori spring, ni abi olori flat (How much is that hot plate? Does it have spring or is it flat?) seller: Gbogbo nkan ti won, won import oja mo (all things have become expensive, no more importation of goods) Text 4: (2 interactants: Yoruba buyer/Yoruba seller) buyer: Good morning ma seller: Good morning, welcome buyer: How much is your chin-chin? seller: We have two type-the one in sachet and the one in bottle buyer: How much is the one in sachet and the one in bottle? seller: 200 per one buyer: 200 naira per one; if I want to buy about fifty of that sachet, I hope there will be discount seller: Yes, I can give you discount, fifty will be two thousand, five hundred naira so far as you are buying fifty I can sell it for the rate of hem … two-thousand, two-hundred buyer: thank you ma. I will contact you later seller: okay you are welcome Text 5: (2 interactants: A Hausa barbecue operator/Yoruba buyer) buyer: Mallam how you dey o (Mallam, how are you?) seller: Am fine o (I’m fine) buyer: A wan suya, a wan suya, give me tasting naa (I want suya (2ce), let me taste it, first) buyer: Ah this one sweet o, Mallam, how much you go sell all this one for me, (Oh! This is tasty, how much will you sell all of this?) seller: Which one, how much you wan pay? (How much do you want to pay?) buyer: This one Seller: How much you wan pay? (How much do you want to pay?) buyer: Tell me now, how much you wan make a pay? A go tell you how much a get; How much is this one last, make a dey go joo (Tell me, please, how much you want me to pay. I will tell you what I can afford to pay, and I will leave, please) buyer: Mallam se you know say you even vex me self (Mallam, are you aware that you vexed me?) seller: A no sey you don vex that day (I know that you were angry that day) buyer: A vex o (I was angry, yes)

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seller: A go collect two-fifty from you (I will sell for you at two hundred and fifty naira) buyer: Me a no get two-fifty o (For me, I don’t have two hundred and fifty naira) seller: How much you get? Se you go buy 200 naira (What can you afford? Will you buy for two hundred naira?) buyer: Se e no gree hundred naira ni (Won’t you agree to one hundred naira?) seller: My daddy no de sell cow (My father does not sell cows) buyer: (laughs) Your daddy no dey sell cow? Mallam a dey come make I reach SUB first. (Your father doesn’t sell cows? Mallam, I will come back later, I want to visit SUB) Text 6: (2 interactants: Yoruba dress-seller/Yoruba buyer) buyer: Good afternoon madam seller: Good afternoon o buyer: How are you? Seller: am fine (I’m fine) buyer: This pleated skirt here, how much is it? seller: Erm … just pay me one five buyer: Ha ha madam, why now, this skirt ke, please take 800 hundred (What! Madam, why the high price, for this skirt? Please accept eight hundred naira) seller: ha, ha, haba! That is too low now, I no fit sell am for 800, ha ha customer (What! Really! That is too low please, I can’t sell it for eight hundred naira. What! Customer) Why are you doing like this now? (Why are you pricing like this, now?) (The “now” being an expression of feigned shock) buyer: Madam now, a beg. Okay how about like 1,000 (Madam, please I beg. Okay, how about paying within the range of one thousand naira?) seller: A no see am buy like that, a beg give me one-three (I didn’t buy at that price) buyer: madam take one-two seller: A no fit collect one-two my sister (I can’t accept one thousand two hundred my sister) Buyer: E gba one-two, now (Accept one thousand two hundred, please) seller: my sister bring am one-three (My sister bring one thousand and three hundred) buyer: madam e joo now, one-two-fifty (Madam please, please, one thousand, two hundred and fifty)

80 Soneye seller: Ha-ha, ha-ha customer you wicked o, e fe koba mi ni (Really! Customer you are indeed wicked, do you want to get me into trouble?) buyer: chai madam, e sa yaari si one-three yii sha (What! You are bent on selling at one thousand, three hundred) seller: bring am, a beg (Bring it, I plead) buyer: Okay Text 7: ( 2 interactants: Yoruba suit seller/Yoruba buyer) buyer: good morning madam seller: Good morning sir buyer: I want to buy suit seller: Which one sir? Italian or Dubai? buyer: How much is Italian or Dubai? seller: Italian suit is N20, 000 and Dubai is N18, 000 buyer: Eh! (What!) It is costly seller: Are you hot in this country? (Have you just arrived in this country?) Text 8: 2 interactants: Shoes and bags’ Yoruba seller/Yoruba buyer buyer: E kasan ma se aje wa, mo f e ra sanda ni (Good afternoon Ma, hope business is fine? I want to buy sandals) seller: kini size yin? (What is your size?) buyer: (she picks a pair of shoes) seller: shoe yen o le size yin (that pair of shoes cannot size you) buyer: kilo de (Why?) seller: cut shoe ni (it is a cut shoe) buyer: e je kin wo sandal yen, e jo e bami mu (let me try that pair of sandals, please help me to bring it) seller: O match e, kilo de te koko lo ra bata ke to ra purse, purse o ni soro bata gan lo ye ke wa (It matches, why don’t you buy shoes before buying a purse, it isn’t difficult to buy shoes) buyer: o ya e je ka soro price bayi (Okay now, let us talk about the price) seller: three-five ni buyer: Ha mummy! seller: e wo shoe ti e n bere yen ko din ni 15,000 (that shoe you are pricing isn’t less than 15,000 buyer: E mi naa ti ri sugbon e ni ko le size mi (I have seen it but you said it won’t size me)

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seller: quality lo matter, three-five ni eyi te mu (quality is the most important factor, the one you have picked is three thousand five hundred naira) buyer: kini price bata yi last (what is the last price of this shoe) seller: E lo si complex ni be yen, won ma ta fun yin ni owo to won buyer: mo ti p emo de fe bayin ra seller: nkan ti won, (things are now expensive) dollar ti won (dollar is now expensive) buyer: mummy ko si owo ni ta (Mummy, there is no money in town) seller: e se mu oni two-five (Why don’t you take the one for two thousand five hundred naira?) buyer: rara (No) seller: dollar won (dollar is expensive) buyer: Mo ma waun ra nkan lowo yin (I patronise your business regularly) seller: oya e mu (okay, take it) buyer: o da e se (Okay thanks) Text 9: 3 interactants: Hausa onion seller/Yoruba buyers buyer: This one – how much? seller: 25- four hundred, 25 this one, three hundred buyer: Chai Malam! (What Malam!) 25 this 400, 25 this one 300 Eh, ah ah malam, Alubarika, 500 (appealing to the Islamic believe by the word “Alubarika”) seller: last 700 (The last price is seven hundred naira) buyer:  Alubasa ti won ni? (Onions are now expensive?) buyer 2: ko won, alabosa ti de (It is not expensive, onions are now available in the market) seller: one-two, one-two buyer: Malam wetin now? Malam, why this at this time? (Now, expressing shock) Malam alubarika, you no know customer? (Appealing to the seller’s religious belief) (You do not know a customer) seller: O ya pay, one three, a know customer (Okay pay one thousand three, I know you are a customer) Text 10: 4 interactants: 2 Igbo clothes sellers/2 Yoruba buyers buyer 1: You can hear Yoruba (You understand Yoruba) Seller 1: I am not deaf, I can hear buyer 2: small time, we go dey see orisirisi (Soon, we would witness different attitudes)

82 Soneye buyer 1: na only skirt a want (I want only skirt) seller 1: sebi you wan take am abi? (You really want to have it, isn’t it?) buyer 1: I’m talking of matching colour seller 1: Talking to S2 (surrogate seller in Igbo) buyer 2: Your wife dey try as you dey tight face (Your wife must be patient as you keep frowning and unfriendly) seller 1: If you look my eyes na im bi say you go dey do mistake, I disagree with you? (If you consider my facial expression you will be mistaking. Did I disagree with you?) You no know wetin dey my mind (You do not know what is on my mind) buyer 2: A dey give your wife kudos (I commend your wife) seller 1: A beg na money I need (Please, it is money I need) buyer 1: As you don put your face for up na im be say make I dey run (Since you are frowning, it means I should take my leave) Text 11: 3 interactants: Igbo suit sellers/one Yoruba buyer buyer: Is this blue or black? seller 2: This is black skirt buyer: Is black, black and white seller 2: Do you want navy blue? buyer: Yes navy blue is fine seller 2: This one is navy blue, is it for you? buyer: Is for me (It is for me) seller 2: Is forty-four already (It is size forty-four that you requested) buyer: Ah ah? So you know my size before you bring it, (What! So you knew my size before you brought it) seller 2: Is by the grace of God buyer: You be prophetess? (Are you a prophetess?) What is em your wholesale price? seller 2: Wholesale price? … eight-five last buyer: Eh! Abasi mbo! En wetin? What is the matter? (What! God have mercy) (in Efik language). What! For what? seller 2: Se me? (Me?) buyer: Why e dey expensive like that? (Why is that expensive?) We no dey for Christmas now? (This is not the Christmas time, please). What is the last price? seller 2: Eight-five buyer: six-five wholesale price, a no buy one (I am not buying only one) seller 1: There are some for six-five, some eight-five buyer: What is the last?

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seller 1: Eight-five buyer: E be like you no wan sell (It seems you do not want to sell) seller 2: Ah ah no be me welcome you? (What! Isn’t it I that welcomed you?) buyer: En na de money for welcome you wan take now! (Yes, It is the money for the welcome that you want to take now) seller 2: Na eight-five last buyer: Ah what is the matter now? What! (What is the matter, please?) Hun this woman na so you be? Oh! This Woman is this how you are? (Addressing seller 1) seller 1: Naa dollar make me be like that O (It is dollar (Foreign exchange) that made me to be the way I am, now) (Buyer pays) seller 1: Thank you ma! Text 12: 4 interactants: 2 Igbo shirts sellers/2 Yoruba buyers seller 1: This one na two-two-X (double extra-large), if you want am 100 pieces … (This is a double extra-large size, if you need 100 pieces …) buyer 1: But all of them naa slim fit, naa baba shirt A  dey look for (They are all slim fit, I want the ones for older people) seller 1: But i big well well, (But it is very big) make I loose am make you see, if I oose am sef you go even say make I give you extra-large (Let me unfold it and if I do, you would want to buy single extra-large sizes) buyer 1: No, the person wey that person tall reach e no dey inside this shop and as he tall na im he huge, so e dey difficult for me to get (No, the person, for whom the purchase is being made, is very huge, no such persons in your shop, presently) seller 1: Mummy, see, A no.. buyer 1: The one wey A buy, e no fit button the … (The ones I bought earlier, were very difficult to button up) seller 2: The person wey that person reach is not … (The person for whom you are purchasing the shirt is as huge as …)

References

Adegbija, Efurosibina. Multilingualism: A Nigerian Case Study. African World P, 2004. Akande, Timothy Akinmade. Globalization and English in Africa; Evidence from Nigerian Hip-Hop. Nova Science Publishers, 2013.

84 Soneye Alo, Moses, and Taiwo Olayemi Soneye. “Haggling as a Socio-Pragmatic Strategy in Selected Urban Markets:  An Amalgam of English and Nigerian Languages.” Marang: Journal of Language and Literature, 2014, pp. 43–62. Anchimbe, Eric A., and Stella A. Anchimbe. “Sociolinguistic Variables in the Degeneracy of English in Postcolonial (Non-Native) Contexts.” ASJU, vol. 39, no. 2, 2005, pp. 13–31, ehu.es/ojs/index.php/asju. Accessed December 30, 2015. Asher, Nicholas, and Brian Reese. “Intonation and Discourse: Biased Questions.” Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies on Information Structure, vol. 8, 2007, pp. 1–38. Awonusi, Victor Olusegun. “The Social Vicissitudes of RP and the Realities of Teaching English Pronunciation in Nigeria.” 2004. Unpublished paper delivered at a plenary session of the 21st NESA Conference, University of Lagos. Ayoola, Kehinde. “Haggling exchanges at meat stalls in some markets in Lagos, Nigeria.” Discourse Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2009, pp. 387–400. Bamgbose, Ayo. “Standard Nigerian English:  Issues of Identification.” The Other Tongue: English Across Cultures. 2nd. ed., edited by Braj B. Kachru, Pergamon P, 1982, pp. 148–161. Banjo, Ayo. “Towards a Definition of ‘Standard Nigerian Spoken English.’ ” Actes du 8e Congress de la Societé Linguistique de LʻAfrique Occidentale, 1971, pp. 165–175. Bartimole, Jennifer. Finding a Niche: Exploring Ethnic Identity among Migrant Adolescents in Northwest Ohio. Master’s Thesis, Bowling Green State University, 2011, etd. ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1306866456&disposition=inline. Accessed December 30, 2015. Chapman, Siobhan, and Christopher Routledge. Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, Edinburgh UP, 2009. Eteng, Inya-A. “Ethnicity, Ethno-Class Relations and Crisis of Nigeria’s Enduring ‘National Question’ and Political Instability. Nigeria and Globalisation.” Discourses on Identity Politics and Social Conflict, edited by Duro Oni, Suman Gupta, Tope Omoniyi, Efurosibina Adegbija, and Segun Awonusi, cbaac, 2004, pp. 37–81. Grimes, Barbara, and Joseph Grimes. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. vol. 1, sil International, 2000. Gudykunst, William B., and Karen L. Schmidt. “Language and Ethnic Identity.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, vol. 6, no. 3–4, 1987, pp. 157–326. Gut, Ulrike. “Nigerian English Phonology.” A Handbook of Varieties of English. Volume 1: Phonology, edited by Edgar W. Schneider, Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, and Clive Upton, Mouton de Gruyter, 2004, pp. 813–830. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams, and Laura Chrisman, Simon and Schuster, 1994, pp. 392–403. Hoff, Meagan A. Ethnic Identity and Accent: Exploring Phonological Acquisition for International Students from China. MA Thesis, Graduate College of Bowling Green State

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University, 2014, etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=bgsu1395176320&disposition=inline. Accessed December 30, 2015. Jenkins, Jennifer. “A Sociolinguistically-Based, Empirically-Researched Pronunciation Syllabus for English as an International Language.” Applied Linguistics, vol. 23, 2002, pp. 83–103. Jibril, Munzali. “Regional variation in Nigerian spoken English.” Varieties and Functions of English in Nigeria, edited by Ebo Ubahakwe, African UP, 1979, pp. 78–93. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. 2nd ed., Manchester UP, 2010. Miller, Jennifer. “Identity and Language Use: The Politics of Speaking ESL in School.” Negotiation of Identities in Multilingual Contexts, edited by Anita Pavlenko, and Adrian Blackledge, Multilingual Matters, 2004. Mitchell, Terence Frederick. “The Language of Buying and Selling in Cyrenaica: A Situational Statement.” Hesperis, vol. 26, 1957, pp. 31–71. Mohanan, Karuvannur Puthanveettil. “Describing the Phonology of Non-Native Varieties of a Language.” World Englishes, vol. 11, no. 2–3, 1992, pp. 111–128. Mutonya, Mungai. Language attitudes Towards Varieties of African English: An Empirical Approach. VDM Verlag Dr. Muller, 2009. Ofulue, Christine I. “Acts of Identity: The Role of Language in Actualising Globalisation.” Nigeria and Globalization, Discourses on Identity Politics and Social Conflict, edited by Duro Oni, Suman Gupta, Tope Omoniyi, Efurosibina Adegbija, Segun Awonusi, CBAAC, 2004, pp. 121–134. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage Books, 1993. Schiffrin, Deborah. Discourse Markers. Cambridge UP, 1987. Simo-Bobda, Augustin. “Some Segmental Rules of Nigerian English Phonology.” English World Wide, vol. 28, no. 3, 2007, pp. 279–310. Soneye, Taiwo, and Kehinde Ayoola. “Onset Consonant Cluster Realisation in Nigerian English: The Emergence of an Endogenous Variety?” Universal or Diverse Paths to English Phonology. Topics in English Linguistics, edited by Ulrike Gut, Robert Fuchs, and Eva-Maria Wunder, vol. 86, De Gruyter Mouton, 2015, pp. 117–131. Uchendu, Victor C. “Some Principles of Haggling in Peasant Markets.” Economic Development and Cultural Change, vol.16, no. 1 (1967), pp. 37–50. Young, Robert J. C. Postcolonialism. Oxford UP, 2003.

­c hapter 5

Standard Language Ideology Revisited—the Case of Newscasters in St. Vincent and the Grenadines Eva Canan Hänsel 1 Introduction1 As James Milroy argues, a variety of a language becomes a standard variety first and foremost because of ideological beliefs that speakers hold about this variety, such as the conviction that the standard variety is inherently more correct than other varieties and that it should be maintained against corruption. All ideological positions about the standard variety are fundamentally based on the supposed existence of this variety and taken together they form the standard language ideology (Milroy 133–134, 139). These group-based ideologies in turn shape individual speakers’ attitudes to different language varieties. In addition to the ideological basis for the emergence and preservation of the norm, Milroy also identifies a structural characteristic of a standard variety that goes hand in hand with the standard language ideology, which is invariance of form: “standardization merely requires that one, and only one, of them [different variants] should be accepted” (133) so that the outcome of this imposition of uniformity is an ideally homogeneous standard. While in actual practice, especially in spoken language, this ideal is never achieved, codification and other language maintenance practices, such as the reliance on authorities, may slow down the process of change and encourage the continued pursuit of uniformity. During Britain’s rule, Standard British English served as the fairly homogeneous norm in the British colonies. Independence and a growing sense of a national identity, however, have led to an increased awareness of a national standard of English in many large postcolonial countries, where efforts of codification are made and an emphasis is put on homogeneity (Schneider Postcolonial English). For the anglophone Caribbean, many studies have reported 1 This contribution was written while the author was employed in the project “Translocality in the Anglophone Caribbean: Regional, Global and Transnational Aspects in Standards of English” funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) - DE 2324/1-1; principal investigator: Prof. Dr. Dagmar Deuber.

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first evidence for national standards that are emerging in the two largest island countries by population size,2 namely in Jamaica (e.g., Mair; Irvine “A Good Command”) and Trinidad and Tobago (e.g., Deuber and Leung; Leung). These studies are based on the description of spoken and written English in formal situations by educated speakers as well as on the analysis of attitudes. While they take the nation state as their point of departure and detect national endonormative tendencies, many of them also raise the question of whether the situation of standards in the Caribbean is developing toward national standards or rather toward a Caribbean Standard English, which might have (national) sub-varieties as was proposed by Richard Allsopp. Moreover, many studies highlight the powerful role of foreign norm-providing varieties competing with and shaping local standards, particularly American English, which is said to have become a more important contact variety than British English today (Mair 58). Generally, American English currently seems to have a considerable effect on usage (e.g., Bruckmaier and Hackert), while British English is still more popular in attitudes toward Standard English (e.g., Westphal 327). So far, Standard English in the smaller anglophone Caribbean countries that have around 100,000 inhabitants or less has hardly been considered in linguistic research. Despite being sovereign nations, these states face “the enduring problem of small states, their chronic dependency” (Grenade 183–184) due to their size and resource limitations and thus they rely more than larger countries on cooperation. Moreover, they are constantly exposed to a multitude of foreign varieties of English through tourism and the media. In view of these circumstances, it appears that preconditions for the emergence of national standards are not met as easily as in larger countries that possess greater self-reliance in fields such as the media and education and where influences of multiple foreign norm-providing varieties are comparably lower. Dagmar Deuber and Eva Canan Hänsel’s corpus study of American influence on Caribbean newspaper English confirms this hypothesis as it found similar tendencies among the newspaper data of three small Eastern Caribbean states (Dominica, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines) and that of Jamaica in terms of grammar and lexicon. However, it also detected that the written standard varieties in the small anglophone Caribbean states were much more susceptible to American influence with regard to spelling than the Jamaican one, which lead to a high degree of heterogeneity in spelling (see Deuber and Hänsel). This result also indicates that influence of foreign norm-providing 2 With 2.95 million inhabitants, Jamaica is the largest anglophone Caribbean island country, followed by Trinidad and Tobago with a population of 1.22  million. (Central Intelligence Agency).

88 Hänsel varieties seems to be even stronger in the small anglophone Caribbean countries than in the large ones (Baker and Pedersen 72). The aim of the present study is to shed a first light on spoken Standard English in the context of one of the small Caribbean countries by focusing on newscaster accents in St. Vincent and the Grenadines (svg). svg is an island chain in the south of the Eastern Caribbean. With about 103,000 inhabitants and a total landmass of 389 km2, svg is one of the very small independent countries of the Eastern Caribbean (Central Intelligence Agency). As is typical of the anglophone Caribbean, English based Creole varieties (Vincentian Creole, Bequia Creole)3 exist side-by-side with Standard English and there is a measure of variation in between these two poles (Prescod A Grammatical Description 21). Standard English is the official language in svg and it is mainly acquired in the education context, while the Creoles, which are popularly often considered to be a broken form of English, are the varieties of everyday communication. In recent years, the Creole varieties of svg have received considerable attention in the research literature, most notably in Paula Prescod’s edited volume on Language Issues in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. While most research concentrates on syntax and morphology, first descriptions of the sound inventories of the Creole varieties of St. Vincent and Bequia have been provided by Paula Prescod (A Grammatical Description 40–62) and Andrew Partridge, respectively. To date, there has been no description of the pronunciation of Standard English in svg. Prescod emphasizes that Creole has been gaining prestige and that it has been entering contexts that formally required the use of Standard English (A Grammatical Description 21). Nevertheless, Creole continues not to be accepted in certain contexts. Newscasting is one of these contexts that are a stronghold of the standard variety in the Caribbean (e.g., Westphal 317). It is important to bear in mind that newscasts are only one domain of Standard English and that language use in other domains such as the education context may differ (Deuber and Leung 310–311). However, it is instructive to analyze standard accents in newscasts, as “in many countries, the language of broadcast news is regarded as the embodiment of standard speech” (Bell 29). The accents of newscasters, therefore, are seen as a point of reference for English in formal contexts by others in the linguistic community. This study takes Milroy’s definition of a standard variety as a starting point for the investigation of spoken Standard English in newscasting in 3 Vincentian Creole is spoken on St. Vincent, with almost 99,000 inhabitants the largest island of svg, and Bequia Creole on Bequia, with about 5,000 inhabitants the second largest island of the country.

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svg. It addresses the following two guiding research questions: (1) Do newscasters in svg use a fairly homogeneous standard accent? (2) Do the newscasters (and/or their tv and radio stations and audiences) strive for a fairly homogeneous standard accent? If so, for which one? As the first question focuses on usage and the second question concentrates on attitudes, both the structural and the ideological properties that are characteristic of a standard variety are considered. Methodologically, the structural component is approached by means of an auditory accent analysis of the accents of seven newscasters who read the news on the radio and on television in svg. A quantitative analysis of the realizations of ten pronunciation variables sheds light on the degree of homogeneity of Standard English in this context. Moreover, it illuminates the possible influence of American English and the usage of Caribbean variants. As individual attitudes toward language are affected by collective ideological positions, attitude research can be used as “one set of methodological options for studying language ideologies” (Garrett 35). Therefore, the ideological component of Standard English in Vincentian newscasts is approached through telephone interviews that were conducted with five of the seven newscasters. This direct method of attitude elicitation with overt questions that ask for rather “conceptual” notions of accents is used to portray language-ideological structures that are present in the community of newscasters in svg (Coupland and Bishop 85). In the following, both research questions are addressed individually in consecutive sections. 2

Accent Analysis

2.1 Data The data for the accent analysis was compiled from recordings of newscasts from three Vincentian broadcast stations: a tv station, a partly government-funded radio station, and a private radio station. The news programs on these channels all cater to the same audience and all speakers who read the news on these channels were included in the data. Background information on the seven newscasters is summarized in Table 5.1 below. Recordings of the newscasts were made between January and May 2014; however, one of the tv newscasts dates back to November 2013. The radio newscasts were recorded live via internet stream and the tv newscasts were recorded from the ­video-sharing website YouTube (www.youtube.com). Each recording is ­between six to eight minutes in length, which amounts to approximately 1,000 word tokens per newscaster.

90 Hänsel table 5.1 Background information on the newscasters

Speaker

tv/Radio station

Age

Gender

1f 2m 3f 4f 5m 6m 7f

radio (partly government-funded) tv radio (partly government-funded) tv tv radio (private) radio (private)

50 50–59 30–39 40–49 30–39 23 20–29

female male female female male male female

2.2 Method The recordings were transcribed orthographically and all words except proper names, place names, and most function words, were coded for selected consonantal and vocalic variables.4 The vocalic variables are represented as John C. Wells’ lexical sets. Only those consonantal and vocalic variables were considered for the analysis that have differing realizations in British English (Received Pronunciation, rp), American English (General American, GenAm), Vincentian Creole, and other Caribbean varieties. Of these, nine high-frequency variables that occurred at least 20 times per speaker were chosen for the analysis in order to allow for a quantitative treatment of the data.5 The consonantal variables are intervocalic (t), postvocalic (r), voiced word-initial (th-), and word final (-ing). The vowels that are analyzed belong to the lot, face, goat, nurse, and strut lexical sets. Additionally, although less frequent, the bath variable was included in the analysis, because it is typical of American English in contrast to Caribbean varieties. The variables were grouped into those that have variants characteristic of American English and those that have distinctive Caribbean realizations.6 4 Only those function words that contained voiced (th-) were considered in the analysis. 5 Overall, for each speaker there were only few tokens belonging to the mouth and down lexical sets as well as tokens that have voiceless (th-), which is why these three variables that have distinctive Caribbean pronunciations (mouth: [ɔʊ]; down: [ʌŋ]/[ɒŋ]; voiceless (th-): [t]‌) were not included in the analysis. Consonant cluster reduction/retention was also not included in the analysis as the reduction of word final /t/ and /d/ preceded by an obstruent also appears in metropolitan varieties of English, including bbc English (See Deterding). 6 British variants were not regarded separately in this study. As British English was the variety that was transplanted to the Caribbean in colonial times and can be expected to have served as the norm during the stable colonial period, it is difficult to decide whether a pronunciation

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table 5.2 Overview of the variables analyzed and their American and Caribbean variants as well as alternative variants

(1) variables with typical American variants (2) variables with typical Caribbean variants variable

American variant intervocalic (t) [t̬] (flapped) postvocalic (r) [r]‌ (rhotic) bath [æ] lot [ɑː]

vs. alternative variant(s) vs. [t]‌ vs. [ø] vs. [ɑː]/[a]‌ vs. [ɒ]

variable

Caribbean variant face [eː] goat [oː] voiced (th-) [d]‌ strut [ɔ] nurse [ɔː] (-ing) [ɪn]

vs. alternative variant(s) vs. [eɪ] vs. [oʊ]/[əʊ] vs. [ð] vs. [ʌ] vs. [ɜː] vs. [ɪŋ]

The Caribbean realizations are typical of various Caribbean Creoles but have also been described to be a possible variant in the standard accents of English in Jamaica and/or in Trinidad and Tobago (see Devonish and Harry; Youssef and James). Therefore, although the variants appear in many Creole varieties, the use of these variants cannot be equated with using Creole variants. However, it is likely that some variants are more accepted in the standard than others. In the auditory analysis, for each variable, the author of this article decided whether a newscaster used the American or Caribbean variant or whether they opted for an alternative variant. Table 5.2 displays the American and Caribbean as well as the alternative variants for each variable. As the accent analysis relied on auditory judgments, an inter-rater agreement test and an intra-rater reliability test were carried out in order to check for consistency of perception. In the inter-rater agreement test, about ten percent of each recording were listened to and analyzed independently by another researcher, trained in discriminating Caribbean accent features. Overall, the two analyses agreed in the perception of 85 percent of all analyzed tokens. In a separate session, the author of this study analyzed the same sample again in order to confirm that the perception was stable at different points of time. The first and the second analysis agreed in 91 percent of all cases. As agreement

is an instance of adherence to the British standard or the usual realization of the vowel in a Caribbean standard whose sound inventory has to date not been described.

92 Hänsel was above 80 percent in both tests, reliability of perception can be assumed (Clopper 190). 2.3 Results 2.3.1 Variables with Typical American Variants Among the variables that were analyzed, there were four with a variant prototypically associated with American English. These variants are the realization of /r/ in postvocalic position, flapped /t/ in intervocalic position before unstressed vowels, as well as the realizations of the lot vowel as [ɑː] and of the bath vowel as [æ].7 While all of these variants are typical of American English and throughout this article will be called ‘American variants,’ it cannot be assumed that the use of these variants is actually a result of American influence as some of the variants are shared with other varieties. Accordingly, only a high degree of co-occurrence of all of these variants in one accent might be considered indicative of an orientation toward American norms. In the Caribbean, full rhoticity is found in Barbados, while semi-rhoticity is characteristic of Guyana (Wells 570). Jamaican English is also semi-rhotic, while Jamaican Creole is non-rhotic (see Rosenfelder). The varieties of the Eastern Caribbean, including Vincentian Creole and Trinidadian English and Trinidadian Creole, have been described as /r/-less (Aceto 294; Prescod A Grammatical Description 40; Youssef and James 330). Flapped /t/s are generally not characteristic of the Caribbean but have been described for the Bahamas (Schneider “Synopsis” 393) and variably for the Turks Islands (Aceto 300). The vowel in words of the bath set is usually realized as the open front vowel [a]‌in Caribbean varieties, including in the Creoles of svg (Prescod A Grammatical Description 49; Patridge 132) and the Englishes of Trinidad and Tobago (Youssef and James 328) and Jamaica (Devonish and Harry 267). In Tobagonian Creole, however, it coincides with the rp variant [ɑː] (Youssef and James 331). Words of the lot set have different realizations in the Caribbean, ranging from [ɔ > ʌ > ɒ] in English in Trinidad and Tobago, and [ɑ] in Tobagonian Creole (Youssef and James 328), over [ɔ] in Jamaican Creole (Devonish and Harry 267), to [ɑ] and [ɒ] in Barbados (Blake 316). Prescod transcribes words of the lot set in Vincentian Creole with [a] (A Grammatical Description 42). For all four variables, mean percentages of realization of the American variant were calculated, which are displayed in Table 5.3. Overall, American 7 Today, the vowel in words of the trap set also differs between GenAm and rp, where it is realized as [æ] and as [a]‌, respectively. However, it has not been included in the analysis as the American variant [æ] is shared with traditional rp (Upton 239–241).

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table 5.3 Mean percentages of realization of American variants

variable: American variant

mean percentage of realization of the American variant and standard deviation

postvocalic (r): [r]‌(rhotic) lot: [ɑː] intervocalic (t): [t̬] (flapped) bath: [æ]

14.1 % (sd=27.7) 14.1 % (sd=20.5) 12.7 % (sd=16.1) 11.1 % (sd=20.7)

­f igure 5.1  Rates of realizations of prototypical American variants

variants appeared very infrequently in the data. The standard deviation indicates that the American variants were not used to the same degree by the seven newscasters. Figure 5.1 provides an overview of how frequently the variants that are associated with American English were used by the seven newscasters, who are roughly grouped by age with speakers 1f and 2m being the oldest speakers and speakers 6m and 7f being the youngest. Generally, the diagram does not display a uniform picture. Different American variants were used to different degrees by the different speakers. The least number of American variants was found in the accent of speaker 1f. She did not use any American variants, except for one rhotic pronunciation. Speaker 7f, in contrast, had rhotic pronunciations in 77 percent of all possible instances. However, all other American variants hardly ever appeared in her accent. In the accents of speakers 2m, 3f, and 4f, American pronunciations

94 Hänsel occurred very infrequently. American variants were more numerous in speaker 5m’s accent. However, the use of American realizations was confined mainly to the use of rhotic pronunciations (in 50 percent of all instances) and to the realization of bath as [æ] (in 56 percent of all instances). Thus, only two American variants appeared in his accent. All four American variants co-occurred in speaker 6m’s accent, who used the American realization of the four variables in 20 to 58 percent of all possible instances. The co-occurrence of all four American variants might indicate that speaker 5m is at least partly oriented toward an American norm. 2.3.2 Variables with Typical Caribbean Variants Six variables that have distinctive Caribbean variants were chosen for the analysis: word-initial voiced th stopping, monophthong realizations in the face and goat lexical sets, a back and rounded vowel [ɔ(ː)] in words of the strut and nurse sets, and the realization of word-final (-ing) as [ɪn]. Voiced th stopping, i.e. the realization of the rp and GenAm interdental fricative [ð] as the stop [d]‌, is a pronunciation that is found all over the anglophone Caribbean and that is the usual pronunciation in Caribbean Creoles (Schneider “Synopsis” 394). Variation between the voiced interdental fricative and the stop realization has been reported for English in Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica, where the stop realization is not stigmatized in formal contexts (Youssef and James 328; Irvine “Contrast and Convergence” 15). While diphthongal realizations in words of the face and goat sets as [eɪ] and [əʊ]/[oʊ], respectively, are the usual realizations in rp and GenAm (Wells 141, 146), in the Caribbean, these realizations are very rare. In many Creole varieties of the Eastern Caribbean, the vowel in words of the face and goat sets are pronounced as the half-close front monophthong [eː], and as the half-close back monophthong [oː], respectively. An exception is Jamaican Creole, which has down-gliding diphthongs in words of the face and goat lexical sets ([ie] and [uo]) (Devonish and Harry 260). However, the monophthong realization is the norm in Jamaican English as well as in English in Trinidad and Tobago (Devonish and Harry 267; Youssef and James 328). The face vowel in Vincentian Creole and Bequia Creole has been described as slightly diphthongized, i.e. as [eː] with a minimal upglide (Prescod A Grammatical Description 43, 48; Partridge 138). rp and GenAm correspond substantially in the realization of the vowels in the strut and nurse lexical sets. In the strut set, both use [ʌ], a “relatively short, half-open or slightly opener, centralized-back or central, unrounded vocoid” (Wells 132). The vowel in words of the nurse set is the long unrounded mid-central vowel [ɜː] that is usually r-colored or followed by /r/ in

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the American variety (137). In many Caribbean Creoles, however, the vowels in both lexical sets are pronounced with a rather back and rounded vowel close to the position of [ɔ]. In Vincentian Creole, too, the vowels in the strut and nurse sets are produced at a central-back position (Prescod A Grammatical Description 43; 48). Such a pronunciation of the strut vowel is common also in Jamaican English, while it is not strongly associated with English in Trinidad and Tobago, where the strut vowel corresponds with rp [ʌ] (Deuber 14). The back and rounded pronunciation of the vowel in the nurse set is rare in English in both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago (Devonish and Harry 267; Youssef and James 328). Leung reports that the back and rounded realization of the vowel in the nurse set is highly stigmatized in Trinidadian English (49). The alveolar realization of (-ing) as [ɪn] in unstressed word-final syllables is a typical feature of Caribbean Creoles. This pronunciation is not restricted to the Caribbean and found in many varieties of English around the world in casual speech; in rp and GenAm, however, it is pronounced as [ɪŋ], which is why it qualifies for an inclusion as a Caribbean variant. Youssef and James define (-ing) as a variable with “little social or stylistic stability” (330) thus not explicitly including or excluding it from the standard variety. For all variables, mean percentages of realization of the Caribbean variant were calculated (see Table 5.4). Figures 5.2 and 5.3 show the percentages of realization of the Caribbean variants. Figure 5.2 comprises those variables whose percentages of realization of the respective Caribbean variants were above the median (goat, face, and voiced word-initial (th-)) and Figure 5.3 encompasses those variables whose percentages of realization of the Caribbean variants were below the median (strut, word-final (-ing) and nurse). table 5.4 Mean percentages of realization of Caribbean variants

variable: Caribbean variant

mean percentage of realization of the Caribbean variant and standard deviation

goat: [oː] face: [eː] voiced word-initial (th-): [d]‌ strut: [ɔ] (-ing): [ɪn] nurse: [ɔː] median = 21.5

61.6 % (sd = 30.8) 51.7 % (sd = 32.1) 36.4 % (sd = 28.5) 21.1 % (sd = 13.8) 14.7 % (sd = 17.2) 5.1 % (sd = 9.0)

96 Hänsel

­f igure 5.2  Rates of monophthong realizations of the vowel in words of the goat and face sets as well as rates of word-initial voiced th stopping

­f igure 5.3  Rates of back and rounded realizations of the vowel in words of the strut and nurse sets as well as rates of the realization of word-final (-ing) as [ɪn]

Overall, Caribbean pronunciations appear much more frequently than American ones. The monophthong realizations in words of the goat and face sets in particular are widely used in Vincentian newscasts.8 So are stop realizations of voiced word-initial (th-), which are on the whole less frequent 8 Considering that the Creole varieties of svg have a slightly upgliding vowel in words of the face set, the number of face diphthongs in the present sample is surprisingly low even though the author of this article classified all face vowels that had only a slight upglide as the diphthong [eɪ]. Future research should clarify on the status of the face vowel by means of an acoustic analysis.

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but still a prominent feature of the newscaster accents in the sample. While monophthongs in the face and goat sets are usually realized to similar degrees by each individual newscaster, the degree of use of th stopping tends not to correlate with the use of face and goat monophthongs. The realization of the strut vowel as [ɔ] is overall less frequent but is still used in 15–46 percent of all cases by six of the newscasters. The realization of (-ing) as [ɪn] is quite rare and [ɔː] in words of the nurse lexical set is hardly ever used except by newscaster 6m. It is remarkable that those features that were described as being the norm (face and goat monophthongs) or generally accepted (voiced th stopping) in Standard English in Trinidad and Tobago and in Jamaica are also used to a high degree in the Grenadian newscasts. The realization of strut as [ɔ], which is a possible variant of Jamaican English but is uncommon in English in Trinidad and Tobago and the realization of (-ing) as [ɪn], which was neither associated with the standard nor with the Creole in Trinidad and Tobago, appear less often. The pronunciation of words of the nurse set with [ɔː], which is highly stigmatized in Trinidadian English, hardly ever occurs in the data. In this respect, it appears that the accents of Vincentian newscasters align with Standard English in the larger Caribbean countries. A comparison of the individual newscaster accents reveals that the accents are also not homogeneous with regard to Caribbean features. Speaker 5m used the fewest Caribbean variants. He did not produce any monophthongs in the face set nor did he display any of the Caribbean pronunciations displayed in Figure 5.3. The highest number of Caribbean realizations was found in the accent of speaker 7f, who consistently used face and goat monophthongs and voiced th stopping and who also used the Caribbean strut variant in almost half of all possible instances. Newscaster 6m’s accent was characterized by a rather low incidence of face and goat monophthongs and a quite high degree of voiced th stopping. The reverse is true for speaker 1f, who used monophthongs in words of the face and goat sets in about half of all cases but hardly ever produced stop realizations of voiced interdental fricatives. Generally, Caribbean features were used to different degrees by the different newscasters. 2.3.3 A Uniform Accent Among Newscasters in svg? Overall, there was a high degree of variation between the accents of the seven newscasters. Two accents clearly stood out. Newscaster 7f’s accent was characterized by a high incidence of Caribbean pronunciations paired with a high degree of rhotic pronunciations. Speaker 5m’s accent comprised very few Caribbean variants and combined pronunciations that are typically associated with British and American English accents, thus forming a foreign-influenced

98 Hänsel accent that does not adhere to one specific foreign model. An orientation toward American norms can be suspected for speaker 6m, in whose accent all four American variants appeared to a considerable degree. In contrast, almost no American-associated variant was found in 1f’s accent. Although both 6m’s and 1f’s accents included Caribbean pronunciation features, their inclusion revealed further differences between the two accents as 6m tended to produce th stopping, while 1f used monophthong realizations in the face and goat sets. The accents of the other three newscasters, 2m, 3f, and 4f, differed mainly in the frequencies of realization of a variant; the inventory of employed pronunciations was largely the same for all three speakers. It is remarkable that the analysis uncovered a substantial degree of heterogeneity between the accents of the seven newscasters based on only ten pronunciation variables. An inclusion of lower frequency variables, especially those with salient variants, might lead to an even stronger contrast between the accents. 3

Telephone Interviews

3.1 Method Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with five of the seven newscasters (speakers 1f, 3f, 4f, 5m, and 6m) in May 2014 in order to obtain a direct assessment of practices at the different news stations and of the newscasters’ overt attitudes toward different accents in the field of newsreading as well as their assessment of the audiences’ attitudes. The interviews ranged between 12 and 30 minutes in length. They followed a pre-determined set of questions and follow-up questions, which allowed for comparability while also giving the newscasters space to relate freely. Four guiding questions and follow-up questions that all newscasters were asked will be discussed below, namely: (1) Did you receive any pronunciation training? If so, what did that training focus on? (2) When reading the news, do you pay particular attention to a pronunciation feature? If so, to which one? (3) Do you have a preferred accent for newsreading? If so, which one? (4) Could you imagine someone with a foreign accent reading the news at your station? If so, with which accent? Would this trigger reactions by the audience? If so, what would these reactions look like? In order to find out whether the newscasters strive for a homogenous standard accent, different questions were asked that targeted the issue of norm-orientation. The purpose of the questions was to reveal the newscasters’ own

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preferences concerning accents in newsreading as well as the tv or radio stations’ and the audiences’ preferences as perceived by the newscasters. Moreover, the questions were asked to find out whether the newscasters speak in a particular way because of requirements of the tv stations or other authorities and what pronunciations the news presenters deem unacceptable in newscasts. 3.2 Results Generally, the newscasters had received some but not extensive formal pronunciation training. Speaker 1f said that when she started working as a newscaster in the 1990s, she was expected to model her accent according to that of bbc newscasters, which she also still considers the norm at her radio station today.9 Speakers 3f and 6m were hired among other things because of their “good pronunciation.” Only later on did they take part in media training, which in the case of speaker 3f focused on diction and breathing. Speaker 6m was taught that newscasters in the Caribbean should have a, what he called, “transatlantic accent” that is understood throughout the region as well as in Great Britain and North America. The newscasters 4f and 5m both had worked in Barbados for some time, where they took part in courses on speech delivery and pronunciation. While speaker 5m recounted that his course concentrated especially on the pronunciation of foreign words and names, speaker 4f said that the purpose of her training was for her to adapt to Bajan pronunciations. She stated that some of the pronunciations that she was taught in Barbados still stick with her to the present day, such as the rhotic pronunciation of party. These last two newscasters, 5m and 4f, were the only ones who specified a particular pronunciation feature which they consciously monitor when presenting the news. Speaker 4f said that she focuses on pronouncing the voiceless interdental fricative as [θ] instead of [t]‌and gave the example of pronouncing fifth as [fɪfθ] instead of [fɪft]. Speaker 5m said that he makes a conscious effort to pronounce “final consonants.” Both pronunciations that are avoided, i.e. voiceless th stopping and consonant cluster reduction, are associated with the Creole varieties. In Alison Irvine’s study on Jamaican English, both the voiceless interdental fricative [θ] and the production of the word final phonological consonant cluster [nt] were characterized as salient variants that index the use of Standard English (“Contrast and Convergence” 19). Possibly, these variants are also salient markers of Standard English in svg. Generally, there seem to be

9 Note that while her accent included Caribbean variants and was therefore not identical to a bbc accent, speaker 1f consistently did not use any American variants.

100 Hänsel only few pronunciation features that are monitored consciously and these are consonantal variants that are strongly associated with the Creole. Speaker 1f was the only newscaster who had a clear preference for a particular accent in newscasting. She preferred the bbc accent, which she called a “universal standard.” Moreover, she disliked the American accent as “the Americans are a little too excited, the British are more sober.” All other newscasters were generally not set on a particular accent that they favor in newscasting. All of them said that they listen to a variety of newscasts from different countries (mainly from the UK and the US) and that the accent is not important as long as it is “standard” and “understandable.” Speaker 6m emphasized that he is generally not fond of listening to Creole on the radio, while newscaster 5m recounted that he sometimes switches into Creole in entertainment news on the radio but not in tv newscasting, where the use of Creole would not be accepted. He also related that he likes to listen to the radio from different places in order to take over bits and pieces of accents and melt them into one “international accent.” When asked whether they could imagine a presenter with a foreign accent reading the news at their station, speaker 1f stated that as the Caribbean countries are fairly closely connected, with much movement between the countries, people in the Caribbean tend to accommodate each other’s accents. Moreover, they are used to the news being read in different Caribbean accents via news portals such as Newslink that connect the territories belonging to the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. She maintained, however, that an American accent would initially trigger unfavorable reactions from the audience and that it would require an adjustment period. She also reported that there had been a presenter with a British accent who read the news at her station for some time. Speaker 3f also mentioned this speaker and reported that the accent was appreciated by the audience. Speakers 3f and 4f maintained that, assuming Standard English is spoken in an understandable manner, different accents are quite readily accepted in the news in svg. Speaker 6m mentioned that foreign accents can be heard at his radio station and that currently a news presenter at his station is from Guyana. He said that her foreign accent initially prompted both appreciative and dismissive reactions from the audience. He stated that in general, listeners are very interactive at his radio station and that while there is “no official watch-dog agency, people do call when we slip up.” On the whole, the newscasters were generally tolerant toward a variety of accents in newscasting. The only important condition was that these accents were standard accents. Based on the description of pronunciations that newscasters 4f and 5m consciously monitor when reading the news, this could mean

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that the accents should not include pronunciation variants that are strongly associated with the Creole. 4

Conclusion and Implications

This study has used Milroy’s definition of a standard variety as a starting point for the investigation of spoken Standard English in newscasting in svg, combining an investigation of usage and attitudes. The results of the auditory accent analysis suggest that there is no uniform standard accent among the newscasters under study. Given that people in the anglophone Caribbean are strongly exposed to American English accents through both tourism and television, the degree of American influence found in the Vincentian newscasts was surprisingly low. A  possible norm orientation toward American English was suspected only in the accent of one of the youngest speakers. Pronunciations associated with the Creole were much more frequent; however, different newscasters used different Creole accent features to different degrees. The telephone interviews revealed that the newscasters are generally very tolerant toward a variety of accents provided that they are standard accents. With the exception of the oldest newscaster interviewed, who named the bbc accent as the norm, all other newscasters did not strive for compliance with one individual pronunciation model. The standard that newscasters in svg deem acceptable for newscasting in their country is therefore for the most part not associated with any particular regional accent. The newscasters emphasized the necessity to accommodate different accents in the Caribbean and highlighted that the accent has to be understood by different speakers. While newscaster 1f favored the use of British English for this purpose, which she described as a “universal standard,” newscasters 5m and 6m preferred a “transatlantic” or “international” accent, respectively. The present findings from the context of newscasting in svg contribute to the issue of whether endonormative national standards are developing in the small Caribbean island countries. With regard to usage, it appears that in newscasting, there is presently no pronounced orientation toward a national norm given the high degree of heterogeneity of the accents. One has to bear in mind that spoken language is always less homogeneous than written language. Still, if there was indeed a common norm—whether endonormative or exonormative—shared by the newscasters, a higher degree of homogeneity would have been expected, considering that in newscasts language is read, highly monitored, and not spontaneous. The apparent heterogeneity of newscaster accents corresponds to Deuber and Hänsel’s findings for written

102 Hänsel Standard English in three small Caribbean islands including svg, where there was substantial inconsistency in the use of spellings. Moreover, like Deuber and Hänsel’s corpus study, this accent analysis has also revealed some regional tendencies in that those Caribbean variants that have been described to be the norm in the standard accents in Trinidad and Tobago and in Jamaica were the most frequent Caribbean variants in the Vincentian data as well. It has become evident that with the exception of speaker 1f, the newscasters did not deliberately target one specific foreign pronunciation model. Therefore, individually, both British and American English were less of an authority than expected. The most important criterion for an accent accepted in newscasting was standardness of the accent. Thus, the newscasters defined the standard in relation to the Creole. This finding also sheds light on the standard language ideology as defined by Milroy. Without a doubt, the newscasters were immersed in the standard language ideology. In the interviews, all newscasters emphasized that an accent had to be standard in order to qualify as an accent suitable for newscasting in svg. Two of the newscasters additionally mentioned that the use of Creole in newsreading would not be acceptable. However, as mentioned above, they did not target a specific standard accent but rather defined the standard negatively by distance to the Creole.10 This negative definition of the standard variety opens up the doorway for variation as in this case there is not one form that is inherently more correct and should be used, which would lead to homogeneity, but rather there is a form that is inherently incorrect and should be avoided thereby leaving “considerable room for variation provided that the pronunciation is not ‘too Creole’ ” (Deuber and Leung 309). In conclusion, in the context of very small postcolonial countries that are exposed to a multitude of varieties of English, Milroy’s definition of the standard language ideology could be complemented with regard to the structural properties of a standard variety as follows: Standard language ideology can also exist without the imposition of invariance of form provided that the different co-existing variants are not salient variants of a variety that is stigmatized in contexts that require the use of Standard English.

10

See, e.g., Deuber and Leung 309; and Irvine, “A Good Command” 68; but cf. Guyanne Wilson. Wilson argues that it is not distance to the Creole alone that determines whether an accent feature is considered standard as in her study on choral singing in Trinidad some features were considered to be standard that are also features of Trinidadian Creole. For Jamaica, Irvine has suggested that some pronunciation variants are more indicative of indexing the use of Creole than others, which is supported by the findings of the present accent analysis (Irvine, “Contrast and Convergence”).

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This study constitutes a first approach to spoken Standard English in svg. While it does not provide evidence for a homogeneous endonormative standard in newscasts in svg, it is possible that such a local norm exists in different domains that are associated with the use of the standard language, such as the education system (Deuber and Leung 310–311). Future research should therefore focus on the description of and attitudes toward standard varieties of English in different contexts. Moreover, in order to detect whether the present findings are indicative of the small Caribbean islands in general, more comparative studies of small and large Caribbean islands should be conducted.

References

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104 Hänsel Deuber, Dagmar, and Glenda-Alicia Leung. “Investigating Attitudes Towards an Emerging Standard of English: Evaluations of Newscasters’ Accents in Trinidad.” Multilingua, vol. 32, no. 3, 2013, pp. 289–319. Devonish, Hubert, and Otelemate G. Harry. “Jamaican Creole and Jamaican English: Phonology.” Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, edited by Edgar W. Schneider, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 256–289. Garrett, Peter. Attitudes to Language. Cambridge UP, 2010. Grenade, Wendy C. “Small States and Risky Global Intercourse: The Grenada-Taiwan Dispute.” Social and Economic Studies, vol. 62, no. 3–4, 2013, pp. 183–204. Irvine, Alison. “Contrast and Convergence in Standard Jamaican English: The Phonological Architecture of the Standard in an Ideologically Bidialectal Community.” World Englishes, vol. 27, no. 1, 2008, pp. 9–25. Irvine, Alison. “A Good Command of the English Language: Phonological Variation in the Jamaican Acrolect.” Journal of Pidgin and Creole Languages, vol. 19, no. 1, 2004, pp. 41–76. Leung, Glenda-Alicia. A Synchronic Sociophonetic Study of Monophthongs in Trinidadian English. FreiDok, 2013. Mair, Christian. “Corpus Linguistics Meets Sociolinguistics: Studying Educated Spoken Usage in Jamaica on the Basis of the International Corpus of English (ICE).” World Englishes: Problems, Properties, Prospects: Selected Papers from the 13th IAWE Conference, edited by Thomas Hoffmann, and Lucia Siebers, Benjamins, 2009, pp. 39–60. Milroy, James. “The Ideology of the Standard Language.” The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics, edited by Carmen Llamas, Louise Mullany, and Peter Stockwell, Routledge, 2007, pp. 133–139. Partridge, Andrew. Charting the Vowel Space of Bequian Creole. Unpublished MScR thesis, U of Edinburgh, 2009. Prescod, Paula. A Grammatical Description of the Noun Phrase in the English-Lexicon Creole of St Vincent and the Grenadines. lincom Europa, 2010. Prescod, Paula, editor. Language Issues in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines. Benjamins, 2015. Rosenfelder, Ingrid. Sociophonetic Variation in Educated Jamaican English: An Analysis of the Spoken Component of ICE-Jamaica. FreiDok, 2009. Schneider, Edgar W. Postcolonial English:  Varieties Around the World. Cambridge UP, 2007. Schneider, Edgar W, editor. “Synopsis:  Phonological Variation in the Americas and the Caribbean.” Varieties of English:  The Americas and the Caribbean. Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 383–398. Upton, Clive. “Received Pronunciation.” Varieties of English: The British Isles, edited by Bernd Kortmann and Clive Upton, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 237–251. Wells, John C. Accents of English (3 vols.). Cambridge UP, 1982.

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Westphal, Michael. “Attitudes toward Accents of Standard English in Jamaican Radio Newscasting.” Journal of English Linguistics, vol. 43, no. 4, 2015, pp. 311–333. Wilson, Guyanne. The Sociolinguistics of Singing: Dialect and Style in Classical Choral Singing in Trinidad. Monsenstein und Vannerdat, 2014. Youssef, Valerie, and Winford James. “The Creoles of Trinidad and Tobago: Phonology.” Varieties of English: The Americas and the Caribbean, edited by Edgar W. Schneider, Mouton de Gruyter, 2008, pp. 320–338.

­c hapter 6

Imagining Pasts, Writing Lives—Familial Narratives, Memory, and the ‘Ideological I’ in Imbi Paju’s Memories Denied Andreas Athanasiades 1

Introduction

During the Soviet occupation of Estonia, Imbi Paju’s mother, Aino, along with her sister, Vaike, were sent to a Siberian gulag in 1948, where they spent six years until their release in 1954; from that story, an author was born and a person was created. Through storytelling, the traumatic events the two sisters witnessed during that period were transmitted to Aino’s daughter as a child, which were then internalised and surfaced as text in her 2006 memoir, Memories Denied. Paju’s text constitutes an attempt to come to terms with this dreadful past through listening and writing her mother’s memories and exposing readers to the mother’s trauma not directly, but indirectly through imaginative narration. The present article approaches the psychosocial implications behind the writing of Memories Denied by Imbi Paju, about her mother’s memories during the Soviet occupation, which constitutes a personal account of understanding a sense of herself as an author and as a person, and an Estonian collective identity, within a post-Soviet space which is read as a postcolonial space in its right. The hypothesis in exploring identity formation is that not in spite of, but because of the unpredictability and unreliability of an ‘I’ which is informed by past memories through projective fantasy, one can open a space of possibilities, hitherto uncharted, to understand the beginnings, real and fictional, of the text and the lives associated with them. The presupposition is that the concept of memory is not merely a passive retrieval from a past life not experienced; rather, I approach the concept of memory here as a complex apparatus which allows the subject to re-imagine the space and time it hails from, infusing imagination into factual autobiographical elements. This approach is based on two theoretical pillars: Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory” put forward in “The Generation of Postmemory” (2008), which highlights how traumatic experiences are transmitted from the first to the second generation in such a powerful way, that the latter perceives the memories in their own right (1), in a sort of “secondary” or transgenerational

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trauma being transferred through stories told from parents to children. Moreover, I  follow Sidonie Smith and Julie Watson’s approach of life writing and memory in Reading Autobiography:  A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (2010) which understands the ‘Ideological ‘I’ as mobile positionalities of the self, with memory being a process in which the remembering subject actively creates the meaning of the past, as opposed to merely replicating it. The ‘ideological I,’ for them, is the notion of personhood which is culturally available to the narrator when he/she tells the story, and which is “at once, everywhere and nowhere in autobiographical acts” as the “ideologies of identity constitutive of it are so internalised (personally and culturally) that they seem natural and universal” (Reading Autobiography 62). In that, such an ‘ideological I’ is not limited to the level of the text alone but it reflects cultural, social and ideological implications behind any life writing text, informed by the need for self-representation. In the light of these thoughts, Paju’s text will be treated as indicative of an ‘ideological I’ which might explain why she thought, acted and wrote the way she did. Memories Denied is approached as a piece of life writing as opposed to using the term autobiography, as the former is a broader term which allows room for the inclusion of anything that might affect the understanding of a life; imagination included. Indeed, moving away from the more traditional, white, western, male, Eurocentric notion of autobiography, we can approach text and subtext as more inclusive of the complexity and heterogeneity of personal and/or collective life. Such complexity is approached keeping in mind what Smith and Watson wrote about the teller of the story who becomes “in the act of narration, both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance and contemplation” (Reading Autobiography 1). Memories Denied arose from Paju’s need to understand what happened to her mother and her nation during that time; the author then is the present ‘I’ that speaks about another traumatised past ‘I’ that she is trying to understand, which at the same times reflects a contemporary ‘we.’ Life writing is approached, then, as “a moving target, a set of shifting self-referential practices that, in engaging in the past, reflect on identity in the present” (1). In other words, it is argued that cultural memory, insofar as it is manifested as life writing including the re-imagination of violent pasts through “remembering” traumatic events such as war, deportation, colonialism and so on, is undoubtedly a significant marker of identity formation. Aino Paju’s traumatic memories of the Soviet past, her arrest and deportation to the Siberian gulags by the Stalinist regime, as well the way in which these transferred memories became words and informed her daughter’s identity formation process, while meeting political and ideological needs at the same time,

108 Athanasiades is the broad examination scope of the present article. Given that, as Smith and Watson argue, feminist writers have used autobiographical forms to show how the personal is political in authorising their political critiques of women’s subjection by appeal to personal experience, the resilience and persuasiveness of autobiographical writing as cultural critique is underlined. This happens within the framework of the “emergence of a heterogeneous welter of conflicting positions about subjectivity and the autobiographical” (36–37), gesturing at the same time towards an empowering history, within which national identity formation and life-writing narratives are closely interconnected. 2

Memory, Self and the Postcolonial

It has been argued that the concept of memory is associated not just with life, but with individuals’ and communities’ transcendence of life and their desires for immortality (Bradford 3). Indeed, one way in which one can begin to unravel the implications behind personal and collective identities alike, is to engage in a sort of archaeology of subjectivity, a process through which one goes through familial conduits of remembrance to ‘excavate’ an ‘I.’ Such a procedure implies a form of digging through the previous generation’s self-constitutive memories, which necessitates an appropriation of ancestral memories. The convoluted understanding of a self that can arise out of such a process, is emphasised not only by the parents’ desire to preserve their memories through their children, but also through the latter’s need to understand their selves through them. Going through such a process, however, is anything but smooth, given the unreliability of memory and the danger of the past becoming a burden one carries for life. Smith and Watson argued that memory fails, as “the authority of the autobiographical … neither confirms nor invalidates notions of objective truth; rather, it tracks the previously uncharted truths of particular lives” (Reading Autobiography 16). Moreover, they underlined that “[m]‌emory is thus the source, authenticator, and destabilizer of autobiographical acts … remembering involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present” (22). The issue is how this reinterpretation is approached. If one merely translates lamentable histories of the past into the present, which is what a nationalistic rhetoric would do, then this can be dangerous, in that racist, violent and oppressive pathologies of the past can be repeated. What is more, such a traditional approach of writing about the self and past traumas is inadequate to “describe the extensive historical range and the diverse genres and practices of life writing, not only in the West but around the globe” (Smith and Watson Reading Autobiography

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3). If one offers a new look into re-interpreting the past which led to the creation of present selves though, especially pertaining to a traumatic event, then questions of belonging can be answered differently. This is true as the anarchic nature of the subsequent ‘I’ can gesture towards new understandings of individual, familial, collective and even national formations, away from fixed histories of the past which claim to know what is ‘true,’ as the emphasis of reading shifts from assessing and verifying knowledge to observing processes of communicative exchange and understanding. It redefines the terms of what we call ‘truth’:  autobiographical writing cannot be read solely as either factual truth or simple fact. As an intersubjective mode, it resides outside a logical or juridical model of truth and falsehood. (Smith and Watson Reading Autobiography 17) It is also true that the scope of examining narratives of life has expanded to include individual stories. With a special focus on memory, life writing has shifted towards perspectives that are comparative and interdisciplinary, reflecting at the same time the representations of a ‘life’ in a variety of modes. Specifically, it is at the intersection of life narratives and (cultural) memory that aspects such as multidirectional memory, postmemory and transnational memory highlight the fluid, complex and dynamic processes at play. Such an approach follows at the same time the more recent understandings of life writing, that acknowledge the importance of its imaginative, personal and fictional components, theorising a different approach on how the personal ‘I,’ because of all its flaws, is important to the collective ‘I’ in that its imaginative qualities inform lived experiences. If this is not the case, then, as Dominick LaCapra argued, the consequent exclusion of personal aspects on behalf of the author such as empathy, can lead to the “phenomenon of numbing in trauma” (39–40). The truth is that historiography in reading and writing the self, as opposed to a life writing approach, cannot comprehensively deal with trauma. This is true as its factual nature by definition excludes emotions, as well as all remembered or imagined experiences. Such ideas were backed by many scholars, including Helga Schwalm (2014) who argued that the notion that autobiography negates the coexistence of fact and fiction is a philosophical assumption; rather, both are narrative provisions of lived experiences (see Schwalm). Smith and Watson have also reflected on the verge of fact and fiction: “How do we know whether and when a narrator is telling the truth or lying? And what difference would that difference make? … Truth from whom and for what? Other readers, the life narrator, or ourselves?” (Reading Autobiography 12) At the same time, Susie Thomas puts forward that

110 Athanasiades any kind of life writing is selective and subjective and therefore, fictional (188). So, the crux of it all is, how we, as artists, individuals, scholars, sons and daughters, allow memory to inform our selves. It is my view that life writing is inevitably constructive and imaginative both in nature and as a form of textual self-fashioning, blurring generic borderlines, despite narrating the life of a real person. It could be argued then that some of the conflicts associated with redefining identity are due, at least in part, to the exclusion of aesthetic elements such as imagination or empathy. What happens then when the life under scrutiny is inextricably intertwined with a collective imaginary and a traumatic past that was never actually experienced? To answer this question, we have to assume a new approach vis-à-vis the psychological processes behind the forming of an ‘I’ which is so complex, anarchic and, therefore, full of potential, so that a new sense of humanity can emerge, and hitherto untapped literary, social, cultural and geopolitical aspects can be understood. The hypothesis is that approaching life writing as in need of imagination, gestures towards the ways in which personal, unreliable memories can inform a collective ‘I’ which entails hope for the future of narrators and narrated alike, in providing new answers to questions of belonging, that truly reflect the complexity of identity. Embedded in such a hope, it is also argued that such an examination of Paju’s Memories Denied, can point to a more engulfing postcolonial critique as strokes across cultures, times and spaces are drawn, which comprise a different, compelling alternative to the examination of Western colonisation processes. As the repeated tragedy of a single family through the retelling of stories becomes a national tragedy deeply rooted into a fragmented, European narrative, the reading and writing of Paju’s maternal memories challenges the Soviet politics of destroying memory, intimacy and family ties in the name of a superior, supposedly stable sense of identity. Such a dynamic approach of the subaltern subject “writing back,” challenging established norms and trying to dictate their own terms of belonging, makes Paju’s writing a challenge to factual autobiography which is, according to Smith and Watson, a “generic practice forged in the West … complicit in the West’s romance with individualism” (Women, Autobiography, Theory 28), and consequently, the dominant order is unsettled and narratives of resistance against the dominant, cultural ‘I’ arise. What allows us to bring trauma theory and postcolonial theory together as applicable to post-Soviet writing is, I argue, the issue of transgenerational trauma. Familial post-memory can serve as a theoretical tool for going through such a process towards realising an ‘I,’ as there is the danger of the memories of the first generation can overlap and be internalised by the second generation’s very own. Post-memory, then, is effectively the link between two consecutive generations, more often than not having to do with

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the individual and the collective traumas of the older generation. This trauma is relived and remembered through narrated stories, with the younger generation then being overwhelmed by the creative power of these stories. It makes sense then that such a process of ‘remembering,’ especially when it has to do with a collective trauma of epic proportions, such as the Holocaust, World Wars or the Soviet occupation in former communist countries, seems to be a definitive marker for understanding an individual and a collective ‘I.’ Smith and Watson argued that [m]‌emory is a means of ‘passing on,’ of sharing a social past that may have been obscured, thereby activating its potential for reshaping a future of and for other subjects. In sum, acts of personal remembering are fundamentally social and collective. (Smith and Watson Reading Autobiography 26) In that, the focus of the present article is on how Paju “imagines” a past, a mother, an Estonia and an exile, as well as on how these affect her personal and artistic development. In doing so, her scholarly project transforms this imagining of a past never experienced as an integral part of who the author is today. Quoting Milan Kundera who states, “the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting,” Edward Lucas, in his preface to Memories Denied, says that in the Baltic States, “the small voices speaking quietly of traumatic memories are drowned out by the discourse of big neighbours to the west and east” (15). However, that does not make them any less important and the issue is how one brings to the forefront these experiences and analyses the trauma behind such small voices. How can one consider the post-Soviet space a postcolonial one though? It is true that one of the ‘strong weaknesses’ of postcolonial theory has always been its auto-critical nature. This paradox has enabled critics to identify the shortcomings of the field, ranging from its geographical coverage to the semantic shortfalls of the term itself.1 At the same time, through the identification of these gaps, the discipline of postcolonial studies has proven its adaptability and ability to examine such inadequacies, which enables its continued relevance. The present article’s lines of thought will be unravelled within such a gap, as this has been identified by David Chioni Moore in “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?,” where the idea of a sense of post-Soviet sense of postcoloniality is analysed, an idea which authors such as Chernetsky, 1 See Shohat 1992, McClintock 1992 and Huggan 1993, among others.

112 Athanasiades Condee, Ram and Spivak have also picked up, examining thus a new horde of possibilities and directions of postcolonial theory. If we approach the East as being South then, like Moore says, and the post-Soviet space as a postcolonial one, new paths for interpreting trauma and the past and identity open up. Indeed, just like postcolonial spaces, nations such as the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) among others, were subjected to brutal Soviet domination; thus, the term ‘postcolonial’ can reasonably be applied to formerly Soviet-controlled regions post-1989 (Moore 115). This is possible as one theorises across and beyond the limiting geopolitical and social nexus which is what pertains at the same time to life writing, in the sense that such spaces are inclusive of the second generation’s identity formation process, vis-à-vis the traumatic memories passed down from the Soviet past to the post-Soviet/postcolonial present. The question to be asked, then, is whether these new postcolonial hermeneutics can add anything to life writing studies which until recently have relied on juggernaut markers such as race, gender and class. It is therefore extremely difficult to theorise silence because it is more often than not explained as an absence of dialogue. However, it is argued that such a focus on ‘non-normative’ postcoloniality in the post-soviet space of Estonia, can assist in the creation of an ‘I’ that is personal, collective, ideological and historical at the same time, which at the same time opposes the ‘monopoly’ of colonial activity by the West. At the same time, it is also argued that such a new epistemological approach vis-à-vis what is considered a postcolonial space, can remedy the externally or internally forced silence of issues such as memory, traumatic past and oppression, especially vis-à-vis identity formation of subsequent generations, of a part of the space that came to be known as the Second World. What is more, remembering that nations are, to use Benedict Anderson’s term, ‘imagined communities,’ the postcolonial aspect comes to the forefront, given the problematic nature of a homogenising national identity. National rhetoric based on a Manichean drive of ‘us and them’ is inevitably selective and excludes the ‘other,’ whomever or whatever that may be; thus, by underlining the different ways in which Paju’s memoir can be approached, it is my belief that myths of national identity can be challenged through the creation of a space of infinite possibilities for understanding the self. Thus, the political context is defined by my reading of the post-Soviet space, within which Paju’s memoir was written, as a postcolonial one. In fact, in the wake of the rise of postcolonial studies in the 1980s, renewed interest in the work of women who were multiply colonised around the world, sparked a series of scholarly work, among which Smith and Watson’s De/Colonizing the Subject (1992), which mapped emergent literatures and rethought women’s subjectivities at

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diasporic sites around the world. In looking at the different manifestations of ‘I’ in Paju’s work, the present work follows along similar lines, as it is argued that such a unique coming together of these different theoretical approaches can create imaginative possibilities in answering questions of belonging. In other words, by intentionally including what has been excluded or alienated based on national or personal rhetorics which excluded the imaginative from life writing, a possibility arises for re-imagining the self both for the author, the memory of her mother, but also for a collective, Estonian identity and conscience. This is true insofar as personal and imaginative life-writing pieces can be read as a collective politics of remembering, alluding to Soviet-era victims ‘writing back,’ re-acquiring their voices and their narratives in the process. In other words, the relationship that exists between subjectivity and the act of writing about it is explored “posing questions about how women, excluded from official discourse, use autobiography to ‘talk back,’ to embody subjectivity, and to inhabit and inflect a range of subjective I’s” (Smith and Watson Life Writing 16). Moore argues that at some point or other throughout human history, almost all inhabited land on the planet has been colonised, while people perpetually moved, displaced—often violently—or migrated (111) and consequently what we mean by ‘postcolonial’ is notoriously hard to define. It is argued though that it might help the breadth of postcolonial studies if it is allowed a larger scope rather than limiting it within western thinking, without at the same time expanding it so much that it becomes all-encompassing and hence vague, depriving it thus of any real critical capability. It is my belief that in examining postcoloniality, one needs to have a widened scope, especially if one considers that it adheres more to a set of characteristics, evident in literary production, which greatly surpasses any kind of limiting geographical or linguistic contexts. Thus, the contention is that despite obvious differences, certain characteristics are shared between post-Soviet and postcolonial spaces, which are examined today in this article: strife between a powerful empire and a subjugated land, desire for independence and post-liberation processes torn between mimicry and originality. In that sense, there is a space which has been excluded from the geopolitical examination of postcolonial studies: the post-soviet sphere (Moore 111). What is underscored then, are the possibilities and power of representing individual and collective histories differently than a traditionally historical piece of work, precisely because of its infusion with individual consciousness. It is underlined that it is extremely important to focus on the traumatised and appropriated space of modern-day Estonia through examining the identified trajectories of the identity formation process of children. In that I go against the perceived lack of objectivity stemming from the inclusion of the self in

114 Athanasiades such processes, in terms of what fuels an author’s desire to write his or her self. It is argued that the narrative representation of the author’s reality can assign meaning to the melancholic isolation and unspeakable traumatic experiences and, in that, the acts of writing and reading, are portrayed as a combination of personal account and intertextual aesthetic experiences that can help deal with past traumatic events through a gendered conduit of experience. Where then do we situate Paju and her people’s social existence in terms of personal storytelling? We need to remember that “located in specific times and places, narrators are at the same time in dialogue with the processes and archives of memory and the expectations of disparate others” (Smith and Watson Reading Autobiography 18), and also that this kind of ideological ‘I’ is not bound by textual limits, but it goes on to echo cultural, social and political characteristics, informed as they are by the need to understand notions of the self. 3

Reading and Writing Maternal Traumas

In representing traumatic events and in transforming such storytelling about conflicts, war and forceful displacement into textual art, a space of possibilities is created, one that pertains to exploring the intersection of imagination and memory in such a way that we can materialise a more ethical and productive stance towards the negotiation of political and national differences, away from nationalistic approaches that merely translate regretted histories of the past. It can be argued that the inevitable unknowability, this anarchic and chaotic nature created when infusing collective imaginaries with authorial and individual consciousness points to new ways of being and highlights hitherto hidden aspects of the process of dealing with wounds left by tragedy. Adding to Hirsch’s idea, Michelle Balaev says that contemporary trauma theory maintains that trauma generates a “speechless fright that divides or destroys identity. This serves as the basis for a larger argument that suggests that identity, at least partly, is formed by the intergenerational transmission of trauma” (149). I read trauma then, as a person’s emotional response to an overwhelming event that disrupts previous ideas of an individual’s sense of self and the standards by which one evaluates society; such a process is of an unmistakably transgenerational nature, albeit with different effects on and implications for the affected generations. The literary trauma theory explored by critics such as Kali Tal or Cathy Caruth, considers the responses to traumatic experience, including cognitive chaos and the possible division of consciousness, as an inherent characteristic of traumatic experience and memory. The idea that traumatic experience pathologically divides identity is employed by literary

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scholars as a metaphor to describe the degree of damage done to the individual’s coherent sense of self and the change of consciousness caused by the experience. In looking at strategies of historicising the personal and personalising the historical then, we must tread at the intersection between fictional and factual modes of narration and at the relationship of a generation to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of the generations that came before, as the former ‘remembers’ only by means of stories, images and behaviours. Such an approach constitutes a recognition of the way in which memories are built on a sense of fantasy that is used as a retroactive auxiliary for filling in voids arising when one tries to narrate reality. The realisation becomes then, that there is not any ‘true’ sense of self which can be exhumed, as all sense of self is necessarily narrative and hence, permeable, endlessly being informed by the narrator and his/her imagined experiences. There are complex connections between the imagined and lived experiences of trauma in Memories Denied, as the autobiographical narrator’s (re) constructions of the past are inextricably tied to that of her mother’s, in that Paju does not deny her mother’s memories in order to survive, but dwells in them. Paju then seems to construct a self and a persona in large part by digging through the self-constitutive memories of her mother. However, she does not unearth a self which is not hers. On the contrary, what informs her identity formation is the psychological process of ‘digging’ itself, which means re-imagining the space she hails from and re-appropriating her mother’s traumatic memories. This is what makes Memories Denied an intriguing example of how individual consciousness and collective imaginaries are mutually dependent and intertwined in a complex process of informing the self. In an attempt to answer questions of belonging within the framework of considering the postcoloniality of post-Soviet spaces, the focus is on the psychological processes identified in Paju’s memoir, triggered by the storytelling of her mother, which functions as a transcultural memorial form, facilitating thus the articulation of a new possibility for articulating the self. Comparative familial history can then function as an apparatus for inter- and intra-generational exchange, as it can provide possible answers to convoluted questions of belonging. I  argue that Paju’s exploration of her relationship with her mother, and her negotiation of her past and her complex identities, manifest within what Hirsch calls a “transgenerational transmission of trauma” (103). This transmitted traumatic experience is passed down to the next generation through the mother’s storytelling. The younger generation then remembers and appropriates trauma through the stories of older generations which are so powerful that the recipients create images of the past that they then appropriate as their own; such a process entails a risk though, identified by Hirsch: to

116 Athanasiades have the traumatic memories of someone else displace and replace your own (107). The challenge is to avoid the liability of accessing traumatic past through post-traumatic memory in a way that might erupt in the present and inhibit reconciliation between past and present selves; on the contrary one must try to incorporate these memories in ways that ensure that they complement instead of overlap each other. Aino Paju had just turned eighteen when she started experiencing the shocking events of the Nazi and the Soviet occupations, as she was branded an enemy of the state. Imbi says that she could not get over what the regime said about her mother, after being sent to the labour camp, as in Aino Paju’s kgb file, she was labelled as “a mother of bandits” (128). One of Imbi’s recollections from her childhood included a plywood suitcase with which she often played with, filling it with doll clothes and toys. It was the same suitcase that her mother had carried on a “summer’s day in 1954 as she stepped off the train that had brought her back home from a place 1,500 kilometres away in Russia. She was then 24 years old, having spent 6 years in a forced labor camp in Archangelsk oblast” (128). Aino was released during the amnesty period which followed Stalin’s death in 1953, having been labelled as someone “behaving in a hostile manner” against the Soviet Union as a young girl. Mother “had survived amid the terror, although death had often been too close” (128), while her own mother Helene and her mother’s sister Heldi and her children Pille and Helve had also been deported to Russia in 1949. Aino’s passport bore the stamp ‘Enemy of the People’ making it hard for her to find work. Upon her release from the camp, Aino signed a promise to keep silent about what she had experienced there. As soon as she returned home, Aino had to register with the Soviet secret security service at the time (nkvd, the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs), and she was forbidden to leave by sea, as the Soviet Union placed strategic importance to such places (128). Despite the vividness of the trauma, it is made very clear in the text that it was very difficult for Aino to talk about her past, and consequently for her daughter to write about it, given that the repression of traumatic memories has always been a method of self-defence for victims. Even though, in Aino’s words, nothing forbade her from talking about those times, she just did not want to: “Life has taught me to be cautious. I don’t want to reveal everything. There are things that may be better left untold” (Paju [Film]; 00:01:32-00:01:45, emphasis added). Even though Imbi Paju understood how important dealing with the past was, as she says that in order not to forget the Estonian spirit, “we must know how to remember ourselves” (128), for a long time she was unable to engage directly with her past, just like her mother was incapable or unwilling to do so with her own past, as “silence became a part of our identity

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[which] was passed on to the following generations” (64). Thus, by beginning to notice what is not there, then, Paju writes herself: “Even today, young people … rarely know the stories of their predecessors” (64). The past has always “signified a nearness of death, and she [the mother] wanted to escape it” (291). This is the mindset of many people even today in Estonia, where many people simply want to forget and do not wish to talk about the traumatic events of the past. However, such a denial might be what is keeping Estonians tied to what they are desperately trying to forget. Maybe then, the way to move forward is to deal with that trauma. It is interesting to note here that Aino Paju never explicitly goes into detail as to what she and her sister went through during their time at Archangelsk oblast. The narrator and the readers are asked to fill in the gaps so to speak, as to what actually happened in Stalin’s gulags. At first, this might seem as if she does not or cannot, explicitly utter what has happened to her, thus repressing her memories. However, on deeper reflection, one might see that Aino chooses to deliberately not go into detail, thus raising the audience’s importance from passive receiver to active contributor, while also elevating the textual medium into something much more important than a mere record of events. This ability the author grants to the audience to add to the story through imagining, speaks to the previously mentioned collective approach to identity formation as well as to how everyone can participate in the making of an ‘I’ through a narrative representation that truly reflects the collective ‘we.’ In other words, Memories Denied is not just a book; rather, it is a work-in-process of an uncontextualised, collective performance. The actors who are asked to carry it out, are those who experienced the trauma, those who listened to the stories, those writing about it and the ones reading about it. One can argue that such a multifaceted and inclusive approach lifts the fear that silenced an entire nation, as it allows for a dual kind of imagination to come into play: one by her daughter, the master of the text, as to what her mother went through and what that means for her identity, and one by the audience who are trying to understand themselves as post-Soviet Estonians carrying their parents’ trauma with them. This is one of the strong points in Paju’s work, as it does not assume a ‘this is what happened’ or a ‘this is what I was told happened’ approach, but one more along the lines of ‘this is what it has been alluded to, make up your own minds.’ This invitation to the readers to partake in the making of a self-defining text is very important as Paju fictionalises her own ‘reality,’ asking the readers to partake in the reading of her and their identity. Her work is at the same time, a work about the nation as much as it is about one family, building on the artistic self-realisation that the boundaries between the artistic and the personal selves, fiction and facts, imagination and reality, are indeed blurred.

118 Athanasiades It is made clear then that the collective, post-Soviet trauma pertains to an unreliable memory and sense of remembering but also, to a sense of vulnerability and guilt on behalf of the survivors. Throughout the Soviet occupation, those who had survived the forced labour camps, either kept those painful memories to themselves out of shame for what they went through or because they survived, or out of fear for retribution. When they did share, they did so with their immediate families, keeping the most horrifying details to themselves: “Fearing renewed persecution and hoping to conceal the fact that they were marked, they remained silent” (Paju 23). What is more, the belief that Communist ideology was a good thing, prevented people from reconciling that notions with the horrors of forced labour camps; hence, such utterances were seen with disbelief and even hostility, making the person speaking even more vulnerable. In Imbi Paju’s words: “I did not know that my mother was suffering from something called remembering” (25); at the same time, she admits her failure to grasp the full meaning of her mother’s use of the word ‘frightening.’ The trauma in this case lies between remembering and forgetting and its potentials for transmissibility and translatability comes from the memoir of her daughter which makes the trauma public, which itself constitutes a direct break from the national rhetoric of silencing ‘embarrassing’ parts of history and the past, pertaining to a socially-driven desire to keep quiet in order to avoid reliving the past, a process that Paju calls “socially designed amnesia” (23). So, the author interviews people who experienced the Soviet occupation, along with her mother, who have a first-hand account of the Stalinist terror, as well as researchers and academics on the subject. Paju asks questions such as what happened, how and why. She also touches upon the survivors’ guilt. It is important to note that these interviews are not presented verbatim; rather, the author takes the information and weaves it with her own memories from her mother, thus creating a patchwork of memories, collective and individual, where the ‘truth’ pertains to how every person remembers certain events. It is through Imbi’s narration then, that the reader is exposed to her mother’s, and indeed the nation’s trauma from the past, as the tragedy of one individual, one family, is set against the backdrop of historical events that affected an entire country: As a child I often couldn’t sleep because my mother had nightmares and cried out for help in her sleep. The horrors of her dreams were Stalin’s forced camps and the Soviet soldiers who threatened her life. In those nightmares, she never made it back to her mother. The nightmares stirred me as a child. It was then that the scenario for this story began to form

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in my mind. Forced labour camps and death camps penetrated my subconscious through my mother’s nightmares. (Paju [Film]; 00:02:20-00:03:00, emphasis added) As indicated by the added emphasis then, such horrible maternal memories were transmitted to and internalised by Imbi, disturbing her in a way that seems to have added a sense of fragmentation in her quest for a self. In considering how to deal with the ghosts of her past and elucidate the implications behind the internalisation of such a sense of pain, Paju started researching her mother’s past along with the history of her country, while attempting to assume a place in her mother’s memories through her own imagination. The burden of the past became, thus, compelling and, as she examined her relationship with her mother, the author relentlessly questioned and commented on the ghosts that reside there. Thus, as Paju became aware of her mother’s pain, she felt like she had to do something about it: It is a universally humane response for children to take care of their parents when they are suffering. My book was born of a child’s pain and love for her mother and Estonia, the place of my roots … Memories Denied is a weave of recollections; a piece of European subconsciousness. These memories are hidden in dreams, which upon waking people hold inside and then proceed to pass on through invisible threads to younger generations and those around them. Or they are present in dreams which were born of the painful experiences of loved ones. (Paju “About Imbi Paju in English”) The fact that the mother eventually does talk about the past, and her daughter writes about it, constitute a direct challenge to the system. Such a sense of hope is visually underlined in the film Memories Denied, where there is a scene where Aino and Vaike, dressed in white, walk around the house and eventually go through a hole in the cellar, where they hid from the Soviet troops so many years ago. In going back into the dark hole, they relive the past and emotions run high—to the extent that they need to hold each other’s hands. However, the stark contrast of white penetrating the blackness of the hole, gestures towards a sense of optimism; same with talking about and working through trauma. It is certainly hard for victims to recall and relate to their past traumatic experiences; indeed, suffering is extremely hard to translate and make sense of. However, if it is transmitted, it can be dealt with, exactly because the victim has not refused to acknowledge it.

120 Athanasiades Leena Kurvet-Käosaar argues that one must ‘work through’ trauma instead of buying into the national rhetoric of making it unsayable and, hence, unthinkable. Paju navigates away from this denial of thought, in part, by effectively re-imagining official history as she infuses it with individual consciousness, underlying at the same time the necessity to share and translate such traumatic affect. It is my contention that the elevation of the importance of imagination as an alternative reality in Memories Denied, highlights that very process of visualising realities that, in turn, can inform identities that help overcome prescribed silences. It is this confrontation with the past which allows Imbi Paju to draw a telling sociological picture of herself and her generation, writing the memoir to understand how it all happened, while wanting something to endure from her mother’s life. This is something that could create a new sense of continuity and essentially a new kind of self in re-thinking a silenced era by giving voice to it, which has hitherto engulfed her mother and denied her possibility to work through trauma. Paju says that even when it seems that everything has vanished into silence, the feelings are still there, “present as if in a dream and, given the opportunity, finally revealing themselves to the descendants of the survivors to take the chaos of history and mould it into continuity, aided by the work of memory” (75). Thus, writing the past … transforms … thoughts into a sacred ritual, a cleansing force. This cleansing force must be accomplished before collective memory perishes without blossoming into an act of global creativity … before giving future generations the opportunity to take responsibility. (Paju 61–62) Such an approach gestures towards a genealogy of belonging as the excavation of the self-constitutive memories of the previous generation can be both a blessing and a curse, as Paju must dig deeply into her past with the danger of having its traces and legacies determine elusive boundaries pertaining to questions of belonging. But Paju knows that it is crucial to know how history is realised through writings that mediate the past and reflect the present at the same time, with a “unique interweaving of truth and fiction, fabrications and actuality” (103); in that, her artistic persona becomes tightly bound to her personal life. As she fictionalises her own lived experiences in her memoir, she also incorporates traditional autobiographical elements, including pictures of herself, her mother and her relatives. Thus, the reader partakes in the making of the text—and consequently of the self—through everyone’s reading of these non-textual elements and the spaces they create. It seems then that Paju interweaves her fiction, her lived experiences and her imagination into a family photo album of sorts, inviting her audience to read her as an embodiment

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of her work. Paju’s matriographical trauma goes beyond an iconographical representation of her (and her country’s) body, both as figuration and as an embodied, authorial spectre, infused as it is with fantasy and the unwritten. Memories Denied is not just about unearthing a hidden ‘I’ then, but about the realisation that one can represent and shape the world by imaginatively taking part in (trans)forming -given- realities. For example, the various references to “The Singing Revolution,” the spontaneous mass night-singing demonstrations at the Tallinn Song Festival grounds, serves to paint a sonic and visual image of Estonian appropriated space, thus illustrating her generation’s cultural milieu. In that sense, Memories Denied is, in fact, a künstlerroman, marking as it does the road to maturity of an author who realises that her artistic gesture of writing the memoir is what will allow her to grow and understand her personal and authorial self alike. This approach also reflects the writer’s multifaceted identity and offers evidence for the experiences to which she lays claim. For Gayatri Spivak, representation is both political and aesthetic, with the two being inextricably intertwined; such an aestheticisation of performativity can provide a background for change since a space of possibilities is created (253). 4

New Routes, New Hopes

John McLeod, borrowing the terms from Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic, wrote that powerful possibilities emerge when one substitutes the rigidity of roots with the freedom of routes (215). This is what Paju does with her memoir, arduously using fragments of her familial memories which appear removed from her own, to forge new ways into the future. Paju truly seeks to grasp her generation’s lack of direct knowledge about the previous generation’s trauma and turns this realisation into something powerful, which challenges the rigidity of national rhetoric vis-à-vis notions such as identity and home. What Paju does, in other words, is to give voice to what was hitherto silent, unsayable, temporal, un(re)presentable and inaccessible. Finding a sense of personal and collective identity in such way entails, inevitably, a clash between artistic and personal capacities. But at the same time, it is within the spaces created by this conflict that a new, more inclusive sense of belonging can be imagined, which is what we see in Memories Denied. Paju’s identity is narratively constructed in such a way that it is inextricably intertwined with that of her homeland and as the story of one becomes the story of many, strong claims to representation and female agency of individual and collective identities alike are laid out. Thus, the textual interpellation of spaces, identities and times, underlines the possibilities the new generation has for an imaginative transformation of post-Soviet

122 Athanasiades and postcolonial individual and collective identities alike. This idea of a transformed space constitutes, ultimately, an imagined ‘other’ Estonian space, one that is constructed largely through imagination. Of course, the unreliable, temporal nature of memory, in relation to actual experience necessarily entails questions and implications, as nationhood seems to be redefined from within. Nevertheless, such revisiting of the past marks its emergence as a powerful signifier and as an imagined space of potentials. It is true that life writers must negotiate their ideological, cultural, historical and political ‘I’ in a way that their self-representation reflects a collective ‘we.’ This collectivity is made up of multiple and fluid subjectivities and, thus, manifestations of culture, history, politics and ideology. “The idea of nationhood is materialised from within the subjects” (Reading Autobiography 64); and this is reciprocal: the collective is informed by the individual as much as the latter is informed by the former; the same goes for reality and imagination, the factual and the fictional. It is a challenge to traverse such terrain; but this path also offers a new way to understand the complexity of the process in which one should allow tradition and the past to influence his/her sense of being. The ‘I’ in life writing is the multiple result of an extremely complex journey which, as alluded to before, if it is not freed from the shackles of roots, can only go to one direction. If it is, however, the routes in front of it are diverse. This is what Memories Denied does, looked at from the perspective put forward in the present article, which also goes on to create an active audience who might be urged to tell their own story and unravel the implications behind their own politics of remembering. Indeed, Memories Denied shows us exactly how the tragedy of an individual family repeated over and over gradually becomes a national tragedy, a part of the collective but interrupted European narrative, silenced by the occupations and practical politics, given that the weakening and destroying of memory, of intimacy and of family ties was one of the goals of Sovietization. Imbi Paju calls her story an “untold story of all Estonian society, a story of sadness, arbitrary power and images of violence—a puzzle” (25). It seems odd to argue that she speaks for all Estonians or that she embodies an essentialised identity. However, she does draw a recognisable portrait of them, which enables their possibilities for transformation and permits a new kind of identity to move beyond limiting ideological insights pertaining to traditional notions of understanding concepts such as nation. This reflection about identity and its borders gestures towards the permeability of the artist’s boundaries and the circularity that characterises her, and her relationship with their environment, since Paju seems to understand that she is made up of others but also that she is not constituted by them; thus, by exposing these others, she exposes the different

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facets of herself. By the end of the memoir, we understand that this constructed sense of ‘Estonianness’ is a complex entity in a world where the self can exist only if it is contingent and faltering, which therefore requires aesthetic strategies that can evoke fragmented subjectivities that, in turn, manifest discontinuity and displacement. Paju’s purpose in writing Memories Denied may very well have been an attempt to lay to rest the ghost of her country’s Soviet past without completely forgetting it. Whether she is successful and if so, to what extent, remains to be seen. For instance, Paju writes that the dead are silent and the living are intimidated; however, the very fact that she embarks on a journey of restoring and reimagining memory, negates this point, which may also point to the realisation of the unbelievable complexity of the task she has undertaken, which is also why, as it was previously mentioned, she asks the help of the audience to contextualise the traumatic events she writes about. Parallel to shifting notions of national identity, traumatic past and migratory experience then, it seems that everything becomes memory, one that serves as a substitute for real experience when reality fails. Thomas argues that from a Freudian perspective, it matters little whether an event actually happened; what is important is what the fantasy reveals about the subject’s unconscious desires (190). The use of imagination to fill in certain gaps passed down through postmemory can help the children’s generation to dictate their own terms for belonging. Such a view of life writing suggests that one is not necessarily caught in a space of inbetweenness defined by past and present. Rather, they can occupy both spaces at the same time or neither all the time. Such an empowering realisation, I argue, permits subjects to avoid being defined by others who see them through the lens of traditional understandings. Ultimately, Paju’s memoir suggests the totality of the subject’s experience in its inclusion of the imagined and experienced lives of objects, people, and communities. In this way, Memories Denied can be approached as a testimony of past and present generations, as well as a nod to those to come. A new kind of identity emerges then, one that challenges dichotomies such as either/or and uncertainties such as inbetweenness, by opening up a space of possibilities for transformation. Hirsch argues that the current generation’s connection to the past is actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation (107). This is the case in Memories Denied as Paju’s psychological processes explained here, are what enable her and her readers to re-imagine the connections between the personal, collective and cultural trauma of the generations that came before, and the generations that follow, as well as their shared connections. Paju says that the maternal images “have rooted themselves into my memory and given rise to new visions. It is as if I can re-create times long past through

124 Athanasiades her stories” (61). Indeed, the memoir ends fully cognisant of the enigmatic and complex interactions of identity, politics, present and past. It is at the crossroads of past and present then, dead and living, and as everything seems to be dissolving into memory, that Paju realises that she has walked along the shadowy and convoluted paths of memory, “seeking to understand the past, its emergence, the attempts to re-interpret it and the interruptions that have plagued it … charting a lost identity” (326). In that, she hopes to offer hope for the future, leading towards a more humane culture of history through a re-assessment of the truth, given that the “consequences of … traumatic memory carry over into at least the third generations, causing bizarre and unanticipated metamorphoses” (328). A re-charting of the territory of identity begs the hypothesis then that this identity is not occupied solely by a single subject’s current circumstances, but by memories and voices from a different past, thereby ‘worlding’ (to use Spivak’s concept) a post-Soviet liminal space where the subject can be an imagining—and imagined—entity with agency to carry on becoming. As this writing is concentrated on somebody else’s story, in this case the mother’s, it also becomes the story of (an)other. Out of her mother’s stories, Paju has created a story of the past, “imagining around their imaginations” to borrow Hanif Kureishi’s expression (238) who embarked on a similar journey with his memoir My Ear at His Heart (2005). In hindsight it seems that the mother’s stories have dissolved into the child’s myths and, perhaps, the mother would not be happy with what her life stories have become. However, this is the fate of parents: to become their children’s myths and memories. Within such an intricate intertwining of fantasy and reality, at the crossroads of past and present, and as everything seems to be dissolving into memory, Paju reads and writes, remembers and imagines, and invites us to imagine, trying to understand a fractured self through an imagined life both for her and her homeland. In a way that gestures towards the essence of postcolonial writing Paju, in her own right, ‘writes back’ in the face of the autobiographical hegemony and challenges dominant narratives by infusing her imagination of what the lost space and time she hails from might have been, into a text about her own life, her mother’s life and the lives of her fellow Estonians. The tragedy of an individual which is re-translated into the present and re-imagined into text, progressively becomes a collective, national tragedy of a marginalised literary place which has been historically silenced by Stalinist politics. In appropriating and re-interpreting her mother’s memory, Paju gains agency then, by being able to speak up for herself, reclaiming her right to define herself. It is very hard to talk about unresolved issues in the past and try to understand them in the present; the price Paju has to pay is the ‘sacrifice’ of the mother figure. It is

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true that Paju deals with her mother’s memories selfishly: she uses them to understand her own self without her mother’s consent. More often than not, life writers read their parents’ stories as personal truths, re-inventing themselves as authors and people through incorporating the fictional into the factual, the biographical into the historical, and the individual into collective imaginary. It is possible then, for such tensions between the historical and the subjective, the post-Soviet and the postcolonial, the imaginative and the experiential ‘truth’ and fantasy to be addressed, in that they create gaps within which the self can move freely. For Paju and her generation, then, the past and imagined spaces and events are but a memory and, therefore, largely unknown, flowing through gendered memory lanes. An accomplished sense of identity that brings together past and present, is nothing if not fragmented and anarchic. Reading identity in such a way points to the chaotic nature and constant mobility of self and identity and Paju seems to have turned the unreliable nature of memory as her most influential, equally pervasive in her life, ideological ‘I.’ Hence, the process of writing the self in Memories Denied becomes inextricably intertwined in expressed desires which fuel the passion of author and reader alike and elevate the importance of the presence of individual consciousness and imagination in life writing. Such a realisation gestures towards a promising approach of text and context alike, where the aim is not an unattainable and elusive sense of ‘truth.’ Instead, the different shifting possibilities of individual lives, provides new access to histories, lives, selves and spaces whose true nature is exposed: fragmented, interactive, uncategorisable, in transit, always in the making, multiple and, as such, full of potential.

References

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. Bradford, Vivian. Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again. Penn State UP, 2010. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103–128. Kureishi, Hanif. My Ear at His Heart. Faber and Faber, 2004. Kurvet-Käosaar, Leena. “Inquiries into Trauma and History in Imbi Paju’s Memories Denied.” Wordpress. imbipaju.wordpress.com/leena-kurvet-kaosaarinquiries-into-trauma-and-history-in-imbi-paju%E2%80%99s-memories-denied/. Accessed February 14, 2016.

126 Athanasiades LaCapra, Dominick. History and Memory after Auschwitz. Cornell UP, 1998. Lucas, Edward. “Edward Lucas: Preface.” Memories Denied, translated by Tiina Ets, Like P, 2006. McLeod, John. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester UP, 2000. Moore, Chioni David. “Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique.” PMLA, Globalizing Literary Studies, vol. 116, no. 1, 2001, pp. 111–128, www.jstor.org/stable/463645. Accessed October 22, 2015. Paju, Imbi. “About Imbi Paju in English.” Imbi Paju—Memories Denied. Wordpress, imbipaju.wordpress.com/about/. Accessed November 8, 2015. Paju, Imbi. Memories Denied, translated by Tiina Ets, Like P, 2006. Paju, Imbi. Memories Denied. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19NpxOrk7Y. Accessed January 26, 2017. Schwalm, Helga. “Autobiography.” The Living Handbook of Narratology, edited by Hühn, Peter et al, Hamburg U, 2014. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/autobiography. Accessed December 13, 2015. Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith and Watson Autobiography Studies Reader. Michigan Publishing, U of Michigan Library, 2016. quod.lib.umich.edu/m/maize/mpub9739969. Accessed July 3, 2018. Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia. Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives. 2nd ed., U of Minnesota P, 2010. Smith, Sidonie, and Watson, Julia, editors. Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader. U of Wisconsin P, 1998. Spivak, Chakravorty Gayatri. “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives.” History and Theory, vol. 24, no. 3, 1985, pp. 247–272. Thomas, Susie. “Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart: When a Writer is Born, a Family Dies.” Changing English, vol. 13, no. 2, 2006, pp. 185–196.

­c hapter 7

Promoting the Exotic?—the Ideological Mechanisms of Literary Prizes Simon Rosenberg 1

Introduction

On October 14, 2014, it was announced that the winning novel of the 2014 Man Booker Prize was Narrow Road to the Deep North by the Australian author Richard Flanagan. The novel tells the story of an Australian who was a prisoner of war during the construction of the so-called ‘Death Railway’ during the Second World War. The announcement of the 2014 winner was eagerly awaited, even more than usual, because for the first time in its history, the Booker Prize had changed its entry requirements: Since its inception in 1969, eligibility for the Prize had been limited to authors with UK or Commonwealth citizenship. In 2013, it was decided that beginning in 2014, every original novel in English is eligible as long as it is published in Great Britain. Many people in the British literary establishment were sceptical about this decision. Critics expected a dominance of American writers and feared a blurring of the demarcation between the British Booker Prize and the American Pulitzer Prize (Bury). The fact that an author from a country with a British postcolonial background won against two American (Joshua Ferris and Karen Joy Fowler) and two British writers (Howard Jacobson and Ali Smith) at least briefly calmed critics. In fact, the choice for the 2014 winner was unambiguous, at least when taking the comment of Anthony C. Grayling, the chair of judges, at face value: “Some years, very good books win the Man Booker Prize, but this year a masterpiece has won it.”1 The 2015 shortlist, announced in September of that year, was praised for reflecting the diversity of writing in English. On the other hand, some journalists labelled this diversity as too good to be genuine. Indeed, the mixture was remarkable in terms of nationality, age and sexuality: two UK authors, 1 Grayling’s comment was made after the announcement of the Prize and is quoted on the cover of the hardback edition published after the award. Not surprisingly, this quote is still heavily used to promote the novel, for example on the dust jacket of the hardcover edition, by online book shops or the publishing house website.

128 Rosenberg one of them with Indian background, two US authors, one with Hawaiian background, one author from Jamaica and one from Nigeria. The youngest author was 28, the oldest 73, and two authors openly queer. It is also noteworthy that two independent publishers, One and Oneworld Publications, were nominated. In comparison to previous shortlists, this was a very unusual combination. In October 2015, Marlon James was revealed as the winner of the Man Booker Prize with his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. The Man Booker Prize website explains the decision of the judges: A Brief History of Seven Killings retells the near mythic assassination attempt through the myriad voices—from witnesses and FBI and CIA agents to killers, ghosts, beauty queens and Keith Richards’ drug dealer— to create a rich, polyphonic study of violence, politics and the musical legacy of Kingston of the 1970s. (“A Brief History of Seven Killings”) Even though Jamaica is part of the Commonwealth of Nations, and therefore has been eligible for the Prize since 1969, this was the first time a Jamaican author had won it, a fact that was constantly emphasized by the media (Cain). The following years, however, witnessed two US winners of the Man Booker Prize in a row, a development which seemed to justify the critics’ fear and ultimately led to 30 publishers urging the prize organizers to reverse the change (Cain). More interestingly, though, this seems to be a deviation from a development the Booker Prize has witnessed since the 1980s: promoting novels set in South Asia and/or authored by South Asian writers. In the literary field of cultural production literary prizes are not awarded by impartial agents (Bourdieu The Rules of Art).2 Prizes potentially enhance the visibility of author, novel and, usually to a lesser degree, the publisher. Generally, sales figures of the winning novel as well as of the author’s previous novels rise significantly. But the prize itself and the institution(s) behind it may profit as well, albeit less visibly so. This chapter addresses some of the essential mechanisms that underlie the cultural practice of awarding literary prizes. It focuses on the (Man) Booker Prize specifically, not only because it is the UK’s most prestigious award and garners extensive international interest, but also because of its complex history which closely connects the prize to Britain’s colonial sugar production in Guyana and the postcolonial repercussions this

2 Further page references are in the main text. See also Bourdieu and Randal Johnson, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature.

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has until today. Due to its significant cultural influence, the Booker has been able to promote novels which fall under Graham Huggan’s definition of the “postcolonial exotic”: [It] marks the intersection between contending regimes of value:  one regime—postcolonialism—that posits itself as anti-colonial, and that works toward the dissolution of imperial epistemologies and institutional structures; and another—postcoloniality—that is more closely tied to the global market, and that capitalises both on the widespread circulation of ideas about cultural otherness and on the worldwide trafficking of culturally ‘othered’ artifacts and goods. (Huggan 28) According to Huggan, the postcolonial has become decidedly commodified, turning an anti-colonial project into marketable assets (31). Not only authors and publishers have benefitted from this development, the Booker Prize and its sponsors have profited too.3 Consequently, this chapter argues that ideological frameworks of literary prizes can be, and usually are, exploited in a way that may conflict with the perceived official goals of the prize:  promoting literature exclusively on aesthetic grounds. ‘Ideology,’ of course, is a problematic term, partially because of its negative connotations based on Marx and Engels’ definition, where ideology was seen as a belief system based on distorted perceptions due to capitalistic production conditions (Strasen 279). This chapter uses the more general definition of ideology offered by Lawrence Grossberg in New Keywords: “ ‘Ideology’ can also refer to broader systems of beliefs, ideas and attitudes that have direct implications for political commitments and actions. […] Such uses tend to treat ‘Ideology’ as a relatively neutral term, since all sides can be said to have an ideology” (177). Grossberg stresses though that the term still has a pejorative quality: “[I]‌deology is opposed to ‘fact,’ ‘logic,’ ‘reason,’ ‘philosophy,’ and even ‘truth.’ It is always the other side—and never one’s own—that has an ideology” (177). This reading of ideology expresses a specific value system inherent in the prize that influences decisions concerning the jury, shortlists and winners. At the same time, it stresses the awareness of this by observers of the prize. One indicator for the growing importance of the postcolonial exotic within the Man Booker Prize are the nationalities of shortlisted and winning authors, 3 Academic interest in book prizes is not a new phenomenon. A good overview of methodologies, the relevance of research concerning literary prizes and the role of book studies in this field is offered in Claire Squires, “A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe.”

130 Rosenberg which this chapter looks at in more detail. Based on Bourdieu’s ideas of the literary field of cultural production and capital (as well as Göran Bolin and John Thompson’s respective interpretations),4 this chapter will first introduce literary prizes in general before specifically addressing the Booker Prize with its history. Following the ideas of the monograph Economy of Prestige by James English, controversies are of vital importance for prizes since they generate media attention and therefore various forms of capital. Hence, the following section briefly deals with prize controversies, before it addresses the role of the Booker promoting postcolonial content. 2

Literary Prizes

Prizes are everywhere. Every conceivable achievement of mankind, from “outstanding contributions in world peace” to “best kissing scene in a movie,” seems to have some sort of prize, if not several. Universities praise their best master theses and dissertations; television broadcasters honour their funniest comedians; food companies give prizes to “best food photographer of the year” and so on. The ubiquity of prizes has also led to ironic prizes like the Raspberry Award, the so-called anti-Oscar, which is annually awarded to particularly disappointing achievements in movie-making. Ironic prizes also exist within the publishing industry. For example, Flanagan’s Narrow Road to the Deep North was also shortlisted by the Literary Review for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award. However, it eventually lost to Ben Okri’s The Age of Magic (“Ben Okri Wins”). Rather fittingly, James English labelled the first chapter of his Economy of Prestige “Prize Frenzy” and argues that because of the steep rise of prizes in the last decades, prizes can also be seen as a “contamination of the most precious aspects of art” (English 2–3). Literary prizes are especially ubiquitous. In Germany alone, it is estimated that over one thousand of them are awarded every year (Hübner).5 Of course, these prizes differ in many respects. They can be categorized by prestige factors like their tradition, their geographical reach (regional, national or international), the prize money, the lavishness of the award ceremony, the winners’ 4 Thompson offers a succinct interpretation of Bourdieu’s ideas of “capital” in his introduction to Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed. and Bolin discusses Bourdieu’s field of cultural production in his Value and the Media: Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets. 5 Burckhard Dücker and Verena Neumann consider 700 a more realistic estimate in their Register mit einer Einführung: Literaturpreise als literaturgeschichtlicher Forschungsgegenstand.

131

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prestige and the attention paid by the public and the media. Three of the most popular prizes in Britain are the Man Booker Prize, the Costa Book Award and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. All three prizes differ in these respects: table 7.1 Properties of the three most popular British book prizes

(Man) Booker Prize

Costa Book Awards

Women’s Prize for Fiction

Est. 1968 Original work of fiction in English

Est. 1971 Five book award categories: novel, first novel, children’s book, poetry, and biography—one of the winning books is awarded book of the year Authors must have been resident in the UK or Ireland for at least six months in each of the previous three years

Est. 1996 Original full-length novel written in English

gbp 5,000 Book of the year: gbp 25,000 “most outstanding books of the year”

gbp 30,000

Published in English in Great Britain (until 2013, citizen of Great Britain or the Commonwealth) gbp 50,000 “Fiction at its finest”

Female author of any nationality published in the UK in the preceding year

“celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing”

The Man Booker is the oldest of the three prizes, offers the highest prize money and focuses exclusively on novels, with no limitation on the authors’ gender or residency. The catchphrases further indicate that the Booker is about literary quality and less about readability. Literary prizes are sociocultural processes which have three main functions: 1) a social function which supports and honours authors (that is, economic, social and symbolic capital), 2) a representative function for both the awarding institution and the laureate, and 3) a cultural and political function to promote and support the language and literature of a specific region and cultivation of specific genres. Consequently, German sociologist Friedhelm Kröll offered the appropriate definition:  “Literary prizes are manifestations

132 Rosenberg of patronage under the conditions of a (highly) developed literary market” (145).6 Literary prizes can be discussed profitably with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the literary field of cultural production, which is characterized by a highly dynamic structure consisting of processes of interaction and competition for certain positions within the field. The spectrum of literature in the literary field ranges from autonomous literature (almost no audience and no economic profit; ‘art for art’s sake’) to heteronomous literature (literature created for the mass market and hence primarily for economic profit) (Bourdieu The Rules of Art 121–127). The most important agents in the literary field are authors, publishing houses, the book trade in general, libraries, newspapers, educational institutes and readers. Literary prizes can also be very important processes that act as agents within this field for authors. With their highly (symbolically) ritualized staging, they can, and usually do (depending on the prestige), enhance the author’s social, economic and cultural capital.7 Every institution offering literary prizes has a dynamic relationship with the field of literary and cultural production. Rewarding a novel in such a way has an integrative function (e.g. creating a new canon such as ‘Booker winners’) but at the same time also a decidedly differentiating function with respect to the competition. However, in order for a novel to be eligible for a prize, the authors and/or their works must fit into a specific requirements profile: the laureate has to win the attention of the institution by a special contribution (meaning his or her work). Then, a consensus must be found between the work of the author and the values and ideologies of the institution that awards the prize. This is necessary as not only the author is honoured, but also the value orientations of the institution and its ideologies are honoured at the same time. Put differently, every recognition and honour of an author precedes the staged self-image of the institution that awards the prize. For this reason, prize-giver and prize-winner are part of an interdependent relationship. 3

The (Man) Booker Prize

The Booker Prize was founded in 1968 to rival the French Prix Goncourt with funding from Booker-McConnell Ltd, a food shipping and wholesaling 6 My translation. 7 For Bourdieu’s concept of different capitals, see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education.

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company that had for decades run the sugar industry in the British colony of Guyana. Booker-McConnell developed an interest in literature when the company purchased the rights to the works of then very popular authors like Agatha Christie and James Bond-creator Ian Fleming. However, in 2000, the company was purchased by the British supermarket chain Iceland, which sold off the literary assets and also withdrew from supporting the Prize. Two years later, in 2002, the Prize was sponsored by Man Group plc, nowadays one of the largest hedge fund managers worldwide.8 Since 2020, the Prize is sponsored by the charity foundation Crankstart (Flood, “Silocon Valley Billionaire Takes Over”). According to its own policy, the Booker Prize is simply given to “the best novel in the opinion of the judges.” No further criteria are stated. The aim is said to increase the reading of finest quality fiction and to attract the intelligent general audience. This can ultimately affect the literary field in various ways. For example, rewarding the author of a highbrow novel with a prize that creates general awareness via media attention entails a struggle that propels the novel from the autonomous side of the literary field towards a more heteronomous place (Bourdieu The Rules of Art 141–146). However, it is also possible that an author known for heteronomous literature is gaining esteem through the cultural capital of the literary prize and, therefore, his or her work is forced more towards autonomous literature. If this happens too often, the respective prize may be in danger of losing its cultural capital and its position within the literary field. Thus, it is necessary for every agent within the literary field of cultural production to be aware of the complex mechanisms that are behind the awards. The standard procedure of the Booker Prize runs as follows:  each year, five judges are chosen following recommendations from the Booker Prize Foundation Advisory Committee, which also advises on any changes to the rules. The Booker judges usually come from a wide range of disciplines, including critics, writers and academics, but also poets, politicians and actors. British publishers can submit between one and four titles from their authors to be considered for the Prize, depending on the number of longlisted books in the previous four years.9 The longlist called ‘The Booker’s Dozen’ is created next. By September, the judges agree on a shortlist of the best 8 A very good summary of the history of the Man Booker Prize is offered by Luke Strongman in the introduction of his published PhD thesis The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire, vii-xxiii. 9 For detailed information on the procedure of the Booker Prize and its current entry requirements, see “Rules and Entry Form.”

134 Rosenberg six novels of the year. The final winner is usually announced in October. All shortlisted authors receive a cheque for £2,500 and a designer-bound copy of their respective novel. The winner receives a further £50,000, although the reward used to be significantly lower and has been raised several times. A less known rule, however, is that publishers and authors alike must also agree to several mandatory contributions concerning publicity. This entails, for example, making the book available as an e-book in the event of being longlisted and authors should be available for award ceremonies. More interestingly, though, if a novel is shortlisted, the publisher agrees to pay gbp 5,000 for ‘general publicity’ and again further gbp 5,000 if the novel wins the prize. In this case, cultural capital certainly comes at a(n) (economic) price.

­f igure 7.1  Standard procedure of the Booker Prize

Fulfilling one of the objectives of the Prize—to encourage the widest possible readership for the best work in literary fiction—the winner, and also the shortlisted authors, usually witness a decisive increase in visibility and book sales. Marlon James was no exception: British news sites like the Daily Mail, The Guardian, BBC News or The Telegraph reported immediately. American sites like The New York Times, Huffington Post or CNN instantly reported as well. What is even more noteworthy:  non-English speaking countries like Spain, France, Germany, Italy and Portugal seemed as interested in the winner as the Anglophone world, though the novel had not yet been published in their

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respective languages. Although their reports were usually less extensive, still they deemed it important enough to report on the Booker winner.10 A look at the sales figures reveals the economic impact of the Prize, the so-called ‘Booker bounce’:  within one week after the announcement of the longlist, James’s novel was sold 512 times. Before the shortlist was announced, A Brief History of Seven Killings had been sold 6,700 times in both paperback and hardback. Until the award ceremony, it had sold 12,200 copies and occupied position 264 on the official UK Bestsellers. One week later, it jumped to position seven with over 23,000 copies sold (“Official UK Bestsellers” 8). From a commercial standpoint, however, the ‘Booker bounce’ was not as pronounced as with previous winners such as Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (published 2009; 974,892 volumes sold), Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger (2008; 557,111) or Mantel’s Bringing Up the Bodies (2012; 540,483) (“Man Booker Prize Winners” 11). This, however, is part of a general development that was described in 2018 as “the Booker Bounce has gone flat.”11 That year’s shortlist noted the lowest sales since 2000 (Jones 5). But the Booker Prize does not only have a direct economic effect on the winning novel. More importantly, Marlon James ceased being a mere author—on October 13th he became a ‘Man Booker winning author’ and his previous two novels were immediately upgraded with stickers. Not only winning the award makes a difference, even a place on the longlist can enhance book sales and the reputation of both author and publisher.12 This status is usually exploited by paratextual elements like stickers fixed to the cover that stress the books’ literary quality to potential buyers. A prominent example is Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World, one of the first American novels longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. But references to the Booker Prize take different forms and Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen takes this practice one step further: not only marked as “shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize,” its blurb also carries an endorsement by the 2013 Booker Prize winner Eleanor Catton. In this case, her Prize-enhanced position within the literary field was used to strengthen her credibility for judging good literature. Finally, even 10 11

12

See, for example, “Littérature: le Jamaïcain Marlon James lauréat du Man Booker Prize,” or Carlos Fresneda. However, in 2019 Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Girl, Woman, Other experienced an impressive spike and sold almost 6,000 copies in the five days following her win of the Booker. Within these few days, the award effectively more than doubled the novel’s lifetime sales: just 4,000 copies had been shifted during the preceding five months since publication. Co-winner Margaret Atwood’s already-bestselling The Testaments, sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, sold 13,400 copies in the five days following her win, and had sold over 191,000 copies before the Booker (Flood, “Bernardine Evaristo Doubles Lifetime Sales”). The longlist of the Man Booker Prize is only published since 2002.

136 Rosenberg translations of Booker Prize winning novels usually refer to the Prize. Clearly, the status of belonging into the Man Booker sphere is certainly exploited at an international level as well. 4

Ceremonies and Controversies

Award ceremonies themselves warrant critical attention. Not only do they affect and reflect the prestige of the respective prize; they are also an opportunity to witness the processes of prestige being enhanced. Bringing together essential agents within the literary field, they reveal demarcations between highbrow and popular literature and they disclose interfaces of the literary with other fields. Award ceremonies are highly ritualized and staged events, based on the ideas of the awarding institution, and tend to be designed for television and broadcasting. They consist of several acts of interactions between the institution, the winner and the interested public. The media functions as a multiplier of attention. The standard formula of award ceremonies consists of welcoming, laudatory and acceptance speeches and are usually complemented with further elements like musical interludes, dinner etc. (Dücker, et al.). This procedure is commonly accepted and any break with this order is immediately noticed and thus reconfirms the norm. This implies that any deviation creates awareness through media interest, albeit to different degrees. Acceptance speeches usually draw the most attention. This is the moment in which the exchange of cultural capital takes place. Especially here, any deviation from the norm is noted. Being aware of this heightened attention, some winners use the opportunity for political statements. For example, Patricia Arquette gave a passionate speech about equal pay for women in the film industry when she won an Oscar in 2015 (Needham and Carroll). Most controversial, however, is the rejection of prizes. Marlon Brando refused to accept the Oscar in 1973 in protest against poor treatment of Native Americans in the film industry and had Native American actress Sacheen Littlefeather read out a statement on his behalf (“Marlon Brando”). Jean-Paul Sartre famously declined the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, as he wanted to avoid being politically exploited by the Nobel Foundation and thereby strengthened his artistic integrity (“Jean-Paul Sartre”). A German example from 2008 illustrates how an acceptance speech can develop into a disaster for the hosting institution, in this case German television channel zdf. In his speech, renowned literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki first mentions other, more prestigious prizes for which he had been grateful, only to reject the ‘Founders’ Honorary

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Award’ of the Deutscher Fernsehpreis for his key role in the popular literature programme he co-hosted for many years. He insisted that he did not belong among the previous prize-winners in this award category, complained about the tedious ceremony and finally praised rival television stations for offering a programme superior to the nonsense (“Blödsinn”) which the zdf stood for in his view. Clearly, in this particular case, the exchange of cultural capital did not proceed as expected (Müller). The Booker Prize is almost famous for its controversies: during his acceptance speech, 1972 winner John Berger protested against Booker-McConnell’s colonial history. He blamed Booker-McConnell’s 130 years of sugar production in the Caribbean for the region’s modern poverty and donated half of his (then) £5,000 prize to the British Black Panther movement (Jordison “Looking Back”). In 1994, Rabbi Julia Neuberger, one of the judges of that year, called the winning novel How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman a disgrace because of its excessive use of strong language and distanced herself from the jury’s decision (Jordison “Booker Club”). Perhaps the most discussed controversy took place in 1980, when Anthony Burgess refused to attend the ceremony unless he could be guaranteed a win. He could not, and his rival William Golding triumphed with his novel Rites of Passage. This controversy certainly helped the Booker Prize to become more prestigious since two of the most prominent members of the British literary elite were competing for it (Todd 445–447). The British media is watching every Booker development closely. And more often than not, they seem to anticipate devaluing developments concerning the Booker Prize. Indeed, it is not uncommon for former Booker judges to criticize the judgement procedure. The most aggressive comment came from A. L. Kennedy, who called the award “a pile of crooked nonsense.” According to Kennedy, winners were always determined by “who knows who, who’s sleeping with who, who’s selling drugs to who, who’s married to who, whose turn it is … I read the 300 novels and no other bastard [on the panel] did” (qtd. in Moss). A much bigger concern was discussed in 2011, when the literary establishment feared a devaluation of the Booker Prize within the literary field. According to the critics, the shortlist only consisted of novels that were “too readable.” And indeed, the novels seemed to be more accessible than previous shortlists (Massie). One publisher, who wanted to remain anonymous, stated that “the consensus does seem to be that the Booker this year is a bit of a shambles … Basically, the whole thing needs to be an utter snob fest, otherwise how is it different from the Costas?” (Flood “Booker Prize Divides”). This clearly suggests that it is important for prizes to set themselves apart from other awards. The Booker Prize organizers, however, shrug away such controversies and even use them as publicity. The 2013 brochure even quotes Mark O’Connell’s

138 Rosenberg comment in The New Yorker: “There’s a peculiar circularity at the heart of its cultural significance. It’s important because it’s controversial, and it’s controversial because it’s important” (O’Connel).13 The Booker Prize definitely caused controversies when it became apparent that it seemed to favour novels with some sort of postcolonial content. Considering the Booker’s past, a very specific ideology of atonement seemed to be at work: making up for its past. 5

Promoting the Exotic?

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children winning the Booker in 1981 can be seen as a breakthrough not only for Rushdie but also for the international visibility of Anglophone South Asian novelists more generally. The Booker Prize seems to have played a major role in that development. Since Rushdie’s victory, Indian-born authors have appeared more frequently on the shortlist, often with works directly addressing the topic of British colonialism from a critical perspective.14 Including figures for 2016, 136 shortlisted authors were British, 27 Irish and 17 Canadian. Only five authors were Indian, three British Indian, two Indian-born Canadian, one Sri Lankan-born British and one Indian-American. Except for Anita Desai, who was first shortlisted for Clear Light of Day in 1980, no other authors from the subcontinent or its diasporas were shortlisted before 1981 (“Backlist”). Some newspapers were suspicious about the Booker Prize’s alleged preference for novels with postcolonial connections. Indeed, it can be argued that colonial power structures and attitudes still reverberate within the Man Booker Prize. The growing commercial success of South Asian writing in English was explained by its ‘exotic’ features rather than literary merit (Dwivedi and Lau 1). Given the commodification of Anglophone Indian literature, Tabish Khair commented that “the best thing that can happen to Indian writing in English today is if it runs out of well-meaning British patronage” (Khair). If the inclusion of postcolonial literature reflects positively on a Prize which thereby becomes associated with an open-minded attitude towards writers of colour and attains a progressive image, then this inclusion can potentially be seen 13

The 2013 Man Booker Prize brochure is available online:  themanbookerprize.com/ sites/manbosamjo/files/files/Man%20Booker%202013%20Booklet.pdf (accessed 14 February 2017). 14 Huggan’s Postcolonial Exotic is regarded as a seminal work on this topic and offers a more extensive analysis.

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as instrumentalizing this field. Moreover, the value which is being bestowed upon novels and authors is controlled by a British institution whose committee used to consist mainly of the white British establishment. As James English has pointed out, this seems rather blatantly reminiscent of “old patterns of imperial control over symbolic economies and hence over cultural practice itself” (English 297–298). Huggan also recognizes ongoing imperialist motives and claims that exoticism has shifted “from a more or less privileged mode of aesthetic perception to an increasingly global mode of mass-market consumption” (Huggan 15). In other words, what may have started out as a clear ideological conviction of aesthetic quality has also gained the quality of an economic asset. An intriguing example of this shift is 2006 winner Kiran Desai with her novel The Inheritance of Loss.15 The novel is set in Kalimpong, Darjeeling. It addresses Indian domestic conflicts, rejection and admiration of the English way of life, the hardships of living in Kalimpong and the accusation that its population was becoming too English and had forgotten the traditional ways of Indian life. Pre-publication reviews were mixed, but after its publication most reviews were favourable. When the novel was published in Britain by a Penguin imprint (it had previously been published in India and the USA), it almost simultaneously appeared on the longlist of the Booker Prize. From then on, the book gained visibility and economic success. Its victory was literary world news and it was talked about internationally in major publications. Up until this point, this example merely shows that the Booker Prize, with its enormous prestige, has the power to control access to worldwide literary markets. However, this time, its high visibility backfired. Since the Booker winner automatically witnesses huge promotion and attention, the novel underwent meticulous inspection concerning its contents. As a result, criticism suddenly started to rise from India, especially from Kalimpong. The inhabitants felt that they were misrepresented and accused Desai of being unable to offer an authentic account of their culture. Reports of protests and threats of book burnings appeared in the Indian press and a newspaper quoted a protester labelling the novel as racist (Allington 131). This criticism not only attacked Kiran Desai, but also the Booker Prize by asking how a British committee from the upper ranks of society could judge the authenticity of a novel that takes place in India. The threatened book burnings in India were not only directed against the book or its author, but also against

15

For a detailed summary of this example, see Daniel Allington, “Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and the Troubled Symbolic Production of a Man Booker Prize Winner.”

140 Rosenberg the people who praised and awarded it for its so-called authenticity.16 In other words, this example made the transition of postcolonial contents towards a simple economic asset transparent and criticized the apparently still existing British colonial power structures in the shape of the Man Booker Prize. 6

Conclusion: “The best book in the opinion of the judges”?

In 2013, Edward St Aubyn published his novel Lost for Words, which, in essence, is a satirical comment about the world of literary prizes, if not about the Booker Prize itself. The fictional look behind the curtain addresses many clichés concerning the Booker as well as unprofessional behaviour on many levels. Judges belong to a small privileged class and most are overburdened by the number of books they have to read. They ridicule their fellow judges for their literary tastes and are more concerned with mundane problems. The expected climax of the novel is the winner of the (fictional) Elysium Prize. Praised for being a postmodern multimedia masterpiece, it turns out to be a text that entered the Prize purely by accident; it is an Indian cooking book. The exotic quality of its ingredients obviously generated enough well-founded reasons for it to be rewarded (Enright). St Aubyn’s novel points to some important issues concerning the validity and mechanisms of literary prizes. The act of rewarding a novel is about making it visible. It is also about values and ideologies. While the institutions that award prizes share their cultural capital with the winners, they simultaneously expand the scope of their value orientations with every new ceremony. Its authority and ideology should be reaffirmed with every winner. The Booker Prize is no exception. One cannot help but notice that the Booker Prize seemed to be reliant on both colonialism (its connections to the sugar industry in Guyana) and globalization (funded from 2002 until 2019 by one of the largest hedge fund managers worldwide). By shortlisting more novels and authors from former British colonies since 1981, it has sought to appear progressive, open-minded and self-conscious of its colonial past, when in fact it can be argued that socalled exotic elements were merely used as a mass-market phenomenon that could be exploited. It is important to note that only UK publishers can make submissions. Ultimately, this reduces the possible submissions in number as

16

Huggan claims that terms like “authenticity” or “resistance” are commercially exploited within a “larger semiotic system” within the postcolonial exotic. Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic, xvi.

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well as content. British publishers function as gatekeepers of ideas as they decide which books are deemed appropriate for the award.17 With the revised 2014 entry requirements, it will be interesting to follow the upcoming Booker celebrations. The first US winner was celebrated in 2016 (after as many as six shortlisted US authors in only three years), receiving the attention everyone expected.18 The following year saw the second US winner in a row, which, interestingly, did not have the usual impact on sales in the US: “Just 48% of sales of Lincoln in the Bardo were generated after it won the Man Booker, compared with [2013 winner] The Luminaries which saw its sales increase 12-times from 4,553 to 56,393” (“Publishers Urge” 19). A development that seems to prove that the arguments of the critics of the rule change. Doubtless, the media will find flaws in future shortlists, be they too readable, too Indian, too American, or too diverse to be truly reflecting the best suggestions for the Booker. Prizes like the Booker may offer good recommendations every now and then, but prizes are always subject to unacknowledged mechanisms and they reflect the ideologies of key agents and institutions within the literary field. Therefore it is always doubtful whether a Prize is purely rewarding the literary quality of a literary text. Having accumulated much cultural capital over the decades, the Booker has cemented its strong position within the literary field. It can therefore ask for a substantial amount of money from shortlisted and winning publishers to finance marketing, which further enhances visibility and in turn perpetuates its position of arbiter and gatekeeper. The claim that the Booker Prize is always awarded to the “best novel in the opinion of the judges” is a half-truth at best and it should be amended in the following way: “after serious consideration of ideological mechanisms of the literary field.” The debate about reversing the 2014 eligibility change and to exclude US authors once more flared up again after the Booker’s sponsor change in 2018 and that certainly underscores the degree to which literature prizes are influenced by ideology.

References

“A Brief History of Seven Killings Wins 2015 Man Booker Prize.” The Man Booker Prize, October 13, 2015, themanbookerprize.com/news/brief-history-seven-killings-wins2015-man-booker-prize. Accessed December 19, 2015.

17 18

For the idea of publishers as gatekeepers, see Lewis A. Coser. See, for example, Tim Masters.

142 Rosenberg Allington, Daniel. “Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and the Troubled Symbolic Production of a Man Booker Prize Winner.” Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 119–42. Bolin, Göran. Value and the Media:  Cultural Production and Consumption in Digital Markets. Routledge, 2011. Bort, Ryan. “The Time Marlon Brando Boycotted Oscars to Protest Hollywood’s Treatment of Native Americans.” Newsweek, January 23, 2016, europe.newsweek.com/ marlon-brando-boycotted-oscars-native-americans-418545?rm=eu. Accessed February 14, 2017. Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, edited by John G. Richardson, Greenwood, 1986, pp. 241–58. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Polity, 1996. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Randal Johnson. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Columbia UP, 1993. Bury, Liz. “Man Booker Prize Will Open to US Authors in 2014.” The Guardian, September 16, 2013, www.theguardian.com/books/2013/sep/16/man-booker-prize-usauthors-2014. Accessed February 12, 2017. Cain, Sian. “Publishers call on Man Booker Prize to Drop American Authors.” The Guardian, February 2, 2018, www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/02/publisherscall-on-man-booker-prize-to-drop-american-authors. Accessed August 24, 2018. Coser, Lewis A. “Publishers as Gatekeepers of Ideas.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1975, vol. 421, no. 1, pp. 14–22. Dücker, Burckhart, Dietrich Harth, Marion Steinicke, Judith Ulmer. Literaturpreisverleihungen:  Ritualisierte Konsekrationspraktiken im kulturellen Feld, 2005, www. ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/5490. Accessed February 10, 2016. Dücker, Burckhart, and Verena Neumann. Literaturpreise:  Register mit einer Einführung: Literaturpreise als literaturgeschichtlicher Forschungsgegenstand, 2005, www.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/archiv/5811. Accessed February 10, 2016. Dwivedi, Om Prakash, and Lisa Lau. “Introduction: The Reception of Indian Writing in English (IWE) in the Global Literary Market.” Indian Writing in English and the Global Literary Market, edited by Om Prakash Dwivedi and Lisa Lau, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, pp. 1–9. English, James F. The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. Harvard UP, 2005. Enright, Anne. “By the Booker:  Lost for Words, by Edward St. Aubyn.” The New  York Times, May 23, 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/books/review/lost-for-wordsby-edward-st-aubyn.html. Accessed March 17, 2016. Flood, Alison. “Booker Prize Divides Quality from Readability, Says Andrew Motion.” The Guardian. October 16, 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/16/booker-prize-cricitism-andrew-motion. Accessed September 22, 2015.

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Flood, Alison. “Booker Prize: Silicon Valley Billionaire Takes over as New Sponsor.” The Guardian. 28 February, 2019, www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/28/bookerprize-silicon-valley-billionaire-takes-over-as-new-sponsor. Accessed April 28, 2019. Flood, Alison. “Bernardine Evaristo Doubles Lifetime Sales in Five Days after Joint Booker Win.” The Guardian. 22 October, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/ books/2019/oct/22/bernardine-evaristo-doubles-lifetime-sales-in-five-days-afterjoint-booker-win. Accessed March 18, 2020. Fresneda, Carlos. “El jamaicano Marlon James gana el Booker Prize con una novela inspirada por Bob Marley.” El Mundo, October 13, 2015, www.elmundo.es/cultura/2015/10/13/561d71dfca4741957c8b45e8.html. Accessed March 03, 2016. Grossberg, Lawrence. “Ideology.” New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris, Blackwell Publ., 2005, pp. 175–178. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. Routledge, 2001. Hübner, Klaus. “Muss das sein? Über Literaturpreise in Deutschland.” Goethe Institut, January 2012, www.goethe.de/ins/ng/de/lag/kul/mag/lit/8754438.html. Accessed March 15, 2016. Jeffries, Stuart. “Jean-Paul Sartre:  More Relevant Now than Ever.” The Guardian, October 22, 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/22/jean-paul-sartre-refusesnobel-prize-literature-50-years-books. Accessed February 12, 2017. Jones, Philip. “Editor’s Letter: Bookers, Burns and Bounces.” The Bookseller, October 19, 2018, p. 5. Jordison, Sam. “Looking back at the Booker:  John Berger.” The Guardian, January 09, 2008, www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jan/09/lookingbackatthebookerjoh. Accessed March 10, 2016. Jordison, Sam. “Booker Club: How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman.” The Guardian, September 14, 2011, www.theguardian.com/books/2011/sep/14/booker-clubjames-kelman-how-late. Accessed March 10, 2016. Khair, Tabish. “In the Shadow of the Empire.” India Today, June 01, 2012, indiatoday.intoday.in/story/tabish-khair-on-indian-authors-indian-writing-in-english/1/ 198629. html. Accessed April 01, 2016. Kröll, Friedhelm. “Literaturpreise nach 1945:  Wegweiser in die Restauration.” Nachkriegsliteratur in Westdeutschland, 1945–49: Schreibweisen, Gattungen, Institutionen, edited by Jost Hermand, Helmut Peitsch and Klaus R. Scherpe, Argument, 1982, pp. 143–164. “Littérature: le Jamaïcain Marlon James lauréat du Man Booker Prize,” Le Monde, October 14, 2015, www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2015/10/14/litterature-le-jamaicain-marlon-james-laureat-du-man-booker-prize_4788811_3260.html. Accessed March 03, 2016. “The Man Booker Prize Backlist.” The Man Booker Prize, https://themanbookerprize. com/fiction/backlist. Accessed February 24, 2017. “Man Booker Prize Winners: Top 10.” The Bookseller, October 16, 2015, p. 11.

144 Rosenberg Massie, Allan. “Is the Booker Prize Really Being Dumbed Down?” The Telegraph, October 15, 2011, www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/booker-prize/8829213/Is-theBooker-Prize-really-being-dumbed-down.html. Accessed 22 September, 2015. Masters, Tim. “Man Booker Prize: Paul Beatty Becomes First US Winner for The Sellout,” BBC Online, October 26, 2016, www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37770363. Accessed February 14, 2017. Moss, Stephen. “Is the Booker Fixed?” The Guardian, September 18, 2001, www.theguardian.com/books/2001/sep/18/bookerprize2001.thebookerprize. Accessed September 22, 2015. Müller, Martin U. “Eklat bei Gala: Reich-Ranicki lehnt Deutschen Fernsehpreis ab.” Spiegel Online, October 11, 2008, www.spiegel.de/kultur/gesellschaft/eklat-bei-gala-reich-ranicki-lehnt-deutschen-fernsehpreis-ab-a-583614.html. Accessed March 11, 2016. Needham, Alex and Rory Carroll. “Patricia Arquette Uses Oscars Speech to Call for Equal Pay for Women.” The Guardian, February 23, 2015, www.theguardian.com/ film/2015/feb/22/patricia-arquette-oscars-speech-equal-pay-women. Accessed February 10, 2017. O’Connell, Mark. “A Booker for Barnes.” The New Yorker. October 18, 2011, www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-booker-for-barnes. Accessed February 14, 2016. “Publishers Urge Man Booker Prize to Rescind Rule Change.” The Bookseller, February 2, 2018, www.thebookseller.com/news/publishers-urge-man-booker-prize-rescindrule-change-723611. Accessed February 23, 2017. “Rules and Entry Form.” The Man Booker Prize, themanbookerprize.com/sites/manbosamjo/files/uploadedfiles/files/161208%20MB2017%20Rules%20And%20Entry%20 Form%20FINAL.pdf. Accessed February 23, 2017. Squires, Claire. “A Common Ground? Book Prize Culture in Europe.” The Public, vol. 11, no. 4, 2004, pp. 37–47. Strasen, Sven. “Ideologie und Ideologiekritik.” Metzler-Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie:  Ansätze—Personen—Grundbegriffe, edited by Ansgar Nünning. 3rd ed., Metzler, 2004, p. 227. Strongman, Luke. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire. Editions Rodopi B.V., 2002. “This Week’s Official UK Bestsellers.” The Bookseller, October 23, 2015, pp 8–9. Thompson, John. Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century. 2nd ed., Plume, 2012. Todd, Richard. “Global Markets: Contemporary British Fiction and the Book Trade.” A Companion to British Literature. Volume IV: Victorian and Twentieth-Century Literature, 1837- 2000, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang and Samantha Zacher, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014, pp. 440–453. Tran, Mark. “Ben Okri Wins Bad Sex in Fiction Award for Scene Featuring Rocket Going Off.” The Guardian, December 03, 2014, www.theguardian.com/books/2014/ dec/03/ben-okri-wins-bad-sex-award-rocket-the-age-of-magic. Accessed December 16, 2015.

pa rt 3 Continuities, Complications, Critique

∵

­c hapter 8

Reflections of Lusáni Cissé—Imperial Images and Sentient Critique Lars Eckstein

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On the last sunny October weekend in 2015 I decided to cycle from my home in Berlin to the small town of Wünsdorf some 40 kilometres south of the city. I was hoping to see the remains of the first mosque that was built on German soil, consecrated 100 years ago, in July 1915. I read in the papers that the foundations had been discovered during construction work in July, and excavated by archaeologists from Berlin’s Freie Universität over summer. The mosque was not just any mosque. It had been the landmark of a prison camp during the First World War. Half Moon Camp (Halbmondlager) in Wünsdorf was established in late 1914 to accommodate around 4,000 colonial prisoners of war from the armies of the Entente. They were West and North Africans, Afghans and Indians, most of them of Islamic faith. The wild idea behind Half Moon Camp which mainly held prisoners from the British and French colonies, and its neighbouring Weinberg Camp, which mainly held Russian Tartars, was to win over its inmates for the confederate cause of the German and Ottoman Empires. It is to this end that the Germans built the mosque. They initially treated their prisoners well by standards, offered Islamic instruction together with political propaganda, distributed a biweekly newspaper published in several languages titled Al Dschihad, and hoped to send their captives back as proper germanophiles who would start anti-colonial revolts in their native lands. The camp was an attraction. I was in a way cycling down the same trail that thousands of weekend visitors trod 100 years earlier:  My mother’s grandparents who lived in nearby Potsdam may well have been among those who came to marvel at the people of colour behind the fences, in the same way that they would have visited Völkerschauen and colonial spectacles. When I got to the place, though, the excavation site was gone. The place was deserted except for a group of some 20 migrant builders having coffee. They kindly asked me to leave the construction site, and told me they knew nothing of any mosque. Back on the road I hit upon an elderly lady, the only

148 Eckstein other person I saw in town. She told me that the excavation is indeed gone, and what is now built on the site of the former mosque is to be part of a refugee camp, designed to become a dependency of the only central reception camp (Erstaufnahmeeinrichtung) in the State of Brandenburg. The 2015 Wünsdorf camp is destined to accommodate the growing numbers of refugees arriving via the Balkan route, most of whom, incidentally, begin their journey in former colonies of the Entente. Why that new construction she did not know; after all, Wünsdorf is full of empty buildings, the lady argued. The town is most famous for its convoluted military history: The first barracks were built in 1910; Wünsdorf served as headquarters of the Reichswehr during the First World War; after the mosque was torn down in 1930, the Nazis constructed a panzer shed in its place, dug a system of bunkers, built more barracks, and used the parade ground to train their Olympic athletes for the 1936 games. After the war the Russians took over to install their military headquarters in East Germany. They declared Wünsdorf a forbidden area, relocated the local population, and moved in 30,000 Russian forces in 1953. They moved out again in 1994 to leave a ghost town full of toxic waste and scrap ammunition. Wünsdorf has not structurally recovered yet. In May 2015, it hit the national news after two young men attempted to burn down a barrack designated for refugees shortly after the plans for the new Camp were announced. There is a civil alliance in the district confronting hate crimes and welcoming refugees; yet most local politicians are in denial of any traces of structural racism. The excavation of the foundations of Germany’s very first mosque thus dug deep through convoluted layers of history; and it is no surprise, perhaps, that the remains of 1915 were speedily covered up again. All that is left now is a street name, and an information board at the entrance of ‘Moscheestrasse’ with an historical photograph and some basic information. And there is an interconfessional graveyard, some two kilometres from the former site of Half Moon Camp, hidden away in the Brandenburg forest. 988 inmates of Half Moon and Weinberg Camp were buried here between 1915 and 1919. Only the section of the graveyard for soldiers from the British colonies was restored after the Russians left by the Commonwealth War Grave Commission and reopened in 2005 as the Zehrensdorf Indian Cemetery, with new stones for 206 Indian soldiers. Without any stones for the French and Russian sections, the rest of the graveyard resembles a shady park; at its centre, a memorial stele lists the names of all those whose death in the Camps was documented. It was here, in that deserted forest glade, on a ridiculously beautiful and golden autumn Saturday, that I felt some of the affective traces of 1915 still at work.

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The reason why I set off on that day to see the remains of the mosque and Half Moon Camp in the first place was a photograph. I had come across it almost exactly a year earlier for the first time. I was invited to speak at a conference in Dakar on 19th- and 20th-century photography in Africa, without really knowing too much about the topic. In my desperation, I typed in “African colonial photography” in Google Images, and one image, the one that ultimately brought me out to Wünsdorf, somehow stood out from all the other thumbnail sized pictures popping up on my screen (see figure 8.1). The black and white frontal shot of a young African man inexplicably affected me, calmly holding my gaze, and strangely throwing it back. When the photograph materialised full screen on the webpages of The Guardian in London, I was stunned. I was looking at the face of a man entirely unknown to me, yet at the same time disconcertingly familiar, a face suggestive of an intimacy that is at the same time deflected and foreclosed, just as the eyes are partly shaded by a reflexion of light. I was especially affected, I suppose, by the vivid material presence of a life that is at the same time an absence: an absence which materialises in the photographic grain, relative lack of depth, and the black-and-white contours which highlight the image’s status as an historical representation, yet which also paradoxically effect its mimetic realism in the presence. In other words, I felt haunted by the image, by a trick of light for which I had no rational explanation. I was struggling with an enchanted agency in what by all means should have been a fully disenchanted object in the age of mechanical reproduction. Rather than shrugging it off as would have been my first instinct, I decided to somehow deal with it. But how to think and write about this enchantment and its uncanny relational pull in a more reflexive way? And how to work it into a critical materialist reading of the colonial archive in which the photograph would have circulated? For of course I expected to find images in my search that are dramatically ideological:  images that are informed by radically asymmetrical relations of power, images that are staged in the interest of Empire, that travelled in the services of imperial propaganda or racist science. The enchanting pull thus almost felt like a betrayal: It seemingly bracketed a proper political response that attends to the image’s discursive frames in order to demystify and deconstruct its colonial ideology. It seemingly displaced political critique with presumably pre-discursive affect and apolitical (re)mystification. This dilemma forms the starting point of this essay. It is about coming to terms with the imperial image of the young African I encountered: to explore ways of deconstructing the colonial ideologies that are underwriting the representation, yet without

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­f igure 8.1 Lusáni Cissé, 1916, digital archive of the Frobenius Institute

disavowing the affective surge across colonial and historical differences. What I  am interested in, ultimately, is a sentient mode of postcolonial critique, a critique which does not foreclose what Michael Taussig refers to as the “sympathetic magic” of the representational objects it studies.

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It was not difficult to find out more about the young African. What I did not expect was that it would take me so close to home; not to the realms of colonial Africa, as I had assumed, but to the very grounds of Half Moon Camp south of Berlin, just a three-hour cycling trip away. The photo on the pages of The Guardian belonged to the coverage of an exhibition which opened in September 2014 at the Historical Museum in Frankfurt (Main). It was titled “Captured Images” (Gefangene Bilder). At its centre were larger than life reproductions of portrait photographs of ten West and North African men, all taken on the grounds of Half Moon Camp. The images were uncovered from the photographic archive of Frankfurt’s own Frobenius Institute on occasion

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of the First World War centenary, as part of an exhibition project devoted to the intimate entanglements of colonial propaganda, science, and the Great War. The exhibition, and the exhibition catalogue were a revelation. Next to a wealth of information about Half Moon Camp, they gave me more images of the young African man. To begin with, these were two alternative prints of the same image that so struck me (see figures 8.2 and 8.3). The Guardian article obviously took its reproduction from the Frobenius Institute’s digital archive. I found it difficult, at first, to recognise the face so familiar to me in its digital form in either the catalogue print, or in the exhibition context where the image was mounted in large scale, before backlighting, to stunning effect. Professionally reproduced with contemporary analogue technology from the original negative, the sharply added contrast, grain, and depth of these prints not only changed the man almost beyond my recognition, perhaps by deflecting attention away from the gaze by a surplus of available grain and detail. They also foreground the reproduction process itself, and support the framing of the image as an artistic, rather than ordinary object. For me they, paradoxically, perhaps, take away some of the traces of life that the flat digital copy seems to maintain. It is the digital copy that I therefore still prefer to think with. Yet the more consequential revelation was the fact that the image did not stand alone; that it is only one half of a pair, and not just any pair: a mug shot pair—one full frontal, and one profile shot. With this realisation at last, ideology kicked in with a vengeance. It should not have come as a surprise. I had known a thing or two about Half Moon Camp and its darker sides before I hit upon the photograph and the exhibition in Frankfurt, mainly through conversations with Britta Lange, a Berlin-based cultural historian who has done extensive research on the legacies of the camp. Her research was integral to the Halfmoon Files project, which includes a highly acclaimed documentary film of the same title directed by Philip Scheffner which premiered at the 2007 Berlinale, and a sound and video installation curated by Scheffner and Lange. The film and exhibition intricately expose some of the haunting medial traces of Half Moon Camp inmates, and explore the uncanny entanglements of colonialism, new media technologies, and the sciences. For the original ideological idea of the prison as a breeding ground for would-be anticolonial revolutionaries in the services of the German Reich only lasted so long: When the more obvious unlikeliness of the project transpired, a new set of interests in the inmates came to the fore. Already in early 1915, German universities and academics began to put pressure on the government to gain access to the readily available ‘human material’ conveniently gathered at their doorstep to pursue different types of anthropological research. And the authorities soon gave in.

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­f igures 8.2 a nd 8.3 Lusáni Cissé, 1916, analogue print, in exhibition catalogue Gefangene Bilder

One of the first to be allowed entry to the Camp, building on his excellent contacts to Berlin’s political elite, was Leo Frobenius. Frobenius, a self-made anthropologist who at the turn of the century developed the concept of a ‘cultural morphology’ underwriting different ‘culture areas’ (Kulturkreise) across the globe, a concept that would later influence Oswald Spengler, had just returned from a secret mission to Abyssinia in the name of the Kaiser. He was to instigate a rebellion against the British-Egyptian dominance in Sudan, yet without receiving the necessary papers by the Italians in Massawa returned to Berlin looking for other ways of promoting his mission. Half Moon Camp must have given him the idea to put together a propaganda volume rallying against the forces of the Entente and their treatment of colonial soldiers in particular, which he titled Der Völkerzirkus unserer Feinde. Published in 1916, it presents a wide array of photographs of colonial prisoners of war to support claims that the Entente treated their imperial regiments inhumanely and wasted them as cannon fodder. The volume contains the frontal shot of the young African man that so struck me, subtitled “Senegalschütze aus dem Sudan, nördlich Kolonie Goldküste.”1 It seems unlikely that Frobenius took the photograph on the 1 “Senegal rifleman from Sudan, north of Gold Coast colony” (my translation).

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grounds of Half Moon Camp himself, or that he specifically commissioned it in 1916; still, the negative slide, together with the profile shot and the images of the other Africans that were exhibited 98 years later in Frankfurt somehow found their way into his personal collection. The ideological work to which Frobenius put the photograph in the propaganda volume is as ambivalent as Frobenius himself, whom the likes of Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire hailed as the harbinger of a new image of Africa, while others, among them Wole Soyinka, challenged that same image as thoroughly racist. Der Völkerzirkus denounces the injustices of colonial exploitation in the War; yet by attacking Britain in particular as “the greatest animal trainer [Dompteur]” in a perverse menagerie of ‘exotic’ aliens (Frobenius 3), it also effectively dehumanises the colonial soldiers. The images of Arabs and Africans are staged specifically for a German audience in a racist spectacle; on the one hand to evidence the cross-cultural degenerations of the enemy, yet on the other to scare Germans of that same degeneration, calling to protect their women and daughters against an imminent racial invasion. It is odd in this context that the director of the Frobenius Institute should insist that the photographs on display at the Frankfurt Historical Museum were not conceived “to display types of ‘races’ or ‘people’,” but that they were shot with the explicit purpose to “show personalities” (Kohl 8; my trans.). That the opposite is much more likely is strongly supported by the fact that all West African men in the series (as opposed to the representations of North Africans) come as mug shot pairs: one frontal and one profile shot. The arrangement of standardised frontal and profile photographic portraits was first used by the anthropologist and criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the 1880s. It served as a key documentation in Bertillon’s morphometric system, a system he developed by measuring the physical proportions of the inmates of Le Santé Prison in Paris, as a means to reliably document and (re)identify criminal individuals. The anthropometric mug shot pair was almost immediately adopted, though, by physical anthropologists, and here it was no longer used to identify individuals, but specifically to document the characteristics of racial types. European anthropology at the time was deeply divided over the question whether mankind had one singular origin (monogenesis), as most famously promoted by Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, or several origins (polygenesis), as most infamously promoted by Arthur de Gobineau and his notion of a divine racial inequality between Aryans and two other, inferior ur-races, one ‘yellow,’ and one ‘black.’ In order to gather empirical evidence for their theories, anthropologists systematically exploited the European imperial machine to ‘collect’ as much anthropological ‘material’ as possible; Berlin’s museums and collections alone still hold an estimated 10,000 skulls today, gathered

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figures 8.4 a nd 8.5 Lusáni Cissé, 1918, in Josef Weninger, Morphologisch-anthropologische Studie, Tafel xxxviii

from colonial battle fields, burial grounds, prison camps and shipped to Germany in the decades before the First World War. It is easy to see how excited Berlin’s anthropologists must have been about Weinberg and Half Moon Camp in this context. Felix von Luschan, first professor of anthropology at the Charité, secretary of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory, and an ardent advocate of the monogenetic paradigm wrote in 1917: “We have in our prison camps an immense amount of representatives of the different races, of all parts of the earth and all colours ever observed in man. A visit in some of these camps is just as profitable for the expert as is a voyage round the world” (2; my trans.) Von Luschan regularly visited Half Moon Camp to document languages on Edison wax cylinders, to take plaster casts of human heads, and to systematically measure body surfaces of the colonial prisoners of war. And he invited his scientific peers to come to Berlin to do the same: among them, fellow Austrian Rudolf Pöch, head of the Viennese Anthropological Commission, and an ardent believer in the polygenesis of human races. Pöch and his assistant, Josef Weninger, readily followed the invitation and went to work with rigour, first in Wünsdorf from August 1917, then, in the final years of the War, in Romania, to where those inmates of Half Moon Camp were transported who suffered under the Northern climate. As part of their

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encompassing raciological documentation, they photographed the young African a second time, in 1918, in a Camp in Turnu Mǎgurele in Romania (see figures 8.4 and 8.5). Again, the images come in an anthropometric setup, if this time taken under standardised laboratory conditions rather than outdoors, using artificial light, the head fixed by a small metal strut, the body naked. Ideologically, though, there are more continuities than differences between both sets of images, those in Frobenius’s collection and those taken by Pöch: Both are designed in the conventions of the day for displaying particular racial types, for objectifying them in a normalised system, and fixing them in an imperial taxonomic order. Weninger published Pöch’s set of images of the young African next to other biometrical photographs taken in prison camps in his 1927 Habilitationsschrift Eine morphologisch-anthropologische Studie. The study purports to empirically underscore the polygenetic paradigm; it proposes a minutely detailed racial taxonomy in-between ‘primitive forms’ and the ‘European type,’ based on nearly 100 morphometric criteria of the face. The man in the image clearly lost weight; to me, he neither resembles the man in the digital print of the 1916 image I had first encountered, nor the man in the analogue prints of the same negative used in the Frankfurt exhibition and catalogue. It is an irony hard to bear that it is through the racist documentary rigour of Pöch that his name and identity have been preserved, dutifully recorded in Weninger’s study next to the minute catalogue of morphometric proportions: He is listed as Lusáni Cissé, a farmer from the Cercle Dédoungou in what is today Burkina Faso, Catholic, unmarried. He was 26 years old when Pöch and Weninger dealt with him (cf. Riesz).

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What does all this mean when imperial images like the portrait of Lusáni Cissé begin to travel, often in unforeseeable ways, beyond the storerooms of colonial archives; in exhibitions like the one in Frankfurt; in volumes like the exhibition catalogue; and not least across viral space, from the digital collections of the Frobenius Institute to the webpages of the Guardian and beyond? The question I am grappling with is whether such travels really have a capacity to liberate imperial images from their racist framings and strategies of objectification, from the unrelenting taxonomic order of their imperial conception, and from the physical, the psychological, and the epistemic violence built into them. Whether exhibiting these images anew, as I do in this essay, really breaks what Adorno called “the catastrophic spell of things” in his “Portrait of Walter Benjamin” (232), or whether it, as Britta Lange fears, merely “adds yet another

156 Eckstein layer to that spell” (101; my trans.). And if this ethical conundrum were not enough: What about my own initial and presumably uncritical response to the image of Lusáni Cissé, this experience of an inter-subjective, affective surge strangely carrying across the colonial difference and 100 years of convoluted history? After all that I found out about the photograph, it felt imperative to know how that spell possibly relates to the catastrophic spell of racist and fascist history that Adorno intimates; to know whether there is inevitable complicity, or whether there is a potential for postcolonial critique. To come to terms with such questions in more reflexive ways, I had to come up with some kind of conceptualisation of the affective capacities of imperial photographs like the portrait of Lusáni Cissé; and I found Taussig’s Benjaminian reflections on the “sympathetic magic” of mimetic objects extremely helpful to think with in this context. Let me begin, however, by addressing some of the medial and material dimensions of photography more generally which would have affected my encounter with its reflections. Photographs are the output of mimetic machines which create visual semblance. Their most radical intervention into the history of representation is, of course, that they do so without human interference into the core mimetic process which is essentially a chemical reaction, even if photographs are always staged and discursively framed, and thus invariably ideological. From the earliest beginnings of photography, viewers have struggled with a destabilisation of representational authority and agency, a destabilisation which crucially fed into associations of photography as ‘magical.’2 If, as expressed in the Greek etymology of the word, it is the light itself—rather than a human hand—which does the drawing, agency in photography turns into something fairly liquid and uncannily relational. Put differently, it remains essentially unclear “what exactly happens between subject, object, and machine” when a photograph is taken; and it remains ultimately unpredictable which messages “seep into” it (Krüger 3; my trans.). 2 European philosophies of the photograph have been riddled by its ‘spectral’ propositions, ranging from spiritualist convictions that photography allows portraits of the dead transmitted through ether and manifested in ectoplasm, all the way to Roland Barthes’s meditations in La chambre claire, who described the photograph as an “ectoplasm of ‘what-has-been’: neither image nor reality, a new being really, a reality one can no longer touch” (Barthes 87). The indexical quality of the photograph as a direct imprint from the real, and its temporal ambiguity as a presence of the past have persistently fed into conceptions of a sympathetic magic which ties together, in perception at least, photographic subject and object, self and other, life and death. Marxist critiques of the disenchantment inherent in photographic technologies such as by Walter Benjamin do not fundamentally question this magic, either; rather, they tend to see it displaced by capitalist dissemination and mass reproduction.

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Despite the radically asymmetrical relation of power between the photographer and Lusáni Cissé on the grounds of Half Moon Camp in 1916, and despite the ideological frames which invariably aimed at objectively fixing him (be it in propagandistic orders or raciological taxonomies), the imperial authority of the image is undercut by this dissemination of agency. In other words, while the conventional sense is that what the viewer is looking at is a photograph by an imperial German photographer of Lusáni Cissé, in a more technical sense, what they are looking at is also an image by Lusáni Cissé of Lusáni Cissé. It is perhaps easier to accept this idea if one attends to a barely visible detail, a light drawing which materially seeped into the image: For on the irises of Lusáni Cissé, there is a miniature reflection of the photographic machine, of the photographer, and the grounds of Half Moon Camp (see ­figure 8.6).3 The imperial gaze of ideological fixation is intriguingly refracted in the photographic process, and literally thrown back upon the colonial apparatus. The reflections of Lusáni Cissé thus effectively blur the boundaries between representational subject and object, between self and other, already in the moment of historical representation. One hundred years later, I suppose, my own gaze at the photographic reproduction is similarly challenged by this relational pull and dissemination of agency. This argument must not be misunderstood:  I am not claiming any emancipatory representational powers for Lusáni Cissé. It is vitally important to resist, as Britta Lange warns, the desire to discursively “heal” the objectified victims of imperial science; that it is our task, rather, to come to terms with the fact that the physical, psychological and epistemic injustices of colonial violence cannot be healed (Lange 101). What I am arguing instead is that the dissemination of agency in the photograph may challenge our own habits of relating to and ordering the world. That it feeds into our perception of the photograph as something uncannily animated; as a relational representation which undercuts that conceptual hallmark of modernity: the duality of subject and object, self and other, mind and matter, life and death. My central proposition is that we might acknowledge the sympathetic magic in images like the portrait of Lusáni Cissé as an initial step towards decolonising our own epistemic relations to the world; that we might value the reflections of Lusáni Cissé as an occasion to interrogate the ways in which we access, 3 Peter Steigerwald, who reproduced the image for the Frankfurt exhibition and was struck to discover this additional “level” telling “a small story on a few millimetres of an old photographic negative,” finds in this a reflexion of the collaborative discipline required from both photographer and photographed to meet the complex technical demands of the photographic machine in 1916 (Steigerwald 55).

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­f igure 8.6 Detail of fig. 2, reflection in the iris of Lusáni Cissé, 1916

process, store, and share sensorial data more generally. This would entail that we reflexively question the ways in which our habits of managing and ordering perceived differences are still entangled in the joint trajectories of coloniality and modernity; and to perhaps develop alternative practices of relation. This project is not at all at odds with, but crucially builds on a thorough critical materialist reworking of the past; it is not about ‘healing’ past injustice, but projected towards epistemic dispositions in the present and future. Even though I have used the first person plural in this paragraph, I guess it really needs to start with the ‘I’; with a reflexion about how I myself have been discursively shaped in my dispositions toward world, including those of body and affect which, following a trajectory from Spinoza to Judith Butler, I assume to be always already political (cf. Eckstein and Wiemann). So let me begin with myself:  Following Michael Taussig’s explorations in Mimesis and Alterity, I speculate that the photograph of Lusáni Cissé so haunts me because it resists possessive appropriation by my senses in the ways I have come accustomed to by the joint avenues of the Enlightenment and commercial capitalism; that it affects me because it refuses to be accumulated in the “bank of the Self” as private property, “quantifiable,” as Taussig puts it, “so as to pass muster at the gates of new definitions of Truth and Accountability” (Mimesis and Alterity 97). Put differently, the mimetic faculty of the photographic machine propels me out of a relation to my Self prescribed for me by scientific modernity: out of a “paranoid, possessive, individualized sense of self severed from and dominant over a dead and nonspiritualized nature” (97), and into a more volatile sense of relational being, if only momentarily, a sense of being that overcomes the dualism of self and other entrenched, not least, by the taxonomic ordering function of imperial discourse. Partly against Taussig, I argue that appreciating this charge does not entail having to buy into the philosophical propositions of a primitivist

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animism: The kind of sympathetic magic I am interested in in mimetic objects like the photograph of Lusáni Cissé does not speculate about how the mimetic correspondence between material copy and historical original, between signifier and signified allows us to reach across that difference, as in the concept of the fetish. I take no interest in questions about how we might access, or even affect, the figure of Lusáni Cissé across history or the colonial difference, be it in the spirit of harm or healing. Rather, I would like to frame the magic of the imperial image in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s notion of “sentience”:  as a non-possessive, non-accumulative, non-dualistic and embodied way of perceiving the Other which “tak[es] us outside of ourselves” (Taussig Mimesis and Alterity 97).

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I thus propose that the charge and challenge of the reflections of Lusáni Cissé is their capacity for depropriation. I  take this term from Marcus Boon, who draws on a trajectory from Karl Marx and Hélène Cixous to Giorgio Agamben and Mahayana Buddhism to position depropriation against the concept of appropriation, both imperial and subaltern, and thus against a dialectic dualism that progressively enters world into the realms of property and belonging. Boon anticipates reservations against the notion of depropriation in postcolonial discourse, especially from a subaltern perspective:  “that to let go of a claim of belonging is to lose everything, made all the more traumatic since this would repeat the violent appropriation of colonization” (144). Sentient critique in the spirit of depropriation must continue, therefore, to self-reflexively interrogate privilege and power, hegemony and different local frames of speaking, even while insisting that the self is not bound by the logic of appropriation and belonging. Sentient critique must acknowledge and appreciate a plurality of epistemic positions across the colonial difference in the spirit of postcolonial justice, even while promoting and sustaining a community across that difference, an open community that is inherently political, yet operates beyond the need for singular ideological identification. As Marcus Boon puts it: “Depropriation means to allow a movement to happen, to allow a different relation between beings to open up, because that is how the world is changed, i.e. through transformative mimesis” (144). How to write this depropriating charge? Taussig, in his fictocritical meditation on “The Corn-Wolf,” calls for a “Nervous System writing” in this context, for writing which breaks out of the managerial ordering functions of generic academic discourse, for a critique which encounters and counters

160 Eckstein the excess of imperial violence that is built into imperial images like that of Lusáni Cissé, not by “giving the Nervous System its fix, its craving for order,” but rather by finding ways of “cutting across and deflecting those violence-stories” in writing that is “apotropaic,” or counter-magical: writing that demystifies, yet “implies and involves reenchantment” as the only strategy to “break the catastrophic spell of things” (Taussig “The Corn-Wolf” 32, 33). That reenchantment, as I  read it, is not a license to be obscure. Rather, it foregrounds that critique itself is an experiment in “transformative mimesis,” caught up in genealogies of knowledge and power which it cannot escape, yet can attempt to turn reflexive in its own modes of narrative. Part of this is to make room, I suppose, in writing, for that nervous ‘sentience’ in the reflections of Lusáni Cissé, and open up to its volatility rather than foreclosing it; to appreciate its charge as already critical in itself in the institutional orders of a capitalist world system, rather than denouncing it as deflecting from materialist critique. Yet writing, surely, is not enough. Writing can only be an extension of a larger sentient practice in the spirit of depropriation, a depropriation which, to insist with Marcus Boon again, allows “a movement to happen” across and beyond ideological difference, by allowing “a different relation between beings to open up” (144). Back in that forest glade again, on that graveyard for the dead of Half Moon and Weinberg Camp, I am struck at how powerfully the reflections of Lusáni Cissé still speak across a century of history: toward that new camp that is being built on the grounds of Germany’s first mosque; toward the racist mob that will march past my apartment backing on Germany’s largest synagogue in Berlin two weeks later, on the 9th of November, rallying loudly against refugees and the ‘Volksverräter’ (traitors of the people) who let them in; toward the necropolitical militarisation of the Mediterranean; yet also toward a growing and thoroughly diverse community of beings who collectively engage in “practices that render things unownable [sic]” (Boon 136)  by the taxonomic border regimes of race, religion, nation or empire.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Prisms, translated by Samuel and Shierry Weber, Spearman, 1967. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Fontana, 1984. Boon, Marcus. “Depropriation: The Real Pirate’s Dilemma.” Postcolonial Piracy: Media Distribution and Cultural Production in the Global South, edited by Lars Eckstein and Anja Schwarz, Bloomsbury, 2014, pp. 135–147.

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Eckstein, Lars, and Dirk Wiemann. Introduction: Towards a Cultural Politics of Passion. The Politics of Passion: Reframing Affect and Emotion in Global Modernity, edited by Lars Eckstein and Dirk Wiemann, Lang, 2013, pp. 7–31. Frobenius, Leo. Der Völkerzirkus unserer Feinde. Eckart, 1916. Kohl, Karl-Heinz. Vorwort. Gefangene Bilder: Wissenschaft und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Benedikt Burkhard in collaboration with Céline Lebret, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Michael Imhof, 2014, pp. 7–8. Krüger, Gesine. “Zirkulation, Umdeutung, Aufladung:  Zur kolonialen Fotographie.” NCCR Mediality Newsletter 9, 2013, pp. 3–11. Lange, Britta. “Die Kriegsgefangenen als Untersuchungsobjekte:  Krieg, Ausstellung, Wissenschaft.” Gefangene Bilder: Wissenschaft und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Benedik Burkhard in collaboration with Céline Lebret, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Michael Imhof, 2014, pp. 94–101. Riesz, János. “Afrikanische Kriegsgefangene in der deutschen Propaganda.” Gefangene Bilder: Wissenschaft und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Benedik Burkhard in collaboration with Céline Lebret, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Michael Imhof, 2014 pp. 58–71. Steigerwald, Peter. “Den Feind im Auge.” Gefangene Bilder: Wissenschaft und Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg, edited by Benedik Burkhard in collaboration with Céline Lebret, Historisches Museum Frankfurt, Michael Imhof, 2014, pp. 54–57. Taussig, Michael. Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses. Routledge, 1993. Taussig, Michael. “The Corn-Wolf: Writing Apotropaic Texts.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, Autumn 2010, pp. 26–33. Von Luschan, Felix. Kriegsgefangene:  Ein Beitrag zur Völkerkunde im Weltkriege. Einführung in die Grundzüge der Anthropologie. Reimer und Vohsen, 1917. Weninger, Josef. Eine morphologisch-anthropologische Studie, durchgeführt an 100 westafrikanischen Negern, als Beitrag zur Anthropologie von Afrika. Verlag der Anthropologischen Gesellschaft, 1927.

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The Ambivalence of the Veil in Contemporary British Culture Ana Sobral In November 2014, the German news magazine Focus published an issue titled Die dunkle Seite des Islam (“The dark side of Islam”) on the then new threat posed by the fundamentalist group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (isis). The cover featured a close-up shot of a brown-eyed woman wearing a niqab and looking directly into the camera in a hostile way.1 In a similar vein, a 2009 campaign of the Swiss right-wing party svp (the Swiss People’s Party) against the construction of further mosque minarets in the country included a controversial poster depicting the Swiss national flag with a series of minarets strategically placed over it and a woman fully covered with a chador and niqab in the foreground. As critical observers noted at the time, the minarets closely resembled missiles, thus subliminally establishing a connection between the veiled woman and the threat posed by the projectiles (Bachmann).2 Both, Focus and the svp campaign, used a similar technique of associating a covered Muslim female figure with danger:  her mind and her emotions are impenetrable, her gaze defying. She is, in short, the embodiment of the ‘dark side’ of Islam in the Western imagination. The veil itself symbolizes this message, functioning as a divide between the Western and Muslim cultures. While these examples constitute more patent examples of Islamophobia, a cursory look at some of the leading debates, campaigns and publications on Muslims in Europe in the past years would suggest a veritable fixation with the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman3 one that dates back to the period of European

1 www.focus.de/magazin/archiv/jahrgang_2014/ausgabe_45. Accessed January 21, 2016. 2 On the svp campaign see also Ruth Wodak, The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. 3 For a more detailed discussion of the media coverage of Muslim communities in general and Muslim women in particular in the UK media, see Paul Baker, Costas Gabrielatos and Tony McEnery, Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press, especially pages 197–229; and Katy Sian, Ian Law, and S. Sayyid. “The Media and Muslims in the UK.”

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colonialism,4 but which has intensified dramatically since the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. The way representations of Muslim women become instrumentalized for political and ideological purposes has been encapsulated in the term ‘Muslimwoman,’ coined by Islamism scholar Miriam Cooke. As a single word, the term is meant to evoke a “singular identity” that indicates insurmountable cultural differences (Cooke “Deploying the Muslimwoman” 91). Gender and religion become blended, leading to an elimination of “national, ethnic, cultural, historical, and even philosophical diversity” from public discourse (91). Cooke concludes:  “As women, Muslim women are outsider/insiders within Muslim communities where, to belong, their identity increasingly is tied to the idea of the veil. As Muslims, they are negotiating cultural outsider/insider roles in Muslim-minority societies” (91). The Muslimwoman thus becomes the expression of a number of tensionsbetween the West and Islam and between inside and outside. Significantly, “neo-Orientalists” (Cooke), i.e. more extreme Western critics of the veil, as well as fundamentalist Islamists both tend to deploy the figure of the Muslimwoman to further their own radically divergent ideological aims. The veil becomes the most easily identified symbol of these tensions. The recent debates about the rights of Muslim women to wear the hijab in Germany, France, Switzerland and the UK further illustrate this. In Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction, Robert Young devotes a chapter to the veil as an item steeped in ambivalence. As Young argues, how we interpret a woman’s decision to wear the veil has much to do with our own position as observers. Hence, “a reading from outside will always tend to impose meanings from the social space of the viewer” (89). Young addresses a Eurocentric reading of the hijab as a combination of essentially negative or disparaging features. Veiling can be interpreted as an expression of modesty, which places the woman in a submissive roleshe is perceived as passive, as the victim of a patriarchal system that cages and oppresses her. For this reason, the veiled woman quickly becomes a target for Western ideas of assistance and direction. To illustrate this point, Young refers to the so-called “Battle of the Veil,” which the French colonial government initiated in Algeria during the War of Independence from 1954 to 1962 (85–86). More recently, we can recall the way politicians in the US and the UK co-opted the discourse of women’s rights to justify the military invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, known as ‘Operation Enduring 4 Cf. Mohja Kahf, Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque; Robert Young, Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction; Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon, The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology.

164 Sobral Freedom.’5 While Femen’s polemical campaigns against the veiling of Muslim women, which have involved undressing in public as well as protests to defend women’s right not to wear the veil, cannot be compared to large-scale international military campaigns, the ideological assumptions behind the work of this radical feminist group resembles the interventions mentioned before.6 A  typical representation of Self and Other along binary opposites is at play here: the observer assumes the position of a knowing and active subject, while the observed is relegated to the position of a subaltern, muted and essentially constructed object. In their introduction to gender studies from a postcolonial perspective, Inderpal Grewan and Caren Kaplan argue that particular traditions and practices such as “sati, seclusion, footbinding, veiling, arranged marriages and female circumcision” have been consistently used in Western discourse as evidence of the so-called “barbarism” of the non-Western world (55). At the same time, the existence of a “global patriarchy,” as postulated by some feminists, would assume that all women in the world suffer from the same forms of oppression and require the same remedies. Grewan and Kaplan conclude that Western feminism has actually often been instrumentalized as a means of supporting an imperial Western outlook that imposes cultural standards and norms on others. As Young points out, for many Muslim women the choice to wear the veil rather indicates their allegiance with non-Western communal values, as well as highlighting their social status within their own community (89). In order to look beyond the surface of appearances, then, Young urges us to consider the “situational questions” involving specific cultural practices and the “local meanings” that those practices assume in each context (88). Using these debates as a foil, I  will examine different ways in which the veiled Muslim woman has been depicted and perceived in contemporary British literature and culture. Based on selected case studies, I will probe the tension between the cultural context in which specific texts and performances are produced to begin with, and the complex context-specific questions and local meanings that the veil itself evokes in these works. The figure of the veiled Muslim woman offers itself as a productive source of critical reflection on cultural production and reception in the UK, precisely because the veil itself is a 5 Cf. Corinne Fowler, “Journalists in Feminist Clothing:  Men and Women Reporting Afghan Women during Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001.” 6 On Femen and ongoing debates about feminism, see Karina Eileraas, “Sex(t)ing Revolution, Femen-izing the Public Square: Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Nude Protest, and Transnational Feminist Body Politics”; Salam Al-Mahadin, “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Making (Non) sense of FEMEN’s Ethico-Aesthetics in the Arab World.”

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shifting signifier, depending on the author’s (and publisher’s) intentions, the audience that consumes the product, and the wider reception of the work in the public sphere. Additionally, the very political and social context of production and reception of a given work will influence the way an ambivalent symbol such as the veil can be read. Relying on a selection of influential novels, a television film and performance poetry, I address on the one hand precisely the variety of positionalities expressed by the veil, while on the other examining the homogenizing pressure that “reading[s]‌from the outside” (Young) can exert. 1

Boundaries of Freedom

A fitting case to open this examination is Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2004), which achieved considerable popularity upon its UK publication, also being adapted to cinema in 2007. The novel tells the story of Nazneen, a humble woman from a small village in Bangladesh, who moves to London after an arranged marriage to an older Bangladeshi émigré. She ends up living in Tower Hamlets, an area known for its large Bangladeshi community, where the well-known multicultural hub of Brick Lane is also located. Nazneen is essentially depicted as a typical subaltern Muslimwoman7: from an early age she is taught to obey and keep quiet. “If God would have wanted us to ask questions, he would have made us men,” her mother tells her (Ali 80). She prays five times a day and tries to stave off any thoughts of unhappiness by reading or reciting the Quran. Although not particularly fond of her husband, she strives to be a good and obedient housewife. However, Nazneen is now in London even though she does not speak a word of English and she is continually exposed to another way of lifeand by implication to other models of femininity. Gradually, Nazneen’s dissatisfaction with her life seeps to the surface and manifests itself in the form of sartorial questions: The sari which seconds ago had felt light as air, became heavy chains (…). Suddenly, she was gripped by the idea that if she changed her clothes her entire life would change as well. (…) If she wore trousers and underwear, 7 I will be using ‘Muslimwoman’ as a single term to refer to Miriam Cooke’s notion explained above. This strategically reductive notion of what it means to be female and Muslim differs from the more neutral expression ‘Muslim woman’ (as two separate terms), because it already attributes a series of meanings to the experiences of female Muslims, namely subservience, oppression, and silence.

166 Sobral like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would roam the streets fearless and proud. (…) For a glorious moment it was clear that clothes, not fate, made her life. And if the moment had lasted she would have ripped the sari off and torn it to shreds. (Ali 277–278) The language in this passage is typical of the way Ali depicts her protagonist’s feelings of oppression. Much emphasis is put on containmentwith the sari itself becoming the symbol of physical and mental subjugation. Liberty is here associated with a markedly Western style of women’s clothing; the “girl with the big camera on Brick Lane” best embodies a spirit of freedom, as she is not only unencumbered by sartorial dictates, but also clearly assumes the position of a fearless explorer of her neighbourhood’s gendered space. The passage is furthermore relevant because it was partially quoted in a promotional campaign by the Book Trust in London in 2008, entitled “Get London Reading.” Using street art and interactive maps, the campaign aimed to encourage Londoners to spend more time reading books by presenting passages from novels dealing with specific streets and spaces in London. Thus, walking around Brick Lane, people would stumble upon the following passage from Ali’s novel sprayed on the pavement using stencils technique: “If she wore trousers and underwear, like the girl with the big camera on Brick Lane, then she would roam the streets fearless and proud.”8 Taken out of context, as the stencil graffito inevitably does, the passage inspires us to read the implied protagonist’s situation as one of patent imprisonment. The “she” in the quotation is clearly not like the “girl” wearing trousers. Given the ethnic and cultural makeup of the East End, which has accommodated London’s largest Bangladeshi population,9 the reader of the stencil may be led to assume that “she” is possibly an Oriental woman, one who is clearly lacking the “fearlessness” and “pride” of the Western(ized) “girl.” Although we can presume that Ali herself had little to do with the Book Trust’s decision to quote this particular passage from her novel, the fact is that her depiction of Nazneen as being disadvantaged because of her clothing inspires such binary readings of ‘Western’ freedom and ‘Eastern’ containment of women. This constitutes a prime example of the way our reading of the Muslimwoman as a singular identity can be strongly encouraged by a specific 8 For a picture of the stencil, see keithmansfield.co.uk/2008/05/12/get-london-reading/. Accessed March 9, 2017. For more information on the Book Trust campaign, see www.booktrust. org.uk/programmes/get-london-reading. Accessed March 9, 2017. 9 Cf. Stephen Shaw and Sue Bagwell, “Ethnic Minority Restaurateurs and the Regeneration of ‘Banglatown’ in London’s East End.”

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contextin this case the celebration of a London street by a local cultural campaign that appears to be aimed mainly at readers with a ‘Western’ background. Did the situational question of Nazneen as a female Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh influence this reading? In effect, the novel essentially explores the imprisonment of Nazneennot only through clothes as in the above case, but also through detailed description of spatial restraint, be it in the bedroom, the kitchen, the living room, even in the tower blocks as a whole. In sum, Nazneen is fundamentally portrayed as un-free. The plot strongly suggests that it is her devotion to her culture and traditions that keeps her from achieving happiness. Eventually Nazneen starts an affair with a younger Bangladeshi man, who happens to also be a devout Muslim. This is the point at which her own sense of imprisonment becomes more palpable to the protagonist, who acts as focalizer throughout the entire narrative. Ali portrays her protagonist’s environment as a suffocating nest filled with rules and expectations from which she can only break free by transgressing boundaries. Nazneen does find a balance eventually: she ends the affair but also manages to separate from her husband, who returns to Bangladesh. In the novel’s last scene we see her putting on a pair of ice skateswhich Nazneen has from the beginning associated with the foreign British host culturewhile wearing a sari. In multicultural London, this hybrid lifestyle is celebrated as a solution to cultural isolation. Here we see the relationship between context and textual production/reception at play. As suggested aboveand highlighted by the Get London Reading campaignBrick Lane’s implied reader appears to be a Western(ized) individual who identifies with the image of London as a multicultural space. To overcome the tension between the reader’s and the character’s distinct situational questions and local meanings, the author turns the sari itself into a malleable signifier. It is firstly perceived by Nazneen as a means of imprisonment, but only so long as she associates it with the larger oppressing rules of her religion and culture. Once she is able to overcome these mental and cultural shackles, the sari can be liberating and in fact re-adapted to a new context, such as the British skating ring.10 While the novel provides closure by celebrating the emancipation of the protagonist, it simultaneously reinforces the image

10

It should be noted that several female characters in the novel articulate their agreement or disagreement with more traditional Muslim views by the way they dress. The range goes from women who adopt a totally Western style and despise any form of veiling as a means of oppression, to women who don the veil, and even eventually the burqa as an expression of loyalty with their community. The lines are sharply drawn between the West and the Other. Nazneen tries to straddle both worlds, and that constitutes her main conflict.

168 Sobral of the Muslimwoman. The narrative starts with the assumption that Nazneen is un-free, and ends with the implication that it was London’s Western-style multiculturalism that liberated her. In other words, had she remained compliant with the precepts of her faithespecially the condemnation of adulteryshe would have remained locked in, isolated in the tower blocks, and suffocated by the traditional sari. It is precisely because her liberation seems to be so closely associated with her committing adultery that Nazneen can be so easily reduced to a Muslimwoman: she is fully defined by her religion, which dictates the confines within which she can move. Perhaps because it places its protagonist so squarely within an apparent cultural clash between conservative Islam and the multicultural West, Ali’s novel was received with very mixed emotions. While the British press and audiences in general celebrated Brick Lane for its depiction of a community that had hitherto remained largely mysterious to the Western readership, the Bangladeshi community was partially outraged.11 Some members of the community demonstrated particularly against the film adaptation of the novel, accusing it of spreading “lies, slander, cynicism” (Lea and Louis).12 These audiences felt that Ali had depicted their community in a simplistic, negative and clichéd manner. As Maswood Akhter puts it, the book became a “defining caricature for all Bangladeshi Muslims” (98). This, some argued, would only serve to please white stereotypical representations of South-East Asians. In the context of post-9/11 UK, when debates about the purported lack of integration of immigrants with Muslim background were on the rise,13 Ali’s celebration of Nazneen’s budding hybridity could be interpreted as a pressure on immigrants to abandon (some of) their own local meanings in order to adapt to the norms of Western society. Taking on the implied reader’s “view from the outside,” Ali proposes a happy conjunction between immigrant and host culture as a way of liberating the Muslimwoman embodied by Nazneen. It is crucial to highlight the impact that the very debates about multiculturalism in the wake of 9/11 may have had on Ali’s depiction of Nazneen as fundamentally oppressed by her cultureas well as influencing the divided reception of the novel. A look at a novel published before 9/11, which equally focuses on a female Muslim immigrant to the UK, may serve here to illustrate the possibility of advancing a different perspectiveone that in fact questions the 11 12 13

On the reception of Monica Ali’s novel see A.F.M. Maswood Akhter, “Politics of Right to Write and Monica Ali’s Fiction.” See also Sean McLoughlin, William Gould, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, and Emma Tomalin, Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas, p. 61. I will address this point in greater detail below, in my discussion of the film Yasmin.

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Muslimwoman as a valid identity. Sudanese-born and UK-based author Leila Aboulela has been one of the leading voices in upholding Islam itself as a major foundation of (female) identity. Aboulela has been generally celebrated for her ‘insider’ depiction of Muslim cultures in the West as well as in the Arab world. One of her more celebrated novels is her debut work, The Translator (1999), which revolves around the experiences of Sammar, a young Sudanese widow working as a translator of Arabic at a Scottish universitywhere she eventually falls in love with her employer, Rae, a Scottish expert on Islam. The drama here is that, in spite of being very sympathetic towards Islamic culture and religion in a time of already rising Islamophobia in the West, Rae is a non-Muslim. And so their love cannot be consummated. In spite of the apparent similarities between Aboulela’s and Ali’s plotsthe Muslim woman tempted to break boundaries to fulfil her desiresThe Translator offers a more celebratory and ultimately empowering image of the Muslim woman. At no point does the protagonist feel suffocated by the local meanings of her religion, as Brick Lane seems to suggest. Quite the opposite: Islam offers her a solid frame through which she can interpret her experiences and regulate her life far away from home. This begs the question about the implied reader of The Translator in contrast to Brick Lane. Aboulela’s novel has been read both as a depiction of the inner life of a Muslim woman for a non-Muslim audience, as well as a narrative of personal journey that is beyond religion and cultural affiliation, and can thus be positively received by both Muslim and non-Muslim readers.14 Whichever way one chooses to receive it, The Translator indisputably foregrounds the protagonist’s Muslim background, which constitutes her very sense of self. At the same time, British culture itself is relegated to the background, against which the exceptionality of the protagonist can be drawn more clearly. In spite of her strong faith, Sammar is often willing to stretch the boundaries of her religion because of her feelings for Rae: she even speaks openly about her desire to marry him and the impossibility of doing so because of his status as a non-Muslim. Her decision to leave Scotlandand thus also Raeshows determination; and in this sense, although she ultimately ‘submits’ to the rules of her religion (returning to the meaning of ‘submission’ carried by the word ‘Islam’), she does not appear submissive. Nor is the issue of unveiling ever open to debate in the narrative, quite the opposite: by complimenting it 14 On the reception of Aboulela’s novel, see C.E. Rashid, “Academia, Empathy and Faith: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator.” On the interpretation of the novel as a personal journey rather than a postcolonial politically tinged narrative, see Shirin Edwin, “(Un) Holy Alliances: Marriage, Faith, and Politics in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator.”

170 Sobral as being “secretive,” Rae highlights the seductive potential of the veil. In order to access the object of his desire, Rae must himself submit to the rules of Islam. The couple are granted their happy end when Rae finally converts, not solely because of his love for Sammar, but also because of his love for Muslim cultureand implicitly for Allah himself. The novel suggests an inverse integration: the Western “Orientalist,” as one of the characters labels him, ends up adopting the faith of his beloved, while she retains full allegiance to her culture. For Miriam Cooke, authors like Aboulela are in fact instrumental as a counter-force to the general image of the Muslimwoman: “Muslim women authors are articulating new ways of being strong religious and gendered persons. They want their readers, like the men in their stories, to come to terms with newly empowered women who live their sexuality, their sex, and their religion in sometimes unexpected ways” (Cooke “Deploying the Muslimwoman” 94). The Translator complicates a number of stereotypical assumptions about Islam, not only through the way Sammar lives her religion, but also through the inclusion of many dialogues about the Quran, aspects of religious practice and a critique of the Western tendency to reduce Muslims to the role of a threatening Other. In these two novels, Islam is used differently in order to explore the agency of womenin Ali, Islam constitutes a constraint, in Aboulela a liberating force. My reading of Brick Lane and The Translator contrasts two distinct images of a Muslim woman: whereas Ali relies more on a stereotypical Eurocentric notion of the Muslimwoman whose gender and faith ultimately entail her imprisonment, Aboulela foregrounds Islam itself as a source of personal fulfilment and freedom. Ali thus seems to suggest that feminism can only be expressed through a general rejection (or overcoming) of Muslim traditions, whereas Aboulela tends to lean more towards an Islamic version of feminism that tries to empower women from within the traditionsa topic I will return to below. It is crucial here to recognize also the special context of the characters themselves, and thus the situational questions they are confronted with. Both women were actually raised in a non-Western contextNazneen in Bangladesh, Sammar in Sudanand immigrate to the UK as young adults. This plays a significant role in their relationships to both their culture of origin and the host culture. There is a clear sense of ‘home’ permeating these stories, and that ‘home’ is vehemently not the UK. Indeed, we could say that the dilemma both characters face is whether they can make the UK their new home, and what implications that has for their identities. The novels offer very different answers to that dilemma: while Nazneen’s adherence to the local meanings of Bangladeshi culture fail to support her in the new environment of multicultural London, it is precisely Sammar’s insistence on the local meanings of her Sudanese upbringing

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that ends up being rewarded. This either-or perspective on Islam and freedom constitutes a recurring topic in articulations of female Muslim identity in the UK, as my next case studies illustrate. 2

A Shifting Signifier

Generally speaking, second-generation immigrants face a different set of concerns from the ones outlined above for the characters of Nazneen and Sammar. Born and raised in diasporic communities, they tend to develop a more ambivalent sense of belonging as they position themselves between two cultures. Hence, Stuart Hall concludes that immigrant communities are in fact the ones that live “in translation” (see Hall): they not only move between different languages, but must also translate and negotiate between the home and the host culture, and between the traditions and expectations of their parents and their own experiences. Studying the identity formation and articulation of young British Muslims, sociologist Claire Dwyer found that many interviewees did not identify with being British because they were routinely exposed to racism. At the same time as they may feel rejected by the host culture, second-generation immigrants are frequently under pressure from their parents to uphold the values and traditions of their culture of origin. In diasporic communities this is reinforced by the practice of what Dwyer calls “community policing” (479), whereby especially women tend to become objects of public scrutinyby relatives, neighbours, acquaintances. Significantly, clothes are a very important aspect in this monitoring behavior of the community. As Dwyer puts it, dress becomes an “overdetermined signifier for the identity of young British Muslim women” (481), and particularly what second-generation women wear becomes an indicator of their loyalty to the host or the home culture. These issues form the narrative backbone of the British film Yasmin (2004) by the director Kenneth Glenaan and scriptwriter Simon Beaufoy. It follows the duplicitous existence of the protagonist, Yasmin, who changes her clothes according to the context in which she moves: at home in a community of Pakistani immigrants, she wears traditional Muslim outfits including the hijab; when she leaves for work in a typical northern English community, she changes to Western clothes, most markedly represented by blue jeans. Yasmin’s identity is seriously split: she feels estranged from her father, an Imam in the Muslim community, and she struggles to be accepted by her Western co-workers. Yasmin clearly rebels against many of the principles of her family’s culture: she drives a convertible, refuses to attend service at the mosque, and on several occasions defies her father’s authority. However, she does not fully integrate

172 Sobral into English culture, either: she does not drink alcohol (although she pretends to do so to feel accepted by her coworkers), she is an active member of her Muslim community and sticks to many of the norms of interaction practiced within it, and she ultimately respects her father in spite of disagreements. Yasmin even agrees to marry a distant cousin from Pakistan, though she keeps it strictly official and refuses to change her lifestyle for him. In short, the film presents us with a fragmented character. Her days are neatly regulated between the moment she drives away from her community to work and changes into a Western woman, and the moment she drives back home and turns into a Muslim woman. The change takes place on a hill overlooking the small community, where Yasmin takes off and later puts back on her veil. The convertible also changes between lowered top and raised top depending on the context in which she moves. We see here already two important stages in the transformation of Yasmin. In what appears to be an act of emancipation, she rejects the veil when she moves in a British context The film images suggest that this corresponds to a sense of release, as she drives away in the convertible, listening to loud dance music. A second stage involves the somewhat more reluctant adoption of the veil when she moves within her community, mainly because of the expectations of her father and of neighbours in general. In fact, several scenes show the neighbours practicing “community policing” in Dwyer’s terms, as they keep an attentive eye on everything that happens in each household and also between the home and the street. The most intriguing and challenging stage, however, is the third, when Yasmin opts to wear the hijab in both the British and Pakistani contexts and in fact becomes a pious Muslim. This remarkable transformation deserves a closer examination. After establishing the character’s dilemma, the film goes on to show how the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre changes the lives of everyone within Yasmin’s communityincluding herself. These changes can be summed up under the heading of Islamophobia. In effect, Islamophobia was formally recognized as a type of discrimination by the UN only days prior to 9/11but after this date it was seriously enhanced. As Chris Allen, chairman of the Religions in Britain Research Organisation, observed, after the attacks on the World Trade Centre there was a great tendency in Western media to generalize all Muslims, and to promote the binary ‘with us or against us’ view that indirectly justified Islamophobia by identifying a threat against Western societies and identities (see Allen).15 In 2006, a report by the eumc 15 See also Tahir Abbas, “After 9/11:  British South Asian Muslims, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, and the State.”

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(European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia) observed that Muslims had become more “vulnerable to manifestations of prejudice and hatred in the form of anything from verbal threats through to physical attacks on people and property” (8). Furthermore, anti-Muslim and anti-Islamic expressions had become more extreme, explicit and tolerated. In short, 9/11 had functioned as a catalyst for fear by reaffirming and renewing prejudices against an ‘enemy within.’ This negative construction of Muslims is central in Yasmin. After the 9/11 attacks, we see the protagonist, her family and her community being cornered by State security forces and rejected by the English community. Yasmin becomes a victim of bullying at the hands of her coworkers, her house is brutally raided by the police, her husband and she herself are eventually arrested on the suspicion of terrorism (because they made routine phone calls to Pakistanas Pakistani immigrants tend to do), and as a result of police harassment, her younger brother eventually joins a fundamentalist Islamic group preaching jihad. Yasmin’s last attempt to become integrated into the English community sees her donning a sexually explicit blouse, wearing make-up and, possibly for the first time, drinking large amounts of alcohol at a pub. In spite of, or perhaps because of this attempt to play the stereotypical Englishwoman, she ends up once again being ridiculed and rejected by her coworkers. By mimicking the perceived Western standards of femininity, Yasmin only highlights the gap between her and her coworkers. We could say that, in a way, her coworkers are reacting precisely to the subversive potential of mimicry identified by Homi Bhabha16 drawing even clearer distinctions between themselves as ‘Westerners’ and Yasmin as the Muslim ‘Other.’ For her coworkers, she must remain essentially a representative of the Muslim community, which is collectively held responsible for the 9/11 attacks. This point is made clear to the protagonist at the pub, when she is asked to “apologize” for the terrorist act in the name of her community. In Yasmin we see then the non-Muslim community forging a local meaning that associates Muslims with terror and responds to in-between individuals such as the protagonist with rejection. In fact, by doing so, Yasmin’s co-workers actively reduce her to the single identity of the Muslimwoman, i.e., an individual whose identity is fully dictated by religion, even if they do not apply stereotypes of the oppressed Muslim to her. Shortly after this experience, Yasmin and her husband are arrested and interrogated. In prison, Yasmin is given the Quran to read, and seems to experience a radical turn. She starts praying at home, wearing traditional Muslim 16

Cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 121–131.

174 Sobral attire even when moving among the English and frequenting the Mosque. On the surface, then, she appears to transform into the figure of the Muslimwoman. And yet, it is important to highlight how the film avoids precisely this trap by rooting Yasmin’s decision not in pressure from her own Muslim community (which would amount to oppression) but in a political decision of sorts. If we return to the opposing key topics discussed when looking at the novels by Ali and Aboulela, we can clearly see that Yasmin has undergone a shift in her perception and experience of Islam, precisely because her identity as a British Muslimwhich could be regarded as the situational question that has determined her fragmented selfno longer seems to apply. Yasmin’s decision for the veil can be seen not only as a matter of faith, but also as a political statement and an act of solidarity with her community, which has been forcefully marginalized by external events. The film suggests that the radicalization of Muslims in Europe cannot be detached from the rise of Islamophobia. Which begs the question: who is actually failing at integration here? Apart from its critical perspective on the difficult relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in Britain, the film also succeeds in providing a nuanced look at the female protagonist’s bond with her culture, including religion. At no point does Yasmin’s return to a more devout practice of Islam appear to be a surrender or a sign of a weak will. Indeed, she even divorces her husband after deciding to become a practicing Muslim. Thus she retains a strong sense of self, of her wishes and her rights, and avoids the reductive identity of the Muslimwoman. The film manages to decouple the notion of women’s rights from a narrow understanding of feminism as a strictly Western ideal. This is even more obvious in the final example I wish to present here. 3

Symbol of Emancipation

Sukina Douglas and Muneera Rashida perform as Poetic Pilgrimage, a duo of rappers, spoken word artists and feminist activists. They have so far released two mixtapes with songs that focus on their own experience as young Muslim women, in the UK and in the world at large. They also perform poetry on stage, organize cultural events, and give workshops on themes such as “21st Century Muslimah.” A documentary film about Poetic Pilgrimage, called Hip Hop Hijabis (directed by Mette Reitzel), was screened in 2015 on Al Jazeera. Sukina and Muneera are second-generation immigrants themselves. Both children of Jamaican immigrants, they were born and raised in Bristol, and converted to Islam in 2005. Even though they have adopted many precepts of Islam, they have manifestly refused to be contained by the narrow frame of

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the Muslimwoman. In fact, one of their main goals has been to counter the notion of Islam as a misogynistic religion, precisely by celebrating the power of women within Islam. This comes across clearly in the spoken word poem “Aborted Daughters,” performed by Sukina Abdul Noor.17 The speaker positions herself in opposition to a certain manifestation of Islam, whose validity she questions. The treatment of women as inferior, and their banishment from the public sphere are perceived as actual violations of the precepts of Islam, and so the poem, the performance itself becomes a manifesto against the so-called “thieves” who have given Islam a bad name. The speaker permits herself to make such bold statements because she sees herself at the centre of a regeneration of Muslim faithas the final stanzas of the poem indicate: We – We represent a new generation Who crave true revelation Brave enough to face the revolution And it is my humble mission To use these words as a form of activism And I am indifferent to the opinions of men and evil women Who thought that our presence, our purpose and our plight may cause offence No offence but We didn’t go through slavery We didn’t go through the Civil Rights, We didn’t go through Apartheid or race riots For my voice to be kept quiet (…) La ilaha illallah Muhammadur resulullah La ilaha illallah Muhammadur resulullah La ilaha illallah Muhammadur resulullah I believe there is no God but Allah and Mohammed is His messenger Of this faith I am a member And only to Allah do I surrender Ameen It is worth discussing these lines in terms of the local meanings that are evoked and negotiated by the speaker. Apart from the strong association between 17

Poetic Pilgrimage, “Aborted Daughters.”

176 Sobral revelation and revolution, which clearly gives Muslim faith a political dimension, what is notable here is also the very inclusive ‘We’ that appears in this final stanza. Slavery in the New World, the Civil Rights movement in the USA, the Apartheid and race riots in South Africaall these become part of the speaker’s background experience. It is to this wide and effectively translocal community of victims of oppression that she adds her voice. Even if some Muslims suffered all these forms of oppression, these are not exclusively Muslim experiences. And that is precisely the point. The speaker uses her faith to pledge allegiance to political movements bent on fighting racism. Thereby she also shifts the audience’s attention to wider issues that concern not only Muslim communities, but many other groups as wellin the West and in the world at large. We could call this a form of Muslim cosmopolitanism that counters more widespread notions of Islam as a hermetic, exclusivist religion.18 In the closing lines of the poem the speaker actually performs a Shahada (or ‘testimony’) on stage. These words are recited by Muslims as a common statement of faith, and are proffered by converts when they officially embrace Islam. By closing the poem with these words, and by highlighting her faith in Allah only, the speaker questions the authority of anyone who may oppose her stance. In a way, she grants herself ultimate authority by aligning herself with God. The gesture is of course highly dramatic, and it makes more sense if we read it against the foil of Islamic feminism. As Cooke has pointed out, this form of feminism results from the diffusion of ideas and perspectives through electronic media, education and modernization. Particularly the ability to connect with other women across national boundaries has created among Muslim women a transnational sense of belonging and resistance. According to Cooke, Islamic feminists have a “double commitment: to a faith position on the one hand, and to women’s rights both inside and outside the home on the other” (“Multiple Critique” 93). They form alliances worldwide and promote the formation of a new community. And yet, their emphasis remains on religious identity. In her book Women Claim Islam, Cooke argues: It is important to note that acquiescence with traditional gender roles and behavioural expectations at one moment does not necessarily contradict resistance at anotherand sometimes even the samemoment. Drawing on the symbolic capital provided by the Qur’an and Traditions, 18

On the cosmopolitan outreach of Islam, particularly in the form of the ‘ummah’ (the international community of Muslims), see especially Miriam Cooke and Bruce B. Lawrence, “Introduction.”

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or the authenticated sayings and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad that form the basis of Islamic law, some Muslim Arab feminists are examining the gendered formation of Islamic epistemology. They do not question the sacrality of the Qur’an, but they do examine the temporality of its interpretations. (Cooke xi) We can see a similar attitude in the performances of Poetic Pilgrimage. The way they present themselves on stage wearing the hijab, their tendency to quote or refer to passages and names from the Qur’an, but also their commitment to a larger community that transcends a more narrow perception of Islam provide a fitting example of Islamic feminism as a “contingent, contextually determined strategic self-positioning,” as Cooke puts it (Women Claim Islam 59). We see here at play once again the local meanings and situational questions that according to postcolonial gender studies are so important to consider when addressing women’s experiences and attitudes beyond the parameters established by the West. Poetic Pilgrimage are the product of a global culture: they have experienced migration in many forms (from their Afro-Caribbean ancestors to their parents’ move to the UK), they have opted for a specific religious identity without subscribing to the more conservative interpretations of its scriptures, and they use their performances to link up different experiences of subalternity based on gender, colonial, political or economic domination. Their performances refuse to fit into neatly delimited categories such as the oppressed Muslimwoman, the Western feminist, or even the multicultural Briton. By extending their loyalties beyond national, cultural and religious boundaries, they emphasize that local meanings can be continually negotiated according to shifting situational questions and different contexts, without endangering their sense of self or even their belonging to a specific community (the poem’s “We”). 4

Conclusion

Focusing on the Muslimwoman, a trope that features prominently in contemporary Islamophobic discourse and which itself can be traced back to the colonial era, this chapter has explored different representations of female Muslim figures in contemporary British culture. My aim has been to illustrate the extent to which contemporary cultural products engage with the reductive notion of the Muslimwoman as defined by Miriam Cooke, and the modes of emancipation offered by these different texts. These range from Ali’s celebration of a Western image of multiculturalism to Poetic Pilgrimage’s framing of

178 Sobral Islam as a cosmopolitan political project. The authors and artists studied here offer radically different ways of perceiving Muslim female characters in the West; the way they frame these characters depends on the specific questions that are addressed and on the context of their production, performance and reception. While Monica Ali uses the trope of the un-free Muslimwoman to essentially celebrate hybridity (encapsulated in the moment when the protagonist steps into the skating rink wearing a sari), Leila Aboulela subverts the very notion of an oppressed Muslimwoman by presenting a strong-willed female character whose devotion to Islam is rewarded in the end. Ali’s and Aboulela’s works present distinct approaches to questions of immigration and integration. In the film Yasmin, the dichotomy between the West and its Muslim other is foregrounded in the context of the aftermath of 9/11 in Britain, which forces all characters to reevaluate the local meanings they attribute to Muslim culture and rituals. The female protagonist ends up with a more political understanding of the value of the veiland thus, ironically, the very act of veiling becomes a means of positioning herself against the stereotypical image of the Muslimwoman forced upon her by mainstream English society. A similar attitude is explored by the rappers and poets Poetic Pilgrimage, who use their public image as Muslim female performers to challenge a number of stereotypes connected to the Muslimwoman and propagated both by conservative Muslims and more prejudiced Western audiences. In a proud gesture reminiscent of Yasmin’s adoption of the veil towards the end of the eponymous film, Poetic Pilgrimage present the veil as the very source of women’s emancipation. At the same time, the rappers and poets also promote a transcultural notion of Islam, forging bonds with other oppressed groups in the history of Western colonialism and imperialism, who have experienced slavery, racial segregation in the USA and Apartheid. This is an effective means of countering the tendency to isolate the Muslimwoman as the manifestation of a ‘backward’ culture and faith. If there is one unifying aspect to all of the above-mentioned examples, it is that these cultural products are not only firmly set in a Western context, the UK specifically, but that they directly address audiences in the West. In this sense, although Islam and more specifically the Muslim female figure are at the centre of these representations, the underlying theme is in fact the complex interconnections between Muslims and non-Muslims in the West. Indeed, the acute concern about the veiled Muslimwoman that permeates Western culture at present attests essentially to the ongoing influence of a specifically Western discourse about the veil. This is important argument was made by Leila Ahmed as early as 1992. According to her, by embedding the veil so strongly

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within “geopolitical discourses” during colonialism, Western culture itself prepared the ground for the veil’s “emergence as a symbol of resistance.” In that sense, the veil as expression of otherness is both a construct of the West and a confirmation of the “hegemonic diffusion of the discourses of the West in our age” (Ahmed 304). Despite the more extreme attempts in both Western and Islamic circles to separate the West from Islam and to proclaim the existence of an unbridgeable chasm between them, both cultures are inextricably entwined. The Muslim woman (here markedly as two separate terms), as a complex figure who finds expression in different contexts and situations, offers a particularly striking way of engaging with the discourses of the West because her representation highlights how those discourses are being negotiated and transformed by globalization.

References

Abbas, Tahir. “After 9/11: British South Asian Muslims, Islamophobia, Multiculturalism, and the State.” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences, vol. 21, no. 3, 2004, pp. 26–38. Aboulela, Leila. The Translator. Grove/Atlantic, 2007. Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. Yale UP, 1992. Akhter, A.F.M. Maswood. “Politics of Right to Write and Monica Ali’s Fiction.” Asiatic, vol. 6, no. 1, June 2012, pp. 95–112. Al-Mahadin, Salam. “Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Making (Non)sense of FEMEN’s Ethico-Aesthetics in the Arab World.” Women’s Studies in Communication, vol. 38, no. 4, 2015, pp. 388–392. Ali, Monica. Brick Lane. Random House, 2004. Allen, Chris. “Islamophobia and Its Consequences.” European Islam:  Challenges for Public Policy and Society, edited by Samir Amghar, Amel Boubekeur, and Michael Emerson, Centre for European Policy Studies, 2007, pp. 144–167. Bachmann, Helena. “Will Switzerland Vote to Ban Minarets on Mosques?” Time, November 3, 2009. content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1933893,00.html. Accessed January 21, 2016. Baker, Paul, Costas Gabrielatos, and Tony McEnery. Discourse Analysis and Media Attitudes: The Representation of Islam in the British Press. Cambridge UP, 2013. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Cooke, Miriam. “Multiple Critique:  Islamic Feminist Rhetorical Strategies.” Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2000, 91–110.

180 Sobral Cooke, Miriam. “Deploying the Muslimwoman.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, vol. 24, no. 1, Spring 2008, pp. 91–99. Cooke, Miriam. Women Claim Islam:  Creating Islamic Feminism Through Literature. Routledge, 2004. Cooke, Miriam, and Bruce B. Lawrence. Introduction. Muslim Networks from Hajj to Hip Hop, edited by Miriam Cooke, and Bruce B. Lawrence, U of North Carolina P, 2005, pp. 1–30. Dwyer, Claire. “Negotiating Diasporic Identities:  Young British South Asian Muslim Women.” Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 23, no. 4, 2000, pp. 475–486. Edwin, Shirin. “(Un)Holy Alliances:  Marriage, Faith, and Politics in Leila Aboulela’s The Translator.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, Spring 2013, pp. 58–79. Eileraas, Karina. “Sex(t)ing Revolution, Femen-izing the Public Square: Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, Nude Protest, and Transnational Feminist Body Politics.” Signs, vol. 40, no. 1, Autumn 2014, pp. 40–52. European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Islamophobia. “Muslims in the European Union: Racism and Islamophobia.” EUMC, 2006. Fowler, Corinne. “Journalists in Feminist Clothing: Men and Women Reporting Afghan Women during Operation Enduring Freedom, 2001.” Journal of International Women’s Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 2007, pp. 4–19. Grewan, Inderpal, and Caren Kaplan. “Postcolonial Scholarship.” A Companion to Gender Studies, edited by Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Hall, Stuart. “The question of cultural identity.” Modernity and Its Futures, edited by Stuart Hall, David Held, and Anthony G. Mcgrew, Polity, 1992, pp. 274–316. Kahf, Mohja. Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. Texas UP, 1999. Lea, Richard, and Paul Louis. “Local Protests Over Brick Lane Film.” The Guardian, July 2006. www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/17/film.uk. Accessed January 21, 2016. McLoughlin, Sean, William Gould, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, and Emma Tomalin. Writing the City in British Asian Diasporas. Routledge, 2014. Poetic Pilgrimage. “Aborted Daughters.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYl0SGC2VL4. Accessed January 21, 2016. Rashid, C.E. “Academia, Empathy and Faith: Leila Aboulela’s The Translator.” Postcolonialism and Islam: Theory, Literature, Culture, Society and Film, edited by Geoffrey Nash, Kathleen Kerr-Koch, and Sarah Hackett, Routledge, 2013, pp. 131–141. Sian, Katy, Ian Law, and S. Sayyid. “The Media and Muslims in the UK.” Consultado a 15, 2012, pp. 229–272. Shaw, Stephen, and Sue Bagwell. “Ethnic Minority Restaurateurs and the Regeneration of ‘Banglatown’ in London’s East End.” Selling Ethnic Neighborhoods: The Rise

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of Neighborhoods as Places of Leisure and Consumption, edited by Volkan Aytar, and Jan Rath, Routledge, 2012, pp. 34–51. Wodak, Ruth. The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean. Sage, 2015. Young, Robert. Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2003. Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youssef. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology. Lexington Books, 2005.

­c hapter 10

Crime and the Censor—the Production and Reception of Crime Fiction in Apartheid and Post-apartheid South Africa Elizabeth le Roux 1

Introduction: Popular Fiction and Ideology

Crime fiction, some say, is “printed trash and poisonous scum” (Cronjé et al. 66), and readers need to be protected from it. Such views, prevalent since the birth of this genre in the 19th century and continuing into the 21st century, show that the reading of popular fiction attracts strong moral judgements. In spite of shifts in social mores and dominant values, popular fiction remains a site of ideological contestation. Crime fiction in particular holds an ambiguous social position, and has done since its first tentative experiments. On the one hand, it is considered formulaic and lowbrow, but on the other hand it has been produced by many very gifted and celebrated authors. It is both intensely localised and yet portable between languages, settings, periods and cultures. It is profit-driven and sales-focused, but also capable of complex social critiques and analysis. And it has been condemned by critics and censors in powerful positions, but remains immensely popular and widely read. To ignore the political aspects of popular fiction in favour of the aesthetic is in itself an ideological position. The reflection and reproduction of ideology in popular fiction, as Stuart Hall notes, refers to “the mental frameworks—the languages, concepts, categories, imagery of thought, and the systems of representation—which different classes and social groups deploy in order to make sense of, define, figure out and render intelligible the way society works” (26). Hall based his theories of ideology on Antonio Gramsci’s views of hegemony, which he defined as the relations of domination which are not visible as such, and yet reflect and support the dominant social values: “ ‘Culture’ in Gramsci is the sphere in which ideologies are diffused and organized, in which hegemony is constructed and can be broken and reconstructed” (Forgacs 216). This way of thinking about popular culture has been profitably applied to popular fiction, to examine how such fiction both replicates and supports “a whole view of the world, one shared by the people who become the central audience to buy, read and find comfort in

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a particular variety of crime fiction” (Knight 2). A key angle for approaching popular or ‘formula’ fiction is thus to examine “the coding of ideologies within the general ideological system which operates in society” (Birch 95). According to the conventions of the genre, crime fiction privileges authority and order; it reveals how the state sees, and talks about, crime. For instance, is crime being seen as random and external or pervasive and endemic? Does it disturb a pre-existing state of equilibrium, or is it rather a symptom of social chaos? The conventions of the genre thus echo (and at times disrupt) the dominant social ideologies, but significantly how we (as authors, readers, and critics) view crime and criminals says something about our ideologies and how power is distributed in our societies. Most analysts agree that the predominant ideology in popular fiction is that crime symbolises evil, and must be condemned and stamped out to preserve the established social order. In traditional crime fiction, the detective is portrayed as an authority figure who puts things right, while the crimes committed are depicted as detached from their social context (this makes the criminal a deviant, and not the product of a specific social milieu) (Cavender 85–86). Moreover, this is seen as a natural belief: “The crime genre obscures its penchant for order and control behind a style so realistic that its ideology seems natural and appropriate” (81). But this is in fact a repressive ideology, that seeks to blame ‘crime’ for a variety of social ills, and to pin hopes for a better future on catching criminals. In fact, some critics have argued that crime fiction is inherently conservative, that “detective fiction helps interpellate its readers into conformity with the hegemony of white, male, middle-class values in Western capitalist-industrialist societies” (Rzepka 21). More recent crime fiction, and its analysis, links crime more closely to the social order from which it emerges. From this perspective, crime fiction is often seen as questioning the social order and authority, and situating these in very specific contexts rather than portraying them as universal. Indeed, this cultural embedding of criminal activities, it is argued, is precisely what makes crime fiction from such a wide range of contexts popular throughout the world: they are not seen as universal or outside of their time and place; and thus “what is useful about such culturally embedded works is what they tell us about the book trade, the market place, the reading public and society generally” (Sutherland 3). This contribution will examine crime fiction within a very particular cultural and social context: that of South Africa, during the period of the apartheid government. In such repressive contexts, the ideological stance of the ruling elite and its dominant values become easier to discern than in more fluid social situations. Moreover, an ideological debate around the role and value of crime fiction was quite intense in apartheid South Africa, and elements of the main

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ways of thinking about crime fiction can still be traced to seemingly aesthetic debates about crime fiction today. In this essay, I will examine the ideological stance taken against crime fiction by the apartheid authorities, which can be seen most clearly in studies of so-called “undesirable” literature from the 1950s and the censorship or banning of works. I will then compare the ideological shifts in the work of an author who spans both the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, Wessel Ebersohn, before concluding with an assessment of the continuing appeal of the highbrow/lowbrow divide. Why, in the 21st century, is there still recourse to such binaries and a continued dismissal of crime fiction as ‘trash?’ 2

Censorship in South Africa

The political sanctions associated with government censorship form part of the wider context of knowledge production as well as publishing. As far back as the 1700s, the Dutch authorities in the South African colonies prevented publications that they considered subversive, while a century later the British authorities suspended publications for contravening a stipulation “not to publish material of a political nature” (Oliphant 111). The early censorship of newspapers and incidence of state intervention, as Oliphant points out, set the pattern for the future. He argues that, “[t]‌hroughout the history of South Africa, and with different degrees of intensity, the State would intervene to safeguard the interests of minority rule” (111). This element of state (and minority) security remained a significant pillar of the dominant ideology until the end of the apartheid period. Other important ideological elements revolved around concepts of morality or obscenity. The first South African censorship legislation may be found in the Obscene Publications Act (1892) of the Cape of Good Hope, which aimed “to prevent the Sale or Exhibition of Indecent or Obscene Books, Pictures, Prints and other Articles” (1). In an echo of what was to come, the Act did not create an enforcing body but rather established powers of search and seizure: the Resident Magistrate could authorise any “constable or police officer to enter in the daytime” into any house, shop, room or “other place,” using force where necessary, and to “search for and seize” any indecent or obscene publications found. Further legislation, controlling the importing and distribution of publications, supported this authority. Before Union in 1910, each of the colonies making up South Africa was governed by its own legislation in this regard. This legislation was followed in 1931 by the Entertainments (Censorship) Act, which aimed “to regulate and control the public exhibition and advertisement

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of cinematograph films and of pictures and the performance of public entertainments,” evidently in response to the distribution of new media channels and formats. The Act also created a Board of Censors with powers to approve or reject films. Ellison Kahn (286) notes that “[l]‌ittle use was made of the statutory powers to suppress locally-produced books or other publications.” However, because this Act focused on the control of films and public entertainment, rather than publications, it was later felt that it should be expanded, to find ways and means of combating “the evil of indecent, offensive or harmful literature” (286). After the nationalist government came to power in 1948, and began implementing the policies of separate development now known as apartheid, the notion of controlling publications that contravened the dominant moral values was raised again. A commission was thus established in the 1950s to investigate the matter, under Professor Geoffrey Cronjé of the University of Pretoria. Cronjé—a sociologist and criminologist who became notorious for his justifications of apartheid—was tasked with investigating the output and reception of what were termed “undesirable” publications. The members of the Cronjé Commission examined the state of “indecent, offensive and harmful literature” in South Africa—which they later combined under the term “undesirable” in their 1957 report. Their analysis of locally produced books between 1935 and 1957 revealed a number of “undesirable” elements that contravened the norms they assumed to be generally acceptable. Cronjé would argue in this report that “[t]‌he publishing of undesirable literature amounts to nothing else than abuse of the freedom of publication—for the benefit of the publisher concerned, but to the detriment of the community” (20). This shows a clear concern for the moral decay associated with the reading of certain kinds of books. As Peter McDonald (25) notes, the Cronjé Commission was particularly concerned about the undesirability of thrillers and crime fiction: they argued that, “[t]‌he overwhelming majority of undesirable novels belong to the category which could be termed tales of suspense, namely, the detective or murder novel or story of villainy, or, in other words, the ordinary thriller” (Cronjé et al. 110). Indeed, according to their analysis as many as 26.8% of the titles sold in South Africa in 1951 could be classified as “mysteries” (20), although the authors comment with apparent relief that only a small amount of the “depraved filth” found in mysteries and pocket books was actually published in South Africa because local publishers could not compete financially with publishers in the US and Britain. This commission and its ideological attitudes should be set against the background of the paperback revolution of the early 20th century. This ‘new’

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format imported many of the traditions of pulp magazines—affordability, low production values, and lurid covers—and was aimed at a mass audience to make money for the publisher. This kind of popular fiction or pulp generally is seen as a genre of imaginative reading matter distinguished by mass production, affordability, an intended audience of common as opposed to elite readers, a dependence on formula and genre; and pulp as a literature aimed at the pleasure centers of the reader, primarily concerned with sensation and escape, variously intended to excite, astonish, or arouse. (Server xi) These ‘American-style’ stories spread rapidly to Britain and Australia, among other English-language reading markets, as well as to South Africa. The Cronjé Report describes—and deplores—the American model being replicated in South Africa, and suggests that the importing of American paperbacks was creating a reading public for similar literature in South Africa (111). As a result, they conceded, there is “money certainly [to be] made out of printed trash and poisonous scum” (66). And there is indeed evidence that such works sold widely in South Africa and were extremely popular among readers, not least in public libraries (see e.g. Clark 198). But it was not only the censors who shared this ideology that posited a simplified relationship of direct influence between texts and readers and who were troubled by this concern with the apparent dangers of popular fiction. Cultural studies theorists such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams have been described as promoting working-class culture even while displaying a “strong bias towards literature and literacy and an equally strong moral tone”; Hoggart in particular saw the working class being undermined by a “Candy Floss World” of “thrills and cheap fiction which was somehow bland and sleazy” (Hebdige 360). In South Africa, writers from the opposite side of the political spectrum apparently also shared an ideological concern with the degrading effects of popular fiction. For example, Jack Cope, a Marxist critic and writer, writing in The Guardian in 1951 saw literature as having a high moral purpose. He thus saw contemporary fiction as registering moral decline (“decadence”) and he deplored the disappearance of ‘positive’ characters. Instead, the figures occurring most often as the subjects of fiction were, in his words, “thieves, scoundrels, police sleuths, prostitutes and sexual perverts” (qtd. in Sandwith 204). There is little place for the ambiguity or even complexity of popular fiction in such an approach and it places little agency in the hands of ordinary readers, who are reduced to “consumers.” The dangers of crime fiction, it seems, were

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sufficient to draw together an uneasy ideological alliance among otherwise sworn enemies—even if they may not have realised it themselves. 3

Banned Books

The Cronjé Commission’s 1957 report was instrumental in shaping apartheid-era censorship legislation, in terms of which books could be banned post-publication and removed from bookshelves. The vast majority of these were international titles; the kinds of American books that were regularly banned in South Africa under the Customs Acts were mostly crime novels and thrillers. A few examples show the kind of work that was of concern to Cronjé and the Commission on Undesirable Publications. The first was a group of “tough gangster writers” like Mickey Spillane, Nat Karta, Ace Capelli or Nick Perelli. For instance, almost all of Perelli’s works in the 1950s were banned in South Africa on moral grounds. One example is A Blonde for Burial, published in the US in 1952 and banned in South Africa in 1956. Perelli was not, in fact, the name of an actual author, but a pseudonym for a group of authors working for the publisher Tempest, and later the imprints Scion and Milestone—it was a series or brand name created by the publisher as a vehicle for its mass consumption crime fiction. Lad Panek suggests that “it was a form that proliferated from the top down: people in the publishing industry decided to write and publish detective stories rather than detective stories rising from independent writers” (55). Publishers like Scion regularly came under fire in the US for portraying obscenity, violence and ‘gangsterism’ in their works, and destruction orders were issued against their books, leading to a loss of sales and thus revenue. But, with sales of 25,000 to 40,000 copies of a single title within a very short period of time, the so-called “mushroom” or “gangster” publishers continued to commission streams of similar work (Holland). The Perelli example shows that the publisher should not just be seen as an intermediary between writer and reader; rather, the publisher plays a highly interventionist role in commissioning and creating books and in matching writers and texts with readers. A second example of books banned is the kind of pulp fiction written by James Hadley Chase, Jack Iams or Vin Packer. This consisted of somewhat violent murder mysteries, with a good helping of sex. Vin Packer (the pseudonym of Marijane Meaker) is somewhat of an anomaly, as her popular crime novels were considered psychologically dense and well-received critically: it is argued that “Her probing accounts of the roots of crime are richly detailed snapshots of their times, unconventional, intensely readable, and devoid of heroes,

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villains, or pat solutions” (Lovisi 36). Nonetheless, her works were all banned in South Africa, probably largely due to their combination of crime and sexuality. Packer was wont to include lesbian scenes in her works, which cannot have been popular with the conservative ethos of the South African censors. The even more violent and sexualised work of a few black genre publishers was also, inevitably, banned in South Africa, with the result that few locally have read classics of the African-American pulp genre such as Donald Goines or Iceberg Slim. Race ideologies, in other words, drastically limited the depiction (or acceptance of the depictions) of non-white characters—a clear example of the abstract ruling ideology being expressed in concrete terms through the censorship boards. Attempts at subverting this ideological stricture had to be downplayed, subtle and often ironic. As Maureen Reddy (4) has noted of crime fiction in the United States, there is a great deal that “significant absences can tell us about the ideology at work in popular fiction.” The “significant absence” of black crime fiction in South Africa has only really begun to be filled since the end of the apartheid era. These “pulp” novels were not considered trash in South Africa alone, especially after the highly publicised trials of Hank Janson in 1954 in the USA: Gangster novels were poison in the new climate. Popular writers like Ace Capelli, Duke Linton, “Griff,” Brett Vane, Nat Karta, Nick Perelli— mostly house names used on sex-and-violence novels of dubious quality—were consigned to the obituary desk. When publishers did produce crime thrillers, the covers, language and action were toned down compared with what had gone before. Wives, servants and fourteen-yearold schoolgirls looking for thrills would have to get them elsewhere. (holland 217) This quote is not intended itself to make a value judgement, but to indicate the prevailing patronising and disapproving attitudes towards mass-market crime fiction. Notably, as the quote shows, such mass-market crime fiction was being produced for exactly the marginal audience that the dominant elites sought to protect through legislation and control—women, the working classes, and the youth. In South Africa, this protectionist stance was extended to the so-called “non-white” population as well. How did local publishing houses position themselves and operate in this context? The consequences for South African authors and publishers only arose some decades later, after the translation of the recommendations of the Cronjé Commission into legislation. From this report and the ensuing debate on what was “undesirable,” emerged the first apartheid-era censorship

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legislation, the Publications and Entertainment Act, No 26 of 1963. The Act created a Publications Control Board, which had the authority to prohibit “undesirable” publications. Analysts have noted that the two main targets of censorship were obscene and political publications, although the literature tends to highlight political factors (see e.g. Du Toit 1981; Hachten and Giffard 1984). They also note the unsophisticated approach to banning by the Board, especially in the decade between 1963 and 1974, when “the authorities appeared to select targets on the basis of title keywords such as ‘black’, ‘socialism’, and ‘revolt’ ” (Merrett 7). In effect, the Board used intellectuals and other “expert” witnesses to legitimise their determination of what was undesirable and what was not, augmenting the “juridical interpretation of canonical judgements,” with supposedly “objective” laws of aesthetics; to discriminate permanent value from the ephemeral and the worthless (Ross 227). In terms of the 1963 Act and the revised 1974 Act, popular fiction fell foul of the provision of being found “indecent or obscene or … offensive or harmful to public morals.” But in addition, the forms to be filled in by Publications Control Board included direct reference to the undesirable nature of crime fiction (Publications and Entertainments Act): 2. References to pages on which appear passages considered to be indecent, obscene or objectionable in terms of the Act. (a) Crime and the technique of crime (b) Lawlessness, murder and sadism (c) … This would appear to suggest that the majority of crime fiction titles may have been banned, on the basis that they appeared to promote “undesirable” elements of lawlessness. However, decisions about crime fiction appear to have been inconsistent. This was even more marked after the revision of the legislation in 1974, which introduced more leeway for the censors to consider literary merit when assessing potentially undesirable titles. Peter McDonald notes: Their [the Publications Control Board’s] belief that mass-market genre fiction was not literature, for instance, which influenced their decisions to ban novels by Wilbur Smith (Heinemann), John Gordon Davis (Michael Joseph), and Stuart Cloete (Collins) on moral grounds, also informed their rulings against anti-apartheid political thrillers like Wessel Ebersohn’s Store up the Anger (Gollancz, 1980) and Andrew McCoy’s The Insurrectionist (Secker, 1978). (McDonald 117) In other words, the division between highbrow and lowbrow literature was inconsistently applied, although that was the framing for such decisions.

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An analysis (using Peter McDonald’s database, Jacobsen’s Index of Objectionable Literature, and the Beacon for Freedom of Expression website) of the crime fiction titles published in English in South Africa or by South African authors during this period shows that few local crime writers were actually banned or censored. Even in Afrikaans, which was the main source of concern for the Cronjé Commission, as it was being “infiltrated” by the American models, little of what was locally published was actually banned, even if some titles were found to be “undesirable” in terms of Cronjé’s survey. Various authors had their titles submitted for consideration by the Board, usually either by Customs or the book trade, but some escaped with no bannings at all. Donald Swanson’s The Freedom Killers (Peter Davies, 1961) was banned in 1961 (i.e. prior to the new 1963 Act being enacted), although this ban was lifted in 1985. Swanson, better known as a film producer and director, wrote a collection of short stories, Highveld, Lowveld and Jungle, which was published by Dassie Books in 1956, and featured a story titled “Murder in the Game Reserve.” The Freedom Killers was published in London rather than South Africa, probably because of its subject matter—the blurb describes it as “a tense story of racial and personal tensions in South Africa, raw, shocking, at times brutal and yet entirely probable.” As mentioned by McDonald, Andrew McCoy’s The Insurrectionist (Secker & Warburg, 1979) was banned on both moral and political grounds, and condemned in the government mouthpiece The Citizen as “a blueprint for black revolution” (Posner). His African Revenge of the following year (Secker & Warburg, 1980) was also banned. The latter title’s banning was lifted as late as 1989, but an age restriction was imposed (no under 18s could read the novel). But his previous novel, Atrocity Week (Sphere, 1978), was not banned, and nor were his later novels. The publishers tended to promote the violence and brutality of McCoy’s works as a selling point, and it should be pointed out that they were not particularly critical of apartheid policies. During the 1980s, some of Colin Ainsworth Sharp’s titles (published by WH Allen) were banned, although all were considered. Ainsworth Sharp wrote thrillers similar to those of Wilbur Smith, but while a title like Birthright (1982) was passed, Borderline (1983) was banned just the following year. Similarly, most of David Stone’s novels were banned (such as A New Friend, which even the blurb described as “racy,” Corgi, 1965), while some were passed. The Canadian author John Peter’s Along that Coast (1969), a love story and murder mystery set in South Africa, was banned, probably because of its unflattering references to National Party supporters; as were Peter Driscoll’s The Wilby Conspiracy (Macdonald 1972)  and Pieter Niesewand’s A Member of the Club (described on the blurb as “a chilling and prophetic novel of apartheid’s last

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stand,” Secker & Warburg, 1979), while other titles by the same authors escaped the censor’s hammer. One of South Africa’s most acclaimed crime writers, James McClure, left the country in protest against the apartheid government’s policies. His first novel, The Steam Pig, was published by Gollancz in 1971 and won the Gold Dagger award. The cover of the first edition highlights the author’s authority and authentic voice: his “unique position” to describe “verismo police procedure” in apartheid South Africa. This work nonetheless escaped banning, in spite of being somewhat critical of the security forces. In fact, only one of McClure’s novels was banned—The Sunday Hangman (Macmillan, 1977)—probably because it discussed capital punishment and prison conditions, while “the paperback edition … was banned because the publisher foolishly included on the cover words to the effect that it was a stinging indictment of the apartheid system” (Lockwood 441). McClure traced his inspiration to write crime fiction to the “neutrality of the crime story” and the potential to reach a wide audience (180). In spite of this attempt at neutrality, international reception of McClure’s work focuses on his socio-political critique: “McClure has chosen the vehicle of the mystery novel, more exactly the ‘police procedural,’ to examine the effects of prejudice upon his native land” (Lockwood 440). This implies the use of crime fiction as a vehicle for social protest, precisely because “the mystery novel reaches a wider and largely different audience than ‘political’ novels such as those of Alan Paton, Nadine Gordimer, and André Brink” (441). Ravan Press, David Philip and Ad Donker, some of the best-known oppositional publishers, all produced works of crime fiction, while Gollancz in London was also associated with progressive and anti-apartheid publishing. Thus, even though commentators like Green (209) suggest that the detective story was not “a viable form of oppositional writing,” this genre was also used for the purposes of social commentary. This example supports the view that mass culture is not automatically either progressive or conservative, and that it need not be stereotyped as such. Some of these crime writers whose work was not banned include Jon Burmeister, Joy Packer, and the queen of local crime fiction, June Drummond. Drummond considered herself a liberal, but tended to steer clear of politics in her novels. She says her first novel was “anti-apartheid in a mild, beginnerish way” and believed that that was why it appealed to Victor Gollancz, who supported the anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggles. “But,” she went on, “publishers switched off on Africa for a long time; they felt that critics and readers heaved a sigh when they picked up a book about apartheid” (qtd. in Von Klemperer). A number of these novels dealt with apartheid only in a contextual sense—it was the background against which a crime was committed, not an ideological framework for the fictional themes.

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Thus, if we look at all the titles censored and those not censored, there seem to be few elements or commonalities that can be extracted to show why certain titles would have been censored rather than others. The ideological elements that the censors considered were not consistent, but these included aspects of morality, sensationalism and state security, as well as a more inchoate sense of the power of the authorities being called into question or mocked. Lurid cover art, it appears, often resulted in a decision to ban a certain title on the grounds of morality. The title may also have played a role. Criticism of police procedure usually led to censorship on the grounds of state security or political motivations. But there are few discernible patterns. In later years, as the censorship legislation adapted and the people in charge changed, a number of the books that were originally banned had their bans lifted. This reflects a wider shift to the mainstream of all forms of pulp fiction, or a greater acceptance of the values of popular fiction by the broader society. Many crime fiction books have been re-issued with new, non-pulp covers, reflecting a broader readership. A key strategy used by publishers, and indeed book reviewers, was to endorse the literary quality of a work by downplaying its political elements (as David Schalkwyk has shown). 4

Crossing Lines and Periods: the Case of Wessel Ebersohn

An interesting example when examining ideologies in crime fiction is that of Wessel Ebersohn, whose work straddles both ideological divides and the historical periods of the apartheid and post-apartheid eras. Because Ebersohn published books in both periods—with a hiatus of about twenty years in between—it is interesting to consider whether there have been shifts in the ideological angles of his characters and themes, as well as the reception of his work. The initial reception of Ebersohn’s work may be assessed in its treatment by the censors. His first novel, the thriller A Lonely Place to Die, was published by Gollancz in London in 1979, and his second, The Centurion by Ravan Press in Johannesburg just a few months later. These seem to have evaded the censors’ attention, with the paperback edition of A Lonely Place to Die only being considered by them in 1981, after two more contentious works appeared—Store up the Anger (1980) and Divide the Night (1981). The latter was banned because of its detailed depictions of torture at the hands of the Security Police. This work upended dominant views of race and justice, by making the killer an elderly white man and his victims innocent—and sympathetically portrayed—black people. The work was unbanned on appeal, with the board finding that the novel “would not undermine relationships or lead to animosity between white

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and black” (qtd. in “Board Lifts Ban”), although there was some lingering concern about references to sexual excitement during the scenes of torture. While Ebersohn is best known for his crime fiction novels featuring prison psychiatrist Yudel Gordon, he also published a few other stand-alone novels. One of these, Store up the Anger, was banned upon publication by Gollancz in 1980. This was noteworthy because the South African edition had not yet appeared from Ravan Press—it was still being printed for local distribution. Since the plot of Store up the Anger deals with the death of a black liberation leader, Sam Bhengu—the name’s similarity to Steve Biko was not accidental—at the hands of the security police, a banning was probably inevitable. Indeed, the novel was found to contravene several sections of the Publications Control Act, including being offensive to public morals, bringing a section of the community into ridicule and contempt, harming race relations and for being prejudicial to the security of the state. It was criticised for being biased and “non-literary” with its basis in reports on Steve Biko’s death in detention. Store up the Anger, according to this view, “could not be defended as literature [… it] was dangerously seditious because it ‘cold-bloodedly’ used the ‘criterion of fictionality’ to disseminate ‘propaganda’ ” (McDonald 80). However, John Dugard, appealing against the banning order before the Publications Appeal Board, argued:  “It is clearly not a work of non-fiction. It is a novel dealing with fictitious characters. The fact that some of them may resemble real persons, and that the situation may resemble a real situation does not deprive it of its qualities as a work of fiction. It is an historical novel in the best tradition” (qtd. in Stoffberg 48). After this appeal, the work was unbanned, as the appeals board felt it was likely to attract a popular readership, but that it was not of a direct and inciting nature. However, the cover artwork for both editions was still considered undesirable. The local, Ravan Press cover at first featured a work by artist Paul Stopforth, of a naked man, but this was replaced with a text-based cover, with no illustrations. The artwork for the paperback Penguin cover in 1984 was also considered undesirable, as an incitement to black anger. This ruling was also overturned on appeal. While McDonald argues that Ebersohn’s work may have been banned because it was not seen as “literature,” his work was extremely well-received internationally, and he is seen as one of the more “literary” and accomplished of South African crime writers. His descriptions of landscapes, for instance, are often lyrical interludes within his texts, pauses within the plots. With some of his work falling foul of the censors, it seems clear that the ideological stance of Ebersohn’s writing must be considered primarily anti-apartheid. Various characters in his work are anti-apartheid activists, while the main “detective,” the psychiatrist Yudel Gordon, observes the workings of the apartheid state from a

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stance at some remove from the mainstream—he is an English-speaking Jewish character, and thus not part of the “closed circle” of Afrikaners. Ebersohn uses a variety of characters to represent various perspectives in the apartheid era, but these are always filtered to the reader through Gordon’s somewhat critical eyes. Gordon is also shown as berating himself when his own prejudices emerge, both in terms of racial and gender politics (although little attention has yet been paid to Ebersohn’s potentially problematic treatment of gender). Ebersohn’s work has thus largely been received in terms of a “sustained critique of the laager mentality, the ideology and the criminal activities of the Security Branch” (Davis 188). However, while Ebersohn’s works do critique apartheid ideologies, this is not always done in a clear-cut way. Linda Stoffberg (47) argues that his fiction is “deeply engaged in the historical circumstances of its production,” and he thus portrays various apartheid situations as normal. Part of the ambiguity arises because of the portrayal of the police, who are good and bad, and sometimes both at the same time. It has been suggested that crime fiction was not widely written in South Africa under apartheid because of the difficulties in depicting the police as the keepers of order and seekers of truth and there is an expectation that we should find more widespread use of amateur sleuths. But there were in fact a variety of fictional police detectives (James McClure’s Kramer and Zondi for instance), while Ebersohn’s psychiatrist works for the prisons system and closely alongside the fictional Cape Town Central Investigations Bureau. Freek Jordaan, Gordon’s closest associate in the police, is depicted as a good man even when his loyalties to Afrikaners appear to hamper his ability to solve a violent crime. This balanced ideological view was very important to Ebersohn, as John Dugard, appearing for the appeal for Store up the Anger, argued: “Neither side is depicted as perfect—both elements are treated critically. The book presents a balanced picture of the struggle between imperfect authority and imperfect revolutionary forces” (qtd. in “Banned Book”). The refusal to moralise was lauded at the time, but in the post-apartheid context it is sometimes considered tacit support for the apartheid government—a reflection of changing ideologies and how they affect the ways in which readings can change over time. In Ebersohn’s work, Yudel Gordon’s response to living under apartheid is ambivalent and some would say problematic (from Divide the Night): He would have admitted it to no one but himself, but something within [him] was quickened by being part of the apartheid society. He loved the stimulation of it, the threat of the police, the excitement of visits like this one, the troubled presence of Soweto, there was much that would not exist in any more sophisticated society that contributed to

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giving Yudel’s experience of life a sharpness that in a truly free country it would have lacked. He hated the system under which he lived with its attendant exclusiveness and injustices, but he would have lived nowhere else. (­E bersohn 136) In addition, Ebersohn’s depiction of criminals is complicated:  “In Ebersohn’s work the murderer is frequently not the social misfit who temporarily destabilises society (as is the case in traditional detective fiction) but conversely is often a political insider who, through murder, seeks to maintain what is ultimately a corrupt status quo” (Stoffberg 28–29). The banality of his evil characters was commented upon: “Overseas critics have been more struck than we would be by the fact that Ebersohn’s security policemen are neither ciphers nor Machiavellian masters, but rather little men with little names” (Bryer 13). In other cases, the identification of the murderer upends expectations, especially in cases where it is quickly assumed that a black man must be responsible for the murder of a white man, or that that man’s murder must be related to his involvement in a racist gang (both of which situations arise in A Lonely Place to Die, but where the murderer—a woman—turns out to have been far more personally motivated). Another departure from the conventions of crime writing may be seen in Ebersohn’s refusal to provide a neat resolution for the crimes depicted—even when identified, the murderer seldom faces what might be called justice, while others remain wrongfully accused or suffer terrible consequences simply because they cannot support the status quo. This upending of expectations is significant, because it suggests a subversion of the power dynamics of the times. Importantly, this complexity has been retained in Ebersohn’s post-apartheid novels, which still feature Gordon as the detective—The October Killings (2009), Those Who Love Night (2010) and The Top Prisoner of C-Max (2012), as well as the e-book A League of Geniuses (2016). But in the newer set of novels he has been joined by a young black woman, Abigail Bukula, who herself falls into the category of amateur detective as a lawyer in the justice department. The characterisation of Bukula is not always successful, but it is interesting to note Ebersohn’s attempt to include an interracial detective duo in the newer books in his series. The crimes in these novels are not, as before, products of the general pathology of society, but are more often motivated by crimes committed in the apartheid era, often by people who are now in positions of power. The works show some inclination to support the post-apartheid ideology of the “rainbow nation,” although they are highly critical of the government and especially of affirmative action. Those Who Love Night expands the setting to include Zimbabwe and parallels are drawn between the two countries and the continuing impact of the past on the present—in a review, the novel is

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described as being “committed in its anatomy of the unending legacy of apartheid” (“Those Who Love Night”). Can we say that Ebersohn’s work has always been ideologically complex, then? Or is his critique of the new government, just like the old one, the result of a conservative view of society and its potential for transformation? The ideological ambivalence of this case underlines the fruitful space for debate, subversion and unsettling of dominant social discourses that crime fiction opens up. 5

Ideological Debates: a Return to the ‘Genre Snob’ Debate

Another kind of ideological positioning emerges when we consider crime fiction: that of the critics themselves. Edgar Allan Poe, often considered the father of modern crime and detective fiction, experienced a clear disjuncture in the reception of his works by critics, on the one hand, and by readers, on the other: he was critically acclaimed, but not immediately popular with a mass audience. Nowadays, the opposite view is more prevalent, as crime fiction is regularly dismissed as “lowbrow” or “genre fiction,” in spite of receiving huge popular acclaim and sales: “Endemic to the … literary world-view is a rooted dismissal of genre writing—that is to say, popular literature—and a firm belief that any notion of ‘cultural production’ and serious aesthetics are incompatible” (Worpole 5). While the rise of cultural theory may appear to have broken down the distinctions between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” culture, the argument continues to be made that genre fiction is “lowbrow.” Popular fiction of all kinds is often seen as inauthentic, and its consumers continue to be seen as consumers of trash and passive victims of ideologies promoted by mass culture. In other words, crime fiction and other forms of popular fiction are often considered inferior, of little importance and even disposable. There are ongoing debates about the value of mass culture as opposed to elite culture. But Cronjé and his ilk, in contrast, certainly did not trivialise popular fiction. This is because they considered the “likely readership” as a central factor when considering the potential impact of a text. The censors seemed to argue that quality and quantity are irreconcilable—a potentially subversive text was safer if it was only expected to circulate among a limited audience, and in particular a limited audience of educated people. Texts reserved for a limited readership were thus considered ‘safer’ than mass-market fiction, which was considered dangerous and significant because it could potentially reach such a large number of readers. In contrast, the commonly accepted view nowadays appears to

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be that popular fiction is of less importance because of its widespread popularity and apparent adherence to generic norms, while works of great literary fiction are more significant even if they reach only a small, highly educated readership. The difference is linked to both the aesthetic and political purposes of writing: Literature—even when its authors are published by Random House or Harper Collins or any other huge conglomerate in Australia—maintains a rhetorical distance from the world of commerce and the commodity form; while popular fiction sits happily right in the middle of the marketplace … [literature] is often claimed as politically progressive, while popular fiction by contrast is rendered conservative, even reactionary. (gelder 116) Michael Birch reacts against this tradition by examining the ideological ambiguities of so-called formula fiction as a form of cultural production. Nonetheless, and even as studies of popular culture and popular fiction have become more nuanced, a value-based notion of what is “genre fiction” and what is “literary fiction” (what has high or low symbolic capital, as opposed to economic capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) remains common. In South Africa this debate has recently re-emerged in what has come to be called the ‘genre snob’ debate. The key question seeks to balance commercial imperatives with aesthetics. So we find commentary of this sort: Detractors see crime fiction straddling the imperatives of artistic merit and commercial success, and their trenchant question is:  how can a literary category that relies on voyeurism, graphic violence and hyperbole be afforded the status of an academic object of enquiry, alongside ‘great’ literature, particularly in the South African context, where crime is a scourge and justice a thorny notion? (naidu 126) There has also been criticism of “Mike Nicol’s decision to abandon high-literary interrogations of the history of apartheid violence and the agonies of transition in favour of writing popular crime fiction” (Titlestad and Polatinsky 260). Such a description implicitly suggests that the value of “high literature” is ranked higher in terms of legitimacy than “popular crime fiction,” revealing an ongoing adherence to the binary of “popular” vs “elite” forms of fiction. Why has this binary distinction reared its head again, twenty years into the post-apartheid era? Anneke Rautenbach has provided a historicised and well-reasoned summary of the discussion and raises the important issue of

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readership. It may be that the debate has been resuscitated because contemporary critics are raising seemingly aesthetic concerns that in fact still retain an ideological dimension. This may be seen in the fact that these points of view—of crime fiction as either dangerous or trivial, primarily because it appeals to a wide readership—are not in fact entirely opposed. Rather, both depend on a certain perception of readers. And readers, after all, are what determine aesthetics, as well as value, as David Dorsey points out: “In referring to any particular aesthetic, I mean the syndrome of factors within a work of art which govern the audience’s perception of and appreciation of the work” (qtd. in Dorsey 7). The Cronjé Report had a simplistic view of the reader as a passive consumer of literature, and reiterated the need to protect readers, and especially allegedly vulnerable groups such as women, “non-whites” and children. For instance, it argued: “If a child’s taste is formed by love and crime comics, he or she will continue to crave lurid, unreal, violent, and sexy material in print” (Cronjé et al. 51)—and this danger of “moral disarmament” (70) was to be guarded against by any means. In particular, the Commissioners found (arguing that it was a “tenable scientific finding”) that certain types of undesirable publications were more conducive to crime than others, by encouraging contempt for the law and the police, and a taste for brutality and violence. Another danger of “undesirable literature” was that it could undermine the position of the “European” in South Africa: “As the torch-bearer in the vanguard of Western civilization in South Africa, the European must be and remain the leader, the guiding light, in the spiritual and cultural field, otherwise he will inevitably go under” (148). The test for what was undesirable was based on the Hicklin rule, which defined material as obscene if it tended “to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” Cronjé based much of his argument about the possible degrading effects of bad literature on the work of Frederic Wertham. Wertham was a psychiatrist, who claimed in the 1950s to be able to “prove” that violent comic books “caused” crime and delinquent behaviour, especially among the young. But his work has long been dismissed in the scientific community: “Wertham’s methods were anecdotal; he had no control groups; and he mistakenly relied on correlations as proof of causation. But his assertions resonated with a public eager for answers to concerns about crime” (Heins and Bertin). This argument clearly had no actual links to audience research or to studies of the reception or impact of books, despite Cronjé using it for that purpose. Significantly, the “cultural depravity” deplored by Cronjé and the censors is not much different from that criticised by F.R. Leavis in The Great Tradition and by other literary critics. And, crucially, this argument is still in circulation today.

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While support for the moral imperative of great literature has waned, we still find an assumption that popular fiction implies the passive consumption of mass-produced narratives—what Jonathan Rose (394) calls “treating mass audiences as herds of pathetic sheep.” For instance, Titlestad and Polatinsky, in criticising Mike Nicol’s decision to start writing crime fiction, set up a distinction between texts that promote one or the other kind of reading: A ‘writerly’ novel (in the terms Barthes elaborates in S/Z), which compels the reader into active engagement, which makes the reader an agent of historical meaning, is replaced by a ‘readerly’ one, in which all that is required is passive consumption. Readerly texts, one must recall, are always in the service of the status quo. (Titlestad and Polatinsky 269) But the assumption that crime fiction is an essentially passive, conservative medium appears unfounded. As can be seen in the case of Wessel Ebersohn discussed above, his work was not more conservative or less subversive simply because it fell into a specific genre. Most academic criticism of literature, whether popular or literary fiction, is focused on the aesthetics of the text and its seemingly intrinsic qualities rather than the ways in which texts are actually read and circulated. The South African (and increasingly, international as well) audience for crime fiction is wide and diverse. Moreover, while none of the non-fiction genres of politics, history or true crime is as large as the crime genre in terms of sales, there is a significant overlap in terms of audience. This may imply that readers seek crime fiction or thrillers not only for their escapist value, but also for the social commentary which has become inherent in the genre. Leon de Kock remarks on the “economy of prestige” in which writing operates, and says that, “A lot of people who are sympathetic to crime-fiction feel that it is underrated, that it is regarded as ‘genre,’ and a kind of schlock, when it actually does more. Crime-fiction allows you to traverse society across and down” (Chetty). As Janice Radway has shown for another commonly derided form of popular literature, the romance, readers engage with these genres at a variety of levels. Thus, “the reader of popular fiction is actively involved in the making of him- or herself” (McCracken 17). Thus, although an elite notion of what is ‘genre fiction’ and what is ‘literary fiction’—going back to the Cronjé Report and finding its roots in Leavisite thinking—and a concern with what has high or low symbolic capital—as opposed to economic capital—remains common in the South African context, this opposition is in fact redundant. So-called ‘formula’ genres attract some of the most significant authors as well as varied readerships. Moreover, it is redundant because the political and the aesthetic are always entangled, and because

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popular literary genres have a particularly important role to play in fleshing out the critical discourses that underpin a democratic society. 6

Concrete Realities

In the face of strong opposition throughout the apartheid era, when popular fiction generally and crime fiction specifically were considered “undesirable,” crime novels were produced in increasing numbers for a growing readership. During this time, the labels of “crime fiction” and “politically engaged” novels were considered mutually exclusive, although there are clear overlaps. In the post-apartheid period, there is a new willingness on the part of publishers to showcase previously marginalised voices and to reach out to previously unexplored audiences in the literary marketplace. This is not simply an academic argument between, on the one hand, those who argue for a division between the highbrow and the lowbrow (or the literary and the popular) and, on the other, those who see the distinction as arbitrary because it ignores the influence of the social context, of popular audiences and their preferences. The former was a literary ideology that was translated into a political ideology and in these hands and under the specific circumstances of the apartheid state, it had very real consequences for real people. Literary critics do not like to think of such concrete realities, of the commercial aspects of publishing, nor of the production of fiction as labour. But fiction is not the only (or even the most important) segment of publishing. And considering authors as labourers, publishers as manufacturers, books as commodities in the marketplace and readers as active consumers does not have to imply “the final collapse of cultural values in the face of relentless consumerism and the bitter exigencies of mass production” (Worpole 15). Crime authors such as Deon Meyer can balance both commercial success and literary awards, and a focus on the publishing and reception history of crime fiction can move us beyond the normative judgements of both the censors and the literary critics. This reminds us that ideologies of aesthetics are also political questions.

References

“Banned Book of Educational Value.” Pretoria News, 22 November 1981, p. 3. Birch, Michael J. “The Popular Fiction Industry: Market, Formula, Ideology.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 21, no. 3, 1987, pp. 79–102. “Board Lifts Ban on Ebersohn Novel.” The Star [Johannesburg], 18 December 1981, p. 11.

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Bryer, Lynne. “Two Novels Set in SA.” Eastern Province Herald, 20 October 1981. Cavender, Gray. “In ‘The Shadow of Shadows’: Television Reality Crime Programming.” Entertaining Crime, edited by Mark Fishman, and Gray Cavender, De Gruyter, 1998, pp. 79–94. Chetty, Kavish. “ ‘New Political Novels’ not so Political.” SlipNet, 12 May 2012, slipnet. co.za/view/event/new-political-novels-not-so-political/. Clark, Patricia. “Reading in Apartheid South Africa.” Oral and Written Expressions of African Cultures, edited by Toyin Falola, and Fallou Ngom, Carolina Academic P, 2009, pp. 195–204. Cronjé, Geoffrey, et al. “Report of the Commission of Enquiry in Regard to Undesirable Publications.” Government Printers, 1957. Davis, Geoffrey. “Political Loyalties and the Intricacies of the Criminal Mind: The Detective Fiction of Wessel Ebersohn.” Postcolonial Postmortems: Crime Fiction from a Transcultural Perspective, edited by Christine Matzke, and Susanne Mühleisen, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 181–200. Dorsey, David. “Prolegomena for Black Aesthetics.” Black Aesthetics: Papers from a Colloquium held at the University of Nairobi, June 1971, edited by Andrew Gurr, and Pio Zirimu, East African Literature Bureau, 1973, pp. 7–19. Du Toit, André. “Facing up to the Future: Some Personal Reflections on the Predicament of Afrikaner Intellectuals.” Social Dynamics, vol. 7, no. 2, 1981, pp. 1–27. Ebersohn, Wessel. A Lonely Place to Die. Victor Gollancz, 1979. Ebersohn, Wessel. Divide the Night. Victor Gollancz, 1981. Ebersohn, Wessel. Store up the Anger. Victor Gollancz, 1980. Ebersohn, Wessel. The Centurion. Ravan P, 1980. Ebersohn, Wessel. The October Killings. Umuzi, 2009. Ebersohn, Wessel. Those who Love Night. Umuzi, 2010. Ebersohn, Wessel. “Wessel Ebersohn.” 2013, www.wesselebersohn.com/. Accessed September 18, 2013. Forgacs, David. “National-Popular: Genealogy of a Concept.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 209–219. Gelder, Ken. “Recovering Australian Popular Fiction: Towards the End of Australian Literature.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2013, pp. 112–120. Green, Michael. Novel Histories: Past, Present and Future in South African Fiction. Witwatersrand UP, 1997. Hachten, William A., and Giffard, C. Anthony. The Press and Apartheid: Repression and Propaganda in South Africa. U of Wisconsin P, 1984. Hall, Stuart. “The Problem of Ideology: Marxism without Guarantees.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 10, no. 2, 1986, pp. 28–44. Hebdige, Dick. “The Function of Subculture.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 441–450.

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Heins, Marjorie, and Joan Bertin. “The St Louis Court Brief: Debating Audience ‘Effects’ in Public.” Particip@tions, vol. 1, no. 1, 2002. Holland, Steve. The Trials of Hank Janson. Telos Publishing, 2004. Kahn, Ellison. “When the Lion Feeds—and the Censor Pounces: A Disquisition on the Banning of Immoral Publications in South Africa.” South African Law Journal, vol. 83, no. 3, 1966, pp. 278–336. Knight, Stephen. Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. Springer, 1980. Lockwood, Bert, Jr. “A Study in Black and White: The South Africa of James McClure.” Human Rights Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4, 1983, pp. 440–466. Lovisi, Gary. “The Return of Vin Packer: Marijane Meaker Resurrects a Pen Name from the Glory Days of Pulp Fiction.” Mystery Scene, vol. 100, Summer 2007, pp. 36–38. McClure, James. “A Bright Grey.” Colloquium on Crime: Eleven Renowned Mystery Writers Discuss Their Work, edited by Robin W. Winks, Scribner, 1986, pp. 167–188. McCracken, Scott. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction. Manchester UP, 1998. McDonald, Peter. The Literature Police:  Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences. OUP, 2009. Merrett, Christopher. State Censorship and the Academic Process in South Africa. Occasional Papers, no. 192, U of Illinois, 1991. Naidu, Sam. “Crime Fiction, South Africa: A Critical Introduction.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 124–135. Obscene Publications Act. No 31, 1892. Cape of Good Hope. Oliphant, Andries W. “From Colonialism to Democracy:  Writers and Publishing in South Africa.” The Politics of Publishing in South Africa, edited by Nicholas Evans, and Monica Seeber, U of Natal P, 2000. Panek, Lad. Probable Cause: Crime Fiction in America. Popular P, 1990. Posner, Matt. “Interview with Andrew McCoy.” School of the Ages, February 6, 2014, schooloftheages.webs.com/apps/blog/show/41344658-special-interview-veteran-author-andrew-mccoy-and-his-african-revenge. Accessed May 12, 2015. Publications and Entertainments Act. No. 26, 1963. Republic of South Africa. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance. U of North Carolina P, 1984. Rautenbach, Anneke. “ ‘Every Technique Known to Prose’:  The Aesthetics of TrueCrime in Contemporary South Africa.” Current Writing: Text and Reception in Southern Africa, vol. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 153–163. Reddy, Maureen T. Traces, Codes, and Clues: Reading Race in Crime Fiction. New Rutgers UP, 2003. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. 2nd ed., Yale UP, 2010. Ross, Andrew. “The popularity of pornography.” The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, Routledge, 1993, pp. 221–242. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Polity P, 2005.

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Sandwith, Corinne. World of Letters: Reading Communities and Cultural Debates in Early Apartheid South Africa. U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2014. Schalkwyk, David. “The Flight from Politics: An Analysis of the South African Reception of Poppie Nongena.” Journal of Southern African Studies, vol. 12, no. 2, 1986, pp. 183–195. Server, Lee. Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction. Facts on File, 2002. Stoffberg, Linda. “Wessel Ebersohn’s Use of the Tradition of Crime Fiction in the Context of Late-apartheid South Africa.” Unpublished MA thesis, U of Natal, 1995. Sutherland, John. Bestsellers: Popular fiction of the 1970s. Routledge, 1981. Titlestad, Michael, and Ashlee Polatinsky. “Turning to Crime: Mike Nicol’s The Ibis Tapestry and Payback.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2, 2010, pp. 259–273. “Those Who Love Night.” Kirkus Review. Jan. 31, 2012,kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ wessel-ebersohn2/those-who-love-night/. Accessed Apr. 12, 2020. Von Klemperer, Margaret. “Review.” Literary Tourism, 2003, literarytourism.co.za/index. php?option=com_content&task=view&id=56&Itemid=28. Accessed Apr. 12, 2020. Worpole, Ken. Dockers and Detectives: Popular Reading, Popular Writing. Verso, 1983.

­c hapter 11

National Allegories in the Age of Globalization— Prologue to an Analysis of Contemporary Canadian Young Adult Fiction Mavis Reimer For the past decade, one of my critical projects has been to document and to study the implications of the widespread interest in representations of homeless child subjects in texts of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centur­ ies. These collections of texts include texts directed to young people as well as texts about young people directed to adults. From textbooks about the urban homeless and refugees designed for primary and secondary classrooms, to a collection of international films about street kids, to the media and social media accounts of the Occupy movement, young readers and young people inside texts have repeatedly been confronted with the imperative to ‘go homeless.’1 While the texts work within different genres and modes, all, I have argued, can be read within the semantic field of globalization and the theoretical vocabularies of subject formation entailed by globalization. In working and reworking my understanding of the grounds on which the meanings of these texts are built, I frequently return to a group of Young Adult narratives published in Canada after 1990, as I do here. In the essay that follows, I tease out the ways in which the genre of children’s literature—and Canadian children’s literature specifically—provides a productive site for using and challenging metaphorical discourses of the nation and transmuting them into new figures to account for contemporary conditions of ‘being-in-the-world.’ In the course of doing so, I summarize arguments I have made in other contexts; if these arguments have been published, I point readers to those sources for further reading. 1

The Genre of Children’s Literature

Children on the move animate narratives for young people. In The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, Perry Nodelman and I argue that the generic pattern of 1 For my discussions of the international films and the Occupy movement as texts about homelessness, see “On Location” and “ ‘It’s the kids who made this happen.’ ”

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stories for young people is a circular journey, in which a central character who is coded as a child leaves home in search of an adventure or is pushed out of an originary home by the behavior of powerful adults; journeys to an unfamiliar place; and, after a series of exciting and dangerous experiences, returns home.2 Children’s literature is not the only kind of text that uses this circular-journey structure: indeed, that this is the generic pattern of the form marks its origins in and continuity with the oral forms of classical and folkloric Western European literature. As David Morley, paraphrasing Iain Chambers, observes, “The classical sense of home was that of the place from which the hero ventures out, and which supplies the constant domestic anchoring place to which he [sic] will return, at journey’s end” (211). Home provides the envelope for the journey; in Chambers’ words, the journey itself always “confirms the point of departure, secured in the presumption of eventual homecoming” (37). A genre, as Sonja Foss explains, is a collection of texts that share themes, forms, and organizing principles, shared features that are “called forth” by the “perception of conditions” within specific situations (226). Tracing the conventional story of children’s literature, then, is a first step toward asking the question of what conditions have called forth a specific assemblage of characteristics and toward noticing the variations of particular narratives from the expected pattern, variations that, when repeated, become subgenres or genres in their own right. As E.D. Hirsch puts it, “The generic conception serves both an heuristic and a constitutive function” (78). In the case of narratives for young people, to give just a few examples, ‘family stories,’ popular in the decades of the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century, feature a group or corporate character in the place of the child protagonist, as in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons series; girls’ books, popular at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, often start with the arrival of an orphaned or otherwise unhomed girl at a place which she makes into home over the course of her story, as Anne Shirley does in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series; and school stories typically mark the separation of school from home in dramatic and, even, oppositional terms, but often end, nevertheless, by suturing school lessons to home values, sometimes recoding ‘home’ as nation in this resolution, as Thomas Hughes famously does in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. In his chapter on genre criticism in The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson notes that, because paying attention to generic narrative models allows readers “to register a given text’s specific deviation from them,” generic criticism raises “the more dialectical and historical issue of this determinate 2 See, in particular, the chapter entitled “Children’s Literature as Repertoire,” 184–217.

206 Reimer formal difference” (113). Paying attention to formal differences directs readers to consider “changes in the historical situation which block” the full replication of the generic pattern; prompts a search for “substitute textual formations that appear in its wake” and for the “historical ground … in which the original structure was meaningful”; and makes visible the “constitutive relationship of forms and texts to their historical preconditions” (133). In the case of children’s literature, the “historical preconditions” for the invention of the genre importantly include the development of the idea that childhood is sufficiently different from adulthood to require that children be addressed as a separate group. While all genres, as Jameson observes, “are essentially literary institutions, or social contracts between a writer and a specific public, whose function is to specify the proper use of a particular cultural artifact” (92), children’s literature uniquely is named for the public to which it is directed rather than the identity or location of the writer who produces it, making manifest the constitutive character of this historical precondition. Scholars of childhood studies generally accept the broad outlines of Phillipe Ariès’ argument that, as Sharon Stephens summarizes it, “the development of the modern conception of childhood as a separate life stage emerged in Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, together with bourgeois notions of family, home, privacy, and individuality” (5). Children’s literature as a genre distinct from schoolbooks, however, did not begin to be widely produced and distributed until the end of the period in which this idea of childhood was developed—specifically, in the middle of the eighteenth century, according to literary historian Harvey Darton (1). While there is agreement that the invention of a particular form of childhood was the necessary precondition for the invention of children’s literature, there is no consensus in the field—indeed, comparatively little scholarship—about the salient conditions of the “historical ground” of the 1740s during which the form originally appeared and became meaningful. Nevertheless, some promising lines of interpretation seem clear: the literary institution of children’s literature is imbricated with the idea of the nation;3 the form arises in the period of early capitalism and responds to the new economic and social conditions inaugurated by this shift;4 and there is a generic interest in the dichotomy of public and private spaces5 and, more generally, an understanding of place as carrying and holding meaning. The “multiscalar” idea of home, to borrow Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling’s resonant description of the concept (6), which 3 See, for one example of this argument, Gillian Brown’s The Consent of the Governed. 4 See, for example, Andrew O`Malley`s The Making of the Modern Child. 5 See, for example, Carolyn Steedman’s Strange Dislocations.

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is both origin and destination in the generic narrative, is one of the manifestations of the generic commitment to meaningful places. Indeed, both ‘genre’ and ‘home’ are concepts that resonate with what Chambers calls the haunting desire for “the closed comfort of the stable same” (34). 2

The Failure of Generic Form

The new millennium has seen an increasing number of narratives for young readers internationally that fail to replicate the terms of the generic pattern. Since the 1990s, narratives about child subjects on the move in which the central characters do not settle at the conclusions of their stories have proliferated around the world: these children might be tourists and travelers, if the narrative is working within the terms of fantasy and adventure (including comic misadventure); immigrants, refugees, or exiles, if the narrative is set within geopolitical contexts, whether contemporary or historical; or street kids, foster kids, runaways, or ‘throwaways,’ if the narrative is working within (or against) the subgenre of domestic realism that continues to dominate in the field of young people’s texts. In a number of the narratives, many kinds of unsettled young people appear, suggesting that these categories are overlapping rather than discrete conceptualizations. The narratives typically close not with a return home for the young protagonists, but with them remaining—literally or metaphorically—homeless, or, at best, contingently housed, at the end of their stories. Following Jameson, I assume that the widespread failure to replicate the generic structure of children’s literature raises the issue of what changed historical conditions might account for this failure and prompts a search for substitute textual formations that have appeared in the system. I assume, too, that the generic reformulations are worth studying closely for what they suggest about the significance of the determinate new conditions and about the possibilities of response to them. In documenting the generic failures, searching for substitute formations, and seeking to understand the “perception of conditions” that have “called forth” these new responses, I focus on Canadian adolescent, or Young Adult (ya), fiction. My focus on ya narratives is a response both to the importance of this subgenre in the contemporary marketplace for young people’s texts and to its historical origins. ya fiction now accounts for a plurality of the print publications in the field in Canada and in North America generally. It was recognized and instituted during the decades following the Second World War and, according to Roberta Seelinger Trites, could not have become codified until the postmodern period, because it assumes an understanding of people “as

208 Reimer socially constructed subjects rather than as self-contained individuals bound by their identities” and is preoccupied with a “questioning of social institutions” (16). My focus on texts produced in Canada was, in the first instance, a pragmatic choice, because the publication, circulation, and prizing systems for children’s literature historically have been national systems, often tied to the curricula or interests of public or state schools. Understanding ideology as both a set of material practices and a set of explanations for those practices, as poststructuralist Marxists after Louis Althusser have taught us to do, however, I also recognize that such a pragmatic choice is inseparable from the interpretative and political choices I have made. Further, while the translation and circulation of young people’s print texts across international borders is limited, the study of children’s literature is an international field and has been so for at least a century, with the result that texts of other national cultures to which scholars pay attention—traditionally, texts that reach the status of children’s classics, but, more recently, also popular texts of series fiction—become visible on the international stage. My speculations about the significance of the ‘homeless’ texts were shaped by these contexts of reception, too, so that I expect that the conclusions I reach here might also be relevant to literatures beyond that of Canada. 3

Writing and Reading Allegory

The book that startled me into the recognition that something unprecedented was happening in Canadian ya fiction and that I needed a new reading strategy to understand it was Martine Leavitt’s 2004 novel, Tom Finder. The narrative opens with a series of sentences marking the undoing of Tom’s identity as he moves toward the urban core of Calgary: Tom had forgotten who he was. Something had happened to him, but that was the first thing he forgot … He forgot if he had a friend … he forgot if he’d ever passed Tadpoles, and if he’d ever known what you say to a girl when you like her … he forgot what his mark was on his last spelling test, and if he knew what it felt like to get punched in the face, and what his mother looked like. By the time the shops were shadowed by the high downtown towers, he’d forgotten his last name. (Leavitt 9) The trajectory of the narrative follows Tom’s attempts to piece together clues about who he is. He does this by recording what he observes to be true about himself from his fragmentary memories and from the responses to him of

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people on the street and in the public park where he sleeps, and by trying to decipher the significance of the notes about Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart he finds in the notebook in his backpack, especially in relation to the advertisement of an upcoming local production of The Magic Flute on the pen he finds in his pocket. He sees himself as “making himself up, inventing the story of himself,” a process he believes has performative power (57): the story he invents includes loving, wealthy parents who are frantically searching for him. This “story of himself” unravels when his memories flood back during a performance of Mozart’s opera. He finally remembers that his mother is a “lucky alcoholic,” lucky because she is treated “like a pet” by her violent boyfriend Bruce (125), who reserves most of his rage for Tom. It was because of a particularly brutal beating at Bruce’s hands, Tom remembers, that he ran away from home. Tom returns to his old neighbourhood and to the apartment block where he once lived with his mother and Bruce, but he neither enters the building nor stops to look at it. He knows as soon as he finds it that he no longer belongs here and chooses rather to run past, “on his orbit back to the Core” (126). The novel ends with Tom still living on the streets—specifically, sitting on the curb of a public street writing down the stories of his homeless friends—a place that is coded as ‘home’ for him in the narrative. This ending registers as a block to the full replication of the generic pattern of children’s literature rather than being merely a variation of it, in part because the ending explicitly refuses the conventional closure of home: “This was home, but he didn’t belong,” Tom realizes when his mother’s apartment building comes into view on his return (126). The ending also refuses the enclosure of home, leaving the central character out in the open, on a public street, rather than inside, in a private domestic space or in an institutional approximation of a domestic space. The narrative organization of the closing of the story, in which subplot and main plot are brought together, also implies that Tom chooses the streets as home. The subplot concerns Tom’s quest to find another young man who has run away from home, a quest he is given by Samuel Wolflegs, the young man’s grieving father. The penultimate chapter of the novel closes with Samuel’s grateful acknowledgement that Tom, to whom he has earlier given the name of Finder, has succeeded in his assignment: “You can go home now, Tom Finder,” he said gently, “Go home” (139). The final chapter opens with the narrator’s observation, “Tom sat down on the curb” (140), the metonymical displacement of “home” with “curb” implying that Tom has responded to Samuel’s imperative by going home to the street. These deviations occur at the levels of story and narrative discourse. But the coherence of this stretch of the narrative also relies on an absent cause—the history of the colonization of Canada. Although Samuel Wolflegs is explicitly

210 Reimer identified as a “First Nations father” only in the back cover blurb, he is coded as Aboriginal for readers who know the Canadian context from the time that Tom (and readers) first glimpse the “big man with black and silver braids,” “a big, brown, pitted face,” and “a fringed leather jacket with beads on the fringes” who is praying on the bank of the river in the park (13). Within the context of the settler nation of Canada, the metonymical recoding of street as home by an Aboriginal father is a symbolically powerful act:  while knowledge of the dispossession of First Nations and the appropriation of the land by European immigrants is often repressed in Canadian texts for young people, the desire to become native to their place also informs many of these texts, sometimes explicitly as a theme in the story but often implicitly in “the political unconscious” manifested symptomatically in the discourses of the texts.6 Samuel’s symbolic power is confirmed at the level of story by the fact that his calling Tom “A Finder” (15) is a felicitous instance of performative naming, unlike Tom’s own “story of himself,” and at the level of narrative discourse by the epigram taken from the Mozart intertext that heads the chapter in which Samuel sends Tom home: “What joy it will be, if the gods remember us” (136). In Leavitt’s narrative, then, the invocation of the foundational national question of territory invites a reading of the narrative closure as a morally authoritative refusal of the settled terms of home and a substitution of the place of homelessness for the place of home for the central White male character. In the Canadian context, reading nation as home is an interpretative strategy widely assumed and sanctioned, as the first line of the English version of the national anthem makes evident: “O Canada, our home and native land.” But the linkage between homes as simultaneously domestic and national is resonant at many locations other than that of Canada. Rosemary Marangoly George, for example, points to the discourses of British imperialism—specifically the context of British India—as the origin of the notion of “home-country” (3). Australian postcolonial theorist Ghassan Hage observes that nationalist practices are enabled by the “structure of feeling” that constitutes the “homely imaginary,” a structure built on “the key themes of familiarity, security and community” (40). Within days of the events in New York on September 11, 2001, the U.S. government established a cabinet position to coordinate the operations 6 I have made a detailed argument, for example, that this is the work of Janet Lunn’s Shadow in Hawthorn Bay (1986) in “Homing and Unhoming: The Ideological Work of Canadian Children’s Literature” in Home Words. See also Perry Nodelman’s chapter, “At Home on Native Land: A Non-Aboriginal Canadian Scholar Discusses Aboriginality and Property in Canadian Double-Focalized Novels for Young Adults,” in the same volume of essays. “Political unconscious” is a reference to Jameson’s seminal work on symptomatic reading.

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of American defence organizations under the heading of Homeland Security. Historian Eric Hobsbawm uses the German term Heimat to refer to the collective understanding of home as public space, and Heim or the French chezmoi to refer to the “essentially private” conceptual space of belonging (67). For Hobsbawm, the private meaning is the literal meaning, while the public meaning is “a social construction” (67). The Oxford English Dictionary, however, lists home as entering English through the Teutonic languages of northern Europe already carrying with it such collective meanings as world, village, homestead, dwelling, and safe dwelling, with the private meanings accruing to the term through later usages. In contemporary English, it is precisely because the public and private senses are conflated in one word that home is not only an auratic term but also can signify simultaneously at multiple scales.7 Indeed, home might be thought of as a mediating term that allows for the transcoding of public and private experiences. Reading home can be understood, then, as allegorical reading in the broad sense of the etymological meaning of allegory: allegory is directly translated as “other speaking,” a speaking which, as Jeremy Tambling notes, takes place in a public place, “a place of assembly, the agora, the marketplace” (6). While Tambling does not point to this connection, it seems that the question of the public and the private is already implicated in allegory—in the possibility of concealed significances, other meanings, enriched meanings, or the “split between the surface meaning and what is underneath” (6). The congruence between the practice of allegory and the meanings of home, arguably, makes home a privileged site for allegorical encodings and decodings. If home can be allegorized as nation, country, village, or another collectively produced safe place, then to what concealed significance, under-meaning, or other public meanings does its lack—homelessness—point? Reading contemporary Canadian short stories beside the analysis of social scientists and political theorists, Diana Brydon proposes that the salient valence now for attempts to reimagine home is globalization, because globalization “has implications for how tropes and territories are understood in every dimension of human activity” (34). As Brydon’s comment suggests, theorists of globalization have taken up a wide range of metaphors of home and homelessness as they seek to document the porous borders between nation-states in the age of digital communications and the global marketplace, and to imagine the supranational subjects wanted for the project of globalization. Michael Hardt and Antonio

7 I have discussed the auratic meanings of home for the study of children’s literature in detail in “Discourses of Home in Canadian Children’s Literature,” the introduction to Home Words.

212 Reimer Negri, for example, argue that “the irresistible and irreversible globalization of economic and culture exchanges” that characterize the new form of Empire that now “governs the world” (xi) takes “[c]‌irculation, mobility, diversity, and mixture” as “its very conditions of possibility” (150). John Tomlinson cites Anthony Giddens’ use of the term deterritorialization to describe the “disembedding” of people from their locations and “the stretching of relations across time and space” as “the core [experience] of globalization” (107). Migrants, refugees, and exiles appear as both empirical and metaphorical subjects in the analysis of cultural geographers and theorists of diaspora (see e.g. Brag 197). Media scholar Morley points out that “[a]ccounts of postmodern nomadology tend to operate with one or another form of technologically determinist explanation,” typically having to do with “what new technologies or modes of flexible production are somehow doing to us” (4). For Zygmunt Bauman, on the contrary, the ‘fashionable’ terminology of nomadology is “grossly misleading,” in that it “glosses over the profound differences” (87) which separate two kinds of contemporary wanderers—the tourists, Bauman’s figure for the “global businessmen, global culture managers or global academics” who travel easily across borders that are being “dismantled for the world’s commodities, capital and finances” (89), and the vagabonds, who travel “because they have no other bearable choice” (93), and for whom “the walls built of immigration controls, or residence laws and of ‘clean streets’ and ‘zero tolerance’ policies, grow taller” (89). Developing the concept of domopolitics as a heuristic for the “reconfiguring of relations between citizenship, state, and territory” that is fueled by the contemporary metaphorical “conjunction of home, land and security” (241), William Walters similarly notes that, in the era of globalization, “[t]he pre-eminent task of government is to attract and channel flows of resources, whether investment, goods, services, and now flows of (the right kind of) people into one’s territory” (244). These examples are only a few of many that could be listed. As Roland Robertson concludes, the “contemporary ideology of home (or homelessness)” “has seemingly acquired a near-global significance” under the conditions of globalization (42). Robertson observes, as well, that the widespread ideology of homelessness combines two discourses that were once distinct from one another: the “specific discourse of homelessness which deals with inadequate shelter” and “the phenomenological notion of homelessness” (42). Robertson’s descriptors suggest that many of the theorists of globalization are working within allegorical modes, moving between literal, concrete events (such as being without adequate shelter, encountering barriers to immigration, or enacting laws) and more abstract, figurative semantic registers (such as circulation, mixture, flow, stretching, or flexibility). In some instances—for example, that of sociologist

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Bauman—this is clearly an intentional and motivated discursive style. In an interview with Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Bauman claims that metaphors “are the indispensable scaffoldings for imagination and perhaps the most effective tools of comprehension” (17). In particular, “[m]‌etaphors come into their own” whenever there is a “need to dissemble the established conceptual network” and “to capture novel phenomena in a new cognitive frame” (19). Globalization, which represents exactly such a phenomenon, has prompted a proliferation of figurative speech from analysts as they attempt to assemble new cognitive frames and conceptual networks. If this is true of sociological and political discourse in the age of globalization, it seems likely to be even more emphatically true of the writers and producers of fiction, who intentionally build the world of their imaginative texts with figurative scaffoldings. Jameson argues that this is, indeed, the case. In an essay entitled “Cognitive Mapping,” he proposes that the problem for art in “our own moment,” what he also calls “the moment of the multinational network” or “late capitalism” (350), is to find figures adequate to the “new and historically original dilemma” in which we find ourselves, “one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital itself” (351). The aesthetic process he identifies in this essay—cognitive mapping—is itself a figure, taken from the description of the phenomenon by which people solve the problem of “the mental unmapability of local cityscapes” by practising and so laying down in memory the paths they take through the city (353). Colin McCabe explains that cognitive mapping effectively “works as an intersection of the personal and the social, which enables people to function in the urban spaces through which they move” (xiv). Jameson appropriates and extends the figure to describe the work of personal and social mapping “of the enormously complex new international space” of the current historical moment (“Cognitive Mapping” 351). In one sense, cognitive mapping describes the work of art or the text, but the text here is understood as “a socially symbolic act” or, as Jameson puts it in discussing what he calls “the conspiratorial text” of contemporary world cinema, as a “collective effort at trying to figure out where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us” (The Geopolitical Aesthetic 2). In another sense, cognitive mapping is also the work of the critic. In “Cognitive Mapping,” Jameson asserts that “one of our basic tasks as critics of literature is to track down and make conceptually available the ultimate realities and experiences” designated by the figures of the text (350). He understands this method as “essentially allegorical” (350): notably, from the time of its definition by classical Roman writers, allegory has been understood to be

214 Reimer at the same time “a mode of writing or speaking” and “a form of interpretation” (Tambling 19). 4

Grasping our New Being-in-the-World: the Work of the Canadian Texts

“[N]‌ational allegory,” Jameson speculates in The Geopolitical Aesthetic, is being refashioned “into a conceptual instrument for grasping our new being-in-theworld” (3). Jameson first introduced the concept of “national allegory” in his 1986 article, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital.” His use of the descriptor “third-world” occasioned a number of pointed critiques, among them Aijaz Ahmad’s virtuosic demonstration of the slippages in conceptual categories in Jameson’s divisions of the world into three spheres. Nevertheless, I want to retain one of the distinctions Jameson makes in the 1986 article for my analysis of Canadian children’s narratives. For critics located at the centre of dominant, Western ideological structures—Jameson seems to have in mind principally American, White, male critics, as his objectors point out—sorting texts into discrete categories of “the subjective” and “the public or political” is a reflection of the “deep cultural conviction” in which they “have been trained,” namely, the conviction that “private existence is somehow incommensurable with the abstractions of economic science, and political dynamics” (69). This, he observes, is not the case for texts from Third-World cultures, and critics who proceed on the basis of this conviction will fail to understand that texts can be “seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic” and, at the same time, project a “political dimension in the form of national allegory” (69). Responding to this argument, Ahmad points out that, if “[w]e replace the idea of the ‘nation’ with [the] larger, less restrictive idea of ‘collectivity’ ” in Jameson’s argument, it becomes possible to see the presence of “analogous [allegorical] impulses in the US cultural ensembles” (110). The examples Ahmad gives to support this claim are of counter-cultural, Black, and feminist American writers. There are many ways in which Canadian writers and critics, like Americans, stand at the centre of dominant ideological structures of the current moment: among other things, Canada is a member of the G7 group of leading developed nations, a participant in the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Mexico, and a leading exporter of carbon fuels. But it is also the case that Canadians, like the writers referenced by Ahmad, have an oblique relation to the American Empire, to use Hardt and Negri’s descriptor of the current hegemon, and, typically, some “sense of their own global marginality”

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(Reed 40). Perhaps for these reasons, Canadian literature often functions as national allegory. This is particularly the case for Canadian children’s literature. In Canada, children’s literature became an established institution during the 1970s as a result of both official government policies and popular political sentiment.8 Publication of books for children in Canada began in earnest with the influx of federal and provincial government funding that was a consequence of a series of official reports on the state of Canadian culture.9 The studies were commissioned during a period of popular nationalist sentiment in the country, much of it aimed at countering or containing the overwhelming American influence on Canadian cultural life: one example was the Committee for an Independent Canada, which took as its mandate the promotion of “cultural and economic independence from the United States” (Egoff and Saltman 309). A  series of events during the decade of the 1970s index the rapid institutionalization of children’s literature in Canada:  the establishment of two presses devoted to the publication of children’s books, Kids Can Press in 1973 and Annick Press in 1975; the opening of the first bookstore dedicated to children’s books in 1975; the founding of a scholarly journal in the field in 1975; the first international, academic conferences on the subject in Toronto in 1975 and in Vancouver in 1976; the establishment of prizes in children’s literature by the Canada Council in 1976; the creation of the position of Children’s Literature Librarian by the National Library of Canada in 1976; the opening by the International Board on Books for Young People (ibby) of the Canadian Children’s Book Centre in 1976; and the sponsorship by the Book Centre of the first annual Children’s Book Festival in 1977. By the end of the decade, in the context of national conversations about multiculturalism—the promotion of which became an official federal government policy in 1982—publishing for young people also acquired an unofficial but often spoken national political mandate, namely, to promote a specific version of Canada as a tolerant, multi-ethnic community bound together by its shared differences. That Canadian children’s literature has produced and reproduced this “imagined political community” (Anderson 6)  becomes obvious through an analysis of the patterns of its award-winning fiction. In a reading of more than 100 English-language novels awarded literary prizes and published in Canada 8 I have discussed the development of Canadian children’s literature as an institution and have cited the facts that follow as an indication of that institutionalization in several places, most extensively in “Canadian Children’s Literature in English” and “For the Record.” 9 Egoff and Saltman list the report of the Royal Commission on Book Publishing of 1971 and the Secretary of State’s The Publishing Industry in Canada in 1977 as formative. See “Canadian Publishing for Children and How It Grew,” in The New Republic of Childhood 306–314.

216 Reimer between 1975 and 1995, Anne Rusnak and I conclude that home in this literature is often defined by central characters at the conclusions of their narratives as a heterogeneous, multi-generational collection of people affiliated through choice, rather than a family bound by filial ties.10 This multicultural view of the national home as formed by affiliation has its unspoken limits: in Canadian children’s literature, those limits are often racialized ones, built, as I have already noted, on a disavowal of the presence of Canada’s First Peoples within the spaces of the nation, a disavowal also extended to other racialized children, as Louise Saldanha and Clare Bradford, among others, have noted. Notably, too, the institutionalization of Canadian children’s literature and the institutionalization of the adolescent or ya novel, with its interest in the relation of young people to societal structures, arise during the same decades. The possibility, then, that Canadian novels for young people might serve as a privileged site for the collective, cognitive mapping of ‘where we are and what landscapes and forces confront us’ in the age of globalization—an age that is often also characterized as an age in which the sovereignty of the nation-state is waning—begins to seem both obvious and overdetermined. To date, I have collected a sample of seventy titles published in Canada between 1999 and 2014 that feature unhomed young people who do not settle at the conclusion of their narratives. This corpus is made up, for the most part, of “unconceptualized texts,” to use Margaret Cohen’s description of the large groups of unread or underread books in the archive of literature (59). My goal, like Cohen’s, is to take up “the critical act of perceptive reading” in order to discern “coherent practices at a collective level” (59).11 Because Cohen works with texts from the past, her particular interest is to re-establish what she calls “the framework of lost langues that need to be recovered” before “the full meaning” of individual texts “emerges” (59). My attempt, rather, is to write a history of present practice and so to outline a framework that is in the process of being built, but, like Cohen, I begin by looking for recurrent patterns in the texts with the aim of defining “the horizon of possibilities” of the group of texts and “the range of variations within this horizon” (60).

10 11

See the article by Reimer and Rusnak in Canadian Children’s Literature. Cohen points out that “intensive reading of canonical texts” continues to be the dominant method in literary scholarship and that critics working with large collections of texts have tended to improvise “alternative kinds of reading” (59). My methods for reading large groups of texts of Canadian children’s literature have been developed in just such improvisational ways over the past fifteen years. I was interested to discover that much of what I had determined to be useful in doing such work was shared by Cohen.

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Most of the texts in my corpus of Canadian ya narratives are interested in networked communication systems: not surprisingly, in these 21st-century texts, these systems are often computers connected to the Internet and mobile phones. These systems fail or are sabotaged in some of the narratives, as, for example, in Tim Wynne-Jones’s Blink & Caution (2011). Perhaps more surprisingly, many of the novels also allude to texts of ‘elite,’ usually European, culture and often use these ‘elite’ texts extensively as intertexts: Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute (in Leavitt’s Tom Finder), Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity (in Barbara Haworth-Attard’s Theories of Relativity), and Vincent Van Gogh’s painting Starry Night (in Eric Walters’ Sketches) are just a few examples.12 An interest in numbers, sometimes explicitly money or the lack of it, recurs in many of the texts; sometimes this interest is focused on a group of random numbers, or puzzling sets or sequences of numbers. In Sarah Ellis’s Odd Man Out (2006), for example, Kip spends much of the narrative unsuccessfully seeking the meaning of a sequence of numbers he finds inscribed in his dead father’s boyhood bedroom. Many of the narratives are structured as mysteries, with the young characters engaged in solving an enigma, as cousins Meline and Jocelyn are in Polly Horvath’s The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane (2007). Forms of mental illness, often including addictions, appear in almost all of the books and are distributed among most of what Vladimir Propp calls the character functions—subject, object, sender, receiver, opponent, and helper.13 Broken relationships with fathers and father figures are ubiquitous: fathers are dead, or have deserted their families, or their identities are unknown to the young characters; father figures are violent or unavailable. Relationships with mothers and mother figures are also sometimes disrupted by death or violence; but, more often, mothers are young, poor, sick, and underemployed. This is the case in, for example, Caroline Adderson’s Middle of Nowhere (2012) and Luanne Armstrong’s I’ll Be Home Soon (2012). Perhaps as a displacement of, or a substitution for, absent or inadequate parenting, the police and other institutional representatives intrude into the homes and lives of the young characters. They are usually unwelcome, as in Sara Cassidy’s Skylark (2014), and often ineffective, as in Edeet Ravel`s The Saver (2008). These regular intrusions also can be seen as one of many instances in which 12 13

I have discussed in detail the ways in which such intertextuality mobilizes the possibilities of metaphorically “going beyond” what is literally understood to be “home” and “nothome” in “Mobile Characters, Mobile Texts.” Michael J. Toolan has demonstrated the usefulness of Propp’s formulation for the analysis of narrative generally (90–102).

218 Reimer boundaries between inside and outside, private and public, are presented as unstable and porous. Read together, this cluster of repeated patterns points beyond a recording of the literal facts of family dysfunction and the fraying of social safety nets to a deep phenomenological anxiety about a social, economic, and cultural system under stress or struggling to find a new formation.14 There is a collective recognition of the failure of established ways of being and a collective effort to grasp the terms and the implications of ‘our new being-in-the-world.’ At the same time, given the intertextual association with ‘elite’ culture, it is clear that the subject being produced is at the centre rather than at the margins of a new paradigm. Some of the texts also begin to map—tentatively and provisionally—ways to move out across the new landscapes before us. Home is a figurative centre of narrative texts directed to young people, a resonant and multiscalar term in thematic structures and the origin and destination of conventional plot structures. Home as nation is also traditionally the context for the production of texts for young people. As identity and belonging become detached from the national home under globalization, questions of the location and the terms—indeed, the possibility or impossibility—of different forms of imagined community are set into motion in these texts. The ability to imagine the nation, Benedict Anderson proposes, requires a conception of the simultaneity of time across a geographical space larger than an individual personally experiences and for large numbers of people of whose existence that individual might be unaware. This is a kind of imagining which Anderson calls “a complex gloss upon the word ‘meanwhile’ ” (25) and sees as made technically possible by two forms of print capitalism, the novel and the newspaper. Jonathan Culler observes that one of the implications of Anderson’s argument that “the world of the novel” is “in principle an analogue of the nation” (23) is that it offers “the insider’s view to those who might have been deemed outsiders” (37). Its structure of address is an “open invitation to readers of different conditions to become insiders” (38). Such an open invitation does seem to be extended to “readers of different conditions” of the Canadian novels for young people I am studying. The complication of these novels is that there is no obvious way to imagine an inside place—the closed, comfortable, stable place that conventionally is coded as home.

14

I have demonstrated some of the terms of this anxiety in close readings of Leavitt’s, Ellis’s, and Horvath’s novels in “ ‘No place like home.’ ”

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References

Adderson, Caroline. Middle of Nowhere. Groundwood-Anansi, 2012. Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. 1992. Verso, 2008. Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 1969. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster. nlb, 1971, pp. 121–173. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Rev. ed. Verso, 1991. Armstrong, Luanne. I’ll Be Home Soon. Ronsdale, 2012. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Human Consequences. Columbia UP, 1998. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. Routledge, 2006. Proquest, ebookcentral. proquest.com/lib/uwinnipeg/detail.action?docID=274420. Accessed June 5, 2019. Bradford, Clare. “The Homely Imaginary: Fantasies of Nationhood in Australian and Canadian Texts.” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008, pp. 177–193. Brah, Avtar. Cartographies of Diaspora:  Contesting Identities. 1996. Routledge, 2003. Gender, Racism, Ethnicity series. Brown, Gillian. The Consent of the Governed: The Lockean Legacy in Early American Culture. Harvard UP, 2001. Brydon, Diana. “Storying Home: Power and Truth.” Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, edited by Marta Dvořak and W.H. New. Montreal:  McGill-Queen’s UP, 2007. Proquest, ebookcentral.proquest. com/lib/uwinnipeg/detail.action?docID=3332117. Accessed June 5, 2019. Chambers, Iain. “A Stranger in the House.” Communal/Plural, vol. 6, no. 1, 1988, pp. 33–49. Cohen, Margaret. “Narratology in the Archive of Literature.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 51–75. EBSCOHost, rep.ucpress.edu/content/108/1/51. Accessed June 5, 2019. Culler, Jonathan. “Anderson and the Novel.” Diacritics, vol. 29, no. 4, Winter 1999, pp. 20–39. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/article/9543. Accessed June 5, 2019. Darton, F.J. Harvey. Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life. 1932. 3rd ed. rev., edited by Brian Alderson. Cambridge UP, 1982. Egoff, Sheila, and Judith Saltman. The New Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English. Oxford UP, 1990. Ellis, Sarah. Odd Man Out. Groundwood-Anansi, 2006. Foss, Sonja K. Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice. 2nd ed. Waveland, 1989. George, Rosemary Marangoly. The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction. Cambridge UP, 1996.

220 Reimer Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society. Pluto Press, 1998. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000. Haworth-Attard, Barbara. Theories of Relativity: A Novel. HarperCollins, 2003. Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation. Yale UP, 1967. Hobsbawm, Eric. Introduction. “Exile: A Keynote Address.” Social Research, vol. 81, no. 1, 1991, pp. 65–68. Proquest, search.proquest.com/pao/docview/1297234165/1974680 1811D4E69PQ/10?accountid=15067. Accessed June 5, 2019. Horvath, Polly. The Corps of the Bare-Boned Plane. Groundwood-Anansi, 2007. Jacobsen, Michael Hviid. “Blurring Genres: A Conversation with Zygmunt Bauman on Metaphors, Science versus Art, Fiction and Other Tricks of the Trade.” Liquid Sociology: Metaphor in Zygmunt Bauman’s Analysis of Modernity, edited by Mark Davis, 2013, pp. 13–26. Jameson, Fredric. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. U of Illinois P, 1988, pp. 347–360. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana UP, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981. Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text, no. 15, Autumn 1986, pp. 65–88. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/466493?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed June 5, 2019. Leavitt, Martine. Tom Finder. Red Deer Press, 2004. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. Routledge, 2000. Nodelman, Perry. “At Home on Native Land: A Non-Aboriginal Canadian Scholar Discusses Aboriginality and Property in Canadian Double-Focalized Novels for Young Adults.” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer, Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008, pp. 107–128. Nodelman, Perry, and Mavis Reimer. The Pleasures of Children’s Literature. 1992. 3rd ed. Allyn and Bacon, 2003. O’Malley, Andrew. The Making of the Modern Child: Children’s Literature and Childhood in the Late Eighteenth Century. Routledge, 2003. Propp, V[ladimir]. Morphology of the Folktale. 1928. Translated by Laurence Scott. U of Texas P, 1968. Ravel, Edeet. The Saver. Groundwood-Anansi, 2008. Reed, Joel. “Nationalisms in a Global Economy.” Reading the Shape of the World: Toward an International Cultural Studies, edited by Henry Schwarz and Richard Dienst. Westview Press, 1996. pp. 30–49. Reimer, Mavis. “Canadian Children’s Literature in English.” International Companion Encyclopedia of Children’s Literature, edited by Peter Hunt. 2nd ed. 2 vols. Routledge, 2004, pp. 1011–1018.

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Reimer, Mavis. “Discourses of Home in Canadian Children’s Literature.” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008, pp. xi–xx. Reimer, Mavis. “For the Record.” Editorial. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 7, no. 2, Winter 2015, pp. 1–15. Reimer, Mavis. “Homing and Unhoming: The Ideological Work of Canadian Children’s Literature.” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008, pp. 1–25. Reimer, Mavis. “ ‘It’s the kids who made this happen’: The Occupy Movement as Youth Movement.” Editorial. Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, vol. 4, no. 1, Summer 2012, pp. 1–14. Reimer, Mavis. “Mobile characters, mobile texts: homelessness and intertextuality in contemporary texts for young people.” Barnboken—tidskrift för barnlitteraturforskning/Journal of Children’s Literature Research, vol. 36, 2013, n. pag. University of Winnipeg Institutional Repository, doi: 10.14811/clr.v36i0.101. Accessed June 5, 2019. Reimer, Mavis. “ ‘No place like home’:  The Facts and Figures of Homelessness in Contemporary Texts for Young People.” Barnelitteraert forskningstidsskrift (Nordic Journal of ChildLit Aesthetics), vol. 4, 2013, n.  pag. www.tandfonline.com/doi/ full/10.3402/blft.v4i0.20605. Accessed June 5, 2019. Reimer, Mavis. “On Location: The Home and the Street in Recent Films about Street Children.” International Research in Children’s Literature, vol. 5, no. 1, 2012, pp. 1–21. Reimer, Mavis, editor. Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008. Reimer, Mavis, and Anne Rusnak. “The Representation of Home in Canadian Children’s Literature/La representation du chez-soi dans la littérature de jeunesse canadienne.” Canadian Children’s Literature, no. 100/101, 2000–2001, pp. 9–46. Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization:  Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” Global Modernities, edited by Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson, sage, 1995, pp. 25–44. Saldanha, Louise. “White Picket Fences: At Home with Multicultural Children’s Literature in Canada?” Home Words: Discourses of Children’s Literature in Canada, edited by Mavis Reimer. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2008, pp. 129–143. Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority: 1780–1930. Harvard UP, 1995. Stephens, Sharon. “Children and the Politics of Culture in ‘Late Capitalism.’ ” Children and the Politics of Culture, edited by Sharon Stephens. Princeton UP, 1995. pp. 3–48. Tambling, Jeremy. Allegory. The New Critical Idiom. Routledge, 2010. Tomlinson, John. Globalization and Culture. The U of Chicago P, 1999. Toolan, Michael. Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction. Routledge, 1988. Trites, Roberta Seelinger. Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature. U of Iowa P, 2000.

222 Reimer Walters, Eric. Sketches. Puffin-Penguin, 2007. Walters, William. “Secure Borders, Safe Haven, Domopolitics.” Citizenship Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 2004, pp. 237–260. Taylor and Frances Online, www.tandfonline.com/doi/ full/10.1080/1362102042000256989. Accessed June 5, 2019. Wynne-Jones, Tim. Blink & Caution. Candlewick, 2011.

­c hapter 12

Bone to Bone, Spirit to Spirit—Sovereign Matriarchy, Asian/Indigenous Relations, and the Work of Directed Re-Membering Larissa Lai I love the bones that are stones. lee maracle, Memory Serves

∵ 1

Introduction

This essay is part of a larger project that seeks to outline the contours of Asian/ Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, north of the 49th parallel in a place that those who attach themselves to nation-state formations called ‘Canada.’ I actively seek channels of relation that foreground Indigenous and Asian-Canadian ways of being, both as they are embedded in the global nation-state system as it has been imagined and produced through Eurocentric histories of colonialism and imperialism and as they are remembered, constructed and reconstructed through the peoples, lands and waters on and through which those histories have been enacted, but who always already have had their own epistemological and ontological roots, routes and understandings of history. Here, I take up a fraught debate that has unfolded over the last decade or so, exemplified most directly in a debate that can be traced through Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua’s “Decolonizing Anti-Racism,” Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright’s “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” and Nandita Sharma’s “Canadian Multiculturalism and Its Nationalisms.” Lawrence and Dua make a powerful and insistent argument that people of colour are settlers and must be accountable for that subject position, however discomfiting it might be. Sharma argues that the Indigenous sovereignty argument made by Lawrence and Dua reinforces a Eurocentric and colonial understanding of the nation and that, as such, it is “neo-racist.” I argue that Indigenous sovereignty

224 Lai need not be understood in Eurocentric or colonial terms and that Indigenous sovereignty therefore need not reinforce colonial nation formations. Further, while it may sometimes be necessary to understand Asian Canadians as settlers, their specific settler condition and responsibilities need to be nuanced and articulated in light of their specific histories of migration, settlement, and survival. From a relational point-of-view, Asian Canadians may from time to time need to take up the Westphalian nation-state formation as a matter of strategy, in order to enter into good relations with Indigenous peoples, but this is not the only way to nurture and build those good relations, and in fact cultural avenues, especially as they are built among women and/or through matriarchal principles can offer a powerful alternative to the much advocated state-to-state relationship. I begin by taking up Jodi Byrd’s borrowing of Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of the “arrivant” as well as Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s concept of the “unsettler” to make a distinction between white and racialized presences on Turtle Island. Then, through a turn to oratory and literature, specifically Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves and SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe, I illustrate the specific forms that Chinese Canadian responsibility might take. I argue further that story and culture are a necessary ground for the work of relation-making, especially in the wake of the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Finally, I  expand upon the call that Disappearing Moon Cafe seems to make for a genealogical recuperation of Asian-Indigenous relation along matriarchal lines. I have recognized this call in an earlier essay on Disappearing Moon Cafe; however, in the wake of Memory Serves it is possible to vastly amplify it, through Maracle’s invocation of intentional, directed memory work and Byrd’s concept of “cacophony.” Indigenous and Asian women in conversation and story through the work of culture offer channels for relation-building, expanding and complementing the work that takes place through the more mainstream channels of the law and the state. For this reason, it is important to read and listen to their work in combination and conversation, across the boundaries of conventionally (and Eurocentrically) demarcated literary fields. I  call for interrelated rather than comparative reading/listening. With Maracle, I  suggest that the work of story and directed memory is as powerful if not more powerful than the work that must also be done through state and legal channels, and further that this work is gendered, and ought to be led by women. Its deepest calling occurs at spirit-to-spirit and bone-to-bone registers, which I articulate via Maracle and Lee. Through their work, I expand this matriarchal call to two-spirit and GBLTQ2SA + writers and storytellers, though these locations require further theorization.

Bone to Bone, Spirit to Spirit

2

225

Impasses, Self-Reflection and the Shifting Ground of Terminology

If there are two major impasses to Asian/Indigenous relation in Canada, the first is legal-historical, and the second is episto-ontological. Both are built into the terms “Asian” and “Indigenous” themselves, and are underpinned by a Eurocentric legal framework and a history of relationship through those legal terms—their ideological freight, if you like. The legal historical impasse is built into the contradiction that when Asian Canadians agitate for rights, they do so in the Canadian state context and thus reinforce the state and its colonial hold on the land that Indigenous people call Turtle Island. The onto-epistemological impasse occurs in the framework of sovereignty, which Indigenous peoples must turn to in order to regain control of their own future and revive the knowledge needed to preserve human life on this planet. As much as these impasses are embedded in Eurocentric legal and historical contexts, they are also embedded in Indigenous land, history and law, and also, importantly, language, experience and story for all concerned. Because this is the case, literary critics are in a unique position to offer at least a partial understanding of both impasses and to offer, if not solutions, at least useful analyses that might direct us towards how alliances might be built across both terms. These may be produced not in any ideal or totalizing sense, but in a nuanced sense that is honest about and responsible to the history we have lived through thus far. It is important to open up the contradictions that arise in language and culture in order to break out of the impasses and open the door to constructive change and respectful relations. The two impasses are connected in the sense that in order for Asian Canadians to understand themselves in citizenship terms, they must imagine a whole and coherent subjectivity for themselves within the bounds of European Enlightenment tradition. Similarly, there is a danger that in order for Indigenous peoples to imagine themselves as sovereign, they must imagine themselves in Eurocentric state terms. In both cases, there is a certain ideological pressure to accept Western state formation as an undigested totality. I will show how this can be intervened upon. For indeed, if the crisis of Western modernity is the crisis of the bounded, discrete and complete Cartesian subject on the one hand and national belonging on the other, both are caught in this onto-epistemological framework, though at odd angles to one another, in the sense that not every national attachment that exists globally inherits Cartesian subjectivity in the same way. Those of us who come from non-European histories have ontological traditions and trajectories of our own. For some of us, to break the hold of these ideological forms, or what Deleuze would call territorializations, requires an extraordinary feat of language, narrative and spirit. I want to argue

226 Lai that this is precisely what contemporary writers and literary critics are doing. In engaging such language, narrative and spirit, writers and critics engage other modernities besides Western ones. I should be clear here that I understand this work as work done from my own contingent and sedimented Asian Canadian location to think through the specific modes of respect and responsibility that properly accrue to those inhabiting this site, as the work of a complex and nuanced solidarity with Indigenous peoples in their nation specificities, here particularly Stó:lō, Nuu’Chah-nulth, and Syilx, though more broadly all the nations of Turtle Island. As such, it is a kinship text with Paulette Reagan’s ­important book Unsettling the Settler Within, though its practice and method are quite different. I acknowledge and stand in solidarity with those upon whose lands I have made my home at various points in my life: Payómkawichum, ­Ioway, Sauk, Meskwaki, Beothuk, Mi’kmaq, Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil ­Waututh; as well as the nations of Treaty Seven: Siksika, Piikuni, ­Kainai, Tsuut’ina and S­ toney Nakoda, in addition to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region iii. I use three different terms in this essay that address the condition of racialized settlement. I use “Asian Canadian” because it addresses my larger project; “people of colour” because it is a term through which much productive contention arises; and “Chinese Canadian” when referring to specific Chinese Canadian historical, critical or literary instances. To the best of my ability, I nuance them in their specificity; nonetheless, some unavoidable slippage occurs. However, I understand all of these terms as emergent and open to the flowing pressures of critical and creative practice, contemporary and historical experience, as well as both Western and non-Western law and their applications. They are not completely open terms, free to any interpretation, but nor are they static or “essential.” I also take up the term “Indigenous” in this essay to address a complicated historical experience imposed by colonial governments but also experienced and claimed in a wide range of ways by the original inhabitants of Turtle Island. I recognize also that specific nation names are preferred and use them as much as possible where it makes sense to do so. The project of Asian/Indigenous relation must have at its base an acknowledgement of and respect for Indigenous attachment to the land on the one hand, and on the other, Asian movements which have variously been framed as Asian Canadian, diasporic and/or globalized. These Asian movements— understood in both senses, as political movements and as worldly mobility— are all implicated in the project of settler colonialism. Specifically, the Asian Canadian justice movements from the 1960s to the present are predicated on agitation for the rights of citizenship. Within the context of settler colonialism, such agitation reinforces the state and in so doing undermines Indigenous

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sovereignty movements, placing Asian Canadian social justice at odds with Indigenous sovereignty however much any individual Asian Canadian subject might wish otherwise. We must be careful when positing “Asian diaspora” or “Asian migration” as frameworks preferable to “Asian Canadian” precisely because such a shift disavows the colonial state at precisely the moment when Indigenous cultural and political activists are asking their racialized brothers and sisters for a measure of accountability in the ways we have taken up that formation. Instead, we must consider the ways diaspora and nation work together. For indeed, we do not want to deny the productivities of the relatively recent ‘transpacific’ formation or its route through Asian American formations (though this is not its only possible route). As Lisa Yoneyama writes: If Asian/Canadian critique were to be critically intersected with transpacific Asian/American critique, this might open up a way to relearn how Canada as a subimperial nation has been deeply implicated in the transpacific Cold War order. (Yoneyama 197) Such an analysis, I  suggest, would open the door also for deeper forms of Asian/Indigenous relations, recognized in difference and as historically produced. Nevertheless, we must remember that the call through Idle No More and other Indigenous movements is for racialized people who have turned to the state for the rights of citizenship to recognize our role in state production. It is a matter of both respect and responsibility to take up that call. While some of us might not desire a relationship to Indigenous people that is triangulated through whiteness and European settler colonial relations to the land, we must, nevertheless acknowledge the ways in which we have been complicit with it, even when such complicity might, at the time, have seemed like the work of survival. As the first move of this essay, I call for a return to the nation and specifically the concept of sovereignty as a way of calling myself and others marked Asian Canadian to take up the call of Idle No More and to do the work of seeking and practicing what might constitute respect and responsibility within a framework that recognizes the necessity of accountability for the past, and for historical justice to unfold in a creative, imaginative present that remains necessarily open and unfinished. The work of the nation attaches to the legal-historical framework I lay out above. Within this sphere, “responsibility” is a key term and a key practice. But the question is, what does it mean, and how can it unfold? I would like to suggest further that the onto-epistemological frame is the frame in which deeper relation can be sought, uncovered and/or newly produced, specifically within the vein of feminist practice and the work

228 Lai of imagination. The legal frame and the frame of being and doing—what we might call the cultural frame—may overlap but one need not be contained within the other. Rather, both already are mutually productive of one another. This mutual productivity needs to be acknowledged and intervened upon. It is, in fact, a site of profound creativity and relationality. 3

“People of Colour Are Settlers”

The overt discussion of Asian/Indigenous relations is relatively new. Born, at least in part, from the incompletely theorized anti-racist movements of the 1980s and 1990s, the recognition that profound distinctions must be made between Indigenous peoples and people of colour is a difficult but necessary one. On Turtle Island, north of the 49th parallel, a heated debate erupted after the 2005 publication of Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua’s essay “Decolonizing Antiracism,” specifically in response to the authors’ provocative claim “People of colour are settlers” (134). Though in the sentence after which they make this claim, they acknowledge the violence of slavery, migrant labour and undocumented migration, the recognition that people of colour live on appropriated, contested land and therefore have specific responsibilities attaching to this condition remains of vital importance (134), the statement “People of colour are settlers” was controversial enough to instigate what the University of Victoria-based political scientist Rita Dhamoon called an “explosion” in response (20). Among the responses the most sensational was issued by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright in an essay called “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States.” Sharma and Wright suggest that Indigenous turns to the nation for the purpose of reclaiming sovereignty constitute a neoliberal return to the ruling practices of the colonial state (126) and make Indigeneity a “possessive identity” for the purposes of group claims on resources (124). Further, autochthony can be said to be a neoliberal mode of belonging, one whose attempts to contain contestation are based on allegation that any demand for rights and/or resources by “non-Natives,” including a radical rethinking of how rights and resources are thought of and distributed, is tantamount to a disregard for, and even colonization of, the autochtones. (Sharma and Wright 126, italics in original) Sharma calls for decolonization without nationalism, and a turn instead to the concept of the “global commons” as an ideal: “The commons is an organization

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of human activity that ‘vests all property in the community and organizes labor for the common benefit of all’ ” (Linebaugh 6 qtd. in Sharma and Wright 131). In her counter-response to Sharma and Wright, in support of Lawrence and Dua’s call to make Indigenous presence and experience foundational to anti-racist thought and practice on Turtle Island, Rita Dhamoon (21) suggests that Sharma and Wright make the mistake of adopting an “Oppression Olympics” framework “whereby groups are positioned as if they were competing for the mantle of the most oppressed, without disrupting hegemonies of power” (22). Dhamoon recognizes, rightly to my mind, that in seeing all nationalisms as colonial, Sharma and Wright’s thinking is stuck in Western epistemologies. I  argue further that in thinking of resources and rights as the substance to be struggled over, Sharma and Wright are inadvertantly caught up in liberal Western understandings of the grounds for human relations. Citing Glen Coulthard’s understanding of decolonization as the work of thinking about “land as a system of reciprocal relations and obligation” and not as a struggle for land (Coulthard qtd. in Dhamoon 24), Dhamoon recognizes the profound need to work across Indigenous and Western epistemologies to understand what is at stake ideologically. She suggests that Sharma and Wright’s assumptions about what is at stake are: bound to Western ontologies of the nation, whether liberal or Marxist, in which it is assumed that land is always a commodity whether privately owned or collectively/commonly shared, that man [sic] can/must master in/as the nation, and that decolonial conceptions of the nation about sharing land are not available. These colonizing and indeed patriarchal ontological frames limit Sharma and Wright because they do not imagine social identities outside of ‘ongoing practices of ruling.’ (Dhamoon 23) In a later essay, “Canadian Multiculturalism and Its Nationalisms,” Sharma insists that a distinction be made between migration and colonialism (99), and argues again for the utopian ideal of a borderless world and common rights for all human beings (101). For her, sovereignty is necessarily a form of hierarchical, racist violence that she cannot support: we also need to challenge sovereignty of all sorts—stories that insist upon there being a coincidence of identity, territory and authority. This claim to sovereignty by the Canadian state forms the basis for legalized discrimination against those deemed to be foreigners, a category that has, throughout modern history, been used to differentially include the Other, rather than simply exclude her or him. This claim to sovereignty

230 Lai also legitimizes a racialized and ethnicized claim to land and to power. (Sharma 100) If there is a strangely impassioned liberalism to Sharma’s articulation, there is also a set of heartfelt ideals that must not be thrown out with the bathwater. Her anxiety about racialized attachment to land makes sense from a diasporic point of view, in other words, from the point of view of those who have suffered racialized displacement. From a diasporic point of view the call to account for one’s participation in racialized wrong-doing could function as a sort of traumatic repetition; it holds up the future spectre of a second loss of home. For indeed, as Lily Cho suggests, diaspora must be understood “first and foremost [as] a subjective condition marked by the contingencies of long histories of displacements and genealogies of dispossession” (14). Further, “[t]‌hey emerge in relation to power. This power is both external to the diasporic subject and internally formative … diasporic subjects emerge in turning, turning back upon those markers of the self—homeland, memory, loss-- even as they turn on or away from them” (15). For such ever-emerging subjects, the hail of “sovereignty” may well be heard as a form of violence. The difference at work here, thinking about Asian/Indigenous relation, is that while the Canadian state may well owe an account of itself to its racialized citizens (as in, for instance, Japanese Canadian Redress), Indigenous people owe no such thing to the racialized citizens of the colonial state. The politics of calling the master to account cannot hold here. In her claim that modern sovereignty has been used to exclude others, Sharma fails to recognize the Eurocentrism of both modernity and sovereignty as she conceives them. Further, when she makes a call against sovereignty from a “person of colour” or “South Asian woman” position she does not recognize the ways in which such a call from her own historically sedimented location reinforces a colonial power relation that she likely does not intend to reinforce. If the body politics of the 1980s and 1990s are to retain their partial productivities, in fact another stance is necessary. The question becomes how to generate such a stance—such a thing is neither obvious nor easy. Kirsten McAllister worries that “solidarity” can be an empty concept without substance, while guilt is not a productive emotion: if guilt is all that racialized settlers like me have to offer, this is very troubling since … guilt is an aggressive emotion … Guilt is a way to punish oneself for something one feels wrong about doing. While it is necessary to regret the harm one has inflicted, it is something different to stay forever in a position fixated on one’s guilt, especially in public forums,

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whereupon the invocation of guilt asks others to relate to us primarily in a relation of aggression, an aggression against oneself. This hardly seems a good path forward. (M c Allister 425) The difficulty then, for diasporic subjects may be as much a psychic/emotional difficulty as a legal/historical one, which is why I argue that a distinction must be made between these modes in order to truly take up the path of respect and responsibility. On the legal/historical front, there is no question that Sharma’s call is a misstep. As Robinder Sehdev argues, from a “person of colour” location, “[t]‌hrough migration our ancestors and we have sworn allegiance to Canada and the Queen of England” (268). She nuances the concept of sovereignty to make it clear that Indigenous sovereignty need not be understood in racial terms or in terms of blood ties to the land, as Sharma fears. Sovereignty need not be understood in Eurocentric terms: One expression of domination in Canada occurs with the imposition of equivalences that, in effect, would level the very difference that distinguishes First Nations’ sovereignty from the ethnic, linguistic, or cultural rights of other minorities. The language of a state-to-state relationship is often used to communicate the intact sovereignty of Aboriginal nations and distinguish their unique position vis-à-vis the state, but this is tricky language. Nationalism and sovereignty are often understood in Eurocentric terms, which assume that its definitions are universal while variations are something less than “true” nationalism and sovereignty. This simply is not the case. Aboriginal sovereignty and nationality are distinct and affirmed in treaties made with European newcomers. (sehdev 269) For Sehdev, the treaty relationship is primary, and people of colour are called into treaty relationship through citizenship, landed immigrant status, refugee status or any other state-recognized form of legitimation. This set of relations is bound to both Western and Indigenous epistemologies of the nation, and works, in a sense, as a site of translation. Because of its legal, material and experiential underpinnings, neither Indigenous people nor people of colour can deny this set of relations, but it is not the only set of relations that binds them differentially together. To think through the concept of the state-to-state relationship, Daniel Coleman turns to Jeannette Armstrong’s essay “Literature of the Land—An Ethos for These Times” in which Armstrong translates the name of her people “Syilx,” and then explains:

232 Lai To be Syilx … is to heed a societal imperative to twine many strands together to continuously sustain a unity of existence with the generation-to-generation, year-to year, season-to-season cycles that we are a necessary part of. Like every other living thing, we have an important role in the health of the tmxwulaxw and a specific purpose as humans in the life-force of the land, and the captikw ∫ of the Syilx are there to continuously rekindle the light of its truth. (Armstrong qtd. in coleman “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space” 11) Coleman explains that tmxwulaxw does not evoke the blood of scientific racism and ethnic absolutism, but rather a twine of many strands that extends across human generations and across species. The life force of the earth itself extrudes these strands of connection and interdependency. It generates story, responsibility, and, Coleman says, the renewal of citizenship with the land (“Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space” 11). For Coleman, this life force has a spiritual aspect. He says: “Each place has its own revelation, and what matters is that the peoples of each region take up their responsibilities to interact with and regenerate the sacredness of their place” (11). What becomes clear here, then, is that sovereignty need not always be sovereignty imagined in European state terms. In fact, as Rinaldo Walcott argues, the violence of contemporary colonialism, or what he calls “vicious modernity” is precisely one that erases non-European modes of thought, non-European ways of understanding the human in relation to nation-state apologies (344), and by corollary, non-European ways of understanding what sovereignty might comprise. Dara Culhane is eminently clear on this subject, vis à vis the colonial production of British Columbia and the legal/state denial of the very existence of Indigenous peoples on the West Coast: Of course, Britain never had colonized and never would colonize uninhabited land. Therefore, the doctrine of terra nullius was never concretely applied “on the ground.” Rather, already inhabited nations were simply legally deemed to be uninhabited if the people were not Christian, not agricultural, not commercial, or not “sufficiently evolved” or simply in the way. In British Columbia, the doctrine of terra nullius has historically legitimized the colonial government’s failure to enter into treaties with First Nations … When Aboriginal people say today that they have had to go to court to prove they exist, they are speaking not just poetically but also literally. (Culhane 48, italics in original)

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For Culhane, it is clear that even within the bounds of British law, the colonial governments had the legal framework to recognize the people who inhabited the land before they came, they simply chose not to use it (48). The denial of Indigenous sovereignty in the face of material human presence is clearly wrong, especially given that even within the framework of the colonizer’s own legal code, the provision for it exists. Further, it is the denial of Indigenous worldviews in a way that impoverishes all of us belonging to the broad and uneven human community. Reading Coleman, Armstrong, Culhane and Sehdev together, it becomes clear that settler relations to the land and to Indigenous people depend upon both the specificity of place as revealed in specific Indigenous nation languages, and also in relation to the (il)legal ways in which European colonization has been enacted. We see further how the statement “People of colour are settlers” binds people of colour to the Eurocentric state in the most discomfiting of ways. In the wake of the tenuous coalition work of the 1980s and 1990s, (some) people of colour’s feelings of abandonment are understandable. We must confront the statement and act at least in part within the confines of this terrible bind. One thing we can do is query the language of benefit. When we say, as Robinder Sehdev and many other people of colour attempting to be accountable do, “I benefit from the work of colonialism”—this is true, but the nature of the benefit is not optimum. People of colour also lose when Indigenous people are violated—we lose access to them in the fullness and generosity of their being, their traditions, and their connection to their land. We lose the possibility of connecting with their ways of knowing and of putting our ways of knowing in conversation with theirs. A deeply considered and practised solidarity is still necessary not just because it is right, but also because the benefits of real solidarity outweigh whatever tenuous benefits we might accrue for participating in colonialism as usual. We must of course, be cautious of easy or “assumptive” solidarity as Dana M. Olwan has written: I argue for the importance of moving towards an understanding of solidarity that does not conceptualize innocence or sameness as prerequisites for liberation movements and justice struggles, and challenges assumptions of mutuality and commensurability between different settler-colonial contexts. (Olwan 90) The path towards non-assumptive solidarity requires us to continuously historicize relationships in their ongoing, location-specific unfolding. While solidarity must actively return balance to historically and materially produced

234 Lai injustice, including the Eurocentric epistemologies that underpin them, it is insufficient to address only the work of complicity with the colonial state because such an address, by remaining in the dialectic, also reinforces the colonial state at the epistemological level, producing the “aggressive guilt” that McAllister cautions us against. We can and must seek other forms of relation in addition, which may, iteratively over time shift relations to a more respectful ground, one that recognizes Indigenous and diasporic modernities and their attached epistemologies and practices. As a first step, however, we must unpack the specific historical circumstances that give rise to our settler being, or, as I prefer to term it, our settler emergenc/y. I have been using the term “people of colour” to address the problem of racialized settlers up until this point, largely because it is through this term that the most pointed debates have occurred to date. It is a fraught term, one that replaces the Canadian government term “visible minority” in a way that names and contains a broad subset of people in a quasi-legal, state-centric way. It does not take account of the multiple histories, interactions and forms of oppression endured by the multitudes it attempts to name, or the instabilities of the subject brought to light through various strains of poststructuralism recognizing the subject as genealogically produced (Foucault), inessential (Fuss, Spivak) or sedimented through repeated iteration (Butler): the construction is neither a single act nor a causal process initiated by a subject and culminating in a set of fixed effects. Construction not only takes place in time, but is itself a temporal process which operates through the reiteration of norms. (Butler 10) If the iteration is not sufficiently consistent or if it operates in relation to other more intensively sedimented terms, it may be that some terms hold only weakly or only under certain circumstances. For instance, taking up Rinaldo Walcott’s declaration “poc doesn’t work for Black people” at the symposium “20 Years of Writing Thru Race” in 2014, I recognize that Blacks and Asians have historically emerged along very different lines in terms of racialization, labour, exploitation and oppression. Though the term “people of colour” may, in fact, occasionally work for Black people, there are clearly times when it erases important differences and important histories. We should ask ourselves instead when, how and in what contexts it works, and what its limitations are and what gets erased at the limit. The term “settler,” even to describe “people of colour,” remains important in relation to the state at the site of accountability. Other terms, however, open up the political, creative and strategic possibilities of an overlapping site of

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responsibility and action. Borrowing from the Bajan poet Kamau Brathwaite, Jodi Byrd uses the term “arrivant” to signify those racialized people who came to the Americas under the violent colonial pressures of either force or necessity (xix), people who have both “functioned within and have resisted the historical project of the colonization of the ‘New World’ ” (xix). For Byrd, however, it is important to recognize the arrivant as a figure belonging to the state, connected internally as I have argued also to “contradictory quagmires where human rights, equal rights, and recognitions are predicated on the very systems that propagate and maintain the dispossession of indigenous peoples for the common good of the world” (xiv). Reading Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, Byrd argues that from the location of the arrivant as much as from the location of the white settler, “the fourth continent of settler colonialism … becomes the very ground through which the other three continents struggle intimately for freedom, justice and equality” (xxv). Indigenous peoples, in other words, are the “transit” through which both white settlers and arrivants struggle to materialize a liberal, democratic world. Generously and brilliantly, she recognizes the profound inequality of the unfolding relationship between white settlers and arrivants on the Indigenous ground of transit, as, for instance when Japanese Americans were interned on the Indian Reservation at Poston in 1942, and told by James Collier, the administrator of the only internment camp for Japanese Americans run by the Office of Indian Affairs, that they had there the opportunity to engage in a patriotic, American democratizing experiment (185–186). Byrd’s recognition is generous because Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land are the foundational underpinning that must be physically and brutally erased before the contradictory relationship between Japanese Americans and the US State, with the fraught hope of democracy attached, can even begin to unfold. This does not in any way minimize our understanding of the suffering endured by Japanese Americans interned during World War ii. To the contrary, Japanese Americans are made to carry the onto-poetic meanings (and experiences) of both “cowboys” and “Indians,” intersubstantively (210). Though Byrd writes in a US context, her argument also applies in a Canadian one—and all the more so given that the national boundary between Canada and the US is a colonial boundary. Byrd’s understanding of Indigenous peoples and lands as the violated and erased ground of transit also illustrates why Sharma and Wright’s ideal of the global commons remains a colonial concept. Byrd writes: any notion of the commons that speaks for and as indigenous as it advocates transforming indigenous governance or incorporating indigenous peoples into a multitude that might then reside on those lands forcibly taken from

236 Lai indigenous peoples does nothing to disrupt the genocidal and colonialist intent of the initial and now repeated historical process. (Byrd 205) Byrd argues thus for the kind of solidarity that posits Indigenous dispossession as foundational. We must recognize this violence in order for other forms of colonial violence to have meaning. This understanding does not preclude meaningful solidarity work, in fact, it inaugurates it. In her debunking of the Bering Strait theory, and her positing of Asian Americans and Indigenous peoples in a relationship of temporal cacophony, Byrd opens up the possibility of more just and direct relations. To get to that place, however, we must understand the ways our colonially produced positions have been used against one another. The Bering Strait theory suggests that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas have their roots in Asia, and crossed a land bridge at the Bering Strait some time in the distant past. The usefulness of this theory to a US white exceptionalist doctrine of Manifest Destiny (and by corollary, such Canadian attempts at Indigenous assimilation like Pierre Trudeau’s infamous 1969 White Paper) is that it posits Indigenous people as, at their root, Asian, and thus as immigrants rather than as rooted in the land since time immemorial as an Indigenous sovereigntist stance would have it. Byrd recognizes that, while there may historically indeed have been movement of peoples across the Bering Strait prior to 18th century European racial classification, there is no reason why people would not have been moving in both directions. The question of origin as such, is thus returned to the unstable realm of hermeneutics. But in the meantime, the contemporary Eurocentric state agenda at work becomes clear. Byrd writes: The orientalizing cacophonies that remap indigenous peoples as part of an early wave of Asian immigrants perform an originary racialization of indigenous peoples as they are recast as immigrants who may or may not be full citizens. (Byrd 202) By corollary, I would suggest, the Bering Strait narrative casts Asians as Indigenous in a curious way. For now, the work of meaningful solidarity must refuse such a narrative and uphold solidarity in difference, in the face of the Euro-modern colonial narrative that aims to conflate Asianness and Indigeneity in order to undermine the claims of each. We are called upon to be attentive to those occasions when difference is used to reinforce the state and when conflations of that difference into a misleading sameness is used for reinforcement purposes. In the case of the Bering Strait narrative, solidarity in difference here is an act of refusing a colonial attempt to make sameness in order to undermine. However, in my drive to elucidate possibilities for Asian/Indigenous relation,

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I argue that Byrd’s notion of “cacophony” can be productive when it produces a noisy potential for Asian/Indigenous relation outside or on the interstices of the linear narratives of the state. Within the concept of “cacophony,” in which opposition to the colonial state is not the only goal, Asian/Indigenous continuities can be tentatively addressed. To be clear, I recognize this cacophony as fraught, and Asian North Americans as implicated in colonial and neocolonial state projects. But to clarify further, I am not seeking an ideal form, but rather looking for chinks in the armour of the state, as it were, through which different relations, even if still messy, can be sought and made. Having stated my intention, I turn now to Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s notion of the “unsettler.” In the introduction to their recent anthology on water, Downstream, in the self-reflective first paragraphs of their introduction, they describe Wong as a “settler (or unsettler)” (2). The grammatical form is important here. In taking up the term “settler,” Wong accepts her inherited relationship to the state: she is still a settler with settler responsibilities. But by placing “(or unsettler)” in parentheses, Christian and Wong recognize Wong’s agented capacity for action. Wong does not need to accept her settler condition lying down; rather, she can stand up, not only for her rights but for the rights of water, Indigenous peoples, the Peace River, all the contributors to the Downstream anthology and the Downstream project more broadly. For her “settler” is a condition she has inherited and must accept and work against, while “unsettler” is an agented (or, as Roy Miki would have it “Asianted”) location, actively engaged to reimagine and remake Asian/Indigenous relations differently. Byrd’s concept of “cacophony” becomes newly important here. If the neo­ colonial cacophony of the US state formation recalls Indigenous people as Asian, it must reach into another historical moment before contemporary regimes of race and the Euro-modern state to make this recollection. In so doing, it opens the door to other, cacophonous genealogies as well as non-Western epistemologies including Indigenous and Asian ones, as well as Western epistemologies of other historical moments. As Renisa Mawani notes, hegemonic racial formations are not historically coherent or seamless (21). In fact, the colonial project on the West Coast was one of constructing regimes of truth and technologies of governance to enforce racial divides (15) (which is why sameness or likeness can sometimes be useful). The door was and still is open, in other words, to the work of culture and relationship building in the form of storytelling, oratory, poetry, fiction, music, film, web art and intermedia of all kinds. It is precisely these relationships that threaten the colonial state: “these colonial proximities disturbed the self/other divide, creating opportunities for affinities, friendships and intimacies that jeopardized the question for racial purity” (Mawani 15).

238 Lai I agree with Byrd that within the logic of the state, so-called people of colour are subject to a process of incorporation, while Indigenous people form the ground of transit who are violently erased. The framework of solidarity work, however, allows so-called “people of colour” and Indigenous people to work in alliance. People of colour, insofar as they have accepted the terms of entry into the state, must be accountable at the site of the state. But there is also an outside condition for people of colour—they are not pure subjects of the state. As Smaro Kamboureli notes (in a Canadian context), they do not need to engage completely the state’s “hailing” (in Althusser’s sense), or programmatic determinations, of who and what they are: In the case of the Multiculturalism Act, identifying with the subject as defined by the law does not necessarily mean conceding to the ways the law constructs us … This involves disobeying the law, deciphering its blind spots, and writing into them ethnic subjectivity not as a disciplinary condition but as one that develops through and against the law, in effect by disciplining the law itself. (Kamboureli 105) I would argue further that such disobedience can have a genealogical aspect— more desirable histories can be retrieved if they are available in the archive, in memory, in story or in literature. It is, then, from active sites of racialized culture-under-production that alternate genealogies can be traced to produce alternate relations. Even though the Bering Strait narrative is a state form of culture-under-production—a bad genealogy as it were—it opens the door to more productive forms, produced by Indigenous and Asian culture producers themselves, as literature, art and story. We must remain attentive to the politics of the state and its linear temporalities, but not in an absolute way. We need also to look to the work of story, literature and culture and its cacophonous “time out joint,” and the work of active memory and imagination. While the realpolitik labour of producing legal state-to-state relations is still needed, more deeply and broadly, a (re)turn to what Lee Maracle calls “spirit to spirit relationships” (2) in their matriarchal iterations is largely missing from the conversation and needs to be recuperated. 4

Labour/Land/Property/Race

Now, in the interests of fully inhabiting embodied experience, I will from this point consider how Asian Canadians, and specifically Chinese Canadians, figure with regard to the historical circumstances that give rise to our settler

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being and how this can be cacophonously intervened upon. This is not because Chinese Canadians are exemplary in any way, but only because this term allows me to unfold an argument about alternate forms of nationality in a historically specific way. Further, with regards to a politics of “speaking for,” as articulated by Linda Alcoff, I can unfold my arguments a little more smoothly from this place, and leave further research for scholars better placed to address their own specifically racialized locations. In order to complete the discussion of culture, it is paradoxically necessary to talk about labour because of the way that labour is storied and understood in relation to Asian migration. Malissa Phung’s recent work on Chinese Canadian labour has been important for recognizing that the ways in which Chinese Canadian settler locations differ from the “founding nations” (British and French) location. Phung recognizes that the combination of Confucian patriarchal economic modes, economic conditions facing Chinese workers through much of the last century, and Canadian colonial state needs for cheap labour, produces a very particular relationship between Chinese labour and the state. She is critical of the ways in which some Chinese Canadian scholars and writers have recuperated the figure of the Chinese Canadian railway, laundry, and/or restaurant worker as an exemplary nation builder, suggesting that this is not a fully desirable recuperation (Phung 99). Arguing that Confucian patriarchal family structures support a work ethic resonating all too well with the Protestant work ethic that was so instrumental in opening up the west in relation to white labour, Phung suggests such an ethic is attached to suspect desires for class mobility and engenders a Confucian capitalism that can be as violent as Protestant or European capitalisms if not more so. To exalt such a figure, in the sense of concealing the violence that marks the origin of the national subject (Thobani 10), is to fully participate in and claim a settler colonial position. It is incommensurate, thus, with respectful relationship building, and further is terribly shortsighted if human freedom is the implicit goal, even if the temptation to do it is understandable. Nevertheless, the figure of the Chinese worker needs to be interrogated. Here, I see this figure not so much as one that needs recuperation and exaltation (though it is certainly a figure deserving of respect), but rather as one that bears a little careful scrutiny so that we can see where the lines of productive relationship building might lie. It is important to recognize that the British legal requirement expropriating Indigenous land, in other words, for converting the legal status of territory from sacred land into capitalist property, requires that the land be worked in the agricultural sense. Dara Culhane identifies John Locke as the British philosopher whose arguments through the early seventeenth century were instrumental in

240 Lai later legal and political justifications of European land seizure in North America (53). Locke’s labour theory of property lays the foundation for legalizing (in British terms) the expropriation of Indigenous lands in the West. According to Locke, what justifies an individual owning land is his ownership of himself and his ownership of his own labour. When a person works the land, his labour enters the land and the land becomes his property: Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body [sic] has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his ­property. (locke 27) Culhane notes that, insofar as labour in the Americas is concerned, however, it is only white men’s labour that can transform natural objects into property. According to Locke, Indigenous people have a right only to “the fruit they gather, the deer they catch and the corn they pick” (Locke qtd. in Culhane 53). Daniel Coleman points out further that in settler ideology, it is agriculture that makes land into property, and further justifies the displacement of Indigenous peoples by whites (White Civility 57). Let me be very clear here that for me this is all very disturbing logic. But it is nonetheless the logic that gives us the property relations we live with on Turtle Island, and it must thus be reckoned with. If the Chinese Canadian desire for exaltation is a desire not just for citizenship rights but also for entry into property relations then it is, as Malissa Phung argues, desire to embrace the settler colonial project. However, Chinese men were not used in the way that the English, Scottish and later other European peoples as well as United Empire Loyalists from the US were for the purpose converting Indigenous land into capitalist property. It should be noted that very few Chinese were the recipients of land grants in British Columbia (“Chinese-Canadian Genealogy”), though further research needs to be done on the extent of Chinese land grants in Canada more broadly. Certainly, national narratives of agricultural settlement speak of white settlers. Chinese presence is narrativized through railway, Head Tax and Exclusion stories. They were not white enough to be used to settle the land. Instead, their labour was supplementary in the Derridean sense that it is both a replacement and an excessive addition. It was used to help open the land up for Western agriculture and resource exploitation,

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specifically through their participation in the building of the railway, in addition to the various kinds of menial support labour that facilitated the colonization of Turtle Island—laundries, restaurants, corner stores. While they were permitted to own property, such ownership was restricted. For instance, in the City of Vancouver, Chinese people could only own land in Chinatown. Further, the Head Tax requirement and the tradition of sending money back to China meant that in practice, Chinese people did not do primary labour of land expropriation. That said, as Malissa Phung has shown, the project of Gold Mountain was a project of wealth extraction and must be recognized as such. Further, the desire for property ownership, though it may or may not have been there for the loh wah kiu (old timers), is certainly a desire and an active practice at present, one noted by many Westerners often with extreme racial prejudice. Those of us Chinese Canadians who make our home in Canada now inherit the support work done to facilitate the colonial expropriation of the land, as well as the wealth-building project of Gum Saan. We also carry a fraught relationship to contemporary Chinese colonialism whether we embrace it or not. To these systemic truths, within an economics of contemporary social justice, we owe a debt specific from our own racialized location, socially constructed and emergent to be certain, but also sedimented in Judith Butler’s sense, taken in to the body through repeated iteration in practice. Phung is so careful however, to respect the generations of the lo wah kiu, and to recognize that within the framework of their own world views at the time, they did what they had to do to survive, and carried a set of fairly hegemonic Confucian cultural ideals, without access to the kind of educated, after-thefact thinking that I have the privilege of engaging here. Such labour must be honoured. In the systemic racialized logic of settlement, we might think of the loh wah kiu as prosthetic to the white bodies that were given land to turn into property. They functioned, in a sense, as disembodied “arms” of the Canadian state— labouring flesh meant to extend the whole and complete property-making bodies of white men, but not to own that property, rather—through the logic of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act—to return to China when the act of property-making was complete. Thinking with Alexander Weheliye and others, we might contrast the property-making flesh of the Chinese indentured labourers against the flesh of those Black people who were taken as property in slavery— labouring extensions of the land at precisely the moment the land was being (il) legally converted from sacred Indigenous earth to Western capitalist property. Again, the possibilities of this argument can be expanded, but that is the work of another essay. For the purposes of this one, what becomes clear is that

242 Lai while there is no question that Asian Canadian subjects must take responsibility for their part in the colonial project and for their relationship to the Canadian state, the form that that responsibility takes is itself racialized; it differs from, for instance, Black Canadian responsibilities. Further, even within the frame of Euro-centric state relations, indeterminacy exists. As Renisa Mawani notes, the colonial state did not have its racial truth regime set up in a seamless way. What it did have was a vested interest in keeping differentially racialized populations separate as a way of controlling relationships among them and as a way of retaining hold on “racial truths”— in other words, the hegemonic prevailing narratives both literally and metaphorically governing specific racial groups. What was clearly undesirable from a Western colonial point of view, was connection, relationship building and inter-mixing among Asian and Indigenous people: Colonial epistemologies gained traction not always (if at all) from a unified set of social relations but from a cracked, conflictual, and contingent constellation. It was precisely because of racial ambiguity and unknowability that the juridical constitution of racial truths and the governance of colonial populations, including their encounters and proximities, were thought to be politically urgent. (Mawani 27) The colonial state was, in other words, in a rush to triangulate Asian/ White/ Indigenous relations, with whiteness and Euro-centric legal thought at the apex of the triangle. Constructing Indigenous peoples (at least at the turn of the last century) as innocent and assimilable, and Chinese people as corrupting and inassimilable (Mawani 25), the Euro-centric state took great pains to keep them both narratively and juridically separate: Indian Agents and missionaries speculated that cross-racial encounters between Chinese, Indian and mixed-race populations and their resulting intimacies, friendships and affinities might also unsettle imperial visions of European resettlement and white superiority in other ways. In particular, many lamented the potentially degenerating effects that Chinese migrants and ‘half-breeds’ might have on aboriginal peoples—influences that many argued would not only hinder colonial efforts to civilize the Native populace residing along the West Coast but would ultimately jeopardize colonial triumph. (Mawani 13) Asian/Indigenous contact and relationship-building, thus, represents a threat to the colonial project. One of the most radical things we can do, then, is seek

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alliance, though, of course, with all the caveats and acts of care and thought I have already laid out. I recognize such a seeking as emerging from a contemporary desire that differs from the needs and desires of the past, and erupts in relation to contemporary decolonial thinking as a utopian, but open-ended project. 5

Culture/Imagination/Spirit

It is at this juncture that arguments made within the bounds of state logic and Western law reach their limit. It is not useful to think of responsibility in terms of “greater than” or “less than”—this partakes of the aggressive logic of guilt that Kirsten McAllister writes against, or what Rita Dhamoon calls the “Oppression Olympics” (22). Rather, it is important now to think in terms of the specificities of responsibility. Here, I make an argument for story and literature—for a poetics of responsibility that is connected to the present historical moment, particular land locations and the particular relationships that exist and are evolving between language and land. Sharma makes another error, then, in jettisoning culture and misrecognizing it as racialized with the rise of neoliberalism. Those of us who produce and/or study culture know that the racialization of culture has a much longer history than this, and further that racialized people are implicated and entangled with the racialization of culture in ways that can be either productive or stifling, and sometimes paradoxically both, depending on the instantiation. For indeed, the racialization of culture is entangled with internally generated cultural difference—cultural difference that we will need in order to build relationships beyond those imposed by the state. When Sharma writes culture “has arrived as a cadaver to the feast of Canadian multiculturalism” she invisibilizes the labour of countless cultural workers, writers, artists, editors, filmmakers and storytellers who agitated for, against and at cross-purposes to official Multiculturalism both before and after the fact, who have held up the cause of human freedom through and beyond official and unofficial multiculturalisms and who at present offer us powerful possibilities for relation making in the present. Though multiculturalism can be deployed in the empty ways that Sharma proposes as its sole purview, these deployments are partial and not total as she imagines. Both official Multiculturalism and small “m” multiculturalism have their productivities, as Smaro Kamboureli has shown (105). To be sure, these are uneasy and contingent, but it is important nonetheless to recognize them, and to be able to think through and beyond total systems as these will always dialectically reproduce themselves

244 Lai if we do not. Of course, culture is more than multiculturalism. Understood as knowledge systems shared by relatively large groups of people, culture in its multiplicity is necessary to understand the non-Western epistemological traditions required to break us out of Eurocentric legalisms. To turn to culture then is to open the door more fully to non-Western epistemologies, and specifically Indigenous ones. Lee Maracle’s important book Memory Serves, which she writes from her location as a Stó:lō si’yam, is instructive in illustrating the fact that other ways of being have been present on Turtle Island all along—since time immemorial—both prior to and contemporary with Western modes. We need to cautiously shift our sense of the importance of property and turn instead to story, memory and spirit-to-spirit relations: “In a society governed first and foremost by spirit to spirit relationships to all beings, memory serves much differently than in a society in which property possession determines importance” (Maracle 2). By steering away from the centralization of property relations (and their racialized production through the logic of Locke) and foregrounding spirit-to-spirit relations, Maracle centres a Stó:lō world view. Western property relations then become one minor relation among many—not to be disregarded (we cannot yet let the nation go because we have responsibilities that lie within its framework), but not to be made central either. It seems to me that Maracle is quite conscious about this. The concept of spirit-to-spirit relations echoes the concept of nation-to-nation relations (Coulthard 147) and refines it to centre Stó:lō ways of knowing. The implicit teaching here is to give secondary (but still serious) importance to the concept of “nation” and to seek first and foremost, relationships through spirit. How can spirit-to-spirit relationships be re-membered and rebalanced from our own specifically embodied locations to create better human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman relational ways of being? For Maracle the present moment is one in which the imaginative and intentionally directed act of “re-membering” is key to Indigenous recovery from discovery: To re-member is … directional. Indigenous people commit to memory those events and the aspects of those events that suit the direction we are moving in or the direction we want to move in if a shift is occurring … We re-member events; we reconstruct them because we are aware that they have already ended, are dis-membered, gone forever, and because they affect us and are directly connected to who we are as a people. (Maracle 2) To re-member is thus purposeful, imaginative and generative in a political sense. To re-member can be to address the fallout of Western legal enactment,

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but more importantly it takes up issues of importance to Indigenous peoples with their own concerns at the centre of the work of re-membering: “I choose to remember what happens to Sockeye because that is the direction from which Salish people move” (Maracle 2). To re-member is to reassemble the body of particular Indigenous communities and also of individuals, to make whole what was dis-membered through colonization. Communities and individuals are re-membered through story, and specifically through active relation to wind, breath and voice (3). In the spirit of directed memory and a poetics of relation, I now return to the metaphor of the Chinese railway worker as prosthetic arm, not one that makes property as such, but rather one that extends the arm of the white man, allowing him to turn land into property. But the thing about prosthetics is that they are not integral to the body, but rather supplementary to it, even if there is a measure of adhesion that must be undone or overwritten. Further, there is no reason—in the present at least—why a Chinese arm must serve the body of whiteness. In one of the more charming moments in Malissa Phung’s text she recognizes that the Canadian state was only able to put down the Riel Rebellion of 1885 after additional soldiers from Ontario were brought to Qu’Appelle, Saskatchewan by rail (219). The implicit question here is: What if the Chinese workers had not built the cpr? Might the Riel Rebellion have gone the other way? This thought experiment is imaginative though not without flaws. Historically speaking, the soldiers were transported from Ontario to Saskatchewan, which is not the part of the railway that Chinese workers were employed in. And of course, Chinese workers did not single-handedly build the railway, though they are certainly to be credited with executing some of the most difficult and dangerous labour in its construction. Nevertheless, suppose that instead of working for the white colonists, Chinese workers had thrown their lot in with the Indigenous people they encountered more wholeheartedly, and if they had re-membered themselves as related to Indigenous bodies instead of white ones. For indeed, there are stories on the oral record about Chinese sojourners intermarrying among the Nuu’ chah-nulth in the aftermath of the Meares’ voyages, Chinese railway workers abandoning the violent exploitation of railway work to intermarry with the Nlaka’pamux at Lytton (Hunter), and Chinese market gardeners bringing food to the Stó:lō when they were hit by famine (as told to the author by Lee Maracle). But the desire for such a re-membering to have taken place in the moment of constructing “White Canada Forever” is a desire of the present. What Maracle offers us now is the possibility for a re-membering now that can call up other partial histories that address the needs and desires of the present. In the meantime, that Chinese workers did take part in the building of the cpr

246 Lai must of course be acknowledged and accounted for, but also respected. Phung offers a wonderful analysis, however, of Richard Fung’s Dirty Laundry, a video production that imagines queer attachments between Chinese railway workers and the Indigenous peoples they encountered while working on the cpr. More than ever, what we can be responsible to and for now is recognizing and acknowledging the historical forms of complicity and using our understanding of them to recognize and avoid contemporary forms. So, for instance, how can contemporary Chinese Canadians agitate against contemporary forms of Chinese colonialism such as that which takes place through China-based global mining companies? Further questions to do with the specificity of Chinese immigration arise also: What can the relationship between the descendants of the loh wah kiu be to newer prc immigrants and prc projects that take part in the Chinese triumphalism that Kuan-Shing Chen documents and critiques in Asia as Method? What might be the role of those descended from immigrants of the 1960s and 1970s fleeing the violence and/or instability of communist and communist-inspired “liberation” movements in East and South East Asia? I ask these questions not as a question of “guilt” but as questions regarding our active construction of relationships as they unfold in what Rita Dhamoon calls “the interactive processes of dispossession and governmentality” (32), but also in the fields of non-Western epistemologies and the cacophonies of contact as they resonate in multiple directions. Chinese Canadians can take seriously our complicity with the colonial project and our responsibilities within in it and still have our cultural, historical and individual differences. 6

Matriarchal Nations/Feminist Connections/Witnessing

If the call to nation is not necessarily the call to repeat European state formations, but rather a re-membering of Indigenous sovereignties that embraces the present in a relational, balance-making, imaginative way, then its liberatory potentialities open up immensely. It is productive in the sense that it allows for the retention and production of difference where such retentions and productions are historically desirable from Indigenous and/or transnational locations. Sharma is right that it forecloses the possibility of “the commons,” imagined with the undocumented migrant as the exemplary contemporary figure, as a borderless globe open to completely free and unfettered movement. It makes sense from a migrant point of view that a borderless world might be desirable, both for those who move with unfavourable or no documentation, and those “multiple passport holders” (Ong 2), who move freely

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about in a privileged and highly financed state of exception allowing almost unfettered movement. However, from an Indigenous point of view, the commons appears as yet another form of land theft defined via non-traditional knowledge systems from the outside. Maracle’s call to re-member shows itself in this light as a powerful practice allowing those who engage it to draw from the past but not in a totalizing kind of way. The imaginative and genealogical aspects of re-membering, and her specific call to consider the direction of travel, makes agented and creative space for imagining relationships across difference, without denying history, without the attempt to create a new year zero or a new terra nullius (which is the problem with the ideal of the borderless global commons). Indeed, it is important to recognize that new fascisms can be imaginatively produced, and we must remain on guard against them, both from the outside and within ourselves, as Rey Chow recognizes in “The Fascist Longings in Our Midst”: Emerging in postcoloniality, the new “desire for our others” displays … positive, projectional symptoms of fascisms—a rebelliousness and a monstrous aesthetics, but most of all a longing for a transparent, idealized image and an identifying submission to such an image … The indiscriminate embrace of the peoples of color as “correct” regardless of their differences and histories is ultimately the desire for a pure-otherness-in-pristine-luminosity that is as dangerous as the fascism of hateful discrimination from which we all suppose we are safely distanced. (Chow 32) With Chow, Maracle recognizes profoundly the violence of the clean slate. We might consider, however, Indigenous traditions of passage, and how those might organize and regulate human, economic and material flows differently, as for instance, in the ways Six Nations have occasionally facilitated the passage of Chinese migrants from the south side of 49th parallel to the north side. This does not mean, however, that the commons as an ideal should be jettisoned. Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s recognition, for instance, that we are all affected by hydrological cycles opens the door to imagining and making a water commons that need not partake of a Euro-colonial genealogy. Such a commons need not foreclose concepts like the two-row wampum, but it still needs to be theorized and delimited. In relation to Lee Maracle’s work, we must also recognize and actively take in the fact that for Maracle, Indigenous sovereignty at least in a Stó:lō context means the return to matriarchy, and thus the return to alternate economic relations—economic relations under Indigenous women’s control: “the original economy was managed by women … women were the great sociological

248 Lai governesses of the past that held jurisdiction over land and the wealth of families” (133). And further: It is not self-governance to take up another nation’s legal system and entrench it in our nations. There is no cultural integrity in guiding our actions based on external world beliefs. There is no spirituality when it is rooted in conditions created by external spiritual beliefs. The restoration of female institutions of power management and authority, choice, permission and jurisdiction and our assumption of responsibility over the foregoing is what nationhood is all about. (maracle 140) Through the 1980s and 1990s, Lee Maracle and SKY Lee actively discussed the relationship between Asian and Indigenous people. These discussions bore fruit in Maracle’s short stories “Yin Chin,” “Eunice,” “Polka Partners, Uptown Indians and White Folks,” as well as the 2002 gathering “Imagining Native and Asian Women: Deconstructing from Contact to Modern Times” (Wong and Christian 1), which Maracle organized and hosted at Western Washington University. Reading Maracle’s chapter on Indigenous women and power, I am now more convinced than ever that SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe is a meditation on patriarchal and matriarchal modes of governance. In order to explain, I must repeat an argument first made by Rita Wong in 2008, which I interweave with my own to highlight the possibilities of matriarchal spirit-to-spirit relations and corresponding male but non-Western-patriarchal bone-to-bone relations (queer resonances intentional). As some readers will know, Disappearing Moon Cafe is a novel about a Vancouver Chinatown family spanning four generations from 1834–1987. The family is plagued by incest because its patriarch, Wong Gwei Chang refuses to acknowledge his son Ting An, a child born through his first marriage to a mixed-race Indigenous woman of the Shi’atko clan called Kelora Chen. Early in the (non-linear) novel, he abandons Kelora in order to marry Mui Lan, a “real wife from China” whom he does not love, because the marriage will guarantee the Confucian hetero-patriarchal success of the family. Touted when it was released in 1990 as the first Chinese Canadian novel (though the Eaton sisters Edith and Winnifred have since been recuperated), it was largely understood as a critique of Confucian patriarchy, the Canadian government’s Chinese Immigration Act (1885–1923) which required a head tax of $50 for Chinese immigrants to Canada, later raised to $100 then $500, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1923–1947) which banned Chinese immigration altogether, producing in effect a large community of Chinese immigrant bachelor labourers, and

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a particularly claustrophobic friendship and dating circle for the children of those few Chinese immigrants wealthy and fortunate enough to have brought in wives before the borders closed to Chinese immigration completely. As our thinking on Asian/Indigenous relation deepens, this novel becomes increasingly important to that discussion and to the work of relationship building. The patriarchal structure of the Wong family in the novel must be juxtaposed against the matriarchal structure of the Shi’atko clan, who preside over Gwei Chang and Kelora’s love and marriage. It is the Shi’atko clan aunties and the natural world itself that sanction that relationship. In keeping with what Maracle calls spirit-to-spirit relation, Gwei Chang and Kelora’s love resonates: “So he thought she had to be a spirit when he met her. In this dreamlike state, he thought maybe he had died and she was another spirit here to guide him over to the other side” (Lee 2). What Gwei Chang misrecognizes as bodily death is in fact a temporary social death, and a rebirth into Indigenous ways of seeing. As Malissa Phung notes, it is through his deep connection with Kelora that Gwei Chang is able to see the land as it truly is, and so find the bones of the “chinamen” who died building the cpr, the task with which he has been charged by the Chinese Benevolent Associations: “Then, as if the barren wasteland around him had magically opened and allowed him admittance, he followed her through dense thickets, up hills and down through ravines, a respectable distance between them” (4). Through deep spirit-to-spirit relationship with Kelora, albeit spirit-to-spirit relationship tinged with a slightly worrisome nativism on the part of author SKY Lee, Gwei Chang is able to engage with the territory that had seemed to him a barren wasteland before knowing her. However, because of the call of Confucian patriarchy and a fear of famine, he returns to Vancouver’s Chinatown to reproduce a patriarchal Chinese national imagination of family and correct economics. Kelora dies shortly afterwards, presumably from both neglect and grief. In turning away from Kelora, Gwei Chang turns away from spirit-to-spirit relations, and in a sense, an originating kinship of contact, in favour of a conservative, patriarchal Chinese nationalism. He enters a life of grief and duty, never fully committing to his Chinese wife Mui Lan, and hanging on to his son by Kelora, Ting An, as a token of his lost love, though never fully admitting him into his new Chinese/Confucian family. As Rita Wong notes, everyone in Chinatown knows Ting An as an orphan benefitting from Gwei Chang’s patronage, rather than as his first son—an exalted position in the Confucian family framework (164). Gwei Chang’s incapacity to embrace Indigenous matriarchal forms of kinship, Asian/Indigenous relation more broadly, and his embrace instead of shame and guilt in relation to these, proves ultimately to be the downfall of the family’s reproductive capacity and its descent into incest. The affect of alliance

250 Lai matters here. In light of Maracle’s recent remarks about the Indigenous sovereignty as matriarchy, we might read supportive social commentary on Lee’s part: Had Wong Gwei Chang been able to embrace the Shi’atko clan and matriarchal forms of kinship, his marriage to Kelora might have stood. Within the diegetic logic of the novel, Ting An would have been Gwei Chang’s heir instead of his charity case, relations between the Shi’atko clan and Chinatown might have been strong instead of weak, and Asian/Indigenous relations could have been matter of pride instead of shame. More profoundly, Asian/Indigenous sovereign relations would have been produced and deepened. The Chinese in Chinatown might then have had stronger ties to the land and been less susceptible to racist Canadian government legislation in the form of the head tax and Exclusion Act. I argue, then, that the embrace of Confucian patriarchy and patriarchal state forms are precisely what bind Chinese Canadians to the racist Canadian state (or the racism embedded in the Euro-normative state form) and to the oppressive conditions of the head tax and Exclusion Act within the frame of the novel. Diegetically, and by corollary, extra-diegetically, had they claimed their original relation to the Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island—relations that were in fact offered—they would not be in the place of suffering oppressed, second-class relations to the racist project of White Canada Forever (as one Canadian project among many). In her chapter on women and power in Memory Serves, Maracle writes: Supposing [Indigenous] men did not believe in the loss of power in their relationship to Canada. Supposing that they went hunting when it was time to hunt, regardless of the laws Canada attempted to impose upon them. Supposing they decided simply to cut down logs in their national territory to build homes … Supposing they insisted that Canada prove its ownership of the logs, fish, or animals in our territories. Supposing every Indigenous man in Canada ignored the need for a piece of paper proving transfer of title, ownership, or rights to use the land. Should Indigenous men decide to act this way, their action will contravene the central belief that we have dragged home, namely that Canadian law is valid and superior to our own. Canada for the most part cannot prove ownership or jurisdiction over our original homelands. (Maracle 139) In parallel with Maracle’s imagining of an alternate relation to the Canadian state for Indigenous men, I ask (with SKY Lee), supposing Chinese men had recognized the traditional sovereignty of Indigenous matriarchies, instead of the tenuous patriarchal and Eurocentric sovereignty of the Canadian state.

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Suppose Gwei Chang had embraced his spirit-to-spirit love for Kelora and the knowledge of the land she freely shared with him? Suppose Chinese men had refused the head tax and Exclusion Act? The West Coast of Turtle Island might have been fraught with much less grief, despair, and loneliness. It might have become much earlier and more intensely the site of Asian/Indigenous kinship on its own terms—the world captured in the photographs of CD Hoy might have continued and might be with us at present. Indeed, I suggest that it is with us at present, but it is repressed. It is held in memory and imagination by Indigenous and Asian storytellers, orators, novelists, poets, culture workers, activists and intellectuals including Rita Wong and Dorothy Christian, the Movement Project, David Khang, Larry Grant, Alejandro Yoshizawa, Sarah Ling, Henry Yu, Bill Chu, Malissa Phung, Lee Maracle and SKY Lee. If we can re-member for instance, the Stó:lō place names that mark shared history, names like “Sxwóxwiymelh” (where Stó:lō people remember many Chinese railway workers died of the flu) and “Lexwpopeleqwith’aim,” a place the ghosts of Chinese workers who died during a blast accident are said to haunt (Hunter), then the Canadian state project of extermination for Indigenous peoples and exclusion for Chinese people, families consisting of real people like the fictional characters Gwei Chang, Kelora and Ting An might be the norm. But this is not yet the case, because not enough of us have properly and directionally re-membered. The Confucian patriarch of Disappearing Moon Cafe is consigned instead to intimate family dysfunction and flawed reproductivity. This presents itself as the infertility that plagues Choy Fuk (i.e. the “fuck-up”), Gwei Chang’s son by Mui Lan, as well as a long line of incestuous relationships among family members who do not understand themselves as such because Gwei Chang kept Kelora’s memory as a shameful secret. More deeply, such self-imposed shame feeds a state-imposed necropolitics that is shared in difference with Indigenous peoples—the lonely bachelor societies of the loh wah kiu for the Chinese, and the genocidal project of the residential schools for Indigenous peoples. These are the unjust prices that Chinese and Indigenous people pay for affirming the sovereignty of the Canadian state while denying their own. A politics of guilt and blame is clearly not productive here, rather, it is important to recognize that this is how hegemony works. In spite of all my imaginative fantasy above, is important to recognize the world historical realpolitik of the moments I am discussing. I acknowledge on my own part a fantasy at work—a retrospective fantasy of the present, a haunted, nostalgic one that longs for a different past that might give us a different present. And yet, in fantasizing, we might also do a genealogical reading of the Foucauldian sort, to see if there are strands from the past and from the land (in Armstrong’s sense, see above) to be pulled forward

252 Lai and woven into the present. Of course, there is always the danger that no strands exist. I would suggest however, that these strands are being offered by the speaker/writer/thinker/re-memberers I have named through the course of the essay. Reading Maracle in particular, I  suggest here that part of the work of responsibility is the recognition and affirmation of one’s own power and one’s own sovereignty, in imaginative yet directed national terms and in individual terms. I used the economic metaphor (“price to pay”) intentionally here just now, to suggest that an alternate economics is embedded in this set of relations, one that refuses the abstract equivalences of capitalist economics. For indeed, Maracle is instructive here too: “Our culture gives us no permission to accept victimization or exploitation of our selves or anyone else” (6). When we do accept such victimization there is a spiritual price to pay. We can see the economics of spirit-to-spirit relations in thinking about the bones that the young Gwei Chang is sent to collect in relation to the bones of the men who walk into the fire, whose story is told in Lee Maracle’s Memory Serves. There are parallels in that in both cases the men are engaged in activities meant to help their home communities. In the case of the railway workers, the act of helping those at home in China takes the form of making money for remittance. In the case of the Stó:lō warriors the work of helping those at home takes the form of fighting the enemy to protect the home community. In both cases, wrongs are committed that might perhaps not have been understood as such in the time of the action: the destruction of the land and the supporting of a violent colonial settlement on the one hand, the destruction of life givers (women and children) on the other. For Maracle, this teaching, this “economics” as it were, goes back to the very earliest ancestors, the stones: “Stone is our oldest grandfather. We refer to the stones that keep our songs and stories as grandfathers” (3). So, the oldest and most enduring material of the earth—stone—holds story. It is a masculine principle—the grandfathers—who do this holding. But the masculine is nothing without the feminine: Our grandfathers give us the rock on which we stand, but our grandmothers move us from that stone in the direction of relation with others. They are the keepers of the stories that teach us about relations; they are the flesh of our bones that are stones. (Maracle 3-4) In seeing the bones as stones, Maracle recognizes the profound interrelationship between land and body, a relationship that needs the grandmothers— sovereign matriarchy—in order to have its being, in order, that is, to be enacted

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in a life-giving way. In the next sentence she says: “I carry them, willingly” (4, italics in original). Maracle herself is one of the grandmothers who translates the stories of the bones that are stones in order to build human-to-human and human-to-nonhuman relations. Maracle’s concerns about re-membering, wind as story and stones as bones are thematized from Wong Gwei Chang’s point of view in the first two sentences of the Prologue, entitled “Search for Bones,” in Disappearing Moon Cafe: “He remembered that by then he was worn out from fighting the wind. He had to stop and rest in a shaded spot, so he found a smooth flat stone to sit on, beside a stream that meandered off around a sharp bend” (1). Gwei Chang is clueless, he does not understand the meaning of the wind, the meaning of the stones or the meaning of the meandering stream. He does not understand the earth ancestors, and nor does he understand the old Chinese uncles, the indentured labourers who did the brutal and often fatal work of dynamiting the mountains in order to make a path for the cpr. Charged by the Chinese Benevolent Associations with retrieving the bones of those who died, he is there in the wilderness for the sake of adventure. Old Chen, Kelora’s adoptive father introduces him to the Chinese uncles, who see his task as a serious and deeply spiritual one. They treat him with great respect, but he does not understand why, and behaves disdainfully towards them until he first touches the bones: When he did, he was awed by them … the spirits in the mountains were strong and persuasive. The bones gathered themselves into the human shapes of young men … How could he not be touched by the spirit of these wilderness uncles who had trekked on an incredible journey and pitted their lives against mountain rocks and human cruelty? … By then, he understood. By then, in the utter peace of the forests, he had met them all—uncles who had climbed mountain heights then fallen from them, uncles who had drowned in deep surging waters, uncles who had clawed to their deaths in the dirt of caved-in mines. By then, he wasn’t afraid and they weren’t alien any more. Like them, he would piece himself together again from scattered, shattered bone and then endure. (lee 12–13) Because they carry spirit, the bones that are stones teach what language alone cannot. Through his encounter with the bones, Gwei Chang learns to share with the old uncles instead of taking from them. He learns to talk bluntly the way they do and he learns to relate to the paradox of land belonging and unbelonging in the way that they do, to “fill … [his] lungs with mountain mist, and see … [his] shadow walk ahead of [him], homesick” (13).

254 Lai In gathering the bones of the old railway uncles so the Chinese Benevolent Associations can return them to China, Gwei Chang does the work also of stitching the land together—Chinese land and Turtle Island land—in an economy of displacement and violence to both human beings and to the earth. The gathering of bones becomes a kind of ritual of expiation, respect and a return to balance. In telling a bone, stone and ancestor story, SKY Lee also honours a Stó:lō bone, stone and ancestor story, an old story of collecting the bones of beloved men who have carried out ambivalent actions. What is important in the present moment is that Maracle has bone, stone and ancestor stories of her own, a Stó:lō story about the painful price to be paid by even the most beloved men for disrespecting women and children. In it, Maracle makes a generous and open-ended recognition that histories of violence cannot and should not be so easily resolved. Told in Memory Serves, the story remembers a group of beloved Stó:lō men who, during a war with another nation fought to protect their own people, killed the women and children of the enemy nation. When they returned home, their own women told them that the price to pay for destroying the givers of life was to walk into the fire and burn to death. Though the killings had been done in the name of self-preservation, a heinous wrong had been committed that had to be expiated. The women who commanded these deaths loved the men upon whom they imposed this law. After the flesh of the beloved men had all burned off, the women collected the bones and carried them to a new village to be mixed and buried with the women’s own bones upon their eventual deaths. The teaching of this story seems to be that we must sometimes commit violence to ourselves or to our nearest and dearest in order for justice to be done and the world returned to balance. This story strikes me as having contemporary relevance in relation to the murdered and missing women, and seems to call particularly to white settlers not to protect the men who have committed violence against Indigenous women along the Highway of Tears, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, on the outskirts of Winnipeg or in any of the other places where such unresolved and unexpiated acts of violence against givers of life have taken place. In an Asian Canadian context, however, there is a different teaching, which is about gathering up and honouring the bones of loved ones who have done ambivalent things—in other words the bones of the sojourner uncles who blasted the mountains in order to enable the extension of the Canadian Pacific Railway to the coast. (All the bones of these Chinese men’s bodies, as arm bones of the Canadian state, needed to be returned to China to become again the full skeletons of men.) These men are our Chinese Canadian beloved men, who did a good thing by sacrificing their

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lives to earn money that enabled the lives of the women and children left behind in China. However, in so doing, they harmed the mountains and enabled the colonization of Indigenous peoples and the conversion of sacred Indigenous land into Western agricultural property. In a sense, they walked into their own fires—the dynamite blasts that killed them as they opened holes in the mountains. Their bones were returned to earth by other sojourners until the flesh rotted off.1 In this context, SKY Lee’s character, Wong Gwei Chang is like the Stó:lō women of Maracle’s story, who gather the bones and honour them. But in his abandonment of Kelora, Wong Gwei Chang repeats the violence of the dynamite-wielding sojourner uncles, and the cycle is repeated. Through these identifications, he becomes a curiously queer character, a concern I hope to take up soon in another essay. My job now, as a contemporary Chinese Canadian writer and critic is, in a sense, to collect his bones and mix them with my own, which I hope this essay does in a metaphorical/literary sense. In this essay, thinking with a broad set of Asian, Indigenous and Black writers, story-tellers and critics, I, in a sense, polish the bones of Wong Gwei Chang and the sojourner uncles who blasted the path of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and attempt to bring them to my current sacred ground, not in the People’s Republic of China, but on Turtle Island, currently on Treaty Seven territory, where I make my home. In polishing the bones here, I am both like and not like the SKY Lee’s character Wong Gwei Chang, who, in turn, is both like and not like the Stó:lō men who walked into the fire to make up for the killing of another nation’s women and children. Likeness is not sameness, and yet, through the work of story there is metaphorical territory that can be traversed. The choice to act like another in a way that produces a resonant, open-ended justice requires a form of attention that Maracle translates as “maturity,” and a deep and careful recognition of one’s own historical embodied location. In other words, though the work of reading and writing that I  take up here requires a large measure of subjective judgment, it is not a case of ‘anything goes’: “We conjure the story in such a way that the best human conduct will show itself through it … Every story is a guide fleshed out by the listeners in their consideration of future” (Maracle 245). In taking up criticism as a kind of Chinese Canadian literary/ critical written storytelling, I enact a kind of literary nationalism, not in the sense of producing “the best of all that has been thought and said” in my culture or connecting my storytelling to “blood and soil.” Rather, in recognizing

1 See also Paul Wong’s video-performance project Walking the Mountain, and my essay on it “The Site of Memory.”

256 Lai the experiential, sedimented cultural specificity of my being, I seek a kind of metaphoric antidote for the historically and nationally specific cultural violence I have inherited. This is a creative act, a critical act, and an act of directed memory. It is open-ended and contingent, but not in any totalizing way—it is not so morally relative as to be meaningless. Rather, the gesture of meaning-making is very specifically chosen in response to both Lee Maracle and SKY Lee’s teaching and their longstanding friendship with one another, which is lucky inheritance of mine, one they have generously passed on, not to me personally, but to women “like” me to take up thoughtfully and maturely. I have made my claim then, for both nationalism and sovereignty, but in so doing I have poetically re-valenced both terms. My nationalism is a contingent one that recognizes the emergent and fluid qualities of the terms “Chinese Canadian,” “Asian Canadian” and “people of colour,” while also, I hope, respecting Indigenous sovereignties, and particularly the Stó:lō matriarchal sovereignty that Lee Maracle lays out in Memory Serves. Contingent nationalism calls for the need for literary, critical and creative thinking, not for the Arnoldian purposes of producing culturally dominant national excellence and quality, but rather for what such thinking might open for those who engage it relationally, in an on-going, ever-emergent “nationalist” practice of “po-ethics” in Fred Wah’s sense of “something that surrounds you like your house it’s where you live” (57).

References

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Coleman, Daniel. “Indigenous Place and Diaspora Space: Of Literalism and Abstraction.” Settler Colonial Studies, 2015, pp. 1–16. Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. U of Toronto P, 2008. Coulthard, Glenn. Red Skins, White Masks. Minnesota UP, 2014. Culhane, Dara. The Pleasure of the Crown:  Anthropology, Law and First Nations. Talonbooks, 1998. Dhamoon, Rita. “A Feminist Approach to Decolonization Anti-Racism:  Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism.” Feral Feminisms, no. 4, 2015, pp. 20–37. Hunter, Justine. “A Forgotten History: Tracing the Ties Between B.C.’s First Nations and Chinese Workers.” The Globe and Mail. May 9, 2015. www.theglobeandmail.com/ news/british-columbia/chinese-heritage/article24335611/. Accessed April 24, 2016. Kamboureli, Smaro. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2009. Lai, Larissa. The Site of Memory: Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain. The Walter Phillips Gallery, 1993. Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. “Decolonizing Antiracism.” Social Justice, vol. 32, no. 4, 2005, pp. 120–143. Lee, SKY. Disappearing Moon Cafe. Douglas and McIntyre, 1990. Locke, John. Second Treatise on Civil Government. U of Adelaide Library, 2014. Accessed April 24, 2016. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015. Maracle, Lee. Memory Serves: Oratories. NeWest, 2015. Mawani, Renisa. Colonial Proximities:  Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871–1921. ubc Press, 2009. McAllister, Kirsten. “Memoryscapes of Postwar British Columbia: A Look of Recognition.” Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, edited by Ashok Mathur et al., Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2011, pp. 421–448. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Duke UP, 1999. Olwan, Dana M. “On Assumptive Solidarities in Comparative Settler Colonialisms.” Complicities, Connections, & Struggles:  Critical Transnational Feminist Analysis of Settler Colonialism, spec. issue of Feral Feminisms, no. 4, 2015, pp. 89–102. Phung, Malissa. Reaching Gold Mountain: Diasporic Labour Narratives in Chinese Canadian Literature and Film. Dissertation. McMaster U. 2016. Reagan, Paulette. Unsettling the Settler Within: Indian Residential Schools, Truth Telling and Reconciliation in Canada. ubc P, 2010. Sehdev, Robinder. “People of Colour in Treaty.” Cultivating Canada:  Reconciliation Through the Lens of Cultural Diversity, edited by Ashok Mathur et  al., Aboriginal Healing Foundation, 2011, pp. 263–274.

258 Lai Sharma, Nandita. “Canadian Multiculturalism and its Nationalisms.” Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada, edited by May Chazan et al., Between the Lines, 2011, pp. 85–101. Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright. “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States.” Social Justice, vol. 35, no. 3, 2008–2009, pp. 120–138. Thobani, Sunera. Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada. U of Toronto P, 2007. Wah, Fred. “A Poetics of Ethnicity.” Faking it:  Poetics and Hybridity. NeWest, 2000, pp. 51–66. Weheliye, Alexander. Habeas Viscus:  Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human. Duke UP, 2014. Wong, Rita. “Decolonizasian: Reading Asian and First Nations Relations in Literature.” Canadian Literature, spec. issue Asian Canadian Studies, no. 199, 2008, pp. 158–180. Wong, Paul. Chinaman’s Peak: Walking the Mountain. Video Installation. Tunnel Mountain, Banff, Alberta, 1992. Yoneyama, Lisa. “Possibilities of Asian/Canadian Transnationality.” Asian Canadian Critique Beyond the Nation, spec. issue of Canadian Literature, no. 227, 2015, pp. 1996– 197. canlit.ca/article/possibilities-of-asiancanadian-transnationality/ Accessed May 6, 2017.

Index 9/​11 attacks 168, 172–​173, 178 Abdul Noor, Sukina 175–​176 Aboulela, Leila 169–​170, 174, 178 Translator, The 169–​170 Accent 6, 7, 60–​62, 69–​70, 88–​94, 97–​102 Achebe, Chinua 31 Adegbija, Efurosibina 60–​61 Adorno, Theodor W. 155–​156 Agency 149, 156–​157 Female agency 121, 124, 170 Ahmad, Aijaz 32, 214 Ahonen, Pasi (see also Greedharry, Mrinalini) 50–​51 Algeria 34 Ali, Monica 166–​168, 170, 178 Brick Lane 165–​170 Allegory 211, 213–​215 Althusser, Louis 1, 208 Anderson, Benedict 112, 218 Imagined Communities 10 Anthropology 21, 150–​155 Apartheid 9–​10, 175, 183–​185, 187–​200 Appadurai, Arjun 52–​53 Archangelsk oblast 116–​117 Armah, Ayi Kwei 40–​41 Armstrong, Jeannette 231–​232 Arrivant (Brathwaite) 224, 235 Asian Canadians 223–​227 Chinese-​Canadians 240, 242–​256 Autobiography, Life Writing 107–​110, 112–​113, 122 Bauman, Zygmunt 212–​213 Berlin (see Germany) Bertillon, Alphonse 153 Bhabha, Homi K. 32–​34 Bhambra, Gurminder K. 33 Black radicalism 38 Bonaparte, Napoleon 16 Boon, Marcus 159–​160 Bourdieu, Pierre 130–​133 The Rules of Art 128, 132–​133 Brando, Marlon 136 Brick Lane (see Ali, Monica)

Brouillette, Sarah 44, 48n9 Butler, Judith 234 Byrd, Jodi A. 33, 235–​238 Cacophony 224, 236–​237 Cabral, Amilcar 31 Canada 207–​210, 214–​216 British Columbia 232, 240 First Nations 210, 231 Indigenous lands 226, 240 Caribbean, The 87–​88, 92, 100, 128 Censorship 184, 187–​189, 192 Césaire, Aimé 31, 153 Chambers, Iain 205–​207 Childhood (stage of life) 206 Children’s literature 204–​209, 215–​216 Chow, Rey 247 Chrisman, Laura 5–​6 Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader 30 Christian, Dorothy (see also Wong, Rita) 237, 247–​248 Cissé, Lusáni 155–​160 Cognitive mapping (see Jameson, Fredric) Cohen, Margaret 216 Coleman, Daniel 231–​232, 240 Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (see Chrisman, Laura) Colonial photography 8–​9, 149 Colonial laws 187–​190, 193, 226 Commonwealth 127, 128 Consonantal variables 90–​96 Cooke, Miriam 163, 170, 176–​177 Muslimwoman 9, 163, 165–​166, 168–​170, 173–​175, 177–​178 Coulthard, Glen 229 Cronjé Commission, The 185–​188 Culhane, Dara 232–​233, 239–​240 Deleuze, Gilles 225 Desai, Kiran 139 Inheritance of Loss, The 139 Destutt de Tracy, Antoine 16, 20 Deuber, Dagmar 87, 101–​102 Dhamoon, Rita 228–​229, 243, 246

260 Index Diaspora 227, 230 Diphthong 64, 72, 94 Disappearing Moon Cafe (see Lee, sky) Discourse analysis  colonial discourse analysis 3, 15 critical discourse analysis 3–​5, 15–​16, 21 Discourse analysis (linguistics) 59, 63–​65 Douglas, Sukina 174 Poetic Pilgrimage 174, 177–​178 Dua, Enakshi (see also Lawrence, Bonita) 10, 223, 228–​229 Dwyer, Claire 171–​172 Eagleton, Terry 1–​2 Ebersohn, Wessel 10, 192–​196 Edwards, Brent Hayes 38–​39 Enchantment 149, 160 Engels, Friedrich 17, 129 English varieties  American English 87–​93, 101–​102 British English 59, 64–​74, 86–​90, 101 Caribbean Standard English 87–​92 Creole varieties 88–​102 Jamaican English 92–​99 Nigerian Pidgin 59, 61, 68–​70, 73–​74 Trinidadian English 92–​97 English, James 130, 139 Enlightenment 48, 158, 225 Estonia 106, 111–​124 Ethnicity 23, 59–​63, 73, 231–​232, 238 Family dysfunction (see also young adult fiction) 218, 251 Fanon, Frantz 34–​36, 39–​41 Feminism 23, 108, 164–​165, 170–​173, 246 Islam and feminism 174–​177 Radical feminism 164 Flanagan, Richard 127–​130 Foucault, Michel 52 France 34, 38 Frankfurt School, The 53 Freeden, Michael 2–​5 Frobenius, Leo (see Anthropology) Germany (see also mosque) 130, 148, 150–​154, 160 Giddens, Anthony 212 Gilroy, Paul 34–​39

Glenaan, Kenneth 171 Yasmin (2004) 171–​174, 178 Globalization 10, 204, 211–​213 Gramsci, Antonio 9, 23–​24, 182 Greedharry, Mrinalini (see also Ahonen, Paul) 50–​51 Grossberg, Lawrence 129 Haggling 59–​61, 74 Half Moon Camp 147–​154, 157 Hall, Stuart 171, 182 Hardt, Michael 211, 214 Head tax and Exclusion Act (Canada) 241, 250–​251 Hegemony 23–​24, 182–​183 Highbrow and lowbrow literature 133, 184, 189, 196, 200 Hirsch, Marianne 106, 115, 123 Postmemory 106–​109 Hobsbawm, Eric 211 Home country 209, 230 Homelessness 210–​212 Host culture 167–​171 Huggan, Graham 44, 50, 129, 139 Hybridity 168, 178 Ideologiekritik 3–​5, 15–​17, 22 Imagined Communities (see Anderson, Benedict) Immigration 168, 171–​174, 207–​212, 236, 246–​249 Imperialism 210, 223 Indigeneity 33, 228, 236 Inheritance of Loss, The (see Desai, Kiran) Interdisciplinarity 50–​52 Interlocutors 33, 61 Intonation 66 Islam 147, 162–​163, 168–​171, 174–​179 Islamophobia 162, 169–​174, 177 James, Marlon 128, 134–​135 Jameson, Fredric 205–​207, 213–​214 Cognitive mapping 213, 216 Japanese Americans 235 Kamboureli, Smaro 238 Labour exploitation (see also Marxism) 40, 234, 239–​241

261

Index labour theory (see also Locke, John; Marx, Karl) 45, 240 Laclau, Ernesto 19 Lange, Britta 151, 157 Language attitudes 73 Lawrence, Bonita (see also Dua, Enakshi)  223, 228 Leavitt, Martine 208, 210 Tom Finder 208–​210 Lee, sky 224, 248–​251, 254–​256 Disappearing Moon Café 224, 251, 253 Literary prizes 128, 130–​132, 140, 191, 215 Man Booker Prize 127–​130, 135–​140 Locke, John 240 London (see United Kingdom) Lost for Words (see St. Aubyn, Edward) Man Booker Prize (see literary prizes) Maracle, Lee 224, 238, 244–​245, 247–​253 Memory Serves 224, 250, 254–​256 Market (publishing) 48, 129, 132, 139, 188, 200 Market, the (commodification) 50–​55 Marketplace (see Nigeria) Marx, Karl 1–​2, 17, 45 Marxism  Alienation 16–​17, 21, 40, 45 Capitalism 5–​6, 40, 47, 50–​51, 239 Added value 46–​47 Commodification 46–​49, 53–​55 Consumption 43–​44, 199 Exploitation (see labour exploitation) False consciousness 1–​4, 17  Fetishism 45 Matriarchy 247 Mawani, Renisa 237, 242 McAllister, Kirsten 230, 234 McClure, James 191 McDonald, Peter 185, 189 McLeod, John 60, 121 Memories Denied  (see Paju, Imbi) Memory (see also postmemory) 108, 120, 124–​125 Memory Serves (see Maracle, Lee) Milroy, James 86 Mimesis and Alterity (see Taussig, Michael) Moore, David Chioni 111–​113 Morey, Peter 32 Morley, David 205, 212 Mosque, Germany’s first 147–​148

Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 209 Muslimwoman (see Cooke, Miriam) Negri, Antonio 212, 214 Newscasting 88, 100–​102  Nigeria 26, 61–​62, 67, 74 Ethnicities 62–​63 Marketplace 60 Objectification 53–​55, 155 Orientalism 30 Paju, Imbi  Memories Denied 115–​117, 121 Parry, Benita 32, 40 People of colour (poc) 228, 233 Perelli, Nick 187 Phoneme deletion 72 Phonology 62 Photography 156 Phung, Malissa 239–​241, 246, 249 Pöch, Rudolf 154–​155 Poetic Pilgrimage (see Douglas, Sukina & Rashida, Muneera) Ponzanesi, Sandra 43–​44 Popular fiction 182, 186 Crime fiction 182–​184, 188, 191, 196, 199, 200 Porter, Dennis 30 Postcolonial cultural industry 43–​46 Postcolonial exotic 44, 129, 140n Postcolonial studies publications 32 Postmemory (see Hirsch, Marianne) Post-​Soviet 111–​113 Prison camp (see Half Moon Camp) Prescod, Paula 88 Publishing industry 187, 190–​193, 215 Radway, Janice 199 Rao, Rahul 4, 15 Rashida, Muneera 174 Poetic Pilgrimage 174, 177–​178 Refugees 148, 207 Remembering 107–​113, 118 Representation 149–​150, 156–​157, 163–​164, 177–​179 Resistance 55, 176 Robertson, Roland 212 Romanticism 48

262 Index Rules of Art, The (see Bourdieu, Pierre) Russia, Soviet Union 116, 148 Said, Edward 31–​33 Orientalism 31 Sehdev, Robinder 231 Senghor, Léopold 31, 153 Settlers 228 Sharma, Nandita (see also Wright, Cynthia) 223, 228–​229, 230, 243 Smith, Sidonie (see also Watson, Julia) 107–​111 South Africa 37, 184–​188, 190–​193 South Asia 128, 138 Spivak, Gayatri 30–​33, 121 St. Aubyn, Edward  Lost for Words 140 Subaltern 33, 159 Subjectivity 112–​113, 122–​123, 225 Sudan 152 Swiss People’s Party (svp) 162 Syllables 69, 95 Sympathetic magic (see Taussig, Michael) Tambling, Jeremy 211 Taussig, Michael 159–​160 Mimesis and Alterity 158 Sympathetic magic 150, 156 Thomas, Susie 109, 123 Tom Finder (see Leavitt, Martine) Translator, The (see Aboulela, Leila) Transnationalism 38–​39 Trauma theory 114 Tune 70 Turtle Island 225–​226

United Kingdom (UK) 168, 170 London 165–​167 Utterances 68–​70 Valorisation 52–​54 Valuation regimes 52–​55 Vane, Brett 188 Veil 162–​165, 178–​179 Visible minority 234 Vocalic variables 90 Walcott, Rinaldo 232–​234 Warwick Research Collective (WReC) 40 Watson, Julie (see also Smith, Sidonie)  107–​111 Weinberg Camp 147–​148 Wells, John C. 90 Weltanschauungen 24, 27 Weninger, Josef (see also Pöch, Rudolf)  154–​155 Wenzel, Jennifer 37, 40 Williams, Patrick 30, 33, 39 Women’s emancipation 174, 177 Wong, Rita (see also Christian, Dorothy) 237, 247–​248 World War I 147–​148 Wright, Cynthia (see also Sharma, Nandita) 228–​229 Writing back 38, 110, 113, 124 Yasmin (see Glenaan, Kenneth) Young adult fiction 207–​208 Young, Robert 46–​47, 60, 163–​165 Žižek, Slavoj 1, 21