The Post-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century 1443849405, 9781443849401

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The Post-Marked World

The Post-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century

Edited by

Krystyna KujawiĔska Courtney, Izabella Penier and Sumit Chakrabarti

The Post-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century, Edited by Krystyna KujawiĔska Courtney, Izabella Penier and Sumit Chakrabarti This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Krystyna KujawiĔska Courtney, Izabella Penier, Sumit Chakrabarti and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4940-5, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4940-1

The editors of this volume are grateful to Amcor Rentsch Polska for their help and support in the publication of this volume

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ................................................................................................ ix The Post-Marked World: Theory and Practice in the 21st Century Krystyna KujawiĔska Courtney, Izabella Penier, Sumit Chakrabarti Part I: “Post” and Theoretical and Political Implications Negotiating with the Post-world: Gains, Losses, Prospects......................... 3 Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk Late Postmodernism: Are We In a New Era of Postmodernism? .............. 19 Metin Colak Silvio Berlusconi and the Second Italian Republic: A Model PostDemocracy? ............................................................................................... 35 Piotr Podemski Part II: Literature and Performance: Post-interfaces and Dialogues The Pre- and Post-Holocaust Reading of The Tempest by Leon Schiller, or the Polish-Jewish Relations ................................................................... 53 Agata Dąbrowska Postmodern Fireworks or Postcolonial Vengeance: The Strange Case of Salmar R................................................................................................ 69 Joanna Dyáa-UrbaĔska Has Postmodernism Really Reached the National? Appropriation and Interpretation in Sita Sings the Blues ................................................. 83 Justyna FruziĔska

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Part III: Feminisms and the “Post”: Problems of Representation Irigaray’s Critique of the Ocularcentric Paradigm: A Postmodern Feminist Perspective .................................................................................. 95 Monika Sosnowska Art and Feminism from a Poststructuralist Perspective ........................... 109 Márcia Olivera Part IV: Ethnic and National Ruptures: The “Post” across Cultures Towards the Post-ethnic American Studies? Postcolonial Interventions in the US Black and Minority Studies ..................................................... 123 Izabella Penier Post-Indian Warriors of Simulation: Sherman Alexie’s Flight as a “Story of Survivance”....................................................................... 139 Monika Kocot Postcolonialism and the Polish Colonial Dream...................................... 153 Maria àukowska and Justyna StĊpieĔ

INTRODUCTION THE POST-MARKED WORLD: THEORY AND PRACTICE IN THE 21ST CENTURY KRYSTYNA KUJAWIēSKA COURTNEY UNIVERSITY OF LODZ

IZABELLA PENIER UNIVERSITY OF LODZ

SUMIT CHAKRABARTI UNIVERSITY OF BURDWAN

It is a cliché now to claim that we live in a “post”-marked world, and indeed the “post-isms” are some of the most used, and abused expressions in the language. In a general sense, the various kinds of “post-isms” are regarded as a rejection of a prevailing number of cultural certainties on which our life in the so-called Western world has been structured since the eighteenth century. Postmodernism and its derivatives—poststructuralism, postcolonialism, post-communism, post-feminism, to name a few—have challenged our belief in “cultural” progress. In other words, the “postisms,” which are anti-authoritarian in their outlook, teach us to be invariably critical of universalizing theories, and embrace scepticism about what our cultures stand for. Engaging with the “post-isms” can be regarded as both a philosophical and political endeavour, which demonstrates, among other things, the instability of language, meaning, narrativity and generally any formal systems. In a continual search for paradoxes, instabilities, and the unknown, the “post-isms” are more concerned with the destabilizing existing theories and their pretensions to truth rather than with the positive construction of other grand narratives that could be applied over an entire scientific community. In our publication the prefix “post” is used in two senses: temporal—as in the coming after, and ideological—as in replacing or superseding. Both of these senses seem to suggest different things to different critics. For

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those who consider the “post” condition of the contemporary world to be first and foremost moving above and beyond the great narrative of modernity, the proliferation and purchase of various “posts” paradoxically bears witness to the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment idea of progress. The academic marketability of “posts” seems to suggest a type of progression that continues notwithstanding the eclipse of modernity itself. For example, just as postmodernism comes after modernism or postcolonialism comes after colonialism, all “posts” have the aura of being avant-garde, dethroning and transcending their predecessors. “Postmarking” seems to be a daring space-clearing gesture that makes room for conceptual innovation. Debates on the theoretical have dominated the discourse on humanities for a few decades now. The surge of anti-humanism from the 60s of the last century had already given way to the hermeneutics of the “post” in the 80s, and the cult of the postmodern has launched us into the era of absolute de-territorialisation of theory itself. As Baudrillard wrote in Symbolic Exchange, “any theory can from now on be exchanged against any other according to variable exchange rates but without any longer being invested anywhere [. . .]” In the wake of such theoretical aporia, the intended volume is an attempt to (re)think the implications of the term “post” in current theoretical parlance. Is there a politics always/already embedded within the “post”? Do we need the “post” any more? Did we, in the first place, need it at all? Is it possible to counter essentialism with the “post” prefix? These are some of the questions the volume intends to raise and explore by examining the “post”-marked terms in the theoretical market. The editors were careful to select essays that address different and relevant issues related to the idea of the “post,” and those that are representative of different parts of the globe. Thus a reader of the volume will not only have a bird’s eye view of the various disciplines where the concept of the “post” is used, but also an eclectic range of contributions about issues that engage different socio-political dynamics from various parts of the world. The volume is thus an attempt not only to cut across disciplines, but also to bring together ideas of the “post” from different cultural and geographical perspectives, and try to find a common link between them theoretically and/or practically. The chief intention of the volume is to create a heteroglossial space where various disciplines and multiple representations meet to explore whether a Habermasian consensus is possible in a world split by differences. While this volume does not attempt the impossible task of covering all possible post-theories and praxes, we hope that this selection of essays will

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help to highlight some issues at stake at the outset of the 21st century. Rather than consider the current state of critical theory and its possible future developments, a topic which has received a lot of critical attention, this volume focuses on the type of work the post-theories have made possible. It shows how critical post-discourses intertwine with the cultural practice and social existence through productions of signs, myths and images that give meaning to everyday life. In other words, what interested us most was the intersection of critical thought and practice. Many essays in this volume follow Friedrich Nietzsche, the iconoclastic nineteenth-century German philosopher, in calling for a “revaluation of all values” dwelling on dissimilarity, difference, differance (Derrida’s neologism), and the unpredictability of analysing cultural phenomena. Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk and Metin Colak’s essays show that set against these views there are more cautious opinions that the “post” discourses imply not only the eclipse of theory, but also a great epistemological crisis at the heart of the modern world. These two sceptically-minded critics appear to anticipate both the end of a certain era and the passing of great critical theories of the 20th century. For them to label contemporary culture as a culture of “posts” means abandoning the concept of Western historicism and discarding most of the philosophical assumptions on which present theorizing has been based. In Foucault’s terms of reference the essays written by Agata Dąbrowska and Joanna Dyáa-UrbaĔska undermine the insistence on the norm at the expense of the different or the Other, which is part of the authoritarianism associated with modern culture. The argument that gender identity, particularly female identity, is not something fixed, but instead a fluid process that cannot be reduced to any essence or norm of behaviour is present in Monika Sosnowska’s and Marcia Olivera’s work. Calling into question the assumptions of patriarchy, in particular the assumption behind the specifically male and female gender traits that have led to the gender stereotypes that our society still adheres to and employs as a basis for suppressing woman, as Luce Irigaray claims, these two essays constitute a valid analysis of the present social, political and cultural situation. Following Lyotard’s argument that knowledge is now the world’s most valuable resource, which may well become a source of conflict between nations in the future, Piotr Podemski and Maria àukowska show that whoever controls knowledge also controls ideology and politics. Since knowledge is seen to be communicated by means of narrative, the authors are critical of what Lyotard calls grand narratives: theories that maintain

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that they can explain everything, resist any attempt to change their form (narrative). The authors of this volume also face another crucial problem which we are left with in the “post-isms” reality: how to construct a value judgment that others will accept as just and reasonable, when we dispense with grand narratives or central authorities of any kind. Izabella Penier, Monika Kocot and Justyna FruziĔska explore the “cultural logic of late capitalism” (Frederic Jameson’s expression), regarding it as being, willingly or unwillingly, in collusion with the authorities in helping to maintain the ideological and political status quo. Overall, the book is premised on the conviction that it is worth engaging in contemporary theories in an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural fashion, and therefore the essays collected in this volume revolve around issues of ideology, politics, literature, art and culture. The essays in the first section of the volume deal with different meanings and judgments of post-theories in humanities. The volume opens with Marta Wiszniowska-Majchrzyk’s essay which looks at the contemporary cultural landscape reshaped by social, economic and technological changes of postmodern times and examines what culture and cultural studies have gained and lost in the process. It also tries to envision future prospects of postmodern ideologies, paradigms and praxes. Metin Colak’s essay “Late Postmodernism—Are We Entering a New Era of Postmodernism?” recounts from a privileged standpoint of contemporaneity the key areas of the debate surrounding the philosophical history of current critical positions. It introduces readers to the genealogy of postmodernism and its complex relation to modernity, and deals with the most important theorists of postmodernism and anti-postmodernism and their diagnosis of the social crisis that gave rise to the postmodern era. The essay concludes with an outline of the major legacies of modernism in the 21st century. Joanna Dyáa-UrbaĔska’s essay—“Postmodern Fireworks or Postcolonial Vengeance: the Strange Case of Salmar R.” provides a link between postmodern and postcolonial literary practice by attempting to critically discuss Salman Rushdie’s fiction against the backdrop of postmodern and postcolonial literary traditions. The essay sets out to show how these two critical paradigms can be used interchangeably with regard to one another producing divergent and competing readings. It also describes various strategies used by Rushdie to avoid being trapped in and defined by any of these two theoretical positions. “Post-Indian Warriors of Simulation—Sherman Alexie’s Flight as a ‘Story of Survivance’” by Monika Kocot narrates a similar story of evasion of appropriation and quest for indeterminacy by another non-

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western writer—Native American Sherman Alexie. The essay analyses the construction of the trickster narration in Sherman Alexie’s novel Flight, but rather than look at it through the prism of western theories, it uses the indigenous trope of trickster (as outlined by Gerald Vizenor’s theory on the Native American tradition in literature) and the theme of simulated knowledge/power, as a strategy of survival in the oppressive white world. Monika Sosnowska and Marcia Olivera’s texts deal with different theories of oppression by engaging in feminist cultural texts and concerns. Monika Sosnowska’s essay “Irigaray’s Critique of the Ocularcentric Paradigm: A Postmodern Feminist Perspective” investigates Luce Irigaray’s feminist critique of the ocularcentric paradigm and discusses how this ocularcentric tradition circumscribed the construction of feminine subjectivity by privileging of the visual in Western theories, as for instance in Freud’s theory of sexual difference. The essay also demonstrates how the marginalization and cultural evaluation of other senses (e.g. touch), contributed to the erasure of the feminine from literary works. On the other hand, “Art and Feminism from a Poststructuralist Perspective” by Marcia Olivera not only deals with visual arts but also discuses how poststructuralist anti-hegemonic discourses have engendered innovative readings and imaginative movements crucial in the contemporary analysis of feminist artistic practices. The intersection of theory, literature and visual arts is also the main concern of Justyna FruziĔska’s essay. “Has Postmodernism Really Reached the National? Appropriation and Interpretation in Sita Sings the Blues” examines the problem of appropriation and legitimacy in crosscultural cinematographic art. Her essay provides an in-depth analysis of the animated film Sita Sings the Blues, which conflates the story of an average American woman and the traditional Hindu tale about Sita, the wife of the Hindu god Rama. The essay addresses the sensitive issue of how the postmodern practice of rewriting national mythologies and other canonical texts can touch a raw nerve in a culture which considers such texts to be their own cultural and intellectual property. It also raises the question of the ethical aspect of postmodernist playfulness. The second section of the volume forges links between culture and politics showing how cultural texts in theatre or mass media can be put to revolutionary or political uses, and how these uses can be explicated by diverse post-theories. In the essay “The Pre- and Post-Holocaust Reading of The Tempest by Leon Schiller, or Polish-Jewish Relations” by Agata Dąbrowska the reception of two productions of The Tempest directed by Leon Schiller is examined. The essay illustrates how the staging of Shakespeare’s play can be read as a commentary on Polish and Jewish

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relations in various historical times and contexts. While the first staging, prepared by the Jewish troupe in cooperation with Polish artists, was a form of protest against racism and anti-Semitism, the second one, as Agata Dąbrowska argues, was treated as an attempt to come to terms with the awareness of Holocaust crimes. Piotr Podemski’s essay “Silvio Berlusconi and the Second Italian Republic: a Model Post-Democracy?” tests the validity of Colin Crouch’s theory of post-democracy in his interpretation of the relationship between politics and mass media in Silvio Berlusconi’s Second Italian Republic—a “videocracy” for “homo videns”— where democratic practices such as free elections are only a mimicry of democracy. Another kind of mimicry is analysed by Maria àukowska whose essay “Postcolonialism and the Polish Colonial Dream” tells the little known story of Polish colonial, overseas explorations. The essay explains that the rationale behind the Polish colonial enterprise was quite different from Western-style colonialism, as the overall objective of Polish colonial entrepreneurs was the restoration of the Polish Commonwealth overseas. Finally Izabella Penier’s work—“Towards Post-ethnic American Studies? Postcolonial Interventions in the US Black and Minority Studies”—that closes the whole volume reviews the institutional conditions in which theories are created. The essay explores the impact of postcolonial studies scholarship on the research imperatives and practices of American Black studies, arguing that postcolonial, and in particular Black British cultural studies (the Black Atlantic), has contributed significantly to the “world-ing” of Black Studies (and, by extension, of ethnic and American studies), reconfiguring the American concept of ethnicity and expanding the American discourse on multiculturalism. Though for some critics the force behind the theoretical revolution that took academia by storm in the latter part of the 20th century seems to be waning, time has not evidenced their belief that the significance of “postism” theories has diminished. On the one hand it is true that this theoretical revolution, so enthusiastically glorified in the past, has lost its impetus, and in many cases it no longer spreads beyond academia and a narrow circle of experts. On the other hand, its repercussions have, however, affected almost every section of daily life: we can see them in ideological formations, literary criticism, literature, comic books, films, art and in the majority of products and processes connected with social, political and cultural aspects of our present reality. It is our hope that this volume, by engaging with a plurality of theorized praxes, will help discover, trace and acknowledge the significance of the many posttheories, showing them nothing but an elitist, esoteric or arcane practice.

PART I “POST” AND THEORETICAL AND POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS

NEGOTIATING WITH THE “POST-WORLD”: GAINS, LOSSES, PROSPECTS MARTA WISZNIOWSKA-MAJCHRZYK

ABSTRACT: Having found ourselves in an utterly different reality, which often turns into hyperreality, with the rapidity of economic, social, technological progress, the so-called quality of life has taken a new turn. This paper strives to examine the consequences of the change in the three areas indicated in the title. There are many, such as the commercialization of culture and the triumph of mass culture over high culture, the end of the old style academia, the fiasco of ideologies and several others. KEY WORDS: culture, civilization, consumer society, postmodernism, quality of life. To negotiate (OED Second Edition): To hold communication or conference (with another) for the purpose of arranging some matter by mutual agreement, to discuss a matter with a view to some settlement or compromise; To deal with, manage or conduct (a matter, affair, etc., requiring some skill or consideration) To transfer or assign (a bill, etc.,) to another in return for some equivalent in value To clear (a hedge, fence) to succeed in crossing, getting over, round or through an obstacle by skill or dexterity [. . .]

It can be argued that our lives are being negotiated by us or for us, as the case may be. On the surface, Baudrillard’s (1983) exchange theory in which exchanges turn more and more problematic and the cherished superiority of the subject becomes ephemeral, seems close to the idea of negotiating, of compromise and settling for less instead of more. This paper wants to examine gains, losses and future prospects in the areas of broadly defined culture and cultural studies, touching upon ideologies, politics, civilization, psychology, multiculturalism, feminism, and post-mutations of the above. To begin the inquiry requires a broad consensus as to what is understood by culture, cultural studies and by (post)modernism in these areas. It also requires a tentative acceptance of

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Negotiating with the “Post-world”: Gains, Losses, Prospects

various theoretical stands without redefining them, but recognizing the status quo and examining their consequences in the given fields. It may be expected that gains and losses intermingle, and the prospects are extremely difficult to envisage. In order to anchor history for now a brief visit into the past may be instructive. A visit to the time when culture/civilization, nature/nurture entered public debates not to be ousted from them ever since. Arnold, Ruskin and Morris offered numerous opinions and much criticism of the existing state of affairs (Wiszniowska 2012). They were believed to have been offering the much needed solutions for society. Such voices as those of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus and J.S. Mill should also be noted. Even if at the time of the actual debate they did not seem universal, with hindsight their universality is striking. The evidence of women’s suffrage and Emmeline Pankhurst presents such a case. Soon the prevailing ideology of Victorianism gave way to the forces of modernism via Wilde, Hardy, Conrad, Yeats and others. Artistic manifestos began to negotiate such categories as truth, realism, verisimilitude, mimesis, the artist’s role in the changing world and the place of art. Correspondences between the arts gained momentum with Ruskin’s criticism, Turner’s paintings and Conrad’s modernist manifesto (Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’). Turner and Conrad, each in his own right, questioned the collective, mimetic and realistic tendency toward nondescript and sublime, from representable to u-representable (Faris 1989). To visualize how modernity turned into postmodernity, an unlikely comparison may prove instructive. We need to juxtapose such seeming incompatibles as the industrial revolution, John Ruskin and the description of the Polish city of Lodz as depicted by Wáadysáaw Stanisáaw Reymont. The comparison extends from Ruskin’s criticism of the consequences of the industrial revolution that could have unwittingly inspired the said Polish novelist (KrzyĪanowski 1963: 235). Reymont was the Nobel Prize winner for Literature in 1924 and the writer who voiced “Ruskinian” sentiments in his industrial novel The Promised Land (1899). The passages from The Promised Land have an aura of universality, evidencing that Lodz was rightly considered the Polish Manchester, an enormous monster that crushes human lives, as the closing paragraphs of the book sum up: From distant plains, from mountains and godforsaken villages, from capitals and towns, from thatched houses and palaces, from the heights and gutters an unending procession of people was towing to “the promised land.” They came to fertilize it with their own blood, bringing their

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strength, youth, health, freedom, hope and poverty, brains and work, beliefs and dreams. For that “promised land,” for that polyp, villages were deserted, forests were dying, land grew infertile of its treasures, rivers were drying, people were born; and it took in everything, and in its huge jaws crushed and chewed people and things; heaven and earth, and instead gave useless millions to a handful of people and famine and strain to the whole rest.

A devastated landscape was not the only outcome of the industrial revolution. The devastation of human beings was evident in the change from a peasant to a factory worker, as the descriptions below show. In his regional/traditional attire, the worker-to-be looks healthy, spruce and dignified: [I]n white coat, embroidered along the seams with black ribbons, trousers in horizontal stripes red, white and green, his waistcoat dark blue with brass buttons. His shirt tied with a red ribbon. Standing straight at the door he put his sheepskin cap on his own hands now crossed across his breast he looked at Borowiecki with unsmiling blue eyes, time an again moving his head to prevent his hair, looking like braked hemp, from falling on his well shaven face. (Reymont 1965: 92)

Having worked in a factory for a time, the man looks utterly different, so much like the figures from Mrs. Gaskell’s industrial novels or Emmeline Pankhurst’s autobiography. Not only had the man discarded his regional costume for “cheap clothes and nasty” (as the famous title of Charles Kingsley’s goes) but also lost his healthy look and most importantly his natural dignity: [I]nstead of a white coat he was wearing a black overcoat dripped with wax on the tails, short black trousers over black boots, a peaked cap, a rubber collar which revealed his dirty neck. He has grown a beard, which covered his jaws like a brush, at sides coming to his short pomaded hair. From his yellow, wrinkled and haggard face the same old blue and honest eyes stared. (Reymont 1965: 401)

The Europe of early capitalism saw more or less the same sad metamorphosis of those ousted from their traditional milieu. It can be summed up as shifting from barter or exchange of commodities (cf. the feudal social hierarchy based on the exchange of services as exemplified in Piers Plowman) via rates of exchange (as ironically exemplified in Bradbury’s novel entitled Rates of Exchange) to virtual transactions that have been colonizing more and more areas of the contemporary world from virtual shopping to making online friends or dating, etc.

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Negotiating with the “Post-world”: Gains, Losses, Prospects

It has been accepted that mass culture was a product of changing social and economic relations. In Great Britain mass culture was created by the working class that came into being in result of the said industrial revolution. Towns became a natural milieu of culture. They offered a new experience to these crowds of people who lost experience, new surroundings, amorphous crowds who have lost their identity/roots, etc. (Piątkowski 2008: 11-24). Other pan-European similarities are discernible. What was said about Lodz and about the emerging working class takes on another dimension when we realize that it was the same city, which had been visited several times by the great American black tragedian Ida Aldridge who had performed there and eventually met his unexpected death (KujawiĔska 2009). Thus Lodz was not as exclusive as Reymont depicted it. Culture and civilization were trying to work out their uneasy compromise that we have been negotiating ever since. Ruskin insisted that beautiful surroundings, education and better living conditions are necessary for men to live decent lives. Culture made claims on civilization trying to humanize it. Yet, new developments were soon to shake the foundations of the industrial revolution. Nowadays, both Britain and Poland have been witnessing the collapse of heavy industry with the former shop floor likely to become a huge mega store or a shopping mall. The progress of industrialization equals civilization, which corresponds with Richard Hoggart’s assessment (in the 1950s) and his reassessment in 2004 diagnosing the gradual devaluation of traditional working class culture and giving way to mass culture, in which the former grass roots producers of culture become passive consumers of the imposed media culture. These tendencies were discerned and criticized from various theoretical stands from The Frankfurt School to Williams and Baudrillard. The process brought the demise of the modernist (or liberal) non-political view of culture, which was openly turning ideological and commercialized. The spread of culture is a sure gain, though it happens at a cost. This cost is the demise of the traditional sources and transmitters of culture, the collapse of the academia, of the traditional hierarchy of cultural values, of the (no matter how tentative) stability that culture used to offer which coincided with the demise of grand narratives (giving culture ideological colours and legitimation which at the same time relegates culture from its former privileged position to one of many artefacts on a par with eating habits and sexual behaviours), to the Americanization of culture by means of Hollywood films, musicals, jazz or “the jeaning of America” (Fiske’s phrase 1990:1) and not only America, truth to tell. What seemed a gain for Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and others was the

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creative role of the working class in producing their own culture, which indicated a grass roots movement, turned sour before our very eyes due to the spreading commercialization of culture, and the near demise of high culture. Unlike F.R. Leavis, Williams (1971) secured no special place for art, including it into cultural practice or just another human activity. Williams’s social definition of culture links it with a specific social group, anthropologically oriented (describing a way of life, values and understanding). Culture became not only class specific but transient and “lived,” and that experience is shared by many. That brought Williams (1977) to develop (with a considerable difficulty in defining) the so-called “structure of feeling.” Ultimately, it seems to denote the culture of a particular historical moment, a commonly accepted set of values, shared by a generation and reflected in particular artistic forms and conventions. In view of later developments it should be stressed that the scholars of the nineteen fifties and sixties still saw individuals as active participants who helped create their own culture, while maintaining that cultural practices should be studied along with historically specific social relations associated with these practices. Cultural Studies, emanating from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in the early 1960s, combined innovative zeal with shaky methodology or, as some opponents want it, no set of tools at all. Parasitic on literature, freely taking from other fields of research and highly politicized, the new discipline was fighting a winning battle with literature. The insistence on the political and class oriented vision of culture must be seen as ideological entrenchment, while the postulate to study popular culture was most desirable. Yet, criticism must not be confined to Marxist perspectives and stories of power relationships, it should take a vaster humanistic turn. By exploring cultural context simplified stories of hegemony or influence may be overcome (Schwarz 1993: 11). The changing concept of culture and its nineteenth- and early twentieth-century milieu undoubtedly influenced the post-postmodern understanding of culture. Yet, to try to understand the present, several other conditions co-created what we have now. The problem is their rating that is our increasingly common and tricky problem today. The relevance of the Freudian Interpretation of Dreams published in 1900 and the 9/11/2001 attack on the WTC almost prophetically encompass the developments of the last hundred years. Within these bookends, the neo- became post- with an interim stage of being itself.

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Negotiating with the “Post-world”: Gains, Losses, Prospects

Until the post- stage was reached, “splitting the atom” (a term popularized by H.G. Wells), quantum physics (Planck and Einstein) and the computerized web world overshadowed the humanities in the sixties, the mistake that comes back with a vengeance, as many ideas and studies had been discarded as unprofitable or politically incorrect or unattainable. God was declared dead. Marxism came under criticism from former supporters (Althusser). Two wars were fought, empires fell, the Iron Curtain dissolved, the world was fragmented, the universe became approachable. More and more dependent on science, the modern world came to distrust science. After all genocide resulted from pseudo-scientific research (Bauman 1995: 45–70). The nineteenth century witnessed revolutionary upheavals in the status of knowledge. The twentieth century pushed the development of sciences to unbelievable extremes. Developments in new fields of knowledge split its more or less solid (even if in theory) paradigm of a uniform body of workable knowledge (for instance how to educate a gentleman as Cardinal Newman maintained). Bombarded with new ideologies, inventions, facing extreme situations in which accepted measures would be sadly lacking, our age offered alternative solutions in almost all spheres of human activity from ideological ones via political to cultural. One of the theories of “the great change” states that the available modernisms were too self-centred and opinionated to break away from their own limitations and in consequence were to become post-modernisms. They were rooted possibly in the counterculture of the sixties or “the watershed of 1968” (Bertens 1995: 5). Leslie Fiedler (1965), John Barth (1992), Jürgen Habermas (1990), Ihab Hassan (1991) and Susan Sontag (1964), to mention but a handful of names, only added fuel to the ongoing discussion and attempts at defining the process. Jameson saw postmodernism as “an inescapable and schizophrenic condition imposed on us by latecapitalist society” (Jameson, quoted in Bertens 1991: 123). Sontag’s campaign against meaning led to postmodern art becoming non-art to avoid being interpreted (Bertens 1991: 124). With the demise of grand narratives, commodification of arts and artists and rationalizing irrationality, literature’s credibility was undermined together with its traditional liberal justification and epistemological transparency and ontological surety. Further dispersion and fragmentation were inevitable, though opposite processes also surfaced. Culture and popular culture used to be kept apart, and their division was not only attacked from various ideological positions but also inexorably losing its relevance. At the moment we have moved to “the culture of the copy,” in which the once admired originality, authenticity

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and uniqueness are undermined by reproductions and fakes (Hawkes 1997, Schwartz 2000). Once “modernist” meanings were discarded the ideological and the aesthetic became inseparable. Several developments helped this to occur. Besides commercialization and commodification of arts, the growing relativization of the truth (linguistically the truth was given the plural it never used to have) coincided with the ebbing support for ideological interpretations of the world. Howard Barker, one of the British avant-garde playwrights, shrewdly assessed the situation: We are living the extinction of official socialism. When the opposition loses its politics, it must root in art [. . .] The accountant is the new censor. The accountant claps his hands at the full theatre. The official socialist also hankers for the full theatre. But full for what? [. . .] We must overcome the urge to do things in unison. To chant together, to hum banal tunes, is not collectivity. A carnival is not a revolution. After the carnival, after the removal of the masks, you are precisely who you were before. [. . .] (1993: 17)

The distrust of fossilized formulas or formulas just declared fossilized, in genres and ultimately, paradigms reached its height in the rise of feminist writings, criticism and theories. As before, there were and still are several feminisms differing because of cultural, geographical and ideological anchoring. What seems undisputed is the new perspective on literary heritage, what may be called “reading and writing as a woman,” offering alternative discourse to the prevailing patriarchal vision. With truly revolutionary progress made in printing techniques, several halfforgotten or neglected women writers of the past came into focus. Feminism has travelled colossal distances from early grass roots of Women’s Lib, from much ridiculed bra burning and unshaven legs to the protest at Greenham Common (does anybody remember what it was all about?), from propagating sex education, discussing sexuality, pregnancy, abortion, IVF, to gender mainstreaming. As Showalter (1990:1) once rightly observed, the rise of gender as a category of analysis has been one of the most striking changes in the humanities of the eighties. By offering an alternative reading of literary her-story, feminism challenged received literary canon, relativized and legitimized studies of the peripheral and neglected. Truth to tell, ideology often got the upper hand over artistic value, which became more and more difficult to agree upon. Feminism has been less successful in preventing the spread of attitudes considered demeaning or counterproductive and upholding the patriarchal and capitalist power structures. This, undoubtedly is the case of popular

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Negotiating with the “Post-world”: Gains, Losses, Prospects

literature, romances, films, TV serials and commercials, let alone pornography and violence on the Internet. Besides, the rise of feminism encouraged cultural and political activities, another truly revolutionary occurrence was the rise of postcolonial studies. The “empire writes back” trend legitimized what was already going on—the former colonies finding their own voice, largely (an irony in history) via their representatives, who were educated in the British education system, first at home and later in Britain, mainly via the British Council (the case of V.S. Naipaul) and who were capable of expressing themselves in the language of the former colonizers. Again, new alternatives were offered. These were other versions of the official history, most inventive in the field of language. Postcolonial literature is not good because it is postcolonial (meaning politically correct) but because it neither tames nor domesticates its otherness. “Making the exotic comfortable” (Todd 2006: 13) for marketing purposes only trivializes otherness, ignores non-mediagenic writers, and those whose works make us distinctly uncomfortable. To support the above view, “dissensus” (as opposite of consensus) Lyotard’s coinage obligingly demolishes the pretence of ideological and commercial innocence as governing in the world of culture: The real political task today, at least in so far as it is also concerned with the cultural [. . .] is to carry forward the resistance that writing offers to established thought, to what has already been done, to what everyone thinks, to what is well known, to what is widely recognized, to what is “readable,” to everything which can change its form and make itself acceptable to opinion in general. (Lyotard 1988: 302)

Paradoxically enough, the vitality of postcolonial literature bridges cultural divides, moving in and out of traditions, appropriating them in a novel way (Wiszniowska 2011). But the long shadow of history can also be a hindrance. As Derek Walcott observed: In the New World servitude to the muse of history has produced a literature of recrimination and despair, a literature of revenge written by the descendants of slaves or a literature of remorse written by the descendants of the masters. Because this literature serves historical truth, it yellows into polemic or evaporates in pathos. The truly aesthetic of the New World neither explains nor forgives history. It refuses to recognize it as a creative or culpable force. (Walcott, quoted in Szuba 2011:102)

The insistence on keeping the label of postcolonial or feminist literature seems ultra entrenching and self defeating in view of the merging of genres, traditions, etc. In both cases there are historical and

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ideological reasons for doing so. Yet, in the long run, the oppositions of centre/peripheries and colonizers/colonized must appear simplistic and outmoded in the globalizing world. Ideological supportive should not be taken as absolutely trustworthy, neither should several lists of must-reads that are thinly camouflaged best-seller lists. By analogy, Wilde’s pun may come in useful. Still, Wilde certainly had it easier to decide which book to praise and which to discard. After all he was not living in the world of aporia, in a maze of choices. He stated (1974: 138) in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all.” That is obviously not all. Over the years, we have turned from the former affluent society into a consumer society with almost infinite options to choose such as views, religion, the country we want to live in, the way we want to dress, even gender, etc. But to accept these options as unbiased would be a mistake. Here comes the downside of our civilization. We are being constantly prepared to buy this and not that, to think this and not that. The freedom of choice has been more and more illusory. The abundance of artefacts creates an illusion of stability, which in turn necessitates further acquisition of commodities and stimuli (discussion in Hoggart 2004, Kubisz 2009). TV sets, computers, mobile phones, iPods and the Internet allow for little or no solitude or contemplation. Personal freedom is endangered if one can be located all over the world via mobile operators. There are far reaching implications of cultural exchanges due to the world wide mobility, of psychological, social and political nature. So unsurprisingly, modern anthropology, sociology and recently crosscultural psychology are investigating psychological problems of long-term residence in foreign countries. Yet, early studies used to devote little attention to the cultural clash experienced by immigrants encountering foreign customs, religion, language, living conditions etc. Indeed, the notion that human behaviour depends very much on cultural traditions that human beings carry with themselves (in other words “culture-bound nature of most human behaviour”) is comparatively new and the relationship between psychology and culture dates back to World War II (Jahoda 1999: X). It is only recently that it has been accepted that human behaviour is culturally specific. Psychology has launched itself to the position that philosophy, theology and literature used to occupy. It appears that literary studies has got yet another competitor besides cultural studies. However, crosscultural psychology may, surprisingly, be an ally to cultural studies.

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Negotiating with the “Post-world”: Gains, Losses, Prospects

Psychology, which as with culture is non-experimental (though it has experimental psychology as its offspring) but looks for interactive meanings (to appropriate Geertz’s formula, 2003: 35–58) and makes judgments ex post. Literature functions in a similar manner, but it takes a great writer to explore the problem of otherness in the collision of cultures. It is not only Naipaul’s protagonist who can become one of his Mimic Men, but collision of cultures makes it necessary to re-examine one’s identity. The term “cross-cultural psychology” is by no means the only new compound that uses the root culture. Such new compounds as multiculturalism, interculturalism and acculturation have become part of scientific debates held in many disciplines. Since the 1970s the psychologist John W. Berry had been researching and ultimately striving to explain how individuals and groups adapt or disadapt to another culture, whether they maintain their own, borrow from another, integrate or separate, which leads to integration or assimilation, segregation or marginalization. Berry’s acculturation model (Berry 1999: 7, Chika Assai 2006) accounts for several choices and consequences that follow. Individuals may either participate in another culture while maintaining his/her own and in result get either assimilated or marginalized. The problem of marginalization has become a burning issue in various parts of the world. Properly defined areas of research should allow for scientific and systematic approach to how human behaviours are shaped and influenced by social and cultural forces, studying individuals from more than two cultures and finally, how they are influenced by culture and how it leads to changes in existing culture (Berry 2008). Multiculturalism seemed a desirable way out of several difficulties and challenges at the end of the twentieth century. Europe had to adjust to the changing political, economic and cultural occurrences. There was a conference organized by the International Society for the Study of European Ideas that gave due attention to those problems. In 1996 the right to preserve one’s cultural identity in increasingly polyethnic societies was perceived as a challenge and a common phenomenon: The Summit of the Council of Europe, 1993, brought forward that Europe is being confronted with a challenge that has to do with national minorities which the “upheavals of history have established in Europe.” The challenge has not decreased in hand with a revival of a search for national identities, in particular, but not only in Eastern Europe. Besides, during the second half of this century many migrant workers from Mediterranean areas and refugees have come to various, in particular Western, European countries, with the result of these countries becoming poly-ethnic. So, almost every European country can be called multicultural, be it multi-

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national or poly-ethnic or both, containing various cultural groups that want to preserve their cultural identity and that express their demands for recognition. In this context many advocate a right to preserve their cultural identity. (Buitenweg 1998)

Until recently multiculturalism was one of the sacred and undisputable favourites of public relations. W.J. Burszta, an eminent cultural anthropologist, already considered multiculturalism a demographic fact that such governments as the US, Canada or Australia try to institutionalize. But there is another aspect of multiculturalism that has dwarfed itself to “boutique multiculturalism,” to cultural tourism and global reification of cultural differences, where exotic goods are offered and traded with no understanding of history and tradition (Burszta 2008: 57–59). The danger of banalization becomes real when given culture is used without thorough understanding of its workings and striving for commercial success is also the shortest way to create cultural nonsense. Some twenty years later, multiculturalism has been considered misleading and dangerous for promoting cultural absolutism. The link with politics is obvious when one offers the following comment: Multiculturalism is, therefore, a deeply misleading term in that it depends on a notion of cultural absolutism, which supposedly exists before the many varied aspects of the ‘multi’ are brought into contact. But this is not how culture works. Cultures are already multicultures in that they always consist of difference and sameness. It is only ever culture in the singular in discourses of power or in naive discourses of resistance. Moreover, what should be regarded as something positive, something to celebrate, is often presented as a negative, something to constrain and control. Overt and organised racism is only one aspect of this negativity. It is nevertheless an irrational and damaging aspect, one that brings despair and destruction to the lives of many British people. (Storey 2010: 23)

Storey’s (2010: 24) criticism, which also turns against the legacy of the Empire was considered a source of xenophobia and racism, owing to the natural link that developed between the skin colour (white) and nationality (also cf. Eagleton 2000: 46–47). Multiculturalism as an idea and a programme suffered from a multitude of inadequate or broad definitions, and from being considered as a panacea for the problems migrants and migration create for their host countries and their inhabitants. Thus, celebrating equal value of all cultures has been giving way to interculturalism resting on the observance of common fundamental obligations, on preserving one’s religious, cultural, and other identities. As yet, it seems a recent and “long-distance” project (as follows from Cushner 1998, Gundara 2000), obviously geared to educating societies and

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upholding a belief in democracy, as democratic governments are to become guarantors of individual rights. However, present day democracies find such obligations difficult if not impossible to fulfil and equally difficult for societies to take on trust. In the long run, the intercultural approach may offer a welcome alternative to the “empire writes back” fears of losing one’s identity, cancellation of individual rights, cultural and religious discrimination. Another much feared and discussed idea is that of globalization. It is feared because it professes various connections transcending nation-states (implying also societies). It is a process of world-wide consequences, in which we become intertwined with distant people and places economically, politically and culturally (Berry 2008). There are several problems we face in our post-world democracies or quasi-democracies. The issues of equal rights for all, personal freedoms, free press, etc. have been guaranteed by various international bodies, national governments and politicians, which is especially true during election campaigns as they make us painfully aware of fundamental problems. Democracies in their pursuit of equality (numerous resolutions of the European Parliament) do not pursue the truth with equal eagerness. Relativity in judgments and morals in the name of tolerance has already spread over politics leading to political correctness or downright manipulation. The challenging problem is whether “dictatorship of relativism,” which is easy to foresee, will make it possible for culture to flourish. In the periods of moral permissiveness and decay in political and social spheres, as antiquity testified, the most advanced and established democracies had fallen prey to barbarians. Postmodern individual identities have undergone a decisive shift. Such fashionable catch words as psychological well-being and quality of life are accompanied by the decline of tradition, demise of values, growing awareness of individual rights to attain personal aims regardless of the socalled social well-being that is functioning in society. Collecting experiences, readiness to trade anything for a more desirable commodity, capability of quick change to start yet anew—all these have been associated with “man chameleons” or, as psychologists want it, “the unencumbered I.” That is a personality without identity, constructed by the subject itself, independent and autonomous. Such individuals are unable or unwilling to take responsibilities for others, to show affection and friendship (Majchrzyk 2010). On both a personal and international level, attitudes toward multiculturalism, globalization, individual and national identities remain liquid (Bauman 2005). The prospect of the clash of civilizations,

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Huntington (1996) eloquently described and Brooks (2011) equally forcefully denied, remains open to investigation if the third opinion is presented. Gellner’s insightful observation that “modern man is not loyal to a monarch or a land or a faith, whatever he may say, but to a culture” (Gellner 1983: 36) may be considered a challenge, one of many; it may also offer hope for culture which is something we like to believe we can manage, though Eagleton’s warning (2000: 131) that culture cannot fulfil all expectations directed at it these days should also be noted. By summing up gains, losses and prospects only a mixed message can be offered: • The post post-modern world is more of a project than a finished product. • In the time of ideological shifts, culture, history and tradition provide minimum continuity and stability. • Colossal gains in the quality of life, living and working standards, technological progress, etc., coincide with unheard-of challenges and tremendous human cost. • Culture and culture-related issues are becoming more and more significant. There are no monolithic (closed) cultures. All cultures enter into some relations with other cultures. • Commodification of such ideas as freedom of expression, tolerance, political correctness etc. almost killed critical (including academic) debate and the so-much-advertised freedom of choice is being constantly restricted. • And lastly, if the world seems like “a heap of broken images” (T.S. Eliot) that we must “only connect” (E.M. Forster) but whatever happens, another poet realistically states: “Between extremities/Man runs his course” (W.B. Yeats).

References Barker, H. 1993 (1989). Arguments for a Theatre. Manchester & New York: Manchester UP. Barth, J. 1992. “The Literature of Replenishment. Postmodernist Fiction.” In The Post-Modern Reader . C. Jencks (ed.). London: Academy Editions.172–180. Bauman, Z. 1995 (1991). WieloznacznoĞü Nowoczesna, NowoczesnoĞü Wieloznaczna. Warszawa: PWN. (First publ. as Modernity and Ambivalence). —. 2005. Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Baudrillard, J. 1983. Les Stratégies Fatales. Paris: Grasset. Berry, J.W., Y.H. Poortinga, M.H. Segall, P.R. Dasen, 1999 (1992). Cross-Cultural Psychology. Research and Applications. Cambridge: CUP. Berry, J.W. 2008. “Globalisation and Acculturation.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations 32: 328-336. Bertens, H. 1991. “Postmodern Culture(s).” In Postmodernism and Contemporary Fiction. E. J. Smyth (ed.). London: Batsford. 123–137. —. 1995. The Idea of the Postmodern: A History. London: Routledge. Brooks, D. 2011. “Huntington’s Clash Revisited.” In The New York Times. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/04/opinion/04brooks.html?pagewant ed=print [06.06.2012]. Buitenweg, R. 1998. “The Right to Preserve a Cultural Identity.” In Memory, History and Critique: European Identity at the Millennium. Proceedings of the Fifth Conference of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas. Brinkhuis, F. and Talmor, S., (eds.). Utrecht: University for Humanist Studies. [CDROM]. Burszta, W.J. 2008. “WielokultorowoĞü—nowy globalny folkloryzm.” In Kiczosfery wspóáczesnoĞci. Burszta W.J., Sekuáa, E.A. (eds.). Warszawa: Academica. 57–66. Chika Assai E., Durham J., Halvorson A., Holte S. 2006. Counseling and Student Affairs. Minnesota State University. [Online]. Available: http://www.stowarzyszeniefidesetratio.pl/Presentations0/20123Majchrzyk.pdf [28.06.2009]. Cushner, K. 1998. International Perspectives on Intercultural Education. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum. Eagleton, T. 2000. The Idea of Culture. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Faris, W. B. 1989. “The ‘Dehumanization’ of the Arts; J. M. W. Turner, Joseph Conrad and the Advent of Modernism.” Comparative Literature. Fall 1989, Vol. 41, No.4: 305–326. Fiedler, L. 1965. “The New Mutants.” Partisan Review 32. 505–525. Fiske, J. 1990 (1989). Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman. Gellner, E. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell. Geertz, C. 2003. “Opis gĊsty – w stronĊ interpretatywnej teorii kultury.” In Badanie Kultury. Elementy Teorii Antropologicznej. M. Kempny and E. Nowicka (eds.). Warszawa: PWN. 35–58. Gundara, J.S. 2000. Interculturalism, Education, Inclusion. London: Chapman Publ. Ltd.

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Habermas, J. 1990. The Philosophy Discourse of Modernity. Twelve Lectures, MIT Press. Hassan, I. 1991. “Pluralism in Postmodern Perspective.” In The Postmodern Reader. C. Jenks (ed.). London: Academy Edition. 196– 207. Hawkes, T. 1997. “Making-Taking. The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles by Hillel Schwartz.” (review article) In London Review of Books, July, 31: 16. Hoggart, R. 2004 (1957). The Uses of Literacy. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers. Huntington, S. P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster. Jahoda, G. 1999 (1992). “Foreword.” In Cross-Cultural Psychology. Research and Applications. J.W. Berry, Y.H. Poortinga, M.H., Segall, P.R. Dasen, (eds.). Cambridge: CUP. X–XII. KrzyĪanowski, J. 1963. Neoromantyzm Polski 1890–1918. Warszawa: PWN. Kubisz, M. 2009. “Ekologia codziennoĞci w czasach nadmiaru. Poszukiwacze skradzionego czasu.” In Znaki, Tropy, Mgáawice. KsiĊga pamiątkowa w szeĞüdziesiątą rocznicĊ urodzin Profesora Wojciecha Kalagi. L. Drong and J. Mydla (eds.). Katowice: Wyd. Uniwersytetu ĝląskiego. 76–84. KujawiĔska Courtney, K. 2009. Ira Aldridge (1807–1867). Dzieje pierwszego czarnoskórego tragika szekspirowskiego. Kraków: Universitas. Lyotard, J.F. 1988. “An Interview with Jean-Francois Lyotard.” Theory, Culture and Society 5, 2–3, 277–309. Majchrzyk, Z. 2010. “Postmodern Individual Identity—the Word of Collected Experiences.” In Sveikatos Moskai. Tomas 20. 2 (68). 312– 315. Piątkowski, K. 2008. “Kich jako problem antropologiczny.” In Kiczosfery wspóáczesnoĞci. Burszta W.J., Sekuáa, E.A. (eds.). Warszawa: Academica. 11–24. Reymont, W.S. 1965 (1899). Ziemia Obiecana. Warszawa: Czytelnik. (The Promised Land) (translation mine). Schwartz, H. 2000 (1996). The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles. New York: Zone Books. Schwarz, D.R. 1993. “Searching for Modernism’s Genetic Code: Picasso, Joyce, and Stevens as a Cultural Configuration.” In Critical Essays. Vol. 10.1. Winter 1993. Available: http://webstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive [2008, April 22]

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Showalter, E. 1990. Speaking of Gender. London: Routledge. Sontag, S. 1964. Notes on “Camp.” Partisan Review 3: 515–30. Storey, J. 2010. “Becoming British.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern British Culture. Higgins M., Smith, C., Storey J. (eds.). Cambridge University Press: 12–25. Szuba, M. 2011. “Re-examining the past, renegotiating identities: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Half a Yellow Sun (2006).” In Empty Treasure Chests Dumped from Departed ships. Re-mapping (Post) Colonia ism in Art and Literature in English. L. Sikorska (ed.) Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. 97–102. Todd, R.K. 2006. “How British is British? Some cultural and historical considerations concerning British literature since 1500.” Inaugural Lecture, Leiden University. Wilde, O. 1974 (1890). “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” In The Portable Oscar Wilde. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —. 1971 (1958). Culture and Society 1780–1950. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. —. 1977. Marxism and Literature. London and New York: OUP. Wiszniowska, M. 2011. Studies in 20th Century Literary/Cultural Britain. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynaáa Stefana WyszyĔskiego. —. 2012. Introducing Cultural Studies. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Kardynaáa Stefana WyszyĔskiego.

LATE MODERNISM: ARE WE IN A NEW ERA OF POSTMODERNISM? METIN COLAK

ABSTRACT: This essay examines, within a historical perspective, theories of postmodernism which emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Within this framework, the theses of the core writers of postmodernism and the views of the writers of the new century will be analysed, compared and discussed from a critical perspective. After seeking answers to the question of whether we are in a new era of modernism, or postmodernism this study also investigates the major consequences of modernism in the theoretical sphere in the twenty-first century. KEY WORDS: theory, modernism, late modernism, postmodernism.

Introduction Postmodernism emerged at the end of the 1960s, as a reaction to modernism, and brought us some new concepts. As soon as it appeared in the intellectual world this new theory offered us a radical breakthrough: a complete break from modernism. Consequently this caused some serious debates among intellectuals in the West, especially in the US. The intense argument was restricted to philosophy at first but later spread to architecture, literature and other fields of arts and increased its momentum in the 1970s and in the end reached its peak at the beginning of 1980s. Although postmodernism has been suspicious of radical views it becomes sufficiently “radical” especially when it is applied in the context of modern hopes and utopias which have always been the driving motives of the modern imagination. Thus, postmodern theorists and writers have insisted on dystopic visions, pastiches, parodies, collages and schizophrenic perceptions and have developed a stance against characters as heroes, as the impelling force of the narration in modern texts. However, this insistence caused some counter-theoretical perspectives. Well known examples are Jürgen Habermas (1981, 1982) and Fredric Jameson’s magnum opus Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1992).

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While Habermas (1982) has used the words “new conservatism” when he defined the emerging theory, Jameson went one step further: he has examined postmodernism as one of the manifestations of the cultural logic of late capitalism which appeared in the twentieth century. The 1970s were a time of radical disjunctions; consequently people experienced these radical breaks in every field from architecture to politics. In the 1990s, postmodern thinking suddenly lost its intensity and left behind an ambiguous world in which some underlying socio-cultural and ideological factors became apparent. Postmodernism lost its momentum just when it was reaching a better definition of contemporary culture and society. It can be said that the theoretical sphere in particular has been experiencing an ambiguity since then. The rationale behind this, indeed, lies in the changes that the world has experienced. Postmodernism, like humanism or realism, two rival movements in modernism, will shift and change continually with time, as Ihab Hassan suggests in one of his interviews (Cioffi 1999: 363). So some interesting perspectives have developed with the decline of the debates in the 1990s, but not in the dialogic contexts of the 1960s and 1970s. And these views mostly concentrate on the question of whether postmodernism is over or not today. This study, in fact, focuses on this question and wants to go one step further: Is postmodernism actually over? If so, are we witnessing another era following this end? How then can we define it? “Late modern” or “Post-postmodern”? It would be helpful to us to express the history of the term within a historical continuity in order to reach acceptable answers to these questions.

The History of the Term David Harvey (1992: 7) and Neville Kirk (1994: 221-222) have stressed that today postmodernism is still a polemical term after all those perspectives and writings. Harvey, who has produced a seminal work on postmodernism, writes on this point: “No one exactly agrees as to what is meant by the term, except perhaps that ‘postmodernism’ represents some kind of reaction to, or departure from, ‘modernism.’” Thus Harvey has developed a schema to make the term more understandable and clearer like Ihab Hassan (as we will see later) and has compared it to modernism. According to his schema, modernism and postmodernism are completely opposed to one another; they are two rival theories. He does not stop here but continues with harsh criticisms of postmodernism from a Marxistmodernist perspective. Nevertheless, what he shows us in his model in the end is extremely subjective, as Kirk (1994: 223) observes. This subjectivity

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of the term occurs not because of the term itself, but a specific “tradition” in the theory. This can also be seen in the case of Hassan. One question inevitably arises here: How has the term postmodernism become so effective given its polemical and contested characteristics? Nonetheless it is not possible to find an exact, definite answer to this question in Harvey. It may be answered to a certain degree, though not completely, through a historical perspective based on the term’s origin and its popularity. Here, Hassan (1983a: 14), one of the most influential figures in postmodern thinking, asserts that the anti-postmodern Habermas develops another Marxist-modernist perspective when he defines the postmodern as “regressive” and “conservative.” Therefore, it is not surprising that Hassan (1983a: 14) sees these kinds of perspective in every Marxist view. He has stressed that postmodernism, against all anti-postmodern claims, contains a sense of “dissent.” Yet this fact, according to Hassan, is different from either the left’s or the right’s views of opposition. “We must look elsewhere,” he writes, “for dissenting attitudes that avoid the antipodes of violence in self and society and resists the coercive discourse of the ideological right and left” (Hassan 1983a: 15). He argues that this opposition, which is not oppressive and is based on a majority (he uses the words “openness,” “variance” and “imperfection” when he defines it) would be possible in a postmodern society. On this basis Hassan questions whether or not Bakhtin’s (1982) linguistic model of “dialogical imagination” would be applicable to postmodern society or not. Ironically, the term “postmodernism,” like its opposite “modernism,” emerged not in the centre, but in the periphery. Perry Anderson (1998: 3) in his elucidatory work explains that the term arose in the Hispanic interworld of the 1930s. Within this world, the literary figure Frederic de Onis first coined the term postmodernismo. He used it to describe a conservative movement within modernism itself (Anderson 1998: 4). “De Onis contrasted this pattern—short-lived, he thought—with its sequel, an ultramodernismo that intensified the radical impulses of modernism to a new pitch, in a series of avant-gardes that were now creating ‘rigorously contemporary poetry’ of universal reach” (Anderson 1998: 4). The term emerged in the western world twenty years after De Onis’s first efforts in the 1930s. The historian Arnold Toynbee started to use the word in his A Study of History (1974). However, he used the term “postmodernism” as an epochal category, in a very different context than De Onis. Toynbee asserts that, as a non-aesthetic, epochal category, postmodernism signifies a rupture from the “modern age” that started in the ninth century and continued to the Renaissance (Kumar 1995: 132). According to Toynbee’s periodization, in contrast to the modern age that is

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based on the fundamental project of the Enlightenment, the postmodern age related to irrationality, uncertainty and anarchy in thoughts and feelings. After the intervention of Toynbee, the term gained a new dimension with the North American poet Charles Olson (Anderson 1998: 7). Olson assumed that the new era is an outcome of late modernism that became very influential especially at the beginning of the twentieth century (Anderson 1998: 11). Olson created a distinctive new poetical style in which he intentionally dealt with “not the past, but the present” with its striking vividness. Consequently postmodern form was developed into this new poetical style by the author. Nevertheless, this form did not have much coherence in its continuity. Therefore explanations within this new style, as would be expected, in the end developed into aphorisms. His distinctive style and aphorisms significantly influenced William Spanos’s journal boundary 2, one of the turning points for the history of postmodernism. Among them one figure came to the fore and became the sole author of the theory: Ihab Hassan. Other than in narrow academic and literary circles, the term did not have much usage until the late 1960s and the publications of Hassan’s writings. It appeared first in architecture, then in dance, theatre, painting, film and music and later in the 1970s gained widespread popularity in all fields (Bertens 1996: 4; Connor 1997: 5–6). Here, however, it must be underlined that the gravitational centre is the year 1968. Thus Dunst (2008: 107) was not absolutely correct when he stressed in regard to Fredric Jameson that as soon as the term emerged in the late 1960s it started to lose its strength. In contrast to this view, postmodernism has continued after 1968 to be one of the most influential theoretical and practical perspectives in the West, particularly in the US. Here another point must be made in this respect. If we agree on Huyssen’s (1984: 16) approach, the postmodernism of one decade must differ from another. So the postmodernism of the 1960s is distinct from the 1970s and 1980s. Each decade rises with its own spirit and this must also be studied and considered. Therefore if one examines the 1960s, 1968 in particular, as the crystallization period of the term, one should study the 1970s as the decade in which the term gained greater importance. Similarly, it seems to be more accurate to evaluate the 1980s as the years of “confirmation” and “ideologization” for the term, in which it was transformed into a justification mechanism for every controversial aesthetic and political stance emerging in every field.

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Hassan, Lyotard and the Main Elements of Postmodernism Hassan does not separate postmodernism from modernism as do his rival thinkers Harvey and Jameson. He starts with a refusal of absolute disjunctions. He instead examines postmodernism as a result of the development of modernity. In other words, according to Hassan, postmodernism lies deeply within the body of modernism (Cioffi 1999: 360) and that is why his categories concentrate more on “diversity” and “continuity.” In Hassan’s view temporal categories become especially important. Thus if one analyses his contributions to the term one clearly sees his temporal indexes: beginnings and ends of specific time periods. However, his temporal categories neither have a tendency to include certain dates nor an inclination to put names on concrete historical developments as in historian Arnold Toynbee’s works. Hassan analyses the term within this context and only in the light of aesthetic transformations. This is because what he shows us in the end is a kind of ambiguity. According to Hassan’s (1983b: 393) perspective the temporal index for postmodernism is not clear, so he has stressed that the starting time of postmodernism is uncertain. In this respect James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake plays an important role, because of the break up of postmodernism. According to Hassan (1983b: 394), for this reason Joyce must be studied and defined as one of the great authors whose works include early postmodern fictional characteristics. In his later works Hassan adds some other modernist figures to this category, from Dadaists to Franz Kafka. Hassan (1983b: 390) grounds his famous postmodern debates in a hypothesis he created himself: Movements in arts, philosophy and literature within the course of modern history would easily become “postmodern revolts.” In this sense even Michelangelo would be a postmodern figure in his unfinished artistic genius. Therefore for Hassan postmodernism does not have a clear beginning and end. “That Modernism does not suddenly cease so that Postmodernism may begin: they now coexist—in effect, I was saying that Postmodernism lies deeply within the body of Modernism” (Cioffi 1999: 360). Hassan (1975: 31) has also stressed that postmodernism is not an aesthetic or ideology, but an “anticipated history.” Within an uncertain temporal index postmodernity is certainly an aesthetic movement that spans wide areas, from architecture to literature, painting to cinema. It was first developed within modern or “late modern” texts itself, not separately from modernity, though he never uses this term in a positive way. Hassan

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in this context has always pointed out that modernism has changed over time and has caused a major transformation in socio-cultural and political spheres. According to Hassan (1983b) this transformation especially affected narratives. Nevertheless on this point, Hassan (1983b: 395) made another significant effort to reach a clear definition of postmodernism and by highlighting that postmodernism is that “unimaginable” which modernism has tried to avoid except in its euphoric moments. This definition, for him, is a sincere evaluation of the present situation of humanity rather than the definition being locked up in alienated forms, images, narratives (one of the arguments of anti-postmodern theorists). Thus the “masters” of our time would only be “revisionists” (Hassan 1975: 55–56). Not surprisingly, artists, creators, masters of our time would be only “epigones” who are unable to produce authentic works which are original and full of hopes of the future of humanity as can be found in modern works. An artist of a postmodern time, due to the disappearance of this authorial self, could only record the vagueness of the “radical forms.” Hassan (1983b: 395) similarly adds Samuel Beckett as another striking example of postmodern literature. Continuity and coherence, one of the most distinctive characteristics of modern narratives, have also turned into language-games, cuts, collages, irony and fragmented texts in Hassan’s (1983b: 395) theory. Thus, according to Hassan (1983b: 396), it is no longer meaningful to write or produce such works. Radical changes in the forms of contemporary society indirectly caused fundamental changes in literature especially since the 1910s. These fundamental changes concerned division and advanced fragmentations of the life experiences of modern man. He thus suggests that literature produced its new forms, forms of expressions, and fictions and this situation continued together with the fundamental changes in the background of advanced Western societies. Hence the new forms of literature, the literature of the contemporary generated critical perspectives, represent the new reality in its extreme ambiguity. As stated above, Hassan developed his first formulations on postmodernism in his seminal work Dismemberment of Orpheus (first published in 1971) and he continued his analyses in his later works: Paracriticisms (1975), The Right Promethean Fire (1980), The Postmodern Turn (1987). Within this new perspective his formulations are mainly characterized by the binary oppositions between modernism and postmodernism. According to this binary opposition, in postmodernism play, for example, replaced modern purpose. Similarly, hierarchy became anarchy; design became chance; presence became absence; synthesis

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became antithesis; genre/boundary became text/intertext; signified became signifier in postmodern arts and literature (Hassan 1983b: 267–68). In one of his other works, “Beyond Postmodernism,” he insists on these formulations, and he goes another phase further in order to search the common characteristics of well known postmodern works. “The answer is familiar by now: fragments, hybridity, relativism, play, parody, pastiche, an ironic, sophistical stance, an ethos bordering on kitsch and camp” (Hassan 2003: 4). What Hassan examines is very important when clarifying the boundaries of the term for other writers. He is the first writer who clearly shows us the boundaries and the basic characteristics of postmodernism as well as its radical detachments from its predecessor. However, although Hassan’s analyses and formulations clarify the term to a certain extent, they cannot precisely answer whether postmodernism is an artistic movement or not, or if it is a social phenomenon, and how psychological, philosophical, economical and political factors interact with one another and how they shape the theory. He was not only the first writer who pointed out the distinctive characteristics of the term, but also broadened it and made it embrace other fields of art and sciences. Moreover, Hassan, more than other boundary 2 group members contributed to the development of the term. Hassan’s first considerations of postmodernism, containing especially literary and aesthetic ones affected other important figures within postmodern and anti-postmodern thinking, from Lyotard to Charles Jencks and Fredric Jameson. Hassan’s postmodern literary criticisms in the late 1960s moved to architecture in the next decade. The term gained a strong position and determined discussions within the postmodern frame in this field in the 1970s. However, another work, The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979, pulled the term into an unexpected dimension, philosophy. Jean François Lyotard, who directly borrowed the term from Hassan, turned his eyes especially towards “grand narratives” and language games. Both, according to Lyotard (1984), have a significant role in the emergence of postmodern society. For Lyotard, the historical process reveals legitimate language contexts and grand narratives. But, after a certain period of time in history, according to Lyotard (1984), time shows us that western society produces new, legitimate language contexts and narratives, new “meta narratives” that abolish past narratives and contexts. Here he questions one of the driving forces of the Age of Reason, namely its “universalist claims.” For this reason, his work is characterized by persistent oppositions to universals, “meta-narratives.”

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Regarding the formation of the “legitimacy crisis,” Lyotard (1984: 66) proposed that the most important factors that caused this crisis were the developments people experienced, especially in post-industrial society. Thus, Lyotard, benefiting from the analysis of such post-industrial society theorists as Daniel Bell, Alain Touraine and Talcott Parsons, believes that postmodern society has been created and has experienced many transformational developments after post-industrial society (Readings, 1991: 54). Lyotard (1984: 60), like Hassan, believed that the postmodern period did not occur immediately after the modern period, but from the beginning modernism was a kind of renewal movement (Readings 1991: 54). For this reason, some writers such as Costello (2000: 76–77) suggest that Lyotard was actually engaged in a project of rewriting or reconceptualizing modernism itself rather than theorizing it. Lyotard worked from the hypothesis that the existing transformation of knowledge and information within societies and cultures after the postindustrial period initiated fundamental changes especially in the linguistic practices and language systems of post-industrial societies (Lyotard 1984: 70). Accordingly, as soon as the process of transition to a postindustrial period started, linguistic practices created other systems in which communication sub-systems were converted to language games and constituted societal formations. Lyotard, unlike Parsons, does not see society as an organic unity or a conflict centre as Marx assumed in all his works, but presented it as a linguistic communication network (Anderson 1998: 35–36). Lyotard has also analysed linguistic practices of a problematized language that both modernists and pre-modernists, especially Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, used to criticize nineteenth-century society, culture and human beings. Lyotard, when he constructed his hypothesis based on this language, reached this theoretical assumption: language has been decentralized in post-industrial societies. According to this theoretical viewpoint, “all societal networks,” for this reason, “are based on language but it has been weaved not from one thread but infinite number of language games” (Harvey 1992: 47). Lyotard (1984: 70–71), has continued his argument by saying that there are two main determining factors of the development of modernism and modern discourse: the French revolution, “the story of the man who created his own freedom on the bases of knowledge and information,” and German idealist philosophy, “the truth itself over time developed its spirit.” The dialogic aspect of Lyotard’s postmodernist analysis, however, was related to the constitution of the crisis of legitimacy: within a discontinued

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and fragmented structure, in the period of cultural representations which did not allow for any universal perspective, Lyotard (1984: 71) stated that grand narratives, utopias, the most important characteristics of modernism, no longer have any magic, importance and reliability. This point though has been overwhelmingly discussed within postmodern and antipostmodern theories. In this respect the legitimacy of grand narratives, which were situated in the heart of modernism and helped the progress of mankind recover from their own dead-end lives, was criticized. According to this view, Modernism, based solely on the Enlightenment, was a story of a “terrorist mind” and became ideologist. However, this situation cannot be considered as an ideological attack on Lyotard, because both his personal biography and the foundations of his theoretical analysis, as Anderson (1998: 37–38) argues, were based on liberal criticism of the West. What is significant here about entering into this kind of systematic thinking is the results that every thinker had encountered in the course of the history of the West. Hassan has experienced a similar breaking point, that in a different frame. Moreover, Lyotard (1984: 60) accuses anti-postmodern writers of being stubborn and making up “another metanarrative.” After describing the fundamentals of his theory as “incredulous towards metanarratives” Lyotard (1984: xxiv) writes in the latter parts of his seminal work that the Postmodern Condition is intended to “destroy a belief that still underlies Habermas’ research, namely that humanity as a collective (universal) subject seeks its common emancipation through the regularization of the ‘moves’ permitted in all language games, and that the legitimacy of any statement resides in its contribution to that emancipation”(Lyotard 1984: 66). Lyotard, when compared to Hassan, clarifies and gives more scientific dimension to the term postmodernism within a changing reality. His real contribution is not only related to the elucidation of the term but is also concerned with the first philosophical presentation of the basic codes of the period. In the light of all these explanations it can be emphasized that postmodernism, with the help of the seminal works of Hassan (1983b: 267–268), Lyotard (1984) and Jencks (1992: 34), insists especially on these points: • rejection of propositions which claim general validity; • pluralism and fragmentation rather than monism in language games, information sources and scientific communities; • preference of the hierarchical in systems of thought;

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• contested consensus rather than consensus; • acceptance of pluralism of discourse; • semiotic view rather than materialism; • adoption and highlighting of differences and variety; realization of linguistic transformation which led to a discussion of facts, reality, the truth and accuracy; • instead of absolute values, liberty of options open to interpretation and distrust; • interpretation of reality as much as possible, instead of using words in a certain space of time and reality understanding them in their own integrities and autonomies; • adoption of the ecological rather than mechanical; • reckoning to the understandings which divide human beings into two parts as soul and body, opposing the domination of the unique and absolute truth; • anti-narrative/petit histoire rather than narrative/grande histoire.

Late Modernism, or a New Era of Postmodernism? It is generally accepted that modernism, as the pinnacle of the Enlightenment, started in the second half of the nineteenth century and continued its strength until the 1960s in the West. Postmodernism, as explained above, emerged in the 1960s when modernism started to decline. It can be said that postmodern debates, at least in the old postmodern context, have lost their momentum today. However, some questions rise at this point: How should we examine today, the twenty-first century? As one of the decades of modernism? Or a “late modern” era? These are the important questions one has to ask if one wants to understand the true characteristics of the present time. However, the question of whether we are in a new era of postmodernism or not depends on one’s point of view. The theorists, for instance, who base their standpoints on modern terms and approaches to contemporary society tend to call it the “late modern” era and also examine it as a radical break from the past. On the other hand, postmodern writers claim that history is over (especially in the case of extremist writers) and what remains from the past is absolutely different from today. Here an analysis which focuses mainly on the refusal of the past’s “grand narratives” and utopic visions becomes apparent. Nevertheless what is clear in these debates is that the old modern and postmodern approaches cannot give us a correct account of the present. Some postmodern writers for instance have now stressed that postmodernism has ended. Hassan is one of them and suggests in one of

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his works that we should “propose to engage” postmodernism in ways that may lead us through it, beyond it” (Hassan 2003: 4). Hutcheon (2002: 165– 166), another influential writer in postmodern thinking recently writes in this context: The postmodern moment has passed, even if its discursive strategies and its ideological critique continue to live on as do those of modernism in our contemporary twenty first-century world. Literary historical categories like modernism and postmodernism are, after all, only heuristic labels that we create in our attempts to chart cultural changes and continuities. Postpostmodernism needs a new label of its own, and I conclude, therefore, with this challenge to readers to find it and name it for the twenty-first century.

Here again an ambiguous situation arises. This happens, indeed, because of the failure to define contemporary culture and society. Thus these approaches, which try to answer the question of whether we are in a new era of postmodernism or not, have tendencies to use different names. On this point we face different approaches. Within this framework, for a better understanding of today, if I exclude Lipovetsky and Charles’ (2005) “hypermodernism” and Alan Kirby’s (2009) “digimodernism,” three recent works must be mentioned: the works of Mikhail Epstein, Roul Eshelman’s “performatism” and the writers of “metamodernism,” Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. Mikhail Epstein (1999: 467), who is known for his works on Russian postmodernism, claims that postmodernism has become entirely conventional and provides the foundation for a new, non-ironic kind of poetry. After analyzing the theoretical backgrounds of modernism and postmodernism he offers the words with the prefix “trans-” instead of the words “late modern” or “postmodern” to describe the current situation of contemporary culture and society. Epstein (2011) contends that the terms of the past, like “objectivity,” “subjectivity,” “utopia,” and “authenticity” can now be explained only through the new terms that are made with the prefix “trans-,” such as “trans-subjectivity,” “trans-utopianism” and “transoriginality.” He asserts that the new terms which transcend the old forms show us the characteristics of contemporary culture and society. Epstein (2011) goes one step further: in spite of the views of anti-postmodern thinkers (who claim that utopia, one of the driving motives of modernist works, is intentionally ignored in postmodern works) there remains a sense of utopia. Epstein (2011) has identified the consequence of the present and its art and literary practices as “the resurrection of utopia” which is “no longer a social project with claims to transforming the world, but a new intensity

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of life experience and broader horizons for the individual.” He proposes that the new era, in which the death of the subject was declared would not be explained with terms like “postmodernism” any more, but the new words starting with prefixes, like “trans-.” However, here, where the “trans” is reborn according to Epstein (2011), any work becomes “aware of its own failures, insubstantiality, and secondariness.” For this reason, even utopianism for Epstein must depart from this total decay. Utopia is born in this deep frustration. Epstein has stated that postmodernism is “a part of a much larger and more extensive whole,” called postmodernity. Now that postmodernism has disappeared, the new era of “postpostmodernism” must therefore be described using “trans-” words. From a different perspective, Raoul Eshelman (2008) claims that postmodernism is over and must be replaced with performatism. This is because performatism forces viewers to identify with one new sense of creativity based on aesthetically mediated experiences of transcendence. Performatism, according to Eshelman (2008: 2) “serves neither to foreground nor contextualize the subject, but rather to preserve it: the subject is presented (or presents itself) as a holistic, irreducible unit that makes a binding impression on a reader or observer.” According to Eshelman (2008: 1), all of the performatist works “derive their strength from the authorially guided apotheosis of reduced, whole subjects and from the performative use of object-bound, holistic signs.” For this reason performative works, according to Eshelman (2008: 1–8) force viewers to identify with simple, opaque characters or situations and to experience beauty, love, belief and transcendence under particular conditions. In this regard he frequently refers to some films, particularly Dogme 95 and the films of Lars Von Trier. In the end he proposes to apply his model not only to literature, but also to cinema, architecture and philosophy, and even politics. Eshelman (2008) has stated that the well-known problems about temporal, spatial and causal development in postmodern works may only be solved with a performatist epoch based on “tendency to create chronotopes allowing a choice between possibilities or even repeated choices between possibilities.” His view does not give us a complete and precise answer to the reasons which cause fundamental changes in the structure of chronotopes. Nevertheless, he suggests that this problem would be overcome with performatism. In short, Eshelman (2008: 3) observes an inadequacy of the current terms. However, his view does not provide precise answers for understanding contemporary society, and it remains limited to aesthetic and literary fields.

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On the other hand, Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker (2010) offer a “third way.” They assert that the present state of history, though they focus on the years of the 2000s, is characterized by the emergence of a new sensibility that oscillates between, and can also be situated beyond, modern positions and postmodern strategies. For this reason they prefer to use modernism with a prefix “meta” which comes from one of the ancient Greek philosophers, Plato (2001). “Metaxy” in Plato’s writing signifies a movement between opposite poles. To Vermeulen and Akker (2010: 4) “postmodern tendencies are taking another shape, and, more importantly, a new sense, a new meaning and direction.” This new sensibility should not be either modern or postmodern, it must be in between or beyond the ideological positions: Between a yearning for universal truth and (a)political relativism, between hope and doubt, sincerity and irony, construction and deconstruction. As we can understand by the examples they examine, the term is used in many different fields from philosophy to music and film. Although they suggest that metamodernism longs for another future, they also do not give clear reasons for the necessity of this kind of future. Their theory offers some interesting insights into the contemporary society and culture, but remains, as in the cases of the above two authors, silent especially about underlying socio-cultural and ideological refractions in the background of the contemporary culture and society.

Conclusion All of the perspectives discussed above indicate to us that we are in a different stage of history, in a new era whatever term the writers use to describe it. However, the problems have become knotted at this point: shall we explain this new era in postmodern terms, even in the new definitions and words that we discussed above, or shall we consider it as a continuation of modernity? Some liberal writers who are influenced by postmodern approaches tend to select and use words from postmodernism when they describe and analyse it. On the other hand there is an absence of anti-postmodern critical perspectives, other than those of Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas on the question of late modernism, postpostmodernism. If one attempts to understand the new era, the spirit of the present time, in the light of historical forces and with the help of Fredric Jameson and Jürgen Habermas, one encounters the social, political and ideological forces and factors underlying today’s culture and society. It might be appropriate to say that we are in a new era of modernism, but it is not certain whether we can call it “postmodern” or “post-

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postmodern.” Here the classic canon against postmodernism would be helpful: Habermas’ “Modernity versus Postmodernity” (1981). Although this new era in which ambiguity and chaos became dominant appears detached from the ideals of modernity it can still be considered, as stated by Habermas (1981: 9), and against one of the grandeur figures in postmodern thinking Richard Rorty (1984), within the perspective of “modernity.” All the arguments of postmodern approaches then and now would be better explained as “false modernity.” Thus the heavily used arguments of the postmodern theory, indeed, reflect the crisis of, or even the dead end of, modernity. Nevertheless, the problems that people face in the present stage of history especially in developed countries can only be overcome with a careful study of the economic and ideological structure of these types of societies. If we take them only as “what they are,” if we only “utter” them, and “play” with them as glittering figures as the theory suggests, use them only in a context of semiotics, if we stress on “dystopia” and text and if we analyse them as the problems of the world as a whole, we would be mistaken. It must be underlined that it would not be possible to resolve completely the current problems of the industrial world with a new postmodern perspective based on radical views on modern ideals as claimed by the new writers with some new words, definitions and prefixes. The consequences of false modernity would not be solved with the abolishing of modern ideals (this could be only a justification mechanism of the problem in question), but rather by using them to change the world in a more fair, free and humanistic way. The consequence of late modernity, especially in the sphere of ambiguous and chaotic feelings and thoughts, would be surpassed with a new modernist stance against them. This stance will be shaped not by the characteristics of previous modernity, because this would be inadequate, but by the characteristics of late modernity.

References Anderson, P. 1998. Origins of Postmodernity. London & New York: Verso. Bakhtin, M.M. 1982. The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bertens, H. 1996. The Idea of the Postmodern. London & New York: Routledge.

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Cioffi, F.L. 1999. “Postmodernism, Etc.: An Interview with Ihab Hassan.” Style. Vol. 33, no. 3: 357–371. Connor, S. 1997. Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary. 2nd edn. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. Costello, D. 2000. “Lyotard’s Modernism.” Parallax. Vol. 6: 76–87. Dunst, A. 2008. “Late Jameson, or, After The Eternity of the Present.” New Formations, 65: 105–118. Epstein, M., Genis, A., Vladiv-Glover, S. 1999. Russian Postmodernism. New Perspectives on Post-Soviet Culture. New York: Berghahn Books. Epstein, M. 2011. “The Place of Postmodernism in Postmodernity” [Online]. Available: http://www.focusing.org/apm_essays/epstein.html [2011, September 17]. Eshelman, R. 2008. Performatism, or, the End of Postmodernism. Aurora: Davies Group. Harvey, D. 1992. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Oxford & Massachusetts: Blackwell. Habermas, J. 1981. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique, 81: 3–15. —. 1982. “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-reading Dialectic of Enlightenment.” New German Critique, 26: 13–30. Hassan, I. 1975. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 1980. The Right Promethean Fire: Imagination, Science, and Cultural Change. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. —. 1983a. “Desire and Dissent in the Postmodern Age.” The Kenyon Review, 5: 1–18. —. 1983b. The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Toward a Postmodern Literature, 2nd Edition, Wisconsin & London: University of Wisconsin Press. —. 1987. The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. —. 2003. “Beyond Postmodernism: Towards an Aesthetic of Trust.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 8: 3–10. Hutcheon, L. 2002. The Politics of Postmodernism. New York & London: Routledge. Huyssen, A. 1984. “Mapping the Postmodern,” New German Critique, Fall 84, Issue 33: 5–52. —. 1992. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Jencks, C. 1992. “The Post-Modern Agenda.” In The Post-Modern Reader. Charles Jencks (ed.). London: Academy Editions. Kirby, A. 2009. Digimodernism: How New Technologies Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure our Culture, New York & London: Continuum. Kirk, N. 1994. “History, Language, Ideas and Post-modernism: A Materialist View.” Social History, 19: 221–240. Kumar, K. 1995. From Post-Industrial to Post-modern Society. Oxford: Blackwell. Lipovetsky, G., andCharles, S. 2005. Hypermodern Times. Cambridge: Polity Press. Lyotard, J.-F. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Plato. 2001. Symposium. Trans. Seth Benardete. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Readings, B. 1991. Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics, London & New York: Routledge. Rorty, R. 1984. “Habermas and Lyotard on Post-Modernity.” Praxis International, 4: 32–43. Toynbee, A. 1974. A Study of History. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vermeulen, T., and van den Akker, R. 2010. “Notes on Metamodernism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Culture. Vol. 2: 1-14.

SILVIO BERLUSCONI AND THE SECOND ITALIAN REPUBLIC: A MODEL POST-DEMOCRACY? PIOTR PODEMSKI

ABSTRACT: The essay aims at presenting the theory of post-democracy as outlined by Colin Crouch as well as at an analysis of politics and media in Silvio Berlusconi’s Second Italian Republic in order to demonstrate to what extent his policies should be considered post-democratic. Crouch defines post-democracy as a reality where while elections remain a facade of democracy, the citizens’ part is de facto restricted and passive, as elites of different kinds tend to take over. The story of Berlusconi’s career from a successful businessman to the country’s Prime Minister seems in many ways truly post-democratic. Using the power of his private media empire he became the Second Republic’s most influential politician facing a wide range of accusations from the opposition, journalists, judges and intellectuals alike. Although his political career currently seems to have come to an end, Berlusconi has undoubtedly altered Italian politics and society, while he must also be regarded as an expression of a new society and politics: a videocracy meant for a homo videns. KEY WORDS: Italy, Silvio Berlusconi, post-democracy, videocracy, Homo videns.

Introduction The origins of the term post-democracy date back to 2000, when Colin Crouch, a renowned British sociologist, published his first study on the subject entitled Coping with Post-Democracy (Crouch 2000). In the present essay I intend to use an extended and revised version of his work, published by Polity in Cambridge and New York in 2004 (Crouch 2004). Shortly after the publication of his first book on post-democracy, Crouch was contacted by some of his Italian readers, inviting him to prepare an Italian version of his work, with more attention devoted to the situation in their country, whose politics had been shaped for a decade by the presence of Silvio Berlusconi. It was his image and the description of his political

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practice that they immediately recognized in Crouch’s work. Therefore, this essay aims at presenting the theory of post-democracy as well as an analysis of Italian politics under Berlusconi in order to demonstrate to what extent his policies should be considered post-democratic.

The Concept of Postdemocracy and the Italian Experience How does Colin Crouch define his main idea, including the prefix “post” as a focus of the present volume? The idea of “post,” Crouch says, is: thrown around rather easily in contemporary debate: post-industrial, postmodern, post-liberal, post-ironic. However, it can mean something very precise. Essential is the idea [. . .] through which the thing being attached to the ‘post’ prefix can be seen as moving. [. . .] Time period 1 is pre-X, and will have certain characteristics associated with lack of X. Time period 2 is the high tide of X, when many things are touched by it and changed from their state in time 1. Time period 3 is post-X. This implies that something new has come into existence to reduce the importance of X by going beyond it in some sense. [. . .] However, X will still have left its mark; there will be strong traces of it still around; while some things start to look rather like they did in time 1 again. ‘Post’ periods should therefore be expected to be very complex. (Crouch 2004: 20)

In other words, a historical analysis of contemporary democracy brings Crouch to a conclusion that despite an apparent triumph of liberal democracy throughout the world following the fall of communism and a number of other dictatorships, now that “more nation states are accepting liberal democratic arrangements of this kind than at any previous time,” the actual condition of democracy in its strongholds i.e. the United States or Western Europe, “where more subtle indicators of its health should be used” (Crouch 2004: 2), may appear much worse. Crouch claims that following the period of what one might regard as that of “pre-democracy” or “struggle for democracy” in the nineteenth century and its historic peak in the years immediately after the Second World War, we are now experiencing the third phase, that of “post-democracy,” bearing some resemblance to the first one. “Democracy has moved in a parabola” (Crouch 2004: 5), he argues. He comes up with the notion of “the democratic moment,” that is a true climax of democracy’s success in a given society resulting from the greatest popular enthusiasm. This is mobilized either “in the early years of achieving it [democracy] or after great regime crises” (Crouch 2004: 6). What is more, in such moments, “popular political movements and parties

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themselves may well be dominated by boss figures whose personal style is anything but democratic; but they are at least subject to lively active pressure from a mass movement” (Crouch 2004: 7). Thus, massive public participation seems a predominant factor capable of prevailing over the selfish ambitions of leaders or lobbies and this has become ever-present. Crouch considers that “the democratic moment” for Western Europe in the 40s and 50s of the twentieth century was a direct consequence of the previous totalitarian experience as well as the contemporary communist menace from the East. The post-war “democratic moment” resulted from an obvious wave of extraordinary interest in public affairs shown by the broader public. When political choices can kill, they assume utmost importance in people’s lives, but as soon as the general situation and the living conditions slightly improve or at least stabilize, the masses are likely to lose their interest in public life. Shortly after dramatic events, they return to their daily routine, as a rule. “People became disillusioned, bored or preoccupied with the business of everyday life. The growing complexity of issues after the major initial achievements of reform made it increasingly difficult to take up informed positions, to make intelligent comment, or even to know what ‘side’ one was on” (Crouch 2004: 9). This has been the case, Crouch says, in contemporary democracies since the 1970s, when “participation in political organizations declined almost everywhere, and eventually even the minimal act of voting was beset by apathy” (Crouch 2004: 9). In Crouch’s opinion, this process has not been hindered and it has even been accepted and promoted by the political elites, determined to take advantage. Moreover, at times these have also become corrupt, and therefore (Crouch 2004: 10) “cynical, amoral and cut off from scrutiny and from the public”: The idea of post-democracy helps us describe situations when boredom, frustration and disillusion have settled in after a democratic moment; when powerful minority interests have become far more active than the mass of ordinary people […]; where political elites have learned to manage and manipulate popular demands; where people have to be persuaded to vote by top-down publicity campaigns. This is not the same as non-democracy, but describes a period in which we have, as it were, come out the other side of the parabola of democracy (Crouch 2004: 19–20).

In line with the wishes of the ruling elites, political parties and their programmes have become but “products” to be placed on a free market of ideas. Numerous people from the “advertising industry” and the “persuasion business,” who once used to sell goods and services, have grown indispensable and have become prominent participants in the “post-

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political” game (Crouch 2004: 24–25). Consequently, “there is a danger that one might concentrate too much on politics in the narrow sense of party and electoral struggle, and ignore the displacements of creative citizenship away from this arena” (Crouch 2004: 15). Politics might turn into an art of winning elections in order to accomplish personal or group goals rather than public activity aiming at dealing with great public issues of the day, and it seems the process has been under way for some time now. In these circumstances it is inevitable that the means of communication in the public debate must be simplified and thus more efficient. Although the language of official documents remains as it used to be in the “democratic moment,” the debate in popular press and political manifestos has meanwhile been reduced to agile “sound bites” whose aim is to grab the attention of the public for a short time in order to get the main, simple message transmitted (Crouch 2004: 24). On the other hand, much of public attention is dedicated to the private lives of elites and the ruling class through the interest of the media. Instead of discussing the complex and yet vital problems facing societies and humanity, electoral campaigns tend to focus on promoting the positive image of the candidate, while making all kinds of attempts at finding evidence proving the lack of moral qualities of the adversary at the same time (Crouch 2004: 28). This kind of action makes more sense, as people are more likely to memorize easily the positive and negative aspects of a specific person rather than the advantages and disadvantages of a proposed solution to a given problem. However, it would be an oversimplification to blame exclusively the mass media along with the activity of spin-doctors as well as the rapid pace of everyday life for reducing the quality of democracy. What Crouch actually wants to stress is that post-democracy is bad news for those striving for greater social egalitarianism and redistribution of power and wealth: it involves power being gradually ceded to highly confined circles e.g. business lobbies. Thus, post-democracy is likely to undo most of the political gains of democracy dating back to the twentieth century, as new elites tend to gather enough power to control the course of events. Hence, trivialization of democracy and the crisis of egalitarianism seem strongly interconnected (Crouch 2004: 4–5). To sum up, Colin Crouch views post-democracy as a new predominant political system of our age: Under this model while elections certainly exist and can change governments, public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion [. . .] The mass of citizens plays a passive, quiescent, even

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apathetic part, responding only to the signals given them. Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly represent business interests. (Crouch 2004: 4)

Formerly a professor at the European University Institute in Florence, the author himself had already made references to the Italian reality and Berlusconi personally, yet the publication of Postdemocrazia in 2003 in cooperation with the prestigious publishing house Laterza (Crouch 2003) was bound to provoke a vigorous discussion, if not a real scandal, in the country. For Berlusconi was then, and remained for some years to come, a focal point of Italian politics: a symbol of success and Italian style to some, while a dangerous oligarch and a de facto dictator for others. As far as historical analysis is concerned, since its unification in 1861 Italy has hardly ever experienced real democracy as represented in Crouch’s parabola as time period 2. What historians refer to as “liberal Italy” in the years 1861–1919 was actually the rule by a wealthy minority according to a very limited franchise based on the criterion of income and amounts of taxes paid and the political practice of trasformismo: no formal political parties, just cause groups and lobbies headed by predominant political figures like Francesco Crispi or Giovanni Giolitti. Daily politics was shaped by these groups in an atmosphere dense with informal relations, mutual favours or simply corruption, making this system a classic pre-democracy, with the right to vote limited to a restricted group of full citizens while class interests openly prevailed over the desire to improve the lot of the masses (Clark 2009: 227–232). What followed was twenty years under a fascist regime, which surprisingly could boast of actually addressing the problems of the masses in contrast with the previous authorities, but certainly was not democratic and acted chiefly through manipulation and indoctrination in order to make people loyal, submissive and uncritical (Gentile 1999: 212). Crouch’s “democratic moment” for Italy was undoubtedly, in line with his theoretical assumption, the period directly following the fall of fascism and the enthusiastic participation in laying the foundations for the new republic (1943–1949). After the nightmare of the Second World War, the double occupation by Nazis and Anglo-Americans as well as the civil war between the Italian fascists and a coalition of the Resistenza; for once there was a widespread enthusiasm and real hope placed in the new democratic order. It was in that brief period of literally a few years that the Christian democrats, communists and socialists managed to co-operate peacefully while writing the Italian republican constitution and performing the necessary reforms (Cotta and Verzichelli 2008: 49).

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However, after 1947, Italian politics was shaped by a futile conflict between, as they were called, “the two Churches”: the Catholic and the Communist one. The Christian democratic party’s position, one of virtually the only possible ruling class due to the reality of the Cold War, was one of growing isolation among accusations concerning corruption and secret cooperation with the Sicilian mafia. It is the public’s varying attitudes to this particular issue that determine contemporary political thinking: the voters either believe the accusations were false and were fabricated by communist propaganda in order to topple the democratic government or, alternatively, they consider these charges generally veritable and therefore reject and condemn the entire heritage of the First Republic. What brought Berlusconi to power was the greatest scandal of the First Republic, Operation “clean hands” (Mani pulite), performed by a group of judges with Antonio Di Pietro, resulting in serious accusations against the ruling class e.g. the senior Christian Democrat, Giulio Andreotti. Traditional political parties, all of them affected by corruption scandals, crumbled and the scene was set for a new leader to emerge (Barbacetto, Gomez, Travaglio 2002: 14–15).

“A Company Transformed into a Party”— Berlusconi’s Emergence in Politics Silvio Berlusconi had long been an exceptionally successful businessman, an incarnation of “the Italian dream.” As early as the 1960s he inaugurated his outstanding business career in the construction sector (Edilnord), gradually moving on to enterprises of extraordinary scale and dimension, for example luxurious districts of Milano 2 and 3 (Stille 2006: 39). There have been considerable doubts concerning the sources of financing for these projects. Hence, repeated accusations have been made pointing at the Sicilian mafia as a probable driver behind the success of Berlusconi, who, it has been claimed, would simply launder the organization’s capital (Ginsborg 2005: 22). Thanks to a cunning business model of diversification combined with mutual synergy, his Fininvest (“Financial Investments”) empire was growing steadily throughout the 70s purchasing local TV channels and news essays or publishing houses (e.g. the Mondadori, Italy’s largest publisher). What brought him some extra publicity was the purchase of the Milan football team (Guarino 2005: 391). As the media mogul he had now become, he was determined to satisfy his customers’ tastes unleashing what must be regarded as a real (a)moral revolution. The audience share of his former local TeleMilano soared in 1976 when he started broadcasting a primitive and disgusting (by

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contemporary standards) show “Let’s undress together” (Spogliamoci insieme) which featured Italian housewives dropping some of their clothes every time somebody answered a rather simple question (Polidori 2011: 81). In the 1980s his TV channels grew from local to national with the new Italia 1, Rete 4 and Canale 5. Huge audiences attracted more commercials and thus a professional agency (Publitalia) had been established in 1979 to run this aspect of the conglomerate’s daily activities as well as to offer adequate public relations support. As a prominent Italian scholar, Giovanni Gozzini, puts it, all this marked a conspicuous transition from “paleotelevision” (the old-fashioned Catholic televisione pedagogica) to “neovision,” one “bringing to the stage, in order to celebrate and mythicise him, the average Italian” (Gozzini 2011: VI). One must emphasize that along with his financial career, Berlusconi maintained close links with the Italian ruling classes. No later than 1977 he had been decorated with the Order of Merit for Labour due to his outstanding success in economic activities (he still today appreciates being referred to as il Cavaliere, the Knight [of the Order]). Berlusconi was a political protégé of the socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi (later to leave the country for Tunisia, when faced with corruption charges) as well as an adherent of the most mysterious group of the Italian elite of that time: the masons of the P2 Lounge (more of a luxurious political club than real freemasonry). To sum up, it was a lack of legal regulation or restrictions concerning private media ownership as much as the de facto alliance with Craxi and the political establishment he stood for (not to mention the controversial problem of the alleged links with the Mafia) that enabled Berlusconi to become the country’s wealthiest and most influential media magnate, and something more quite soon (Gozzini 2011: XI). In the general political crisis of the early 90s with the traditional ruling class shattered by corruption scandals and popular mistrust, Berlusconi decided to “enter the battlefield” (scendere in campo). In many ways, his emergence in politics can be deemed post-democratic. It is believed meticulous preparations had commenced already in 1992, though any such plans were repeatedly denied till the very last moment (Galli 2001: 393). As has been convincingly demonstrated by a young Polish-Italian political marketing expert, Jakub JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio, a wide range of business techniques were implemented for the occasion. In the summer of 1993 the country’s best public opinion centres were commissioned to carry out carefully planned research. Brand recognition surveys in reference to Berlusconi as a person showed he was one of the main assets of his future political movement whose target voters as well as their expectations were

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also defined. Thus, a new party about to be born would provide them with an adequate “product,” according to a new business market approach to politics (JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio 2011: 122–125). The consequences were hard to determine in full, yet a post-democratic “business firm model of party organization” (partito azienda) had just been devised, a party built on the personal appeal of its founder and leader, whose aim seemed to be that of a successful bid for power, irrespective of the programme one needed to adopt for that purpose (JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio 2011: 9). Il Cavaliere would put it bluntly a year later: “The name of Italy’s successful recovery is Silvio Berlusconi” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 94). On 26th January 1994 the official declaration was made. In a meticulously pre-arranged speech broadcast by his own television channels Berlusconi inaugurated a new era in Italian post-war history, later to be named the Second Republic (Barbacetto 2006: 170–173). As has been pointed out, there were several meaningful keywords appearing throughout the speech more than once: “freedom” or “free” (14 times), “Italy” or “Italian” (13 times), “new” (8 times), “hope” (3 times), “dream” and “trust” (twice) (Stille 2006: 184). Thus, turning optimistically towards the country’s future (“new,” “hope,” “dream”) Berlusconi made attempts to combine an image of a business-oriented liberal and that of a true patriot. Yet, in fact he failed to propose a coherent political programme and decided to play the card of his personal ability and success instead, as suggested by the polls. Another significant choice was that of a new name or, alternatively, the brand of the new “product” party. Before the Berlusconi era Forza Italia! (“Forward Italy!”) had been a traditional, almost patriotic cry of fans of the Italian football team. Interestingly, the very same slogan had also been made a part of a 1992 social campaign meant to bring more optimism and inspiration to the national struggle against recession (Galli 2001: 392). In order to secure the new party’s electoral triumph, some 40,000 Fininvest employees in every corner of Italy were now, as usual, at Berlusconi’s disposal. Business hierarchy had automatically been transformed into an oath of obedience towards the employer’s political leadership in what seemed a typically Italian practice of clientelismo, yet seriously affected real democratic procedures anyway (JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio 2011: 146). The Publitalia Agency, through direct activity of its sellers of advertising space, launched a large scale search for suitable MP candidates. The selection criteria came as no surprise: about forty years of age, a successful professional career, personal respect within the local community, no experience in national politics, no charges of corruption and liberal economic views (JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio 2011:

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135–140). Thus, Giovanni Gozzini did not hesitate to state: “It is the first time in Italy’s history (and perhaps also anywhere in the West) that a company has transformed into a party” (Gozzini 2011: 156). An even more radical vision was presented by a famous journalist Marco Travaglio: “Fininvest has become the state” (Travaglio 2010: 25). Obviously, the ideological dimension of politics played a secondary role in Berlusconi’s public career. His new party members were provided with not much more than brief training sessions aimed to familiarize them with the movement’s programme and its goals as well as the basics of the political system of the Italian Republic. The only ideological banner Il Cavaliere would display remained his deep-rooted anti-Communism as a way of uniting former Christian democrats, liberals and even socialists, whose previous leaders had been accused of corruption and Mafia collusion in the “clean hands” (Mani pulite) campaign of the early 1990s led by the famous judge Antonio Di Pietro (Gozzini 2011: 154). Berlusconi’s lack of ideological consistency was also made evident by his awkward choice of coalition allies: while in the North he chose to cooperate with the autonomist Northern League (Lega Nord), at the same time in the South he allied himself with the neo-Fascist National Alliance (Alleanza Nazionale) (Koff and Koff 2000: 31). The only element bringing the three parties together was their opposition against the “corrupt” First Republic. To sum up, Berlusconi built his political career with hardly any reference to the traditional notion of ideology. The foundations of his success were his own legend as a “self made” businessman and his pragmatic business approach combined in a brand new kind of antiestablishment populism. And that was precisely what a great majority of Italians were inclined to follow. Apart from this, he had also found out as a result of his professional opinion polls that in fact as many as 70% of his compatriots declared they were uninterested in politics and did not actually pay much attention to the party’s ideological message (Gozzini 2011: 159). Hence, his syncretism would after all go down well. One of his most radical critics, Indro Montanelli, thought it was as simple as this: “Berlusconi has no ideas: he only has got his own interests” (Travaglio 2010: 39). It has also been in this light, apart from Il Cavaliere’s personal ambition, that most commentators have tried to explain the reasons for his decision to enter politics. A rather commonly accepted version is an alleged secret pact between Berlusconi and the discredited former Prime Minister Craxi, supposedly urging his friend in 1993: We need to find a “label,” a new name, a symbol, something that could unite the moderate voters [. . .]. With the power you have of your

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Silvio Berlusconi and the Second Italian Republic television, which you can use to make pounding propaganda. [. . .] You have your men all over Italy, you make it to regain those voters who are shocked, confused, yet determined not to be ruled by communists, in order to save what can still be saved. (Travaglio 2010: 26)

An Italian saying goes: Se non è vero, è ben trovato. Many people view Berlusconi as little more than a guardian and vicar of the old ruling class interests, disguised as an apolitical newcomer to avoid accusations. And it is this common conviction that one can trace in the conversation quoted above, whether it be true or false.

Videocracy Ad Personam: Berlusconi in Power The beginning of the Berlusconi era, often referred to as the Second Republic, constituted a major breakthrough in the country’s modern history. Italy’s political culture has changed and an utterly new kind of mass-communication policy has been brought to light. Even though the term “telecracy” had already been used to describe De Gaulle’s France, the Italian situation under Berlusconi remained in many ways unique. In 1999 media ownership concentration was by far the highest in Western Europe as two main broadcasters shared 82% of the market, whereas the same figure was at 69% in Germany, 57% in Britain and just 45% in France (Gozzini 2011: 153). However, in Italy the two: state-owned RAI and Berlusconi’s Fininvest/Mediaset fell in the hands of the same person (Prime Minister and private entrepreneur at the same time) forming a truly peculiar structure of a double state and private monopoly leading to a conflict of interest. Since such criticism had emerged at the very beginning of his struggle for power, in his very first political speech Berlusconi had declared he was leaving his media empire, and in 1995 he still promised he would “sell the television channels to foreign investors” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 71). As time passed, though, his stance changed dramatically in this respect. A year later he would already tell a journalist: “I do not even intend to address this issue [conflict of interest]; the voters have done this in all elections so far, making them a sort of referendum on television ownership” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 73). It was a repeatedly expressed idea of his that by making him their Prime Minister, the Italians simultaneously authorized Berlusconi to act as he had done before with a sort of a popular mandate and absolution. His vision of democracy came remarkably close to the British notion of an “elective dictatorship.” During his successful electoral campaign of 1994 Il Cavaliere declared: “I will not even move a flower pot at the RAI,” yet when already

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in power he would publicly blackmail reporters: “Pay attention to what you write as I remind you it is these days that important meetings concerning the RAI are held in my house” (Belfiori and Santello 2010: 62). These were no vain threats. Especially after the second victorious general election of 2001, Berlusconi gradually carried out some obvious purges in the state television he was now in full control of, dismissing prominent journalists like Enzo Biagi, Michele Santoro or Daniele Luttazzi, simply by requesting that their shows be removed. An almost national scandal broke out in 2008, when his loyal collaborator, Augusto Minzolini, was appointed the editor of the main RAI evening news programme (Polidori 2011: 53, 62). Berlusconi never admitted having exerted pressure on the media. He once commented facetiously: “If I phone somebody, it is Fede [Emilio Fede, an openly pro-Berlusconi news editor] to tell him: ‘Emilio, don’t love me so much’” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 52). However, many journalists complained their freedom had been seriously restricted, if not eliminated, and the RAI-Fininvest duopoly had actually become Berlusconi’s personal monopoly: To say that Silvio Berlusconi is an undisputed master of all national TV channels is by no means [. . .] a propagandistic phrase used by the opposition to discredit a political adversary. It is a solid fact. However, few understand to what extent this fact has affected and ruined the cultural and social profile of today’s Italians, particularly the new blood among the political and economic elites. (Polidori 2011: 49)

That implies enormous power since in Italy, lacking a typically Protestant tradition of high literacy and readership, in 1995 some 50% of the population admitted television was their main source of information, the figure going up to 82% in just four years up until 1999 (Gozzini 2011: 171–172). Yet, it has often been argued Berlusconi’s “videocracy” is not just about monopolizing the media in order to make his power last. As a widely acclaimed documentary “Videocracy. Basta apparire” (2009) by a Swede of Italian origins, Erik Gandini, shows, Il Cavaliere’s style has already shaped and altered, and not for the better, the mentality of Italians, especially the younger generations. “Basta apparire” (“It’s enough to appear”) is what one of the protagonists of the film and Berlusconi’s close friends says. Not just appear on TV to get publicity, as this is the original meaning of the phrase, but also to appear, to seem, to pretend, to build one’s fake, yet attractive image. Faithful to the owner’s philosophy of entertainment first, the Fininvest media are often accused of spreading a superficial vision of life as a vanity fair, where money, fame and beauty are the sole values. Significantly, as Crouch has pointed out, faced with

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Berlusconi’s campaign “using omnipresent and carefully rejuvenated pictures of himself,” his political opponents accepted the challenge, adopting the very same tactics in trying to “identify a sufficiently photogenic individual within its own leadership” (Crouch 2004: 26). The result is that young Italians seem obsessed with an ambition to appear on TV, be it as a hostess or a member of the studio audience, as they believe that to be the ultimate proof of success in life. Government politicians and journalists alike are instructed by Fininvest professionals on what to say and how to say it (Polidori 2011: 69–70), contributing to the official optimism of what has come to be called not just a “business firm party organization model” but an “Italy PLC” (azienda Italia) (Tosi 2001: 125). Within Berlusconi’s reasoning in terms of a public relations policy of a business firm, criticism of any kind grows potentially harmful. In 1995 he had expressed his opinion that making public accusations against the former Christian Democrat leader Andreotti “created an image of Italy as a country ruled by the Mafia” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 86). In the same way, Berlusconi perceived any criticism directed at Italy, the Mafia or himself as a threat to the country’s prestige in the world. Contrary to that, the mission of Italian media, as he had always put it, was to “enable [Italian families] to spend their free time [. . .] in a pleasant way” (Belfiori and Santelli 2010: 67). However, apart from establishing a de facto media monopoly, far more radical charges were made against Berlusconi. Many argued he had never been interested in power for power’s sake. If he had transformed his own business empire into a political party, the argument went, the former never ceased to be his main concern and political power was chiefly meant to allow him to pass state regulations improving his own or his companies’ legal status. Marco Travaglio has classified these as ad personam, ad aziendam (azienda = company), contra personam, ad mafiam and contra iustituam laws (Travaglio 2010: 5-9). No more than a few months after the electoral victory a new regulation was passed (referred to as Salvaladri – “protecting thieves”). It made it significantly more difficult for judges to arrest people accused of corruption (Crapis 2006: 132–133). Di Pietro and the other “clean hands” campaign heroes fiercely protested against what truly seemed an incomprehensible development: Berlusconi, the man who came to power as a result of corruption scandals among the old elite he claimed he had never belonged to, was clearly acting to protect those under accusation. It was then that Italy’s new Prime Minister (who had tried, to no avail, to take advantage of Di Pietro’s popularity inviting him to join his cabinet) was surprisingly turning against the judges, denouncing them as “doubly

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mad,” communist-driven and eager to start their own political careers (Travaglio 2010: 277). Many years later in 2009 when a repentant mafioso claimed that the funds to start Berlusconi’s business had been provided by the Mafia, a new law was brought in denying any legal importance of such testimonies made by people who had been Mafia members themselves. Thus, one of the most efficient weapons of anti-Mafia struggle was eliminated, marking a “gravestone on all mafia trials” (Travaglio 2010: 569–571). Throughout the Berlusconi era significant economic matters were occasionally reshaped in order to favour his own business empire. Already in the summer of 1994 Mediaset was virtually exempted from taxation with a special law meant for companies investing their profits in new technologies and modern equipment. Officially, the regulation’s aim was to facilitate the country’s economic recovery, yet in fact specific criteria seemed to have been defined especially for Mediaset to benefit (Travaglio 2010: 69). At the same time, a vast tax amnesty programme was launched enabling the treasury’s debtors to pay only conspicuously reduced sums (Partridge 1998: 161). Among the largest beneficiaries of this, as well as of another similar measure, a “building amnesty” (condono edilizio legalizing any buildings put up against the law), was Berlusconi himself and his companies (Travaglio 2010: 72). On the other hand, in November 2008 a new law increasing the VAT was, many believed, written in exactly such a way as would affect Sky, a private television channel owned by Rupert Murdoch, Berlusconi’s greatest competitor (Travaglio 2010: 573). Over the recent years the nature of Italian ad personam laws has changed. Facing corruption charges Il Cavaliere made efforts to postpone, prolong or simply prevent his probable trials from taking place. The famous Lodo Alfano in 2007 implied that any such cases against the country’s key political figures, Prime Minister included, would have to wait until they had terminated their political missions. The law was declared unconstitutional in 2009 as it had made (as Berlusconi’s adversaries mocked it) “some animals more equal than others” (Travaglio 2010: 477). In 2010 another controversial principle was adopted. The processo breve meant if trials lasted too long, the defendants would automatically be acquitted of all charges. A further step, the legittimo impedimento, promoted by the Berlusconi coalition later the same year considered it justified if a state official did not attend a hearing in court when busy with his public duties (Reduzzi 2010: 78). In simple words, Italy’s Prime Minister was free not to come to court for a number of reasons, the trial being postponed and it was enough for him to wait long

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enough to have his lawsuit ended as it had lasted for too long. Berlusconi dismissed such interpretations in a truly original way. In 2004 he said: “All this story of ad personam laws is false; I have just made three of them for myself” (Travaglio 2010: 193). His uncompromising opponent, Marco Travaglio, has made another judgment. To him all this was “privatization of justice, a senile, incurable stage of the conflict of interest” (Travaglio 2010: 6). Berlusconi was dismissed as Italian Prime Minister on 12th November 2011. His media empire was not able to alter one basic truth: it had been under the apparently efficient and professional business mogul Berlusconi that Italy was affected by one of the worst economic crises in history. Thus, Italian voters turned a deaf ear to Il Cavaliere’s positive interpretations. Paradoxically, his own media had taught them to value the young, the handsome and the successful, a set of expectations a 76-yearold man in times of crisis could hardly live up to. Today’s commentators tend to agree it is unlikely he will come to power again.

Conclusion Indro Montanelli, one of the greatest Italian intellectuals of the twentieth century, has declared: “Berlusconi’s Italy is the worst I have ever seen” (Polidori 2011: 64). Yet to what extent is this system solely a problem of the persona of a man who has been named “the master of Italy” (il padrone d’Italia)? (Travaglio 2010: 7). As early as 1964 Hebert Marcuse, the famous New Left sociologist and philosopher, came up with a warning: a “one-dimensional man” is being forged, shaped by popular culture industry, whose pivotal element is advertising (Gozzini 2011: VI). It seems that today, after some fifty years, the process has gone much further. In his world-acclaimed work, a great Italian sociologist, Giovanni Sartori, claims new generations of men have been transformed from homo sapiens to homo videns, “the watching man,” capable of seeing, but not reading, simplified “post-thinking” rather than thinking itself (Sartori 2011: XVI). Another contemporary scholar has emphasized that what makes the two “species,” homo sapiens and homo videns, largely different is that watching does not necessarily imply understanding. Hence, in Giovanni Gozzini’s view we now live in a “postliterate society” (Gozzini 2011: 170). Italian scholars tend to accept Colin Crouch’s idea of “postdemocracy” and they argue that Italy under Berlusconi is a perfect example. “Democratic principles remain in the background [. . .] Politics is becoming a kind of consumption: one votes for the best and the most

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persuasive story from their armchair in front of a TV screen, certain (deceived) that politics will never really affect his everyday private life” (Gozzini 2011: VII). At the same time, though, they agree with Crouch putting the entire blame on the media is a gross oversimplification: “Television does not determine this transformation, but reflects it, catalyses and multiplies” (Gozzini 2011: XII). Gozzini’s final remarks are truly thought-provoking: In Italy the time of post-democracy reflects the crisis of the individualist transformation (mutazione individualista) brought about by the baby boom generation with its feeling of uncertainty resulting from restricted working perspectives. Commercial neotelevision helps them live in this unstable world: simplifying the meanings and reducing the complexities. It makes myths of individual success through a status of celebrity, it advertises consumer goods as means of consolidating one’s personal identity. (Gozzini 2011: 193).

What happened in Italy under Berlusconi is a durable social change, at the same time a motive for and an expression of post-democracy. “And the alteration of the Italian society provoked by the individualist transformation is irreversible, [lasting] far beyond Berlusconi’s adventurous political career” (Gozzini 2011: XII–XIII).

References Barbacetto, G. 2006. B. Tutte le carte del Presidente. Milano: Tropea. Barbacetto, G., Gomez, P. and Travaglio, M. 2002. Mani pulite. La vera storia. Roma: Editori Riuniti. Belfiori, G. and Santelli, G. 2010. Berlusconario. Tutte le gaffe del Presidente. Milano: Melampo. Clark, M. 2009. Wspóáczesne Wáochy. Warszawa: KsiąĪka i Wiedza. Cotta, M. and Verzichelli, L. 2008. Il sistema politico italiano. Bologna: il Mulino. Crapis, G. 2006. Televisione e politica negli anni Novanta: cronaca e storia. Roma: Meltemi. Crouch, C. 2000. Coping with Post-Democracy. London: Fabian Society. —. 2003. Postdemocrazia. Roma: Laterza. —. 2004. Post-Democracy. Cambridge: Polity. Galli, G. 2001. I partiti politici italiani (1943–2004). Milano: Rizzoli. Gentile, E. 1999. La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo. Milano: Mondadori.

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Ginsborg, P. 2005. Silvio Berlusconi: television, power and patrimony. London: Verso. Gozzini, G. 2011. La mutazione individualista. Gli italiani e la televisione 1954–2011. Roma: Laterza. Guarino, M. 2005. L’orgia del potere: testimonianze, scandali e rivelazioni su Silvio Berlusconi. Bari: Dedalo. JóĨwiak-Di Marcantonio, J. 2011. Silvio Berlusconi. Geniusz mediów i marketingu politycznego.Wrocáaw: Atla 2. Koff, S. and Koff, S. 2000. Italy. From the First to the Second Republic. London: Routledge. Partridge, H. 1998. Italian politics today. Manchester: MUP. Polidori, E. 2011. Berlusconi e la fabbrica del popolo. Venezia: Aliberti. Reduzzi, G. 2010. I mali che tuttora affliggono il Bel Paese. Dallas: St. Paul Press. Sartori, G. 2011. Homo videns. Roma: Laterza. Stille, A. 2006. Citizen Berlusconi. Vita e imprese. Milano: Garzanti. Tosi, A. 2001. Language and society in a changing Italy. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Travaglio, M. 2010. Ad personam. Milano: Chiare Lettere.

PART II LITERATURE AND PERFORMANCE: POST-INTERFACES AND DIALOGUES

PRE- AND POST-HOLOCAUST READING OF THE TEMPEST BY LEON SCHILLER IN 1938/39 AND 1947 AGATA DĄBROWSKA

ABSTRACT: The main aim of this essay is to analyze the reception of two productions of The Tempest directed by Leon Schiller in 1938/1939 and 1947 in the context of Polish and Jewish relations. The first staging, prepared by the Jewish troupe in cooperation with Polish artists, was a form of protest against racism and anti-Semitism. The second one was treated as an attempt to settle and understand the Holocaust crimes. KEY WORDS: Anti-Semitism, Holocaust, Jews, Shakespeare, war.

Introduction Over the centuries, the cultural activity of Polish Jews has suffered from marginalization, which had an unquestionable influence on the way Jewish art was perceived. The common recipient considered it artistic kitsch, and believed theatre to be the least worthy form; he or she would use the term “shund”1 to decry this unambitious, unoriginal and commercial form of scenic performance. This negative view of Jewish culture persisted until the interwar period, when the Folks und Jugnt Theatre was created in 1923 (Buáat 2006: 88). It was the first Jewish theatre in Poland which performed in Yiddish an ambitious repertoire addressed to a select audience. It was founded by Klara Segaáowicz2 and its biggest star was the Polish director and stage manager Leon Schiller. 1

The word “shund” means “trash” in the Yiddish language and was in common use to describe Jewish theatre in Poland before the Second World War (see the polemical discussion, printed in Izraelita in 1883–1905, devoted to the role of Yiddish language and culture in Poland). 2 Klara Segaáowicz was a very famous Jewish theatre director and actress who had a lot of experience in co-operating with Polish artistic societies. Due to her support Jan KosiĔski, a painter and stage designer, she made her debut in the Polish theatre

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Schiller was a man who caused much controversy over the years. A world-class director and educator, he was considered to be a genius responsible for the reform of the Polish theatre, though he was an eccentric who caused scandal. His works provoked extreme reactions. Some adored him for his adaptation of Easter in 1923, during which the audience knelt in tears and even made the sign of the cross. Others were disgusted by his baseness and profanity presented in the production of The Story of Sin (1926). Critics accused him of blasphemy, pornography, deviant eroticism and propagating moral dissolution (Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, 2005a: 51–66). It seems fitting, therefore, to ask what inspired Segaáowicz to hire this controversial Polish director. Her decision was certainly not made lightly, as the brand new theatre could not afford to make any mistakes—the smallest error could result in bankruptcy. Schiller’s force was his novel approach to art. He believed that a theatre was like a laboratory, in which the director could conduct whatever experiments pleased him. Furthermore, working with the Folks and Jugnt Theatre would be, for Schiller, a sort of ennobling activity. At that time, the director had made enemies in many artistic circles3 and was the subject of notorious accusations of propagating bolshevist, anti-clericalist4 and philosemitic views. The friar Zygmunt KaczyĔski (1924: 10) claimed Schiller’s theatrical concepts were “influenced by Jewish propaganda.” Tadeusz Boy-ĩeleĔski (1935: 10) criticized the non-Aryan character of his adaptation of King Lear, where it was allegedly suggested that Goneril was the fruit of the queen’s illicit affair with a Jewish miller. Schiller’s troubled relations with Jews were also noticed by the reviewer of conservative MyĞl Narodowa, who concluded his racist discourse by saying “Schiller’s stage design should be promptly dismantled and sold for

in 1937. During the war Segaáowicz was imprisoned and transported to the Warsaw ghetto where she worked as a volunteer for the Jewish Social Self-help— Co-ordinating Commission (SS-KK). She died in Pawiak Prison in 1943 executed by the Nazis (BorzymiĔska, ĩebrowski 2003: 512). 3 Leon Schiller was regarded as a very choleric and quarrelsome person. He fought notoriously with many prominent Polish actors and theatre directors such as Stefan Jaracz, Aleksander Zelwerowicz, Juliusz Osterwa and Arnold Szyfman (Raszewski 1973: 627-630). 4 The most heated debate over Schiller’s negative attitude towards the Christian religion started after his premiere of Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1925). He interpreted Olivarius as a caricature of the Christian friar. The reviewer of Gazeta Poranna 2 grosze claimed that he had directed the play in an anticlerical and Moscow style (Gawlikowski 1925: 4).

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scrap to the Jews” (Godlewski 1935: 649).5 But while Schiller was so unjustly condemned among Poles, he was a popular and respected figure among Jewish critics and publicists. Naomi Beluch (1938: 772) called him “the first great director in Poland,” and Jakub Appenszlak (1938: 11) mentioned him as “an excellent artist of the Polish stage.” It seems, however, that the most valuable argument in favour of employing Schiller in the Jewish theatre was his significant experience in working with Shakespeare’s plays. By 1938 he had directed seven of them: Much Ado about Nothing (1920), The Winter’s Tale (1924), As You Like It (1925), Julius Caesar (1928), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1934), King Lear (1935) and Coriolanus (1936).

Pre-Holocaust Tempest of Leon Schiller Therefore it should not come as a surprise that Schiller was invited to stage The Tempest.6 The premiere took place on 9th October 1938 and was prepared by the Jewish troupe in cooperation with Polish artists: Wincenty Daszewski (stage designer), Artur Malawski (composer) and Tacjana Wysocka (choreographer).7 It was staged in the Lodz Philharmonic, a location which had a direct influence on the character of the production.8 A horizontal structure was built on the stage for Prospero and Ariel to stroll upon. The metre-high platform was enclosed in an enormous wheel, probably a symbolic representation of the globe. In the background hung an old map, with emblems of the sun and moon placed in its top corners 5

Schiller became the object of an anti-Semitic campaign conducted largely in Gazeta Warszwska. Its publicists accused him of “jewing of the native culture.” The case found its finale in court and resulted in a conviction for the newspaper (Prokop-Janiec 2004: 257). 6 Due to his inability to communicate in Yiddish, Schiller had to cooperate with Michal Wiskind, a young Jewish director. However, as he mentioned in the interview, he spoke with the Jewish artists in Polish and German (Auerbach 1938: 10). 7 The main roles were performed by the following famous Jewish actors: Abraham Morewski (Prospero), Cypora Fajnzylber (Miranda), Estera Goldenberg (Ariel), Moise Lipman (Caliban), Daniel Szapiro (Alonso), Leon Kaswiner (Fernando), Salomon Konow (Gonsalo), Symche Rozen (Antonio), Moise Garbarz (Sebastian), Wáadyslaw Godik (Stephano), Abraham Kurcow (Trinkulo) and Salomoni Rybak (Bosman). 8 It was the only place where the Folks und Jugnt troupe was allowed to perform. Segaáowicz wanted to rent any leading theatre in Lodz to stage the play but she was refused because Polish theatre directors were afraid of the Jewish competition (Auerbach 1938: 10).

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(Daszewski 1974: 100). The stage design and costumes created by Daszewski took the audience back into the Elizabethan times. The overlay of longitudes and latitudes on the map permitted a precise geographical placement of the events. Reviewers concluded that the chosen site was one of the Bermuda islands, although this interpretation contradicted Schiller and Daszewski’s intentions. The audience were given numerous clues, which were to be taken at a symbolic rather than literal level. The map did not mark the location of Prospero’s island, but the time in which the events took place. Drawn as a facsimile of Elizabethan maps, it transported the spectators into a time of great geographical discoveries. Its difference from a typical sailor’s chart was noted in the motto: “Totus mundus historiem agit” (The actor plays the whole world). Prospero’s makeshift shack rose on the right side of the stage, while Caliban’s cave occupied the left. Such a symbolic stage design provoked many interpretations. Jerzy Timoszewicz (1993: 450) thought it a reference to Richard Teschner’s Viennese puppet theatre. In such an interpretation Prospero would be the director of the play while the other characters became marionettes deprived of free will. Contrary to this view Krystyna Duniec (1998: 131) pointed out the adaptation’s direct reference to morality plays. Just as in the medieval form, Good and Evil did battle over the protagonist’s soul, and this theme was underlined by the division of the stage into the spiritual (the elevation) and the earthly (the stage). The stage design alluded also to the multi-tiered Elizabethan stage. Zbigniew Strzelecki maintained that it was, in Schiller and Daszewski’s mind, the illustration of a certain philosophy, the so-called Shakespeare’s views on the world the poet lived in (1955: 45). The link to the Elizabethan era was suggested further by the costumes designed by Daszewski. Most characters wore the Renaissance garb, with the exception of Ariel, Caliban and Prospero. The first was clothed once in a veiled, flowing robe which accentuated his spiritual nature, other times in coral flames, announcing the coming of a storm. Caliban was dressed in a leaf and scale costume that marked his link to nature. The most controversial was Prospero’s outfit. He wore a plain black floor-length overcoat cut to resemble a Jewish gabardine, which post-war critics understood to be a likeness of Shakespeare’s own clothing. This fairytale imagery was completed by “unearthly” music filled with sweet, moody melodies and a dance performed by Tycjana Wysocka’s troupe. Schiller interpreted The Tempest in a unique and innovative way. He did not turn the play into a fantasy recreation, but instead chose to tell it as a philosophical parable. “All symbols were preserved,” the publicist of Chwila argued, but “the supernatural and natural forces alike were

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expressed through human traits.” The characters came to life, and only the sea tempest, which previous staging treated in a realistic manner, was interpreted as a hallucination (Auerbach 1938: 10). According to Schiller, the main idea of The Tempest was the motto “to seek virtue is a higher cause than vengeance.” The director explained that, in this spirit, only he who has earned his humanity may rule others: The play depicts a development of thought leading to the secret of a wise and just government which must rely on a deep understanding and mercy. This mercy would arise not from weakness, but from a sense of the human community. The island which the exiled philosopher king and wizard Prospero summons using the supernatural powers of all his tormentors— his goal being forgiveness—is a symbol of some higher level of existence (quoted in Auerbach 1938: 10).

Such an innovative and precursory manner of interpreting Shakespeare’s play aroused both indignation and fascination, which was clearly illustrated by the press polemics. It is worth noting, however, that this passionate discussion was confined to the Jewish essays published in Polish (Nasz Przegląd, Nowy Dziennik, Chwila) and Yiddish (Literarishe Bleter, Haynt, Der Moment). In contrast to their enthusiasm, the Polish press remained silent and did not comment on Schiller’s adaptation. Not a single piece of information appeared in the leading journals, except for the publication of brief announcements in Gáos Poranny and Republik—the social-democratic dailies, which shared Schiller’s world view. In the life of the Jewish community, the premiere of The Tempest was a rather important event. It evoked much interest among the Warsaw intelligentsia, who came to Lodz in droves in order to attend it. The audience could also boast many Polish actors with the director of the Lodz Theatre Aleksander Rodziewicz among them. All 1200 seats of the Philharmonic were filled (Timoszewicz 1993: 441). Michal Weichert (1964: 60) described the production as sophisticated and rich, stressing the role of music in creating the atmosphere. Nahma Sandown (1986: 335) emphasized that it was an artistic compromise. The architecture was monumental and impressive while the light was soft. The director deliberately created an atmosphere of scepticism, leaving the interpretation of his work to the audience. However, there were also critics who had nothing good to say about Schiller’s production. Aleksander Bardini wrote that Schiller used the old style of Max Reinhardt, which could have impressed the audience thirty years earlier but failed to meet the expectations of today. The monumental architecture of the play recalled the idea of a kitschy Jewish theatre from the nineteenth century. His opinion was shared by Bohdan Piasecki, who stated that the director

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paid more attention to the stage design than he did to acting, and that he tried to attract people by its nearly photographic precision. Both Piasecki and Bardini stressed that at least Schiller did not introduce the crowd of quarrelling Jews and Christians, as Reinhardt had, which definitely contributed to a better reception of the play (quoted in Timoszewicz 1993: 448). The two-and-a-half-hour-long show was rewarded with extremely long applause. Abraham Morewski was received the most enthusiastically for his portrayal of Prospero, so full of bitterness. Reviewers recalled his passion and wisdom which overcame evil forces and animal instincts that tempt humans, while reminding both tormentors and victims that “our little life is rounded with a sleep.” Appenszlak (1938: 11) made similar observations in Nasz Przegląd, reporting that the artist “had a deep understanding and emotion for the spiritual context of his role, despite his vocal problems.” Schiller described working with Morewski as an interesting endeavour, since, as he claimed, the Jewish actor was a Shakespeare fanatic (Auerbach 1938: 10).9 Reviewers also raved about Estera Goldenberg’s “graceful and spiritual” Ariel, and MojĪesz Lipman’s “talented” Caliban. Exceptional praise was given to Wáadysáaw Godik and Abraham Kurc, who “became the most hilarious of comical figures while adhering perfectly to Shakespeare’s style” (Kitai 1938: 686). The production was extremely popular, which was confirmed by its non-stop, twice daily run in Lodz until 20th November, then in Warsaw from 28th April to 4th June 1939. It was not, however, the artistic measure of The Tempest but its political message which guaranteed its exceptionality. The play was staged during a time when anti-Semitism was on the rise, exemplified by economic boycotts of Jewish entrepreneurs, the organization of pogroms, the introduction of Aryan paragraphs in governmental and private institutions, as well as the appearance of bench ghettos (i.e. segregation) in universities. In this environment, Schiller’s Tempest gained a symbolic character. The play was a comment on the contemporary socio-political situation of Jews in Poland. Critics agreed unanimously that the actors as well as the authors of the staging displayed great “wisdom” and “nobility” in rising above mutual racial prejudice. They created “an exceptional artistic union,” which found perfect harmony in the atmosphere of Shakespeare’s play (Appenszlak 1938: 11). 9

Prospero was one of the most important roles in Morewski’s stage career. In the numerous commemorative articles published after his death, the part was always named second after the tzadik in Dybbuk and before Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.

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Above all, nationalist themes were exposed within Schiller’s production. In several articles, Appenszlak (1938: 11) informed the public of how the Polish theatre elite co-operated with Jewish actors to bring the play to the stage. This collaboration was so exceptional and unique, that reviewers often neglected to mention the crew’s names, and cited only their national affinity. In Literarishe Bleter the publicist (1938: 686) stated that the play was prepared by a Polish manager, in the stage design built by a Polish designer, with music by a Polish composer. Appenszlak (1938: 11) wrote about the kind of respect paid by “Polish masters” to the Jewish artistic community, which was allegedly delighted to fulfil their every command. Journalist Adolf Nejman expressed a similar thought, claiming that by giving proof of their willingness to stand beside Yiddish actors in a time which found them so troubled, the Polish elite deserved high praise for their conduct (quoted in Timoszewicz 1993: 442). Newspapaers in Lodz thanked Polish artists for their support of fellow Jewish actors in a time when racism triumphed all over Europe. The Warsaw press followed, stressing the meaning of such a cross-culture exchanges, in times when it was “so difficult to cast off the shackles of the everyday.” The only person, who represented a different opinion was Rachela Auerbach. She (1938: 10) claimed that there was nothing unusual in the collaboration of Jews and Poles, and that the real anomalies and anachronisms were the declarations of those who opposed it. Schiller himself protested against the politicization of his Tempest: 10 I am deeply moved by my reception by the Jewish audience as well as my Jewish fellow artists. It was pointed out that my collaboration with a Jewish crew was some kind of symbol. My firm position is that there was nothing heroic in my actions, nor in the actions of any of the other Christians who helped stage this wonderful work by Shakespeare. (quoted in Baruchin 1938: 7)

In spite of his claims, most critics agreed that The Tempest contained timeless themes, which were an excellent parallel to the contemporary spirit. The issues it touched on were universal: the lust for power, the desire to build an ideal nation, the rebellion of primal instincts, the longing for work and freedom as well as the bloom of romantic love. At a time when Hitler’s ideals were grewing popular in Germany, and anti-Semitism was spreading across Poland, these themes gained a specific significance. 10

It was not the first time Schiller expressed his political ideas by using Shakespeare’s plays. In 1928 he had directed Julius Caesar, which was understood as an allusion to the May coup d’état carried out in 1926 in Poland by Marshal Jozef Pilsudski (Callier 1928: 10).

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The Tempest was understood to be an allegory, granting its protagonists symbolic meaning. Prospero became the embodiment of intellect, Ariel of spirituality, Miranda of earthly beauty, Antonio and Sebastian of foolishness and evil, Trinculo and Stephano together were the symbol of carelessness, and finally, Caliban was that of primal instincts (Finkelstein 1938: 14). Schiller’s Tempest became first and foremost an apologia for human freedom, and the “lawful rule of good as opposed to ignorance, foolishness and the exploitations as performed by usurper powers” (Appenszlak, 1939: 11). It did not unilaterally condemn nationalistic ideologies, nor the cult of power and the individual promoted by Hitler’s followers. It advocated, however, that government must be based on reason and rationalism. According to this message, Prospero, performed by Abraham Morewski (the great Jewish actor) was the ideal ruler, who used wisdom to fight greed, perversity and criminal instincts. His was the chance to stand in defence of humanity and in particular the persecuted Jews. He was seen as the father of the Chosen Nation, not unlike Moses in giving his people freedom. In this context, the words “thought is free,” as uttered by Ariel, gained a special meaning. They gave hope and comfort to the Jewish community. This is confirmed by Morewski’s comments after the premiere: I firmly believe that if we, as Jews, as ancient world wanderers, are able in this age of riots and broken windows to detach ourselves from reality and create as wonderful a Shakespearean spectacle as this very premiere of The Tempest, then we can also weather the storm which rages around us (quoted in Baruchin 1938: 7).

Schiller’s Tempest was considered to be a tale of an enlightened Prospero’s struggle against Caliban, who was the embodiment of base animal instincts. The trial of the leading character resembled that of the biblical book of Job. Its purpose was to teach him patience, understanding and acceptance of the inevitable. The road to freedom from the shackles of evil was long and strewn with thorns. According to reviewers, Caliban represented all that was barbaric. He was seen as a typical representative of the so called Sturmabteilung brown shirts, the paramilitary storm detachment of the Nazi Party, whose chief task was the persecution of Jews in the Third Reich (Finkelstein 1938: 14). Their members organized pogroms attacking people of Jewish background, encouraging civilians to destroy and loot their establishments. Like Caliban, they were puppets in the hands of madmen, themselves deranged and lusting for power. They unquestioningly submitted to the will of fools and usurpers, much like

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Shakespeare’s protagonist, who betrayed his liege for the sake of rogues and drunks (Trinculo and Stephano) (Appenszlak 1939: 8). The key scene in The Tempest was determined to be the symbolic battle for books between Caliban and Prospero. As the escaped slave claimed, burning the books would deprive Prospero of his power (Timoszewicz 1993: 440). This was supposedly a reference to the events of 10th May 1933, when the burning of Jewish book collections was initiated across Germany. In the play, Caliban lost the fight, and good triumphed over evil, but the theatre’s optimism did not comfort Polish and Jewish society. By mid-1939, all hope was lost as aggression against Jews rose again, and preparations for the oncoming war continued. It was written and proclaimed quite openly that Prospero had perished during the war, and Caliban now claimed his throne.

Post-Holocaust Tempest of Leon Schiller Schiller returned to The Tempest in 1947. Critics suggested that this production was a repetition of the 1938 version, but this opinion has no merit, as the only element common to the two versions was the stage design and its author. In all other aspects, they were different: the time and place of the premiere, the cast,11 and most of all, Schiller himself. The man cherished by the interwar period was gone forever. Leon Schiller was a new man, whose life and work would forever be marked by the events of World War II (Duniec 1998: 129). In 1940 he was arrested and placed in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He suffered there, working beyond his strength in the construction crew, which caused irreversible damage to his health. In a setting as cruel as Gibson’s Passion, the tortured and berated Schiller underwent a spiritual change. It resulted, among other things, in a reconciliation with his sworn enemy, Stefan Jaracz, who later became his partner in the forming of post-war theatre.12

11

The play was performed only by the Polish actors: Karol Adwentowicz (Prospero), Benigna Sojecka (Miranda), Jozef Wegrzyna (Alonso), Tadeusz Wozniak (Ferdinand), Jozef Wasilewski (Antonio), Ludoslaw Kozlowski (Sebastian), Jozefa Maliszewski (Gonsalo), Jozefa LodyĔski (Adrian), Stanisáaw àapiĔski (Stephano), Zdzislaw Lubelski (Trinculo), Wojciech Pilarski (Bosman), Leon Pietraszkiewicz (Caliban), Ryszarda Hanin (Ariel). 12 As Jaracz reminisced years later: “we were dragging some wheelbarrow along, both completely exhausted. And we both fell, old and helpless men, and then began to scramble up again, helping each other. Our hands locked and our eyes welled with tears. We promised each other never again to quarrel! In future Poland, we would work tirelessly for the brighter future of theatre” (CieĞlak 2010).

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Jerzy Zagórski reminisced of Schiller’s transformation; upon his return to Warsaw, the staunch Marxist and materialist had become a man of faith. “His great faith gradually became religion. He was as eager in his practice as a neophyte. Some accused him of bigotry, but there was no truth in it” (CieĞlak 2010).13 What Schiller experienced in Auschwitz was an authentic spiritual breakthrough, which had a great influence on his work. The artist’s repertoire was broadened to include messianic works such as Wielkanoc, Dziady and Pastoraáka. He was the first director to introduce the theme of the Holocaust and relations between Poles and Jews into the post-war Polish theatre. On 1st October 1946, to inaugurate his term as director of the Polish Army Theatre in Lodz, Schiller brought Stefan Otwinowski’s debut play Easter to the stage. The work told of the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto, and of the relations between Poles and Jews during the occupation. Every single Polish (Gáos Ludu Gáos Robotniczy, Lodz Teatralna, Ilustrowany Kurier Codzienny) and Jewish review (Opinia, Nasze Sáowo, Mosty) in Lodz recommended the play, regardless of political agenda. In unison, they praised the worth of this story of suffering and joined the struggle against the enemy of two nations. In directing Easter, Schiller attempted to force Poles to reflect on anti-Semitism. The play was a provocation which caused a veritable political uproar. The Polish community responded aggressively to Schiller’s appeal, who had correctly predicted the audience would overreact (Kuligowska-Korzeniwska 2005a: 53–68).14 Easter, whose leitmotif was anti-Semitism and racism, inspired the director to re-read The Tempest. In the post-war adaptation, the prologue was the climax. In this scene, Prospero, dressed to resemble Shakespeare himself, spoke thus: The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep (4.1)15 13

After returning from Auschwitz Schiller became an oblate of the Dominican order, never entering the monastery but promising to keep the vows. He took the name Ardalio, in honour of the Christian actor sentenced to a martyr’s death for his faith (Kuligowska-Korzeniewska 2005b: 100). 14 During a guest performance in Cracow, Schiller’s troupe was met with whistling. After the performance, a group of students attempted to assault Stefan Otwinowski for his support of the Jews (Kuligowska Korzeniewska 2005a: 67). 15 All quotations from The Tempest come from the Arden edition (London 1999).

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These words were not a prophecy of what was yet to come, but a comment on the past. Abraham Morewski’s Prospero had foretold the tragedy which Poland was heading for in 1939, and the character played again by Karol Adwentowicz tallied up its ravages. He spoke of the world before the war, of the great buildings, palaces and towers, which were now gone without a trace. The old towns of Warsaw, Lvov, Posen and Breslau were gone forever. Gone were also their citizens, perished and turned to dust along with the rest of the world. But the key meaning was in the last phrase uttered by Prospero. It was directed at future generations and contained an open warning. The prince advised that history was not unlike a rolling wheel, and certain events could very well repeat themselves. These words often found proof in reality. The murder of Jews in Kielce in 1946 was a clear demonstration of hatred and contempt towards people of Judaic faith, and was based on the exact ideals which fuelled pre-war antiSemitism. Schiller’s mise-en-scène, taking the stage a year after the pogrom, in 1947, was a subtle comment on the events in Kielce. As a metaphor, they may have appeared in the shape of the sea tempest, depicted as a whirl of human passion. The crowd, mad as the sea in a storm fell upon the Jews and committed murder. No one was spared, not even those who happened to be travelling that day through the town of Kielce. Forty-two people perished as a result of these actions, and over forty more were injured. The Polish government blamed clerics, the Polish People’s Party and the underground. In a show trial which took place on 11th July 1946, nine individuals were condemned to death. But the punishment inflicted on the guilty parties only caused further animosity towards Jews (Caáa and Datner-ĝpiewak 1997: 17–22). In many cities, Poles came together to support the convicted. And just like the government’s firm intervention prevented a national revolution, in The Tempest, Prospero, like an orchestra conductor, ended the concert of human passions with one strike of his baton. The play was staged according to the policies adopted by the Polish Army Theatre in Lodz after the pogrom in Kielce. At a meeting, the artists officially condemned the murders, pointing out that Poland had never before seen crimes based on racial hatred. In an attempt to defend the authority and honour of the country, they suggested a new vision of theatre as a school of moral conduct and ethical values for citizens. The theatre was supposed to educate society on the respect due to a human being regardless of his racial background, faith or convictions (KuligowskaKorzeniewska 2005a: 62). These positions, strongly underlined in the post-war staging of The Tempest, were to be a lesson in tolerance and morality for the Polish spectator.

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Unlike the 1938 performance, the 1947 show inspired no optimism in its audience. Instead, it was filled with reflection on the senselessness and fleeting nature of human existence. Prospero as played by Adwentowicz had none of the strength and resilience of Morewski’s character. He was filled with resignation, while the Jewish prince was a man of action. Andrzej ĩurowski (2003: 147) claimed that “the character portrayed by Adwentowicz seeks solace in an escape into the void, the eternal, to a point of view from which the affairs of an individual are reduced to insignificant specks.” In this context, Prospero’s words “Now my charms are all o’erthrown” (5.1) gain a symbolic meaning. They represent the parting of an ancient order and the arrival of a new one. Schiller’s protagonist was forced, wrote the director, to step in front of the curtain, take off his wig and fake moustache and beg for a substitute (ĩurowski 2003: 147). To the audience’s great surprise, he chose Caliban, played by Leon Pietraszkiewicz, as his successor. Pietraszkiewicz created a very complex character which eludes a simple rating. He fascinated some critics, among them Zenobiusz Strzelecki (1955: 50), who wrote that the actor had achieved his life’s success. Others were disappointed by the portrayal. Stanislaw WoynaGwiaĨdziĔski argued that the actor had created a faceless creature, bereft of tragic traits (1947: 10). Caliban as Pietraszkiewicz played him was a middle-aged man, tired and discouraged by his life in a hostile environment. He found no comfort on the island, though it was the only home he had ever known. The other islanders, Prospero, Miranda and Ariel, did not allow him equal rights but treated him as a second-class being. Caliban’s “otherness” revealed itself in many ways. He was a sort of contrast to the spoiled Christian community. In comparison, he was a man of few words, steering clear of rowdy celebrations which could sooner be called orgies than dances. He spent his time at home, or toiling at tasks given to him by Prospero. His social interactions were minimal. What conversation could he possibly hold with those who call him a slave, monster, barbarian? Pietraszkiewicz’s Caliban was a solitary by choice. He marks his status as an outsider with the clothes he wears. While all other islanders wore rich, Renaissancestyle costumes, Caliban chose a simple black tunic adorned with leaves and fish scales. The colour harmonized with his character as the symbol of the mourning he carried in his heart. It represented his longing for someone long ago passed, or perhaps a stage in life which ended irretrievably. The black costume also spoke of an immense need for the character to fill his inner void. Despair was a feeling which followed Caliban throughout the play, subtly, masked by the character’s bravery in coping with his fate. He was a

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proud and great man who suffered in solitude. He might have been treated thus as the mute symbol of the martyrdom of the Jewish people, for it was not his demeanour that caused his suffering, but his provenance. Prospero, Miranda and Ariel hated him because of his skin-colour. Pietraszkiewicz played the victim of a Christian conspiracy, cheated and downtrodden. His misfortune weighed heavily on him and drove him to his knees. However, Pietraszkiewicz’s Caliban had something of the grotesque in him, particularly when, with a wry smile, he offered his deal to Gonsalo; also when, hearing of Prospero’s imminent end, he began to dance. The audience was moved by the misery of a man stripped of his dignity, who long suffered all cruelty with silence. At the end of the play, the character had undergone a spiritual change. Once a calm and oppressed individual, he had become bloodthirsty. This change had a deep psychological setting, and was the expression of years of contained frustration and anger (KaáuĪyĔski 1947: 15). Caliban seemed to avenge a lifetime of humiliation and pain. He chose to deliver justice with his own hands, since the law did not offer him the opportunity to seek it within its decrees. The scene in which the hero spreads his arms out and signals freedom had a significantly different interpretation than before the war. In 1938, Caliban’s plot against Prospero’s life earned him the name of public enemy, but in 1947 it was considered that he had a right to revenge, since his motive was a greater good: the defence of human freedom and dignity (Duniec 1998: 137). He might have been viewed through the experience of war, and identified with the oppressed Jewish nation, which, not unlike Shakespeare’s hero, suffered due to its ethnic origins. Like the character, also, the nation fought back, organizing an uprising in the ghetto. The audience was greatly shocked by the last act, which departed widely from the original. In the final scene, Prospero embraced the kneeling Caliban, then, after a long gaze into his eyes, commanded him to walk away in a direction of his choosing (quoted in Duniec 1998: 141).

Conclusions The performances of The Tempest put together by Leon Schiller were a proof of the complex personality of the artist, Catholic and communist, and a manifesto of his political views. The 1938 performance was a protest against the rule of Nazism, racism and anti-Semitism. Schiller prophesied one of the greatest genocides in the human history: the extermination of Jews. The 1947 performance had a completely different character; it was an appeal to the generation of survivors and witnesses of the Holocaust. The director condemned the acts of violence levelled at Jews. He strove to

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prove that Jews were no different from other humans, that they were people who suffered from being persecuted and rejected. Caliban’s struggle for equal rights represented also the difficulties facing the Polish community and its attempts to retain the respect of an individual’s rights. It seems that, by introducing the characters of the island both before and after the war, Schiller attempted to show that different nations may live side by side only if we learn tolerance and forgiveness. Moreover the post-war Tempest was the director’s commentary on the surrounding reality. On the one hand, it was a sum of his theatrical experiences and a farewell to the past; on the other, it was a declaration of dedication to new socio-political processes. The socialist ideal was found within the play. Prospero, the embodiment of the old, feudal world, had to step down and relinquish his power to the working class, portrayed by Caliban. At the same time, Tadeusz Peiper in Odrodzenie (1947: 10) suggested that this was nothing shocking, as the modern working man could match the so-called upper class in intelligence and education.16

References Appenszlak, J. 1938. “Scena Īydowska. Burza.” (The Jewish Stage. The Tempest) Nasz Przegląd 67: 8. —. 1938. “Teatr Īydowski w polskiej koncepcji.” (The Jewish Theatre in a Polish Concept) Nasz Przegląd 200: 11. Auerbach, R. 1938. “Leon Schiller o swojej pracy z aktorami Īydowskimi.” (Leon Schiller about His Cooperation with Jewish Actors) Chwila 7027: 10. Baruchin, E. 1938. “ĝwiĊto teatru Īydowskiego w àodzi.” (The Holiday of the Jewish Theatre in Lodz) Nasz Przegląd 17/10: 7. Boy-ĩeleĔski, T. 1935. “Premiera w Teatrze Polskim.” (The Premiere in the Polish Theatre) Kurier Poranny 281: 10. Buáat, M. 2006. Krakowski Teatr ĩydowski (Cracow Jewish Theatre). Cracow: Jagiellonian University Press. Callier, Z. 1928. “Z Teatru Polskiego.” (From the Polish Theatre) PolakKatolik 24: 10.

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Tadeusz Peiper found The Tempest to contain multiple allusions to contemporary ideological struggles. According to him, Schiller openly stood by Caliban, an oppressed lowlander whom he identified with completely. He rehabilitated him, and made criminals out of his oppressors (1947: 10).

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Caáa, A. and Datner-ĝpiewak, H. 1997. Dzieje ĩydów w Polsce 1944–1968 (The History of Jews in Poland). Warsaw: Jewish Historical Institute. CieĞlak, J. 2010. “Zapomniana Wielkanoc.” (Forgotten Easter) In Rzeczpopsolita [Online]. Available: http://www.rp.pl/artykul/455843.html?print=tak&p=0 [2012, January 14]. Daszewski, W. 1974. “Kilka uwag o wspóápracy z Schillerem.” (Some Notes about Cooperation with Schiller) Dialog 5: 100–120. Duniec, K. 1998. Kaprysy Prospera (Prospero’s Vagaries). Warsaw: Errata. Finkelstein, L. 1938. “Burza Szekspira po Īydowsku.” (Shakespeare’s Tempest in a Jewish Style) Nasz Przegląd 16: 14. Gawlikowski, F.J. 1925. “Jak wam siĊ podoba.” (As You Like It) Gazeta Poranna 2 grosze 257: 5. Godlewski, S.J. 1935. “Król Lear w Teatrze Polskim.” (King Lear in the Polish Theatre) MyĞl Narodowa 42: 649–650. KaczyĔski, Z. 1924. “O dobry teatr.” (About the Excellent Theatre) PolakKatolik 24: 10. KaáuĪyĔski, Z. 1947. “Burza Szekspira.” (Shakespeare’s Tempest) KuĨnica 31–32: 15. Kitai, M. 1938. “Shakespeare’s Sturem af der Jidishe Scene” (Shakespeare’s Tempest on the Jewish Stage) Literarishe Bletter 41: 686–687. Kuligowska-Korzeniewska, A. 2005a. “Between Holocaust and Shoah. Easter by Stefan Otwinowski directed by Leon Schiller.” Kwartalnik ĩydowski 1: 51–68. —. 2005b. “Oblat Leon Schiller – polski Ardalion.” (Oblate Leon Schiller—Polish Ardalion). In Etos Īycia – etos sztuki: wokóá legendy o Ğw. Genezjuszu–aktorze (The Ethos of Life—the Ethos of Art: around the Legend of St. Genesius–Actor). M. Leyko and I. Lewkowicz (eds.). Lodz: Lodz University Press. Beluch, N. 1938. “Noch sturem in der Lodzer Filharmonie.” (Still The Tempest in Lodz Philharmonic) Literarishe Bleter 48: 772. Peiper, T. 1947. “Po konkursie szekspirowskim.” (After Shakespeare’s Contest) Odrodzenie 34:10. Prokop-Janiec, E. 2004. “Nacjonalistyczna krytyka teatralna wobec ĩydów.” (Nationalist Theatrical Criticism towards Jews) In ĩydzi w lustrze dramatu, teatru i krytyki teatralnej (Jews in the Mirror of Drama, Theatre and Theatrical Criticism). E. Udalska (ed.). Katowice: ĝląski University Press.

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Raszewski, Z. (ed.). 1973. Sáownik biograficzny teatru polskiego 17651965 (The Biographical Dictionary of the Polish Theatre 1765–196). Warszawa: PWN. Sandown, N. 1986. Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater. New York: Syracuse University Press. Strzelecki, Z. 1955. “Oczyma Scenografa.” (In Stage Designer’s Eyes) Pamietnik Teatralny 3/4: 45–60. Timoszewicz, J. 1993. “Burza w Folks un Jugnt Theater” (The Tempest in the Folks un Jugnt Theatre) PamiĊtnik Teatralny 1/4: 439–452. Weichert, M. 1964. Zihrojnes (Memories). Vol. III. Tel Aviv: Farlag Menorah. Woyna-GwiaĨdziĔski, 1947. “Burza Szekspira.” (Shakespeare’s Tempest) Kurier Popularny 247: 10. ĩurowski, A. 2003. Szekspir ich rówieĞnik (Shakespeare Their Peer). GdaĔsk: Gdansk University Press.

POSTMODERN FIREWORKS OR POSTCOLONIAL VENGEANCE: THE STRANGE CASE OF SALMAN R. JOANNA DYàA-URBAēSKA

ABSTRACT: Salman Rushdie’s status as a writer is problematic as his fiction can be easily inscribed within literary theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism On the one hand Rushdie adopts in his novels numerous narrative strategies and techniques that, due to their experimental, metafictional nature, may be termed postmodern. On the other hand, however, he, like other postcolonial writers, strives to subvert the stereotypical image of the otherness, sustained by the colonial cultural and political ideologies and their dominating discourse of the centre. The writer’s role as a political activist and a spokesperson for freedom of artistic expression should also not be neglected. What is more, in recent years Rushdie has also achieved the status of a media celebrity. Taking all these aspects of Rushdie’s life and work into consideration, this essay not only attempts to critically discuss his fiction and locate it within the postmodern and postcolonial literary traditions, but also tries to deconstruct some of Rushdie’s cunning and elaborate literary hoaxes and position Rushdie within the context of the global literary world. KEY WORDS: Salman Rushdie, postmodernism, postcolonialism.

Introduction Salman Rushdie is a writer born and brought up in India and educated in Great Britain. His fiction, blending the elements of Eastern and Western cultures and heterogeneous literary traditions, makes Rushdie troublesome to the seeker of distinct contours. In the world of literary criticism and in the academia there has been an ongoing dispute over Rushdie’s position as a writer. Critics deliberate over the question whether he still belongs to the Eastern part of the world, where he was born and whose depiction is the central, recurring theme of his writing, or whether the West should claim rights to his fiction, as, first and foremost, he writes in English. The problem of relevance in Rushdie’s fiction to literary theories of

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postmodernism and postcolonialism (for his novels can be easily inscribed within both currents) is another subject for critical dispute: [this] mish-mash of influences, the juxtaposition of the European and the Indian can be said to represent a form of multiculturalism, absorbing the historical and cultural forces of West European literary culture on colonized societies. In this sense it can be interpreted as quite a realistic portrayal of the construction of a postcolonial culture. On the other hand, it might seem remarkably akin to Jean-François Lyotard’s account of the eclecticism of contemporary, consumer culture. (Baker 2001: 50)

Salman Rushdie as a Postmodern Writer Several strategies and techniques that may be termed postmodern are adopted by Rushdie in his fiction: multiple metafictional and selfreferential narrative techniques that stress the textual playfulness of the novels; the debunking of history; formal experiments with narration exhibiting digressiveness, fragmentation, orality; intertextual parody that makes use of a whole gamut of literary references and allusions; heterogeneity of styles, registers and genres intermixing within particular novels; satiric, “humorously deconstructive” devices; the use of jokes and puns; polyphony and dialogicality (Fletcher 1994: 10–18). The hybrid form of Rushdie’s dense and sprawling novels, which contain a collage of literary devices, intermingle and fuse intertexts, mix high and low genres and registers and play with popular cultural references and pastiche is, hence, a postmodern mélange where no single concept is privileged over another and therefore the notion of purity does not exist and play and deferral are celebrated instead. While the author’s novels in a true postmodern manner undermine the system of old stabilities, echoing J. F. Lyotard’s subversion of grand narratives that claim the right to universal explanations and recognize that “we live in a world without stable truths or the possibility of transcendence,” they simultaneously celebrate cultural heterogeneity by recognizing “multiple realities” and record a whole array of polyphonic voices where “every language counts, each has its moment, but none is ultimate, none bears imperial weight” (Edmundson 1989: 70). The palimpsest character of Rushdie’s oeuvre is manifested by blending different languages within the novels, including a mixture of different varieties of English. Apart from the plurality of opposing voices found in Rushdie’s novels, these texts are also characterized by a mish-mash of intertextual references, which highlight the postmodern assumption of the lack of one pure tradition or point of origin on which to rely, and suggests the

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multiplicity of narrative possibilities and, therefore, the multiplicity of ways of understanding the world. At the same time, however, this points to their evanescence. According to Baker (2001: 48), Rushdie makes up for the postmodern absence of grand narratives by providing readers with a succession of often interrelated fictions. On the one hand, Rushdie’s fiction is deeply rooted in the literary traditions of the West, so, to a certain degree, it legitimizes the sources and contexts from which the writer borrows, but simultaneously he secedes from that tradition by subverting and “tainting” it with various postcolonial elements. What is more, the purpose of revising ideologies, styles, themes or languages is not to replace the dominant versions or valorise other perspectives, like, for instance, the subaltern one. Instead of making this process of replacement a strategy of retaliation, it provides an intermingling of various literary modes and, subsequently, their mutual transculturation. This multitude of intertextual inspirations defies any essentialist mode of thinking and, instead, shows an infinite range of possible influences. If anything is privileged, it is the notion of inclusiveness and hybridity that is meant to be an alternative, constructed in an effort to demystify existing ruling certainties such as, for instance, patriotism, religion and identity. The hybridity created by mixing, parodying, and borrowing is done at times in such a subversive manner, that it becomes a powerful form of resistance not only to Western epistemology but to the subcontinent’s dominant ideologies as well. Through a complex process of re-writing and re-representing, Rushdie juxtaposes our most entrenched beliefs with alternate readings so that all positions and contexts remain contradictory. (Sanga 2001: 77)

Another significant outcome of Rushdie’s intertextual strategies is the emphasis on the fact that his novels are fictions about fictions that engage in the process of deconstructing the text and that therefore they express the idea of playfulness with the form, the language and with the reader, and, hence, form an exercise in self-reflexive literary game-playing, which emphasizes the textual status of the world of Rushdie’s novels, novels constructed from a multitude of other literary texts. On the whole, Rushdie’s experiments with the art of narrative and the use of language achieved by means of mixing, borrowing, parodying and subverting different literary intertexts emphasize the need to create a new, fresh discourse which is free of the imperatives of the colonial legacy and which reflects the underlying metaphor of Rushdie’s fiction, the metaphor of hybridity and eclecticism. This eclecticism is also visible in Rushdie’s use of a mixture of cultural elements, puns and neologisms. Rushdie’s novels, with their encyclopaedic

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range of allusiveness, straddle multiple cultures, texts and languages. In his fiction disparate worlds, East and West, meet and form a multidimensional mosaic composed of intermingling cultural elements. An in-depth study of Rushdie’s fiction, particularly when one reads his novels in chronological order, reveals that over the course of time the focus shifts from presenting postcolonial India in Midnight’s Children and bitter commentary in the magical realist mode on the post-Partition Pakistan in Shame, to the observation of the Western postmodern condition and an emphasis on linguistic experiment. This is clearly visible in the allusion and pun-oriented The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, as these later novels have become more centred on the problems of linguistic ambiguity and experimentation, cultural syncretism and heterogeneity. Generally, the use of word games in Rushdie’s novels is crucial to the overall vision of the world proclaimed by his fiction, as one of its prime concerns is to stress the postmodern relativity and instability of the world around us, at the same time observing its cultural heterogeneity resulting from constant collision of East and West. Therefore, the hybridity resulting from a collision of cultures and the unlimited potential of playing with language which destabilizes and relativizes its conventions and habits, emphasize the postmodern aspect of the writer’s oeuvre. The constant manipulation of the literal meanings of words and phrases, multiplying their significance, echoing allusions and implications connected with them, surprising readers with new interpretations while subverting the hitherto definitions of seemingly known phenomena, seem to reveal the essence of Rushdie’s writing. In Rushdie’s novels worlds and cultures engage in a process of constant collision and out of this collision new hybrid values are created and plays on words and neologisms are invented. His linguistic experimentation involves not only puns operating within the boundaries of the English language, but the writer undertakes a more demanding task and creates puns that function interlingually, between English and Latin or between English and local Indian languages. There are several puns and allusions that call attention to the postcoloniality of the writer’s novels by highlighting the correlations between English and indigenous Indian languages and playing with the dialogic relation, which often produces an alienating effect for the Western reader and privileges the Eastern cultural context. Sanga (2001: 149) observes: The puns and allusions whose meanings are especially connected to Indian languages, often exude a self-consciously esoteric quality that is meant to distance the Western reader; what is suggestive in the act of distancing is

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the notion of fissure, of a rupture that momentarily disengages the nonIndian reader, thereby marking the text as critically and idiosyncratically Indian.

Therefore, Rushdie’s postcolonial use of the English language, which he suggestively explains in his 1982 New York Times article “The Empire Writes Back With a Vengeance,” a truly postcolonial manifesto, accentuates the politically entrenched aspect of his writing.

Salman Rushdie as a Postcolonial Writer In his essay “In Good Faith” from Imaginary Homelands (Rushdie 1992: 393–394) the writer admits that throughout his life he has attempted literary renewal because of his “determination to create a literary language and literary forms in which the experience of formerly colonised, stilldisadvantaged peoples mind find full expression.” Rushdie articulates contradictions of the postcolonial individual because, just like other postcolonial writers, he seeks possible ways of expressing his subversion of the stereotypical image of the otherness sustained by the colonial cultural and political ideologies and their dominating discourse of the centre. His fiction remains in a constant dialogue or confrontation with the European centre. In this respect a special emphasis should be put on Rushdie’s handling of language to represent the way English is used by Indian people, where “the ruled take over the language of their former rulers” (Langeland 1996: 17). Rushdie’s writing serves the purpose of redefinition and appropriation perfectly. His attempt is to achieve a self-reflexive and organic “english” and he succeeds in doing so by decolonizing the English language and challenging its ability to carry the weight of Indian postcolonial experience. What seems to me to be happening is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it—assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers. (Rushdie 1992: 64)

In his article devoted entirely to the idiosyncrasies of Rushdie’s language, Rustom Bharucha (1994: 160) gives an exceptionally accurate metaphor for this phenomenon and claims that Rushdie’s language “is a colossus choked with words, Angrezi for most part [. . .] but Angrezi in a very unusual way. It is almost as if the Queen’s English has been ‘chutnified,’ fried in sizzling ghee, and dipped in curry.”

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By means of linguistic experiments a writer is able to decolonize the language of the centre and re-inscribe it with various local influences. Rushdie expresses his resistance to the hegemonic dominance of English in Imaginary Homelands: One of the changes has to do with the attitudes towards the use of English. Many have referred to the argument about the appropriateness of this language to Indian themes. And I hope all of us share the view that we can’t simply use the language in the way the British did; that it needs remaking for our own purposes. Those of us who do use English do so in spite of our ambiguity towards it, or perhaps because of that, perhaps because we can find in that linguistic struggle a reflection of other struggles taking place in the real world, struggles between the cultures within ourselves and the influences at work upon our societies. To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free. (Rushdie 1992: 17)

Rushdie questions all notions of an essential linguistic identity. Instead, his writing celebrates difference, uncertainty and questioning. Writing in English seems almost an imperative for the writer because through the appropriation of English, he is able to state what it means to be a member of an ex-colonized community and what it means to live as a migrant in the country of the colonizer. Moreover, English also bridges all the cultures discussed by Rushdie in his novels. The diversity and mongrelization of Rushdie’s language is best summarized by Gorra: Rushdie makes English prose an omnium gatherum of whatever seems to work, sprinkled with bits of Urdu, eclectic enough even to accommodate cliché, unbound by any grammatical straitjacket. The very structure of the sentence seems to open possibilities, to re-cut the borrowed clothes of English until they’ve become those of that new Indian language Angrezi. And while the sound of that new name onomatopoeically evokes the anger implicit in having to use a language, ‘marred by the accumulated detritus of it’s owner’s unrepented past’, it also transforms that bitterness into laughter; the master’s tongue appropriated for one’s own subversive purposes. (Gorra 1999: 193)

Acknowledging the skilfulness of Rushdie’s postmodern writing techniques and his commitment to the importance of postcolonial varieties of English, his fiction gains another interpretative aspect when set in the context of the globalising world and literature. On the one hand, despite his de-colonized use of the language of the Empire, Rushdie is condemned by the Islamic postcolonial world for acting as a “chamcha.” The term is explained with reference to Saladin

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from The Satanic Verses as “someone who sucks up to powerful people, a yes-man, a sycophant [. . .] The Empire would not have lasted a week without such collaborators among the colonized people” (Rushdie 1998: 195). Some Eastern critics denounce the author for writing from within the centre and for using the language of the oppressor and thus collaborating with the colonizer. The writer notes critical assaults made on him and other contemporary Indian writers working in English and states that the “practitioners” of this newly emerging literature are denigrated for being too upper-middle-class; for lacking diversity in their choice of themes and techniques; for being less popular in India than outside India; for possessing inflated reputations on account of the international power of the English language, and of the ability of Western critics and publishers to impose their cultural standards on the East; for living in many cases outside India; for being deracinated to the point where their work lacks spiritual dimension essential for a “true” understanding of the soul of India; for being insufficiently grounded in the ancient literary traditions of India; for being the literary equivalent of MTV culture, or of globalizing coca-colonization. Leaving aside the more general theoretical disputes over the possible correlation between postmodernism and postcolonialism, one should observe that, perceived from this angle, Rushdie’s exploitation of postmodern narrative techniques gives him a somewhat privileged position of a Western writer. What is more, when scrutinized deeply, Rushdie’s embrace of postmodernism seems to a certain extent totally overworked. The title of this essay purposely refers to the aspects of postmodernism in Rushdie’s writing as “postmodern fireworks” because the writer seems to have exhausted this writing convention. In his novels one may find a set of much tried-and-tested literary devices, strategies and techniques, which are, to put it bluntly, quite predictable in the course of reading his novels. Actually, the part of the title of my essay—the strange case of Salman R.—which deliberately verges on the banal and the clichéd, serves to demonstrate this annoying convention, the use of intertextual allusions, very often travestied, sometimes in a purposely shocking way, or blatantly paradoxical or punning, the use or even overuse of paradoxes or selfreferential, metafictional devices. An example of overusing this writing convention may be, for instance, the writer’s putting his own name, Rushdie, in the attendance list in Saleem Sinai’s class in Midnight’s Children. One may conclude that this is just an inside joke of Rushdie’s, a postmodern knowing wink at the readers, whose function is to reveal the conventionality and/or (meta)fictionality of his writing, but to a certain

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degree it also signals the cynicism of the writer and undermines the credibility of the novels. Another claim that has been put forward in reference to Rushdie’s position in the globalizing literary world concerns his celebrity status. There are critical voices maintaining that while Rushdie’s writing talent has declined over the past decade, his celebrity certainly has not. The writer is in tabloids, he is the guest of Jay Leno’s and Craig Ferguson’s popular TV shows (where he does not talk of politics and he hardly talks of literature but instead makes jokes about sex, his knighthood and female friends). He is in Scarlett Johansson’s music video where he nuzzles her neck. He additionally plays himself, the very famous writer, in the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary. As a result, the image of Rushdie one gets from the media is his complete and non-ironic embrace of the West and its capitalistic culture. One may ask the question again, “Is it accidental or is it actually the “hybridity” his novels espouse?” (Dieter 2010). To substantiate these allegations, Patricia Cohen’s (2008) ironical observation in the review of Rushdie’s latest novel The Enchantress of Florence, published in the New York Times, how “he is only hunted by cameras seems worth considering.” Rushdie’s postcolonial valorization of the local Indian cultural difference had also given rise to a critical dispute, which was influenced by the publication of Graham Huggan’s book The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. In this critical study the author proposes a term “Indian Chic” (Huggan 2001: 59) to denote the act of presenting the cultural differences of India by Indian writers as a fetish. By parading the exotic otherness of the Indian subcontinent to metropolitan audiences, writers like Rushdie take part in the process of the “industry of postcoloniality,” which seems almost an Orientalizing practice if one assumes Edward Said’s perspective. Therefore, Rushdie’s metaphor of “chutnification,” used repeatedly in Midnight’s Children and exploited in his subsequent novels and emblematic for the writer’s fiction, is criticized in the global literary world for becoming commodified and sold out to the West as a new, ready-made postcolonial product manufactured by the international star Salman Rushdie has become. Bearing in mind the fact that in contemporary postcolonial studies there has been a shift from the polarity of postcolonial dialogue, from the tendency to present postcolonial writing in the context of the opposition between the colonised and the colonizer, the peripheries and the centre, towards new problematics of the globalized world, Rushdie’s fiction acquires new significance. Postcolonial literature, or as Rushdie himself calls it “post-postcolonial literature,” approached from this angle provides

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a critical reflection and discussion on the progressing globalization. Dorota Koáodziejczyk observes that this “new postcolonial writing, the critical cosmopolitan writing” (Koáodziejczyk 2008: 256–257) retains the essence of postcoloniality, but at the same time creates the space of critical contemplation on the dynamics of the contemporary condition, global culture and globalization. This new critical cosmopolitan writing depicts a “contemporary nomadic diaspora which is in constant movement between the continents and countries and incorporates notions of the constant hybridization, mixing and productive merging of languages, cultures, styles, genres, literary modes and conventions” (Koáodziejczyk 2007: 33– 34), so typical of Rushdie’s fiction. The symbol of this new global diaspora is homelessness and migrancy. And, therefore, in this sense, Rushdie’s emphasis on the figure of a migrant is so powerful and so relevant.

Salman Rushdie as a Migrant Writer The writer understands the status of a migrant as a general metaphor relevant to an overall human experience: migration offers us one of the richest metaphors of our age. The very word metaphor, with its roots in the Greek words for bearing across, describes a sort of migration, the migration of ideas into images. Migrants—borne across humans—are metaphorical beings in their very essence; and migration, seen as a metaphor, is everywhere around us. (Rushdie 1992: 278)

In Imaginary Homelands Rushdie offers a somewhat simplistic, yet ingenious, explanation of the important status the figure of a migrant claims. As a migrant is denied “roots, language and social norms,” determinants perceived to condition a human being, he must “find new ways of describing himself, new ways of being human” (Rushdie 1992: 278). “We all cross frontiers” even if they are not geographic, says Rushdie, “and in that sense we are all migrant peoples” (Rushdie 1992: 279). This idea of crossing boundaries is manifested in Rushdie’s use of language, when, in a truly innovative and challenging manner, he juxtaposes the old and the new by mixing disparate cultural elements, by means of his intertextuality, which rewrites and subverts literary traditions and, also, in his word games and neologisms that probe and question the immediate meanings of words and phrases and defy linguistic convention. This conviction is demonstrated also by the author’s obsessive use of the recurrent motifs of flight, of crossing boundaries and “stepping across

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lines” as well as his fascination with phenomena that cause cultures to cross-pollinate: “airplane travel (and hijackings), movies, pop music, love affairs that cross borders of many sorts, telephones, TV, and writing itself” (Edmundson 1989: 70). Reading Rushdie in the context of postmodern theory allows us to better comprehend his vision of a migrant condition characterized by “the experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis.” Rushdie’s migrant position may be interpreted as postmodern, as it reveals identity as a construct. The writer rejects a politics of identity that attempts to purify everything: countries, religions, languages, peoples, as acts leading to separatism and in turn result in violence. His fiction challenges any entrenched beliefs, deconstructs the prevailing myths of purity and homogeneity and questions any essentialist values, whether Eastern or Western—“identity,” “nationalism” and “religion”—that are based on binary oppositions such as Us/Them, East/West and secular/religious in an attempt to promote difference, plurality and hybridity. The experience of rootlessness, of homelessness, so close to a migrant, results in fragmented, multifaceted, multicultural selves that render a truly postmodern subversion of homogeneity of the subject and offer a fragmentary collage of truths and convictions: “a human being, inside himself, is anything but a whole, anything but homogeneous; all kinds of everywhichthing are jumbled up inside him, and he is one person one minute and another the next” (Rushdie 1995: 236). The migrant condition reflecting the controlling idea for the whole of Rushdie’s fiction is also voiced by the author with reference to The Satanic Verses: If The Satanic Verses is anything, it is a migrant’s eye view of the world. It is written from the very experience of uprooting, disjuncture and metamorphosis (slow or rapid, painful or pleasurable) that is the migrant condition, and from which, I believe, can be derived a metaphor for all humanity. Standing at the centre of the novel is a group of characters most of whom are British Muslims, or not particularly religious persons of Muslim background, struggling with just the sort of great problems that have arisen to surround the book, problems of hybridization and ghettoization, of reconciling the old and the new. Those who oppose the novel most vociferously today are of the opinion that intermingling with a different culture will inevitably weaken and ruin their own. I am of the opposite opinion. The Satanic Verses celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotchpotch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world.

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It is the great possibility that mass migration gives the world, and I have tried to embrace it. It is a love-song to our mongrel selves. (Rushdie 1992: 394)

In self-referential passages in Shame the narrator, Rushdie’s alter ego, voices belief in the creative productiveness of migration. By constant crossing frontiers, a migrant writer encounters a novel experience and discovers new ways of expression. A feeling of split identity and constant unsteadiness, of “straddling two cultures and falling between two stools” (Rushdie 1992: 15), identified by Rushdie in a metaphor of “ambiguous and shifting ground” beneath the feet of the community of displaced writers, offers numerous creative possibilities and cannot be perceived as “an infertile territory for a writer to occupy” (Rushdie 1992: 15). Rushdie, who shares the experience of migration, observes that if the aim of literature may be identified as an effort to find new angles at which to enter reality, then, “once again our distance, our long geographical perspective, may provide us with such angles” (Rushdie 1992: 15). Hence, the sense of belonging fully nowhere results in the possibility of experiencing (artistic) freedom: I, too, know something of this immigrant business. I am an emigrant from one country (India) and a newcomer in two (England, where I live, and Pakistan, to which my family moved against my will). And I have a theory that the resentments we mohajirs engender have something to do with our conquest of the force of gravity. We have performed the act of which all men anciently dream, the thing for which they envy the birds; that is to say, we have flown. I am comparing gravity with belonging. Both phenomena observably exist: my feet stay on the ground, and I have never been angrier than I was on the day my father told me he had sold my childhood home in Bombay. But neither is understood. We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places [. . .] To fly and to flee: both are ways of seeking freedom [. . .] (Rushdie 1983: 85–86)

Conclusion Salman Rushdie, “a writer of dialogue of cultures, a writer of meetings” (Jarniewicz 2000: 165) and a migrant who is never fully at home anywhere, expresses a determined refusal to pigeonhole his fiction in terms of the binary East/West opposition and strongly opposes the notion of being a writer “contained inside a passport” (Rushdie 1992: 67).

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He also voices discomfort with being placed in any single category of literary modes and instead emphasizes the eclectic character of his writing. It seems appropriate, therefore, to refrain from classifying Rushdie as solely “an Indian writer” or “a British writer” or “a Third World writer” and instead attempt to acknowledge his position as just a writer from his beloved city Bombay. Rushdie’s confession that he is just “a boy from Bombay” (Rushdie 1996: 350) is truly his “postcolonial vengeance,” an ironic response to those who criticize him from both worlds, the East and the West.

References Baker, S. 2001. “‘You Must Remember This’: Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35.1: 43–54. Bharucha, R. 1994. “Rushdie’s Whale.” In Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. M.D. Fletcher (ed.) Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Cohen, P. 2008. “Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras.” New York Times. May 25. Dieter, Scott, M. 2010. “Rushdie, American Celebrity.” [Online.] Available: http: //rushdiecourse.wordpress.com/2010/03/12/rushdieamerican-celebrity/) [30.01.2012]. Edmundson, M. 1989. “Prophet of a New Postmodernism. The Greater Challenge of Salman Rushdie.” Harper’s Magazine, December: 62–71. Fletcher, M.D. 1994. Reading Rushdie: Perspectives on the Fiction of Salman Rushdie. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi. Gorra, M. 1999. “‘This Angrezi in which I am forced to write’: On the language of Midnight’s Children.” In Critical Essays on Salman Rushdie. K.M. Booker (ed.) New York: G.K. Hall. Huggan, G. 2001. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London: Routledge. Jarniewicz, J. 2000. Lista obecnoĞci: Szkice o dwudziestowiecznej prozie brytyjskiej i irlandzkiej. PoznaĔ: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis. Koáodziejczyk, D. 2007. “Globalizacja a literatura Ğwiatowa—czy wspóáczesna powieĞü postkolonialna wyznacza kierunek nowego krytycznego kosmopolityzmu?” In Kultura Historia Globalizacja [Online.] Available://www. khg.uni.wroc.pl/files/kolodziejczykt.pdf [30.01.2012]. —. 2008. “Postkolonialny zamach stanu w literaturze.” Literatura na ĝwiecie 1-2: 241-57.

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Langeland, Agnes, Scott. 1996. “Rushdie’s Language.” English Today: The International Review of the English Language 12.1: 16–22. Rushdie, S. 1992 (1991). Imaginary Homelands. London: Granta Books. —. 1995 (1981). Midnight’s Children. London: Vintage. —. 1983. Shame. London: Jonathan Cape. —. 1998 (1988) The Satanic Verses. London: Vintage. —. 1996. The Moor’s Last Sigh. London: Vintage. Sanga, J.C. 2001. Salman Rushdie’s Postcolonial Metaphors: Migration, Translation, Hybridity, Blasphemy, and Globalization. London: Greenwood Press.

HAS POSTMODERNISM REALLY REACHED THE NATIONAL? APPROPRIATION AND INTERPRETATION IN SITA SINGS THE BLUES JUSTYNA FRUZIēSKA

ABSTRACT: The essay analyses the animated film Sita Sings the Blues, which simultaneously tells the story of an American woman abandoned by her husband and the narrative of Sita, the wife of the Hindu god Rama, inspired by the Ramayana. As Sita’s author is the American Nina Paley, it is interesting to see how her interpretation of Hindu mythology has raised doubt as to whether or not a non-Indian artist is should use and appropriate Hindu culture by giving it contemporary American references. KEY WORDS: Sita Sings the Blues, Ramayana, post-nationalism, animated film.

Introduction One might think that in the era of postmodernism, concepts such as “nation” or “the national” have already been permanently deconstructed. As Jeff Spinner-Halev claims, our notion of belonging to a particular state is no longer connected to sharing the same background with other members of one’s nation but is rather based on a social contract, and “anyone who is willing to obey the laws of the state, which in turn are based on consent of citizens, can be a member of the state” (Spinner-Halev 2008: 604). Thus, the idea of national identity seems very arbitrary and easily gives way to the concept of post-nationalism, according to which “national identity is a political identity, sustained by political institutions for political purposes” (Spinner-Halev 2008: 605). In the post-national world identity is a question of convention or even choice, which agrees with the “liberal cosmopolitan understanding of citizenship (where rights and civic values take precedence [over the sense of community—J.F.])” (Keating 2009: 140).

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There are several reasons for the emergence of post-nationalism. Firstly, postmodernism has rejected a stable and authoritative vision of national identity, drawing upon “anti-essentialist theories of the performative, dialogical and porous nature of all cultural identities” (Berendt, quoted in Hurley 2009: 107). Secondly, globalization itself made the idea of fixed nationality somewhat suspect. Instead, it has offered all shades of identity mixtures, ranging from “hegemonic westernization” to “postmodern diversity” (Wang and Yeh 2005: 176), with Homi Bhabha’s hybridity (where all elements of cultural exchange interact and influence each other) somewhere in the middle of this continuum (Papastergiadis 2000: 170). What all these concepts have in common is the fact that if the concept of the national is to be sustained, it must be radically redefined to accommodate change brought about by the globalized reality. This is indeed what post-nationalism postulates, being more of a prescriptive than a descriptive idea. It finds its advocates not only among those who believe it to be a more correct vision of the reality of the twenty-first century, but also among political theorists who, after Western experiences of Nazism in the twentieth century, are quite distrustful of the idea of nationalism (Spinner-Halev 2008: 605). As post-nationalism is still at the level of an academic postulate, it would seem logical to expect that it should be realized in the sphere of culture sooner than in everyday life. However, it seems that post-nationalism is not yet a concept that would inform contemporary reception of cultural works, but rather that it still remains within the domain of pure theory.

Sita Sings the Blues An interesting example of how the audience and critics view the national with regard to culture is the American animated film Sita Sings the Blues (2009). It has been created single-handedly by Nina Paley, a Jewish-American cartoonist, known for her comic strips “Nina’s Adventures” or “Fluff.” Paley created the film after her husband, away on a contract in India, terminated his relationship with her via email. A visit to India and the subsequent breakup resulted in her getting acquainted with, and then rethinking, the Ramayana, an ancient Hindu epic which tells the story of the god Rama. In the narrative, Rama’s beautiful and chaste wife Sita gets abducted by Ravana, the king of Lanka. Rama saves her from the evil king, but after Sita gets pregnant, he begins to doubt her purity and, worried about his subjects’ gossiping nature, sends her away to the forest. Sita gives birth to Lavana and Kusha, who are taught to recite

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the story of the Ramayana, and while Rama learns that they are his legitimate sons, Sita asks the Earth to take her back into her womb. In the film, Paley simultaneously tells both stories: of her contemporary marital crisis and of what she sees as Sita’s unjustified mistreatment by her husband. What connects both narratives are the original songs by a 1920s American blues singer, Annette Hanshaw, which speak of a woman being blindly in love and abandoned by her beloved. On all three levels Paley uses three distinct graphic styles: a “painterly” Indian-stylized one for the story of Sita, a sketchy style for the contemporary story of Nina, and flash animation for parts where a sex bomb-like Sita sings Hanshaw’s jazz and blues songs. The Ramayana story is narrated by Paley’s three Indian friends, Manish Acharya, Bhavna and Aseem Chhabra, represented in the film as Indonesian shadow puppets, who recorded at her studio their discussion about what they remembered from the epic. The result is an improvised, rather chaotic and highly unreliable narration, which shows how the story is alive, being recounted by everyone in a slightly different version. What Paley does is add her own variant to the ones remembered by her Indian friends. The narrators, purposely speaking with Indian accents (Di Justo 2008), try to recollect basic information, such as when the story of Rama happens, how many wives and sons Rama’s father had and what their names were. They show how contemporary their reading of the Ramayana is: they interpret the epic not for its religious, but rather psychological dimension. When Sita is captured by Ravana, and Rama sends the ape-like god Hanuman to save her, she refuses to go with the messenger and decides to wait for Rama himself. The narrators wonder why she risked her own life and caused the slaughter of two armies; whether she “didn’t trust the monkey,” or wanted to glorify Rama as her saviour. Also, when the pregnant Sita lives in the forest and prays every day to Rama, the narrators become frustrated with her passivity and the fact that she still loves a man who treated her so badly. They refer to their everyday life experience: If you had a girlfriend who was being treated really badly, by like her ex or her current boyfriend and she kept saying, “no, every day I’m gonna make sure I cook for him and send him a hot lunch at noon,” aren’t you going to be like, “listen he doesn’t like you and talk to you [. . .] you’ve got to move on. Something’s wrong.” OK?

There is no discussion of the possible spiritual meaning of the story; instead, Sita’s behaviour is interpreted psychologically like that of a character of a book.

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It is not only the narrators’ discussion, but also Paley’s graphic choices that make her version of the story very contemporary and transcultural. When the shadow puppets recount the fact that a wife of Rama’s father took care of the king when he was sick, she is depicted in a blatantly sexual nurse outfit. When Sita’s possible impurity is discussed, she is shown with warning signs of radioactivity and a label saying “biohazard infectious waste.” The description of Ravana as a learned man is accompanied by his picture in an American university outfit; being an evil king he gets devil’s horns, and the righteous Rama has for a while a halo and the wings of an angel. This not only appeals to the contemporary reader’s imagination but also translates a foreign religious story into the language of the more familiar Christianity. Paley’s version uses also references to popular culture. When Rama and Sita finally meet after her captivity, their reunion is shown in slow motion with romantic music in the background, just like in Hollywood films. When Rama slaughters the rakshasa daemons, their blood forms fountains reminiscent of the aesthetics of Tarantino’s Kill Bill or Japanese manga. Perhaps the most daring play with convention is a three-minute intermission, in which the viewers see a theatre curtain, and the film’s characters behave like actors: Sita runs to the bathroom, Rama has a friendly chat with Ravana who drinks Coke with all of his ten heads, and the daemons stroll along with the hermits eating popcorn. It is unequivocal that Paley’s version is not only contemporised, but also depicts the story from a feminine perspective, even though the author herself does not subscribe to the feminist agenda (Melwani 2010). She changes the main focus of the story from Rama’s adventures to those of Sita, which makes some critics call the film the Sitayana (Melwani 2010). Just as the New-York based Nina is shown as a loving wife who obediently gets up early in the morning to feed the cat but is abandoned by her ungrateful husband, Sita is a perfect wife who first goes with Rama into exile when he is banished by his own father, and then never questions his doubts about her purity but willingly undergoes a trial by fire. She tells Rama “I live only for you,” and he responds by literally kicking her out of the palace when she is pregnant. She allows her sons to be raised in a deep sense of devotion to Rama, and the sage Valmiki teaches them a hymn to Rama, which in Paley’s version is very ironic: Rama’s great, Rama’s good, Rama does what Rama should. Rama’s just, Rama’s right, Rama is our guiding light. Perfect man, perfect son,

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Rama’s loved by everyone. Always right, never wrong, We praise Rama in this song. Sing his love, sing his praise, Rama set his wife ablaze. Got her home, kicked her out, To allay his people’s doubt. Rama’s wise, Rama’s just, Rama does what Rama must. Duty first, Sita last, Rama’s reign is unsurpassed!

The irony of this moment serves as a turning point in the story. When Rama demands of Sita another trial to prove her purity, she asks Mother Earth to take her back into her womb, tired of constant suspicions despite her righteousness. In this moment Rama realizes what he has done and he sheds a tear of regret, but it is too late. The ending of the film parallels its beginning: in the opening scene, we could see the goddess Lakshmi (whose avatar is Sita) massaging the feet of her husband Vishnu (whose avatar is Rama); in the closing one, the roles are reversed. In Paley’s version, the story of Sita’s abuse turns into an empowering narrative of a just woman having the last word. On the one hand, Paley’s use of irony may be seen as expressing criticism of the patriarchal Hindu culture: when king Ravana’s evil sister wants to persuade him to capture Sita, she says: “Dear brother Ravana, have you seen Rama’s wife Sita? She is the most beautiful woman in the world. Her skin is fair like the lotus blossom, her eyes are like lotus pools, her hands are like, ehm…, lotuses, her breasts like big, round, firm, juicy lotuses!” This ridicules the Indian convention of describing Sita and the fact that her greatest asset seems to be her beauty. On the other hand, the fact that Paley selected the Ramayana as symbolic of her personal experiences, and that she decided to inscribe her own suffering into the Hindu tradition can be seen as an immense tribute to the culture she was not born into, but chose because of felt affinities. What is more, in Sita Sings the Blues the audience never get the feeling that it is a portrayal of the Other; that Paley takes a stand for or against Hindus or their culture. The fact that the story of Nina and the one of Sita parallel each other, and are shown not one after the other but intertwined, suggests that the problem the film speaks of is not culture-specific. Rather, relationships between men and women all over the world encounter the same obstacles. In this way Paley’s vision seems to be universalizing, which would ask for her work to be read on a post-national level. If this version of the

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Ramayana shows Hindus as patriarchal and Hindu women (represented by Sita) as overly submissive, twentieth-century century America is not depicted in a very different way. It could be even stated that these are Hanshaw’s lyrics put in Sita’s mouth that make her portrayal so ironic so the most patriarchal element in the film comes not from the Indian, but from the American tradition. The blues Sita sings are all about glorifying the man she loves and diminishing herself: “I know he loves me, Heaven knows why / And when he tells me he can’t live without me/What wouldn’t I do for that man.” She feels she does not deserve the love she gets and should sacrifice everything for her beloved, naming quite explicitly the role which she enjoys so much: “I never knew how good it was to be/ A slave to one who means the world to me.” Even though she knows that “He’s not an angel or saint” she demands of herself much more than of him, swearing: “I’ll be so true to him he’ll never doubt me” and “show me the ring and I’ll jump right through.” The woman in Annette Hanshaw’s songs seems to be a mixture of a self-denying martyr, a voluntary slave, and a defenceless child: “Oh when he lets me lean my weary head on his shoulder/ I close my eyes right there and wish I never grow older.” In her idea of love there is no room for partnership; it does not even have to be reciprocated, as she expects her beloved to do nothing but tolerate her suffocating, ivy-like attachment to him, which sounds as much like a declaration of love as a menace: “I’ll never leave him alone/ I’ll make his troubles my own.” The man repays her with “treating her coldly,” but she cannot help her submissiveness: “I don’t know why/ I stay home each night / When you say you’ll phone/ You don’t and I’m left alone./ Singing the blues and sighin’.” She is well aware of his lack of respect for her and even a hint of sadism (“It must be great fun to be mean to me”), she acknowledges that “Everyone says I’m a fool” but despite this—or perhaps because of this— she still declares: “Sweetheart I love you / Think the world of you.” When the man finally leaves her, the situation does not remind us of a conscious break-up of two partners who decide to go their separate ways, but sounds rather like abandoning a useless object or a pet: “My lovin’ daddy left his baby again / Said he’d come back but he forgot to say when.” The woman remains stupefied, still waiting for him to come back: “Got up this morning, along about dawn / Without a warning, I found he was gone / Why should he do it, how could he do it/He never done it before.” Even if she feels mistreated (“Don’t know any reason why he treats me so poorly/What have I gone and done?”) it does not weaken her love: “My sweet man, I love him so / So he’s mean as can be.” The woman from Hanshaw’s songs appears to be completely blind, and Paley

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makes it into a diagnosis of female love in general, linking the blues to her own story and putting the songs in Sita’s mouth.

A Post-Nationalist Reception of the Film? Unsurprisingly, Paley has been criticized by the Hindu extreme right for her contemporaneous and, in their view, disrespectful version of the epic. One can even sign a petition online1 demanding the film be banned from having free distribution via the Internet (it can be downloaded freely under Creative Commons License). The authors of the petition enumerate fifteen points in which Paley offends their religious feelings and is unfaithful to the original story. However, apart from those who reacted negatively for religious reasons, there is a more interesting category of viewers whose dissatisfaction is motivated by their opinions about nationality. Asked in an interview whether she has received any negative feedback, Paley replies: “Much less negative than positive feedback, but the negative things are more notable. And I get it both from the far right and the far left” (Di Justo 2008). She also diagnoses the leftist critics of her work who are very privileged people in academia who have reduced all the wondrous complexities of racial relations into, “White people are racist, and nonwhite people are all victims of white racism.” Without actually looking at the work, they’ve decided that any white person doing a project like this is by definition racist, and it’s an example of more neo-colonialism. (Di Justo: 2008)

The reason why Paley’s work causes controversy is that many people seem to question the fact that a non-Indian artist should be allowed to use Hindu culture by giving it contemporary American references. It seems that if Paley was from India her work would be seen as an interpretation of a story culturally “owned” by her; as she is American, what she does is seen as appropriation and abuse. One person wrote on Paley’s blog: “Have fun representing white people with your cultural appropriation and misrepresentation” (Kohn 2008). And most probably, if Paley decided to make a similar film based on American cultural myths, she would be ostracized for appropriating America to her supposedly Jewish ideology. There is no limit to refusing artists the right to interpret a culture that does not belong to them, as the sentence from Paley’s blog could be 1

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/sitasingstheblues/

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easily changed into “Have fun representing middle-class women/Jewish people/dark-haired people with your cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.” It is important to note that the idea of having religious stories presented through the medium of cartoons or comic books is not foreign to Indian culture. The most spectacular example of such a framing of Hindu mythology would be Amar Chitra Katha (“Immortal Illustrated Story”), a series of comic books (later transformed also into cartoons) created in 1967 by Anant Pai, which includes Indian folktales, epics, literary classics, mythology and biographies of important Indian figures. Pai’s idea of changing religious stories into comic books was inspired by his growing concern with young Indians’ lack of knowledge of their own cultural heritage—a TV show had revealed that Indian youth are more familiar with Greek mythology than with their own (Pritchett 1995: 76). In his representation of the stories Pai wanted to be as exact as possible (80); however, Frances W. Pritchett points to the fact that especially the Amar Chitra Katha volumes dealing with modern Indian history end up being selective and represent Pai’s own idea of his “mission” (1995: 94). Even though Pai operates through a similar mass culture medium to Paley, both works serve very different purposes: Paley never claims to be accurate in her version of the Ramayana; she does not have the educational purpose of Pai’s, and, most of all, she takes liberties at interpreting the epic without constraining herself by what religious people might think. On the other hand, Amar Chitra Katha is extremely sensitive to its religious audience—to such an extent that “whenever an issue involving Sikh characters is drafted, an expert consultant on beards is employed” (Pritchett 1995: 78). Paley’s friend involved in the making of Sita, Manish Acharya, defends Paley’s right to her version in the following way: “I think Jewish culture and Indian culture are very alike [. . .] Both are family focused, have very strong female influences and use food to show love. Having a Jewish person understand and love India was very believable to me” (Kohn 2008). The direction his defence goes into is in itself quite telling: according to Acharya, Paley has the right to interpret the Ramayana to the same extent as Indian people have, not because she is an artist and a human being who can be inspired by Hindu culture like by any other, but because she is Jewish and thus endowed with special sensibility, one would say almost semi-Indian. Hence, Acharya does not really defend the idea that culture does not belong to any specific nation; he rather decides that Paley can be trusted to have what it takes to read the Ramayana properly.

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Conclusion My magnification of Acharya’s point serves to illustrate how far our (as viewers’) thinking of the questions of nation and culture is from the idea of post-nationalism. Many critics and audience members do succumb to cultural nationalism, demonstrating their belief that only a native artist has the right to interpret his/her “national” culture. It still seems that even those who want to defend Paley hold essentialist views on culture and its nationality. If post-nationalism became reality it would be logical to expect that the boundary between appropriation and interpretation would disappear, as everyone would have the right to interpret and to contribute to the many oral versions circulating among the heirs of a given story. However, the negative reactions to Paley’s work can be seen as a hostile reaction to globalization by those who do not believe in the naturalness of Bhabha’s hybridization, but who are afraid of westernization that would eradicate all cultural difference and specificity. It is indeed difficult to decide whether Paley, taking a sacred Hindu text and not only transforming it according to her personal experience but also inserting into it American popular references, is stealing a part of India’s heritage or contributing to Indian culture. Probably much depends on the film’s future: whether it will be the only, hegemonic version of the Ramayana known to the Americans (which is probable giving its artistic perfection and appealing sense of humour) or it will refer its audience to look for more information on the epic; and whether India will defend itself against this external attack or embrace this surprising contribution to its already rich and diversified culture.

References Di Justo, P. 2008. “One-Woman Pixar’s Animated Film Premieres at Tribeca.” In Wired. [Online.] Available: http://www.wired.com/entertain ment/hollywood/news/2008/04/sita?currentPage=all [01.11.2010]. Hurley, A.W. 2009. “Postnationalism, Postmodernism and the German Discourse(s) of Weltmusik.” In New Formations 66.1: 100–117. Keating, A. 2009. “Educating Europe’s Citizens: Moving from National to Post-national Models of Educating for European Citizenship.” In Citizenship Studies 13.2: 135–151. Kohn, E. 2008. “A Filmmaker’s ‘Blues’ Prompts Traditionalists To See Red.” In The Forward. [Online.]. Available: http://www.forward.com/articles/13468/ [01.11.2010].

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Melwani, L. 2010. “Sita Sings the Blues to Rave Reviews.” In Hinduism Today Magazine. [Online.] Available: http://www.hinduismtoday.com/ modules/ smartsection/item.php?itemid=5123 2010/8/29 [01.11.2010]. Papastergiadis, N. 2000. The Turbulence of Migration: Globalization, Deterritorialization, and Hybridity. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press and Blackwell. Pritchett, Frances W. 1995. “The World of Amar Chitra Katha.” In Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia. Lawrence A. Babb and Susan S. Wadley (eds.). Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass. Spinner-Halev, J. 2008. “Democracy, Solidarity and Post-nationalism.” In Political Studies 56: 604–628. Wang, G., and Yeh, E. Yueh-yu. 2005. “Globalization and Hybridization in Cultural Products: The Cases of Mulan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 8: 175–193.

PART III FEMINISMS AND THE “POST”: PROBLEMS OF REPRESENTATION

IRIGARAY’S CRITIQUE OF THE OCULARCENTRIC PARADIGM: A POSTMODERN FEMINIST PERSPECTIVE MONIKA SOSNOWSKA

ABSTRACT: The article investigates Luce Irigaray’s critique of the ocularcentric paradigm, which has dominated Western philosophical thought since Plato. It will discuss how this ocularcentric tradition intersects with issues of sexual difference and language. It will examine the relationship between privileging of the visual in Western theories (e.g. Freud’s theory of sexual difference) and its influence on feminine subjectivity. It will demonstrate how the marginalization and cultural evaluation of other senses (e.g. touch), contributed to the eradication of the feminine from these cultural pieces of writing. KEY WORDS: ocularcentrism, feminist criticism, the senses in culture, sexual difference, subjectivity in philosophy, Irigaray, Freud, Plato.

An Introduction to the Introduction: His-story There was a man in our town, And he was wondrous wise, He jumped into a bramble bush, And scratched out both his eyes; But when he saw his eyes were out, With all his might and main, He jumped into another bush, And scratched them in again.

Even an old story for children (quoted above from Shipley (1984: 226), the culturally famous nursery rhyme, is no more than a tale of the inseparable bond between a man, wisdom and sight. Is female to male as touch is to sight—to paraphrase the question posed by Ortner (1972). Telling a woman’s story is how I try to respond to this inquiry.

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The Introduction to Her Story I cannot but initiate her story by evoking some biographical facts that changed her life. She was not born a woman, but rather, she became one— to paraphrase Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir’s wellknown quotation. She could not accept that the process of becoming a woman is culturally detrimental to the female sex. She decided to expose “the logic” of sexual difference in her writings, characterized by a critical tone, similar to the following: Within this logic, the predominance of the visual, and of the discrimination and individuation of form, is particularly foreign to female eroticism. Woman takes pleasure more from touching than from looking, and her entry into the dominant scopic economy signifies, again, her consignment to passivity: she is to be the beautiful object of contemplation. (Irigaray 1985a: 26)

She was so determined to lay bare the invisible fabric of cultural inequalities that she risked her academic career as Jacques Lacan’s follower (and admirer). How different would her story be if she was a male student of Lacan, the heir to the throne of psychoanalysis? Would she still be banished for insubordination from his “court” (Lacan terminated her academic career under his protection) at the University of Paris? Would her rebuttal to Lacan’s ocular phallogocentric theory have ever resulted in counter-theory without her “feminine eye” sensitive to tactile cultural practices and tangible phenomena? Luce Irigaray is one of the postmodern feminist thinkers, to whom the expression “a speculator” might unquestionably refer. There are a few reasons for this labelling, but all of them are connected with the root-word “speculate.” One of the definitions indicates that it means to “meditate” or “think,” which is connected with an activity of the mind. Another explanation suggests that it is synonymous with “hypothesize” or “theorize,” which also involves an intellectual activity. According to Jay (1994: 29), the word “speculate” is partly entangled with the concept of vision. He refers to the Greek differentiation between speculation understood as seeing with the mind’s eye, and seeing with the bodily eyes, which signifies observation. Jay reminds us that ancient Greek philosophers almost wrote eulogies on vision, although they were also suspicious of its illusionist capacities. A case in point is provided by Plato’s praise of vision, which after a textual scrutiny of his works, signals an ambivalent attitude towards sight.

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To prove Plato’s ambiguity in regard to the power of the eyes, Jay contends the following: For in his philosophy, “vision” seems to have meant only that of the inner eye of the mind; in fact Plato often expressed severe reservations about the reliability of the two eyes of normal perception. We see through the eyes, he insisted, not with them. [emphasis in the original] (1994: 27)

Such a distinction privileges speculation over observation, yet simultaneously it favours male usage of the sense of vision. Not only does speculation become the highest form of (self)perception, but it is also traditionally circumscribed the male sphere of action. Thus a speculator is a man who meditates on a given subject or constructs a theory with the power of his mind’s eye. Interestingly enough the term “mind’s eye” did not only follow the philosophical school of thought, since it became sidetracked by the aesthetic, scientific, medical and literary arena. Such a departure of the “wandering eye” (analogous to an ancient concept of a wandering womb, responsible for female hysteria and thus uncontrollable behaviour or movements of the body) must have resulted in “hysteric” movements within the body of human perception of the world. Although the metaphor “mind’s eye” could be identified both in ancient and medieval texts, its presence only signalled the approaching fascination with the imaginative potential of (male) visual perception, especially in the Renaissance; the fascination that manifests itself in the development of fine arts, scientific inventions, medical knowledge and continually in philosophical concepts. Yet, to my mind, only in literature may one find all crucial aspects belonging to a multi-sided subject called vision. I shall refer to Hamlet as the case in point, not only due to its fame and mesmerizing qualities, but primarily because this drama heralds the transition in conceptualization of the body/mind problem in the Renaissance period, emphasizing the forthcoming dualism of vision.

What Does Shakespeare Have in Common with Western Duality of Vision? The expression “mind’s eye” appears twice in Shakespeare’s most interpreted drama. It is Horatio who introduces the term as he comments on the ghost’s materialization at the beginning of the play: “A mote is to trouble the mind’s eye” (1.1.111.). The second usage belongs to Hamlet when he admits to seeing his dead father in his mind’s eye. Hamlet’s father is alive in the protagonist’s wild imagination, imbibing all

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stimulating visual impressions. The Prince’s (un)natural bent of the mind is to think. Not incidentally has Hamlet become the symbol of speculative activity of intellect. According to Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, the editors of The Arden Shakespeare Hamlet (2006: 159), Shakespeare’s usage of the “eye-minded” phrase is the first ever recorded by Oxford English Dictionary. Hamlet the speculator is the chief literary model of the respectable Western mode of perceiving, that is obviously with the mind’s eye. Seeing as expressed by the powerful metaphor “the mind’s eye” suggests that visual perception cannot be confined to the organ of sight. The activity of the mind attempts to intercept the eye for its own solitary (or even solipsistic) uses, that is for mental purposes. That is exactly what Hamlet indulges in and even devotes himself to, especially in his soliloquies. Hamlet, the tragedy, serves as another prototype; a prototype of early modern drama in which one of the most pivotal “cultural splittings” within the sensory field of vision occurred. Particularly the “splitting of the eye” (my own expression), might be noticed if one reads (as I do) between the lines. This “splitting of the eye” between the mind and the body influences the way visual perception exists in (dis)embodied terms. Connected in part to the material dimension of the self, the eye is forced to share its existence with the incorporeal ego. The division of the eye lies behind the pivotal dualistic foundations of Western culture such as mind/body, knowledge/ feeling and reaching even further, it becomes responsible for the subjectobject position. In my opinion, what Shakespeare presents in his wordiest play, is a world where early modern subjectivity emerges. He lays the foundations for the Western “divided self,” not so long before Cartesian dualism of body/mind. The eye as flesh had to be tamed and investigated by the higher form of sight, that is the mind’s eye. The scopic economy in the play appropriates vision for the purposes of disembodied thinking, objectifying and subordinating the “corporeal.” In Hamlet male visual perception is represented by such attributes as: the privileged source of information, having power to investigate and speculate, the capacity for apprehension, reliability as eye-witness, being active as participant. Apart from Shakespeare’s anticipation of the future shape of the speculative tendency within Western culture, other manifestations of ocularcentric inclinations are worth mentioning. As early modern times developed into modern times, so did the early modern visual culture enter its modern phase. This evolution was accompanied by such “visual evidence” as: the rise of modern science and its stress on visually oriented

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method of conducting research; the emergence of a disciplined society remaining under invisible control of an elaborate system of surveillance; the development of a medical system mostly relying on “ocular proof,” especially new optical concepts of madness; the expansion of Gutenberg revolution that contributed to an increase in the number of literate people; the transformation within theatre—the introduction of the proscenium and an increasing dependence on the visual, e.g. the significance of theatrical scenery; the popularity of entertaining spectacles like freak shows; the beautification of the body connected with attentiveness to the appearances and the extension of the embellished and enhanced body in form of fashion. The abovementioned symptoms of early modern and modern developments of ocularcentrism cannot be separated from philosophical discourse. All philosophical endeavours by male speculators, have led them to create theories, from which a coherent, rational and singular (male) subject emerged. This subjectivity not only establishes visual foundations of Western ontology, buy it has also monopolized the act of speculation by men. If a woman becomes a speculator, as Irigaray does, she inevitably becomes someone, who exercises the mind, yet also enters the “forbidden sphere.”

Speculating Like a Woman: against the Grain and against Freud Through her critical philosophical engagement, Irigaray speculates in two above-mentioned senses of this word. Furthermore, her method of speculation reveals that she plays with the root-word and its variations, among which the word “speculum” is being paid much attention. To theorize and criticize, Irigaray exploits different meanings of a special optical tool “a speculum” which also becomes the title word of her work Speculum of the Other Woman (1985). Using this multifunctional instrument, being both a gynaecological device for dilating bodily interiors or a mirror for use as an optical instrument, she “is turning philosophy against itself to show what it says (or more precisely does not say) about sexual difference—the technique borrowed from psychoanalysis, a symptomatic listening” (Elliot and Ray 2003: 171). Irigaray questions not only the privileging of the visible but that of the male dominance within this sensory field. Irigaray offers a new “sensory order” as an alternative to the dominant scopic economy, which marginalizes woman’s existence within Western culture. In this article I investigate Irigaray’s critique of the ocularcentric paradigm, which dominated

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Western philosophical thought since Plato. I discuss how this ocularcentric tradition intersects with issues of sexual difference and language. I also examine the relationship between privileging of the visual in Western theories, especially evident in Freud’s theory of sexual difference, and its influence on feminine subjectivity. Meanwhile I try to demonstrate how the marginalization and cultural evaluation of other senses (e.g. touch), contributed to the elimination of the feminine from these cultural pieces of writing, especially before the emergence of postmodern times. In her critical attempts to unpack the Western concepts of visuallygrounded subjectivity, Irigaray takes certain philosophical texts as a point of departure. For this postmodern thinker, who makes a critical journey through rudimental theories of the self, particularly Freudianism with its complex and developed concept of sexual difference, becomes very useful for her speculative analysis. Freud’s theory of sexual difference constitutes the culmination of the patriarchal point of view. It is expressed through the philosophical language that abounds in visual metaphors. By paying attention to a dangerous and simultaneously “sensual” relation between the recognition of sexual difference and visual language, Irigaray aims at “psychoanalyzing” the father of psychoanalysis. As the subversive speculator, she reveals the naked truth about woman’s inferior status in Western discourse. According to Joanna Bator, who writes on the subject of feminism, psychoanalysis and postmodernism, Irigaray notices that philosophy speaks with the words of a masculine subject and looks with an eye of Oedipus, who after abandoning his mother, turns his sight at the world of light and knowledge, and with stubbornness he constructs a vision of his own auto-creation in a world created in his own likeness. [translation mine] (2002: 193)

In other words, patriarchal discourse privileges light, reason and the intelligible, and devaluates and represses the feminine. It cannot be articulated within Western culture except as invisibility. Irigaray contends that for Freud: Nothing to be seen is equivalent to having no thing. No being and no truth. The contract, the collusion, between one sex/organ and the victory won by visual dominance therefore leaves woman with her sexual void, with an “actual castration” carried out in actual fact. ( 1985b: 48)

Cultural Fear of Nothing-to-See According to Irigaray (2003: 255), Western discourse and symbolism have an essential anatomical foundation. The male form becomes the

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norm, both as a biological and cultural model to be imitated. This feminist speculator assumes that psychoanalysis makes universal claims about femininity, not allowing a woman to invent positive representations of the feminine. The imposition of sexual identification, seen through the prism of a sexual model that was constructed by men, might be regarded as a perceptual act of violence. The point being that sexuality and its symbolic meaning are generated by the “male eye,” and are being subjected to it. Irigaray claims that within a scene of sexual representation, “woman’s sexual organs are simply absent” (1985a: 26). This particular (ab)use of woman’s body also becomes a kind of visual appropriation and cultural distortion of femininity in the patriarchal system. Irigaray perceives Freud as one of the most influential zealots, who “in the name of anatomical destiny” established “masculinity as the sexual model” [translation mine] (Bator 2002: 192). Moreover, she uses significant expressions such as monosexual and homosexual culture to characterize an image of Western culture, which arises from the texts by Freud. If, as Chris Weedon suggests (1999: 99), “The body is the primary referent in visually grounded categorizations of people,” then in psychoanalysis the body becomes the “referent of all referents,” an overarching object from which subjectivity springs. By exploiting vocabulary which is connected with visual perception, psychoanalysis exposes those ideas that accentuate some anatomical parts in the gesture of fixing the eyes on certain fragments of the body. Freud avails himself of perceptual abilities of an eye in order to appreciate and catch sight of bodily “prominences,” while at the same time to devaluate and take no notice of its corporeal “cavities.” It is worth explaining that in Freud’s terminology, male and female sexual organs not only denote a biological fact, but they also have a suggestive connotation: presence and visibility of the male organ and absence and invisibility of its female counterpart. Hanna Bacon states (2009: 155) that Irigaray “criticizes Freud for theorizing sexual difference in terms of the ocular (that is in terms of what is visible) and for establishing a phallocentric economy in which the male sex organ is viewed as normative.” Irigaray (1991: 118–119) is of opinion that: Freud does not see two sexes whose difference are articulated in the act of intercourse, and, more generally speaking, in the imaginary and symbolic processes that regulate the workings of a society and a culture. The ‘feminine’ is always described in terms of deficiency, atrophy, as the other side of the sex that alone holds a monopoly on value: the male sex. Hence the all too well-known “penis envy.”

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Furthermore, she highlights the psychoanalytic belief that a young girl is an incomplete boy and her sexuality is defined in relation to male form. Once again, anatomy is an essence, on the basis of which Freud establishes a social status of a “castrated” and “lacking” woman. “The very first” observation of a young child, the observation that results in a confirmation of having or not having a penis, constructs a positive or a negative image of oneself. The positive image, which is supported by vision, resides in the mind as male phantasm of completeness and female fantasy of becoming complete by possessing the “lost organ.” At this point Irigaray explains the mother-daughter relationship in Western culture. According to her (1991: 119): “the girl turns away from her mother, ‘hates’ her, because she observes that her mother doesn’t have the valorising organ the daughter once thought she had; this rejection of the mother is accompanied by the rejection of all women, herself included.” The feminist speculator laments over cultural rivalry between women, who being deprived of their positive representations, desire to occupy phallic positions or be in possession of the phallus. A woman can only become “the same” as a man if she wishes to create an illusion of being meaningful and perceptible. Irigaray calls the logic, standing behind this mechanism, the logic of the sameness.

A Stripped Woman Talks Back The speculum, with the usage from which male subjectivity emerged, has been a reflecting instrument. Irigaray regards the speculum as a phallocentric mirror that upholds the logic of the same. Once a literal instrument used for penetrating the interiors of a woman’s body, the speculum has been turned into the metaphorical reflecting surface, constituting a masculine subject. If the speculum serves as a mirror, a woman stands on the side of the looking-glass, giving back the reflection, being “the same of the other.” On the one hand, Irigaray presents the title word of her work as a deforming two-dimensional surface, yet on the other hand, she takes advantage of woman’s stripped “nothing” only to reveal it is something more than just a cavity and invisibility. Irigaray suggests a way out of the closed space of male representations within the field of womanhood. Instead of visually saturated discourse and ocular symbolism, she offers a new sensory and figurative language that could possibly fill the void left by Western philosophers, notably by Freud. According to Irigaray, female genitals resemble two lips that instantly touch one another. Such an image escapes ocular categorizations and becomes a prelude to overcoming the logic of the same. Irigaray’s

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poetic description deploys tactile expressions as in the following fragment: “Two lips kissing two lips: openness is ours again. Our ‘world.’ And the passage from the inside out, from the outside in, the passage between us, is limitless. Without end” (1985b: 210). The positive symbol of two lips breaks with masculine system of signification, which concentrated on oneness, closeness and solidity. On the contrary, evoking tactile contact between the lips, Irigaray seems to be inspired by a tangible intimacy which is experienced without reference to the visible. This is not a provision-al partitioning of flesh, but an interiorly constituted dimension of a different order. Refractory to the distinction between visible and invisible, the tangible invisible describes the body as a subjectless, objectless difference in the flesh; a constitution that, remaining in the interior, is never experienced as either idea or a thing. The tangible is the body as a positive reserve, a vitally constituted dimension, an adherence to indetermination rather than the surfacing of an unpresentable interior (Vasseleu 1998: 67). This is the order of touch, traditionally considered to be the female sense. If sight is characterized by masculine attributes and touch is “cumbered with” feminine qualities, then the sensory order produces the superior and inferior gender. Constance Classen comments on the distinction between sensory perception of men and women: Both men and women were understood to make practical use of all of their senses: men could touch, women could see. Nonetheless, touch, along with taste and smell, was imagined to be essentially feminine in nature: nurturing, seductive, dissolute in its merging of self and other. Sight, and to a lesser extent hearing, was essentially masculine: dominating, rational, orderly in its discrete categorization of the world. (2005: 70)

Such a division also contributes to the evaluation of how knowledge might be provided by each sense. Touching purveys immediate, intimate and subjective cognition, while seeing distances, mediates and objectifies. Privacy confronts publicness whenever tactile feelings are put in contrast with visual experiences of everyday life. Apart from these cultural differences, Irigaray reminds us that touch is a primordial sense, establishing the closest relations with the mother and with the world outside the womb. Coming back to maternal and feminine symbols could be a dangerous rupture in the ocularcentric paradigm, which dominated Western thought and cultural relations between genders.

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The Potential of “the Tactile” To my mind, Irigaray’s input into the criticism of visually-oriented culture of the West is invaluable. She makes us more aware of the fact that women have a more problematic and even more complex relation to the visible than men. Culturally being more susceptible to vision, women are ascribed the qualities of objects: passiveness, stillness and submissiveness. If still life painters intended to extract the essence of the lifeless form, focusing on how light reflected off different parts of objects’ surfaces, then philosophers treated women in a similar manner, yet with a slight difference—they used “mental light” to illuminate them. Their shadow role as mothers-founders of Western subjectivity has paradoxically turned them into hyper visible corporeal targets of the male gaze, which as a consequence, excluded them from speculative activity undertaken by the reflexive (masculine) mind. It somehow was equated to the statement that being objects of contemplation they were (over) substantial/material and thus visible (but insignificant), yet as somatic entities, they were (according to one of the definitions of an object) to be seen or touched. Postmodern culture also exploits this tradition of female objectification, especially through the male gaze. Philosophical discourse realizes in practice if one takes into consideration how most of contemporary popular images are constructed. These are easily exemplified by representations of beautiful, sexually attractive and eyecatching women in cinema, advertising and fashion, which preserve negative female symbolism, based on reification. Curiously enough, the word objectification (in its lexical understanding) reveals a creation that is either a visual or a tangible rendering of a woman, thus allowing for the exploitation of the sense of touch. Eclipsed by the sun(s) (a pun on sons is inevitable), the female figures (daughters) remained in the shadow of the culture for too long. Irigaray severely criticizes this shadowlike cultural status of women. In her reiterated articulated callingí“return to touch”íin favour of women, she rediscovers their tangible attributes. Touching recalls a primordial contact with the mother, while seeing evokes separation with “the loving object.” The distinction is both a biological fact as well as a symbolic rite of passage. Irigaray resorts to a certain strategy as she composes her writings. She was accused by many scholars of being an essentialist feminist who attempts at finding biological aspects of femininity. Her “strategic essentialism” consists of using traditional attributes of women, e.g. nature, body, motherhood, while confronting them with masculinity and its

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characteristics. Irigaray utilizes somatic vocabulary, putting an emphasis on tactile vulnerability of language (which is also my intention within this last paragraph; words italicized). The unfolding of women’s story as a haptic story makes it a very feminine discovery and experience of one’s body. This feminist thinker grasps the overlooked and overshadowed aspects of femininity. In her consequently built tactics, Irigaray reaches out her hand for positive images of women, as she locates objects (women) in a more favourable cultural spatiotemporal reality, as she skilfully manipulates the psychoanalytical concepts to get the devisualised effect, as she tries to feel her true palpable self. She seems to be under nobody’s thumb, but develop a thick skin during her academic career. Her integrity was put to the test when she was criticized by Bricmont and Sokal (1997). She was in the firing line for claiming that E=mc2 is a masculinist equation that privileges the speed of light over other speeds. She also asserted that rigid mechanics have been paid attention to such an extent that fluid mechanics, described as “feminine,” might even be considered excluded. Although this criticism touched a raw nerve, “the cold-blooded speculator” reacted as if it was no skin off her nose. Through her writings she proves that speculating about femininity absolutely and desperately needs a woman’s touch.

A Finishing Touch Instead of a typical conclusion I wish to explain myself, in particular the way I arranged my article. I begin with a nursery rhyme, then I poke around in Irigaray’s biography in search of the roots of her critique of ocularcentrism, next I make a departure to the literary land of Shakespeare and the nascent visual culture of the Renaissance, later I present how Irigaray “has a grip on” psychoanalysis, afterwards I unveil the cultural potential of the sense of touch, and finally, here I quote a poem by Urszula Benka, a prominent Polish poet (quoted in Grol 1996: 21). Placing her “The Touch and the Taste” below, I intend (in a simplified manner) to set the direction in which the flight from the cultural world signified/dominated in/by ocular (male) terms to the world that acknowledges women as subjects of philosophical and poetic thinking—yet with the help of a woman’s hand—takes place in Western culture. The examples I refer to, belong to different cultures: the old English story for children, the world-famous Hamlet, Austrian psychoanalysis, French feminism and, as my final touch, the Polish poem. All are connected, as they brush against each other in time and space.

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Irigaray’s Critique of the Ocularcentric Paradigm The Touch and the Taste Heavy, ripe and the fruit: Jupiter Saturn, the Earth, Mars. They spill their moons, Squirt drops of asteroids. So says the gloomy stranger Touching my breast. I’m sitting in his house in front of a fire; Flames and fruit are reflected in the dampness of my sex, cut-up pomegranates, huge apples. An oak library glistens in the library of my sex. I’m thinking about an oak and about centuries, about rituals. The stranger leans his face Toward my sex. In its concave-convex dampness The old face reflects in red. On the library’s massive oak there’s a configuration of planets and a gold patera with fruit. (Katowice, April 12, 1993)

References Bacon, H. 2009. What’s Right with the Trinity: Conversations in Feminist Theology. Farnham: Ashgate. Bator, J. 2002. Feminizm, postmodernizm, psychoanaliza. Filozoficzne dylematy feministek drugiej fali, GdaĔsk: Sáowo/Obraz/Terytoria. Bricmont, J. and Sokal, A. 1998. Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. New York: Picador USA. Classen, C. 2005. “The Witch’s Senses: Sensory Ideologies and Transgressive Femininities from the Renaissance to Modernity.” In Empire of the Senses. The Sensual Culture Reader. D. Howes (ed.). Oxford and New York: Berg Publishers. 70–84. Elliot, A. andRay, L. 2003. Key Contemporary Social Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Grol, R. 1996. Ambers Aglow: An Anthology of Polish Women’s Poetry (1981–1995), Austin, TX: Host Publications. Irigaray, L. 1985a. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

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—. 1985b. “When Our Lips Speak Together.” In This Sex Which is Not One. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 205–218. —. 1991. “The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine.” In The Irigaray Reader. Whitford M. (ed.) Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 118–132. —. 2003. “The Sex which Is Not One.” In From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology. L. Cahoone (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. 254–259. Jay, M. 1994. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in TwentiethCentury French Thought, California: University of California Press. Ortner, S. 1972. “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?” In Woman, Culture and Society, M.Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 67–87. Shakespeare, W. 2007. Hamlet: the Texts of 1603 and 1623. A. Thompson and N. Taylor (eds.). London: Arden Shakespeare. Shipley, J.T. 1984. The Origins of English Words: A Discursive Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Vasseleu, C. 1998. Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty. London and New York: Routledge. Weedon, C. 1999. Feminism, Theory, and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Blackwell.

ART AND FEMINISM FROM A POSTSTRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVE MÁRCIA OLIVERA

ABSTRACT: This article glides through a number of concepts and principles from the theoretical frame that is now called poststructuralism in order to perceive how they can act productively in terms of an interface between feminist art practices and theories. The inquiry leads us to consider how the theories produced around the 1960s and 1970s, and the inherent epistemological shift, were fundamental for contemporary accounts of feminist artistic practices. KEY WORDS: feminism, poststructuralism, visual arts, performativity.

Introduction Research on the field of visual arts, after entering the twenty-first century, presents us with a wide range of challenges, given the tremendous changes that occurred in this field throughout the twentieth century, even though from modernism to postmodernism and to elaborations such as “altermodernism,”1 “hypermodernism” (a working concept explored by Paul Virilio) or Zygmunt Bauman’s “liquid modernity” (Bauman 2000), modernism is still a central axis, being incorporated rather than dismissed through the prefix “post.” A number of questions immediately occur in such a context: are these kind of tropes still adequate in terms of interpreting, reading or analyzing cultural objects? Is this a moment after the “post” (postmodernism, poststructuralism) one caught in a nihilistic web of events when art works are no longer fit to be creative as once believed? Is theory an entropic practice that no longer produces productive alternatives in terms of our contemporary life? Have these kinds of critical 1

On the occasion of the Tate’s 2009 Triennial, Nicholas Bourriaud announced the death of postmodernism, which, he considered, was now replaced by the contemporary moment of “altermodernity,” marked not only by the entanglement of social and technological networks, but also by global practices that escape the pervasive western features of modernism and postmodernism.

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formulations been rendered politically void in the cultural present? Is it still impossible to consider any analysis on visual arts without taking into consideration the developments of the critical and aesthetic frame from the past decades, especially the tensions produced not only by art works, but also by critical and philosophical thought? When researching contemporary visual arts in relation to feminist issues, it is convenient to consider some of the most relevant discussions and theoretical moments which have altered the course of the cultural production of artistic objects (as well as its analysis), that do not represent isolated moments in a linear time frame, breaking definitely with the past and paving way to a radically different future. On the contrary, the future of these moments today is still very much intertwined with its past and present, and we are now at a point when the legacy of the 1960s and 1970s is more than just a remembrance: the positive articulation of open systems, the possible relations between diverse discourses and the denial of a closed, self-contained system of knowledge and thought emerged from that moment of reaction to modernism and to structuralism which is not at all dated. On the contrary, as I will argue, the intertwined field of the “post” in the visual arts—poststructuralism, postmodernism—and their main premises are still very much in process, especially when gender and feminist issues are also at stake.

The Field of the “Post” Versus the New Avant-Garde I will take Huyssen (1990) as a point of departure for these brief considerations. The author debates postmodernism in relation to modernism and to poststructuralism, denying the association of postmodernism to a formalist and a-critical artistic style, and also contradicting the general idea that poststructuralism was the theoretical branch of postmodern practice: In much of the postmodernism debate, a very conventional thought pattern has asserted itself. Either it is said that postmodernism is continuous with modernism, in which case the whole debate opposing the two is specious; or, it is claimed that there is a radical rupture, a break with modernism, which is then evaluated in either positive or negative terms. But the question of historical continuity or discontinuity simply cannot be adequately discussed in terms of such an either/or dichotomy. To have questioned the validity of such dichotomous thought patterns is of course one of the major achievements of Derridean deconstruction. But the poststructuralist notion of endless textuality ultimately cripples any meaningful historical reflection on temporal units. (Huyssen 1990: 235)

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Trying to assert a political and critical dimension to postmodernism, I would like to point out poststructuralism’s practice proceeding with a pairing of a French based set of theories with modernism instead. According to his argument, modernism has also been mistakenly associated with the avant-garde, an “equation [. . .] that can no longer be maintained.” Huyssen recalls that “contrary to the avant-garde’s intention to merge art and life, modernism always remained bound up with the more traditional notion of the autonomous art work, with the construction of form and meaning (however estranged or ambiguous, displaced or undecidable such meaning might be), and with the specialized status of the aesthetic” (Huyssen notes that this difference between modernism and the avant-garde was one of the pivotal points of disagreement between Benjamin and Adorno in the 1930s) (Huyssen 1990: 245). Therefore, for Huyssen, French theory [provides] us primarily with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of modernism at the stage of its exhaustion. It is as if the creative powers of modernism had migrated into theory and come to full self-consciousness in the poststructuralist text—the owl of Minerva spreading its wings at the fall of dusk. Poststructuralism offers a theory of modernism characterized by Nachtriglichkeit, both in the psychoanalytic and the historical sense. (Huyssen 1990: 260)

Countering the late American 1970s consensus that “postmodernism represents the contemporary ‘avant-garde’ in the arts” and poststructuralism stands for “its equivalent in critical theory” he sees poststructuralism as “the revenant of modernism in the guise of theory” (Huyssen 1990: 260) and also as being in trapped in the aesthetic realm, as was modernism and the historical avant-garde: Poststructuralism seems to seal the fate of the modernist project which, even where it limited itself to the aesthetic sphere, always upheld a vision of a redemption of modern life through culture. That such visions are no longer possible to sustain may be at the heart of the postmodern condition, and it may ultimately vitiate the poststructuralist attempt to salvage aesthetic modernism for the late twentieth century. (Huyssen 1990: 261)

This text emphasizes even one more critical movement in relation to poststructuralism, by asserting that it maintains common grounds with modernism and its dogmas: the anti-humanist denial of authorial subjectivity. The end of the author is seen by Huyssen as “mere reversal to the very ideology that invariably glorifies the artist as genius.” And he asks: “doesn’t poststructuralism, where it simply denies the subject altogether, jettison the chance of challenging the ideology of the subject

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(as male, white, and middle-class) by developing alternative and different notions of subjectivity?” (Huyssen 1990: 264). Noting that the postmodern advocates have recognized this dilemma, Huyssen concludes by assuming poststructuralism’s emphasis on language and the text as the “swansong of modernism, but also already a moment of the postmodern” (Huyssen 1990: 264). This discussion makes clear, first of all, that it is impossible to speak of modernism, the avant-garde and postmodernism and poststructuralism as separate phenomena and clearly bordered subjects. In fact, they introduced, as the text by Huyssen so clearly demonstrates, the dialogic process that these theories and practices entail. This dialogue is still very much up to date and in sync with many of the problems raised when discussing feminism and the visual arts. Even though Huyssen is accurate when refusing a direct link between postmodernism and poststructuralism, I think that this theoretical and critical frame is better off being approached to the new avant-garde, as it introduces the artistic and theoretical debate to a moment when theory, practice, politics and aesthetics become intertwined. And this is very much a discussion that is still ongoing alongside feminist accounts of the visual arts. I would say that we are still, and from the 1960s onwards, in a moment of “expanded modernism,” borrowing from Rosalind Krauss’s reflexion on Sculpture in the Expanded Field (Krauss 1979), with moments of contamination and rejection from high modernism and historical avant-garde to the new avant-garde and postmodernism. Chris Weedon states that “feminist poststructuralism demands attention to social, historical and cultural specificity” (Weedon 1992: 136). In art this means looking at the theory produced, at the artistic objects and at the surroundings of the time of its production, but also at the time of its reading, therefore asserting the reader a very important role on the interpretation of work of art, no longer believed to have an inherent meaning and value, but a constructed one. This then brings us to a discussion on the changing and contradicting subject introduced in this dialectics of theory and practice, whose experience is discursively produced and constantly open to redefinition. As Weedon (1992: 138) puts it: Where texts are read as sites for the discursive construction of the meaning of gender, as in feminist poststructuralist readings, their meanings will relate both to the original historical context of production, understood through the discourses which constitute present day conceptions of history, gender and meaning, and to the concerns of the present.

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This pursuit of multiple subjects as an alternative for the clearly identified subject (and therefore a closed and unified one) is also a legacy of poststructuralism, one that we should still consider for feminist purposes, a process still ongoing in feminist artistic practices, continuing the never finished “project” that started for women artists in the 1960s. And here I recall that the politics of identity is also very much in tune with a specific epistemological frame contradicted by theorists as Gilles and Félix Guattari for, as Guattari himself clarifies in an interview published in The Guattari Reader: As Deleuze and myself are concerned, and must recall that we were rebelling against the attempt to reconstruct a particular form of analysis, namely, the Lacanian pretension of erecting a universal logic of the signifier that would account for not only the economy of subjectivity and of the affects but also of all the other discursive forms relating to art, knowledge, and power. (Genosko 1996: 178)

Feminism and Poststructuralism in Visual Culture Even though feminist theory is embedded with many of poststructuralism’s principles, the fact is that this is one of the main criticisms the feminist points out in poststructuralist theory. Diane Elam speaks of the indeterminacy of the determined concept of woman as follows: We do not yet know what women are. It remains uncertain what it would mean to be a woman (to be part of the group “women”), just as it remains uncertain what precisely would constitute the knowledge of women. There are neither epistemological nor ontological grounds which would settle the issue once and for all. This is not necessarily a political limitation for feminism. Women are yet to be determined and so are their (political) actions. (Elam 1994: 27)

On the other hand, Linda Alcoff reminds us in The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory: For many contemporary feminist theorists, the concept of woman is a problem. It is a problem of primary significance because the concept of woman is the central concept for feminist theory and yet it is a concept that is impossible to formulate precisely for feminists. It is the central concept for feminists because the concept and category of woman is the necessary point of departure for any feminist theory and feminist politics, predicated as these are on the transformation of women’s lived experience in contemporary culture and the re-evaluation of social theory and practice from women’s point of view. But as a concept it is radically problematic

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Recognizing that “there are established, pre-conceived notions of what women can be and do, at the same time that ‘women’ remains a yet to be determined category” (Elam 1994: 27), Diane Elam suggests the figure of the “mise en abyme”—a strategy of representation in which the whole image is depicted in part of the image ad infinitum—to think about this category and this subject constructed through representation. In Elam (1994) we are confronted with one of the main problems inherent in a poststructuralist/feminist critique: the fact that poststructuralism denies a stable subject, inherent in one of the most productive concepts brought by poststructuralist critics: difference. As Susan Lurie recalls, in this debate Some feminists have attributed the tendency for poststructuralist feminism to eschew feminist politics to the insistence on the instability of subjects and terms; for these feminists, such instability makes impossible a politics that explicitly identifies oppressed subjects. On the other hand, poststructuralist feminists have tended to efface their own gestures towards the need for strategic and contingent terms. As a result, these critics continue to privilege a polemic against stable feminist terms that at the same time valorises the link between discursive instability and positive change (Lurie 2001: 679).

This subjectification has been paired by Elam with objectification, since “the achievement of a definitive or calculable constraint of subjectivity, even when subjectivity seems to offer agency, is clear when we realize that women become subjects only when they conform to specified and calculable representations of themselves as subjects” (Elam 1994: 29). On the other hand, to search for the instability of difference instead of the grounded female subject brings us problems when undergoing feminist analysis of representation. For Elam, the “mise en abyme” somehow resolves this equation, because it “acknowledges the subject/object positions assumed by representation, but it also makes those positions infinite and ultimately incalculable. Women ultimately will never be determined as either subject or object” (Elam 1994: 29). The artist and critic Hito Steyerl, drawing from an explicit Benjaminian influence (based on the main idea that the “image doesn’t represent reality, it is a fragment of the real world”), commented recently on the difficulties posed by the need of subjectification posed to feminist theory and practice, especially the body which became a site of political agency bringing up

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the question on how “senses and things, abstraction and excitement, speculation and power, desire and matter actually converge [since then] within images” (Steyerl 2010). Poststructuralism, as a process and not as a unified critical movement (it would be impossible and contradicting, even to establish a time frame for it, as is for postmodernism), provides us with important tools to question assumptions such as universal thought, essentialism, binary oppositions or other types of paradigms. Important it is, then, to have in mind that artistic practices and artistic objects are to be perceived as a part of a signifying world that lies not on essential, but constructed values. And if the relational perspective can be an interesting option, the fact is that, due to the danger of associating the terms “feminine” and “aesthetics” to an essentialist perspective (and, therefore, bad art), the analysis of form, of purely aesthetic aspects, has also been neglected and set aside by feminist criticism. The prejudice of categorizing is, still, hard to overcome, as we have seen. And it is precisely that kind of categorization that must be set aside, together with a strategy of collective identification, made in the name of an underlying political goal. The identification, or said in a different way, “identity” as a main premise to these strategies, must be questioned, thus providing us with the possibility to rethink the work by women artists aesthetically also-and by an aesthetic approach I mean a multifaceted work, anchored on formalist and on relational and poststructuralist methodologies, for, as Linda Nochlin says: There is still resistance to the more radical varieties of the feminist critique in the visual arts, and its practitioners are accused of such sins as neglecting the issue of quality, destroying the canon, scanting the innately visual dimension of the artwork, and reducing art to the circumstances of its production—in other words, of undermining the ideological and, above all, aesthetic biases of the discipline. (Nochlin 2006: 30)

Conclusion Poststructuralism in its various discourses and concerns has highlighted not only the importance of discursive practice in the construction of subjectivity (meaning it is created inside language and doesn’t pre-exist it) but has also provided a key concept such as performativity and as it is referred in the book Art since 1900, “unlike the idea of the autonomous academic discipline (or work of art) whose frame is thought to be necessarily external to it—a kind of nonessential appendage—the performative notion of language places the frame at the very heart of the speech act” (Foster 2004: 41). I will end this brief reflection by convoking

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this concept of performativity as an example on how this critical and philosophical moment brought the political to the aesthetic and vice-versa. Performativity, as a concept and not merely as an artistic medium, which involves movement, can be seen in my point of view as one of the main mechanisms through which art has been expressing multiple desires acts also as a gender defining concept (Butler 1990), as artistic practice which blurs the limits of the traditional medium or as a form of transporting the artist’s or the reader’s body into the always in motion material art work. In works of art encompassing such a principle, which can be acquired through the use of various formal strategies, the aesthetic is no longer mere form, since form is impregnated with the body and its desires which are political; and also, the political is no longer a mere conceptual abstraction, since it is materialized in the body, thus creating this dialogical momentum. In this context, poststructuralism’s most important contribution to the field of visual arts, and also to feminist critique, lies in the fact that it brought theory to the realm of practice and practice to the realm of theory, and these two continue from then and until today to engender creative movements and processes (this link between theory and practice is also the main contribution of poststructuralism to feminism, something clear from the development of the performative or the creativity inherent to the creation of concepts). This is the main difference from postmodernist art that found itself caught up in a web of pure aestheticism and institutionalization, also being deemed as neo-conservative (Habermas 1981). Habermas defends the idea that the project of modernity is not a lost cause and is, therefore, not to be rejected. Identifying three types of conservatism (anti-modernism, pre-modernism and postmodernism) Habermas defends the continuation of the project that “aims at a differentiated relinking of modern culture with an everyday praxis that still depends on vital heritages, but would be impoverished through mere traditionalism” (Habermas 1981: 13). In turn, Kroker and Cook (1986) identify an esthetization in excess when referring to late capitalist art. Given that an autonomous art is “the perfect ideological expression for an advanced capitalist society.” For the authors this art in its commodity-form is “the most advanced (postmodernist) representation” (Kroker and Cook 1986: 17). And even though postmodernism brought practices like rewriting, rereading and an always productive understanding of the past, it ended up engulfing its own critique of master narratives in moves such as, for example, the return to painting in the visual arts. In this sense postmodernism is essentially different from the (poststructuralist) avantgarde and the avant-garde can be seen not as modernism’s last breath, in

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Huyssen’s terms, but as the beginning of an enduring self-critique and the precursor of a political practice in feminist terms. Given that “feminism shares with poststructuralist criticism a critique of the hegemony of the identical and the desire of other forms of discourse” (Martin 1982: 3), which can be said also to be the general formulation of what constitutes its political project, and with this notion of process and inherent sense of participation entering the realm of the visual arts, feminism has been able to articulate the difficult subject/object, discourse/materiality opposition that pervaded feminist practices throughout the second half of the twentieth century, much in the line of Elam’s formulation on the “mise en abyme.” One can say that this formulation proposed by Diane Elam incorporates a sense of liminality, an impermanent state that is always in the threshold, and therefore can never be static, which are attributes common to the diverse range of visual or artistic strategies, such as video, body art, performance or even photography. According to Victor Turner, “the attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (“threshold people”) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (Turner 2004: 89). Thomas Zummer makes an excellent argument on the occasion of the exhibition “Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977,” held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In the text Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual, Zummer considers the complex prosthetic relation between sense, memory and technical mediations” to analyse the production of projective installations in the art works produced in the time span of the exhibition, which constituted sites of reflection: “Reflection on modes of artistic practice entered into critical and theoretical debate in a variety of ways, as praxis, but also as discourse, and as heterogeneous admixtures of both. The hitherto discrete boundaries of thinking, acting, techné, and artefact dissolved, as artist and author, spectator and subject—bodies and all—were cast into a dissimulating abyss of mediations.” (Zummer 2001: 78)

The field of the visual arts from the seventies onwards allow us to consider this difficult entanglement and find in the notion of performativity an adequate trope to consider feminist contemporary practices, since it works as an interface between cultural and embodied perceptions and most adequately incorporates the participatory impulse that characterizes poststructuralism and feminist emphasis on the notions of difference and process, also very much in tune artistic theories produced since the 1990s, drawing on participation and the relational nature of

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artistic production, such as Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998) or Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation based on Deleuze and Guattari (Glissant 1990), to quote only a few examples.

References Alcoff, L. 1988. “Cultural Feminism versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory.” Signs. Vol. 13 (Spring): 405–36. Bauman, Z. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourriaud, N. 1998. “Relational Aesthetics.” In Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation. London: Whitechapel. 160–71. Butler, J. 1990. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” In Sue-Ellen Case (ed.), Performing Feminisms: Feminist Critical Theory and Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 270–82. Elam, D. 1994. Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. En abyme. London: Routledge. Foster, H. et al. 2004. Art since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism. London: Thames & Hudson. Genosko, G. (ed.). 1996. The Guattari Reader. Cambridge and Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Glissant, É. 1990. “Poetics of Relation.” In Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation. London: Whitechapel, 71–78. Habermas, J. 1981. “Modernity versus Postmodernity.” New German Critique, 22 (Winter): 3–14. Huyssen, A. 1990 (1984). “Mapping the Postmodern.” In Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism. London: Routledge. 234– 277. Krauss, R. 1979. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, 8 (Spring): 30–44. Kroker, A. and D. Cook. 1986. The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-aesthetics. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Lurie, S., et al. 2001. “Roundtable: Restoring Feminist Politics to Poststructuralist Critique.” Feminist Studies, 27 (3): 679–707. Martin, B. 1982. “Feminism, Criticism, and Foucault.” New German Critique (27): 3–30. Nochlin, L. 2006. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? Thirty Years After.” In Carol Armstrong and Catherine De Zehger (eds.), Women Artists at the Millenium. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 21–32.

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Steyerl, H. 2010. “A thing like you and me.” E-flux, 15. [Online.] Available: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/a-thing-like-you-and-me/. Turner, V. 2004. “Liminality and Communitas.” In Henry Bial (ed.), The Performance Studies Reader. New York: Routledge. 89–97. Weedon, C. 1992. Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory. Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Zummer, T. 2001. “Projection and Dis/embodiment: Genealogies of the Virtual.” In Chrissie Îles (ed.), The Projected Image in American Art 1964–1977. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art.

PART IV ETHNIC AND NATIONAL RUPTURES: THE “POST” ACROSS CULTURES

TOWARDS THE POST-ETHNIC AMERICAN STUDIES? POSTCOLONIAL INTERVENSIONS IN THE US BLACK AND MINORITY STUDIES IZABELLA PENIER

ABSTRACT: My essay explores the impact the scholarship of postcolonial studies had on the research imperatives and practices of Black American studies. I am going to argue that postcolonial, and in particular Black British cultural studies (the Black Atlantic), has contributed significantly to the “world-ing” of Black Studies (and, by extension, of ethnic and American studies), reconfiguring the American concept of ethnicity and expanding the American discourse on multiculturalism. KEY WORDS: Black Atlantic, postcolonialism, postethnic studies.

In the increasingly more and more globalized world, national, ethnic or even regional paradigms of thought are very hard to sustain. As languages and ideas circulate on an unprecedented scale, hybridity and multirootedness have an ever increasing worldwide impact on national and ethnic practices and canons. Black American studies have also been subjected to such critical interventions. In the last three decades it has been exposed to multiple challenges from such global frameworks of analysis as Atlantic studies, postcolonialism or international feminism. While feminist criticism produced a diverse array of gendered perspectives, the scholarship of postcolonial and cultural studies effected a shift from national to transnational perspective by exploring new frontiers of the African diaspora. With their innovating concepts these feminist, postcolonial and cultural studies critics have begun to reconfigure and expand the field of Black studies gradually erasing its insularity. This essay will particularly focus on the critical intervention that has come from the Caribbean-born British cultural studies theorists; first and foremost Paul Gilroy, the first critic to use the postcolonial frame of

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reference to black American texts.1 Gilroy placed postcolonialism in dialogue with the major texts of Afro-American literary theory and applied it to Afro-American texts, mostly by Black American men who travelled across the Atlantic to Africa and Europe. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) is Gilroy’s most important work to this day. It contests the way in which the Black minority within the USA adopted nationalist ideology to define their unity in opposition to the white mainstream culture. Gilroy dares Black Nationalist thinkers to investigate how their thinking about race and culture is configured by their embededness in the Enlightenment ideas and Romantic concepts of “race,” “people” and “nation.” He (Gilroy 1993: 30) provocatively contends that the intellectual heritage of Euro-American modernity determined the manner in which nationality has been understood by the majority of black people in the US. Despite many critiques of modernity, declarations of the crisis of modernity and predictions of its eclipse, there are quite a few Black intellectuals in the United States who are doggedly committed to the ideal of black exceptionalism, and who continue to theorize about the process of identity formation in concepts taken form the white tradition that they overtly discard. They often emphasize ancestry or roots as the foundation for identity, instead of thinking of identity as an ongoing quest, both spatial and spiritual. In Gilroy’s words (1993: 19): “modern black political culture has always been more interested in the relationship of the identity to roots and rootedness than in seeing identity as a process of movement and meditation that is more appropriately approached via the homonym routes.” Looking for roots or stable and presumably authentic forms of subjectivity and identification has been the main strategy for “nation” building and racial uplift ever since the post-emancipation period. This is how, argues Gilroy, the Euro-American tradition of thinking about identity and nation taught blacks to accept a modern concept of identity as something grounded in roots, folklore, racial and ethnic authenticity.

1 I use the term postcolonial also with reference to Gilroy’s theories. I am aware that postcolonialism and Black British cultural studies are separate disciplines that should not be conflated, but in view of the fact that Gilroy’s ideas had such a purchase among postcolonial thinkers, I think we can call Gilroy a postcolonial critic. Gilroy also owes much to postcolonial theory—he shares with the postcolonial critics interest in slavery, dislocation and concomitant diaspora. Like postcolonial critics he emphasizes that hybridity which produces anxiety and identity crisis is nevertheless a source of strength conferring on an individual a unique angle of vision. For Gilroy, However, the movement through spaces is more important than the experience of displacement and alienation.

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It is a fact that the African American Studies that emerged as an institutional discipline in the Black Power era amidst the Civil Rights campaign was hinged upon a similar agenda; its primary aim was to legitimize the black culture as a national culture with its own ideas and forms of expression. African American or Black Studies rose in response to the problems of desegregation and institutional racism. This is why its scholarship was so narrow in focus—until the end of the previous century it was limited to US blacks and it ignored histories and experiences of other blacks in the Diaspora. This traditional disciplinary model, which takes the nation-state and the experience of the US blacks as its major unit of analysis, is becoming increasingly less and less popular, though it still has its proponents among well known black scholars such as Talmadge Anderson (Introduction to African American Studies published in 1992, updated and revised in 2007) and Maulana Karenga (Introduction to Black Studies 2002) to name just a few. In opposition to this nationalist and ethnically absolute approach that still to a certain extent characterizes the black culture of the US, Gilroy (1993: 15–16) proposes a Diaspora perspective which he calls the Black Atlantic and which is defined as “one single, complex unit of analysis.” It is “a formal unity of diverse cultural elements”; it is transcultural and international and therefore antithetical to the traditional national emphasis of African American Studies. The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993: 28–29) “challenges the coherence of all narrow nationalist perspectives and points to the spurious invocation of ethnic particularity to enforce them and to ensue the tidy flow of cultural output into neat symmetrical units.” It seeks to dismantle literary canons, raised exclusively on a national basis, into which the literary productions of Black Atlantic populations have been segregated. I think that Gilroy’s application of postcolonial theory to deconstruct ethnic, national and regional paradigms is worth a closer look. In a brilliant tour-de-force Gilroy shows the legitimacy of using in the American context such postcolonial concepts as the “displacement,” “centre-periphery opposition” or “counter-discourse.”2 While the 2

In asserting similarities between American blacks and other blacks in the diaspora Gilroy also goes against much contemporary postcolonial criticism that excludes African American experience from the realm of postcolonialism. The Australian academics Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin, who co-authored an important and contested study The Empire Writes Back, contend, for example, that the experience of Afro-Americans (1989: 19–20) is of “a Black majority in a rich and powerful white country” is too radically different from that of “the Black majority population of an independent nation.” African American Studies, the argument

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postcolonial stress on displacement and identity crisis helps Gilroy to make sense of the feelings of attraction and repulsion that Afro-Americans feel towards modernity, the concept of historically and politically charged counter-discourse is used to describe the process through which Black intellectuals revise the dominant discourse. Gilroy (1993: 48) points to the interdependence of black and white thinkers and acknowledges the fact that in spite of their scepticism towards the ideology of progress many black intellectuals made good use of the ideologies of the West: “the intellectual and cultural achievements of the Black Atlantic populations exist partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of Enlightenment and its operational principles.” Thus, in Gilroy’s view, modern black political formations as well as cultural productions are not pure essences of blackness but an amalgamation of ideas of the Enlightenment, non-European, black linguistic tropes, signifiers or aesthetic ideas. A more pluralistic and libertarian standpoint that sees Black culture as a counter-discourse to modernity can help, in Gilroy’s opinion, to understand better its polyphonic quality and the strength it derives form its peculiar status inside and sometimes outside and in opposition to the assumptions of modernity. It is this special hybrid condition of existence that confers on Black people a unique perspective on Western civilization: “a privileged standpoint from which certain useful and critical perceptions about the modern world will become more likely” (Gilroy 1993: 111). It is this experience of being a cultural outsider as well as of dislocation that endows blacks with what Du Bois called “double consciousness”/“twoness” and what Richard Wright called “dreadful objectivity.” Therefore “writing back” to the discourse of Modernity is, according to Gilroy, the most salient feature of the Black Atlantic world in general and of Black American discourse in particular. Gilroy’s Black Atlantic model understandably sparked a widespread resistance among scholars of Black studies in the USA. Gilroy was criticized for his evident anti-nationalist contempt, for the omission of Africa in his model and for privileging the experiences of Black men. Nonetheless his new topical focus exerted an enormous impact on the research imperatives and practices of American Black studies. Gilroy found some allies among Black American intellectuals who appreciated and in some cases even anticipated Gilroy’s effort to push the discipline beyond its tunnel vision i.e. beyond “constraints of ethnicity and national goes (Ashcroft et al. 1989: 6), “has had a widespread and often quite separate development from postcolonial studies, to which it is related only in a complex and ambiguous way.”

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particularity” (Gilroy 1993: 19) and whose articulations filled the blank spaces of his model. There are, to name just a few, Black feminist scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies (1994), Veve Clarke (1990), Sheila Walker (2001) and Rosalyn Terborg-Penn (1989). Both Davies and Clarke, though they did not receive such serious critical acclaim as Gilroy, did as much as he to popularize African Diaspora Studies by developing undergraduate, graduate and doctoral programs. One of the most distinguished scholars whose work also cuts against the grain of the dialectic of Euro-American academic establishment “[mapping] the contested concept of culture in diasporic, postcolonial and multicultural spaces” (Mercer 3) is Henry Louis Gates Jr., whom Gilroy calls a cultural interventionist.4 This compliment was fully reciprocated by Gates (Gates 2010: 52), who asserted that the cultural studies movement in Great Britain was “a remarkable time of black creativity” whose achievements surpassed those of the Harlem Renaissance and The Black Arts Movement. In the words of Gates (2010: 53): “[distance] and displacement have their benefits [. . .] so it isn’t altogether surprising that one of the most provocative reflections on [. . .] the cultural politics of Black America should come across the Atlantic.”5 Gates is one on the best known, most versatile and prolific AfroAmerican critics who, like Gilroy, has been exploring the commonalities between the postcolonial discourse and dissident minority discourses within the US. As early as in 1985 he co-edited a special issue of Critical Inquiry titled “Race,” Writing and Difference consisting of fourteen essays by eminent theorists and scholars (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Barbara Johnson, Jacques Derrida, Gates himself). The majority of its articles dealt with the topics that today would be defined as postcolonial, while four others would be categorized as African American scholarship. This special issue constitutes a precedent of intersection of those two critical approaches. In the following decades the two disciplines coalesced and grew in terms of prominence and influence, yet the striking similarities between them were largely overlooked. 3

Kobena Mercer’s review of Gates’s book Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora on amazon.com. 4 Gilroy mentions C.L. R. James, Stuart Hill, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Houston A. Baker, Jr., Anthony Appiah, Hazel Carby and bell hooks. In his opinion they were the first to articulate the ideas that white cultural theoreticians grapple with today, such as the issues of globalism or cultural hybridity. 5 Gates said it in praise for the film Looking for Langston by British director Isaak Julien.

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Gates is also intent, like Gilroy, on examining the hybrid and counterdiscursive character of black discourse. His literary theory of signifying, which resembles postcolonial counter-discourse and creative and transformative mimicry, is one of the most important instances of minority discourse in postcolonial analysis. Contrary to Gilroy, Gates focuses more on the literary aspect of Black literary tradition. His aim (Gates 1988: XXV) is “to account for the configuration of texts in their literary traditions.” Therefore he examines the intertextuality of African-American texts, which he defines (Gates 1989: 41) as the “non-thematic manner in which texts respond to other texts.” According to Gates the counterdiscursive character of black literary tradition can be traced back to the African trickster figure the Signifying Monkey and Esu-Elegbara— Yoruba, the trickster and messenger. In short, signifying is a folkloric concept rooted in black vernacular tradition; it is a counter-discourse that uses mimicry to appropriate and subvert white models with black idiom and black language patterns (call-and-response, blues, storytelling, jazz improvisation, children’s games). Like in the postcolonial tradition of literary revisionism, signifying is used to discover points of difference between the metropolitan centre and the minority culture and to appropriate the English language which is transformed by Black authors into an English of their own. Gates’s most recent work relies even more heavily on the postcolonial and cultural studies theory. In his newest book Tradition and the Black Atlantic published this year, Gates traces the development of cultural studies theory form its beginning in the 1970s in Great Britain to its ascendancy in America in the 1980s amidst the so called “culture wars” i.e. heated debates over the meaning and vistas of multiculturalism. Gates relies on the critical insights of not only the founders of the cultural studies, such as Start Hall or Paul Gilroy, but also on postcolonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon, to examine the uses for which their theories can be mobilized in the United States. He applies their theories to criticize the American model of multiculturalism which he (Gates 2010: 152) calls “a sort of federation of officially recognized cultural sovereignties.” This model imagines various constituent elements of multi-ethnic society as bubbles that collide with one another but still remain different and intact as if they (Gates 2010: 138) “[existed] in splendid isolation of one another.” It rests upon cultural fundamentalism, “the cult of ethnicity and the fetish of pluralism” (Gates 2010: 142). Consequently it cherishes cultural authenticity and purity, and it refuses to see culture as (Gates 2010: 146) “the result of intercultural relations of forces.” Such a model leaves no place for cultural, political or social exchange, it not only essentializes

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culture but also occludes political and economic inequality of cultures. Gates quotes Hazel Carby, who likewise maintains that the idea of multiculturalism is used in a manipulative way—it excludes the concept of the dominant/mainstream culture and subordinate cultures and turns a blind eye to power relations between cultures: the paradigm of multiculturalism actually excludes the concept of dominant and subordinate cultures—either indigenous or migrant—and fails to recognize that the existence of racism relates to the possession and exercise of political-economic control and authority and also to forms of resistance to the power of dominant social groups. (Quoted in Gates 2010: 142)

Gates’s study can be seen as an attempt to use theories of postcolonial/ cultural studies to forge a new vision of multiculturalism that would make it possible for Americans to “go beyond the culture wars” and create a more just and egalitarian civil society. Even though the culture wars ended with the rise of Ethnic and Minority studies and the valorization of multiculturalism, it was time that showed the limitations of culturalism and American democratic pluralism. It is the failure of multiculturalism that, to my mind, has created a space for postcolonial and Black Atlantic intervention. Gates’s work, which I see as the ultimate product of that intervention, seems to me very important as it has the most practical goal to achieve—it aims at overcoming the impasse in which the politics of multiculturalism has found itself by building bridges not only between postcolonial and Black Studies scholarship, but also between postcolonial and Ethnic Studies scholarship. Gates’s interdisciplinary research, his “critical bricolage,”6 brings together a wide range of scholars and establishes multiple lines of communication between different theoretical praxes. Gates’s diagnosis of the pitfalls of American multiculturalism has an affinity with the work the most important of contemporary multiculturalists of the left7 i.e. David Hollinger. Hollinger descended from the school of Werner Sollors, one of the most important researchers of American ethnicity in the twentieth century. Hollinger admits that multiculturalism helped to recognize and appreciate cultural diversity. On the other hand, however, he argues in a vein similar to Gates stating that it failed to put an end to cultural denigration and the prevailing imbalance of power. He explains the intricacies of multiculturalism via the concept of 6

Gates’s words about his own tendency to combine Western and Black traditions. Their opponents are conservatives of the right for whom, as Gates observes, multiculturalism has always been “a slippery slope to anarchy and tribal war.”

7

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an ethno-racial pentagram, a system of demographic classification similar to the model of bubbles, which divides Americans into separate wedges (Afro-Americans, Asians, Native Americans, etc.), with affiliation based on ethno-racial and political solidarity and “rooted” identity. He exposes the unity-in-difference ideology as a kind of exoticism that celebrates ethnic diversity and struggles to keep identities pure in an increasingly more and more hybrid environment. Multiculturalism, concludes Hollinger, only enhances fragmentation of the American society into competing ethnic enclaves, each concerned first and foremost with its own well being. In his important and frequently reprinted study Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, Hollinger encourages America to take one step beyond multiculturalism. It is a “cosmopolitan-inspired” step which favours voluntary affiliations among different communities and cultures. Hollinger builds upon Sollors’ division of identity narratives into those which rely on descent (family, ethnicity, national history) and those that rely on consent. Consequently there are communities of descent and communities of consent; there are identities and affiliations. It is clear that Hollinger grapples here with much the same issues as postcolonial critics though he uses a slightly different terminology. In the words of Hollinger (1995: 6) “the concept of identity is more psychological than social and it can hide the extent to which the achievement of identity is a social process by which a person becomes affiliated to one or more acculturating cohorts.” The concept of identity based on filial rootedness, argues Hollinger (1995: 6), “implies fixity and givenness while the word affiliation suggests a greater sense of flexibility.” “Affiliation is more performative,” claims Hollinger (1995: 7), “while identity suggests something that simply is.” This “performative affiliation” can be seen as a correlative for relational, hybrid or rhizomic identity, whereas Hollinger’s “identity” seems to be a different moniker for Gilroy’s concept of “rooted” identity. Thus Hollinger’s discussion on the politics of identity formation in American multicultural society bears a striking resemblance to that of postcolonial critics. It is based on the recognition of similar social and cultural processes that take place within the USA and many postcolonial/multiethnic nations. Hollinger, like Gates and many theorists of postcolonialism and globalism, believes that the twenty-first century is an age of affiliations, not identities. It is an age that requires a post-ethnic perspective that “denies neither history or biology, nor the need for affiliations, but it does deny that history and biology can provide a set of clear orders for the affiliations we are to make” (Hollinger 1995: 13). Hollinger is aware that

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we may have had too many “posts” already, but his project of postethnicity “differs decisively from many posts of our times.” “Posting,” argues Hollinger, designates a corrective measure, a critical stance or a sceptical response. “Post” questioning the usefulness of previous paradigms poses questions about the limits and abuses of previous frameworks (Hollinger 1995: 5); it “is often a way of repudiating a preceding episode rather than building upon it and critically refining its contributions. Most vindicators of postmodernism scorn modernism, or are condescending towards it. Instead postethnicity is respectful of ethnicity,” but at the same time it emphasizes “the dynamic and changing character of many groups and is responsive to their potential for creating new cultural combinations” (Hollinger 1995: 3–4). Both Gates and Hollinger seem to rehearse Homi Bhabha’s warning (Bhabha 1994: 209)8 that “the exoticism of multiculturalism” and “the diversity of cultures” should be rejected for the sake of “inscription and articulation of cultures’ hybridity.” But neither Hollinger nor Gates actually mention Bhabha’s theory of hybridity or the term itself, though I think it might be useful. Clearly Bhabha’s concept of hybridity conflicts with the American model of multiculturalism, criticized by both Hollinger and Gates. This does not mean that Americanists are not familiar with the debates about hybridity. On the contrary no other postcolonial concept has gained such a widespread currency in American debates surrounding multiculturalism. As Bruce Simons (2000: 412) argues, “since Homi Bhabha inaugurated hybridity’s academic popularity in the United States no other word—with the possible exception of ‘postcolonial’ itself—has come under such scrutiny and critique.” Simons’s article sets out to examine “what happens to hybridity as it travels”: “What do Americanists mean when [they] write or say “hybridity”? “What difference have the debates in postcolonial studies made in and to the research, pedagogy and curricula that go under the name of American Studies?” In answer to these questions, Simons (2000: 414) concludes by quoting David Palumbo-Liu, that regrettably for the scholars of American Studies, hybridity is “a particular modification of the melting pot ideology.” Hybridity, pluralism and diversity are often “lined up as mutually defining and practically synonymous terms [. . .].” “Many critics have been astounded,” concludes Simon (2000: 414), “by the facility with which hybridity can be assimilated into a model of pluralists nationalism and used as a signifier of

8

Bhabha comes close to the idea of a melting pot—a ruling dogma prior to the emergence of multiculturalism in the 1980s.

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ethnic diversity and cultural pluralism that connotes power blind celebration of multiplicity and difference.” The appropriation of the term “hybridity” by mainstream American Studies may be seen as symptomatic of a larger impulse on the part of American Studies to have an ideological control over the study of ethnicity and race in the United States. Ever since the culture wars were allegedly won,9 the departments of American, Black and Ethnic studies (as well as Women and Gender Studies) competed with one another for students, funds and reputation. John Carlos Rowe, the editor of an important study tellingly entitled Post-Nationalist American Studies, observes that in the midst of the 1980s “culture wars,” in the face of different ethnocentric nationalist movements (such as the Black Power Movement or “La Raza”—Chicano/a movement) the mainstream American Studies programs embarked on a multicultural project (Rowe 2000b: 6). “to avoid being perceived as ‘white heterosexual male studies’.” However, what seems to be more important is that today many scholars working outside American Studies programs see the adoption of multiculturalism as a concerted attempt to assimilate minority studies and to control difference. In view of the fact that many Ethnic Studies programs have been recently downsized, the “overarching” American Studies (Rowe 2000b: 11) “now [loom] large as a new imperializing force.” I think that this situation should make Black and Ethnic Studies natural allies. It calls for more interdisciplinary interaction between these two fields, between the works of such scholars as Gates or Hollinger, who are both acutely aware that the American culture wars are far from being over. In my opinion, Black Studies, which are increasingly transnational and comparative in outlook and which make good use of postcolonial and cultural studies theories, have the potential to change methodologies, areas and objects of study of not only Ethnic Studies but also American Studies. Not all scholars working in the field of traditional American Studies10 are conservative and reactionary; not all of them are committed to the celebration of American exceptionalism and cultural nationalism. There 9

Black, Ethnic and Women Studies entered the academia as a result of social movements of the 1960s such as the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power Movement, Women’s Movement, Gay and Lesbian Movement. 10 By traditional American Studies I mean the version of American Studies that emerged during the Cold War era. It was based on narrow definitions of national character, Puritanism, isolationism, Manifest Destiny and the melting pot ideology. It was challenged in the 1960s by aforementioned social movements that objected to presenting America as (Rowe 2000a: 5) “economic, social and political utopia towards which other nations ought to aspire.”

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are more and more scholars, who like John Carlos Rowe, see the limitations of the traditional model of American studies and call for new methods of study and new paradigms of research. They “seek to revise cultural nationalism and celebratory American exceptionalism” building on the scholarship of Black, Ethnic and also Women’s Studies. Rowe’s discussion of the future of American studies in Post-Nationalist American Studies proves that some channels of communication have already been established among Black, Ethnic and American scholarship. In fact, in my opinion, some of the most interesting recent work in the field of American Studies grapples with the ideas that postcolonial and British cultural studies have elaborated on for a few decades. Besides Rowe’s pioneering work: Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: From the Revolution to World War II and Post-Nationalist American Studies, (the first book written, the second edited by him) there is also an interesting monograph by Amerjit Singh and Peter Schmidt on Postcolonial Theory and the United States. All three of these books that appeared at the turn of the century are focused on new theoretical imperatives in the field and its future prospects. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism explores the subject of the North American Empire, the problem of internal colonization and the role of literary culture in disseminating the ideology of the American Empire. The study was inspired by Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism and its title is a tribute to Said’s study. PostNationalist American Studies discusses the persistence of US nationalism and potential rewards of assuming (Rowe 2000b: 2) a “less insular and parochial, and more internationalist and comparative” perspective. Postcolonial Theory and the U.S. includes diverse opinions about recent postcolonial and cultural studies interventions in the field of American, Black and Ethnic Studies, including the work of scholars who question the application of foreign paradigms to American culture. In the words of Rachel Adams “together [these books] show the potential of postcolonial studies to invigorate the field, they also reveal that American Studies has something to learn from its relatively new partner” (Adams 2011: 3). What American Studies can learn is a more inclusive perspective embracing the two Americas, the Pacific and various transatlantic routes. According to Rowe (2000b: 24–25) American studies now “tries to work genuinely as a comparativist discipline that will respect the many different social systems and cultural affiliations of America. Rather than treating such cultural differences as discrete entities, this new comparative approach stresses the ways different cultures are transformed by their contact and interaction with one another.”

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The extent to which American Studies is being transformed by the interventions from within and outside the USA can be also illustrated by the titles of conferences and presidential addresses over the past fifteen years. The conferences have been devoted to: “American Studies and the Question of Empire: Histories Cultures and Practices” (1998), “Crossing Borders/Crossing Centuries” (1999); “The World in American Studies; American Studies in the World” (2000), “Ethnic Canons in Global Contexts” (2011) to name just a few. A number of essays have also detected the changing agenda of American Studies, for example Porter (1994), Jay (1991), Desmond and Dominguez (1996), , Sharpe (1995). The list can be completed with such anthologies Werbner and Modood (1997), Sollors and Dietrich (1994) and Sollors (1997). In conclusion, I think that in the years following the publication of The Black Atlantic, Black Studies gained immensely from the dialogue with postcolonial and Black British cultural studies. In the opinion of James Turner, from the prestigious Africana Studies and Research Centre at Cornell University, the most progressive contemporary Black scholarship is characterized by a sweeping global vision, an outlook that embraces the entire Black world or global Black experience. By adopting praxes from postcolonial and Black cultural studies, Black American criticism introduced into the American academia new theories with which to revise the American discourse of multiculturalism, nation and identity, proving that concepts imported from one discipline or culture into another can not only result in important advances in critical praxis but also in a new practice. I think we are witnessing a moment in which the disciplines of American and Ethnic Studies are being pushed beyond their national/ethnic structures, beyond their utopian unity-in-difference ideology. Thus the “post” in “post-ethnic” or “post-national” does not imply a development trajectory in which the “nation,” the “tribe” have been superseded by transnational or trans ethnic formalism, but it signals a desire to move from (Rowe 2000b: 7) “uncritical nationalist perspectives towards what has been variously called critical internationalism, transnationalism or globality.”11 Thanks to postcolonial interventions US scholars have a

11

Trevor Phillips “After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation” is a speech delivered on 22 Sep. 2005 for the Manchester Council for Community Relations. In it Philips argues that the US uses multiculturalism to segregate its ethnically diverse populace: “Amongst America’s hyphenated identities, the part of their identity that marks them out as different seems to have becomes as important, or even more important, that the part that binds them together. Americans have all fetched up at the same restaurant; but every group has its own separate table, with its own menu,

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chance to stop looking at their research solely through the prism of multiculturalism, so far the central organizing principle of how to study culture in the US that skews the field towards what seems to be an obsolete ideological position.12 Therefore building transatlantic bridges, through which ideas can freely pass, can in my opinion enrich the American academia and postcolonial and cultural studies as well so that we may begin to see in Spivak’s fashion how different theories intersect, complete one another or how they bring each other to crisis. Presently when some critics claim that both postcolonial and cultural studies are in their eclipse, American scholars working in the field of Black, Ethnic and American Studies show that postcolonial/cultural studies’ theories can still be useful when applied in another context. As Henry Louis Gates (2010: 34) puts it: One might think that’s just the story of the world, given the way ideas circulate. If structuralism is passé in its land of origin, then ship it and it can have a new life across the channel, or across the Atlantic. Oscar Wilde once quipped that when good Americans die, they go to Paris. I think that in Paris, when good theories die, they go to New Haven or Ithaca.

I think in this sense we might say that good theories never die, they simply migrate like people. In the work of contemporary American critics such as Gates, Hollinger, Rowe or Simons we can see what happens to these ideas as they travel.

References Adams, R. 2011. “The Worlding of American Studies” [Online.] Available: http://racheladams.net/portfolio_item/the-worlding-of-american-studies [2012, February 02]. Anderson, T. 1992. Introduction to African American Studies: Cultural Concepts and Theory. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt. Anderson, T. and J. Stuart. 2007. Introduction to African American Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications. Baltimore: Imprint Editions. its own waiters and its own way of paying the bill.” He argues that Great Britain should not imitate that model. 12 As Gates argues multiculturalism, based on a post-war valorization of ethnicity, “reified conception of cultural membership borrowed from the social sciences of mid-century” (Gates 2010: 144).

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Ashroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. 1989. The Empire Writes Back. London, New York: Routledge. Bhabha, H. 1994. The Location of Culture, New York: Routledge. Clarke, V. 1990. “Developing Diaspora Literacy.” In Out of the Kumbla: Women and Literature in the Caribbean. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. Davies, C.B. 1994. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. London, New York: Routledge. Desmond, J.S. and Dominguez, V.R. 1996. “Resituating American Studies in a Critical Internationalism.” In American Quarterly 48 (Fall): 475– 490. Gates, H.L. Jr. 1989. Figures in Black. Signs and the “Racial” Self. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Gates, H.L. Jr. 1988. The Signifying Monkey: a Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. —. 2010. Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora. New York: Basic Civitas Books. Gilroy, P. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard Press. Hollinger, D.A. 1995. Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism. New York: Basic Books. Jay G.S. 1991. “The End of American Literature.” In College English 53.3: 264–281. Karenga, M. 2002. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press. Porter, C. 1994. “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary studies.” In American Literary History 6.3: 467– 526. Rowe, J.C. 2000a. Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism: from the Revolution to World War II. New York: Oxford University Press. — (ed.). 2000b. Post-Nationalist American Studies. Berkley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. Singh, A. and Schmidt, P. 2000. Postcolonial Theory and the United States. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. Said, E. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Sharpe, J. 1995. “Is the United States Postcolonial? Transnationalism, Immigration and Race.” In Diaspora 4: 2. Simons, B. 2000. “Hybridity in Americas: Reading Condé, Mukerjee and Hawthorne.” In Postcolonial Theory and the United States. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press. 412–437.

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Sollors, W. and Dietrich, M. (eds.). 1994. The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Sollors, W. (ed.) 1997. Neither Black nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Terborg-Penn, R., Harley, S. and Benton, A. (eds.) 1989. Women in Africa and the African Diaspora. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Walker, S. (ed.) 2001. African Roots, American Cultures: Africa in the Creation of the Americas. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Werbner, P. and Modood, T. (eds.) 1997. Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multi-cultural Identities and the Politics of Anti-racism. New York: Zed Books.

POSTINDIAN WARRIORS OF SIMULATION: SHERMAN ALEXIE’S FLIGHT AS A TRICKSTER NOVEL MONIKA KOCOT

ABSTRACT: The aim of the article is to attempt an analysis of Sherman Alexie’s trickster novel, Flight, through the prism of Gerald Vizenor’s theory concerning trickster discourse in Native American literature. Special attention will be given to the construction of the trickster narration together with its paraphernalia, and how the issue of “Indianness” is approached. The theme of simulated knowledge/power, and struggle for survival together with active resistance (survivance) will also be addressed. KEY WORDS: Sherman Alexie, Gerald Vizenor, Native American, American Indian novel, postindian, simulation, survivance, trickster, trickster discourse, trickster narrative.

Introduction “To be an Indian in modern society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical” (Vine 1969: 10). And Kimberly Blaeser suggests a possible solution to the problem of entrapment: We can be prisoners, and we are, in our bodies. But we can liberate our minds. Tribal people were brilliant in understanding that a figure, a familiar figure in an imaginative story, could keep their minds free. [ . . .] I’m going for trickster consciousness because it’s an ideal healing, because it disrupts the opposites and that creates the possibility for discourse that’s communal and comic (Blaeser 1996: 238).

The struggle for self-definition against the oppressive narrative structures that define the contemporary identity of the American Indian is one the issues Sherman Alexie deals with in his prose and poetry. Alexie admits that he has come to the realization that many people read literary fiction for the same reason they read mainstream fiction: that is for entertainment and a form of escape. “I don’t want to write books that

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provide people with that,” he says. “I want books that challenge, anger, and possibly offend” (Grassian 2005: 14). And indeed, his narrations touch upon radical, disturbing, controversial and confrontational issues. Flight, being a modern-day vision quest, a trickster novel, is no different in this respect. Alexie once again endeavours to rewrite dominant American history as he challenges stereotypes of Indians as nature-loving noble savages and criticizes what he calls “the corn-pollen, four directions, eagle-feathered school of Native literature” (Grassian 2005: 7). His touch is playful, full of well-targeted satiric tease. He depicts America as a land of Indians both real and imagined, where history replays itself, where dream memories and jumps in time are the rule, where each transformation happens at high pace (Lee 2009: 481–524). In order to show the ways in which Alexie creates and maintains the “disequilibrium between fact and fiction” (Grassian 2005: 15), I will refer to Gerald Vizenor’s theory concerning trickster discourse, and I will point to mutually informing concepts of postindian, survivance and warrior of simulation.

From Trickster to Trickster Discourse In order to grasp the concept of trickster discourse, or trickster hermeneutics, the figure of trickster itself has to be introduced. For Paul Radin, the trickster is the oldest figure in American Indian religions (1956: 154). S/he embodies all contradictions (Ricketts 1965/1966: 327); s/he is ambivalent in character and difficult to pin down. S/he is a creator, shaman, mediator and a destructive demiurge. In Victor Turner’s opinion, the figure of trickster is the embodiment of liminality in myths (Turner 1974: 71). S/he dwells in a liminal situation, between two events, on the border of two worlds, or at a moment where one has to make a conscious decision. As Jeanne Rosier Smith points out, the trickster’s identity is neither reductive nor static; rather, s/he embodies an expansive, dynamic cultural identity (1997: 156). In “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: a Heuristic guide,” William Hynes offers six characteristic features most common among the tricksters; the most important of these is a fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous personality of the trickster. Flowing from this are the following features: a) deceiver/trick-player, b) shape-shifter, c) situation inventor, d) messenger/imitator of the gods, e) sacred/lewd bricoleur (Hynes 1997: 34). In Flight, the trickster manifests itself in all the above mentioned forms. Furthermore, s/he does so on four levels: as a character named Zits endowed with fluid identity, as a first-person narrator Zits (commenting

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and subverting the meaning of narrated events), as a narrative structure (trickster-relation, trickster-timespace), and as an incessant movement/ process (or processuality, both on the level of plot and narration). Those four areas of the trickster’s actualization are mutually conditioned, creating “trickster aesthetics” or “trickster discourse” (Vizenor), which manifests itself by merging the fictional worlds and exploring their boundaries, jumps in time, disruptions, multivocality/dialogicality, multiperspectivity, intertextuality, intratextuality, fluidity of meaning and unfinished/undefined story lines. The role of the reader of this “trickster story,” just as the role of the listener of—traditional oral stories, is to actively co-create the meaning of the text. Hence, the application of Vizenor’s theory allows us to see how Alexie’s “trickster discourse” becomes the connection between traditional oral tribal stories and postmodern metafiction. Vizenor stresses that the trickster is a postmodern figure that has always been a tribal phenomenon. In his opinion, the trickster’s signatures create trickster discourse of “narrative chance—a comic utterance and adventure to be heard or read” (Vizenor 1993: x). The trickster narrative situates the participant audience, the listeners and readers, in agonistic imagination: there, in comic discourse, the trickster is being, nothingness and liberation; a loose seam in consciousness; that wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences end narratives; and at last the trickster is comic shit (Vizenor 1993: 196).

The last sentence of the quotation signals a highly subversive character of the trickster’s action, be it a character of the novel or a figure of speech, and introduces the trickster’s relationship with the concept of survivance as a way of active struggle for self-definition and against simulacra of the real.

Representation, Simulation, Survivance In The Wake of Imagination, Richard Kearney argues that the human ability to imagine something has been understood in two main ways throughout the history of Western thought. The first is a “representational faculty which reproduces images” of some reality; the second is a “creative faculty which produces images” that stand alone. “These basic notions of imagination” refer to “everyday experience and artistic practices” (1988: 15). The idea of the imminent demise of imagination is clearly a postmodern obsession. “Postmodernism undermines the modernist belief in the image as an authentic expression. The typically postmodern

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image is one which displays its own artificiality, its own pseudo status, its own representational depthlessness” (Kearney 1988: 15). Gerald Vizenor shares Kearney’s opinion and, in his numerous writings, explores the issue of the representation of Native Americans in literature, history, and popular culture. Vizenor creatively mixes contemporary poststructuralist and postmodern theory and Native intellectual traditions to defamiliarize common notions of Native Americans. Crucial to his theory is the association between historically distorted images of Native Americans, the problematic issue of American Indian identity/authenticity, and last but not least the name Indian itself. In his analyses, Vizenor creatively mixes poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern criticism; he refers to the writings of Michel Foucault, and his analyses of the link between the production knowledge and the possession of power by dominant groups; drawing on the writings of Edward W. Said, he claims that the Indian is an “occidental invention,” from Jean Baudrillard he borrows the concept of simulation, or the belief that in postmodern life, we are so far from real things and experiences that we can only simulate them, not represent them. Vizenor uses Baudrillard, Foucault and Said’s concepts in his continuous attempts to reclaim a sense of real Native peoples and cultures. Vizenor also seems to have been the first to remark upon the relation between storytelling and survivance that he understands as “an active sense of presence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name.” To him, Native survivance stories are “renunciations of dominance, tragedy, and victimry” (1994: vii). Vizenor’s methodological tools will help to point to the ways in which Sherman Alexie, being one of the most gifted and accomplished storytellers, and a prominent representative of the younger generation of Native American authors, uses his cultural heritage in creating the trickster narration together with its paraphernalia, and how he approaches the issue of Indianness. The themes of simulated knowledge/power, and struggle for survival together with active resistance (survivance) will remain at the core of the analysis.

The Flight Alexie invokes Melville as his narrator intones the opening line: “Call me Zits.” This mocking, sometimes self-narcissistic tone of the narrator as well as the protagonist, is taken after indigenous comedians who often perform tricks on the listeners. In that first line, with a characteristically canny sense of humour and irony, Alexie initiates his multilayered

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“trickster hermeneutics” (Vizenor 1994: 16–17). The trickster as a shapeshifter, wit, disturber of the status quo, becomes also a dissembler of meaning, the one who “uncovers distinctions and ironies between narrative voices” (Vizenor 1993: 192). Alexie will apply “trickster hermeneutics” in the course of the whole narration, presenting numerous, and selfcontradictory, voices inside Zits’ psyche. The hero of Flight, a throwaway kid, half-Native American, half-Irish, is an orphan since the age of six. He inherited his mother’s green eyes and his father’s acne. At fifteen, Zits has lived in twenty different foster homes, gone to twenty-two different schools and owns just enough clothing to fill a backpack. He might be characterized as the embodiment of shame: I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame. I’m ashamed of being fifteen years old. And being tall. And skinny. And ugly. I’m ashamed that I look like a bag of zits tied to a broomstick. I wonder if loneliness causes acne. I wonder if being Indian causes acne. (Alexie 2007: 4)

And he adds: Yes, I’m Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they’re not here and haven’t been for years, so I’m not really Irish or Indian. I’m a blank sky, a human solar eclipse. (Alexie 2007: 5)

Zits is filled with anger towards the whites, his foster parents, but also towards other Indians, especially educated ones “the rich and educated Indians don’t give a shit about me. They pretend I don’t exist. They say, The drunken Indian is just a racist cartoon. They say, The lonely Indian is just a ghost in a ghost story” (Alexie 2007: 7). Alexie decides to face the stereotypical image of an Indian, however, not to say that this image is not true; rather to claim that this is the cold damp reality that Native Americans choose to erase from their consciousness. In the course of the narration, Alexie argues that the reasons of such an attitude is the white man’s policy towards Indians of the nineteenth century that shaped their way of thinking about themselves, and still exerts influence on Native Americans’ perception of their heritage. He is at one with Vizenor who claims that manifest manners describes the spread of literary and cultural representations much as the historical subjection of Native peoples was explained as Manifest Destiny, which led to the justification of violence done to Native peoples, and

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spread of scholarly knowledge of their inherent inferiority, which in turn warranted their surveillance, control, as well as their “natural” extinction (1994: 10–11). Influenced by Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation, Vizenor argues that the word Indian says more about “who we are not, which is significant in identity politics, and nothing about who we are or might become as postindians” (1999: 84). Postindian, a term Vizenor employs to attempt to explain identity, is a placeholder name for the outdated and colonialist misnomer Indian. Coining the term survivance, which infuses survival with a more active sense of resistance, Vizenor turns the image of the Native American from a romanticized victim to a figure of strength and endurance. The result is what he calls the postindian, the postmodern Native person who has an awareness of conventional images of the Indian and manipulates them. Vizenor urges people to become “postindian warriors of simulations” and engages in “trickster hermeneutics,” using invention in language and the shifting and contingent nature of meaning to replace simulations with a more valid tribal consciousness (1994: 10–11, 16–17). In the first chapter of the book Zits admits that his identity as an Indian is based on what Vizenor calls projections or simulacra of the real: Everything I know about Indians (and I could easily beat 99 percent of the world in a Native American version of Trivial Pursuit) I’ve learnt from television. I know about famous chiefs, broken treaties, the political activism of the 1960s and 1970s, and the Indian wars of the nineteenth century. I know all this stuff because it makes me feel more like a real Indian. Maybe I can’t live like an Indian, but I can learn how real Indians used to live and how they’re supposed to live now (Alexie 2007: 12).

In subsequent chapters of Flight, Alexie will violently expose simulacra and simulations in the head of Zits, and as he gains more and more knowledge about his family and tribal past, as he learns about his own projections, prejudices and possible solutions to existential questions characteristic of a teenage boy. He eventually becomes the “postindian warrior of simulations,” a mature individual freed from anger and the need for revenge. To avoid a monologic perspective in Flight, Alexie decentres the text, using the structuring device of the tale-within-the-tale. The lack of linear links between subsequent threads of narration is substituted with an arrangement based on associative thinking (Cox 2000: 219–246) which allows for, and even promotes alternative interpretations. Individual stories act as metonymies, as part-wholes. Each story is linked with another, but,

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significantly, with a highly contextualized discourse that assumes the knowledge of history and shared experience. The story opens as Zits wakes up in yet another foster home, has a stare-down contest with his brutish foster father, shoves his foster mother and starts his flight. In this context it means an escape from oppression embodied by his new foster parents. While he is running the city streets, randomly turning left and right, we can hear his thoughts: “I used to dream that I could run fast enough to burn up like a meteor and drop little pieces of me all over the world” (Alexie 2007: 16). And metaphorically speaking, he becomes a self-proclaimed “orphan meteor” (Alexie 2007: 17). After a long police pursuit, he ends up in jail, where he meets a wise and well-read white boy, Justice, who apologizes for his race’s aggression toward Native Americans. They talk about “empowerment”—Nietzsche’s, Santayana’s philosophies, Crazy Horse and the Ghost Dance. Significantly, empowerment, the way they see it, might stand as a synonym to Vizenor’s survivance. Justice, a model trickster figure (deceiver/trick-player and situation inventor), encourages Zits to perform a Ghost Dance, dancing the white people away: “Do you think the Ghost Dance is real?” After hearing that question a thousand times, I finally have the answer. “Yes,” I say. [. . .] “Okay, okay,” he says. “Now you can dance. Now you understand. Now you have the knowledge. Now you have the power. Interestingly enough, the idea of knowledge as power may potentially activate references to Foucault’s and possibly Bacon’s philosophy. But to continue the story: So what are you going to do with that power?” I stare at the pistol in my hand. “I’m going to start a fire,” I say. “Yes,” Justice says, and keeps on hugging me. He loves me. And I love Justice. (Alexie 2007: 34)

Once out of jail, Justice gives Zits two guns, one real, one paint, and Zits’ homicidal dreams lead him into a bank, brandishing the paintball gun and a real 38 Special, which will stand for a mode of transport in his travels in time. Later on we see Zits “ghost dance” in a bank: “I spin in circles and shoot and shoot and shoot. I keep pulling the triggers until the bank guard shoots me in the back of the head” (Alexie 2007: 35). “I am still alive when I start to fall, but I die before I hit the floor,” Zits says in the final line of that chapter. Surprisingly, the beginning of the next

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chapter reads: “Wake up, kid; come on, it’s time to go” (2007: 36). Indeed, Zits is not really dead, and Alexie’s plot becomes a mixture of historical fiction and sci-fi, or using Vizenor’s term, a story of survivance. Zits’ flight as a (tribal) journey begins. Zits goes back and forth in time, inhabiting the bodies of people who are in decidedly dangerous situations. Alexie takes characters and events from the history of the colonization of North America and blends them with Western expansion myths, thus forcing the reader to consider the message contained within the world he creates. He aims at subverting the dominant paradigm as a way to deconstruct and reject it. For as Blaeser explains, “because historical stories, imaginative stories, cultural stories work to form our identity, the disarming of history through satiric humour liberates and empowers us in the imagination of our destinies” (Blaeser 1992: 363). Gerald Vizenor applies a similar perspective when he states: “In the realm of art, a comic response is more resilient, more effective in revolt against terror and the sources of terror than a response that is solemn or tragic” (Vizenor 1994: 83). While Vizenor admits tragic wisdom to be part of survivance (2003: 36), he either prefers the comic vision as more in keeping with survivance or he redefines tragic wisdom, which, “in the native sense, is the ecstatic nature of creation and chance” (Vizenor 1998: 19). Indeed, according to Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen, the distinguishing characteristic of tribal thought is precisely this “enduring sense of the fluidity and malleability, the fragility and plasticity of the creative universe in which we live and dwell and have our being” (1991: 22). During the “flight,” Zits still has his mind, but he must battle the brains and bodies of those he takes over. His odyssey is actually a vision quest on which he learns that the projections of the real are very difficult to annihilate, and the only way to know the real is through first-hand experience. Landing in 1975, Zits inhabits the body of FBI agent Hank Storm and finds himself suddenly sympathetic with the law as he confronts two traitorous members of a Native American group called Indigenous Rights Now, who have gruesomely tortured a young warrior for not revealing some mysterious and unspecified secrets. In order to show his dedication to the cause, he is made to kill the already dead, young warrior. Sickened, Zits/Storm falls unconscious, wakes three days later in the hospital where he learns that he had fainted during the act of that bloody murder. His FBI partner relates the events Zits/Storm is unable to retrieve from his memory. It appears that for Storm “eliminating” people is a daily routine, but the same awareness almost kills Zits. For the reader, the scene of killing the Indian warrior by the members of IRN is even more

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“sickening.” Throughout the narration, Alexie introduces such apparently insignificant scenes to show that the details that matter are often overshadowed by a grand narrative. Instead of dwelling on the subject of the murder, however, he decides to change the subject completely. To Zits’s/Storm’s surprise, he meets his wife, Mrs. Storm, kisses her and realizes he would kill for her kiss. In a purely trickster fashion, that thought transports him again and chapter seven begins as follows: I’m running through the dark. I run toward the sound of laughter. I run toward a bright light in the distance. I run super fast. And I wonder if I’m not running at all. What if I’m flying? What if I have become that bank guard’s bullet? What if I’m the bullet that blasted through my brain? But, wait, no, I suddenly burst through the bright light, which is really the opening of a buffalo-skin tepee, and I run outside and stop. I am standing in the middle of gigantic Indian camp. And I don’t mean some Disneyland, Nickelodeon, roller-coaster, stuffed-animal, cottoncandy Indian camp. Nope. I am standing in the middle of a real Indian camp, complete with thousands of real Indian tepees and tens of thousands of real old-time Indians. [. . .] And there are so many Indians. Yep, a bunch of real old-time Indians. I’m not exactly sure what year it is. It’s tough to tell the difference between seventeenth- and eighteenthand nineteenth-century Indians. [. . .] These old time Indians have dark skin. There aren’t any half-breed pale-beige green-eyed Indians here. Nope, unlike me, these Indian are the real deal. [. . .] And it stinks something fierce. [. . .] So imagine a camp filled with tens of thousands of sweating Indians, dogs, and horses, along with what appears to be the rotting and drying corpses of hundreds of buffalo, deer, porcupines, badgers, squirrels, rats, and who-knows-what other animals, hanging on racks everywhere I look. These Indians eat a lot of meat. And deodorant has not been invented yet. And it’s hotter than the pizza cheese that gets stuck to the floor of your mouth and burns you so bad you can have one of those skin flaps hanging down. Imagine what this smells like. (Alexie 2007:59–61)

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Once again, we are facing narration that assumes the knowledge of history and shared experience. The mocking tone of the narrator points to the stereotypical depictions of traditional (in this case nineteenth-century) Indian lifestyle. “The corn-pollen, four directions, eagle-feathered school of Native literature” (Grassian 2005: 7) is juxtaposed with rough language and naturalistically activated sensorium—the dominating sensation is that of an overwhelming stink. It seems as though for Alexie it is personal experience together with history seen through the eyes of the individual that creates a sense of Indianness. The constant presence of mockery, irony and sarcasm is aimed at subverting the discourse of the AngloSaxon-dominated matrix. Trickster discourse dictates that “native identities are personal creations of the real, not the decorative lace of metaphysics” (Vizenor 1998: 73). Line by line we are introduced into the scene where Crazy Horse and his band await Custer. Zits witnesses the carnage of Custer’s Last Stand through the eyes of a young, speechless Indian child. In two subsequent chapters Zits inhabits the body of an ageing expert Indian tracker employed by the American Army of the same era who decides to kill his commander-in-chief and then helps a young American soldier save an Indian child. The complexity of emotional and ethical problems Alexie tackles in those chapters is surprising. What seems of great value of this prose is that the emphasis is not placed on the political, or social aspect of the racial divide; rather, Alexie strives to convince his readers about the importance of the so-called human values, and he does so by activating the individual, the most subtle and intimate feelings and emotions of his characters. The dialogicality/ multivocality inside of Zits’ head, sudden disruptions of the plot, unfinished/ undefined story lines together with intratextuality create a fluidity of meaning which encourages the reader of this “trickster story” (similarly to the role of the listener of the traditional oral stories) to actively co-create the meaning of the text. Zits, the protagonist and the narrator, is oriented towards expressing himself, and it is done in a dialogic genre in which conversation between historia and poesis; documentation and creation is always in progress. He performs the task of the storyteller and the critical historian, who is to name and remember the wreckage of history and to make that remembrance relevant to present generations. The storyteller as “historyteller” (Benjamin 1968: 95) engages in the act of interpretation, “which is not concerned with an accurate concatenation of definite events, but with the way these are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world” (Benjamin 1968: 96). The purpose is not to explain the past. Explanation reduces history/story to information, which we can verify or not, but

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which does not communicate the experience of the past or provoke a change in our perspective. The storyteller’s interpretation, on the other hand, directly connects the experiences of the past and present, and possibly the future. Zits travels through time on several more occasions, and each trip presents moral dilemmas. He becomes the linchpin for the slaughter of children, innocently befriends a suicide bomber and finally inhabits his own absentee father. Finally, in the finishing chapters of the novel, Alexie challenges the need for a synthesis, the need to draw a moral. The narrator intones: I am tired of hurting people. I am tired of being hurt. I need help. I walk from street to street, looking for help. I walk past Pike Place Market and Nordstrom’s. I walk past Gameworks and the Space Needle. I walk past Lake Washington and Lake Union. I walk for miles. I walk for days. I walk for years. I don’t understand how time works anymore (2007:162).

The incantatory construction of the narrative voice connects the hereand-now with the undefined and apparently relative sense of time. And when Zits encounters two police officers who have arrested him countless times, he admits: I want to tell him the entire story. I want to tell him that I fell through time and have only now returned. I want to tell him I learned a valuable lesson. But I don’t know what that lesson is. It’s too complicated, too strange. Or maybe it really is simple. Maybe it’s so simple it makes me feel stupid to say. Maybe you’re not supposed to kill. No matter who tells you to do it. No matter how good or bad the reason. Maybe you’re supposed to believe that all life is sacred (Alexie 2007: 162–163).

Zits surrenders to police, he submits his two guns and relates the story of meeting Justice and the whole idea behind killing people in the bank. The police officers do not believe a word he says, so he encourages them to watch the bank security tape video recorded on the day of the massacre: In the video, I pat my coat once, twice, three times. “What are you doing?” Eyeglasses asks. “I’m checking to see if my guns are still there,” I say. “Are you thinking about using them?” “Yeah.” “But you didn’t. Why not?”

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Postindian Warriors of Simulation On the video, my image disappears for a second. I’m gone. And then I reappear. “Whoa,” Officer Dave says. “Did you see that?” The detective rewinds the tape. Presses PLAY. I’m there in the bank. Then I’m gone—poof. And then I reappear. “That’s weird,” Officer Dave says. “Aw, it’s just a flaw in the tape,” Eyeglasses says. “They reuse these tapes over and over. The quality goes down. They got weird bumps and cuts in them” (Alexie 2007: 166).

The passage may serve as a perfect example of trickster discourse. On the face of it, one might say, we are dealing with a flaw on the tape. If we acknowledge the fact that the “flaw,” that second embraces timespace with all Zits’ incarnations, then the scene appears to be a possibility of a supernatural level of existence intervening the here-and-now of 2007 Seattle. Alexie shows that tribal consciousness is wonder, chance, and coincidence.

Conclusion In Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent, Vizenor identifies contemporary mixedbloods as the new earthdivers, that is to say tricksters who “dive into unknown urban places now [. . .] to create a new consciousness of coexistence” (1981: ix). He also notices an undeniably strong association between the function of tricksters and that of writers: “Earthdivers, tricksters, shamans, poets dream back the earth” (1981: xvi). For Vizenor, the contemporary mixedblood trickster writers “speak a new language, ” and he specifies that “in some urban places the earthdivers speak backwards to be better understood on the earth” (1981: xvi). In Alexie’s narration, the creation of the world points to ambiguity, indeterminacy, and inscrutability; together with the images of passage— themes of liminality, transformation—create trickster discourse that challenges simulated grand narratives. Mutation, ecstasy beyond appreciation, rejection of plot and pattern (an-arche), seduction/fooling techniques, these are the characteristics of Alexie’s postmodern writing; he rejects the ideal order of presentation towards uncurbed freedom of images. Textual inventions of chance and hazard run through his work, as do dreams, worlds and a vein of nonsense. By means of synchronization and intentional asynchronisation of patterns of perception as well as axiological and ethical patterns, Alexie creates a synchronic cultural timespace where anything goes.

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Alexie’s Flight as a literary trickster survivance stands as a complex pattern of coherence without suggesting the underlying cause-and-result relationship (Vizenor 1994: 173). Thus a disjunctive and potentially radically subversive trickster influences the already ambiguous narrative strategies with the themes of survivance and liberation from simulations.

References Alexie, S. 2007. Flight. New York: Black Cat. Benjamin, W. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Ed. with an Introduction by H. Arendt. Trans. H. Zohn. New York: Schocken. Blaeser, K.M. 1992. “The ‘New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature: Dis-Arming History With Tribal Humour.” Genre 25: 351–364. —. 1996. Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Cox, J. H. 2000. "'All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something': Thomas King’s Revisions of Narratives of Domination and Conquest in Green Grass, Running Water." American Indian Quarterly. 24.2. 219-246. Grassian, D. 2005. Understanding Sherman Alexie. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Hynes, W. 1997. “Mapping the Characteristics of Mythic Tricksters: a Heuristic Guide.” In W. Hynes and W. Doty (eds.). Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 13–32. Kearney, R. 1988. The Wake of Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lee, A.R. 2009. Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction. Rodopi: Amsterdam. Radin, P. 1956. The Trickster: A Study in American Mythology. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Ricketts, M.L. 1965/1966. The North American Indian Trickster. “History of Religions.” Vol. 5: 327–50. Smith, J. R. 1997. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Turner, V. Liminal to Liminoid in Play, Flow, and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology. “The Rice University Studies.” 1974. 60.3: 53–92. Vine, D. 1969. Custer Died for Your Sins: an Indian Manifesto. New York: Avon. Vizenor, G. 1981. Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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—. 2003. Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —. 1998. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. —. 1994. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover NH: University Press of New England. —. 1993. “A Postmodern Introduction” and “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games.” In Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures. G. Vizenor (ed). New York and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Vizenor, G., and Lee, A.R.. 1999. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

POSTCOLONIALISM AND THE POLISH COLONIAL IDEOLOGY MARIA àUKOWSKA AND JUSTYNA STĉPIEē

ABSTRACT: The aim of the article is to unveil Polish colonial ideology, which dominated Polish thought, after the third partition and consequently after the loss of independence. Polish colonial thinking had three dimensions: utopian— omnipresent in theoretical writing and accidental—realized by individual colonial initiatives and state initiatives after the reconstruction of the state’s independence. The article gives insight into the perspectives in chronological order, attempting to draw a comparison between the Polish colonial ideology (“dream”) and the aspects of real colonialism. KEY WORDS: Polish colonization, sarmatic society, Polish partitions.

Introduction The sea had no value in Polish culture as traditional “Sarmatic” society was located within the land, constituting Antemurale Christianitis in Europe (Tazbir 2004: 21–29; Kowalski 2005: 351–356) and the “Granary of Europe.” The myth of “antemurale” dates back to the sixteenth century when Poland was surrounded by Muslims in the South, the Orthodox Christians in the East and the Reformists in the West and North. On the other hand, the mythical “Granary” was inspired by the noble and agrarian character of Polish culture closely connected with the land property and military tenure obligation perceived both as political and patriotic duty. In such conditions, over centuries Poland did not acknowledge the financial advantage of the sea. But contrariwise, the defence against “strangers” and preservation of the “European” values (Kowalski 2005: 43–45) constituted a major part of Polish political aspirations. At this point, it is worth emphasizing that for many centuries Poland had no access to the Baltic

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Sea and it was only after the Thirty Years’ War with the Teutonic Knights Order1 that a part of the Baltic seashore became Polish property. But even then, when Poland became a European power, marine affairs did not play a considerable role in Polish politics as the main focus was on the expansion in a continental dimension. And it was thanks to the union with Lithuania that the Commonwealth stretched across the huge territory in the East, reaching Moscow and the Black Sea. This territory was sparsely populated, with a tendency to be internally colonized. In this light, the role of GdaĔsk and Prussian cities was diminished mainly owing to the lack of royal navy in the Polish Commonwealth. This was a direct result of the fact that for many centuries the political and historical situations directed Polish colonization to the East, to the “rugged fields” across the land rather than to overseas territories. The first changes in attitudes to the value of the “water” appeared in the second half of the eighteenth century with the development of inland water transport. From that time the interest in colonial territories rose. Polish colonial ideology reflected three tendencies which revolutionized attitudes towards political thinking. This essay investigates the instances of the real, historical but unconscious colonialism; the utopian colonialism in the colonial projects undertaken through individual initiative; and the institutional colonial projects of the II Polish Commonwealth after the year 1918.

The First Colonial Episode The first Polish colonial episode was connected with the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia. In the year 1562, during the Livonian Wars, the Livonian Confederation was dismembered and the Livonian Brothers of the Sword, an order of German knights, was disbanded (Kowalski 2005: 83–93). Soon the southern part of Estonia and the northern part of Latvia were incorporated to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania on the basis of the Vilnius Pact, forming the Ducatus Ultradunensis (PƗrdaugavas hercogiste). In effect, the part of Latvia between the Daugava River’s west bank and the Baltic Sea became the Duchy of Courland and Semigallia, nominally a vassal of the Sovereign King of Poland. In the year 1651, the Duchy established its first colony in Africa, St. Andrews Island at the Gambia River, founding the Fort Jacob where (Kowalski 2005: 101–108) the export of ivory, gold, fur and spices was promoted. Soon in 1652, 1

The war with Teutonic Knights Order, which ended with the ToruĔ Agreement in 1466, resulted in the incorporation of GdaĔsk to Prussia.

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Courlanders established another colony, in Tobago, the West Indies which traded in sugar, tobacco, coffee and spices (Kowalski 2005: 109–122). In the year 1647, Duke Jacob Kettler asked the Polish King, Vladislav IV, his patron, to support his colonizing undertakings. Unfortunately, the request met with refusal, consequently leading to the end of the Polish colonial episode. However, the Duchy of Courland still remained an object of interest for both Sweden and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Eight years later the Swedish army entered the Duchy territory, and as a result the Swedish-Polish war (1655–60) began during which Duke Jacob was captured by the Swedish (1658–1960). During this period, the Dutch took over both Courland’s colonies, while their merchant fleet and factories suffered destruction. This war ended with the peace Treaty of Oliwa (1660), enabling Courland to regain Tobago until 1689 and oppose the interests of France, Holland and England. Duke Jacob attempted to restore the fleet and factories, but the Duchy of Courland did not reach its pre-war level of prosperity. Thanks to the treaty of Aix-la Chapelle, which was signed in 1684, Tobago gained the status of a “neutral” island, where the representatives of all European countries had the right to settle. In fact, it was initially a base for pirates, and eventually in 1803 it became a British possession. Finally, in the year 1888 Trinidad and Tobago became a British colony (Kowalski 2005: 123–134).

Before the Loss of Independence In the early seventies of the eighteenth century, when Poland was to lose its independence, two “pre-positivists,” Ksawery Karnicki and Paweá Mostowski, submitted their project to establish “New Poland,” somewhere in North America or Brazil. The concept was proposed to the young administration of the United States. Karnicki Ksawery KoĞciesza (1750–1801), a traveller and whaler, emigrated to Chile in 1774. Moreover, he organized a trip to Australia to settle there and became the first Polish traveller to this continent. Soon, he abandoned Australia and travelled through the Indian Ocean and around Africa, finally reaching France in 1791. After the partitions of Poland he emigrated again to France, where he died in Cherbourg (Pertek 1966– 1967: 68). Also Paweá Mostowski DoáĊga (1721–81), a voievode of Pomerania and Mazovia was one of the organizers of the Bar Confederation against the King, Stanislaus Augustus, tried to lift Polish colonial spirit. First, he obtained finances in France in the year 1774 and as a result bought an estate near Paris, proclaiming that he was a prince. During the American

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War of Independence, he proposed a creation of the “Mostów Knightship” in Carolina, Florida or Virginia State to the Continental Congress. He promised to send Polish colonizers that would enable to form “New Poland” under the auspices of the United States. As suggested by the author of the proposal, this colony would be governed by Karnicki and Mostowski and would have representatives in the Congress. In return, Mostowski offered a miracle balm that would heal wounded American soldiers (KonopczyĔski 1977: 68–71). But in comparison to the seventeenth-century colonization missions, Karnicki and Mostowski’s project was a private initiative with a pre-positivist ideology to “preserve the national substance” (Kowalski 2005: 151–152). The Marine Enterprise for the Eastern Trading, which was called into being in ChestoĔ by Prot Potocki in 1784, bears resemblance to the colonial concept proposed by Karnicki and Mostowski. This project was initiated by five ships of this Enterprise launched under the Polish flag into the Mediterranean Sea that reached, among other places, Spain (Kowalski 2005: 153).2 In the beginning, the Enterprise transported all the goods directly to CherstoĔ. Then, it bought several ships—St. Michael, Poland, Ukraina, Podole, Jampol and St. Prot—consequently becoming the regular merchant marine company (Pertek 1981: 609–614), which docked at Marseilles, Alexandria, Barcelona and Baionne, under the modified Russian flag with the Cross of St. Andrew and the Polish eagle emblem. It is worth emphasizing that this Enterprise was supported by the King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatowski and the Prime Bishop Michaá Poniatowski. Eventually, the collapse of the Enterprise had the political origin and was a direct result of the Russian-Turkish war (1787–92), the second partition of Poland, the loss of the agricultural ground and the bankruptcy of Prot Potocki and the Tepper-Fergusson bank, the partner of the Enterprise (GaziĔski 2007: 93–99). After the first partition in 1772, GdaĔsk remained an independent city and a contact point with the rest of the world. Its value was recognized by Tadeusz Czacki, Stanisáaw Soátyk, Józef Drzewiecki and Michaá Walicki, who established a new trade enterprise run on the Black Sea. Tadeusz Czacki (1765–1813), who was a pedagogue, an organizer of Polish trade and industry, a historian, lawyer and a scholar, prepared a project of a salt trade with Moldova and Turkey. As he wanted to use the Dniester River as a trade route, he worked out a hydrographic map of Poland and Lithuania (Hydrograficzny krajopis [Hydrographical country 2

Antoni Protazy Potocki (1761–1801), who was the head of the Enterprise, bought a part of Jampol, where he established the Enterprise’s warehouse. The harbor in ChersoĔ on the Dniepr river was established in 1775.

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description]). Moreover, he tried to develop a Polish trade partnership with England, Russia and Turkey to improve the economic condition of the state (Knot 1938: 144–145). In 1802 with Stanisáaw Soátyk (1752–1833), the Senator of the Polish Kingdom (Czeppe and Orman-Michta 2001: 425–431), and Józef Drzewiecki (1772–1852), the legionary of General H. Dąbrowski (Knot 1938: 144–145), he called into being the Society for Black Sea Trading and the Society of Shipping. The first ship named Czacki departed from Odessa to Trieste. The Society was established to revive WolyĔ, Podole and Ukrainian trading. However, the society soon went bankrupt due to the lack of economic flair of its founders (PachoĔski 1939–46: 414–415). Despite this fiasco, the enterprise was an inspiration for local nobles who started the trade in dry goods with Odessa without any agents.

The Madagascar Episode: DzierĪanowski and Beniowski The first Polish contact with Madagascar was established by Michaá DzierĪanowski, a former pirate, who landed in Madagascar, namely on Howa tribe’s territory. He initiated contacts between the Howa and the French traders, formed the Howa army and eventually became the King of Madagascar. Michaá DzierĪanowski count Grzymaáa, who was the Bar confederate and adventurer, left GdaĔsk and went to France in 1744, where he joined the Polish military formation under the Luis XV’s patronage. After the Aahen Peace in 1748, he continued his travels. Then, from 1758 to 1760 he served in India, where according to historical sources, he was a pirate pursued by the English. Having reached Madagascar, he set his ship on fire, thereby gaining the title Michaá the First, the King of Madagascar. During his “reign” he declared war with the French king but, even though he had an army of ten thousand natives fighting with one hundred French soldiers, his army was defeated. Hence, he had to escape from Madagascar to St. Helena Island where he was captured by the English (KonopczyĔski 1948: 157). Even today, it is difficult to assess the reliability of the DzierĪanowski legend. Beniowski, or Benyovszky, was born and raised in Verbó near Pöstyén, (today PiešĢany, Slovakia), which was in the past the northern part of the Kingdom of Hungary. He began his career as an officer in the Habsburg army during the Seven Years’ War. However, his religious views and attitudes towards authority resulted in his departure from the country. From that time on, he was a sailor, adventurer, visionary colonizer, entrepreneur and at the final stage the king. In 1768, he joined the Confederation of Bar, the Polish national movement against the

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Russian intervention. In effect, he was captured by the Russians, interned in Kazan and later exiled to Kamchatka. Subsequently, he escaped and returned to Europe via Macau and Madagascar (Kowalski 2005: 190–195). Beniowski was the eighteenth-century knight-errant, and the author of Diaries translated into different languages (Modelski 1935: 429). In the year 1772 Beniowski arrived in Paris where he impressed the Minister Prince d’Auguillon and King Louis XV to such a degree that he was authorized to act in Madagascar on behalf of France. The plan, however, failed. According to Beniowski’s Diaries, in 1776 the author was elected by the local tribal chiefs as Ampansacabe (king) of Madagascar. In 1776 he returned to Paris where Louis XVI, in appreciation for his services as a Commander of Madagascar, promoted him to the rank of General, granted him the military Order of Saint Louis, and awarded him a life pension. However, the reality differed from what was described in his book. When French inspectors visited Madagascar, they found out that Beniowski’s administration was very deficient and as a result did not approve of his rule, making him leave the island (Modelski 1935: 430). In consequence, in 1779 Beniowski arrived in America, where he tried to obtain support for his proposal to use Madagascar as a base in the struggle against England. Nonetheless, he received a negative feedback. Soon after his return to Europe, he continuously tried to draw English and Austrian attention to the plight of Madagascar, but he was treated with disregard by both Emperors. Finally, in 1783 he managed to persuade John Hiacynth de Magellan, a member of the Royal Society of London, to support his expedition to Madagascar. Also Benjamin Franklin and Zollikofer and Meissonier Store became interested in this idea and offered him a ship, the Intrepid, which was sent to the colony. The American expedition departed from Maryland through Baltimore in 1784, along the seashore of South America, reaching Madagascar a year later. Unfortunately, it encountered the hostility of the natives and a distrust of the French, consequently contributing to a military conflict during which Beniowski lost his life in 1786 (Modelski 1835: 430). Unfortunately, in the course of time, the importance of his colonizing mission was underestimated and reduced only to his concepts of merchant projects and slave trade.

Polish Utopian Colonialism: Wojciech Gutkowski and his Travel to Kalopea In 1814 Wojciech Gutkowski (1775–1826), a Polish engineer, soldier, mason and writer (representative of the Enlightenment), just after the third

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partition and the loss of Polish independence, wrote a utopian novel The Journey to Kalopea, which was the first Polish socialist utopia (Tyrowicz 1960: 182). While the plot of the book concerns a fictional Polish colony in Australia, the name “Kalop” means “Polak” (read backwards, a Pole), and thus Kalopea stands for Poland. Kalopea represents an idealistic political entity, the embodiment of the author’s own political ideas. According to Gutkowski’s concept, Polish was also the official language of the Kalopea state and was voluntarily chosen by Aboriginals. Furthermore, in the social hierarchy of Kalopea one can distinguish eleven classes in the social hierarchy. Cesar stood at the top, followed by the King (the vice-Cesar). In addition, Kalopea was inhabited by 50 families. The basic features of the colony were: faith but with religious tolerance, the fundamental rights to be reviewed every twenty-five years, and the lack of private property. Kalopea had its own constitution, which Gutkowski included in his novel that clearly resembled the early theoretical concepts of socialism (utopian socialism). In this light, it is worth mentioning that Gutkowski believed in social egalitarianism and the creation of a new model of state. The fictional hero-narrator of the novel introduced his reasons to travel and explore in the following words: “After the partition of our country in 1796, I was filled with such melancholy, which was worsening day by day that I decided to disappear from the country and travel around the world to entertain myself a little” (Gutkowski 1956: 55). A hero of Gutkowski’s novel visited different European countries, the Cape of Good Hope and Southern India, where he met French engineers, who were preparing their expedition to Australia, aimed at the preparation of maps of the southern coast of the continent. This information proves that Gutkowski was acquainted with the work written by Louis Antoine Bougainville, the French sailor, who travelled around the world in 1766–69 with biologists and illustrators. Inspired by the sailor, Gutkowski’s hero travelled through the Strait of Magellan to Haiti and then to the New Hebrides and the Solomon islands. Additionally, he passed the Sunday Islands, eventually reaching the French seashore. Most importantly, he tried in vain to reach the Great Coral reef off the north-eastern coast of Australia at the island of Bougainville. The book was translated into main European languages at the beginning of the nineteenth century (a Polish version appeared in 1962). As the novel suggests, Gutkowski could have been initially inspired by James Cook’s expedition to Australia in 1769–71 during which Cook reached Botany Bay and managed to examine the shore. Then, the British explorer sailed along the eastern coast to the north of the continent, taking

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possession of the discovered land. After his return to England in 1771, he called the newly acquired possessions “Terra Australis.” During his next two expeditions, which were not organized until 1778, he examined the southern coast of the land and ascertained its separateness from New Guinea. Ultimately, the setting of the penal colony in New South Wales in 1786–88 facilitated further penetration of the continent. However, before the 1820s, the Australian continent remained an area of unknown size and capacity. In 1795 colonisztion stopped at the foot of the Blue Mountains, which were treated as the natural border of the expansion. Gutkowski as a scientist and an active member of the Association of Scientific Fellows could have heard of the latest discoveries of the southern coast of Australia. However, the discovery of the Australian interior was a historic moment of the nineteenth century. In this light, it means that the expansion of the inner continent took place after the novel’s appearance. In Gutkowski’s novel the expedition landed at Bonaparte’s Bay in 1802 (the northern coast of Australia, near Darwin), where engineers started to draw maps and biologists initiated their studies of fauna and flora. That work was continued for the next two years. Subsequently, the narrator with his companions decided to visit the central region of Australia, which had never been discovered and remained mysterious. Having covered over 300 miles (215 km) along rivers, they crossed mountains and found flat, fertile areas inhabited by the tribes of half-wild shepherds. When they passed the next 300 miles, they encountered dense forests. They established contacts with tribal natives, who explained to them that nobody had ever crossed this barrier though there had been some daredevils who had never returned. Despite these warnings, the novel’s expedition crossed the forest and reached the borders of Kalopea after seven days. The information given by the fictional narrator locates the country in the central part of Australia about 500 km from the seashore. Numerous natural obstacles, rivers, moors, mountains and forests protected access to this region. The potential enemy before the invasion could have built hard roads along the 500km route and organized transport across the mountains. Along the borders, they encountered a lot of fortified settlements and brick pillars embellished with the image of the sun—the Kalopea's emblem. Moreover, a warning inscription in Polish, Latin, French and English, informed that “Kalopea’s citizens swore for all time not to assail anybody, neither to interfere with anything, but woe betide him who trespasses this border by force of arms in order to break the peace” (Gutkowski 1956: 62). The official language was Polish. The Constitution of Kalopea, which was appended to the text of the novel, elucidated this in its first paragraph: “Kalop, however, reading from right

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to left means Polak (Pole in the native language)” (Gutkowski 1956: 173). Although the majority of citizens were of native Australian tribes, the Polish occupied a dominant cultural position. The true value of The Journey to Kalopea lies not in its reliable knowledge of Australia but in the depiction of Polish social consciousness in the epoch after partition, particularly respect of colonial propaganda. Hence, The Journey to Kalopea could be treated as a premise of Polish colonial thinking after the loss of independence. Whether The Journey to Kalopea is a projection of Polish colonial nostalgia after the partition still remains an unsolved problem which requires further research. However, the biggest merit of the book is that the vital interest of Polish society in the colonial conquest in the eighteenth century, already before partition, was documented. Accompanied by his friend S. WĊgrzecki, Gutkowski presented the novel at the Warsaw Science Society’s meeting in 1817. Although the book was considered a philosophical and economic treaty, it did not receive favourable reviews, as Gutkowski’s theories were contrary to public opinion. Hence, the novel remained unknown until 1956, when it was published for the first time (Tyrowicz 1960: 183).

New Amsterdam Island or “New Poland” The island was discovered in March 1522 by Spanish explorer Juan Sebastián Elcano. In 1633, a Dutch captain Anthonio van Diemen named it Nieuw Amsterdam (Dutch for New Amsterdam). Subsequently, a French Captain, Pierre François Péron, was marooned on this island for three years (from 1792 to 1795), and in the course of time the island became French. At the final stage, the islands of Ile Amsterdam and the neighbouring Ile Saint Paul were formally attached to Madagascar in 1924, officially becoming a French colony (Kowalski 2005: 205–206). It was thanks to Adam Piotr Mierosáawski (1815–1851) that New Amsterdam became the next colonial episode in Polish history. In 1832 Mierosáawski, at the age of 17, became a sailor on French ships who landed on New Amsterdam Island in 1841 and who registered it as his own discovery. Unaware of the fact that it had been earlier known as a French possession, he named it “New Poland,” declaring that it is his private property by raising a Polish flag. Two years later Mierosáawski sailed to small islands located in the South of the Indian subcontinent and claimed them for the French administration. Moreover, the “New Poland” colony was still associated with the French since Mierosáawski held French citizenship. Having received information about the European

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Revolution of 1848, he sold half of Saint Paul Island and all his former possessions and he departed to Europe where, accompanied by his brother Ludwik Mierosáawski, he took part in the Sicilian uprising. After the fiasco of the Revolution, he returned to France, to Saint Denis, where he bought a little yacht and called it My Poland and again embarked on a trip to St. Paul and Amsterdam Island. Unfortunately, he died during the cruise in 1851. The memories of his expedition and activities remained on St. Paul Island among the indigenous people until the 1930s (Pertek 1975: 810–811).

The Melanesian Episode After the fiasco of the January Uprising, Piotr Aleksander WereszczyĔski (1806–79) promoted the idea of establishing “New Poland” on the Melanesia Island, New Guinea. To popularize his concept, he published a leaflet titled An Open Letter Regarding the Creation of the Polish Independent Settlement in Melanesia (“List otwarty wzglĊdem zaáoĪenia osady polskiej niezaleĪnej w Oceanii”) in 1875, in Cracow. His plan involved the mass emigration of Poles to the place, which was far from “the enemies and false allies” of the Polish nation (Kowalski 2005: 233– 234). Thus, New Guinea became a chance for Polish citizens to form a new independent country with the Polish flag signifying national spirit. This new country was to be ethnically Polish (the tribal inhabitants were not taken into consideration!) with limited possibilities of settlement allowed to the Czechs, Slovaks, Lusatians, Belgians, Irish and Swedish. WereszczyĔski’s plans excluded Jews, Russians and Germans, whom he perceived as enemies and false allies. “New Poland” was meant to be a republic with Roman Catholicism as a state religion, and Lutherans were supposed to be in the minority. The regulations of “New Poland” allowed each settler to get an equal quantity of land. What is more, at first, the authorities of the country would consist of intellectual leaders, and in the course of time citizens would elect a democratic government. For him emigration of the entire country to “New Poland” should be the last stage of the process. His plan thus indicated his scepticism about the final results of the national Polish uprisings. Instead, he proposed the colonization, directing all his efforts to create “New Poland” in Melanesia (Cegielski 1983: 35). WereszczyĔski was not a utopist, as his idea appeared in the period of intensive colonisation. He was born in the old and noble Courland family, and his father was a colonel and aide-de-camp of King Stanisáaw August Poniatowski. Piotr was a well-educated person who knew four foreign

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languages. Moreover, he was a soldier in the Russian army in Dyneburg and Finland. At the age of 24 (in 1830), after his resignation, he became an enthusiast for geographical discoveries and distant expeditions to exotic countries. Soon he became interested in the concept of colonization and found out that France, Great Britain and Germany would be interested in the project to stop Russia in its expansion after the expedition of Nikolaj Miklucho-Maklaj to New Guinea in 1870. WereszczyĔski thought that this politically neutral country would stabilize that region (Strasz 2001). Eventually, he presented this idea to Wáadysáaw Czartoryski, the leader of the Hotel Lambert party, who had connections with the French government. Although WereszczyĔski’s idea was similarly utopian to the concept proposed by Gutkowski, it attracted the attention of two Poles from America, namely, doctor Henryk Korwin-Kaááusowski (the official representative of American Poles in the US federal administration) and Sigurd WiĞniowski (a traveller, journalist and writer). They both gave political support for the idea and helped to ensure the American protection of the “New Poland” project. Unfortunately, the USA had already legitimized the French and English influence in Melanesia but decided to offer protection for those Poles who wanted to settle there. This did not, however, correspond with WereszczyĔski’s initial plans which included establishment of a new Polish settlement in New Guinea, New Ireland or New England, consisting of 500–1000 inhabitants of agricultural and trading character. It was assumed that the total cost of the project would be 227 thousand roubles collected by the national enterprise (Cegielski 1983: 36). Nevertheless, WereszczyĔski’s ambitious plan ultimately ended up with the mass emigration of Poles to the United States, to California (Kowalski 2005: 242).

Siberia as the Real “Colony” Polish “colonization” of the eastern territories of Europe and central Asia has its own long history. The Russian Empire enforced deportations of Poles, and Polish settlement in Siberia started in the seventeenth century. The influx of Poles proceeded in several waves just mainly after the Polish-Russian wars in the seventeenth century. Also Polish citizens after the partitions of Poland, under the rules of the Russian Empire, were forced to settle in Siberia to civilize these distant territories. The greatest waves of Polish settlers came after the Bar Confederation (1768–72), the 1794 Kosciuszko Insurrection, the 1830 November Uprising and PolishRussian War (1830–31), the January 1863 Uprising and the Revolution of

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1905–07 in Poland and Russia. In addition, many political prisoners were sentenced to deportation from the eastern Polish territories allocated to the Soviet Union during Poland’s partitions just after the Russian Invasion in 1939 and after 1945 (Kowalski 2005: 219–220). Having taken over the new territories of Siberia, the Russian Empire’s government organized a forced settlement of Poles. These mass settlements of Poles, in different places of central Asia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, exerted a noticeable impact on Russian culture and sciences. It is particularly visible in the great contribution made by Poles in the development of this region (KuczyĔski 1994: 14). They adopted the new conditions of existence in Siberia and after some time they started to make careers in the Russian administration, economy, literature or sciences (Kowalski 2005: 221). Some of them left diaries from their travels between the November (1830) and January (1863) uprisings3 (KuczyĔski 1994: 31–33). After the January uprising (1864) prisoners could develop their professional abilities in Siberia and climb the social ladder.4 There was also a large group of Polish scientists and artists in Siberia.5 (KuczyĔski 1994: 34–52). Finally, the group of 721 January insurgents settled in Tobolsk and established a secret association that would help with the preparations of the new uprising in Tomsk, Jaátorowsk, Omsk and Kurgan, where groups of Polish prisoners had already been based. The uprising started at night on the 25 of June in 1866 near the Bajkal Lake and, as a result, some 3

Namely, Rufin Piotrowski, Agaton Giller Maximilian Jawtowt (ps. Jakub Gordon), Aleksander Bem, Antoni Pawsza, Szymon Tokarzewski, Stanisáaw Krupski, Adolf JabáoĔski (ps. Julian JasieĔczyk), Konstanty Wolicki, Justynian RuciĔski, Józef Bogusáawski, Wincenty Migurski and priests: Tadeusz Maszewski, Krzysztof Szwernicki (KuczyĔski 1994: 34–35). 4 The list contained the following names: Zachary Cybulski, the mayor of Tomsk, Aleksander Despot-Zenowicz, the governor of Tobolsk, Alfins Kozieáá-Poklewski the owner of gold mines and marine transport enterprise, General Bolesáaw Kukiel (a member of the Russian Geographical Society in Irkutsk), General Bronisáaw Grąbczewski (a traveler) and General Hieronim Stebnicki (a geographer of Kaukaz mountain region.) 5 Aleksander Czekanowski (a geographer of Siberia from the Russian Geographical Society in Irkutsk), Jan Czerski (an ethnographer of the Siberian people), ethnographers Benedykt Dybowski, Bronisáaw Piásudski and Wiktor Godlewski, biologists Wiktor Godlewski, Wáasysáaw KsiĊĪopolski, Mikoáaj Hartung, Mikoáaj Witkowski, Michaá Jankowski, Jan Kalinowski, painters of Siberia: Stanisáaw WroĔski, Leopold Niemirowski, Aleksander Sochaczewski and Jan TalkoHryncewicz, Justynian RuciĔski (a writer), Jan StróĪecki (a photographer) (KuczyĔski 1994: 36–51).

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insurgents had escaped from prison. They proclaimed New Poland in territories that they occupied (Kowalski 2005: 224–225; Skok 1974). After the collapse of the uprising the leaders: Gustaw Szaramowicz, Wáadysáaw Kotkowski, Narcyz CeliĔski and Jakub Rainer were executed by Russians on the18 of August 1867.

The Polish African Dream Stefan Szolc-RogoziĔski (1861–96), one of the Polish explorers of Africa, planned to create a Polish colony in Cameroon. RogoziĔski was born in Kalisz, which then was under Russian occupation. After his career in the Imperial Russian Navy, he organized a marine expedition to Africa with Klemens Tomczek and Leopold Janikowski (Kowalski 2005: 255– 257). In 1882–83, Szolc-RogoziĔski bought a small ship and on 13 December 1882 he departed from Le Havre in France under the French and Polish flag6 and set off to Cameroon in a sailboat called àucja Maágorzata. He was responsible for quite a few geographical discoveries, a number of high-quality maps of the then-unexplored Cameroon and an extremely valuable ethnographic collection, which later became an enormous contribution to the foundation of the Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, were the final outcome of Szolc-RogoziĔski’s expedition. From Le Havre, the àucja Maágorzata sailed to Funchal on Madeira, where Szolc-RogoziĔski met another famous Pole, Benedykt Tyszkiewicz (KuczyĔski 1994: 277). To accentuate his devotion to exploration of the unknown, Tyszkiewicz built a ship in Le Havre, weighing 320 tonnes, and made a trip around the world in that vessel. His expedition reached the tiny island of Mondolech in Ambos Bay, where his scientific station was established. Its staff, who worked there for three years, explored the coast of Cameroon, the Mungo River estuary and discovered the M’bu Lake. In the meantime, one of the crew members, Klemens Tomczek, died of yellow fever, leaving a dictionary of the Krumen language, seven volumes of ethnographic and geographical notes, dissertations and maps. What is more, in December 1884, Szolc-RogoziĔski and Leopold Janikowski ascended the highest peak of Cameroon, Mt. Fako (4070 m) (Kowalski 2005: 255–263). There is no denying the fact that RogoziĔski was a dreamer; therefore, the real aim of his expedition became known after 50 years, when Leopold Janikowski, one of its members, admitted that the aim of the expedition was to find a proper territory for colonizing by Poles who after the partition did 6

As the flag of armature, white-red with the emblem of the Warsaw mermaid.

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not want to live under the foreign regimes. Rogozinski imagined that this colony would be able to function without the “mother country.” To fulfil his plans, during his stay in Cameroon in 1884, RogoziĔski took control over the local tribes and bought 30 square kilometres of land, which became a cornerstone of the future colony. But at the same time Germans started their intensive exploration of the land, signing contracts with the local tribes and taking possession of the majority of the land just to compete in that project with the British explorers. RogoziĔski decided to sign a contract with the British on 28 August 1884. Nevertheless, after the Berlin Conference in 1885, devoted to the European colonial partition of Africa, the Germans received Cameroon (Bartosik 2012: 2). As a result, the first Polish colonizer had to return to Poland. During the next expedition he brought his wife (Helena Janina-Hajota, a writer) and bought a cocoa plantation in the island of Fernando Po. Interestingly enough, he devoted his income from the plantation to future expeditions, still dreaming about African colonies belonging to Poland. The description of the language of African tribes, maps of Central Africa as well as some artefacts were his final legacy that was donated to the Ethnographical Museum in Warsaw. (Bartosik 2012: 2). In 1895 RogoziĔski joined the British Royal Geographical Society, and in the years 1892-1893 organized another expedition, this time Egypt became his destination.

The Last Colonial Dream The last episode of the Polish colonial dream took place relatively late, namely in the 1920s and 1930s after Poland regained independence in 1918. In 1930, the Maritime and Colonial League (in Polish: “Liga Morska i Kolonialna”) was created out of the Maritime and River League (“Liga Morska i Rzeczna”) and was directed by General Mariusz Zaruski. The roots of the League can be traced back to the autumn of 1918, in the early days of the Second Polish Republic. On 1 October 1918, a group of 25 young men founded an organization called “Polska Bandera” [Polish Flag], whose purpose was to popularize the sea among Poles and to encourage young people’s participation in overseas expeditions. The organization, which was supported by influential politicians, quickly grew, and in May 1919 it was renamed the League of Polish Navigation (Liga ĩeglugi Polskiej). In late 1925, the organization published its first monthly magazine, The Sea, which was transformed into The Sea and Colonies in 1939. The first demands for Polish colonies were voiced at the first convention of the League (Katowice, October 1928). In consequence, two

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years later, during the last convention in Gdynia, the organization got its most recognizable name, the Maritime and Colonial League. The League’s main aim was to educate the Polish nation about maritime issues. It also actively supported the development of both a merchant fleet and a navy, as well as the creation of Polish colonies and overseas possessions (Kowalski 2005: 303–304). Poland thought about establishing colonies as a means of ensuring f a higher status among the contemporary empires. On the other hand, the integration of Poland into a consolidated country after the partitions was too difficult. The Maritime and Colonial League was able to attract large numbers and make them engrossed in the idea of colonies. As a result, both the Polish press (Ilustroway Kurier Codzienny [Illustrated Daily Courier], Gazeta Polska [Polish Gazette], Gazeta Warszawska [Warsaw Gazette] and monthly magazine Morze [The Sea]) and scientific journals wrote about the potential colonies in Madagascar, Cameroon, Angola and Liberia (Kowalski 2005: 304). Between 25 and 27 October 1930 in Gdynia, when the Maritime and Colonial League was established, General Gustaw Orlicz-Dreszer a member of the General Inspection of Military Forces in Poland, who supervised the National Polish Army, delivered an appeal for Polish colonial action against the German possessions in Africa in accordance with the Versailles Treaty after World War I (Biaáas 1983). Gustaw Orlicz-Dreszer (1889–1936), an activist of the independent movement, a general, the Army supervisor of the first Polish air forces, was also a colonial activist. He pursued his manifold interests to connect Poland with the rest of the world and link the Polish community to the new-born country (PomaraĔski 1939: 367). Having been chosen as the leader of the Maritime and Colonial League in 1930, he played a crucial role in the organization. He reorganized the League, transforming its regulations to prepare for the future colonial programme. Subsequently, he travelled to the United States, where he visited the main Polish centres of immigration, to propagate the idea of economic and cultural cooperation with the Motherland. In that way, he indicated new goals for Poles in America and as a result received the honorary title of “Our General.” One year later Orlicz-Dreszer established a new foundation for colonial activities, which were the basis for the League’s works. Moreover, he soon visited several Polish settlements in Western Europe (France, Belgium) and consolidated Polish migration in all European countries. In the years 1932–34, as an advocate of the new maritime programme, he went on a tour round Poland to promote the new concepts of co-operation between Polish émigrés and prospective colonists. To achieve this, he wanted to establish new settlements in South America and Africa. Therefore, he

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called into being two periodicals: the popular Poland in the Sea and the scientific Maritime and Colonial Affairs, which popularized the maritime program in Poland (PomaraĔski 1939: 367). Brazil (Paraná), Peru, Liberia, Portuguese Mozambique and French possessions in Africa, including Madagascar and Angola were countries regarded as suitable for Polish overseas settlement. In its final stage, the organization gained widespread popularity and in the year 1939 consisted of one million members.

Parana Project In its initial stages of colonization, Peru was one of the first countries to attract emigration. The first idea of colonization of Montania in Peru appeared in 1924 with a group of Polish economists and nobles in Maáopolska, where the Polish-American Colonization Syndicate was called into being and which obtained the concession for Polish settlement in the river-basins of Ucayali, Tambo and Urubamba. In the year 1928 Mieczysáaw Lepecki and the emigration leader Kazimierz Warchaáowski directed their efforts to assess the conditions of life in Peru to check the possibilities for the future colony. Despite their negative opinions, almost 200 emigrants left for Montania in Peru. As it happened, they suffered a lot of tragedy there for they were deceived by agents and abandoned by the Peruvian government. Eventually, the immigrants had to disperse to other countries (KuczyĔski 1997: 60–61). It is difficult to assess how many Poles migrated to Latin America in the inter-war period, but it was quite a large number. The emigrants went to Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, Mexico, Bolivia and Cuba. Consequently, the àódĨ Archeological and Ethnological Museum received a rich collection of literature devoted to Latin America and a lot of artefacts (KuczyĔski 1997: 61–62). The extensive literature included the descriptions of the country, American Indian tribes, their beliefs, customs as well as fauna and flora. Moreover, Polish emigration to South America became an inspiration for fictional writers, namely, for Arkady Fidler, Mieczysáaw Lepecki and Kazimierz Warchoiáowski (KuczyĔski 1997: 62). “Morska (or Nowa) Wola” in Parana was the first settlement established according to the new rules formulated by the Maritime and Colonial League. In 1930, 135 Polish families settled in Espirito Santo. Four years later, the League sent its messenger, retired General Stefan StrzemieĔski, with an instruction to buy 2 million hectares of land in the Brazilian Paraná state (a part of its population, around 100,000, were already Polish, the result of the nineteenth-century mass emigration of

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Poles from Galicia). The agreement was signed with the state government and allowed the land to be divided between Poles. In exchange, in accordance with the agreement, Poles were supposed to construct a 140kilometre railway line. However, the Poles bought only 7000 hectares and created a settlement called “Morska Wola.” They purchased an additional 2000 hectares with the intention of founding another settlement, to be named “Orlicz-Dreszer” in honour of the League director, General Gustaw Orlicz-Dreszer, who died in 1936 in Gdynia in a plane crash. The next influx of Polish settlers was in August 1935. Soon afterwards, the Brazilian government formed by Getulio Vargas began limiting Polish immigration. Also Poles were not enthusiastic to settle in Brazil, and the whole project was cancelled in 1938 (Kowalski 2005: 326; Pankiewicz 1935: 9–10).

Liberia Project In 1847, when Liberia freed itself from American protection, it became the second independent country in the African continent (after Ethiopia). In fact, it was an American colony under the protection of Afro-Americans who gave real social and political privileges to its native people (Kowalski 2005: 306–307). In August 1933, the Polish government signed a co-operation treaty with the government of Liberia, at the request of the Liberian government represented by Leo Sajous. Soon unofficial representatives of the Liberian government arrived in Poland to establish close economic, political and cultural co-operation. Furthermore, the agreement signed on 28 April 1934 foresaw the establishment of 50 Polish plantations, a tax-free zone for Poland and concessions to conduct geological research. Poland was to protect Liberian affairs in the League of Nations and Liberia promised not to undertake any initiative without consulting the Polish government. Additionally, this agreement implemented the modernization of Liberian border forces. Hence, in case of war, Poland could mobilize 100 thousand Liberians and use them as defence forces. The first attempt to put the agreement into practice was the creation of mutual diplomatic representation in Monrovia (Rudolf Rathaus) and Warsaw (Leo Sajous) (Biaáas 1983; Kowalski 2005: 332). General Gustaw Orlicz-Dreszer, then director of the League, was planning to promote large-scale Polish settlement with Polish farms in African countryside (Kowalski 2005: 330; Górski 2010: 2). In the course of time, the rise of Polish influences in Liberia worried the British, Dutch and Americans. In particular Americans were interested in curbing Polish influences, bringing about several

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agreements with Liberia, which occurred unprofitable for Poland. There is no denying the fact that it was due to the lack of funds and interest in the Liberian colony that the Polish government had to abandon this project in 1938 (Kowalski 2005: 334; Górski 2010: 3). On the whole, while assessing the achievements of the Maritime and Colonial League it has to be emphasized that the League had 300 branches in 1939, almost 100,000 members and 312,000 school pupils in towns and villages. In the academic year 1938/1939 the Faculty of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene was called into being at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow. There were also plans to start the Intercollegiate Colonial Studies at the same university the next academic year (1939/1940) but the Second World War foiled the initial plans (Kowalski 2005: 316, 344). Ultimately, Poland’s plans for colonization on a global scale turned out to be a complete fiasco.

Conclusion Polish colonialism, in comparison to its real counterpart, differed in reasons, forms and results when investigated from historical, political, economic, social and cultural perspectives. The paper proved that there were visible distinctions in fostering the relations between the colonial empires (centres) and colonial territories (peripheries) that contributed to the different policies of colonial expansion. First, the historical perspective shows that Polish political utopian thinking stimulated an interest in the colonial ideology that was associated mainly with an aspiration to regain independence after partitions. In the same time, western European countries rivalled each other for a dominant role over the world and become a central power that would control and exploit natural resources around the globe. They subjugated the countries, implementing central regulations that led to the discrimination of tribal laws and political systems. While the subordinated countries were forced to be the peripheries of the major colonizers, Poland ensured a peaceful coexistence of the tribal societies, guaranteeing common rules that enabled them to establish egalitarian societies in a utopian style. As Polish colonies had limited access to agricultural land, co-operation with the natives was economically and socially profitable. Hence, there was a strong emphasis on identification with the social order of peripheries. This was in opposition to the real colonialism that exploited manpower and shifted economic profits to the central power, promoting mono-culture production pattern at the peripheries. Also the disintegration of social hierarchy, relations and ties contributed over time to the development of postcolonial

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immigration from the “peripheries” to the “centre.” Moreover, the local cultures were treated as inferior to the western cultural policies that gradually eliminated the tribal practices, substituting them with European languages and styles. Contrariwise, Polish co-existence with the locals ensured the mutual exchange between the countries, sometimes even total integration with the locals. In this manner, Poland desired to establish an independent, democratic country distant from enemies, discrimination and invaders.

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