The Routledge Companion to Literature and the Global South [1 ed.] 9781032075464, 9781032075471, 9781003207603

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

The Routledge Companion Literature and the Global South offers a comprehensive overview of the field at a key moment in its development—a snapshot of where Global South literary studies stands in its second decade. As the aftermath of a string of global cataclysms since the rise of neoliberal globalization has demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized who consistently bear the brunt of the suffering. What defines the Global South is the recognition across the world that globalization’s promised bounties have not materialized. It has failed as a global master narrative. Global South studies center on three general areas: globalization, its aftermath/failure, and how those on the economic bottom survive it. Organized into three parts, this volume consists of original chapters by 25 contributors from around the world. Part I focuses on the origins and objects of Global South studies, and how this field has come to define and historicize its organizing concept. Part II considers subsequent critical developments in Global South studies, particularly those that embrace interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. Part III features case studies that highlight a range of applications and interventions. The contributors critique the boundaries and definitions explored in the earlier parts and push “settled” literatures or methods into new analytical spaces. This innovative collection is an invaluable resource for anyone studying and researching Global South studies and literature, but also those interested in world literature, contemporary literature, postcolonialism, decolonizing the curriculum, critical race studies, gender studies, and politics. Alfred J. López is Professor and Head of the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Director of Global Studies, and Director of Latin American and Latino Studies at Purdue University, Indiana. His publications include José Martí: A Revolutionary Life (2014) and A Posthumous History of José Martí: The Apostle and his Afterlife (2023). López was also the founding editor of The Global South (2007–), the leading journal of globalization and Global South studies. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo is Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College. He is the author of Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States (2021). His essays have appeared in Literary Geographies, Norteamérica, The North Meridian Review, and Chasqui, and in several edited volumes.

ROUTLEDGE LITERATURE COMPANIONS

Also available in this series: THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO MEDIEVAL ENGLISH LITERATURE Edited by Raluca Radulescu and Sif Rikhardsdottir THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ROMANTIC WOMEN WRITERS Edited by Ann R. Hawkins, Catherine S. Blackwell, and E. Leigh Bonds THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO GLOBAL LITERARY ADAPTATION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY Edited by Brandon Chua and Elizabeth Ho THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO POLITICS AND LITERATURE IN ENGLISH Edited by Matthew Stratton THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERARY MEDIA Edited by Astrid Ensslin, Julia Round and Bronwen Thomas THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO FOLK HORROR Edited by Robert Edgar and Wayne Johnson THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO ECOPOETICS Edited by Julia Fiedorczuk, Mary Newell, Bernard Quetchenbach and Orchid Tierney THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH Edited by Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo For more information on this series, please visit: www​.routledge​.com​/Routledge​-Literature​ -Companions​/book​-series​/RC4444

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO LITERATURE AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Edited by Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

Designed cover image: dikobraziy, Getty First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Alfred J. López and Ricardo QuintanaVallejo; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978-1-032-07546-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07547-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-20760-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003207603 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

CONTENTS

List of Contributors

Introduction: Cardinal Points and “Hilly Sand” Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo PART I

Intentions: Geographies, Epistemologies, Subjects 1 Fanon: A Theatre of Embodiment Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

x

1 3

2 Solidarity’s Temporalities Adhira Mangalagiri

19

3 From the South Out: Neoliberalism, Horizontality, and the P ­ ost-Global Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Juan Meneses 4 Deep Souths: The U.S. South and the Global South Pashmina Murthy



viii

31 42

5 Situating Energy Humanities in India: Labor and Gender in Narratives of Energy Systems Swaralipi Nandi

52

6 Queer/Cuir in the Global South?: Latin-American Dissidence and Gendersex Non-Conformity Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

64

v

Contents

7 Resonances of Race in the Global South and the Decolonial Turn Juan G. Ramos

76

8 Colonial Traces: The Specter of the Global South in Contemporary Cinema Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

87

PART II

Approaches: Methods and Methodologies 9 Global South Literatures as New Materialisms: Ecologies, Objects, and Ontologies Carlos M. Amador

97 99

10 Historicizing Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina Nilanjana Bhattacharya

111

11 Slave Literacy, Creolization, and Muslim Formation in Colonial Jamaica Ahmed Idrissi Alami

122

12 The Southern Submarine: Storying the Deep Indian Ocean Charne Lavery

134

13 Contested Histories: Indian Cinema in the Global South and Beyond Parichay Patra

143

14 Between Lettered and Popular Cultures: A Cultural History Perspective Guillermo Zermeño and translated by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

154

PART III

Case Studies: Examples and Exceptions

167

15 The Computer and the Subject: Computing Extractivism in Global South Literatures Amrita De

169

16 Carolina Maria de Jesus: Four Movements of the Favela and Literature Fabio Akcelrud Durão

179

17 Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde, An Intransigent Aesthetics Brinda Bose

190

18 The Sociological Imagination of Dr. Jose Rizal Teresita Cruz del Rosario

204

vi

Contents

19 Human–Nonhuman Intra-Action in Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry Yvonne Liebermann

215

20 Epeli Hau’ofa: Sly Naïvety in Tales of the Tikongs Sudesh Mishra

226

21 Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast: Kappappāṭṭu and the Chronotope of the Ship in Mappila Literary Culture A.K. Muneer 22 The Guantánamo Graphic Novels: Towards a Carceral Imperialism Pramod K. Nayar

236 250

23 Exploring Digital Archives: Vieques on the Internet and Yabureibo in the Global South Juan Carlos Rodríguez

260

24 “We Must Be a Third Principle”: Midnight’s Children and the Non-Aligned Movement Y. P. Zhang

275

Index287

vii

CONTRIBUTORS

Ahmed Idrissi Alami Associate Professor at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana. Carlos M. Amador Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Associate Professor of Spanish and Culture Studies at Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan. Nilanjana Bhattacharya Assistant Professor at the Centre for Comparative Literature, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. Brinda Bose Associate Professor at the Centre for English Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India. Felicity Bromley-Hall University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom. Teresita Cruz del Rosario Senior Research Associate at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, Singapore. Amrita De Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Humanities and Information at Pennsylvania State University, Pennsylvania. Fabio Akcelrud Durão Professor of Literary Theory at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Campinas, Brazil. Jean Khalfa Professor of French Studies at Trinity College Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom. Charne Lavery Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa. viii



Contributors

Yvonne Liebermann Graduate Student at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany. Swaralipi Nandi Assistant Professor of English at Loyola Academy, Secunderabad, India. Pramod K. Nayar Professor at the University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad, India. Adhira Mangalagiri Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary University of London, London, United Kingdom. Juan Meneses Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Charlotte, North Carolina. Sudesh Mishra Professor at the University of the South Pacific, Suva, Fiji. A. K. Muneer Assistant Professor at the Department of English, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India. Pashmina Murthy Associate Professor of English at Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio. Parichay Patra Assistant Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and the coordinator of the Digital Humanities Interdisciplinary Research Platform, Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur, India. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the Washington University in St Louis, St Louis, Missouri. Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo Assistant Professor of English at Rhode Island College, Providence, Rhode Island. Juan G. Ramos Professor of Spanish at the College of the Holy Cross, Worcester, Massachusetts. Juan Carlos Rodríguez Associate Professor of Spanish and Co-director of the Atlanta Global Studies Center at Georgia Tech., Georgia. Guillermo Zermeño Professor and Researcher at the Center of Historical Studies at El Colegio de México, Mexico city, Mexico. Y. P. Zhang Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and World Literature at Fudan University, Shanghai, China. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. Please advise the publisher of any errors or omissions and these will be corrected in subsequent editions

ix

INTRODUCTION Cardinal Points and “Hilly Sand” Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

To fly from Mexico City to New Delhi, one must make one or two stops in Europe; perhaps Schiphol or Munich. To read Rabindranath Thakur in Argentina, this volume’s editors must likewise ‘stop’ in Europe, since we will not be able to find a translation directly from Bengali—translations into Spanish have only been made from English renderings. Whether to displace epistemologies, cosmologies, or bodies, from South to South, it seems one must always stop North. To examine literature from the Global South, draw South-South connections and inferences, and ponder canonizations of non-European/U.S. literatures, we have met physically and scholarly in the North. We have stopped North because we have had to, not only because the languages we have in common are European in origin, but because our ways of thinking, of feeling, reading (from left to right, top to bottom), how we structure essays (with thesis statements, evidence, and conclusions) are all conventions of European and colonial academic clarity and elegance. As a yet-untenured professor, this volume’s junior editor surely worries that if he does not follow such conventions, publish in the right journals, cite ‘proper’ poststructuralist thought, he will simply not be read— not only by the epistemological zero points of Boston, Cambridge, London, Paris, Barcelona, but also the active scholarly heterotopias of Bangkok, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Cape Town, Islamabad, Jakarta, or Lagos, to name a few. His worry—our worry—is rooted in colonialist discourses that place the North, as Walter Mignolo explains, “not just as another civilization in the planetary concert, but as the civilization destined to lead and save the rest of the word from the Devil, from barbarism and primitivism, from underdevelopment, from despotism, and to turn unhappiness into happiness for all and forever” (Mignolo 2011, 28). The Global North, comprised—but not limited to—the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, inhabits the upper tiers of an epistemological hierarchy that imbues Northern discourse with faux scientific objectivity—particularly when the study of Global South experiences, artistic production, and anthropology are involved. In a colonial vision of the world order, Northern discourse, insofar as it is produced in epistemic zero points, renders Global South epistemologies and scientific thought premodern, superstitious, thus unimportant. Mignolo explains, “every way of knowing and sensing (feeling) that do not conform to the epistemology and aesthetics of zero point are cast behind in time and/or in the order of myth, legend folklore, local knowledge, and the like” (80). This volume collects novel ways of thinking that bypass the North and establish connections between dwellers from all those geographies that were—and are—mined and abused by a capix



Introduction

talist/colonialist logic of exploitation. In doing so, this volume recognizes the Global South as a category of analysis, and a marker of ontology, that enables coalition across geographic lines of difference throughout the hemisphere least-responsible but most-harshly affected by climate change, unvolitional mass migration and displacement, and exploitation of both human labor and natural resources. Yet as has been well-established over the last fifteen years of scholarship, the Global South is not a ‘place’: we encounter it most viscerally today among those populations identified by this volume’s senior editor in a long-ago manifesto as “those who have experienced globalization from the bottom.” The words with which were launched the first journal of Global South studies in 2007 ring even truer today: “They more than anyone live the decline…of globalization as a world-utopia, one market under God” (López 7). Thus in order to avoid reproducing the systemic inequalities and oppressions against which we write, it is crucial that we who call ourselves scholars of Global South studies be intentional about questions of access and equity—the existential worries of writers and thinkers who find themselves outside the circuits of scholarly circulation and dissemination that define Global North academia. As Anne Garland Mahler and Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra have correctly noted, scholars situated in Global South spaces “face challenges that are institutional, field-specific, and linguistic” (Mahler 473). What this volume’s junior editor portrays in his own experience as “worries” that shadow his efforts to publish and not perish are more broadly contextualized by Mahler and Armillas-Tiseyra: “in practical terms, this means that hires and project initiatives are often only tenuously accommodated by existing institutional infrastructures” (473). Such is the precarity—and the resilience—of the South-South epistemologies we have been laboring to build, driven by the promise of knowledge production from positions (geographical and epistemic) historically dismissed as marginal: premodern, uncivilized, uninformed, or unworthy in whatever way. Such is also the urgency of our emphasis—our insistence—on the local and the interstitial. In the introduction to their groundbreaking volume Sur-South, Susanne Klengel and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner embrace decentralized loci of enunciation as a methodology “to reach a comprehensive critical analysis and reclassification of epistemic locations within the global circulation of knowledge” (Klengel 10). The “epistemic locations” that Klengel and Wallner reference are not abstract positionalities: they define the individual scholar’s disciplinary identifications and positions within the academy—departmental tenure-home (or not), access to research materials and travel funding (or not). Mahler and Armillas-Tiseyra also correctly emphasize the enduring challenge of language—literally of linguistic access—for many scholars of the Global South. It is not happenstance that the vast majority of contributions to this volume are written originally in English. After fifteen years and many, many books and articles in the field, English remains the hegemonic lingua franca of Global South scholarship. It is the institutional condition under which scholarship in this field has happened at all; and it remains the most vexing methodological obstacle to our truly embodying the goal of a South-South epistemology. Overcoming the challenge of globalized English as a de facto gatekeeper will require, to be blunt, money and training in languages; any meaningful editorial work for projects translating work into English from multiple other languages, or otherwise engaging scholars working in English as a non-native language, will require significant amounts of both. Yet even among the most elite 21st-century Global North institutions, funding for language teaching and research has grown conspicuously scarce. This volume has not been immune to the above-outlined conditions of production. What it has managed to achieve, however, is no small task: we present here a one-stop comprehensive overview of Global South studies at a key moment in its development—a snapshot of where global South literary studies stands in its second decade. This volume consists of original essays by 24 xi

Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

contributors from around the world, including institutions in Asia, Africa, South/Central America, and the Caribbean. That is: we have deliberately stayed (mostly) away from the institutional ‘usual suspects’, doubling down on our conviction that a field calling itself Global South studies cannot be taken seriously if its primary contributors hail from AAU universities. And in keeping with the preponderance of work in the field by newly-tenured and untenured scholars, we likewise feature work from rising and independent as well as established senior scholars. Finally, the volume presents what we believe to be a representative sense of the broad range of methodologies, approaches, primary and secondary texts, and literary canons to be found in a truly Global South studies. We are not, and have never been, an abstraction—undifferentiated “hilly sand”—for the famous postcolonial critic to ponder from the comfort of her (no doubt first-class) airline seat: My plane is flying now over the land between Baghdad, Beirut, Haifa, and Tripoli, into Turkey and Romania. I am making a clandestine entry into “Europe.” Yet the land looks the same—hilly sand. I know the cartographic markers because of the TV in the arm of my seat. (Spivak 93) It is long past time for denizens of the Global South to stop waiting patiently to be seen by the North—by its governments, its financial centers, its postcolonial critics. In the conclusion of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon urges us to “Leave this Europe…. That same Europe where they were never done talking of Man, and where they never stopped proclaiming that they were only anxious for the welfare of Man: today we know with what sufferings humanity has paid for every one of their triumphs of the mind” (Fanon 235). “Yet it is very true,” he also cautions, “that we need a model, and that we want blueprints and examples” (236). The Global South, and more specifically South-South epistemology, offers one such model: rather than simply turn away from the North, we now turn to each other. The notion that the Global South is premodern and should strive to become more like the North, socially, culturally, economically, politically, insidiously ignores the complex histories of the sovereign states and territories south of the U.S.-Mexico border, of the Gibraltar Strait, east of the European Union. A decolonial vision of the world would be polycentric and “no one civilization is imposed over all the rest” (Mignolo 28). Hegemonic discourse produced in the economic centers of the globe is then distributed through international capitalist channels. Global South scholarship informed by these histories of coloniality and discourse does not fall for linguistic sleights-of-hand such as “emerging markets,” “developing nations,” and “modernization—but reads such terms as part of a larger history of coloniality that has never gone away. --“Global South” is already a widely used term. Its introduction is often attributed to Carl Oglesby, who described the category in terms of the exercise of dominance by U.S. Cold-War foreign policy in Southeast Asia (90). Global South is an inherently unstable category of geography that invokes the relevance of place and history. It is porous and flexible. It hinges on hierarchies of development and post-World War II independence and industrialization. The Global South is as much crossed by the Tropics as by histories of brutal colonization, genocide, and contemporary neo-colonial corporate and banking practices—both soft and violent interventions from the Global North. The field that today calls itself Global South studies has devoted most of its first fifteen years to defining its object of study, refining and expanding its epistemic reach: what the Global South “is,” and what it might aspire to become. Geographically the term has been applied variously to Africa and Latin America, but also the U.S. South and the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean—and to xii

Introduction

marginalized Southern populations in otherwise Northern spaces (e.g., Turks in Germany, African immigrants across Europe, etc.). Definitions of what the Global South “is” certainly abound. These have included descriptions defined by historicized resistance, as in Vijay Prashad’s famous declaration: “The global South is a place [sic] of great struggle, of various tactics and strategies experimented with on the streets and in the halls of government. It is an unfinished story—one that has to have a good ending” (Prashad 11). But for us as editors of this volume the Global South, though it may exist in places, is not a place. It is not a geographical designation but an ontological one. It constitutes the mutual recognition by the rest of the planet’s population of its shared condition on the margins of the neoliberal dream: modernizing but not yet modern, developing but never quite developed—forever becoming. In this sense the Global South is the farthest thing from a ‘place’ or destination of any kind: it is rather a point of departure. We do not aim to outline a cartography of the Global South, or even to trace its epistemological or geopolitical ‘borders’; rather with this volume we explore how a Global South studies can fill epistemic gaps, can serve as a framework for literary analysis and decolonization of literary canons. Indeed the chapters that follow reflect the Global South’s elasticity, as they dialogue with variegated predecessors such as négritude (Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon); the Black Atlantic and Postcolonial Melancholia (Paul Gilroy); othering (Edward Said, Homi Bhabha); world englishes (Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin); borders and intersectional feminisms (Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrie Moraga, Kimberlé Crenshaw), etc. In this way we may read the Global South as a sort of metadiscourse, absorbing and appropriating to varying degrees (depending on the practitioner): postcolonialism, decoloniality, colonial histories and anti-colonial and anti-racist movements from across the planet, and even Africana and Latinx discourses, yet departing from that genealogy toward an uncertain but generative future. In the seminal 1989 volume The Empire Writes Back, Aschroft et al. defined postcolonial literatures as those which “emerged in their present form out of the experience of colonization and asserted themselves by foregrounding the tension with the imperial power, and by emphasizing their differences from the assumptions of the imperial centre” (2). Aschroft et al. recognized that the study of English is “a densely political and cultural phenomenon,” because literatures produced in the geographies that made up the British Empire must recognize, negotiate, and face their relationship with the former metropolis. Indeed, literatures from and for these geographies might respond, reject, or embrace—but never ignore—the ghost of coloniality and the Canon (with a capital C). While “postcolonial” and “Global South” literatures are distinct categories (with vast theoretical baggage associated to each) they share the inescapable anxiety of colonial pasts and neocolonial presents—regardless of whether these are more economic, corporate, or cultural in nature. In order to write back to the North, beyond asserting “difference from the imperial centre” (4), we collect in this volume ways to create and nurture new otologic grounds whose purpose is not to write back, against, or in response. We are not arguing for a historical/epistemological perspective that pretends colonialism never happened, or that our epistemologies are not relevantly intersected by epistemic hierarchies. Instead, we set out to collect South-South connections, case studies that exemplify Global South scholarship on alterity in literature, and essays on ontology, environmental studies and ecocriticism, climate change, human displacement, sexual/gender nonconformity, performativity; essays that read and re-read de Certeau, Deleuze, Fanon, Foucault, Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx. To re-semanticize Ashcroft arguments, “a major feature of [Global South] literatures is the concern with place and displacement” (8). Authors writing in the Global South often face a process of coming-to-terms with dislocation; that is, with writing necessarily from places that do not xiii

Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

feel entirely their own—and whose sense of definition is often based on syncretism and hybridity produced by brutality: A valid and active sense of self may have been eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration, the experience of enslavement, transportation, or ‘voluntary’ removal for indentured labour. Or it may have been destroyed by cultural denigration, the conscious and unconscious oppression of the indigenous personality and culture by a supposedly superior racial or cultural model. (Ashcroft et al. 9) Even in a mestizaje manifesto as significant as Mexico’s José Vasconcelos La Raza Cósmica (1925), which heralds miscegenation as the ultimate path to human evolution, there are racist assumptions about the superiority of whiteness, and the need for colonialism to “serve as a bridge” to that next stage in human progress: The white race has brought the world to a state in which all human types and cultures will be able to fuse with each other. The civilization developed and organized in our times by the white has set the moral and material basis for the union of all men into a fifth universal race, the fruit of all the previous ones and amelioration of everything past. (9) Unlike Vasconcelos, this volume recognizes hybridity and syncretism as facts of our globalized world, but not as a path to modernity. Contrary to Vasconcelos, we do not celebrate them as tools to erase difference. Instead, the essays in the volume build the notion of the possibility of coalitions across lines of difference, where those differences are respected, honored. This book is about dislocation, written from dislocation, but it categorically rejects notions of epistemological or racial hierarchies. Instead, we argue here for a polycentric world, in which the North is not more insightful or better-equipped to describe the universe and ourselves, especially when it comes to understand South experiences, epistemologies, and ontologies. We likewise do not aim at eliminating the Global North as a productive site of knowledge and empathy—this volume simply shows that it is just not the only one. --Deleuze’s and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature proves relevant in the reading of the Global Sotuh. Deleuze and Guattari give “Jewish literature of Warsaw and Prague” as an example of minor literature, defined not as one that comes “from a minor language” but rather “that which a minority constructs within a major language” (16). Much like Kafka, Global South literature “is affected with a high coefficient of deterritorialization” (16). Like Kafka’s, Global South literature is necessarily political. Minor literature’s “cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it” (17). And finally, fitting well into the third characteristic of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of minor literature, Global South literature “takes on a collective value” (17). Global South literature could only be a productive category of analysis in globalized world where all local geopolitical decisions and events send ripples through humanity because of the “political domain [having] contaminated every statement” (17). Deleuze and Guattari argue that there is a scarcity of talent in minor literatures, a point that could be certainly contested when one considers the vast number of Global South literatures. However, Toward a Minor Literature is useful in that it suggests how Global South literature welcomes contrasting readings and sparks vehement debate: xiv

Introduction

Literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation. It is literature that produces an active solidarity in spite of skepticism; and if the writer is in the margins or completely outside his or her fragile community, this situation allows the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility…the literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to- come not all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern. (17-18) In asking whether and to what extent Global South literatures belong in a World Literature Canon and the puzzle of a hemispheric body politic, we raise questions about an issue intimately related to collective memory—since, what does not fit into our body politics could disappear from future portraits of what will be the past, unless the alien limbs of Global South are actively remembered—a political act of memory. --To return to our opening metaphor, this volume thus represents our attempt to enable direct flights from Buenos Aires to Mumbai, from Algiers to Kuala Lumpur. This is not to say that the erudite contributors to this volume have not read Baudrillard, Butler, Benjamin, Foucault, Heidegger. Indeed, we are extremely familiar with U.S. and European philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—we have to be, since most of us were asked about those authors in our qualifying exams, in job interviews, in conferences. Without diminishing or disregarding the importance of Northern philosophy, we attempt here to look elsewhere for answers about epistemologies that break the molds of materialism and poststructuralism, we are looking for eccentric (i.e., outside of the central, epistemic, and colonial/postcolonial zero points) ontological positions. There is insightful scholarship being produced in the Global South, if we are willing to look for it, translate it, and disable the epistemic hierarchies that marginalize it. We editors likewise acknowledge that some conventions of Northern scholarship—such as starting with a thesis statement, providing textual evidence throughout, citing the great minds of the past (standing on the shoulders of giants)—are notably absent in several of the contributions. In many places, theses and theories are presented as consequences of reading, of failing onto insights and discoveries—instead of the ways U.S. scholars are accustomed to read a hypothesis and then subsequent proof for it. The very language of varied contributions resists the colonialist urge to standardize English, to standardize ways of thinking and writing, according to the conventions of the most powerful. --We have hinted in this introduction at the darker side of Northern modernity, its colonial hierarchical structure, its assumption that the Global South should be—and should want to be—more like the Global North. “How could they not?” —the Global North might ask, “if everything from art to technology, from education to day-to-day life is better here.” Indeed, many of us from and within the Global South internalize such capitalist adages and look North for culture capital, mass media commodities, travel, etc. The work of Fanon and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, hooks and Haraway, to mention a few, has already served as antidote for such colonization of the mind. Yet here we focus on Paul Gilroy’s concept of the “Black Atlantic” as counterculture of modernity because several of the essays in our collection look to Gilroy for the sense of a framework. Gilroy articulates the project of the Black Atlantic as counter to modernity in the following terms: xv

Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

I intend not only to question the credibility of a tidy, holistic conception of modernity but also to argue for the inversion of the relationship between margin and centre as it has appeared within the master discourses of the master race. In other words, I am seeking to contribute to some reconstructive intellectual labour which, through looking at the modern cultural history of blacks in the modem world, has a great bearing on ideas of what the West was and is today. (Gilroy 1993, 45) Gilroy indicts the centrality of racism and cultural hierarchies in the construction of modernity, built on an Enlightened notion of the triumph of reason for all humankind, which in reality only produces any joy in Berlin, Paris, and London. Because the North’s master narratives of superior reason and scientific racism needed the brutality of genocide and colonialism—and still employ such narratives to ostracize ways of knowing that modernity deems premodern and thus expendable, skepticism produced in the Global South, that disables those master narratives, meanwhile reconstructing the World Literature Canon, ought to be recorded, printed, and distributed. This is why the logic that questions the hegemony of modernity is so often anti-racist and, to use one of Gilroy’s most-cited terms, a banner of “multicultural conviviality” (Gilroy 2005, XV). Gilroy likewise indicts the softer ways in which the Northern modernity’s discourse, in the face post-WorldWar-II propriety, has shifted from outright racism to more subtle ways of marginalizing Southern ethnicities and, therefore, epistemologies: The overcoming of scientific racism (one of modernity's more durable intellectual products) and its post-war transmutation into newer, cultural forms that stress complex difference rather than simple biological hierarchy may provide a telling, concrete example of what skepticism towards the grand narratives of scientific reason adds up to. (Gilroy 1993, 44) --The essays that comprise our volume are organized into three sections. “Part I – Intentions: Geographies, Epistemologies, Subjects” focuses on the origins and object(s) of Global South studies, and how the field has come to define and historicize its organizing concept. More specifically, this section examines how the global South has come to be a critical rubric for the analysis of literatures across geographical and linguistic boundaries in the larger context of capitalist globalization. “Part II – Approaches: Methods and Methodologies” follows with a consideration of subsequent critical developments in Global South studies, particularly those that embrace interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary approaches. This section specifically traces the field’s recent shift away from defining its object(s) of study to questions of intention and method—of methodologies and metamethodological, arguably nomadic intellectual formations that cross disciplinary boundaries. “Part III - Case Studies: Examples and Exceptions” is simultaneously the most self-explanatory and the one whose contents are most difficult to anticipate. Here is where will be find a range of applications and interventions, in a sense a state-of-the-art of Global South literary studies. Essays here critique the boundaries or definitions set out in the previous sections, and push ‘settled’ literatures or methods into new analytical spaces. Within each section, the chapters are organized alphabetically by last name. The editors of the volume had a lengthy discussion about how to organize the essays. We decided that any ordering based on hierarchy, fame, or seniority of the contributors would be antithetical to the decolonial spirit of this volume. xvi

Introduction

Part I includes nine essays. Chapter 1 – Fanon: A Theatre of Embodiment by Felicity Bromley-Hall and Jean Khalfa studies two plays written by Frantz Fanon in 1947-48. “When these texts are staged,” argue the authors, “one realises that Fanon’s surrealist and disturbing dramatic technique do not just develop characters, but also aim to exhibit, and perhaps, induce the complexities of a turbulent mind within a historical situation.” The is essay argues that Fanon anticipated “a theatre developed later in Europe, particularly under the influence of Artaud: a theatre which directly stages a complex composition of forces through physicality and the experience of the senses, reflected in its language.” Chapter 2 – Solidarity’s Temporalities by Adhira Mangalagiri “probes the temporal dimensions of South-South solidarity, understood as expressions of transnational togetherness asserted in opposition to a colonial hegemon. The chapter explores the case of China and India, tracking the rhetoric of “two thousand years of friendship,” arguing that, far exceeding its usage in state-led activities of cultural diplomacy, “two thousand years of friendship” opens a radical understanding of South-South solidarity as a form of transnational temporal relation capable of decolonizing not just political structures but also the textures of time.” Chapter 3 – From the South Out: Neoliberalism, Horizontality, and the Post-Global Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Juan Meneses “reconsiders the relationship between the Global South and the neoliberal regime imposed on it by the Global North as the latest element in a succession of interrelated historical interventions that include colonization, imperialism and global capitalism, and globalization.” This chapter argues that “as neoliberalism becomes increasingly pervasive across the world, a horizontal multiplication of relationships has replaced the original North-South distribution of power rooted historically in the colonizer-colonized binary.” Chapter 4 – Deep Souths: The U.S. South and the Global South by Pashmina Murthy studies an important instance of South-South relations, the U.S. South, “whose transnationalism is foregrounded in texts that situate it in conversation with, among other places, the Caribbean, Latin America, and west Africa. This chapter explores whether discourses and structures of feeling specific to the U.S. South can also apply to the global South, using the “Deep South” as a test case.” Chapter 5 – Situating Energy Humanities in India: Labour and Gender in Narratives of Energy Systems by Swaralipi Nandi addresses questions about the history of India’s energy regimes, how we critically understand India’s present energy networks as socio-political structures of labour extraction, and the representation of energy labour in cultural texts of workingclass realisms. Chapter 6 – Queer/Cuir in the Global South? Latin-American Dissidence and Gendersex Non-Conformity by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo argues that “queerness” has impacted the Global South lexis to further liberation and emancipation, and is inextricably embedded into social movements. Yet this essay proposes that “queerness” has limitations and its universal imposition across geographies too often results in the division of oppressed peoples, in the exclusive use of Anglo terms as if only they could create coalitions and interactions worldwide, and in the normalization of a monolithic way of being “queer” that centers consumerism and social conservatism as the cornerstones of a fulfilling life and sexuality. This essay parses how sexual and gender dissidence in Latin America is being theorized foremost as a political subjectivity, enacted by nonwhite bodies, breaking rules inherited from homophobic colonial pasts. Chapter 7 – Resonances of Race in the Global South and the Decolonial Turn by Juan G. Ramos “examines the points of contact between the Global South and the decolonial turn by focusing particularly on the privileged position that race occupies in the organizational logic that grounds both fields of study […] At the core of this study is a closer examination of a key concept that questions specific formations of race, namely the idea of “whiteness” (blanquitud).” Chapter 8 – Colonial Traces: The Specter of the Global South in Contemporary Cinema by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado discusses “a series of spectral narratives in works of world cinema from the 2010s, who share a concern xvii

Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

regarding the persistence of the colonial in film representation” with a particular focus on three directors—Herzog, Mati Diop and Pedro Costa. The chapter, Sánchez Prado explains, studies “not so much the politics of representation in cinema from the Global South, but rather the ways in which the Global South is thematized and turned into a referent for cinematic form in European cinematographies with different relationships to their colonial heritage.” The chapter signals “the correlation between the haunting persistence of people and stories from formerly colonized societies and parallel the rise of the idea of the Global South as a geographical and political marker.” Part II includes six essays. Chapter 9 – Global South Literatures as New Materialisms: Ecologies, Objects, and Ontologies by Carlos M. Amador historicizes “the extractive, exploitative ontologies of capitalist accumulation in order to produce a ground for the emergences of complex, multi-agent ontologies.” This essay argues that “Global South literature makes possible discussions of the insufficiencies of previous materialisms (and hence of the region's own history of materialist thought) by focusing upon the role of climate collapse, nonhuman/human agency, and uneven and combined development exercise in the development of rigorous materialisms.” Chapter 10 – Historicizing Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina by Nilanjana Bhattacharya explores “one of the earliest examples of south-south connection between India and Latin America;” specifically, “Indo-Argentine literary transactions to demonstrate that attempts to forge a direct relationship between these two countries begun as early as the nineteenth century, which reached its peak in the twentieth century with Rabindranath Thakur.” Chapter 11 – Slave Literacy, Creolization and Muslim Formation in Colonial Jamaica by Ahmed Idrissi Alami demonstrates how some enslaved people on Jamaican plantations “used Arabic and creolized writing to resist cultural assimilation, maintain historical memory, and share Islamic learning.” The essay discusses “the presence, performance, and importance of Arabic literacy, the transmission of Islamic practices and culture among this population on Caribbean slave plantations.” Chapter 12 – Submerging the South: Storying the Deep Indian Ocean by Charne Lavery “proposes a submersive method of reading, going below the waterline to take account of three-dimensional oceanic space in and from the south. It explores three narratives of twentieth and twenty-first century Indian Ocean connection in relation to the undersea, placing stranger-than-fiction events of the deep Indian Ocean in conversation with fictions of strangeness.” Chapter 13 – Contested Histories: Indian Cinema in the Global South and Beyond by Parichay Patra shifts away from the mostly-historical approach to research about Indian cinema studies. Instead, it explores the “possibility for the existence of a transnational history of South Asian cinema in general and Indian cinema in particular.” The chapter “demonstrates how a global history of Indian cinema might be conceived, with a consideration of the various modes of association and negotiation between the Global North and the Global South.” Chapter 14 – Between Lettered and Popular Cultures: A Cultural History Perspective by Guillermo Zermeño (translated by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo) leverages the study of French philosopher Michel de Certeau to ponder discursive relations of power in lettered (highbrow) versus popular (lowbrow) culture. It also reflects on the role of the historian (and history as a field) — inevitably displaced and dislocated from her object of study. Part III includes ten essays. Chapter 15 – The Computer and the Subject: Computing Extractivism in Global South Literatures by Amrita De analyzes the role of the computer in Global South literature. “The computer has, after all, been a heavy-duty commitment in the Global South: in an increasingly amplified global economy, the Global South is the birthplace of necessary raw materials, which get disproportionately devalued in Global North centers. The digital is inarguably the sine qua non of contemporary urban life; it is ubiquitous to social life, at once processing a gamut of functions, from paying bills, watching movies to accessing healthcare services— the one-stop social smorgasbord accessible by one touch and a swipe. […] In simple terms, xviii

Introduction

this essay is invested in the life of the object and the ways in which the object constitutes the social [The chapter] demonstrates this through two examples from Alejandro Zambra’s “Memories of a Personal Computer” and Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger”. Chapter 16 – Carolina Maria de Jesus: Four Movements of the Favela and Literature by Fabio Akcelrud Durão, through a detailed reading of Carolina Maria de Jesus’ texts, investigates a locus constituted by contradiction and imbued with negativity, the favela, as a particularly relevant Global South space. It describes four spatial movements that generate a circle of negativity. Chapter 17 – Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde, An Intransigent Aesthetics by Brinda Bose studies the “Indian avantgarde, largely mapped post India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947, belong[ing] to its ‘afterlife.’” This essay studies how avant-garde poetry “veers away from the institutional and the programmatic (as military formations generally denote) to court danger and risk appositely: it shoots out onto every side from formalistic arrangements to lead a very different kind of charge into uncharted territory, in extreme and radical experiments with the form, image, style and tone of its own literary heritages.” Chapter 18 – The Sociological Imagination of Dr. Jose Rizal by Teresita Cruz del Rosario studies two novels by Filipino novelist, medical doctor, political philosopher, and subversive, Dr. Jose Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive). “This essay discusses the novels of Dr. Jose Rizal to construct a theory of social and political transformation, review the historical evolution of Spain and the Philippine colonial relationship, and draw from Jose Rizal's biography to elucidate the intersections between history, structure, and biography.” Chapter 19 – “i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone:” Human-Nonhuman intra-action in Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry by Yvonne Liebermann “takes as its subject the ecopoetry of the St. Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte. It argues that Hippolyte’s poetry situates the human subject beyond the Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, human and nonhuman. This essay analyses how Hippolyte’s poetry configures the St. Lucian nonhuman environment as agentic despite its fragility in the face of the Anthropocene and how it situates the human within this environment.” Chapter 20 –Epeli Hau’ofa: Sly Naivety in Tales of the Tikongs by Sudesh Mishra explores the ways in which “Hau’ofa’s characters grasp utterly the norms of the global north, but they fail—and this failure is craftily disingenuous—to emancipate themselves from the ironies, ambiguities and contradictions, comic as well as economic, that emerge whenever they call upon practices and attributes that differ relationally from the norm, the global north, thereby constituting exceptionalities.” The essay shows how, “in his two works of fiction, Tales of the Tikongs and Kisses in the Nederends, Hau’ofa employs the attributes of a sly naïvety to depict the norm, the north, as it functions in the south while, paradoxically, subverting the north’s normative value by citing exceptional southern practices that defy incorporation.” Chapter 21 – Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast: Kappappāṭṭu and the Chronotope of the Ship in Mappila Literary Culture by A. K. Muneer “focuses on the chronotope of the ship in an eighteenth-century Arabi Malayalam song-poem called the Kappappāṭṭu composed by Kuññāyin Musliyār to explore an amphibious poetics on the Malabar Coast in southwest India where the literary culture of the Mappila Muslims has flourished from the early seventeenth century onwards.” Chapter 22 – The Guantánamo Graphic Novels: Towards a Carceral Imperialism by Pramod K. Nayar argues that “Gitmo, as represented in two graphic texts, Sarah Mirk’s Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison (2020, hereafter GV) and Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc’s Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani (2019, hereafter GK) instantiates a new form of neoimperial domination of the Global South by the Global North, specifically the United States: carceral imperialism.” Chapter 23 – Exploring Digital Archives: Vieques on the Internet and Yabureibo in the Global South by Juan Carlos Rodríguez has a twofold purpose: “first, to understand the xix

Alfred J. López and Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

relevance of the Vieques struggle (silenced by the Navy, incomprehensible for algorithms, missing in key academic discussions) in the context of Global South literature; and second, to explore the social meanings, practices, and layers of opacity that link Vieques's digital representations to the rethinking of Global South digital humanities projects and archival networks.” Last, but certainly not least, Chapter 24 – “We Must Be a Third Principle:” Midnight’s Children and the Non-Aligned Movement by Y. P. Zhang shifts critical focus on Salman Rushdie’s groundbreaking novel “from its relation with the nation to its entanglements with the hopes and predicaments of third world internationalism, [inviting] a reassessment of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism and a rethinking of the relationship between global South studies, Cold War studies, and postcolonialism.”

Works Cited Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. The Empire Write Back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. Routledge, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. [Trans. ????????] U of Minnesota P, 1986. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Richard Philcox. Grove P, 2004. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia UP, 2005. Klengel, Susanne & Alexandra Ortiz Wallner, eds. Sur/South: Poetics and Politics of Thinking Latin America / India. Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2016. López, Alfred J. “Introduction: The (Post)Global South.” Global South 1.1 (2007) 1-11. Mahler, Anne Garland & Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra. “Introduction: New Critical Directions in Global South Studies.” Comparative Literature Studies 58.3 (2021) 465-484. Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso, 2012. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. Death of a Discipline. Columbia UP, 2003. Vasconcelos, José. “The Cosmic Race,” in The Mexico Reader: History, Culture, Politics. Gilbert Eds. M. Joseph and Timothy J. Henderson. Duke UP, 2002.

xx

PART I

Intentions Geographies, Epistemologies, Subjects

1 FANON A Theatre of Embodiment Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

Frantz Fanon wrote three plays in 1948–49 whilst he was a medical student in Lyon, two of which have survived. His brother, Joby, recalled that the young Frantz, who had an extraordinary memory and a passion for theatre, had memorised the prefaces Racine wrote for Bérénice and Britannicus.1 Pupils at that time would have been encouraged to learn famous lines, but memorising these texts, which are reflections on the nature and meaning of theatre, shows how serious the young Fanon’s interest was. In Lyon, he was a passionate theatre-goer. We know that he sent one of his plays to Jean-Louis Barrault, who had staged several plays at Théâtre des Célestins during the period.2 According to Marie-Jeanne Manuellan, to whom he was to dictate his later work, Fanon occasionally referred to the plays fondly in the late fifties whilst dictating L’an V de la révolution algérienne.3 François Maspero, who published three of Fanon’s books, referred to them in his correspondence with Giovanni Pirelli, Fanon’s Italian publisher at Einaudi. They were hoping to publish the plays as part of the projected edition of Fanon’s complete works, which they worked on in 1963.4 This edition was never published, and the typescripts were lost, but photocopies of two plays survived in the archives of Joby Fanon who deposited them at the Institut Mémoire de l’Édition Contemporaine, in Caen. After extensive deciphering work on this copy, occasionally barely legible, they were published in French in 2015 and then in English in 2017, in a volume of unpublished or forgotten texts by Frantz Fanon, collected and edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert JC Young, under the title Alienation and Freedom.5 These plays have not been staged yet (as of mid 2023), but several readings of excerpts have been organised since their publication, in French and in English. It turned out that when performed, these apparently conceptual texts were extraordinarily dramatic, worthy of interest not just for what they tell us about Fanon’s early thought and preoccupations, but for staging. Our purpose in this chapter is to give indications of their place within Fanon’s work as a whole, and then to comment more at length on their astonishingly precise dramatic conception, in view of future performances.

Theatre and the origins of Fanon’s thought We know from his numerous philosophical readings of the time that one of the young Fanon’s preoccupations was the paradox of the creation of values ​​by action. This is a major philosophical theme in Black Skin, White Masks: DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-2

3

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

It is not the black world that governs my behaviour. My black skin is not a repository for specific values. The starry sky that left Kant in awe has long revealed its secrets to us. And moral law has doubts about itself. […] Sartre has shown that the past, along the lines of an inauthentic mode of being, ‘takes’ en masse [congeals] and, once solidly structured, then gives form to the individual. This is the past transmuted into value. But I can also revise my past, valorise it, or condemn it depending on what I choose.6 If the values that had prompted Fanon to join the Free French Forces during the war (and would lead him to join the Algerian independence struggle ten years later) were not inherited from an historical identity or derivable from a rational constitution, how can the ‘initial Act’, as he writes in Parallel Hands, generate them? This classical paradox, at the centre of his passion for post-war theatre, is the subject of the two plays. Their heroes are defined by a quest for authenticity, for a thought and an action that would not be derived from any inherited identity. Thus, in the existentialist drama that is The Drowning Eye, the central character, François, constantly demands that his fiancée proves that her love is a conscious and continuous act and not the reflection of family and social expectations (a quest for authenticity that actually nourishes her love). In Parallel Hands, a classical tragedy, the young prince Épithalos engages in the liberation of his island nation at the cost of a parricide. Social peace there has been based on an alienation: a blindness symbolised by the choice of the authorities to turn off the Sun, so to speak, and live in a permanent penumbra to avoid all conflicts. Throughout the play, the Chorus repeatedly reflects Épithalos’ motivation to bring light in these terms, here addressing the king, Polyxos: The Chorus (With a voice returned by a distant echo.) Polyxos, prince of Lébos, On the other side of the emaciated Word, The initial Act is erected. On reaching its maximum limits, human thought can only transmute.7 Fanon had probably read the passages from Aeschylus’ Prometheus which were part of the Greek texts collected, translated and commented on by Simone Weil in 1942. They had just been published under the apocryphal title of Pre-Christian Intuitions, a volume in Fanon’s library, where the pages containing this passage have clearly been read. The god crucified on his rock by a divine father punishing him for the act of giving light to men, and having thus stripped him of it, corresponded to Weil’s theology: ‘Prometheus is the lamb slaughtered since the foundation of the world’. The dispossessed Zeus, deprived of ‘the spirit and the possession of wisdom’ now turned to pure violence. Before Prometheus, men had been plunged into darkness: They who at first, when they saw, saw in vain, heard without hearing; and similar to the shapes in dreams, during all their long lives, mixed everything at random.8 In Fanon’s play, the act of giving light is not in itself enlightenment, and the conclusion is a warning rather than a solution; this thought that has reached its maximum limits unleashes death.9 The Promethean enterprise goes wrong, only generating catastrophic violence, without any Hegelian sublation. 4

Fanon

When he read these plays, François Maspero described them thus to Giovanni Pirelli: ‘It is a kind of work of personal exorcism which often achieves an extraordinary formal beauty but is not devoid of hermeticism.’10 This was remarkably perceptive. In Algeria, Fanon was indeed to study rituals of exorcisms as ways of dealing with mental illnesses. But these plays could be read as the exorcism of a specific ‘pathology of freedom’ that Fanon alludes to in Black Skin, White Masks: Some men want to fill the world with their being. One German philosopher described the process as the pathology of freedom.11 This philosopher was Günther Anders, who had published in 1935 and 1936, in Recherches Philosophiques, the text of two lectures: the first on freedom and the second on pathologies of freedom. Fanon read and referred to these texts.12 In the first lecture, Anders defines freedom ontologically, as detachment or foreignness to the world, and not ethically, as decision or autonomy, at least initially. He opposes that condition to that of animals, who live within the horizons of ‘material a prioris’. They do not need to learn the world, which is only given in the form of material determinations to which instincts are attuned. Whatever remains exterior to an animal’s instinctual anticipations simply escapes its apprehension. Humans, by contrast, are not fixed (except, will add Fanon, when they are subjected to a racist, objectifying gaze). The whole of the human world is an a posteriori and requires interpretation. This human freedom is on the one hand nothing else than ‘the negation of a certain degree of integration’, writes Anders, but it is also the possibility of the Theorein, the theoretical relationship to the world now at a distance: ‘the starting point of the problem of freedom is in the fact that man, a foreigner to the world, is detached from it and abandoned to himself’. In his second article, Anders analyses pathologies that often derive from this ontological experience of freedom as abandonment. They come from the fact that this freedom is not an initial act but just a fact. Paradoxically, men discover themselves through reflection by their faculty of abstracting from the world, and therefore through an act of freedom, but what they discover is that they are never totally free since they have not determined themselves to be so. They just happen to be born free. This experience of the self as free but in pure contingency is a shock which produces in turn what Anders calls an ontological shame. This shame of the origin is commonly counterbalanced by the development of the familial and private sphere, in effect forms of dissimulation of the origin, but Anders also describes two pathologies of identification which may derive from this ontological shame. One is nihilism, or the disgust with oneself as being purely this or that, purely contingent – the other is a thirst for power and pride. Though for him nihilism is closer to the truth of this condition, it is really when writing on the thirst for power that Anders speaks of a pathology of freedom. The historical context for this pathology of identification, when man wants to take his revenge from the world by absorbing the whole world within his own self – now raised to the glory of a statue, as he describes it – is not named but it is clear: it is Nazism. When Fanon read that almost 20 years later, he interpreted this pathology in Black Skin, White Masks in a new context: the opposition of the inferiority complex of the colonised, who, unable to escape into the private sphere, has been made to permanently feel his contingence through the reification of his physical appearance, and the Negritude movement, which wanted to erect a statue to a negated and lost identity as a reaction. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon uses the vocabulary of his play very precisely to point out that enlightenment cannot be given nor received: 5

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

All I know is that anyone who tries to read in my eyes anything but a perpetual questioning will have to lose his sight; neither gratitude nor hatred. And if I utter a great shout, it won’t be black. No, from the point of view adopted here, there is no black problem. Or at least if there is one the whites are only accidentally concerned. It is a story that takes place in obscurity, and the sun I carry with me must lighten every corner.13 By contrast, each of these plays portrays one of Anders’ two pathologies, the nihilistic and the Promethean.14 At the beginning of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon notes that decolonisation cannot happen through the stroke of a magic wand or through institutional substitutions. It implies a transformation in each being and in society as a whole. He describes it like a tragedy, one where the spectators would become the show, in a reversal of light and obscurity: Decolonization never goes unnoticed, for it bears on and fundamentally alters being, and transforms spectators crushed to a nonessential state into privileged actors, captured in a virtually grandiose fashion by the spotlight of History.15 This is a metaphor, but it echoes Fanon’s conception of the dramatic form so clearly illustrated in his theatre. Both plays have clearly been influenced by the theatre of the time, in particular that of Sartre and of Claudel, both authors whose plays Fanon probably saw in Lyon.16 But throughout, there is an influence of surrealism, especially via Césaire and Artaud.17 From Césaire, Fanon derived the synesthetic quality of the plays, so striking in the stage instructions as we will discuss below. Both plays stage a quest for authenticity through a dialectic of light and obscurity, transparency and opacity. The main character, in the first one, François, is fascinated by the sharp lights of the stars in a night sky (in his youth he had broken windows to see the night better). When his enthusiastic brother celebrates the Sun and more generally earthy materiality, a voice offstage says: ‘The rain bathes in the lunar pulp and invents eternal stria.’ François stands up to leave.18 The moon, like an eye in the night, drowns in this translucent thickness. This image was probably taken from one of Victor Hugo’s poems that the young Fanon, intensely preoccupied with the purpose of being, read and memorised. In it, the soul, which is called a single eye, trying to understand destiny, forever drowns in the abyss of the heavens’s intentions: Oh ! pensais-je, pouvoir étrange et surhumain De celui qui nous tient palpitants dans sa main ! Ô volonté du ciel ! abîme où l'œil se noie !19 We have seen how the other play reverses this opposition but still stages a doomed attempt at bringing pure light in a world of compromise. The ‘parallel hands’ of the quest in the dark (perhaps as in a painting by Wifredo Lam) close onto nothing. From Artaud, Fanon probably derived the sense of a tragic theatre of concepts (rather than of psychologies), which would somehow go beyond words (‘Mother, methods disappear’ [les méthodes se résorbent], says the hero, Épithalos), to pierce through the skin of spectators and awaken them directly within their bodies. Artaud’s theory certainly resonates with what Fanon attempts in both works: 6

Fanon

The question, then, for the theatre, is to create a metaphysics of speech, gesture, and expression, in order to rescue it from its servitude to psychology and ‘human interest’. But all this can be of no use unless behind such an effort there is some kind of real metaphysical inclination, an appeal to certain unhabitual ideas, which by their very nature cannot be limited or even formally depicted. These ideas which touch on Creation, Becoming, and Chaos, are all of a cosmic order and furnish a primary notion of a domain from which the theatre is now entirely alien. They are able to create a kind of passionate equation between Man, Society, Nature, and Objects.20

Staging: Fanon and bodies So how can such strange theatre be performed? The following remarks are born of the experience of the premiere reading of Fanon’s plays in the UK, directed by Felicity Bromley-Hall.21 They are a reflection on Fanon’s stage instructions, which reveal how much a stage performance of these works, however conceptual in appearance, must be a total – sensorily overwhelming and affective – theatrical experience. This first experience did not result in a singular method on how to read or stage the plays but, instead, in a series of questions and interpretations of the text, which is useful to bear in mind when approaching the stage. In Fanon’s theatre, there is a distillation of relationships between bodies and history. As theatre-makers, we ask ourselves how our bodies might be used to manifest the power of his plays to an audience – how the experiences of our bodies on stage, and in the world, inform our means of articulating Fanon’s dramatic works. It’s a simultaneous relationship between what we see – what we experience – and how we are experienced by both onstage and offstage audiences. This is also how François describes the eye, in The Drowning Eye: ‘some morsel of our being is both source and mouth’.22 We consider Fanon’s as a ‘total’ theatre – probably like the Greek tragedy which inspires Parallel Hands, or indeed similar to Artaud’s – where words themselves would also be objects, staged in a total experience of all the senses. Indeed, he stages the words perhaps even more than any kind of narrative action. They are complex plays to read – clearly not meant to be just read. They tell us about the importance of Fanon’s interest in theatre as perhaps the only artistic method capable of totally exemplifying the body’s experience in space, and the connection between body and psyche. He participates in a transformation of theatre developed in Europe, particularly under the influence of Artaud: a theatre which directly stages a complex composition of forces through physicality and the experience of the senses, reflected in its language. Artaud writes that theatre ‘uses all languages (gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness)’ and ‘rediscovers itself precisely at the point where the mind needs a language to bring about its manifestations’.23 Fanon’s theatre – staged – is at its most affecting when it uses all of the senses to capture and evoke the mindset which exists at the threshold of expression. We know that Fanon dictated his books. They were performed aloud for the transcriber as he paced the room, even before they were committed to page. He saw their embodiment via the performed and spoken word as essential. In his preface to Black Skin, White Masks, Francis Jeanson recalls a correspondance with Fanon where he asked him to explain a sentence in the book. Fanon answered: ‘I seek, when I write such things, to touch my reader with affect… that is to say irrationally, almost sensually’. Later he added ‘Words have a charge for me. I feel myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark’.24 In considering how to direct the plays and examine how their words might be embodied through planned performance, we need to consider the relationship between the plays’ texts and the body – as the performer’s body becomes a host if you will, to the power of Fanon’s language. 7

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

Words are attached to the body The language used in both The Drowning Eye and Parallel Hands immediately forms an intense connection with the body – describing attacks on the human form which are often both violent and oppressive. Titled as such, The Drowning Eye already creates a surrealist association where an isolated body part dies through submersion and the moon disappears into the sea or behind the rain. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon also discusses the ‘eye’ in the singular, against ‘eyes’ in the plural, as referring to a living consciousness, one freed from the images embedded in culture by centuries of exploitation and racism.25 The play’s title evokes body and mind in simultaneous distress. The other play, Parallel Hands, creates an image of two limbs that, whilst belonging to the same form and corresponding in their ‘parallelism’, also exist in constant opposition to one another – remaining always distinctly separate. Also concerned with the concept of pursuing clear vision and what that means (as a metaphor for a person’s search for absolute authenticity), the second play is about a rejection of the refusal to see. But it fails and finishes with the hero ‘like flesh torn by a hail of bullets’ bellowing into the void of a blackened auditorium, ‘I SEE.’ But everything is back in obscurity; ‘on stage, darkness returns as the curtain falls’.26 In the concluding paragraphs of Black Skin, White Masks – written almost simultaneously to the plays – Fanon writes that ‘Before it can engage in a positive voice, freedom requires an effort at disalienation’.27 It requires the person to understand the world and the truths of the people around them, to seek an authenticity of self in relation to the other. Clear and unobscured vision is a condition for action. He asks, ‘Why not simply try to find the other, to feel the other, to reveal the other to myself? / Was my freedom not given me to build the world of the You?’ Fanon suggests that for a person to be truly free and self-determining, they must be able to connect with this ‘other’. They must somehow reject or dissolve that separation between bodies. In The Drowning Eye, François had wished to achieve that unifying contact – but his body has been brutalised and this prevents him from reaching the enlightened disalienation that Fanon’s theory might suggest. In this pursuit of absolute transparency and authenticity, the play becomes a tragedy: that pursuit is both necessary and impossible. François describes literal and figurative violence inflicted upon him – recalling, even in childhood, being forced to wear ‘big shoes that hurt your toes’ and being fearful of ‘the adults with their large strangling hands roaming freely’.28 As a man, he is seriously injured by ‘true, hard, strong men’ who ‘start hitting and lynching you, and you get hurt, badly hurt. They leave and you’ve understood nothing and you are beaten down by blows… they leave you alone with a medal and you are beaten down by blows’.29 The people who inflict such violence are always detached from him – referred to in the third person with ‘they’ and ‘their’ and ‘those’. ‘They’ are never a group that he feels himself a part of, yet their physical, intimate closeness is enough to inflict grave damage. When François’ body is connected with another, it is abused – in spite of his efforts to make a liberating, ‘positive’ touch. In spite of a cerebral quest for the ‘truth’ of human connection, Fanon’s language creates an image of a body constantly struggling against the world in which it exists. Tragically, the more he seeks to understand ‘them’, the more alienated his character becomes from both himself and the realities of the world. When staging these plays, we must not ignore the significance of François’ beginning the play from the floor. We are presented with ‘A sofa. An armchair’ yet ‘François is seated at Ginette’s feet’ – presumably looking as battered as the ‘blind black cat’ that sits by him in relative comfort ‘on a cushion’. For François, ‘the lighting has to be metallic’, and much of François’ lines are uttered in related darkness. He is referred to as ‘pale’ and ‘the colour of new blotting paper’ – whilst the rest of the play alternates between obscurity and how ‘the light imposes itself increasingly harshly’ on other characters. Even when François does later stand, frustrated and beaten by miscommunications with Ginette, we see him reduced again, ‘collapsing on the armchair’.30 Most 8

Fanon

of our knowledge of François comes from Lucien, who says, ‘One day he confided in me that he would like to be blind’ and ‘Death is what inhabits François. Death guides him./ François does not want to live, that’s the secret’.31 Teamed with plays of light which at times are erratic and disorientating – otherworldly and ethereal – illuminated here is one of the play’s central frustrations. François is shrouded in darkness. Despite his best efforts to see the world, we are presented with a chronically depressed man – contrasted with his brother, who is exasperated with François’ seeming lack of motivation to seek anything other than suffering. Lucien mocks François’ downtrodden demeanour, mimicking François’ words: ‘Only the idiot, that is indeed the word he used, only the idiot can hope for such joy’.32 Whilst Lucien is cruel but comedic (a trait which adds to the play’s ambivalence and charm), François is hopeless. Lucien suggests that he chooses this depression. In staging blindness, in staging darkness, are we also staging François’ depression and others’ ignorance to it? Does François simply sit in his despair? When we stage the battered, prostrate body of the actor, beaten by life and its oppressions, do we also stage the eye of the mind – the consciousness – floundering against a similarly oppressive force, of its own destruction and creation? Does François choose depression? Does he lean into it, as Lucien suggests? Or simply is the world too heavy for François, so much so that he cannot possibly stand against it, and is Lucien’s optimism part of the world’s inauthenticity? There are no dialectics in these dialogues; no rational solution is offered to this condition. No clear difference in the end between insanity and the sharp consciousness of a certain ethical truth. These are questions we might ask of François’ character, as we bring these descriptions to stage. François seeks the cover of night. He had tried to seek enlightenment in the past but was instead beaten down by ‘the blows’ that disturb his life’s experiences and sharpen his demand for authenticity. We are presented with a character who is both alienated from the people surrounding him and, further, from the material world. The words that describe his bodily experiences of ‘other’ characters are always cerebrally distanced whilst, physically, cruelly close. François instead aligns his own identity with celestial beings. He describes having conversations with ‘the stars’, referring to them as his ‘friends’ – who ‘when they saw [him], they smiled at [him] for a long while’. ‘They alone understood [him]’. He is resultantly mocked for ‘wanting to live at the level of the fantastic’.33 Whilst as theatre-makers we are blessed here to be offered opportunities to stage what indeed would be fantastical, it is also worth questioning whether Fanon, in the role of the psychiatrist he was to become and as a war veteran, who had been wounded, is also giving the actor an opportunity to inhabit and understand the symptoms of trauma-related psychological disorders. In both plays, Fanon’s directions for the set present a detachment from known ‘reality’. The otherworldly stage directions open with ‘a garden in which flowers amuse themselves in short dresses’ and plays of light which are celestial and ‘metallic’. ‘In a corner, a painting by Wifredo Lam’34 – its presence further heightens the suggestion of a relationship to a ‘beyond’ (as in the trance and possession represented by the Afro-Cuban artist) not as an evasion from reality but the capability of the ‘beyond’ to illuminate something about the real. Lingering in the corner of the set, the painting’s surreal, hybrid figures haunt the entirety of the action – their presence, whilst static as a prop, disorientate our expectations of the bodily form, and in doing so, the painting’s presence also calls into question experiences of and within that body. Perhaps the painting is also something that François’ character is drawn to from time to time. Is he transfixed by its distortions of reality when he ‘looks into the distance’ – or does it mirror his own perplexing sense of the world and his place in it? Is there something trancelike here (or depressively ‘absent’)? Amongst the paintings by Lam that Fanon might have seen in Paris in 1946 and 1947, two stand out: Dream of a still life and The Sombre Malembo, God of the Crossroads.35 As often in Lam’s paintings of the period, they depict the gods that operate the passage into another world during a Santería ceremony. They manifest 9

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

the experience of the consciousness possessed by these specific gods, who face the outside of the painting as if they had stopped in their movement to gaze at the spectator and the world with detachment and some disbelief. The tragic heroes in Épithalos and François are presented as opposites, particularly in the way they embody celestial beings and in their castings in light. François is ‘pale’, ‘absorbing’ – Épithalos ‘burns’.36 The fire burning in Épithalos has the potential to cause destruction, whilst François – absorbing violence – is destroyed. Where François is beaten down by violence, Épithalos embodies it. The curtain rises on Act 1 of Parallel Hands with very specific directions for lighting: The curtain rises. Palace room: darkness made lighter by discreet lighting. The ambiance in which the tragedy unfolds depends upon the luminosity. Where Épithalos is concerned, furtive lightning bolts go to confirm the fears of the actors on stage. Épithalos haunts the stage. He burns to come on.37 ‘Lightning bolts’ accompany the mention of his name or announce his entrance, ‘furtive’ with his looming conspiracy to plunge Lébos into the woeful transparency of daylight. King Polyxos, unable to locate who calls to him through the voices of the Chorus bellows, ‘Who’s calling me?’ only to be answered by ‘Claps of thunder, in the distance a bell wails for a very long time’. The Chorus simultaneously warns Polyxos, ‘Beware, woe betides you!’.38 Épithalos – who comes to kill Polyxos and destroy the ‘darkness’ that he represents – becomes the thunder. He is the destruction that the thunder and lightning represent. Thunder and lightning continue throughout, as ‘Claps of thunder, lightning bolts glide their red eyes over the stage’.39 Perhaps these ‘red eyes’40 belong to Épithalos. We might illuminate the actor playing him in roaming red spots, or in a simmering kind of red light that then burns brighter and clearer as the play goes on. Lightning ‘burns’, as does Épithalos. We are told in Scene 2 that Épithalos ‘appears… clothed in red satin… As soon as he appears, the spotlight seizes hold of him’.41 Both lightning and Épithalos have the potential to create devastation by setting the world, quite literally, alight – a fire introduced to us at the very beginning of the play and condemned at the end, as ‘light settles in the auditorium’ and the ‘Blessed’ darkness returns.42 Whilst the first play expresses a longing for the Moon and the night, and the second a longing for the Sun and for daylight, both heroes relate only to celestial bodies and refuse the physical intermingling of ordinary society (light, a metaphor, is polluted by haptic descriptions of rain ripples, for instance). Yet we are only able to induce much of these plays’ remarkable stage presence when their words are voiced through and with the body of the actor. In turn, this power of the body is only sufficiently amplified to create the kind of tactile and total theatre that these plays demand when it is enhanced by a bombardment of the senses through staging. Through disorientating plays with light and obscurity and chaotic sounds, whilst our heroes refuse tactility, the plays become intensely tactile, as they make contact with the body of the audience. ‘Moved and blood-stained, bells palpitate’.43 Later, ‘A noise is heard.’/ ‘The noise gets closer’.44 The Chorus fades into the background after its initial prologue, only to return throughout the play at varying degrees of volume and interaction. In these ways, Fanon uses the medium of theatre to stage bodies in space and stress how their autonomy might be compromised or controlled. What Fanon had in mind was not just a theatre of pure concepts (which these plays also are) but an experience where the palpable nature of the forces at play is not just perceived by us, the audience, locked in the auditorium, but inflicted via uses of light and sound that encroach into this space and where the blood and breath in our own bodies mirror the throbbing of the theatre’s own. We must experience the barraging cacophony of visual as well as auditory cues in light and reflection, bells, screams, Chorus and a strange external, oracular voice as a kind of sensory violence. His 10

Fanon

theatre thus becomes a heightened and sensory metaphor for inescapable violence against bodily autonomy.

Embodying the mind in distress The plays are inherently contradictory – even in their presentations of the same concept of authenticity or vision versus ignorance and obscurity. We must play these contradictions as we play the contradictions in ourselves. They are not just a playful association of unrelated images, an exercise in indulgent surrealism, but utilise a surrealist dramatic form, a play of pure forces rather than the interactions of psychological beings, as in Artaud, aiming to exhibit, and, perhaps, induce the complexities of a turbulent mind within a historical situation. In staging them we must recognise that whilst the texts are strange and dense, often hard to read but sensational to perform, they also present an experience that is inherently human. Fanon’s theatre deals with philosophical concepts popular in the theatre of the time (responsibility, value, freedom) but it does so from the point of view of a psychiatrist: his characters clearly exhibit symptoms of depression or mania. In Parallel Hands, depictions of harm are self-evident. In The Drowning Eye there is a passage where François tells Ginette, ‘I will say to you again that never must a place be at your side, but you must open yourself so that I can create a home in the heart of you…’ He goes well beyond the standard ‘couple’ configuration, where a place is kept next to her for someone to fill, simply because society expects it, but rather wishes to take his place inside her, as a necessity she would have felt. At the beginning of this verse, François’ words hint at an undoubtedly damaging, sexual violation. He tells Ginette, ‘I would have wanted to enter you in spite of yourself’ and ‘You shouldn’t have made a place next to you but rather split yourself!’.45 But to solely reduce the passage’s meaning to this most damning reading would too easily reduce Fanon’s understanding of a complex psychology and the social construction of a multifaceted character. Instead, stage directors might have to decide whether this difficult passage also represents the psychotic desire of a self to merge with or melt into the other or a neurotic desire to return to the womb as the undifferentiated space, before the divisions that reality consists of. If we refer back to Black Skin, White Masks and the ‘attempt to find the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself’,46 we may consider how François might yearn for this most complete of ‘touches’ with her, in order to freely rebuild his own understanding of himself in his own singularity and not as a ‘lover’ or ‘husband’. In this play, the quest for authenticity seems to imply the dissolution of all selves, to move into another plane than that of separated individuals, and yet also a pathological expansion of the self onto the world, as Anders put it. The intellectual world of Fanon’s formative years is defined by the phenomenology he encountered first through Merleau-Ponty who states: Our own body is no longer an object in the world under the gaze of a separate mind, it shifts towards the position of the subject, it is our viewpoint of the world, the place where our mind becomes vested in a specific physical and historical situation… It is through this positioning of our body that we take possession of exterior space. At any given moment a ‘corporal’ or ‘postural schema’ gives us a practical and implicit global notion of things, and as it were its location in relation to them47 This insistence on the bodily inscription and definition of subjectivity is omnipresent in the chapter on ‘The Lived Experience of the Black man’ in Black Skin, White Masks, but in a negative way, as it describes the shattering of this inscription caused by the interiorisation of the racist gaze. In this difficult passage in The Drowning Eye, one could also read an inexcusably forceful but also a 11

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

terribly sad attempt of a damaged individual to free himself from the unbearable intensity of isolation and alienation. Does he simply wish to relate to the people and world around him? François is repeatedly characterised as being pessimistic – more, depressed – but he also exhibits symptoms of further mental illnesses. His visions of the stars, though blueprint for an extraordinary set, are hallucinatory. The embodiment of disordered identities channelled through complex word patterns and visual and auditory refrains, via the form of a surrealist theatre, is perhaps the only medium capable of mirroring the distorted mind in its complex content and all its perplexity vis-à-vis what is ‘real’. Later on, during his internship at Saint Alban’s hospital, Fanon experimented extensively with Moreno’s drama therapy as a remedy for such conditions. It should be noted that several translations of L’Œil se noie are possible: ‘The Eye Drowns’ or ‘The Eye Drowns Itself’. There is an ambiguity in the original between the pronominal form (drowns) and the reflexive one (drowns itself). Granting the ‘Eye’ agency over its own death by drowning suggests that this psyche has a hand in its own current turmoil, which is not just a direct consequence of the oppressive world described by François. But it could also be that a general consciousness drowns. The air is humid, turbulent, tactile. It lacks the transparency François longs for, symbolic perhaps of the authenticity of direct relations. Ginette’s love might be a product of social conventions and Lucien’s energic discourse only repeat banalities. In both cases, François’s resulting withdrawal from the world of action is not dissimilar from that of Melville’s Bartleby. For theatre-makers involved in character development for stage, one must not forget that selfdestruction is a topic constantly contemplated throughout the play. Amidst a trio of disturbing interjections which are a foil to Lucien’s humorous dismissal of François’ frame of mind, ‘The Voice’ interjects a conversation between Ginette and Lucien, narrating, ‘Silence! Two captive stars commit suicide at the bottom of orbits.’48 It could be another allusion to sight, in that ordinary vision is unable to go beyond the given; ‘orbites’ are also eye sockets. But Lucien suggests later that, ‘Death is what inhabits François. Death guides him./ François does not want to live, that’s the secret’.49 Suicide is a spectral presence in this text. The play may be viewed as a ‘philosophical dramatization’,50 that is, a staging of ideas and contradictions rather than plot (not unrelated to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which is a drama of the successive forms that consciousness takes in history). It is worth suggesting then that François’ character is not to be staged as just a straightforward ‘victim’, a case of ‘Protagonist Versus World’ but that he embodies the voicing of a complex character who is also painfully and, tragically, mentally unwell. The body, which houses the ‘disordered’ mind (following severe trauma) is also constantly threatened by the possibility of self-sabotage. In staging The Drowning Eye, we must stage the mind and body in turmoil through both their apparent inaction and the injustices of their world.

Words are given a body of their own Words are also embodied within The Drowning Eye. If we revisit Young’s suggestion that the plays are ‘philosophical dramatizations… primarily plays of ideas and expression’,51 then we see how Fanon also uses the plays as a tool to stage his musings upon language’s significance in the world. In perhaps the play’s most beautiful moment, Lucien’s character delivers a manifesto for words’ significance, rebutting Ginette’s dismissal of them, saying: Mere words you say? But words the colour of pulsating flesh. Words the colour of mountains on heat. Of cities on fire. 12

Fanon

Of the resurrected dead. Words, yes, but battle flag words. Words like swords. The love that makes you live to the power of two. A word, but a word strangled by life, bristling with life.52 Words are the colour of ‘pulsating flesh’. They are personified by agency and limitations; ‘when words scratch each other’s eyes out, the only remaining resource is action’.53 They suffer and are at risk of ceasing to exist in the same way as a human – and are thus given a breathing, living form of their own. There is probably an allusion to Aimé Césaire’s poetics here. At the hands of the poet or the playwright, words are ‘miraculous weapons’. In both plays Fanon uses repetitive, pulse-like beats and intentioned echoes. In The Drowning Eye, François says ‘They speak, you hear them faintly, very faintly, and then they start hitting and lynching you, and you get hurt, badly hurt’.54 This character’s suffering is relentless, and, presented to an audience, the experience of such a pattern insidiously embeds itself similarly into the rhythm of the spectators’ living consciousness. In this way, Fanon’s plays together present a theatre of concepts and yet of bodies. In Parallel Hands the words themselves also become bodies. A specific issue in this play is that it takes place in obscurity, literally. Act 1 is set in ‘darkness’ which is only ‘made lighter by discrete lighting’. As the play begins in (and returns to) relative darkness, we might partially hide characters on stage, only dimly lighting them, whilst casting their shadows onto the back walls of the palace. This would foreground the relationship between breathing, voice and identity or ‘form’, as voice, words, and silhouettes become our only way of experiencing onstage characters as tangible, living figures. But shadows cast on the walls would also allow us to play with the reciprocal impact between bodies and their environment. As we struggle as an audience to distinguish the complete form of the actors on stage, some characters too only notice the presence of other figures when they speak. At the beginning of the play, the king, Polyxos, does not seem to know that any other body inhabits the space, except by hearing its voice, and so the ‘body’ of the Chorus (which speaks directly to him) here becomes defined solely by that voice. This visual tension generated by the arrangements of light that Fanon had in mind is reinforced by the peculiar organisation of the stage he prescribed.

The stage becomes a body In Parallel Hands, the Chorus holds a significant function as a body in its own right. In his Poetics, Aristotle writes that ‘the chorus should be regarded as one of the actors’; it should be an integral part of the whole, and share in the action’.55 Albert Weiner, writing on the function of the Chorus in Ancient Greece, notes however that ‘the chorus exists to elevate commonplace details into universal verities’ or that ‘it exists to transform the passion of the actors, which are necessarily diffused, into sharp focus’.56 But the Chorus is also a functional convention of the stage – traditionally implemented to project voices louder and narrate the action to audiences at the back of a crowded and raucous theatron (who might be otherwise unable to hear/understand the action). Thus, it both directly interacts with onstage actors and simultaneously retreats into its role as exterior narrator. The Chorus literally has its own voice in the play; lines are scripted specifically for it, and so it also becomes the collective, abstracted mind of the action on stage. In the Chorus, the stage has 13

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

its own vitality, not just as an isolated character with its own thoughts and expectations but as the intricately connected and tangible manifestation of human thought or ‘reason’. Thus the Chorus also at times becomes an impassioned reflection of Épithalos’ thoughts and inner chaos: a mirror to a mind battling with conflicting and contradictory reflections on its decisions. In Act 4, Scene 1, the Chorus addresses Épithalos directly, beginning, ‘Épithalos, heterogenous spark/ on reaching the eruptive peak the ACT can only be absorbed!’ to which Épithalos replies, naming the Chorus specifically as a part of himself, as he chastises them, ‘Disappear you inventions of my new consciousness!’.57 In staging it we must show the Chorus as a part of Épithalos, present on stage even when his bodily form is not. Where other characters remain only in shadow, as Épithalos seeks higher knowledge, he tragically becomes the light, as the light becomes him. Staging choices here too are integral to the way we characterise Épithalos. We have discussed his relationship to thunder at the beginning of Act 1, when he ‘haunts the stage’ and ‘burns to come on’ and how he is repeatedly characterised by the sinister glow of the colour red. Épithalos is due to be betrothed to Audaline but his transition to manhood is in fact a parricide, and his actions literally bring both light and death to his island. So, spotlights that mark him on stage might be increasingly enflamed by the murderous colour. ‘The rushed light [of his enhanced knowledge] opens the palace doors’ and proclaims ‘original effervescence’.58 If it floods the auditorium, is that light red, too? Or has the red wash simmered up from the beginning of the play, only to violently ‘transmute’ into the harsh and blinding white light of the new Sun, lit by Épithalos? Is it just the stage that is awash with that blinding fury, or are the house lights of the whole auditorium switched on? In this way, audience members too are forced to confront and view in full the results of Épithalos’ doomed revolution – while experiencing vividly the lived realities of breathing alongside one another, in the real world of the theatre. Just as the voice of the Chorus might be projected from speakers scattered throughout the stalls – disorientating in their distortion of partitioned space and the division on/offstage – as spectators, we too become embedded in the onstage action, our involvement evoking a sense of our personal responsibility in the world. The ringing of bells haunts the play; Fanon writes that they ‘have been discussing since the third scene’.59 We already know that just before Épithalos’ first entry to the action, ‘Moved and bloodstained, bells palpitate’. Like Épithalos, they are thus marked in a throbbing blood-red. Again, like the Chorus as voice and consciousness, Fanon uses the sound of the bells as an instrument of the stage to represent an aspect of Épithalos’ body. They ring, engorge and contract throughout the play in relation to Épithalos – sometimes in place of him as he is not physically present: ‘One by one the bells fall silent’ as he re-enters. Épithalos himself makes reference to both light and blood beating when he says ‘The sun sleeping in a corner anxiously watches blood beat the amber walls of its rays’.60 As he does with the Chorus, here Épithalos directly interacts with the stage directions, as a wall of light may be coloured ‘amber’ or red as the Sun becomes progressively more intense in a corner of the stage. Echoing the living body, elements of the set are employed to create a living, breathing, rhythmic form. Audaline says, ‘Épithalos o thrilling minstrel I come shaped by the rhythm of bells to sing your infinite glories’.61 As with François, much of what we learn about Épithalos and his actions, we gain in his absence – either through other characters’ discussions or through his haunting presence in the trappings of the set. At the end of Act 2, Scene 5, the relationship between Épithalos’ quest and lighting, voice and bells is finally consummated as they merge into one another. We do not see Épithalos succeed in his quest to bring light to Lébos, yet ‘The impatient bells, furious at not being understood, set fire to the stage with their exclamations. At that moment, claps of thunder, lightning, satisfied tongues, take place in laughing’ before the light ‘proclaims original effervescence’.62 ‘Furious’ and ‘laughing’, the celestial bodies created by stage lighting carry out our hero’s will. 14

Fanon

Words, embodied and the realities of our world: Fanon’s own internal debates Parallel Hands is haunted by the Chorus’ voice, ‘returned by a distant echo’, repeating, ‘On the other side of the emaciated Word, The initial Act is raised. On reaching its maximum limits Human thought can only transmute.’63 Words (or thoughts) may become ‘emaciated’ or meaningless – Artaud writes ‘dried up’ – when cut from the active, communicative bodies, magnified through staging to deliver the wholeness of their expression. Épithalos, seeking a new understanding and vision of the world, discovers that ‘on reaching the volcanic extremes speech makes itself act!’/ A language haunted by exhilarating perception!’.64 For this character, ‘speech is no longer the world’s rest/ The sentence returns to the gestural origins and disarms the prolixity of observation’.65 Words are embodied in the plays on their own and they are attached to the bodies that perform them in the real world. They are also attached to the bodies which they fictionally present. Through them we see historical trauma and its impact on the body, anew. Conjured in the post-war world, Fanon’s characters are vulnerable and complex. To use Anders’ categories, they are split between nihilism and the desire for glory. Épithalos incarnates the desperate and dangerous battle to lift his island out of darkness, only to realise that he has unleashed violence and death and finally pleads ‘Night of the WHOLE come back to drown the flame of my consciousness’.66 François similarly falls back into darkness, exhausted, resigned to the idea that the system of the world is a meaningless pretence. And yet the brash Lucien still suggests that there is more bravery to believe in life and in love./ It’s more wearying to open up your hands and seize life fiercely, humanly, that is to say, frighteningly./ It’s more difficult to fight, to shout, not to yell yourself to death anymore but to life!.67 So as François Maspero noted, both plays offer a kind of exorcism of Fanon’s own personal alienation from his perceived place in the world. Frantz, like François, had fought in a war from which he had come back with a medal and deep disillusionment, and like Épithalos, he had realised (as reflected in the writing of Black Skin, White Masks) that he could probably not bring enlightenment to a deeply alienated island. If we are to consider Fanon’s later writings, through which these plays will inevitably be framed, it is perhaps in his study of the popular uprising in Algeria that Fanon will find a solution to this opposition, never losing sight of the risks inherent to the narcissistic posture of the revolutionary leader that he warns repeatedly against in The Wretched of the Earth. Each of these plays stages a contradiction that will only be tentatively solved much later: that of a thought turning into act, of the difference between the idea of violence and its lived reality. These plays are as harrowing as they are intricate. As beautiful as they are dense. As painful as they are erudite. They breathe with the complexities of someone who has lived the brutal realities of their subject matter. Through staging, these texts seem to become as alive as the actors that perform them. Iterated depictions of characters psychologically trapped in their mental anguish – isolated and abused in both body and mind or enraptured by some enthusiasm – are immediately felt and recognised by spectators. In different ways in the two plays, the audience is moved through passionate images and rhythms of language, of sound and light almost too subtle to be pinpointed as the exact cause of the affect. For actors, the ability to choose how to deliver the script implies their knowledge of how to manipulate the processes of the body – breathwork, rhythm and posture. Theatre-makers will manipulate the stage through lighting, sound and set. Voicing words in this theatre is a process that involves the whole body and the space around it. Fanon’s plays on paper may appear difficult to grasp – at times almost impenetrable, but we must remember that they are far more expressive than they are didactic, or even narrative. The combination of surrealist stage 15

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

directions and décor – including Wifredo Lam’s hybrid trance figures, poetic and jarring linguistic and theatrical forms – and Fanon’s preoccupation with blindness, is disorientating and brilliant. The dramatic instructions are sometimes mystifying but they aim to represent characters deeply alienated from themselves and their worlds. Rodenburg emphasises the actors’ ‘right to breathe, the right to be physically unashamed, to fully vocalize, to need, choose and make contact with a word, to release a word into space – the right to speak’.68 Actors grapple with the privilege and the responsibility of choosing how the breath is manipulated to articulate speech in Fanon’s plays – in the ease of it. Indeed, we recognise our freedom in that, on stage, with its infinite possibilities, we have not just the right but the choice of breathing. In a theatre of concepts and yet of bodies, surprisingly conscious of how light and darkness could be used, as theatre-makers we must embody the complexities of alienation, and stage bodies that are at once living, impossible and real. In the final rehearsal for the plays’ premiere reading, with actors Iggy London, Reuben Riley, Femi Tiwo, Ivana Mazza-Coates and Thea Gajic, a moment stood out: a moment that is simmering and nervous and tender in a way that only the last hour before a performance can be. Iggy is pacing the floorboards of the white rehearsal studio with its fishbowl windows and biscuit-laden tables – running his lines just one last time – and rocking from foot to foot with the rhythmic thump and beat of a body breathing in the intimacy of its words. Now familiar with the lilt and turn of each syllable as he declares them to the room, his body pulses with François’. Outside, Reuben roars, his voice – bass – erupting as Épithalos: ‘My fierce body collided with the flank of human history/ My fever dissolving the comic banality./ My glory/ I rise up’.69 The room feels it in its ribcage. Hopefully Fanon would have seen himself there. In awe of where – and in whom – these plays would breathe, next.

Notes 1 Joby Fanon, Frantz Fanon, My Brother: Doctor, Playwright, Revolutionary, Transl. Daniel Nethery, Lexington Books, London, 2014, p.21. 2 David Macey, Frantz Fanon: A Biography, London, Verso, 2000, p.126. 3 Private conversation with Jean Khalfa. 4 Fanon, The Political Writings from Alienation and Freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, London, Bloomsbury, 2021, p.181. 5 French edition, La Découverte, 2015 and 2018. English edition, Bloomsbury, 2017 and 2020. One of the reasons for publishing the second, revised, English edition, in three volumes, was to offer theatre companies the possibility to use a separate volume of Fanon’s theatre. 6 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Richard Philcox, New York, Grove Press, 2008 p.202, 204 (modified translation). Henceforth BSWM. 7 Fanon, The Plays from Alienation and Freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, London, Bloomsbury, 2021, p.121. 8 Simone Weil, Intuitions pré-chrétiennes, Éditions du Vieux Colombier, La Colombe, 1951, p.97. 9 In a chapter of his doctoral dissertation, written shortly afterwards, Fanon discussed Lacan’s definition of madness as an upper limit of freedom. Fanon, The Psychiatric Writings from Alienation and Freedom, edited by Jean Khalfa and Robert J.C. Young, London, Bloomsbury, 2021, p.105–106. 10 See Robert J.C. Young, ‘Fanon, revolutionary playwright’, in The Plays, p.19. 11 BSWM p.200. 12 Günther Stern [Anders], ‘Une Interprétation de l’a posteriori’, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 4, 1934– 35, pp.65–80; ‘Pathologie de la liberté: essai sur la non-identification’, Recherches philosophiques, vol. 6, 1936, pp.2–54. 13 BSWM, p13. 14 Fanon’s doctoral dissertation in psychiatry is already preoccupied with pathologies of identification, and several passages of the Wretched of the Earth analyse the pathologies of identification that may derail the revolutionary transformation in newly decolonised countries. Fanon’s correspondence with Maspero

16

Fanon

15 16 17

18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

reveals that he had considered writing a chapter of The Wretched of the Earth titled ‘Negritude and NegroAfrican civilizations, a mystification’. The Political Writings, p.152. The Wretched of the Earth, transl. R Philcox, New York, Grove Press, 2004, p.2 (transl mod.). The Plays, p.2. Fanon quotes Césaire’s Notebook of a return to the native land in several places in BSWM. He also comments on the first version of Césaire’s play Et les chiens se taisaient. Artaud is quoted once, on Aeschylus in BSWM, p.100, and though allusive, this quote shows that he had read The Theatre and its Double very carefully. Here is the passage on Aeschylus that Fanon alludes to: ‘If we are clearly so incapable today of giving an idea of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Shakespeare that is worthy of them, it is probably because we have lost the sense of their theatre’s physics. It is because the directly human and active aspect of their way of speaking and moving, their whole scenic rhythm, escapes us. An aspect that ought to have as much if not more importance than the admirable spoken dissection of their heroes’ psychology.’ Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, Transl. Mary Caroline Richards, New York, Grove Weidenfeld, 1958, p.108. The Plays, p.78. Oh I thought, strange and superhuman power Of he who holds us, palpitating, in his hand! O will in the heavens! Abyss where the eye drowns! ‘En passant par la place Louis XIV’, in Les Rayons et les ombres (1840). In his translation of Joby Fanon’s book, Daniel Nethery, who pointed to this poem, translates ‘L’œil se noie’ as ‘The eye falters’. This is indeed the point of Hugo’s poem which is a reflection on the unpredictability of a destiny (the revolution and the beheading of Louis XVI). There is an echo of this theme in Fanon’s play, but he spins the metaphor into the synesthetic image of a vision drowning in a troubled element all along the play. The Theatre and its Double, p.90. Autograph Gallery, London, 17 November 2017. The Plays, p.84. Theatre and its Double, p.12. The Plays, p.47. BSWM, p.178. The Plays, p.168. BSWM, p.206. The Plays, p.73. Perhaps a reminiscence of Léon Gontran Damas’ poem ‘Sale’. The Plays, p.75. The Plays, p.71, 77, 81. The Plays, p.89. The Plays, p.85. Or in the illusion of a transcendental subject, as we have seen in Fanon’s dismissal of the awe before moral law, famously compared by Kant to the sight of a stary sky by night. The Plays, p.74, 84. The Plays, p.71. Reproduced in The Plays p.70 and 106. The Plays, p.71, 109. The Plays, p.109. The Plays, p.109. The Plays, p.108. Perhaps a reminiscence of Oedipus’ destiny. The Plays, p.125. The Plays, p.167. The Plays, p.123. Fanon’s surrealist stage instructions simultaneously denote a particular tool or event and the effect it must have on the spectator. The Plays, p.133, 134. The Plays, p.76, 77. BSWM, p.206. ‘Un inédit de Merleau-Ponty’, text published by Martial Guéroult in Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, no.4, October 1962, reprinted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Parcours deux, 1951–1961, Jacques Prunair,

17

Jean Khalfa and Felicity Bromley-Hall

48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

ed, Verdier, Paris, 2000, p.39. See Jean Khalfa ‘My body, this skin, this fire: Fanon on flesh’, Wasafari, 20:44, 42–50, 2005. DOI: 10.1080/02690050508589950, p.43 and Poetics of the Antilles, Oxford: Peter Lang, 2017, p.188. The Plays, p.87. The Plays, p.89. Robert J.C. Young, ‘Fanon, Revolutionary Playwright’, p.4. Robert J.C. Young, ‘Fanon, Revolutionary Playwright’, p.4. The Plays, p.88. The Plays, p.82. The Plays, p.75. Aristotle, ‘Chapter 18’ in Poetics, transl. S.H. Butcher, New York, Hill & Wang, 18.7. See Albert Weiner ‘The Function of the Tragic Greek Chorus.’ Theatre Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, pp.205–12, https://doi​.org​/10​.2307​/3207113, p.205. Albert Weiner, ‘The Function of the Tragic Greek Chorus.’, p.206. The Plays, p.155. The Plays, p.137. The Plays, p.136. The Plays, p.125, 126. In his Cahier, Césaire wrote of plunging in ‘the ardent flesh of the sky’. The Plays, p.145. The Plays, p.140. The Plays, p.107, 111, 118, 121. Césaire defined the words of the poem as ‘miraculous weapons’ and wrote of poetry itself that ‘surging from the inner void, like a volcano emerging from the primal chaos, it is our energy centre, the preeminent place from which to summon’. See Jean Khalfa, op. cit. p.69. The Plays, p.135. The Plays, p.167. The Plays, p.89. Patsy Rodenburg, ‘Declaring Your Vocal Rights’, in The Right to Speak, London: Bloomsbury, 2015, p.9. The Plays, p.165.

18

2 SOLIDARITY’S TEMPORALITIES Adhira Mangalagiri

Solidarity takes as its basis shared temporality. This idea found lasting articulation in the decolonization programs of the mid-twentieth century and in the many activities of nation- and Third World-building undertaken across the formerly colonized world. The Third World decolonizers spoke solidarity in the language of time. When state leaders and cultural delegates met at conferences – the main forum of non-aligned internationalism of the day – they framed their gathering in the present as the recovery of a lost history of mutual contact, those ancient ties severed under colonialism and now re-established in a proclamation of independence. Their speeches abound with references to past and ongoing struggles each had endured in the face of colonization, separately but in simultaneity and resonance with each other. And they envisioned together inaugurating a shared future of autonomous, modern nationhood. These narratives of aligned temporalities – constructions of shared pasts, presents, and futures collectively summoned – wove the bonds of transnational solidarity, the cornerstone of the “Bandung spirit” that still underpins how we conceptualize South–South relation today. This chapter probes the temporal dimensions of discourses of South–South solidarity, understood here as expressions of transnational togetherness asserted in opposition to a colonial hegemon. Understanding South–South solidarity as firstly a temporal construct lays bare a central contradiction: participants of the Third World project constructed and put to use narratives of shared temporality as a tool for decolonized nationhood, and yet, the teleological demands of modernity and nation-building bore striking resemblance to the linear, progressive, developmental notion of time that had facilitated and bolstered colonial conquest. To what extent, then, can narratives of shared temporality deliver liberation, and inversely, to what extent can South–South solidarity decolonize time itself? I pursue these questions through the case of China and India in the age of decolonization. When China and India established diplomatic relations in the early 1950s, a single phrase – “two thousand years of friendship” – curiously came to encapsulate and signify the entire political program of solidarity the newly-established nations had jointly embarked upon. This narrative of shared temporality was recited time and again by heads of state Jawaharlal Nehru and Zhou Enlai, and subsequently, by the many participants of and witnesses to China–India diplomacy or “brotherhood” in the 1950s. The phrase presents its meaning as a simple (and simplified) statement of a particular historical narrative: China and India had enjoyed 2,000 years of friendly contact and DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-3

19

Adhira Mangalagiri

conflict-free coexistence prior to the colonizer’s violent intervention in the region. But beyond its function as a shorthand for a much-rehearsed historical narrative, the phrase accrued through its many utterances layers of affective and political charge, growing into a conceptual complex capable of effecting a range of functions within and beyond the realm of diplomacy. Temporally, the phrase appears at first backward-looking, but “two thousand years of friendship” far exceeds its imagination of the past, offering legitimization for China–India solidarity in the present and communicating a joint vision of a future in common. In the first half of this chapter, I investigate the imagination and construction of this narrative as an instantiation of solidarity’s temporalities, revealing how the phrase both enlivens some forms of political potential and furthers the suppression of others. The phrase lives comfortably among the many announcements of shared temporality echoing across the emergent Third World of the time, and yet, it frustrates the frame of nostalgia for an idealized past through which such articulations have been studied so far. Beyond nostalgia, “two thousand years of friendship” holds the potential for opening a radical understanding of South–South solidarity as a form of transnational temporal relation capable of decolonizing not just political structures but also the textures of time. The case of China and India in the Third World era offers a second strand of inquiry into the ends of solidarity. China–India brotherhood began to fray in the late 1950s amid the rise of geopolitical tensions, most immediately regarding the controversial status of Tibet and the contested borderline between the two nations. By 1962, when China and India waged a short-lived but deadly war, the refrain of “two thousand years of friendship” disappeared from political discourse, reappearing only with the re-establishment of diplomacy in the 1980s. If we understand South–South solidarity as a fundamentally temporal construct, can we apprehend the breakdown of solidarity not merely as political failure but as a crisis of temporality, a generative clash between disparate narratives of time now misaligned and irreconcilable? The second half of this chapter explores the temporal dimensions of the ends of solidarity through a reading of Bhisham Sahni’s Hindi short story, “Wang Chu” (1978). Written in the wake of the China–India war, the story dramatizes the fate of the phrase “two thousand years of friendship,” a temporal narrative embodied and personified by its titular protagonist, through the dawn and demise of China–India brotherhood. The story urges a renewed contemplation of this chapter’s central concern with the liberatory potentialities of a shared experience of time.

Two thousand years of friendship Although popularized during – and now taken as metonymic of – 1950s’ China–India diplomacy, “two thousand years of friendship” holds deeper roots in the early decades of the twentieth century. One salient iteration occurs in a speech the renowned Chinese intellectual Liang Qichao 梁启超 (1873–1929) delivered in 1924 on the occasion of Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s visit to China. Addressing the thousands of university students in attendance, Liang urged them to welcome Tagore not on the basis of some “blind worship of idols” but rather for the very fact that he “comes to us from the nation that is our nearest and dearest brother – he comes to us from India” (Liang 1).1 Liang continues, “I say ‘the nation that is our nearest and dearest brother’ not merely out of courtesy to our guest. [Instead] this is what history tells us” (1). Liang devotes the rest of his speech to outlining this long history of contact between China and India, “two thousand years” long to be precise, for “it was not until around two thousand years ago that we gradually came to learn that we have a good brother on earth” (1). For Liang, India figured as the elder brother, imparting much wisdom and influence upon China through a variety of “gifts” ranging from music, painting, and fiction to astronomy, medicine, and education (1–3). 20

Solidarity’s Temporalities

In Liang’s speech, the idea of “two thousand years of friendship” takes shape along two intersecting conceptual axes. First, as discussed in the vast body of scholarship on Tagore’s visit to and reception in China, Tagore entered into the Chinese literary sphere during “a global moment of intensive engagement with Asia as an imagined alternative to Western materialism between the two great wars,” and specifically in China, as part of a larger intellectual interest in the anticolonial potential of pan-Asianism (Gvili 182).2 For pan-Asianist intellectuals, envisioning a China– India unity brought into view an alternative world order capable of countering both Western and Japanese imperialisms.3 Liang’s expression of China–India brotherhood amplified this anticolonial gesture already in circulation in radical circles in China, Japan, India, and elsewhere. Significantly, Liang endows this anticolonial political stance with a second characteristic: that of shared temporality. Whereas earlier pan-Asianist writings paired China and India together on the basis of their commensurable civilization greatness,4 Liang conceptualized China–India brotherhood firstly as historical, as rooted in fact and narratable as history, and secondly, as a history unfolding not on parallel but on intertwined tracks, a history of sustained contact. “Two thousand years of friendship” signified a mutually-legible and shared time-scape, one temporal narrative that could stand simultaneously for both nations. And this shared temporality heightens the phrase’s anticolonial potential, for here is a history of 2,000 years of contact unmediated by the West, a history that adamantly debunks Western accounts of the time that painted China as an isolated and stagnant monolith awaiting the West’s arrival as the harbinger of intercourse and change. Liang’s speech thus stands as an antecedent of the familiar circular maneuver that would soon become the hallmark of mid-century South–South solidary, of basing anticolonial oneness upon a shared temporal narrative and, in turn, wielding this shared temporality as a powerful anticolonial tactic. Following India’s formal independence and China’s communist victory in 1947 and 1949 respectively, the two now encountered each other as the Republic of India and the People’s Republic of China, young nations together braving a world on the brink of the Cold War. Keen to draw China toward non-alignment, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru pursued a program of China–India diplomatic relations officially launched with both states’ signing of the Panchsheel Treaty in 1954. Much of this politicking took place under the sign of “two thousand years of friendship.” During Premier Zhou Enlai’s 1954 visit to India, for instance, Nehru framed their meeting as not just between two individuals, but between “representatives of great nations, India and China, both [of which] have a tremendous past […] The past two thousand years stand witness to our mutual relations” (Bhasin 1218). Zhou echoed this rhetoric: “There has been a two-thousand-year-long tradition of friendship between China and India,” he emphasized during multiple speeches and press conferences held in India (“Zhou Enlai zongli”).5 Now that China and India had broken free from the colonizer’s hold, this ancient friendship could finally be revived. In these discourses of diplomacy, “two thousand years of friendship” acquired new political valences. By endowing China–India diplomacy with a temporal dimension that extended far back into ancient times, the heads of state could outwardly present their partnership as the natural extension of a long and robust past, and further, as a return to an earlier long-maintained equilibrium of Asian peace. The phrase now also carried considerable normative heft in its particular tenor of futurity. Beneath its many repetitions ran a forceful subtext: because China and India had extended friendship to each other for 2,000 years, they should return to doing so; this is simply the way the world ought to be. The phrase thus legitimized and naturalized China–India diplomacy (while also framing European colonization as “unnatural”) by foregrounding a celebrated and shared historical narrative, effectively neutralizing the highly charged balancing act unfolding behind the scenes of the states’ careful dealings with each other alongside the U.S., U.S.S.R, and other states within and beyond the region. 21

Adhira Mangalagiri

“Two thousand years of friendship” also pithily set the agenda for China and India’s activities of cultural diplomacy, those performances of solidarity ritualized and choreographed by the state. Anticipating the 1955 call at Bandung for reestablishing “cultural contacts” as instrumental in achieving decolonization, China and India had already embarked on a hectic schedule of cultural exchange in the early 1950s (“Final Communiqué” 163–4).6 Activities of cultural diplomacy unfolded in the marked presence of “two thousand years,” witnessed materially in the records and relics of historical contact the cultural delegations invariably tracked during their trips to China and India, and captured in the archives of cultural diplomacy as photographs of ancient carvings, temples, and manuscripts telling the history of Buddhism’s transmission from India to China. Alongside its material manifestation, “two thousand years of friendship” also appears as an apparition, perceived in uncanny moments of recognition, of finding in foreignness unexpected flashes of familiarity. A pamphlet commemorating an Indian cultural delegation’s visit to China in 1955 captures one such moment: Chinese artists, in particular, have been amazed and proud during these delightful performances to discover similarities between Indian and Chinese music and between the movements and modes of expression of Indian and Chinese dancing. These traces of centuries of cultural exchange between India and China are a vivid illustration of the long and profound friendship our two peoples have enjoyed.7 (“The Indian Cultural” 3) In these ways, the work of building solidarity remained founded upon and manifested in both empirically-evidenced and amorphous manifestations of “two thousand years of friendship.” Invoking the phrase in the name of cultural diplomacy involved a careful and deliberate alignment of temporalities across national borders, the construction of a single narrative capable of telling the story of the birth of two new nations, preordained as brothers, marching together toward a jointly envisioned future at once predestined and in-the-making. The activities of cultural diplomacy sought to consolidate this narrative of past and future, and, at the same time, to make it immediately perceptible, by rousing intimate memories and sensations in the lived present of that distant closeness. This construct of solidarity inevitably held omissions and erasures within. By crafting and recalling a particular idealized imagination of the past, the phrase risked drawing those who championed it away from the “real” present of nation-building. Indeed, one could argue that the makers of China–India solidarity designed and deployed the historical imagination evoked by the phrase as a tactical shield, a protective encasing for “friendship” bracketed away from and painting over the tensions and messiness of the realpolitik. Observing a 1952 Chinese cultural delegation in India, a minister wrote to Nehru on the resounding silences of “two thousand years of friendship”: Regarding the Chinese goodwill mission which visited India […] may I draw your attention to a curious fact? I have been carefully going through the speeches delivered by the members of the Chinese goodwill mission in India. In all speeches here they were very careful not to refer to the makers of India of Today. No mention was made or any tribute paid to Gandhiji or the Congress or even yourself (though two or three times your name was taken). In no speech was there even an indirect praise given to the present Government of India or the Congress or for what it is trying to do. There were only two points stressed in all their speeches, as far as India was concerned: one was the traditionally-historic friendship between India and China and the other was the greatness of Indian civilization. (“Letter from Deputy Minister”) 22

Solidarity’s Temporalities

The discourses of solidarity issued under the banner of “two thousand years of friendship” strategically dwelled in the past and selectively reactivated certain constructions of that past, saving the cultural delegates (many of whom were artists and writers who now found themselves in roles of diplomacy) from having to engage in potentially sensitive or charged matters of national and international concern. The minister’s observations quoted above stand as emblematic of a more fundamental dissonance. In its most aspirational form, South–South solidarity names a form of temporal relation forged between national others anticolonially, that is, according to an anticolonial understanding and experience of time. If the colonial conception of temporal relation involved an encounter along a singular, linear, progressive temporal vector, with one side of the encounter (the self) positioned as further along than the backward other in the pursuit of the eventual telos (be it civilization or freedom or modernity), South–South solidarity aspires to open an entirely oppositional scene of temporal relation. Here, national others encounter each other not along an empty, homogenous track of time locked in perpetual forward movement, upon which relation can only be measured in terms of their relative stages of progress. Instead, by seeking to align and inhabit at once multiple temporalities, South–South solidarity thrives in layered, entangled time planes. “Two thousand years of friendship” challenges its beholder to extend relation toward the Chinese or Indian national other by jointly and simultaneously summoning varied timeframes non-sequentially, by reckoning with the vastness and depth of 2,000 years and in the same instant grasping its present meaningfulness and casting its future potentialities. As such, South–South solidarity holds the potential through its particular temporal workings to forge anticolonial relation between national others while decolonizing the shape of time itself. The Global South has served as an important locus for rethinking temporality, against both the colonial temporal logic that positioned the colony as stuck in a primitive past and the capitalist drive toward a modernity always out of reach. Postcolonial interventions have exposed the inadequacy of the historicist conception of “continuous, homogenous, infinitely stretched out time” in accounting for the “time-knots” that comprise “subaltern pasts” and presents (Chakrabarty, Provincializing 100–113).8 Building upon this earlier work, recent theories of Global South temporalities offer “new senses and sensibilities” of time that become perceptible in the lived experience of colonial and capitalist exploitation, such as “elastic time,” for instance, that opposes “the segmented, metronomic, sequential progressive time of European Enlightenment and European colonization and globalization” (West-Pavlov, “Temporality” 257, 267). Alongside this body of scholarship, South–South solidarity becomes graspable as a temporal form of relation that eschews the idea of time as a linear scale of measure and instead draws national others together in a shared inhabitance of, and in recognition of the political potential of, temporal multiplicity and heterogeneity. The Third World desire to recover lost histories of contact, of which “two thousand years of friendship” represents one among a host of resonant calls issued at and beyond Bandung, have been previously understood within frames of “nostalgia,” the summoning of an idealized past in the face of an inadequate present.9 Taken as “strategic nostalgia,” Bandung’s temporal formulations “allowed for a psychological opening […] [enabling] a separation from ‘the more immediate past’ of European colonialism ‘by establishing a mediated relationship to a distant past’ of Afro-Asian existence” (Yoon 27). A different reading identifies in the Third World project an “anti-imperialist nostalgia” that desires not “a past moment in and for itself but rather […] the past’s promise of an alternative present: the past’s future” that constantly beckons a “rededication to [the past’s] unfinished business” (Wenzel 17, 22). Such conceptualizations of Bandung nostalgia help grasp the complex imbrications of political utilitarianism and idealism characteristic 23

Adhira Mangalagiri

of Third World decolonial discourse and its reverberations in the present day, but stop short of grasping the immense radical ambitions of a South–South solidary that not only deploys temporal narratives in order to enact political critique but also takes temporality itself as among its objects of critique. Could this radical reconceptualization of temporal relation find realization through state-led channels, those sites of diplomacy that most audibly announced the formation of and commitment to South–South solidarity across the Third World? At its core, a political discourse centered upon the establishment of an autonomous and sovereign nation capable of standing on par with the West, such as that articulated at Bandung, fundamentally contradicts the non-linear and heterogenous temporal ambitions of South–South solidarity. The Bandung vision’s commitment to the nation-state model, what has been described as an arguably “uncritical emphasis on modernization” sustained by the “clear and conscious desire to ‘catch up’ with the West,” ultimately preserved and left uninterrogated the colonial version of linear, singular, universal time (Chakrabarty, “The Legacies of Bandung” 53). It is unsurprising then that “two thousand years of friendship” features often as a superficial gloss in records of cultural diplomacy, as expressing more in what it leaves unsaid than what it is capable of voicing. Although the phrase grew in the 1950s out of the mechanisms of statecraft and lived in the nation’s utterances, its radical temporal critique necessarily remained stilted and constrained by the developmental logics of the state, the very conditions of its crafting. Rather, in a twist that the nation-states could not have foreseen, the full potential of South–South solidarity carried in the phrase “two thousand years of friendship” conversely found realization only once diplomatic relations between China and India came to a halting end.

The pages of history In the winter of 1962, a month-long war erupted in the borderlands between China and India, bringing to a close the age of diplomacy and its proclamations of “two thousand years of friendship.” In the months leading up to and in the wake of the war, each state’s claim over the contested territory also constituted a claim over the narrative of history previously conceptualized as shared. The Himalayas stood at the center of both tussles, geopolitical and temporal: while the 1950s era of brotherhood envisioned the Himalayas as representing connectivity – the mountainous passes traversed by all those involved in the history of friendly contact – now China and India each cast the Himalayas as a divisive boundary and claimed that site both territorially and as the spiritual and symbolic font of their national cultures. During talks with Zhou Enlai about the border issue, for instance, the Indian Home Minister argued that “the Himalayas have been our sentinels and the Indian culture centers round them. They stand as a divine bastion along our frontiers” (Bhasin 3238). While China–India diplomacy found articulation through an alignment of the two nations’ temporal narratives, the states announced the end of diplomacy by prying apart and staking ownership over that once-shared construction of time. Its release from the state’s hold in fact allowed the idea of “two thousand years of friendship” to grow beyond the constraints of cultural diplomacy, in a fuller and freer pursuit of South–South solidarity’s radical potential to forge relation through a decolonization of time. The eminent Hindi writer Bhisham Sahni’s short story “Wang Chu,”10 published in 1978, offers through its eponymous protagonist a biography of the narrative of “two thousand years of friendship.” Wang Chu stands in his story as a living manifestation of that temporal imagination, a metaphor for the nation-states’ diplomatic construction of solidarity that ironically reveals its own incompatibility with the imperatives of nation-building even as it is championed by the state, and defies its own death even as the states go to war. While the official story of China–India diplomatic relations 24

Solidarity’s Temporalities

in the mid-twentieth century tells of the rise and fall of friendship, “Wang Chu” explores the radical relational power of temporal transformation only possible once “two thousand years of friendship” breaks free from its national instrumentalization and exhausts its usefulness to the nation-states. The story opens with a depiction of Wang Chu entering into his own narrative as marked by temporal ambiguity. The opening line reads: “Just then, Wang Chu came into view from afar” (Sahni 174).11 The brevity and suddenness of this opening sentence – beginning with tabhī, meaning “just then” or “in that moment” – introduces Wang Chu as an interruption, a new insertion into an ongoing narrative, or the second half of a sentence begun elsewhere. Yet, against the immediacy of the interruption, Wang Chu comes into view not in a sudden flash but gradually, “from afar” (dūr se), an anticipation already there but only now perceptible. The contradicting temporalities of “tabhī” and “dūr se” mirror in both form and content the contrast between the brief immediacy of the opening sentence and the lengthy, elaborately-constructed paragraph that follows, in which Wang Chu enters the scene as an embodiment of time, or more precisely, as the embodiment of an idealized past. Wang Chu slowly walks into the scene in the image of a “Buddhist monk,” bald and draped in robes, set against an idyllic Kashmiri backdrop: the rivers that flow down from the Himalayas, the towering Shankaracharya hill, rows of safeda (Himalayan poplar) trees against clear blue skies (174). “For a moment,” the unnamed narrator reflects, it seemed to me as though Wang Chu had stepped out of the very pages of history. In ancient times, robed monks from around the world must have arrived in India just in this way, crossing through the mountains and passes. I saw Wang Chu, too, as walking out from the enigmatic haze of the past. (174) Lifted out of “the pages of history,” Wang Chu appears as “two thousand years of friendship” personified, a lived manifestation of a narrative of temporality that romanticizes ties forged across the Himalayas. Wang Chu enters into his story from afar, distant yet immediate, foreign yet familiar, just as China entered into the Indian imagination of the mid-century through the trope of a lost history of contact recalled. Following its introductory portrayal of Wang Chu as a stylized image of the past, the story then quickly fills in some contextual blanks. Wang Chu, the reader learns, arrived in India sometime in the late 1920s along with “Professor Tanshan,” a likely allusion to the historical Tan Yunshan (1898–1983) who traveled to India in 1928 on Tagore’s invitation and proved a central figure in the establishment of China studies in India.12 In Sahni’s story, the fictional Wang Chu had apparently followed the professor to India, spent some years learning Hindi and English, and then stayed on to retrace the Buddha’s footsteps, journeying to Sarnath and other sites of Buddhist significance and frequenting museums to visit Buddhist relics. Wang Chu’s single-minded search for the “romantic realm of antiquity” stands out of joint with the “turbulent tide washing over the nation in those days” of the independence movement (175). Those around him receive Wang Chu with both annoyance and confusion: in those days, my friends and I would hold heated discussions for hours on the state of the country […] but Wang Chu never participated. […] His abstention in these moments at times grated against us and at times perplexed us. He had no interest – not only in the affairs of our country, but even in those of his own. (175) 25

Adhira Mangalagiri

Wang Chu’s obsession with living in the past during a fast-paced moment of change charged with anticipation for a decolonial future seems incompatible with and frustrates the transformative drive of the present. Wang Chu’s uncomfortable inhabitance of his own story cultivates an aesthetics of detachment. His obsession with India’s Buddhist past draws Wang Chu away from the present in which he lives, but instead of following its protagonist into his reclusive retreat, the narrative repeatedly leaves Wang Chu behind, opting instead to stay in the politically-charged present of India’s anticolonial struggle. As a result, much of the action unfolding in the first half of the story excludes Wang Chu; he features only as a reluctant, passive, and for the most part, silent witness to the change unfolding around him. When Nehru visits Srinagar following the 1931 uprising in Kashmir, for instance, the entire city flocks to welcome him. The narrator drags a reluctant Wang Chu into a crowd teeming with excitement and anticipation. “I kept glancing in Wang Chu’s direction out of the corner of my eye,” the narrator admits, “to try to gauge his reaction, what effect the torrent rising in our hearts was having on him” (175). But Wang Chu only gazes vacantly ahead before excusing himself and heading off to a museum, leaving the narrator behind. The narrative grants Wang Chu his retreat: rather than following him out of the crowd and into the museum, the past’s memorial, the story lingers in the scene of India’s political foment, capturing instead a conversation between the narrator and his friends who puzzle over Wang Chu as he “recedes into the distance” (176). A similar scene occurs years later, when Zhou Enlai visits Delhi unbeknownst to Wang Chu, who happens to be in Delhi at the time only by coincidence and expresses no desire to meet his own state leader, much to the narrator’s dismay. The narrative thus captures Wang Chu’s detachment by detaching itself from Wang Chu, who features in the first scenes of the story more so in states of absence. The sense of detachment the story engenders from its own protagonist makes Wang Chu legible as a figure of temporality misaligned and at odds with the demands of the present. “Wang Chu” is a biography of an unwilling subject told in fragments. Wang Chu falls in and out of the narrator’s life. Years pass between their interactions, and through all the trauma and devastation that wrought India’s entry into independent nationhood, Wang Chu stays ever the same: Days of satyagraha, famine broke out in Bengal, the ‘quit India’ movement happened, bullets rang through the streets, the navy rebelled in Bombay, bloodshed throughout the nation, and then the nation’s partition, and all this while Wang Chu stayed as he was in Sarnath. (178) By positioning Wang Chu in a relation of reclusive retreat away from the present, the story casts him as a figure of temporality itself, as an embodiment of the forms of temporality erased in the face of a nation bent on charging ahead on the track toward some idea of progress, in disregard of the wreckage and destruction left in its wake. Wang Chu’s disinterest in ascribing to this logic of time manifests through the narrative’s struggle to make sense of his fragmented and perplexing appearances in the story. As the story enters into the 1950s, the official championing of “two thousand years of friendship” marks the state’s recognition of Wang Chu; his previously confounding presence in India now receives the state’s sanction, promising him legibility within both nation and narrative. The narrator lures Wang Chu back into the present by urging him to make use of the opportunities his newfound political significance could afford him: “Listen, Wang Chu,” the narrator advises, the closed doors between China and India have now opened. The two countries are now establishing relations and this holds great significance for you. The scholarly work [on 26

Solidarity’s Temporalities

Buddhism] you have been so far carrying out all alone, you can now undertake that same work as a respected representative of your country. Your government can arrange for your salary. (179) If Wang Chu had spent the past 15 years seeking a home he could only realize as a refuge in the past, he now faced the possibility of finding belonging in the present, given the state’s proclaimed utility for “two thousand years” in its own processes. Wang Chu returns to China buoyed by these hopes, leaving behind a trunk containing his writings as a sign of his intention to return to India. But once in China, the temporal construct Wang Chu personifies only seems further out of joint with the priorities of the incipient communist state: in those days, China, too, was witnessing the rise of a massive wave. There was a fervor all around, and all the people were wrapped up in that fervor. Life was taking a new turn. When people went to work, they did so by forming groups, and while singing and raising the red flag. Wang Chu simply watched from the roadsides […] as though he had arrived in some strange world. (179–180) He had no family to return to, his village was now unrecognizable; as in India, he remained “a mere spectator” in China (180). The revolution unfolding around him intensified. The people all came together as one, “only Wang Chu sat alone in silence” (180). Ironically, China–India friendship outwardly proclaimed by the states does not bring Wang Chu greater acceptance or understanding; instead, he now becomes subject to the Party officials’ skepticism and surveillance. The more Wang Chu attempts to explain his time in India to the officials, the more it defies narration and remains incomprehensible within the rubric of the state. Lengthy interviews only further underscore Wang Chu’s perceived irrelevance: “from a political perspective, you know nothing!” the officials finally exclaim, “You cannot even account for the principles of Buddhism from the perspective of the social sciences. Who knows what you got up to over there” (181). Against the images of 1950s’ cultural diplomacy that portrayed Chinese and Indians jubilantly locked in embrace and together rebuilding their lost historical ties, “Wang Chu” offers a darker account of the 1950s. The story dwells in the fundamental incompatibility between the narrative of shared temporality the states proclaimed and the lived embodiment of that construct in a world ultimately inhospitable to alternative imaginations of time. The story captures Wang Chu’s incomprehensibility by refusing to offer an explanation for his motivations or intentions. But this tragedy sparks a reformulation of solidarity’s relational potential away from the state’s hold. Through its resistance to rendering Wang Chu transparent and easily legible, the story challenges its reader to confront, puzzle over, and make conceptual room for a notion of time that does not heed the nation’s demands and directives. In opposition to the national proclamation of China–India friendship, “Wang Chu” invites its reader to conceive of and put into practice a China–India solidarity utterly useless to the states. From the sidelines of nation-building, Wang Chu opens up the radical potential of a temporal existence that refuses to subscribe to the idea of time as a relentless forward progression along a linear track toward the fulfillment of nationhood. After two years in China, Wang Chu manages to return to India but, as luck would have it, arrives in India on the very day that armed conflict erupts on the borders of the nations. As the nations’ efforts to reify and fix the border between China and India reach a violent head, Wang Chu’s defiant presence – as a “China–India” construct altogether uninterested in nationality – 27

Adhira Mangalagiri

frustrates the very notion of national borders and throws into question the foundational tenets of the insular nationalism now on the rise in both nations. Refusing interpolation by the states, Wang Chu quietly resists the nation’s attempts to overdetermine being. He desires only to continue his Buddhist studies – immerse himself in the readings and writings held in his precious trunk of papers – but he is repeatedly taken into police custody and interrogated about the political significance of his writings. Unable to decipher his multilingual scholarship, written in Pali, Sanskrit, and Chinese, the police eventually confiscate his papers (184). Wang Chu spends the rest of his story struggling with various governmental offices to retrieve his trunk of papers in the face of much hostility and impenetrable bureaucracy. Even the narrator, to whom Wang Chu sends a plea for help, suggests that he may be better off returning to China (185). Despite his desperate efforts, the police eventually return to Wang Chu only a few, incomplete pages of his life’s work. He dies soon after. The story seems to suggest that Wang Chu could never have survived in a world unable to break out of nationalized frames of thought and intolerant of non-national ways of being. But, as though unwilling to accept this tragic state of affairs, the story does not end with Wang Chu’s death. The narrator learns that Wang Chu had entrusted him with the trunk containing the incomplete papers. The narrator travels to Sarnath to collect Wang Chu’s trunk, the remnants of a life cast aside, and the story closes with the following contemplation: I have brought back the trunk and bundle of papers. What shall I do with these papers? Sometimes I think, perhaps I should have these published. But who would be willing to publish an incomplete manuscript? My wife keeps complaining that I’m filling the house with garbage. She has even threatened to throw out the papers a couple of times. I keep hiding the bundle: at times tucked away on some shelf, at times pushed under the bed. But I know that one day, this, too, will be thrown away outside. (185) In a final act of defiance, Wang Chu claims for himself a future that disavows the teleology employed in service of conquest. Wang Chu lives on beyond his death – and beyond his story – in the fragmentary pages he leaves behind, the pages upon which he inscribed the “two thousand years” of China and India’s shared Buddhist history, but that constantly eluded and remained illegible to the states despite their outward endorsement of that very history. Wang Chu achieves neither victory nor freedom nor even understanding – indeed, even in his death, he remains never at home and always on the brink of being cast aside, “thrown away.” But his lingering presence opens the more radical possibility of an inclusive future. His papers survive as an eternal reminder of the erasures of a nation-based world order, the forms of relation forged in defiance of divisive national borders, and the entangled textures of time that thrive despite and in the face of enforced temporal singularity. A story about detachment – from the present, the nation, the narrative, even from the narrator – “Wang Chu” ultimately sows the seeds of attachment with the Indian reader who, amid severed geopolitical relations between China and India, finds in this tragic tale of a Chinese man trapped between borders a new, shared experience of temporal multiplicity. The decolonization programs of the mid-twentieth century articulated South–South solidarity as a form of temporal relation, a sense of sameness asserted through narratives of shared time, as encapsulated in the phrase “two thousand years of friendship.” This narrative stands as emblematic of the anticolonial gesture enacted across the Third World of authoring a joint history for the formerly colonized nations and of putting this history to work in service of national self-determination. This chapter has argued that a South–South solidarity deployed toward national ends can only go so far toward fulfilling its anticolonial ambitions since it leaves standing the conception of time 28

Solidarity’s Temporalities

that once bolstered colonial rule and subsequently laid the foundations for autonomous nationhood, the telos of the Bandung political imagination. In contrast to its stilted manifestations in the state-led activities of cultural diplomacy, “two thousand years of friendship” reclaims its fuller spectrum of liberatory potentialities in literary form, in “Wang Chu,” a story that personifies that temporal construct and sets it against the violence wrought by the nation-state. The story makes possible an understanding of South–South solidarity as the shared inhabitance of temporalities that defy the linear, progressive logics of colonial and national time alike. Reaching far beyond the desire to overthrow colonial governance, South–South solidarity thus demands a decolonization of time itself as a necessary step toward summoning a just world.

Notes 1 All translations from Chinese and Hindi are my own, unless indicated otherwise. I refer here to both the Chinese transcript of the speech published in the newspaper Chenbao 晨报 in 1924, and the English translation of the speech available in Tagore, Talks in China. 2 For a further selection of scholarship on Tagore in China, see: Hay; Duara; Lee. 3 See Murthy for reading of the “China–India” pairing in pan-Asianist thought. 4 As Murthy discusses, this was the logic evoked by, for instance, the late-Qing intellectual Zhang Taiyan 章太炎(1869–1936). 5 Another instance of Zhou Enlai’s use of this phrase is quoted in the People’s Daily article, “Premier Zhou Conducts Press Conference in New Delhi.” 6 For an archive-based account of the early stages of China and India’s cultural diplomacy, see Mangalagiri. 7 See also Wilcox on China’s dance diplomacy in the Third World. 8 For an overview of postcolonial critical approaches to temporality, see West-Pavlov, Temporalities, especially Chapter 8. 9 This understanding of nostalgia is based upon the discussion in Hutcheon and Valdés. 10 For a brief introduction to Sahni, see Shingavi. 11 The story was translated into English by Jai Ratan in 1993 (see Sahni, Anthology 94–116) and Nirmala Menon in 2017 (see Menon 153–171). Here, I use my own translations while consulting the two prior translations. The Hindi story was originally published in Sahni’s 1978 collection. The page numbers cited here refer to the Hindi text reprinted in Menon. 12 On Tan Yunshan, see Sen, especially 306–320; Tsui.

Works Cited “Final Communiqué of the Asian-African Conference of Bandung (24 April 1955).” Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung, edited by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Indonesia, Djakarta, 1955, pp. 161–169. “Zhou Enlai zongli de zhici” 周恩来总理的致词 (Premier Zhou Enlai’s speech). Renmin Ribao 人民日報, 28 June 1954, p. 1. “Zhou zongli zai Xin Deli juxing jizhe zhaodaihui” 周总理在新德里举行记者招待会 (Premier Zhou Conducts Press Conference in New Delhi). Renmin Ribao 人民日報, 29 June 1954, p. 1. Letter from Deputy Minister of External Affairs to Nehru. 26 March 1952. Jawaharlal Nehru Post-1947 Papers. Vol. 122-I. Nehru Memorial Museum and Library. The Indian Cultural Delegation in China. Foreign Languages Press, 1955. Bhasin, Avtar Singh, ed. India-China Relations 1947–2000: A Documentary Study. Geetika Publishers, 2018. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Legacies of Bandung: Decolonization and the Politics of Culture.” Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and its Political Afterlives, edited by Christopher J. Lee, Ohio UP, 2010. ———. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton UP, 2000. Duara, Prasenjit. “Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 69, no. 4, 2010, pp. 963–983.

29

Adhira Mangalagiri Gvili, Gal. “Pan-Asian Poetics: Tagore and the Interpersonal in May Fourth New Poetry.” The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 77, no. 1, 2018, pp. 181–203. Hay, Stephen. Asian Ideas of East and West: Tagore and His Critics in Japan, China, and India. Harvard UP, 1970. Hutcheon, Linda and Mario J. Valdés. “Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern: A Dialogue.” Poliografias, vol. 3, 1998–2000, pp. 18–41. Lee, Yu-Ting, “Tagore and China’ Reconsidered: Starting from a Conversation with Feng Youlan.” Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s, edited by Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, Oxford UP, 2021, pp. 209–235. Liang Qichao梁启超. “Yindu yu Zhongguo wenhua zhi qinshu de guanxi” 印度与中国文化之亲属的关系 (The kindred relation of Indian and Chinese culture). Chenbao fukan 晨报副刊, 3 May 1924, pp. 1–3. Mangalagiri, Adhira. “The Culture of Cultural Diplomacy: China and India, 1947–1952.” China and Asia, vol. 3, no. 2, 2021, pp. 202–216. Menon, Nirmala. Remapping the Indian Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Murthy, Viren. “Rethinking Pan-Asianism through Zhang Taiyan: India as Method.” Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting China and India, 1840s–1960s, edited by Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui, New Delhi, Oxford UP, 2021, pp. 94–128. Sahni, Bhisham. Vāṅ Cū (Wang Chu). New Delhi, Rajkamal Prakashan, 1978. ———. “Wang Chu.” Anthology of Hindi Short Stories. Translated by Jai Ratan, Sahitya Akademi, 2003, pp. 94–116. ———. “Wang Chu.” Remapping the Indian Postcolonial Canon: Remap, Reimagine and Retranslate, by Nirmala Menon, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 174–185. Sen, Tansen. India, China, and the World. London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. Shingavi, Snehal. “Translator’s Introduction.” Today’s Pasts: A Memoir, by Bhisham Sahni, Penguin Books India, pp. vii–xv. Tagore, Rabindranath. Talks in China. Edited by Sisir Kumar Das, Visva-Bharati, 1999. Tsui, Brian. “The Plea for Asia – Tan Yunshan, Pan-Asianism and Sino-Indian Relations.” China Report, vol. 46, no. 4, 2010, pp. 353–370. Wenzel, Jennifer. “Remembering the Past’s Future: Anti-Imperialist Nostalgia and Some Versions of the Third World.” Cultural Critique, vol. 62, Winter, 2006, pp. 1–32. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Temporality in the Contemporary Global South Novel.” New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel, edited by Sibylle Baumbach and Birgit Neumann, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 255–275. ———. Temporalities. Taylor & Francis Group, 2012. Wilcox, Emily. “Performing Bandung: China’s Dance Diplomacy with India, Indonesia, and Burma, 1953– 1962.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, 2017, pp. 518–539. Yoon, Duncan M. “Bandung Nostalgia and the Global South.” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 23–33.

30

3 FROM THE SOUTH OUT Neoliberalism, Horizontality, and the ­ Post-Global Subject in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia Juan Meneses The history of the Global South cannot be understood without an account of the rise of neoliberalism, and vice versa. As Vijay Prashad, Alfred López, Arif Dirlik, Sudesh Mishra, and others have shown, one cannot simply describe the world-making potentialities we can easily identify in either of them without having to refer to those of the other. The “financialization of everything,” as neoliberalism is often described, necessitates the entire planet to sustain an endless growth scheme that, paired with the inequality that is baked into capitalism as a system of relations and enables its reach into all four quarters of the globe, allows the global rich to continue to exercise their power over the global poor. At the same time, the idea of the Global South is only comprehensible if we attend to neoliberalism’s genealogy, connecting it to the rise and fall of European imperialism; a postcolonial, post-World War II era kickstarted by the transition of power from Britain to the United States; the emergence of Western capitalism as the world’s hegemonic economic system at the end of the Cold War; the advent of globalization; and the current international power disputes by blocs such as those spearheaded by the United States and China. And yet, while this conceptual relationship can be described as a kind of constitutive reciprocity, it cannot simply be understood as a symmetrical one. Theoretical and historical descriptions of the rise and evolution of neoliberalism have tended to describe the link between the latter and the Global South primarily through the lens of Western economic imposition. David Harvey argues that, understood as a politico-economic rationale rooted in a systematic “accumulation by dispossession,” neoliberalism is a vehicle to form “new” imperial relationships (New Imperialism 137–182). Likewise, Harvey centers his critique in A Brief History of Neoliberalism on the orchestrated effort by the Anglo-American axis commanded by US President Ronald Reagan and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s to impose neoliberalism as the regulator of all relations of governance (from economic to political to social) on the rest of the world, rooting it in part in the Global South—it is worth remembering—by pointing to the first attempt to establish a neoliberal agenda of governance in Chile under the rule of dictator Augusto Pinochet (7–9). Vijay Prashad, for his part, offers an important addition to this narrative by highlighting the “power asymmetry” (7) with which the Global North has forced the Global South into a position of planetary subordination in the post-war era (1–13). And while acknowledging that

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-4

31

Juan Meneses

“neoliberalism in the South was and continues to be violently imposed through coups d’état and juntas, occupations, structural adjustments … and militarized disciplining of populations” (47), Wendy Brown identifies it as a “contemporary” phenomenon located in a “place we may call the EuroAtlantic world” (21). More recently, Quinn Slobodian has offered an account of the Austrian school of neoliberalism and its harnessing of decolonization as the “epochal shift of order” in which to stake out “the neoliberal model of world governance” it designed in the mid-twentieth century (5). This, however, is not the whole picture. The advance and evolution of neoliberalism as globalization’s motor has revealed other important dimensions. One of the most important such dimensions is concerned with the fact that the relationship between the North’s neoliberal agenda and the Global South is indeed asymmetrical but with a tendency toward horizontality. I employ this term in a related, though not identical, way to that used in critiques against top-down managerialism (especially of the neoliberal kind) and directed toward the organization of grassroots social movements as described by Marina Sitrin and others. The horizontality that preoccupies me here is motivated by an attempt to bring to its logical conclusion the totalizing, cannibalizing subsumption of the planet by neoliberalism, thus reassessing its original unidirectional advance in search of new profit terrains from the Global North into the Global South, the latter often driven into a neocolonial framework of relations with the former. This is not to dispute the narrative describing the North’s initial encroachment upon the South by way of the neoliberalization of the planet or the roots of this operation in the history of imperial capitalism. Instead, in emphasizing that neoliberalism is now everywhere, I want to explore the nuances of a new, more complex network of relationships that emerges as a result. I will do so by considering Mohsin Hamid’s work and, in particular, his 2013 novel How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, which moves past the North-toSouth genesis narrative by mobilizing core diegetic elements such as voice, audience, and plot arc in order to decentralize the discourse of global neoliberalism and update the distribution of active and passive roles in it. Reassessing this relationship reveals a re-democratizing dynamic in Hamid’s narrative that articulates a response explicitly emanating from the South not only to neoliberalism’s “de-democratizing” repercussions (Brown 77) but also to a fundamental humanistic crisis occasioned by it. As I will explain in detail in the next section, the Global South must be considered a co-actor in the very world-making mechanics of neoliberalism. This is more than implying that the presence of neoliberalism in, say, Nigeria or El Salvador is proof that it is a truly planetary force deserving the most potent critical scrutiny. The current neoliberal moment is anchored in key moments of modern history that suggest that the Global South is not simply a passive recipient of the North’s neoliberal doctrine but a world-making planetary bloc in itself. While the resulting constitutive reciprocal relationship is by no means based on an even distribution of agency, it is impossible to conceive the North’s imposition of neoliberalism as the ultimate ideological, economic, political, social, and cultural measuring rod without the enlistment of Southern actors, locales, and forms of knowledge. In the subsequent section, I will turn to Hamid’s novel to show how it performs what Pashmina Murthy calls a “disorientation” of the Global South and, with it, of the “North–South binary implicit” in it (206). In particular, I will argue that it proposes a new kind of relationship between the Global South and the neoliberal order imposed by the North by conjuring up an alternative subjectivity that is unshackled from the very operations of neoliberalism.

A co-constitutive relationship As I have pointed out, the irruption of neoliberalism in the Global South was the result of the expansion by Global North actors into the planet’s peripheries via a set of successive exploitative 32

From the South Out

relationships rooted in imperial conquest, capitalist globalization, and the neoliberalization of everything. According to Sudesh Mishra, The South is an effect of the globalizing neoliberal drive to subject everyone to the logic of an unbounded market; it is also, paradoxically, neoliberalism’s most powerful antagonist. As an effect, it is engendered by neoliberal modernity. As an antagonist, it perpetually calls attention to its exceptional status in spaces, tropes, and practices not territorialized by the North. (55) North and South are, thus, inscribed in what can be called the world-making dialectical relationship that is globalized neoliberalism inasmuch as they play opposed parts in a simultaneous relationship of mutual affirmation and negation. While this is of course the product of the North’s drive to subjugate the planet via its financialization, each is not possible without the existence of the other. Underneath this paradoxical relationship is a clear genealogy that reveals their necessary condition as opposed yet mutually constitutive poles. Of the many one could name to construct such a genealogy, I want to highlight three interlinked dimensions: a material one, a financial one, and an onto-political one. First, the most literal form of co-constitution in this relationship is of a material nature, and it corresponds to the colonial pre-history of neoliberalism’s grip on all aspects of life on the planet. Perhaps one of the most famous formulations of this idea appears in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. While Fanon’s writing is well-known for its fierce antagonism to the forces of colonialism, it also reflects how cognizant he was of the co-constitutive relationship between the South and the North. This is powerfully crystallized in his assertion that European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. … Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. (53, 58) The power in Fanon’s words lies in their capacity to signify, in their indictment, Europe’s cannibalizing of the territories, raw materials, and peoples of the South. Yet this is not the only foundational text from the Global South in which this notion is put forth. One can turn to other accounts that describe a similar material link as rooted in the histories of colonial violence and their legacies, such as Eduardo Galeano’s important chronicle of the “open veins” of Latin America, where “[e] verything, from the discovery until our times, has always been transmuted into European—and later United States—capital” (2), Cedric J. Robinson’s formulation of the materiality of “racial capitalism” (9–28), and Lisa Lowe’s reflection on the “intimacies of four continents,” which bring together the centuries-long tangible enmeshing of a universal European subjectivity, the archived experiences of the colonized Other, and global capitalism under the sign of Empire. The second dimension, which pertains to the financial plane of this relationship of co-constituency, is most prevalent in the postcolonial era and is closer to our current understanding of the workings of neoliberalism. Akin to the material one, this is a relation of extraction and is perhaps best epitomized by the idea of development. As Walter Rodney theorizes in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, “capitalist development” is a relational notion since capitalism is itself a relation of competition (6–7). In turn, “underdevelopment” is not simply the “absence of development” (15) but an instrument for perpetuating global economic inequality, since “[a]ll of the 33

Juan Meneses

c­ ountries named as ‘underdeveloped’ in the world are exploited by others; and the underdevelopment with which the world is now preoccupied is a product of capitalist, imperialist, and colonialist exploitation” (16). The main vehicle to carry out an agenda designed to maintain what Harvey calls “uneven geographical development” (Brief History 178) is debt because it, too, operates as a relation of subordination. As David Graber suggests, “Third World debtor nations are almost exclusively countries that have at one time been attacked and conquered by European countries— often, the very countries to whom they now owe money” (5). Debt is, indeed, a key legacy of colonial subjugation framed by the discourses and practices of development because it conceals the continuation of a hegemonic order that was once maintained by colonial force and is now perpetuated by the rules of the market. On the one hand, countries in the South are coerced into accepting extremely onerous conditions attached to the loans they need to prosper as stipulated by institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. On the other, the North continues to reap the benefits of maintaining its meridional counterpart not only perennially in need of such loans but unable to pay them off too. A final dimension that informs both the foregoing material and financial ones gives shape to the global dynamics at the core of the North–South relationship at the onto-political level. A few foundational texts help us identify precursors of this element. For example, C. L. R. James’s classic study of the anti-slavery movement in Hispaniola and its crucial role during the Haitian and French revolutions in The Black Jacobins irrefutably disproves that modern liberal democracy itself is an exclusively European phenomenon, revealing instead the imprint of the colonies on which the West has historically depended. Paul Gilroy’s articulation of the “black Atlantic” is similarly helpful to understand how the inauguration of modernity by the triangular trade and the institution of slavery “transcend[s] both the structures of the nation state and the constraints of ethnicity and national particularity” (19), refutes understandings of “black and European … identities … to be mutually exclusive” (1), and reveals an interconnection where “modern black political formations stand simultaneously both inside and outside the western culture which has been their peculiar step-parent” (48–49). And in considering the more recent history of neoliberalism, we can turn to the work of Achille Mbembe, whose theoretical project has been concerned in part with connecting the matching dehumanizing powers of both capitalism and colonialism. In the neoliberal era, such powers lead up to the dramatic transformation of the human into what he calls “a human-thing, human-machine, human-code, and human-in-flux” (4, emphasis original). This “new fungibility, this solubility, institutionalized as a new norm of existence and expanded to the entire planet,” Mbembe argues, results in “the Becoming Black of the world” (6, emphasis original). Beginning with the historical subhuman objectification of the racialized subject, then, neoliberalism is the last stage of a complex process of global commodification that aims now toward the reproduction and exploitation of the human as universalized figure of extraction. Considered together, these key dimensions provide a sketch of the undeniable role played by a variety of agents in the South as it is engulfed in a globalizing process whose culmination takes the shape of neoliberal capitalism. Yet the spread of neoliberalism across the world is increasingly giving rise to alternative relations. For instance, peripheral alliances such as India’s alignment with China (in what Arundhati Roy calls a “new cold war” between the latter and the United States, 43), or networks of neoliberal extractive expulsion, such as those studied by Saskia Sassen, who writes that “75 per cent” of land grabs “in South East Asia are [perpetrated] by regional players within the context of growing regional integration” (98–99), have become more prevalent. Methodologically speaking, world-systems theory, first developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and others, has shed crucial light onto the ways the planet is mapped out by networks of neoliberal activity and must be understood, as a result, as composed by different “worlds.” Scholars such as Sharae Deckard 34

From the South Out

and Stephen Shapiro, in turn, have produced crucial analyses that complicate the “core-periphery” paradigm in world-systems theory (Wallerstein 93), moving beyond the originary North–South narrative and thus revealing “how neoliberalization is differently experienced and mediated in cores, semiperipheries, and peripheries of the world-system” (4). Deckard, Shapiro, and the other members of the Warwick Research Collective, for their part, have crucially reinvigorated the study of late-capitalist globalization by considering it not in terms of “difference but [of] inequality” (7). In proposing a departure from the binary structure inherent in the concept of difference and promoting an orientation toward questions concerning the distribution and intensity of inequality, they offer a fertile approach with which to examine “how the idea of combined and uneven development works in the literary realm” (51). It is along the axes of a redistribution of agency and the reappraisal of the North–South binary that I want to turn next. While retaining as its historical root the North and South’s co-constitutive genealogy I briefly revisited above, I want to explore how Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia exploits the tendency of neoliberalism’s planetary spread toward horizontality, scrambling its original North-to-South unidirectional spread. I will focus my argument on the relationship that the novel establishes between its narrator and narratee, who are put at the center of the novel’s challenge of the seeming unchallengeability that neoliberalism attributes to itself so as to pre-empt resistance against its destructive operations.1 In doing so, I seek to expose how the novel undoes homo œconomicus, the neoliberal subjective mode par excellence, and proposes to replace it with an alternative, post-global one.

Undoing homo economicus: A Global South response As Alfred López has argued, the Global South is not only defined by “the recognition by peoples across the planet that globalization’s promised bounties have not materialized, that it has failed as a global master narrative,” but it is also, at its core, a relational idea: “The global South … marks, even celebrates, the mutual recognition among the world’s subalterns of their shared condition at the margins of the brave new neoliberal world of globalization” (3).2 This self-poietic operation that crucially articulates a common front across the South is recurrent in the writings of Mohsin Hamid. A quick review of his work reveals that Hamid is highly invested in creating aesthetic networks of Global South solidarity. In Exit West, for instance, we read about the creation and destruction of affective relationships surrounding the lives of its two protagonists, Nadia and Saeed, as they navigate the difficulties of displacement and forced migration experienced by millions of people across the South. The magical doors through which they traverse the world symbolize the North’s expulsion (to recall Saskia Sassen’s term) of the denizens of the South while reflecting, via the doors’ elimination of the distance between origin and destination, on the planetary entanglement in which the North and South co-exist as shaped by the world-making neoliberal dialectic relationship I discussed earlier. This common front is similarly reflected in a crucial passage in The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where its protagonist, a Pakistani transplant working for Underwood Samson, a valuation company in New York City, silently stares at a man driving a jeepney in the streets of Manila while on an assignment. Looking out of his limousine’s window and feeling both loathed by the man and increasingly detached from his American colleagues, Changez begins to suspect that he is nothing but a cog in the neoliberal machine that has been ravaging the South for decades. Afterwards, he is left ruminating over the man’s disdain: “I remained preoccupied with this matter far longer than I should have, pursuing several possibilities that all assumed—as their unconscious starting point— that he and I shared a sort of Third World sensibility” (67). Not long after, on a consequential trip 35

Juan Meneses

to Valparaíso, Chile, Changez finally declares his allegiance to his fellow Global Southerners, refuses to complete the charge of valuing a struggling publishing company that would ensure its closure, and quits his job upon returning to New York before moving back to Lahore. Realizing the co-constitutive relationship between North and South as revealed by Underwood Samson’s destructive mission, given that its only function is to tighten the screws of an international market dominated by the North one shuttered company at a time, Changez vows to become a loud dissenting voice against the US post-9/11, neoliberal global agenda. Such a preoccupation with this common Southern front is not only a thematic dimension but also present at the formal level in Hamid’s work. Of note is the very structure of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, which is narrated as a dialogical response to the Global North in the form of a conversation between Changez and an American man visiting Lahore.3 In crafting the story this way, Hamid responds antagonistically to the North–South binary—the novel famously refuses to give the American a voice and only allows him to be heard through Changez’s own reactions. In contrast, Hamid employs a different strategy to engage with key issues surrounding the Global South in How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Satirizing the 12-step “how-to” structure of the self-help genre, which the protagonist employs to describe his rise from utter poverty and his success as a businessman, Hamid stages a Global South riposte to the installation of homo œconomicus in the contemporary historical moment. The author achieves this by crafting a bildungsroman “centered on entrepreneurial achievement” (Gui 185) characterized by two salient aspects. The first one is the fact that it is narrated by its protagonist in the second person, playing with the slippage of the “generic you” or “fourth person” typical of the self-help genre, thus causing a conflation of narrator and narratee that dissolves the individuality of homo œconomicus. The second distinctive feature, which is a result of the first, is the opening up of alternative subjective spaces in which individuality can be separated from the kind of individualism promoted by neoliberalism. Before addressing these two aspects, however, it is necessary to consider the composition of the novel’s diegetic framework, as it will shed light on the kind of intervention from the South out that it enacts. The novel’s structure has been read as a response that orchestrates the narrative act in a similar way to Changez’s in The Reluctant Fundamentalist. According to Yogita Goyal, Hamid “interrogates the motives of the Western reader of global fiction, suggesting that such a reader is really after a selfish project of self-help” (247). Goyal offers as proof the following passage from the novel: Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own? (19) This is an excellent interpretation. Yet Hamid’s trademark penchant for lack of specificity indicates an alternative reading of the implied addressee is possible. What are those distant lands and, more importantly, where are they? Might the influence caused by globalization not occur in more than one direction? Does the North have a monopoly on slow, conceited fiction writing? Is “the foreign” not a relative position without an immanent location or identity? Of course, the protagonist’s chronicle of public defecation in his childhood village’s river, for instance, whose water is both drunk by the locals and further polluted by “the industrial processes of an old, rusting, and subscale textile plant,” might be prone to Northern tokenization (the problematic presumption of 36

From the South Out

a homogenous privileged reception in the North notwithstanding) (6). But such a chronicle is, too, likely to ring true and familiar to Global South readers, some of whom might also recognize the novel’s echoing of Sufi love poetry’s doubling as a “prism for relating to the universe” (Johnson). At the same time, the state of cities overrun by rampant sprawl can arguably strike a chord among readers in the South and North alike, “unplanned development having yielded … a ribbon of convenience stores, auto garages, scrap-metal dealers, unregistered educational institutes, fly-by-night dental clinics … perilously unresistant to earthquakes, or even, for that matter, torrential rain” (120). We can also ask ourselves whether the increased encroachment on privacy by technologies of surveillance and the data-ification of our individuality via “property and income-tax registries, … passport and ID card databases … [and] electromagnetically shielded military-intelligence servers” (161) is a question exclusive to the North, the South, or neither. In other words, reading the novel in a way that transcends “disciplinary strategies that overdetermine the problem of Eurocentrism or fetishize the category of the West in binary terms” allows us to “account for the complex polygonal logics that govern the inter-relations of cores, semi-peripheries and peripheries throughout the contemporary capitalist world-system” (Deckard 239–240). This includes registering the transformation of a foundational vertical relationship of domination into a horizontality in which power relations are much more volatile and multidirectional, which opens up new ways to appreciate the aesthetic critique of neoliberalism that we find in Hamid’s narrative. My reading of the novel’s elocutionary act as occurring from the Global South out to the rest of the world, and not just the North, is in keeping with the critique of neoliberalism that is at its heart. To be sure, it is conceptually rooted in the original North–South co-constitutive entanglement I explored earlier. The creation and dissemination of homo œconomicus as the neoliberal subjectivity materialized in the form of “an entrepreneur of himself,” as Michel Foucault defined it, can only be imputed to the Global North (226).4 However, instead of rejecting it outright, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia embraces the figure of homo œconomicus in order to upend it from the inside out. As we navigate the 12 steps one must follow to become filthy rich, which contain instrumental advice such as “Move to the City,” “Learn from a Master,” and “Dance with Debt,” as some of the chapter titles enjoin us, one essential element is hidden in plain sight that undermines the entire premise of the self-made man. On the surface, the narrative hinges on the principle that you must “Work for Yourself” (96). Yet there is no key event in the narrative arc of this homo œconomicus that is not “dependent on and connected to others” (Poon 147), which shows the impossibility of a true individual enterprise, be it by his conniving with corrupt bureaucrats, his enlisting the structural advantages of the state, his taking advantage of the wealth created by others’ labor (Walonen 253, 256), his participation in networks of violence (Naydan 97–98), or the very fact that his emporium is built on the fraudulent act of collecting public water from the “city’s neglected pipes,” which “reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and typhoid,” boiling it, and selling it in re-used bottles (How to Get Filthy Rich 99). Like the “totally free market,” which is according to Immanuel Wallerstein “an ideology, a myth, and a constraining influence” (25), the neoliberal self-made man trope is simply that, a trope whose artifice the novel hyperbolically dramatizes to rethink the position of individuality in our globalized planetary landscape. The most striking way in which Hamid dismantles the trope of neoliberal individualism, however, is the conflation of narrator and narratee. If it can upend homo œconomicus by constantly connecting the protagonist’s success to a network of external agents and elements playing in his favor, his interpellative address to the reader completes the novel’s truly global resisting gesture. By way of the “deterritorializ[ation]” of “narrative voice” and the “unfasten[ing] [of] ambiguities where certainties rule,” Hamid succeeds in imploding homo œconomicus as embodied not only by 37

Juan Meneses

the nameless protagonist but, notably, by the reader too (Veyret 315). The employment of “you” as both a way to articulate one’s actions and an exhortative address directed to one’s audience has been interpreted as a form of mutual acknowledgment between the first and the second persons (e.g., Poon 144), which emerge late in the narrative along with a new “we” that implies a collectivity denied until now precisely by the protagonist’s emphasis on his individualistic enterprise. While this form of recognition may be important to think about the possible relationships that the first and second persons build in a narrative that has so far curtailed them by focusing exclusively on individualism, the last few chapters of the novel present an even more powerful intervention as they undo and then reconstruct the very idea of subjectivity. This is in my opinion the novel’s true response from the South out.

Post-global subjectivities The concluding chapters of the novel provide, against its grain, a resolution to the story. They bring to fruition the narrative’s underlying critique of neoliberal individualism, which is present not only in its description of the external elements necessary for the protagonist’s success but also in the form of recurrent ironic commentary by the narrator, such as “ideals … are by their very nature anti-self” and “any self-help book advocating allegiance to an ideal is likely to be a sham” (57). Here, the very principle of homo œconomicus becomes fully undone. First, the protagonist loses everything after his brother-in-law runs away with company funds prepared for a merger, the failure of which provokes the company’s bankruptcy. Almost simultaneously, he survives two consecutive heart attacks, which render him “plugged into machines,” the latter in turn connected to the hospital’s power system, its backup generator, its information technology infrastructure, the unit that produces oxygen, the people who refill and circulate the tanks, the department that replenishes medications, the trucks that deliver them, the factories at which they are manufactured, the mines where requisite raw materials emerge, and on and on. (183–184) Recovering from these two crucially unselfing events leads the protagonist to turn his energies to helping members of his community with their financial issues, “accept[ing] no financial reward” and motivated by “lingering desires to connect and to be of use … the need to fill a few of the long hours of the week, and … curiosity about the world beyond,” while finally settling with the unnamed “pretty girl,” with whom he has had a series of romantic encounters over the course of the novel (200). Hamid thus upends the homo œconomicus archetype by thwarting the rags-toriches trope and transitioning the narrative’s address from the ambiguous “fourth person,” which rhetorically shores up the speaker’s authority via precedence (“I did it, and so can you”) and prescription (“you must complete the following twelve steps in order to become filthy rich”), to an effective deindividuating gesture that explodes the telos of materialistic self-accomplishment governing neoliberal ideology. It is at this juncture that the narrator conjures up a new kind of subjectivity. If, as López has shown, the condition of the Global South in the “neoliberal world of globalization” is a “postglobal” condition insofar as “globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles” and “experiences a crisis or setback” (3), the same can be said about the new subject position that emerges in the novel. Thematically, this is evident in the protagonist’s financial ruination followed by his abandonment of neoliberalism as self-poietic foundation and, after ending a loveless marriage and finally becoming truly able to love, embracing a “[s]ubjectivity” governed by “a becoming-other” 38

From the South Out

in the process of “constitut[ing] … the other as an object of love” (Rancière “Critical Questions” 89). At the level of form, this new post-global subjectivity is anchored in and yet transcends the original disidentification performed by the ambivalence of “you,” which is necessary for a subsequent reconstruction of personhood that is uncoupled from the dictates of neoliberal self-formation and does not necessitate the prevalence of the individual over everyone else. This is inaugurated by the acknowledgment in chapter nine that “[w]e’re all information, all of us, whether readers or writers, you or I” (159). Likewise, while chapter ten includes the warning that “[w]e are nearing our end, you and I” (177), later the narrator confesses that “[t]hough filthy richness is admittedly gone from your grasp, this book is going to … continue offering … help to two selves, one of them yours, the other mine” (197). The emergence of this constellation of persons (I, you, we, and so on), which has been called a “transition from a subject-oriented to an intersubjective relationship” (Gui 185), also establishes a separation between the protagonist’s narrating and experiential agencies, provoking the abrogation of the original interpellative gesture that drives the narrator’s account of “yourself.” The last pages of the novel suggest that a crisis at the individual level may be an effective way to respond to the crisis that is the rise of globalized neoliberalism. As Judith Butler has suggested, “The ‘I’ is always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence” and, therefore, “it is only in dispossession that I can and do give an account of myself” (8, 37). In the novel’s closing, the narrator asserts the full undoing of homo œconomicus, matching the liberation that results from this process to the conclusion of one’s life: “you are ready, ready to die well, ready to die like a man, like a woman, like a human, for despite all else you have loved … you have been beyond yourself” (222). At once a literal and symbolic termination, the undoing of the narrator’s self transcends the only singularity authorized by neoliberalism (i.e., individualism). In doing so, it makes way for an alternative, post-global subjectivity that gives rise to a renewed form of individuality. It is a subjectivity that can call itself “I” without participating in the self-interested individualism promoted by neoliberal ideology, and can call itself such while addressing a “you” to which it relates not on the basis of competition, but on the basis of a shared existence “in the aftermath of globalization as a master discourse” (López 7). Hamid’s novel, then, rejects the tenets of neoliberalism as ideology by rearranging the relationship between the figures of the narrator and his narratee. Finally ready to die, the pretty girl holds your hand, and you contain her, and this book, and me writing it, and I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you, though not in a creepy way, and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end. (222) The death of homo œconomicus is the birth of an Other whose individuality is no longer forged by the pressures of the neoliberal financialization of the self. Inspired by Prathama Banerjee’s important book Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South, I consider the ending, and Hamid’s novel as a whole, to be crucial because it intervenes in our very understanding of political thinking and action. It formulates a riposte from the Global South to the violence of neoliberalism’s devastating presence across the globe that transcends the original North–South binary. As a result, the novel’s resistance against the principles of neoliberalism is not simply in voicing the protestation and resilience of those in the South, but in showing, too, “the nature and limits of the modern political” (217). In other words, it stands in opposition to the self-assigned universality of the North while creating new imaginative political alignments. And, as Banerjee argues, “modern politics per se— being the paradoxical enterprise of naming a people into being while invoking people as prior guar39

Juan Meneses

antee—demands a certain aesthetic orientation of and from the people” (190). Thus, if the political is, at its most elementary, a product of the imagination, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia entreats us all, wherever we may be, to imagine an experience that, while anchored in the Global South, serves as a global counter-model to resist shaping and reducing our lives to a series of financial decisions.

Notes 1 I follow here Jacques Rancière’s work. Rancière calls this action the creation of “dissensus,” which amounts to “a division inserted in ‘common sense’: a dispute over what is given and about the frame within which we see something as given,” out of which a “conflict” emerges “between a sensory presentation and a way of making sense of it, or between several sensory regimes and/or ‘bodies’” (Politics of Aesthetics 69, 139). On neoliberalism’s alleged unchallengeability, see, e.g., Bourdieu, Brown, and Fisher. 2 For an exploration of such networks of recognition, see Mahler. 3 For analyses on this question see, for instance, Hutton and Meneses (149–170). 4 Even Foucault, who has been famously (and fairly) critiqued for remaining largely silent about the Global South, understood that if the West could pursue a “policy of growth” by mobilizing the figure of homo œconomicus, a similar “attempt is being made in order to rethink the problem of the failure of Third World economies to get going” (232).

Works Cited Banerjee, Prathama. Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South. Duke UP, 2020. Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by Richard Nice, The New Press, 1998. Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015. Butler, Judith. Giving an Account of Oneself. Fordham UP, 2005. Césaire, Aimé. Discourse on Colonialism. Translated by Joan Pinkham, Monthly Review Press, 2000. Deckard, Sharae. “Inherit the World: World-Literature, Rising Asia and the World-Ecology.” What Postcolonial Theory Doesn’t Say, edited by Anna Bernard, Ziad Elmarsafy, and Stuart Murray, Routledge, 2016, pp. 239–55. Deckard, Sharae and Stephen Shapiro. “World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An Introduction.” World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, edited by Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro, Palgrave, 2019, pp. 1–48. Dirlik, Arif. “Global South: Predicament and Promise.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12–23. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004. Fisher, Mark. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Winchester: Zero, 2009. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Translated by Graham Burchell, Picador, 2008. Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. Translated by Cedric Belfrage, Monthly Review Press, 1973. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993. Goyal, Yogita. “‘We Are All Migrants’: The Refugee Novel and the Claims of Universalism.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 66, no. 2, 2020, pp. 239–259. Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Melville House, 2011. Gui, Weihsin. “Creative Destruction and Narrative Renovation: Neoliberalism and the Aesthetic Dimension in the Fiction of Aravind Adiga and Mohsin Hamid.” The Global South, vol. 7, no. 2, 2013, pp. 173–190. Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist. Mariner, 2008. ———. How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. Riverhead Books, 2013. ———. Exit West. Riverhead Books, 2017. Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford UP, 2003. ———. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2005. Hutton, Margaret-Anne. “The Janus and the Janissary: Reading into Camus’s La Chute and Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist.” Comparative Literature, vol. 68, no. 1, 2016, pp. 59–74.

40

From the South Out James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Vintage, 1989. Johnson, Reed. “Mohsin Hamid Comes Home to Roost in Pakistan.” Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2013, www​.latimes​.com​/books​/la​-xpm​-2013​-mar​-14​-la​-et​-jc​-mohsin​-hamid​-20130314​-story​.html. Accessed 22 January 2021. López, Alfred J. “Introduction: The (Post)Global South.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–11. Lowe, Lisa. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke UP, 2015. Mahler, Anne Garland. From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity. Duke UP, 2018. Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Translated by Laurent Dubois, Duke UP, 2017. Meneses, Juan. Resisting Dialogue: Modern Fiction and the Future of Dissent. U of Minnesota P, 2019. Mishra, Sudesh. “The Global South: Modernity and Exceptionality.” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 45–55. Murthy, Pashmina. “Uneasy Returns: The Literary Turn to the South.” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 198–208. Naydan, Liliana N. “Beyond Economic Globalization in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia: The False Promise of Self-Help and Possibilities Through Reading with a Creative Mind.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, 2018, pp. 92–108. Poon, Angelia. “Helping the Novel: Neoliberalism, Self-Help, and the Narrating of the Self in Mohsin Hamid’s How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 52, no. 1, 2017, pp. 139–150. Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso, 2012. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill, Bloomsbury, 2013. ———. “Critical Questions on the Theory of Recognition.” Recognition or Disagreement: A Critical Encounter on the Politics of Freedom, Equality, and Identity, edited by Katia Genel and Jean-Philippe Deranty, Columbia UP, 2016, pp. 83–95. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. U of North Carolina P, 1983. Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso, 2018. Roy, Arundhati. Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Haymarket Books. 2014. Sassen, Sakia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Belknap, 2014. Sitrin, Marina A. Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina. Zed Books, 2012. Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Harvard UP, 2018. Veyret, Paul. “Fractured Territories: Deterritorializing the Contemporary Pakistani Novel in English.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 56, no. 2, 2021, pp. 307–321. Wallerstein, Immanuel. World-Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Duke UP, 2004. Walonen, Michael K. “Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur Through Narrative in the Contemporary South Asian Novel.” Interventions, vol. 22, no. 2, 2020, pp. 246–260. Warwick Research Collective. Combined and Uneven Development: Towards a New Theory of WorldLiterature. Liverpool UP, 2015.

41

4 DEEP SOUTHS The U.S. South and the Global South Pashmina Murthy

Sometimes, the “Global South” can seem like a contradiction of terms. The broad signifier of the “global” works against the pointed cardinal direction of “south,” so scholarship on the Global South must often begin by clarifying what the phrase means. This ranges from a geographic focus to refer primarily to “regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania” (Dados and Connell 12), in acknowledgment of their shared resemblance as well as heterogeneity, to more conceptual formulations that describe it variously as the “mutual recognition among the world’s subalterns” (López 3) and a “metaphor of the human suffering caused by capitalism and colonialism on the global level” (de Sousa Santos 2016, 18). The latitude in meanings – whereby the Global South indicates at one and the same time a geographic region and a critical epistemological approach, a conscious political opposition to and a default exclusion from the Global North, solidarity and a gathering of the dispossessed – has resulted in some frustration about its semantic flexibility. But as Russell West-Pavlov has concluded, “Global South” is a shifter not merely because it is a mobile term with variously inflected meanings but because it works like a deictic marker, linking discourses, places, and speakers in such a way as to generate new subject positions, fields of agency, and possibilities of action […] Therein lies the potential of the term, but also its unpredictability and, to a certain extent, its riskiness. (2–3) I begin with this brief sketch in order to signal my own attachment to the Global South’s definitional openness, which invites productive conversations with other Souths: in this case, the U.S. South. Of course, this connection is not a new one. In their introductory essay to American Literature’s 2001 special issue on “Violence, the Body and ‘The South’,” guest editors Houston Baker Jr. and Dana Nelson used the distinctiveness of “the South” as a point of departure, emphasizing the South’s character as both a microcosm of the nation-state as a whole and a stage on which race, regionalisms, and difference in the Americas play out. Calling for “a new Southern studies,” they concluded that their project helps one “realize that as a nation, we are always already in ‘The South’, that it is unequivocally and intricately lodged in us, a first principle of our being 42

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-5

Deep Souths

in the world” (243). Five years later, in a prefatory essay for another special issue of the same journal, McKee and Trefzer responded to this call by resituating the U.S. South in the global, posing the central question: “What happens when we unmoor the South from its national harbor, when it becomes a floating signifier in a sea of globalism?” (678). They explored how the Global South becomes visible in the national South but, equally, considered ways in which the U.S. South already exceeds the boundaries of its own regionalism. Where Baker and Nelson’s essay had emphasized the South as a synecdoche for the United States, McKee and Trefzer took it a step further by expanding the scope and reach: it is not just we who are always already in ‘The South’, but the (U.S.) South itself which is always already global. Their special issue is indicative of the increasing attention to South–South connections in American Studies, and the past two decades have witnessed a robust discussion on the scope and (inter-)disciplinarity of New Southern Studies (NSS), debates on its purported ‘newness’, and considerations of its implications for the field of southern studies more broadly.1 The committed examination of the transnational American South leads to what James L. Peacock has called a “grounded globalism that might resonate with yet also transform the [U.S.] South’s traditional emphasis on place” (271). Reversing the focus, I explore whether discourses and structures of feeling of the U.S. South can also apply to the Global South. Both Souths have amorphous contours, are heterogeneous geographies, become sites of contradiction, and function as a shorthand for a constellation of cultural and affective meanings. Without conflating these two souths, I examine what new connections arise when epistemological frameworks specific to the U.S. South are extended to the Global South. Since the histories, cultures, and narratives of the South(s) are too capacious to do more than gesture here, I consider just one term imbued with complicated connotations in the United States: the Deep South. This chapter takes the form, therefore, of a brief provocation or, better yet, a thought experiment. In thinking about the meanings and effects that are shared by these Souths, what happens to the Global South when it comes into contact with the Deep South? If the U.S. South does not exclude, nor is excluded from, the global (South), where does one locate the Deep (Global) South?

How “Deep” is the South? The boundaries of the “Deep South” in the United States are not always consistent: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi are a core part, though Georgia and South Carolina are also often included. Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi also join Florida in comprising the Gulf South, which was historically a frontier zone between the Caribbean and North America.2 In the prefatory note to his book on the “slave country” of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century United States, Adam Rothman notes that the region which would become the Deep South was “the leading edge of a dynamic, expansive slave regime incorporated politically into the United States and firmly tied to the transatlantic system of commodity exchange” (xi). Whether the Deep South refers to particular states or a general region depends, then, on its history and, to a lesser extent, its geography, and how that has informed the felt quality or culture of a place. I read the term, therefore, not in terms of its origins but for its associations as an evocative metaphor for certain characteristics of the Global South. “Deep” is a suggestive word, implying complexity, truth or authenticity, endurance, and intensity. If the South writ large is often construed as inscrutable, the Deep South is so to a greater degree (“deep” itself being a word conveying degree). Unlike other qualifiers for the South, including the temporal and ideological formations of “Old South” and “New South(s)” or the aesthetics of “Dirty South,” “Deep” is at once less legible and, perhaps because of that, more generative. Beyond all the other associa43

Pashmina Murthy

tions lies something altogether undefinable, an ineffable quality that can be sensed but never easily articulated. Let me begin with three different impressions from travelers to the South, which are revealing not for their authority – as though there is a “true South” to discover – but for the implications of their language. On the opening page of his book The Southern Mystique, Howard Zinn recounts his initial encounter with the Deep South; driving into Atlanta for the first time, he senses that [t]here was something about Atlanta, about Georgia, the Carolinas, that marked them off, as with a giant cleaver, from the rest of the nation: the sun was hotter, the soil was redder, the people blacker and whiter, the air sweeter, heavier. But beyond the physical, beyond the strange look and smell of this country, was something more that went back to cotton and slavery, stretching into history as far as anyone could remember – an invisible mist over the entire Deep South, distorting justice, blurring perspective, and most of all, indissoluble by reason. (3–4) Zinn’s almost gothic evocation recalls W. E. B. Du Bois’s description of taking the train down Georgia in The Souls of Black Folk: “Below Macon the world grows darker; for now we approach the Black Belt, – that strange land of shadows, at which even slaves paled in the past, and whence come now only faint and half-intelligible murmurs to the world beyond” (76). A more notorious impression comes from V. S. Naipaul, who, meditating on the sense of “home” that southerners associate with the South irrespective of how long ago they left it, has this to say about visiting a New York acquaintance’s home in North Carolina: “It was a richer and more complicated past than I had imagined; and physically much more beautiful […] But, still, in the past there was that point where darkness fell, the historical darkness, even here, which was home” (11). The resemblance in the affect, tone, and grammar of the three evocations suggests that, viewed from elsewhere, “the South” is overdetermined and, therefore, unfathomable. Such impressions echo – in Naipaul’s case, perhaps consciously – Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.3 Admittedly, Conrad is not the writer who immediately comes to mind when working on a theorization of the U.S. South, but the novella, which exemplifies the colonial view of Africa and the Global South more broadly, also captures some of the lexicon on the Deep South. Natalie Ring reveals, for instance, that at the turn of the twentieth century, the U.S. South was often compared to the tropics and that “[n]orthern travelers to the Deep South often commented on the dangerous, dank, and primitive characteristics of the landscape” (84). Such rhetoric is equally pronounced in descriptions of the Global South, which is figured as conquerable but never fully knowable and as embodying a clear representational difference while refusing any cohesive thematization. At the start of his journey, Marlow offers a crisp description of the coast: “The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with a white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist” (Conrad 114). As he journeys up the river, however, the vista slips into a blankness – “great, expectant, mute” – the “stillness on the face of the immensity looking at” him later revised to being “unearthly,” “a thing monstrous and free” (129, 139). There is thus more than a passing resemblance between traveling deep in the South and into the heart of darkness. Textually, the narrative play on light and shadow conjures the “heart of darkness” as a visual obscuring as much as an epistemological opacity, though the phrase recalls more forcefully the misguided metaphor for Africa that Henry Morton Stanley introduced into the public imaginary with travel accounts entitled Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest 44

Deep Souths

Africa (1890). To a modern reader, if the darkness is a pressing reminder of the Belgian Congo’s bloody history, Naipaul’s “historical darkness” redeploys the same language to suggest the South’s violent past. Similarly, Zinn’s “invisible mist” and Du Bois’s “strange land of shadows” find an uneasy kinship in Marlow’s “unearthly” earth. Darkness and deepness seem to go together. “Deep” suggests direction and interiority, so that the further down south one goes, the deeper one is in the South. Consider again that “deep” as a modifier for geographic regions finds its obverse not in “shallow” or “surface” but in “rim” or “periphery.”4 Marlow wryly observes after being judged medically fit for travel that he felt he was about to embark on a journey to the “center of the earth” rather than the “center of a continent” (113). To be at the periphery or on the rim is to position oneself on the edge of a valley or depression so as to gaze down into the center. Moreover, there is a perceptible change the further south one travels. Though published over half a century apart, a common feature of Du Bois’s and Zinn’s impressions is a phenomenological calibration, a gradual awareness of having crossed into the Deep South that can only be explained as a progressive gradient or saturation: the Deep South is hotter, redder, blacker, whiter, sweeter, heavier, darker. “Deep” here suggests not just an intensity but an intensification, where the South appears and is felt more acutely, more deeply. Undoubtedly, whether “Deep” appears in Heart of Darkness as an intensifier needs to be worked through a little further. As Jesse Matz points out, what Chinua Achebe’s scathing criticism of Heart of Darkness took particular issue with was not just the racism in how the Congo was portrayed but also its pseudo-impressionism, since [Achebe] feels that Conrad has isolated one aspect of the mode (its affective intensity) in such a way as to limit its further reaches. [Conrad’s] impressions are mere sensations, superficial perceptions lacking the emergence toward supposition, abstraction, or more emphatic subjectivity of impressions left to their own devices. (142) If we think about this within the structural frame of my argument, one of the features of Marlow’s narration with which Achebe takes umbrage is that it restricts itself to a play of surfaces (“sensations, superficial perceptions”), and the only depth to be found is in what Matz has labeled an “affective intensity.” But it is in the retraction from other impressions to intensify the affective response that we might start to glean the depth of the Deep South, suggesting yet another implication of the term on which I want to focus: “Deep” less as a problem of impression than of expression, what I earlier labeled the Deep South’s ineffable quality. Zinn’s initial impression of the Deep South is striking for his difficulty in enunciating the region’s difference from the rest of the country. While he eventually settles on intensification, the recourse to “something” and “something more” betrays a dissatisfaction with those comparative adjectives. For both Zinn and Du Bois, language meets its internal limit in describing the Deep South: shrouded in an “invisible mist,” the “blurring perspective” of the Plantation South emits “only faint and half-intelligible murmurs.” Here, “Deep” is linked to a psychoanalytic concern with the buried or concealed. Michael P. Bibler notes in his overview of the range of meanings of “Deep” – among which are “untouched” by civilization, “authenticity,” the “intensity of a purely saturated hue,” and “the closest thing we’ll get to the truth” – that in a psychoanalytic context, Deep is “of the symptom and the closet, the hidden place of what many like to call the ‘true self’” (5, 6). Returning to Marlow – whom we find still attempting to make sense of what he witnessed years after returning to the metropole – he can offer only this placeholder in the absence of a full account of the journey: 45

Pashmina Murthy

I had turned to the wilderness really … [a]nd for a moment it seemed to me as if I also were buried in a vast grave full of unspeakable secrets. I felt an intolerable weight oppressing my breast, the smell of the damp earth, the unseen presence of victorious corruption, the darkness of an impenetrable night. (Conrad 169–170) Marlow trails off, unable to translate that sensation of oppression – an affective horror – into meaning, and shifts instead to recounting his conversation with the Russian. What occurs deep in the heart of darkness can never fully be brought to light. It is unsurprising that the sense of the Deep South, which the three impressions pick up on, parallels depictions of colonial Africa. Toni Morrison noted in her discussion of American literary history three decades ago that [w]hat rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize external exploitation was an American Africanism – a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American. (There also exists, of course, a European Africanism with a counterpart in colonial literature.) (38) The parenthetical parallel between American and European Africanism joins up in a figure like Henry Stanley, a Welshman who worked in Mississippi and fought for the Confederate Army before he traveled to Africa as a correspondent for the New York Herald. Indeed, Hickey and Wylie remark that Stanley’s perception of Africa and Africans was deeply affected by his American experience. The American image of Africa which emerged during this period was a fusion of two major sets of impressions: a vision of the continent derived from European (especially British) accounts, on the one hand, and a domestic inventory of texts and assumptions concerning the Amerindian and African American populations, on the other. (8) When the editor of Scribner’s Monthly, Josiah Holland, wanted to replicate the success of Stanley’s accounts of Africa for the New York Herald, he dispatched a young writer, Edward King, to the Reconstruction-era southern states to produce an account about The Great South.5 In hearing the echo of “deep” and “dark” in these disparate texts, I do not want to collapse the difference between them: colonial Africa is not the same as the Deep South. Rather, just as the Global South is not a monolithic category, it, too, may have a Deep South that lies outside the signifying reach of language. In the next section, I fast-forward nearly a century from Conrad’s text to consider how the implications of “Deep” change in a South–South encounter.

Deepness in/and the Global South While the previous section examined echoes between the two Souths, this section scrutinizes their overlap. To reframe the question I had posed at the beginning of the chapter: how do we see the Global South differently when it comes into contact with the Deep South? My question draws upon Michael Bibler’s view of the Deep South as an orientation rather than a location, “not where we look for it but how we look at it” (13, emphasis in original). What changes when from a sur46

Deep Souths

face/depth binary, we instead look across the Deep or even “slantwise, at an angle?” (Bibler 8). To think through such a perspectival shift, I turn to Mira Nair’s early film, Mississippi Masala (1991), which exemplifies South–South connections by following an Asian African family from Uganda to Greenwood, Mississippi. Jay Loha, his wife Kinnu, and their daughter Mina are forced to leave Kampala in 1972 as a result of Idi Amin’s expulsion of South Asians from the country. Eighteen years later, the family’s social and economic precarity in a community of Gujarati Hindu motel owners in Greenwood provides the backdrop for the central strand of the narrative: Mina’s burgeoning romance with Demetrius Williams, a young African-American man running his own carpet-cleaning business. Their relationship causes a scandal, throwing into sharp relief the racism and hypocrisy of the South Asians. Jay’s insistence to Mina that “people stick to their own kind” also stands out because of his history in Uganda: he, himself, had been considered a race traitor by other Asians for his commitment to racial equality in his work as a barrister. The film thus deploys interracial romance as a tool to interrogate not only the complexities of diasporic constructions of home and belonging but also the limits of cross-racial political solidarity. What is valuable about the film, despite the evasiveness of its political message, is its attempt to see Uganda anew from the Deep South. Mississippi Masala’s setting in Greenwood has led critics to view the film as primarily an interrogation of race, ethnicity, and difference in the United States. Roger Ebert critiqued Nair’s twining of various narrative threads as “cover[ing] too much ground.” For Ebert, the romance was the real center of the film, with the result that the “scenes in Uganda, for example, are not necessary for narrative purposes, and [Nair’s] closing scenes (as the father returns to the home of 20 years earlier) upstages the conclusion of the love story” (Ebert). Scholarly appraisals offer a more expansive discussion, recognizing the crises unraveling in Uganda in 1972 and Mississippi in 1990 as refracted images of similar racial economies. But, even here, the central focus is often on the scenes in the United States, whether in terms of “contemporary South Asian (American) racial identity formations” (J. Desai 68) or “how essential migration and displacement are to an understanding of the behavior of the twice-displaced Indians” (Mehta 199). Mira Nair’s own interest was in the specific structure of racial hierarchy, with “history repeating itself, with the Asians coming between black and white people, but in a different context” (qtd. in Stuart 212). The conditions of the emotional and existential rupture in Uganda, in other words, become significant primarily in terms of what they portend when carried over to the United States. In contrast to these readings, I want to recenter geography as critical to how we read the film. Idi Amin’s Uganda and neoliberal Deep South are more than a mere backdrop against which the formation of the individual self plays out. They are sites undergoing radical social and economic transformation, which exists in tension with the continuity of historical racial structures. In both spaces, South Asians are figured variously as intermediaries, bystanders, and interlopers; Jay’s tenuous position as an Asian African in the Deep South places him at the intersection of these southern geographies. He rightly “upstages the conclusion of the love story” because it is through his journey – both geographic and emotional – that the film revisits Uganda. Jay is haunted by two betrayals: by his country and, more intimately, by Okelo, his best friend since childhood. In one of the opening scenes set in 1972, Okelo captures the restive mood of the people when he responds to Jay’s vehement claim of being Ugandan with a resigned, or perhaps just pragmatic, “Africa is for Africans. Black Africans.” These seemingly harsh words take on added meaning in Mississippi when Demetrius reacts with furious disbelief to Jay’s complaint that he and his family have struggled: “Struggle? Strug…? Look, I’m a black man born and raised in Mississippi; ain’t a damn thing you can tell me about struggle.” When Jay counters, asking “What do you know about my…,” Demetrius refuses to let him complete his question and instead points out the racial 47

Pashmina Murthy

privilege that South Asians exercise in Greenwood. The scene would have been just as forceful had it been set anywhere in the United States, but there is a different emotional charge it carries in the Deep South. Furthermore, it is the calling out of South Asians’ complicity in the Deep South’s racial hierarchy that now demands a reexamination of their history in Uganda. Jay is dumbstruck at Okelo’s and Demetrius’s remarks, making visible his lack of self-awareness. Gaurav Desai astutely observes that Jay’s greatest moral failure is his inability to recognize at quite an early stage that while Amin’s expulsion of the Asians was undeniably a painful experience and an egregious act of injustice, his worst victims … were the many black Ugandans who were killed during his regime. (212) Jay’s interaction with Demetrius repeats this failure. Whether he recognizes his complicity in the racio-economic hierarchies in Uganda and Mississippi is uncertain because it remains unarticulated, caught in the ellipses of his arrested speech. He returns to Kampala to attend the legal hearing for the return of his property, only to discover that Okelo – with whom he had hoped to reunite – died not long after the Lohas left. Okelo’s colleague at the school where he taught can only shake his head and say “Disappeared one day … They found his body.” The true horror of Okelo’s death cannot be uttered but neither, it appears, can it be fully confronted; Jay responds with a non-sequitur as he plaintively claims, “I wrote him so many letters,” and the narrative hurtles instead towards the dénouement. Mississippi Masala’s inability to unravel the thorniness of South Asian complicity feels like a missed opportunity. bell hooks and Anuradha Dingwaney have excoriated the film’s insufficient focus on the political and social structures in Uganda, as Okelo is sidelined to promote Jay “as a victim but more importantly as ‘innocent’”; they critique a similarly superficial treatment of the Deep South, likening it to Naipaul’s travels where he “acted as though a bit of lookie-loo tourism was all that was needed to convey the spirit of contemporary race relations in the United States” (43). Put differently, the film becomes yet another impression, unable to do more than hint at the buried layers of history. At the same time, there is hope that what Demetrius forces Jay to recognize of himself and his place in the world – the hypocrisy of his victimhood – will lead to something akin to restitution, even if it falls short of an admission of accountability. Once Jay learns about Okelo’s death, the feeling of being wronged gives way to long-repressed grief. He gives up his claim to his old property in Kampala and though he explains his decision in a letter to Kinnu with a clichéd “home is where the heart is, and my heart is with you,” there may be more at work here. Well before he was forced to leave Kampala, Jay had criticized Asian Ugandans for being left with only one of the five senses: “the sense of property.” Abandoning his claim might be seen as a tacit recognition of the racial privilege that South Asians exerted in Kampala and Greenwood alike, a reading that can be inferred only by reading across the film’s two Souths. Though the narrative structure emphasizes a chronological, vertical understanding of the Deep, whereby the prologue set in 1972 haunts the Lohas’ life in Greenwood, the sequence of scenes towards the conclusion requires us to read Jay’s changed perspective of Uganda as a direct effect of what has transpired in Mississippi. Critically, while the Deep South spurs Jay to reassess his claim, the Deep Global South is not restricted to examining the violent past. Instead, new possibilities for the present arise at the intersection of the two Souths, which the film explores via match cuts in the last scene. Jay’s disconsolate walk through a market takes a turn towards the hopeful – quite literally, too, as he turns near what appears to be a framed photograph of a young Yoweri Museveni – and he joins an 48

Deep Souths

appreciative crowd watching a young woman dance. He holds a child who had caressed his face, his mood lifting at the gaiety he sees around him, while the child’s father looks on smilingly. As the song continues to play during the end credits, the camera’s gaze returns to the young lovers who look ahead to a future outside of Greenwood. The film plays on that seductive combination of hope and naïveté by using a technique reminiscent of the dreamlike song sequences in popular Indian cinema: Mina and Demetrius – dressed in ethnic clothes with bandhini prints and kente cloth – frolic in an open field. Here history is transformed first into trauma and then into fantasy as South Asian and African pasts find a new intimacy in the Deep South. But the open space is actually a cotton field, which, as Vanita Reddy notes, “is a radically material landscape, carrying with it the specter of slave economies but also standing as the site of raw material and the sharing of black and Asian labor and capital” (257). Reddy sees in this moment a possibility for cross-racial endeavors of labor and capital in Mississippi that is not available in Uganda, while Urmila Seshagiri concludes from the symbolic setting that the lovers “are trapped in the same exploitative geography that dispossessed their parents and grandparents” (193). Thadious M. Davis strikes a more conciliatory note: “While there is no fairy-tale ending, the strategy of having Demetrius and Mina set off together defies the old racial taboos so staunchly in place in Mississippi and much of the South” (108). A different possibility emerges, however, when the match cuts are read against each other, one that suggests neither the flight into fantasy nor a neoliberal forgetting. When Jay returns to Kampala, his taxi driver cheerfully proclaims that “[e]verything is in ruins, but it is still heaven. The good soil of Uganda, it is still the same. Welcome back, bwana.” Far from being a disavowal, the driver’s appraisal takes stock of the weight of the past and balances it with an optimism for the future to come, a sentiment that can be extended to the scene at the marketplace and the lovers in Mississippi. The future is as unsettled as it was when the family first departed Uganda, but what surfaces at the crossroads of the Deep South and Global South – the confrontations, insights, and recognition that they yield – is a tentative hopefulness of Souths in transformation. The Deep Global South is thus also an ethical challenge and a promise that the real work of engaging those unresolved histories will occur.

Conclusion: Towards a Deep Global South “Deep” as an adjective has enjoyed prominence recently in the renewed attentiveness to layered histories, whether in Wai Chee Dimock’s discussion of “deep time” – which similarly does a reaching back and across – or the focus on “deep history.”6 Sophie White has strongly urged a retheorizing of the Deep South not in terms of geography but temporality and the longer arc of a pre-antebellum history. Considering the deep history of the Deep South would inevitably unsettle the meaningfulness and “myopia” of the Deep South as a fully known and bounded field (White 76). Boaventura de Sousa Santos has elaborated on the importance of deep sensory experiences, of “deep seeing” that is attentive to the “invisible” as well as the “unimaginable” and of “deep listening” that picks up on the “unintelligible” (2018, 172, 178). Here, “deep” returns to an active, ethical mode. I conclude as I began with the varied significations of “deep” because it is important to keep open its heterogeneity of meaning. An interrogation of the term qua modifier both complicates any easy legibility and creates the possibility for alternate meanings. There is a risk that the enduring association of the Deep South with its history of enslavement, racism, and violence can be carried over uncritically to the Global South, thereby reducing them to their shared traumas. But when we combine gazing down with looking across, we realize that the still-buried pasts and unsavory presents exist in tension with other meanings of “Deep.” My doubled perspective of “Deep” as down and across is doubled in another way: to look at the Deep 49

Pashmina Murthy

South from the Global South before gazing back to now see the Deep Global South. In many ways, this illuminates the work that is already happening in Global South studies, whose expansive disciplinary, scalar, and conceptual reach has generated new forms of methodological inquiry. The Deep Global South offers us a way to think through not only the metaphorical implications of Southness but also South–South relations, which are conditioned by their shared, but also separate, histories. Taking into account the tropological meanings of “Deep” – in its positive and negative implications – enriches the already complex understandings of the Global South.

Notes 1 A few texts that have been especially helpful to my understanding of the U.S. South-global South connections include Martyn Bone, Where the New World Is: Literature about the U.S. South at Global Scales. University of Georgia Press, 2018; the special issue on “Plantation Modernity” edited by Amy Clukey and Jeremy Wells in The Global South, vol. 10, no. 2, 2016; The American South and the Atlantic World, edited by Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A. Link, The University Press of Florida, 2013; and Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, edited by Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, Duke University Press, 2004. For a sample of the debates on NSS, see Michael Kreyling, “Toward ‘A New Southern Studies’,” South Central Review, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 2005, pp. 4–18; the forum “What’s New in Southern Studies – And Why Should We Care?” organized by Brian Ward (Journal of American Studies, vol. 48, no. 3, 2014, pp. 691–733), as well as Jon Smith’s and Ted Ownby’s responses to the forum (Journal of American Studies, vol. 49, no. 4, 2015, pp. 861–70, 871–78). 2 See Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press, 2018, pp. 12–13. 3 For a discussion of Naipaul’s travels in the South, see Scott Romine, The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction. Louisiana State University, 2008; Leigh Anne Duck, “Travel and Transference: V.S. Naipaul and the Plantation Past.” Look Away!: The U.S. South in New World Studies, pp. 150–70; Rob Nixon, “V. S. Naipaul: Postcolonial Mandarin.” Transition, no. 52, 1991, pp. 100–13. 4 Seth C. McKee, “Race and Subregional Persistence in a Changing South,” Southern Cultures, vol. 23, no. 2, Summer 2017, pp. 134–159. While the language of “rim/peripheral South” circulates to a lesser extent in U.S. public discourse, and though it is outside the scope of this chapter, it would be interesting to consider how differently the “rim” functions in the context of Asia-Pacific. For more on this, see the edited collection What is in a Rim?: Critical Perspectives on the Pacific Region Idea, edited by Arif Dirlik, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1998. 5 For an excellent discussion on Holland and the imperial and ideological underpinnings of such a venture, see Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature. Harvard University Press, 2010, especially pp. 241–49. 6 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton University Press, 2006); James C. Scott, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (Yale University Press, 2017); Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present, edited by Andrew Shryock and Daniel Lord Smail (University of California Press, 2011).

Works Cited Baker Jr., Houston A. and Dana D. Nelson. “Preface: Violence, the Body and ‘The South’.” American Literature, vol. 73, no. 2, June 2001, pp. 231–244. Bibler, Michael P. “Water Skis and Dirty Back Roads: Reorienting the Deep South.” South: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, Fall 2015, pp. 5–15. Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and Other Tales. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Cedric Watts, Oxford University Press, 2002. Dados, Nour and Raewyn Connell. “The Global South.” Contexts, vol. 11, no. 1, 2012, pp. 12–13. Davis, Thadious M. Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Region, & Literature. The University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

50

Deep Souths Desai, Gaurav. Commerce with the Universe: Africa, India, and the Afrasian Imagination. Columbia University Press, 2013. Desai, Jigna. Beyond Bollywood: The Cultural Politics of South Asian Diasporic Film. Routledge, 2003. de Sousa Santos, Boaventura. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke University Press, 2018. ———. “Epistemologies of the South and the Future.” From the European South, vol. 1, 2016, pp. 17–29. https://www​.fesjournal​.eu​/numeri​/archivi​-del​-futuro​-il​-postcoloniale​-litalia​-e​-il​-tempo​-a​-venire/​#epistemologies​-of​-the​-south​-and​-the​-future​_351. Accessed 18 November, 2020. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver, W. W. Norton and Company, 1999. Ebert, Roger. “Review of Mississippi Masala”, directed by Mira Nair. Ebert Digital LLC, 14 February, 1992, www​.rogerebert​.com​/reviews​/mississippi​-masala​-1992. Accessed 12 December, 2021. Hickey, Dennis and Kenneth C. Wylie. An Enchanting Darkness: The American Vision of Africa in the Twentieth Century. Michigan State University Press, 1993. hooks, bell and Anuradha Dingwaney. “Mississippi Masala.” Z Magazine, July–August 1992, pp. 41–43. López, Alfred J. “Introduction: The (Post)global South.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 1–11. Matz, Jesse. Lasting Impressions: The Legacies of Impressionism in Contemporary Culture. Columbia University Press, 2016. McKee, Kathryn and Annette Trefzer. “Preface: Global Contexts, Local Literatures: The New Southern Studies.” American Literature, vol. 78, no. 4, December 2006, pp. 677–690. Mehta, Binita. “Emigrants Twice Displaced: Race, Color, and Identity in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala.” Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality, edited by Deepika Bahri and Mary Vasudeva, Temple University Press, 1996, pp. 185–203. Mississippi Masala. Directed by Mira Nair, Samuel Goldwyn Company, 1991. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992. Naipaul, V. S. A Turn in the South. Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Peacock, James L. “The South and Grounded Globalism.” The American South in a Global World, edited by James L. Peacock, Harry L. Watson, and Carrie R. Matthews, The University of North Carolina Press, 2005, pp. 265–276. Reddy, Vanita. “Afro-Asian Intimacies and the Politics and Aesthetics of Cross-Racial Struggle in Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, October 2015, pp. 233–263. Ring, Natalie J. The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880–1930. The University of Georgia Press, 2012. Rothman, Adam. Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South. Harvard University Press, 2005. Seshagiri, Urmila. “At the Crossroads of Two Empires: Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala and the Limits of Hybridity.” Journal of Asian American Studies, vol. 6, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 177–198. Stuart, Andrea. “Mira Nair: A New Hybrid Cinema.” Women in Film: A Sight and Sound Reader, edited by Pam Cook and Philip Dodd, Temple University Press, 1993. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Toward the Global South: Concept or Chimera, Paradigm or Panacea?” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 1–19. White, Sophie. “Deep/South, Up/West.” South: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 48, no. 1, Fall 2015, pp. 74–77. Zinn, Howard. The Southern Mystique. Alfred A. Knopf, [1959] 1964.

51

5 SITUATING ENERGY HUMANITIES IN INDIA Labor and Gender in Narratives of Energy Systems Swaralipi Nandi In a recent announcement, the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy said that India has inched closer to its target of renewable energy: “At COP 21, as part of its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), India had committed to achieving 40% of its installed electricity capacity from non-fossil energy sources by 2030. The country has achieved this target in November 2021 itself”. It is welcome news no doubt. Environmental and more mundane concerns of the recent hike in petrol prices have led to pressing questions of our fossil fuel dependence and speculations about alternative energy resources. India is the world’s third-largest energy-consuming country, with its energy use having doubled since 2000, and 80% of demand still being met by coal, oil, and solid biomass. A steady move towards renewable energy is a definite scorer, but while the numbers may lead to a statistical euphoria, there are critical questions that remain about our energy use, energy production and distribution, its social and political implications, and most significantly, the local impact of such grand national, or even international, visions of alternative energy. In this chapter, I attempt to explore India’s energy scenario through some critical research questions:

i) What does a history of India’s energy regimes, especially the systems of fossil energy, entail? ii) How do we critically understand India’s present energy networks as socio-political structures of labor extraction? iii) How is energy labor represented in cultural texts of working-class realisms? I address these questions through the tropes of social and cultural ramifications of energy or, as Szeman and Boyer would put it, “the why and how of energy”, taking my cues from the fairly recent field of energy humanities but also by postcolonizing it. Echoing Jennifer Hamilton who argues that our work in the environmental humanities must invoke “the sweaty, material and embodied effort invested in making the crisis” and should invite “speculation as to what kinds of labours it will take to actively create a different future”, the primary focus of my inquiry is the condition of human labor in energy and the way cultural texts represent the all crucial but oft-neglected paradigm of energy labor along with energy systems. More than conclusive answers, I plan to offer a roadmap to the various avenues in the field and the critical questions we might seek in the context of energy through the lens of humanities or, more particularly, literary and cultural studies. 52

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-6

Situating Energy Humanities in India

Postcolonizing energy humanities The emerging field of energy humanities, primarily conceptualized by the likes of Imre Szeman, Dominic Boyer, and Stephanie LeMenager, contextualizes the history of modernity in the politics of accessibility, exploitation, and domination of energy resources. The primary focus of energy humanities is to interrogate the dominant narrative of modernity that embodies the expansion of rights and freedoms, the advent of scientific insights and technological innovations, and the ballooning of capitalist economies, holding these very different spheres of social life as “progress” in the context of “the massive expansion of energy use by human communities”. (Energy Humanities, 1) In spite of energy’s global relevance, energy humanities scholars often identify their focus with the energy questions of the Global North. Consequently, discussion of energy in the Global South would invoke different paradigms of energy modes and analysis. Contextualizing energy humanities in the Global South also entails a discursive shift from the consumptive paradigms of energy to an extractive analysis of the systemic violence of imperial forces followed by the state and corporate-sanctioned neoliberal regimes. Fossil fuel’s inroad to the developing nations follows a natural trajectory of the colonial era’s import of the fossil fuel regime to the colonies. Scholars like Crutzen and Davis assert the inextricable connection between the empire and fossil capitalism, whereby they date the Anthropocene beginning with Britain’s colonial ventures in the late eighteenth century. As Jeremy Davies asserts, in 1820, half of the world’s population came under the British empire, facilitating a “colonial hinterland” that impelled it toward mechanized and coal-fueled production (97). Subsequently, processes of extractivism and the conflict over natural resources on the “contact zones” would inform our energy consciousness more than reflections on how energy shapes the various freedoms of the “normal” and “modern societies” as is taken up by various Northern energy scholars. In Varieties of Environmentalism, Ramachandra Guha and Martinez-Aliers outline the polemic of the “empty belly environmentalism of the South” that is essentially different in focus from Northern environmental concerns. “The environmentalism of the poor”, they argue, is essentially hinged on social conflicts over land and other natural resources. Situating energy humanities in India thus not only entails taking into account the colonial history of the energy regimes of India, and their analysis as part of the colonial commodity networks of cotton, timber, opium, indigo, tea, etc., but also recognizing the essentially extractivist processes in continuum and a critical questioning of the human cost involved. Along with resource extraction, labor forms a fundamental component in understanding energy systems of the Global South. The fossil fuel regime, as Andreas Malm convincingly argues, is essentially built on the accessibility to exploitable labor, asserting that the transition to coal power from an earlier water power was spurred not by its relative cheapness but rather by the availability of cheap labor that eased transport. For Malm, the fossil fuel regime is intricately attuned to capitalism’s inherent characteristic of expropriation through waged labor, for “no piece of coal or drop of oil has yet turned itself into fuel, and no humans have yet engaged in systematic large-scale extraction of either to satisfy subsistence needs (Fossil Capital, 19). Labor and energy regimes are thus intricately connected. Malm assigns materiality to energy transitions as an integral part of the proletariat’s relation to the industrial capitalist system not only in Britain but also in the empire. Thus, Malm asserts: 53

Swaralipi Nandi

team power was explicitly conceived as a weapon to augment the power over the peripheries, haul in the products of all continents, dispatch manufactured goods in return, and ensure military superiority all along the way, in a sort of fossil-imperial metabolism that undergirded the post-1825 development of empire (Malm). Energy regimes in India are also built on existing local power systems that ensure a steady supply of precarious labor to the mines and sites of extraction, mostly from marginalized communities. The social dimension of energy in India thus must take into account the intricacies of energy labor whose precarity is entangled with complexities of caste, class, gender, and ethnicity-based marginalizations. One must however grapple with the problem of energy’s “invisibility” in culture before attempting any analysis. “For too long” Szeman contends, “energy has been treated as a largely neutral input into societies—a necessary element of social life, but not one that has any significant, defining impact on its shape, form and character” (285). Though Szeman credits postcolonial literature for engaging with the “lived” experience of global imperialist forces, asserting that postcolonial writers offer more visibility to energy systems since the peripheries witness the violence of extraction more evidently, a systematic discussion on energy has been lacking in postcolonial studies on India. The problem is not as much a lack of cultural texts to look for—for there are plenty that are left unexplored—but has more to do with what Neil Lazarus calls the limitedness of the field. Asserting that scholars of literary postcolonial studies have been working with a “woefully restricted and attenuated corpus of works”, Lazarus points out that “the same questions are being asked, the same methods, techniques, and conventions being used…about a remarkably small number of literary works”, “prioritising a certain, very specific and very restricted kind of reading” (422) mostly dealing with cultural issues of migrancy, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, and in-betweenness. Postcolonial study in energy humanities will need to ask more materialistic questions in sync with what Benita Parry proposes as a paradigm for postcolonial studies, i.e. “more historically grounded directions and greater discrimination in the enquiries of an ecumenical and proliferating field where the material impulses to colonialism, its appropriation of physical resources, exploitation of human labour and institutional repression” (3). This article seeks to explore the materialism of colonial ecologies, as what Jason W. Moore (2015) describes as the interrelation of the “joining the accumulation of capital, the pursuit of power, and the co-production of nature as an organic whole” (249) through a study of India’s energy ontologies in cultural texts. I attempt to situate energy humanities in India through three texts that perspectivize coal and petroleum systems through the female experience—proposing a critical paradigm of exploring them through the tropes of resource extractivism and its human cost in the various literary texts that remain unexplored.

Coal energies: Locating the human cost The scholarship in energy humanities in the West has often been dominated by what Christopher Jones calls “petro-myopia” or predominant attention given to petroleum over other energy forms, though coal has played a central role in fueling (literally) the capitalistic modernity globally for more than two centuries. Unlike petroleum, which is ubiquitous and yet invisible, coal and collieries feature as both a thematic presence as well as invoke a literary form in an oeuvre of social realist fiction of modernist continental, British, and American literature. One can thus, as Andreas Malm (2017) suggests, start with the texts that overtly speak about coal capitalism: Jules Verne’s 54

Situating Energy Humanities in India

The Child of the Cavern and Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley, as well as nonEuropean texts such as Anil Barve’s Akra Koti Gallon Pani (India) or Ba Jin’s Xue (China) (15). India’s foray into coal energy invokes a long history of commercial coal mining covering nearly 220 years starting from 1774 by M/s Sumner and Heatly of East India Company in the Raniganj Coalfield along the western bank of the river Damodar. As Kuntala Dutta-Lahiri asserts in Coal Nation, synced with the introduction of the steam locomotive, coal assumed a symbolic import of the European industrial economy and espoused modernist values of development. Dutt-Lahiri asserts the seminal role of coal in “fueling” the empire in the literal sense, for it facilitated the other commodity frontiers of the Raj: It was not surprising that coal mines were the most prominent amongst the various modern industrial enterprises established in India under colonial rule. Well after coal mining commenced, the first pound of tea from Indian plantations was brought to Calcutta in 1838; the first jute mill was established in 1873; and the first iron foundry began production in 1874. It is through coal mining that India internalised many of the modernist values and ideas that colonialism introduced (11–12) Essential to coal’s operations in the Raj was a colonial capitalistic venture that hinged on the exploitative extraction of both the indigenous environment and local labor mining labor. Coal mining ushered in one of the earliest private entrepreneurships during the Raj based on a tripartite extractive system of Indian entrepreneurs, tribal laborers, and the colonial government as its customer. Dutta-Lahiri evinces in her historical study how colonial coal mining embodied a capitalistic enterprise that reinforced the existing stratification between the upper caste bourgeoisie mine owners such as Dwarkanath Tagore and the Santal, and lower caste communities like Bauris as laborers. Texts on colonial extractivism are however sparse and unexplored, and often invisibilizes human labor. I briefly discuss two texts that take the plight of the coal mining laborers headon, albeit in different ways. What stands out in the two texts is the significant commonality of the gendered victim, with the trope of mining violence being played out against the lives of the women. Though exclusively a male realm, the mine and its disasters portray a heightened victimhood through the body of the women who embody the cultural import of the disaster. One of the early proponents of the Kallol Yug in Bengali literature, Shailajananda Mukhopadhyay, recreates the lives of the miners in his novels. Touted as a “yug” or era, the Kallol Yug refers to the Bengali literary movement in the 1930s ushered in by the literary magazines of Kallol, Pragati, Uttara, Kalikalam, Purbasha, and others. Spearheaded by young writers such as Budhhadeb Basu, Sudhindranath Dutta, Jivananda Das, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Premendra Mitra, and Achintyakumar Sengupta, and inspired by European literary traditions, the Kallol era literature was revolutionary in its spirit of rebellion, rejection of traditionalism, and commitment to socio-political consciousness. Primarily conceptualized as a post-Romantic, post-First World War, new-wave movement, and significantly influenced by Freudian theories of psychoanalysis, Marxist ideology, and the European realist writers, Kallol’s experimental writing invoked the margins of society in a way beyond Bibhutibhushan’s romantic pastoralism, Sharatchandra’s overt sentimentalism, or Tagore’s melancholic tragic resignation. As Achintakumar Sengupta said about the project: “Kallol came away from Rabindranath. It came away to the lowborn and forgotten masses. The word of the poor and the marginalized. In the coal mines, the filthy slums, the footpaths. Among the betrayed and the abandoned multitudes of humanity” (translation mine) (Achintyakumar Sengupta: Kallol Yug, 55

Swaralipi Nandi

p. 47). Simultaneously, the Kallol era writers also brought in themes of forbidden sexual desires and sexual awakening in fervent romanticism of the writings, as Gopikanatha Roychoudhury points out (Gopikanath Roychoudhury: Dui Biswayuddher Madhyakalin Bangla Kathasahitya, p. 177). Kallol era’s Bengali colliery fiction, popularized by Shailajananada Mukhopadhyay and Achintya Sengupta, takes up the form of social realist fiction to narrate the structural exploitation of the coal mine workers and offers a glimpse into their inner lives like never before. Among his other colliery novels, Mukhopadhyay’s short story “Koyla Kuthi” stands out for its unique focus on a female miner in the Raniganj mine. Bilasi is a Bauri—one of the Dalit castes of Bengal that were particularly prominent in the coal mining labor—who has eloped with the Santhal Nanku to the coal mine. The coal mine that offers a refuge of freedom and sexual liberty to the young couple in the beginning quickly turns into a place of moral decay. Nanku strays away from Bilasi for another woman, and Bilasi chooses another man in retaliation while pining for Nanku nonetheless. This story of human relationships is, however, overshadowed by the precarity of the mines and Bilasi’s gendered experience in it. Bilasi is heckled and bullied by all the men at the mine, irrespective of their status. Unlike Nanku and the other men, Bilasi remains an outsider to the mines—precluded out of mine labor and agency.1 Yet, when the tragedy of Nanku’s death strikes at the mine, the effect is felt most in Bilasi’s experience. In his study of frontier mining novels, Michael Niblett talks about the significance of two sites where the violence of extractivism is represented—“the image of the enervated or degraded human body—the labouring body on the brink of collapse or broken and disfigured ‘mangled’” and the toiling body of unpaid labor or the domestic drudgery of the housewife. In “Koyla Kuthi” too, the gendered subject of the extractive regime doubles up as the site for the mine’s violence, almost on a gothic scale. On hearing about Nanku’s disappearance, Bilasi makes a journey alone to the deepest recesses of the underworld, navigating the dark mines alone. It is interesting to note how the narrator (presumably male) objectively describes the mines vis-à-vis Bilasi’s intensely subjective perspectivization. The scene at the mines is described with a note of romantic lyricism in the narrator’s exposition of the story: A spell of rain has just washed the evening. The moon was peeping through the dark rain clouds strewn all over the evening sky. The sprouting mango leaves revealed snippets of the Santhal and Bauri coolies pulling the coal-laden wagons through the rail path on a moonlit night. The thumping sound of the unloading coal mingles with the rhythmic din of the tramline wagon, creating an unparalleled country music that travels far through the rain-washed winds of faraway fields. (1, translation mine) Such lyrical descriptions of the mining scene are countered by Bilasi’s solitary descent into the dark underbelly of the underground mine in search of Nanku. A thriving, lively Nanku is suddenly turned into a mangled body that is left to die. Mangled beyond recognition—“the left eye is disgorged; part of the left hand is missing” (15, translation mine)—Nanku’s distorted body offers a tragic reminder of the nightmarish dangers of the mine that are posed in the lives of the expendable laborers. It is important to note that labor exploitation in the mines would often reinscribe the social hierarchies of colonial society. British colonial powers sought to reinscribe upon the pre-colonial systems of hierarchy to ensure a more localized system of hegemony, whereby the mining labor would consist of the marginalized castes like the Bauris and tribal communities like the Santhals. Hailing from such peripheral communities, both Bilasi and Nanku are insignificant and disposable. Thus, Nanku’s body registers the double violence of both physical battering as 56

Situating Energy Humanities in India

well as the insignificance of anonymity. The sheer inconsequentiality of Nanku’s death emphasizes its tragedy—no one bothers to rescue the faceless, nameless dying miner trapped in the pits alone, except Bilasi’s desperate attempts for whom the tragedy is personal. Braving the fatality of the mines, Bilasi travels alone to the netherworlds to rescue her man. The mine that Bilasi encounters in her nightly descent is not only inaccessible but also gothic, with phantasmagoric elements at play. Souls of dead miners haunt the lightless tunnels, accounting for the numerous, unspoken lives lost—“some disembodied soul haunts the gigantic pillars for release”. Bilasi moves around like a specter too, moving in the caverns with Nanku’s corpse on her shoulder. In an elaborate descriptive passage, the story follows Bilasi’s frenzied movements in the mine as she looks for an escape with the corpse amidst a space that has claimed many lives: Nothing can be seen in the unmitigated darkness that lies ahead. Bilasi enters the black caverns for an escape route, yet no path can be seen in that pitch black air…So many people have died during mining, so many people are buried amidst the black rocks…their spirits are bewailing in every corner of the cavern tunnels (17) Haunted and eerie, the mines thus house ghosts that speak of the age-old saga of exploitation. Uncanny specters are a part of several other landscapes of colonial and postcolonial violence in Indian popular culture. Thus, the Lambi Dehar coal mines of Mussourie are said to be haunted by ghosts of miners who died coughing blood while the haunted villages of Yellandur and Benagram coal mines attest to coal mining violence that lives on. Memories of colonial violence live on in the hauntings of the neel kothis or indigo mansions in Champaran that recall the torture of the British indigo regime and in the ghosts of Darjeeling’s tea estates that testify British plantocracy, as well as in the hauntings of the abandoned DOW Industrial Complex that testify the horrors of Bhopal gas tragedy.2 Wandering around with Nanku’s corpse—“frenzied, hair opened and unclothed—her husband’s corpse on her shoulder” (17), Bilasi herself becomes a living specter testifying to the labor violence of the mines. The story ends with a gory death for both as the roof of the mine collapses, burying the lovers into death and oblivion. The violence of Nanku’s death is thus echoed only in the personal tragedy of his wife’s lament and her consequent death. The impact of environmental violence, as Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies note, is felt more intensely by the women. The woman’s body thus becomes the site where the violence is felt on a deeply personal note, while the outside world remains largely oblivious. Bilasi’s personal loss thus counters the invisibilization of Nanku’s body that not only registers the death but also focalizes its gravity. With Bilasi’s death in the mines, the story immortalizes one of the nameless, faceless people that perish in the mines in a perpetual trajectory of mining disasters. A more haunting tale of a mining disaster is told through Aji Pandey’s folk song “Chasnala mine”. An active member of Bengal’s communist movement, Pandey was a pioneer in the Bengali “gonosangeet” or mass song movement of the 1970s—a turbulent time in Bengal’s political history, characterized by mass movements, guerilla warfare, and state repression of the communist activists. “Gonosangeet” or mass songs are radical by nature and are connected to revolutionary people’s movements in Indian history. From the Tebhaga revolution to anti-colonial movements against the British, from anti-fascist movements to the Bangladesh War of Independence, mass songs have formed an integral part of the popular revolutionary culture of Bengal. Subsequently, mass songs have been composed on the oppression of the farmers by the zamindars and the working-class uprisings against the bourgeoisie. By the 1940s, “gonosangeet” was infused with a new cultural impetus from budding musicians such as Hemango Biswas, Salil Chowdhury, and Paresh 57

Swaralipi Nandi

Dhar. Often calling for a mass movement, these songs speak about hunger, poverty, and the blood and sweat of the laboring masses on the margins. These are songs of people’s resistance against the oppressor and embody the bold voices that protest against injustice and inequality. Pandey’s “Chasnala mine” is a powerful protest against the infamous Chasnala mine disaster that claimed over 300 lives. On 27 December 1975, an explosion in a coal mine in Chasnala near Dhanbad in the Indian state of Jharkhand was followed by flooding that killed around 375 miners. The accident stands out in its utter violence, with many miners trapped inside for days together while their families kept waiting at the entrance. As one of the victim’s wife recounts: “But there was no body, only the skeleton. The belt and battery lamp number were all that was left…This was how a large number of the dead were identified” (“Chasnala 40 years later”). Pandey’s song captures the nightmare of the deadly inundation but through the eyes of a female relative whose menfolk went missing. The song starts with a lament for the indefinite time that has passed, which points to the excruciatingly long wait that the family members had to endure before they received any news of the lost miners. Once the female narrator acknowledges the tragedy, the tragic tone of the song transforms into an endless lament. Thus, she goes on in a loop. It is interesting to note how Pandey’s song captures the impact of the catastrophe beyond its immediate effect. The female victim is not physically hurt, but her life bears the brunt of the disaster in the most intimate way. Like Mukhopadhyay, Pandey too augments the impact of the death of the nameless miners through individual tropes, the magnitude of each death haunting the surviving family members for whom the dead bodies are not mere numbers. For Pandey’s female mourner, the loss surmounts to a renunciation of all festivities, indicating a life of total abstinence from anything celebratory. Thus, she laments. The intensely personal effect of the catastrophe is indeed stifling, for the song captures the devastation as a disruption of the woman’s everyday reality. The female mourner’s lament also encompasses a universality of religions and festivals. She is the quintessential woman of the miner’s household, representing all the women of her kind irrespective of their caste, creed, and religion. This merger of the Hindu and Muslim identities—the confluence of Durga Puja and Muharram—suggests a greater class solidarity beyond the parochial divisions of religious groups and ethnic communities. In a place that is still rife with mutual tensions between the Hindus and the Muslims, Pandey’s song offers a unique solidarity of the working-class perspective, bringing to the fore the common violence and its far-reaching impact.

Petroleum and networks of petro-labor While the nineteenth-century dependence on coal energy, as Andreas Malm argues, was spurred by the potential to exploit labor in fossil capitalism, petroleum embodies amorphous networks of transnational capital that feed on rhizomatic structures of extraction, involving multinational companies, national governments, and local populations. Like coal, petroleum regimes are also fraught with power imbalances that invisibilize labor and the violence of extraction. Graeme Macdonald cogently observes: As soon as oil is struck, its site is internationalized by virtue of the multinational capital and expertise required (often American) to set up the extraction infrastructure and the labor force, and to enable its immediate plunge into the world market. (Macdonald 7) Oil systems operate in the form of petro-dollars, spawning an immense network of global labor migration in oil economies that are utterly deterritorialized and ubiquitous. The huge swathes 58

Situating Energy Humanities in India

of undocumented, unskilled laborers migrating from the margins of global economies to UAE, Oman, Kuwait, and other Gulf nations, and sustaining the extravagant megacities of the petroempires of the Gulf, testify to a system of utter exploitation, inhuman extraction, and human rights violation. A prominent feature of the petro-economy of the Gulf is the easy exploitability of labor. According to the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic Affairs (UNDESA) in 2019, there were 35 million international migrants in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, and Jordan and Lebanon. Carl Skutsch estimates that the total number of migrants in the Gulf states grew from 2 million to 5.5 million between 1975 and 1985, after the 1970s’ oil boom, and this phenomenal upsurge came with draconian labor systems such as the kafala that replicated conditions of trans-Atlantic slavery. An oppressive system that controls unskilled migrant workers from Africa and South Asia in the Arab states, the kafala system is an exploitative system that requires each worker to be sponsored by a citizen of the host country. That employer, also known as a kafeel, is responsible for the worker’s legal status and visa, and workers are excluded from citizenship rights, regulations of minimum wage, maximum working hours, vacation, and overtime. Explicit comparisons of the kafala system with slavery abound. Kurt Hauser calls it “a modern-day chattel slavery, whereby the employer effectively owns the worker”, while Human Rights Watch lists kafala under contemporary modes of slavery. While not all kafala workers are involved in oil rigging directly, the basis of the system is based on the energy regime of petroleum. The kafala workers constitute forgotten human actors slaving in the Gulf system of capitalism, essentially bred and sustained by the power of oil. The Gulf’s petro-economy thus invokes a petro-critical paradigm beyond petroleum’s commodity value and accounts for its conceptualization as an energy system of labor extraction. The existing scholarship on energy humanities seems inadequate to address petro-labor. Atabaki et al. in their significant collection Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil point out the erasure of labor in contemporary oil studies, asserting that the oil discourse has been dominated by cultural studies. Launching a vehement attack on the field of energy humanities, Ehsani comments that these petro-critics are most concerned with how systems of energy systems have “shaped public culture and the collective imaginaries of everyday life”, yet devote little interest in the people “who work, or have worked in oil and gas industry”. Ehsani criticizes cultural/literary critics like Stephanie LeMenager and historians like Christopher Jones along with Marxist scholars for ignoring “class relations” in the oil systems and for sidelining issues of “agency and experience of labor” in their investigation. Situating energy humanities in the Global South would entail a focus on this petro-labor as the human cost of the extractive energy system that thrives on a network of global capitalism that siphons cheap labor from the Global South. Situating energy humanities in the Global South also entails focusing on the few, but nevertheless, existing literary texts that stage the plight of the Gulf worker, especially the female migrant worker, trapped in a system of endless exploitation and erasure from public visibility. Mimicking the elusiveness of oil, this human workforce is largely invisible in both cultural and political imaginaries. Very few texts—barring maybe Amitav Ghosh’s Circle of Reason, which narrates the brief oil encounter of Alu in the mythic state of Al-Ghazira—address the lives of migrant workers, and fewer instances can be found about the female migrant worker in the cultural imaginary. A host of recent fiction—primarily built on the plight of the Malayalee workers in the Gulf—has made its presence felt in the literary scene. It includes Benyamin’s autobiography Aadujeevitham (translated as Goat Days), which poignantly narrates the story of an undocumented Indian migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. Other South-Asian Anglophone fiction focusing on migrant workers include Shyamlal Puri’s Dubai Dreams and Dubai on Wheels on the undocu59

Swaralipi Nandi

mented taxi drivers of Dubai; Nikhil Ramteke’s 365 Days narrating the dark underbelly of Dubai that lies beneath its ultra-modern urban shimmer; Mohanalaxmi Rajakumar’s Migrant Report presenting a motley band of migrants and their stories; Saud al-Sanaussi’s The Bamboo Trunk; and Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, which rose to global prominence following its Man Booker Prize. Priya Menon’s article “Kerala’s own Petrofiction” lists a host of other recent fiction, including the Malayalam poetry of Kattu Pattu, artists like S.A. Jameel, and travelogues like Muzafer Ahamed’s Camels in the Sky. Given the magnitude of Indian migration in the Gulf, these few pieces of literature offer an occasional, but poignant, reminder of the thousands of precarious, undocumented laborers that toil at the bottom of the oil systems. Migration narratives on female protagonists are rarer, and few narrate the multi-layered exploitation of oil economies. One remembers the desperate refugee, Karthamma, from Ghosh’s Circle of Reason, who undertakes the perilous journey to Al-Ghazira in her heavily pregnant state in the hope that her child will have “houses and cars and multi-storeyed buildings” (p. 177). When her labor starts midway, she fights and screams and resists it, demanding papers of citizenship rights to be conferred on her child. As a sexual laborer traveling to the Gulf with Madam Zindi, Karthamma’s Gulf dreams meet a quick disillusionment in the migrant realities of the oil state where she thrives in a brothel. While Zindi’s brothel offers an alternative female refuge for Karthamma, Kulfi, and others, they attest to the invisibilization of the gendered margins rendered vulnerable to sexual exploitation. A more haunting tale is told in the Malayam movie Gaddama, or Khadama, which documents the life of a female migrant worker in Saudi Arabia. Played by the veteran Kavya Madhavan, the protagonist Aswathi is a khaddama (translated as “housemaid”) who migrates to the UAE in search of jobs when her husband dies. She blends into a crowd of hijabs and niqabs as soon as she arrives, rendered anonymous by her sartorial appearance among the other multitudes of “ghost” workers in the Gulf. Soon her experience as a domestic helper turns into one of intense abuse—physical, emotional, and sexual—portrayed through disturbing visuals of both the young and the old men tormenting her alike. After a particularly harrowing experience of being brutally beaten up for helping another maid to escape, Ashwathi escapes in the middle of the night, wandering alone in the streets aimlessly. After a series of misadventures, she ends up in jail and is finally deported, thus her plight comes to an end. The film stages Ashwathi’s journeys through wide-angle shots of the landscape with the desolate desert spanning to the horizon. The vast expanses of sand are barren except for a couple of electric poles that stand as markers of modernity. Aswathi navigates the contrasting landscapes of modern highways and endless sand dunes, both of which exude a sense of hostility for the female protagonist. She is quite an anomaly—a sole female pedestrian navigating the streets alone in a state of alienation, severed from any possible affiliating networks of nationality, ethnicity, or gender. In a way, her stateless fluidity and

Figure 5.1 

60

Situating Energy Humanities in India

Figure 5.2 

flexible journey mimic the global flow of oil that spills beyond the geographical boundaries of the Gulf oil states. Oil is invisible in its physical form in the film—the absence of the physical markers of oil, in images of oil fields or pipelines, is striking. Yet oil is ubiquitous in the power structures that operate. The Arab employers and their Indian servants share a highly exploitative relationship—their power imbalance streaming from the immense socio-economic disparity that the oil state entails. Labor here is a commodity that does not operate on an agency of fair exchange and thereby is extracted inexhaustibly on unequal power relations among its citizens and the migrants that draw from the network of flowing petroleum. Symbolically, oil’s power is manifested in the menacing images of fast-moving cars that unsettle Aswathi. Cars in this movie offer a significant symbolic meaning of both imprisonment and imminent threat. Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson point out the symbolic import of automobiles as embodiments of freedom: “to be modern is to be mobile as never before. At the heart of this mobility is the culture of the automobile. In the West, the automobile has been imbricated as a normal and necessary tool for personal independence” (9) Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson assert that the association of the idea of automobiles with liberty is particularly narrativized in the context of women. The connections, they state “have been naturalized to such a degree that they are being upheld in twenty-first-century advertising campaigns as symbols of Western women’s equality and freedom”. In contrast, “non-Western women’s inability to access these products is upheld as evidence of women’s oppression” (9). The movie also highlights the trope of the automobile as the embodiment of female freedom, and its lack thereof as constricting. Aswathi’s lack of access to automobiles (and oil) certainly amplifies her vulnerability. In one of the early scenes, Aswathi travels with her employer to her new destination. The visage of Aswathi seated in the back seat of a claustrophobic car in a black burqa among two men not only offers a subtle statement of her vulnerability but is also a foreshadowing of the oppressive days to come. Cars assume a more menacing form in Aswathi’s elopement. Every approaching car on the deserted highway brings a flurry of panic moments for Aswathi who runs to hide out of sight until everything is clear. Similarly, Aswathi falls into the hands of two men in a truck who lock her up with the cattle as she cries desperately for help. It is interesting to note that vehicles driven by oil that facilitate Aswathi’s transnational travel by plane and her journey to the Arab household are never accessible to Aswathi’s own agency. She rides a car only when she is carried in it, and her own flight is a desperate attempt to run by foot. Gaddama thus reveals the stark imbalances of power in a fossil fuel system that marginalizes the gendered subaltern and portrays the deeply discriminatory networks of oil that operate in the Gulf and beyond. On the one hand, the prosperous oil economy facilitates a global network of transnational labor supply from the developing geographies of the Global South, but on the other hand, lack of access to oil spells out an intense imbalance of labor mobility. People like Aswathi can only be brought in, they cannot travel at will. 61

Swaralipi Nandi

Rethinking renewables The three texts thus reveal the stark imbalances in fossil energy systems. Several policies have been created with the aim of enabling India to have total renewable energy sources by 2030. Yet, situating energy humanities in the Global South would invoke the hermeneutics of suspicion in reading renewable energy resources as the magic elixir of all existing problems. Environmentally, solar parks have detrimental effects on microclimate and plant-soil processes, including productivity and decomposition. Renewable energy resources—just like fossil fuels—operate on the same grids of socio-political power that characterize any extractive system. While many of us are aware of the downside of India’s hydro-electric projects and their impact on indigenous communities— thanks to the visibility of Medha Patkar’s Narmada Bachao Andolan—many might be oblivious to the structural violence of wind and solar power. For example, the Charanka solar plant, built on a massive 5,384 acres and touted as Asia’s largest solar plant and India’s solution to reducing its carbon footprint, is built on the displacement of the pastoral Maldhari community, whose right to the common land has been unrecognized. Corporate-funded solar projects are thus built on the same logic of resource exploitation mapped on existing power imbalances in society, with the Adivasis, indigenous, and local communities being sacrificed for the macrocosm of energy reliance. The field of energy humanities in India is thus rich with several prospects for new and sustained inquiries. Studying cultural texts through the trope of India’s energy history could offer a nuanced understanding of India’s modernity and its future. It is imperative to understand the structures of energy in the past and present before envisioning an equitable and just future of energy, both for humans and the environment. To quote Wilson, Szeman, and Carlson again energy transition will therefore involve not only a change in the kinds of energy we use, but also a transition in the values and practices that have been shaped around our use of the vast amounts of energy provided by the fossil fuels. (MacDonald 4)

Notes 1 The Indian State assumed its traditional benevolent role through its commitment to the protection of women. The legislation tells us that women miners were perceived by the State as one group that needed to be “protected” from hazardous mining work. 2 Also see Arup K Chatterjee’s study of ghost stories in the context of the Indian railways https://scroll​.in​/ magazine​/862609​/haunted​-trains​-and​-railway​-stations​-have​-a​-long​-history​-in​-bengal​-and​-its​-literature.

Works Cited Atabaki, Touraj, Elisabetta Bini, and Kaveh Ehsani. Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Bereau, “India Meets Non-Fossil Fuel Target Much Ahead of 2030 Deadline.” Business Line, Hindu, 28 December 2021 https://www​.the​hind​ubus​inessline​.com​/news​/india​-meets​-target​-of​-producing​-over​-40​-of​ -installed​-power​-through​-non​-fossil​-fuels​-in​-2021​-against​-deadline​-of​-2030​/article38058235​.ece Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. University of California Press, 2016. Guha, Ramachandra and Juan Martinez-Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South. Earthscan Publications, 1997. Lahiri-Dutt, Kuntala. The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India. Taylor and Francis, 2016. Lazarus, Neil. “The Politics of Postcolonial Modernism.” Postcolonial Studies and Beyond, edited by Ania Loomba, Suvir Kaul, Matti Bunzl, and Antoinette Burton. Duke UP, 2005, pp. 422–438.

62

Situating Energy Humanities in India MacDonald, Graeme. “Containing Oil: The Pipeline in Petroculture.” Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by Sheena Wilson, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman, University of California Press, 2017, p. 37. Macdonald, Graeme. “Oil and World Literature.” American Book Review, vol. 33, no. 3, 2012, p. 7. Malm, Andreas. “The Origins of Fossil Capital: From Water to Steam in the British Cotton Industry*.” Historical Materialism, vol. 21, no. 1, 2013, pp. 15–68. Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016, p. 289. Malm, Andreas “‘This Is the Hell That I Have Heard of’: Some Dialectical Images in Fossil Fuel Fiction.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, vol. 53, no. 2, April 2017, pp. 121–141. Menon, Priya. “Kerala’s Own Petrofiction: Literary Interventions in Gulf Migration Studies.” 31 July 2020 http://ala​.keralascholars​.org​/issues​/23​/keralas​-own​-petrofiction/#:~​:text​=Kerala's%20O​wn%20​Petro​ficti​ on%3A​%20Li​terar​y%20I​nterv​entio​ns%20​in%20​Gulf%​20Mig​ratio​n%20S​tudie​s,-31​st%20​July%​20202​ 0&text=​Priya​%20Me​non%2​0writ​es%20​about​%20th​e,Ker​ala%2​0to%2​0the%​20Gul​f%20c​ountr​ies Moore, Jason W. “The Value of Everything? Work, Capital, and Historical Nature in the Capitalist WorldEcology.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center), vol. 37, no. 3–4 [Fernand Braudel Center, Research Foundation of State University of New York, Review (Fernand Braudel Center)], 2014, pp. 245–292. Niblett, Michael. 2020. World Literature and Ecology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Pandey, Prashanth. “Chasnala, 40 Years Later: Memories of a Flooded Mine Recede.” 22 January 2016 https://indianexpress​.com​/article​/india​/india​-news​-india​/chasnala​-40​-years​-later​-memories​-of​-a​-flooded​ -mine​-recede/ Skutsch, Carl, editor. Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities. Routledge, 2013, p. 586. Szeman, Imre and Dominic Boyer, editor. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Szeman, Imre. “Conjectures on World Energy Literature: Or, What Is Petroculture?” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 53, no. 3, 2017. Szeman, Imre. “Literature and Energy Futures.” PMLA, vol. 126, no. 2, 2011, p. 324. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?”AMnio, vol. 36, no. 8 (2007), pp. 614–621. Sengupta, Achintyakumar. Kallol Yug. M. C. Sarkar & Sons Pvt. Ltd., 1950. Wilson, Sheena, Adam Carlson, and Imre Szeman Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, edited by, University of California Press, 2017.

63

6 QUEER/CUIR IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH? Latin-American Dissidence and Gendersex Non-Conformity Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo Introduction Queerness—as a term—is in crisis in Latin America. Although the term has proven useful to name experiences and individuals related to sexual and gender diversity and non-conformity, in recent years, the term has been associated with neoliberal and monolithic connotations. The fact that contemporary scholars of sexual and gender diversity in Latin America are questioning the usefulness and accuracy of queerness in non-Anglo settings does not expunge the contributions of Global North queer theory and activism to Latin-American sexual and gender liberation. However, new forms of conceptualizing and theorizing this liberation are emerging in scholarly Latin-American contexts that, rather than trying to translate (and transculturate) queerness, opt for the reclamation of traditionally homophobic terms more familiar to us: bollera, joto, loca, puto, maricón, tortillera, marimacha, travesti,1 etc. Latin-American activists and scholars alike are asking: should we feel the same sense of identification with the Stonewall riots as someone from New York? Are we morally obligated to use Anglo terms to name our experiences of marginalization or violence, to find communities of solidarity, if they feel foreign? In this chapter, I argue that queer theory, and the associated English-language vocabulary of sexual and gender variance, have impacted the Global South lexis in ways that have furthered the political rights of people. Queerness is thus inextricably embedded into social movements in the Global South in general and Latin America in particular. However, I also parse its limitations and how activists and academics propose to outgrow it, thus creating terminologies of gender and sexual difference in service of decolonial epistemologies and community organization in Global South geographies. This chapter provides an introductory overview of the state of queerness in Latin America. It discusses how queerness intersects and fits in with decolonial thought and explores its possible futures and limitations. Finally, it provides an historical outline of sexual and gender diversity in Latin-American literature including contemporary texts reshaping the boundaries of genre and gender. The chapter argues that the key terms repeatedly emphasized in Latin-American theorization of sexual and gender diversity are not Anglo-centered ones. The reasons are that: 1) Anglo terms 64

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-7

Queer/Cuir in the Global South?

have become associated with epistemological hierarchies where the Global North is at the center and the Global South is the periphery where theories can be merely translated and applied—rather than altered or criticized; and 2) Anglo terms have too often been associated with global neoliberal cultural practices that strive for heteronormativity, normality, and to define the queer subject as an active participant in consumerism. Instead, this chapter shows how Latin-American scholars foreground dissidence and non-conformity rather than queerness or gayness. In other words, the chapter parses how sexual and gender diversity in Latin America is being theorized foremost as a political subjectivity, enacted by non-white bodies, breaking rules inherited from homophobic colonial pasts.

To queer or not to queer in Latin America? What is the place of queerness in scholarship and theory produced by and for the Global South? Can queerness, a reclaimed English-language slur with Germanic roots (meaning oblique and perverse),2 serve as an umbrella term to encompass all identities, communities, and experiences of sexual and gender transgression and diversity everywhere? In Latin America, the term “queer” irrupted into academia and mainstream thought in the 2000s as a neutral-to-positive alternative to the homophobic and transphobic bollera, joto, loca, puto, maricón, tortillera, marimacha, etc. Early on, Anglo terms such as gay, lesbian, and queer had a clearly positive effect. As Mexican writer Carlos Monsiváis argued in 2001, coming out of the closet using foreign terms no longer represented “an action tied to shamelessness and the cynicism of those who had nothing to lose, but rather is now an act which proclaims the legitimacy of difference” (Monsiváis 9).3 Queer theory (a term attributed to Teresa de Lauretis in 1990) in Latin America, per Héctor Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, is beneficial to the communities it names in that it “transgresses the traditional gender structure, identified as Catholic and patriarchal, and advances toward the paradise of freedom, where nonhegemonic desires finally enjoy legitimacy” (13). Further back, in 1987, Gloria Anzaldúa famously listed queerness as a cornerstone of the “new mestiza consciousness.” Necessary to survive and thrive in (post) colonial geographies and contexts of displacement and marginalization, Anzaldúa argued the “new mestiza” must develop a tolerance for ambiguity by adopting “new perspectives toward the darkskinned, women and queers” and even goes as far as contending that, “The mestizo and queer exist at this time and point on the evolutionary continuum for a purpose. We are a blending that proves that all blood is intricately woven together, and that we are spawned out of similar souls” (82, 85). Queerness as an umbrella term, an identity, a tool for community-building, and a methodological technology has been key for decolonizing work in the social sciences and humanities in Latin America. However, in recent years, queerness as a tool for activism, as well as in queer theory, has come under scrutiny and often vilified as a globalization of capitalist, neoliberal, and (neo)colonial epistemological dominants imposed by—usually well-meaning—Global North academics on ways of knowing and organizing in the Global South. Many Latin-American activists and scholars alike recognize the problem of queer, a “modern Western sex-gender system” (Domínguez-Ruvalcaba 14), that can erase complexity and nuance and erase ancestral (i.e. pre-colonial) systems of gender and sexuality that survived Christian-European heteronormative colonial suppression and violence. Susana López Penedo argues that a neoliberal ideology that cleanses class consciousness dangerously underlies queer theory: The Queer Theory of postmodernity has generated, in my opinion, a series of discourses that reflect, and likewise reinforce, the commonplaces of neoliberal ideology … The belief 65

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

in the end of ideologies and the disappearance of social classes, and the individualism that encourages the excessive attention to subjectivation processes, are some of the elements that are picked apart in Queer Theory, a discourse sometimes critical of these approaches, but that often confirms and legitimizes them. [la Teoría Queer hija de la posmodernidad, ha generado, a mi parecer, una serie de discursos que reflejan, y a la vez refuerzan, los lugares comunes de la ideología neoliberal … La creencia en el fin de las ideologías, y en la desaparición de las clases sociales y el individualismo que anima la atención excesiva a los procesos de subjetivación son algunos elementos que se desgranan en el trabajo de la Teoría Queer, un discurso a veces crítico con estos planteamientos, y a menudo confirmador y legitimador de los mismos]. (20) Other critics such as Javier Sáez, warn of the dangers of homogenizing queer liberation in global settings under “respectability politics,” which contend for the normalized integration of queer consumers into a heterocentric and capitalist market by criticizing and rejecting all sexual and political conducts that veer away from “the normal:” sadomasochism, cross-dressing, promiscuity, etc.4 Instead, monolithic queerness becomes synonymous with normal white, respectable, monogamous, gay men, “fascinated by fashion, eager to participate in the fundamental heterosexual institution: marriage” [fascinados por la moda y ansiosos por entrar en el paraíso de la institución heterosexual por antonomasia: el matrimonio] (Sáez 72). Sáez implies that by a parallel process of normalization of social behavior, gay respectability politics also homogenize discourses (72). To further problematize the issue of the suitability of queer theory in Latin-American social sciences, it is often the case that authors (such as Falconí, Castellanos, and Viteri) begin their comprehensive studies of gendersex diversity in Latin America by providing a history of the positive and negative impacts of Anglo terminology throughout 20 years of crowded academic debate. The result is a complex state of affairs, with confounding sentiments of, on the one hand, celebration of the incorporation of queerness into Latin-American studies since it enables one to “transgress both heteronormativity and homonormativity, expanding beyond binary understandings of sexuality,” but, on the other hand, has an “ethnocentric character [rooted] geo-historically in the North” (Falconí et al. 10). In this sense, queer could be considered an epistemic zero point, a “modern” term in Walter Mignolo’s recognition of epistemological hierarchies, where the knowledge produced in Europe and the United States has an enunciative privilege and “every way of knowing and sensing (feeling) that do not conform to the epistemology and aesthetics of zero point are cast behind in time and/or in the order of myth, legend folklore, local knowledge, and the like” (80). In giving explicit preference to the English term queer, we run the risk of placing puto, maricón, tortillera, and marimacha in the space of the premodern, pre-enlightened, and deny Latin-American communities the possibility of reclamation. Instead, from a decolonial standpoint, in the polycentric world, where knowledge about the politics of sexuality and gender are produced in all places and for all places, sexual liberation can happen in myriad ways and can thus prioritize the needs and rights of people not interested in assimilation into normalized heterosexual and hegemonic society (as consumers), on the one hand, or marriage (as monogamous, decorous subjects), on the other hand. Variance in language has powerful material consequences for marginalized communities, most often for those poorest and furthest from access to medical care—as Gomes Pereira explains in Queer in the Tropics. For example, Pereira cites the case of many travestis (a word that Pereira’s interviewees used to effectively self-identify) unable to access HIV/AIDS-related healthcare through Brazil’s Unified Health System in the late 1980s because of “health care providers’ preju66

Queer/Cuir in the Global South?

dices; their refusal to use patients preferred, ‘social’ names when attending to them; an unfamiliarity with the particular necessities of travestis, as well as mistreatment, acts of violence, and miscomprehension” (2). While Pereira is certainly not blaming queer theory (or terminology) for this disparity in healthcare access, he contends that societies invent forms of regulating and materializing sex for specific subjects—and if these “regulatory norms” demand to be repeated, cited, and reiterated constantly—twists and lapses in the process will still exist. These twists and lapses are most visible in the bodies that do not conform directly to the rules that regulate them, and that never adhere fully to the norms imposed on their materializations. (Pereira 3) And while some of the travestis that Pereira interviewed called themselves the “junk of the world” (20), Pereira also learned that “philosophies exist that are rooted in the Afro Brazilian religions with which these travestis interpret the world and their own corporal transformations,” philosophies that in turn enabled marginalized communities to develop “their own language and understanding of HIV, their own bodies as sites of desire and affliction, modes of persistence linked to communities of belonging, and a subtle practice of subversion in relation to institutions from which they are excluded” (Butler xiii). Because the precision of naming disproportionately affects the material conditions of marginalized communities, discussing the potency and possible limits of queer theory is especially urgent when its terms travel “to the tropics” (29). In this vein, Pereira phrases vital questions as follows: Are we facing another theory that moves from the center to the periphery (and that is bound to rewrite, in different colors, this center-periphery divide)? Does the persistence of the English-language term queer signal a geopolitics of knowledge in which certain people formulate theories to be applied by others? How, then, can we translate the expression “queer?”. In other words, how can we think queerly in the tropics? (29) Like Mignolo’s warning of colonial epistemological hierarchies, Pereira cautions against queerness in this context of modern ideological mobility. Rather than providing a clear-cut answer, Pereira plainly asks: does queer signal […] toward a geopolitic that decolonial thinking aims to oppose? […] Can queer positions of agency account for the forms chosen to express dissident bodies below the equator […] How do queer propositions of agency relate to chosen forms of expressing non-conforming bodies in the tropics? (Pereira 6–7) Though phrased as a question, Pereira does hide rhetorically the answer to his own inquiries in the clear absence of English terms in the second half of his questions. Careful readers will note that his questions are built rhetorically to feature the term queer at the beginning, as a symbolic starting point, but end with dissident bodies and non-conforming bodies when the gender and sexual difference makes its way to the tropics—which are lines that emblematically cross Latin America (and could serve as a sort of flag of the whole Global South): In Latin America, the Tropic of Cancer touches Mexico and The Bahamas; the Tropic of Capricorn touches Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, 67

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

and Brazil. Pereira’s rhetorical prowess implies how the term “queer,” when displaced, develops into a necessary dissidence and corporal materiality. Moreover, within the Global South, it would also be inaccurate to use “dissidence” and “non-conformity” monolithically, as if experiences of sexual and gender diversity in Brazil and India—or even within different neighborhoods of Rio or São Paulo—could be made to signify consistently in all geographies of the South. In Queer in the Tropics, mainly an ethnographic text, Pereira argues that it is not only that queer (merely) translated is insufficient to name the experiences of the people he interviewed, but it is indeed the entirety of the cultural, societal, and religious structures that cannot make room for queerness understood in its most Anglo iteration. First, because it is so foreign. Second, because the problem of translation transcends language and involves all cultural signifiers and behaviors, down to the most mundane. In the particular Brazilian context that Pereira studies, people in communities of gender and sexual difference are reported to prefer to inhabit the ideologies and physical spaces of affection and care that the term travesti enables than to be mistreated and marginalized by heteronormative, controlling, and normalizing governmental systems that, for example, call them “the AIDS dispositive” and “at-risk groups,” rather than their chosen names (2). Their own complex language-cultural system enables the following for travestis: The framework of Afro-Brazilian religion is a complex one that involves contact between different religious perspectives; characters who handle sophisticated, mythological forms of knowledge, and who construct a grammar of gender and sexuality that removes itself from compulsory heterosexuality; the technological reconstructions of bodies; as well as ritual performances centered on bodies and made up of a movement that evokes and produces these same bodies. This frame-work, as I have mentioned, allows a travesti who has already passed through all kinds of technological interventions to produce a feminine body, and to call herself by a feminine name. (38) To conclude this excursion into Pereira’s work, what his interviews with travestis demonstrate is that “queer” quickly becomes insufficient in geographies where dissidence and non-conformity (understood in local vocabularies) are necessary for community and survival.

Dissidence before queerness In my own experience of activism in English-speaking countries, I have heard advocates claim queerness precisely because they remember the term as an act of violence uttered by bullies and often accompanied by bullying and other forms of assault or exclusion. How then, could I be “queer” if the violence I experienced was magnified by joto, puto, and maricón? Queerness is not reclaimable for me because it is not meaningful in the first place. Before queerness as the organizing principle of sexual and gender dissidence ever traveled to Latin America, marginalized communities were already organizing, protesting, and rioting. Martín H. González Romero explains that in Mexico, the Movimiento de Liberación Homosexual [Homosexual Liberation Movement] (MLH) was already active in the 1960s, that by the mid 1980s, “travestismo started to be thought of as a spectacle for the consumption of an urban middle class” [el travestismo comenzaba a ser concebido como un espectáculo que podía ser objeto de consumo para una clase media urbana], and notes journalists of the mid 1980s would recommend travesti shows to the general public using the grammatically-feminine word “vestidas” [crossdressers] and, for the heterosexual public, “bugas” (3). González Romero thus reports on a logic of 68

Queer/Cuir in the Global South?

consumption contained in local vocabulary. Here the dissident bodies, using technologies of performativity, become commodities for “normal” society’s entertainment as long as they make the audience laugh and are contained within the Zona Rosa of Mexico City. González Romero further asserts that the MLH, which in 1978 associated with the Grupo Lambda de Liberación Homosexual and the lesbian association Oikabeth, forming the Coordinadora de Grupos Homosexuales, celebrated the “vestidas” because of their “heroism” and because “travestismo [is] an important component of masculine homosexual liberation” [el travestismo (es) un componente importante de la liberación homosexual masculina] (6). The term “homosexuality,” despite its clinical connotation in the present, here works as an umbrella term that included several forms of sexual and gender dissidence. Despite this, González Romero argues for the separate study of the history of travestismo, too often erased by gay histories that discuss it only as a footnote and which mirror, however unwittingly, the ways the study of Global North queerness merely footnotes other histories (often fetishizing pre-Columbian histories) of dissidence and non-conformity. In the search for Latin-American histories of non-conformity, recently renewed attention has been given to the “baile de los 41.” This was a scandalous event in which 41 (some sources say 42) mostly affluent men were arrested in a same-sex dance where many wore gowns “of the opposite sex” [del sexo contrario al suyo]—an action that was considered by one of the newspapers at the time “extremely disgusting” [sumo asqueroso]—and made to clean the streets of the city as a form of punishment and humiliation, in the best of cases (El Popular n.p.). Miguel Ángel Barrón Gavito explains that the event inspired a “corrido” and plenty of journalistic derision which included the words “maricones,” “afeminados,” and “jotitos,” evidencing the long legacy of these words in modern, independent Latin America and their persistent underlying homophobia. As an alternative to the “monolithic, unidimensional subject, always proud of his own coherence” [el sujeto monolítico, unidimensional, y siempre orgulloso de su coherencia consigo mismo] (Cornejo Polar 16), which is the representative of “colonial propriety” [pertinencia colonial] (Falconí, 2018 227), Diego Falconí proposes “decolonial improprieties” [impertinencias decoloniales], which “evidence situated positions that cannot separate the subjective position of theorization, and that are deeply tacit to assemble sex-dissident emancipations from/for Latin America” [evidencian posicionamientos situados que no pueden separar la posición subjetiva de la teorización, y que son profundamente tácitos para ensamblar emancipaciones sexo-disidentes desde/ para América Latina] (227). Much like Anzaldúa’s “new mestiza” in her own time, Falconí’s “improprieties” serve as a form of intersectional and prescriptive set of behaviors and decolonial policentric epistemological displacements that are aimed at creating both theory and social praxis by and for Latin Americans. I partially reproduce Falconí’s list here: “demand that the gay label not be a prerequisite for global coalition and interaction” (Cruz Malavé / Manalansan 4); rethink the Latin-American relation to gayness from a standpoint not of monogamy and conservatism … prevent certain universalist discourses from fragmenting the oppressed … establish more active dialogues with indigenous, feminist, and transfeminism postures … [and] distrust capitalism as the [necessary] condition for the exercise of a fulfilling sexuality. [“demandar que la etiqueta gay no sea un prerrequisito de coalición e interacción global” (Cruz Malavé / Manalansan 4); replantear la relación latinoamericana con lo gay no desde la monogamia y el conservadurismo … impedir que ciertos discursos universalistas fragmenten las opresiones … dialogar más activamente con posturas indígenas, feministas y transfeministas … [y] dudar que el capitalismo sea condición de ejercicio de una sexualidad plena.] (228–229) 69

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

To conclude this section, Parrini, Guerrero, and Pons suggest that abandoning the queer would be the queerest action in Latin America, and would lead to the theoretical independence that the Latin-American (and the Global South) scholarly and activist landscapes are in the process of building. To show the internal cohesion of their argument, I cite their case in full: Abandoning the queer would be properly queer because neither the word nor its incitements are a home, a residence, a little conceptual sovereignty. Abandoning is perhaps the founding act of that theoretical and political restlessness: abandoning the identity presuppositions of a sexual collective and displacing ourselves towards non-resolved spaces of emancipation or desire; renouncing the name to allow for a conceptual and affective proliferation; leave bodies with determined identities behind to instead access the promised corporalities brought by escapes, slips, lapses, and wanderings. Assume the unbearable weight of sexual, gender, racial, geopolitical and class (among others) subordinations in order to reconfigure grasps and closures. [Abandonar lo queer sería propiamente queer, porque ni la palabra ni sus incitaciones son un hogar, una residencia, una pequeña soberanía conceptual. Abandonar es quizás el acto fundante de esta inquietud teórica y política: abandonar los presupuestos identitarios de un colectivo sexual y desplazarse hacia espacios no resueltos de la emancipación o el deseo; renunciar al nombre para permitir una proliferación conceptual y afectiva; dejar los cuerpos resueltos de las identidades para adentrarse en las corporalidades prometidas de las fugas, los deslices, lo lapsus o las errancias. Asumir el peso agobiante de las subordinaciones sexuales, de género, raciales, geopolíticas y de clase (entre otras), para reconfigurar los asimientos y las clausuras.] (Parrini et al. 2) Queer in Latin America is in crisis, in the sense that through local transformations, it is in an exciting and empowering state of flux. Crisis is opportunity.

Sexual and gender dissidence in Latin-American literature This final section of the chapter explores how some key works of Latin-American gendersex dissidence use local vocabulary, often in Spanish, to express experiences, build community, and describe instances of practical non-conformity. Due to the brevity of the chapter, the voyage must be short and shallow, but it should provide a starting point in terms of the abandonment of “queer” and the suggestion of possible alternatives. I begin with Emilio Bejel’s Gay Cubal Nation (2001) as a point of reference to illustrate how a type of anthological taxonomy has been attempted on a large scale, and many opportunities for study in this vein still exist. Few Latin-American studies have been made of the breadth and scope of Gay Cuban Nation. Bejel argues for a flexible definition of “gay,” including works of the Cuban canon that had not, to that point, been widely read as references to a phantasm of sexual and gender non-conformity. He bases his reading, against the grain, on the “effeminate man” and the “manly woman,” who are both “excluded being[s] that participate (by exclusion) in defining the nation to which [they] do not belong” (2001 4). In a way, Latin-American non-conformists have always lived in letters but often pathologized and at the margins: in the 1800s, hated by criollo nationalists and peninsular colonialists alike, and in the 1900s, as we will see, making strides in visibility and liberation. An early example of a twentieth-century work of explicit Latin-American dissidence is Ecuadorian Pablo Palacio’s “A man kicked to death” [Un hombre muerto a puntapiés], originally 70

Queer/Cuir in the Global South?

published on April 26, 1926, in Hélice. The narrator tells of a story he reads in the local paper about the murder of Octavio Ramírez. Initially, the paper calls Ramírez a “vicious man” [vicioso], without much explanation of what “vice” means. It is possible to interpret that the readers at the time would be able to understand the euphemism without much context, yet the narrator assumes or performs ignorance of the meaning and seeks out the policemen who oversaw the case. The story becomes an obsession for the narrator precisely because of the lack of detail and the absence of a follow-up report. By means only of deductive reasoning, the narrator finds that Ramírez was a foreigner, that Ramírez’s vice was that “he had had since he was little a deviation of his instincts” [había tenido desde pequeño una desviación de sus instintos] (37) and that Ramírez had followed and made a pass at a 14-year-old boy and was subsequently murdered by that boy’s father, a construction worker, who called Ramírez “very dirty” [so sucio] and a “pícaro” as he kicked him to death (41). The narrator is an unusual character because of his unreliability. The story he tells is entirely in his own imagination, and no evidence supports it. While he initially attributes the crime to a man cheating on his wife, he quickly switches to this narrative, using especially baroque and poetic language to describe the worker’s killer instinct and the act of kicking a man to death. The words used to describe Ramírez are all euphemisms—Ramírez’s gendersex identity at this moment was unable to be articulated or uttered. The reaction of the narrator is uncanny, but it is not of disgust or antipathy, rather a morbid fascination. In 1976, Argentinian Manuel Puig published his famous novel-in-dialogue The Kiss of the Spider Woman [El Beso de la Mujer Araña] in Barcelona, where many studies about Latin-American sexual dissidence are published to this day. It was famously banned by the right-wing dictatorship of the 1970s in Argentina and adapted in the 1990s into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical. Like many of the studies cited in the previous section, Puig represented sexual/gender dissidence as analogous to social/revolutionary dissidence in the sexual coming-together of self-proclaimed “loca” Molina and idealist Valentín Arregui in prison (Puig 85). Much has been written of Puig’s masterpiece in terms of its structural complexity (Coddou), the visual language of cinema (Garrido Domínguez), its camp and kitsch aesthetics (Neyret), and the link between sexual non-conformity and revolution (Balderson). What I wish to point out in this crowded scholarly scape is that Puig defends sexual dissidence not only in his representation of possible affection and tenderness within the homo-social (and heterotopic) space of prison but clinically too in the abundance of footnotes that cite countercultural and respected psychoanalytical sources such as Freud, Marcuse, Fenichel, Reich, West, Gibbons, Brown, Unwin, etc. Puig thus shows how the incorporation of Global North theories more lenient of homosexuality were key in the 1970s to forms of liberation from oppressive laws and the cruel criminalization of dissidence already illustrated in this chapter (El baile de los 41, Palacio’s short story, Puig’s novel, and below, Arenas’s autobiography). No outline of Latin-American gendersex-dissident fiction, however brief, would be complete without mention of Mexican Luis Zapata’s The Vampire of Colonia Roma [El vampiro de la colonia Roma] (1979). Like Puig’s, Zapata’s novel has received abundant scholarly attention, including perceptive essays on terminology and identity (Laguarda) and the local-marginal vocabulary of sex work (Ruiz). I wish to foreground the use of a Hispanization of “gay” as a term that brings people together, especially in the urban space of Mexico City’s neighborhoods. at that time not only the city fascinated me but also the people the atmosphere people understand each other it was very curious because everyone was friends with everyone I mean everyone knew everyone and everyone uh protected each other helped each other it was like a great gay brotherhood ha gay brotherhood […] back then everyone had the impression of living in a free country, right? 71

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo

[en aquella época no nomás la ciudad me fascinaba     también la gente     la gente de ambiente     se entiende          era muy curioso porque todo el mundo era cuate de todo el mundo          o sea     todos conocían a todos y todos     este     se protegían     se ayudaban          era como una gran hermandad gaya          je     hermandad   gaya     […]    entonces todo el mundo tenía la impresión de vivir en un país libre ¿no?] (original punctuation, Zapata 208) Towards the end of the novel, sex worker Adonis García imagines a community of friends under the gay umbrella term (translated with the feminine “a” to qualify the grammatically-feminine noun brotherhood), although here, as in the rest of the novel, the spaces of friendship are exclusively masculine, and so gay takes on that exclusionary meaning that too often persists in the present. Two years after the publication of El vampiro in 1981, Argentinian Sylvia Molloy published En breve cárcel, a meta-narrative novel about the act of writing oneself as character in what Elena Castro terms a “triple subversion” of the “masculine world which had appropriated for centuries the literary task” [el mundo masculine que se había apropiado durante siglos de la tarea literaria] (Castro 12). The triple subversion of the novel is that the literary subject is constituted as “Woman, Lesbian, and Writer” [Mujer, Lesbiana y Escritora] (capitalization in original, Castro 12). The nameless narrator is a fragmented subject who in the act of seeing and writing herself, becomes whole—importantly, not as someone’s mother, sister, or any other social function—and much less as a body-object—but rather as an active subject who has the agency of constructing herself into the page. Cuban Reinaldo Arenas’s autobiography Before Night Falls [Antes que anochezca] (1992) takes sexual dissidence as a form of political resistance to a powerful extreme as he uses his own story, and his own sexual promiscuity and emancipation, as a means to further the liberation of people like himself. Although devastating in the end due to Arenas’s health decline because of HIV-AIDS, and his eventual suicide, Arenas ends his suicide note (and opens his autobiography) with the phrase “Cuba will be free. I already am” [Cuba será libre. Yo ya lo soy] (Arenas 343). Sexual non-conformity as the path to liberation takes here the ultimate form, where a man’s voracious sexual appetite shakes the heteronormative grounds upon which a whole country is built. To return to Bejel, he calls the text a furious clash between homosexual desire and political power: In this text homosexual desire and political power furiously intertwine in a textuality whose creativity is nurtured precisely by its paradoxes and the power vacuum on which the work glides. In it, forces clash, which go beyond (or are closer to) the rebellion of a homosexual who dedicates his literary production to take indignant revenge on a political system that discriminated and besieged him. To see it exclusively in these terms would be to reduce Arenas’s work to a mere example of discourse produced by a soldier of the cold war. [En este texto se entrelazan con furia el deseo homosexual y el poder político dentro de una textualidad cuya creatividad se nutre precisamente de sus paradojas y del vació de autoridad en el que se desliza dicha obra. En ésta se enfrentan fuerzas que van mucho más allá (o más acá) de la rebeldía de un homosexual que dedica su producción literaria a vengarse, con indignación, de un sistema político que lo discriminó y asedió. Verlo exclusivamente de esta manera sería reducir la obra de Arenas a un mero ejemplo de discurso producido por un soldado de la guerra fría.] (Bejel 1996, 29) 72

Queer/Cuir in the Global South?

However political, it must be noted, as I argued in Children of Globalization, that Arenas frames dissident sexual desire in the strictest of heteronormative terms, where “birds” [pájaros] like himself—“a complex identity marker that performs gender-bending and necessarily implies madness”—(Quintana-Vallejo 102), desire “Bugarrones” or “Machos,” who perform the active, penetrative, role in sexual intercourse (Arenas 133). In Miami, where these strict social and sexual roles do not exist, Arenas finds sex boring, almost completely de-eroticized. To finish in the twenty-first century, a promisingly crowded literary ecology of sexual and gender dissidence has emerged across Latin America, including diasporic communities in the United States. One such case is Chilean Iván Monalisa Ojeda’s Las biuty queens (2018), a novel built on short vignettes of 40 years of experiences of trans sex-worker Monalisa and her close community of Latinas in New York City. A thoroughly hybrid text, written mostly in Spanish but full of English-language vocabulary and grammar, in which the autodiegetic narrator alternates between masculine and feminine pronouns, between Iván and Monalisa, the identities of Monalisa’s community are in a constant state of flux and move between taxonomies with ease. From locas to travestis, from transexuals to crossdressers, maricones, biuty queens, gay, trans, and, at the very end, “a coven of multicolor witches” [un aquelarre de brujas multicolores] (173), the characters of Monalisa’s stories are comfortable inhabiting flexibility; their desires twist and turn while their affections remain constant in a loving sorority. Las biuty queens presents new possibilities of being-in-flux/becoming-in-flux, which in turn needs a malleable vocabulary to bring subjects of radical dissidence into existence. As Émile Benveniste argued in his landmark work Problèmes de linguistique générale, language is the only means that we as human beings have, to constitute ourselves as subjects (180). In Latin America, as in the Global South, “queerness” has proven a tool for liberation, a name to bring together and destigmatize, to name affection, without homophobia, and learn how other dissident and non-conforming subjects live elsewhere, in geographies beyond the tropics that some of us can only access in our imagination. However, “queer” has grown insufficient for many of us who seek to name our experiences, desires, communities, and affections in the languages that created us as subjects, to remember the violence that made us and, sometimes, reclaim it for own empowerment. Sexual and gender dissidence and non-conformity seem to be in the process of seeking company in intersectionality, decoloniality, and anti-racism. And, as the Latin-American literary ecology is blooming in dissidence, so are the possibilities of naming beyond “queer.”

Notes 1 “A form of self-designation used by people assigned male at birth and who engage in different levels of corporal transformations so as to construct a more feminine form of corporal presentation” (Gomes Pereira 2). 2 For a full etymology of “queer,” see Sedgwick, E. K. Tendencies, 1993. 3 All translations from Spanish in this chapter are mine. 4 I have kept the term “queer” in this sentence to avoid confusion between terms. However, it must be noted that rather than “queer,” Sáez uses “gay” as an umbrella term. The use of the term “gay” to encompass all forms of sexual and gender diversity (i.e. lesbian, trans, intersex, agender, etc.) was common in early2000 texts written in Spanish. For further discussion of the terms “queer” and “gay” used in Spanish language, please see Viteri et al., 2011 and Viteri, 2008.

Works Cited Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera. Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Balderston, Daniel. “Sexuality and Revolution: On the Footnotes to El beso de la mujer araña.” Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America. Durham: Duke UP, 2003, pp. 216–232.

73

Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo Barrón Gavito, Miguel Ángel. “El baile de los 41: La representación de lo afeminado en la prensa porfiriana.” Historia y Grafía, UIA, no. 34, 2010, pp. 48–76. Bejel, Emilio. “Antes Que Anochezca: Autobiografía De Un Disidente Cubano Homosexual.” Hispamérica, vol. 25, no. 74, 1996, pp. 29–45. JSTOR, www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/20539913. Bejel, Emilio. Gay Cuban Nation. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2001. Benveniste, Emile. Problemas de lingüística general. Trans. Juan Almela. Mexico: Siglo XIX, 1971. Butler, Judith. “Experiencing Other Concepts.” Queer in the Tropics: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South. Pedro Paulo Gomes Pereira. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2019, pp. xiii–xv. Castro, Elena. “Identidad lésbica y sujeto femenino: El papel de la escritura en En breve cárcel de Sylvia Molloy.” Letras femeninas, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 2000, pp. 11–26. Coddou, Marcelo. “Complejidad estructural de El beso de la mujer araña, de Manuel Puig.” Inti, vol. 7, 1978, pp. 15–27. Cornejo Polar, Antonio. Escribir en el aire. Ensayos sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural de las literaturas andinas. Lima: CELACP/Latinoamericana, 2003. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo and Martin G. Manalansan. “Introduction: Dissident Sexualities/ Alternative Globalisms.” Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo and Martin G. Manalansan, Eds. New York: New York UP, 1992, pp. 1–12. de Lauretis, Teresa. “Teoría queer: sexualidades lesbiana y gay.” Florilegio de deseos. Nuevos enfoques, estudios y escenarios de la disidencia sexual y genérica. Mauricio List and Alberto Teutle, Eds. Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and Ediciones Eón, 2010, pp. 21–47. Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, Héctor. Translating the Queer: Body Politics and Transnational Conversations. London: Zed Books, 2016. El Popular. “42  hombres aprendidos, unos vestidos de mujeres.” El Popular [Mexico], no. 1764, 20 Nov. 1901, n.p. Falconí, Diego. Inflexión Marica: Escrituras del descalabro gay en América Latina. Barcelona: Egales, 2018. Falconí, Diego, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Viteri. Resentir lo queer en América Latina: Diálogos desde/con el Sur. Barcelona: Egales, 2014. Garrido Domínguez, Antonio. “Manuel Puig: Cine y literatura en El beso de la mujer araña.” Anales de literatura hispanoamericana. vol. 29. Madrid: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 2000. Gomes Pereira, Pedro Paulo. Queer in the Tropics: Gender and Sexuality in the Global South. Cham: Springer, 2019. González Romero, M. H. “Vestidas Para Marchar. Travestismo, Identidad Y Protesta En Los Primeros años Del Movimiento De Liberación Homosexual En México, 1978–1984.” Revista Interdisciplinaria De Estudios De Género De El Colegio De México, vol. 7, no. 1, July 2021, pp. 1–34, doi:10.24201/reg.v7i1.582. Laguarda, Rodrigo. “El vampiro de la colonia Roma: Literatura e identidad gay en México.” Takwá, 2007, pp. 11–12. López Penedo, Susana. El Laberinto queer: La identidad en tiempos de neoliberalismo. Barcelona: Egales, 2008. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Molloy, Sylvia. En breve cárcel. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1981. Monsiváis, Carlos. Una exposición, varias exposiciones, un tiempo de inauguraciones. Mexico: Difusión Cultural UNAM and Museo Universitario del Chopo, 2001. Neyret, Juan Pablo. “Entre acción y actuación: La politización del kitsch en El beso de la mujer araña de Manuel Puig y Tengo miedo torero de Pedro Lemebel.” Espéculo. Revista de estudios literarios, vol. 36, 2007, n.p. Ojeda, Iván Monalisa. Las biuty queens. Santiago de Chile: Alfaguara, 2018. Palacio, Pablo. Un hombre muerto a puntapiés. Colección Literatura y Justicia. Quito: Consejo de la judicatura, 2013. Parrini, R., S. F. Guerrero Mc Manus, and A. Pons, Eds. “Introducción.” Revista Interdisciplinaria De Estudios De Género De El Colegio De México, vol. 7, no. 1, July 2021, pp. 1–9. https://estudiosdegenero​ .colmex​.mx​/index​.php​/eg​/article​/view​/850. Puig, Manuel. El beso de la mujer araña. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1977. Quintana-Vallejo, Ricardo. Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States. London: Routledge, 2021. Ruiz, Bladimir. “Prostitución y homosexualidad: interpelaciones desde el margen en El vampiro de la colonia Roma de Luis Zapata.” Revista Iberoamericana, vol. 65, no. 187, 1999, pp. 327–339.

74

Queer/Cuir in the Global South? Sáez, Javier. “El banquete uniqueersitario: discusiones sobre el s(ab)er queer.” Teoría queer: Políticas Bolelras, Maricas, Trans, Mestizas. David Córdoba, Javier Sáez, and Paco Vidarte, Eds. Barcelona: Egales, 2005, pp. 67–76. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Viteri, María Amelia. “Queer no me da: Traduciendo fronteras sexuales y raciales en San Salvador y Washington DC” Estudios sobre sexualidades en América Latina. Kathya Araujo y Mercedes Prieto, Eds. Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, 2008, pp. 91–108. Viteri, María Amelia, Fernando Serano, and Salvador Vidal-Ortiz. “¿Cómo se piensa lo ‘queer’ en América Latina?” Íconos. Revista de Ciencias Sociales, vol. 15, no. 39, 2011, pp. 47–60, doi: https://doi​.org​/10​ .17141​/iconos​.39​.2011​.742. Zapata, Luis. El vampiro de la colonia Roma. México: Grijalbo, 1979.

75

7 RESONANCES OF RACE IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH AND THE DECOLONIAL TURN1 Juan G. Ramos This study examines the points of contact between the Global South and the decolonial turn by focusing particularly on the privileged position that race occupies in the organizational logic that grounds both fields of study. The rubric of the Global South has become a term that aims to name postnational forms of organizing networks of relations, collaboration, and solidarity that emerge as a response to global forms of capitalism that subjugate and afflict vast sectors of the globe. These geocultural areas usually appear under the term the Global South due to their shared history of colonization and for being subjected to forms of domination through war, racialization, economic plundering, and debt, among other mechanisms of subjection. As Anne Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South demonstrates, race played a key role in the deterritorialized coalition-building efforts and forms of anti-racist and anticolonial struggles taking place in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Conversely, in what is now known as the decolonial turn, a field of study that has now over two decades of existence, race has always been an integral part of the mechanisms of domination under what Anibal Quijano termed “the coloniality of power.” For Quijano and other decolonial scholars (Walter Mignolo, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, among others), the creation of racial categories, which harkens back to the sistema de castas, and the imposition of racial ideology served to legitimize a hierarchy of power that led Europeans (now part of the Global North) to subjugate native populations and enslave African with the aim of expanding European empires. At the core of this study is a closer examination of a key concept that questions specific formations of race, namely the idea of “whiteness” (blanquitud). For Bolívar Echeverría, “whiteness” (blanquitud) names a homogenizing identity that describes the totalizing force of capitalism, a form of modernity that aims to become widespread on a global scale. Echeverría’s concept will be situated in the context of debates emerging from both the Global South and the decolonial turn to underscore resonances of race in two literary texts emerging from South America in the early decades of the twentieth century. Following Wai Chee Dimock’s theorization of resonance, in this article, I tease out how race appears and resonates across time in La vorágine [The Vortex] (1924) by Colombian author José Eustasio Rivera (1888–1928), and in Los monos enloquecidos [“The Mad Monkeys”] (1951) by Ecuadorian fiction writer José de la Cuadra (1903–1941). In so doing, these two novels illustrate specific racial configurations in South America, while bringing into dialogue the Global South and the decolonial turn through their investment in questioning race. 76

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-8

Resonances of Race in the Global South

On parallel tracks: The Global South and the decolonial turn As two frameworks to understand global dynamics of power which are concretely linked to humanistic inquiry and the social sciences, the Global South and modernity/coloniality/decoloniality emerged toward the end of the 1990s and have gained momentum in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. The theoretical conceptualization of the Global South began to take shape predominantly in academic institutions of the Global North, whereas the modernity/coloniality/ decoloniality triad began in universities in Latin America, and soon became prominent in universities in the Global North, but has also found echoes in locations that might be understood as souths within the Global North. Both fields emerged with a common attentiveness to the shortcomings of postcolonial theory, while building upon some of its interventions. The emergence of the Global South as a critical term has different temporal locations. As one scholar has noted, the term Global South emerges somewhere between the Brandt Commission’s report North-South: A Programme for Survival (1980) and the South Commission’s The Challenge to the South (1990) (West-Pavlov 5). Produced by the Independent Commission on International Development Issues or otherwise known for its shortened identification with the commission’s chairman Willy Brandt, the North-South report reproduces a binary organizational logic of the world centered on economic development with terms such as developed and underdeveloped. The report aims to correct global disparities through proposals attentive to international finance, trade, and monetary reform, but always “underlining the growing global interdependence both from a political and an economic point of view” (Gilbert 455, my translation).2 The South Commission’s The Challenge to the South, on the other hand, aimed to center the economic and political demands of nations from the perspective of what is today the Global South. The report articulates the South as an alternative to the Third World. It seeks to redress the dominant narrative of the time: While most of the people of the North are affluent, most of the people of the South are poor; while the economies of the North are generally strong and resilient, those of the South are mostly weak and defenceless; while the countries in the North are, by and large, in control of their destinies, those of the South are very vulnerable to external factors lacking in the functional sovereignty. (The South Commission 1) The report writers, many of whom were political figures in their respective countries, saw the economic, political, cultural, and social differences of each country as strengths that could generate coalitions in what today we understand as South–South orientations and relations. Since the 1990s, the formation of the Global South has continued having a grounding in political economy and finance as a way to contest “Euro-American hegemony” or become an alternative to it (WestPavlov 5). If the Global South has made become a theoretical framework in fields as diverse as environmental studies, law, economics, or political science, it has also become an important way to approach literary and cultural studies from a distinctly comparative perspective.3 Its cross-over into literary and cultural studies, particularly in the United States, as noted by West-Pavlov, has its points of origin with the creation of The Global South journal in 2007 and the MLA forum focusing on the Global South since 2015 (5). To this, we can add a growing number of scholarly books that engage this critical framework to trace either alternative lineages or edited volumes that offer different paths to illustrate the term’s potential from different parts of the Global South with an eye toward literary and cultural production.4 77

Juan G. Ramos

In his introduction to the inaugural issue of The Global South journal, Alfred J. Lopez notes the major differences between the Global South and postcolonial studies by arguing that [w]hat defines the global South is the recognition by peoples across the planet that globalization’s promised have not materialized, that it has failed as a global master narrative. The global South also marks, even celebrates, the mutual recognition among the world’s subalterns of their shared condition at the margins of the brave new neoliberal world of globalization. (Lopez 3) If the original framing of the intentions behind The Global South journal was rooted in discourses around globalization, by the spring of 2011, this same journal published a special issue entitled “The Global South and World/Disorder,” co-edited by Caroline Levander and Walter D. Mingolo. This special issue directly brought into the conversation the points of contact between the Global South and decoloniality and brought together some scholars (Pedro Lasch, Marina Gržinić, Madina Tlostanova, and José David Saldívar, to name a few) whose scholarship has built upon decolonial theory and expanded its geographical reach from a distinct theoretical framework that emerged from the Americas to parts of what is considered the south of the Global North (e.g. the Balkans, the Caucasus, or hemispheric connections between the US South and Latin America). As Levander and Mignolo put it, [i]n a nutshell, the “Global South” (like democracy, development, and many other concepts) is now the place of struggles between, on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity and modernization together with the logic of coloniality and domination, and, on the other hand, the struggle for independent thought and decolonial freedom. (Levander and Mignolo 4) As such, then, the Global South and decoloniality can trace their common matrix to the discourses of modernity, modernization, development, domination, colonialism, and coloniality, while offering alternative paths to challenge such dominant discourses traditionally projected from the Global North onto the Global South. On a parallel track to the Global South, decoloniality also responds to passé framings of concrete parts of the world as either Third World, dependent, or underdeveloped. Decoloniality has its grounding in what was known as the modernity/coloniality research program. For Arturo Escobar, a possible genealogy that serves as the building blocks would include debates in Latin American philosophy and social science around notions of liberation philosophy and autonomous social science (e.g. Enrique Dussel, Rodolfo Kusch, Orlando Fals Borda, Pablo Gonzales Casanova, Darcy Ribeiro); dependency theory; the debates on Latin American modernity and postmodernity in the 1980s, followed by discussions on hybridity in anthropology, communications and cultural studies in the 1990s; and, in the United States, the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. The modernity/coloniality group certainly finds inspiration in a number of sources, from European and North American critical theories of modernity and postmodernity to South Asian subaltern studies, Chicana feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and African philosophy; many of its members operate within a modified world systems perspective. (“Words and Knowledges Otherwise” 179–180) 78

Resonances of Race in the Global South

The founding perspectives of modernity/coloniality were vast and broad but were also attentive to different intellectual traditions that were at times at odds with each other, whereas other times they offered complementary perspectives to problems dealing with various forms of domination. Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano coined the term coloniality and later the concept of coloniality of power to name the various forms of control and subjugation that continue beyond the formal end of colonization and that continue shaping allegedly postcolonial societies.5 This early iteration of the modernity/coloniality working group had its origins of intellectual exchange in Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Mexico, and the United States. Its reach has extended to most countries in the Americas. As a critical term, decoloniality aims to be an option, an alternative mode of thinking, undoing, and challenging the weight of modernity and coloniality as modernity’s underside by privileging both discursive and experiential registers of peoples from the Global South.6 For Nelson Maldonado-Torres, who places the emergence of the decolonial turn around 2005, the decolonial turn builds upon work by Mignolo, María Lugones, Catherine Walsh, Chela Sandoval, and Linda Martin Alcoff, among others to “convey the irreducible character of the problem of colonization and the far-reaching dimensions of the open, generative, creative, and unfinished project of decolonization” (114). Framed this way, coloniality is an aspirational and constantly evolving project that is at once theoretical while also building upon lived experiences and contemporary anticolonial struggles. This is why, in a recent publication, Catherine Walsh underscores the centrality of the concept of interculturality as decolonial praxis in social movements of Abya Yala, including the Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, Colombia (CRIC), the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), and Afro-descendant social movements (Mignolo and Walsh 57–62). In short, the Global South and decoloniality draw upon mid-twentieth-century references to transformational South–South meetings (e.g. the Bandung conference or the Tricontinental), refer to shared intellectuals (e.g. Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, Sylvia Winter, among others), respond to the shortcomings of post-WWII geopolitical framings (e.g. First vs Third World, developed or underdeveloped), and build upon and critique the theoretical enterprise of postcolonial studies. The Global South and decoloniality take economic organizational narratives (developed/ emerged vs developing/emerging) and political struggles (neocolonial/neoimperial vs anticolonial/anti-imperial) as their point of departure in both theoretical and analytical or applied work. Such economic and political dimensions often get transposed onto the cultural sphere, including literature, but such a transposition could potentially fall into reductive formulas involving a racial dimension: cultural artifact produced by a person of color = Global South/decolonial. If a cultural artifact is produced by someone who is not a person of color (white or mestizo), it cannot be Global South/decolonial. In this logic, color as one form of identity politics and one of the determinants of race becomes the organizational feature that decides whether or not a writer or artist can or cannot be considered part of, read as, or studied from the perspective of either the Global South or decoloniality. Understood this way, skin color as one form of delineating race becomes another binary logic—much like the ones highlighted above—that does not always help to unpack forms of racialization that do not fall neatly into established racial categories (e.g. white, black, indigenous, mestizo, etc.). By turning to intellectuals writing from Latin America such as Bolívar Echeverría, other ways to explore the gray areas or crevices of racial demarcations emerge. In the following sections, there will be a focus on texts written in the first half of the twentieth century. In so doing, I read La vorágine and Los monos enloquecidos by foregrounding how these texts engage with race and how such framings of race resonate with the past and present. By invoking the resonance of race, I am following Dimock’s understanding of resonance as a way to trace the “traveling frequencies of literary texts: frequencies received and amplified across time” (1061). 79

Juan G. Ramos

This approach not only foregrounds alternative models of figuring race alongside literary texts but also showcases the different amplifications these novels have received since their publication.

The prominence of “whiteness” in La vorágine Since its inception, race has been a form of control, a way to organize the world along racial lines that also serve to justify forms of subjugation. Race is indeed a construct that has been internalized since early modernity. As Mignolo has noted, the word indigenous only came to be used starting around 1640, as a term to categorize people who were native to the spaces known as the New World (Mignolo, “Racism” 86). In another text that discusses the emergence of racial categories as pillars of modernity/coloniality, Walter Mignolo argues that: If the inhabitants of Indians Occidentales became Indians, enslaved Africans became Black and, therefore, lesser beings in relation to the prototype of the (White) human. While in Europe racism manifested itself in the sphere of religion, in the New World (Indias Occidentales, and then America) racism was established in the secular realm, with people who, according to Christians, had no religion. (Mignolo and Walsh 158) According to this framing, race and racialization served to create a hierarchy of domination that began first with a religious perspective that served to justify a logic of deciding who was the ideal and dominant figure (the white male), whereas Indians and Blacks were deemed inferior. In such discussions of racial categories, particularly when we move from the colonial period to the postcolonial or republican period, the racial categories that existed with the caste system (sistema de castas) begin to dissipate. As such, racial “impurity” and other forms of racial mixing shift toward a rhetoric—particularly as nation-states continue their nation-building project from the nineteenth into the twentieth century—that aims to categorize national subjects into neatly defined categories: criollo (or later mestizo), white, black, or indigenous. Ethnic, linguistic, and cultural differences get coalesced or reduced into these grand racial narratives that subsume and obviate racial-ethnic differences (e.g. cholo, montuvio) that do not always conform to significations of whiteness, blackness, or indigeneity. An example from literature that serves to illustrate this narrative of racial classification as part of a nation-building project is José Eustasio Rivera’s La vorágine (1924), a novel that is central to a period that has either been framed as a moment of the regional novel or novela de la tierra (novel of the land), and which has been studied as either producing an autochthonous Latin American discourse on modernity or as describing the logic of savage capitalism during the age of the rubber boom.7 It should be noted that Rivera became a first-hand witness to what was happening in the Amazon with the rubber boom when he was sent in 1916 to be part of a Colombian group to demarcate the Colombian–Venezuelan national borders. This novel focuses on its protagonist, Arturo Cova, and his journey from the Andean highlands through the Colombian plains toward the Amazonian forest. The novel is framed as being a first-hand account of Arturo’s journey as described in his diary. In racial and class-based terms, Arturo represents the “white” and uppermiddle class figure who runs away from the comforts of his upbringing alongside Alicia, another character of the same social class. Once the novel’s plot focuses on the Amazon, predominantly in the second and third sections of the text, the narrative turns toward a set of characters who are either rubber tappers, rubber barons, or middlemen. Native characters are tangentially mentioned, whereas nature acquires an ominous presence through personification and anthropomorphism. In 80

Resonances of Race in the Global South

what follows, however, there will be a focus on brief scenes that place an emphasis on a microscopic version of the Global South, reduced to a regional focus on the Amazon, and that underscore instances in which race and racialization become prominent. In one scene in the novel’s second part, a secondary character named Clemente Silva recalls part of his precarious life in the Amazon and describes the concentration of peoples from the Global South in the Amazonian jungle as they are getting drunk in front of a rubber-tapping company store: “There were Indians of different tribes, blacks from the Caribbean, whites from Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, and Brazil—shouting for drink, shouting for women, shouting for the little stuff that means so much in the jungle” (Rivera, 124). With this brief description, there is already a suggestion of the interplay between people of different nationalities whose racial markers give them more specific identities connected to a particular location. Indians, or indigenous peoples, simply belong to different tribes, whereas blacks come from the Caribbean. It is unclear and seemingly irrelevant for the action in the narrative if the black characters are coming from Hispanophone, Anglophone, or Francophone parts of the Caribbean. The only characters linked to a specific nation-state are those deemed white. This supposed whiteness based on skin color grants characters a certain status within the hierarchy of power at play in the rubber-tapping industry. Those who do the hard labor are often those with darker skin or deemed non-white. As such, then, what we witness at work is the perpetuity of coloniality of power, specifically how those who have positioned themselves in positions of power keep using indigenous, black, and mixed-raced peoples to continue working under conditions of servitude and slavery to the point that they must procure their food and essential goods from a store run by the rubber barons. This places workers in perpetual debt that gets passed down from generation to generation. In a later episode, Arturo Cova, the novel’s protagonist, is already in the depths of the Amazonian jungle, disoriented, and moved to rescue Alicia who has been taken hostage by one of the rubber tappers. It is at this juncture that Arturo begins to realize that the attacks committed against people of color also extend to nature: “Little is known about what plants feel, and yet the jungle, both virgin and sadist, communicates to men a presentiment of immediate, constant threat” (154). This is a premonition of what is to come: nature’s ultimate revenge on rubber tappers and workers who do not respect nature. Arturo continues with the realization that it is white men who are the core of the dual problem of racial-ecological dimensions: Even in the jungle, however, “civilized” man is the most destructive protagonist of all. There is a certain piratical magnificence in the struggle of a few renegade businessmen to exploit the Indians and bend the jungle to their will. Having failed to make fortunes in the cities, they plunge into the wilderness seeking some kind, any kind, of denouement to their life stories. Delirious with malaria, they put aside whatever conscience they might have brought with them and, armed with only Winchesters and machetes, oriented toward pleasure and abundance, confront physical privations so severe that their clothing rots away to nothing on their emaciated bodies. (154) Here the civilized man is equated with the whiteness of a perceptible racial order. For the white man, the exploitation of indigenous, black, and racially-mixed peoples is necessary for the accumulation of wealth. As such, the novel creates an inextricable link between being white and capitalism. Bolívar Echeverría makes a useful distinction between whiteness as linked to skin color, and “whiteness” as linked to a mindset, behavior, and attitudes. For Echeverría, “whiteness” (blanquitud) is a set of attitudes and behaviors, an assumed identity “imposed by capitalist modernity” 81

Juan G. Ramos

that makes it possible for whites and “Blacks, Asians, or Latinos who have shown signs of ‘good behavior’ in terms of US capitalist modernity” to assume and participate in “whiteness” (42– 43).8 Whiteness (blancura) names the racial dimension of skin color as the visible manifestation of “whiteness,” an internalized and proliferated set of practices that have come to dominate the rhetoric of progress, which are constitutive of modernity and capitalism. In his work, Echeverría extends his analysis of “whiteness” onto other latitudes and temporal framings, including the colonial period in Latin America, the emergence of modern republics, Germany under the Third Reich, as well as the more recent multiculturalist moment in the United States, thus tracing resonances of race across time. This is why, and to return to the novel, there are multiple references to Peruvian-born and French Guyanese-born rubber barons, middlemen of Venezuelan, Colombian, Brazilian, and Peruvian origins, as well as the sole woman, Zoraida Ayram, of Middle-Eastern descent who has arrived in these lands to make her fortune. There is also a description of migrants from other parts of the Global South, including Turkey, India, and Italy, working alongside Brazilian, Colombian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Ecuadorian rubber tappers. These characters are mentioned here to signal precisely that racial determinants in terms of blackness, whiteness, or indigeneity do not always work on a global scale. In fact, the novel moves parts of what we today call the Global South into the Amazon as a reduced space where colonial and neocolonial differences become more evident. Echeverría’s concept of “whiteness” is helpful to understand the capitalist impulse that drives people of color—the rubber barons—to subjugate other people of color and thus replicating coloniality of power, particularly in terms of the interaction among race, capitalism, and extractivism as a form of ecological devastation. The novel further suggests migratory routes linked to the appeal of material wealth due to the rubber boom of the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries in the Amazonian jungle. By the end of the novel, Arturo and the secondary characters accompanying him in their quest to escape the jungle have indeed succumbed to the vortex, as the Amazonian jungle is repeatedly described in the novel. It could also be argued that this ends up having resonances today for discussions of the Global South and coloniality/decoloniality, particularly the narrative hints at an interconnected understanding of power along racial, ethnic, capitalist, and ecological lines.

Racial resonances in Los monos enloquecidos If La vorágine places the core of its narrative arc in the Amazonian jungle and thus exceeds the models of national borders, Los monos enloquecidos moves toward transpacific, transoceanic, and localized concerns. Garland Mahler reminds us that the Global South acts “as a kind of intermediary between deterritorializing and territorializing models” (33). Early-twentieth-century novels emerging from Latin America by and large tended to be very localized as a way to figuratively reflect upon national and social concerns. As such, many novels situated within the rubrics of regional novels, novelas de la tierra, indigenismo, or social realist novels, were primarily territorialized reflections upon the ultra-local and the national, though at times such reflections could be extended upon wider regional concerns. In the case of Los monos enloquecidos, it is a narrative that can be divided into two parts. The first part begins by tracing the genealogy of the Hernández family to their Galician roots and how they arrived in territories now known as Ecuador during the colonial period to conquer and amass wealth and land. The narrative traces the temporal arc from the colonial period through independence and the emergence of the republic, and how the Hernández family maintained its social status and wealth in the port of Guayaquil, while accruing lands—ranches and farms—in both the tropical and highland regions of Ecuador. Soon, the 82

Resonances of Race in the Global South

narrative turns to Gustavo Hernández and his adventures as a merchant marine whose adventures take him to the Galapagos Islands, Australia, the Marquesas Islands, Malaysia, Mozambique, Denmark, St. Thomas (while still a Danish colony pre-1917), New Orleans, Richmond, New York, Buenos Aires and Bahía Blanca in Argentina, Valparaíso in Chile, and a return to Guayaquil after a 29-year journey through ports in the Global South and the Global North. After Gustavo’s older sisters die, he decides to turn his attention from his seafaring ventures toward tropical lands, particularly by working on the vast ranch and farms comprising Pampaló, which have been passed down from one generation to another in his family. That the novel places an emphasis on the Galapagos is no coincidence. Early on in the novel, after being stranded in the Galapagos for over a year, and after a 29-year journey throughout the world, the novel’s omniscient narrator states the following: Hernández possessed… an imagination that ran wild; and, one can suppose that his stay in the Galapagos islands, together with his later readings of Darwin, Agassiz, and others, and his travels throughout Mozambique’s sertão was what sparked in his brains those ideas about monkeys and evolution, which he later attempted to put into practice. (De la Cuadra 77, my translation) The second part of the novel, in fact, moves toward Gustavo’s invested interest in cutting wood, preparing it for sale in Guayaquil, and growing a business based on deforestation. In reality, Gustavo’s passion soon turns to finding a presumed gold treasure that may be somewhere within the confines of his massive land. As Humberto Robles has argued, the narrative is at once an adventure novel, while also advancing a critique of latifundista (plantation) economies (38–39). It should be stressed that while the novel invokes Charles Darwin as well as Louis Agassiz, de la Cuadra was neither a racist writer nor a proponent of eugenics or any other ideology linked to racism or white supremacy. Quite the contrary, throughout the 1930s, de la Cuadra had focused his attention on writing about the montuvio, the countryside peasants, with the intent of expressing social critiques about the ways in which land-owning and highly racialized Ecuadorian society looked down upon vast sectors of Ecuador’s population.9 It could be argued that the invocation of Darwin—known for his theory of evolution and natural selection—and Agassiz—known for his rejection of Darwin’s theories, a supporter of creationism, and whose ideas have been used for racism and white supremacy—are invoked here as a parody of Gustavo as a figure that stands for the early-twentieth-century landowner as well as carrying on his family’s legacy of avarice and unparalleled appetite for accumulating wealth. Such names bring to the fore the racist discourses that were being used in Europe in the early 1930s and with which de la Cuadra would have been familiar. For Gustavo, it was not sufficient to have a more or less stable income by selling wood from his expansive land. Instead, he was attracted by still “virgin lands where no civilized man had ever set foot” (139, my translation). In fact, Gustavo at times advances a neocolonial discourse that aims to complete what the Spanish settlers had not been able to accomplish: “Save for glorious exceptions, the Spanish soldiers had not altogether entered the most remote parts of America. Then and now, there are unexplored jungles in the heart of continent” (139, my translation). In this passage, there is a narrative compression of colonialism and postcolonialism. Gustavo becomes the emblematic figure of the landowner wishing to control more land, extract more goods, and subjugate more people. In short, what we have is a continuation from colonialism to coloniality of power. This is why, when Gustavo meets Masa Blanca—a black witch doctor living in complete isolation and 16 hours away by foot from Gustavo’s house but still within the confines of Gustavo’s expansive property— 83

Juan G. Ramos

they came to terms that they would “exploit” each other for different ends: “Masa Blanca saw in Gustavo Hernández a mine, while Gustavo Hernández saw in Masa Blanca the means to find the gold mine” (161). By this time, Gustavo had become obsessed with finding gold in his land, and Masa Blanca spins a story that Gustavo believes. For Gustavo to be successful in unburying gold, which legend says is now controlled by the devil, he would need hands that have not been exposed to holy water (a reference to Catholicism) to dig the gold from a location that only Masa Blanca is able to locate. Gustavo comes up with a plan to train monkeys based on what he had learned during his stay with Africans in Mozambique: that some groups thought of monkeys as inferior to men but that they could be trained in mysterious ways so that they “could make the jump to a human state, thus becoming violent toward evolution that normally becomes actualized through successive existence” (169, my translation). Here, again, there are resonances of Darwin’s theory of evolution. By the tentative end of the novel, Masa Blanca has obtained—even extracted—a lot of money from Gustavo, whereas Gustavo believes that his plan will move forward, as the omniscient narrator suggests: “Columbus gave one more world to the world. Gustavo’s work would be superior to that of the poor admiral, because he would give a new humanity to humanity” (180, my translation). The novel concludes with an image of Gustavo aiming to extract buried gold while leaving his almost sci-fi plans of creating a new “race” to another time. As Mignolo has noted: “Racial classification is tantamount to establishing hierarchies that, in the language of modernity/coloniality, manufacture colonial differences…. Colonial differences have been established since the sixteenth century both racially and sexually” (“Racism” 87). As I have been arguing throughout this section, this novel emphasizes the discourse and history of racial classification with the aim of critiquing racial and class-based hierarchies of power.

Conclusion La vorágine and Los monos enloquecidos articulate two complementary positions on the critical debates that frame the Global South and decoloniality. The civilizational and capitalist impulse that drives the narrative in La vorágine is inscribed in what Echeverría termed “blanquitud” (“whiteness”). In turn, the racial register of certain characters and events in Los monos enloquecidos evinces a continuation of “whiteness” as discussed by Echeverría but also an interplay of the three racial categories—white, black, and indigenous—that are so present in many Latin American nations. These novels question the geopolitical limits of the nation-state as both narratives exceed the political borders of the nation to suggest, on the one hand, a macro-regional Amazonian focus and, on the other hand, a transpacific and micro-regional tropical articulation of South–South framings that scale down the oft-Sisyphean impulse and reach of the Global South and decoloniality. In other words, these two novels situate localized problems to test the geographical reach of the Global South and decoloniality as projects that in their attempt at fostering coalitions at times lose sight of nuances that have geocultural and racial implications. This leads to the second point: that grand racial categories, integral to both the Global South and decoloniality, are good to articulate broad problems but run into the issue of not being able to account for how such problems transfer onto literary texts, which often complicate the work of theory. By turning to two novels that were written by so-called white men and that seemingly do not engage in attempts at discursively dismantling mechanisms of power—a central tenet for both the Global South and decoloniality—I am, in fact, drawing attention to nuanced ways of reading novels that might readily fit into the archive of texts from which the Global South and decolonial84

Resonances of Race in the Global South

ity can draw upon, or at least how we might pursue alternative readings. It is sometimes gestures of decoloniality that can be useful to draw attention to alternative ways of reading (Ramos 11–12; Gómez-Barris 112). To make contributions from literary criticism to the Global South and decoloniality, it is necessary to tease out how power operates to discursively subject racialized others in canonical and non-canonical texts alike while also drawing attention to ways in which againstthe-grain readings can be activated to tease out critiques of power to question the legacies and resonances of race and racism as a form of power that traverses the Global South and decoloniality as parallel critical projects.

Notes 1 This essay was completed with the support of the M.H. Abrams Fellowship (2021–2022) from the National Humanities Center and the O’Leary Faculty Research award from the College of the Holy Cross. 2 The original phrase comes from Étienne Gilbert’s review of the Brandt Report, which describes the report as follows: “Ton mesuré, style alerte et simple, le rapport souligne l’interdépendance croissante de la planète, aussi bien du point du vue politique qu’économique.” 3 For a useful bibliography of how the Global South has emerged in the social sciences, see West-Pavlov’s “Toward the Global South” (2018) and Levander and Mignolo’s “Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order” (2011). 4 For an alternative lineage that roots the emergence of the Global South in relation to the Tricontinental, see Garland Mahler’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South (2018). A volume that offers a reorientation of the Global South but in relation to the Atlantic is Bystrom and Slaughter’s edited volume The Global South Atlantic (2018). A volume that offers a multifocal global perspective on South–South relations is West-Pavlov’s The Global South and Literature (2018). While this brief list is not meant to be exhaustive, it is indicative of the paths Global South literary studies has taken. 5 For a detailed framing of coloniality of power, see Quijano’s “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America” (2000) and “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” (2007). 6 Key texts that have articulated the concept of decoloniality are Walter Mignolo’s books, including Local Histories/Global Designs (2000), The Darker Side of Western Modernity (2011), and most recently The Politics of Decolonial Investigations (2021), as well as Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine Walsh’s On Decoloniality (2018). Texts that have focused on decoloniality and the arts, including literature, are Macarena Gómez-Barris’s The Extractive Zone (2017), Madina Tlostanova’s What Does it Mean to Be Post-Soviet? (2018), Juan G. Ramos’s Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts (2018), as well as Juan G. Ramos and Tara Daly’s edited volume Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Culture (2016). This brief list is by no means exhaustive. It is merely indicative of some of the directions the concept has taken. 7 For a discussion of La vorágine as a text of the novela de la tierra and as one producing an autochthonous discourse with the advent of Latin American modernity, see Alonso’s The Spanish American Regional Novel (1990). For a Marxist reading that focuses on how this novel describes the capitalist logic of accumulation during the rubber boom, see Beckman’s Capital Fictions (2013). 8 Following the translation strategy present in the English translation, I am using “whiteness” in quotation marks to signal blanquitud to differentiate it from whiteness as a term used in everyday speech that often marks a white skin or sets of behaviors but that does not add the connection to capitalist modernity. 9 For a discussion of De la Cuadra’s work on montuvios, see Ramos’s “Contesting Domination” (2015) and Robles’s “Los monos enloquecidos” (1997).

Works Cited Alonso, Carlos. The Spanish American Regional Novel. Cambridge UP, 1990. Beckman, Ericka. Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America’s Export Age. U of Minnesota P, 2013. De la Cuadra, José. “Los monos enloquecidos.” La Tigra/Los monos enloquecidos, Ariel Clásicos, 2011, pp. 47–180. Dimock, Wai Chee. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA, vol. 112, no. 5, 1997, pp. 1060–1071.

85

Juan G. Ramos Echeverría, Bolívar. “Images of ‘Whiteness’.” Modernity and “Whiteness.” Translated by Rodrigo Ferreira. Polity, 2020, pp. 38–51. Escobar, Arturo. Pluriversal Politics. Duke UP, 2020. ———. “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 179–210. Gilbert, Étienne. “Le rapport de la Commission Brandt, North-South. A programme for survival.” TiersMonde, vol. 21, no. 82, 1980. pp. 455–456. Gómez-Barris, Macarena. The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Duke UP, 2017. Levander, Caroline, and Walter Mignolo. “Introduction: The Global South and World Dis/Order.” The Global South, vol. 5, no. 1, 2011, pp. 1–11. Lopez, Alfred J. “Introduction: The (Post) Global South.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–11. Mahler, Anne G. From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity. Duke UP, 2018. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. “The Decolonial Turn.” Translated by Robert Cavooris. New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, edited by Juan Poblete, Routledge, 2018, pp. 111–127. Mignolo, Walter D. and Catherine Walsh. On Decoloniality. Duke UP, 2018. Quijano, Anibal. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” Cultural Studies, vol. 21, no. 2–3, 2007, pp. 168–178. ———. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Translated by Michael Ennis. Nepantla: Views from South, vol. 1, no. 3, 2000, pp. 533–580. Ramos, Juan G. and Tara Daly, editors. Decolonial Approaches to Latin American Literatures and Culture. Palgrave, 2016. Ramos, Juan G. Sensing Decolonial Aesthetics in Latin American Arts. U of Florida P, 2018. ———. “Contesting Domination: Modernity, Coloniality of Gender, and Decolonial Feminism in José de la Cuadra’s ‘La Tigra’.” Romance Notes, vol. 55, no. 1, 2015, pp. 61–75. Rivera, José Eustasio. The Vortex: A Novel. Translated and introduction by John Charles Chasteen, Duke UP, 2018. Robles, Humberto E. “Los monos enloquecidos en el país de las maravillas: paradigma, zonas de contacto, zonas de ‘macidez’.” Kipus. Revista andina de letras 7 (1997): 35–46. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. The End of the Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South. Duke UP, 2018. Slaughter, Joseph R. and Kerry Bystrom. “Introduction: The Sea of International Politics: Fluidity, Solvency, and Drift in the Global South Atlantic.” The Global South Atlantic, edited by Joseph R. Slaughter and Kerry Bystrom, Fordham University Press, 2018, pp. 1–30. The South Commission. The Challenge to the South: Report of the South Commission. Oxford UP, 1990. Tlostanova, M. V. What Does It Mean to Be Post-Soviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire. Duke UP, 2018. West-Pavlov, Russell. “Toward the Global South: Concept of Chimera, Paradigm or Panacea?” The Global South and Literature, edited by Russell West-Pavlov, Cambridge UP, 2018, pp. 1–19.

86

8 COLONIAL TRACES The Specter of the Global South in Contemporary Cinema Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Early in his documentary Nomad (2019), Werner Herzog travels to Punta Arenas, in the Southern tip of South America, to find a wrecked ship that his subject, the writer Bruce Chatwin, photographed and later discussed in his book In Patagonia (1977). Chatwin was a close friend to Herzog and a collaborator in his films, most notably Herzog’s grand work on the slave trade, Cobra Verde (1987), an adaptation of Chatwin’s The Viceroy of Ouidah. The scene, shot in a region full of paleontological discoveries, functions as an aggregate of spectralities. The ghost of Chatwin, an indefatigable and influential travel writer who died of AIDS-related complications in his late 40s, chases the ghost of Charley Milward, a distant relative whose merchant ship sank in the entrance of the Magellan strait. Milward, in turn, was chasing the ghosts of the distant past, including the remains of a brontosaurus that he promptly sent back home to Britain. In fact, Chatwin’s grandmother, Milward’s cousin, possessed a piece of the brontosaurus’s skin, which fueled an obsession in the young Bruce: “The Charley Milward of my imagination was a god among men—tall, silent and strong, with black mutton chop whiskers and fierce blue eyes” (1). Replicating this gesture, Herzog imbues the travels of his transnational documentary with a sense of haunting, a tension between Chatwin’s specter, and a trip to sites that often diverge from his account of them. In this chapter, I discuss a series of spectral narratives in works of world cinema from the 2010s, which share a concern regarding the persistence of the colonial in film representation. I will do so with a particular focus on works from three directors—Herzog, Mati Diop, and Pedro Costa—alongside other films mentioned for comparison. The phenomenon I study here is not so much the politics of representation in cinema from the Global South but rather the ways in which the Global South is thematized and turned into a referent for cinematic form in European cinematographies with different relationships to their colonial heritage. My selection of films, clearly, is not intended to be exhaustive, and my claims here are relevant to a much larger set of contemporary films. But I believe that Herzog, a filmmaker with a longstanding history of cinema engaged in the question of colonialism, Diop, an up-and-coming filmmaker whose work bridges the history of Senegalese film with French art cinema, and Costa, who has developed one of the most radical projects of filming in collaboration with migrants from the Portuguese former colonies, provide good case studies to think through my conceptual questions. This chapter analyzes what I call “the specters of the Global South” to signal the correlation between the haunting persistence of people and stories from formerly colonized societies DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-9

87

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

and parallel the rise of the idea of the Global South as a geographical and political marker. The Global South is a construct that beckons an imagination that transcends the long durée histories of Orientalism, indigenism, and other constructions of the European self through the Otherization of the colonized. It also constitutes a form of broken-glass, fragmented version of the narratives of political solidarity and decolonization that underlies the idea of the Third World. The Global South points to new arrangements under neoliberal globalization, in which the North–South binary has come into question. Yet, the Global South remains imagined as a site of relative autonomy and political futurity. As Arif Dirlik notes, “The South as it invents itself must also invent economic alternatives to neoliberalism if it is to achieve autonomous development within the confines of global capitalism, which is about the only option available in the horizon presently” (15–16). This geopolitical arrangement is accompanied by a significant ideological and aesthetic change that is directly relevant to the study of cinema. Russell West-Pavlov notes two features of the idea of the Global South in this divide. First, he notes the fact that “modern Global South artistic forms circulate as online or artifacts whose range and penetration is oblivious to distance and whose distribution is limited only by the logistic barriers of the digital divide” (11; see also García Canclini 2014, West-Pavlov’s source). Nomad, although not a film from the Global South, embodies some of these logics: shot in digital format, commissioned by a global cultural industry (the BBC), fundamentally distributed globally through streaming platforms such as MUBI, etc. Second, WestPavlov observes that the extensive bibliography on the concept points to the Global South as a concept that unfolds a “programmatic idea of multiplying without homogenizing or totalizing the relationships which they sketch out” (11). As Irmgard Emmelhainz (2009; 2019) puts it in relation to the work of Jean-Luc Godard on Palestine, there is a shift in the politics of representation that moves “from Third World to Empire,” that is, from the unified narrative of political solidarity of the 1960s and 1970s to a more diffuse politics of representation, humanitarianism, and identity. Chatwin represents a parallel transition in travel literature. As Ralph Pordzik observes, Chatwin’s works are enabled and inherently delimited by their underlying assumptions and demarcations, by their trying to get into a direct and meaningful relationship with the Other—an effort constantly thwarted by the “physicality” of the literary signs, the ‘multiple sites’ or spaces they create when introduced into the text. (388) Chatwin embodies, in Herzog’s rendering, the nature of this transition towards a practice of literary and cinematic representation of the Other that formally accounts for its own insufficiencies. This is the mode that defines many works of contemporary film dealing with colonial legacies. As a product of European cinema grappling with these questions, Nomad can be read as a belated and self-undermining entry into the longstanding tradition of travel narratives and their rendering of the Global South through “imperial eyes” as Mary Louise Pratt has studied. Focused on one of the two most influential travel writers of the Anglosphere in the 1970s and 1980s (Paul Theroux being the other one), Herzog’s film morphs constantly Chatwin and the very politics of representation embedded in the traveler gaze. J.M. Tyree observes that “neither Chatwin nor Herzog is particularly well suited to our moment, when a generational riptide is currently dragging their artistic methods out to sea” (148). The problem is not so much a matter of contemporary sensibilities but of the way in which the current articulations between (former) colonizers and colonized, between Europeans and their others, are based on the reflexive undermining and deployment of longstanding formal and ideological procedures. Pratt notes that travel writing from the 18th cen88

Colonial Traces

tury onwards enacts a metropolis that “binds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis—beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its others continually to itself” (6). Pratt notes that to engage these narratives, she sought ways to interrupt the totalizing momentum of both the study of genre and the critique of ideology. These projects are both anchored, as I am, in the metropolis; to concede them autonomy or completeness would reaffirm metropolitan authority in its own terms—the very thing travel writers are often charged to do. (5) Nomad offers no such totalizing project. Herzog’s spectral style offers Chatwin’s life as an aggregate of fragments, frequently troubled not only by the tension between biography and memory but also by the dissonances between Chatwin’s writing and his represented objects. Herzog is famously a filmmaker that rose to prominence with a set of fiction features in which the folly of the colonial enterprise, embodied in the character portrayed by actor Klaus Kinski, was not only a thematic concern but also a formal question. As Joshua Lund (2020) studies extensively, films like Cobra Verde or Fitzcarraldo are part of a project that pursues a “sustained problematization of the idea of America [the continent] and its relation to the consolidation of capitalist modernity” which in turn allows not only for the representation of “man’s apocalyptic drive,” but, more importantly, “to defamiliarize the world and render its dominant interpretations rethinkable” (6–7). I would further note that the unfolding of this oeuvre in the 1970s and 1980s positions Herzog as one of the key filmmakers in the transition from the unifying and militant aesthetics of the Third World (and the various iterations of radical and Third Cinema) and the aesthetics of a decentered world cinema that would flourish in the intersection between globalization and the film festival and streaming models of distribution. And yet, Herzog is not a key figure in the latter. It is telling that his most recent success is as a documentary filmmaker, in works generally removed from the epic works that forged his name. If anything, Herzog’s two attempts to rekindle this kind of filmmaking in the 2010s, Queen of the Desert (2015), on the writer Gertrude Bell’s travels to the Middle East, and Salt and Fire (2016), a Bolivia-based ecological thriller, feel anachronistic and can be considered failures when compared to his prior films or his documentary work. Nomad can be understood as an exploration of the limits of filmmaking ideas that Herzog pursued back in the 1980s, to which Chatwin was a contributor. Halfway through the film, Herzog presents another network of spectralities: a series of images of indigenous peoples who embodied nomadic forms of living, presented by the film as attuned to Chatwin’s ethos but that nonetheless were subject to mass extermination. The scene presents to us through photographs taken by colonizers, whose secret stories are disclosed in Herzog’s voice-overs. Herzog notes that “history aspires to the symmetry of myth,” but, in presenting the traces of colonial enterprises into violence, that totalization and symmetry become untenable. I would claim here that Herzog’s turn in Nomad is from a filmmaker that seeks the depiction of the Global South itself from the eyes of Europeans that sought to either colonize it or be a part of it, to the spectrality of the Global South as a theme and motif in European and American art. This turn, of course, is not original to Herzog. But Nomad is a notable work because Herzog had been so invested in a project centered on the delirious epic of Europeans in South America and Africa. For a film that is meant as a tribute to Chatwin, even in Herzog’s clear desire to cast a forgiving and loving view on his friend, the ambiguities regarding some of his works are visible in the film. When Herzog travels to Australia to explore Chatwin’s book The Songlines, his interpretation of aboriginal music traditions is challenged by the presentation of community elders, as well as the statement by his biographer Nicholas Shakespeare 89

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

noting that Chatwin did not appear to fully understand the songs central to the book. Herzog makes clear that the European representation of aboriginal culture must be subject to questioning, an analysis that he applies not only to Chatwin but also to the anthropologist Theodor Strehlow, who spent his life trying to collect aboriginal knowledge. Tyree observes that “Herzog chooses not to criticize Chatwin directly. Instead, his film is reparative” (150). This is very clear when he interviews Shaun Angeles Penangke, a researcher in the Strehlow Center who is himself a member of the Aboriginal people, and who evidently has conflicted emotions related to the work that both Strehlow and Chatwin carried in relation to culture sacred for Australian first nations. Herzog’s portrayal of Chatwin fits in the forms of analysis that belong to what critics and theorists call a “spectral turn.” The figure of the ghost and the specter emerged in recent years from philosophical and theoretical interventions that range from Jacques Derrida’s reading of Marx to forms of thinking surrounding trauma, nostalgia, and other forms of dwelling. Yet, as María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren observe, studies of ghosts and haunting can do more than obsessively recall a fixed past; in an active, dynamic engagement, they may reveal the insufficiency of the present moment, as well as the disconsolations and erasures of the past, and a tentative hopefulness for future resolutions. (16) This is notable in Herzog and in the filmmakers that will be discussed momentarily: there is a restitutive understanding of the past and a broken sense of the present which creates in some cases spaces to envision forms of futurity. More significantly, the spectral presence of the Global South in many contemporary films, as well as in literary works, is moving away from testimonial modes for which justice is correlated with the act of bearing witness, and from forms of neoliberal multiculturalism in which the mere act of representation and presence is understood to be inherently political. Instead, as Amanda Petersen and Alberto Ribas-Casasayas note, “the ghost allows for the possibility of a transgenerational ethics, as it reveals an obligation to victims whose presence has been excluded from the historical record and hegemonic discourse” (3). While the representation of the silenced and the forgotten can be a vehicle for political redress, it is more significant that the spectral “conveys the notion of a present disrupted by attempts to verbalize images or words that contradict the coherent, unproblematic and historically decontextualized character of the representation of social reality in hegemonic discourse” (3). Pedro Costa is one of the filmmakers who has taken the disruption of the present by the spectral haunting of the Global South to a radical manifestation in cinematic form. His trajectory from a filmmaker rising in the conventional circuits of art cinema to the way he has developed a style based on minimal film crews, deep collaboration with the marginalized people at the center of his film, and an unwavering and sometimes impenetrable aesthetics has been discussed extensively by authors like Nuno Barradas Jorge (ReFocus). Costa’s filmmaking has been studied as a set of “narratives of deterritorialization” (Vera) and a realism of the poor (Valente). For the purposes of this chapter, Costa’s deep collaboration with Ventura, a Cape Verdean immigrant and construction worker in his 70s, offers a useful vantage point. Ventura is one of the many non-professional actors at the center of Costa’s work and has appeared in his feature and short films for over a decade. Costa transitioned to this model of work after shooting Casa de Lava (1994) in Cape Verde. According to Hilary Owen, Costa became disillusioned with traditional methods of filmmaking after sensing the disruptions that the production had on islanders (186). More importantly, Owen suggests that this film still works on “the ghosts of a still recognizable historical indexing” related 90

Colonial Traces

to the ethics of Portugal’s colonial entanglements (187). Costa follows this up with a trilogy on the residents of a lower-class neighborhood in Lisbon, Fontainhas, through an increasingly minimalistic form of filmmaking based on digital video and a deeply collaborative process with residents. One of these residents is Ventura, who is prominently featured in the third film of the Fontainhas trilogy, Colossal Youth (2008). Ventura embodies the idea of the migrant as a specter. In Colossal Youth, he is shown visiting and speaking to various neighbors in Fontainhas, who he calls his children. Costa’s film uses cinematography that is heavy on chiaroscuro and set within Fontainhas that make clear the neighborhood’s decay, granting Ventura a gothic nature. In this particular film, Ventura appears in an uncertain space between the present, the past, and the future. In this and other Costa films, Ventura often refers to past events as if they were taking place in the present. In Colossal Youth, this temporality is further problematized as we see Ventura considering moving to a new housing development, brighter but also anonymous and empty-looking, in which he would clearly lack the community of Fontainhas. Aurelien Gerbault’s documentary All Blossoms Again (2006), which follows Costa and Ventura through the making of the film, shows the destruction of Fontainhas as it takes place during the shooting of Colossal Youth. Gerbault also shows the way in which, after meeting Ventura by chance, Costa learned about his story and worked in collaboration with him to build an on-screen persona. Ventura always plays himself, but the version in which his personal history is continually re-narrated is a process of dislocation and haunting. “Spectrality,” Giorgio Agamben observes, “is a form of life, a posthumous or complementary life that begins only when everything is finished” (2011: 39). Ventura embodies this posthumous life in Costa’s films. This complementary life is defined by a sort of eternal present, a temporality in which the traces of Portugal’s colonial past in Africa, as well as the marginalized lives of the colonial subjects living in the metropolis, hauntingly and recurrently appear. Costa is notable because of his clear avoidance of any kind of testimonial or documentary method that would be limited to give voice to the voiceless or to provide a clear political statement regarding their conditions. Judice observes that this stance has led to accusations of distortion of the lives of the poor and the exploitation of their stories for a very small audience of art cinema (2020, 144). This criticism misunderstands the point of the films. They are most certainly inaccessible to many members of the audience, both in terms of their distribution and their difficulty. But their deep portrayal of Ventura as a haunting signifier deeply challenges the anthropological gaze and the patina of Otherness characteristic of older European artists like Herzog or Chatwin. Costa’s approach also skillfully avoids the patronizing tone one can find, for example, in films about Mexican migrants to the United States such as Chris Weltz’s A Better Life (2011), which are designed to elicit sympathy towards the migrant that is likely to exist already in the mere decision to watch such a film. An enthusiastic spectator of Costa, Jacques Rancière praises “the attention given to all forms of beauty that can be secerned in poor people’s dwellings” (Intervals 136). Elsewhere, Rancière notes that “cinema cannot be the equivalent of the love letter or music of the poor” but rather “agree to be the surface on which an artist tries to cipher in new figures the experience of people relegated to the margins of economic circulation and social trajectories” (Emancipated 82). The figure of Ventura, though, is not merely limited to the question of poverty or marginalization. Agamben contends that a specter is made of “signs, or more precisely signatures, that is to say, those signs, ciphers, or monograms that are etched onto things by time.” Ventura, the character, is not built by Costa solely based on the aesthetics of poverty. It also relates to historical experience. Ventura is the protagonist of Costa’s most experimental feature, Horse Money (2014). In this film, Ventura appears in a variety of scenes and contexts, some realistic and many dreamlike, embodying various moments of his life simultaneously. As Sérgio Dias Branco posits, the 91

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

film portrays a “fractured history […] stylistically shaped […] through a radical use of the expressive tools of digital cinema” (48). Ventura spends the film disoriented and lost, and his memory appears to return in lapses and fragments. In an early scene, Ventura is shown in a medical office. As the doctor interrogates him, Ventura, in his 70s, tells the doctor that he is 19 years old, but that he works as a bricklayer, retired. In other words, he is his 19- and his 70-something-year-old self at the same time. Edmundo Cordeiro describes Ventura as a “statigraphic character” in whom “those layers of time overlap on him” (35). Throughout the film, we see him represent various scenes of his life, from his work as a bricklayer to his fear during the Carnation Revolution, the coup in Lisbon that ended the authoritarian Estado Novo regime and led to the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa. Anna Mester notes: “in elliptical conversation, Ventura confronts the historical burden of the Carnation Revolution while he is reliving the event as a personal and historical trauma” (181). Mester continues: “Ventura’s historical account takes the shape of a non-linear temporality and allows for the past to exist in a present moment” (180). Although Mester reads Ventura’s incoherence as a matter of his perspective from the margins (179), thinking the fragmentation of his consciousness through the lens of the spectral allows for a broader interpretation. Esther Peeren observes: whereas the ghost as a figuration of marginality tends to point to a lack of visibility and impact in the social real that, within this realm, can only receive negative expression as lack or absence, the cultural imagination can render such social invisibility and impotence tangible through narrative and technique. (8) In Costa’s films, this logic goes to one of its most extreme manifestations. Ventura is a hypertangible ghost. Rather than representing his invisibility within a realist representation of contemporary Portugal, Ventura materializes deeply and distorts and disrupts the world around him. It’s a logical inversion: Ventura’s visibility renders the reality surrounding him, as well as historical time, illegible and incoherent. The climax scene in Horse Money takes place in a purgatory-like elevator. In this space, Ventura holds a physical and mental conversation with the statue of a soldier. They are bound by the Carnation Revolution, as we learn with some uncertainty that the soldier was on the street fighting the police while Ventura was working at a construction site. Although we see the soldier moving still positions and Ventura dialoguing, through his mouth or his mind, the conversation suggests a continuous change of space and time, present and past. The voice of the soldier morphs in time through the other figures that haunt Ventura, even presenting itself as a chorus of voices. The key to the scene is the enactment of the contradiction between the Carnation Revolution as a foundational moment of both contemporary Portuguese history and postcolonial Africa, and the memory of Ventura’s fear of being killed and losing his job because of the revolution. Cordeiro describes the temporality of the scene as “a dead-end present time” whose function is to make audiences feel the “extreme suffocation” of the present (38). Ventura’s spectral being interrupts and distorts the narrative of the nation. Tellingly, the soldier conveys to Ventura early on in the scene that they have been together for the past 38 years and that he wished to be doing something else. The elevator scene (a version of which Costa gave to the omnibus Portuguese film Centro Historico) enacts Ventura, his memories of Cape Verde, and his presence in the refoundation of Portugal after the Estado Novo as the ghost to which the Portuguese are inexorably bound and indebted. Costa’s aesthetic and cinematic approach to Ventura is thusly not a matter of marginality 92

Colonial Traces

or mere representation: it is a radical recoding of reality in which the former colonies and the past break the narrative coherence of the presence. Scholars of Lusophone culture have emphasized Costa as part of a larger trend of films contending with human mobility and immigration in general, and the African presence in Portugal in particular. This has in turn led to very polarized accounts regarding Costa’s politics, as has been suggested before. Similar to Rancière, Fernando Arenas praises Costa for his “highly selfconscious ethics of representation where subaltern subjects are not only allowed to speak, but also seen in their full splendour and dignity” (360) He further notes that Costa’s aestheticized style “attempts to level power asymmetries intrinsic to the relationship not only between film director and actors, centre and periphery, national citizen and immigrant, but also in connection to race relations in societies in which Afro-descended peoples constitute a minority” (361). Commenting on Costa’s most recent film Vitalina Varela (2019), Mariana Liz reenacts the long history of discussions that emerge from the fact that Costa is a white filmmaker representing black people in his films. Vitalina Varela is named after a Cape Verdean woman who had already appeared in Horse Money, and who plays herself in both films, representing her being stuck in Portugal after coming to the country to seek her husband’s ashes. Liz puts forward a detailed and thoughtful validation of Costa’s virtues and limitations under the light of both debates surrounding his work and the larger tradition of European cinema of mobility. From this perspective, she offers an inconclusive reading that does not quite dismiss Costa, although her analysis points towards the idea that Vitalina is presented as full of despair, giving “no redemption or future for this character” (13). Liz concludes with this characterization: As a film about inbetweeness, characterized by a sense of quiet suspension, Vitalina Varela’s fatalist representation can be seen as unimaginative (albeit aesthetically accomplished) depiction, which constricts African immigrants, and women in particular, to a position of inescapable weakness, much more so than as a beautiful audiovisual composition. (13) Whether Costa is able to adequately represent African migrants or not may, however, be an intractable and unproductive question. One could certainly ask whether empowerment and elevation are the only narratives that are valid, as this reading suggests. If anything, the debate appears to be as to whether Costa’s aestheticizations elevate migrants or not, but the question as to whether the elevation of migrants to representation in itself constitutes a desirable politics for cinema is not sufficiently raised. Costa’s narrative’s inescapability and spectrality are powerful and controversial because they show that the recognition of these subjects in cinema is not in itself a way to transcend the guilts of colonialism. They interrupt the liberal fantasy of recognition and the idea that a culture of positive representation and futurity would be a tool for justice. Instead, one could furnish that the spectral signifiers of the Global South, whether it is the subjects of the European gaze that interest Herzog or Costa’s marginalized collaborators puncture the fantasies of Europe as a democratic and inclusive society. They are the constant reminder of the labor of colonial subjects, Africans in particular, in the material foundations of its modernization. Ventura, after all, is a construction worker. And both Ventura and Vitalina, elderly subjects whose life in the capitalist society has been exhausted, live in despair and without a future because their lives are rendered meaningless and precarious by the society built by their hands and by the plunder of their homelands. Films like Horse Money and Vitalina Varela are unpopular, irritating, and inaccessible because their aesthetic wager is premised on the unwillingness to offer wide audiences any reassurance about the possible redemption of subjects broken by colonization. 93

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

In the context of neoliberal globalization, spectral Global South signifiers interrupt the selfenclosed narratives of neoliberal subjectivation that have become the norm across many contemporary cinematographies, particularly those that face the commercial market domestically or exist in the space of indecision between the multiplex and the arthouse. As I have mentioned elsewhere (Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism), genres like romantic comedy are bound with the naturalization of various ideological and identity axioms of neoliberalism, including the centrality of the creative class. The arch of the genre in North America, Europe, Latin America, and East Asia, just to mention some of the regions where this is visible, shows a significant persistence of this trope. They are the films that idealize the stories of the young professionals that populate the genre globally from Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally (1989) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Sólo con tu pareja (1991) to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Asako I & II (2018) and Joachim Trier’s The Worst Person in the World (2021). Films of this kind, some of them amongst the most important in the recent history of their national cinematographies, often have acritical relationships to the present, using the contemporary creative economy as a matter-of-fact space for the affective engagement of its protagonists. They can be great and successful films, but they are also part of a mediascape that presents the Global North and its semiperipheral urban outposts as places in which economic prosperity exists inherently and axiomatically. In contrast, films in genres like horror have provided a counterpoint, using the tropes of the ghost, the vampire, and the zombie to put forward the disruptive presence of the lumpenproletariat and of subjects marginalized by the neoliberal economy. This is evident in films that connect the monstrous with the margins of the economy, such as Jorge Michel Grau’s We Are What We Are (2009), or with the remnants of deindustrialization, such as David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows (2017). To conclude this chapter, I want to bring to the fore a horror film that bridges Global South and European cinema and reflects on the spectrality of the space in-between: Mati Diop’s Atlantics (2019). Based on an earlier documentary short from 2009, narrating the experiences of migrants who nearly died trying to get to Europe, Atlantics tells the story of a group of men who must emigrate after not receiving their pay for working in a modern tower building. The migrants died on their way to Spain, and their souls begin possessing people in Senegal, seeking to recover their pay and get revenge for their death. Atlantics is not a story of the European gaze on Africa, like Herzog’s films, or of the specter of the migrant in Europe like Costa’s. Rather, it is a story of the in-between, migrants who are lost dreaming of Europe but return to disrupt Senegalese modernization, one that we can presumably identify with the exploitation of workers at home by alliances of African and transnational capital investment. The film is rich in aesthetics and politics, and critics have noted its bleak visual language (Hamzah 126) and its visualization of air pollution as a feature (Turner). Unlike Costa and Herzog, whose work raises the question of the European auteur’s engagement with otherness, Diop belongs to a cohort of artists who are second-generation migrants in the metropole and trace back to the cultural traditions of the former colonies. She is the daughter of musician Wassis Diop, known for his combinations of African and European films, and a collaborator. Her father’s brother is Djibril Diop Mambéty, the great filmmaker of the Senegalese New Wave, whose masterpiece, Touki Bouki (1973), cast a critical eye on the urge of young Senegalese to leave for France. This is not solely anecdotal. As Gigi Adair notes, the film must be regarded as part of a tradition of filmic depictions of Dakar, as well as of the representation of “the colonial history of contemporary exploitation and thus the coloniality of migration,” tying it to the work of filmmakers like Mambéty, Ousmane Sembène, and Souleymane Cissé (Adair). Further, Mati Diop debuted as an actress in Claire Denis’s minimalistic masterpiece 35 Shots of Rum (2008). James S. Williams suggests this was a formative experience for Diop because of the way in which Denis 94

Colonial Traces

portrays the everyday nature of community, as well as the mixing of European and non-European styles—exemplified by Denis’s engagement with Yasujirõ Ozu and European traditions or Wassis Diop’s mix of Senegalese folk with modern pop (88–89). Rather than imagining the specter of the Global South as a disruption in the metropolis, Diop maps the ghostly presence of the dead migrants, across transnational spaces of capital, one that equally haunts Europe and the capital interests in Africa itself. Replicating the critique of national bourgeoisies in the postcolonial Senegalese cinema of Mambéty and Sembène, Diop imagines a haunting that cuts across various structures of capital. Atlantics is an example of a new cinema emerging in the liminal zone between the metropole and the former colonies, in which the ghosts of the Global South remain a point of reference for the planetary.

Works Cited Adair, Gigi. “The Spirity of Migrancy. Mati Diop’s Atlantique.” Studies in 20th and 21st Century Literature, vol. 46, no. 1. DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.2208. Agamben, Giorgio. Nudities. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford UP, 2011. Arenas, Fernando. “Migrations and the Rise of African Lisbon.Time-Space of Portuguese (Post)Coloniality.” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 18, no. 4, 2015, pp. 353–366. Blanco, María del Pilar and Esther Peeren, eds. The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in Contemporary Cultural Theory. Bloomsbury, 2013. Chatwin, Bruce. The Viceroy of Ouidah. Cape, 1980. ———. In Patagonia. Cape, 1977. Cordeiro, Edmundo. “Ventura: A Character’s Mental Landscape as History.” International Journal of Film and Media Arts, vol. 2, no. 1, 2017, 32–41. Costa, Pedro, dir. Vitalina Varela. Sociedade Óptica Técnica, 2019. ———. Horse Money. Sociedade Óptica Ténica, 2014. ———. Colossal Youth. Ventura Films, 2008. ———. Casa de Lava. Madragoa Filmes, 1994. Dias Branco, Sèrgio. “Spectres of Today. The Fractures of History in Horse Money (2014).” Observatorio Special Issue 2020, pp. 039–051. Diop, Mati, dir. Atlantics. Ad Vitam, 2019. ———. Atlantiques. Anna Sanders Films/ Le Fresnoy Studio National des Arts Contemporains, 2009. Dirlik, Arif. “Global South. Predicament and Promise.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, Winter 2007, pp. 12–23. Emmelhainz, Irmgard. Jean-Luc Godard’s Political Filmmaking. Palgrave, 2019. ———. “From Third Worldism to Empire. Jean-Luc Godard and the Palestine Question.” Third Text, vol. 23, no. 5, 2009, pp. 649–656. García Canclini, Néstor. Art Beyond Itself: Anthropology for a Society without Line. Trans. David Frye. Duke UP, 2014. Gerbault, Aurelien, dir. All Blossoms Again: Pedro Costa Director. Qualia Films, 2016. Graça, Andé Rui. Portuguese Cinema (1960–2010): Consumption, Circulation and Commerce. Tamesis, 2021. Hamzah, Sahar. “Ghost Story as Social Commentary. A Look at Mati Diop’s Atlantics.” Journal of African Media Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 125–127. Herzog, Werner, dir. Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin. BBC Scotland, 2019. ———. Cobra Verde. Werner Herzog Filmproduktion, 1987. Jorge, Nuno Barradas. ReFocus: The Films of Pedro Costa. Producing and Consuming Contemporary Art Cinema. Edinburgh UP, 2021. Liz, Mariana. “Vitalina’s (in)visibility. Contemporary Portugal and the Cinema of Human Mobility.” Transnational Screens. Latest Articles section. 2022, pp. 1–15. DOI: 10.1080/25785273.2022.2033400. Lund, Joshua. Werner Herzog. University of Illinois Press, 2020. Mester, Anna. “Tragic Revolutions on Screen. Decolonization Revisited in Cavalo Dinheiro [Horse Money, 2014] by Pedro Costa and Virgem Margarida [Virgin Margarida, 2012] by Licínio Azevedo.” Challenging

95

Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado Memories and Rebuilding Identities. Literary and Artistic Voices that Undo the Lusophone Atlantic. Eds. Margarida Rendeiro and Federica Lupati. Routledge, 2019. 176–191. Owen, Hilary. “White Faces/Black Masks: The White Woman’s Burden in Pedro Costa’s Down to Earth.” Portugal’s Global Cinema: Industry, History and Culture. Ed. Mariana Liz. I.B. Tauris, 2017, pp. 187–204. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Pordzik, Ralph. “Travel Writing and Its Discontents. Culture, Tourism and the Dynamics of Narration in Bruce Chatwin’s In Patagonia and The Songlines.” Anglia, vol. 121, no. 3, 2003, pp. 373–389. Rancière, Jacques. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Eliot. Verso, 2009. ———. The Intervals of Cinema. Trans. John Howe. Verso, 2014. Ribas-Casasayas, Alberto and Amanda L. Petersen, eds. Espectros: Ghostly Hauntings in Contemporary Transhispanic Narratives. Bucknell UP, 2016. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M. Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012. Vanderbilt UP, 2014. Tyree, J.M. “Nomad: Herzog, Chatwin and Non-Non-Fiction.” Film International, vol. 18, no. 4, December 2020, pp. 148–152. Turner, Lindsay. “In the Atmosphere: The Politics of Mati Diop’s Atlantics.” The Yale Review, vol. 108, no. 2, 2020, pp. 186–191. Valente, Simão. “Pedro Costa’s Realism of the Poor.” Orbis Litterarum, vol. 76, 2021, pp. 204–213. Vera, Ana. “Cape Verdean Immigration in Pedro Costa’s Trilogy. Narratives of Deterritorialization.” Journal of African Cinemas, vol. 10, no. 3, 2018, pp. 241–252. West-Pavlov, Russell, ed. The Global South and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2018. Williams, James S. “A Thousand Suns. Traversing the Archive and Transforming Documentary in Mati Diop’s Mille Soleil’s.” Film Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 1, Fall 2016, pp. 85–95.

96

PART II

Approaches Methods and Methodologies

9 GLOBAL SOUTH LITERATURES AS NEW MATERIALISMS Ecologies, Objects, and Ontologies Carlos M. Amador Let us begin with one definition of the Global South and then transition towards understanding it as a critical optic. Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra characterizes the Global South as those nations marked by the “involvement of foreign powers in recently independent countries and their continued marginalization in the world system” (Armillas-Tiseyra 21). This simple definition yields a world in the throes of global climate change, with the eventuality of the utter alterations of everyday regimes of life by political and economic marginalization of the vast majority of the world; the periphery of racialized bodies that make up another extractable resource from the formal colonies of Western imperialism is to signify a world where the social reality of matter is now ever more present. Matter matters. Much in the way that Raymond Williams argues for a reading of literature that emphasizes how periodization in literature is subject to the conglomeration of social and material forces of capitalist life, it is crucial to recognize questions of materiality, of what the actual stuff of life and sociality, materialism, and the human vision of that reality actually signify beyond humanist traditions. Enfleshing humans by means of race, for instance—marking bodies as territories and subjects in conditions of fictitious alterity—was part of the specific development of capitalist accumulation. In this way, the literary representation of bodies expands the analysis of how the logics of racialization, extractive accumulation, and the logics of heteromasculinity and white supremacy are specific questions of matter and relations. Moreover, it must be recognized that part of the definition and theoretical preoccupations of the Global South resists the trajectory of Eurocentric economic theories—whether in the form of dependency theories/dependent relations or in the current era, with neocolonial and neoliberal tendencies—where central/peripheral relations are not theorized but rather reify metropolitan economic theory and naturalize regimes of capitalist jurisprudence. Samir Amin argues in his text, The Long Revolution of The Global South, that there is no dispute about the unevenness and distribution of accumulation and conquest, and that “the conflict between North (centers) and the South is an inherent part of the entire history of capitalist development.” Amin goes on to argue that Historical capitalism…merges with the history of world conquest by Europeans and their descendants, who made the United States, Canada, and Australia. This conquest was victoriDOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-11

99

Carlos M. Amador

ous for four centuries—from 1492–1914—before which the resistance of victims peoples had always failed. Such success made it possible to legitimize the conquest by citing the obvious superiority of the European system, synonymous with modernity, progress, and happiness--to use the terms from English utilitarianism—the foundation of Eurocentrism. The successful conquest persuaded the peoples of the imperialist centers (originally all Europeans, to which were added the Japanese, who chose to imitate their predecessors, but excluding the Latin Americans) that they have a “preferential” right to the world’s wealth. This is really a type of deep-seated racism, one that no longer takes on the elementary form of belief of the inequality of “races.” (Amin 403) Amin’s summation ratifies the vision of the Global South as the peculiar resource, target, and occasional agent in the development of racialized, colonial-imperial capitalism as specifically marked by geographical specificity and uneven results. The “inequality of races,” however, goes beyond the elementary form suggested here, as it specifically expresses uneven and combined development as crusted within the logic of capitalist development, and suggests that racialization is specific to the material and cultural life of Global South nations. As Gail Day and Steve Edwards write: Capital subsumes pre-existing or non-capitalist social forms, and remoulds them according to the forces of accumulation, internalizing their contradictions and unevenness, simultaneously resynchronising and redifferentiating cultures, societies, and economies. These transformations take place not only at national and global levels, but also refigure particular practices, institutions and even ideologemes. (Day and Edwards 259) In what follows, I show a crucial heuristic for both Global South studies and capitalism’s uneven and combined development, and I show that the reality of materialism is the effects of destruction, dislocation, and the magnitude of material changes on the climate are felt more powerfully in the Global South. The Global South is not only defined by means of colonialist and extractive exploitation but also by how this history instantiates a complex intersection of material analyses that work to identify divisions between the rich countries and regions of the Northern Hemisphere, critiquing the expansion of specifically uneven, neocolonial, and capitalist exploitation across the globe. While this chapter primarily works in a descriptive, interpretative mode, identifying how key concerns of materialism are being theorized through literary interventions, there is also a prescriptive element, as I argue that it is precisely within Global South literature, along with indigenous literatures writing under conditions of settler colonialism, where the interrogatives of new materialism couple with the theory of uneven and combined development to produce an emergent form of aesthetically mapping our times. As Sarah Brouillette, a communist theorist of literature and underdevelopment, writes: To return to a mantra from cultural materialism: literature’s forms change as social conditions of production change. Literature is a manifestation of social relationships, needs, capacities and constraints. New modes of reading culture have been emerging in relation to immiserating contemporary conditions. (Brouillette 63) 100

New Materialisms

A literature of the Global South is one where the effects of settler and plunder colonialism, for example, inform both speculative, futurist writing and works leaning towards realism. Moreover, Global South literature displays more a cosmopolitanism of focus on the experimental form of an expanded materialism and an investigation of the consequences of uneven and combined development than any set of political solutions or even unified access to literary markets. As Ignacio Sánchez Prado recently wrote, Global South forms a subset of “world literature” as a set of contingent networks materialized in the literary forms and ideologies of specific writers. It takes previous works on world literature as a “space” and as an “ideal,” and it adds a still-understudied conception of world literature as a set of material practices and institutions. (Sánchez Prado 29) Global South cultural discourse is specifically formed by its world connections. It is also noteworthy to point out that even the tendencies of African and Latin-American literatures participating in regionalist or nationalist cultural claims are generally mapped by a market system that places them in uneven and combined relations. The dialectic between the specificity of uneven and combined development in Global South literature makes discussions of the insufficiencies of previous materialisms (and hence the region’s own history of materialist thought) possible by focusing upon the role played by race and racialization, resistance to extraction, non-human/human agency, and uneven and combined development exercise in the development of rigorous materialisms. In Global South literature, as David Chandler writes, “minds” matter. The new literary engagements with materiality express the limitations of older forms of material engagement; they “seek to provide means and techniques for new, more iterative and experimental forms of governance” (Chandler 566). And while scholars often question the political efficacy of linking new materialism to cultural and theoretical life, what we are specifically interested in is understanding how the reimagining of matter is part of the literary toolkit of Global South literature and how literature and the focus on material life is an effect of capitalist accumulation and the uneven histories of Global South nations.

Defining new materialism Rather than an actual movement, new materialism can be said to be a cluster of intersecting positions renewing attention on how, historically, the epistemological and ontological accounts of the human sciences and hard sciences tend towards anthropocentrism, speciesism, and enforcement of an increasingly untenable border between nature and culture. Representation, critical theoretical modes, and the language of philosophy become subjected to a thorough evaluation of how their treatment of matter intersects both in distinctness and interconnectedness, moving past idealism and anthropocentric materialisms. More tendency than actual school, new materialism’s unity is comprised of a series of general principles that reject accounts where Eurocentric and universalism impose regimes of description that are racialized, heterosexist, and parasitic on extractive accumulation practices—what Marx calls the “capitalist free appropriation of natural and social relations.”⁠ New materialism’s concerns are the threads and networks of human and non-human semiotics and engagements, in rendering visible or bringing into some relief where socalled oppositions between agents, causal descriptions, and concerns are fundamentally entangled. Taking a cue from Karen Barad’s work, we can state unequivocally that entanglement is the first 101

Carlos M. Amador

general principle of new materialism. The stakes for a view of entangled materiality are absolutely clear for Barad: Matter and meaning are not separate elements. They are inextricably fused together, and no event, no matter how energetic, can tear them asunder. Even atoms, whose very name, (atomos), means “indivisible” or “uncuttable,” can be broken apart. But matter and meaning cannot be dissociated, not by chemical processing, or centrifuge, or nuclear blast. Matter-ing is simultaneously a matter of substance and significance, most evidently perhaps when it is the nature of matter that is in question, when the smallest parts of matter are found to be capable of exploding deeply entrenched ideas and large cities. Perhaps this is why contemporary physics makes the inescapable entanglement of matters of being, knowing, and doing, of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, of fact and value, so tangible, so poignant. (Barad 3) Matter-ing, as Barad writes, describes the constantly flowing, often dialectical connection that matter—whether it be human agents, viruses, or less discrete phenomena such as tectonic plates, climates, and cities—shares as part of everyday reality. Materialisms that deny the plurality of connection between entities and phenomena reify dualisms between human/non-human, gender binaries, or racializations and unfreedom. Human existence is a sort of polymorphous perversity of entanglements that flatten with the imposition of anthropocentric normativity. Human existence is decoupled from the world of materiality, ratified by everything from secular science to the most devout religious thought, as the necessary peak of earthly existence—or if it isn’t the peak of earthly existence, humanity is tasked with the horizon of naming and building the world per se. This attitude of superiority, premised always in this false separability of matter from meaning, as new materialism reveals, is inherently part of the nullification of the value of the material world into an extractive source. It is precisely within this intersection that Global South writing works to link the ideological reifications of Western ontological thought and capitalist accumulation with the pernicious logics of racialization and the destruction of non-white bodies. Another critical aspect of Global South literary new materialism is the political dimension of materiality, where we see how the subjects and political potentials of everyday life under capitalism materialize within bodies, objects, internal biological processes, skin, and animals—in short, corporeality and materiality as critical insights on everyday life. New materialist authors Dinah Coole and Samantha Frost write: As Stephen White points out, ontology involves not simply the abstract study of the nature of being but also the underlying beliefs about existence that shape our everyday relationships to ourselves, to others, and the world. “Ontological commitments in this sense are thus entangled with questions of identity and history, with how we articulate the meaning of our lives, both individually and collectively”. (Coole and Frost 5) Moreover, new materialism refigures the political sphere to include and highlight expressions of matter that thread everyday life. Politics is imagined as a new, disaggregated landscape of agency and being: “The body politics is posited as a unity it can never be. Yet, that does not have to be a cynical conclusion,” as Judith Butler argues (Butler 4). One does not have to see the inherent contradictions of body politics as either cynical or utopian. Rather, what Butler identifies leads 102

New Materialisms

to questioning institutional practice, and everyday life requires a renewal of questions of agency and ethics, cause and effect, and inclusion/exclusion that accept a fundamental disunity of materiality.

Defining the Global South as materialist In order to understand how materialisms both new and old function as part of the expressive landscape of the Global South, it is critical to delimit what we are talking about to allow the term to have resonance in our contemporary conjuncture. An additional argument to the argument pursued here will be that new materialism in the Global South can be theorized to be an emergent definition of the Global South, given the shared reality of the unevenness and destruction of capitalist accumulation and capitalocenic climate change. In the last section of this chapter, I will suggest that the principal motivation of new materialist theory should now be to answer for the Capitalocene as a “new materialism.” For now, it suffices to note that this activity is happening in much of the literature I cite here. These literary works include Peruvian author Alexis Iparraguirre’s short stories, works from the Peruvian sci-fi collection La realidad no existe, and works by multiple South African and Nigerian authors writing in short form and the novel. They all directly engage with questions of matter and unevenness, and address capitalism’s role in continuously and irrevocably altering the landscape of matter. These texts form part of the ever-increasing bibliography of “climate fictions” or “anthropocene” fictions that mark and index our specific conjuncture and its imaginings of the future. Of course, this will be a question of integrating the current conjuncture of capitalist accumulation—the age of the crisis of capitalist profit, and the post-COVID-19 world—and the focus on the effects and affects in production during this long era of capitalist stagnation.⁠ If one of the tendencies that has emerged historically is the tendency for modernisms to concern themselves with the propensity of language to lie, dissemble, confuse, authorize, and denounce—in short, the properties of language to act normatively—and that this is a direct effect of the transformation of the social sphere by hyper-commodification, emerging financialization regimes, and the imperialist regime, then Global South literature exists specifically to show where unevenness frames the potential for symbolic action. In order to fully clarify the relation of the Global South to uneven and combined development in the service of coupling it to materialism, it is important to further specify the conditions of our terms. As Anna Garland Mahler writes: The Global South as a critical concept has three primary definitions. First, it has traditionally been used within intergovernmental development organizations…to refer to economically disadvantaged nation-states and as a post-cold war alternative to “Third World.” However, in recent years and within a variety of fields, the Global South is employed in a post-national sense to address spaces and peoples negatively impacted by contemporary capitalist globalization. In this second definition, the Global South captures a deterritorialized geography of capitalism’s externalities and means to account for subjugated peoples within the borders of wealthier countries, such that there are economic Souths in the geographic North and Norths in the geographic South. While this usage relies on a longer tradition of analysis of the North’s geographic Souths—wherein the South represents an internal periphery and subaltern relational position—the epithet “global” is used to unhinge the South from a one-to-one relation to geography. 103

Carlos M. Amador

It is through this deterritorial conceptualization that a third meaning is attributed to the Global South in which it refers to the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation under contemporary global capitalism. This subject is forged when the world’s “Souths” recognize one another and view their conditions as shared (López 2007; Prashad 2012)…In this sense, the Global South may productively be considered a direct response to the category of postcoloniality in that it captures both a political collectivity and ideological formulation that arises from lateral solidarities among the world’s multiple Souths and moves beyond the analysis of the operation of power through colonial difference towards networked theories of power within contemporary global capitalism. (Garland Mahler online) From this point of view, we can move towards another definition of the Global South: its vulnerability to capitalist destruction by means of climate destruction. The Global South, irrespective of its geographical position, is comprised of nations riveted to capitalist accumulation as the putative inexhaustible source of capitalism’s metabolism—cheap, disposable labor, primary resources to be extracted for the consumptive habits of the metropolitan North,⁠3 and a market for the remaining goods it cares to share with the regions. Jason Moore terms this the four cheaps, which power its destructive cycle of production and consumption as a system that Moore terms “a dissipative system.” As Moore argues: capitalism as “dissipative system”—is the law of value’s negation of life-making, which turns on adaptation, variation, and the ongoing emergence of biological and even geological difference. What has been missed is capital’s dependence on such life-making processes: those uncapitalized human and extra-human natures without which no great wave of accumulation can materialize. That dependence is materialized through accumulation by appropriation: the channeling of unpaid work by human and extra-human natures into the conditions for capital accumulation. (Moore 2015) The aforementioned analysis illustrates how the Global South is always defined by its objective and material basis for the provision of wealth to the moneyed North, and further developed by the institutional encapsulation within the modes of production, circulation, and distribution that name its ecological reality—and the cultural responses to this truth. Colonialism and imperialism leave enduring legacies that are continued, albeit with certain key differences in the neoliberal era and the post-COVID future. Networks of power and accumulation continue to perpetuate the divisions between societies that benefit from extractive modes of capitalism and the plentiful migrant pool of surplus population that steadily flows to Global North countries and extractive super-economies in the Persian Gulf region. Reinforcing center and periphery relations, what Boaventura de Sousa Santos terms “the deep abyssal lines,” carves out a path where the certainty of Global South and Global North interchange is that the “new materialism” of the Global South will be markedly different from that of the Global North, where concentrations of wealth, political power, and military guarantee an asymmetrical climate apocalypse.

Literature, speculation, and matter—Global South new materialism Recent Latin-American and African literature has been a vanguard of literary challenges regarding Eurocentric capitalist accumulation and the disproportionate violence that the Global South 104

New Materialisms

will suffer in the new climate situation. As noted earlier, the history of capitalist accumulation and extraction leaves marks of violence and long-term consequences that mark new materialist concerns as essential to the representative resources of literature. Note, too, that our definition of the Global South does not shift concern over materialism exclusively to reflections on “nature” or the “environment” in lockstep with ecocritical practice. Climate science shows that the Global South, in all of the different interpretations of the term, will bear the extreme brunt of a world that is warming and dying due to capitalist production. Answers concerning the relationship between materialism and local knowledges/literatures and cultural texts link up within the space of a literature that operates within a horizon of expectation around materialism and objects precisely because attention and representation work to ratify the lines of flight and coherence drawn out by literary analysis. There is a specific commitment to generativity as a condition of language that, at the surface level, structures some of the most important ethical and theoretical commitments of new materialism. Take, for instance, the materialisms at play in Zimbabwean writer Tsitis Dangarembga’s This Mournable Body, a novel that works with a map of the dynamic material life—both human and non-human, mediated and unmediated. It is critical to argue strongly for the emergence of shared preoccupations among writers and that these intersections express a certain new materialist perspective, which forms part of the emergent cultural form of the current conjuncture. Contemporary climate theories emphasize the common destiny of climate collapse in terms of changes to the world system, where local conditions express the specifics of their own environmental regimes in relation to the movements and flows of international capitalism, with their radically disproportionate rich-nation hunger. Take, for instance, Nigerian writer Wole Talabi’s collection, Incomplete Solutions (2019), as an example of formalist irrealism suffused with a preoccupation with materiality and its political and social life. The eponymous novella tells the story of Wale Adedji, a Nobel-Prize-winning physicist based in Lagos, and the discoverer of the means to teleport objects and his quest to teleport organic matter. The quest fails, as the organic life either perishes or loses a fundamental animating principle— a “soul,” but not configured as a theological constant but rather a kind of material unity formed by the intersection of physical processes. Talabi’s novella directly presents a typology of intersections and regimes of matter that are configured by means of difference rather than a hierarchy of animating principles theological in nature. The “soul” for Talebi isn’t an ineluctable transhistorical reality but rather woven into the ontology of everyday life as a network reality of material life. And when the human subject returns from her teleportation, effectively lobotomized by the process, the soul can be seen to be little more than the specific arrangements of processes and matter in the production of an entanglement. The following paragraphs lay out how a group of African and Latin-American texts, especially “speculative” fiction, share the specific concerns of both new materialism, broadly conceived, and the consequences of uneven and combined development. Argentine, Peruvian, Chilean, Colombian, and other cultural producers, for instance, share this particular investment in thinking through new theories of cosmovision and knowledge that Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch or Suyi Davies Okongbowa’s David Mogo, Godhunter do through a kind of materialist magic, an occult of the local ingredients and sympathies that think Nigerian reality in the “singular modernity” of capitalist life. Aspirations and affects in the face of climate collapse and the nihilism of capitalism as the only possible set of social relations of production are a measure of the dialectical relationship between core/periphery developmentalism and the qualities of aesthetic categories and expression in the literatures of the Global South. Or, as Fredric Jameson writes, this literature presents “a mode in which [the] transitional economic structure of incomplete capitalism can be registered and identified as such” (Jameson 142). David Mogo, Godhunter in particular “registers” 105

Carlos M. Amador

how the incompleteness of capitalism fuses with the new materiality of a world where mostly parasitic and environmentally “gods” have crashed into Lagos, destroying much of its oil-producing infrastructure, providing David Mogo with the needed employment of Godhunter and exterminator. His efforts take him through a Lagos entangled with the new materiality of the post-God, postenvironmental collapse Lagos. Similar texts will only proliferate as capitalocenic climate change continues unabated, and the unfolding and reordering of the global capitalist economy continues “the re-spatialisation of production and consumption.”⁠4 Aesthetic forms emerge to fill in the gap of meaning that emerges from this new movement. Lastly, these new aesthetic forms, common in their irrealist and realist modalities, by design draw out maps of the limits and points of conflict of an uneven and combined sphere, and how the imaginary of a politics of everyday life temporally situated is a future that is both speculative and strangely mimetic for our own times. Readers will recognize the future conjuncture not exclusively for its deviation from our current norm but from within the written text’s interstices between the emergent, dominant, and residual cultural modes and what we call later “peripheral irrealism.”⁠5

Global South: Narratives of climate collapse and the new materialism Contemporary Latin-American literature is part of the intersecting concerns over how uneven and combined development and the concerns of Global South writers in part lie in a constant reappraisal of the specific role of materiality and the matter of the world. Extractive capitalism’s costs are cut into the tissue of works that approach how the reality of combined and uneven development under capitalist accumulation correlates with racialization, heteronormativity, and colonial logics of ascription and oppression. These works mediate the current conjuncture, expressing through the work a series of formal features that renew a dialectical relationship between realist expression and the futuristic, detemporalizing effects of speculation and genre. Moreover, this dialectic between the real and the imaginative speculation—in both the Hegelian sense and the sense of literary genre—is a better fit for the literature of today’s new materialism, which attempts to move beyond representationalism, anthropocentrism, and Eurocentric, radicalizing discourses. In Peruvian writer Alexis Iparraguire’s short story collection Inventario de naves (2010), the short stories “Orestes” and “Sábado” manifest the specific role that racialized, lumpenproletarian life, ecological collapse, and biomechanical engineering, in the form of hallucinogens or mutants, have in developing literature’s reflective and predictive capacity. Set in a Perú stripped down to its barest national markers, Iparraguirre’s stories write about the way in which everyday life, comprising Peruvian economic contradictions and colonial racial hierarchies, is marked in the logics of enfleshing into discourses of subjectivity. The precariousness of social life and the ways in which the matter of the world is social, effectual, and dynamic are represented as an agent, an actively material sphere that unsettles historical blindnesses and challenges binary logics of the human and non-human. The five stories that make up the collection write an immanent history of climate collapse and the reframing of the material world—with even psychic premonitions and tarot divinations sharing empirical value with scientific knowledge and occult rituals sharing the same space as mutagenic creatures who are part of the mutual aid regime emerging after society’s fall—that also serves to compress into literature key engagements with the consequences of uneven and combined development, such as the question of differential security regimes, class, and everyday struggles for survival and social reproduction—“a pervasive and conspicuous feature of peripheral social formations” (WERC 70). Moreover, Iparraguirre’s work contains tropes and approaches of 106

New Materialisms

speculative fiction that highlight the new materialist preoccupation with thinking through ways of representing the entanglements of the Global South. What will come in the futurity of speculative fiction is nothing less than, as Neil Davidson writes, a “form of experience, generated by the dynamic of capitalist modernity, and in turn responding to it with the cultural forms of modernism” (Davidson 178). In the short story “La hermandad de la luna,” a group of dreamers and soothsayers divine the climate collapse across dreamtimes, trances, and climate phenomena, and the mood and affect fill the psychic space of a blurred-edged but recognizable Lima landscape. A flow of information transects occult spheres and material spheres and strives to eliminate the discriminatory, classificatory ontologies of the past for a notably more suitable one for an era of extreme unevenness—especially the effects of crisis. Claudia Rivera Sálazar’s short story “Cyber-proletariado” (2021), Mike Wilson’s 2008 novel Zombie, and Carlos Chernov’s El sistema de las estrellas all share interrogations of an endgame, an apocalypse, or a minimal transformation of the world of late capitalism into something else, something reflecting the inherent contradictions of the capitalist age, and in one, somewhat fatalist case—Carlos Chernov’s text in particular—how the social relations of capital may survive collapse intact, or more lugubriously, in a more expansive, totalitarian refrain. In fact, another crucial aspect of the peripheral irrealism we are discussing is the prevalence of the survival of capitalism after crisis. Each of these novels belongs to a category of texts that write about how the temporality of a post-crisis world is marked by a disorder of social relations that is still utterly imaginable and recognizable by means of the contours of uneven and combined development. As the WReC group writes, “what is formally distinctive about peripheral” aesthetics is that they situate temporal discontinuities within the material space of the novel. We now turn to fiction from sub-Saharan Africa, especially speculative fiction, which represents an increasingly populated trajectory of literary engagements with materialism—especially in terms of the everyday practices and affective responses to environmental collapse and the grinding hegemony of capitalist life. Writers in the speculative tradition reject writing an Africa that is delimited by Western fantasies that have been instrumental in the erasure of local aesthetic autonomy. African writers—I will focus on writers from parts of Southern and Western Africa, as we saw with Wole Talabi’s work—are modeling the consequences of centuries of capitalist accumulation and structural underdevelopment through worlds where the relations between objects, selves, subjects, and practices are all woven into the surface of everyday capitalist life. Lauren Buekes’ Moxyland and Zoo City concerns South Africa’s status as a neocolonial redoubt and hub of extractive capitalism that is further amplified by the biopolitics of a network capitalism threaded to the genetic level. This is a South Africa where virtual worlds and material worlds are continuously branded experiences and rebranding subjectivity. In this South Africa, the characters and imagined spaces of Moxyland read as chronotopes of a world that continues to be marked by ever-expanding material incursions—where the biopolitics of the body becomes utterly imbricated by the presence of non-human bodies in its form, as characters are branded by corporations at the nano-level, and public health and housing have been fully subsumed by the capitalist sector. Beukes’ fiction, among other South African and African writers such as Efe Okogu’s novella Proposition 23 which treats post-apocalyptic Lagos turned into a snowy, freezing megacity whose populace is controlled by corporate and state biotechnology, has been termed “post-crisis” fiction given its treatment of a world after collapse.⁠6 These texts form part of a nascent politics and aesthetics of the African Anthropocene. A continent that has been seized for nearly five hundred years by the predatory violence of imperialism, capitalism, 107

Carlos M. Amador

and now global warming must see its way through to the other side of these predations—to the other side of crisis. (Omelsky 33) This crisis can only be expressed through a writing explicitly tied to materialism and unevenness, framing the peripheral irrealism of African (and Latin-American writers) as living in the moment of a dying Earth. Okogu and Beukes are pioneers of an aesthetic turn to articulate the ontological paradox that we may soon face: that life may one day exist on an Earth that no longer sustains life. These writers question the possibility of reconstituted life, both human and non-human, on a post-crisis African continent. Moreover, the focus on the politics of climatological and material crises maps the imagining of future dystopias and their grounding in capitalist accumulation. The Warwick Research Collective nicely summarizes this operation: The appearance and growth of fictitious capital, the most “virtual” or immaterial form of capitalisation, and primitive accumulation, the most bloody and material, are interlinked… The simultaneity of material and immaterial regimes of production—of spilled blood and evanescent credit, to put it sloganistically—which is a pervasive and conspicuous feature of peripheral social formations, especially, does not readily lend itself to representation through the relative facticity of realist forms of the “ideal-type.” The in-mixing of the imaginary and the factual that characterises “irrealist” writing is arguably more sensitive to this simultaneity, to the seemingly incongruous conjunction of “abstract” and “scarring” modes of capitalisation. Irrealist aesthetics might then be presented as corresponding not to any depreciation of realism, but to a refinement of it, under the specific circumstances of combined and uneven development. (WREC 69)

Conclusion In literature, new materialism has become more than a tendency and less than a movement. It operates as something like literary mode—a set of generic obligations that specifically enfranchise a series of repeatable and recognizable affects. Affect—if only in the sense of a source that helps support certain decisions and effect of literary prose, as Fredric Jameson has written—emerges from the allegorical approaches to the extreme concerns brought on by the tyrannical force of capitalism over the material development and survival of the planet. The Global South is united as a region where uneven and combined development textures the way capitalist accumulation expands across the world. In an interview, Alexis Iparraguirre mused that “Latin American literature has always been much more concerned with its uneven and combined reality than romanticizing its historical development or making Latin American a taproot for magical realism.”⁠7 For Iparraguirre and other writers of the Global South, irrealism and speculation work not exclusively as counterfactuals but as literary conventions that shape the dialectic between art and the capitalist real. The engagement with new materialism through even a limited critique of uneven and combined development allows texts like W. Sello Duiker’s Thirteen Cents, Liliana Colanzi’s Our Dead World, or others in the vast panoply of Global South texts, to make specific interventions in the destruction of a literary politics that writes forms and practices as abstractions in an ideologically constructed horizon of expectations. Moreover, these texts reveal the social life of ideas as real abstractions or abstractions that reveal the specific social relations of capital. As Alberto Toscano writes: 108

New Materialisms

Society is above all relation: the role of these univocal simple abstractions—such as value, labor, private property—in the formation of the concrete must be carefully gauged so that they do not mutate back into those powerless and separate, not to mention mystifying intellectual abstractions that had occupied the earlier theory of ideology. But these abstractions are not mental categories that ideally precede the concrete totality; they are real abstractions that truly caught in the social whole, the social relation. (Toscano 275) Real abstractions integrate the social whole of literature. Put another way, the specific articulation of capitalist totality that we see in the Global South confronts ideological abstractions of capitalism by refocusing the attention upon the materiality of capitalist life. Bodies and physical life are put into work by Global South writers, especially in the speculative tradition; to accurately address the tissues and threads of capitalism—such as when ecological regimes are organized around the production/extraction of single commodities, as is often the case in peripheries and former colonies, the use of catachrestic narrative in speculative fiction serves to mediate the intense sensations of spectrality and phantasmagoria resulting from the hyper-commodity fetishism. (WREC 97) The Global South fiction we examined in this chapter speculates from the catachretical position of fiction in specific relationship to new materialism. This speculation was done through the focus on the networks of inter-relation that mediate social life. Spanish philosopher Krizia Nardini refers to the focus on materiality as the fruit of an “ethical-political exercise, given that intra-actions offer options for reconfiguration, whose objective is to detect the relations and open up space for movement and change within those selfsame reconfigurations” (Nardini 23), and this exercise forms part of the preoccupations of Global South texts with peripheral irrealism. Moreover, these Global South texts reveal social and political truths of capitalist totality, revealing as Alfred J. López argues the continual relevance of concerns of materiality in literature. As he writes: “The question […] it is to learn to hear— and not interrupt or bracket—the speaking but unheard voice of those subject-things already vibrantly inhabiting the material world” (López 386). In our interview, Alexis Iparraguire suggests that Global South fiction takes the ethical-political exercise seriously by attempting to negotiate dialectically the relationship between capitalism’s present and an imagined future. As he puts it. “I care about the material and unevenness because it is our present. I speculate the future in order to reject the idea that there is nothing beyond capitalism.” In short, Global South fiction’s work is to reject the imperialist present for an openness to possibility and a renewal of social relations through the modeling of fiction. In short, another world is possible.

Works Cited Amador, Carlos M. “Science Fiction and New Materialism in Latin America with Alexis Iparraguirre.” 30 March 2021. Interview. Amin, Samir. The Long Revolution of the Global South: Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International. Monthly Review Press, 2019.

109

Carlos M. Amador Armillas-Tiseyra, Magalí. The Dictator Novel: Writers and Politics in the Global South. Northwestern University Press, 2019. Beukes, Lauren. Moxyland. Penguin Books, 2018. Brouillette, Sarah. Underdevelopment and African Literature: Emerging Forms of Reading. Cambridge University Press, 2020. Burkett, Paul. Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Chernov, Carlos. El Sistema De Las Estrellas. Interzona, 2017. Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost.New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2010. Dangarembga, Tsitsi. This Mournable Body. Faber and Faber, 2021. Day, Gail, and Steve Edwards. “Differential Time and Aesthetic Form: Uneven and Combined Capitalism in the Work of Allan Sekul.” Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development: From International Relations to World Literature, edited by James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu, Brill, Leiden, 2019. De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. “Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges.” Epistemologies of the South, 2015, pp. 130–147. https://​doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9781315634876​-14. Diamanti, Jeff, et al. The Bloomsbury Companion to Marx. Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. Foley, Barbara. Marxist Literary Criticism Today. Pluto press, 2019. Garland Mahler, Anne. “What/Where Is the Global South?“ Global South Studies, U.Va., https://globalsouthstudies​.as​.virginia​.edu​/what​-is​-global​-south. Gordimer, Nadine. Get a Life, Penguin Books, 2006. Hartmann, Ivor W. AFROSFV3. StoryTime, 2018. Iparraguirre, Alexis. El Inventario De Las Naves. Sudaquia Editores, 2014. Iparraguirre, Alexis, and Francisco Joaquín Marro. Esta Realidad No Existe: Antología De Ciencia Ficción Por Escritores Del Perú. Estruendomudo, 2021. Sánchez Prado, Ignacio. Strategic Occidentalism: On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market, and the Question of World Literature. Northwestern UP, 2018. Sálazar Jiménez, Claudia, “Ciber-proletariado.” Edited by Alexis Iparraguirre and Francisco Joaquín Marro, Estruendomudo, 2021. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007. Mike, Wilson. Zombie. Alfaguara, 2011. Moore, Jason W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. Verso, 2015. Okogu, Efe, and Hartmann W. Ivor. “Proposition 23.” AFROSF: Science Fiction by African Writers, Story Time, Lieu De Publication Non Identifié, 2012. Omelsky, Matthew. ““After the End Times”: Postcrisis African Science Fiction.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 1, 2014, pp. 33–49. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1017​/pli​.2013​.2. Talabi, Wole. Incomplete Solutions. Luna Press Publishing, 2019. Toscano, Alberto. “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction.” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 20, no. 2, 2008, pp. 273–287. https://​doi​.org​/10​.1080​/08935690801917304. WReC or Warwick Research Collective, editor. Combined and Uneven Development - Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press, 2015. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford University press, 1992.

110

10 HISTORICIZING RABINDRANATH’S RECEPTION IN ARGENTINA Nilanjana Bhattacharya

Any cross-cultural literary transaction is complex to analyze due to its layers of interventions across time and space. When it comes to South–South literary transactions, however, the trajectory becomes even more difficult to trace, as it is permeated with many extra-literary factors, including colonial/imperial power politics. Focusing on Rabindranath Thakur’s (1861–1941, known as Tagore in English and Tāgoré in Castilian) reception in Argentina, this chapter explores some of the factors, literary and extra-literary, which inform literary transactions within the Global South. Taken together, these factors frame the literary horizon of expectations within which I venture to locate the reception of Rabindranath in Argentina. Historicizing this reception would help better understand the Indo–Argentine literary transactions, as the poet was a key person in this dialogue. The horizon of expectation is shaped by textual, factual, and other forms of experiences of the readers. Therefore, to understand the reception of Rabindranath in Argentina, it is important to begin with the Argentine horizon that initially encountered India. Of course, there is another side of this larger process: the reception of Argentina in India, which the scope of this chapter would not allow me to explore, except tangentially. I shall focus on critically analyzing the larger process of reception, and while the process of reception goes on, this chapter will have to end at a given point, which in this case would be roughly the 1940s, the decade following the demise of Rabindranath. A historical mistake of Columbus, unwittingly, connected two distant parts of lands together, India and Latin America. Although these lands had to wait for centuries before establishing any actual connection between themselves, the role that colonialism and explorations played in accelerating these connections could not be ignored. The technological progress of the “first world” contributed to better navigation, making maritime travel more accessible to many. The first contact between India and Argentina can be traced back to 1850 when the young Lucio V. Mansilla (1831–1913), who would later become a famous Argentine journalist and governor of a province, came to India. Among other places, Mansilla also visited Kolkata and nearby areas in November 1850, about which he wrote in his diaries. Seventy-four years after Mansilla, in November 1924, the first non-European Nobel laureate, Rabindranath Thakur, visited Argentina. Between these two visits, much had been exchanged between these two countries. Given the different languages of these countries, these exchanges took place primarily through translation. While the scope of this chapter does not allow a detailed discussion of each and every DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-12

111

Nilanjana Bhattacharya

translation of Rabindranath’s books published in Argentina, it is important to underscore here the critical role translation played in forging this South–South connection. So far, I have not come across any Argentine – or for that matter, Castilian – translation of Rabindranath’s books done directly from Bengali. Almost all the Latin American translations of Rabindranath were from the English renderings, prepared sometimes by the poet himself, sometimes by his friends and scholars. Doing an “accuracy check” of the Castilian versions is not an objective of this chapter. I shall focus on the larger context of the reception and the Indo–Argentine dialogue, where translation, or more precisely, literary transduction, acts as a critical tool. Focusing on literary transduction (Doležel), instead of translation, would be advantageous in exploring the literary horizon. The concept of literary transduction is based on the idea that any speech/written act is a response to a received message and is intended to be received by others who would again respond to it, thus generating a potentially never-ending chain. Unlike translation that presupposes the existence of a specific “source text”, literary transduction acknowledges the plurality of the received messages, which may or may not be in the form of a single text. This is useful in the context of Indo–Argentine dialogue as it would often be difficult to identify the source text of a translation, which further rules out any possibility of an “accuracy check”. Rabindranath’s books arrived in Latin America primarily in two ways – in the form of English renderings (by the poet, or somebody else) and through Spanish or French or Italian (or another European language) translations of the English versions. The role of Europe in this South–South connection, therefore, cannot be ignored. Zonobía Camprubí’s translations of Rabindranath’s works were quite popular in Latin America, and since the 1940s, Argentine editions of many of these texts were published by Editorial Losada in Buenos Aires. Victoria Ocampo, however, categorically mentioned in her memoirs (1982, 1983) that she read André Gide’s French translation of Gitanjali. While discussing his reading of Rabindranath, Joaquín V. González (1917) referred to a former Italian Prime Minister Luigi Luzzatti’s reading. In 1945, Anatole y Nina Saderman translated Rabindranath’s Gora into Castilian from German. Nevertheless, the reception of Rabindranath’s works in Latin America is very different from that of Europe, and this is where the question of South–South connection and a similar colonial history become crucial. By the early nineteenth century, Argentina was able to free itself from the control of the Spanish crown, which was followed by a nation-building process that required a national identity. While one tendency of this period was to imitate Europe and fashion a national identity after Europe, there were also strong inclinations towards rejecting Europe and developing an identity independent of Europe. Thus, while in Domingo Sarmiento’s Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (1845), Europe stood for civilization and the gaucho symbolized the barbarians, the hierarchy was soon turned upside down in José Hernandez’s Martín Fierro (the first part published in 1872 and the second in 1879), which projected the gaucho as the hero. With the 1837 Generation openly eschewing the colonial and pre-colonial past of the country, proclaiming themselves as free people and looking for a new identity, began in Argentina. This quest was for a new literary form and diction that would enable it to express its new identity. Modernismo, to a large extent, reflected this quest. During this crucial juncture of searching for its own identity, Argentina, like many other Latin American countries, looked towards the East, which was manifested in its literary and travel history. This was also the time when a tide of Orientalism swept Western Europe. Axel Gasquet analyzed how the negative and monolithic image of Asia as “buried in dense darkness” gradually changed in Argentina. This change was linked to the fact that in India, the English colonizers had begun translating a number of ancient Sanskrit texts into English and other European languages from the late eighteenth century. Scholars have shown how these translations were fraught 112

Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina

with colonial power politics. Nevertheless, it was mainly through these translations and re-translations that many ancient Indian texts arrived in Argentina and other parts of Latin America. The Ramayana by Valmiki was translated in 1869 by Lucio Vicente López. In 1896, the first Argentine edition of the Bhagavad Gita, translated by Emilio H. Roqué, appeared (Gasquet). Argentina’s growing interest in India was manifested in the many voyages the Argentines made to this distant place. Following Mansilla, in 1911, Ricardo Güiraldes traveled to India. His wife, Adelina del Carril, visited India several times during the twentieth century and spent years there. She adopted an Indian child, Ramachandra Gowda. Both Ricardo and Adelina’s writings revealed that they were drawn primarily to the spiritual and yogic practices of India. In 1913 – the year when Rabindranath won the Nobel Prize for literature – Ernesto Quesada included India in his world tour. The latter inscribed his highly spiritual encounter with India in Una vuelta al mundo (Journey Around the World), and it was certainly not a coincidence that this piece appeared in the same periodical, Nosotros, which also published the first Argentine translation of Rabindranath’s poems. Thanks to all these travels, and translations of ancient Indian texts, Argentina was already familiar with the major philosophic thoughts of India, including the Buddhist and Sufi philosophies. Apart from the translations, European Orientalism also had an impact on this reception through the works of Schopenhauer, Schlegel, Hume, Schelling, and others (Gasquet). Latin America, therefore, came in contact with the Vedanta through the works of European philosophers or European translators at a time when their disappointment with Europe was strong, especially in the years leading to and following the First World War. Thus, even before their contact with Rabindranath, Argentina was already familiar with the so-called spiritual and mystic “Orient”. The Argentine periodicals, incidentally, played a major role in this entire process of reception. In London, the first edition of Gitanjali: Song Offerings was brought out by The India Society in 1912. They printed only 750 copies out of which only 250 were for sale. The success of the book was such that a giant publisher like Macmillan soon signed a contract with Rabindranath, being his only publisher in English for a long time. The French translation of this book was published by another famous publishing house, Gallimard. In Argentina, however, the poet’s introduction was very different. Copyright issues could be one reason that kept major publication houses out of the picture. Here, the newspapers and the newly emerging periodicals played a critical role in introducing not only Rabindranath but also the “Orient” to the larger public. It was, for instance, a periodical named El Plata Científico y Literario that published a piece by Lucio V. Mansilla on his oriental voyages (Gasquet). Some of his writings were also published in a periodical La Revista de Buenos Aires. Lucio Vicente López’s translation of The Ramayana by Valmiki also appeared in this journal in 1869 (Gasquet). It, therefore, does not seem to be surprising that within days of the announcement of the Nobel Prize, in November 1913, an Argentine periodical, Nosotros – the one that would soon publish Ernesto Quesada’s travel narrative – published 12 poems of the poet, along with the news of his winning the Nobel Prize in literature. Poem numbers 1–6, 15–18, and 102–103 from the Gitanjali: Song Offerings were published, without the name of any translator. These were the first translations of Rabindranath published in Argentina and probably in the whole of Latin America, and though the name of the translator remained a mystery, the translations seemed rather “faithful” to the English versions.1 In fact, Spanish translations of Rabindranath’s poems first appeared in Spain in August 1913, months before Rabindranath received the Nobel Prize in literature.2 The translator, Perez de Ayala, was not unknown in Argentina. La Prensa, an important news daily of the country, used to publish Ayala’s articles frequently. Thus, it was quite possible that Argentina came across Rabindranath’s poems even before the Nobel Prize announcement in November 1913. The Nosotros translations were accompanied by a portrait of the poet by Rothenstein, the same one that was in The India Society edition of Gitanjali: Song Offerings, 113

Nilanjana Bhattacharya

and a brief foreword that stated that the poems were by the Indian poet who had recently won the Nobel Prize in literature and whose life and works had been discussed extensively in all Argentine dailies in the last few days. It was also a periodical that published the first complete translation of a book by Rabindranath, which, incidentally, was itself a translation. Cien poemas de Kabir was a translation of One Hundred Poems of Kabir that Rabindranath and Ajitkumar Chakraborty jointly translated into English. Although the Castilian translations were done in 1915, González did not publish these then. The translation was finally published in 1918, in Atenea, in two consecutive issues, along with a long introduction by González. This piece revealed that González had probably read all the books of Rabindranath published in English, he knew about the poet’s school in Santiniketan, he mentioned the Bengali language and songs composed by Rabindranath, and many such details from which it became clear that he had a thorough idea about the backdrop of the poems he translated. Significantly, he also stated clearly that he had no knowledge of Bengali, Sanskrit, or any other Indian language. In this prologue, he shared with his readers his reading of Rabindranath in such a way that this piece became significant in understanding the reception of Rabindranath in Argentina and also – quite independent of the former – translation studies. Divided into four sections, González opened this prologue by explaining his reasons for selecting this book for translation. He explained how translated texts had always played a major role in inspiring “foreign” authors. He also referred to the ancient Indian texts, such as The Mahabharata, The Ramayana, Bhagavat Gita, the Upanishads, and the Puranas – in that order – and the multiple foreign invasions in India, which resulted in polyphonic philosophies. In Kabir’s poems, González detected Islamic and Sufi impact. He was moved by Kabir and Rabindranath’s quest for the divine truth and finally stated, Ever since I had started studying and thinking about the inherent problems of our nationality, taking them out from the heart of the history, I have acquired the conviction that there is a Hatred that reveals itself with all the characteristics of a historical rule…When I could read Tagore…my rejoice knew no bound on being able to strengthen my poor voice with that enlightened musical instruments of love. (Tagore, Cien Poemas de Kabir, 47–48) This proved that Argentina did not discover Rabindranath abruptly. At least, for a section of Rabindranath’s Argentine readers, his works were part of a tradition, which might not have been very well-defined under the overpowering image of the “mystic orient”. Nevertheless, Rabindranath was not an isolated poet. Therefore, unlike Luzzatti, González did not try to fit the poet within a monolithic religious idea. Ever since the publication of the first 12 poems in Nosotros, there had been a steady stream of translations of Rabindranath’s works being published in Argentina. In 1915, a book named Poemas appeared, containing 25 poems from The Gardener, translated by Carlos Muzzio SaenzPeña (1885–1954). In fact, Saenz-Peña and Joaquín V. González – both well-known for their oriental inclinations and their prolific translations of oriental texts – were two key figures in disseminating the works of Rabindranath in Argentina. Around 1914–15, an Argentine publishing house, Ediciones Minimas, decided to publish a series of foreign authors whose writings had arrived in Argentina primarily through translations. Poemas by Saenz-Peña was the second book in this series, the first being a translation of Omar Khaiyam’s Rubaiyat, also by Sanez-Peña. The introduction to Poemas credited Rothenstein, and not Yeats, as the one to introduce Rabindranath to Europe. The next year, Sanez-Peña’s translation, Los poemas de Kabir, appeared, where 49 114

Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina

poems of Kabir were translated into Castilian. This was one of the various examples where the idea of literary transduction would come in handy, as it was not very clear what the source text of this translation was. The introduction mentioned Kshitimohan Sen, a teacher in Santiniketan who collected the dohas of Kabir, and also Rabindranath and Ajitkumar Chakraborty, who translated these into English. Sanez-Peña, presumably, read One Hundred Poems of Kabir. However, the title page did not mention Rabindranath. In 1917, the second edition of Sanez-Peña’s translation of Fruit Gatherings appeared as La cosecha de la fruta. These literary transductions, appearing one after another almost like “best sellers”, were not mere products of a sudden hype. Yeats’ introduction to Gitanjali: Song Offerings read the text as an isolated example, which appeared to Yeats “immeasurably strange”, yet he was moved because therein “we have met our own image” (Tagore, Gitanjali 264–65, emphasis added). Gide clearly stated in his introduction to the French translation of Gitanjali that “although it would probably be worthwhile to know how it relates to the traditions of ancient India, it might even be more interesting to consider how it addresses us”. (Tagore, Gitanjali 268, emphasis added). Their focus was evidently on their own cultures, or, on the West. In contrast, the initial Argentine translations reflected an ardent desire to understand Rabindranath’s works by placing them within a rich and diverse literary tradition, and not to read him as an isolated example of how the colonizers “empowered” Indians by exposing them to English and Christianity. Almost all the translations by Saenz-Peña and Joaquín V. Ganzález carried scholarly introductions, which bore evidence of their in-depth knowledge of the literary traditions of India. Instead of singling out the source text, these translations were remarkable in their references to the other works of the poet, as well as their detailed discussion of the polyphonic Indian literary traditions. In fact, unlike the Anglo-West, Argentina never regarded Gitanjali as the most important work by the poet. On the contrary, Sadhana was mentioned again and again, and the introduction to Poemas (1915) clearly stated that the poems of The Gardener were better than those of Gitanjali. The statement seemed to be a well-thought-out one, as the author of this introduction was able to situate Rabindranath within a literary tradition by linking these poems with the Gitagovinda by Jayadeva and the Padavali tradition. Joaquín González, in the introduction to the La cosecha de la fruta, argued how Rabindranath’s idea of life was ennobled by action. He discussed in depth the literary tradition which had germinated the poems of Rabindranath. Although by 1917 Rabindranath had become known as the poet of Gitanjali in the English-West, González’s introduction began with a reference to Sadhana, drawing attention to the “action” that was an integral part of Rabindranath’s idea of “renunciation”. Interestingly, González referred to the illustrations of Abanindranath, Rabindranath’s nephew, in Fitzgerald’s translation of Rubaiyat by Omar Khaiyam, published in 1910. Abanindranath’s works probably reached Latin America even before Rabindranath’s. As mentioned earlier, Saenz-Peña was the one who translated Rubaiyat into Castilian. Sanez-Peña, in his introduction to Los poemas de Kabir, tried to trace a trajectory of Indian philosophies beginning with the Rigveda, then through Manusamhita, Buddhist and Sufi philosophies, locating Kabir within that trajectory. In short, in Argentina, Rabindranath’s works were neither strange nor isolated – they were very much part of a trajectory, a literary history. Thanks to so many literary transductions, by the early 1920s, Rabindranath had become an important name in Latin American literature. During 1922–23, Colegio Nacional Mercedes published an anthology of poetry, El manantial, where along with poets like Ruben Darío, Amado Nervo, and others, there were also two poems of Rabindranath. In fact, the title of the volume was taken from a poem by Rabindranath from The Crescent Moon. The edition, however, did not mention any translator’s name. To understand the span of Rabindranath’s reception in Latin America, the anonymous translations must be taken into account. As pointed out earlier, the Nosotros translations did not mention any translator’s name. In many of her writings on Rabindranath, Victoria 115

Nilanjana Bhattacharya

Ocampo quoted the poet in Spanish without mentioning the name of any translator. During the poet’s stay in Buenos Aires, La Nación also published some short stories of Rabindranath, translated into Spanish, without mentioning any translator’s name. Evidently, the poet had more translators in Latin America than are currently known. However, to understand Rabindranath’s reception in Argentina, it is necessary to move beyond translations. In 1933, a compilation of Joaquín González’s writings was published by Talleres Graficos Argentinos de L.J. Rosso. In the introduction to this volume, Arturo Marasso explained that González’s writings took a different turn around 1914, which was roughly the time when he encountered the works of Rabindranath. In fact, the place where González wrote the preface to Cien poemas de Kabir was named, in the language of the Incas of ancient Peru, “Samay Huasi”, meaning the abode of rest, which was very similar to Rabindranath’s asrama, Santiniketan, meaning the abode of peace. Ricardo Güiraldes’ ideas of beauty, divinity, etc., especially the way he equated the idea of God with beauty and truth in Sendero, were again very similar to Rabindranath’s, although there were no direct references to Rabindranath. Rabindranath’s reception in Latin America cannot be read in isolation from the overall literary trend in Latin America and Europe, which was largely based on an apparent binary between the Orient and the Occident. A few months before Rabindranath’s arrival in Buenos Aires, Victoria Ocampo published an article on him in La Nación. In this article, “The Joy of Reading Tagore”, she contrasted the poet’s writings with those of Proust, who, for Ocampo, was the embodiment of the “restless Occident” (Ocampo, An Annotated English Translation of Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro 4). As opposed to that, she called Rabindranath a “bridge in the making” between the Orient and the Occident. For Ocampo, reading Rabindranath was like “a refreshing shower for a traveler, tired and grimy, who has traversed the occidental desert” (Ocampo, An Annotated English Translation of Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro 7). Understandably, therefore, Rabindranath’s visit to Argentina, which initially was supposed to be a stop on his way to Peru and other Latin American countries, was a huge affair for which the whole of Buenos Aires was prepared. Ocampo (1982) referred to this event as the turning point of her life; for Jorge Luis Borges, Rabindranath’s visit to Buenos Aires was like a “visible testimony of miracle” (Borges, “Comentarios: La llegada de Tagore”, 61). The other side of all these eager anticipations was reflected in Hector Castillo’s poem “Plegaria por Rabindranath Tagore” (Prayer for Rabindranath Tagore), where the institutionalized fame of the poet became the sarcastic target of the avant-garde. Published in a periodical called Martín Fierro, this poem advised Buenos Aires to hide herself, her “loud fussy streets”, her “vulgar gestures”, and everything, in the fold of her “crescent moon robe”, so as not to disturb the dream of “the divine gardener” who knew “greater things than your skyscrapers and your street-crossings”. The mockery was deft and strong but seemed to be directed more towards the magnificent preparations of Buenos Aires to receive the poet, than towards the poet himself. The periodical, named after José Hernandez’s famous book El gaucho Martín Fierro, was known for its anti-institutional tendencies and was dedicated to bringing the country out of Europe’s intellectual grasp. One reason why Rabindranath became their target could be that his intellectual prowess was acknowledged even by Europe. Nevertheless, the fact that the poet managed to find a place in such a periodical reflected his popularity and relevance in Argentina. Another reason why some people were unhappy with the poet’s visit could be the news that the poet was going to attend the Ayacucho centenary in Peru as a guest of President Leguía, a well-known dictator. The October 1924 issue of Nosotros published a brief note in anticipation of the poet’s visit, where, after expressing their admiration for the poet they lamented that “his noble presence and high renown” would lend more limelight to the Ayacucho centenary that the tyrant Leguía was organizing for his personal gain. 116

Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina

In such a contested atmosphere, Rabindranath arrived in Buenos Aires on 6 November 1924. A huge reception committee was formed, headed by the famous Argentine author Ricardo Rojas, to receive the poet. The committee met and felicitated the poet; so far, however, I have not come across any copy of any speech delivered at this reception. On arrival, Rabindranath met several journalists and gave them long interviews from Montevideo and Buenos Aires. In an interview published in La Nación on 7 November 1924, the poet expressed his despair with Europe and hoped that civilization would be reborn in the New World. He wanted to know the soul of Latin America and not its economy or industrial development. However, he spent only a few days in the Plaza Hotel and then was shifted to Miralrío, in San Isidro, a stay that Victoria Ocampo generously arranged for him. He was said to be ill and needed rest and, therefore, took part in very few official programs. On 18 December 1924, he delivered a lecture on “Lyric Poetry” at Amigos del Arte, and this was probably his only public lecture in Buenos Aires. He also met a group of Argentine students and had a long discussion with them. Elmhirst took notes of this conversation, which was later published as “To the Young”. On 27 December 1924, Rabindranath had a discussion with a group of Argentine teachers, later published as “Teaching to Children the Idea of God”. There were several occasions when Rabindranath discussed various issues with Elmhirst, or Ocampo, or both of them, and Elmhirst’s notes on many of these discussions were later published in The Visva-Bharati Quarterly. However, none of these talks mentioned anything about his interaction with any Argentine author/translator. There were no references to Argentine literature or culture, or even Argentine translations of his works, or anything about the Latin American literary tradition. A significant Latin American account of Rabindranath’s stay in Argentina is by Adelina del Carril, which is important as here some references are found as to how the poet reacted to the Argentine. The “Orient”, Carril said, had fascinated her ever since she was very young, and her introduction to the works of Rabindranath was through the translations of Zenobía Camprubí and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Adelina and Ricardo met Rabindranath in San Isidro. Carril mentioned that she and her husband sang Argentine folk music for Rabindranath, including the northern vidalas, which the poet appreciated very much, and also sang Bengali songs for them that he had composed himself. In fact, despite reading Rabindranath in translation, Argentina had long been interested in the poet as a musician. As early as 1918, Nosotros (No. 109) published a brief piece on “Rabindranath Tagore, the Musician” under “Noticulas” or news, which mentioned his published volumes of notations. The news gave the audience a general idea about Rabindranath’s songs and also quoted a few lines in Bengali language, using Roman script, explaining how Rabindranath’s tunes carried across cosmic emotions. In 1924, Adelina recalled, the poet told them, “None of the so many places I have visited seemed to me so similar to Bengal, as does your country. The sky here, the dawns and the sunsets, are so much like mine.” (Carril 64, my translation). In this article, Carril also mentioned visiting the ancestral home of Rabindranath in Jorashanko during her trip to India in the 1930s, when she had met the poet and his nephews, Abanindranath and Gaganendranath, who were both painters. It would be impossible to gauge the ripples Rabindranath’s visit created in Argentina if the popular press were excluded. In early twentieth-century Bengal, it was very popular among youngsters, especially, aspiring authors, to imitate Rabindranath’s handwriting. Most of his books carried his signature in Bengali like an emblem, which for many people, was like a model. Some of this frenzy must have reached Buenos Aires, as right after his arrival there, La Razón published the big news of this “grand arrival” along with a photograph of his signature in Bengali. A photograph of his Bengali and English signature was also published in the periodical Caras y Caretas. Another news daily, Crítica, published a cartoon of the poet captioned “El hombre del día” or “The Man of the Day”, also accompanied by his Bengali signature. Unfortunately, however, in this case, the 117

Nilanjana Bhattacharya

signature was printed upside down, thus creating an effect that was probably very different from the intended one. A cartoon of the poet was also published in a periodical Caras y Caretas. During the poet’s stay in Buenos Aires, several poems and letters were published in various dailies by various people expressing their admiration for the poet. Some of these poems and letters were also sent to Miralrío. Ocampo recalled how caravans of people came to Miralrío every morning to see the poet, though not always for literary reasons. All these instances reveal his popularity among the common people of Argentina. Regrettably, in Buenos Aires, Rabindranath did not have the opportunity to meet one of his most committed translators, Joaquín V. González, who passed away months before the poet’s arrival. Carlos Muzzio Saenz-Peña, however, was in the city and met the poet. However, I have not found any document so far regarding their meeting. The language barrier could be one reason why these meetings might not have been very fruitful. Leonard, K. Elmhirst, the poet’s secretary in this voyage, was English and did not know Spanish. The other reason could be that the poet spent most of his time away from the city, in a small suburb of Buenos Aires, San Isidro, and did not have the opportunity to meet many people. While this helped the poet to rest and recuperate, it deprived him of the chance to interact with many. The person who played a key role in Rabindranath’s reception in Latin America was the well-known Victoria Ocampo. Her contact with the poet has been discussed widely (Dyson, Ganguly) in India and Argentina. Elsewhere (Bhattacharya, “A Critical Introduction”), I have analyzed the role she played in Rabindranath’s reception in Latin America. Without repeating myself here, I shall focus on a few points in order to better understand Rabindranath’s reception in Argentina. In a number of her writings, Ocampo reminisced about Rabindranath’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1924 and their second and last meeting in Paris in 1930. She discussed (1983) how Rabindranath was introduced to his French translator André Gide and other French poets and artists like Paul Valéry, Countess de Noailles, Jean Cassou, and others. Strangely, however, she did not discuss anything about Rabindranath meeting his Argentine translators or any Argentine poets/authors/artists, although she narrated in detail how a certain woman came to San Isidro early one morning hoping Rabindranath would interpret her dreams for her. Ocampo mentioned that Ricardo Güiraldes met the poet, but almost like a passing reference, without any details. Given Rabindranath and his English secretary L.K. Elmhirst’s very limited or no knowledge about the country, the local language, or the Latin American literary tradition, it was not possible for any of them to appreciate the significance of these meetings. Ocampo’s own writings discussed in detail her reading of Rabindranath and his impact on her life, but she did not mention anything about the larger reception of the poet in her country. In 1933, Nosotros published four articles by Arturo Montesano Delchi in three different volumes, which brought back the “Orient–Occident” dichotomy in a different way. The first one was titled “Rabindranath Tagore, Filosofo” (Rabindranath Tagore, the Philosopher), where Delchi recalled his experiences of meeting the poet in 1924 and conversing with him. He found the poet “profound and pleasant” (33). He narrated how the poet used to sit beneath a tree and invite his audience to ask questions. A young Creole person acted as their interpreter. Delchi was particularly intrigued by Rabindranath’s concepts of truth and beauty. He also discussed how the “occidental” idea of religion that dealt with the exterior could never be used to understand the “oriental” idea of “yoga” which was a force of action and, therefore, a philosophy. This article was accompanied by a portrait of the poet drawn by J. Planes. In his second article, “Rabindranath Tagore, the Patriot”, Delchi connected the idea of nationalism in India with religious and social reforms, while his third essay was a detailed discussion of the poet’s pedagogy. The fourth article of the series discussed Rabindranath’s works, where Delchi depicted how the poet used art forms to envision a holistic 118

Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina

universe. Despite certain broad generalizing tendencies, these articles were significant proof of what Rabindranath meant to many Argentines and what profound interest some of them had in India. The association of Rabindranath with the “mystic orient” and, subsequently, his identification with a spiritual guru was also enhanced by his physical appearance. Although Latin America never regarded Gitanjali as the most significant text of Rabindranath, the “mystic” image did play a major role here. Ocampo (1983) narrated how the chief of Paquin in Buenos Aires compared the poet to “God, the Father”. Ocampo’s own fascination with the poet’s appearance was revealed in many of her writings. To Adelina del Carril, he appeared to be an “Assyrian God”. A periodical, Caras y Caretas, interviewed the poet in the Plaza Hotel and introduced him as “the handsome prince of Bengal” who was like an emblem of beauty and love. Although Rabindranath never preached any religion and had, sometimes, spoken against religiosity, his saintly appearance was often associated with the “mystic orient” and “Hinduism”. The imperial power politics became explicit in the way this “mystic” image was projected against Christianity. An interesting example of hailing Christianity as opposed to the “poet’s religion” was found in an issue of an English daily Buenos Aires Herald. On 30 November 1924, this newspaper published a news article with the headline, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Interpreter Converted to Christianity”. The brief note described Yiba Ibao, aged 42 years and “a native of the Province of Pou in India”, who “decided to forego the faith of his fathers”, converted to Christianity, and left the service of the poet. La Nación published a photograph of the poet with Ricardo Rojas and an interpreter, but apart from Elmhirst, there was no one as part of the poet’s entourage. The fact that by this time the poet had already moved to San Isidro and was generally avoiding public meetings definitely aided the fabrication of this piece. Nevertheless, it was significant that the fabrication happened in an English daily and was probably not repeated in any of the major Spanish dailies. On 6 November 1924, La Razón published the news of the poet’s arrival and declared his wishes to invite South American intellectuals to Visva-Bharati. Illustrious personalities from various parts of the world visited Visva-Bharati during the poet’s lifetime; unfortunately, however, there was no one from South or Central America. Rabindranath passed away in 1941, and up to then, Victoria Ocampo seemed to be his only regular contact in Argentina. His gratitude to the people of Argentina was expressed in a letter to his friend C.F. Andrews, where the poet said, “I am certain that quite a number of these people will remember my words even when I am no longer on this earth.” (Andrews Correspondence 2, Rabindra Bhavana Archive, Santiniketan). And he was right. His popularity in Argentina remains unmatched by any Indian up to now. Translations of his works continued to appear after his demise, and they continue to appear even now. Among the translators was Alicia Molina y Vedia, who translated The Shipwreck and My Reminiscences from French to Spanish. During the 1940s, Ricardo Nevares published translations of several books of poems. Texts such as Sadhana and One Hundred Poems of Kabir were also retranslated. In 1949, José D. Forgione published a book on pedagogy, Ideario de la Escuela Nueva, where a chapter included some excerpts from Rabindranath’s works, showing that his pedagogy was also relevant in Argentina. On 19 July 1962, La Nación published a news article about an “Instituto Cultural Rabindranath Tagore” being inaugurated in San Martin, which proved that even after the heavilycelebrated birth centenary in 1961, the poet was still not forgotten. It is difficult to pinpoint the reason behind the popularity Rabindranath enjoyed not only in Argentina but in many other Latin American countries. González, Sanez-Peña, Ocampo, Delchi, and many others were particularly intrigued by his idea of god, an attribute-less one, but who could easily take up the form of a friend or confidante, one who was never judgmental. The other point 119

Nilanjana Bhattacharya

that was stressed again and again, by Ocampo, Eduardo González Lanuza, and many others, was the accessibility of Rabindranath’s poems. The fact that reading these poems did not require any “preparation” was definitely one reason why Rabindranath gained so much popularity even among casual readers. Despite all these reasons, it is evident that the larger literary and political factors acted as catalysts in this reception. Therefore, taking this reception into account would result in a better understanding of Indian and Latin American literary history.

Notes 1 It is important to clarify at this point that Gitanjali: Song Offerings is not a translation of the Bengali book of poems Gitanjali. The former contains poems from ten different Bangla books of poems of Rabindranath. 2 Details about this can be found in Bhattacharya (2012).

Works Cited Bhattacharya, Nilanjana. “A Critical Introduction.” Victoira. An Annotated English Translation of Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro. Translated by Nilanjana Bhattacharya. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. pp. xiii–xli. ———. “Exploring a South-South Dialogue: Spanish American Reception of Rabindranath Tagore.” Revista de Lenguas Modernas, vol. 25, 2016, pp. 81–99. ———. “Gitanjali and Its Afterlife in the Hispanic World: Two Forgotten Translations.” The Visva-Bharati Quarterly, vol. 20–21, 2012, pp. 151–164. Borges, Jorge Luis. “Comentarios: La llegada de Tagore.” Proa, vol. 4, 1924, p. 61. ———. “El Nacionalismo y Tagore.” Sur, vol. 270, 1961, pp. 60–61. Carril, Adelina del. “Rabindranath Tagore.” Rabindranath Tagore, edited by Embajada de la India, Embajada de la India, 1961, pp. 63–65. Castillo, Héctor. “Plegaria por Rabindranath Tagore.” Martin Fierro, vol. 12–13, 1924, p. 3. Delchi Montesano, A. “Rabindranath Tagore, Filosofo.” Nosotros, vol. 284, 1933, pp. 33–47. ———. “Rabindranath Tagore, Pedagogo.” Nosotros, vol. 287, 1933, pp. 307–320. ———. “Rabindranath Tagore, Patriota.” Nosotros, vol. 285–86, 1933, pp.149–163. ———. “Rabindranath Tagore, Poeta.”Nosotros, vol. 289, 1933, pp. 159–170. Doležel, Lubomír. “Literary Transduction: Prague School Approach.” The Prague School and Its Legacy, edited by Yishai Tobin, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1988, pp. 165–176. Dyson, Ketaki Kushari. In Your Blossoming Flower Garden. Sahitya Akedemi, 2009. Ganguly, Shyama Prasad. “Ocampo y Tagore: Entre la Vision de Uno y lo Otro.” n.d. Instituto de Cervantes. Web. 04 July 2013. http://cvc​.cervantes​.es​/literatura​/aih​/pdf​/13​/aih​_13​_4​_038​.pdf Gasquet, Axel. 2008. El Orientalismo Argentino (1900–1940): De la revista Nosotors al Grupo Sur. The University of Maryland, College Park (Working Paper No.22). Accessed October 26, 2020. http://www​ .lasc​.umd​.edu​/documents​/working​_papers​/new​_lasc​_series​/22​_gasquet​.pdf González, Joaquín V. “Prefacio.” La cosecha de la fruta, by Rabindranath Tagore, translated by Carlos Muzzio Saenz-Peña, Sociedad Cooperativa Editorial Limitada, 1917, pp. 5–23. ———. Ritmo y línea. Talleres Graficos Argentinos de L.J. Rosso, 1933. Jauss, Hans Robert. “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” New Liteary History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1970, pp. 7–37. Accessed January 23, 2013. http://www​.jstor​.org​/stable​/468585 Mansilla, Lucio V. Diario de viaje a Oriente (1850–51) y otras crónicas del viaje oriental, edited by María Rosa Lojo, Corregidor, 2012. Niranjana, Tejaswini. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism and the Colonial Context. Orient Longman, 1995. Ocampo, Victoria. An Annotated English Translation of Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro. Translated by Nilanjana Bhattacharya, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2021. ———. Autobiografía IV: Viraje. Sur, 1982. ———. Tagore en las barrancas de San Isidro. Sur, 1983. “Rabindranath Tagore, músico”. Nosotros 109, 1918, pp. 142–143.

120

Rabindranath’s Reception in Argentina “Rabindranath Tagore.” Nosotros 185, October 1924, p. 263. “Rabindranath Tagore.” Caras y Caretas 1363, 15 November 1924. Saenz-Peña, Carlos Muzzio. Los Poemas de Kabir. Nosotros, 1916. ———. Poemas. Ediciones Mínimas, 1917. Tagore, Rabindranath. Cien Poemas de Kabir. Translated by Joaquín V. González, Libreria Hachette S.A, 1923. ———. Gitanjali. Visva-Bharati, UBSPD, 2003. ———. Poemas. Translated by Carlos Muzzio Samez-Peña. Ediciones Mínimas, 1915.

121

11 SLAVE LITERACY, CREOLIZATION, AND MUSLIM FORMATION IN COLONIAL JAMAICA Ahmed Idrissi Alami Introduction Arabic literacy played a crucial role in the formation of Muslim slave society and the maintenance of Muslim identity in the colonial Caribbean and on slave plantations. While estimates about the actual number of Muslim slaves who were brought from West Africa during the heyday of slavery differ, it is well-known that Islam arrived in West Africa in the 11th century and that its transmission spread through active Sufi orders (Kettani 297)1 and later became an established faith in the region of Senegambia and the Gold Coast, where manufactured goods were brought by European merchants to trade for gold, ivory, and slaves. As historian Michael Gomez notes, in “the mid-range of the Senegambian supply zone a substantial proportion of the population was Muslim” (677) and that, in the Gambia, “a significant number of the captives exported from the Bight of Benin were Muslim” (681). Far from being without religion, the spread and institutionalization of Islam in the different tribal, social, and political structures of West Africa assured the persistence of Arabic scholarship and the study of the Quran throughout the region. More specifically, the Muslim jurisprudence of the Maliki school was an entrenched discipline in various centers of learning such as Djenné, Timbuktu, and Kano.2 Islam not only connected various ethnic and tribal groups in West Africa, but it also encouraged the development of a network of communication among Muslim scholars, students, and tradesmen, which one can roughly parallel to the functional use of Latin in earlier periods in Europe and the Middle East. Paul Lovejoy also regards Islam as a strong factor in the economic prosperity of the region north of Benin in the gold-producing forest region known as the Akan states, as he notes, “providing commercial connections with the far interior, so that the Akan states were involved in continental trade on a scale that was at least equal to Oyo, Dahomey, and Benin and was perhaps even greater” (Lovejoy 200, 58). It should, therefore, come as no surprise that many of the slaves on plantations in the Americas and in the Caribbean used Arabic, practiced Islamic rituals, and sought to create and maintain Muslim communities. There are many accounts of slaves who used Arabic and practiced Islamic rituals by colonial administrators, travelers, and abolitionists.

122

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-13

Slave Literacy, Creolization

Language as battlefield Literacy was a contentious issue in the West Indies, as it was used by white planters to justify the inferior status of African Blacks who were enslaved and brought to serve on their plantations. Concerted efforts were also made to prevent slaves from having access to education. Several laws and injunctions were introduced to prevent them from learning how to read and write and becoming literate. For example, the American Antebellum South was notorious for such laws. Beth Barton Schweiger observes that “[a]nti-literacy laws in half of the slave states ensured that nine-tenths of all slaves would remain illiterate; local ordinances, custom, or the lash sufficed to discourage slave literacy in the others” (333). Other slaveholders were opposed to slaves developing skills of reading and writing because they perceived these skills as interfering with the abilities and dedication of slaves to labor and as practices that could ultimately enhance slaves’ pathways to freedom. As historian Marie Jenkins Schwartz also observes, these slaveholders tended to believe that literacy left slaves ill-suited for work in the fields, and many worried that slaves would use skills of reading and writing to learn freedom, or even worse, to counterfeit documents that would enable them to escape slavery. (150)3 In this way, literacy itself became constructed and deployed as a dividing line between the free and unfree, the master and the slave, the white and the non-white or Black. Ironically perhaps, literacy, defined by most slaveholders in terms of the ability to read and write English or European languages, precluded knowledge of other languages including Creole, which derived from the mixing of African and European languages. Thus, slaves were defined by the absence of these Eurocentric languages and their indigenous languages were either banned or discouraged, sometimes seen as dangerous for their potential use of promoting subversive acts among them.4 Making English the only means of communication was critical for the assimilation of African slaves by further ensuring that they were cut off from their ancestral languages and cultures. However, what Madden found was that some literate Muslim West African slaves who were educated before being sold into slavery in fact resisted assimilation by practicing Islam secretly and continuing to write Arabic texts and letters. Many travelers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to many of the islands of the West Indies included reports in their accounts about coming across or hearing stories about such individuals able to write and read Arabic.5 Some missionaries, it was reported, even resorted to the use of Arabic terms related to Muslim theology in their attempts to convert and introduce African slaves to Christianity. As historian Katharine Gerbner notes, “the Moravian missionary C. G. A. Oldendorp translated the word ‘God’ as Allah for the enslaved Fula men and women he met in St. Thomas and St. Croix” (9–10). As Anders Ahlbäck adds, Oldendorp, a Dutch Moravian missionary sent to observe the progress of Moravian missionaries in their efforts to convert natives, in fact ended up publishing an over 3,000-page manuscript about slavery in the West Indies in 1777. Rather than simply noting the church’s progress, which involved working with local Dutch magistrates and landholders, in his work he heavily critiqued the slave-based culture he had found there, arguing for the need for human dignity. Much to his frustration, church elders back home reduced his 3,000 pages by three-quarters, dispensing with much of his critique of slave culture, as it undermined their goal of advancing their missionary work and their “humanizing” efforts of conversion.6 123

Ahmed Idrissi Alami

R. R. Madden in Jamaica, “ideal” slaves and Arabic literacy Some 60 years later, R. R. Madden, a colonial administrator and magistrate, was sent from Britain to their holdings in Jamaica to prepare for the apprenticeship period (1834–1838), following the Abolition Act of 1833, the British Act of Parliament which officially “freed” more than 800,000 slaves in the Caribbean, South Africa, and Canada. Taking effect on August 1, 1834, this period was designed as the official transition from slavery to freedom on the island. Madden was also married to the youngest daughter of a British plantation owner in Jamaica. Driven by his interest in advancing abolitionism and his advocacy for emancipating slaves, modeled on the British master and servant law, the apprenticeship aimed at ensuring that the slaves develop the skills and aptitudes that would prepare them to live as free and independent workers when emancipation became formalized in 1838. Besides pushing for ordinances and resolutions that mandated that apprentices’ rights be respected by planters and local legislators, Madden was also interested in promoting slave profiles that challenged the false claim that Blacks were lacking in mental capacities, such as the assumed slave illiteracy, which slaveholders and their supporters publicized and disseminated in order to maintain their bondage as described above. Madden reported on his interactions with some of these literate Muslim slaves in his book A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship (1835). The complete title of the work also included a telling summary of the content to be found, as appeared on the front piece, “with incidental notices of the state of society, prospects, and national resources of Jamaica and other islands.” With this expansion of content, Madden proceeds to write, in many ways, in the long-established European tradition of travel writing and early ethnographic writings. For example, in his letter to J. Buckingham, Madden expresses his surprise when he discovered, by the mere accident of seeing the man sign his name in very well written Arabic […] that he was a man of education, and, on subsequent inquiry, a person of exalted rank in his own country, who had been kidnapped in a province bordering on Timbuctoo. (Madden, vol 2, 157) This man called Donlan,7 whose original name was Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq, was in fact a descendant of an elite family from West Africa who, before arriving in Jamaica at the age of fifteen, had studied to become an Islamic cleric like his father and grandfather. Al-Ṣiddīq is only one example among many Muslim slaves who used their Arabic literacy to communicate with others and who was able to write down the story of his experience in autobiographies (one version of this, in Arabic, was given to R. R. Madden in 1834, another account appeared in England the following year). Madden’s abolitionist impulses drove him to notice such individuals and write about them to contradict the narrative of slaveholders who, in enforcing their brutal system of bondage, sought to prevent Blacks from benefiting from education and learning, claiming that literacy was coterminous with being white because of what they claimed as unique mental capacities and superior racial traits. In the same letter, Madden reports on how he deliberately planned to befriend and become social with Donlan, convincing him finally to write down the story of his early life, childhood, and enslavement in Africa and the journey to Jamaica. Although the original Arabic version of this story did not survive, Madden included the English version in his book, and other versions have been published by the Royal Geographical Society of London and by S. G. Renouard and Ivor Wilks.8 Madden extolled literacy as a marker of intellectual excellence and moral virtue, and found in al-Ṣiddīq a per124

Slave Literacy, Creolization

fect candidate to advance his abolitionist vision and challenge one of the tenets upon which the racial hierarchy of slavery was founded. Al-Ṣiddīq became a prime example in Madden’s argument that differences for distinguishing between people and establishing their superiority can be based on education (or lack thereof) and social class (even if forced upon people) rather than race. In attempting to transvalue racial blackness through the lens of literacy and socio-cultural mobility, Madden projects al-Ṣiddīq as a British nobleman “educated at Oxford. … Fancy the poor youth marched in the common slave coffle to the first market-place on the coast. He is exposed for sale: nobody inquires whether he is a patrician or a plebeian: nobody cares whether he is ignorant or enlightened.” (Madden 158). By creating parity between British noblemen and West African elites, Madden subverts the ideological manipulation of literacy by slaveholders and planters. He also deploys slave literacy to push his abolitionist campaign and undermine the false logic of slave plantocracy that defined African Blacks as primarily physically-abled bodies that are naturally and inherently designed for hard labor but destitute of the mental aptitudes with which Whites are naturally endowed. When word came out about Edward Donlan’s literacy and good character in the papers, another Muslim slave, Robert Peart, known also by his original Muslim name Muhammad Kabā, who worked on the coffee estate of Spice Grove in the mountains of Manchester Parish, took notice and sought to start a conversation with him through letters. Kabā wrote a letter in Arabic and had Madden hand it over to Edward Donlan, who, after reading it, wrote back a reply also in Arabic, stating that his real and original name was Abū Bakr al-Ṣiddīq and that he had been born in West Africa and had grown up near Timbuktu. Kabā, in his letter to al-Ṣiddīq, complimented him on his accomplishments but used language and statements that suggested he was still a practicing Muslim although he told Madden that he wanted to invite him “to abjure Mahomatanism and embrace the true religion” (Madden 197). Through this correspondence, Kabā learned not only about al-Ṣiddīq’s Arabic literacy but also the public efforts to help him buy his freedom. Kabā used Arabized English to write his letter to al-Ṣiddīq. However, as the reply made clear, al-Ṣiddīq had some difficulties deciphering some parts of the letter and instructed Kabā in the next correspondence between them that he should “write it in Arabic language; then I will understand it properly” (Madden 201). For him, Arabic conveys not only communication but also aspects of cultural and religious identity. Kabā uses Arabic to represent the sounds and words of his English (likely a mixed combination of creolized English and Arabic scripts) and also mentions his desire to develop this conversation with al-Ṣiddīq. In contrast to al-Ṣiddīq, who does not include any distinct Islamic language, referring to Kabā as “dear countryman,” Kabā uses creolized English in Arabic script and suggests a Muslim identity by invoking the name of Allah and the blessings on his Prophet Muhammad in the beginning of his letter. He also requests a copy of the Quran from Madden. Al-Ṣiddīq not only left behind letters of correspondence but later also composed his short autobiography in Arabic and then read it aloud to Madden, who collaborated to have it translated into English. As an ardent abolitionist, Madden found in al-Ṣiddīq a strong example to buttress his arguments for ending slavery and liberating the slaves without emphasizing religion. Arabic literacy played a crucial role in mobilizing public opinion for al-Ṣiddīq’s manumission or release from slavery, including fundraising for his liberation after the publication of the English translation of his autobiography.

Kabā and the long life of a slave in Jamaica Kabā, for his part, was able to use his knowledge of Arabic reading and writing as well as Islamic literacy not only to communicate with al-Ṣiddīq but also to compose an important Islamic manu125

Ahmed Idrissi Alami

script about the sequence of events of the Day of Judgement, Islamic rituals of prayer and purification, and legal procedures for contracting Muslim marriages. A critical investigation of this manuscript, known as Kitāb al-Ṣalāt, explains why Kabā needed a copy of the Quran. In different parts of this manuscript, Kabā had problems quoting verses of the Quran correctly. It could also be due to his failing memory as he was already in his late 70s or early 80s when he tried to communicate with al-Ṣiddīq. This manuscript, which was translated by Daddi Addoun and Paul Lovejoy,9 exemplifies Kabā’s efforts to replicate the tradition of Muslim knowledge production in which he was raised and educated in West Africa. The first part of the manuscript reads like a direct sermon with its direct address to other Muslim slaves, men and women. At the beginning of this speech, Kabā exhorts them to wake up and shun sleep. The reference to sleep could definitely indicate that Kabā was delivering the speech in the late evening or early dawn, exhorting the Muslim slaves to get up and pray. He invokes Quranic verses about the benefits of prayer at night and early morning, using sayings from the tradition of the Prophet about the rewards that await those who show submission and compliance with God’s orders and recommendations as well as the punishment that disbelievers will undergo on the day judgment. Kabā most probably operated a network of Islamic preaching and Islamic education not only in Spice Grove, where he remained since arriving in Jamaica in 1777, but also on other plantations. After converting to Christianity by the Moravian Church in 1813 (the same sect to which Oldendorp belonged), Kabā was praised by Madden and others for his discipline and honorable service as well as his Christian behavior. As a result of his exemplary good conduct, the Moravian Church promoted him to the role of “elder,” an expression of the trust of his supervisors and mentors and an appreciation of his wisdom and service. As an elder, Kabā enjoyed more freedom of mobility, especially after he benefited from a mule from the Moravian Church, which facilitated his travels to other plantations and neighboring estates in the mountainous region of Manchester Parish. Kabā was in his 20s when he arrived at Spice Grove in 1777; he witnessed the experience of slavery in the last decades of the 18th century, lived through the Jamaica rebellion of 1831, and, at the end of his life, saw the apprenticeship period (1834–1838). At the end of his life, he lived as a free man in post-emancipation until his death in 1845. However, one should not construe his long life as evidence of a good and happy life since, as Charles Sydnor notes about Mississippi slaves, the fact that a slave “lived a reasonably long life does not prove that the life of the slave was pleasant or even reasonably bearable” (Sydnor 537). This longevity, nonetheless, allowed him to interreact with Afro-Jamaicans born in slavery as well as the new slaves brought from West Africa. Kabā, who benefited from an Islamic education and was receiving training to become a legal jurist in his native country, put this knowledge of Islam and his Arabic literacy to serve his Muslim community in Jamaica, maintain his religious identity, and help others convert to Islam (despite his conversion to Moravian Christianity). Other indications suggest that Kabā was aware and actively involved in the social and political movements around him. As a historian of the African Diaspora, Mohammed Bashir Salau, notes, he “was politically active on the island, helping to reveal the existence of a wathiqa (clerical letter) circulated among Muslims in Jamaica prior to 1834, and shaped the reactions of those enslaved in Manchester during the Baptist War of 1831–2” (255). The discovery and translation of his Arabic manuscript Kitāb al-Ṣalāt, which he wrote in 1820, reveals that his memory of what he studied was probably starting to wane and the writing of this manuscript was a desperate act to recall and rehearse some of that knowledge. Salau observes that at the time of the writing of this manuscript, Kabā “had been living in Jamaica for about 40 years and was alleged to have converted to Christianity, though he maintained a commitment to Islam” (Salau 255). Unlike the emancipation address, in which he uses Arabized creolized English,10 126

Slave Literacy, Creolization

the manuscript of Kitāb al-Ṣalāt was written in classical Arabic. However, the manuscript contains orthographic and spelling typos as well as incomplete Qur’anic and Hadith quotations and a fragmentary style. The manuscript reflects that Kabā, who by then had been more than 40 years a slave, likely experienced a cognitive decline as revealed by the difficulties he had remembering verses from the Quran and certain sayings of the Prophet and using Arabic correctly. Indeed, Kabā admitted facing these memory difficulties and even lamented his state, expressing his longing for his teachers and their guidance. In commenting on this part of the manuscript, Daddi Addoun and Lovejoy observe that the fact that Kabā “had lost touch with the tradition of scholarship and instruction available in West Africa is particularly poignant and revealing” (Daddi Addoun and Lovejoy 318). This manuscript covers three subjects; the first is a sermon in which Kabā calls on Muslims, males and females, to wake up, reminding them of the merits of night prayer and exhorting them to be mindful of the agony and trials of the last day of judgment. The second section discusses the rituals of purification and ablution, including the requirements of clean spaces for prayer. In the middle of the ablution section, Kabā inserts a third short section in which he discusses Islamic instructions and regulations for concluding marriage contracts with names of West African families such as the famous clerical family of the Darame. Overall, the religious content of Kabā’s Kitāb al-Ṣalāt is in line with the type of Islamic education “associated with the Saghanughu towns of Futa Jallon and its interior” (Salau 256).11 After close to 60 years of alienation from his Muslim teachers and their guidance, Kabā must have resorted to writing this manuscript in order to preserve some of the Islamic knowledge and pass it on to the Muslim community in Jamaica so that they could benefit from it and perhaps perform their faith “properly.” The emphasis on prayer and the last day of judgment represents the core Islamic belief of monotheism. The section on marriage represents a concern with consecrating marriages in accordance with Islamic law rather than Christian law and ensuring that the bond between husband and wife contributes to the creation of a sense of Muslim community. Given that the sharing of knowledge is an obligation within the Islamic intellectual tradition, Kabā felt the burden of that responsibility acutely as a learned Muslim in a predominantly nonMuslim environment. After lamenting his alienation from his spiritual master and his guidance, Kabā acknowledges that in the absence of that bond, he got lost along the way, perhaps referring to his earlier conversion to Christianity. The manuscript can perhaps be read as Kabā’s attempt to enact the obligation of transmitting knowledge as stipulated by the Islamic tradition of intellectual and spiritual learning as well as a type of personal “reversion” to his Muslim identity—it is not clear if his earlier claim of a desire to “convert” al-Ṣiddīq was a purposeful dissembling to hide a sublimated personal identity as Muslim or that this work marked a return to this identity. At the end of the first section of Kitāb al-Ṣalāt, he attempts to cite a hadith by his Shaykh Bābā al-Fakīru12 about the obligation of knowledge sharing, but he could not cite it properly due to his failing memory. Kabā started the quotation by referring to “the person who conceals knowledge,” but his writing broke down and he could not properly complete the citation. The quotation is part of a hadith by Prophet Muhammad who cautions against hiding knowledge, warning that a person who conceals knowledge will be bridled with a bridle of hellfire on the Day of Resurrection.13 Those words with which Kabā concludes this section of the manuscript point to his tormented soul and the qualms of conscience he experienced as a learned Muslim tasked with the duty of not only preserving his faith but also putting that knowledge in the service of his community. Literacy for Kabā was not only about fulfilling his personal spiritual needs such as reciting the Quran and carrying out other Islamic rituals, but it rather involved catering to his community. Kabā signed his first section according to the conventions used in Islamic manuscript writing in West Africa. He mentioned the day as Friday, stating his name and confirming his identity as the 127

Ahmed Idrissi Alami

author of the text. He moaned over his separation from his spiritual guide and master and sorely anguished over the severance and loss of the bond with that spiritual authority.14 Kabā also regretted and lamented the corruption of his reason and memory, perhaps indicative of his unquenched Sufi spiritual needs and reliance on reason, “eventually dying of spiritual thirst in the desert of the mind” (Whitehouse 27). However, this could also reflect the mental crisis he had if he was actually maintaining his Islamic faith in secret while acting publicly according to the rules of the Moravian Church. The act of writing can in itself be such a transformative experience that it may have enabled Kabā to regain self-awareness of his Muslim identity and cultivate a higher spiritual sense of his life. Either way, it can also be seen as his attempt to propagate an Islamic tradition of learning and develop his network among the newly emancipated, since “Africans have appropriated Muslim identity and knowledge practices to stake claims of belonging or to otherwise effect change in their environment” (Wrights 23). Invoking the Prophets’ injunction against concealing knowledge, Kabā thus attempts to reproduce a system of educational practices and pedagogical learning tradition in Jamaica derivative of his original West African culture. While this claim requires locating similar manuscripts and further research in the different archives of the British Colonial Office as well as other colonial archives, including the various Christian denominations where Muslim slaves lived and were involved, a critical reading of Kabā’s hand-written manuscript and its form suggests that he felt an obligation to write a tract to use and maybe also share with other Muslims and disciples. As Salau points out, “[i]n addition to maintaining commitment to Islam, Kabā helped draw attention to the existence of a small close-knit community in Jamaica until his death in 1845. He made efforts to communicate in order to sustain Islamic scholarship” (256).

The writing of English/Creole in Arabic script The practice of manuscript writing of West African Muslim scholars could vary depending on the local context, the status of the scholar, and the purpose of the manuscripts. While Kabā is not an established Muslim scholar on par with his teachers back home, the special local context in which he found himself must have compelled him to undertake the role of a community guide and teacher. His short Arabic address, given on Emancipation Day in 1838, however, is unique in both its form and content. Kabā seized this public occasion of delivering official speeches of thanks to write a testimony in creolized English, using Arabic letters and speaking in his own personal voice. Other scholars have commented on such skillful use of Arabic to transcribe English.15 But until very recently, almost no copies had survived that illustrated the complex and dexterous way in which English was transcribed using the Arabic alphabet. Kabā’s Arabic address on the occasion of emancipation in Kingston, Jamaica, remains the only copy that survived from the times of colonial Jamaica. This address by Kabā, as recorded in a transcription in Arabic script, was recently discovered and translated, and remains unique and unprecedented in this regard, especially among the literacy practices of Muslim slaves in the New World. Despite its brevity, about eight lines, this text is unparalleled in its linguistic features and discursive complexity. Kabā, by that time in his 90s according to Lionel Smith, Governor of Jamaica at the time, uses the first person to speak on the occasion of emancipation and celebration of freedom from “chattel slavery.” Scholars who have worked on the transcription and examined its language point out that it “exhibits several rare qualities.” Among the most remarkable of these features are the author’s use of the Arabic alphabet to transliterate the English speech and his use of his “individual voice” not only to emphasize “the brutality of apprenticeship but also in two additional ways: he does not present himself as affili128

Slave Literacy, Creolization

ated with a Christian congregation, and he references his African origins” (Dolan and Idrissi Alami 2019, 289). Before the original document was discovered, studies that explored Kabā’s life and address relied on the English translation of his address that appeared in the Liberator on September 7, 1838 (2). The English translation indicates that the original address was written by Kabā Saghanughu, referring to him by his master’s name Robert Peart, and calls him “late an apprentice to Spice Grove,” who “produced an address written in Arabic (by himself) to the Governor, which was agreed should be presented also to Sir Lionel Smith, on Friday the 10th ins., by the above four persons” (Liberator 2). The four persons referred to are William Barnard, Simon Martin, Francis Green, and James Martin, who delivered an address on behalf of the apprentices. The address was in the handwriting of Simon Martin. It is worth noting that Kabā, who was also an apprentice and therefore should have felt included in that address, chose to write his own address and entrust the four apprentices to deliver it into the hands of Governor Lionel Smith. The address by the four former “apprentices” uses the subject pronoun “we,” stating “we on the part of the late apprentices, but now happily free men,” and they offer gratitude and thanks to God, Queen Victoria, and the Governor. On the other hand, Kabā starts his address in the first person, reminding the Governor of his original name and country: “I Robert Peart, baptized in that name in Jamaica but in my country, I was named Mahomed Cover, I was born at Bucka” (Liberator 2). In the rest of the address, he pays homage to his “countrymen and countrywomen who may be alive in Jamaica, return thanks to Almighty God, and next, to the English Nation, whose laws have relived us from the bondage in which we have been held” (ibid 3). Kabā takes advantage of this public ceremony to remind the Governor and the British Colonial Establishment of the impact of slavery through the mention of his original name, native country, and people. A comparison, however, of the English translation that appeared in the Liberator and the manuscript reveals several significant divergences. While the English version couples the reference to countrymen and countrywomen with Jamaica, Kabā’s Arabic manuscript refers to them without linking them to Jamaica, which indicates that he most probably was referring to his original country in West Africa. There are also words that Kabā used in his manuscript but which did not appear in the translation. In the middle of his speech, for example, he expresses gratitude for the laws of the English nation that “relieved us of the bondage we have been held,” whereas in the Arabic version, he adds “chainhood” after “bondage.” In the closing of his Arabic version address, Kabā inserts the phrase “today end the torture,” which is not included in the English translation that was published. When we examine such differences between the two versions of Kabā’s address, as well as his address in comparison to that of the four other men, we realize that Kabā not only used his literacy in classical Arabic to maintain a sense of Islamic learning but that he more significantly took full advantage of his expertise in creolized literacy to voice his personal protest against the system of slave plantocracy, to pay homage to his country people, and to, in another way, reclaim his identity. Just as cultural creolization results from the complex mixing and encounter of various orders of cultural expression and identification, Kabā’s creolized writing not only embraces nonstandard forms of English use as a resistance strategy to subvert the hegemonic socio-cultural and political system but also expresses the new self that emerges as a result of his conflicted experience in Jamaica for more than seven decades. The translinguistic creolized writing of his manuscript is another proof that “creolization accepts the fact that issues such as identity and culture are never absolutes but always a process of connection and tensions along a continuum of other possibilities that grew out of the Caribbean’s colonial history” (Aljoe 20). 129

Ahmed Idrissi Alami

Conclusion The practice of Arabic literacy in colonial Jamaica is tied to its various appropriations by literate slaves as well as abolitionists. While literacy gives access to liberationist pathways, its performance is a multifaceted and malleable phenomenon, enabling empowerment and emancipation through different forms of collaboration and creolization. For Madden, al-Ṣiddīq’s literacy was a powerful tool to advance the abolitionist cause and subvert the ideological fallacy about the limited mental capacities of Blacks that was spread and propagandized by slaveholding planters and their advocates. In the case of Kabā, Arabic literacy was not only a means of communicating with other West African literate slaves but also a means to recall his early Islamic education and transmit it to the Muslim community on Spice Grove and adjacent estates as clearly demonstrated by his Kitāb al-Ṣalāt. His Arabic address, however, which he penned towards the end of his life to mark the celebration of emancipation, illuminates the role of creolized forms of literacy in resisting containment and enabling the emergence and consolidation of transnational narrative textuality. Without access to the original manuscript and its translation, the differences between the two versions would have remained unknown. Moreover, we would not have been able to examine and study the character of Kabā’s creolized translingual writing and discover his special use of Arabic letters to capture the various voice modulations and articulations of his spoken English. Through this linguistic creolization, Kabā was able to reclaim agency, provide his autobiography, and register his protest against the slavery institution. It is an excellent example of his liberated spirit and mind that he planned to record and leave for posterity such an enigmatic and coded testimony that resonates with the profound tortured souls of enslaved populations rather than the official sanitized addresses that were delivered by his representative apprentices in Manchester on August 2, 1838.

Notes 1 Also, around the late 11th century, “the West African Kingdom of Ghana is said to have converted to Islam through the influence of the Berber Almoravid Dynasty.” For more information on this, see Stephen Cory, “West Africa,” Juan Campo, ed. Encyclopedia of Islam, New York: Facts on File, 2009, pp. 709– 710. 2 For a comprehensive and well-documented survey of the role of Muslim education in pre-colonial West Africa, see Mauro Nobili, Reinterpreting the Role of Muslims in the West African Middle Ages,” Journal of African History, vol. 61, no. 3 (2020), pp. 327–340. 3 Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 2001. 4 It goes without saying that literacy played a major role in attempts of slaves to acquire social and political agency and plan rebellious acts. For example, Erica R. Johnson notes that literacy was also “a major theme of the Haitian Revolution.” For more information on this point, see her book Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 5 There are many accounts about West African slaves, often referred to as Mandingos or from Mandinka, who wrote Arabic tracts and letters. Some of the early accounts are reported in Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, in three volumes, vol. 2. Dublin, Ireland: Luke White, 1793. Other missionaries in the Moravian Church have also reported many cases of Muslim slaves who used Arabic and practiced Islam on slave plantations. For information on Muslim slaves and their literacy practices in the Moravian Church, see J. H. Buchner, The Moravians in Jamaica: History of the Mission of the United Brethren's Church to the Negroes in the Island of Jamaica, from the Year 1754 to 1854, London: Longman, 1854. 6 For more information on this, see Anders Ahlbäck, “The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: CGA Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies.” In Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission, pp. 421–446. Brill, 2021.

130

Slave Literacy, Creolization 7 Different spellings have been used in Madden’s text and other literature to refer to Al- Ṣiddīq’s first name. It appears as "Donlan,” “Donellan,” “Doulan,”and “Dolan.” For the sake of consistency, he will be referred to throughout this chapter in the analytical sections as “Donlan,” but alternative spellings will be kept as they appear in the citations used in this chapter. 8 The English translation of the autobiography appeared in Madden’s A Twelvemonth and was translated into French by G. C. Renouard. For more information, see Abu Bekr es Siddik, “Routes in North Africa, by Abú Bekr eṣ ṣiddíḳ,” The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, vol. 6, 1836, pp. 100–113, Ivor Wilks, “Abū Bakr al-ṣiddīq of Timbuktu,” P. D. Curtin, ed. Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade. Madison, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 152–163. 9 Yacine Daddi Addoun and Paul Lovejoy, “The Arabic Manuscript of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu of Jamaica, c. 1820,” in Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, ed. Annie Paul (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press, 2007), pp. 311–341. 10 For a detailed analytical study of Kabā’s emancipation address and Creole testimony, see Elizabeth Dolan and Ahmed Idrissi Alami, “Emancipation address as creole testimony: Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, a formerly enslaved Muslim in Jamaica” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 41, no. 4, 2020, pp. 795–815. 11 For information on the Qadiriyya and other Sufi orders in West Africa and their cultural history and social role, see Abdul-Aziz Abdulla Batran, “The Qadiryya-Mukhtaryya Brotherhood in West Africa: The Concept of Tasawwuf in the Writings of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1811)” Transafrican Journal of History, vol. 4, no. 1/2 (1974), pp. 41–70, J. M. Abun-Nasr, The Tijaniyya. Oxford, 1965, Cheikh Anta Babou, “Educating the Murid: Theory and Practices of Education in Amadu Bamba’s Thought,” Journal of Religion in Africa, vol. 33, fasc. 3, Islamic Thought in 20th-Century Africa (Aug., 2003), pp. 310–327, Fallou Ngom, Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjamī and the Murīdiyya (Oxford University Press, 2016), and Rudolph T. Ware III, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. 12 Fakīru is an alternative spelling of the original Arabic “faqīr,” ‫ريقف‬, derived from “faqr,” ,‫“رقف‬poverty.” In Sufi literature and discourse, it is an Islamic term used to refer to a Muslim Sufi who is totally dependent on God and who struggles to attain the status of a true slave or worshipper of Allah. 13 Daddi Addoun and Lovejoy translate the rest of Kabā’s quotation as “Whoever hides knowledge [should be bridled with a bridle of fire,” adding in endnote 83 that the section in square brackets is crossed out in the original (Daddi Addoun and Lovejoy, 330). Actually, the quotation Kabā attributes to his Shaykh Faqīru is a reference to a hadith of Prophet Muhammad in which he discourages and intimidates the concealment of knowledge. Kabā could not remember the rest of the hadith, but in the manuscript, he wrote the word day [‫ ]موي‬without the middle letter [‫ ]مي‬which is the word that completes the rest of the hadith. The reported hadith of the Prophet warns against hiding knowledge. Abu Huraira reported: The Messenger of Allah, peace and blessings be upon him, said, “Whoever is asked about knowledge and he conceals it, will be bridled with a bridle of fire on the Day of Resurrection.” “The intimidation against concealment of knowledge” is reported as hadith number 120–122 by Albani. For more information on this hadith and other alternative versions of it, see Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn Albānī, Ṣaḥīḥ al-Targhīb wa-al-Tarhīb. al-Mujallad al-awwal, al-Riyāḍ: Maktabat al-Maʻārif, 1412 [1991 or 1992], p. 160. 14 The proper transmission of spiritual knowledge in Sufi orders requires a close relationship between disciple and master teacher or murīd and shaykh. The bodily presence of the shaykh is crucial to the successful apprenticeship and attainment of spiritual enlightenment which “drew upon an earlier practice of person-to-person knowledge transmission in the Islamic religious disciplines (ʿulūm al-dīn) more generally. Disciples accompanied Sufi guides because the knowledge they sought could not be properly internalized without a master whose bodily presence had already become fused with this knowledge” (164). For more information on system of education and transmission of spiritual knowledge in Sufi oreders, see Zachary Valentine Wright, Living Knowledge in West African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse, Leiden: Brill, 2015, pp. 164–191. 15 Curtis and Jackson have commented on this rare linguistic phenomenon, saying that “slaves who were literate in Arabic were not literate in English. Abu-Bakr al-Siddiq was able to write in black English by using Arabic script to transliterate English as he heard it; he wrote ‘Afro-Jamaican English’ in Arabic script for Alexander Anderson, a planter, between 1807 and 1834. A slave called London was able to transliterate Biblical hymns and verses using this same method when he was moved from Georgia to Florida in the 1850s​.​by slaves from West Africa” (62). For more information on this point, see Edward E.

131

Ahmed Idrissi Alami Curtis IV and Paul A. Jackson, “Arabic,” Curtis Edward E., ed. Encyclopedia of Muslim-American history, 2 vol, New York: Facts on File, 2010, pp. 61–63.

Bibliography: Abun-Nasr, J. M. The Tijaniyya. 1965. Ahlbäck, Anders. “The Overly Candid Missionary Historian: CGA Oldendorp’s Theological Ambivalence over Slavery in the Danish West Indies.” In Critical Readings in the History of Christian Mission, pp. 421–446. Brill, 2021. Albānī, Muḥammad Nāṣir al-Dīn. Ṣaḥīḥ al-Targhīb wa-al-Tarhīb. al-Mujallad al-awwal, al-Riyāḍ: Maktabat al-Maʻārif, 1412 [1991 or 1992]. Aljoe, Nicole N. Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Babou, Cheikh Anta. “Educating the Murid: Theory and Practices of Education in Amadu Bamba's Thought.” Journal of Religion in Africa, Vol. 33, Fasc. 3, Islamic Thought in 20th-Century Africa (Aug., 2003), pp. 310–327. Batran, Abdul-Aziz Abdulla. “The Qadiryya-Mukhtaryya Brotherhood in West Africa: The Concept of Tasawwuf in the Writings of Sidi al-Mukhtar al-Kunti (1729–1811).” Transafrican Journal of History, vol. 4, no. 1/2, 1974, pp. 41–70. Buchner, J. H. The Moravians in Jamaica: History of the Mission of the United Brethren's Church to the Negroes in the Island of Jamaica, from the Year 1754 to 1854. Longman, 1854. Cory, Stephen. “West Africa.” Encyclopedia of Islam, edited by Juan Campo, Facts on File, 2009, pp. 709–710. Curtis IV, Edward E. and Paul A. Jackson. “Arabic.” Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History, 2 vol, edited by Edward E. Curtis, Facts on File, 2010, pp. 61–63. Daddi Addoun, Yacine and Paul Lovejoy. “The Arabic Manuscript of Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu of Jamaica, c. 1820.” Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Annie Paul, University of the West Indies Press, 2007, pp. 311–341. Dolan, Elizabeth and Ahmed Idrissi Alami. “Emancipation Address as Creole Testimony: Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu, a Formerly Enslaved Muslim in Jamaica.” Slavery & Abolition, vol. 41, no. 4, 2020, pp. 795–815. Dolan, Elizabeth and Ahmed Idrissi Alami. “Muhammad Kabā Saghanughu’s Arabic Address on the Occasion of Emancipation in Jamaica.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 2, April 2019, pp. 289–312. Edwards, Bryan. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, in three volumes, vol. 2. Luke White, 1793. Eṣ ṣiddíḳ, Abú Bekr. “Routes in North Africa, by Abú Bekr eṣ ṣiddíḳ.” The Journal of the Royal Geographic Society of London, vol. 6, 1836, pp. 100–113. Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Gomez, Michael A. “Muslims in Early America.” The Journal of Southern History, vol. 60, no. 4, November 1994, pp. 671–710. Johnson, Erica R. Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Kettani, Houssain. The World Muslim Population: Spatial and Temporal Analyses. Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2020, p. 297. Lovejoy, Paul. Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa. Cambridge University Press, 2000. Madden, Richard Robert. A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship; with Incidental Notice of the State of Society, Prospects, and Natural Resources of Jamaica and Other Islands, 2 vol. James Cochrane and Co., Waterloo Place, 1835. “Manchester, Aug. 2, 1838.” [Boston] Liberator, September 7, 1838. Ngom, Fallou. Muslims beyond the Arab World: The Odyssey of ʿAjamī and the Murīdiyya. Oxford University Press, 2016. Nobili, Mauro. “Reinterpreting the Role of Muslims in the West African Middle Ages.” Journal of African History, vol. 61, no. 3 (2020), pp. 327–340. Salau, Mohammed Bashir. “Nineteenth-Century North American Muslim Slave Narratives.” pp. 249–259, Christian-Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History Volume 16 North America, South-East Asia, China, Japan, and Australasia (1800–1914), edited by David Thomas and John A. Chesworth, Brill, 2020.

132

Slave Literacy, Creolization Schwartz, Marie Jenkins. Born in Bondage: Growing Up Enslaved in the Antebellum South. Harvard University Press, 2001. Schweiger, Beth Barton. “The Literate South: Reading Before Emancipation.” Journal of the Civil War Era, vol. 3, no. 3, September 2013, pp. 331–359. Sydnor, Charles S. “Life Span of Mississippi Slaves.” The American Historical Review, vol. 35, no. 3, April 1930, pp. 566–574. Ware III, Rudolph T. The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa. University of North Carolina Press, 2014. Whitehouse, Anab. An Introduction to the Sufi Path. The Interrogative Imperative Institute, 2018. Wolks, Ivor. “Abū Bakr al- ṣiddīq of Timbuktu.” Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, edited by P. D. Curtin, U. of Wisconsin Press, 1967, pp. 152–163. Wrights, Zachary Valentine. Living Knowledge in West African Islam: The Sufi Community of Ibrāhīm Niasse, Brill, 2015.

133

12 THE SOUTHERN SUBMARINE Storying the Deep Indian Ocean Charne Lavery

Introduction The Indian Ocean, in literary, cultural and historical both studies, has been a productive lens through which to understand transnational South–South interaction, as an oceanic space that offers an alternative frame to the land-based narratives of European empire or postcolonial nationalism. As Isabel Hofmeyr writes, unlike northern-oriented globalization and the Western-focused black Atlantic, the Indian Ocean provides a framework for reading “transnationalism within the South itself” (3). However, despite its expansive, regional scale, this view of the Indian Ocean is in one sense narrow, comprising a thin two-dimensionality tracking mostly across the surface of the sea. From another direction, while the oceanic humanities (or oceanic cultural studies) is gaining traction as a method for bringing together questions of the material ocean with its cultural meanings (Blum; Gillis; Cohen, “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe”; DeLoughrey), its subjects and locations remain overwhelmingly northern. The deep Indian Ocean, as a site and optic of imaginative inquiry, is one way of centering simultaneously both the Global South and the sea itself. The distance from the surface of the Indian Ocean to its deepest point, the Sunda Deep of the Java Trench, is almost exactly proportional to its width, a fair measure of which is the distance between Malaysia and Mozambique (about 7,000m and 7km, respectively). While its lengths have received much attention, whether from travelers, artists or scholars, its depths barely register. This is partly due to the opacity of water—ocean floors are still largely mapped at any level of detail using acoustic methods such as sounding because visual technologies like satellite imaging cannot easily penetrate bodies of water—and partly due to the inhospitability of the deep ocean to human life. The deep Indian Ocean is also far less well studied than the depths of the other oceans, for historically determined economic reasons—the Indian Ocean is a southern sea, ringed by “the poorer countries of the world” (Prashad). The second International Indian Ocean Expedition was launched in 2015, nearly 60 years after the first, an expedition that gathered important data but left understanding about the Indian Ocean “still rudimentary in many respects” (Hood et al. 2). The Indian Ocean remains “under-sampled in both space and time, especially compared to the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans” (Hood et al. 2). This empirical paucity is matched by cultural underrepresentation. 134

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-14

The Southern Submarine

The study of underwater depth and formations on the seafloor is known as bathymetry, the underwater equivalent of topography. Rather than conceiving of “topographies of interconnectedness,” as Indian Ocean studies have been described, what the deep ocean suggests is a bathymetry of interconnectedness, as well as disconnection (Bremner 18). We might imagine an Indian Ocean that is somehow transparent, in which the connecting lines of shipping routes are visibly underlain by those of submersibles, deep water currents, the ridges, valleys and shipwrecks of the seafloor (see for example The See-through Sea). Taking a submarine perspective on historical events and literary texts draws attention to the three-dimensional ocean that hosts strange and threatened multispecies life; to new sociopolitical tensions and alliances in the off-shore Global South; and to the operations of opacity, whether criminalized underworlds or undiscovered corals, reflective sea surface or resistant text. Conducting such a submersive reading means asking questions of critical ocean studies from and about the Global South, noting, as pointed out by Meg Samuelson, that the southern is the more oceanic hemisphere, which as we have suggested might be called the “oceanic South” (Samuelson and Lavery). It requires taking an interdisciplinary, entangled approach, which is also characteristic of a wider project “to write the world from Africa or to write Africa into the world” (Mbembe and Nuttall 348) as well as writing “theory from the South” (Comaroff and Comaroff). That in turn requires taking a fluid approach to texts that is attentive to language and narrative, but that is also grounded in contemporary life forms, including the mobility and interconnectedness of the Indian Ocean world as well as emerging marine science. The emergence of an oceanic imaginary has been motivated by an awareness of anthropogenic climate change, signaled by sea level rise that is slowly submerging, in an iconic instance part of the island nation of the Maldives (DeLoughrey 32). This is part of the too-rapid environmental change marked by the term “Anthropocene,” although the deep ocean is perhaps better served by Donna Haraway’s alternative, Chthulucene, which references a subterranean spider named for chthonic forces via the tentacle-faced deep ocean monster of Lovecraftian lore (13). Haraway’s proliferative approach, favoring more rather than fewer terms and stories, provides a model for the current study, a method appropriate to a many-faceted, all-encompassing crisis. As she says, “a myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene” (Haraway 1). The tentacular approach is appropriately oceanic and provides a way to draw together real and imagined stories of the deep ocean in overlapping, mutually informed and informing ways. There are three stories of the deep Indian Ocean to follow, based in both fiction and fact, which may suggest different ways in to beginning a cultural history of this southern submarine.

The orange roughy gold rush and the SIODFA The first story is a fish story. One of the types of fish which have drawn fishermen to deeper waters globally is the orange roughy, a round-headed fish that lives up to 600 meters under the surface of the sea. Its most striking characteristic, other than a vivid brick-red color that turns orange when caught and an apparently delicious flavor, is the fact that it lives up to 150 years old (Fenton et al.). Orange roughy is one of the valuable fish species that can be found in the vicinity of seamounts—lofty underwater mountains whose peaks may yet be hundreds of meters below the ocean surface (Clark et al.). During the 1970s and 1980s, commercial fishers first became aware of the close relationship between deep seafloor features and the presence of valuable fish stocks, just as shallow and medium-depth waters were becoming overfished, forcing fishing fleets to explore increasingly deeper waters in search of catch (Warner et al. 15). The first major catch of orange roughy was 135

Charne Lavery

recorded in 1979, off the coast of Australia and New Zealand, prompting a search for similar seamounts elsewhere. The Southern Indian Ocean Deepsea Fishers Association (SIODFA), formed in 2006, brings together the four main companies involved in exploiting deep Indian Ocean fisheries. Its origin story—according to a detailed and often idiosyncratic website whose mediation is the focus here—is related directly to the story of the orange roughy (SIODFA). As it recounts, when the primary fisheries around New Zealand had been almost fished out, by 1997, a South African vessel returning from Tasmania chanced upon the southern Indian Ocean fishery, a series of seamounts many miles east of Madagascar, around which significant numbers of orange roughy gathered. Between 1995 and 2000, the number of boats exploring that region of the ocean went from two or three to over fifty, with the annual catch going from under a thousand tons to a peak of 40,000 in 2000—an orange roughy gold rush (Smith 81). Like all gold rushes, it also ended quickly, with catches down to less than 5,000 tons by 2002. The handful of companies that remain in operation form the core members of the SIODFA, based out of Australia, Mauritius, the Cook Islands, Japan and South Africa (although several have complicated national affiliations involving, appropriately, off-shore islands), while the fishermen are also from Indian Ocean shores: “from the Phillipines, Namibia, South Africa and Indonesia.” The SIODFA’s stated mission is to “ensure sustainable harvests to the benefit of mankind while conserving biodiversity.” The two main points of environmental concern with deepsea fishing around seamounts are the destruction by trawl lines of rare cold coral on seamount walls and the considerable bycatch of rare and often unknown species. Examples include deepsea sharks that, because they live in the deep ocean’s twilight zone of the ocean to which very little sunlight penetrates, often have enormous eyes (Smith 83). The SIODFA website laments general ignorance about these species. It features a list of deepsea sharks with fantastical names that “we believe” exist in the southern Indian Ocean but with the caveat that “their taxonomy is in urgent need of revision: indeed a reliable key to assist data collection officers on SIODFA vessels to more consistently and accurately identify species is urgently required.” Between 2012 and 2014, one graduate researcher discovered 12 new species of shark on two trips accompanying the fishermen and assessing their bycatch.1 Extinction here is moving much faster than exploration, environmental impacts preceding environmental knowledge. The SIODFA’s rhetoric of conservation is complicated not just by the commercial interests of the signatories but also by the nature of the high seas. Until 2012, the only large-scale conservation initiative for the deep and high seas of the Indian Ocean came from the SIODFA, which in 2006 voluntarily set aside protected areas and agreed to refuse subsidies so as to reduce incentives to overfishing (Warner et al. 34). However, the high seas is an oceanic arena in which enforcement is in any case practically impossible. There is an inherent invisibility to deepsea fishing, which takes place in locations that are usually at least six weeks’ cruise from the nearest port. And there may also be something about the strangeness of some of the species under threat. The SIODFA laments the paucity of funded deepsea shark conservation efforts and offers as a possible explanation the unfortunate lack of charisma of these often odd-looking sharks: “Perhaps […] their generally unappealing appearance would make them poor candidates to feature in calls for funding.” The constellation of events, associations and discoveries taking place around the deepsea fisheries of the South-West Indian Ocean ridge constitutes a reminder of the strangeness of the submarine world along with its inseparability from more familiar surface tensions. Sociopolitical configurations develop around seamount fisheries, linking up older Indian Ocean networks in new

136

The Southern Submarine

ways and exemplifying Indian Ocean transnational regionality in its more lawless and ad hoc guise. At the same time, and often partly as a result, new species emerge from the deep, as those more familiar lateral networks intersect vertically with multispecies diversity. Long-lived fish and large-eyed sharks are discovered on exploratory fishing trips or listed as bycatch by fishermen from nearby shores, such that the itineraries of southern connectedness extend not only across the Indian Ocean but to the seamounts beneath.

The dragon vent, fish, and submarine The second story is about gold, and dragons. If the high and deep seas are largely beyond the reach of general knowledge and the law, the seafloor is even more so. In 2007, a large number of active volcanic vents were discovered deep below the surface of the sea on the South-West Indian Ocean ridge, east of Madagascar. One of them is known as the Dragon Vent (Qiu). Like seamounts, deepsea vents occur along mid-ocean ridges, where seafloor spreading causes seismic activity. Superheated, mineral-infused seawater erupts at these points from the ocean floor, where, in reaction with the very cold surrounding seawater, metallic compounds precipitate out. The sides of the underwater vents accumulate deposits of what are known as polymetallic sulphides, which contain high concentrations of base metals (copper, zinc, lead) as well as precious metals like silver and gold. Naturally, these have attracted the interest of the international mining industry, prompting deepsea submersible exploration. In addition to vent minerals, one of the major undersea deposits of the polymetallic nodules, largely associated with abyssal plains, is the Central Indian Ocean Basin. The International Seabed Authority (ISA), a branch of the United Nations in operation since 2001 and responsible for parceling out these and other potential mining areas on the seabed, initially granted several 15-year contracts for deepsea mining exploration. China was granted the exploration concession for the South-West Indian Ocean ridge in 2011 to search for polymetallic sulphides. A Chinese deepsea exploration submersible, named Jiaolong after a mythical dragon, was employed to explore the Dragon Vent (Singh 242). The Jiaolong finished its 118-day journey in 2015, and the results seemed promising but expensive. A deep seabed mining project was estimated to cost approximately 1.6 billion dollars, with the risks equally high. The possibility of sharing the costs, risks and benefits of the deepsea mining project with India was proposed by He Zongyu, deputy director of the China Ocean Mineral Resource R&D Association (“China Proposes Joint Mining of Indian Ocean with India”). As he explained, “China and India are both developing countries and contractors with the International Seabed Authority, so we have a lot in common and plenty of opportunities for further cooperation” (“China and India May Partner for Seabed Mineral Exploration in Indian Ocean”). The opportunity was reported in The Times of India as both attractive and suspicious, which conveyed a wariness that China was possibly only using India to gain access to the resources of the Indian Ocean. India later commenced deep sea prospecting itself, partly as a means of offsetting China’s overwhelming predominance in the rare earth minerals that are necessary for high-technology manufacturing; in 2014, the ISA granted India a concession on the mid-Indian Ocean ridge across 10,000 square kilometers stretching close to the coastline of Mauritius (Das). These events formed part of the beginning of the deepsea mining race, with China and India competing even in the early stages for technological and therefore oceanic dominance in the region—and with countries from the east coast of Africa not visibly in contention.

137

Charne Lavery

One of the collateral consequences of deepsea mining exploration, as with deepsea fishing, is biological discovery. In addition to substantial polymetallic sulphide deposits, the Jiaolong discovered several new species, including the first sea cucumber to be found in the Indian Ocean (“China’s Sub Finds Mysterious Deep-Sea Living Creatures in Indian Ocean”). Other researchers, setting off from Cape Town, also found a new species of hairy “yeti crab,” vent shrimps, scalyfoot snails and a black dragonfish (Jha). That sense of vast undiscovered biodiversity motivated a petition by a group of scientists and conservationists to the International Seabed Authority to set aside areas of the deep ocean as closed to deepsea mining—before rather than after the technology is fully in place to begin (Gebelhoff). But there is over all this a sense of impossibility given the magnitude of what remains unknown. The various documents—from the ISA as well as further afield—detailing the environmental consequences of deep ocean mining are filled with blanket phrases of uncertainty and ignorance: “the paucity of knowledge,” “gauging is difficult…little is known,” “may be,” and “could cause” (International Seabed Authority). The same submarine hydrothermal activity that produces rare minerals is harnessed by previously unknown microbes for chemosynthesis—the sulphurous correlate to photosynthesis that occurs in the lightless conditions on the seafloor—to form the basis of cold, dark ecosystems that in turn support the sea cucumbers and dragonfish that represent what may be the earth’s currently least familiar forms of life. As with the industry of deepsea fishing, vent mining is technologically advanced yet proceeding under conditions of gaps in knowledge. It is also somehow reflective of the kind of post-American world order that twenty-first-century Indian Ocean links suggest (Kaplan), in which China and India compete for the outlandish possibility of mining rare earth minerals from the bottom of the African Indian Ocean.2 This slow scramble for the deep ocean floor draws attention again to a bathymetric view, in which the still-relevant geography of ports and harbors lies above the oceanography of metal- and lifeencrusted seafloor volcanoes. This layering, rather than completing the view, serves rather to destabilize and shadow, providing a submersive view of political geographies (see also Squire 2021).

“It will be a submergence” The final story is a novel, Submergence by J.M. Ledgard. It represents a rare attempt to bring into imaginative proximity the human and inhuman scale of the ocean, from the perspective of the Indian Ocean shore—with partial, but informative, success. Oceanically incommensurable scales are described in one of the opening pages of the novel: They had different understandings of time and space. He worked on the surface, the outside of the world. For him, everything was in flux. He was tasking agents to infiltrate mosques in Somalia and along the Swahili coast. He was concerned with alleys, beliefs, incendiary devices; with months, weeks, days, with indelible hours. For her, an age was an instance. She was interested in the base of the corrosive saltwater column, delimiting through mathematics the other living world which has existed in darkness and in continental dimensions for hundreds of millions of years. (Ledgard 69)3 In the passage, as in the novel as a whole, the world is divided into a dry, thin surface and the dark, timeless depths; the related deep time of hundreds of millions of years juxtaposed with the days, months and years of human life and politics; and the locatedness and historicity of Somalia and 138

The Southern Submarine

the Swahili coast placed awkwardly against the abstract mathematics required to imagine what the narrator calls “the other living world,” the vast arena of the undersea (69). The passage also introduces the way in which these apparently opposed poles of thought are raised and maintained through the structure of dual focalization. The novel is divided into two threads following the two main characters, whose only link is a chance romantic encounter. James More is a British spy who is kidnapped by the Somali jihadi fighters known loosely as Al Shabab. Danielle Flinders is a Caribbean-French-Australian biomathematician and marine biologist who studies microbial life in cracks on the deep ocean floor. The parallel narratives, while seemingly incommensurable, are connected through a set of shared characteristics: insideness, secrecy, darkness and invisibility. As one of the characters notes in an aside: “The essence of it is that there is another world in our world” (3)—this is the thing that is true of both the ongoing, rife and yet ignorable Islamic and poverty-driven insurgencies, as also the predominating but invisible deep ocean life. The novel makes its first link in the opening few pages, where the action begins in a bathroom in Somalia in 2012. The spy, More, is imprisoned there by Somali Jihadis, where the sound of the unreachable Indian Ocean waves beyond the walls intensifies his sense of isolation. The darkness of his cell is described in terms of “the blackness Danny saw when she explored the abyssal deep” (3). The confined space also reminds him of the Kaaba in Mecca, a cube-shaped and empty shrine, unlit and empty. Underneath the Kaaba in the Grand Mosque are a honeycomb of lava caves, whose walls are lined with a similar kind of microbial life to that which Flinders studies in seafloor fissures: “life which exceeded all chronologies, which had never been studied before, and which had yet to be named” (26). She in turn links the seafloor to Sumerian mythology, which preceded the Greek myths. Sumerian civilization, although predominantly inland and agricultural, was fascinated with the deep ocean (32). Its pantheon of deities is dominated by the air god Enlil and the sea god Enki: Enki lived on the seafloor in a house made of colors that could not be seen (37). These gradually accrued connections are vital to the imaginative operation of the novel, which weaves together the two different realms. It produces a sense that there is something contrasted and yet linked between the deep oceanic discoveries and some of the hidden histories of the Global South—both are worlds within, histories (plural) within History (with a capital H) (Chakrabarty 64). Like More’s work in political espionage, Flinders’s explorations in deepsea submarines involve the “discomfiting realization that most of the planet you call your own is hostile to you” (75). The gap between the rich and poor in Nairobi, which More describes as vast and almost unbridgeable, seems to Flinders at least comparable to “the division between life on the surface of the world and the life she studied in the Hadal deep; light and dark, air and water, the breathing and the drowned” (44). In sweeping back and forth between different scales and places, the novel troubles and blurs the illusions of distance and difference. One of these is the well-established link between darkness and death. The submarine world, rather than vacant and negligible, comes to be represented as both the source of life and its ongoing predominance. Life on land, in contrast, is in the minority, a desiccated afterthought. As Ledgard explains in an interview, “What I wanted to do was to alter the reader’s perspective of Earth, to show that dirt is precious but seawater dominates, to step out on a field is rare while to float and scintillate with bioluminescence is common” (Gourevitch). As the narrator describes in the final pages, life in the deep ocean “is evolved to the highest state of simplicity. It is stable. Whereas you are a tottering tower, so young in evolutionary terms, and addicted to consciousness” (200). As More prepares to die, he reimagines death not as a return to the earth but as a submersion in the sea, and a merging with it. What is likely is that, sooner or later, carried in the wind and in rivers, or your graveyard engulfed in the sea, a portion of each of us will be given new life in the cracks, vents, or 139

Charne Lavery

pools of molten sulphur on which the tongue fish skate. It will not be the nourishing womb you began your life in. It will be a submergence. (200) Rather than a decomposition into a form of humus, an even longer view proposes a gradual merging with the deep, where human life joins with other chemosynthetic building blocks in the deep oceanic hadal sludge. The deep ocean suggests deep time—but without forgetting multispecies life, including the human. While suggestive of the questions indicated by the previous two stories of submersive exploration, the novel’s form allows for a rich, unsettling engagement, a different way to approach these ideas. This is mainly because it is able to deploy the formal techniques of dual focalization, juxtaposition and gradual image accretion, as described. Ledgard suggests that the novel is a first attempt at what he would call planetary writing—“not the same as nature writing, but rather something more political, more discarnate” (Gourevitch). While flawed, this direct novelistic treatment points to a capacity of fiction, which, in its incremental accumulation of metaphoric links, is able at times to produce some form of imaginative density or grasp: in this case, linking the secret jihad to the darkness of the Hadopelagic zone, strange microbial life to human death—the slowness of fiction as one means of telling tentacled, deepsea and southern stories.

Conclusion Encounters with the deep sea are mostly indirect, extrapolated or imagined, given its inhospitability to human life. This explains the necessarily cyborg nature of human exploration into the deep ocean, which requires advanced technologies to combat the effects of pressure and airlessness on the human body. The preceding stories touch on three of these encounters—deepsea fishing, vent mining and submersible exploration—which provide together a sense of the difficulty, threedimensionality and unfamiliarity of the deep. But they also raise a number of related questions: how can these things be written about, in ways that are attentive both to emerging phenomena and their imaginative dimensions? How can fishing be described in a different form? How can stranger-than-fiction events be brought into productive conversation with fictions of strangeness? In an important and now well-known critical intervention, writer Amitav Ghosh demonstrates that the novel as a genre has displayed a startling lack of engagement with the impending crisis of climate change (2018). However, the gap goes the other way too, as climate change activism faces a problem of imaginability. From fiction’s side, there is a problem of likelihood, that the increasing commonness of what were once rare events stretches realism to breaking point; from the environmental, the vast scales and uncertainties of climate change defy impactful narration. In this context, stories of the southern submarine may have something useful to offer. As Margaret Cohen argues in “The Chronotopes of the Sea,” sea fiction of the high seas and deep ocean (“blue water”) has a paradoxical relationship with realism. Exceeding the powers of the imagination as well as conventional plausibility, the extravagance of bluewater happenings is not a mark of their fanciful status, as in some literary contexts. Rather it is testimony to their existence: blue-water events are strange and therefore true. (Cohen, “The Chronotopes of the Sea” 651) This quality of “strange and therefore true” applies to deepsea events as well as their fictionalization. The natural world of the deep ocean, while implausible, is not fantastic or supernatural. 140

The Southern Submarine

What it comprises rather is the preternatural, a set of events and stories that, despite appearing unrealistic, are nevertheless real. In this way, it perhaps offers an imaginative model for the kinds of writing required to deal with the urgent improbabilities of climate change. There is also the added complication of the Indian Ocean, whose depths are doubly invisible, as a region in any case underrepresented. This then is a foray into thinking about oceanic submersion in the South, centered on the Indian Ocean as a site of historical South–South interaction and a speculative future of reconfigured relations in the Global, or oceanic, South. These relations, while yet primarily based on maritime trade routes, port cities and islands, also sometimes dip beneath the surface to cluster around features of the seafloor. Features such as seamounts, volcanic vents and seafloor fissures suggest an imaginative map that connects the topographies of land to the bathymetries of the sea, prompting a more amphibious view (Samuelson). This requires not only decentering land and nation-based perspectives but also supplementing the lateral relations of the sea surface with the vertical dimensions of the deep ocean, while also locating these questions in the Indian Ocean, and thereby the South.

Acknowledgements An early version of this paper was published in the Johannesburg Salon, Vol. 10, 2015, by the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC).

Notes 1 Paul Clerkin, who conducted the research over two 60-day trips approximately 1,600 km south of Mauritius, on the commercial trawler Will Watch. “Discovering deep-sea sharks,” August 18, 2014, http:// saveourseas​.com​/update​/discovering​-deep​-sea​-sharks/. 2 The International Seabed Authority lamented the lack of participation of African states in the initial phases of deepsea mining exploration. See Anine Kilian, “African States Urged to be More Involved as Seabed Mining Regulations are Drawn Up,” Mining Weekly, August 7, 2015, www​.miningweekly​.com​/article​/ african​-states​-urged​-to​-be​-more​-involved​-as​-seabed​-mining​-regulations​-are​-drawn​-up​-2015​-08​-07​-1. 3 All further page references to this edition of the novel.

Bibliography Blum, Hester. “The Prospect of Oceanic Studies.” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 3, 2010, pp. 670–677. Bremner, Lindsay. “Folded Ocean: The Spatial Transformation of the Indian Ocean World.” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, vol. 10, no. 1, 2014, pp. 18–45. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton University Press, 2008. “China and India May Partner for Seabed Mineral Exploration in Indian Ocean.” Mining Technology | Mining News and Views Updated Daily, 10 May 2015, https://www​.mining​-technology​.com​/uncategorised​/newschina​-and​-india​-may​-partner​-for​-seabed​-mineral​-exploration​-in​-indian​-ocean​-4573567/. “China Proposes Joint Mining of Indian Ocean with India.” The Times of India, 7 May 2015, https:// timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/india​/China​-proposes​-joint​-mining​-of​-Indian​-Ocean​-with​-India​/articleshow​ /47184739​.cms. “China’s Sub Finds Mysterious Deep-Sea Living Creatures in Indian Ocean.” The Times of India, 15 January 2015, https://timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/world​/china​/Chinas​-sub​-finds​-mysterious​-deep​-sea​-living​ -creatures​-in​-Indian​-Ocean​/articleshow​/45896643​.cms. Clark, MR, et al. Seamounts, Deep-Sea Corals and Fisheries: Vulnerability of Deep-Sea Corals to Fishing on Seamounts beyond Areas of National Jurisdiction. UNEP/WCMC, 2006. Cohen, Margaret. “Literary Studies on the Terraqueous Globe.” PMLA, vol. 125, no. 3, 2010, pp. 657–662. ———. “The Chronotopes of the Sea.” The Novel, vol. 2, 2007, pp. 647–666.

141

Charne Lavery Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America Is Evolving toward Africa. Routledge, 2015. Das, Ajoy K. “India Expands Deep-Sea Mining.” Mining Weekly, 10 October 2015, https://www​.miningweekly​.com​/article​/india​-expands​-deep​-sea​-mining​-2015​-10​-30​/rep​_id​:3650. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. “Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene.” Comparative Literature, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 32–44. Fenton, G. E., et al. “Age Determination of Orange Roughy,Hoplostethus Atlanticus (Pisces: Trachichthyidae) Using210Pb:226Ra Disequilibria.” Marine Biology, vol. 109, no. 2, June 1991, pp. 197–202. link​.springer​ .com​, https://doi​.org​/10​.1007​/BF01319387. Gebelhoff, Robert. “Environmental Groups Call for Regulation as World Dives into Deep Sea Mining.” The Washington Post, Science, 10 July 2015, https://www​.washingtonpost​.com​/news​/speaking​-of​-science​/wp​ /2015​/07​/10​/environmental​-groups​-call​-for​-regulation​-as​-world​-dives​-into​-deep​-sea​-mining/​?noredirect​ =on​&utm​_term=​.f20d691798f9. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. Penguin, 2018. Gillis, John R. “The Blue Humanities. In Studying the Sea, We Are Returning to Our Beginnings.” Humanities, vol. 34, 2013, p. 3. Gourevitch, Philip. “‘There Is Another World in Our World’: A Conversation with J. M. Ledgard.” The New Yorker, April 2013, https://www​.newyorker​.com​/books​/page​-turner​/there​-is​-another​-world​-in​-our​-world​ -a​-conversation​-with​-j​-m​-ledgard. Haraway, Donna. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene.” E-Flux, vol. 75, 2016, pp. 1–17. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “The Black Atlantic Meets the Indian Ocean: Forging New Paradigms of Transnationalism for the Global South – Literary and Cultural Perspectives.” Social Dynamics: A Journal of African Studies, vol. 33, no. 2, 2007, pp. 3–32. Hood, Raleigh R., et al. “The 2nd International Indian Ocean Expedition (IIOE-2): Motivating New Exploration in a Poorly Understood Basin.” Limnology and Oceanography Bulletin, vol. 25, no. 4, 2016, pp. 117–124. International Seabed Authority. Polymetallic Sulphides. https://ran​-s3​.s3​.amazonaws​.com​/isa​.org​.jm​/s3fs​ -public​/documents​/EN​/Brochures​/ENG8​.pdf. Accessed 26 July 2019. Jha, Alok. “Exotic Creatures Discovered Living at Deep-Sea Vent in Indian Ocean.” The Guardian, 28 December 2011. www​.theguardian​.com, https://www​.theguardian​.com​/science​/2011​/dec​/28​/exotic​-creatures​-deep​-sea​-vent. Kaplan, Robert D. Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011. Ledgard, Jonathan Magnus. Submergence. Coffee House Press, 2013. Mbembe, Achille, and Sarah Nuttall. “Writing the World from an African Metropolis.” Public Culture, vol. 16, no. 3, 2004. Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso Books, 2013. Qiu, Jane. “Indian Ocean Vents Challenge Ridge Theory.” Nature News, December 2011. Samuelson, Meg. “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral.” Comparative Literature, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 16–24. Samuelson, Meg, and Charne Lavery. “The Oceanic South.” English Language Notes, vol. 57, no. 1, 2019, pp. 37–50. Singh, Swaran. “China’s Forays into the Indian Ocean: Strategic Implications for India.” Journal of the Indian Ocean Region, vol. 7, no. 2, 2011, pp. 235–248. SIODFA. Who Are We? | SIODFA. 2010, http://www​.siodfa​.org​/about​/who​-are​-we/. Smith, P. “Issues, Status and Trends in Deep-Sea Fishery Genetic Resources.” Workshop on Status and Trends in Aquatic Genetic Resources: A Basis for International Policy. FAO Fisheries Proceedings, Victoria, 2007, pp. 81–108. Squire, R. Undersea Geopolitics: Sealab, Science, and the Cold War. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. The See-through Sea. 16 July 2016, http://worldif​.economist​.com​/article​/12151​/see​-through​-sea. Warner, Robin, et al. An Ecosystem Approach to Management of Seamounts in the Southern Indian Ocean: Volume 3: Legal and Institutional Gap Analysis. IUCN, 2012.

142

13 CONTESTED HISTORIES Indian Cinema in the Global South and Beyond Parichay Patra

Introduction Despite certain attempts at situating Indian popular cinema within a mythological narrative framework, the predominant mode of research in Indian cinema studies has mostly been historical.1 Several historiographic models and modes of film history prevail in Indian cinema studies; they include colonial, nationalist, ideological, biographical-historical, institutional, economic/labor, exhibitional, spatial, corporeal and others. Sumita S Chakravarty’s work on national identity and popular cinema (Chakravarty), M. Madhava Prasad’s ideological history of Bombay cinema (Prasad, Ideology), Priya Jaikumar’s exploration of empire cinema (Jaikumar, Cinema) and spatial cine-history of India (Jaikumar, Histories) are some of the most significant interventions. Economic history is a much less explored territory though, with occasional unpublished dissertations engaging with histories of film-industrial labor and trade unions in regional industries and scattered articles looking at the economic illegitimacy of Bombay cinema (Rajadhyaksha, “Illegitimacy”). A number of anthropological-ethnographic accounts also exist, exploring mostly the cine-politics of South India and, occasionally, production conditions of Bombay cinema.2 The immensely complex cultural constellation known as Indian cinema(s) necessitated such a co-existence of many contemporary histories and historiographies. However, the possibility for the existence of a transnational history of South Asian cinema in general and Indian cinema in particular seems significantly less explored. The absence of such a global history also signifies the unlocatedness and exceptionalism of Indian cinema. Since the inception of cinema studies as a university discipline in India in the early 1990s, Indian cinema studies remained strongly associated with the framework of South Asian/ Area studies, developing an obsession for the popular cinema industries and their negotiations with the nation-state. The national cinema paradigm dominated existing research models, considering the Indian cinema case as a notable exception in terms of its history, aesthetics and politics. While such an exceptionalist approach contributed to the exploration of the distinctive forms and aesthetics of Indian cinema, it has presumably hindered the process of relocating Indian cinema to the wider context of a global history of cinema. This chapter intends to concentrate on this perceived lack, addressing film history’s potential in overcoming it. It demonstrates how a global history of Indian cinema might be conceived, with DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-15

143

Parichay Patra

a consideration of the various modes of association and negotiation between the Global North and the Global South. A global history of a “national cinema” should not remain confined to the history of its circulation, overseas exhibition and reception alone.3 Instead, it needs to take into account cinema’s European origin, its global travels and the multimodal histories of regional-local industries in the postimperial locations in the South where the policies of the Empire played a significant role in the dissemination of cinema. Cinema’s complex use of the Global South as a location/space with significant connotations should also be considered, especially since several auteurs from Europe and Latin America engaged with the spatial politics of India after independence. The advent of transnational cinema as a method should ideally result in a more nuanced reading of cinema’s reception in southern locations, something which this chapter will briefly address. In this chapter, the emphasis will be on the interrelated histories of cinema that make a national cinema that is moving beyond the paradigm of the nation. Starting from the imperial-colonial policies impacting film aesthetics, production and exhibition through the complex association between the metropolis and the peripheries to the many modes of association between many Global South cinematic locations in the long 1960s, it will present a global history of a southern cinema that has long been confined to its specific geopolitics. Instances from industrial and auteurist cinemas of India in the long 1960s suggest that the politico-aesthetic-philosophical associations that Indian cinemas had with other cinemas in the Global South need a different and largely unexplored historical model. Such associations can be traced even between locations that do not share similar histories of colonialism and modernity. This evidence may seem anecdotal at the outset, but, as this chapter shows, they go beyond the anecdotal and contribute to the existing global cine-historical archive replete with contestations and counter-claims. It strongly suggests that the kind of transnational association it emphasizes is not limited solely to a reductive history of film exhibition. It moves beyond such an account of specific films and their afterlives abroad and focuses more on a wider context of movements, negotiations and exchange.

Empire and cinema The history of cinema in India is inherently associated with the British Empire, its various strategies in the colony and the perpetuation of those in the postcolony. Even though cinema arrived in the colonies near-simultaneously with its appearance in metropolitan centers such as Paris, the import of films, the construction of film theaters in urban locations, the politics of its exhibition and the gradual development of filmmaking first as an artisanal and later as a distinctively industrial practice in this part of the Global South were significantly impacted by the Empire. Tracing the trajectory of a cultural form and its mode of production from the Global North to the South carries many nuances and connotations associated with the shadow lines on the globe, without remaining confined to a naïve idea of the global. While tracing the journey of the novel, literary scholars concentrate on the novel’s status as one of the central cultural transactions of the Empire, as the inevitability of its association with colonial modernity has significantly shaped more complex novelistic forms in the colonies (Bhattacharya & Sen). Several binaries that categorize the Western/European novel and its other, the postcolonial novel, have been made explicit and are explored. The foreign form’s negotiations with the local content and form, the problematic idea of the Global South narrative as an allegory, the predestined association of the modernist metropolitan novel with existential crisis, and boredom and the mundane by banishing the postcolonial novel to the domain of events/phenomena/riots/movements have been subjected to intense critical discussion.4 However, in the case of cinema as a predominantly 20th-century medium that originated in Europe and traveled to the colonies, the role of the Empire seems more complex 144

Contested Histories

and multifaceted. Here the mode and the means of production, the formation of industries and exhibition sectors, and the emergence of the center and the periphery within a national cinema are impacted by the Empire. As the advent of Indian cinema was intimately associated with the emergence of a distinctive and resistant nationalism under the Raj, D. G. Phalke, one of the earliest filmmaker-producers from India, presented an unequivocal confession of creating a national history through cinema in his writings. For Phalke, the death of his filmmaking business could have been interpreted as a “permanent disgrace” to the nationalist movement “in the eyes of people in London” (Rajadhyaksha, “Phalke Era” 48). Phalke’s first film appeared as early as 1913. By the 1920s, the British Empire was already facing challenges, allowing the colonies to have local self-governance, with the gradual shaping of the idea of the commonwealth and the reorientation of the British State to a “new political collective” (Jaikumar, Cinema 4). The Empire anticipated its own disintegration and the gradual decline in the already diminishing importance of Britain in the new, forthcoming world order. After the loss of Britain’s colonies in the subcontinent and during the Cold War, the downward journey became even more explicit. During the transitional phase, the idea of Britain’s diminishing global visibility was extended beyond the domain of the political. The overabundance and widespread circulation of American cinema was perceived as a threat to British cinematic culture. As Jaikumar suggests, “bilateralism” was strongly recommended for dealing with the colonies (4). In 1927, the Cinematograph Films Act, alternatively known as the Quota Act, was initiated to offer British cinema the much-needed support of the state against the domination of Hollywood. The act attempted to include “British Empire Films” within its apparently protective framework, offering the illusion of all the films made in Britain and her colonies as eligible for imperial protectionism that was supposed to be extended to the wider geographies of the Empire. However, in reality, it was not as egalitarian as it seemed. The promised bilateral exchange of cinemas and apparent opening up of the metropolitan locations for the exhibition of cinemas from the periphery were not successfully implemented. The colonies were not eager enough to welcome British films for exhibition, and the doubt over the uncertain implementation of the act while making ways for the exhibition of Indian cinema (or cinemas of other colonies) at the imperial center persisted. As Jaikumar notes, anticolonial nationalist resistance in India led to picketing against British films (5). The colonial administration developed its censorship mechanism as well, with the latter being perhaps the most effective mode of state control on cinema. The Raj developed various acts of media control throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries; the list ranges from the Dramatic Performances Act 1876 to the Newspaper (Incitement to Offences) Act 1908 and the Indian Press Act 1910, long before the Indian Cinematograph Bill arrived in September 1917 (Bhowmik 35). As several commentators argue, the coercive obsession for state control over cinema at the pretext of curtailing “obscenity” continued even after the independence, and cinema has remained the domain where the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and expression was significantly compromised (Bhowmik; Mazzarella). The British administration also controlled and restricted the construction of film theaters in this part of the Global South through an elaborate colonial imagination of urban space. The demarcating wall between the European spaces and the native quarters in a colonial city also impacted the various modes of cinematic entertainment. The proliferation of widespread anticolonial movements in British India prompted the administration’s unfavorable approach towards the possible development of a leisure industry such as cinema. Construction of film theaters was not encouraged by the state, as a film theater was regarded as a site where the dissident Indian subjects may 145

Parichay Patra

gather, conspire and devise a potentially seditious plan. As a result, compared to the enormous film-going public in India, the actual number of film theaters was considerably less. The gathering of a working-class audience in the near vicinity of the government institutions was a cause of concern for the Empire and the civic administration often took every possible measure for neutralizing the apparent threat of film exhibition, as Stephen P. Hughes has shown in his research on exhibitional history in the Madras Presidency (39–64). This paranoia has been compared to the similar responses of the European elites to the socialist agitation in Europe at that time (Athique 149). However, some restrictive measures of the British Indian state contributed to the shaping of an indigenous cinema in India, even if the latter faced discrimination and censorship. The state imposed many restrictions on the import of Hollywood films in India, as the prospect of having scantily clad white women on screen as subjected to the male gaze of the desiring native Indian subject created a profound sense of discomfort. It was also asserted that the overabundance of crimes and Caucasian criminals in a Hollywood film may instigate the gullible native subject in disrespecting the European (Prasad, “Natives”). This resistance to Hollywood’s global imperialism primarily because of concerns over race relations significantly helped in the formation of India’s own national/regional cinemas. The latter received the opportunity to develop on its own, without facing the challenge of a much prosperous global industry. The Empire’s ways of dealing with its peripheries and the leisure industries of the latter not only add to the political historical archive of South Asia, but they associate Indian cinema with the globality of the film form, as opposed to the exceptionalism within which it is usually located. The formation of an Indian popular cinephilia might also be explained through an exploration of the policies of the imperial state. It raises the issue of a global history of cinema that has been operational for a long time, as its many connotations become evident in the new historiographic model that is being proposed through the rise of the transnational as a method.5 However, Indian cinema studies, since its inception in the early 1990s, rarely addressed any other mode of global history except for the histories of exhibition. The history of India as a preferred and nuanced location of cinema is gradually intersecting with and finding its way into a wider spatial history though.

Spatial and exhibitional histories The global history of Indian cinema exhibition is intimately associated with the Cold War history with India as a non-aligned nation closer to the USSR, as the latter helped India during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War where the United States sided with Pakistan. Also in several film society narratives and oral histories, the increasingly left-leaning movement’s indebtedness to the Eastern European embassies and cultural centers for acquiring films for exhibition is strongly emphasized.6 The global exhibitional history of Indian cinema has received some attention over the last few years, and such a history connects Indian cinema to many other histories, including that of the Cold War, the history of many socialisms and the socialist world(s), and the curious placement of Global South locations during the Cold War. Sudha Rajagopalan’s research on the exhibition and reception of Bombay cinema in the post-Stalinist USSR is a case in point. Associated with the “Cultures of World Socialism” working group, Rajagopalan conducted extensive archival and ethnographic research in Russia in order to locate Indian popular cinema’s complex situatedness in a Soviet Union under Khrushchev and Brezhnev. While more orthodox ideologues of socialist realism found Bombay cinema and its predominant form of “melodrama” ideologically problematic and unsuitable for a socialist nation, the strategic alliance between India and the USSR con146

Contested Histories

tributed to the movement of this kind of cinema beyond its national borders and into the erstwhile USSR. A non-aligned Global South nation and a former colony of the British, India’s ties with the Eastern bloc were strengthened because of realpolitik and also because of the Gandhi-Nehru family’s socialist ideas of nation-building. Cinema’s contribution to the political history of the then India and that of the Soviet Union also reveals the complexities of audience response in a setting dominated by a state-sanctioned socialist realism where the “legitimized attention for personal emotions and individual pursuits and triumphs” in Bombay cinema garnered an unprecedented mode of audience support (Rajagopalan 43-44). Indian cinema’s exhibition in and exchange with Southeast and Central Asia, Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa has also been able to attract some attention in recent times. The works range from Indian cinema’s exhibition in Thailand through the mediation of the local voice performers (Ingawanji) and the unexpected success of Tamil star Rajinikant in Japan (Srinivas, “Japan”) to the circulation and resultant cine-economic implications of cinemas of Hong Kong and South Korea in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (Srinivas, “Mass Hero”, “The Host”) and recent works on the emergence of categories such as world cinema in the long 1960s in the context of cine-diplomacy during the Cold War (Sunya). Bombay cinema’s impact on Nollywood, the Nigerian film and video industry, has also been subjected to exploration. The use of India as a nuanced cinematic location and complex geopolitical territory through the mediation of the West and Western film practices has been explored in Priya Jaikumar’s most recent work. Jaikumar’s spatial cine-history of India and “reverse ethnography” is methodologically intriguing, and a significant section is devoted to the French auteur Jean Renoir’s Indian sojourn during the making of The River (1951) as it reveals more about Renoir’s own filmmaking career (Jaikumar 130–80). However, Jaikumar’s book doesn’t refer to the extended tradition of engagement that many European and Latin American filmmakers, visual artists and designers, mostly arthouse or experimental, had with India through the use of it as a location of experimentation. Through such a cine-experimental association, they contributed to India’s own political, cultural, cinematic and architectural histories after independence. The Indian sojourn of such European arthouse auteurs as Rossellini, Renoir and Pasolini is not unknown, while the same of Argentine/Latin American experimental filmmakers fleeing the 1970s dictatorships in that continent has received almost no attention so far.7 The interdependence and consistent mutual engagement between India and other cinematic spaces, industries, exhibition sites and histories resist the notion of a linear national cinema history. However, the Global South associations formed by Indian cinema, especially Indian art cinema in the long 1960s, formed radically alternative shadow lines on the globe, and their history remains mostly unwritten and unwebbed.

The long 1960s A discussion on the long 1960s in Indian cinema and its various possible connotations, associations and/or afterlives should associate itself with the politics of film festivals as a global site of exchange. With a geopolitical consideration of curatorial politics, this chapter wants to proceed to other, Global South-specific cine-sites of the time that raised several issues. The film festival circuit as an ever-contested space, a site of dissension and debates between the northern and the southern locations, offers many possibilities for Indian cinema research. In October 1968, select Asian and African filmmakers met in Tashkent, the then capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, on the occasion of the First Tashkent Festival of African and Asian cinema. A few 147

Parichay Patra

years later, in 1976, Latin American cinema was included in the festival. The USSR’s interest in creating an active site for Global South cinema had implications. The Tashkent festival featured Bombay popular cinema and its celebrated proponents. Raj Kapoor, primarily because of his popularity in the USSR, was the most significant Indian guest at the festival. Djagalov and Salazkina, in their extensive research on the festival space and its curious politics in the long 1960s, observe how the festival in Tashkent offers itself as a discursive space and text with wider connotations of Cold War politics, state control over cinema and the politics of curation. Soviet cultural delegations to India in the 1950s and 60s, despite obvious ideological differences, preferred and selected Bombay popular cinema primarily because of the profitability of distribution (Djagalov and Salazkina, 289). At the same time, they showed interest in regional art and middle cinema of Satyajit Ray and Tapan Sinha, respectively.8 But the South Indian/Tamil popular cinema was near-unanimously rejected and derided, even though its Bombay counterpart was able to develop its own acceptability. While both the conflicting nations, namely the USSR and the United States, and their respective ideologies, played a crucial role throughout the Cold War period in determining the international politico-cultural relations of the Global South nations, the nations themselves formed networks that remain much less explored.9 Especially in Indian cinema studies these associations of Indian cinema remain almost non-existent as the discipline developed an obsession for the national cinema paradigm, emphasizing the negotiations between Bombay popular and the nation-state. The perpetual lack of discussion on the globality in and global history of Indian cinema also contributed to the absence of any effort in locating Indian cinema within the larger Global South associations that were gradually taking shape in the late 1960s. With the advent of and wider discussion on Third Cinema10 as a conscious politico-ethical choice for the Global South filmmaker/filmmaking collective, a number of Third Cinema conferences were held in the 1970s with an interest in assembling filmmakers from Asia, Africa and Latin America along with their producers and exhibitors from the north (Europe and the United States). The first one was organized in Algiers, followed by a shorter version in Buenos Aires and, finally, in 1974, a more inclusive one in Montreal.11 The Montreal conference was attended by Fernando Solanas of Argentina, Julio García Espinosa from Cuba, Walter Achugar from Uruguay, the French Third Worldist critic Guy Hennebelle, the exiled Chilean auteur Miguel Littín, the Italian Lukácsian critic Guido Aristarco, the Pesaro Film Festival director Lino Micciché and the American producer Bill Susman, among others.12 The recordings of the conference reveal several debates on Marxism and “true socialism”, the debatable alliance between Cuba and the Soviet Union, and on the “problematic” political standpoint of some of the Latin American filmmakers. Fernando Solanas’ allegiance to the exiled former Argentinian President Juan Domingo Perón was severely critiqued and challenged.13 The Global North–South divide became explicit in the fundamentally contradictory European and Latin American approaches to Perón. More controversies found their way into the conference as the film distributors from the socalled small European/North American nations such as Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Portugal and Quebec in Canada accused the wealthier houses such as the French MK2 of “brokering” the circulation of Third World films in the first world (Mestman, “Estados”). Bill Susman, the leftleaning American producer of Grupo Cine de la Base, raised a significant issue concerning the profits made by the European distributors through the exhibition of “Third Cinema” in Europe, and he asked whether the Europeans should return their profits to the Third World filmmakers so that the capital could be invested into the ongoing political struggle in Latin America and elsewhere. Within such debates and anecdotes on the Global North–South divide and the complex cultural formations with extremely porous borders, the geopolitical implications often seemed complex, 148

Contested Histories

enigmatic and ambiguous, especially for other Global South locations. It should be noted that Jean Pierre Brossard, while commenting on these Third Cinema conferences, mentioned the unanimous “lamenting” for “the almost total absence of representatives of Asian cinema” in them (Mestman, “Entre Argel”). What does the absence of Asia/South Asia/India signify in this context? Can a South–South association be imagined with(out) Indian participation? What role did Third Cinema play here?

An Asiatic/Indian absence? Despite the absence of any representative of South Asia in general and India in particular in the Third Cinema conferences, the conceptual-political apparatus of Third Cinema had its impact on Indian cinema of the 1960s/70s. The politicality of Third Cinema and its manifestos, cultural constellations and collective mode of filmmaking at the expense of the European mode of auteurism significantly reshaped the history of non-industrial cinema in India. Indian filmmakers responded to the global and national political crisis and radicalism through manifestos such as the New Cinema Manifesto of 1968. Mrinal Sen and Arul Kaul acknowledged the French New Wave, American Underground cinema and “other yet unlabeled currents of world cinema” as sources of inspiration for a new Indian cinema (commonly addressed as an Indian New Wave) (Sen & Kaul n. pag.). The manifesto suggests possibilities for an alternative, non-industrial, politically active distribution-exhibition network for the new cinema, with the active participation of film society groups and activists. It should be noted that the latter gradually assumed a distinctive left-leaning shape in the wake of many modes of radicalism in global cine-politics. In the 1970s India, several film collectives such as Odessa, Yukt, Chitralekha and Navya were formed (Rajadhyaksha, Celluloid 233; Bhaskar 23). Odessa collective produced Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother, John Abraham, 1986), the first collectively funded film in India through film exhibitions across several rural and semi-urban locations in the Indian state of Kerala. John Abraham, one of the most significant exponents of the Indian New Wave, started his project as a non-fictional documentation of strikes and leftist movements in the state, but it gradually emerged as a deceptively “fictional” radical work on the 1970s radicalism and its afterlife, marked by real and cinematic disappearances. While Abraham’s narrative is concerned primarily with the apparent suicide of a former radical activist cum percussionist who lost his musical abilities due to custodial torture, it features activist protagonists who disappeared a few years after the film was made. Disappearance (and the Spanish term desaparecido), as a distinctively political phenomenon marking the 1970s’ radicalism and dictatorial regimes in Asia and Latin America, had an overwhelming presence all over the Global South, especially in the cinemas of the latter. Cinema’s role in political activism, mobilization of the audience gathered in the site of exhibition and the formation of the cine-political collective contributed to the production, exhibition and narrative-aesthetic framework of Abraham. The film festival/film society space in his native Kerala was marked by the consistent flow of radical images from Eastern Europe and Latin America, something which shaped the political debates in and outside the cinematic domain (Joseph 151). Cine-textual references to Latin American cinema/Third Cinema of the time might also be traced to the Indian New Wave of the 1970s. Such references resulted in the “disconcertingly direct links” (as manifested through “quotations” and “evocations”) between films such as Ghashiram Kotwal (Yukt Film Collective, 1976) and Antonio Das Môrtes (Glauber Rocha, 1969), or between La hora de los hornos and Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (Saeed Mirza, 1978) (Rajadhyaksha, Celluloid 240). 149

Parichay Patra

Mrinal Sen, the Indian auteur who was politically more explicit than many of his 1970s peers, maintained his exchanges with Latin American filmmakers whom he met through the global festival circuit. In his autobiographical writings in Bengali, Sen notes his encounters with Fernando Solanas, Raymundo Gleyzer, Jorge Sanjinés and others, his intriguing engagement with Gleyzer’s Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973) at the Berlin Film Festival three years before the disappearance of the filmmaker, his sustained interest in the works of Glauber Rocha, Patricio Guzmán and Solanas, and support for various filmmakers imprisoned by the dictatorships and/or authoritarian regimes in Mexico, Chile and Colombia (Sen 171–80). Sen’s own filmmaking in the 1970s, especially in his city trilogy comprising Interview (1971), Calcutta 71 (1972) and Padatik (Guerilla Fighter, 1973), bears close aesthetic resemblances with Latin American films such as La hora de los hornos (Octavio Getino & Fernando Solanas, 1968). His fragmentative juxtaposition of non-fictional and fictional, use of montage, documentation of political struggles in the streets, featuring of the disappeared and refusal to allow self-effacement of the cinematographic apparatus bring him closer to the Latin American filmmakers he comments so excitedly on in his autobiographies.14 An apparent lack might be located in the writings of Sen as he hardly recounts any significant aesthetic exchanges between him and the Latin American filmmakers, nor does he make any specific observation on the cinemas of Latin America apart from the latter’s political commitment. However, this lack of critical consideration and/or nuanced reading seems deceptive. In the 13th chapter of his autobiography in Bengali, Sen devotes a significant section to Third Cinema and its major proponents, with occasional references to the then leadership of newly independent African nations whom he met at the conferences of Antifascist writers and artists (174). The entire chapter and subsequent chapters provide his discursive standpoints on certain transnational geopolitical formations that had their impact on many filmmakers. Sen transcends the festival circuit despite starting with his experiences in the latter. It seems that he is trying to connect with other Global South filmmakers through his comments on the postcolonial “democracies”, the suspension of cultural decolonization in the oligarchic systems in the postcolony and the filmmakers’ desperate attempts at escaping state control on one hand and the industrial models of filmmaking on the other, something which Glauber Rocha addressed as the dictatorship of the industry. What emerges from Sen’s commentaries is a subjective engagement with his postcolonial present that does not remain confined to his national boundaries. A non-aligned and free-flowing filmmaking network is formed gradually, and, more importantly, it is free from European mediation as revealed through his memories.

Conclusion Despite having widely different experiences of colonization and encounters with modernity, South Asia and Latin America did initiate South–South dialogues cinematically. At the end of the Cold War, the mediating space offered by the erstwhile USSR and other Eastern European nations was no longer available for the exhibition of a political avant-garde. With the onset of economic liberalization and globalization, the aesthetic and the political avant-garde in Indian cinema lost its state support and momentum, with the state becoming more interested in favoring popular cinema as a part of its soft diplomacy. The rise of Hindutva politics in South Asia gradually transformed the developmentalist welfare state into a ruthless oligarchic neoliberal one with a façade of democracy. Thus the arguments, debates and associations foregrounded by this chapter may seem suspended in a distantly radical history.

150

Contested Histories

However, as some commentators argue, there is surely a degree of inevitability in cinema’s historical relationship and encounter with political anarchy. This social history of a “libertarian cinema” seems somewhat fragile, as evident in the recounting of it in this chapter. To compensate for that, cinema itself works as a repository of “phantom witnesses” and “disappeared figures” that may seem useful for such a history (Marinone 22). Phantoms and disappearances, unarguably, have haunted our cinephilia since the long 1960s, offering unconventional historiographies that are needed for an essential redrawing of shadow lines over the globe.

Notes 1 The notion of drawing a parallel between mythological narratives and the complex structuring of Indian popular cinema was prevalent before the advent of film studies as a university discipline. In that literature, Indian popular cinema has either been naively critiqued for its “anti-modernist” approach or celebrated for the same reason. 2 Most notable ones include S. V. Srinivas’ research on fan associations, stardom and cine-politics in Telugu cinema (Srinivas, Megastar) and Uma Maheswari Bhrugubanda’s account of goddess films in Telugu and the supposedly possessed woman spectator (Bhrugubanda). For an ethnographic exploration of the Bombay industry, see Ganti. 3 Indian popular cinema’s reception in the erstwhile USSR, the Middle East and the Arab world, in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia) and Japan have received some attention, along with South Korean cinema’s penetration and appropriation into the Indian regional market. 4 Saikat Majumdar’s work challenges this binary by showcasing the boredom and the quotidian that might be located in the postcolonial experience as manifested in the novels of the periphery, settler and other colonies (Majumdar). 5 Contemporary cinema studies research has seen an upsurge of works on transnational cinema more as a method than a discipline, but such works have appeared mostly from the Global North universities, especially from the UK. 6 Vernacular accounts of and interviews with film society veterans often mention the collaboration with the Eastern European embassies. Personal interaction with activists (of film society as well as of leftist political parties) produced similar information, with more subjective narratives recalling film society visits to such Eastern European metros as Prague and meeting with auteurs such as Jiri Menzel. 7 Here I am referring mostly to the Indian journey of Claudio Caldini and Jorge Honik of Argentina. Caldini’s brief stint and filmmaking in the “spiritual” city of Pondicherry, which was once the capital of French India, demands introspection. 8 Art cinema may have different meanings in different cine-cultural contexts, but it is usually associated with cultural taste and privilege, with a strong connotation of festival-touring films from the Global South that had a wider acceptability in the North. Middle cinema, a curiously Indian category that originated as a journalistic term, refers to the group of films that existed somewhere between the art and the popular, targeting a middle-class audience. It should be noted that Apanjan (1968), the Tapan Sinha film that was selected for Tashkent ’68, is about the avoidable loss of innocent lives in the political turbulence of the long 1960s, and the film, like many other films by Sinha, refrains from taking any political stand. 9 Rossen Djagalov has explored Soviet’s cine-political engagement with and resultant networks (or the lack of it) in Africa, Asia and Latin America during the Cold War in his recent monograph (Djagalov). 10 The term gained significant prominence in the aftermath of the advent of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s seminal text/manifesto “Hacia un tercer cine” or “Toward a Third Cinema”, an accompanying text to their collective film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968). 11 The 48 videotapes of the conference were recovered from Cinémathèque Québécoise and archived at Instituto Investigaciones Gino Germani, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), because of the efforts of Mariano Mestman. A book with an accompanying DVD carrying select excerpts from the videotapes was brought out by UBA (Mestman, “Estados”). 12 Bill Susman was an American film producer sympathetic to the Latin American cause and funded Los Traidores (The Traitors, 1973), a film by the group Cine de la Base whose most prominent member was Raymundo Gleyzer who disappeared under the Videla dictatorship in Argentina.

151

Parichay Patra 13 Solanas and Getino’s association with the exiled former President Juan Domingo Perón, especially after his return to Argentina and brief stint as President before his death, caused a lot of controversy. Perón, despite his populist, pro-left appeals in Argentina, has always been regarded as an authoritarian political figure in Europe, especially since he was hosted by General Franco during his exile in Spain. 14 Calcutta 71 was released in a central Calcutta (now Kolkata) film theatre where many radical youths gathered to catch a glimpse of their dead and/or disappeared comrades whose memories were preserved in the film. Interview features a now-famous sequence where the actor addresses the camera/audience frontally, and the Brechtian overtones and breaking of verisimilitude are supported by the revealing of the cinematographer K. K. Mahajan in the process of recording it.

Works Cited Athique, Adrian. “From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History.” South Asian Popular Culture 9.2 (2011): 147–160. Bhaskar, Ira. “The Indian New Wave.” Routledge Handbook of Indian Cinemas. Ed. K. Moti Gokulsing and Wimal Dissanayake. Routledge, 2013. 19–33. Bhattacharya, Baidik, and Sambuddha Sen, eds. Novel Formations: The Indian Beginning of a European Genre. Permanent Black, 2019. Bhowmik, Someswar. Cinema and Censorship: The Politics of Control in India. Orient Blackswan, 2009. Bhrugubanda, Uma Maheswari. Deities and Devotees: Cinema, Religion, and Politics in South India. Oxford University Press, 2018. Chakravarty, Sumita S. National Identity in Indian Popular Cinema 1947–1987. University of Texas Press, 1993. Djagalov, Rossen, and Masha Salazkina. “Tashkent ’68: A Cinematic Contact Zone.” Slavic Review 75.2 (2016): 279–298. Djagalov, Rossen. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism: Literature and Cinema between the Second and Third Worlds. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020. Ganti, Tejaswini. Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry. Duke University Press, 2012. Hughes, Stephen P. “Policing Silent Film Exhibition in Colonial South India.” Making Meaning in Indian Cinema. Ed. Ravi S. Vasudevan. Oxford University Press, 2000. 39–64. Ingawanji, May Adadol. “Mother India in Six Voices: Melodrama, Voice Performance, and Indian Films in Siam.” BioScope 3.2 (2012): 99–121. Jaikumar, Priya. Cinema at the End of Empire: A Politics of Transition in Britain and India. Duke University Press, 2006. ———. Where Histories Reside: India as Filmed Space. Duke University Press, 2019. Joseph, Jenson. “Cinema and the Political in Kerala: On Mukhamukham and Amma Ariyan.” Studies in South Asian Film & Media 10.2 (2019): 149–161. Majumdar, Saikat. Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire. Columbia University Press, 2013. Marinone, Isabelle. “Méthodes pour une histoire des rapports entre cinéma et anarchie.” Cinémas libertaires: Au service des forces de transgression et de révolte. Ed. Nicole Brenez and Isabelle Marinone. Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2015. 17–24. Mazzarella, William. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass Publicity. Duke University Press, 2013. Mestman, Mariano. “Entre Argel y Buenos Aires: El Comité de Cine del Tercer Mundo (1973/1974).” La Fuga 5 (2007), http://www​.lafuga​.cl​/entre​-argel​-y​-buenos​-aires​/28. Accessed March 24, 2022. ———.“Estados Generales del Tercer Cine: Los documentos de Montreal, 1974.” Cuadernos Rehime 3 (2013–14): 18–78. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of Hindi Film: A Historical Construction. Oxford University Press, 1998. ———. “The Natives Are Looking: Cinema and Censorship in Colonial India.” Law’s Moving Image. Ed. Leslie J. Moran, Emma Sandon, Elena Loizidou, and Ian Christie. Cavendish, 2004. 161–172. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. “The Phalke Era: Conflict of Traditional Form and Modern Technology.” Journal of Arts & Ideas 14–15 (1987): 47–78. ———. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency. Indiana University Press, 2009.

152

Contested Histories ———. “The Guilty Secret: The Latter Career of Cinema’s Illegitimacy.” The Indian Media Economy, Vol. I: Industrial Dynamics and Cultural Adaptation. Ed. Adrian Athique, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and S. V. Srinivas. Oxford University Press, 2018. Rajagopalan, Sudha. Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going After Stalin. Indiana University Press, 2008. Sen, Mrinal, and Arul Kaul. “New Cinema Movement.” Close Up 1 July 1968: n. pag. Sen, Mrinal. Tritiyo Bhuban. Ananda, 2011. Srinivas, S. V. “Hong Kong Action Film and the Career of the Telugu Mass Hero.” Hong Kong Connections: Transnational Imagination in Action Cinema. Ed. Meaghan Morris, Siu Leung Li, and Stephen Chan Ching-kiu. Durham University Press and Hong Kong University Press, 2005. 111–123. ———. “When The Host Arrived: A Report on the Problems and Prospects for the Exchange of Popular Cultural Commodities with India.” CSCS, 2008. ———. Megastar: Chiranjveei and Telugu Cinema after N. T. Rama Rao. Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “Rajnikant in Japan: Indian “Superstardom” and Low Value Markets.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 14.4 (2013): 615–634. Sunya, Samhita. Sirens of Modernity: World Cinema via Bombay. University of California Press, 2022.

153

14 BETWEEN LETTERED AND POPULAR CULTURES A Cultural History Perspective Guillermo Zermeño and translated by Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo1 By way of introduction, we could allude to Nietzsche’s aphorism number 218 in his 1879 text The Wanderer and His Shadow. The aphorism provides a framework for the following reflections on the differences between lettered (highbrow) and popular (lowbrow) cultures. With these seven judgmental lines, Nietzsche depicts the future of popular culture in the age of science and technology, the age of industrial civilization. He titles it: the “machine,” that great “instructor:” that gives lessons—different from an “educator.” It deals with a mechanism that engenders activities that are not necessarily processed by conscience. It is the “machine as teacher” (of life). Machinery teaches in itself the dovetailed working of masses of men, in activities where each has but one thing to do. It is the model of party organizations and of warfare. On the other hand, it does not teach individual self-glorification, for it makes of the many a machine, and of each individual a tool for one purpose. Its most general effect is to teach the advantage of centralization. (Nietzsche 218) Of course, one cannot ignore the expansion of Nietzsche’s early intuition: the work of historian and urbanist Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization takes command. A contribution to anonymous history.2

Lettered culture, history, and dislocation In the realm of lettered culture, there are several levels. For example, the work of a scholar consists basically of living from and among books, without excluding what in anthropology is called “fieldwork.” “Books” of all kinds. That is why archives and libraries exist. In the case of the historian, to the former, one must add old papers in archives called “primary sources.” In all cases, whether books or archives, “alive” or “dead,” in such works, there is a sort of deterritorialization or, if one prefers, of semantic dis-location and displacement of the “original” (of the information received and its meaning) to a different place, in which an (inevitable) act of resignification upon the materials takes place. In historiography, this consists of the movement from one place to another, distinct and distant temporarily. That is why it is said that in this new place, there is an act of “total 154

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-16

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures

estrangement.” Without this “defamilarization” of the “ordinary,”3 the gaze of the historian does not actually emerge. Only in that radical estrangement, does the view of the modern historian reveal itself.4 Such effect of “historical estrangement” was engaged with for a long time,5 although it has been renovated and actualized, which is why it is known as a new “cultural history.”6 I owe my attention to this effect to my friend John Kraniauskas, a specialist in contemporary literature:7 documents and objects of the past, when brought to the present, arrive dislocated and disoriented; that is, without a direction or precise meaning. For the same reason, they are rendered likewise disarticulated from their place of production and belonging. In other words, they are “de-politicized” (outside of their original “polis”). The historian, the humanist, or the social scientist, works on re-situating them in another niche, another pentagram, adjusted to another order, another syntax, and other forms of composition: other semantics. Thus, one could affirm that the “estranged” arrives to the historian under the aspect of a “ruin-monument,” tormented between what was and cannot return, and what could still be or not. What direction should the historian take? The historian’s answer could clarify in effect this fascination with the past. At what moment did this fascination for “ruins-monuments,” that characterizes our modernity, appear and develop?8 This quid, in my understanding, can be answered, paradoxically, only from history itself. But how can that be achieved—how can one give an account of something from the same thing? Can we try, like Benjamin once did?

Popular culture and historiography The “estranged” in historiography is not so much the past itself as it is a displacement of past objects, which implies their re-location and reutilization and, therefore, their transformation. In reality, what is of interest here is to understand what we historians do when we write “history,” even when we do so about so-called “popular culture.” One should remember, one of its most illustrious cultivators of the nineteenth century was Jules Michelet, who undertook the task of telling the story of The People, assuming himself (in body and soul) as its stellar representative, having descended from it and thus being better suited for the profession of “popular” historian.9 From that calling, he derived his dedication and fascination for the past, his devouring of archives, and his submergence into the hallways and basements of history to be soaked in history’s ruins and monuments. By affirming the symbiosis between the historian and “the people” (or the popular) through the act of writing its history, he constructed simultaneously the space/performativity of “the popular.” It was a moment, however, in which still no one had reflected enough on the meaning of the act of scribing the past, which took place during the following century.10 To be precise, in the aftermath of the twentieth century, we have another expression of a similar endeavor: to account for “the popular,” although now as a deviation of the “populist” model of the previous century. Such is the case of the historians grouped around current so-called postcolonial studies and the subalternity of the South of Asia, led by Ranajit Guha. For example, in a study about the popular insurgency during the British domination of the nineteenth century in India, Guha showed the limits and possible “undesired” effects of the political character associated with a progressive, liberal, or socialist historiography, focused on rescuing “popular culture,” or the voice of subalterns, for history. It was an attempt to become not only the spokesperson of forgotten voices, or to show the potential of “history from the bottom,” but also to become its authority, in the name of science, when speaking and writing in the name of subalterns. This effort led, however, to the following paradox detected by Guha. In the name of science, armed with new techniques and ways to trace the past, these historians did not do much more than provide information and elements for the subjugation of the very subaltern they were trying to represent—those 155

Zermeño and Quintana-Vallejo

without voice, oppressed by the state and acting government. Thus, more than collaborating in their emancipation, the historians did nothing more than worsen their domination. The analysis of Guha unmasked the guile of the state and unveiled its mechanisms to subjugate even the “intellectual insights” of historians from popular or subaltern classes, even when, in their naiveté, the historians were supporters of altruistic and humanitarian causes.11 In France, a few years before—almost in parallel with the discussions in Britain related to Guha—an intense discussion developed in relation to the historiographic reconceptualization of “the popular.” The critical reflection about conventional forms of inscribing naively “popular culture” into history was written by Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel’s 1974 essay “The Beauty of the Dead.”12 Its argument accompanied, to a large extent, a collective indignation over the transformations of language in the context of the French Revolution13 and a discussion with previous work by historian Robert Mandrou in 1964, De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Julia and Revel 302). Michel de Certeau highlighted this third way to relate historiography with popular culture, in particular in his book The Practice of Everyday Life, whose impact can be seen in the reconceptualization of British social and political historiography and in our field in the book coordinated by Ana María Zubieta about the relations between the history and anthropology of popular culture and mass culture.14 Situated in a different place, and with a particular style of writing that was sinuous and elusive, and with an interdisciplinary focus, intersected by sociology, anthropology, Freudian psychoanalysis, and linguistics, Certeau, from that mixed place, developed a new notion of the “popular” made up of a political network of multiple tacit trajectories and movements, of relations of power between the weak and strong parts of the political gameboard. Of course, this form of re-politization and re-semanticization of “popular culture” is framed by an opening towards the radical alterity that surrounds the transformations of “the popular” in a mass society or in the era of multitudes, announced by Nietzsche and formalized by Gustave Le Bon in The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind. One should also add the study of Serge Moscovici, the French sociologist and historian, in La era de las multitudes. Un tratado histórico de la psicología de masas.15

Historiography as a battlefield of forces and mass media To understand the warp and woof of the social thread that comprises “the popular,” Certeau found a classic writer of the nineteenth century who wrote a treaty about war: Carl von Clausewitz. This finding led him to establish a critical dialogue with the political theory or microphysics of power of Michel Foucault, who did not find any solution to the chasm announced between humanist ideologies and the improvement of “the people” and the oppressive or disciplinarian practices of the Enlightenment. The ideals supposedly would be colonized or “vampirized” by the organizing disciplinary procedures of the social space itself.16 Facing what appears as a contradiction between norms and social praxis, the problem would reside in not pretending to reduce “the functioning of a whole society to one type of dominant and unique process” (Certeau, 2003 94). From this perspective, in which Manichean judgments are suspended, a society would be composed of multiple practices, some charged with establishing normativity, in a selective and projective manner, in the social group, and other, of lower profile, that figure out how to maneuver within a social and cultural latticework not established by them, without accepting subjugation to the same dominant discourse (Certeau, 2003 94). From this tenet would follow that the coherence of a social system relies on a base asymmetry or disagreement between the monotheism of the dominant panoptic processes and the “survival of a polytheism of disseminated or hidden practices, dominated but not erased by the historical triumph of one of them” 156

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures

(Certeau, 2003 95). We would then have the emergence of a political configuration in which there is hegemony without proper domination (Guha). This is a system in which the “weak” part learns to develop its own guile to surprise and unsettle the powerful. Importantly, this does not properly mean the development of a festive culture or a frontal resistance founded on supposed utopianism or a culture of transgression in an anthropologically-substantiated category of “the popular.”17 This critical consideration is complemented with a second one focused on the interpellation of the members of the “lettered culture,” intellectuals; traditionally constructors of their own opposites, “popular culture,” progressively turned into folklore, and whose foundation resides in the practices of reading-writing and the fabrication of classical distinctions from the romantic period around the beautiful, the sublime, the ugly, and the lowly.18 The critical notes to such traditional forms emerge from the observation of how new mass media tend to “vampirize” previous forms (Certeau, 2003 95), no longer dependent on the written voice, but rather on the voices of electronic media.19 At this point, Certeau assumes Foucault’s criticism of the figure of the “intellectual,” which germinated during the era of nationalisms in the nineteenth century, formalized around the Dreyfus case of January 1898 and established during the nineteenth century, a figure that in many cases and paradoxically fought to distinguish itself from the “mob” in order to protect its condition as autonomous “intellectual worker” and bestow upon itself the prerogative to speak on behalf of the “people.” An ideal figure that, situated under the impact of mass media, tends to be decentered and questioned as the giver of the last sense of history, and of “popular classes” in particular (Certeau 2003, 68–69). According to Certeau, we owe Foucault the abandonment of that privileged position because of his assumption that the culture of the nineteenth century was immersed “in another [sociopolitical and cultural] configuration,” different from the moment of its appearance (Certeau 2003, 68)20—which coincides with the diffusion of Le Bon’s book about the popular mind. Some of the consequences are the following. Intellectuals are no longer heroic figures facing power. Their place has been substituted with a history without heroes or names, a diffuse, anonymous, and fundamental history. This history is occupied with the intellectual practices insofar as they inscribe in the network a thousand ways of exercising power. The object thus changes: it no longer points to the actors, but rather to actions; no longer the characters whose shadow stood out from society, but the “operations” that, in Brownian motion, weave and comprise the background of a painting. […] Thus, a labyrinth emerges of ways to make or use language practices, space practices, uses of time, etc. (Certeau 2003, 70) Here, practices of power should be understood in the Foucauldian way: “a form of action that does not act directly and immediately on others, but rather acts on its own action” (Certeau 2003, 70). These practices comprise “a set of actions on possible actions” (Certeau 2003, 70). They are therefore operations (procedures) and not conceptions (ideas) (Certeau 2003, 70).

Popular culture and its reconceptualization Therefore, from the perspective of the irruption of mass culture in terms of “the popular,” the determining factor can no longer be “highbrow culture” nor the denomination of “popular culture” fabricated from the exterior as a form of domesticating and eliminating what was once threatening content. Its place has been occupied by a swarm of voices, from “perishable and anonymous creations” that facilitate living but “do not capitalize” (Giard xviii). 157

Zermeño and Quintana-Vallejo

Following the former, in the observation of such practices of “the popular,” there is an attempt to shift focus away from commodities themselves and toward the operations that use them, and that signals a distinction or separation against the “originating” datum (Certeau 1999 189–204). In this sense, data and received information have no more validity and belonging than “the conditions” that have enabled their collection (Giard xx–xxi).21 Thus, the concepts of “folklore” and “popular culture,” exclusive to past centuries, would have ceased to be operative to account for the “culture” framed—no longer by the extraordinary, the sublime—but instead by the mundane: that place “splattered with wonder, as crowded as it is dazzling, on the long rhythms of language and history, as the world of writers or artists. Without proper nouns, all types of languages engender these ephemeral parties that emerge, disappear, and recommence” (Certeau 1999, 199). That is why popular culture would be currently situated in the interior of mass culture, different from an operational culture (mass media), which does not explicitly use a colonizing function like in the past—when educational and literacy campaigns were made to integrate “the popular” into the framework of a cultural politics of the elites. That space has now become a malleable and profitable object that fits the needs of the market, instead of constituting a “weapon of combat.” The relation with “powers” has changed (Certeau 1999, 174–175). Facing a modern notion of culture—which presuppouses the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow cultures, one of good manners and one of popular models, and to whose fabrication and reproduction academics and scholars have collaborated—one requires the clarification of this other “place” in order to fix the “series of determinations” and the precise limits of what can be understood as “culture,” or, better yet, by “cultures,” conceptualized as those places where tensions and social ills bloom (Certeau 1999, 195). “Places” are understood as unstable and mobile borders where encounters and disagreements take place between the participants in conflict (Certeau 1999, 195).

The cultural as operation and its sens effects The prioritization of the analysis of cultural operations, above cultural objects, supposes that creativity or innovation resides less in technology itself and more in the use that is given to technology. That is why the understanding of cultural expressions responds to the clarification of ways to build worlds. This perspective shift implies giving more weight to practices than representations. In discourse, for example, all statements suppose a simple (corporal) gesture that makes them possible. That is why the analysis of cultural products derives from the actions that produce them. And with respect to the “reception” of the product, this does not mean that users enact an arbitrary operation so that instead creativity is always done within and not outside of or against the inscribed rules in the same productive act (Certeau 1999, 200–201). On the other hand, when analyzing texts, one must not forget the weight that the very act of reading has, which makes it impossible to make an ultimate or originative reading available. To think that it is possible to adhere to the text, to let it talk and manifest its truth, means to ignore “its own way of functioning.” That is why there must be a distinction between the act of reading and the act of writing. “The first is silent creativity, invested in the use that one makes of a text; the second is this same creativity, but made explicit in the production of a new text” (Certeau 1999, 202).22 A “cultural operation” would thus be the completion of a “trajectory relative to a place that determines its conditions of possibility. It is the practice of a space already constituted when the trajectory introduced a new innovation or displacement.” And the notion of place would define “the determined and differentiated sites that organize the economic system, hierarchization, the syntax 158

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures

of language, customary and mental traditions, and psychological structures” (Certeau 1999, 39). For example, from linguistics, action as “spatial practice” would suppose the distinction between language (a system) and speech (an act), the former understood as a sort of capital, the latter as the operations that the former enables (Gilbert Ryle). Users would be like tenants who acquire the right to carry out operations in the interior of the building that is language, without becoming the landlords (Certeau 1999, 39). The analysis of these uses of language enables access to the region of mundane practices from the framing of problems related to the act of enunciation. This supposes, first, the actualization of the system of language through the means of speech. Language is only real in the act of speech. Second, in the appropriation of said “capital” a user or speaker comes into play. Third, the input of a speaker supposes a listener (interlocutor), whether real or fictional. All speech acts, the elocution, supposes a contract with someone to whom one speaks. And, fourth, it is an act intersected by “temporality:” through elocution, time is set in motion, in the present, the now (which is presence in the world), by which past and future become organized. These four conditions create a knot of precise circumstances related to a situation or context of the speech. In this way, it is a use of language to the interior of an operation that is always recursive. According to Certeau, it is possible to transport this linguistic theoretical model to observe other classes of non-linguistic operations, insofar that it matches the general hypothesis of “uses” linked to “consumption” (Certeau 1999, 39–40).23

“The culturel”, “the political”, and historiography As a closing thought, how does “the political” come into play in this linguistic pentagram? As stated, for Certeau, culture is, before anything else, the place where society’s conflicts are staged, and this takes place in the very same interstices of mundane life where the multiple and slippery uses of “things” take place. This is why, given the foregrounding of language linked to the ways that social relations are articulated, “polemology” emerges; in other words, the ways (relative to places) in which networks are defined, in which movements, forms of speech, and uses of language, are inscribed and delineated. In that place (culture), “skirmishes,” “games between strong and weak,” and the possibilities of action within games take place (Certeau 1999, 40). In this framework, which implies a re-politization of the observer, be it a historian or anthropologist, Certeau activates the notions of “strategy” and “tactic”—borrowed from Clausewitz’s treaty on war—to clarify the ways in which culture operates (Certeau, 1993 13). The critical reflections by Certeau about cultures (lettered, popular, etc.) are relative to the place that culture has come to occupy as a specific problem of the twentieth century. One cannot hide that, behind this discussion, also are Pierre Bourdieu and Michel Foucault.24 However, from my perspective, in the case of Certeau, one deals with a thinker who explicitly introduces himself to the discussion from the perspective of history. With questions like “can history guarantee a communication with the past without turning facts and described situations into caricatures?” Interspersed is the conviction that the past, being about what no longer is, is invested with an intrinsic resistance. It is not to be revealed without further ado. And it is from that resistance that the passion of the historian reveals itself. A figure that is in principle created to “give its contemporaries that necessary and legitimate part of their social ‘image’ which integrates a past with the present” but in whose evolution “one discovers a mission more essential and difficult, that consists of revealing to them, in a moment in the past, the negation of the same image.” Surely in Certeau “the passion of the historian” is invested with that desire which includes a large dose of self-criticism, which “little by little” makes the historian “dispossessed from the knowledge that 159

Zermeño and Quintana-Vallejo

reduced men of yesterday to nothing more than equals.” And that makes one refuse to “see everything through the eyes of a culture, his culture.” That is why this “historian’s desire” is invested with the “enjoyment for that which is different,” for that which does not cease to amaze. The result of all the work that stems from this “passion for history” will probably be “no more than a grain of sand” but is nonetheless capable of stopping “the logic of a system,” of breaking “a collective mirror” (Certeau, 2010 77–78). Secondly, historians never arrive at the past (at those other presents) without crossing through their own present. This conclusion implies the recognition of historians being at a great disadvantage, insofar as “their mental landscape is still the background on which all historical knowledge is placed.” But at the same time, this disadvantage has an advantage insofar as it signals the alterity of the past. The reading of one’s own history through those who have done it differently from oneself marks a limit to the logic that dominates the present: “The distance in the present opens the possibility to capture the distance of the past” (Certeau, 2010 78). It is in this being in-between, between cultures of the past and the present, that Certeau situates his anthropological and historical research about “popular culture.” Having established that third space, Certeau activates the categories of strategy and tactic, taken from military vocabulary, to account for that which connotes culture as an element “from which it receives its form and expression” (Certeau 2010, 51). In that context, the term strategy names the calculation or manipulation of the relations of force, a step that implies being able to isolate the will and power of a subject (a company, the army, a city, a scientific institution, etc.). This movement supposes the establishment of a “no-place” susceptible to be subscribed as something personal and to serve as a base to manage the relations with an exteriority of goals or threats (clients or competitors, enemies, research objectives). The establishment of that place as one’s own constitutes a “victory of place over time” (Certeau, 2010 42). From this place, a panoptic practice enables observation, measuring, and control of the observed. From the hills and with binoculars, it is nothing more than including in one’s own strategy the strategical movements of the other. In that context, knowing designates a power capable of transforming uncertain situations into “legible spaces.” In fact, military and scientific strategies start with the construction of personal fields (cities, institutions, laboratories, border drawing, etc.) (Certeau, 2010 42–43). Conversely, “tactic” is a notion that defines the calculation of an action without this action needing its own place. In this modality, there is no place but that of “the other.” That is why its action and calculation develop in the terrain imposed by the counterpart. Its action develops always in the field of view of the enemy, controlled by the enemy. “It does not have thus the possibility of a global project nor totalizing the enemy in a different space” (Certeau, 2010 43). That is why it takes advantage of occasions and depends on them, without being able to accumulate benefits, or augment one’s own or foreseeable outcomes. On the other hand, not having a place gives them the advantage of mobility, handling the hazard of time and taking advantage or the possibilities of the moment. It needs to use the opportunities of favorable situations.25 Its force comes not from place but from time. “It poaches. It creates surprises.” Such is its guile (Certeau, 2010 43). Tactic is, in that sense, the art of the weak. In summary, “strategy is the science of warrior movements outside of the field of vision of the enemy”; the tactic, in its interior” (Certeau, 2010 43). Clausewitz also compares guile with joking: “Just like a joke is a prestidigitation relative to ideas and conceptions, guile is a prestidigitation relative to some acts” (Certeau, 2010 44). It is the art of introducing oneself into the order. “The ways of doing of consumers are the practical equivalents of jokes” (Certeau, 2010 44). So, tactic is determined by the absence of power, unlike strategy, which is determined by power. Tactic is the art of sophists or the “art of turning the position of the weakest to the strongest” (Certeau, 2010 44). 160

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures

The recipients or protagonists of this “popular” history are all those anonymous producers that use the vocabularies and glossaries of language received (newspapers, television, movies, supermarkets, urban signage), who, despite being framed by prescribed syntax (schedules, the organization of places), are still heterogeneous to the systems in which “different desires” are drawn. “They circulate, come and go, overflow and derive on an imposed scape, like foamy waves in a sea between cliffs and labyrinths of a constructed order” (Certeau, 2010 41). It is not a liquid that circulates in solid devices but instead different movements that use the elements of the terrain. This approach can be visualized in Agnes Varda’s documentary Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse; i.e., artists who use the ruins of a consumeristic society to produce something else and compose original histories and objects.

Some concluding remarks We close these observations by returning to the beginning when we tried to identify the relations between (popular) culture and history from the framework by Michel de Certeau. We have seen that in its conception, the concept of “popular culture” cannot be understood without that of “lettered culture,” two notions that emerge during the Enlightenment. This semantic variation caused the marginalization of “oral culture,” such as it is studied by folklorists. The danger of “popular culture” has been eliminated (domesticated) and is thus the moment in which it becomes an object of interest for scholars. In that sense, “a political repression is found” in this type of “scientific curiosity.” The study of popular culture is underlaid by a withdrawal of the books from the people to reserve them for “cultured people or fans,” insofar as how it is thought of as an “endangered” literature whose ruins must be preserved, or also as a place of daydreaming about the “paradise lost” (Certeau, 2010 47–70). The “people” are thus infantilized—best kept in their original pure form, uncorrupted by mad readings (Certeau, 2010 53). That shows the inaugural gesture of the lettered elites for popular culture, and we can observe the possible existing link between the emergence of a new sense and purpose for history alongside a new sense and way to wage war. Related to the state of historiography, the invention of a modern historical time originates likewise from a lettered culture, which, based on research about the circulation of written text and print culture, institutes itself as the authority to speak on behalf of this other—the people. Its power consists of establishing the new coordinates of the political game, derived from the Napoleonic wars, forms that intersect the nineteenth century. There, a scholar of war appeared, fundamental to understanding these “new rules” in which one can see two types of players, the strategists and the tacticians: Carl von Clausewitz (1831). And Certeau, from a different place, no longer from “the people” but from another denomination derived from new technologies of communication, from this oceanic swarm of voices, or this “man without attributes,” described by the novelistic work of Robert Musil. Nevertheless, the proliferation and swarm of voices originated in the technologic reproducibility relative to mass media are a sign also of the return to that lost and repressed orality, but now turned into a “secondary orality,” per Walter Ong, which marks the end of the classical distinction during the period of the Enlightenment.26 This disassembly is based on the notion of mass culture, a sociological fabrication of the twentieth century. The model established to account for “the popular” was, rather than scientific, military. On the other hand, the historiographic operation must be included in the general analysis of culture, understood not only as representation but as production and fabrication of the senses. In this frame, critical history undertakes the role of a practice of grief and of deviation from the existing order. It 161

Zermeño and Quintana-Vallejo

is situated in the no-place of tactics, facing the place of the strategies of the strong. In this sense, a relation of equivalence appears between the horizon and the expectations of history and the personal horizon of the analysis of “the popular.” In Certeau, every word, every spin, every metaphor counts. In his language, the verbs “proliferate,” “swarm,” and “exhume” acquire a particular relevance by approaching the accounting of the phenomenon of contemporary culture from history as a field of forces. I think that his notion of culture is coetaneous with other previous cultural producers, like the philosophical novels of Robert Musil or Thomas Bernhard, and other later ones, like the narratives of Julian Barnes or Emmanuel Carrere.

Notes 1 Note from the translator: I have favored the retention of Zermeño Padilla’s baroque Spanish in my translation to convey the complexity of his insights, his labyrinthine thought process, and to show readers how his sinuous style embodies the very concept of estrangement that he examines. The objective of the volume as a whole is to present and represent ways of thinking and writing that do not exclusively originate from the bourgeois conventions of the Global North. I have tried to reflect this objective in my translation. 2 See also Lewis Mumford, Arte y Técnica, tr. Julián Lacalle, Logroño, Pepitas de Calabaza, 2014. 3 See Hans Blumenberg, “Mundo de la vida y tecnificación bajo los aspectos de la fenomenología” in Las realidades en que vivimos, tr. Pedro Madrigal, Barcelona, Paidós/I.C.E. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 1999, pp. 73–114. 4 “Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. The original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to ‘change the world,’ but also—and above all—to ‘change time.’ Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time. Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history.” (Agamben 91). 5 Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Images, Texts, Signs, Eds. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla, London, Verso, 2007. For the “Benjamin method,” see Beatriz Sarlo, “El taller de la escritura,” in Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin, Mexico, FCE, 2000, p. 21–31. 6 For exchanges between history and anthropology and the call to care for historical anachronisms, see Robert Darnton, La gran matanza de gatos y otros episodios en la historia de la cultura francesa, tr. Carlos Valdés, México, FCE, 1987. 7 His most recent book is Políticas literarias: poder y acumulación en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos, prol. Roger Bartra, México, FLACSO, 2012. 8 In the frame of an ever-growing bibliography, one should see: Horst Bredekamp, La nostalgie de L’Antique. Statues, nachines et cabinets de curiosités, Paris, Diderot Editeur, 1996. An answer to this fascination can be found in: Georg Simmel, Diagnóstico de la tragedia de la cultura moderna, tr. various, Salamanca, Ediciones Espuela de Plata, 2012, pp. 237–248. 9 See Roland Barthes, Michelet, tr. Jorge Ferreiro, México, FCE, 1988 10 See Julia Kristeva, Historia da linguagem, tr. María Margarita Barahona, Lisboa, coleccao signos, 1969. Kristeva groups within “structural linguistics” the research by Husserl (1990–1901), the Prague circle, the Copenhagen circle, American structuralism, mathematical linguistics, generative grammar (Chomsky), even the meeting of linguistics with Freudian psychoanalysis and its use in mundane practices, anthropology, and semiotics (305–454). It is from linguistics that Mikhail Bakhtin would renew (and modify Michelet’s romantic vision) of “popular culture” studies reinstituting the historical-idiomatic specificity to writers like Francois Rabelais (Bakhtin, 1990 346–353). Bakhtin also called to strengthen ties between the science of literature and cultural history in M. M. Bajtín, Estética de la creación verbal, tr. Tatiana Bubnova, México, Siglo XXI, 1985, 2nd ed., pp. 346–353. 11 On this issue, see Ranahit Guha, “The Small Voice of History” in Subaltern Studies IX. Writings on South Asian History and Society, Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakrabarty, eds. Bombay, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 1–12. This book also collects varied reflections on the meaning of writing scientifically about popular classes. Also see Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies V. Writings on South Asian History and Society, Dehli, Oxford University Press, 1995 [1987]. In Spanish, see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Rossana Barragán, Debates PostColoniales: Una introducción a los Estudios de la Subalternidad, La

162

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures

12 13 14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

26

Paz, SEPHIS, 1997. My essay, “Condición de subalternidad, condición postmoderna y saber histórico. ¿Hacia una nueva forma de escritura de la historia?,” Historia y Grafía, 12, México, 1999, pp. 11–47. Originally written in the heated context of May 1968 in Paris, published as “La beauté du mort: le concept de ‘culture populaire,’” in Politique aujourd’hui, dic. 1970, pp. 3–23. Une politique de la langue. La Revolution Francaise et les patois, Paris, Gallimard, 1975. See Patrick Joyce, “Narrative and history,” in Democratic subjects. The self and the social in nineteenthcentury England, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 153–161; and “The constitution and the narrative structure of Victorian politics,” in James Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the constitution. New narratives in the political history of England’s long nineteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 179–203. Ana María Zubieta, Cultura popular y cultura de masas. Conceptos, recorridos y polémicas, Barcelona, Paidós, 2000. In relation to Nietzsche and Certeau, Moscovici affirms the need to unlink “the popular” from the notion of a shapeless, manipulable mass (9). See Michel de Certeau, Historia y psicoanálisis, entre ciencia y ficción, tr. Alfonso Mendiola and Marcela Cinta, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2003, 2nd ed. Alluding to the apology of popular culture that Gabriel Garcia Marque made in Cuba in the presentation of Frei Betto’s book Fidel y la Religion during the “II Encuentro de Intelectuales por la soberanía de los Pueblos de nuestra América,” in Habana, from November 29 to December 1: “resistance culture expressed in the corners of language, in the mulatto virgins, true miracles of the people against the colonizing power. It is a culture of partying, of transgression, of mystery. A decisive input to the urgent political determination of jumping over five foreign centuries, and arrive on firmly footed, with a millenary horizon, to the coming millennia” (Dussel). Immanuel Kant, Observaciones sobre el sentimiento de lo bello y lo sublime, tr., estudio introductorio, notas e índice analítico Dulce María Granja Castro, México, FCE, 2004. The proliferation of treaties about beauty often comes accopanied by a moral assesment grouned on the color of human skin. JeanPierre de Crousaz, Tratado de lo bello (1715), tr. M. Angeles Bonet, Valencia, Universitat de Valencia, 1999. In fact, “mass communication” first appeared in a New York Times article in 1927 linked to the radio (Simonson 9). See episodes of history written from the farewell of this figure and its modernists uropias in Wolf Lepenies, Qu’est-ce un intellectuel européen? Les intellectuels et la politique de l’esprit dans l’histoire européenne, Paris, Editions Le Seuil, 2007. Here, Luce Giard points to their “Presentation” to Certau’s Everyday Life where there is a reflection on the epistemology of history: “Tratados manualmente o dóciles al tratamiento sofisticado que lleva a cabo la máquina, los datos siguen siendo lo que son en el momento de su producción como tales; su calidad y su significación informativa son proporcionales a los que los procedimientos de desglose y de construcción de categorías que han organizado esta producción, y unos valen tanto como los otros” (Giard xx–xxi). For more on these variations over time, see Roger Chartier, Lecturas y lectores en la Edad Moderna, tr. Mauro Armiño, Madrid, Alianza,1993 and Gugliemo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (dirs.), Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, Madrid, Taurus, 1998. To account for consumption, we generally account for what is used and much less how things are used. The analysis of consumption remains in the exterritoriality of the phenomenon and, thus, function is ignored. In this sense, “consumer practices” are like the “ghosts of a society,” analogous to “the ancient spirits that build the multiform hidden principle of production activity” (41). Such practices are the blind spot of present social formations. Luce Giard explains, in terms of “style,” some of the possible differences between the three thinkers. And, in the case of Certeau, Giard points to a particular preference for approaching the understanding of “ordinary people” (xxii). Due to a lack of an owned place, time becomes a fundamental element in its movements. Tactics are worthy procedures because of the pertinence they give to time: return to the moment when the situation is favorable. Strategies place their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the deterioration of time. Tactics place their hopes on a skilled use of time. These are plays in the art of quotidian war, in which gambling on either space or time distinguishes the ways strong and weak act. (Certeau, 2010 45). See Walter J. Ong, Oralidad y escritura. Tecnologías de la palabra, tr. Angélica Scherp, México, FCE, 1999.

163

Zermeño and Quintana-Vallejo

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, tr. Liz Heron. Verso, 1978. Barthes, Roland. Michelet, tr. Jorge Ferreiro, México, FCE, 1988. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator” [1923], in Illuminations, tr. Harry Zohn ed. & intro. Hannah Arendt. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968. Blumenberg, Hans. “Mundo de la vida y tecnificación bajo los aspectos de la fenomenología.” Las realidades en que vivimos, tr. Pedro Madrigal, Barcelona, Paidós/I.C.E. Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 1999, pp. 73–114. Bredekamp, Horst. La nostalgie de L’Antique. Statues, nachines et cabinets de curiosités, Paris, Diderot Editeur, 1996. Bakhtin, Mikhail. “Introducción. Planteamiento del problema.” La cultura popular en la Edad Media y en el Renacimiento. El contexto de Francois Rabelais, tr. Julio Forcat y César Conroy, México, Alianza Editorial, 1990, pp. 7–57. Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier. Historia de la lectura en el mundo occidental, Madrid, Taurus, 1998. de Certeau, Michel. La debilidad del creer, tr. Victor Goldstein. Katz Editores, 2010. de Certeau, Michel. Historia y psicoanálisis, entre ciencia y ficción, tr. Alfonso Mendiola y Marcela Cinta, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, 2003. de Certeau, Michel. “Conclusión. De los espacios y de las practices.” La cultura en plural, tr. Rogelio Paredes, Buenos Aires, Nueva Visión, 1999, pp. 189–204. de Certeau, Michel. La escritura de la historia, tr. Jorge López Moctezuma, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1993, p. 13. de Certeau, Michel, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel. Une politique de la langue. La Revolution Francaise et les patois, Paris, Gallimard, 1975. de Certeau, Michel. “La beauté du mort: Le concept de ‘culture populaire’.” in Politique aujourd’hui, dic. 1970, pp. 3–23. Chartier, Roger. Lecturas y lectores en la Edad Moderna, tr. Mauro Armiño, Madrid, Alianza, 1993. von Clausewitz, Carl. De la guerra, obra en tres volúmenes editada a partir de 1831. México, Editorial Diógenes, 1972/1973. de Crousaz, Jean-Pierre. Tratado de lo bello (1715), tr. M. Angeles Bonet, Valencia, Universitat de Valencia, 1999. Darnton, Robert. La gran matanza de gatos y otros episodios en la historia de la cultura francesa, tr. Carlos Valdés, México, FCE, 1987. Dussel, Enrique. “Fidel y la Religión.” La Jornada, 5 December 1985. Giard, Luce. “historia de una investigación.” La invención de lo cotidiano. 1 Artes de hacer, tr. Alejandro Pescador, México, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1996, p. XVIII. Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History. New York, Norton and co., 1969 [1948]. Guha, Ranahit. “The Small Voice of History.” en Subaltern Studies IX. Writings on South Asian History and Society, eds. Shahid Amin y Dipesh Chakrabarty, Bombay, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 1–12. Guha, Ranajit, ed. Subaltern Studies V. Writings on South Asian History and Society. Dehli, Oxford University Press, 1995 [1987]. Joyce, Patrick. “The Constitution and the Narrative Structure of Victorian Politics.” Re-reading the constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 179–203. Joyce, Patrick. “Narrative and History.” Democratic subjects: The self and the social in nineteenth-century England, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 153–161. Julia, Dominique and Jacques Revel, “Postfacio.” Una política de la lengua. La Revolución Francesa y las lenguas locales: La encuesta Gregoire, p. 302. Kant, Immanuel. Observaciones sobre el sentimiento de lo bello y lo sublime, tr. Dulce María Granja Castro, México, FCE, 2004. Kraniauskas, John. Políticas literarias: Poder y acumulación en la literatura y el cine latinoamericanos, prol. Roger Bartra, México, FLACSO, 2012. Kristeva, Julia. Historia da linguagem, tr. María Margarita Barahona, Lisboa, coleccao signos, 1969. Le Bon, Gustave. La psychology des foules. New York, Dover Publish. 2001. Lepenies, Wolf. Qu’est-ce un intellectuel européen? Les intellectuels et la politique de l’esprit dans l’histoire européenne, Paris, Editions Le Seuil, 2007.

164

Between Lettered and Popular Cultures Marx, Ursula, et al., eds. Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Images, Texts, Signs. London, Verso, 2007. Moscovici, Serge. La era de las multitudes. Un tratado histórico de la psicología de masas, tr. Aurelio Garzón del Camino, México, FCE, 1985 [1981]. Mumford, Lewis. Arte y Técnica, tr. Julián Lacalle, Logroño, Pepitas de Calabaza, 2014. Nietzsche, Friedrich W. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, tr. Paul V. Cohn, The MacMillan Company, 1913. Ong, Walter J. Oralidad y escritura. Tecnologías de la palabra, tr. Angélica Scherp, México, FCE, 1999. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia and Rossana Barragán. Debates PostColoniales: Una introducción a los Estudios de la Subalternidad, La Paz, SEPHIS, 1997. Sarlo, Beatriz. “El taller de la escritura.” Siete ensayos sobre Walter Benjamin, Mexico, FCE, 2000, pp. 21–31. Simmel, Georg. Diagnóstico de la tragedia de la cultura moderna, tr. varios, Salamanca, Ediciones Espuela de Plata, 2012, pp. 237–248. Simonson, Peter. Refiguring mass comunication. A history, Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2010. Tavares, Goncalo M. Enciclopedia I, tr. Antonio Sáez Delgado, México, Aldus, 2010, p. 79. Translation of Fátima Vieira. Zermeño, Guillermo. “Condición de subalternidad, condición postmoderna y saber histórico. ¿Hacia una nueva forma de escritura de la historia?” Historia y Grafía, 12, México, 1999, pp. 11–47. Zubieta, Ana María. Cultura popular y cultura de masas. Conceptos, recorridos y polémicas. Barcelona, Paidós, 2000.

165

PART III

Case Studies Examples and Exceptions

15 THE COMPUTER AND THE SUBJECT Computing Extractivism in Global South Literatures Amrita De Aravind Adiga’s epistolary novel The White Tiger (2008) begins with a series of epithets. The protagonist is Balram Halwai, who is writing emails to the Chinese Premier, Wen Jiabo. Balram identifies himself as “The White Tiger: A Thinking Man, And An Entrepreneur” living in the “world’s center of Technology and Outsourcing Electronics” in Bangalore, India (13). The emails operating as personal testimonials are embedded in a digital repository by an everyman entrepreneur, dispensing essential wisdom related to making it big in neoliberal1 India. The knowledge when disseminated is permanently pegged into a system, where even the murkiest of information becomes marketable knowledge with deft handling of the chosen medium. The chosen medium necessary to occasion such intended effect must be then composed of accreted signs, which metonymically signals India’s participation in global consumerism: here, the ubiquity of the computer presents just such a representational framework and meaning-making device. Balram is the disenfranchised poor, now ventriloquizing entrepreneurial knowledge gleaned from the urban elite; he is the “speaking other”, an “illegitimate mouth”(Joseph 2012), and a “half baked” technocrat, who appropriates neoliberal wisdom, only to expose neoliberal India’s universalized pretensions and exclusions. Balram’s efficient handling and deft knowledge of the cyber world is a crucial part of the act. The computer enables his entrepreneurial scripting, insofar it is his familiarity with the medium that legitimizes his aspirational subject formation, like in a traditional bildungsroman:2 the computer is essential to the graft sanctioning his integration into a transitioning society shaken by the “new and destabilizing forces of capitalism” (Moretti 1987). In tandem with massive economic gains, Balram’s initiation and ultimate fusion with the neoliberal social order (Nandi 2017) mirrors his physical transformation: from a malnourished nameless driver, he turns into a stocky businessman with a potbelly, who spends most of his time facing a computer in a room filled with chandeliers. In Chilean author, Alejandro Zambra’s short story, “Memories of a Personal Computer”, struggling poet Max migrates from a typewriter to a computer. This seemingly commonplace event turns into a life event, a la Badiou (2013), inciting major transformations in his personal life. The first thing Max notices is how perfect the computer is, and how imperfect his poems look when typed on the page—the syntax made sense before, but in the present moment appears visually disappointing. Soon, Max starts experimenting with different designs, fonts, editable texts; he begins reacting to words differently, doing away with previously defined intellectual standards. DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-18

169

Amrita De

The computer then is the first entry point if we were to retroactively trace the proper sequentiality of events to mark important nodes in Max’s transformation. Both of the above-outlined journeys: from the driver to the entrepreneur, a university student to an out-of-work poet, pivot around the use of a computer as a non-negotiable essential to chart such a transformation. The computer has, after all, been a heavy-duty commitment in the Global South: in an increasingly amplified global economy, the Global South3 is the birthplace of necessary raw materials, which get disproportionately devalued in Global North centers.4 The digital is inarguably the sine qua non of contemporary urban life; it is ubiquitous to social life, at once processing a gamut of functions, from paying bills, watching movies to accessing healthcare services—the one-stop social smorgasbord accessible by one touch and a swipe. Think about the latest gadgets dominating the cultural zeitgeist, the new smartphone, or AirPods first launched in the Global North and then immediately celebrated in the Global South despite a belated overpriced arrival.5 After all, it is not only material confirmation of possession that is integral to this transaction but rather the intangible affective participation in the world provided by the new object. This is commodity fetishism driven to its ultimate exhaustion: conditions of relations leading to the production of said object are first massively devalued then promoted at an exorbitant rate as the final product. Any kind of affective investment in the afterlife of an object, or in the consumerist fantasy endorsed by the object by default, then engages the consumer-subject in a dialogical relationship with existing global supply chains, where each node is perfectly calibrated to sustain a continuous flow of uneven social relations and labor conditions. The object world then becomes a legitimate subject of literary inquiry, for, in Benjaminian fashion, it shows through flashes6 rather than demonstrates through sublation the impossibility of an equitable world under neoliberalism. The computer then is a perfect example to think about global supply chains. To better understand global supply chains, think about the underside of a computer which says “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in China:” the supply chain encompasses all parts of the processing, from the sourcing to the final product—the device in our hands. Balram in Bangalore and Max in Santiago despite radically different lived experiences use the computer, making sense of their being and belonging in the world through access to the internet—both are axially located at different points in a continuously replicating supply chain. Supply chains then render visible the sophisticated, exploitative interconnected networks, which systematically replicate themselves to confirm the stability of the Global North as the head and everything else as the rest. It is telling that even though parts of the hardware integral to the final makeup of the computer are sourced from China, India, Taiwan, and Bolivia, they are rarely assembled in any of these places. Think about how new updated versions break the market each year but the labor relations integral to its formations are consistently undervalued. Supply chains are economically modeled on a condition of deep extractivism, “where some countries specialize in producing raw goods, while others manufacture products” (Acosta 2017). The back story of the computer alongside its economic makeup also provides behind-thescenes footage of the social entanglements, cosmopolitan desires, and affective attachments generated by the object. I find it instructive to think about objects materially to refocus attention on how human behavioral scripts are shaped by a present ubiquitous digital economy, where lines between aspects of sociality are often blurred to reveal phantasmic leaps of imagination: couples role-playing (Zambra 2015), a self-styled entrepreneur dispensing life wisdom and a catch-all success mantra in a neoliberal economy (Adiga 2008), where the virtual seamlessly collapses into the real in an indistinguishable form. Objects populating literary texts then become instrumental tools to navigate the complex nexus of subject–object interactions at a glocal level, where the top-view vertical organization of a neoliberal economy devolves into micro conduits of personal cellular 170

The Computer and the Subject

interactions and where the use-value of objects can be plotted at its maximum and minimum. For instance, Claudia and Max’s romantic interactions can be graphically plotted against their combined use of the computer, with their relationship reaching a crescendo when the computer reaches its maximum functionality, and absolute alienation when the use of the computer becomes obsolete; similarly, Balram’s increased entrepreneurial subjectivity mirrors his growing digital literacy. In simple terms, this essay is invested in the life of the object and the ways in which the object constitutes the social. I will try to demonstrate this through two examples from Alejandro Zambra’s “Memories of a Personal Computer” and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.

Being and belonging in the technosocial Chilean author Alejandro Zambra is known for several short novels, some of which have been translated into English. Unlike other South Cone writers, writing about life under a dictatorship, Zambra’s oeuvre traces everyday lived experiences of what it feels like to live under democracy, which translates in a distinctive lightness in storytelling commensurate with the everyday lightness of objects peppering the technosocial. For instance, Zambra writes about love without directly transposing any political allegory on narrative storytelling. His stories provide metonymies of a world (Hoyos 2019), where the use-value of objects drives feelings, attitudes, attachments of being and belonging in the private. The public space operates as an extension of this grammar existing in a symbiotic relationship with humans and objects, consumption and production, individual and community—all of which are marked by different levels of participation in the technosocial. The name of the short story collection, My Documents evokes the cruel optimism of the fantasy of technosocial, at once current and obsolete in the process of a future becoming that is always in arrival. After all, “my documents” has now been replaced by far more efficient holding containers—the computer PC now transmuted into daintier gadgets that can fit into the palm of our hands. Zambra’s stories are both a reflection on use and obsolescence—a retroactive charting of a trajectory that begins with the affective desire of the worlding afforded by human–object interactions, but its logical denouement ends in obsolescence and nostalgic remembrance of the past. Zambra’s story set in Santiago in early 2000 nostalgically re-remembers the initial phase of the technosocial. The story begins with the cataloging of life, unhurried and observant—the computer is an addition to the private space replete with its own sense of wonderment. The protagonist is a poet, a member of the upwardly mobile lettered bourgeoise. Zambra writes, The first thing he did was transcribe the poems he had written over the past several years […] Something happened, though, when he saw those words on the screen, words that had made so much sense in his notebooks: he began to doubt the verses, and he let himself get carried along by a different rhythm. (115) Soon, we learn the computer generates a new kind of solitude for Max, leading to attenuated participation in public social life as he spends his time indoors exploring the possibilities of the computer. When its mediated possibilities reach new pinnacles throbbing with the pulse of erotic desire, we see Max refracted through his romantic encounters—the computer becomes increasingly entangled with his personal life. First, the computer brings Max and Claudia together becoming the repository for all their romantic moments and affective transferences); then the computer is placed in a specific room, which also becomes the center for their intimate engagements; at 171

Amrita De

the end, the computer becomes the pivot for their ultimate disintegration culminating in a horrific account of rape. This is, ironically, also the moment when the computer reaches maximum functionality. The short story retroactively traces the rudiments of what we now know is the beginning of the technosocial—almost as if Zambra is nostalgically re-remembering a pre-computer era by activating a teleological narrative of the personal with the intent to caution. Zambra is then driving “driving technological commodity fetishism to its exhaustion” (Hoyos 2019) by alluding to the long history of computation and its processual imbrication with the personal. Whether this is done through instrumental storytelling or not remains to be seen, for Zambra’s whole corpus is putatively engaged in ratifying the inherent instability and internal contradiction of instrumental storytelling. The life of the computer never ends in this story; it is relegated to a room in the basement, replaced by a shinier efficient object—not an updated version but a different being. Claudia and Max’s love story, when transposed on the trajectory of the computer in their lives, replicates the growing workings of an inner consciousness that is both fluid and rooted. When we first meet the couple, the computer is uncoupled from the internet, acting as a repository of harmless evening games, like Minesweeper and Solitaire to keep the couple entertained; the computer is then only an object amongst hundred other objects—discrete entities with a fixed repertoire of services. It is when the computer is connected to the internet that we sense the beginning of a hipsterish consciousness, out of step with the values of the previous. When the couple begins to flirt with the possibilities afforded by the computer, the reader senses them becoming increasingly alienated from one another: photos from their vacation documenting their intimate moments are dumped on the internet, archived as digital memorabilia. Images of places, beaches, white sand, and hotel exteriors abound in the framing, while memories are increasingly evacuated of the rawness of tangible emotions. In the one frame, where Max appears alongside Claudia in their vacation photos, his frame is silhouetted existing only as a phantasmic presence that is part liquid, part spongy—a proverbial palimpsest soaking in shared want and desire for the good life. What gets archived is the fragility and frailty of such fleeting moments, for we know that this is the last vacation Max and Claudia will take as a couple. Even their private sexual moments come to mirror knowledge gleaned from the internet as if now the phase of exploratory intimacy between them is over, and now only the internet can provide the necessary cues to get out of the intimacy rut. Eventually, Claudia chances upon Max’s internet history to find him addicted to porn; she also finds proof of his dalliance in his sexual chats with other women. Interestingly, she can only access his email ID when she enters the password as her name. The irony is not lost to anyone: what passes as dalliance has origins in romantic sensibility or maybe sentimentality. A lot like the Global South’s flirtations with instruments of neoliberal capitalism in the first place, or a bid to partake in the fantasy world provided by such participation—when all that percolates are extractivist tunnels into the heart of the colony itself. It is telling that Claudia is raped at the end of their romantic relationship: as if, when she has figured out all pieces of their inner lives, she is so attenuated, so alienated that she must be stripped bare of all knowledge before she can start anew. Claudia literally strips herself off her clothes and touches her nipples to arouse herself to once again tangibly feel/live the maddening pull of this object, but she is too pared down at this moment to feel anything. Only after she finds herself at the receiving end of explicit violence when she is forced into a non-consensual sexual encounter does she begin to reclaim her lost self: she kicks Max in his balls and leaves the relationship forever. At the beginning of their relationship, it is Max who is more visibly transformed by the computer, but towards the end, it is Claudia who bears the physical imprint of his transformation, even as the object catalyzing the transformation loses its 172

The Computer and the Subject

holding power. In a way, Claudia can only reclaim lost power, when the agentic possibilities of the computer have been driven to exhaustion. In Aravind Adiga’s novel, however, the agentic possibilities of the computer are effectively harnessed to render visible the structural imbrications of class-caste extractivism, while the text remains cognizant of its own conflicting participation in the very object world it serves to critique.

Computing entrepreneurial subjectivity In Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, Balram’s self-fashioning as a successful entrepreneur occurs through the seven letters written by him to the Chinese premier in broken “half-baked” English, which simultaneously connects him to a global anglophone audience. The first page of the novel introduces a confessional style narrative, and through a mode of double interpellation, the reader becomes a co-participant in the constitution of the metatext (the novel). In the first point of interpellation, the reader is conscious of reading Balram’s life story as the main foreground—at the surface of the novel. The second point of interpellation occurs by way of textual initiation to a discursive landscape, where hitherto accrued epistemological purchases of center-periphery dynamics in postcolonial anglophone literature are effectively destabilized through the inauguration of a new episteme of knowledge-making that at once satirizes and vindicates neoliberal individualism. It is telling that the computer is the chosen medium to actualize Balram’s processual deconstruction of the myth of the neoliberal entrepreneur, for the computer is the apt metonym for the very condition Balram deconstructs—the cruel optimism of wanting to belong in the same world that is an obstacle to his flourishing (Berlant 2012). Isolated in his “150 square foot company” (180) with only a chandelier and a computer for company amidst India’s tech hub, Balram is still insecure about his positioning in a system, where the older feudal system still persists alongside a burgeoning ethos of radical individualism, which requires him to perform an updated version of the master-servant dialectic. The ambiguity of this dialectic is best delineated through careful parsing of the contents of his letters, for not only do these epistolary confessions enable his entrepreneurial avatar while providing a searing commentary of the extractivist imperative embedded within the system but also seek to offer a break away from the pervasive hold of a colonized mindset. “The India” Adiga represents manifests what Trotsky called “combined and uneven development”: a condition where contemporary forms exist as an amalgam with archaic forms. On the one hand, Adiga offers a view of tremendous technological progress populated by a thriving software industry and endless call centers in Bangalore, where Balaram sets up his taxi business—and on the other, feudal structures governed by ruthless landlords in the rural hinterland. Balram’s description of the four landlords who control Laxmangarh reveals the routine debauched practices and extractive tendencies they engage in. He gives them animal names to further highlight their exploitative, predatory attributes. They control every aspect of public life in Laxmangarh: the river, agricultural lands, grazing lands, and roads. While all four landlords embody characteristics of toxic, classed entrepreneurial masculinities, they are a product of pre-neoliberal India, reflecting an antithesis of the brand of entrepreneurial masculinity that is valorized in the neoliberal moment. “Not innovating, not contributing to economic growth, parasitically benefiting from the scleroticness of the local socioeconomic structure rather than participating in any sort of dynamism” Wallonen (2020), they still manage to control, continuing to hold enormous power in rural Laxmangarh by exploiting their upper-class-caste socio-cultural capital. Even though Balram moves away from this space finding himself at the center of urban India, which is the site of contestation with global capital practices in neoliberal India, the value system he identifies as an entrepreneur in the changing economy does emerge from 173

Amrita De

a dialectical confrontation between the entrenched feudalism of the “darkness” and jet-setting dynamism of the “light”. Balram unpacks the “con-game”7 (Singhavi 2014) of class capital to reflect on the persistence of stratified layers of class-caste oppression, even though outwardly he fashions himself as an entrepreneur by evacuating himself completely from the identity that has historically shackled him. Balram theatrically announces that it is time for the “brown” people and the “yellow” people to take over alluding to a socio-cultural utopia, where the hierarchy of the “first-world-third world” binary has been destabilized. Through this strategic avowal, he evacuates the first world of its putative authority by proceeding to tell the readers that “our erstwhile master, the white-skinned man, has wasted himself through buggery, cell phone usage, and drug abuse” (Adiga 4). It is indeed telling that his great admiration for China stems from knowledge amassed from a surficial reading of the book Exciting Tales of the Exotic East. The name of the book stunningly betrays its orientalist lineage, but Balram, our neoliberal educator, now turned peddler of entrepreneurial wisdom, interprets it differently. This book teaches him that the British failed to colonize China; Balram emphatically declares that the only three nations he admires are the ones who have never let themselves be ruled by foreigners—China, Afghanistan, and Abyssinia. The brown man and the yellow man in his autobiography are intertwined in a fantastic symbolic register of twinned identification. They are now at the center of global cultural imperialism while the white man from now-former first-world countries is relegated to peripheral globality. The defining trait of this novel is its condition of extreme unreliability which Adiga mobilizes with full-throttled abandon to write a “global anglophone” novel or a “conditions of India” novel (Detmers) illuminating the despicable nature of abject poverty in India and its causal elements while daring to imagine an alternate universe or “world”, where India and China exist in a triangulated relationship with America. But Balram, the astute neoliberal interlocutor, does not allow himself to be magnetized by objects inherited from the West like cellphones or computers—in a way, he prides himself in his ability to separate the use of these objects from the affect world surrounding them. Consider the section at the beginning, where the reader is introduced to a wanted poster of Balram after he had committed the murder and is pursued by the police. Before this point, Balram had avowedly contended that our erstwhile colonial master the white man had squandered away his resources through unmitigated cell phone usage and buggery. However, at this point he perfunctorily considers skin-whitening creams to look “white as westerners”. Balram is inscribed in the same tautological framework of the political economy of cosmopolitan desire which he rails against becoming a complicit participant in the maintenance of its putative authority. Mariano Siskind (2014) in his monograph, Cosmopolitan Desires, writes, The desires for commodities and discourses, “of distant lands and climes” (Marx and Engels) that continue to constitute our cosmopolitan subjectivities are at once the symbolic ground on which we hope to inscribe an intellectual emancipatory practice and a domestication of the world that reproduces the hegemonic relations that world literature may or may not address. Seen in the light of Siskind’s theorization, Balram’s “cosmopolitan desire” to pass off as a neoliberal upper-class English-educated entrepreneur is reflective of the perverse autonomy of global capital and its continued relevance. A close reading of the ambivalence in his ambitious declarations—in Balram’s rejection of the putative authority of the Global North and subsequent desire for accommodation in its interpretive schema—presents a clear dialectical aporia foreclosing any unidimensional, static determinative interpretation of the novel. Balram’s “becoming” into an independent, authorial entrepreneur, from someone who literally had no name, rests on the inter174

The Computer and the Subject

nal contradictions of the outdated feudal power structure in the rural and the unabashed cronyism and startling lack of inclusivity in the metropole. His entrepreneurial avatar is modeled on that of Ashok, his former master, who represents the prototypical iteration of the classed, entrepreneur, who can freely navigate spaces accessible only to people with political and capital clout. Even though Ashok fails as an entrepreneur due to his inability to demonstrate the active ingenuity and work ethic required to be a successful entrepreneur, Balram mimics his lifestyle and consumption practices to style himself in the same brand of entrepreneurial masculinity he sees Ashok perform. After Balram comes into money, rising the rungs of economic success, he invests in shiny objects like chandeliers—yet chandeliers cannot obliterate the darkness that was symptomatic of his previous life in Laxmangarh, which he narrates he can never completely eschew as he is always suspicious of his employees and therefore maintains a detached relationship with them. Balram is a newly defined agent of extractivism8 when he murders his master, steals his identity, and becomes the owner of an exploitative cab company, “White Tiger Taxi services”, located in the middle of the Indian technosocial capital in Bangalore, which is also one of India’s key entry points in its global reckoning of cultural capital. He now maintains a strictly professional relationship with his employees and is driven only by the promise of perpetuating capital, which allows him to adopt a secular mindset. Balram’s entrepreneurial wisdom, therefore, rests on his ability to see himself as an individual distinct from his community. He can only break away from the “rooster coop” of stratified class-caste logic when he transcends the ethical dilemma of sacrificing his family.9 Balram is, therefore, as much constituted by darkness as he is constitutive of the continued replication and maintenance of feudal classed mindsets. This is perhaps Adiga’s way of staking a claim for community over radical individualism. The form of the novel, especially written through seven emails, upholds the impossibility of a successful transition from the “light” into the “dark”, presenting a strikingly consistent critique of bourgeois individualistic capitalism while assessing its affective hold over individualistic aspirations. A close reading of the textual surface reveals the novel’s inability to destabilize concretized cultures of neoliberal capitalism so semiotically lodged in the psychogeography of colonized mindsets that it becomes impossible to exist outside its replicative extractive schema. The text (Balram’s intext) within his autobiographical rambling casts entrepreneurial masculinity as aspirational while as a whole exposing the fragility of this figuration.10

Conclusion: Global South world literature as object-oriented literature of extraction The above two examples demonstrate how purportedly disembodied objects such as the computer render visible the constitutive forces of the technosocial; writing with and on the computer is then a political act focused on narrating the materiality of cultural production, especially as a function of its imbrication with the social. In Chilean author Alejandro Zambra’s short story, we see the agentic possibilities of the computer and its effect on private social relations, ultimately resulting in the loss of both public and private communities. In dialectically reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, I demonstrate how the idea of computation is foregrounded as both an endorsement and critique of neoliberal individualism on one hand and the very basis to situate alternate historiography—ala the proletariat writing a series of “dead letters” to the new center—on the other. Both stories obliquely reference the history of extractivism through a refracted gaze on individual protagonists, whose lives are mediated through the use of an object, which at once controls their destiny and sense of being and belonging in the world. In one of the first enunciations of extractivism, as recorded in Marx’s manifesto, Marx comments on the cosmopolitan nature of the world market while delineating the path of extraction of 175

Amrita De

“raw materials drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home but in every quarter of the globe” (Marx, quoted in Ahmad, 2000). In the second phase of this articulation, Marx equates the historical condition of the bourgeoise’s cosmopolitanism with a sort of isomorphism of world literature and world market highlighting: And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literature, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie … compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. (Marx, quoted in Ahmad, 2000) This is the internal logic of capitalism at work; the good and the bad are not isolated functions of the same condition but modes in a single process, which cannot be simplistically dissolved to mark a portion from the whole. Hoyos reads it as a celebration of an unintended favorable consequence of the consolidation of the bourgeoisie at a global level and as a budding critique of its emerging, integrated culture (Hoyos, 2018). One can argue that using the computer simply as a tool for writing, like Balram is doing to write his narrative, is free from the backstory of extractivism; however, a consideration of the cultural production of the object renders visible a contemporaneous account of the push and pull imbrications structuring the circulation of neoliberal capital. At once aspirational and attenuating, computation is the new age branding of literary cosmopolitanism—an amorphous interconnected disembodied process (narratives structured in ether) with tangible material consequences. If world literature is a function of the world market, then a study of literature from around the world must necessarily consider the historicity of objects and their affective entanglements. Taking seriously Edward Said’s (1985) provocation that “the beginning, then, is the first step in the intentional production of meaning”, it makes sense to locate at the very beginning the very object that makes meaning-making possible in the contemporary world market. Attention to the backstory of objects activates a mode of reading, which evacuates the idea of cosmopolitanism from its presumptive investment in wanting to “win a world” (Siskind 2019)—instead, it privileges a mode of reading, which interrogates the text as a symptom of the “overwhelming impression of a world” ridden by extractivism. While I am not advocating for any homogeneous epistemological leap in the study of literature from the Global South, I am suggesting that any examination of it must necessarily attend to the backstory of extractivism concomitant in the surface of the text. It is not enough to delineate the actor from the agent, or the tool from the history of its cultural production; a consideration of the timely material ephemera embedded within literary form draws attention to the different forms of worlding made possible by objects and their affordances. Projecting the stories of objects onto literary entanglements additionally cultivates a different ethos that considers the surface of the text as sovereign while rendering visible its conflicted engagement with the object world. In keeping with its “nomadic disciplinary formulation” (Lopez 2021), object-oriented readings mainly offer a potent heuristic alongside other “inclusive metamethodological approaches” (Lopez 2021) activating a South–South comparative approach, which takes into account the agentic spaces in relation to each other, while being mindful of their strategic relationship with global neoliberal capital. I will end with a note of caution: one from Hoyos “to not replicate extractivism by plucking from 176

The Computer and the Subject

the cultures of the world to build upon them conceptually, thereby adding value, and then shipping them back to their places of provenance as theory” and a cautionary reminder to address the question of determination of world literature by “the conditions of its production and class location of its agents” (Ahmad 1994).11

Notes 1 I consider the period post-1991 economic liberalization as the advent of neoliberalism in India. For information about how India is presented to the world as India Inc., see Ravinder Kaur (2012). 2 Multiple critics (Mendes 2010; Khor 2012; Nandi 2017) have read the novel as a neoliberal bildungsroman. I find particularly instructive Nandi’s take on the resolution of textual ambiguity when Balram becomes capitalism’s “social avatar” (277). 3 Beyond geographical descriptors, I also think of the term in relation to minority populations in the Global North, but here, I am drawing reference to regions in the Global South, where ideas of extractivism are most economically dominant. 4 The backstory of a computer demonstrates how value accumulation drives every link in the relations of its production with the final product priced at a sum much higher than its parts. Hoyos (2018) provides a detailed glimpse of the profit maximization in every link of the supply chain, “from the mining of mercury and gold in Africa and South America; through the aluminum foundries for the computer’s frame and motherboard assembly in China; to its rote software coding in India and its design in Cupertino; to its glorified commercialization in all of these locales.” 5 Chellis Glendinning (1990) presciently argues that “all technology is political” in her “Notes Towards a Neo-Luddite Manifesto”. 6 Channelizing Benjamin’s concept of history, where he suggests that the past can be seized as an image whose recognition is fleeting, available only in the instant when the image flashes up, and the Hegelian idea of sublation, which can be interpreted as a levelling upwards through a dialectical opposition, I suggest that even as consumers from the Global South continue to be magnetized by the affect world of these objects, there remains a stark economic disparity in the conditions of relations leading to the production of these objects. 7 Singhavi (2014) notes that narratives of passing are often narratives of slumming in reverse, especially in a political economy where caste hierarchies are permanently embedded, leaving no room for alternate imaginaries. Sanggvi, quoting Ankhi Mukherjee, writes that “the con-game of class can only end in one place, one that undermines the universal character of capital only to re-establish it on a stronger footing” (Mukherjee 284–5). 8 While extractivism is broadly understood as an economic model, where some nations specialize as producers of raw goods and some nations specialize in manufacturing products (Acosta 2017), I have deployed the term to allude to the exploitative nature of unorganized, informal labour relations, in particular to India and other parts of the Global South. 9 Balram does sacrifice his family by murdering his master, Ashok, but he also returns for his nephew, Dharam, in the final climactic moment. This becomes an eventual liability for him as he is always conscious of the fact that Dharam knows the complete truth—for him, he shall always be an imposter, even if he convinces the world of the worth of his, now, accumulated capital. 10 He does become an entrepreneur, but neoliberal India does not accommodate half-baked, self-styled entrepreneurs like him unless he appears to belong to an upper caste-class position. 11 While Ahmad writes this in the context of “contemporary literary radicalism” critiquing the poststructuralist kind of ironic self-referentiality and self-pleasuring evident in a critical stance, where the agent considers his class location—this serves as an important reminder for the study of world literature as well.

Works Cited Acosta, Alberto. 2013. “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two Sides of the Same Curse.” Beyond Development: Alternative Visions from Latin America, vol. 1: 61–86. Adiga, Aravind. 2008. The White Tiger. New Delhi: Harper Collins. Ahmad, Aijaz. 1994. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso.

177

Amrita De Ahmad, Aijaz. 2000. “The Communist Manifesto and ‘World Literature’.” Social Scientist. Vol. 7/8: 3–30. Berlant, Lauren. 2012. Desire/Love. New York: Punctum Books. Badiou, Alain. 2013. “Philosophy and the Event.” New York: Wiley. Benjamin, Walter. 2009. “On the Concept of History.” doi:www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/books/Concept_History_ Benjamin.pdf Cristina Mendes, Ana. 2010. “Exciting Tales of Exotic Dark India: Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 45, no. 2: 275–293. doi:10.1177/0021989410366896 Detmers, Ines. 2011. “New India? New Metropolis? Reading Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger as a ‘condition-of-India novel’.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing, vol. 47, no. 5: 535–545. doi:10.1080/17449855.2 011.614790 Glendinning, Chellis. 1990. “Notes Toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto.” Utne Reader, vol. 38, no. 1: 50–53. Hoyos, Héctor. 2015. “The Telltale Computer: Obsolescence and Nostalgia in Chile After Alejandro Zambra.” In Technology, Literature, and Digital Culture in Latin America. Edited by Matthew Bush and Tania Gentic. Routledge, pp. 121–136 . Hoyos, Héctor. 2018. “Global Supply Chain Literature vs. Extractivism.” Re-mapping World Literature: Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies between Latin America and the Global South/Escrituras, mercados y epistemologías entre América Latina y el Sur Global. Edited by: Gesine Müller, Jorge J. Locane and Benjamin Loy. De Gruyter, pp. 1–33. Hoyos, Héctor. 2019. Things with a History. New York: Columbia University Press. Joseph, Betty. 2012. “Neoliberalism and Allegory.” Cultural Critique, vol. 82: 68–94. doi:1​0.574​9/cul​tural​ criti​que.8​2.201​2.006​8 Kaur, Ravinder.2012. “India Inc. and Its Moral Discontents.” Economic and Political Weekly: 40–45. doi:23214625 Khor, Lena. 2012. “Can the Subaltern Right Wrongs?: Human Rights and Development in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” South Central Review, vol. 29, no. 1: 41–67. doi:10.1353/scr.2012.0006 López, Alfred J. 2021. “Intentions, Methods, and the Future of Global South Studies.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 58, no. 3: 485–508. doi:10.5325/complitstudies.58.3.0485 Moretti, Franco. 2000. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York: Verso. Mukherjee, Ankhi. 2009. “‘Yes, Sir, I Was the One Who Got Away’: Postcolonial Emergence and the Question of Global English.” English Studies, vol. 62, no. 3: 280–291. doi:10.3917/etan.623.0280 Nandi, Swaralipi. 2017. “Narrative Ambiguity and the Neoliberal Bildungsroman in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 47, no. 2: 276–301. doi:10.1353/jnt.2017.0011 Said, Edward W. 1985. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Columbia University Press. Shingavi, Snehal. 2014. “Capitalism, Caste, and Con-Games in Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger.” Postcolonial Text, vol. 9, no. 3. pp. 1–16. Siskind, Mariano. 2014. Cosmopolitan Desires: Global Modernity and World literature in Latin America, vol. 14. Illinois: Northwestern University Press. Siskind, Mariano. 2019. “Towards a Cosmopolitanism of Loss: An Essay About the End of the World.” Latin American Literatures in the World. Edited by: Gesine Müller, De Gruyter. vol. 4: 205–236. Walonen, Michael K. 2020.”Debunking the Myth of the Entrepreneur through Narrative in the Contemporary South Asian Novel.” Interventions, vol. 22, no. 2: 246–260. doi:10.1080/1369801X.2019.1649178 Zambra, Alejandro. 2015. “Memories of a Personal Computer.” In My Documents, Trans. Megan McDowell. San Franisco: McSweeney’s.

178

16 CAROLINA MARIA DE JESUS Four Movements of the Favela and Literature Fabio Akcelrud Durão

Literature of the favela as a way out In April 1958, Audálio Dantas, a young reporter of Folha da Noite, a newspaper of wide circulation, was doing a news report on a children’s park at the Canindé slum, a recent settlement of extremely poor people next to the Tieté River in São Paulo City. Favelas had been around since the nineteenth century, but the increasing speed of urbanization, much fueled by migration from rural areas, had given them a new magnitude, making them harder to be ignored. As he arrived there, he found a strange but typical scene, as a group of adults was there preventing the children from playing. He then heard someone say: “‘What a shame! Grown-ups taking toys from children!’ […] The men continued to swing smugly and she warned: ‘You just wait and see; I’m going to put you all in my book” (Dantas, 9, emphasis in the original). He approached that curious figure – a faveladweller writer! – and at her shanty found a host of manuscripts, 20 notebooks in total, including an incipient diary describing the daily ordeal of a resident of the slum. The woman is Carolina Maria de Jesus, and she shows him a number of short stories and poems, but Dantas is really interested in the diary, whose continuation he strongly encourages. When Quarto de Despejo [Trash Room] was published in 1960, its success surpassed anything its editors could imagine. The first edition, comprising 10,000 copies, was all out in three days; new prints came out one after the other but had to be stopped when the printing machinery of Francisco Alves Press broke due to overwork; the book would eventually be translated into 14 languages and is estimated to have sold more than 1,000,000 copies worldwide. It became a cultural landmark, and as we shall see as well, turned de Jesus into an icon, placing her for a short time in the vortex of a period of cultural and social ebullition. She appeared in magazines and was photographed together with famous writers such as Clarice Lispector and Jorge Amado; she was incessantly interviewed, traveled to different parts of Brazil and South America, and met with several politicians. Much of this movement is recorded in her second diary Casa de Alvernaria (1961, literally Cinder-Block House, translated as I’m going to have a little house, 1997), which is an important book to understand why de Jesus’ fall was as swift as her ascent. It sold poorly in comparison to its predecessor, while still being much more successful than the two other books she published in 1963, the novel Pedaços da Fome [Pieces of Hunger] and the collection Provérbios, both funded by the author and released by obscure presses.

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-19

179

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

We will unpack and analyze this publication history below, but before that, two words on editing are in order. As already mentioned, the many notebooks Dantas found comprised short stories, novels, poems and the diary all mixed up. In the introduction to the first editions of Quarto de Despejo, he remarks that the editing work he carried out involved only the suppression of less interesting parts, which at any rate were marked with brackets. Perpétua (2014: 143–215) argues otherwise, showing not only how extensive and significant the cuts were but also that other changes were made as well, which directly interfered with de Jesus’ meaning. Today all extant manuscripts are available in microfilm at Rio de Janeiro’s National Library, and a considerable part of the diaries were published unedited in English by Levine & Meihy (1999). It is important to keep this editing history in mind because, not unlike much Latin American testimonial literature, it forces us to reconceptualize authorship. In a certain way, Dantas is a coauthor, but interestingly enough he is also an important character in both Quarto de Despejo and Casa de Alvenaria, which complicates the question of autobiography when Dantas is editing himself on de Jesus’ text. Our concern here, however, is less that of recuperating de Jesus’ life in its authenticity than dealing with Quarto de Despejo as a fertile cultural phenomenon; this is why we will be basing our reading on the published Brazilian text, and freely and silently modifying St. Clair’s translation, which domesticates much of the book’s language. Quarto de Despejo owed much of its astounding success to a particular political and cultural configuration in Brazil during the late 50s and early 60s. That was a socially progressive period, during which a general disposition was in the air to bridge the gulf between an exclusive and excluding high culture (cutura erudita) and popular manifestations. These effervescent years ended with the 1964 military coup, which still needed four years to suppress what Roberto Schwarz (1992) in the best description of these times characterized as a cultural hegemony of the left. Though this historical framework is important to understand the climate in which Child of the Dark was received, it is a book that stands on its own, even if its merits were not intended as such. The story of Dantas’ finding is very much repeated in the increasing bibliography on de Jesus’ diary and life, but critics and commentators seem not to have paid enough attention to a fundamental element in it, namely, the imaginary role played by literature as a tool of prestige and a means of leaving the favela. This gesture must be emphasized in all its strangeness: a favela dweller proclaiming herself a poetess is such a strange speech act, mixing as it does the disparate spaces of the slum and high culture that it is difficult to decide whether it is the result of utter audacity or at least mild insanity. Be it as it may, this otherwise delirious call worked as fiat lux for progressive reporter Dantas, unleashing a highly significant process as far as the combination of different social spaces is concerned. Now, the mobilization of literature as an instrument of power was not just a threat Dantas happened to hear; it can also be found in several occurrences in the text itself: When those female witches invade my shack, my children throw stones at them. The women scream: “What uneducated brats!” I reply: “My children are defending me. You are ignorant and can’t understand that. I’m going to write a book about the favela, and I’m going to tell everything that happened here. And everything that you do to me. I want to write a book, and you with these disgusting scenes are furnishing me with material.” Silvia asked me to take her name out of my book. She said: “You are a tramp too. You slept in the flophouse. When you end up, you’ll be crazy.” (24) 180

Carolina Maria de Jesus

Or, a little further on, the same day: Today was a blessed day for me. The troublemakers of the favela see that I’m writing and know that it’s about them. They decided to leave me in peace. In the favelas the men are more tolerant, more understanding. The rowdies are the women. (25) The writing of the book is also connected to the world of money: Senhor Gino came to ask me to go to his shack. That I am neglecting him. I answered: no! I am writing a book to sell. I am hoping that with this money I can buy a place and leave the favela. I don’t have to go to anybody’s house. Senhor Gino insisted. He told me: “Just knock and I’ll open the door.” But my heart didn’t ask me to go to his room. (31) Note that these entries well precede Dantas telling de Jesus of his intention to publish her diary; they refer to a time when the book was only present in de Jesus’ mind. In all her writing, “culture” and “literature” are prestigious entities, powerful things from another world, a characterization that is at the same time both right and wrong. It is right from the point of view of the favela dweller who had just two years of formal schooling1 and is excluded from official society;2 it is wrong from the point of view of modern literature, which would like to get mixed with the world. Such a conception of literature helps explain the most interesting stylistic trait of the diary, its mixture of registers. Erudite words, with a typical flavor of nineteenth-century literature, coexist with the grossest errors of spelling: “bed” is never called “cama”, but “leito”; “sun” is never “sol”, but “astro rei”; “to wash” is seldom “lavar-se” and very often “abluir”; on the other hand, “educação” is rendered “iducação”, “projeto” is “progeto”, and verbs in the plural, as a rule, don’t get their endings. The desire for a language that would transcend the favela contrasts sharply with the contents of the writing. One revealing, strong feature of the book is the representation of routine: the repetition of the everyday, waking up, looking for iron, tin, or paper to be scavenged, trying to buy food, feeding the children etc. gives the text an uncanny modern character. In this desperate struggle to survive, all days are the same, nothing really happens at the same time, and even details can be a matter of life and death – e.g., when it rains de Jesus loses her day because paper cannot be sold wet; she then is restricted to tin and leftover food in butchers, street fairs, or trash. Except for the coming into being of the book itself, the eventful plot is no plot at all, for there is no exit, nothing leading to a way out. This is because hunger is the motor of the narrative; as an organizing force, it can only appear and be intermittently suppressed, in a simple albeit potentially deadly cycle of need and fulfillment. The drag of such a terrible routine is finely mirrored in de Jesus’ short sentences, which, almost devoid of self-reflexivity, shun sentimentality. The lack of compositional resources here becomes an asset: The night is warm. The sky is peppered with stars. I have the crazy desire to cut a piece of the sky to make a dress. [Eu que sou exotica gostaria de recortar um pedaço do céu para fazer um vestido.] I hear some yelling [brados]. I go into the street. It is Ramiro who want to give it to Senhor Binidito. Misunderstanding. A tile fell on the electric line and turned off 181

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

the lights in Ramiro’s house. For this Ramiro want to beat Senhor Binidito. Because Ramiro is strong and Senhor Binidito is weak. Ramiro got angry because I was on Senhor Binidito’s side. I tried to fix the wires. While I was trying to fix them Ramiro wanted to hit Binidito who was so drunk he couldn’t even stand up. He was unconscious. (35, translation altered) Remarkable in a passage like this is, first, the mixture without the transition of lyricism and violence, the dress made of stars, and the potential beating of a helpless person. The simplicity of the language suggests that an occurrence such as this one is nothing special, just part of a day like any other. Absence of state power, lack of civil order, the precariousness of life, the role of chance, the rule of the strongest: everything is there characterizing the favela as a space of exclusion. But what makes the quote so interesting, which is valid for Quarto de Despejo as a whole, is that there is no sense of outrage, no regulating idea of how things should be, no notion of civil or even human rights from which acts of barbarism could be morally judged. To be sure, de Jesus is often angry, but her revolt is directed towards the politicians, who are very much conceived as paternal figures. It is the absence of a horizon of equality, even as an ideology, which fixates the diary so much within the space of the favela. The absence of a standpoint of universality affects the concatenation of ideas; descriptions of particular events do not lead to more general considerations. In the same way that there is no introspection, one cannot find extrapolations: I went to the bakery [Fui na bolacha]. The owner told me he wasn’t going to give away any more crackers. I came back picking up everything that I found along the way. It’s raining and I didn’t want to look for paper. When I got back in the favela Vera [de Jesus’ daughter] told me that the Baiana had insulted her. A woman of 32 years old fighting with a child of five! A neighbor who saw the Baiana threatening Vera confirmed it. As soon as that creature sees me she starts insulting me. She brandished a knife at José Carlos [de Jesus’s son] and said was going to stick him with it. I sold some scrap to Senhor Manuel. I got 55 cruzeiros. I took very little scrap with me and thought that was a lot of money. I asked Senhor Manuel if he hadn’t made a mistake. (86) The decision on the part of the backer not to give away crackers does not trigger reflection but is taken as a fact of life, as are the Baiana’s threats. The abrupt transition from one paragraph to the other is puzzling to someone outside the favela, who misses the moment of self-reflexivity. There are other aspects of Quarto de Despejo where lack of compositional resources generates intriguing aesthetic results. As far as characterization is concerned, people are never described physically or properly introduced, as realist protocol demands it, nor are their lives or actions contextualized; they are just thrown in. Even de Jesus’ children appear suddenly and without explanation: e.g., only on page 19 do we find out that Vera Eunice is only two years old. Being deprived of attributes, always presented as if we already knew them, characters acquire an uncanny modern sense of presence. And the same holds true for the materiality of objects, for in a context of such overwhelming poverty things become touchingly concrete. A shoe or a shirt, for example, is never considered in comparison with others, never viewed as an object of choice, as is the rule in consumerist society, but rather in the context of its absence, appearing as a victory over deprivation. At this point, we can turn to the characterization of de Jesus’ behavior as the last part of the analysis of Quarto de Despejo. Indeed, her attitudes are complex in the sense that they fail to 182

Carolina Maria de Jesus

coalesce into a clear identity. As mentioned, she only had two years of formal schooling, back as a child in the impoverished town of Sacramento, in the State of Minas Gerais, and yet imagined herself a poetess; moral comments abound in her diary, but her three children come from three different fathers, all white, none born in Brazil; equally frequent are observations concerning racial inequalities, while almost in the same breath one finds invectives full of prejudice against gypsies and migrants from the northeast of country, the nordestinos. There is no collective project underlying de Jesus’ actions; her ideals of sobriety and industriousness, her self-assigned role as defender of order, and her self-representation as poetess, and therefore a superior, created a tension with the community, and it is no wonder that she was stoned the day she left the favela for good. But to sum up, then, in this first framework we have a spatial configuration in which a claim to the symbolic space of literature, however misconceived, buttresses an innovative kind of writing, which derives its strength both from the unspeakable dreadfulness of the place it originates in and represents, and from lack of mastery over language, which itself rhymes with such environment.

The favela outside the favela In Casa de Alvenaria, de Jesus records her experience of moving out of the favela, of enjoying financial comfort and public notoriety. This is a curious book, especially when read after Quarto de Despejo; it deserves more attention than it has received, for it presents a complex scene brought about by a change of space. The first interesting aspect one can mention regarding it is its role in demythologizing the Hollywoodian Cinderella syndrome: if life were a film, de Jesus’ monstrous fame would be the perfect happy ending pointing to everlasting joy, but unlike what the movies keep telling us, success here, as in social life in general, is a problem rather than sheer redemption. Then there is the question of intertextuality, for by registering the success of Quarto de Despejo and de Jesus’ role inhabiting the world created by it, Casa de Alvenaria engulfs its predecessor, which becomes an internal force in the text; or, if we want to invert the focus, Casa de Alvenaria represents an attempt to come to terms with Quarto de Despejo. De Jesus is not only the subject who wrote the first diary but also the figure that emerges from it and confronts the writer of the second. The reading hypothesis here is that since compositional traits are the same in both books, their sharp contrast is the result of a change in social space, a physical departure from the favela, but not a symbolical one. We can begin with the status of the writing itself. If in Quarto de Despejo the diary had almost magic powers, in Casa de Alvenaria it becomes a strategic instrument of pressure based on the public image of the slum-dweller. Here de Jesus is in one of many sessions of book signing: A little black fellow who was walking around said in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “You know Carolina, I wish you would include in your diary that there is racial prejudice here in the South.” The white people that were present exchanged looks, thinking that the black mans complaints were inappropriate. I stopped so I could hear him. I believe I ought to take into consideration my colored brothers. “Okay. I will include your accusation in my diary.” (65) Interestingly enough, the power of the book can even become a matter for de Jesus’ concern: December 16, 1960: We said our goodbyes and returned to Recife. (…) On the outskirts of town I saw the pipes that were the main water lines. They said that Sr. Juscelino Kubitschek 183

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

was piping water into Caruaru from forty kilometers away. The people praised the former president of Brazil. And I who had been anti-Kubitschek also became an admirer of the former president of Brazil. And I ask forgiveness for the stabs I took at him in Quarto de Despejo. (83) Education is no longer something of another world as it was in the favela; now it is rather just an aim to be reached. In one of her numerous interviews, when asked if she is a communist, de Jesus replies: They asked me what I thought of communism. “I haven’t read about communist countries and I haven’t been to any so I can’t give an opinion.” They said I was a communist because I pity the poor and the workers that don’t earn enough to live on. They don’t have a true defender unless it’s the strike, a means they resort to in order to improve their living conditions. But they are so unfortunate that they wind up getting arrested and fired from their jobs. Conclusion: the worker doesn’t have the right to say that he’s going hungry. When men become supereducated they will free up the land and whoever wants to plant can plant [Quando os homens fôr super-cultos êles hão de liberar as terras e quem quiser plantar, planta]. And there will not be any hunger in the world. The land has to be free just like the sun. (81) The lack of self-reflexivity and the absence of a horizon of human rights, which, as we saw, in Quarto de Despejo hindered any vision of the outside of the favela, becomes here just a succession of punctual, undeveloped statements of pleasure and surprise with the new life, especially as far as food is concerned. Thus, for instance, in Rio: [w]hat fascinated me was the cultured ways of the hotel employees. [O que fascinou-me foi as maneiras cultas dos funcionarios do hotel.] They smiled when they saw me. It made me feel like I was in heaven. Dona Luiza told me I ought to take a bath. I took her advice. […] My kids were stunned. Vera looked at everything around her with amazement. What really impressed her was the bathroom. She said, “How can water come out hot from behind the wall. Mama, is this an enchanted house like you read about in books?” “It’s not an enchanted house and it’s not like the ones in those books. It’s a hotel.”

(53–54)

The relationship with objects changes. Buying is still constantly registered, but after the initial surprise it enters the routine and its interest is lost. A more significant transformation touches work: if Quarto de Despejo shows the everyday repetition of looking for things to pick up and sell, Casa de Alvenaria witnesses the quotidian act of people looking for Carolina de Jesus in order to get something out of her. In 150 pages of text (and less than that, if one subtracts the passages involving travel), there are no fewer than 30 occurrences of individuals coming to de Jesus to ask for money, which can only be explained because as a former favelada, she was expected to express solidarity towards the poor, which she very often did, contributing to her swift loss of resources 184

Carolina Maria de Jesus

and return to poverty. The difficulty she had in planning how to use her money is not hard to explain since, in the slum, savings were inconceivable and every day the cycle of something and nothing had to be repeated. Here we reach the last point of analysis, the construction of the favela-dweller identity. Throughout Casa de Alvenaria, we read of de Jesus meeting politicians, mostly leftists like Leonel Brizola and Miguel Arraes but also conservative ones such as Adhemar de Barros, whom she admired; we also see her in many TV and radio programs giving interviews and participating in round tables and debates. What is most interesting in the book as it describes all this frantic exposure is that de Jesus completely fails to perceive that at stake was the construction of an identity. She sees herself being seen as a former favelada, and it never occurs to her to instrumentalize herself and give these eyes what they want. She does not become a privileged representative of, or the spokesperson for, the favela, which is what the media wanted, in which case she could help alleviate the public’s conscience through her own improvement, nor does she notice that she could let her image be associated to a politician who could protect her in exchange of support. In sum, de Jesus managed not to fulfill anything of what was expected of her: if intellectuals were searching for popular authenticity, she was a staunch defender of order, including hard labor, female submission, and individualism; the black movement had reason to be embarrassed by her admiration of white culture and her almost unbelievable defense of racial democracy in Brazil;3 and the public in general who might expect a humble poor woman, thankful for her new position, found an outspoken, opinionated individual. Casa de Alvenaria ends formally well with de Jesus going to see a staging of Quarto de Despejo and after the play participating in a round table to discuss it. As opposing voices clash, she is disoriented and in the middle of the tumult writes: “What confusion for me.” (149) This is a sentence that very much summarizes this diary of displacement. But if de Jesus proved incapable of becoming what was expected of her and insisted on remaining herself, where does her desire lie? It happens systematically in Casa de Alvenaria that when meeting people, de Jesus recites her verses and sings sambas composed by her. It is plain for the attentive reader, and this is already noticeable in Quarto de Despejo, that diaries are not high in de Jesus’ list of priorities; her real dream is to sing on the radio and not represent the favela. It is here that Audálio Dantas’ influence is most decisively felt, for it was he who encouraged de Jesus to continue Quarto de Despejo, who motivated her, in an intelligent marketing strategy, to unfold it into Casa de Alvenaria, and who, most importantly, advised her against a career as a singer and fiction writer.

Literature without the favela But de Jesus for better or worse went against Dantas and in 1963 paid for the publication of two books, Pedaços da Fome [Pieces of Hunger] and Provérbios, which together with the posthumous volume of poems Antologia Pessoal (1996) and the two short stories collected in Onde estaes Felicidade (2014) represent the non-autobiographical part of de Jesus’ corpus so far. Even though one can find in these writings abundant elements from the author’s life, and although the favela is present as a theme, they ask to be read as objects in their own right and aim to occupy the autonomous symbolic space of literature. Representation here loses its former ambiguity present in the diaries because it no longer means “to serve as a specimen, example or instance of” or “to correspond to in essence”. The favela is represented, if at all, just in the sense of “to forming an image of in the mind”; in other words, the favela is being spoken “of”, not “from” or “through”. And as self-sufficient objects, they are disastrous works. Pedaços da Fome manages to fail on all narrative levels, from plot construction through characterization to style and even grammar, not to 185

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

mention typographic errors of different kinds. This is the story of Maria Clara, daughter of the allpowerful, large farm owner Pedro Fagundes, who is seduced by Paulo Lemes, a good-for-nothing who tempted her into marrying him saying that he was a dentist, which in the novel means that he belongs to the world of the rich. After eloping, Maria Clara finds herself in a slum and has to support her husband and her children until she is found by her father and brought back to wealth and to the farm. If anything, the text expresses the authority of the dentist, ludicrously viewed here as part of the elite, and of the patriarch, whom all fear, including the daughter he loves and who loves him but is too afraid to reach out for him even in sore need. As for Provérbios, it is a short collection of sayings in which de Jesus’ fixed, hierarchical, and moralist worldview becomes apparent. They are so repetitive that any random examples suffice to convey the general gist: “Os que vivem fora da honestidade não conseguem triunfar-se.” [Those who live out of honesty fail to triumph themselves”]; “O homem superior é igual ao sol. Aquece a humanidade.” [The superior man is like the sun. He warms humanity]; “As aparências disfarça os homens. Há os que vestem veludo e são os medíocres. Há os que usam farrapos e são os cavalheiros [Appearances disguise men. There are those who wear velvet and are mediocre. There are those who put on tatters and are gentlemen]. Antologia Pessoal, finally, is a collection of poems precariously composed, in which the whole impulse of meter is to reach the rhyme at the end of the line. The same rigidity can be found here in the symbiosis of a static, moralist worldview and the simplicity of syntax. De Jesus’ view of women as subordinate to men is clearly stated: Brides of May Oh dear daughter Congratulations for you are getting married. You want to be happy in life. Listen to what I am going to cite. They say that it is woman Who makes happy her home She is happy if she knows How to live and think. Treat your husband well With all devotion. Do not make him upset Do not do ingratitude to him. If your husband speaks It is not hard: to obey. That which happens in the home Nobody needs to know. There is not much that can be said in favor of lines like these.

Back, postmortem, in the favela Unhappy and increasingly poor in her middle-class house, Carolina de Jesus bought a little property in Parelheiros, a semi-rural area some 40 km away from downtown São Paulo, and lived there from 1970 until her death seven years later. She faced hardships in the beginning (even going back to scavenging for a short period), but then stabilized in regular poverty, not misery, as her children grew old enough to start working and the land began to yield the first crops; all but forgotten, 186

Carolina Maria de Jesus

she was finally out of the favela physically and symbolically. As already mentioned, Quarto de Despejo profited from a political and cultural climate in which intellectuals, artists, and cultural producers were trying to draw closer to the poor and bridge the experiential abyss originating in extreme social inequality. In this context, Carolina de Jesus appeared both as a curiosity, a favelada writer, and a denouncer, a favelada writer. She was taken as a voice from the new urban hell, a state to be overcome through economic reform, if not revolution. With the 1964 military coup and the 1968 suspension of civil liberties, such attempts at rapprochement with popular culture were violently suppressed while the military regime carried out an unheard-of process of conservative modernization, which included great advances in the consolidation of Brazilian cultural industry. As de Jesus disappeared from view, Quarto de Despejo went out of print for several years, though it continued to sell well abroad. It was only in the mid-nineties, after redemocratization, that de Jesus was rediscovered, and especially since the late 2000s, interest in her has skyrocketed. A Google search with the words “Carolina de Jesus” yields (Sept. 20, 2019) about 1,900,000 results; the site Vida por escrito (www​.vidaporescrito​.com​/a​-b​-e-c) lists hundreds of pieces of writing on de Jesus, many of them academic studies. In spite of its bulk, critical reception has been quite homogenous. To be sure, themes vary, as also do the theories lavishly applied, but a set of assumptions underlies virtually all this mushrooming bibliography on de Jesus, namely, that hers is a writing of resistance, representative of an identity, that of a shanty-town black woman. As we saw, this is wrong: what is most interesting about de Jesus’ writing of her life is its refusal (conscious or not, it does not matter) to develop a coherent favelada image, which could be instrumentalized and taken advantage of.4 Biography became the main focus (e.g. Levine & Meihy, 1995; Moura & Machado, 2007; Santos, 2009; Faria, 2017). For reasons that cannot be dwelt on here, our Zeitgeist – and I suspect that this goes beyond Brazil – is one in which the construction of identities becomes a central political issue, and we should not wonder that in a country still marked by such absurd levels of inequality,5 the democratic appeal for the inclusion of the marginalized could prove to be so strong. Perhaps this is best captured in a change of affects, for while in the 60s the favela generated a sense of shame in social critics, by the 2000s positive elements such as sense of community and resistance to exclusion were commonly highlighted by scholarship.6 The price to be paid, however, is a high one, because, first, critic-supporters must produce a one-dimensional picture of de Jesus, ignoring or mentioning only in passing everything that links her to the status quo; secondly, by fighting to include her in the canon, they lose the opportunity to critique literature as an institution, something which the avant-gardes always did. But for our purposes the main conclusion to be reached here is that the consolidation of an identity means, as the word implies, identifying de Jesus to the favela, putting her back in the very place she strived to leave.

Conclusion We have followed four moments in which the symbolic space of literature interacts with the physical one of the favela: 1. in Quarto de Despejo, writing is a tool for moving away from the slum; 2. in Casa de Alvenaria, the favela appears as a symbolic space de Jesus is associated with and which haunts her; 3. the failures of Pedaços da Fome and Provérbios come as the favela disappears as a regulating space, and the texts propose to inhabit the space of literature tout court; and 4. the circle closes when recent criticism pushes de Jesus back in the favela, advocating her inclusion in the canon with an identitarian notion of literature very much at odds, indeed quite inferior to, her own semi-magical projection. This circuit exhibits a negativity that is exemplary of the tense space of literature in the Global South. 187

Fabio Akcelrud Durão

Notes 1 See here Bitita’s Diary (2015), de Jesus’ fascinating autobiography, whose Portuguese was unfortunately corrected by the Brazilian editors. 2 For instance, not having proper documentation, de Jesus couldn’t write checks, and all bank transactions had to go through Dantas. 3 E.g. “I think I should be happy because I was born in Brazil where there is no racial hate. I know that the whites hold power. But they are human beings and the law is the same for everybody. If one could compare all the whites in the world, Brazilian whites would be the best.” (120). Interestingly enough, too, after leaving the shanty town, de Jesus gets herself two white maids in succession. 4 To mention only a few recent studies: see Delcastagné (2014); Arruda (2015, 2016); Penteado (2016); Birman (2017); Palma (2017); Pureza (2017); and Oliveira (2017). 5 “Brazil’s six richest men have the same wealth as poorest 50 percent of the population; around 100 million people. The country's richest 5 percent have the same income as the remaining 95 percent.” www​ .oxfam​.org​/en​/even​-it​-brazil​/brazil​-extreme​-inequality​-numbers 6 See here Vallares’ fundamental study (2005) on the social and academic history of the representations of the favela.

Works Cited Arruda, Aline Alves. (2015). Carolina Maria de Jesus: Projeto Literário e Edição Crítica de um Romance Inédito. Ph.D. dissertation. Federal University of Minas Gerais. Arruda, Aline Alves et al. (eds.) (2016). Memorialismo e Resistência. Estudos sobre Carolina Maria de Jesus. Jundaí: Paco Editorial. Barbosa, Cilene and João Pinheiro. (2016). Carolina. São Paulo: Veneta. Birman, Daniela. (2017). “A centralidade das margens literárias: Carolina Maria de Jesus e Paulo Lins.” Romance Notes, vol. 57, no. 3, pp. 361–375. Castro, Eliana de Moura and Marília Novais de Mata Machado. (2007). Muito bem, Carolina! Belo Horizonte: Editora Arte. Dantas, Audálio. “nossa irmã Carolina.” in Jesus (1960). Faria, Tom. (2017). Carolina: uma biografia. Rio de Janeiro: Malê. Jesus, Carolina Maria de. (2014 [1960]). Quarto de despejo. Diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática/Editora Universidade Zumbi do Palmares. ———. (1963). Child of the Dark. Translated by David St. Clair. New York: Mentor. ———. (1961). Casa de Alvenaria. São Paulo: Editora Franciso Alves. ———. (1963a). Pedaços da Fome. São Paulo: Editora Aquila. ———. (1963b). Provérbios. São Paulo: no press indicated. ———. (2014 [1986]). Diário de Bitita. Organized by Clélia Pisa. São Paulo: Sesi Editora. ———. (1998). Bitita’s Diary. The Childhood Memoirs of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Edited by Robert M. Levine. Translated by Emannuelle Oliveira and Beth Joan Vinkler. London & New York: Routledge. ———. (1996a). Antologia Pessoal. Organized by José Carlos Sabe Bom Meihy. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ. ———. (1996b). Meu Estranho Diário. Organized by José Carlos Sabe Bom Meihy and Robert M. Levine. São Paulo: Xamã. ———. (1999). The Unedited Diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus. Edited by Robert M. Levine and José Carlos Sebe bom Meihy, Translated by Nancy P.S. Naro and Cristina Mehrtens. New Brunswik: Rutgers University Press. ———. (2014). Onde estaes felicidade? Edited by Dinha and Raffaella Fernandez. São Paulo: Me parió revolução. Levine, Robert M. and José Carlos Sebe Bom Meihy. (1995). The Life and Death of Carlona Maria de Jesus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Oliveira, Vera Lúcia de. (2017). “Outros retratos, outras vozes na narrativa brasileira contemporânea.” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporanea, volume 50, pp. 237–253. Penteado, Gilmar. (2016). “A árvore Carolina Maria de Jesus: uma literatura vista de longe.” Estudos de Literatura Brasileira Contemporanea, volume. 49, pp. 19–32. Perpétua, Elzira Divina. (2014). A vida escrita de Carolina Maria de Jesus. Belo Horizonte: Nandyala.

188

Carolina Maria de Jesus Pureza, Fernando Cauduro. (2017). “Representações da fome: carestia e racialização na obra Pedaços da fome, de Carolina Maria de Jesus.” Revista de Estudos. Brasileiros, volume 66, pp. 52–68. Santos, Joel Rufino dos. (2009). Carolina Maria de Jesus. Uma escritora improvável. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Garamond. Sousa, Germana Henrique Pereira de Sousa. (2012). Carolina Maria de Jesus: o estranho diário da escritora vira lata. Vinhedo: Editora Horizonte. Schwarz, Roberto. (1992 [1978]). “Culture and Politics in Brazil, 1964–1969.” Misplaced Ideas. Translated by John Gledson. London & New York: Verso, 126–159.

189

17 POETRY OF THE INDIAN AVANT-GARDE, AN INTRANSIGENT AESTHETICS Brinda Bose Mappings It may not be surprising that what we are calling avant-garde poetry should deploy militaristic signs and images, signifying the forward rank of army formations that are exposed to the greatest dangers and risks. However, ‘the exploded self’ and ‘the bullet holes’ are ironic because even while there appears to be an obvious allusion to the military in its moniker, avant-garde poetry actually veers away from the institutional and the programmatic (as military formations generally denote) to court danger and risk appositely: it shoots out onto every side from formalistic arrangements to lead a very different kind of charge into uncharted territory, in extreme and radical experiments with the form, image, style, and tone of its own literary heritages. And if, as Paul Mann has defined it, the avant-garde is ‘any self-consciously advanced or oppositional movement in art and literature between, say, 1871 and 1968’ (1999, 2), then much of the Indian avant-garde, largely mapped after India’s independence from British colonial rule in 1947, belongs to its ‘afterlife’, also a term put into circulation by Mann after he grappled with the concept of ‘the death of the avant-garde’ that became popular in the late 1960s. Mann’s understanding of an avant-garde ‘afterlife’ does not merely consist of the memories and inspirations left behind after the death of an aesthetic movement but exists in fits and starts in tandem with the many deaths of the avant-garde, which flickers, falters, dies, and revives in the course of its history: like its multiple, imperfect, incomplete deaths, Mann says, its afterlives too are continually dying, failing, sparking, and fusing. If one can see the Indian avant-garde (in this essay, in English and Bengali poetry) as participating in these afterlives, we can imagine them spinning out globally in temporal, geographical, and aesthetic moments: if ‘we have never been modern’(to think laterally through Latour), we could also say that ‘we have never been avantgarde’: we are always in a process of becoming what we claim to be; there cannot be rigorous separations between states of being; deaths and afterlives are simply part and parcel of the same churning. The afterlives, then, are as intransigent as the deaths: manifold, resistant, resolute. India has 22 official vernacular languages; English is its 23rd language, the illegitimate progeny of the country’s historical, violent intimacy with British imperialism for over 200 years. Bengali – or Bangla – is one of the many Indian vernaculars known for vast and rich literary output but one of the few perhaps that have produced substantial avant-garde literature. A small corner of Indian 190

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-20

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

poetry in English, too, has occupied this space of risk. Gilles Deleuze, in his essay ‘Literature and Life’, talks of literature as delirium, and as a becoming-other of a language, what he calls its minorization, ‘a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system’ (1997, 229). Avant-garde poetry in an acquired or vernacular Indian language may be considered a triple delirium (if both the avant-garde and poetry already belong there). I shall attempt to employ minoritization/delirium as method and metaphor to explore avant-garde poetry in Indian English and the vernacular, many of them framed within entities that are almost endemic to the avant-garde, like the manifesto, the little magazine, and small independent publishing houses. While in many ways the avant-garde method lies in its heady delirium, its dishevelment, and its investment in the small and the contingent, there is also a bold purposefulness in its manifestos, in its declamations for the future, particularly for the future of the word. This boldness is also manifest in multiple ways of robust risk-taking, writers, painters, and designers launching their own little magazines and publishing houses for writing and art that wished to risk putting out work that may not have found homes among established publishers. Even as they are connected by the geopolitics of location, Indian English and Indian vernacular avant-gardes diverge as much as they converge (in the radicalism they espouse for a Modernist poetry just by existing outside of the pale of the larger movement), and it is from these cracks and chasms that a method of reading them may emerge – a minor way of reading – embracing recalcitrance as derangement, and touching the local and the fabular at once, in difference and in resonances. That is to say: by bringing Indian English and vernacular (Bengali) avant-garde poetry together in this chapter, I shall draw attention to the range of differences and specificity between them, as well as between the poems I shall read in each poet. I hope to employ a ‘minor’ way of reading that no longer compares but scatters, flagging distinctiveness and quirkiness in resistance to the critical habit of yoking texts by violence together to demonstrate connections where they are not obvious: I emphasize this to underline an intransigent aesthetics of the literature that I shall be reading with an intransigence of reading method, attempting to throw its avant-garde characteristics into relief.

Bengali avant-gardism and the Hungryalists: ‘A holocaust’ Poetry is no longer a civilizing maneuver, a replanting of the bamboozled gardens: it is a holocaust, a violent and somnambulistic jazzing of the hymning five, a sowing of the tempestual hunger. The Hungryalist Manifesto on Poetry, 1961–68, multiple versions (Moody and Ross, 2020, 298) Avant-garde movements all over the world have been awash with manifestos: it appears to be the singular Modernist form adopted for striking the iron hot, in keeping with its imagination of itself as forward, combative, iconoclastic, aggressive. Manifestos of the Futurist, Surrealist, and Dadaist movements are some of the best known. The many Indian avant-garde vernacular literatures, art, and cinema produced varied manifestos: the Hungry Generation of Bengal who drafted at least three versions of their Hungryalist Manifesto exhibits revolutionary zeal in its very name, ‘Hungry’, inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer’s poetic line ‘In the sowre hungry tyme’. The movement was founded by Malay Roy Choudhury, with his brother Samir, and Shakti Chattopadhyay and Debi Ray in the small town of Patna in eastern India in 1961 and drew the concept of hunger from the Indian classical, mythological term sarvagrasa (‘devouring all’) rather than one of poverty causing literal hunger for food. The Hungryalists were mostly poets, radical and maverick in dif191

Brinda Bose

ferent ways, and famously befriended the American Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky on their visit to India in 1962, who then remained in close association with many of the Hungryalists for years after. The ‘hunger’ that the movement venerated sought to translate passion into a language that upheld the impossibility of words to capture and express such passion, which is the larger Modernist impulse, of course. What the avant-gardes did with it was to transgress this impossibility by embracing it, breaking out of acceptable molds of language in self-conscious and dramatic ways, and pushing the boundaries of language, syntax, form, and style. The Hungryalists were invested in overturning genteel, middle-class moralities, targeting what they identified as the gentrified poetry of the big city (Calcutta) and replacing it with a small-town rough-cut that caused discomfort in the reader by breaking taboos with explicitly sexual and low-life slang, for example (which resonates in a significant way with the poetic intransigence of Ginsberg). They professed in their manifesto to glorify ‘the narcissistic spirit’ of the poet, to discard ‘the blankety-blank school of Modern poetry’, vowing instead that Poetry is not the caging of belches within form. It should convey the brutal sound of breaking values and startling tremors of the rebellious soul of the artist himself, with words stripped of their usual meanings and used contrapuntally. It must invent a new language which would incorporate everything at once, speak to all senses in one. Poetry should be able to follow music in the power it possesses of evoking a state of mind, and to present images not as wrappers but as ravishograms. (Moody and Ross, 2020, 298) Poets and artists moved in and out of the group and the movement, not surprising for a volatile, intensely creative, sometimes intensely narcissistic, and arrogant group: Bengali literary modernism had been experimenting for decades with aesthetic form and ideological inclinations, particularly in a range of ‘little magazine’ movements from the 1930s in small periodicals like Parichay (1931) and Kallol (1932) to the 1950s in Krittibas (1953) and Notun Reeti (1958), but the Hungryalists positioned themselves as adversaries to earlier radical poetic movements which they saw as confined to aesthetic realism and balked against what they saw as Modernist radical posturing with much of the style but none of the gut. Malay Roy Choudhury’s poem, ‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar’ (‘Stark Electric Jesus’) led to his arrest and imprisonment in 1965 on charges of obscenity; he was exonerated in 1967, but not before the crisis precipitated the dissolution of the Hungryalist group (numbering over 40 at its height), which had already been fragmenting with the departure of some key members since 1963–64. In some of the Hungryalists, the ‘devouring’ mode shades into madness and a certain kind of frenzy that no longer even allows for hungers to be perceived for what they might symbolize, but breaks down poetry into a delirious language that enacts the alienation of the mind and spirit.

Binoy Majumdar and Bengali poetic obduracy: ‘We shall not write letters’ Binoy Majumdar, a Hungryalist for a while before he fell out with one of its earliest lights, Shakti Chattopadhyay, stands out for bringing a different lineage to the Hungry Generation: the inspiration of Jibanananda Das, one of the most significant and difficult Modernist poets of Bengal. Many Bengali readers have a troubled relationship with Das who was an avant-gardist in spirit and style, causing discomfort with a devouring imagination. Binoy Majumdar, a worthy successor of Jibanananda Das in his fraught, almost wicked, poetic honesty, stands out for yet another reason: 192

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

for bringing a unique mathematical sensibility to Bengali poetry along with an eccentric brilliance that sparkled like a sharp-edged gem in moonlight. It was not surprising that such a mind was given to mental disbalance in later life, which slowly crippled his poetic impulse. But for as long as he did write poetry, it increasingly mimicked the acrobatics of his wild, glinting thoughts, becoming, even as he withdrew into another world, more and more cryptic, sometimes sardonic, sometimes childlike and innocent. Though he died a veritable unknown (a fate taken in stride, if not sought, by the avant-gardes), he has since been retrieved and hailed by readers of Bengali poetry, perhaps particularly for the shroud of the tragic about him, and not least for his mysterious – almost apocryphal – attachment to the dedicatee of his book of love poetry titled Phire Esho, Chaka (Come Back, Chaka).1 The collection was inscribed by the poet to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, later an acclaimed academic and public intellectual who was his youthful contemporary when he was an undergraduate student at Presidency College, Calcutta. In the opening lines of ‘Amar Aschorjyo Phul’/’My Astonishing Flower’, a powerful, mournful apostrophe, Majumdar airily offers a simile for his beloved that then melds into meaning, flower as chocolate – My astonishing flower, as if chocolate, not instantly ingesting it but little by little I savour its flavour, my deep thirst forgotten in discovery, in love. (Majumdar 2014 70, translation mine) She is a flower that stirs wonder: like a chocolate slowly savored on the tongue instead of being instantly swallowed, it causes him to forget his overwhelming desire in the slow discovery of his love afresh. The interpellation of the arresting visual beauty of the flower with the sweet-bitter taste of chocolate on the tongue is a Keatsian kinaesthetic; there is surprise in one effecting the forgetting of the other rather than reinforcing its memory. Forgetting and remembering, remembering to forget: in these oppositional maneuvers the mind fragments and spins into delirium. In Majumdar’s love poetry, there is an embedded resistance to the idea of eternal love, its intransigence repeatedly returning in the ways that the poet imagines his love transforming and transmuting into other forms. Instead of bemoaning this transformation, this impossibility of love to remain blissed and untouched by the vagaries of time and change – as love poetry has done through the ages – Majumdar revels in its anthropomorphic quality, its ability to disappear in broad daylight into other shapes and repose there, until disintegrating and becoming yet another being. There is no sense that the transformed shape is in any way less than the love he cherished; the poetry demonstrates, rather, a realist reckoning with the changes wrought, and a wry, fatalistic, cosmological acknowledgment of it, much in the tradition of Jibanananda Das. It is almost as if Majumdar conjured up his love in order to be able to scatter her in other ‘such visions’ and to consecrate such love in the pages of poetry: If you never come back, never as the rising steam fuses into the air do you fuse with me, that too is an experience; in a land of countless blossoms like the absence of a blue or aquamarine rose I feel your absence; who knows perhaps eventually you may melt away; there is many a wondrous spectacle, like the faint scent of my own hair perhaps you too I will not find, even on a full moon night I spy 193

Brinda Bose

in inexpressible shyness a dim scant crescent rising, in an eclipse, there are many such visions. (‘Aar Jodi Nai Asho’ [‘If You Never Come Back’] in Majumdar 2014 50–51, translation mine) There is a counterintuitive sense in the poem that if the love does not last because the beloved does not return, ‘that too is an experience’, an experience at least as equally uplifting as her coming back: one may read it as a peculiarly avant-garde intransigence that pushes back against the romantic poem of love and longing without discarding it: enfolding it, instead, with wistfulness and an ironic humor at once. The poet does not deny an immense experience of loss – ‘in a land of countless blossoms/like the absence of a blue or aquamarine rose/I feel your absence’ – but it is immediately followed by an encounter with reality: ‘who knows perhaps eventually you may melt away’. Had it stopped at this thought, Majumdar may have been echoing the lament of lovers everywhere, that love inevitably connotes loss and longing. But while there is love, there appears to be, instead of lament, an obduracy here in imagining ‘many a wondrous spectacle’ and ‘many such visions’ that the melting away of such a love brings to the poet. Majumdar is obstinate in his consecration of a love that melts away to find itself in another vision, or another form – as in poetry. At the end of the poem ‘Amra Dujone Meele’ (‘The Two of Us Together’), from his Haspatale Lekha Kobitaguchchho (Poems Written in a Hospital) comprising his last stretch of writing completed under confinement in hospital for mental illness, Majumdar concludes firmly: My address lies with you in your home, Your address lies with me in my home, We shall not write letters. We are together in the leaves of the book.

(Majumdar 2003 16, translation mine)

These lines come after a string of touching, personal reflections on how the beloved is now long gone, and must now be aging and perhaps has grandchildren of her own. Even as one might expect that this would be followed by an expression of the poet’s desire to reconnect – or a dirge about its impossibility – he imperiously cuts himself off to declare, ‘We shall not write letters./We are together in the leaves of the book.’ There is a tonal stubbornness here that I read as a marker of avant-garde inflexibility. Intriguingly enough, it contributes a richness to the poem by layering love and longing with the distance of its transformation into a poem and then taking a kaleidoscopic twist towards material closeness in print on a page: ‘We are together in the leaves of the book’. At the far end of poetic composition, Majumdar’s cryptic craft of language is manifest most starkly in his astounding bunch of one-liner poems: it is where his mathematically logical mind meets his extreme poetic sensibility on the borders of in/sanity, a condition that lends itself to the sharpest pyrotechnics of word and thought. A set I collate here on water creatures, humans, and survival, appearing randomly in over 100 numbered poems, reads: 7. The stupidest creature is the fish 20. All fish live in water 23. Humans drown in water but flailing their arms and legs stay afloat 194

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

30. Turtles live in water lay eggs on land 31. Now once the turtle learns to fly its work is done (‘Ek Ponktir Kobita’ [‘One-Liner Poems’] in Majumdar 2014b 118–120, translation Suchismito Khatua2 and I) They are interspersed by other one-liners which are entirely disconnected in focus from those that I have (in a counterintuitive exercise of reading) pulled into a set of possibly connected, single, and separated sentences; despite this exercise, there is no logical progression of meaning through this set, a signal that the poet has abandoned meaning-making for the sheer pleasure of disconnected utterances that create witticisms in just ‘being’, or existing, in the form they do. In Marjorie Perloff’s recuperation of Marcel Duchamp’s notes on infrathin for her theory of micropoetics, she emphasizes how Duchamp makes a case for difference, however minute, between an A and a B… The singular is not the plural, the present tense not the past. A second-long interval can be a decisive one… however miniscule the difference between one word or phrase or statement and another, the ‘difference’, as Gertrude Stein puts it in Tender Buttons, ‘is spreading’. (Perloff, 2021, 3) It is uncanny how Duchamp’s notes on infrathin could be speaking for Majumdar’s one-liner poems, as Perloff describes them: ‘Duchamp’s short and often enigmatic maxims… are always a shade tongue-in-cheek. He tells us that infrathin cannot be a concept… but of course his witty examples do add up to a concept’ (2021, 4–5). A stab at Majumdar’s ‘concept’ could reveal a resistance to an emotional attachment to life and language at the final frontier, where meaning, if there is any at all, can reside in the shifting and unknown spaces between words and phrases, in a ‘difference’ that ‘is spreading’. It is of little surprise, then, that Majumdar asks in a short poem collected in Haspatale Lekha Kobitaguchchho, On the table in a vase a few flowers, scarlet blossoms. In the breeze of the electric fan The flowers are swaying, swaying away. Why do I write these lines, for whom do I write them? Amassing more questions about who creates flowers, people, and the earth’s clay, the poet then asserts in quiet defiance even as his mind slips away from him: ‘These are the questions I think of every day.’ (‘Tebile Phuldanite’ [‘On the Table In a Vase’] in Majumdar 2003 17, translation mine)

Arun Kolatkar and bi-lingual avant-gardism: A ‘disobedient poetics’ On the west coast of India in the old and very colonial city of Bombay from the fertile 1960s–70s, Arun Kolatkar, poet in Marathi and English, graphic design artist, and aspiring singer, traced his ‘disobedient poetics’3 in broken, staccato fragments that brings James Joyce’s prose-poetic ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ section of Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s rhythmic ‘If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso’ to mind: 195

Brinda Bose

you never know it then yes I guess I guess but you don’t realize it then do you you only realize it later you realize it long after it has happened long after you’ve parted separated gloomily you look at the books in the shelf you tell yourself she will be back (Nerlekar, 2016, 137) Kolatkar was a poet who would deny what he would tell himself, an overreacher like all avantgardists, unsatisfied and searching. His constant foraging in two languages yielded rich results in creative work – and a number of awards and other recognitions – but he was never at ease in any of the multiple creative skins he wore lightly, irritably, disobediently. Kolatkar wrote concurrently in Marathi and English, and had a strong sense of himself as a writer in the world of other writers, both local and global. In a fragment in the Kolatkar Papers, a collection of his unpublished drafts, the speaker of the poem locates himself amongst the world’s best-known writers in English: ‘I was born the year Hart Crane killed himself / Nine years after Ulysses was burnt / three years after Auden published his first collection’ (Nerlekar, 2016, 213) However, this knowledge of his contemporaries in the world of English poetry brought him neither confidence nor hope; what it did surely offer him was more ways of occupying the English language as the outsider he was, despite the cosmopolitan urban landscape he lived in and the company he kept among the Clearing House poets of Bombay through the late decades of the last century. Kolatkar’s Jejuri was one of the best-known collections of Indian English poetry in its early heydays, and despite the variety of tone and mood in its poems, vividly refracts the fractious quality of avant-garde poetics in its self-conscious keenness to resist any kind of expectation, either in content or in style. As Laetitia Zecchini constructs it, he steps out of the frame in order to change his perspective, which could well be a metaphor for delirium, Deleuze’s ‘minoritization’. One of the most striking poems in Jejuri destabilizes one’s perception of a doorstep with a visual reorientation, with the confidence of one who sees and knows differently. It is a four-line poem, of which the first two set out the proposition and the second two add what could be thought of as unnecessary emphasis unless one speculates that it must have a purpose: That’s no doorstep. It’s a pillar on its side. Yes. That’s what it is.

(‘The Doorstep’)

It speaks to Zecchini’s reading: ‘His poetry privileges the odd angle, the peripheral and the eccentric, the out of place and “out of frame”’ (2011, 198) and that ‘Kolatkar’s aim is to unsettle and estrange. He dislodges comfort by instability, belonging by errantry, permanence by impermanence and the “compactness” of identity by the “disturbance” of alterity’ (2011, 201). However, Zecchini goes on to nuance the remoteness of the poet from his object of poetry, More than ‘outsidedness’, perhaps, I would suggest that the trope of ‘in- betweenness’ as the specific combination of wandering and fixation, nearness and remoteness, of ‘outsidedness’ and ‘insidedness’, which is crystallized in the figure of the stranger, is characteristic of Kolatkar. (2011, 202) In Zecchini’s differentiating between outsidedness and in-betweenness lies the paradox of complete freedom and a certain rootedness, where breaking out entirely is an impossibility and it is in the hanging between that intransigence lies: ‘Yes./That’s what it is’. 196

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

Kolatkar is not being confidently contrarian when he makes a quadruple-assertion of what contradicts the logical perception of the doorstep – first by stating that it is not a doorstep (despite the poem’s title), second by positing that it is a pillar lying on its side (instead), third by the singular ‘Yes’, fourth by reiterating what he has claimed it is (instead) – in the many repetitions of his proposition, he is planting doubt even as he makes an apparently immovable claim. This is the in-betweenness that reveals a strange vulnerability beneath a complete outsider’s immaculate confidence; repetition is a staple of avant-garde bravado from Joyce to Stein, and in it what is intransigent is not the doggedness of assertion but the tremor of uncertainty, for it reveals knowledge that the claim has cracks through which the light comes in. Knowing that what one is asserting repeatedly is not true and still asserting it is the most delirious, and most poetically delicious, sign of intransigence that the avant-gardists often wear on the sleeves of their cryptic verse. There is a combativeness embedded in much of Kolatkar’s poetry which remains banked, wary, almost like an animal circling its prey without being sure of its power to retaliate; in some poems, however, it spills over, as in ‘Malkhamb’ (literally, a wrestler’s pole), in which he boasts of his strength to withstand assault through the extended metaphor of wrestling – where he is the metal pole upon which the wrestler expends his physical aggression – Come climb on me. Go right up, all the way to the top. Wrap yourself around me. Crawl up and down and all over me. Want to trip me up? Come on, give it a try. Put your arms around my neck, Or strangle me with your legs. The staccato sentences mimic the breathless challenges a wrestler may utter in the throes of an encounter with a competitor, but here the ‘I’ becomes the inert pole that is much used and abused in the name of sport. Have you done your worst? And yet here I stand, the same as ever I was unshaken and firmly rooted to the ground like an exercise pole in an Indian gym. But an exercise pole made of steel, shall we say? There is a note of defiance and counter-aggression in the poem that deliberately recreates the world of wrestling – and one in which he establishes the immovable strength of the pole – before a throwaway final couplet in which he airily offers the wrestler some reprieve: 197

Brinda Bose

And if nothing else, at least I hope you had a good workout. The poet, impersonating a wrestler’s practice pole, is steely in his monologue addressed to the one he seems to have no interest in aiding despite the fact that it is his raison d’etre, and with whom he establishes instead a position of combat, as if he is assuming the role of the adversary of the wrestler. This then is a double shift, first to the wrestler’s inanimate practice pole and then to his competitor; whichever we wish to identify him with, he emerges the vanquisher by the end of the poem who carelessly throws his opponent a crumb of ‘a good workout’, in effect merging the two voices he assumes. Kolatkar also, in signature avant-gardist experiments, strayed at odd moments into playing with visual effects of the alphabet, words, and lines on his page, gesturing affirmatively at what the Cubists and the Dadaists saw as one of the most effective ways of capturing the topsy-turviness of language and thought: in that affirmation, he thumbed his nose at the rule-books of writing poetry and introduced – playfully, visually – the sense of incompliancy that nestles at the core of the avant-garde. What has stopped you in your tracks and taken your breath away is the sight of a dozen cocks and hens in a field of jowar in a kind of harvest dance. The craziest you’ve ever seen. where seven jump straight up at least four times their height As five come down with grain in their beaks. up a^nd dow^n and u P & d & ^w°n and pu an^d ^do w n & u^P dw°n & u^P and and u^P dow^n &^&& (‘Between Jejuri and the Railway Station’)4 Kolatkar’s deployment of playful, ironic, satiric, cryptic, humorous tones to dismiss phony religiosity and its endless rituals has been repeatedly noted, and Jejuri compared to Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ for its creation in word images of an entire universe that has gone to seed. The short poem ‘Makarand’ contains the explosive element of this resistance in Kolatkar, whose set of poems is, however, obstinately iconoclastic rather than sustainedly mournful like Eliot’s: Take my shirt off and go in there to do pooja? No thanks Give the matchbox before you go will you? In his insistence on enjoying a smoke outside the temple where he is expected to enter to pay obeisance to the gods, Kolatkar quietly, almost naughtily, rests his resistance to social norms imposed by a closed society.

Hoshang Merchant, ‘rebel angel’ who would be queen: ‘We grow wings’ If queer resistance is embodied in Indian English poetry, Hoshang Merchant is its original queen; all those who came after have been but remainders of this fearless gay Parsi poet who literally puts 198

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

his poetry where his mouth is. Like all terrifying avant-gardes, he is so eminently quotable that one wonders what one may say of him which he has not, already and always, said: pithily, wittily, shockingly. He describes the poet you may be looking for as ‘the quick-change artist, the escapeartist, the con-artist, the death-defying leap of the trapeze-artist (you survived this time, you might not the next)’ and pronounces: This is modernism with its pants down, uncle Ezra lending arse at Wayside Inn, Kala Ghoda, Bombay; this is Bombay pretending to be Paris, paan-stained and all. This is convent English giving Mumbai Marathi a well-deserved kick in the pants, this is the Parsi Queen desperately mimicking Sultan Padamsee if not Jean Genet! (2016, 12–13) Merchant delights in catching the world around him, and poetry, with its pants down; he works queer wit with an exuberance that is rare in the Indian English landscape of writing – drawing upon his lineages of Anglo-Euro-American Modernist poetry – but he combines it with the sadness of Agha Shahid Ali and the transcendent possibilities of Farsi poetic traditions, making his poetry a continued adventure in reading and imagining. He is a poet of the sensuous body and the cerebral, literary, mind at once: I believe this to be the reason for his obsessive engagement with poetic form. It is the only way that he can continually play with angles of the human body – the lover’s body – in poetry, and find sustenance through and in both as they collapse into each other. Yaraana, edited by Hoshang Merchant, is a classic: it was the first collection of gay writing from India in English, published in 1999. It shaped the landscape of queer literature in South Asia at a time when no such rubric existed. Deepa Mehta’s Fire, hailed as the first lesbian film from India, was released in 1997, and Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India, edited by Ashwini Sukthankar, was published in 1999 as well. Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai’s edited collection, Same-Sex Love in India, was published in 2000. By the time this new century began, India had more than a toehold in asserting that a queer culture existed in South Asia and that the creative imagination had been romancing it for a considerable while. In his Secret Writings, Merchant declares, ‘Technically, there is no gay movement in modern Indian poetry’ (2016b, 135). He goes on to describe how he attempted, in his academic life – Merchant was a professor of English Literature at the University of Hyderabad for 28 years – to construct a ‘counter-canon’ to the ‘mainstream’ canon of male Indian poets where, ‘In the centre, literally and metaphorically, is our star poet: the Kashmiri-American Agha Shahid Ali’ (2016b, 135). Indeed, in a way, Merchant has continually seen himself in a creative and intellectual and imaginary conversation with Ali, a poet who was in his public life and speech as reticent as Merchant is open. However, the conversation is not merely with Ali but with a magnificent gallery of modern poets from all over the world, from Ezra Pound to Anaïs Nin, from Mahmoud Darwish to Adil Jussawalla. Much of these conversations happen through Merchant’s engagement with the forms of their writing – not just poetry, but also poetic prose, diaries, journals, and letters. It is some sort of queer reckoning, perhaps, that the outed gay poet is fascinated by the confessional writings of those he fancies for the forms their confessions take. ‘What is the poem?’, Merchant asks rhetorically, talking of Darwish and Agha Shahid Ali, then answering, ‘Exile is the poem. The land of exile is both the kingdom and the poem, and the humiliation and the exaltation. And it is the prophecy of great things to come’ (2016b, 36). He sees himself as continually in exile, too: 199

Brinda Bose

I left my heart on the pavements of my home city Bombay. I wrote ‘Arabs on Leaving Andalusia’ when I was forced out of Iran by the revolution, my third life eviction after America and my own Bombay home… Goodbye orange grove of crenelated garden wall Goodbye land of courtship where love depended on a lift of a veil. Hello homeland Poorer brother yet the same Whose eastern window Is flung open on a similar moon In similar dawns.

(2016b, 41)

So much of this sense of exile connects the loss of ‘home’ with the experience of an imperiled sexual identity, brightened by the unbearable lightness of being, in love with men and poetry interchangeably and orgiastically. Merchant, even as he has made a fetish out of not hiding his homosexuality, has borne the weight of what it means to be different and to be exiled for being different, and the exuberance of loving his favored poets intimately. His editor Kazim Ali (of My Sunset Marriage, 2016) writes perceptively of his polyglot temperament that speaks in many tongues at once even with the bubble of Indian English. Experiences born of grief and loss have always been a part of the great poetic traditions of the region, but in Hoshang’s case it is always leavened by wit and humor. As when amidst the grief and pain of sunset, Hoshang finds joy simply in being alive in the created world: The moons of our bodies waxed and waned The hour of Friday prayer came and went We are praising yet.

(2016, 18)

Nowhere does this intertwining of his passion for poetry, his poets, and the well-wrought forms of poems he writes come together more evocatively than in his burst of experiments with Poundian cantos, published as Paradise isn’t Artificial: Les paradis ne sont pas artificiels (2021). In ‘PostScript’ (at the beginning of the collection), Merchant writes of it: ‘Pound, and before him Dante are the inspirations. But the canto form (used from Spenser to Pound) is loosely used by me… This poem sets out to fail’ (2021, preliminary page). The later poetry of Merchant has an abandonment that leans into avant-gardism through his sheer pleasure in form and the letting go of poetic propriety. ‘Canto XIV Pound Learns to Love Pasolini in Age’ begins with a shocking, joking aside: 200

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde

Pasolini’s Pope birthing from the Devil’s asshole Was for Pound a boring tale, already twice told, after which the Canto carries on in the same rollicking vein, Those furren fairies! Idaho circa 1930s Ol Ez old as the weathered beard Ensconsed in Rapallo knows his heart; has his fears He knows his litter-chure Pasolini is a fag! But a magnificent fag Who in the war years brought home the boys in rags to dress what Yeats called the rag-and-boneshop of the heart

(2021, 33)

This riotous disregard for civility and such delicious humor – ‘those furren fairies!’ – speaks to avant-gardist intransigence: a refusal to be polite and deferential to inspirational poets like Pound and Yeats or to club one of them with that ‘magnificent fag’, the virtuoso poet-filmmaker Pasolini much-maligned for his penchant to love young boys. A certain sense of freedom from language, from form, and from literary propriety drums behind such rambunctiousness; perhaps no other Indian English poet has indulged in such poetic devilry as Merchant has, though it has been seen in vernacular modernists like Malay Roy Choudhury in Bengali (who set out to break middleclass morality codes of his own society in his often shockingly sexual poetry) and Namdeo Dhasal in Marathi (who as a Dalit poet expressed his rage against caste oppression in angry and ironic poems like ‘Man, You Should Explode’). Merchant peppers his playful, puckish poems with cuss words and slang that yoke the local street flavors of Bombay with a sunny Californian impishness and is rare in Indian English writing, though similar punning witty plays with language have been seen in the early Indian English novel All About H. Hatterr (1948) by GV Desani, and later the Booker-winning Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981). Incidentally, Merchant is himself a Midnight’s Child, having been born in 1947, the year India got independence at midnight on August 15th. Like most avant-gardists, Hoshang Merchant is a genie who can do the poem (if not the police) in different voices: his images, and imagination, turn like a kaleidoscope with poetic mercuriality. What remains constant is an honesty with the self, a baring that one may either embrace or shield one’s eyes from; a baring about love and sex and life and loss and poetry, for what else is there but the word that gives us the wind to fly on: This is a fever I’m writing and the alphabet is of fire of the djinns My lover born of fire fears fire I, a fire-worshipper douse him with my waters …My lover, Jonah-born, breathes like a fish intermittently 201

Brinda Bose

between two elements I born to one, am one I consume myself and him My lover rouses me with rings and demands a poem We grow wings

(‘Talking to the Djinns’)

Envoi Let us read Arun Kolatkar’s poem ‘The Door’ apocryphally as a metaphor for the kind of barbed intransigence that sticks out like a thorn on the side of Indian avant-garde poetry, determined, awkward, unaesthetically aesthetic. The door has come off its hinge at one corner, ‘a prophet half brought down’, ‘a dangling martyr’. Its unhinged corner drags in the dust on the road. The grains on its wood get sharper, like memory. It leans like an old drunk who rests on a doorway. Why does it stay propped up? Is it pathetic? Should one feel sorry for the state of the door, and the world? And then, all is revealed: there is an odd sense of wonder and an unwilling but significant attraction to an unexpected visiting object. hell with the hinge and damn the jamb the door would have walked out long long ago if it weren’t for that pair of shorts left to dry upon its shoulders

(‘The Door’)

Notes 1 The title of the collection (Phire Esho, Chaka in Bengali) has elsewhere and more popularly been translated as Come Back, O Wheel, since the Bengali word ‘chaka’ translates as ‘wheel’. I prefer to leave it as ‘Chaka’, as I think it is likelier to be a cheeky salutation to his addressee, Gayatri Chakravorty (shortened to Chaka), Majumdar’s wit also punning on the implications of ‘wheel’ as that which moves (away). 2 Suchismito Khatua (currently a PhD scholar at Stanford University) and I have been working on translations of avant-garde poetry from Bengali little magazine movements in the late last century. 3 A term used by Kolatkar scholar Anjali Nerlekar, in her essay on the poet for an anthology on the avantgarde in India (forthcoming, Routledge 2023–24, edited by Brinda Bose). 4 Here I have approximated (using the ^ sign) the actual arrangement of the letters at different heights that the original poem displays to represent the jumping up and down of the cocks and hens in the ‘craziest’ harvest dance that is described in the preceding lines of the poem (quoted above). The insertion of the vernacular word ‘jowar’ (wheat grain) in the phrase ‘in a field of jowar’ is also in keeping with Kolatkar’s casual resistance to conforming with the (written, unwritten) rules of English poetry, a gesture that was adopted by many Indian English poets for local colour, and emphasizes its foreignness.

Works Cited Deleuze, Gilles. (Transl. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco). “Literature and Life.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 2 (Winter, 1997), 225–230. Kolatkar, Jejuri. Pras Prakashan, 2001 (1st edition 1974).

202

Poetry of the Indian Avant-Garde Majumdar, Binoy. Haspatale Lekha Kobitaguchchho. Kobitirtho, 2003. ———. Kabyosomogro Ek [Collected Poems Vol. 1]. Edited by Tarun Bandyopadhyay, Protibhas, 2014a. ———. Kabyosomogro Dui [Collected Poems Vol. 2]. Edited by Tarun Bandyopadhyay, Protibhas, 2014b. Mann, Paul. Masocriticism. State University of New York Press, 1999. Merchant, Hoshang. My Sunset Marriage. Navayana, 2016. ———. Secret Writings of Hoshang Merchant. Oxford University Press, 2016b. ———. Paradise isn’t Artificial: Les paradis ne sont pas artificiels. Red River, 2021. Moody, Alys and Stephen J. Ross (Eds). Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Nerlekar, Anjali. Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture. Northwestern University Press, 2016. Perloff, Marjorie. Infrathin: An Experiment in Micropoetics. University of Chicago Press, 2021.

203

18 THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION OF DR. JOSE RIZAL Teresita Cruz del Rosario

It is the late 60s in the Philippines, over 100 years since the execution of Dr. Jose Rizal. I sit in a class on Philippine history as an undergrad. We read his two novels – Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer)1 and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive). We view a few films to complement our readings. The most vivid image in print and on film was his early morning execution on 30 December 1896. As the Spanish guardia civil raised their rifles and were given the order to shoot, Rizal turned around in an attempt to face his executioners, not wanting to be shot in the back as a traitor. At the moment of his death, he faces the morning sun – a singular final act of defiance against the Spanish colonialists. The same defiance portrayed in his ‘Mi Ultimo Adios’ (‘Last Farewell’) was a kind of love letter to the Filipinos, still then colonial subjects of Spain. The letter is framed in the Intramuros – the famed walled city the Spaniards built in the center of the metropolis – a symbolic reminder of the endurance of Spanish colonialism and Rizal’s struggle against it. More than a century later, Rizal’s novels and writings live in the imagination of most Filipinos. It certainly did in mine. At the end of the semester, when we completed our excursus into both his novels, I became a student activist. It was perfect timing. The late 60s was a period of disquietude in the Philippines. Campuses were in ferment. The country was plagued with a multitude of social and economic problems. There was much agitation from many sectors of Philippine society for reform and social transformation. Other voices called for outright revolution. Rizal’s novels lived in our midst. He would have recognized the same problems minus the Spanish colonizers, the same debates and arguments on the character of Philippine society in the 20th century, the causes of the country’s malaise, and the methods for change. A century later, it was as though our conversation with Rizal continued. Rizal’s novels are simultaneously social history (Riggs 1964: 489) and social critique (Alatas 2017: 145). The setting is the late 19th century at the twilight of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines when agitation and unrest were rife in the colony. Jose Rizal captured the anti-colonial mood most vividly in his two novels, both of which would become the inspiration for the founding of the secret revolutionary society, the Katipunan,2 whose founder, Andres Bonifacio, laid the groundwork for independence and separation from Spain. Two years after the execution of Rizal in December 1896, the Philippine Revolution broke out, lasting nearly two years. And thus was born the first-ever republic in Asia but was cut short by the intervention of the United States, which was embroiled in its own war with Spain (Matibag 1995: 250). 204

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-21

Dr. Jose Rizal

Against this historical background that framed the novels of Rizal was his own biography, his experiences as a well-educated and well-traveled Spanish mestizo, a creole, a doctor, a polymath, a writer, a propagandist, a philologist, a linguist, and, finally, a hero. All these elements of self that have come to be known as Jose Rizal, the national hero, are contained in the two novels for which he is best known. Celarent (2015: 346) reminds us that fiction and biography are a form of social analysis. She goes further to argue that by focusing on Rizal’s individual consciousness and life experience, both his novels created “entire worlds of activity, … ranging across characters and classes to represent whole societies.” The sociologist of literature Masato Hase (2014: 43) described it as “the layers of time affecting each individual flow and how each is intricately woven with the wider society.” Rizal’s life was situated within the historical context of Spanish colonialism in the Far East – Spain’s only colony in Asia. His and his family’s personal circumstances yielded the bigger structures of colonial society, which he produced into fictionalized accounts in Noli and Fili.3 In this respect, his biography melded seamlessly with social history and critique of Spanish colonialism. The abovementioned approach to literature fits squarely within the “sociological imagination” – the term and title of a book by C. Wright Mills (1959). Though Mills was not particularly focused on colonial society but rather on America, his sociological approach to understanding colonial society resonates. He proposed analysis through a certain “quality of mind” that involved the incorporation of the three coordinates of human life, namely, biography, history, and structure. For Mills, the starting point of sociology is an individual’s “private troubles,” especially those troubles that are nothing but social entrapments. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighbourhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. (Mills 1959: 3–4) A certain quality of mind – the sociological imagination – frees the trapped individual and allows him/her to “understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of various individuals. From lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves” (Ibid: 5), this quality of mind transcends personal anxieties and discomforts. It transforms them into involvement with public issues. The sociology of Mills differs markedly from the sociological traditions of his time. In the decades of the 50s and 60s, the discipline was far more formalistic. That is, sociological analysis was heavily oriented towards the study of systems. The ultimate goal of sociology was to codify analysis through systematization and abstraction that could then qualify as “scientific law.” Mills eschewed these propositions and denounced the excessive formalism of the sociological traditions best exemplified by Talcodt Parsons and his The Social System (1951). The Parsonian “project” consisted of a grand theory known as “structural-functionalism,” the core of which was a well-worked-out model for understanding and deciphering all social systems. Mills criticized Parsonian sociology as “formal and cloudy obscurantism, formal and empty ingenuity (from which no one) learns too much about man and society” (Mills 1959: 75). Mills went further to criticize grand theorists who were so preoccupied by 205

Teresita Cruz del Rosario

syntactic meanings and so unimaginative about semantic references, they are so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the “typologies” they make up – and the work they do to make them up – seem more often an arid game of Concepts than an effort to define systematically – which is to say, in a clear and orderly way – the problems at hand, and to guide our efforts to solve them. (Mills 1959: 33) Mills’ final salvo on what he considered as Parson’s turgid prose was that the 555 pages of The Social System could be translated into 150 pages of straightforward English. “The fact is that it [Parsons’s prose] is not readily understandable; the suspicion is that it may not be altogether intelligible.” (Mills 1959: 26). In its stead, Mills proposed a sociology that could “make connections between public issues and private troubles, between history and biography, or what some might call structure and agency” (Gane and Beck 2012: 402). The inner life of individuals was central to the sociological imagination and the ability to situate these lives within the larger social structure and located within specific periods. The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it – is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. [T]hat every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. (Mills 1959: 5–7) Sociology’s promise, according to Mills, goes beyond analysis and understanding. Rather, the sociological promise provokes questions beyond theory and method, and more about power and politics. For Mills, the sociologist is a “‘public intellectual’ [who is] both publicly and politically engaged” (Gane and Beck: Ibid). In this chapter, I utilize Mills’ sociological imagination as illustrated in the novels and writings of Jose Rizal. His fictionalized account of colonial life in the Philippines in the late 19th century exemplifies what Mills might regard as social analysis infused with a “quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities” (Mills 1959: 14). Rizal as a writer possessed this quality of mind, hence explain his writings’ enduring appeal. His characters in both Noli and Fili are personified elements of a colonial structure as they are located within a particular period of late Spanish colonialism. Rizal’s biographical intersection with colonial history and colonial structure provides the impetus for social action, then as it does now. Not too coincidentally, Mills was regarded during his time as a “rebel sociologist” (Wakefield 1995: 2) because of what he wrote, much like Rizal was branded a filibustero (subversive) by the colonial authorities due to his writing. Though separated by almost 100 years, much unites the sociologist and the novelist. 206

Dr. Jose Rizal

In the treatment of colonial history, I elaborate on several themes, specifically those that refer to Spain’s political environment in the late 19th century, when strong reformist winds blew across the country and the struggle between the monarchists and the republicans helped to define the struggle within the colonies. In Rizal’s novels, this social tension played out as the different religious orders competed for control with the colonial administrators. Further, colonial social structure puts the role of the friars and religious orders at center stage. Rizal’s bitter critique against the friars who controlled the colony was a unique feature of Philippine colonial life. The impact of friar control is widely discussed in Rizal’s novels, and his own militancy against Spanish colonialism was borne out of the execution of three indigenous priests to whom he dedicated his second novel, El Filibusterismo, as well as his family’s misfortune at the hands of the Dominican friars. These elements are all elaborated in the following sections.

Rizal’s private troubles and public issues Jose Protacio Rizal Mercado y Alonso was born in 1861 in Calamba, a small city located south of Manila in the province of Laguna. He was a fifth-generation Chinese-Spanish mestizo (creole) whose parents were considered of high status in Calamba. His paternal grandfather held local government posts, and his father was a planter with agricultural holdings rented from the Dominican friars. Their household was staffed with nurses and servants (Celarent 2015: 347). Though not landowners, the Mercados became increasingly wealthy due to the export boom during that period (Claudio 2019: 13). The Mercados’ relatively affluent status in colonial society allowed Rizal’s parents to send their sons to reputable universities. In 1877, Rizal completed his Bachelor of Arts degree from the Ateneo de Manila, a Jesuit college. The same year, he enrolled in the University of Santo Tomas, run by the Dominican order. There, he took courses in Philosophy and Letters. The following year, he enrolled in medicine at the same university but left when he felt the Filipino students were suffering from discrimination from their Dominican tutors.4 At the urging of his uncle Antonio Rivera, he left for Europe to pursue further medical studies and philosophy. As with most young men the world over in whatever time and place, their private troubles inevitably begin with affairs of the heart. Rizal was no exception. He was in love with his cousin, Leonor Rivera, whom he met when she was 13 years old, and he was 19. Rizal, who was a well-educated member of the ilustrado class, would return from Europe in 1887. Considered the most brilliant nationalist intellectual during the latter part of the colonial period, Rizal had completed his first novel, Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer). In it, he referred to the problems of Filipinos with the Spanish friars. The critical tone of the novels resonated throughout the colony, and his name became widely known. The book infuriated the Spanish authorities. At the behest of the liberal governor General Carlos Maria de la Torre, who could not protect him from the ire of the influential and powerful friars, Rizal departed for Europe in 1888. He narrated: “My family would not allow me to eat in any house, for fear that they might poison me” (quoted in Claudio 2019: 42). However, he could not see Leonor before his departure because her parents forbade him due to his controversial reputation as a filibustero (subversive). While in Europe, he continued to correspond with Leonor. Leonor’s mother purportedly bribed the post office officials to give Rizal’s letters to her instead.5 After an 11-year courtship, Rizal and Leonor finally parted ways. Leonor’s mother convinced her to marry Henry Kipping, an English railway engineer who helped build the Manila-Dagupan Railway system in 1890.6 Rizal writes her a farewell poem, sad and poignant, one of many writings that would seal Rizal’s reputation as a gifted writer. 207

Teresita Cruz del Rosario

Rizal’s personal troubles are immediately laid out at the novel’s opening. Crisostomo Ibarra, a creole of Basque ancestry, returns to the Philippines with idealistic dreams of educational reform and marrying Maria Clara, his long-time sweetheart. At the opening of the novel, the setting is a dinner at the home of Maria Clara’s parents, Don Santiago de los Santos or “Capitan Tiago.” Present at the dinner is the Franciscan friar Padre Damaso. There is tension between Ibarra and Padre Damaso, which surprised the former, having known the friar as a close family friend when he was the parish priest in their hometown in San Diego. “You were not mistaken,” said the priest. “But your father was never an intimate friend of mine.” (Noli: 6). This brief exchange between the two guests at Capitan Tiago’s dinner party portended the public issue that would soon unravel. By the end of the evening, as Ibarra takes a walk with Lieutenant Guevarra, one of the dinner guests, Ibarra learns that his father died in prison. Having run afoul of the tax collector who died, Ibarra’s father was blamed for the death and sentenced to prison. It is from this vantage position that Ibarra’s fictional character and situation mirrored that of Rizal’s. His family ran into problems with the Dominican friars to whom they leased their landholdings. The fortunes of the family were derived from sugar production, the proceeds of which financed Rizal’s studies in Manila and Europe. As members of the provincial elite who benefited from global trade in sugar, Rizal’s family did not directly till the land themselves; instead they hired sharecroppers. Over a period of many years as tenants to the Dominican friar-landowners, the family’s relations with the Dominicans would remain harmonious, until conflicts erupted between them and their landowning benefactors around the issue of increased land rentals at a time when sugar prices in the global market were declining.7 Noli lays out the personal circumstances of the Ibarra family. At the same time, the novel casts light on the injustices that the locals suffered at the hands of the colonial authorities, particularly the Spanish friars who are the anti-heroes in this novel. What began as a dinner party and an occasion to see his family whom he hadn’t seen in seven years while he was in Europe becomes a setting for the more significant themes of injustice and the struggle for political and social change in the Philippines. As the novel progresses, Ibarra’s complex relationship with Maria Clara unfolds. There is a direct implication that she is the daughter of Padre Damaso, a recurring theme in the popular imaginaries of Philippine history that many Filipinos trace their ancestry to the religious friars.8 She is likewise prohibited from seeing Ibarra after a physical altercation between Ibarra and the friar. Maria Clara is pressured to break the engagement and is betrothed to Linares, a lawyer, very much like Rizal’s sweetheart Leonor who had become forcibly engaged to a British engineer by her mother. Maria Clara is adamant about entering the nunnery and prefers to live out the remainder of her life in isolation and contemplation rather than marry someone she does not love. Mirroring Rizal’s own unrequited love as he left for Europe a second time, Ibarra leaves his hometown San Diego to join the struggle against colonialism even while he is not yet firm in his decision to press for independence from Spain. The sequel to Noli Me Tangere is El Filibusterismo (The Subversive). The parody against the friars continued and became more embittered and acrimonious. A chapter entitled “The Quiapo Fair” ridiculed Padre Camorra who was in the seventh heaven at the sight of so many pretty girls. He stopped, looked back, nudged Ben-Zayb, chucked and swore, saying, “And that one, and that one, my ink-slinger? 208

Dr. Jose Rizal

And that one over there, what say you?” In his contentment he even fell to using the familiar tu toward his friend and adversary. Padre Salvi stared at him from time to time, but he took little note of Padre Salvi. On the contrary, he pretended to stumble so that he might brush against the girls, he winked and made eyes at them. (Fili: 155). The harsher anti-clerical tone of the second novel was written when Rizal’s work and personal world darkened (Celarent 2015: 348). Rizal’s family was evicted from their Calamba estate when they lost the legal case against them levied by the Dominican friars. Fili’s protagonist is Simoun, also returning from travels in Europe as a jeweler. He is Ibarra resurrected, and his ideas about reform had evolved from assimilation to independence from Spain. But he was never fully resolved to the notion of violent revolution, realizing the futility of an armed struggle that stood no chance against the armed colonial authorities. At the end of the novel, as the plot of bombing a dinner party at Capitan Tinong’s house failed, Simoun fled to the home of Padre Florentino, where he died from self-poisoning. His political ambiguity was evident till the very end: With Spain or without Spain, they would always be the same, and perhaps worse? Why independence if the slaves of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow? And that they will be such is not to be doubted, for he who submits to tyranny loves it. [W]hen our people is unprepared, when it enters the fight through fraud and force, without a clear understanding of what it is doing, the wisest attempts will fail, and better that they do fail. (Fili: 332) Rizal’s critical historical fiction resonated throughout the colony. His name became widely known as the author of “incendiary literature” (Claudio 2019: 42). Within the reformist movement, he became a cause celebre, and his writings galvanized anti-colonial sentiment directed against the Spanish friars. He was banished to Dapitan in Mindanao on 7 July 1892 and was then executed on 30 December 1896, thereby effectively ending the reformist phase of the nationalist movement. In its stead, a revolutionary program sought to achieve independence from Spain and an end to the colonial era. The Filipino historian Teodoro Agoncillo (1960) would regard this as a crucial historical moment, one which redefined the character of the anti-colonial struggle in nonassimilationist, separatist terms. In fact, the Philippine Revolution broke out in August 1896 under the leadership of Andres Bonifacio, the founder of the revolutionary secret society, the Katipunan.9 Andres Bonifacio declared hostilities against the colonizers in a symbolic gesture of raising and tearing his cedula [residence certificate], shouting “Long live the Philippines!”

The sociological imagination in historical fiction Referring to Millsian sociology on the intersection between biography, history, and structure, I contend in the following section that the larger structural forces positioned within Philippine colonial history are neatly laid out in both of Rizal’s novels. Each of the novel’s characters and situations are occasions for the novelist to examine the structure of Philippine colonial society. At the same time, the characters deliver the “ideology of their class or their type, that are simply voices for particular social positions” (Celarent 2015: 350). The opportunistic Chinese merchant, the assiduous student leader, the liberal friar, the social-climbing termagent, the detached philosopher – all of them are articulations of the historically and structurally positioned critique of Philippine society that coalesced around his two novels. 209

Teresita Cruz del Rosario

Rizal wrote as a member of the ilustrado class, a distinct social layer that emerged in the context of social and economic transition. The ascendance of an ilustrado class in the Philippines may be regarded as one of the most notable features of this period. Meaning the “enlightened ones,” these ilustrados enjoyed the privileges of a university education both in the capital city and abroad. Though the term is “notoriously slippery” (Hau 2017: 12); the sociological definition is one whose political stance is critical.10 Taking their cues from the philosophical traditions that dominated European thought, particularly the ideas of the Enlightenment, the ilustrados borrowed the ideals of humanism and erected upon it their program for reforms. Their demand for social equality signaled their weariness over being viewed and treated as inferior to their Spanish counterparts. They resented and denounced the abuses of the Spanish friars and pressured for the Filipinization of the clergy. Thoroughly Hispanized and believing in the superiority of Spanish culture, the ilustrados committed their reform goals to achieving equal social and political status with Spain. They demanded equality rather than servitude, believing themselves to stand equal under the sun to the Europeans. Rizal’s ilustrado position is further revealed in Noli through Ibarra’s role as a philanthropist returning from Europe who laid out his plans to build a school in his hometown in San Diego, following the precepts and principles of European secular education. Ibarra made oblique references to the rote learning of friar education and to the broader principles of the Enlightenment which no doubt he picked up during his European journeys. In Fili, several chapters are focused on the students who reflect the sordid state of education under the friars. A physics lesson is described as science [that] is taught practically in the laboratory itself, its utility does not come to be so great as it would be if it could be utilized by the two hundred and fifty who pay their matriculation fees, buy their books, memorize them, and waste a year to know nothing afterwards. As a result, with the exception of some rare usher or janitor who has had charge of the museum for years, no one has ever been known to get any advantage from the lessons memorized with so great effort. (Fili: 109) In the middle of the 19th century, certain changes were sweeping across Europe that were to have profound repercussions in the colonies. In what may be characterized as a shift from monastic supremacy to the ascendance of liberalism in Europe, Filipino society underwent a transformation from an outpost of Catholicism in the Far East to an agricultural economy whose orientation was the exploitation of raw materials and the production of export crops – indigo, sugar, hemp, and tobacco – for foreign trade. Manila became the site of foreign commercial and shipping houses for various European and American trading ships. At the time of Rizal’s writing, the Philippines was opened up for global trade. Manila, the designated colonial capital, was a cosmopolitan city where different nationalities congregated for trade and for leisure. The English, the French, the Danish, the Americans, the Swedes, among others, sent their envoys to Manila. Commercialization of agriculture accelerated, along with it, the concentration of land into bigger estates. An Italian Opera Company visited the city to entertain the urbanites, along with a Spanish comedy company performing in one of Manila’s four theaters (Caoili: 38–41). There are also detailed ethnographic descriptions of Manila’s cafes that dot the promenade, a thriving Chinese trading community outside the walls of Intramuros built by the Spaniards. Rizal devoted a whole chapter in Fili to describe in vibrant detail a visiting French operetta company that was staging its initial performance, Les Cloches de Corneville at the Teatro de Variedades (Fili: pp. 184–195). 210

Dr. Jose Rizal

An important related development is the emergence of what Dennis Morrow Roth (1977) terms “ecclesiastical haciendas,” i.e., large friar estates in the immediate vicinity of the capital city that later became the adjacent provinces of Bataan, Bulacan, Batangas, Cavite, Pampanga, and Laguna. Among them, the Dominicans, Franciscans, Augustinians, Recoletos, and Jesuits acquired their estates in this manner. As a result, land disputes inevitably arose between the friars and their tenants from whom the former exacted tributes and exorbitant rents. Moreover, the sheer size and expanse of these estates – “true behemoths” – according to Roth (Ibid) further fanned native resentment against the friars. LeRoy (1903: 680) referred to them as “monastic corporations.” Apart from large urban estates that included monasteries and convents, college buildings, and quasi-charitable institutions, the friars also had controlling shares in the Spanish-Filipino bank. These religious corporations collected tithes, fees for weddings, burials and other rituals, sales of indulgences, and salaries of the parish priests. Without doubt, the economic power of the friars was the anchor of their political and administrative power as well. In 1889, the ilustrado Marcelo H. del Pilar wrote a book entitled Monastic Supremacy in the Philippines11 and coined the term “frailocracy.” The family estate of Rizal was one of those who came under the power and authority of Dominican friars. Their conflicts with the religious authorities serve as the starting position of Rizal’s private troubles that connect seamlessly with Philippine colonial history and structure – the convergence of which produced the sociological imagination in his novels. A parallel development was the diffusion of ideas in Spain’s other colonies – Cuba and Puerto Rico through what Julian Go (2016) calls “ilustrado transnationalism.” Madrid and Barcelona were hotbeds of ilustrado activism. The Logia Solidaridad was a transcolonial organization that included in its ranks Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Filipinos, and Spaniards. The Spanish members were immigrants to the Philippines known as peninsulares. Among its liberal members were Rafael del Pan, the son of Jose Felipe del Pan who published La Oceania Espanola in Manila; Manuel Becerra, Grand Master of a Masonic group called the Gran Oriente de Espana and one of the original signatories of the charter of the Logia Solidaridad; and Miguel Morayta, a professor at the Universidad Central Madrid. The Logia was meant to be an overseas cross-colonial organization that would coordinate the demands of the different colonies for political rights and representation and situated the Philippines into a “wider intraimperial frame” (Ibid: 130). Even while Rizal wrote his novels against the background of burgeoning nationalism, he drew inspiration from a wider network of liberal activists. His fellow ilustrados were members of a sizable solidarity movement, an “overseas autonomous colonial sphere within the rubric of the Spanish empire” (Ibid: 131). Benedict Anderson’s (2007) study of Filipino and Cuban nationalists portrayed them as embedded in a “transglobal coordination” which facilitate a dense exchange of ideas and produced a transcolonial alliance within the context of late 19th-century globalization. While the novels of Jose Rizal adhere to the coordinates of the sociological imagination, they also expand the imagination to wider geographical and intellectual territories. Beyond the confines of the colonial state in the two novels is the enlargement of the sociological imagination to overseas relationships between Spain and the Philippines, and the historical relationship that contextualized the biographies of both Rizal the author and the novels’ protagonists. The starting points of the novels were always the personal troubles of the author as reflected in the novels’ protagonists. Further, the ideas about reform and social change were set within a particular historical moment in Spain – the diffusion of liberal ideas about progress, faith in science, an anti-monastic/antimonarchical sentiment, and political preferences for republicanism. Rizal’s ideas were drawn from the novels of the French Enlightenment, those of Voltaire, Dumas, and Hugo (Claudio 2015: ix) and linked him to European liberalism and republicanism. These ideational currents intersected with Rizal’s personal life and found their way into his novels and writings. 211

Teresita Cruz del Rosario

The craft of the sociological imagination The final strand in Mills’ sociology concerns the methodology of the sociological imagination. In eschewing traditional formalistic quantitative methods that were primarily directed at Paul Lazarsfeld (Mills 1959: 239), whose “turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences,” Mills instead proposed a “public sociology” – one that addressed a larger audience beyond the academy, one that is critical and publicly engaged (Beck and Gane 2012: 407). The notion of sociology as craft is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological. … It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformation to the most intimate feature of the human self – and to see the relations between the two. (Mills 1959: 13) Burawoy (2008: 372) advocated for an “organic public sociology.” He hoped that sociologists would be deeply embedded in communities and neighborhoods, with labor movements and prisoners, “outside of the protected environment of the academy and [reaches] into the pockets of civil society” (Ibid.). He challenged social scientists to enter into dialogue with these multiple publics, to uphold justice and equality as overarching values of social science, and to engage in what Burawoy calls the “political imagination” (Ibid.: 375). For Mills, he was interested not just in engaging with multiple publics as Burawoy was but, more importantly, in communicating with them through multiple genres of writing. Writing is the thread that weaves the different strands of biography, history, and structure together into the sociological imagination, thus the imperative for sociologists is to write with imagination, one that involves “literary craftmanship,” and “literary ambitions” (Gane and Beck 2012: 411). Mills himself was interested in the “possibility of learning from stylistic practices and research techniques that lie beyond the immediate boundaries of the discipline” (Beck and Gane 2012: 411). He was equally interested in the production of artists, journalists, and novelists as he was with social scientists, humanists, and historians. Thus, his Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba published in 1960 spoke to a very wide audience inside and outside of academia. He engaged with scholars but also with decision-makers who were, in equal measure, agreeable to and critical of Mills’ political stance towards Cuba, even while a few others were irritated by the political discomfort that Mills provoked through his book. In the truest sense of the word, Mills was the “public intellectual” when he decried: “I have tried to be objective, but I do not claim to be detached.” (Mills 1960: 11). Rizal’s story-telling craft would have appealed to Mills. His novels were beyond doubt exemplary of Mills’ sociological imagination. Both Noli and Fili speak about themes that are every bit biographical, set within the historical period and addressing structural deformities that give rise to questions about social and political transformation. His characters and their situations speak across generations. Reyes (2006: 340) referred to Rizal and his compatriots in Spain as imbued with “the exuberance of their intellectual adventurousness and the rich complexity of their imaginations.” Biccum (2008: 177) praised the “truly global span of Rizal and [his] company’s communicative stretch and alliance resonates profoundly with contemporary issues of migration, citizenship, extra-territorial allegiance, remittances and diasporic mobilization.” For all these reasons, Rizal’s sociological imagination is a gift to social scientists who need not struggle between academic rigor and political/moral engagement, between intellectual autonomy and public sociology. Both Mills and Rizal were clear that the distinction is artificial, unnecessary, and in today’s world, nonexistent. 212

Dr. Jose Rizal

Notes 1 The literal translation is “Touch me Not” taken from the Bible, book of John 20:17. According to Nicholas Tamblyn (2018), the title refers to and is a “telling injunction to anyone, especially those thought holy or incorruptible, who through their deceit or brutality is a cause of suffering in others.” See Nicholas Tamblyn, Noli Me Tangere: A shortened version in modern English with an introduction and notes. Golding Books, 2018, p iii. 2 The full name of the secret society was the Kataas-taasan, Kagalang-galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (Highest and Most venerated Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Land). 3 Both novels are popularly referred to as Noli and Fili as convenient shortcuts to Rizal’s best-known writings. These terms will be used consistently in this chapter. 4 The Biography of Dr. Jose Rizal. www​.jrizal​.com​/biography (accessed 4 February 2022). 5 Jeel Monde, “Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera: How they met and their sad ending.” 19 September 2019. https://philnews​.ph​/2019​/09​/19​/jose​-rizal​-leonor​-rivera​-story​-how​-they​-met​-sad​-ending/ (accessed 4 February 2022). 6 “Goodbye to Leonor” www​.joserizal​.com​/goodbye​-to​-leonor/ (accessed 4 February 2022). 7 For a detailed discussion of the Rizal family’s conflict with the Dominicans, and a breakdown of the land area, houselots, and rental by the Rizal family on the Calamba Hacienda in 1890, see Roth, The Friar Estates of the Philippines, Ch. 1 and Appendix C. p. 171. 8 In her book Love, Passion and Patriotism: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement 1882– 1896 (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), Raquel A.G. Garcia devotes an entire section subtitled “Sex and the Sacerdotes,” pp. 121–128. 9 Short for Kataas-taasang Kagalang-galang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan, translated as the Highest and Most Respected Association of the Sons and Daughters of the People. 10 Tracing the etymology of the term, Hau argues that not only wealth, education, and power define the ilustrado but more importantly is the linkages of the term to progresista, reformista, reformador, librepensador (free thinker), liberal, volteriano (Voltairian), filosofo, or filibustero. The term is derived from Ilustracion (Enlightenment). The full text can be found in Caroline Sy Hau, “Patria e intereses: Reflections on the Origins and Changing Meanings of Ilustrado,” Philippine Studies 59 (1): 3–54, March 2011. 11 Published in 1958 by the Philippine Historical Association and translated from Spanish by Encarnacion Alzona.

Works Cited Agoncillo, Teodoro and Milagros Guerrero. History of the Filipino People (6th edition). Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1977 Alatas, Farid and Vineeta Sinha. Sociological Theory Beyond the Canon. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2017 Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. London: Verso Books, 2007 Biccum, April R. “Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination.” Book Review. Capital and Class, vol. 32, number 3, 2008, pp. 175–177 Burawoy, Michael. “Open Letter to C. Wright Mills.” Antipode, vol. 40, number 3, 2008, pp. 365–375 Caoili, Manuel. The Origins of Metropolitan Manila: A Social and Political Analysis. Quezon City, Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1999 Celarent, Barbara. “Noli me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by Jose Rizal.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 121, number 1, 2015, pp. 347–352 Claudio, Lisandro E. Jose Rizal: Liberalism and the Paradox of Coloniality. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2019 Del Pilar, Marcelo H. Monastic Supremacy in the Philippines. Manila: Philippine Historical Association, 1958 Fili. El Filibusterismo. Translated by Charles Derbyshire. Boston, MA: Simon and Brown, 2013 Gane, Nicholas and Les Back. “C. Wright Mills 50 Years On: The Promise and Craft of Sociology Revisited.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 29, numbers 7/8, 2012, pp. 399–421 Go, Julian. “Ilustrado Transnationalism: Cross-Colonial Fields and Filipino Elites at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.” In Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, edited by Martin F. Manalansan and Augusto F. Espiritu. NYU Press, 2016, pp. 128–150

213

Teresita Cruz del Rosario Goodbye to Leonor. https://www​.joserizal​.com​/goodbye​-to​-leonor/. Accessed 4 February 2022 Hau, Caroline Sy. “Patria e intereses: Reflections on the Origins and Changing Meanings of Ilustrado.” Philippine Studies, vol. 59, number 1, March 2011, pp. 3–54 LeRoy, James A. “The Friars in the Philippines.” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 18, number 4, December 1903, pp. 657–680 Matibag, Eugenio R. “El verbo de El Filibusterismo: Narrative Ruses in the Novels of Jose Rizal.” Revista Hispanica Moderna, vol. 48, number 2, December 1995, pp. 250–264 Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959 Mills, C. Wright. Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. New York: McGraw Hill Company, 1960 Monde, Jeel. “Jose Rizal and Leonor Rivera: How They Met and Their Sad Ending.” 19 September 2019. https://philnews​.ph​/2019​/09​/19​/jose​-rizal​-leonor​-rivera​-story​-how​-they​-met​-sad​-ending/. Accessed 4 February 2022 Noli. Noli Me Tangere. A Shortened Version in Modern English. By Nicholas Tamblyn. Melbourne: Golding Books, 2018 Parsons, Talcott. Structure and Process in Modern Societies. Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960 Reyes, Raquel A. G. Love, Passion and Patriotism in the Philippines: Sexuality and the Philippine Propaganda Movement. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008 Riggs, Fred W. “Jose Rizal, El Filibusterimo.” Book Review. The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 23, number 3, May 1964, pp. 488–489 Roth, Dennis Morrow. The Friar Estates of the Philippines. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977 The Biography of Dr. Jose Rizal. https://www​.jrizal​.com​/biography. Accessed 4 February 2022. Shorthand Citations for Rizal’s Works

214

19 HUMAN–NONHUMAN INTRA-ACTION IN KENDEL HIPPOLYTE’S ECOPOETRY Yvonne Liebermann The Global South and the nonhuman world In 2021, Leonor Martínez Serrano and Cristina Gámez-Fernández published a monograph on Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World. In it, they describe the insistence and tradition of poetry to examine “the pristine encounter between the observing human subject and the observed natural world” (2). This practice, they point out, is “rooted in centuries-old tradition in Western and Eastern lyric” (2). This chapter will analyse the ecopoetry of the St. Lucian poet Kendel Hippolyte. It argues that Hippolyte’s poetry situates the subject beyond the Cartesian belief in the inherent distinction between subject and object, human and nonhuman. This chapter analyses how Hippolyte’s ecopoetry configures the St. Lucian nonhuman environment as agentic despite its fragility in the face of the so-called Anthropocene and how it situates the human within and in intra-action with this environment. Kendel Hippolyte, born in Castries, St. Lucia, in 1952, is an acclaimed poet, playwright and director. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Fault Lines (Peepal Tree Press, 2012), Night Vision (Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2005), and Birthright (Peepal Tree Press, 1997). Hippolyte’s poetry engages with various topics, ranging from history and its present-day repercussions, capitalism and global consumerism to reflections on Caribbean lived realities and ecological concerns. This chapter will focus on the latter. Hippolyte’s ecopoetry follows the characteristics of ecopoetry by employing a “perspective recognizing the interdependent nature of the world”, displaying “humility with regard to our relationships with human and nonhuman nature” and displaying “an intense skepticism toward hyperrationality” (Bryson 2). Hippolyte’s ecopoetry, I claim, even goes a step further by actively dismantling the idea of the “observing human subject” (Martínez Serrano and Gámez-Fernández 2). In this, Hippolyte’s ecopoetry makes an important contribution to literature’s attempt to come to terms with the so-called Anthropocene. The term Anthropocene, first coined in 2000 by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer, describes our current geological era in which humans are propelling complex transformative processes which can no longer be controlled by human agency and which have unprecedented impacts on the planet. This new age, scholars argue, commenced either with the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century or with the mid-twentieth century and the splitting of the atom (cf. Grusin 2). Despite the focus DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-22

215

Yvonne Liebermann

on humans’ impact and responsibility in discussions about the Anthropocene, scholars nevertheless caution not to neglect the agency of the nonhuman in debates about the Anthropocene. While humans, of course, should be seen as the ones responsible for the current state of crisis (climatic and species-wise), the nonhuman should not be considered as a passive, non-agentic object. After all, despite its name, the Anthropocene is not an anthropocentric concept. The epoch does not get its name because nature is now completely subordinated to human agency, as if clouds now form and swallows now fly only after getting permission from human beings. The name suits it because human societies exert a novel and distinctive degree of sway in the physical world, but other creatures still continue independently to exert their own powers and pursue their own interests in this new field of action (Davies 7) The challenge for literature is now to go beyond human-centred forms of storytelling in order to do justice to these forms of power that are beyond human control or even understanding. The Australian philosopher Val Plumwood, for instance, underlines that “[i]n human-centered frameworks, hegemonic forms give rise to an exaggerated sense of the human side’s contributions and just deserts, and an underestimation of those of nonhumans” (“Cultural Landscape” 117). Along similar lines, Adeline Johns-Putra rightly notes that the prevalence of realist conventions should be scrutinised for its suitability to tell stories of the Anthropocene (27). Therefore, the centrality of the human perspective and related “notions of subjectivity” (29) should be renegotiated (29). Kendel Hippolyte’s ecopoetry showcases the Global South as a space for negotiating the assumed superiority of the human over the nonhuman. Hippolyte’s poetry thereby does not decouple history from nature. Rather, it highlights that humans and their histories need to be seen in connection to agentic nonhumans. Especially Caribbean poetry hereby plays an influential role in highlighting that the decoupling of nature from history helped obscure colonialism’s histories of exploitation and conquest (cf. Pratt; Neumann and Rupp 475) and thus should be renegotiated. In the context of ecofeminism, Val Plumwood explains: Dualism [as for instance that of nature/culture, Y.L.] has formed the modern political landscape of the west as much as the ancient one. In this landscape, nature must be seen as political rather than a descriptive category, a sphere formed from the multiple exclusions of the protagonist-superhero of the western psyche, reason, whose adventures and encounters form the stuff of western intellectual history. (Feminism 3) Hippolyte’s poetry, alongside many other powerful pieces of poetry from the Caribbean, deconstructs this dualism. Following Russell West-Pavlov’s concept of the Global South as having come into being after 1990 (12), I will analyse poems from Night Vision (2005), Fault Lines (2012), and a poem published in a poetry collection in 2018 and will neglect Hippolyte’s earlier work.

Kendel Hippolyte’s poetics of intra-action While the assumed superiority of the human over the nonhuman has a long tradition in Western schools of thought, the so-called Global South has long been a space for challenging this dichot216

Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry

omy.1 In the context of Australian indigenous stories, Warren Cariou points out that in the epistemologies of Australian indigenous people, land is described as the originator of stories and language, respectively. This is fundamentally different from colonial understandings, which generally place humans or a human-like God as the originators of both language and stories, with the land being simply one of many “things” that can be gestured toward using language. These Indigenous philosophies of language and belonging reverse the trajectory of Western mimesis, starting with the land as the source of not only sustenance but also of knowledge (Cariou 340–341) Stressing the agency of the land, Cariou makes a case for realigning what we think we know about subjectivity, knowledge, and the act of storytelling. Along similar lines, Karen Barad makes a case for overcoming the “powerful grip on contemporary patterns of thought” that “[r]epresentationalism, metaphysical individualism, and humanism” have (134) in her influential study Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. She challenges the “alleged spatial, ontological, and epistemological distinction that sets humans apart” (136) and instead perceives humans as an entangled part of the material world not by way of observation and reflection but rather by way of “intra-action”, which is the reciprocal constitution of entangled agencies in which all agents are considered equal. In this process of “intra-action”, matter has to be seen as “an active participant in the world’s becoming” (136). As Barad explains, “in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, intra-action” (33). This alternative understanding of humans’ position in the material world challenges traditional concepts of human exceptionality, power and agency. Barad’s concept of intra-action can be seen in close relation to other, non-Western, theories of co-productive being, for instance, animism. Animism is “a term broadly used to designate non-Cartesian modes of thought, and specifically the attribution of agency to nonhuman beings” (Jolly and Fyfe 296). Animism as a philosophy invites us to abandon binary dichotomies which favour human intentionality over other fields of energy. Human and nonhuman agencies are subsumed under the category of “being” instead, a category that they share equally. In her work, African Literature: Animism and Politics (2000), Caroline Rooney points out that in the philosophy of animism, “[b]eing is thus variously considered in terms of energy, force, vitality where such terms are not necessarily opposed to non-being and absence” (20). In this definition, humans become “absolutely co-extensive with the being of the world, not transcendentally detached from it” (Rooney 4). In this sense, animism forms a counterpoint to Western epistemologies, precisely because it emphasises the gaps in our knowledge and challenges the binary of presence and absence. Animism makes clear that “despite all our accumulated knowledge regarding the workings of the world, we are in continual, felt relationship with unseen realms” (Abram 125). In this sense, animism calls for what Karen Barad defines as a “relational ontology” (132), which is an understanding of our being-in-the-world in which “agency is cut loose from its traditional humanist orbit” (144). This chapter will analyse the “intra-action” (Barad 132) of the human “i” – constantly written in lower case in Hippolyte’s poetry – and their nonhuman environment. It will showcase how Hippolyte uses his poetics in order to rethink the ontological exceptionality of the human and instead configure it as co-extensive with other nonhuman agents. 217

Yvonne Liebermann

I will start by analysing one of Hippolyte’s last poems to date. The poem “Avocado” was published in a collection called So Many Islands (2018, edited by Nicholas Laughlin). In the introduction, the acclaimed Jamaican writer Marlon James explains: “Everything we [island people, Y.L.] write stands one foot on land, the other in the sea. We can’t help it: we’re from where the air is clear, so it’s almost impossible to think small.” (16). Hippolyte’s poem perfectly underlines this point since it at once makes room for local specificities and wider global contexts. The poem opens with an enigma: “i woke one morning and the Caribbean was gone. / She’d definitely been there the night before, i’d heard her / singing in crickets and grasshoppers to the tambourine of / the oncoming rain.” (“Avocado” 190). While the speaker is positioned prominently at the beginning of the poem, it immediately strikes the reader that the poem breaks with the rules of grammar that stipulate the capitalisation of the pronoun “I”. In contrast to the lowercase “i”, the Caribbean is called “She” with a capital “S”. Right from the start, the Caribbean as a nonhuman environment is portrayed as an entanglement of different human and nonhuman agents. The speaker hears the Caribbean sing “in crickets and grasshoppers” and in harmony with the tambourine played by the “oncoming rain”. While the identity of the speaker is not disclosed and from the beginning takes position in the background, the Caribbean takes centre stage as a point of junction between different nonhuman forces that interact. While the anthropomorphising of the Caribbean as a “she” might at first strike readers as very human-centred, it is worth keeping in mind what Serpil Oppermann and Serenella Iovino point out in their chapter “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity”: In the context of material ecocriticism, the humanization of things, places, natural elements, nonhuman animals, is not necessarily the sign of an anthropocentric and hierarchical vision but can be a narrative expedient intended to stress the agentic power of matter and the horizontality of its elements. (82; cf. Bennett 92) The “horizontality” of different interacting agents is central to Hippolyte’s poetry as it stresses the “reeling and unreeling of ourselves and other / selves of nature” (191). The play with the word “self” here indicates how subjectivity is understood in Hippolyte’s poetry, that is as a “self” that is always in the making and necessarily plural, in constant dialogue with an “other”. The splitting of the verse after “other” indicates that the othering of nature is only one of many instances in which the human self sees itself confronted with an “other” whose self is constitutive of theirs.2 The deconstruction of the unified Cartesian self is also prominent in other poems by Hippolyte. In Night Vision (2014 [2005]), the poems with the loaded titles “History” and “Creation” both entangle the human self with nonhuman agencies. The poem “History” starts with the powerful lines: “Knowing that at the end / Death will acknowledge no identities / i can only half believe / in heroes, villains, histories.” (42). It continues: “In the clear light of Death / i lower my gaze – I see / shadows, all similar, all / on the ground, haphazardly.” (42). It is only in stepping away from an assumedly superior position, by lowering the gaze, that the “I” can become complete and finally see. The act of stepping away and lowering the gaze allows the speaker to set his perception into different proportions. Suddenly, humans are only “shadows” whose trajectories on earth are “haphazard” and the speaker can no longer differentiate between “Ibo, French, Madrasi, Arawak” (42). The earth as the agent which “sucks the shadows back” is configured as a nonhuman agent that will, with the passage of time, in the poem described by the line “[a]s light climbs higher” (42), prevail while human life as we know it might come to an end, making the differentiations between different tribes, nationalities and religions that sometimes still dominate modern life seem trivial. 218

Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry

Along similar lines, the poem “Creation” thematises the power and also unknowability of the earth. The poem, similar to “Avocado”, starts with a loss: “For days, weeks at a time, i lose whatever it is / which keeps my senses softened to the sentience of the earth” (53). The poem deals with different perceptions and ways to approach the earth and its many nonhuman inhabitants and underlines the limits of human attempts at capturing the essence of nonhumans. The earth withdraws from the allegedly knowing human subject. The possibility to sense the earth in its complexity is not a secured ability of the human subject but depends on forces beyond human understanding: “All this can suddenly go without a hint / like a room slips into darkness with a passing cloud – / except, i don’t know how, / it happens with no slippage of the sense of self” (53). The poem not only criticises the predominance of human knowledge over other forms of knowledge but also reflects on the idea of the human self as the surveyor who observes the nonhuman world. Questioning “who is looking now”, the poem challenges the concept of the world as a readily available object of scrutiny. In his study The Object Stares Back (1997), James Elkins contests the idea of seeing as an easy, straightforward activity. He writes: “Seeing does not interfere with the world or take anything from it, and it does not hurt or damage anything. Seeing is detached and efficient and rational. […] Each one of those ideas is completely wrong” (11). Instead, “[o] ur eyes are not ours to command; they roam where they will and then tell us they have only been where we have sent them. No matter how hard we look, we see very little of what we look at.” (11). Hippolyte’s poem makes a point of underlining the fragility not only of vision but of the illusion of cognitive control over our human bodies. In questioning the human “sense of self” (Hippolyte, Night Vision 53) as the controlling force in perceiving the nonhuman environment, the poem also challenges “the visual practices associated with European colonialism” (Emery 3), especially the almost naturalised association of vision with knowledge. “Visuality”, according to Nikolas Mirzoeff, “supplemented the violence of authority” as it “sought to present authority as self-evident” (3) and thus was used to demonstrate the assumed superiority of observing humans over other beings. The poem contests the historicised gaze of the coloniser and Western representational authority more generally. It finally ends on a conciliatory note: “i want to find a way that they may see each other. / i want them – the glint-eyed one of rationed sight, / the other, dreamblinded even in the day’s light – to meet and in that meeting learn a threefold vision” (53). In this process of intra-action, the human subject is placed as an intermediary, a translator (53) and not a speaker. “Avocado” plays both with the conception of the singular, self-contained subject and with the traditional, Western conception of “nature”. While the Caribbean has traditionally been configured in terms of untamed nature and uncivilised peoples, the poem states: “a maypole reeling and unreeling of ourselves and other / selves of nature / swirling out into a futuriginal symphony of civilisation / entitling itself Caribbean” (191). The Caribbean so often associated with a naïve idea of “untamed nature” (cf. DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley 5–10) is here configured as a “civilisation”,3 a civilisation moreover which gives itself said title and thus appropriates the right of naming itself, thereby implicitly re-membering the colonial discourse of configuring non-Western spaces as “passive space[s]” (Nayar 33) that are no more than an “object of study, an area of development, a field of action” (Spurr 25) for the coloniser. The act of claiming a name for oneself plays with colonial histories of appropriation and unjust acts of “naming”, thus giving even more weight to the powerful word “futuriginal” (191). The Caribbean, the poem makes clear, is not just its colonial history but has to be seen as a powerful agent that is oriented towards the future. Perhaps playing on the well-known assertion by V.S. Naipaul who declared the Caribbean a place of constant mimicry and cultural and historical emptiness,4 the poem combines the words “future” and “original” to defy this idea of cultural belatedness. This is furthered by the constant challenge 219

Yvonne Liebermann

to the nature/culture dichotomy in the poem. While describing the island and its flora and fauna – stressed also by the poem’s title “Avocado” – the poem constantly links this back to the already discussed word “civilisation”. In this, it contests the idea of the Caribbean as a “small space” and instead underlines its connectedness and its role in the globalised world. In her influential study Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from the Twilight Zones (2013), Carole Boyce Davies explains that due to migratory histories and ongoing globalisation, there are now social and cultural places (spaces) that extend the understanding of the Caribbean beyond “small space,” fragmented identifications. The claiming of Caribbean Space captures ontologically ways of being in the world. It assumes movement as it makes and remakes the critical elements of Caribbean geography: landscape and seascape, sky and sun, but also music, food, and style. (1) While Boyce Davies focuses on diasporic spaces, her claim still resonates with Hippolyte’s poetry. While focussing on life on the island rather than its travels into the diaspora, the poem “Avocado” still underlines routes of Caribbean culture. Choosing the avocado, a well-selling export into Europe and the world, as a sign of the interconnectedness of the Caribbean with the world, the poem zooms in on the microcosmos of its journey: the market. The word “market” is used polysemously in the poem, since it alludes both to the present-day food market as well as the historical “stock exchange of flesh” (“Avocado” 192). Commenting on the gift of the avocado the speaker has received from the market women, they self-reflexively note that their ideas of Caribbean forms of community might be tainted by “Romanticism” (192). “Yet, how else”, the speaker wonders, “through centuries of the / stock exchange of flesh / – glistened black bodies > < tarnished silver coins / transacted on an auction block –/ how else had the boughtand-sold kept within their own / unchattled selves?” (192). The Caribbean, the poem underlines, is deeply rooted in trajectories of capitalism and one of its historically entangled means: The transatlantic slave trade. However, the Caribbean people persisted through acts of giving and grace: “Gift. The unslaved remembering of hands held out with no / calculating fingers, offering / the graciousness that grows out of a ground of knowing: / existence is a grace” (192). Not only are the Caribbean people described as resilient and strong people, but the nonhuman environment is similarly depicted as agentically resisting the pull of human acts of conquering and owning. In this, the poem draws a line of continuity between the marketing of people and the marketing of nature and finally stresses the resilience of both: There had been rumours of hotel managers trying to hire / the sunlight, / contract the hurricane into a breeze for gently fluttering / brochures, / draw columns of strict profit margins permanently on the / sand; / and the Caribbean, sensing the intimation of quick, crab-/like hands crawling / to get underneath the white broderie anglaise of her skirt; / withdrew herself / the way the sea, clinching herself into a tidal wave, / withdraws (“Avocado” 195) Sunlight, the hurricane and the sandy beach do not bow to human needs but resist appropriation. Interestingly, the Caribbean nature is again described through a feminised vocabulary, wearing a “skirt” and withdrawing “herself”. Hippolyte’s poem thus might invite the reader to look at it through ecofeminism. Ecofeminism is a line of critical thought that lays bare and analyses the “structural binaries supporting the oppression of women and those supporting the exploitation of 220

Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry

nature” (Grusin 4). For ecofeminists, “patriarchy and the domination of nature, as well as other forms of oppression, are deeply intertwined, with both women and nature having been perceived as the other to men, who are associated with the cultural center” (Sanz Alonso 217). In her study Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (2002 [1993]), Val Plumwood explains: The concept of reason provides the unifying and defining contrast for the concept of nature, much as the concept of husband does for that of wife, as master for slave. Reason in the western tradition has been constructed as the privileged domain of the master, who has conceived nature as a wife or subordinate other encompassing and representing the sphere of materiality, subsistence and the feminine which the master has split off and constructed beneath him (Feminism 3) The parallel is striking in the poem, since “crab-/like hands crawling / to get underneath the white broderie anglaise of her skirt” (195) is clearly indicative of a male sexual predator. Considering the agency of the Caribbean to withdraw from these “crab-like hands” of tourism and global capitalism, the poem stresses acts of not knowing and decidedly makes room for “the right to obscurity” (Glissant 2) for the nonhuman other that can withdraw from scrutiny at any moment. The main theme of the poem, the Caribbean disappearing, can definitely be read within the frameworks of the Anthropocene and climate change – although this is not explicitly thematised in the poem. Climate change and concurrent rising sea levels severely threaten the existence of smaller islands as well as diminish the capabilities of human life upon them.5 In Anthropocene Feminism (2017), Richard Grusin explains: the Anthropocene is a strikingly resonant reiteration of a feminist problematic powerfully articulated in 1985 by Donna Haraway, whose “Manifesto for Cyborgs” sees humans, nonhumans, culture, and nature as inextricably entangled and warns that the consequences of attempts to dominate human and nonhuman nature can be at once devastatingly successful and productively perverse. Indeed, the concept of the Anthropocene has arguably been implicit in feminism and queer theory for decades. (Grusin 3) By focussing on the avocado as the gift the speaker receives, the poem underlines this duality: at once successful in connecting the Caribbean to the global market of exchange and thus “productively perverse” (Grusin 3), it is also a factor that contributes to the destruction of local landscapes, the degrading of natural resources and an increase in pollution. In the poem, marketability, consumption and capitalism are directly opposed to Caribbean concepts of grace and nonhuman agency. The nonhuman is more than a tradeable good, be it the landscape with its beaches and warm breezes or the island’s fruits. In “Avocado”, the Caribbean is described as a female agent of memory and thus much more than a descriptive ornament. The speaker laments: “If she is gone, / what is this place? With her gone, who am i? / If she is gone, who braids the fraying fibres of memory into / accord?” (“Avocado” 191). The poem appropriates the language of domesticity and female labour (“braiding”) and connects it to the concept of memory, a concept that is traditionally connected to institutions, monuments and history (cf. Bond). While the Caribbean is connected to acts of “mothering, neighbouring, villaging, lend-hand, / raising up, lifting up” (“Avocado” 193) in the poem, it is also constructed as a place of epistemology, since “if after all this, she had gone, what wider absence 221

Yvonne Liebermann

was there / left to know / except the sky-wide absence of our not even knowing?” (193). The poem ultimately ends with a warning, calling for an end to acts of domination and control: “Harder to find now, / and when found, held better lightly, in an open palm; then / best unheld, let go / in an unexpected, unexpecting, freehand green thankful of / avocado” (198). An ontology-based on equality between humans and nonhumans, the poem underlines, works alongside concepts of grace and opacity – granting the nonhuman the right to not be seen, deciphered or known. The politics of intra-action between human and nonhuman agents is not only limited to nonhumans that would traditionally be captured under the umbrella term “nature”. While “Avocado” and “Creation” focus predominantly on traditionally “natural” nonhuman agents, the poem “Fault Lines” (Fault Lines 15) puts the naturalcultural environment centre stage. In her study Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry (2017), Sarah Nolan, drawing on Donna Haraway’s concept of “naturecultures”, that is “the implosions of the discursive realms of nature and culture” (3), explains that [b]y drawing naturecultures into a text that exposes and even foregrounds the multifaceted environmentality brought on by material and nonmaterial objects, places, thoughts, feelings, connections, and histories, the poem’s textual space shows that environmental experiences are always naturalcultural and grants the material world agency in shaping that space. (2) The poem “Fault Lines” deals with the changing nature of Caribbean space, a theme that runs through the collection it is placed in (see, for instance, the poems “Going”, “Village” or “A Place”). In “Fault Lines”, the speaker describes the processes of decay of a “civilization aging prematurely” (15). This decaying is visible in “lines” that appear on “sidewalks” and “bridges and on buildings” (“Fault Lines” 15), that is nonmaterial objects that entangle places, histories and people. In a next step, the poem juxtaposes this act of “aging prematurely” with the act of human aging: “The hand is writing too on faces – lines of bewilderment, fear, guilt; other unfinished lines trail off, coagulating red on bodies left as messages” (15). Although the poem uses the word “hand”, this “hand” does not seem to be human, since it is “something dying” that “scrabbles” these “last messages” (15, emphasis Y.L.). The humans, on the other hand, seem unable to understand this “ancient language now, of earth writing itself” (15). By juxtaposing the lines that earth draws on both, the material environment as well as on humans, the poem creates a textual space in which the “material and nonmaterial come together” (Nolan 3) and thereby moves away from “restrictive conceptions of nature and the breakdown of identifiable boundaries between the human body and the rest of the world” (Nolan 8).6 The poem ends on a self-reflective note, asking: “what hope for a poem, like this one, struggling to translate, with nothing but words, these dark fault lines of our disintegration into poetry?” (15) Thus, similar to other poems by Hippolyte, the poem is highly suspicious of the power of human acts of meaning-making and appeals to other forms of being-in-the-world that pay more attention to the agency of nonhuman others that are making themselves felt, seen and heard if not directly readable or translatable.

Conclusion According to Russel West-Pavlov, the Global South is a “spatiotemporal concept” (West-Pavlov 14). Focussing on local contexts, narratives from the Global South show that “prior teleological narratives of change cannot be maintained” (14) and that non-teleological concepts of time need to be revisited. “The Global South”, West-Pavlov explains, “is thus not merely a space, but also 222

Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry

a time: the time after 1990, a time in which the future […] can no longer be unproblematically construed as a site of liberation” (12). However, this does not simply mean that there is no hope in the face of the so-called end of history. Rather, [t]his collapse of previous temporalities and teleologies constitutes an ineluctable challenge as we find ourselves obliged to develop models and concepts of a political temporality that is no longer “driven by the confident hubris of teleologies that extract the future seamlessly from the past”: one that therefore must become “more attuned at the same time to the intricacies, ambiguities, and paradoxes of the relations between actions and their consequences, and intentions and chance contingencies that sometimes undo them” (Scott 2004: 210). What, then, may be the new temporalities that are demanded, and perhaps even made visible by the concept of the “Global South”? What might the “Global South” promise that is more than a tired repetition of a Third World paradigm bereft of even residual energy? (West-Pavlov 13) Kendel Hippolyte’s ecopoetry shows that this negotiation of time takes place alongside a glocal concept of space and a conceptualisation of self that strives on plurality and intra-action with the nonhuman. His poems combine different thematical concerns, ranging from conceptions of history and teleology (placing the Caribbean as “futuriginal”) to ecofeminist concerns and “unnatural” spaces and how they negotiate traditional conceptions of “nature”. Actions and their consequences, Hippolyte’s ecopoetry makes clear, do not follow simple cause and effect logics. The Caribbean, “Avocado” shows, might just one day disappear and with it a nonhuman agent of memory. The earth, “Fault Lines” emphasises, is a writing agent that humans still need to learn to read, and our human senses on which we so much rely to decipher the nonhuman world around us “can suddenly go without a hint” (“Creation” 53).

Notes 1 The term “Global South” of course comes with discursive baggage. I understand the Global South as “more than a place; it is a set of relations that structure a political consciousness through a longing or desire for (non)alignment” (Feldman 201). 2 See, for instance, the elaborations on ecofeminism later in this chapter. 3 As DeLoughrey, Gosson and Handley explain: “To foreground the ways in which colonialism has radically altered and transplanted the Caribbean environment is to call attention to how natural histories are deeply embedded in the world historical process, to highlight the organicist assumptions of what might be deemed ‘natural’, and to underscore the difficulties posed to European and Caribbean writers alike in rendering a history of the environment.” (6). 4 In The Middle Passage Naipaul famously writes: “History is built around achievement and creation; and nothing was created in the West Indies” (20). 5 With reference to St Lucia, “The effects of climate change are already being felt on the island. Between 1970 and 2009 there was a rise in the number of relatively hot days experienced on the island. Added to this, there was also a decline in mean precipitation over the period. In addition to temperature, there is also the threat of increased wind speeds. Since the early twentieth century, the number of hurricanes passing through the Caribbean has risen from about 5–6 per year to more than 25 in some years of the twenty-first century. […] the estimated damage from 12 windstorms (including hurricanes) affecting the island was US$1 billion or about 106% of 2009 GDP. Climate change is also likely to significantly affect coral reefs” (www​.cepal​.org​/en​/publications​/38612​-assessment​-economic​-impact​-climate​-change​-tourism​-sector​-saint​-lucia). 6 The poems “Village” and “A Place” in the collection Fault Lines similarly stress the entanglement of the material and nonmaterial world. In “Village”, the speaker is driving through a village that “was vanishing” (11). Again, the landscape withdraws from the human observer: “The dust! It was phantasmagori-

223

Yvonne Liebermann cal how it could suddenly blot / bits of landscape out, trees wavering briefly and receding / into a grey haze of vehicles-men-vegetation” (11). In “A Place”, the speaker discusses whether or not the place they are describing is a city, starting the poem with: “Alright, someone from Europe might not call it a city” (12). However, they then go on describing the naturalcultural elements of the place and finally ending the poem with the statement: “then this plent​y-sha​ck-wi​th-co​uple-​condo​/jalo​py-SU​V/spe​ndfas​t-pay​slow/​ so-it​-come​-so-i​t-go/​quick​-dead​/cont​inual​-stat​e-of-​inbet​ween-​uncer​taint​y is in some sort of way, i guess, perhaps, / a city” (12).

Works Cited Abram, David. “The Invisibles: Toward a Phenomenology of the Spirits.” The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, edited by Graham Harvey. Acumen, 2013, pp. 124–132. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2007. Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke UP, 2010. Bond, Lucy. Frames of Memory After 9/11: Culture, Criticism, Politics, and Law. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Boyce, Davies C. Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zones. U of Illinois P, 2013. Bryson, J. Scott. The West Side of Any Mountain: Place, Space and Ecopoetry. Iowa UP, 2005. Cariou, Warren. “Sweetgrass Stories: Listening for Animate Land.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 3, September 2018, pp. 338–352. Davies, Jeremy. The Birth of the Anthropocene. U of California P, 2016. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., R.K. Gosson, and G.B. Handley, eds. Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture. U of Virginia P, 2005. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: [On the Nature of Seeing]. Harvest, 1997. Emery, Mary L. Modernism, the Visual, and Caribbean Literature. Cambridge UP, 2007. Feldman, Leah. “Global Souths: Toward a Materialist Poetics of Alignment.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture, vol. 47, no. 2, May 2020, pp. 199–225. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. U of Virginia P, 1999. Grusin, Richard. Anthropocene Feminism. U of Minnesota P, 2017. Hippolyte, Kendel. Night Vision. TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2005. Hippolyte, Kendel. Fault Lines. Peepal Tree, 2012. Hippolyte, Kendel. “Avocado.” So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian and Pacific Oceans, edited by Nicholas Laughlin. Telegram, 2018, pp. 190–198. Iovino, Serenella, and Serpil Oppermann. “Material Ecocriticism: Materiality, Agency, and Models of Narrativity.” Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature, Culture and Environment, vol. 3, no. 1, 2012, pp. 75–91. James, Marlon. “Introduction.” So Many Islands: Stories from the Caribbean, Mediterranean, Indian and Pacific Oceans, edited by Nicholas Laughlin. Telegram, 2018, pp. 13–19. Johns-Putra, Adeline. “The Rest Is Silence: Postmodern and Postcolonial Possibilities in Climate Change Fiction.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 50, no. 1, 2018, pp. 26–42. Jolly, Rosemary and Alexander Fyfe. “Introduction: Reflections on Postcolonial Animations of the Material.” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 3, 2018, pp. 296–303. Martínez, Serrano L. M, and Cristina M. Gámez-Fernández. Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World. Brill, 2021. Mirzoeff, Nikolas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011. Naipaul, V.S. The Middle Passage: A Caribbean Journey. Picador, 1996. Nayar, Pramod K.. Colonial Voices: The Discourses of Empire. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Neumann, Birgit, and Jan Rupp. “Sea Passages: Cultural Flows in Caribbean Poetry.” Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, vol. 13, no. 4, December 2016, pp. 472–490. Nolan, Sarah. Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry. U of Nevada P, 2017. Plumwood, Val. Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Routledge, 2003. Plumwood, Val. “The Concept of a Cultural Landscape: Nature, Culture and Agency in the Land.” Ethics & the Environment, vol. 11, no. 2, 2006, pp. 115–150. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992. Rooney, Caroline. Literature, Animism and Politics: Writing Africa. Routledge, 2000.

224

Kendel Hippolyte’s Ecopoetry Sanz Alonso, Irene. “Ecofeminism and Science Fiction: Human-Alien Literary Intersections.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 47, no. 1–4, January 2018, pp. 216–231. Scott, David. (2004). Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Spurr, David. The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration. Duke UP, 1993. West-Pavlov, Russell. The Global South and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2018.

225

20 EPELI HAU’OFA Sly Naïvety in Tales of the Tikongs Sudesh Mishra

Inhabiting Epeli Hau’ofa’s fictional island of Tiko are characters, including narrators, who exhibit a sly naïvety in response to the incursions of the Global North. This sly naïvety, which Hau’ofa treats as a peculiar personality trait of the postcolonial subject, emerges as a result of the volatility in the very idea of progressive civilizational value due to the unequal relations between the discursive north and the counter-discursive south. Hau’ofa’s characters grasp utterly the norms of the Global North, but they fail—and this failure is craftily disingenuous—to emancipate themselves from the ironies, ambiguities, parodies and contradictions, comic as well as economic, that emerge whenever they call upon practices and attributes that differ relationally from the Global North, thereby constituting exceptionalities. The figure of a southern exceptionality defines the norm through a relational structure of non-conformity. Curiously, however, this non-conforming figure shows itself only when incompletely reproducing the dynamic of incorporation that the norm demands. To be sure, there is subterfuge at work here in that the characters play at their ignorance of northern norms. They achieve partial incorporation into the norm by feigning not to fully comprehend the terms and values of the norm. Partial incorporation can cut both ways—and here we have Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence on display (85–92)—in that the figure representing the norm may not be entirely normative. Sly naïvety, in short, is a cunningly informed species of ignorance. It is mimicry par excellence in that the act of imitation betrays the subject’s noncorrespondence with the object of mimicry. It functions like Bertolt Brecht’s “alienation effect” as it pertains to the theater in that there is an intentional disjoint between an actor and the character they enact (Bennett & Royle 36). Furthermore, it draws on the “play of alienation and identification” that Simon Gikandi ascribes to the postcolonial subject (420). In his solitary collection of short fiction, Tales of the Tikongs, Hau’ofa employs the attributes of sly naïvety to depict the norm, the north, as it functions in the south while, paradoxically, subverting the north’s normative value by citing exceptional southern practices that elude incorporation. First published in 1983, Tales of the Tikongs consists of 12 interlinked short stories set on the fictional island of Tiko in Polynesia. In the process of conjoining the tales, Hau’ofa varies his focalization by zooming in and out of various characters. When one Tikong turns protagonist, the protagonist of another story fades into the background. In this regard, Hau’ofa draws on the structuring principle first established by V.S. Naipaul in Miguel Street (1959). Naipaul varies his point of view according to the perspective of a focalized character. However, it is the witnessing narra226

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-23

Epeli Hau’ofa

tor—an adolescent boy from the eponymous street—who weaves together the disparate stories. In the concluding story, he leaves Miguel Street for further studies in London, England. Hau’ofa, too, has a man of unspecified age, namely Manu, who appears in almost all the stories. He is the narrator in one story, a confidante in another, an anti-colonial interjector in a third and a sarcastic eavesdropper in a fourth. Tiko’s satirical superego and spinner of pithy proverbs, Manu threads together the tales through a multitude of barbed postcolonial interventions. He is both the aficionado of sly naïvety and its remorseless debunker. He narrates the opening story, “The Seventh and Other Days,” in which he is a character who speaks of himself in the third person. The story itself is a parody of the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In fact, whether directly or obliquely, the titles of several stories allude specifically to Christianity (“The Tower of Babel,” “The Second Coming,” “The Wages of Sin,” and so on), clearly indicating that Tiko has already been subject to the civilizing mission. It follows that the life-worlds depicted in the tales are primarily concerned with the colonial versus the postcolonial project. Manu, who is the exemplary agent of decolonization, employs sly naïvety to show how a partial incorporation of the norm undermines normative expectations. Where Jehovah is said to work for six days and to rest on the seventh, “Tiko rests on six days and works on the Seventh” (1). At a fundamental level, Manu is parodying the colonial mindset when it comes to stereotyping the colonized. Natives, after all, are lazy because they lack a work ethic. Sly naïvety, however, operates on multiple tiers for Manu is a master of tonal nuance. Tikongs are not only able to out-Jehovah Jehovah by rearranging the order of one of the commandments, but they treat pious devotion as a form of imposed drudgery that requires six days of rest. To reverse this trend for the sake of national development, Tiko recruits an expert from abroad, one Merv Dolittle. The decision serves to reinforce Manu’s poststructuralist in-joke when Sione, a card-playing freeloader, responds derisively to the expert’s work-related queries: “‘Your name. Dolittle. It’s so beautiful! Heavens above, you must be one of us! Ana! Ana! Bring the cards back in’” (5). Mostly through Manu’s interventions, Hau’ofa is able to shed light on the hypocrisy, opportunism and contradictions of both the colonizer and the colonized. In “Old Wine in New Bottles,” for instance, he relates the story of Hiti George VI, a character endeared to all things—including people—that have aged prematurely. Hiti, whose name is changed for reasons of political expedience from Hitler to Hiti George, has a talent for contributing actively to the aging process. The narrator remarks that he is no different from the rest of the islanders in this respect (12). All gleaming commodities, including brand-new Japanese cars, become quickly antiquated in Tiko. The slyly naïve narrator is, of course, commenting on how underdeveloped third-world actualities shipwreck commodities meant for the overdeveloped world. Hau’ofa’s general strategy is to create encounters between two purportedly different value systems as embodied by the colonizer and the colonized in order to chart morally dubious similarities. Hiti gains promotion to a higher position in the civil service because, as it turns out, of his aristocratic lineage, old-school ties and incompetency. His incompetency contributes directly to the recruitment of a surrogate who happens to be an Englishman named Charles Edward George Higginbotham. He, too, has entered the civil service because of his aristocratic lineage, family connections and old-school ties. Higginbotham begins to criticize Hiti for his dubious habit of employing family members and for using official vehicles for personal matters, but the narrator objects to his hypocrisy. Higginbotham is, in truth, Hiti’s double with the difference that the former conceals from his own conscience his moral shabbiness. If Hiti partially incorporates the ethical norm, he does so in the clear light of day. Higginbotham, on the contrary, admits to no such ethical lapses. He partially incorporates the ethical norm, too, but pretends that he is in full possession of it in the manner of an exemplary colonialist. Hiti’s dishonesty is curiously honest, Higginbotham’s dishonesty is fatally dishonest. 227

Sudesh Mishra

In his essay, “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud speaks of the double as an insurance against mortality (in that the self may be perpetually reproduced) and, paradoxically, as “the ghastly harbinger of death” (425). If I am alive over there, for instance, am I not dead over here? Hiti becomes an uncanny harbinger of death for Higginbotham. Unable to persuade the former that private self-interest and public service are irreconcilable, Higginbotham takes to alcohol and expires on a flight bound for Auckland. Hiti triumphs over Higginbotham by turning the Englishman’s office into an anti-utilitarian sinecure: hence the doubling effect. He then proceeds to recruit a Peace Corp volunteer of Polynesian stock from California to do the work that they both shirk. Since he is an insider-outsider, Hiti cannot prematurely age the volunteer who has shrewdly deciphered the codes of sly naïvety. Instead of being provoked “into self-righteousness and hence into an early old age” (16), the volunteer outperforms the Tikongs. He audaciously multiplies their acts of partial ethical incorporation: “If they put the departmental vehicles for personal use once a day, he does it twice; if they go on sick leave twice a fortnight, he goes four times, spending much of it drinking beer and playing snooker at the Tiko Club” (16). The upshot is that Hiti takes to riding his old bicycle all over Tulisi to avoid the youthful American and to take solace in the signs of decrepitude and decay proliferating across the island. He recoils, however, when he comes across “the cleanest, whitest, freshest” (17) spaces in Tiko—its shiny, sand-laden cemeteries. In response to Hiti’s reaction, Manu, who is “riding his brand-new Hercules,” loudly commends “the Whited Sepulchres” (17), thereby bringing to Hiti’s attention the inescapable novelty of death. Hau’ofa plays intertextual games in “The Second Coming.” The title alludes to at least four different texts. The first is obviously the Bible and refers to the second coming of Jesus Christ. The second reference is to W.B. Yeats’ poem of that title, first published in 1920, which forms a premonitory declaration of impending planetary violence: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world” (91). Critically, for Yeats, in his second coming, Christ is an avenging “rough beast” with “[a] gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” (91–2). In his novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), Chinua Achebe employs these compelling lines from Yeats’ poem to describe how the colonizing mission in Africa, which includes enforced conversion to Christianity, led to the wholesale destruction of African life-worlds. Achebe is never romantically uncritical of these life-worlds, but his novel serves to depict a highly structured society with its own proverbial language system, oracular practices, social and matrimonial obligations, gendered discrepancies, recreational activities, internal agreements and disputes, economic and customary transactions, and violent dissensions. The novel, in short, is a corrective to the colonial lie that Africans had no civilizational structures and values in place prior to the arrival of the white redeemer. The fourth text Hau’ofa has in mind is his own which builds on the insights of both Yeats and Achebe. The title turns into a promissory note to the reader in an intertextual as well as an intratextual sense. In terms of the latter, Hau’ofa narrates the second coming of Eric Hobsworth-Smith, Director of the Bureau of Preservation of Traditional Culture and Essential Indigenous Personality, when Tiko is under British dominion. The narrator’s sly naïvety is on full display here as Hobsworth-Smith, despite his many colonial qualifications, is devoid of an indigenous personality and therefore can do little about the preservation of traditional culture. When he arrives as the custodian of traditional culture and indigenous personality, the sly narrator observes that he has come for “what remained of these after the running dogs [of imperialism] had done their bit for more than a century” (49). One such running dog is, of course, Hobsworth-Smith. The stage is set for a story that hilariously deploys colonial mimicry, chameleonic changeability and nativist or inverse mimicry in the service of sly naïvety. When Tiko gains her independence and the Paramount Chief proclaims that henceforth the island’s destiny shall be in the 228

Epeli Hau’ofa

hands of Tikongs, the protagonist, Sailosi Atiu, finds himself promoted to the office erstwhile held by his superior, Hobsworth-Smith. The former director receives his marching orders. Salosi initially secures the office of Deputy Director because of his kinship ties to Tikong’s aristocracy. As Hobsworth-Smith’s deputy, he practices the art of colonial mimicry to the degree that “he looked and sounded like a true Briton” (49). The egregious irony is that his job is to protect and safeguard his own culture and tradition. The slyly naïve narrator, recognizing that mimicry relies on the subject’s imperfect identification with the object of imitation, thereby triggering the alienation effect, comments “that the imperial Governor often took him for a cultured English gentlemen of impeccable lineage, or so the Governor would exclaim in a tone that was only just perceptibly questioning” (49–50). Salosi is not oblivious to the Governor’s double-edged compliment, but accepts the condition of his partial incorporation into the colonial norm so that he may access the lavish cocktail parties. With the colonialists banished and with a fashionable focus on all things Tikong, Salosi reveals a chameleonic changeability by ridding himself of the trappings of colonialism. He now actively seeks to restore and preserve his “essential” indigenous personality without realizing that the dynamic of mimicry knows no end precisely because it is caught up in a movement where the self is partially other and vice versa. Biological essentiality has no place in the staging of mimicry. Even as he discards the accouterments (posh accent, safari shirt, long socks, foreign lover, etc.) associated with colonial mimicry and embraces the Tikong lifestyle, Sailosi refuses to disavow imported first-world perks and luxuries. The narrator dwells sarcastically on this contradiction: But he kept the concrete house, the Kelvinator refrigerator and the Holden station wagon…, maintained his membership of the expatriate-dominated Tiko Club and his subscriptions to Playboy and Time magazines, paid regular visits to the International Nightlight Hotel to dine on grilled steaks and imported potato washed down with French wines, and sent his sons to the special school for children of the elite and his only daughter to an upper-class convent in Perth (50). The narrator proceeds to declare that, along with his friends, “Hiti George VI and Sione Falesi, Sailosi was blessed with freedom from the kind of neurosis which arises from over-sensitivity to contradiction, doubt, or guilt” (50). If the espousers of the civilizing mission justify their imperial project on ethical grounds by repressing the contradictions supporting it (Higginbotham’s alcoholism is plainly a symptom of this repression), Sailosi, Hiti and Sione experience no such neurosis since they have no ethical superego to repress. In derisively celebrating an informed species of ignorance, the narrator disavows the neurotic colonizers as well as the neurosis-defying postcolonial elites who inherit their power and authority from the former. To be sure, Hau’ofa reserves a special disdain for indigenous elites who draw on the same power dynamics as the colonialists to belittle the common people by calling them “me’a vale, the ignorant ones” (4). The story draws subtly on a degraded idea of the philosophy of eternal recurrence, hence its incisive witticism. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation of the principle, the recurrent experience is never a repetition: it is the recurrence of the original act (say, for instance, the act of living out one’s life) without any deviation, permutation or variation (194–5). For Hau’ofa, this is not the case at all. Eternal recurrence features in the dynamic of colonial mimicry and counter mimicry where there is an apparent reversal in the order of self and other as viewed through the comic mirror of sly naïvety. In any event, after his promotion to the director’s job and the partial incorporation of indigenous habits, Sailosi is unable to retain any of the four deputies he hires to fill his position. The first two are university-trained Tikongs who, undermined by their edgy, uneducated boss, 229

Sudesh Mishra

emigrate to Hawaii and New Zealand respectively. The third, an Indian, is promptly dispatched to Australia because of his endless chatter and argumentative ways. The fourth, a religious type, finds himself terminated for embezzling funds and for “gobbling the forbidden fruits of his director’s secretary” (54). In the meantime, as a direct result of the bloody-minded incompetency of comprador elites, “the skilled and the talented fled the country” (53), creating vacancies “filled with alacrity by alien experts” of all types and descriptions (53). So the scene is set for a neocolonial blowback. Sailosi returns from leave to find the unredeemable running dog, Hobsworth-Smith, ensconced as his deputy. It is the strangest of returns as it affords Hobsworth-Smith an opportunity to put on full display his own chameleonic changeability. The result is an inverse or nativist mimicry. Whereas Sailosi aped his master earlier, he is the master to be aped now: “[Sailosi] noticed that his former superior had shaved his handle-bar moustache, softened his stiff upper lip somewhat, and donned the Tikong national dress instead of his standard safari shirt, Bengali shorts, and knee-length socks” (55). What moves between the poles of mimicry is the shuttle of ambivalence where the self is in danger of turning into its other. For his part, Bhabha believes that the process depends on a turnover of language and gaze and may not be an intentional act (107). By ascribing sly naïvety to his character, Hau’ofa’s narrator suggests that informed ignorance may be a ploy to achieve a hidden outcome. Hobsworth-Smith’s adoption of indigenous codes, his newly acquired smile, his facile deference and supplicatory pleas—all indicate that his partial incorporation of the nativist or postcolonial norm is intended to achieve a strategic objective. This objective involves bringing about the psychological disintegration of his erstwhile deputy. Unable to bear witness to Hobsworth-Smith’s counter mimicry, Sailosi is persuaded by his deputy to work from home. The upshot is that the running dog of imperialism regathers the reins of the Bureau for the Preservation of Traditional Culture and Essential Indigenous Personality. He attains this goal through imitating the sly naïvety of the indigenous subject. “The Glorious Pacific Way” is a Faustian account of the moral erosion of Ole Pasifikiwei, a character who also embodies an endangered indigenous value system as the pun in his name indicates. Ole’s daytime job is that of an eradicator of pests and weeds, but his real interest lies in “collecting oral traditions, initially as a hobby but in time it had developed into a near obsession” (83). Ole serves as a corporeal metonymy for an entire indigenous value system besieged by the discourse of development and the financial aid attendant upon it. The story begins at a cocktail party to which Ole has been invited because of the extensive fieldwork he has carried out on family genealogy and oral history. In seven years, we are told, he has captured the data in exercise books for close to twenty percent of the island. Hau’ofa is plainly offering a portrait of the “organic intellectual.” According to Antonio Gramsci, the organic intellectual emerges spontaneously from the masses and is a purveyor of folk wisdom of the commoner variety (5–23). Ole is not a trained researcher and he does not belong to the intelligentsia. He is captivated by oral histories and sets his heart on building an archive for the benefit of his fellow islanders. At the cocktail party, he is introduced to Harold Minte, a visiting diplomat, whose job is to identify local projects to fund. That Minte’s surname carries a fiendish monetary pun is, therefore, no coincidence. He embodies money and its dreadful temptations. In any case, Ole has been identified as a person whose work is worthy of financial aid and Minte is there to help him out procedurally. At this juncture, however, something odd happens. Minte makes the initial offer of financial assistance but wants Ole to ask for it first. With one fell stroke, Hau’ofa exposes the ruse of Western financial aid which pretends to be a gift without return when it is a calculative financial transaction with the rules set by the funding agency. Ole understands the power differentials at work between gifting and begging: “If Minte had money to give, as he said he did, why did he not just give it? Why should he, Ole, be required to beg for it” (84). With this realization, Ole is filled with loathing for Minte’s ambition 230

Epeli Hau’ofa

to turn him into a beggar and with disgust at his own inability to beg. All Ole wants is a typewriter to type out his oral histories and a cabinet for storage. Minte’s response to his request reveals the hypocritical double consciousness of the funding agent: “What’s a civilized typewriter to do with native cultures?” (85). The typewriter is an exemplary emblem of Western modernity and the point being made is that Ole’s work bears no relation to this modernity. The narrator’s sly naïvety directs us to a cunning riposte buried within the text. Jotting down oral histories in exercise books is also an act of anthropological modernity, but this insight eludes Minte. Early in the story, Minte declares that the agency’s “aim is to preserve the Pacific Way” (84). The brazen irony is that his intervention at the cocktail party sets in motion a train of events that scuppers the Pacific Way and substantiates the view that, in its contemporary rendition, it is largely a discourse mediated by manipulative Western commentators (Mishra 364–7). Minte, it turns out, has no regard for the culturally valuable contents of Ole’s notebooks. He is more interested in Ole forming a rubberstamp committee to oversee the publication of a newsletter that describes his annual activities. Oral histories and the kinship genealogies of Tiko mean little to Minte. Caught in an impossible bind, Ole approaches a high official, Emi Bagarap, for advice. He is bluntly told to swallow his pride, to shelve his self-respect and to sidestep his conscience. Bagarap reminds Ole that he has to play according to the rules of the game, as determined by the funders, in order to obtain money. Money is not the means to an end for Bagarap, but an end in itself. When Ole turns to the Bible for guidance, the Good Book simply reinforces Minte’s position on the dangers of pride and the benefits of asking with grace. At each turn, Ole is urged to join the corrupt bandwagon of aid donors and recipients who play the development game all over the world. The one exception is Manu who warns Ole that it is the devil’s bargain, involving the forfeiture of his soul, but to no avail: Next day when he met Mr Minte he was all smiles. The smoothly seasoned diplomat raised an eyebrow and smiled back—he was familiar with this kind of transformation; it happened all the time; it was part of his job to make it happen (88). The allusion to the fiend, Mephistopheles, could not be clearer. Minte performs a similar transformational trick in that the attainment of transitory material desires is predicated on the loss of one’s soul for all eternity. Not only does Minte pledge $10,000 over a five-year period, he also tempts Ole with the promise of a short course in Manila where he will be taught how to properly collect oral narratives. That he has been doing exactly that for seven years appears to be of no consequence. Ole accepts the conditions set by Minte. He is duly paid the money and catches a flight to Manila. He learns nothing from the workshop but takes to Manila’s seedy nightlife. Once he yields up his soul, his body follows, seeking out and purchasing carnal pleasures. He buys a typewriter in Sydney on the flight back. Arriving home, he discovers that his aunt has sold all his notebooks as toilet paper. Hau’ofa is making the tragi-comic point that Ole ceases to be a worthy custodian of Tiko’s oral history the minute he succumbs to Minte’s machinations. What the aunt does to his archive literally, Ole has already accomplished figuratively, but this realization does not lead to any show of contrition. Instead, Ole resolves to “go after the whales of the ocean” by begging on an epic scale (92). He founds the National Council for Social, Economic, and Cultural Research, recruits a foreign expert to devise a research plan and write applications, and appoints honorary office-holders to give it a veneer of respectability. When his project meets with success, he institutes 18 different national councils and committees and, in a matter of six years, puts in grant applications worth 14 million dollars. He becomes an influential star in the firmament “of ­development through foreign aid” (93) and is awarded honorary doctoral degrees by the University of the Southern Paradise. Hau’ofa’s sly naïvety seeks out the reader at this juncture. Ole may have 231

Sudesh Mishra

been deserving of honorary doctoral degrees if he had kept to his original task of chronicling oral histories. That he receives the degrees when he stops being an organic intellectual, a scholar, and transforms into “a first-rate, expert beggar” (93) tells us a great deal about the hollow benefits of neocolonial mimicry. In most of his stories, Hau’ofa’s focus is on the chicaneries undergirding discourses pertaining to pious dogma and development. His recourse to sly naïvety is grounded in an interesting observation made by the narrator of “The Winding Road to Heaven.” Tikongs, according to the narrator, are “expert tellers of half-truths, quarter-truths, and one-percent truths” (7). Half-truths and quarter-truths are not that difficult to come by, but it requires intellectual sophistication to tell a one-percent truth. To illustrate this point, Hau’ofa relates the story of Inoke Nimavave who commits forgery to the tune of $100. Inoke blames the cross-eyed bank cashier for confusing a check worth $1.00 for $100. He argues that he had requested $1.00 in taxi fare to visit his hospitalized mother. In response to this explanation, the magistrate poses the following question: “And why did he not return the ninety-nine point zero zero dollars to the cross-eyed clerk at the Bank of Tiko?” (8). To which query, Inoke responds: How, he appealed, could he think of money when all the thoughts in his head were with his poor mum who was on her way to Heaven? How could he indeed; and the angels wept; and the police magistrate wept and gave Inoke a six-month sentence with hard labour. Poor Inoke; his fellow inmates called him Zero Zero, which was most misleading since he was a brilliant arithmetician and a top graduate of Potopoto college (8). Sly naïvety, as I commented earlier, relies enormously on subtle tonal permutations. Inoke’s disavowal of material interest in the face of his mother’s impending death fails as an example of one-percent truth precisely because the narrator, the angels and the police magistrate are privy to zero-percent. The notion of weeping is turned on its head tonally since it signifies belly-shattering laughter, followed by hard prison labor. Still, the nickname given to Inoke in prison, Zero Zero, is only partially true because of his professed arithmetical brilliance. It is difficult to ascertain where the narrator’s sly naïvety ends because the serious and the comic, truth and lie, become tangled up in the nuanced inflections of tone. Hau’ofa fixes on the gray areas, either tonally or through puncturing received sacred wisdom, in order to explore the dynamic of partial incorporation into the norm as manifested in Tiko. If religion dictates that the path to truth is narrow and straight (and the anti-religious Manu exemplifies this path), the pathways of Tiko “are straight and wide or narrow and crooked” (9). Hau’ofa continues in this mixed-up mode in “The Tower of Babel” where he espouses sly naïvety to rail against the imported obsession with growth and development as measured by northern norms. At the beginning of the story, Manu claims, with typical sarcasm, that the ancient gods have to be slain for Tiko to become developed. All the while he, of course, works on behalf of the old gods against the new ones. The story revolves around three failed development projects. The first concerns the old fishing vessel, Maumau Taimi, gifted by the Japanese to assist Tiko in developing its fishing industry from the top down. Perhaps invariably, the gift turns out to be a white elephant. Before they catch a single fish, the islanders dream of becoming “a Nation with a Fish Cannery” (20). The vessel’s maiden voyage ends up being a disaster because the crew consists of young sexobsessed male Tikongs who sail home after three sexless weeks at sea, returning a loss of $6000 for their beloved country. Tiko adopts a bottom-up approach in the wake of the top-down disaster. This second approach involves one Sharky Lowe from Australia. Sharky’s job is to buttonhole informal or part-time fishermen and coerce them into accepting individual loans: 232

Epeli Hau’ofa

One such frightened, small-time, part-time fisherman was Ika Levu, who happened also to be a small-time, part-time gardener. His dual occupation meant that Ika worked whenever he felt like it; and he had very little money, which bothered him not at all. Ika never felt miserable until Sharky laid hands on him (21). Hau’ofa is making two critical observations at this point in the narrative. Ika Levu (or Big Fish) is content to live his life according to the unregulated pre-colonial rhythms of his culture. He is not a market-driven man, but one guided by the old gods of subsistence. Sharky, on the other hand, as his name suggests, is an unscrupulous predator who sells dinghies, engines and assorted fishing commodities on behalf of the foreign firms he represents, thereby assisting in “the development of himself and his companies most generously” (23). He profits by driving ordinary Tikongs into debt. Sharky is one cog in the greasy wheel of developmental capitalism. When Ika attempts, without success, to explain to the authorities his failure to service his loan, he cannot be directed to the right person because they are abroad on various development-related rackets and junkets. In the end, utterly exasperated, he scuttles his dinghy, together with all the gear he purchased, and reverts to his earlier lifestyle. The loan sharks put him on a list of defaulters, but to no avail since he exists outside the market system. The slyly naïve narrator comments: “Not all are so fortunate” (26). The third failed project concerns Toa Qase, whose name means Old Chicken. A successful small-time gardener and banana grower, Toa succumbs to the temptations of surplus accumulation by switching “to big-time chicken farming under the Poultry Development Scheme funded by an agency of the Great International Organisation” (26). He invests in 6,000 imported chickens and nurtures the trait of capitalistic self-interest by eschewing the system of communal obligation that governs life in Tiko. Under the mentorship of a Development Expert, “Toa aimed to become a Modern Businessman, forgetting that in Tiko if you give less you will lose more and if you give nothing you will lose all” (26). His defiance of the old gods brings on disaster as the collective communal response to his self-interest is to deprive him of the very objects propping it up. Thieves steal all his well-bred chickens, sending Toa to the Church for spiritual consolation. Manu, of course, does not pass up on the chance to exercise his sly naïvety in the context of Toa’s plight. He reminds us that Toa has not given up on his dream of riches, he has merely redirected it by devoting “all his time to developing for himself vast treasures in Heaven where live neither thieves nor experts” (26). Hau’ofa is forever in the habit of casting a sly eye on religious dogma since it serves as a preparatory ideology, one that seamlessly manufactures consent (Herman & Chomsky viii), for coercive forms of control and regulation. In “The Wages of Sin,” a side-splitting story about a serial cigarette cadger called Ti Polo Simini, he investigates his character’s subconscious life-world so as to comment on Tiko’s relationship with an imported religion. Ti’s troubles begin when, in the dark of the night, he rips off a page from an unseen book to serve as his cigarette paper. He rolls the tobacco, smokes it and falls asleep. In his sleep, he dreams that he is visited by Moses and Joshua. The former accuses him of sacrilege while the latter shoves an explosive down his throat and lights the fuse. Ti wakes up screaming just as the stick of dynamite explodes. It turns out that he had smoked a page from the Holy Book listing the Ten Commandments. Exodus Chapter 20 to be exact. Ti’s dilemma attracts a slyly naïve remark from the narrator: “A Tikong will commit with impunity any number of sins, but he will never deface the Good Book, let alone send it up in smoke” (36). Hau’ofa’s wry point is that the book-object is merely ink on paper if one ignored the theological content. The act of violating textual injunctions is far more sacrileges than defacing the book, but Tiko regards the book-object as a hallowed thing, an idol. In short, the old gods endure in one form or another. As a Tikong disposed to treating the book-object as sacrosanct, Ti is racked by guilt. The following night 233

Sudesh Mishra

he pilfers the same page from his neighbor’s Bible to replace the leaf missing from his copy, thereby committing two acts of sacrilege and breaching a core commandment. The terrible vision returns that same night. On this occasion, he is blown up with two sticks of dynamite. Moses and Joshua forget to vanish on cue, injuring themselves in the blast. The shrewd point is that violence, even in its most fantastical form, has dire consequences for the perpetrators. On the third night, Ti resolves to return the stolen leaf but ends up having sex with his neighbor’s wife, thus adding to his inventory of sins. When he botches the sex act, he is sent reeling through the wall by a brutal punch. He passes out at home and the nightmare resumes. More incendiary sticks are shoved down his throat and discharged. Moses and Joshua, once again, fail to safely exit the explosive dream and end up in wheelchairs. Ti makes another attempt to return the pilfered page, but it is destroyed when the neighbor’s inebriated son urinates on him. His dreams not only gain in ferocity, but they start to reflect real conflicts in the Middle East. At the end of his tether, Ti turns to Manu, the master of sly naïvety, for help. Manu’s solution to Ti’s dilemma is to convert a mathematical principle into a redemptive account of negative theology: “‘You see, a negative and a negative make a positive. Likewise, a sin can only be cancelled by an equal and opposite sin’” (41). He recommends that Ti tear out the page “containing St Luke Chapter Twenty-Three, Verse Thirty-Four” (41), use it as cigarette paper and smoke it to ashes before retiring to bed. The verse in question is the one where a crucified Christ appeals to his Father to forgive his tormentors because they, as it transpires, know not what they do. When he tore out the page containing the Ten Commandments, Ti did so unintentionally. He did not know what he had committed in the darkness, and so is deserving of forgiveness. By intentionally ripping up the relevant verse from St Luke, Ti draws attention to his innocence in the earlier example, thereby making a case for the retrospective application of Christ’s precept. If the precept cannot be applied (and this is the critical point), it should go up in smoke. The two acts cancel each other out because the second sin, the intentional act, makes it obvious that the first sin, the unintentional act, was not a sin in the first instance. One is equal and opposite of the other. On the back of Manu’s sly philosophical brilliance, Ti gets to share a cigar with God. In conclusion, Hau’ofa employs sly naïvety with the aim of demonstrating that the norm can never achieve normativity. What stands revealed in the encounter between unlikely life-worlds, aspirations, economic models, cultural obligations, religious impositions, ethical expectations and historically defined social systems is a structure of partial incorporation of normative values. Contradiction, anomaly, mimicry, absurdity, ambivalence and outright defiance all play their part in staging this scenario. Whether it is professed by colonial powers, developmental experts, postcolonial mimic men, indigenous missionaries, neocolonial returnees or ex-colonial dissenters, normative value appears to elude all and sundry. The glass is perpetually half-full and perpetually half-empty. Hau’ofa’s world is a hilariously fraught place where identification with one set of norms results in alienation from another series of competing norms. He is a writer superbly alert to the possibilities of bathos where each inflated word, act or gesture is subject to deflation via an inbuilt deconstructive dynamic. In story after story, he shows how various characters employ sly naïvety to embrace corruption, to expose the folly of surplus accumulation, to interrogate the complicity of comprador elites, to defend the simple man delinked from commodities or to win a dramatic theological argument with no less a person than God.

Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann, 1958. Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2009.

234

Epeli Hau’ofa Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, pp. 418–430. Gikandi, Simon. “Preface: Modernism in the World.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006, pp. 419–424. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Smith. New York: International Publishers, 1971. Herman, Edward, and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 2002. Hau’ofa, Epeli. Tales of the Tikongs. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. ———. “Our Sea of Island.” A New Oceania: Rediscovering our Sea of Islands. Suva: Beake House, 1993, pp. 2–16. Mishra, Sudesh. “Pacific Way.” A Historical Companion to Postcolonial Literatures in English. Edited by Prem Poddar and David Johnson. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005, pp. 363–367. Naipaul, V.S. Miguel Street. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971. Nietzche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Yeats, W.B. “The Second Coming.” W.B. Yeats. Edited by Edward Larrissy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, pp. 91–92.

235

21 AMPHIBIOUS POETICS ON THE MALABAR COAST Kappappāṭṭu and the Chronotope of the Ship in Mappila Literary Culture A.K. Muneer

Amphibious poetics on the Malabar Coast: Kappappāṭṭu and the chronotope of the ship in Mappila literary culture Maritime studies, in general, and Indian Ocean studies, in particular, have been offering refreshingly illuminating perspectives on a range of communities and cultures which get muted in hermetically “land-based” interpretive grids and angles of vision about the world. In a manner that is not fortuitous, the insights emerging from this “new thalassology” (Vink 2007) also help amplify the analytical possibilities of the Global South—beyond its narrow geopolitical valence—as a location and vantage point from which to look at the world, inter alia (West-Pavlov 2018; Mignolo and Walsh 2018). Following the lead of such maritime research, various yet related imaginaries and paradigms have entered the critical parlance, which shed new light on the formation of literary cultures in littoral societies and regions across the Indian Ocean, among other oceans of the world. Some of the intriguing imaginaries and paradigms emerging from this scholarship have come to us in the form of such analytics as “tidalectics,” “archipelagic thinking,” “coastal thought,” and “amphibian aesthetics,” to cite a suggestive few. All these notions foreground a “complicating sea”—a sea that “complicates binaries, moving us away from the simplicities of the resistant local and the dominating global” (Hofmeyr 2010, 722). The term “tidalectics,” which calls to mind the rhythmic fluidity of water, was coined by the celebrated Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite as a play on “dialectics.” This approach is alive to both the universal and the particular and celebrates the multiplicity of knowledges and experiences while resisting any easy synthesis or resolution (DeLoughrey and Flores 2020, 138). In a similar vein, the French Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant posits “archipelagic thinking,” which focuses on the connections among material, cultural, and political practices, cutting across islands, oceans, and continents and shaped by the complex movements of capital and commerce, media and technology, ideas, and people (Thompson 2020, 109). This offers the framework for probing “the complex and shifting entanglement between sea and land, diaspora and indigeneity, and routes and roots” (DeLoughrey 2007, 2). More recently, considering coast as a “heuristic device and unit of analysis,” Meg Samuelson (2012; 2017, 16–17) 236

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-24

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

has advanced the categories of “littoral literature” and “coastal form” by showing how such categories help unsettle “the inside-outside binary” underwriting nations and continents and decenter, expand and complicate the regnant constructions of world literature. The heuristic of the coast also enables Samuelson (2012, 2017) to develop an “amphibian aesthetics” following Michael Pearson’s case for “amphibious history of the ocean,” which moves easily between land and sea, as well as his notion of “littoral society” (2003, 1985, 2006). Samuelson accordingly uses this analytic with its dual orientation of land and sea to underscore “the layered and ambivalent histories” of littoral communities such as the Swahili Coast (2012, 499). Giving further momentum to this intellectual ferment, Ananya Jahanara Kabir (2022, 204) theorizes the “coastal enclave” as a “contact zone” after Mary Louise Pratt (1992) to flesh out the analytical and historical force of what she calls “Creole Indias” which have been constituted by the “multidirectional encounters” resulting from “the material circularities linking the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Ocean worlds and the hinterland.” Clearly, the “oceanic turn” in literary studies has furthered and chastened world literature’s paradigms. As Meg Samuelson (2020, 375) notes, oceanic literatures “chime with models of world literature as a circulatory system.” Yet, through their amphibious positions, they also “expand and thicken conceptions of the world,” thereby challenging the “Euro-Atlantic” bias of theories of world literature. The “new thalassology,” to follow MPM Vink (2007, 58), “dissolve[s] artificial distinctions among supposedly coherent and ostensibly distinct regions (e.g., Europe, Africa, Asia, etc.) by drawing attention to systematic and longterm interactions conducted across bodies of water.” Consequently, literary histories of the oceans present an increasingly comparative and transregional outlook, resist dominant chronologies and geopolitical formations shaped by modern capitalism and imperialism, and encompass within their remit multiple loci ranging from “small islands, littorals, and archipelagoes to vast interregions and transregions” (Ganguly 2021, 453–54). “An Indian Ocean poetics” (Moorthy and Jamal 2010, 3) is thus particularly apposite, given that, as Sugata Bose (2006, 5) puts it, “The history of the Indian Ocean world is enmeshed with its poetry and in some ways propelled by it.” Against this background, and following up on Meg Samuelson and the thrust of the present churn in oceanic literary/cultural studies touched on above, in this chapter, I mobilize the concept of an “amphibious poetics” to illuminate the littoral literary culture of Mappilas of Malabar in southwest India, which acted as a crucial nodal point in the Indian Ocean world. My focus will be on the Arabi Malayalam Kappappāṭṭu (“ship song”) of the Mappila poet Kuññāyin Musliyār who lived in early eighteenth-century Malabar. Adding the literary scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to my critical repertoire, I will explore the “maritime imagination” animating this song-poem by foregrounding its “chronotope” of the ship in a way that helps to reveal its “routes and roots” (DeLoughrey 2007) within the “cultural milieu” (Bose 2006) of the Malabar Coast. I argue that an amphibious poetics that is alive to the mutual imbrication of land and sea, the local and the global, as exemplified by Kuññāyin’s Kappappāṭṭu, best characterizes and propels the larger multilingual literary culture of Mappilas as well.

Iśals between land and sea: Malabar, Mappilas, and Arabi Malayalam Wedged between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, the Malabar Coast enjoys pride of place in the Indian Ocean world as the land of pepper, “the king of spices.” Historically, the region mostly corresponds to the modern South Indian state of Kerala, roughly covering the area between the ports of Barkur in the north and Kollam in the south (Prange 2018, 12). By its location and geography, Malabar, literally meaning “the land of hills,” boasts an orientation towards the sea, with several port towns/cities having flourished on its lap. This historic region served as a natural 237

A.K. Muneer

transhipment hub for long-distance monsoon navigation, and rose to become the primary supplier of black pepper—the most prized commodity of the Indian Ocean spice trade. The Malabar Coast, thus, had been indispensable to the maritime trading world of what Sebastian Prange (2018, 13) so evocatively calls “monsoon Asia” since ancient times (see also Kooria 2018). No sooner had trade thrived than the region became a meeting point for not only commodities but also for people, ideas, languages, and texts, inter alia, from across the Indian Ocean littoral, thereby making it into a cosmopolitan, polyglossic space. Michael Pearson (1985; 2006, 353) has famously posited that “littoral societies” have more in common with each other than they do with their inland neighbors. He adds, [such societies] “are much more cosmopolitan than parochial inland people for, at the great ports which constitute the nodes of the littoral, traders and travellers from all over the ocean, and far beyond, were to be found” (2003, 39). Thus, as the Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah writes about the coast of Africa—in his novel By the Sea— They [traders and sailors] brought with them their goods and their God and their way of looking at the world, their stories and their songs and prayers, and just a glimpse of the learning which was the jewel of their endeavours. (2021 [2001], 15) Following Pearson’s heuristic of the “littoral society,” Gurnah’s words on East Africa could well apply to the Malabar Coast. Malabar, too, attracted to its port towns traders, travelers, scholars, Sufi masters, and refugees from across the Indian Ocean regions, including China, Persia, Egypt, South Arabia, Southeast Asia, and East Africa (Ho 2006; Prange 2018; Kooria 2022). It is through a combination of transoceanic networks—of trade, scholarly, literary, Sufi, and the like—facilitated and sustained by the Indian Ocean that Islam spread on the Malabar Coast (Ricci 2011; Prange 2018; Kooria 2022). The Malabar Coast is credited with being the first site of Islam on the Indian subcontinent thanks to the Muslim merchants [and pilgrims] from across the Indian Ocean trading world who carried to the region the new faith and its norms and practices (Prange 2018, 14). In medieval times, Muslims came to dominate the region’s crucial spice trade—a monopoly that provoked the Portuguese onslaught on the coast in the sixteenth century (Pearson 2003; Prange 2018). The indigenous Mappila Muslim community of Malabar was born of the conversion of Malayali Hindus to Islam and of the intermarriage between foreign (mostly Arab) Muslims and Malayali women. These features are well captured by the community’s appellation “Mappila,” which means either “bridegroom/son-in-law” or “big/great child,” among other interpretations (Moulavi and Kareem 1978; Miller 2015). As a “littoral community” moving between land and sea in major port cities on the Malabar Coast, Mappilas and their literary culture embody the salient features of “littoral societies and literatures” as they bring together the global and the local, creating multiracial, multilingual and cosmopolitan spaces open to the world. As Rhoads Murphey notes of port cities, The smell of the sea and the harbour, still to be found … in all of them, like the sound of boat whistles or the moving tides, is a symbol of their multiple links with a wider world, samples of which are present in microcosm within their own urban areas. (as qtd. in Pearson 2003, 32) For Mappila Muslims of Malabar, one significant tradition that helps illuminate “their multiple links with a wider world” has existed in the form of the hybrid dialect of Arabi Malayalam—the 238

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

pivot on which the Mappila literary culture has turned for centuries (from the early seventeenth to the late twentieth centuries, to say the least) (Ilias and Hussain 2017; Arafath 2020; Muneer 2022). Arabi Malayalam uses Malayalam grammar, Arabic script, and a vocabulary borrowed from as many languages as Arabic, Malayalam, Tamil, Urdu, Persian, and Sanskrit. This language hybrid, with its remarkable wealth of literature in verse and prose covering a wide range of themes and concerns, had rightly assumed the status of the literary language of Mappilas from at least the early seventeenth century when the earliest extant work in this linguistic tradition, the Muhyiddīn Māla by Qadi Muhammad of Calicut (1607), appeared on the scene (a status it maintained well into the late twentieth century). Some prominent genres of the rich, diversified Arabi Malayalam songpoetry include mālappāṭṭukaḷ, paṭappāṭṭukaḷ, qissappāṭṭukaḷ, kattupāṭṭukaḷ, and kalyāṇappāṭṭukaḷ (Abu 1970). Mālappāṭṭukaḷ, or simply called mālas, are largely devotional poems extolling the life and virtues of Sufi figures. While paṭappāṭṭukaḷ (war/battle songs) are songs that describe and commemorate battles in early Islamic history as well as in the local history of the Mappila community, qissappāṭṭukaḷ designate narrative poems chiefly dealing with the life and work of important Islamic figures such as the prophets and of significant events in the history of Islam. Kattupāṭṭukaḷ, epistolary songs, are romantic in tone and character and are often written in the form of impassioned exchange of confessions of love and yearning between spouses and lovers. Finally, kalyāṇappāṭṭukaḷ are nuptial songs that mainly describe the marriage between the Prophet Muhammad and his wives, traditionally known as the “Mothers of Believers,” and are notably sung at weddings. These songs are all set in a highly stylized and conventionalized form called iśal (“tune”/ “meter”) which determines the rhythms and melodies of individual songs, often with richly intricate patterns of internal differentiation within a single composition. Nurtured on the Malabar Coast with its natural orientation to the sea and its amphibious sensibilities, Arabi Malayalam literary culture is deeply animated by maritime imagination in ways that bring into relief the specificities of its location (“the Malabari roots”) and the generalities of its cosmopolitanism (“the transoceanic routes”). This is best exemplified by the eighteenth-century Mappila poet Kuññāyin Musliyār’s Kappappāṭṭu (“ship song”), which mobilizes the “enduring cultural symbol” of the ship (McCaughan 2001) to illuminate the voyage of life and its vagaries and ultimate moorings from a standpoint heavily freighted with Islamic mysticism.

Roots and routes: Kappappāṭṭu and the chronotope of the ship While Qadi Muhammad’s Muhyiddīn Māla—a praise poem on the renowned Sufi master Shaikh Muhyiddīn Abdul Qādir al-Jīlāni (d. 1167) composed in 1607—helped fashion an “Arabi Malayalam literary formation” on the Malabar Coast from the early seventeenth century onwards (Muneer 2015), it was through the pomes of Kuññāyin (circa 1700–circa 1786) such as Nūlmadh (1737), Kappappāṭṭu (circa 1751), and Nūlmāla (1785) that Arabi Malayalam song tradition witnessed a revived efflorescence in the long eighteenth century (Kareem 1983; Hussain 2014a, 2014b; Hussain and Kareem 2015; Arafath 2020). The poet-scholar, Kuññāyin, is popularly known among Mappilas as a witty mystical poet who enjoyed a close relationship with the Zamorin, the ruler of Calicut, as attested to, for instance, by the words of noted Mappila chronicler K.K. Muhammad Abdul Kareem (d. 2005) who called Kuññāyin rasika śirōmaṇi (“the wit par excellence”) (1983). The friendship and playful exchange of quips between Kuññāyin and Zamorin’s minister Maṅṅāṭṭaccan have become the stuff of local lore in Malabar. This notwithstanding, details of Kuññāyin’s life are scant in extant sources, and the only saving grace in this regard has been the rudimentary, patchy evidence extrapolated from his own writings. Born at Thalasseri in northern Malabar around 1700, Kuññāyin received his education from Ponnani, the “Mecca of Malabar,” under the tutelage of Shaikh Nuruddin and his 239

A.K. Muneer

son Shaikh Abdussalam, members of the great Malabari family of religious scholars, the Makhdūms, and died around 1786 (Kareem 1983, 18–21; Abubakkar 2014, 18; on the Makhdūms, see Randathani 2010; Prange 2018; Kooria 2022). Of his only three known poems, Nūlmadh was written in 1737 (AH 1151), whereas, Nūlmāla, a poem extolling the virtues of al-Jīlāni, was completed in 1785 (AH 1200). A third poem called Kappappāṭṭu, which this chapter focuses on, offers philosophical reflections on human life with the help of rich nautical and maritime imagery deeply inflected by Islamic mysticism and must have been composed between Nūlmadh and Nūlmāla, around 1751. My analysis of the Kappappāṭṭu and its profuse maritime imagination, including the titular trope of the ship (kappal) in the context of the aforementioned “amphibious poetics” of Arabi Malayalam on the Malabar Coast, draws on the concept of “the chronotope” as adumbrated by the literary theorist M.M. Bakhtin (1981) in his ground-breaking study of “dialogism” in the novel. A concept that has invited a proliferation of meanings over its relatively short career since the Western scholars’ discovery of Bakhtin’s writings in the 1970s and 1980s (Bemong and Borghart 2010), the chronotope in its restricted sense has been conceived of as “device,” “functions,” or “motifs” constituting narrative in ways that help distinguish one kind of text from another (Holquist 1990, 109–110). Literally meaning “time-space,” the chronotope, as summarized by Bakhtin’s translators in The Dialogic Imagination, is: A unit of analysis for studying texts according to the ratio and nature of the temporal and spatial categories represented. [It is] an optic for reading texts as x-rays of the forces at work in the culture system from which they spring. (425–426) As “a formally constitutive category of literature” (Bakhtin 1981, 84), the chronotope, Bakhtin goes on to suggest in his concluding remarks in the “chronotope” essay, is more than a device, as it is deeply imbricated with the cultural environments from which it emanates (Holquist 1990, 111): “Out of the actual chronotopes of our world (which serve as the source of representation) emerge the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work” (Bakhtin 1981, 253; original emphasis). Thus, as the well-known Bakhtin scholar Michael Holquist (1990, 111) notes, when understood as more than “a narrowly technical narrative device,” the chronotope proffers an analytic with which to interrogate “the complex, indirect, and always mediated relation between art and life.” The chronotope concept, in its expansive sense, has profitably been exploited in contemporary cultural studies—beyond narratology and literary criticism, where a “novelistic” approach to narrative often prevails (Scholes et al 2006, 6). One of the boldest and most inventive of such cultural studies projects has been Paul Gilroy’s tour de force, The Black Atlantic (1993), which mobilizes the chronotope of the ship to describe a black Atlantic culture whose morphology transcends ethnicity and nationality—a culture forged in the crucible of the slave trade which engendered the African diaspora. Gilroy notes that “the image of the ship, a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion” is significant in that ships immediately focus attention, among other things, on “the circulation of ideas and activists as well as the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). In a way that provides a model for my analysis in this chapter, Gilroy marshals not just the concept of the chronotope but a maritime chronotope as well. I, therefore, deploy the chronotope of the ship not only to show how maritime imagination animates the Arabi Malayalam literary culture, particularly the Kappappāṭṭu, but also to illuminate how such an imagination constitutive of an amphibious poetics arose out of Malabar in the Indian Ocean littoral historically. 240

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

Maritime imagination and the emblematic ship metaphor have long fired human consciousness and produced conflicting emotions of awe and fear through allure and repulsion (McCaughan 2013). For example, as Antonina Harbus (2011, 21) demonstrates, the Anglo-Saxon poets used “the dual containing and traveling aspects of the ship” as a befitting model for “the embodied yet metaphysical mind” and deployed the pervasive trope of life as a sea voyage for coherently imagining “how the mind operates in relation to the body.” In Islamic societies, the image of the ship figures prominently in cultural expressions, more particularly in the Sufi tradition, as illustrated, for instance, by Sufi “ship songs” or “boat poems” produced by diverse Islamic communities in the Indian Ocean world. For example, V.I. Braginsky (1988, 1998, 2007) has shown that Sufi poems of a boat (ship) are widespread in the Malay world, the most famous example of which is a syair perahu (“boat poem”) attributed to the sixteenth-century Malay Sufi poet, Hamzah Fansuri. The ship motif also plays a significant role in Middle Eastern Sufi tradition, as exemplified by Arabic, Persian, and Turkish authors whose works exhibit the direct influence of the Quranic sources of ship symbolism (Braginsky 1998). Fulk (“ship”) figures prominently in the Quran, where it is presented as a sign of Allah’s Greatness and Mercy, often in conjunction with other signs such as the creation of the heavens and the earth and the succession of day and night (2: 159, 14:37, 16:3–17, 22:62–64, 29:62–63, 31:24–28; Braginsky 1998; Pearson 2003; Agius 2007). As Braginsky (1998, 52) notes, as in the Quran as well as in the Sufi tradition inspired by it, the basic components constituting “the semantic field of the ship” such as sea, storm, favorable wind, pearls, and land are also invested with symbolic significations, thereby influencing the symbolism of the ship itself in a state of mutual interaction and cohabitation. In the classical Middle Eastern Sufi tradition, the ship metaphor has provoked paradoxical interpretations, according to which it has come to be seen both as an obstacle to, and as a symbol of, the Sufi path (Braginsky 1998, 52–54). Along the Indian Ocean rim, on the Malabar Coast, the ship sign had inspired Sufi poetry by the turn of the sixteenth century, if not earlier, as evidenced by the Arabic poem Hidayat al-adhkiya ila tariq al-awliya (“Guide for the Intelligent to the Path of the Friends of God”) composed by Shaikh Zainuddin ibn Ali (d. 1521/2), the grandfather of Zainuddin al-Malabari (d. ?1583), the author of the celebrated Tuhaft al-Mujāhidīn. Shaikh Zainuddin came from the illustrious family of Malabar’s religious scholars known as the Makhdūms who had transformed the port town of Ponnani into a hub of Islamic higher learning from the late fifteenth century onwards (Prange 2018, 110–113; Kooria 2022, 229–232). It may be recalled that the author of Kappappāṭṭu, Kuññāyin, who bears the honorific musliyār suggesting training in Islamic sciences, sat at the feet of the Makhdūmi scholars at Ponnani early in the eighteenth century. Shaikh Zainuddin’s poem Hidayat al-adhkiya has enjoyed an influential career across South India and beyond in the Indian Ocean world (for example, Java) and still remains a staple of Islamic education at madrasas, mosque schools, and centers of Islamic higher learning throughout Malabar (Kunhali 2004, 65). It declaims: Fear of God (taqwa) is the foundation of all victory Following one’s passions is the root of all evil. The path is sharī‘a, tarīqa and haqīqa Therefore, listen to the examples carefully. The sharī‘a is like a ship, the tarīqa like the ocean And the haqīqa like a priceless pearl… Whosoever desires the pearl shall embark on the ship And dive into the ocean, and then he will attain the pearl

241

(ll. 3–5, 9)

A.K. Muneer

The poem exploits the basic units of the semantic field of the ship such as the ocean and pearl and describes “the true path” as made up of religious law (sharī‘a), the Sufi order (tarīqa), and the ultimate knowledge of the divine (haqīqa) in a way that bears a striking resemblance to the work of the Sufi master from Baghdad, Shihāb al-Dīn Umar al-Suhrawardi (d.1234), who employs the tripartite leitmotif (sharī‘a-tarīqa-haqīqa=ship-ocean-pearls) to illustrate the multitiered Sufi path (Ohlander 2008, 156–57). This “sharī‘a-oriented Sufism” advanced by Shaikh Zainuddin in Hidayat al-adhkiya (and before him by al-Suhrawardi) emblematizes the Malabari Sunni ulema’s attitude to Sufism, which seeks to use religious law as a bulwark against the “excesses” of spiritualism (Prange 2018, 248). However, such an orientation is by no means unique to Malabari Muslim scholars and practitioners. This point will be germane to the architectonics of the Kappappāṭṭu analyzed below. In fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Malabar, as trade and wealth flourished, religious law and spiritualism were often combined by concerned Malayali scholar-poets (both Hindu and Muslim) as a means to check materialistic tendencies or moral and political decadence among their communities (Freeman 2003, 479; Kooria 2022, 226). This was when the bhakti literature was developing in domestic spheres in Kerala, providing textual resources for devotional recitation and expressions of personal/communal piety. Tuñcattu Eḻuttacchan’s Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam written in the kiḷippāṭṭu (bird’s song) form marks a watershed in the larger Malayalam bhakti poetry, and his contemporaries only helped further this bhakti tradition, albeit in different ways. For example, one of his contemporaries, Mēlppattūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭatiri composed Nārāyaṇīyam, a Sanskrit praise poem to the god Krishna as worshipped in the Guruvayur temple. Another contemporary poet Pūntānam Nampūtiri wrote the Jñanappāna in Malayalam, which presents a fusion of advaita and bhakti in the simple song-form of the pāna chant (Freeman 2003, 483–484). Around the same period, in 1607, Qadi Muhammad of Calicut (d. 1616) crafted Muhyiddīn Māla, an Arabi Malayalam praise poem to Shaikh Jīlāni—a text which has nurtured Islamic devotional piety on the Malabar Coast historically (Muneer 2015, 2022; Arafath 2018, 2020). Both these Hindu and Islamic traditions of devotional literature have been read as reactions to the European onslaught on Kerala’s coasts during the period. Rich Freeman (2003, 479) has noted this point for Malayalam, and in the case of the contemporary Arabic/Arabi Malayalam corpus, P.K. Yasser Arafath (2018) has posited the analytic of “an age of fasād (social disorder)” to probe the motifs of valor and piety in this literature composed during/ in the wake of the Portuguese attacks on the Malabar Coast. However, the situation is far more overdetermined than such a simple “resistance” reading allows. These devotional texts by Hindu and Muslim poets were also social commentaries on the moral, spiritual, and political decadence of their respective communities as illustrated by Shaikh Zainuddin’s Hidyat al-adhkiya, Qadi Muhammad’s Muhyiddīn Māla, and Pūntānam’s Jñanappāna (Freeman 2003, 479–484; Kooria 2022, 226). I suggest that the Kappappāṭṭu, too, be read in the larger context of the devotional ferment that developed within the vernacular culture on the Malabar Coast from the sixteenth century onwards. In so doing, one can illuminate the Malabari roots and the transoceanic routes of this major Arabi Malayalam work. Marshaling the ship chronotope, Kappappāṭṭu continues the tradition of shari‘a-oriented Islamic mysticism pioneered by Shaikh Zainuddin’s Hidayat al-adhkiya on the Malabar Coast. The poem tracks the contours and vicissitudes of the voyage of human life (the ship) through the sea of worldly experiences until it reaches its destination on the shores of salvation and peace in the hereafter. It is thus heavily infused with esoteric religious and mystical content, which is illustrated with the help of rich nautical and maritime terminology. Abandoning the long formulaic invocatory lines that usually open Arabi Malayalam devotional literature, Kappappāṭṭu begins on a hortatory note:1 242

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

Those basking in self-importance Think a good deal and look with care. Should you look with interest, shedding all dross You can walk ahead, leaving inertia behind. And the body will gain in strength And shine without wrinkles and spots

(ll. 1–6)

Then, the ship chronotope is introduced in minute detail to describe the human body which ultimately has to withstand the hazards of the sea to be blown ashore to safety and ecstasy: We have a lovely ship Measuring nine inches in length From keel to bow…

(ll. 7–9)

Amplifying the principle of the ship-body equivalence, Kuññāyin mobilizes a range of ship parts and imbues them with a signification of similitude to the organs of the human body. Accordingly, the ship’s hull and keel designate ribs and backbone; the ship’s treenails the heart, brain, and the like; the ship planks fastened together the intricate network of the body’s veins and blood vessels; and so forth. The ship crew tasked with steering the ship through the tumultuous and turbulent ocean of life includes the perspicacious nākhuda, the master, who stands for intellect, the mu‘allimi, the pilot/navigator, the ārāṭṭi, guide, and the fanjili, the officer standing guard. Expectedly, the five masts of the ship symbolize the five pillars of Islam, which are discussed at great length, thereby foregrounding the centrality of Islamic law (sharī‘a) to the Sufi path (tasawwuf) which the poem maps. In this regard, the poem suggests that the ship’s (human body’s) purpose is to collect precious stones (i.e., faith and good deeds) from different parts of the ocean of life so that it can reach its destination in the eternal world of peace and salvation. Graphic descriptions of the horrors and trials of the Day of Judgement follow the many lines that add flesh to salāt (“ritual prayers”), key among the five masts. In ways that call to mind the piratical activities endemic in the Indian Ocean, including the Malabar Coast, where piracy continued to flourish over centuries throughout its maritime history (Chakravarty 2016, 57; Pearson 2003, 105–7), Kappappāṭṭu then adumbrates the four pirates (wealth, bodily temptations, people, and the Satan) who attack the ship and strive to lead it astray: [Beware], there are four thieves around the ship Those shameless four [hover] over four sides They are wealth, bodily temptations, people As well as the cursed (mal‘ūn) ʿAzāzīl (the Satan)

(ll. 201–204)

The poem also recommends the weaponry with which to overpower these four adversaries. It includes tawakkul (trust in God), fikr (thinking about God), shahādat (profession of faith), and zuhd (renunciation). The poem enjoins that the body-ship should mobilize against the four pirates the gun of tawakkul, load it with the bullet of fikr and then fire it, pulling the trigger of shahādat. Then, the weapon of zuhd should be pressed into service to win the war against worldly temptations. Finally, armed with the two shields of islām and īmān, the human ship will 243

A.K. Muneer

reach the shores of the highest regions of heaven (firdaus) in the company of tranquil, exalted souls. The three other masts of the ship, namely the Islamic pillars of zakāt (“obligatory almsgiving”), saum (“fasting”), and the hajj, also receive detailed treatment in the poem, following which the ship docks at the Rawḍa (“the mausoleum of the Prophet Muhammad”) in Medina and treats itself to an ebullient expression of love and longing for the Prophet (bēdāmpar, from the Persian payghambar) in which several of his virtues and miracles are extolled. The ship chronotope takes on a special valence here as none other than the Prophet is now described as the prototypical ship filled with precious gems, which provides the model for the larger voyage of life undertaken by the ship, the human body. In a style that is redolent of the mystical tendency to self-abnegation, the poet calls himself a fool (poṭṭan): O fool! Don’t you have the desire to go and shower greetings of peace (salām) Standing beside the master (khwaja), the epitome of all virtues (cīlakkuṇam nallē)? (ll. 279–81) Such self-abnegating expressions reach a crescendo as the poem proceeds to draw to a close, and Kuññāyin ends 20 hemistichs with the word poṭṭā (“o fool!”) in quick succession. The poem then proclaims the purpose of the voyage of life, meeting with God, meandering through a motley assortment of negative formulations to achieve special rhetorical effects through a combination of apophasis and periphrasis: I have embarked on the ship Not in pursuit of food, wages, or a maritime job Nor to go sightseeing around the sea Nor to amass goods that suit my needs Nor to roam the various ports Nor to climb a tall mansion Nor to do a roaring trade Nor to babble, whiling away the time Nor to land on my feet, getting rid of hardship Nor to delight in playing in the lovely stream Nor to enjoy the fragrance of jasmines Nor to be sprayed with musk and ambergris Nor to eat my fill of a sumptuous feast Nor to cover myself with the luxuries of life Aboard the wedding ship, I am sailing To meet with the Lord of all worlds!

(ll. 473–488)

Thus, in illuminating the purpose of the voyage of life, the poet exploits the trope of the wedding ship (kalliyāṇa kappal) inspired by the perennial bridal symbolism of mystical marriage in Sufi literature, which captures the union of the soul of the departed Sufi with God, the Primordial Beloved. That is, the Sufi, who is regarded as the bride of God, has left for his eternal abode, where he is united with his Love (in fact, her Divine Bridegroom) (Schimmel 1975, 203). As the ship finally reaches the shores of peace and eternal bliss, braving the ravages of seafaring throughout, 244

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

Kuññāyin’s song-poem concludes in fervent supplication with the poet-speaker pleading for the most ­coveted honor of being able to meet with God (liqā) in the company of the Prophet. Remarkably, Kuññāyin’s poem models the ship chronotope after the type of ships he is most familiar with on the Malabar Coast: the famous dhows which dominated trade and navigation in the western Indian Ocean from East Africa around to South India for centuries, the planks of which had been stitched together with twine/coir made from coconut husks (Pearson 2003, 63–9). In an idiom that is deeply multilingual and which further complicates the morphology of Arabi Malayalam with heavy use of words from Tamil and such proximate dialects of Malayalam as the Jasari spoken on the Indian archipelago of Lakshadweep, among other languages (Hussain 2014a, 30), the poem pushes the ship chronotope beyond the ship-body symbolism by drawing on the expansive semantic field of the ship, including the sea, ports, winds, maelstroms, pearls, shores, and so on, as Braginsky (1998) underscores for the Malay Sufi boat poems. Thus, following Bakhtin, the ship’s semantic field can be “chronotropic” in that a single chronotope can include a host of other chronotopes in mutual dialogue, interaction, and even tension (1981, 252). Also, as noted earlier, the paradox of the ship/body as being an “enabling constraint”—as something that is to be pressed into service as well as destroyed on the path to God—is internal to the architectonics of the Kappappāṭṭu (Braginsky 1998; Pokkanali 2018, 11). Understood in Bakhtinian terms, again, the chronotope of the ship in the Kappappāṭṭu is not just a trope of thematic value but also sheds light on the diverse socio-cultural contexts from which the poem has issued. The location of the Malabar Coast in the Indian Ocean, the circulatory networks of trade, faith, scholars, commodities, ideas, and texts it fostered, and the larger literary cultures of Kerala it helped nurture—all provided the fertile ground for an amphibious imagination which brought into being the “ship song” of Kuññāyin in eighteenth-century Malabar.

An enduring trope: the ship, Kappappāṭṭu, and the Mappila imaginary As a littoral society that flourished on the Malabar Coast and its riverine hinterlands, the ship chronotope has been central to the imagination of the Mappila Muslims of Kerala historically and contemporaneously. Islam, it may be recalled, arrived on the Coast via the sea rather than land, and the ship consequently figures saliently in the stories of Islam’s origins in the region. For example, an immensely popular Mappila song that draws on the tradition of the Malayali king Cheraman Perumal’s conversion to Islam during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad exploits the motif of “the sailing ships of yore” (paṇṭu paṇṭu pāyakkappalil).2 The chronotope is also a staple of Mappila religious and mystical literature written in Arabic and Arabi Malayalam, as exemplified by Hidayat al-adhkiya and Kappappāṭṭu. Moreover, the enduring appeal of the ship motif for Mappilas has left its imprint on the domain of material culture as well, as shown by Jahfar Shareef Pokkanali (2018) in his study of the Sufi ship-body symbolism in Jasad al-Muslim (“The Muslim’s Body”), a ship painting on the wall of an eighteenth-century mosque from the riverine hinterland of Areacode in South Malabar. Notably, Pokkanali juxtaposes the ship painting—whose six floors and five masts represent the six articles of Islamic faith and the five pillars of Islam, respectively—with Hidayat al-adhkiya and Kappappāṭṭu to illuminate the creative use by Mappilas of the ship chronotope that is deeply embedded in both the Islamic tradition and the Malabari geo-socio-cultural milieu. Additionally, echoing the pioneering study of the Rāmāyaṇa tellings by the Indian poet-literary scholar A.K. Ramanujan (2004), one could say that the cultural milieu in which the ship chronotope is active also produces “a pool of signifiers,” including plots, characters, names, geography, incidents, and relationships (157–158). Thus, oral, literary, and performative traditions, phrases, 245

A.K. Muneer

sayings, and even jokes could allude to the ship motif. In Malabar, the expression “Are you making me into a ship?” (nīyenne kappalākkukayāṇō?) can even mean “Are you taking me for a ride?” This expression enjoys pride of place in the lore surrounding Kuññāyin’s interactions with his teachers, the Makhdūms of Ponnani, and is therefore mentioned unfailingly by contemporary Mappila commentators in discussions of the tradition explaining the context for the Kappappāṭṭu (Moulavi and Kareem 1978, 165–166; Kareem 1983, 25–26; Hussain 2014a, 30–31). In light of the above, an amphibious poetics which takes “the chronotopicity of language” seriously would read Kappappāṭṭu dialogically by paying attention to the creative exchange between work and life. The dominant chronotope of the ship and its kindred tropes in Kappappāṭṭu open up multiple worlds, including the worlds of its author Kuññāyin, its listeners and readers and the larger “real-life time-space” wherein the poem is anchored (Bakhtin 1981, 252–253). It is these real worlds that created the Kappappāṭṭu, which in turn represented those worlds within it in the manner of mutual constitution, interaction, and even friction. Thus, as Bakhtin says, “the chronotopes of our world” give birth to “the reflected and created chronotopes of the world represented in the work” (1981, 253; original emphasis). Moreover, the ship chronotope in the Mappila literary culture aided the religious and spiritual education among the Mappilas—where Sufi literature such as Hidayat al-adhkiya and Kappappāṭṭu, among other works, served as resources for ethical formation (Muneer 2016, 2022)—while the same religious-spiritual exigencies, in turn, created texts like Hidayat al-adhkiya and Kappappāṭṭu, too. It may be helpful to conclude our discussion with a few remarks on the status of the Kappappāṭṭu within the Mappila literary culture. Mappila literary scholars have hailed the poem as a watershed in the checkered career of the Arabi Malayalam literary tradition from the early seventeenth century onwards (Abu 1970; Moulavi and Kareem 1978; Kareem 1983). In this home-grown historiography, the Kappappāṭṭu is second only to the popular Muhyiddīn Māla, the earliest Arabi Malayalam work still in existence (Abu 1970, 84; Kareem 1983). Running to 600 lines, the Kappappāṭṭu is set in a unique mono-iśal throughout, which later came to be called the iśal-Kappappāṭṭu (the Kappappāṭṭu tune/meter) eponymously. Generations of Arabi Malayalam poets would later vie with each other to employ this iśal—or variations thereof—to perfection, as evidenced by the work of such illustrious nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mappila poets as Mōyinkuṭṭy Vaidyar (d. 1892; cf. Badr Qissappāṭṭu, Malappuram Paṭappāṭṭu, and Husn al-Jamāl-Badr al-Munīr available in Kareem and Abubakkar 2015), Muṇṭampara Uṇṇimammad (d. 1930; cf. Veḷḷappokkam [2015]), Pulikkōṭṭil Haider (d. 1975; cf. Pulikkōṭṭil Kr̥tikaḷ [2021]), and P.T. Bīrānkuṭṭy Moulavi (d. 1957; cf. Hajj Yātrākāvyam [2015])—to cite a representative few. The poem also attracted the attention of European scholar-administrators: for instance, the English civil servant and philologist A.C. Burnell (d. 1882), in his Specimens of South Indian Dialects (1873), describes the Kappalpattu [sic] as “one much in favour and deservedly so” (as qtd. in Kareem 1983, 28). Thus, following the example set by its predecessor, namely Muhyiddīn Māla, early in the seventeenth century, which epitomizes the formation of Arabi Malayalam literary culture, Kuññāyin’s poetry is believed to have ushered in the so-called second wave of “Arabi-Malayalam literarisation” on the Malabar Coast from the 1730s onwards (Arafath 2020, 529). Finally, in a way that further attests to the influence of the ship chronotope and the Kappappāṭṭu on the Mappila literary culture, the Arabic word for ship, safīna (or a corruption thereof, sabīna), has come to serve—metonymically and synecdochically—as the appellation for the Arabi Malayalam song tradition known as māpppiḷappāṭṭukaḷ (Abu 1970, 84–85). The current term māpppiḷappāṭṭukaḷ seems to have gained currency only very recently, around the latter half of the twentieth century, as the Mappila literary historian O. Abu (1970, 84–85) has observed, and until then, the Arabi Malayalam song-poetry more commonly went by the name “safīna- / 246

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast

sabīnappāṭṭukaḷ” after the Kappappāṭṭu.3 Strikingly, in the Arab-Islamic tradition, the term safīna denotes collections of strophic/devotional poetry as well, as Dwight Reynolds (2012, 75–76) and Ines Weinrich (2020, 30–32) have pointed out, and, remarkably, safīna/sabīna is also the name for the Islamic prayerbook on the Malabar Coast, which includes prayers and devotional poems in Arabic and Arabi Malayalam (Muneer 2016, 435–436; Weinrich 2020, 30–32). Much like the ship, the ship chronotope has traveled across regions, cultures, and languages in the Indian Ocean world, often shifting its boundaries and amplifying its semantic shape and charge, as well as lending itself to multiple articulations from the divine sign and ship-body symbolism to names for collections of texts. On the Malabar Coast, Kuññāyin’s Kappappāṭṭu stands out in that it signifies a crucial moment in the long, far-flung, and multifarious peregrinations of the chronotope of the ship across the Indian Ocean world.

Conclusion This chapter has sought to bring the analytic of amphibious poetics built on contemporary maritime studies within the Global South to bear on an analysis of the ship chronotope in the multilingual Arabi Malayalam literary culture of the Malabar Coast in the Indian Ocean world, with a focus on a text, the Kappappāṭṭu, which marks a watershed in the history of that culture spanning centuries of literary production and performance. Combining maritime imagination with Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination—of which the idea of the chronotope is an integral part—I have attempted to illustrate the chronotope of the larger world in the Indian Ocean that Kuññāyin’s ship song has inhabited and from which it has sprung, while also indicating in turn how the poem has helped develop and sustain an amphibious poetics that had been internal to the very architecture of the Arabi Malayalam song-poetry since the Muhyiddīn Māla. More broadly, this chapter suggests that littoral literary cultures—such as that of Malabari Mappilas, which developed along the coasts and riverine hinterlands of southwest India—are best appreciated through a sociological poetics that captures the amphibious character of those cultures where land and sea, roots and routes, and the local and the global intersect with and co-produce each other. Such analytics call into question the insularity of a terrestrial imagination underlying the pursuit of world literature in our times, notwithstanding the supposed capaciousness of “world” and “literature” as heuristic categories.

Notes 1 I follow the Arabi Malayalam text of the Kappappāṭṭu (printed at the Nurul Hidaya Press, Ponnani) available in Hussain 2014a, pp. 123–140. 2 A Malayalam māppiḷappāṭṭu written by the noted contemporary Mappila lyricist, Bāppu Veḷḷippaṟampu. See www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=oTiooQKg​_RE. 3 Another Mappila literary historian, K.K. Abdul Kareem (1983, 29–30) has, however, suggested that the word safīna/sabīna is a corruption of the Persian shabīna (“nocturnal”) rather than the Arabic safina (“ship”) and alludes to the nightly devotions central to the formation of Arabi Malayalam literary culture (cf. Muneer 2016, 435–436).

Works Cited Abu, O. Arabi Malayala Sahitya Charitram [A History of Arabi Malayalam Literature]. Sāhitya Pravarttaka Sahakaraṇa Saṅgham, 1970. Abubakkar, K. “avatārika [Foreword].” kuññāyin musliyāruṭe kappappāṭṭu: oru dārśanika paṭhanam [A Philosophical Study of Kuññāyin Musliyār’s Kappappāṭṭu]” by P. Sakkeer Hussain, Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2014, pp. 17–24.

247

A.K. Muneer Agius, Dionysius A. Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean. Brill, 2007. Arafath, P.K. Yasser. “Polyglossic Malabar: Arabi-Malayalam and the Muhiyuddinmala in the Age of Transition (1600s–1750s).” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 30, no. 3, 2020, pp. 517–539. ———. “Malabar Ulema in the Shafiite Cosmopolis: Fitna, Piety and Resistance in the Age of Fasad.” The Medieval History Journal, vol. 21, no. 1, 2018, pp. 25–68. Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. UT Press, 1981. Bemong, Nele and Pieter, Borghart. “State of the Art: Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives.” Bakhtin’s Theory of the Literary Chronotope: Reflections, Applications, Perspectives, edited by Bemong Nele et al. Academia Press, 2010. Bose, Sugata. A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire. Harvard UP, 2006. Braginsky, Vladimir I. …And Sails the Boat Downstream. Malay Sufi Poems of the Boat. Dept of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, University of Leiden, 2007. ———. “Sufi Boat Symbolism: Problems of Origin and Evolution.” Indonesia and the Malay World, vol. 26, no. 74, 1998, pp. 50–64. ———. “A Preliminary Reconstruction of the Rencong Version of ‘Poem of the Boat.’” Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, vol. 77, 1988, pp. 263–301. Chakravarty, Ranabir. “Seafarings, Ships and Shipowners: India and the Indian Ocean (AD 700–1500).” Ships and the Development of Maritime Technology on the Indian Ocean. Edited by David Parkin and Ruth Barnes, Routledge, 2016, pp. 28–61. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and Tatiana Flores. “Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art.” Environmental Humanities, vol. 12, no. 1, 2020, pp. 132–166. Freeman, Rich. “Genre and Society: The Literary Culture of Premodern Kerala.” Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia, edited by Sheldon Pollock, University of California Press, 2003, pp. 437–500. Ganguly, Debjani. “Oceanic Comparativism and World Literature.” The Cambridge History of World Literature, edited by Debjani Ganguly, Cambridge UP, 2021, pp. 429–457. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. LU Press, 2020. Gurnah, Abdulrazak. By The Sea. Bloomsbury, 2021 [2001]. Haider, Pulikkōṭṭil. Pulikkōṭṭil Krtikaḷ [The Works of Pulikkōṭṭil], 3rd edition, edited by M.N. Karasseri. Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2021. Harbus, Antonina. “The maritime imagination and the paradoxical mind in Old English poetry.” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 39, 2011, pp. 21–42. Ho, Engseng. The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. UC Press, 2006. Hofmeyr, Isabel. “Universalizing the Indian Ocean.” PMLA, vol. 125 no. 3, 2010, pp. 721–29. Holquist, Michael. Dialogism: Bakhtin and his World. Routledge, 2002. Hussain, P. Sakkeer.  kuññāyin musliyāruṭe kappappāṭṭu: oru dārśanika paṭhanam [A Philosophical Study of Kuññāyin Musliyār’s Kappappāṭṭu]. Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2014a. ———. kuññāyin musliyāruṭe nūlmadh: kavitayum kālavum [Kuññāyin Musliyār's Nūlmadh: Text and Context]. Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2014b. Hussain, P. Sakkeer and K.K. Abdul Kareem. nūlmāla: moḻiyum poruḷum [Nūlmāla: Text and Meaning]. KK. Muhammaed Abdul Kareem Foundation, 2015. Ilias, M.H., and Shamshad Hussain. Arabi-Malayalam: Linguistic and Cultural Traditions of Mappila Muslims of Kerala. Gyan, 2017. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Creole Indias, Creolizing Pondicherry: Ari Gautier’s Le thinnai as the Archipelago of Fragments.” Comparative Literature, vol. 74, no. 2, 2022, pp. 202–218. Kareem, K.K. Abdul. Rasikaśirōmaṇi Kuññāyin Musliyārude Kappappāṭṭum Nūlmadhum [Kappappāṭṭu and Nūlmadh by the Witty Kuññāyin Musliyār]. Al-Aman Kitab Bhavan, 1983. Kareem, K.K. Abdul and K. Abubakkar. mahākavi moyinkutty vaidyaruṭe sampūrṇṇa krtikaḷ [The Complete Works of Moyinkutty Vaidyar]. 3 vols. Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2015. Keunen, Bart. Time and Imagination: Chronotopes in Western Narrative Culture. Northwestern University Press, 2011. Kooria, Mahmood. Islamic Law in Circulation: Shafi'i Texts across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Cambridge UP, 2022.

248

Amphibious Poetics on the Malabar Coast ———. “Introduction.” Malabar in the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism in a Maritime Historical Region, edited by Mahmood Kooria and Michael Pearson, Oxford UP, 2018, pp. xv–xxvii. Kunhali, V. Sufism in Kerala. University of Calicut, 2004. McCaughan, Michael. “Symbolism of Ships and the Sea: From Ship of the Church to Gospel Trawler.” Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies, vol. 40, no. 1, 2001, pp. 54–61. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Duke UP, 2018. Miller, Roland E. Mappila Muslim Culture: How a Historic Muslim Community in India Has Blended Tradition and Modernity. State University of New York Press, 2015. Moorthy, Shanti, and Ashraf Jamal. “Introduction: New Conjunctures in Maritime Imaginaries.” Indian Ocean Studies: Cultural, Social, and Political Perspectives, edited by Shanti Moorthy and Ashraf Jamal, Routledge, 2010, pp. 1–31. Moulavi, C.N. Ahmad and K.K. Abdul Kareem. Mahattāya Mappila Sāhitya Pāramparyam [The Great Mappila Literary Tradition]. Published by Authors, 1978. Moulavi, P.T. Bīrānkuṭṭy. Hajj Yātrākāvyam [The Hajj Travelogue in Verse]. Mahakavi Moyinkutty Vaidyar Mappila Kala Academy, 2015. Muneer, A.K. “Devotional Contextures: The Māla Songs and Muslim Ethical Formation in Contemporary Kerala.” Contemporary South Asia, vol. 30, no. 4, 2022, pp. 551–567. ———. “Poetics of Piety: Genre, Self-Fashioning, and the Mappila Lifescape.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 26, no. 3, 2016, pp. 423–441. ———. “Poetics of Piety: Genre, Devotion, and Self-Fashioning in the Mappila Literary Culture of South India.” The English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad, PhD dissertation, 2015. Ohlander, Erik S. Sufism in an Age of Transition: ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi and the Rise of the Islamic Mystical Brotherhoods. Brill, 2008. Pearson, Michael. The Indian Ocean. Routledge, 2003. ———. “Littoral Society: The Concept and the Problem.” Journal of World History, vol. 17, no. 4, 2006, pp. 353–373. ———. “Littoral Society: The Case for the Coast.” The Great Circle, vol. 7, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–8. Pokkanali, Jahfar Shareef. “Sailing Across Duniyāv: Sufi Ship–Body Symbolism from the Malabar Coast, South India.” South Asian Studies, vol. 36, no. 2, 2020, pp. 125–138. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 2007. Ricci, Ronit. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia. University of Chicago Press, 2011. Ramanujan, A.K. “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.” The Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, edited by Vinay Dharwadker, Oxford India Paperbacks, 2004, pp. 131–160. Randathani, Hussain. Makhdūmum and Ponnaniyum [Makhdūms and Ponnani]. Ponnani Juma Masjid Committee, 2014. Samuelson, Meg. “The Oceans.” Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures, vol. 13, edited by S. Helgesson, B. Neumann, and G. Rippl, Walter de Gruyter, 2020, pp. 375–393. ———. “Coastal Form: Amphibian Positions, Wider Worlds, and Planetary Horizons on the African Indian Ocean Littoral.” Comparative Literature, vol. 69, no. 1, 2017, pp. 16–24. ———. “Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Fictions of the Swahili Coast: Littoral Locations and Amphibian Aesthetics.” Social Dynamics, vol. 38, no. 3, 2012, pp. 499–515. Schimmel, Annemarie. Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of North Carolina P, 1975. Scholes, Robert, James Phelan, and Robert Kellogg. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford UP, 2006. Thompson, Lanny. “The Chronotopes of Archipelagic Thinking: Glissant and the Narrative of Philosophy.” Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Toward New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations, edited by Michelle Stephens and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Rowman & Littlefield, 2020, pp. 109–130. Uṇṇimammad, Muṇṭampara. Veḷḷappokkam [Flood]. Edited by K.M. Abdulla and M.U. Abinsha. Areacode Grama Panchayath, 2015. Vink, MPM. “Indian Ocean Studies and the ‘new thalassology.’” Journal of Global History, vol. 2, no. 1, 2007, pp. 41–62. Weinrich, Ines. “From the Arab Lands to the Malabar Coast: The Arabic Mawlid as a Literary Genre and a Traveling Text.” Entangled Religions, vol. 11, no. 5, 2020, pp. 1–39. West-Pavlov, Russell. 2018. The Global South and Literature. Cambridge UP, 2018. Zainuddin ibn Ali, Shaikh. Hidayat al-adhkiya ila tariqil al-awliya. Amirul Islam Press, 1994.

249

22 THE GUANTÁNAMO GRAPHIC NOVELS Towards a Carceral Imperialism Pramod K. Nayar In the story of Alka Pradhan in Guantánamo Voices, Pradhan describes the system put in place by the US government: We created an entire new legal system for brown men. If these were white men from France or Germany, there is no way Guantánamo Bay would exist. There is no way we would have gotten away with being able to create a prison camp on land that’s not our territory specifically for the purpose of not applying our laws. (140) The above lines delivered in a story placed toward the end of the volume are the departure point for this chapter. Pradhan is speaking of the spatial organization of races and the racialization of space. This chapter argues that Gitmo, as represented in two graphic texts, Sarah Mirk’s Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison (2020, hereafter GV) and Jérôme Tubiana and Alexandre Franc’s Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani (2019, hereafter GK) instantiates a new form of neoimperial domination of the Global South by the Global North, specifically the United States: carceral imperialism. This carceral imperialism has three components as discernible in the graphic texts. First, the Gitmo graphic novels depict the Global North–Global South encounter as a corporealized one, with the inmates beaten, traumatized, starved, and humiliated. This corporealized encounter is aligned with a certain subhumanization and ghosting of the humans from the Global South. The confinement of the ‘terror suspects’ is also, as the texts imply, the confinement of their (white) wardens, and both the inmates and the guards are dehumanized. Second, the inmates occupy a state of limbo, with their experience of ‘timelessness’ and ‘stuckness’. Time in Gitmo makes little sense, as the inmates are invariably interred for many years, several in solitary confinement. Their patience, frustrations, and strange experience of time become a major theme in the Gitmo graphic novels. Third, the texts propose a certain spatial organization of the world in terms of the US-controlled carceral system, specifically in the construction and functioning of Gitmo. Territories in different parts of the world are transformed into ‘black sites’ for US army personnel to operate with impu250

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-25

The Guantánamo Graphic Novels

nity, clearly signaling a new geography of military operations but also of a globalizing carceral mechanism. Mirk’s Guantánamo Voices is a collection of ten biographies of people interred in Gitmo. The biographies, by different writers and artists, document their arrests, their experience of Gitmo, and in some cases, life after release. Franc’s Guantánamo Kid is the story of one teenage boy, El-Gharani, whose life turns upside down when he is picked up as a terrorist and taken to Gitmo.

Dehumanization and ghosting In GK, the problem of identity begins very early, when Gharani takes on a false name and nationality in order to cross into Pakistan. He becomes Yousef Abkir Saleh, a Chadian. As he puts it: ‘That fake name was the beginning of my problems with the Americans’. The image accompanying this text shows Gharani looking at his passport. His shadow behind him is outlined against the backlit window frame, which is a crisscross of, perhaps, an iron grill. The effect is a proleptic image: it suggests the shadow is literally ensnared in, and behind, bars. It anticipates his incarceration, or rather, the incarceration of his double, Yousef Abkir Saleh. This image is not confined in a panel, although his shadow is shown as confined. Then, at the bottom right there is an image of an official-looking document that identifies him as Yousef Abkir Saleh Al Gharani. The shadow behind bars is metaphorically the nonhuman Gharani, reduced to someone other than Gharani: an Al-Qaeda operative, a terrorist. Dehumanization is the order of the day in Gitmo and operates at two levels – perpetrators/ oppressors and victims. Gitmo is the space of a racially organized dehumanization, where both the white/American wardens and torturers and their victims/prisoners from the Global South are reduced to these identities alone. In GK, this begins with the transportation of the inmates to Gitmo. They are transported with hooded heads: ‘they covered our eyes and ears with masks’ (30). They sit on the floor of the helicopter in a row, all hooded figures, already unrecognizable as individuals (31). Upon arrival, the first words the inmates hear are: You’re terrorists, criminals, we’re going to kill you ! You fucking nigger!

(31)

Gharani says: ‘It was the first time I heard the N-word’ (31). The images accompanying the text show them being practically pushed and dragged from the helicopter, the white soldiers holding them in a vice-like grip. Abusing them, the white soldiers smile gleefully. The three pages dealing with transportation to and arrival in Gitmo offer us considerable food for thought. First, there is the hooding and shackling. Hooding, writes Stephen Eisenman in The Abu Ghraib Effect, enabled the ‘elimination of their human and social identity’ (28). The individuals become just meat for the wardens to do with whatever they want. Second, the use of the derogatory ‘nigger’ epithet in Gitmo is a powerful message to the Arab inmates. The portability of derogatory racial descriptors from Africans/African Americans to Arabs signals the collapse of racial and cultural differences, homogenizing all victims of white racisms into one social group. Third, when inmates like Gharani return the abuse with some of their own – Gharani head butts a guard and breaks his tooth, and calls them ‘Honky’ and ‘white trash’ (32) – the dehumanization of both guard and prisoner is complete. 251

Pramod K. Nayar

In the first images of Gharani being beaten, one in particular stands out. The narrow panel shows Gharani, hands tied behind him, face down on the floor. His face is contorted in pain. His neck is held tightly by a hand, in a throttle grip. The hand holding him down is disembodied. The image draws just the hand, from the forearm downward, ending in the grip on his neck. The perpetrator is solely identified by his strong arm and grip, and nothing else. The disembodiment of the perpetrator is matched by the dehumanization of the victim here. By drawing this dehumanization in a narrower panel than usual, symbolically capturing the claustrophobic space of the prison, Tubiana and Franc seem to suggest a confinement of both victim and perpetrator within one common space. Torsa Ghosal proposes in her reading of comics from the Global South that the surface of the page presents the landscape where the ‘struggle of the local population to find an inhabitable space…is staged on the page as topos’ (187). Building on Ghosal’s argument, I have argued that the panel can now be read a topos of witnessing. In this topos, there is no attempt at objective or distanced witnessing, but neither is there a solitary witness. (2021: 124) Here, Gharani is the sole experiential and therefore primary witness to whatever happens in the torture/interrogation chamber or his cell – which corresponds spatially, the way it is drawn in this specific instance, to the panel – which then is the space of the interracial encounter. The Global South, embodied in Gharani (Arab and ‘nigger’) prostrate and immobilized on the floor, encounters the spectral, detached hand of the Global North. The panel is the topos of the dehumanizing encounter of two races, two cultures, and two geopolitical regions. Throughout GK are panels full of violence and abuse documenting the systematic dehumanization of Gharani and others: he is beaten, shouted at, force-fed (when he goes on a fast), threatened, and segregated. In GV, we see another mode of dehumanization: ghosting. The inmates are not human because they are ‘ghost detainees’, a term employed through the multiple stories narrated in the volume. One of the first clues regarding this ghosting of persons comes from an inferential moment. The panel depicts US Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor pronouncing a judgment that ‘indefinite detention…is not authorized’ (GV 50). On the top of the panel, the text tells us that the ‘court held that foreigners imprisoned in Guantánamo had the right to habeas corpus’ (50). The habeas corpus, literally, ‘you shall have the body’, treated the prisoner as a flesh-and-blood person. The trick with Gitmo was, there was no record of such a person. The next panel is particularly frightening in its ghosting of the inmate: The Bush administration refused to reveal who was imprisoned in Guantánamo. Lawyers couldn’t file suit on behalf of a person without knowing his name. (50) The image depicts an outline, a transparent one at that, of a person inside a prison cell. ‘It’ is a ghost, not a person. The topos of the cell is a place, then, first of disappearance – those who are interred there disappear from the world, and even the panel does not show the person as a flesh-and-blood person. Second, this disappearance is a ghosting, as whoever he is, loses cohesion, identity, personhood. Gitmo is the space of ghosting, an apparatus devoted to the production of ghosts. 252

The Guantánamo Graphic Novels

Avery Gordon in her reading of the spectral argues that the arrival of the ghost is the arrival of a ‘social figure’. It calls attention, Gordon continues, to ‘modernity’s violence and wounds… about systematic injury in the social world’ (24–5). Gordon’s definition is apposite for Gitmo: it is systematic injury inflicted on racially marked individuals. In Gitmo, those from the Global South are ghosted, in a powerful echo of the established conventions of the dark-skinned persons being invisibilized. In Gitmo, they are first identified and isolated as threatening dark-skinned Arabs/ Muslims and then disappeared. In Pradhan’s story, she underscores the racial dimensions that produced Gitmo: Racism is the reason for it [Gitmo]. And nobody wants to talk about that. If a white man had been waterboarded, I guarantee you that everyone would at least acknowledge that it’s torture. (140) Thomas Wilner narrating his story of the Gitmo prisoners discovers that he cannot legally help and represent them: ‘It’s a very weird situation to represent someone you haven’t met’. When he arrives at Gitmo he seeks to meet the prisoner, the scene goes like this: Wilner: I’m here to meet with prisoner 232 Guard: Who’s that? Wilner: Uh…I’m not allowed to say his name. You’re supposed to know their numbers. (99) As in the Nazi camps, the numbering is an act of depersonalizing and ghosting the individual in Gitmo as well. When Mark Fallon, former Chief of Middle East Counterintelligence Operations for Naval Criminal Investigative Service, narrates his Gitmo experience, he tells us how he arrived at the prison expecting the ‘big Al-Qaeda guys’ (27). When he assesses the persons inside, he is shocked and exclaims None of these guys are on our list. Who are these guys?

(28, emphasis in original)

He understands that several innocent Afghani men had been handed over to the United States in exchange for huge cash rewards: those in prison were not Al-Qaeda. But there are also no records as to who they really are (captured in Fallon’s outraged query). The few they identified (‘Abu Zubaydah’, for example) ‘to the outside world, they’d just disappeared’ (37). These, says Fallon, are the ‘ghost detainees’ (37). Moazzam Begg, one of the inmates narrating his story tells us as he watches a fellow inmate being tortured, ‘We’re no longer people…we’re numbers’ (77). In the case of Gharani, when his case comes up for hearing, Justice Richard J. Leon notes that the ‘mosaic of tiles bearing images this murky reveals nothing about the petitioner with sufficient clarity’ (104). The statement serves as a metaphoric echo of the ghosting: all US documents are ‘murky’, and do not offer a clear picture of the inmate (Gharani). This lack of clarity is itself a ghosting: there is no concrete, clear, and unambiguous ‘portrait’ of the alleged terrorist in the US documents. This suggests that the US government is uncertain of the person that is Gharani: even to them he is unknown, mysterious, a ghost of someone they wish to hunt down. That is, Gharani 253

Pramod K. Nayar

in this text is a ghost or shadow of someone else. From the false name that implicates him to the ‘murky’ picture in the government documents, Gharani remains an uncanny echo of a ‘wanted’ person.

Waiting, stuckness, and stuckedness GV is marked by the theme of waiting. Held without being charged and without a trial, most of the inmates are stuck in Gitmo. In Mark Fallon’s account, Abu Zubaydah remains in Gitmo, although ‘he has never been charged with a crime’ (41). Other inmates such as Fouzi Al Oda, again, ‘never charged with a crime’, spend 13 years in custody, notes Wilner (100). The releases of others are endlessly delayed, records Alka Pradhan (142). In some cases, after the hope of being released, they are reincarcerated, and ‘they’re stuck for years’ (155). Emad in the Pradhan story from GV is described thus Stuck in limbo, Emad protested with the only tool he had: his body.

(140)

‘You are thrown into another dimension’, says one inmate to Hazel Newlevant (176). This perhaps captures the experience of Gitmo: another dimension where laws, time, and space cease to matter, perhaps even exist. There are two related components that operate in this other dimension: mobility and waiting. Those from the Global South interred in Gitmo are humans denied all mobility. From the incarceration in the prison to ‘confinement’ boxes (small boxes into which the inmates were forced, spending hours in extremely stressful and constricted/contorted positions, GV 40), the aim is the denial of mobility. The second, perhaps more psychologically debilitating, dimension is the interminable waiting, a condition of being in ‘limbo’, as another inmate is described. To be in limbo is to experience what Liene Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald calls ‘incapacitating waiting’ (2016: 457). In many nations, especially in countries in the Global South but also the former Soviet Union and the Balkan states, ‘many of the most vulnerable individuals in society are kept in a limbo’, endlessly awaiting welfare and state support (467). The inmates are subjugated in space (carceral) and in time (waiting). The endless waiting for charges to be filed, to be given a lawyer, to be produced in court, to be given access to their families, and, in some cases, to be released is a part of the carceral process in Gitmo. The wait is incapacitating and, as Javier Auyero argues in his work on the politics of waiting in Argentina, constitutes the ‘temporal processes in and through which political subordination is reproduced’ (2). Auyero elaborates: Domination works, we contend, through yielding to the power of others; and it is experienced as a waiting time: waiting hopefully and then frustratedly for others to make decisions, and in effect surrendering to the authority of others. (4) All the inmates are shown, at some point, sitting or lying quietly in their cells, with nothing to do, staring at the ceiling. The abject nature of their waiting, its tenure, is a form of racially determined political subjugation. (To incapacitate through waiting, however, also includes other forms of incapacitation – such as torture.) 254

The Guantánamo Graphic Novels

To keep the Arabs/Muslims/Global South ‘locked up forever’, as Steve Cambone, an ‘undersecretary of defense for intelligence’ puts it to Morris Davis, the Chief Prosecutor for the Military Commissions, is really the purpose of constructing Gitmo. We see Abu Zaydah spotlighted in his cell, huddled on the floor (GV 41). We see Shaker, a mere ghostly figure in the darkness of his cell/ panel, ‘in solitary for over a year’ (GK 79). In GV’s opening story, we are told: Of those 40 people [in Gitmo], the U.S. has only charged nine with crimes… They’re just…waiting. For years.

(10)

Morris Davis comments that ‘if you’re never charged with a war crime, you may still be sitting there ten years later with no end in sight’ (114). The image accompanying this text captures the stuckness of the inmate powerfully. There is no panel here, and the image is coterminous with the page border. On the right is the inmate, sitting huddled on a mattress. The window behind him, he himself, and a little square of the floor are lit. The rest of the panel is completely dark, colored jet black. It heightens the isolation and desolation of the inmate in his cell, marooned, it appears, in a sea of inky blackness. Andrew Jefferson et al propose: stuckness…refer[s] to the way confinement is experienced, sensed and lived. The experience of stuckness is not simply an expression of physical confinement and spatial closure but expresses the way people make sense of confining dynamics and practices. To be stuck is a quality (not simply an effect or a product), we argue, of confined lives worthy of further exploration…Similarly, stuckness seems to imply spatial immobility – people are stuck somewhere. Mobility, too, is a spatial metaphor, linking movement in space with freedom of choice, political agency and social potentialities, and implying that immobility leads to the opposite: un-freedom, lack of political agency and social stagnation. (2019: 2–3) For those from the Global South, there is no mobility or agency, only stuckness. In this, Gitmo is an enactment and reiteration of one of the most consistent stereotypes of the Orient by the European world. In Edward Said’s words, the Orient in the European imagination and discourse was static, frozen, fixed eternally. The very possibility of development, transformation, human movement—in the deepest sense of the word—is denied the Orient and the Oriental. As a known and ultimately an immobilized or unproductive quality, they come to be identified with a bad sort of eternality (1978: 209) Gitmo enables the literal enactment of the stereotype in its most extreme form: the stuckness of the Arab/Muslim/Oriental, with no agency and experiencing varying degrees of pain and humiliation. Their stuckness is engendered precisely because they have been accused of (but not proven) excessive mobility and agency. They are, in the eyes of their oppressors (Americans) far too destructively agential. They have traveled between nations, between groups (Al-Qaeda and Islamic organizations in Pakistan), and between people. The American response to the inmates’ alleged agency is to term their mobility as excess, and their agency as more than is warranted. Perhaps indicative of a colonial-legacy trope where mobility was the characteristic solely of the white race, the very 255

Pramod K. Nayar

idea that these Arabs/Muslims/Orientals traveled is sufficient to treat this agency-of-mobility as excessive and suspect. In Gitmo, they come under one rubric, ‘terrorists’. Even if barely adult, juvenile, they are ‘very, very dangerous people’, a ‘terrorist team’, in the words of Geoffrey Miller, Commander, Joint Task Force, Gitmo (GK 99). It would not be too imaginative to argue that the Gitmo inmates are synecdochic for their religion, culture, and people in their stuckness, so that the Global South itself, as embodied (again synecdochically) in the Muslim world, is incapacitated, humiliated, and immobilized in a specific space. (I shall return to matters of space later.) That said, in GK, Gharani abuses, fights, and beats up his wardens. He makes them laugh and laughs at them. The other inmates throw things at the wardens in GV (51, 123). Even in the extreme states of deprivation and pain integral to their situation, the inmates at Gitmo morph stuckness into stuckedness. Ghassan Hage refers to the ‘stuckedness’ of those who remain stuck in their jobs or those who ‘wait out’ a crisis since there is nothing else to be done, seeing ‘stuckedness’ as a sign of heroism: the heroism of stuckedness lies in this ability to snatch agency in the very midst of its lack. This is what the notion of endurance implies: asserting some agency over the very fact that one has no agency by not succumbing and becoming a mere victim and an object in circumstances that are conspiring to make a total agentless victim and object out of you. (101) Hage sees the endurance and waiting forced on people as a new form of governmentality, designed to force citizens into greater and greater degrees of self-control. In Gitmo, the waiting generates a sense of ‘stuckedness’ but also an agency within that stuckedness. In small, perhaps insignificant ways, there is still a measure of agential control that the detainees assert.

Carceral imperialism and the Global South When GV opens, we are given some specifics about Gitmo Guantánamo Bay Naval Base An American military base on Cuban land

(x)

Later we are told how a ‘makeshift refugee jail was turned into Camp X-Ray’ and it ‘became the most infamous prison in the world’ (9). Gitmo is a part of the Global South, being Cuban land, and yet not. In addition to Gitmo, there are references to ‘black sites’ in Poland, Romania, and other territories in GV. Several points about this space-beyond-space are foregrounded in these texts. First, Gitmo and other ‘black sites’ exist outside known laws. Humanitarian laws, Geneva Conventions, and such do not operate in Gitmo, as numerous ‘voices’ in GV indicate. The US government made this possible by enacting legal terminology like ‘enemy combatants’ and apparatuses like the Military Commissions, for those interred in Gitmo. Second, Gitmo is a space where the dehumanization of the inmates, already discussed above, takes extreme forms. Caged, the inmates are left without any shelter from the elements (GK 39). 256

The Guantánamo Graphic Novels

Leashed, in the notorious Lynndie England photograph from Abu Ghraib, which is drawn in GV along with the ‘“Gilligan” image (48–9), recalls a long tradition…in the discourses characterizing criminals in animal terms’ because ‘the deviation of crime from “normal” civilized behaviour is often seen as monstrous and therefore beast-like’ (Fludernik 2019: 284). The images are cast as blood-red drawings of the events in Abu Ghraib – the only pages/images in this lurid color in the volume, itself drawing attention. These insets from Abu Ghraib illuminate Gitmo, as it were, just as Gitmo is an iteration of Abu Ghraib. But this is not all. There are references to similar torture spaces in other parts of the world (all operated by the United States). We are shown images from ‘brutal prisons at U.S. military bases at Kandahar and Bagram’ (23). Mark Fallon says: ‘the President [of the United States] authorized the CIA to kidnap people, giving them to other countries to be tortured’ (GV 34). Gharani is first interrogated and tortured in a Pakistani prison by American soldiers (GK 24–6), and later in Kandahar, Afghanistan (31–5). If Al-Qahtani is tortured in Gitmo, Abu Zubaydah is tortured in ‘a black site in Poland’ (39). In the story of Moazzem Begg, we are shown Bagram prison, Afghanistan. We are told by Fallon that President Bush signed an order permitting the CIA to interrogate people. The signature of the President of the United States, in burgundy ink, is at the foot of this panel. Beneath this panel, we see the following words: ‘The CIA and U.S. allies were covertly arresting and interrogating people at “black sites” – clandestine prisons hidden around the world’. Mark Fallon describes these other sites: The U.S. held people on other countries’ soil partly to avoid having to declare the prisoners’ existence to the International Red Cross, which insists on basic rights for prisoners. (36) The accompanying image is terrifying in how it thematizes the torture space. The inmate, Al-Qahtani, is drawn suspended by his hands. There is no panel framing this image, and the human appears suspended like in a magic trick, in empty space. The entire space here is white, and the inmate is in his orange suit. Inscribed over his hands, almost like a supporting column or structure for handcuffs, is a scrawled signature, which we know from the previous panel, is that of President Bush. Al-Qahtani appears to be suspended from Bush’s signature. The stark emptiness in which he is suspended gives the impression that he is at once everywhere and nowhere. By erasing any walls, or specific markers of any prison, Gerardo Alba’s image instills more horror than it would if we could identify the location and space. This (torture) is an event without a location precisely because it could be anywhere. These texts gesture at what Clare Anderson in her work on British penal settlements in the colonial period describes as the ‘global repertoire of carcerality’ where ‘penal sites were mutually constituted: they had influence over and were influenced by one another, and prisoners, convicts and officials experienced, viewed and moved around them as a set of linked sites’ (2016: 430). There are two dimensions to this spatialized ‘global repertoire of carcerality’. One, the United States, the principal participant in the coalition in the ‘War on Terror’, is literally writ large across multiple geopolitical spaces of the Global South in the form of ‘linked sites’ of torture and incarceration in Iraq, Pakistan, Cuba, and Afghanistan (in addition to such sites in Europe). Thus the ‘global repertoire of carcerality’ is a networked penal system where the Global South is colonized by ‘Camps’, black sites, and interrogation-torture sites. That the United States’s soldiers, CIA officers, and interrogators have the run of these sites, including Pakistani prisons (GK) signals a new form of imperialism, a carceral imperialism, over the Global South. Carceral imperialism as embodied in the Gitmo texts enables the Global North, especially the United States, to kidnap, arrest, incarcerate, torture, and execute ‘enemy combatants’, ‘very, very 257

Pramod K. Nayar

dangerous people’, and ‘terrorists’ from any country of the Global South at their ‘black sites’ scattered across the world. Perceived and presented as threats to the United States, even the specialists picked for the job of interrogation and torture, have received their training in the Global South. As Michael Dunlavy, appointed to Gitmo Joint Task Force’s interrogations, says to his team, ‘I was in ‘Nam, I know how to do interrogations’ (GV 31), suggesting that he had earned his spurs in another Global South country wherein the United States had intervened. Space in the Gitmo texts, as we can see, instantiates this carceral imperialism. When Al-Qahtani hangs in free space it becomes a metaphor for this form of imperialism, the conquest of all available space. There is one further instance of carceral imperialism in the Gitmo texts. After 15 years in Gitmo, Mansoor Adayfi is released, and ‘sent to live in Serbia, a country he had never been to’ (128). The resettlement component of carceral imperialism consists of the United States’s ability to send off any released prisoners to any other country that agrees to accept them – not the country of their origin or of their choice. If ‘repatriation…is not possible, another country has to agree to take him in’, says Alka Pradhan about the inmates (135). Omar Khalifa Mohammed Abu Bakr and Salem Abdul Salem Ghereby, from Libya, after being released are resettled in Senegal. It was not an option: ‘stay in the prison indefinitely or be sent to Senegal’ (161). In Senegal, they lived uncertain lives because ‘they could be tossed out at any moment’ (162). The American assigning of new spaces of habitation – which are not spaces of belonging – for the freed detainees through an arrangement with pliant nations documented in these texts demonstrates the complete and vicelike grip the Global North exercises over the geopolitics of the Global South, including African, Arab, and South Asian nations.1

Conclusion Carceral imperialism is very clearly raced. In this model of imperialism, Muslims can be picked up from any part of the world, and incarcerated in US black sites and prisons in designated spaces (which are therefore not very distinct from the penal settlements of the British Empire) in other parts of the world. The intensive quest for and incarceration of the Muslims and declared terrorists is what Loïc Wacquant calls ‘hyperincarceration’. Wacquant identifies the following properties of hyperincarceration: They have been finely targeted, first by class, second by that disguised brand of ethnicity called race, and third by place…This cumulative targeting has led to the hyperincarceration of one particular category, lower-class African American men trapped in the crumbling ghetto, while leaving the rest of society – including, most remarkably, middle- and upperclass African Americans – practically untouched. Third, and more important still, this triple selectivity is a constitutive property of the phenomenon (2010: 78, emphasis in original) Gitmo, like Abu Ghraib, is a carceral designed in the wake of 9/11 for a specific class, race, and ‘type’ of person. Hyperincarceration as embodied in Gitmo as a carceral space, is made tragically clear in the graphic narratives. The focused targeting of Muslim individuals, the calculated insults to Islam within Gitmo, exemplified in the narratives by the guards’ disrespect towards the Holy Koran (GK 62), and the mocking of the inmates when they pray (GK 48) are race-based abuse. Gharani, while being slapped, is told: ‘You’re just a slave! We bought you from the Pakistanis!’ (42). The words recall the slave trade, its geographical specificity, the forced relocation of Africans, 258

The Guantánamo Graphic Novels

and the systematic abuse they were subject to in the ‘New World’. With the iteration of this nomenclature, the guard at Gitmo aligns the hyperincarceration of the present-day Muslim with the older race-based system. The Gitmo texts evidence the distinction between the two worlds (Global South and North) and the space of their encounter as violent, oppressive, and racialized.

Note 1 Nicholas Mirzoeff makes the important point that an ‘imperial regime of sodomy’, calculated to humiliate the Arab sexual mores, was a component of the tortures (2006: 36).

Works Cited Anderso, Clare. ‘Convicts, Carcerality and Cape Colony Connections in the 19th Century’, Journal of Southern African Studies 42.3 (2016): 429–442. Auyero, Javier. Patients of the State: The Politics of Waiting in Argentina. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Eisenman, Stephen F. The Abu Ghraib Effect. London: Reaktion, 2007. Fludernik, Monika. Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy Oxford. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hage, Ghassan. ‘Waiting Out the Crisis: On Stuckedness and Governmentality’, in Hage (ed) Waiting. University of Melbourne Press, 2009. 97–106. Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Jefferson, Alexander, Simon Turner and Steffen Jensen. ‘Introduction: On Stuckness and Sites of Confinement’, Ethnos 84.1 (2019): 1–13. Mirk, Sarah. Ed. Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2020. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. ‘Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib’, Radical History Review 95 (2006): 21–44. Nayar, Pramod K. The Human Rights Graphic Novel: Drawing it Just Right. London and New York: Routledge, 2021. Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, Lieme. ‘A State of Limbo: The Politics of Waiting in Neo-Liberal Latvia’, British Journal of Sociology 67.3 (2016): 456–475. Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Penguin, 1978. Tubiana, Jérôme and Alexandre Franc. Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani. London: SelfMadeHero, 2019. Wacquant, Loïc. ‘Class, Race & Hyperincarceration in Revanchist America’, Dædalus 139.3 (2010): 74–90.

259

23 EXPLORING DIGITAL ARCHIVES Vieques on the Internet and Yabureibo in the Global South Juan Carlos Rodríguez To Carmelo, Orlando, Carmen, and Manolín Algorithms such as those used to generate Spanish closed captions in YouTube videos are unable to recognize the sound of the word “Vieques” and reproduce it as text. Every time someone says Vieques in a YouTube video, the Spanish closed caption delivers a gibberish text. For computers, Vieques seems incomprehensible, a name that cannot be processed by machines. In contrast, for US Navy Vice Admiral G.R. Kinnear, commander of the Atlantic Fleet’s Naval Air Force, Vieques used to be irreplaceable, “the only place in the Atlantic where we can come close to simulating realistic combat conditions for the carriers and practice strike warfare” (“Navy Training” 44–45). If this island in the eastern part of Puerto Rico was so important for the Navy, why then was Vieques excluded from the recently published history of this military branch (US Navy)? The Navy’s silence on Vieques can be explained because Vieques is considered as one of the most embarrassing defeats suffered by the US military forces. The Vieques struggle, an important victory for social movements fighting demilitarization, is barely known, even in the context of Global South studies, which claims to provide a framework for the understanding of global popular struggles (Prashad 9). The fact that YouTube algorithms do not recognize the name of Vieques does not help to make the struggle of its people more visible, but it also suggests that unpacking the history of this island on the internet involves paying attention to the silences and layers of opacity that give shape to what Alfred López has called “an-other history” (487). The purpose of this chapter is twofold: first, to understand the relevance of the Vieques struggle (silenced by the Navy, incomprehensible for algorithms, missing in key academic discussions) in the context of Global South literature; and second, to explore the social meanings, practices, and layers of opacity that link Vieques’s digital representations to the rethinking of Global South digital humanities projects and archival networks. For more than 60 years, the military facilities in Vieques were part of the US Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility (1941–2003), which also included bases and target ranges in the island of Culebra and the town of Ceiba, on the eastern coast of Puerto Rico. In this militarized archipelago of Puerto Rico, the US Navy and the Marine Corps trained their military forces by simulating war situations that included amphibious landings, naval gunfire, electronic warfare, and air-to-ground and air-to-air bombings, some of which were conducted with live explosives. After serving in the training of US military forces 260

DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-26

Exploring Digital Archives

during the Second World War, Vieques served as a “theater of war” for many conflicts in which the United States and its NATO allies participated during the Cold War and its aftermath. The planetary expansion of US and NATO military forces in the Atlantic and the Global South cannot be understood if we do not take into consideration the role of Vieques in the globalization of military power and the role of its people in fighting against this global trend of destruction.1 In a conversation recorded in Vieques in 1998, Ismael Guadalupe, one of the Viequense leaders of the movement against the military presence of the US Navy on the island, recalled that in 1973 some Viequenses organized a protest to oppose the participation of the US Navy in the Fiestas Patronales (Patron Saint festivities) in Vieques.2 For Guadalupe, that moment of cultural resistance, led by the Movimiento Viequenses Pro Fiestas Patronales Sin Marina (Viequenses Movement Pro Patron Saint Festivities without the Navy), represented a major victory because it was one of the first times the people of Vieques were able to successfully challenge the Navy’s presence on their island. After this incident, the Navy never again attempted to take part in the festivities. When I initially recorded Ismael Guadalupe’s testimony for a documentary project, I thought I was dealing with a piece of oral history. Years later, while exploring the digital collection of the Vieques Historical Archive, I discovered that the incident mentioned by Guadalupe was associated with the publication in 1973 of Yabureibo, la revista de los viequenses, the first bulletin made by Viequenses for Viequenses, which focused on Vieques’s problems and the negative impact of the US Navy in the island.3 In this chapter, I would like to highlight the importance of mixing and matching materials from digital archives to investigate the political, sociocultural, and literary networks that emerge from the popular struggles of the Global South. First, I will describe two digital archives created recently that contain invaluable materials to tell the story of Vieques resistance against global militarization. Then, I will analyze Yabureibo as a cultural and literary platform in the context of the Vieques struggle against the US Navy and in dialogue with the tensions created by the military presence of the United States in the Global South. To conclude, I will share some reflections about Yabureibo in the context of Global South digital humanities and archival projects.

Digital archives in conversation: Vieques struggle and the digital collection of the Archivo Histórico de Vieques The video conversation with Ismael Guadalupe belongs to a documentary and digital humanities project I have been working on for the past 20 years. Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive began as a documentary in 1998 when I traveled to the island of Vieques for the first time to conduct interviews with leaders of the Vieques movement against the US Navy. The project continued in 2004 when I spent the summer collecting testimonies of the Vieques people a year after the US Navy had left the island and their land had been transferred to the Fish and Wildlife Service. In 2017, this video collection turned into a digital humanities project, as I received funding to digitize the videotapes, transcribe the interviews, and create an interface to make these materials publicly accessible.4 Vieques Struggle is part of the projects supported by Georgia Tech’s Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC), a digital lab that has allowed the stories of Viequenses to be in dialogue with a network of digital initiatives that explore the history of US South and the role of Atlanta in the struggle for civil and human rights. Vieques Struggle is an invaluable source to understand the history of Vieques in the context of two major transitions: a political transition from militarized to demilitarized zone, and an economic transition driven by tourism (Galanes xi–xx), real-estate investment, and farming as complementary yet competing alternatives for development. A case 261

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

study of military training as slow violence,5 the project highlights the environmental and health problems created by the military use of Vieques as a bombing site, as well as the challenges of cleaning up vast areas of an island polluted with toxic waste.6 The story of Vieques can teach us how demilitarized communities confront social, economic, and environmental challenges while struggling to create civic-driven opportunities for sustainable development.7 In the process of developing this digital project, I started to collaborate with the Archivo Histórico de Vieques (the Vieques Historical Archive), as a member of its advisory board. This archive is a community archive initiated by Dr. Robert Rabin back in the 1980s, when, as a teacher of Vieques High School, he organized a Vieques History Club and began interviewing Viequenses and creating oral history projects with high school students; these efforts led to the creation of a Viequense Collection in the library of Vieques High School that included audio recordings, photographs, and news clippings. In 1991, the archive found its actual home at the Conde de Mirasol Museum Fortress. According to Robert Rabin, the communitarian character of this archive is vital to generate agile, participatory, and democratic models of preservation and conservation of documents. In the context of scarce libraries and municipal archives in Vieques, it is important to keep the Archivo Histórico de Vieques as a living lab to guarantee the access to information. (Rabin 2) In recent years, the University of Puerto Rico, through its Diasporas Caribeñas Project, led by Dr. Nadjah Rios, has contributed to the digitization of historical documents (photographs, bulletins, newspapers) that form part of the Archivo Histórico de Vieques’s collections.8 The virtual space of this archive is now available through the Digital Library of the Caribbean, “a multi-institutional, international digital library” founded in 2004, which “has grown from nine founding partners to over sixty partners in the United States, the Caribbean, Canada, Central and South America, and Europe” (“about dLOC”). By giving access to its physical and virtual collections and promoting the use of these collections in research and educational projects focusing on social justice, this historical archive contributes to the public dissemination of the Vieques struggle in dialogue with other collections capturing various aspects of the history of popular movements from the Global South. Prior to digital archives, the tense relationship between the US Navy and the people of Vieques was captured in novels, bulletins, newspapers, books of poetry, academic scholarship, testimonies and chronicles, and documentary films. Now that some of these cultural productions are available in digital archives, it is important to develop new models to analyze these networks of texts and images, to understand them both in the specific context of their production and in the expanded context of their digital circulation, while mapping the dialogues produced by these materials. When adding tags to the videos of my project Vieques Struggle, I discovered that at least two testimonies evoked the episode that is the point of departure for this chapter, the day that Viequenses expelled the US Navy from the Fiestas Patronales in 1973. Both Ismael Guadalupe, in his 1998 interview, and Victor Emeric, in his 2004 interview, referred to this episode as one of the early victories of the Vieques people against the US Navy.9 The digital tagging of this moment of cultural resistance resulted important because it highlighted a point in time that does not belong to the most known cycles of the Vieques struggle: The Fishermen Struggle (1978–1983) and the civil disobedience camps and acts of defiance inside the US Navy target range in Vieques (1999–2003), that led to the end of military exercises in Vieques in 2003. Most cultural productions (bulletins, poetry books, testimonies, chronicles) 262

Exploring Digital Archives

about the Vieques struggle cover these two periods. Although the academic scholarship focusing on the case of Vieques against the Navy offers historical overviews covering prequels and sequels of these cycles of struggle, these accounts very rarely take into consideration the textual network of Viequense local publications and tend to rely instead on historical documents, US and Puerto Rican newspapers, and oral testimonies. When interviewing Guadalupe in 1998 and Emeric in 2004, I took the episode as a piece of oral history, without ever wondering if this episode had a printed companion. While exploring the digital collection of the Archivo Histórico de Vieques available through the Digital Library of the Caribbean, I realized that the Movimiento Viequenses Pro Fiestas Patronales Sin Marina was tied to the publication of Yabureibo, the first local publication created by Viequenses to challenge the presence of the US Navy on the island.

Yabureibo in the Vieques of the 1970s and in the Global South As many Viequense activists emphasize, the Vieques struggle against the US Navy began 1941 when some Viequenses resisted the military eviction from their land and challenged the construction of military facilities. After two expropriation cycles (1941–1943 and 1947–1950), the US Navy occupied approximately 79% of Vieques’s territory.10 By constructing a weapon storage facility in the western part of Vieques and a training area for naval bombing and amphibious landings in the eastern part, the US Navy condemned Viequenses to live in a zone in the middle of the island that represented only 21% of Vieques original territory. Hunger, unemployment, and military abuses came to characterize the life of Viequenses in the next decades. Between 1958 and 1964, the Navy made attempts to take control of the entire island, but the government of Puerto Rico, the Vieques municipal government, and the people of Vieques challenged this expropriation, also known as Plan Drácula.11 In the context of the Cold War, the Puerto Rican pro-independence movement elaborated a strategy to kick the US Navy out of the island of Culebra, an island next to Vieques, used by the US Navy as a target to conduct air-to-ground bombing training. In contrast to the Culebra struggle, which concluded when the US Navy exited the island in 1975, the Vieques’s opposition to the US Navy in 1973, represented by Yabureibo, did not use an anticolonial or national self-determination framework to articulate its political claims but instead framed itself as a local movement for cultural autonomy and economic development. Although the Vieques struggle has always been in dialogue with anticolonial and national self-determination discourses, its frameworks have tended to emphasize the effects of the globalization of the US military forces and its NATO and Latin American allies from a local perspective. The cycle of protests led by the Vieques Fishermen from 1978 to 1983 was framed both as an environmental struggle and as a struggle for the right to fish in Vieques waters.12 The Vieques land occupation movements behind the creation of the neighborhoods of Villa Borinquen in 1976 and Monte Carmelo in 1989 – in territories controlled by the US Navy – were predicated on claims of land and housing rights.13 More recently, in 1999, the death of Viequense security guard David Sanes, killed by a US Navy bomb dropped accidentally near the Camp Garcia observation point, ignited another cycle of civil disobedience in Vieques. The coalition of social movements that gave impulse to the Vieques struggle from 1999 to 2003 combined different frameworks to articulate its social demand for peace in Vieques: security, healthcare, development, demilitarization, decontamination, and cultural autonomy. As a result of this struggle, the US Navy finally ended training exercises on the island and transferred its territory to the US Fish and Wildlife Service in 2003. A constant element crossing all these 263

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

frameworks is the demand for the transfer of the federal land, previously occupied by the US Navy and now in control of the Fish and Wildlife Service, back to the people of Vieques. From the perspective of Vieques, the struggle against the global militarization of our planet cannot be disentangled from the struggle for the local control of lands. As the episode of cultural resistance narrated by Ismael Guadalupe suggests, the Vieques struggle against the US Navy is, among other things, a struggle for the affirmation and recuperation of an ethnic space that belongs to the people of Vieques. Literature, films, and digital media have played a key role in the symbolic construction of Vieques as an ethno-colonial space impacted by the global militaristic campaigns of the United States and its NATO and Latin American allies. As early as 1947, a group of diasporic Viequenses published in San Juan the bulletin El eco de Vieques. Another member of the Vieques diaspora, Pedro Juan Soto, wrote Usmaíl (1955), a coming-of-age novel about a Viequense teenager, Usmaíl (US MAIL), son of a Viequense woman and a US soldier, who becomes traumatized by his experiences with military forces. One of the characters of the novel refers to Vieques as “the colony of a colony” (49), a formula that highlights the intensification of colonial differences between Puerto Rico and Vieques within the overall US project of incorporating the Caribbean into its agenda for global militarization. According to Cesar Ayala and José L Bolivar: the establishment of the navy in Vieques coincides with the period of transformation of Puerto Rico from an agrarian society to an industrial one, and with the change in colonial regime, from direct rule by presidentially appointed governors to locally elected governors, and finally, to the establishment of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1952. The transformations wrought by the navy in Vieques ran contrary to the decolonizing thrust of the changes then taking place elsewhere in Puerto Rico. We find that US militarism in Vieques is imbricated with colonial structures, old and new. (5–6) This structure of internal colonial difference has been evoked by Viequenses as a symbolic boundary to distinguish their experiences of colonial subjugation from those of Puerto Ricans. In Soto’s Usmaíl, as well as in the novel Veinte siglos después del homicidio (1971), by Viequense writer Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, male anxieties concerning castration and emasculation dominate the narration of colonial oppression that is the product of the US project of global militarization. By 1973, however, we begin to witness a shift in the literary representations of the presence of the US Navy in Vieques that precisely coincides with the creation of the movement against the participation of the military forces in the Vieques’s Fiestas Patronales. It was in 1973 that Viequense student Orlando L. Cruz Emeric created Yabureibo while studying mechanical engineering at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez. According to Cruz, the idea for the bulletin came out of the tertulias (literary gatherings) organized by Viequense writer Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez.14 Rodríguez Torres’ house in Mayaguez became the home of an improvised literary club that welcomed engineering students from different backgrounds, including Orlando Cruz and others, who would meet to discuss the history and current situation of Vieques. According to Orlando Cruz, Yabureibo came from a conversation with Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, who suggested to his students that the name of the bulletin was in Juan de Castellano’s elegy, a colonial text that narrates the conflict between Spaniards and natives’ inhabitants of the island of Puerto Rico. Yabureibo was a Caribe warrior from the island of Vieques that in 1511 challenged Spanish colonial power in Borikén (Puerto Rico). As argued by Viequense anthro264

Exploring Digital Archives

pologist Marie Cruz Soto, Viequenses have created a sense of ethno-cultural identity that differs from the rest of Puerto Rico (197–198). While Puerto Ricans tend to associate themselves with the heritage of the Taino culture, characterized by Spanish cronistas as more passive than the combative culture of the Caribes, Viequenses prefer to associate themselves ethno-culturally with Yabureibo and Cacimar, two Caribe warriors from the island of Vieques. Although the stability of Taino and Caribe ethno-cultural formations has been a topic of debate for scholars, as some have argued that these identities were created by Spanish colonizers to fit their narrative of the conquest, the name of Yabureibo, as argued by Cruz Soto, emphasizes the performative recuperation of the Caribes by Viequenses, which allows them to the construct their combative ethno-cultural identity as a struggle of resistance and freedom with strong ties to the colonial past (200–211). Although the name of the bulletin constitutes a direct identification with the act of resistance of the Caribe warrior, the textual inscription of Yabureibo in the pages of the bulletin takes a different dimension in two texts written by Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, appearing in the first two numbers. In the first number of the bulletin, the author expresses his desire to write about Yabureibo, reviving the great hero, as the purpose of the bulletin suggests, but this task is impossible “when in Vieques the people are dying of hunger and the authorities... play the gringo’s game and behind the people’s back exchange the moral for money bills” (“Yabureibo su lucha”; all translations are from the author). Yabureibo is a model of heroism from the past that cannot be matched with the political leadership of Vieques in the present. Yabureibo is therefore presented as an aspiration, as a desire for changing the present, as a work in progress guiding the Vieques struggle, but Rodríguez Torres adds drama to the narration of Vieques’s search for the origins of political resistance when he affirms that the forces of the present create obstacles for inheriting Yabureibo’s legacy. The author goes as far as to admit that rather than speaking about Yabureibo, “it is better to speak of the problem of the military bases,” calling into question the project of rescuing the epic past if it supposes a disregard for the challenges of the present. In a text included in the second number of Yabureibo, “En busca de nuestras raíces,” Rodríguez Torres celebrates Yabureibo as an example of heroism against the Spanish conquistadors and denounces the silencing of his act in the Puerto Rican history classes taught in the school system (7). He goes on to lament the disregard for the protection of archaeological sites in Vieques and assumes his own guilt, as a Black man, for the disappearance of indigenous roots (9), while concluding with this affirmation: “I am up for the fight like all Viequenses” (9). In the texts of Carmelo Rodríguez Torres, Yabureibo emerges as a protean figure that projects the anxieties of a Viequense author that is aware of the need to read the colonial archive against the grain and rescue the memory of an anticolonial hero for the Vieques resistance but who does not want to lose sight of the challenges of the present and is not willing to return to the past only for the sake of nostalgia. It is not clear why Rodríguez Torres links his racial identity as a Black Puerto Rican with a sense of guilt for the loss of indigenous roots, whether it is an ironic comment or an unexpected repetition of colonial racist tropes that could be taken as a symptom of internalized racial oppression. Eleuterio Santiago Díaz suggests that Rodríguez Torres’ novels dramatize the crisis of the subject and the dislocation of identity, pointing to the failure of an Afrocentric writing project in Puerto Rico. According to the literary critic, this failure is the best demonstration of the problems faced by Afro Puerto Rican authors. Following Santiago Díaz, it is possible to argue that Rodríguez Torres’ guilt for the loss of his roots points not only to the “recognition of the impossibility of articulating a genealogy that would bring unity and stability to the writing subject,” but also to “the frustration of not being able to put together a harmonic genealogy of Vieques” (7). 265

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

In Castellano’s elegy, Yabureibo made a sound with his horn to announce his revenge against the Spaniards after the death of his brother Cacimar: Gran grita y alarido se condensa/ Después que Yabureibo tocó cuerno,/ Encendido de furia tan inmensa,/ Ansí como si fuera del infierno [Great scream is condensed/ After Yabureibo plays (his) horn/ Fired with immense fury/ As if he was from hell] (67) For Orlando Cruz, that sound of fury and rebellion became a symbol for the urgent task of creating a means of communication and analysis that would guide the steps of Viequenses opposed to the military presence of the Navy in Vieques. The creation of Yabureibo is therefore the result of an oppositional reading of the colonial text that reveals the symbolic power of subaltern practices in the context of the present.15 The discourse of counterinsurgency elaborated by a Spanish conquistador is turned upside down to highlight the Vieques people’s actual need for alternative networks of communication at the service of political resistance against colonialism and militarization.16 As explained by Orlando Cruz, Yabureibo grew out of the need to combat disinformation in Vieques.17 At the time, the circulation of news about the Vieques situation was very scarce, even in Vieques. There were no media outlets in Vieques informing the citizens about local politics, decision-making processes, policy matters, or development projects involving the municipal government and the US Navy. In its opening editorial for the first number of the bulletin, Yabureibo is presented as an educational magazine, an open forum for Viequenses to express their concerns about the problems of the island. This text includes a call to all Viequenses to use the bulletin as a tool of communication. While the novels Usmaíl and Veinte siglos después del homicidio were published by Viequense writers in San Juan for a national audience with the purpose of creating awareness about the devastating effects of militarization, Yabureibo was created, published, and distributed in Vieques, by Viequense writers, and for Vieques audiences, to overcome the media blackout existing in Vieques, an island also facing a devastating drought in 1973.18 In 2014, Viequense writer Manolín Silva, one of the contributors of Yabureibo, celebrated Yabureibo as the first journalistic and periodical publication produced in Vieques by Viequenses,19 a project that opened the way for some other community publications focusing on Vieques’s local problems, such as the programs of the Festival del Pescador, the bulletins La Cruzada Informa, produced by La Cruzada Pro Rescate de Vieques (1979–1987) and La Voz de Vieques (2000–2003), as well as the newspapers Página de Cheo (1983–1987), The Vieques Times (1987–2004), Isla Nena (1989–1992), and El nuevo Vieques (2003–2004).20 As happens with other Global South political publications, including those of the Tricontinental, Yabureibo’s third and fourth numbers are motivated by a political event, that of challenging the presence of the Navy in the Fiestas Patronales of 1973. As Ann Garland’s analysis of the Young Lords suggests, the printed versions of the performance of politics by the Puerto Rican diaspora played a key role in the global dissemination of political messages produced in the context of local struggles.21 Although Yabureibo never reached global circulation, it shares with the Young Lord struggle the tactic of linking political performance to printed messages in the context of local struggles. The third number of Yabureibo is a call for action inviting Viequenses to protest the participation of the Navy in the Vieques carnival. In its role as “Suplemento Especial-Fiestas Patronales” (Special Supplement-Patron Saint Festivities), Yabureibo becomes the means of communication for the message of the Movimiento Viequense Pro Fiestas Patronales sin Marina (the Viequense Movement Pro Patron Saint Festivities without the Navy), a message originally 266

Exploring Digital Archives

transmitted in radio. According to Orlando Cruz, this movement, organized by Manolín Silva, Carmen Cruz Centeno,22 and himself, emerged out of the indignation provoked by the fact that the Navy had won an award in the Vieques parade, given by the municipal government organizing committee, with an adorned military vehicle that included ornaments along with weapons and bombs, the same weapons used by the Navy to destroy Vieques. For Cruz and others, the Navy had invaded the Vieques carnival with its military presence to gain cultural legitimacy and support from the Vieques community. Part of this call for action is framed as an institutional critique, as it denounces the municipal government, the school system, and the Catholic Church’s complicity with the Navy, whose military presence has resulted in Vieques’s social decline. The message uses a before and after the Navy plot structure to offer a critical view of the crisis of Vieques in the present. Neither the decline nor the Navy’s local apologists had existed in the past. Before there were some resources, economic development, and all the problems associated with capitalism, created by the exploitation of man by man, but at least the people of Vieques knew who they were, in contrast to the present, when drugs, complacency, and family separations due to emigration were now destroying the Vieques social fabric. At the time, the Navy’s use of “military vehicles, soldiers with rifles, and music of military bands” in “a religious and cultural celebration” of the people constituted an act of “cultural aggression” (“Suplemento” 8) that cannot be applauded, as it attempts to hide the acts of violence of the Navy against Viequenses. Viequenses have lost many things. But we have not lost our memory. Vehicles like those that are now disguised with ornaments were the same that persecuted our parents, brothers, neighbors, and poorer friends who went inside the base looking for wood or crabs to sell. From one of those rifles that now shoot pellets came the bullet that opened the abdomen of Toñito from Santa María, or the bullet that killed a kid in front of the Camp García gate... However much the Municipal administration, the Civic-Military committee and the organizing committee of the Fiestas would like to disguise them, those are the same trucks, the same rifles, the same soldiers, and the same musicians that played the funeral march to Ernesto Rosario and many other Puerto Ricans killed in Viet-Nam. We are not going to applaud that the same Navy that has stolen our tranquility and has outraged and humiliated us as people will also dance in the street with us. (“Suplemento” 8–9) The call to subvert the carnival and turn it into an insurrection, the call to challenge the meaning of its cultural code, reject the presence of the foreign military forces, and denounce them as agents of violence evoke some of the tactics described by Rajanit Guha in relation to the notion of negation that is one of the elementary aspects of peasant insurgency; the text at this point performs a semiotic break, as “it violates that basic code by which the relations of dominance and subordination are historically governed in any particular society” (Elementary Aspects 36). But this semiotic break does not work by turning the world upside down and switching the location of power from top to bottom, as in Guha’s analysis, but instead operates to unmask the carnival as a tool for the normalization of violence and the acceptance of subjugation. Another semiotic break occurs in this text when the authors discuss the notion of manifest destiny, tying it to the sufferings of various groups in the Global South: We must call out that some schoolteachers … never taught us that that which gave Vieques to the Navy was not a people’s assembly, but a game move of the manifest destiny. The 267

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

manifest destiny that finished with North American Indigenous people, that deformed an entire generation of youth and children in Hiroshima, the manifest destiny that burned entire civilian communities in Vietnam. (“Suplemento” 6) The attack against the school system echoes Paulo Freire’s denunciation of the role of education in oppression.23 Manifest destiny operates as a twofold semiotic break, delivering at once disarticulating and anchoring effects. On the one hand, it disarticulates the hegemonic meaning of manifest destiny by revealing it as a mask of the violence on which the United States has relied to accomplish its “God-driven” territorial expansion. On the other hand, this semiotic break also operates as an anchoring point that serves to articulate the inscription of the local history of Vieques within the context of the history of US imperialism in the Global South. The suffering of Viequenses, caused by the military control of 79% of its territory, is connected to the land grabs that have caused so much pain to Native American communities in the United States. The suffering of Viequenses is also connected to the pains of the people in Vietnam, as both have become victims of the US military-industrial complex that relies on the same fantasy of military control of the planet that justifies the burning of Vietnamese villages and the bombing of Vieques. The memory of Hiroshima serves to associate the racist violence of manifest destiny with the threat of nuclear catastrophe. In this case, Indigenous and Asian people represent the targets of manifest destiny, and Black people are missing, perhaps because their racial difference has been made invisible by the veiled forms of racism that exist in Puerto Rico, which oftentimes tend to ignore racial oppression while absorbing racial differences under the umbrella of the mestizaje ideology (las tres razas: taino, africano, y español). As an anchoring point, however, manifest destiny still serves to map the shared sufferings of ethnically different subaltern groups. In these pages of Yabureibo, the Global South is evoked as an affective geopolitical condition that highlights the intersectionality of military oppression as a planetary network of destruction. Although many studies focusing on Global South political and social movements privilege the role of global solidarity networks, it is also important to remember that these networks tend to be preceded by an affective experience that begins with a shared sense of common suffering. Yabureibo belongs to the constellation of “Cold War internationalism” that gives shape to our idea of the Global South (Armillas-Tyseira and Garland 469) because it refers to “the resistant imaginary of a transnational political subject that results from a shared experience of subjugation” (Garland Mahler 6). The fourth number of Yabureibo offers a chronicle of the public protest against the Navy’s participation in the Vieques carnival parade and the intervention of some pro-Navy Viequenses who tried to disrupt the protest. The chronicle includes pictures of the event and describes the success of the protest, a radical subversion of the carnival, and a real act of insurrection. Building on the success of the protest, the editorial calls for the further organization of the Vieques people into a permanent movement, which is later announced in the fifth and final number of Yabureibo, published in October 1973. In this final number, which includes articles denouncing problems in the Vieques hospital and the use of funds for the construction of a road, the editorial piece, “Editorial: balance de la lucha,” announces the creation of a new organization, Viequenses Unidos contra ocupación militar (VUCOMI), which will expand the struggle initiated by the Movimiento Viequense Pro Fiestas Patronales sin Marina (3). Anticipating the possibility of having achieved its goal, the fourth number of Yabureibo includes a text by Manolín Silva referring to the creation of a new organization in case the Vieques carnival parade organizers ever decide to no longer invite the Navy to future carnivals. In this statement, Silva links the future of the movement to the struggles of exploited people around the world: 268

Exploring Digital Archives

It is good to remember, however, that if [the organizers] desist from inviting the navy to the festivities, the Movimiento Viequense Pro Fiestas Sin Marina would have only lost its name. Another name will appear, others will be the faces, others will be the slogans, but the objective will always be the same: the taking back of all our lands that are today under the control of the Navy of the United States. And the struggle will be the same as the one being fought by all the exploited people of the world. Justice against abuse. People against exploitation. Vieques against sell-outs. Vieques against the navy. (Silva 11) Although Yabureibo only published five numbers in 1973 and lasted approximately six months, it is important for three reasons. First, it is the first Viequense publication focusing on local problems, serving as a community media outlet to express socioeconomic and environmental concerns about the impact of military training in Vieques. Second, it illuminates a transitional moment in the Vieques struggle against militarization, a period in which Viequenses combined an ethno-cultural formation with economic and environmental claims in a framework that served as a means of resistance; this opposition can be read as a prequel to the Vieques Fishermen Struggle (1979– 1983), which also combined ethno-cultural, economic, and environmental claims to articulate its political demands. Third, it projects the process of political organization in Vieques as one of constant renewal and adaptation, a process conditioned by contingency and continuity. Yabureibo tells the story of a political transition from one organization with a very specific goal, eliminating the Navy from the Fiestas Patronales, to a more comprehensive organization opposing the military occupation of Vieques by the Navy. But this transition, as told by Yabureibo, is narrated with the full awareness that it is not definitive, that Viequenses’ capacities for political organization belong to a long tradition of struggle that is constantly reinventing itself. In the pages of Yabureibo, political performance becomes a collective process of creation, re-elaboration, and renewal mediated by complex textual negotiations. Political imagination is defined as a generative process, as an incubator of new ideas, forces, and alliances. Yabureibo is an expressive and organizational media lab showcasing collective desires and aspirations across multiple intergenerational networks, including those from the future. After Yabureibo, Carmen Cruz Centeno, who led in Vieques a factory-workers protest in the 1960s, continued to participate in the struggle until she moved out of Vieques in the early 2000s. In 1976, Manolín Silva founded Villa Borinquen, a community located on Navy land that was rescued and occupied by Viequenses families. In the late 1970s, Orlando Cruz became the spokesperson of La Cruzada Pro Rescate de Vieques, which allowed him to speak at a US Congressional Hearing and at the UN Committee on Decolonization. Almost 50 years after Yabureibo, new names and new faces have continued to emerge, insisting on the right of Viequenses to take back their land. Communities like Monte Carmelo (1989), organizations like Comite Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Vieques (1990s–2000s) and Alianza de Mujeres Viequenses (2000s), civil disobedience camps such as Monte David (1999–2000) and Camp Luisa Guadalupe (2000–2002), and farms like Finca Conciencia and La Colmena Cimarrona are part of this constellation of social forces that confirms Silva’s political predictions delivered through the pages of Yabureibo. What is so fascinating about Yabureibo for the understanding of politics in the context of Global South literature is that the Viequenses’ process of political reinvention is framed as a planetary process, as a world-making quest for global justice, as a South-to-South relation connecting the struggles “fought by all the exploited people of the world.”24 “Vieques against the navy” is not simply the struggle of one island against military imperialism but a node within the network of Global South struggles that embraces demilitarization as a step toward global justice. It does 269

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

not come as a surprise that the Vieques victory against the Navy (1999–2003) was made possible in part due to a strong global solidarity network coming from the Global South. Although the Vieques struggle symbolizes an important local victory against military imperialism in the Global South, more work needs to be done to highlight its political importance in the context of Global South studies. The fact that the Vieques struggle has been almost invisible in academic debates at the turn of the century focusing on political notions such as anti-globalization, subalternity, empire, multitude, hegemony, post-hegemony, nomos of the earth, biopolitics, decoloniality, and even Global South is very telling of the ways in which dynamics of invisibility and exclusion operate even within the global networks of radical politics, but it also points to the need of mapping all the missing nodes in the network of struggles constitutive of the Global South as a political horizon.25

Yabureibo in the digital archives of the Global South The case of Yabureibo confirms a trend within Global South studies: the important role of periodicals, bulletins, and other contingent and ephemeral forms of print media, in the study of social movements,26 as they reveal the transitory, impermanent, and discontinuous dynamics that give shape to specific contexts and articulations of popular protest. In its current digital form as a pdf file, Yabureibo could be included in future projects, such as timelines focusing on the history of the Vieques struggle and the role of global ethno-cultural resistance, digital maps exploring the impact of military training in Vieques and the Global South, hypertexts exploring the connections of Spanish colonial and 20th-century literature across the Americas, podcasts or online videos about the responses to the Vietnam war in Puerto Rico, and other social contexts. Combined with other materials, Yabureibo could generate multiple uses in the digital archives of the Global South, opening the door for projects dealing with “South-South comparative reading of subaltern subjects” (López 492). The first lesson to be learned here is that the digital archives of the Global South must be explored in search of new dialogues taking place across media, as these dialogues shine light into meaning-making practices of popular protest that, although frequently overlooked, contribute to a more complex understanding of the politics of memory elaborated by local communities and their global allies. The second lesson is that the correlation of textual and testimonial materials across digital archives involves a form of multimodal learning that could lead to new forms of digital pedagogy, which could also have an impact on the way we design interfaces in digital humanities projects. The third lesson is that to foster potential dialogues across digital archives from the Global South we need to take into consideration the tension between the creation of inclusive solidarity networks and the exclusionary protocols of archives and computers, including the North/South dimensions of the digital divide, specifically the digital inequality produced by the unequal generation and distribution of technologies, intellectual property rights, and networked knowledge.27 Digital archives facilitate access to materials in various media that would otherwise be difficult to find. But these archives do not necessarily guarantee that these varied materials will articulate a meaningful dialogue that would lead to new connections and new knowledge. Working with digital archives to map the political, sociocultural, and symbolic networks of popular movements always requires human labor, labor that cannot always be outsourced to artificial intelligence. While digital links at times create the illusion of immediate and permanent access to resources that are interconnected through digital networks, data structures at times create the illusion of providing a transparent articulation of classified materials as a coherent whole, even in cases in which it is assumed that collections may be incomplete. Exploring the Global South’s digital archives 270

Exploring Digital Archives

invites us to challenge these assumptions of digital transparency and archival order. This requires the elaboration of a practice of mixing and matching that will generate new connections at the margins of the digital interface by recognizing the mutual interdependence of oral history and print culture in the context of popular struggles. Yabureibo might easily find its place in timelines and digital maps, but data structures and clean visualizations alone may not be able to provide all the answers when it comes to creating awareness about the layers of opacity that operate in local media practices driven by ethno-cultural formations. As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the fact that YouTube algorithms do not recognize the name of Vieques suggests that unpacking the history of this island on the internet involves paying attention to the silences and layers of opacity that give shape to it. Rather than encapsulating these silences and getting rid of their opacity, it would be more stimulating to create hybrid online and offline interactive designs that would invite users and participants to consider the challenges of researching and responding to the ambiguities and polysemy of these political messages available across media platforms. Questions of interactive design may lead to epistemological questions related to discussions about the “plurality of overlapping and at times contradictory methods” within Global South studies (López 487): how can Global South digital humanities projects address the tension between the logics of modularity and encapsulation prevalent in computational designs and the intersectional dynamics of oppression and defiance that complicate the history of our multimodal contact zones? How can digital design projects incorporating non-digital materials contribute to “critical acts of dis-orienting and dislocating texts” (López 489)? Up to what point could this practice of mixing and matching lead us to question location and dislocation inside and beyond cyberspace, particularly today, when every media form seems to have already been subsumed by the logics of location and geo-positioning operating in digital platforms? These questions cannot be answered by simply creating a new tool, designing clean data visualizations, or adopting the next ready-made software solution; these questions cross the threshold of design, revealing the dialogic potential but also the incompleteness of data-driven representations of knowledge, while also inviting a deeper interrogation of digital humanities-as-usual. Now, when Puerto Rico has become a new destination for DH funding agencies, these questions become more relevant than ever for the future of Yabureibo in the digital archives of the Global South. Beyond facilitating immediate and permanent access to classified materials, or readymade links across media, digital archives invite us to look at the intersection of the different layers of opacity that operate within the complex networks of meaning-making practices (writing, political performance, photography, oral testimony) that mark key shifts in the constantly evolving processes of social movements, key shifts that also contribute to an understanding of the multimodal character of the politics of memory in the Global South. Rather than assuming digital archives as one-way and fast information superhighways complicit with the protocols of search engines and internet monetization, it would be more productive to take another route, Yabureibo’s route, the slow route of reinventing political alliances and alternative epistemologies across the multiple spatial and temporal configurations of the Global South. As Anita Chan suggests, it is important to elaborate intersectional approaches of digital design to challenge modular universalism and the reliance on an informatic ideal coming from the North (138–154). A Global South digital pedagogy worthy of its name should never be just one click away;28 it must become a good pretext to learn how to teach, how to learn, and how to think when we turn on but also when we turn off our screens. Either as a digital file or through the sound of his horn, Yabureibo is calling us to experiment with new ways of imagining encounters and disconnections, alliances and disputes, online and offline practices, and convergent and divergent tem271

Juan Carlos Rodríguez

poralities, which may complicate the shape of our digital archives, maps, timelines, podcasts, and lists of documents. To conclude, let me share with you these slogans that may never go viral: Yabureibo in the Global South against divide and conquer! Yabureibo in the Global South against modular universalism! Yabureibo in the Global South against the gatekeepers of the informatic ideal! Yabureibo in the Global South: a counter-archive of Bieké futurism! Digitize that!

Notes 1 See Meléndez López for a history of the Vieques resistance against the Navy. 2 Video available at Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive: http://vieques​.iac​.gatech​.edu​/items​/show​/373. 3 Yabureibo’s five numbers are available online in the Digital Collection of the Vieques Historical Archive, which is part of the Digital Library of the Caribbean: Yabureibo, no. 1 https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00004 Yabureibo, no. 2 https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00001 Yabureibo, no. 3 https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00002 Yabureibo, no. 4 https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00003 Yabureibo, no. 5 https://dloc​.com​/AA00062890​/00001 4 Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive is available online at https://vieques​.iac​.gatech​.edu/. 5 See Nixon, chap. 7, for a discussion of slow violence and war. 6 See Massol, as well as Davis, Hayes-Conroy, and Jones for a discussion of military pollution in Vieques. 7 See Guías para el desarrollo sustentable de Vieques. 8 Along with Ivelisse Rivera, Nadjah Rios has explored the role of this archive in student projects. This digital collection is available at https://dloc​.com​/collections​/vieques. 9 Victor Emeric’s interview is available at https://vieques​.iac​.gatech​.edu​/items​/show​/384. 10 See Ayala and Bolivar for an overview of the expropriation of Vieques land by the US Navy. For a personal account of this process, see Zenón. 11 See Vélez Rodríguez for a discussion of Plan Drácula. 12 See McCaffrey, chap. 5, for an analysis of the Vieques Fishermen Movement. 13 See Cotto (177–215), and McCaffrey, chap. 6, for an overview of the Vieques land rescue movement. 14 Personal communication with the author. 15 See Hall for an overview of the notion of oppositional reading. 16 See Guha, “The prose of counterinsurgency.” 17 Personal communication with the author. 18 See Orlando Cruz, “Vieques pronto sin agua,” for a discussion of the drought. 19 Manolin Silva’s posting appeared on his Facebook page: www​.facebook​.com​/permalink​.php​?story​_fbid​ =1533395486872136​&id​=100006050984212. 20 Many of these publications are available at the Vieques Historical Archive Digital Collection at https:// dloc​.com​/collections​/vieques. 21 See Garland, From the Tricontinental to the Global South, for a discussion of the role of print media in the Global South. Particularly chapter 3 discusses the printed materials produced as a result of the Young Lords takeover of the First Methodist Church in El Barrio, or East Harlem in 1969. The Young Lords was a group of Nuyorican men and women from the Puerto Rican Diaspora that created a network of local activism in New York with links to US Black radical movements. 22 Manolin Silva offers a tribute to Carmen Cruz Centeno, entitled “Heroínas Viequenses,” on his Facebook wall. The text includes a poem by Manolin Silva dedicated to Cruz Centeno. www​.facebook​.com​/permalink​.php​?story​_fbid​=1866896163522065​&id​=100006050984212. 23 See Paulo Freire for a discussion of education and oppression. 24 For a discussion of South-to-South relations, see López, as well as Armillas-Tyseira and Garland Mahler. 25 For a comprehensive mapping of the field of Global South studies, please consult “Global South,” a bibliography prepared by Ann Garland Mahler. 26 See Garland’s From the Tricontinental to the Global South. 27 For a discussion of these debates in the Latin American context, see Hernandez-L’Hoeste and Rodríguez. 28 See Ames for an analysis of the limitations of the One-Laptop-Per Child project in Paraguay.

272

Exploring Digital Archives

Works Cited Ames, Morgan. “The Media Machine: One Laptop Per Child in Paraguay.” Digital Humanities in Latin America, edited by Hernández, Rodríguez, 2020, pp. 38–56. Archivo Histórico de Vieques. https://dloc​.com​/collections​/vieques Armillas-Tyseira, Magali and Ann Garland Mahler. “Introduction: New Critical Directions in Global South Studies.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, 2021, pp. 465–484. Ayala, Cesar, and José Bolivar. Battleship Vieques: Puerto Rico from World War II to the Korean War. Markus Wiener, 2011. Cotto, Liliana. Desalambrar. Tal Cual, 2006. Cruz Soto, Marie. “Indígena y rebelde: Vieques, imaginarios indígenas y la narración del pasado caribeño.” Op.Cit. vol. 23, 2014–2015, pp. 191–225. Davis, JS, JS Hayes-Conroy and VM Jones. “Military Pollution and Natural Purity: Seeing Nature and Knowing Contamination in Vieques, Puerto Rico.” GeoJournal, vol. 69, 2007, pp. 165–179. de Castellanos, Juan.  Elegía de varones ilustres de Indias (1589). Ebook, M Rivadeneyra, 1857. dLOC. “about dLOC.” https://www​.dloc​.com​/overview Freire, Paulo. Pedagogía del oprimido. Siglo XXI, 1970. Galanes Valldejuli, Luis. Tourism and Language in Vieques: An Ethnography of the Post-Navy Period. Lexington Books, 2018. Garland Mahler, Ann. From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Global Solidarity. Duke UP, 2018. ———. “Global South.” Oxford Bibliographies. 2017. Available at https://www​.oxf​ordb​ibli​ographies​.com​/ view​/document​/obo​-9780190221911​/obo​-9780190221911​-0055​.xml Grupo de Apoyo Técnico. Guías para el desarrollo sustentable de Vieques. Gaviota, 2002. Guha, Rajanit. Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. Duke UP, 1999. ———. “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” Selected Subaltern Studies. Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 45–84. Hernandes-L'Hoeste, Héctor and Juan Carlos Rodríguez, editors. Digital Humanities in Latin America. UFP, 2020. López, Alfred. “Intentions, Methods, and the Future of Global South Studies.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, 2021, pp. 485–508. Massol, Arturo. Ciencia para la insurgencia. Ed. Callejón, 2020. McCaffrey, Katherine T. Military Power and Popular Protest: The U.S. Navy in Vieques, Puerto Rico. Rutgers UP, 2002. Melendez López, Arturo. La Batalla de Vieques. Edil, 2000. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011. Prashad, Vijay. The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South. Verso, 2012. Rabin, Robert. “Archivo Histórico de Vieques: Memoria histórica de un pueblo en constante lucha y resistencia.” Revista Puertorriqueña de Bibliotecología y Documentación, vol. 1, 2020, pp. 1–8. Rivera, Ivelisse and Nadjah Rios. “Archivística y sonoridad: un ejercicio práctico para conocer mejor el patrimonio documental del Archivo Histórico de Vieques en la Biblioteca Digital del Caribe.” Unpublished manuscript, 2020. Rodríguez Torres, Carmelo. Veinte siglos después del homicidio. Ed. Puerto, 1971. ———. “Yabureibo: Su lucha contra el invasor.” Yabureibo, no. 1, 1973. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​ /00004 ———. “En busca de nuestras raíces.” Yabureibo, no. 2, 1973, pp. 7–9. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00001 Rodríguez, Juan Carlos. Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive. http://vieques​.iac​.gatech​.edu​/items​/show​ /373 Santiago Díaz, Eleuterio. El drama de la escritura puertorriqueña en el escenario de la modernidad: Carmelo Rodríguez Torres ante la ontología de la nación. 2003. Brown U, Ph.D. dissertation. Silva, Manolín. “Porqué escogimos del día del carnaval.” Yabureibo, no. 4, 1973, pp. 5–6, 11. https://dloc​ .com​/AA00062889​/00003 Soto, Pedro Juan. Usmaíl. 9th Edition. Ed. Cultural, 2003. Torres, Norma. Y sueño con ser poeta, Vieques y otros temas. Gráfica Metropolitana, 2006. U.S. Congress. Naval Training Activities on the Island of Vieques, Puerto Rico. Hearings of the House of Representatives Committee on Armed Forces Ninety-sixth Congress. Second Session. U.S. GOP, 1980. U.S. Navy: A Complete History. Naval historical Foundation, 2006.

273

Juan Carlos Rodríguez Vélez Rodríguez, Evelyn. Plan Drácula. Edil, 2002. Yabureibo. “Editorial: Balance de la lucha.” no. 5, 1973, pp. 3–5. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062890​/00001 Yabureibo (1), “Vieques pronto sin agua.” no. 1, 1973. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00004 Yabureibo (2), “La tragicomedia de Culebra.” no. 2, 1973. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00001 Yabureibo (3), “Suplemento Especial Fiestas Patronales.” no. 3, 1973. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062889​/00002 Yabureibo (4), “Viequenses protestan contra Marina Turba Pro Marina Interfiere.” no. 4, 1973. https://dloc​ .com​/AA00062889​/00003 Yabureibo (5), “Caos en Hospital.” no. 5, 1973. https://dloc​.com​/AA00062890​/00001 Zenón, Carlos. Memorias de un pueblo pobre en lucha. El Antillano, 2018.

274

24 “WE MUST BE A THIRD PRINCIPLE” Midnight’s Children and the Non-Aligned Movement Y. P. Zhang

Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, first published in 1981, marks an age of postcolonial1 writing and has been intensely studied as such. In a 1992 essay in response to the Rushdie fatwa, Carlos Fuentes adds a hitherto overlooked dimension to the acts of reading Rushdie’s works: “Rushdie is the first victim of a religious atavism which filled the ideological void left by the end of the Cold War.” Timothy Brennan, while dismissing Fuentes’s comment as a “dodgy statement,” nevertheless underscores the necessity and potential fertility of studying Rushdie’s writing through the lens of the Cold War (1999, 125–126). In part as an answer to Brennan, M. Keith Booker, in an article included in the same volume as Brennan’s, investigates the ways in which Midnight’s Children is shaped by “the Cold War aesthetic of the West” (Booker 286). In Brennan’s and Booker’s attempts to place Rushdie in the context of the Cold War – attempts that reflect a trend initiated by socialist scholars to recuperate what was perceived as suppressed Marxist thought in postcolonial studies in the 1990s – the Global South is, ironically, insubstantial. The picture of the Cold War delineated by Booker is largely bipolar. In Salman Rushdie and the Third World (1989), Brennan associates the term “Third World” primarily with an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and liberationist nationalism, to which a “cosmopolitan” writer like Rushdie is opposed; such association, as Anuradha Dingwaney Needham observes, is “extremely problematic” (655). The writings of Brennan and Booker on Rushdie shed light on the difficulty of situating Rushdie, a quintessential postcolonial writer, at the conjunction of discourses of the Cold War, the Global South, and postcolonialism. In the past 20 years, there has been no sustained consideration or interpretation of Rushdie’s writing in the framework of the Global South – a conspicuous lack given the proliferation of scholarship associated with the Global South turn (Lee). In a recent essay, Vijay Mishra investigates Rushdie’s later texts and discovers in them a “Southern” aesthetic based on “an alternative and even vernacular rendition of archival modernism” (256). While Mishra’s essay pushes us to think about what later Rushdie has to do with the “South,” the relationship between Rushdie’s early texts and a Cold War Global South remains unexplored. This paper revisits Midnight’s Children – the “Booker of Bookers” – and decodes it as a historiography not only of post-independence India but of India as a member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in the context of the Cold War. It argues that Midnight’s Children – in particular its central shaping plot, the Midnight’s Children’s Conference (M.C.C.) – is every inch imbricated in the history of the NAM. By shifting critical focus on the novel from its relation with the nation to its DOI:  10.4324/9781003207603-27

275

Y. P. Zhang

entanglements with the hopes and predicaments of Third World internationalism, this paper invites a reassessment of Rushdie’s cosmopolitanism and a rethinking of the relationship between Global South studies, Cold War studies, and postcolonialism.

“Telepathy”, 1956 Saleem Sinai, “handcuffed to history” (Rushdie 1981, 3), is born at the exact moment of India’s independence. As the narrator of the novel, Saleem emphatically draws attention to the correspondence between his fate and the fate of India. Such explicit metafictional insistence makes it almost impossible for readers to miss the novel’s roots in the history of post-independence India, yet it also does the author a disservice, for it obscures a significant facet of the novel – the history of a Cold War Global South in which the novel is firmly entrenched. In Midnight’s Children, the national and the international are inextricably intertwined. Rushdie encodes both dimensions in Saleem’s tale and makes Saleem an untiring educator in the art of their decoding. To unravel the overlooked international dimension in Midnight’s Children, it is necessary to highlight the novel’s distinctive narrative logic, and the narrative logic is nowhere more clearly expressed than in Saleem’s instructional digressions. In one of such detours, Saleem says: How, in what terms, may the career of a single individual be said to impinge on the fate of a nation? I must answer in adverbs and hyphens: I was linked to history both literally and metaphorically, both actively and passively … actively-literally, passively-metaphorically, actively-metaphorically and passively-literally, I was inextricably entwined with my world. (Rushdie 1981, 232) Actively: he sets history in motion; passively: things happen to him; literally: he directly triggers historical events; metaphorically: his private life is symbolically at one with history. Strictly speaking, Midnight’s Children does not have an independent narrative logic; its logic is the logic of history. Characters are pushed around by historical events rather than following rational lines of development, hence all have a cartoonish touch. The “magic realism” of Midnight’s Children has its roots in the substitution of historical logic for narrative logic. Rushdie the fabulist is a historian at heart. What kind of history does he write? In what “world” does he place Saleem? A close examination of the centerpiece of the novel – the M.C.C – affords us clues to these questions. Contained in Book Two of Midnight’s Children, the M.C.C. plot spans the middle third of the novel’s 30 chapters. In Chapter 11, “Accident in a Washing-chest,” nine-year-old Saleem takes to hiding in a washing-chest and accidentally acquires a miraculous gift of telepathy. Saleem thus educates the readers: “Reality can have metaphorical content, that does not make it less real” (Rushdie 1981, 197). The reality of this episode is implied in a passage that exemplifies the Penelope craft of weaving in Midnight’s Children: 1956. Ahmed Sinai and Dr Narlikar played chess and argued – my father was a bitter opponent of Nasser, while Narlikar admired him openly. “The man is bad for business,” Ahmed said; “But he’s got style,” Narlikar responded, glowing passionately, “Nobody pushes him around.” At the same time, Jawaharlal Nehru was consulting astrologers about the country’s Five Year Plan, in order to avoid another Karamstan; and while the world combined aggression and the occult, I lay concealed in a washing-chest which wasn’t really big enough for comfort any more; and Amina Sinai became filled with guilt. (Rushdie 1981, 156) 276

“We Must Be a Third Principle”

World history and national history are threaded by the year 1956; together they provide the driving force for plot development. 1956 is a significant year in the history of the Cold War. It is remarkable that the major events that contributed to the significance of the year are unfailingly invoked in Saleem’s seemingly inadvertent braiding of history and fiction. In 1956, one year after the Bandung Conference, Yugoslavia’s president Josip Broz Tito invited India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser to the island of Brioni, where the three leaders signed a joint statement, “on principles which should govern international relations.” The Brioni Declaration is generally regarded as the founding document of the Non-Aligned Movement. One week after the Brioni meeting, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in a surprising military coup, which caught Nehru and Tito flatfooted, yet made Nasser a hero of Arab nationalism and anti-imperialism – “he’s got style”; “Nobody pushes him around.” The Suez crisis coincided with the Hungary crisis – the Soviet “aggression.” The Hungary crisis, among other momentous consequences it brought on to the world, prompted reflections of Soviet-style communism on a global scale and reoriented communists and leftists alike towards the Third World. Riding the tide of communist renaissance in the Third World, the Communist Party in India (CPI) actively campaigned for the impending election. In this atmosphere, “Amina Sinai became filled with guilt,” as she started secret rendezvous with her impotent ex-husband – then head of CPI –Nadir Khan in the Pioneer Café, “a notorious Communist Party hangout” (Rushdie 1981, 247). Khan went into hiding in the cellar of the Aziz family after the assassination of Miah Abdullah in 1942 and disappeared at the time of India’s independence. The emergence of Khan from underground and his acquisition of a new name – Qasim the Red – mirrors Saleem’s emergence from his secret hiding and his acquisition of a miraculous gift. Although the Non-Aligned Movement is fraught with competing national interests and parochialism of the Cold War from the beginning, the prevailing atmosphere in its inaugural stage is one of hope and optimism. Nehru, Tito, and Nasser all had their individual agendas when they met on the island of Brioni – Tito wanted to assert his independence from the Soviet sphere, Nasser sought to increase his international stature and attract funds for his Aswan Dam project, and Nehru aimed to strengthen his non-aligned foreign policy and extend his Pan-Asianism. Nevertheless, the three leaders shared the common goals of nonalignment, disarmament, and decolonization, which were stressed in the Brioni Declaration. The Brioni Declaration is bathed in the light of the Bandung Conference, whose name has come to define an era (Berger). Held in 1955, the Bandung Conference sowed the seeds of the Afro– Asian Solidarity Movement, inspired the Brioni meeting, and paved the way for the Non-Aligned Movement. The 29 Asian and African nations that participated in the Bandung Conference were bound by a sense of common experience in the struggles against colonialism and imperialism and a sense of self-determination to act on the world stage. Arif Dirlik has observed that there is nothing revolutionary about the program of the Bandung Conference and that underlying its concern with world peace there was “a deep-seated fear of global conflict” (Dirlik 2015, 616) – “[f]ear of the future, fear of the hydron bomb, fear of ideologies” (22), in the words of President Sukarno of Indonesia. Y et, at the same time, the Bandung Conference generated a powerful optimism that had far and wide repercussions. In Dirlik’s view, the optimism is arguably the most enduring legacy of Bandung (2015, 617). Richard Wright, an unofficial observer at Bandung, wrote in his report on the Bandung Conference: It was my impression that, with the exception of Nehru, Chou En-lai, and Unu, no other delegations or heads of delegations came to Bandung but with the narrowest of parochial hopes 277

Y. P. Zhang

and schemes. But when they got to Bandung, with their speeches in their pockets, something happened that no Asian or African, no Easterner or Westerner, could have dreamed of. (129) This “something,” unexpected to the delegates and overwhelming for all, is a euphoric sense of solidarity. Wright characterizes it as “an emotional nationalism … leaping state boundaries and melting and merging, one into the other” (140). In the words of H. Roeslan Abdulgani, chair of the Bandung Conference secretary, it is “determination to live together; to solve our problems peacefully in a brotherly fashion” (64). The rhetoric of Third World solidarity had immense appeal for Third World writers and intellectuals following the Bandung Conference. Its effects can be glimpsed through the poetic locutions of Jacque Stephen Alexis and Leopold Sedar Senghor at the First Congress of Black Writers in 1956 – “Bandung, a bell that resounds, … demonstrates that the peoples want to be born in a life as constituted bodies (Présence Africaine, 71)”;2 “Henceforth Bandung will be a sign of rallying for the people of colors. Not through the intrigues which the two Blocs tried to provoke there, but through the spirit of liberation that was born there” (Présence Africaine, 51). Thus contextualized, Saleem’s acquisition of telepathy takes on special historical significance. Passively-metaphorically, his acquisition of telepathy can be interpreted as an act of acquiring, or being exposed to the “Bandung spirit.” To use a frequently occurred metaphor in Midnight’s Children, it is zeitgeist “seeping” or “dripping” into Saleem. Saleem takes to hiding because he is afraid that “my much-trumpeted existence might turn out to be purposeless” (Rushdie 1981, 152); having acquired telepathy, he observes that “through it I could glimpse … my reason for having been born,” and “it was astonishing how soon fear left me” (Rushdie 1981, 162). “Reason” and “purpose” are Saleem’s obsessions and the objects of his search; in the novel, they are equivalent to “optimism disease,” the belief that “what-we-had-in-common retained the possibility of overpowering what-forced-us-apart” (Rushdie 1981, 295). Saleem’s “optimism disease” echoes the optimism of the Bandung era, and his “fear” resonates with Surkano’s speech on fear – fear that brought the non-aligned nation together in the first place. Nehru adopted nonalignment as part of his foreign policy in 1947 and successfully carried it out during the Korean War and the signing of the “Declaration of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” with China in 1954. There is an unmistakable touch of idealism in Nehru’s conception of nonalignment and “Panchsheela,”3 but it was not until the Bandung Conference and the joining of Yugoslavia at the Brioni meeting a year later that a truly global system of nonalignment – together with a wide-spread optimism – emerged. Metaphorically, Saleem was born at the time of India’s independence with a sense of purpose, yet he did not find the purpose until his acquisition of telepathy in 1956. Solidarity overcomes fear, for fear, as Mikhail Bakhtin observes during the “Great Terror,” “can only enter a part that has been separated from the whole, the dying link torn from the link that is born” (256). However, the sense of solidarity that emanated from Bandung was besieged by cold facts of the Cold War.

“Horns of the dilemma” Fear leaves Saleem when he acquires telepathy, yet it soon returns. Saleem discovers that he can enter the mind of everyone, even Nehru; that his Ayah’s lullaby– “anything you want to be you kin be” – becomes frighteningly true. “The feeling had come upon me that I was somehow creating a world … which is to say, I had entered into the illusion of the artist” (Rushdie 1981, 172). Saleem’s telepathy has generated a plethora of readings, yet the sinister origin of his telepathy has eluded 278

“We Must Be a Third Principle”

critical attention. For Saleem, telepathy is essentially an “art.” In regard to the nature of such an art, Saleem explains: Matter of fact descriptions of the outré and bizarre, and their reverse, namely heightened, stylized versions of the everyday – these techniques, which are also attitudes of mind … their effect was to create a picture of a world of startling uniformity. (Rushdie 1981, 214) Saleem’s exposition carries disconcerting echoes. It is nothing less than a paraphrase of Andrei Zhdanov’s instructions to the Soviet writers at the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress – to combine “the most stern and sober practical work with a supreme spirit of heroic deeds and magnificent future prospects” (Zhdanov, 1934: 22). Moreover, it resonates with the Chinese equivalent of Zhdanov’s theory – Mao Zedong’s prescription of “the combination of Revolutionary Realism and Revolutionary Romanticism” to the Chinese writers, which was contained in Mao’s 1942 “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art” and reasserted by Mao’s mouthpiece Zhou Yang during China’s “Great Leap Forward.” In both theories and their applications, emphases were placed on the heroic and romantic side – the subjugation of reality to an overpowering will; in Saleem’s words, “self-aggrandizement” (Rushdie 1981, 172). Paradoxically, nowhere was Oscar Wilde’s turn-of-the-century aestheticism – “life imitates art more than art imitates life” – carried out on broader bases and grander scales than in Soviet Russia and Red China. In an article titled “Romantisme Révolutionnaire,” published in Nouvelle Revue Française in 1957, Henri Lefebvre shrewdly remarks that “revolutionary romanticism” “supposes that in pushing to the limit – instead of masking – the problematic character of art and life, something new comes out” (292); “Man in thrall to the possible” (293, 298); such is Lefebvre’s definition of the new art. Lefebvre’s essay testifies to the spread and lure of Mao’s theory of literature and art in the French intellectual circle after the events of 1956. Yet, the influence of Mao’s writing on literature and art spread far beyond France. References to Mao’s Yan’an talks proliferated in the debates and writings of such Third World intellectuals as Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, Jacques Alexis, and Leopold Senghor in the wake of the Bandung Conference.4 Communism, Soviet- and Chinesestyle, was a controversial issue at Bandung, as many participants feared its infiltration into the nonaligned sphere. Such apprehension is vividly captured by Wright’s suspicious remark over Zhou Enlai’s claimed commitment to solidarity. Ironically referring to Zhou as “Brother Chou” (160), Wright writes: “Chou En-lai, by promising to behave, had built a bridgehead that had found foundations not only in Asia but extended even into tribal black Africa” (162). In Wright’s view, Nehru made “a strange pact” (165). Wright’s skepticism is not unfounded. The Bandung Conference and the potent Bandung spirit it gave rise to not only fueled the Afro–Asian Solidarity Movement, which, as Dietmar Rothermund points out, is in fact a communist front organization (22); but it also gave rise to a radical Third-Worldism that helped to define the global sixties. It is worth noting that Saleem, with his acquisition of an art haunted by the specter of communism, is placed in a line of communists who are distinguished by two common features: artistry and impotency. Nadir Khan, who could have fathered Saleem were he able to, is a bad poet who “had shared a room with a painter whose paintings had grown larger and larger as he tried to get the whole of life into his art” (Rushdie 1981, 48). Uncle Hanif, one of the most lovingly depicted figures in Midnight’s Children, is a childless social realist documentary filmmaker, “the only realistic writer working in the Bombay film industry” (Rushdie 1981, 265). Picture Singh, the last surrogate father to Saleem, is a magician, a snake-charmer who charmed Saleem by speaking of “a socialism which owed nothing to foreign influences” (Rushdie 1981, 386). Singh ultimately 279

Y. P. Zhang

“lost his old on reality” (Rushdie 1981, 387). So did Saleem, the last in the line, a failed telepathyexerciser and narrator. While for Saleem, the euphoric feeling of solidarity is nothing but an illusion produced by an art that has roots in communism, its equivalent – “love” – which Saleem experiences in his encounter with a “tough” American girl Evie – an opposite image to the impotent communist artists – proves to be equally disastrous. Significantly, it is when faced with the “potent” Evie, who exemplifies “Americans [who] have mastered the universe” (​179), that Saleem’s telepathy loses its sinister power. In the ironically titled chapter, “Love in Bombay,” Evie’s rejection of Saleem completes what the washing machine has begun: it makes Saleem aware of the Midnight’s Children and transforms him from a “radio receiver” into a “forum.” Evie’s violent reaction to Saleem’s imposition of telepathy produces two consequences. Actively-literally, Saleem’s imposition of telepathy/ unity triggers the language riot that leads to the partition of Bombay. Actively-metaphorically, his realization of the impossibility of “love” with America, on top of his insights into the treacherous nature of the communist art, leads him to “act,” that is, to form his own non-aligned M.C.C. If the communist source of Saleem’s telepathy already hints at the impossibility of a truly “third path,” Saleem’s ambiguous feeling for an American girl sheds further metaphorical light on the difficulty of nonalignment. No surprise M.C.C. is ill-fated from the beginning. Not only does Saleem, the “big brother,” find himself “not immune to the lure of leadership” (​222) and soon begins to wax lyrical about solidarity, but the forum is also crippled by “prejudices and world-views of adults” (​249) from the outset. “Prejudices and world-views of the adults” are metaphors for divisive national interests and parochialism that persistently plagued the Non-Aligned Movement. Behind such conflicts and views lay the pulls of the two camps. The non-aligned nations were inevitably aligned with the two blocs in one way or another. The Suez crisis, which marred the inception stage of the NAM, was directly triggered by America’s refusal of Nasser’s appeal for funds for Egypt’s industrialization program. In Nehru’s letter to Tito two days after Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, Nehru describes the situation as “embarrassing” (qtd. Mišković 120). Yet, Nehru was no less aware than Nasser of the importance of securing American funds. It is worth noting that Nehru consciously capitalized on Soviet-America competition to stimulate aid for his own industrialization program – the Second Five-Year Plan, to which Midnight’s Children abounds in references. Nehru visited the USSR two months after the Bandung Conference and a year before the Brioni meeting; the trip was reciprocated six months later by Khrushchev, whose visit ushered in a friendly stage of Soviet–India relationship. Eager to “contain” communism in Asia, the United States substantially increased its investment in India’s nation-building project in 1956. The actual amount of U.S. aid to India’s Second Five-Year Plan is impressive.5 Remarkably, a project closely modeled on the Soviet experience was heavily dependent on U.S. funding. The dialogue between Saleem and his alter-ego, Shiva, is especially revealing in terms of the relationship between Midnight’s Children and the NAM. While Saleem embodies the “optimism disease,” Shiva speaks of the realpolitik of the Cold War. Disappointed by M.C.C., Saleem stays hopeful nonetheless: “[We] must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only being other, by being new, can we fulfill the promise of our birth!” Shiva replies: “there is no third principle, little rich boy; there is only money-and-poverty, and have-and-lack, and right-and-left; the world is not ideas, the world is things. For things, America and Russia send aid; but five hundred million stay hungry” (Rushdie 1981, 249). Reference to the two superpowers is unequivocal. Such expressions as “third principle” and “driv[ing] between the horns of the dilemma” are strongly reminiscent of the rhetoric of nonalignment and Third World solidarity that permeated the speeches and writings of Third World intellectuals in the 1950s and the 1960s. Midnight’s Children has been intensely studied as a critique of post-Independence 280

“We Must Be a Third Principle”

Indian politics. Yet, its reference to the politics of a broader world – that of the Cold War Global South – is generally neglected. In Midnight’s Children, a blistering critique of Indira Gandhi’s violation of the principle of democracy is tightly woven with the author’s sympathy for Third World internationalism represented by the NAM and his recognition of its predicaments and shortcomings. M.C.C. inevitably falls apart, and its disintegration parallels the disintegration of Saleem.

“The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger,” Kerala crisis, and “drainage” The chapter “Alpha and Omega” is a critical turning point in Midnight’s Children: it records Saleem’s first mutations and the consequent revelation of him being a changeling – revelation, in this case, of the fakeness of Indian democracy, if Saleem’s fate is understood as a metaphor for the fate of India. “Alpha and Omega” is one of the most densely packed and most enigmatically encoded chapters in Midnight’s Children. The amount of critical attention it has received is curiously disproportional to the amount of information encrypted and the momentous significance the author accords it. It is necessary to unravel the chapter in order to better understand the ways in which the NAM is written into Midnight’s Children, for at stake is not only a crucial point in the history of post-independence India but also a history of the Cold War Global South that is intricately entwined with it. Saleem’s first mutilation “took place one Wednesday early in 1958,” and “it happened at school” (Rushdie 1981, 224). These are the first of a series of clues that the author drops for readers to unlock this episode. Saleem’s mutilation is caused by the loss of his hair at the hand of a violent geography class teacher, Emil Zagallo, and the loss of one-third of his middle finger “to the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic” (Rushdie 1981, 232). The figures of Zagallo and Miovic have symbolic significance that waits to be unveiled. The history that underlies this episode is compactly encoded in the following passage: the loss of my finger (which was conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh’s fisherman), not to mention the removal of certain hairs from my head, has undone all that [the whole]. Thus we enter into a state of affairs which is nothing short of revolutionary; and its effect on history is bound to be pretty damn startling. (Rushdie 1981, 231) The passage is strewn with clues to the historical cause and effect that sustain the narrative logic of this episode. Interestingly, the key information is contained in the parenthesis – i.e., Saleem’s disintegration is “conceivably foretold by the pointing digit of Raleigh’s fisherman.” “The pointing digit of Raleigh’s fisherman” refers to the first chapter of Book Two, titled “The Fisherman’s Pointing Finger,” which opens with a description of a picture on the wall of Buckingham Villa through the eyes of Baby Saleem. The picture shows “an old, gnarled” fisherman with “a walrus moustache” pointing towards a watery horizon to a young Walter Raleigh sitting at his feet (Rushdie 1981,122). The fisherman’s finger points to three things. Firstly, it foretells Saleem’s future – his “special doom” (Rushdie 1981, 122) – the loss of a part of his middle finger. Secondly, it points to the historical event for which Saleem’s loss of his finger serves as a metaphor – the death of a pregnant fisherwoman in the “Kerala crisis,” which lasted from 1957 to 1959 and ended with the imposition of presidential rule by Indira Gandhi, then president of the Indian National Congress Party. The effect of the event is “bound to be pretty damn startling” because it was the first time that a democratically elected state government was dissolved by citing the Emergency law. 281

Y. P. Zhang

The Communist Party of India lost the general election in 1957 but won Kerala’s assembly election and formed the first communist state government in the country. This event is alluded to in the chapter “At the Pioneer Café.” The Kerala crisis was touched off by the passing and enforcement of the Kerala Education Act in 1957 – that is, it happened in relation to school. The Education Act includes such terms as prohibition of the use of schools for prayer houses and limitation of corporal punishments. Ironically, in Midnight’s Children, the cancellation of Optional Cathedral placed Saleem in the hands of a school bully. The Catholic Church and the Muslim League in Kerala saw the Act as encroaching on their power and called on the communist ministry to resign. The local Congress Party, which had just lost the election to the CPI, seized the chance and mobilized oppositional parties into state-wide strikes and protests. The crisis reached its climax when police accidentally killed a fisherwoman, whose death was then utilized by the Congress Party as a symbol of the crisis. The Kerala crisis is generally regarded as the first test case of Indian democracy. The mutation of Saleem, which leads to the revelation of him being a fraud, is a metaphor for the Kerala crisis that betrays the fraudulent nature of Indian democracy. Writing on the heel of the Kerala crisis, Benjamin N. Schoenfeld observes: The problems raised by the imposition of presidential rule are greater than those solved by it. The cardinal issue raised is whether unconstitutional means have been utilized to oust a democratically elected Communist Party. Set against the backdrop of Middle East and South East Asian events, presidential rule in Kerala is further evidence of the trend away from democratic processes and toward dictatorial rule by individual or faction. (248) Schoenfeld regards the Kerala crisis not as an individual and independent event but rather as an indicator of a global trend. Rushdie demonstrates a similar insight in Midnight’s Children. The institution of a democratically elected communist state government in India at the height of the Cold War stirred immense enthusiasm and apprehensions around the world. At the same time, Nehru’s friendliness towards communism began to wane as a result of a series of international factors. In addition to the Hungarian crisis and the growing Indo-China border conflict that increasingly absorbed Nehru’s attention, the influences of India’s non-aligned allies, the expansion of communist influence in the Third World, and Nehru’s commitment to the alluring idea of neutrality all contributed to Nehru’s complicity in the undemocratic “containment” of communism in Kerala. Nehru treated Tito as a major consultant on issues regarding the Soviet Union; Tito, on the other hand, was concerned with distancing Yugoslavia from the Soviet Union and exercising leadership in the NAM. With enthusiasm dampened by the events that followed the Brioni meeting, the fathers of the NAM did not venture another meeting until five years later in Belgrade, wherein Nehru had to be persuaded by Tito to join. Saleem’s mutations were directly triggered by “the lip-licking goads of Masha Miovic” and “the bitter violence of Emil Zagallo.” The name Masha Miovic suggests a Serbo-Croatian connection. Miovic’s voice, “full of promises – but also of menace,” is evocative of the seduction of Titoism. Zagallo, on the other hand, is the third target of the fisherman’s pointing finger. Sir Walter Raleigh is well-known for his expeditions in search of El Dorado. The fisherman in the picture supposedly tells the young Raleigh a tale about the “City of Gold.” The fisherman, with “a walrus moustache” (Rushdie 1981, 122) points not only at South America but also at Saleem’s future assailant, an alleged Peruvian “with a barbarian’s shaggy moustache,” who “hung a print of a stern, sweaty soldier in a pointy tin hat and metal pantaloons above his blackboard” (Rushdie 1981, 224). The picture of the Peruvian soldier invokes an association with the Peruvian guerilla 282

“We Must Be a Third Principle”

movement, which gained momentum in the late 1950s. The Peruvian guerillas claimed to follow the Chinese and the Cuban models – a telling case of the spread of communism in the Third World. The most famous of the Peruvian guerilla organizations is perhaps the notoriously violent Shining Path. The mutilation of Saleem at the hands of the seductive Miovic and the violence-worshipping Zagallo suggests that the dissolution of the first communist state in India at the expense of Indian democracy was inextricably intertwined with the divisive agendas of the non-aligned nations and a global fear of communism as a new form of imperialism in the late 1950s. The final disintegration of M.C.C. occurs simultaneously with the Sino–Indian War. Saleem, head of M.C.C., languished among a surge of fervent reactionary nationalism during the war: when “students burned Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-lai in effigy” and “mobs attacked Chinese shoemakers, curio dealers and restaurants”, “I, Saleem, felt as if I was about to die of asphyxiation” (Rushdie 1981, 293). Meanwhile, the M.C.C. drained away: “[q]uarrels began, and the adult world infiltrated the children’s; there was selfishness and snobbishness and hate, and the impossibility of a third principle” (Rushdie 1981, 295). What destroyed all possibility of renewal was the adults – Ahmed and Amina, “the worst victims” of the emotion-integrating nationalism. While the Peking People’s Daily complained, “The Nehru Government has finally shed its cloak of non-alignment”, neither my sister nor I were complaining, because for the first time in years we did not have to pretend we were non-aligned in the war between our parents. (Rushdie 1981, 291) Ahmed and Amina instructed an operation on Saleem, which deprived him of his nose-given telepathy, thus “banishing [him] from the possibility of midnight children” (Rushdie 1981, 295). In the end, Saleem laments: “If there is a third principle, its name is childhood. But it dies; or rather, it is murdered.” The Sino–Indian border war in 1962 effectively dissolved Pan-Asian solidarity, and the Afro– Asian Solidarity Movement fell apart after the war. Although the NAM survived the moment, the Bandung spirit that inspired and sustained it suffered a decisive blow. The deprivation of Saleem’s gift of telepathy by fanatically nationalist adults metaphorically corresponds to the undermining of Third World solidarity by national conflicts.

Coda: Third World, Global South, and postcolonialism Midnight’s Children is dominated by a tone of mourning. As “the end” nears, Saleem “gave to grief,” for he “was given no reason” (Rushdie 1981, 419). In spite of Saleem’s sentimental, romantically-flavored laments, Midnight’s Children registers an acute wariness of idealism – the “optimism disease” – and a deep understanding of the doomed fate of “a third principle.” In an essay written in response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Saleem’s bitter foe, Rushdie thus acknowledges Gandhi’s achievement in the NAM: She managed, for the most part, to keep the balance between America and the Soviet Union … And as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement she gave India great stature in the eyes of the people of the Third World. (Rushdie 1992, 45) Leniency and respect for the dead aside, this passage echoes Rushdie’s understanding of “a third principle” in Midnight’s Children. Both texts evince the insight that the “Third World,” a term 283

Y. P. Zhang

coined by Alfred Sauvy during the Cold War to distinguish formerly colonized and neocolonized societies from the capitalist and socialist worlds,6 did not exist as a separate entity, independent from the influences of the two blocs; rather, it was intricately tied to the capitalist and socialist spheres – in other words, the Third World, with its Cold War provenance, is a global concept. And yet, the frequently invoked terms “third” and “third world” in Rushdie’s writings do carry special “third”-related significance for the author – they are associated with third-world solidarity represented by Bandung, a lingering idealism about which Rushdie remains ambiguous in Midnight’s Children. Rushdie’s “Third World” cosmopolitanism (Brennan viii) has roots in his embrace of a democratic Third World internationalism associated with the Bandung moment. Rushdie’s Third World internationalism underlies his recognition of a “deeper affinity” with Central America and the “South” at large, of “an awareness of the view from underneath” (Rushdie 1987, 12) – in other words, his recognition of the shared condition of “a global subaltern” (Lopez 5). It is worth attention that Rushdie did not take the leap from his democratic Third World internationalism to the radical Third World politics of the 1960s, which, as Dirlik remarks, “represented both the unfolding of the Bandung moment, and its negation” (2015, 621). The absence of such a leap in Rushdie’s writings partly accounts for their congeniality to “reconciliatory postcolonialism” (During 31). However, the unveiling of an encoded history of the Non-Aligned Movement in Midnight’s Children should alert us to the myopia of leaving out the picture of a Cold War Global South in the conceptualization of postcolonialism and prompt an alternative conception of postcolonialism based on considerations of South–South relations and the lingering idealism of Third World solidarity and self-determination bequeathed by the Bandung moment.

Notes 1 I use the word “postcolonial” in reference to a cluster of academic discourse that emerged in the late 1970s and lasted to the 1990s, and I use it primarily in association with – but not limited to – the works of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Robert Young, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. 3 For a detailed discussion of Nehru’s idea of peaceful coexistence, see Mišković. 4 See, for example, Aimé Césaire’s “Letter to Marice Thorez,” Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and the September 1956 issue of Présence Africaine. 5 India received more than ten billion U.S. dollars from U.S. assistance between 1956 and 1975. See Singh. For a discussion of the India–U.S. relationship during the Cold War, also see Mansingh; Wetering; Frankel. 6 See Dirlik 2007, 13.

Works Cited Abdulgani, H. Roeslan. Bandung Spirit: Moving on the Tide of History. Badan Penerbit: Prapantja, 1964. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World, trans. H Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. Berger, Mark T. The Battle for Asia: From Decolonisation to Globalisation. London: Routledge, 2004. Booker, M. Keith. “Midnight’s Children, History, and Complexity: Reading Rushdie after the Cold War.” Critical Essays on Salmon Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999, pp. 283–313. Brennan, Timothy. Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myth of the Nation. London: Macmillan, 1989. Brennan, Timothy. “The Cultural Politics of Rushdie Criticism: All or Nothing.” Critical Essays on Salmon Rushdie, ed. M. Keith Booker. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1999, pp. 107–128. Césaire, Aimé. “Letter to Marice Thorez.” Social Text vol. 103, 2010, pp. 145–152. Dirlik, Arif. “The Bandung Legacy and the People’s Republic of China in the Perspective of Global Modernity.” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, vol. 16, no. 4, 2015, pp. 615–630. Dirlik, Arif. “Global South: Predicament and Promise.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 12–23.

284

“We Must Be a Third Principle” During, Simon. “Postcolonialism and Globalisation: A Dialectical Relation After All?” Postcolonial Studies, vol. 1, no 1. 1998, pp. 31–47. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004. Frankel, Francine R. When Nehru Looked East: Origins of India-US Suspicion and India-China Rivalry. New Dehli: Oxford University Press, 2020. Fuentes, Carlos. “First Victim of the 21st Century: The Hunted Novelist Is the Victim of Religious Atavism That Is Filling the Vacuum Left By Vanished Cold War Ideologies.” Los Angeles Times, 1 April 1992, https://www​.latimes​.com​/archives​/la​-xpm​-1992​-04​-01​-me​-17​-story​.html Lee, Christopher. Making a World After Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010. Lefebvre, Henri. “Revolutionary Romanticism.” trans. Gavin Grindon. Art in Translation, vol. 4, no. 3, 2012, pp. 287–299. Lopez, Alfred J. “The (Post) Global South.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 1–11. Mansingh, Surjit. “India and the United States.” Indian Foreign Policy: The Nehru Years. New Dehli: Vikas Pub House, 1976, pp. 150–169. Mishra, Vijay. “Literary Theory, Salman Rushdie, and the Global South.” The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 250–263. Mišković, Nataša. “Between Idealism and Pragmatism.” The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade, eds. Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nada Boškovska. London and New York: Routledge, 2014, pp. 114–142. Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. “Salman Rushdie and the Third World: Myth of the Nation (Review).” Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 36, Number 4, Winter 1990, pp. 655–656. Présence Africaine, No. 8/10, Le Ier Congrès International des Écrivains et Artistes Noirs (Paris — Sorbonne — 19–22 Septembre 1956), juin–novembre 1956. Rothermund, Dietmar. “The Era of Nonalignment.” The Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War: Delhi – Bandung – Belgrade, eds. Nataša Mišković, Harald Fischer-Tiné and Nada Boškovska. London and New York: Routledge, 2014, pp. 19–34. Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 1981 Rushdie, Salman. The Jaguar Smile: A Nicaraguan Journey. New York: Viking, 1987. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–1991. London: Penguin Books, 1992. Schoenfeld, Benjamin N. “Kerala in Crisis.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 32, no. 3, 1959, pp. 235–248. Singh, S. Nihal. “Can the U.S. and India Be Real Friends?” Asian Survey, vol. 23, no. 9, 1983, pp. 1011–1024. Sukarno, President. “Speech by President Sukarno of Indonesia at the Opening of the Conference.” In Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia. Asia-Africa Speaks from Bandung. Djakarta: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Indonesia, 1955, pp. 19–29. Wetering, Carina van de. Changing U.S. Foreign Policy Toward India: US-India Relations Since the Cold War. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. New York: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. Zhdanov, Andre. “Soviet Literature – The Richest in Idea, the Most Advanced Literature.” Problems of Soviet Literature, ed. HG Scott. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1934, pp. 15–26. Zhou, Yang. “Xin Minge Kaituo Le Shige de Xin Daolu” [The New Folk Songs Blaze a New Road for Poetry]. Hong Qi [Red Flag]. Number1, 1958.

285

INDEX

Note: Page numbers following “n” refer notes. Aadujeevitham 59 abandoning 195, 242; binary dichotomies in animism 217; of neoliberalism as self-poietic foundation 38; of queer 70; racial privilege 48 Abdullah, M. 277 Abdussalam (Shaikh) 240 Abolition Act of 1833 (Jamaica) 124 Abraham, J.: Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) 149 abstractions 108, 109, 205, 206 Abu, O. 246 Abu Bakr, O.K.M. 258 The Abu Ghraib Effect (Eisenman) 251 Achebe, C.: Things Fall Apart 228 Achugar, W. 148 activism 272n21; cinema role in political 149; ilustrado 211; imaginability problem of climate change 140; queerness and 65, 68; queer theory and 64 Adair, G. 94 Adayfi, M. 258 Addoun, D. 126, 127, 131n13 Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam (Eḻuttacchan) 242 Adiga, A.: Exciting Tales of the Exotic East 174; The White Tiger 169, 171, 173, 175 Aeschylus 17n17; Prometheus 4 African Indian Ocean 138; see also Indian Ocean African Literature: Animism and Politics (Rooney) 217 Agamben, G. 91 Agassiz, L. 83 Agoncillo, T. 209 Ahamed, M.: Camels in the Sky 60 Ahlbäck, A. 123 Ahmad, A. 177n11 Akan states 122



Akata Witch (Okorafor) 105 Akra Koti Gallon Pani (Barve) 55 Alba, G. 257 Alcoff, L.M. 79 Alexis, J. 279 Ali, A.S. 199 Ali, K. 200 Alienation and Freedom (Fanon) 3 alienation effect 226, 229 All About H. Hatterr (Desani) 201 All Blossoms Again (Gerbault) 91 Amado, J. 179 American Antebellum South 123 Amin, I. 47 Amin, S.: The Long Revolution of The Global South 99–100 Amma Ariyan (Report to Mother) (Abraham) 149 amphibian aesthetics analytics 236, 237 Anders, G.: publishing lectures of Frantz 5 Anderson, B. 211 Anderson, C. 257 Andrews, C.F. 119 animism 217 Anthropocene 107, 215, 216; environmental change/climate change 135, 221; in feminism and queer theory 221; in fictions 103; in Hippolyte’s ecopoetry 215; nonhuman in debates about 216; period during Britain’s colonial ventures 53 Anthropocene Feminism (Grusin) 221 anti-literacy laws 123 Antologia Pessoal (Jesus) 185, 186 Antonio Das Môrtes (Rocha) 149 Anzaldúa, G. 65 Apanjan (Sinha) 151n8 aphorism 154

287

Index Arabic literacy 122, 124–5, 126, 130 Arabi Malayalam 237–9, 242; amphibious poetics of 240; literarisation 246; literary culture in 240, 247; Mappila religious and mystical literature written in 245; māpppiḷappāṭṭukaḷ (song tradition) 246; song-poetry 246, 247 archipelagic thinking analytics 236 archives see digital archives Archivo Histórico de Vieques 261–3 Arenas, F. 93 Arenas, R.: Before Night Falls [Antes que anochezca] 72 Argentina 151n11–12; ban of Latin-American sexual dissidence in 71; growing interest in India 113; politics associated with waiting in 254; reception of Tagore in 111–20 Aristarco, G. 148 Armillas-Tiseyra, M. 99 art cinema 87, 90, 147, 151n8 Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan (Mirza) 149 Asako I & II (Hamaguchi) 94 Atabaki, T.: Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil 59 Atenea (journal) 114 Atiu, S. 228–9 Atlantics (Diop) 94, 95 Auyero, J. 254 avant-garde poetry 190–202, 202n2; Bengali avant-gardism 191–2; Bengali poetic obduracy 192–5; bi-lingual avant-gardism 195–8; disobedient poetics 195–8; Hungryalists 191–2; mappings 190–1 “Avocado” (Hippolyte) 218, 219, 220, 221, 222 Ayala, C. 264 Bagarap, E. 231 Ba Jin: Xue 55 Baker, H.: “Violence, the Body and ‘The South,’” 42 Bakhtin, M.M. 162n10, 240; The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays 240 The Bamboo Trunk (al-Sanaussi) 60 Bandung Conference 79, 277–80 Banerjee, P.: Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South 39 Barad, K. 101–2; Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning 217 Barnard, W. 129 Barnes, J. 162 Barrault, J.-L. 3 Barve, A.: Akra Koti Gallon Pani 55 Basu, B. 55 Before Night Falls [Antes que anochezca] (Arenas) 72 Begg, M. 253

Bejel, E. 72; Gay Cubal Nation 70 Bell, G. 89 Bengali 117, 120n1, 230; autobiographical writings of Sen in 150; avant-gardism 191–2, 202n2; books of Rabindranath containing signature in 117; Kallol Yug literary movement 55, 56; poetic obduracy 192–5; songs of Rabindranath in 114; work of Pandey in gonosangeet (mass song movement) 57 Benjamin, W. 177n6 Benveniste, É.: Problèmes de linguistique générale 73 Bérénice (Racine) 3 Bernhard, T. 162 A Better Life (Weltz) 91 Betto, F.: Fidel y la Religion 163n17 Bhagavad Gita 113, 114 Bhaṭṭatiri, M.N.: Nārāyaṇīyam 242 Bhrugubanda, U. M. 151n2 Bibler, M.P. 45, 46 Bilasi (dalit caste) 56, 57 bilateralism 145 bi-lingual avant-gardism 195–8 Binidito, S. 181–2 Birthright (Hippolyte) 215 Biswas, H. 57 black Atlantic 34, 134, 240 The Black Atlantic (Gilroy) 240 The Black Jacobins (James) 34; crisis at the individual level 39; post-global subjectivities 38–40 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon) 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15 Blanca, M. 83, 84 body: connection between psyche and 7; of domestic drudgery of the housewife/unpaid labor 56; stage becoming 13–14; of women 57; words connection with 8–13 Bolivar, J.L. 264 Bonifacio, A. 204, 209 Booker, M.K. 275 Bose, S. 237 Bourdieu, P. 159 Boyer, D. 52, 53 Braginsky, V.I. 241, 245 Branco, S.D. 91–2 Brandt, W. 77 Brandt Commission: North-South: A Programme for Survival 77 Brathwaite, K. 236 Brecht, B. 226 Brennan, T.: Salman Rushdie and the Third World 275 A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Harvey) 31 Brioni Declaration 277 Britannicus (Racine) 3 British Empire 53, 144–6

288

Index Bromley-Hall, F. 7 Brossard, J.P. 149 Brown, W. 32 Buekes, L. 108; Moxyland 107; Zoo City 107 Buenos Aires Herald (newspaper) 119 Burnell, A.C.: Specimens of South Indian Dialects 246 Butler, J. 102–3 By the Sea (Gurnah) 238 Calcutta 71 (Sen) 150, 151–2n13 Caldini, C. 151n7 Cambone, S. 255 Camels in the Sky (Ahamed) 60 Camorra, P. 208–9 Camprubí, Z. 112, 117 capital 33, 104, 173–6, 177n9; appropriation of 159; colonial 210; exploitation of workers through transnational investment 94; investment in politics 148; labor and 49; requirement in petroleum industry 58; social forms of 100; totalitarian refrain and 107; virtual (or fictitious) 108 capitalism 59, 88, 104, 105, 109, 221, 233; associated with coal 54; colonialism and 34, 42, 100; conditions of kafala workers in Gulf 59; as dissipative system 104; fossil 53, 58; history of 99–100; imperial 32, 100; inequality and 31; modernity and 82; racial 33; rhetoric of progress 82; survival of peripheral irrealism after crisis 107; Western 31; whiteness and 81 capitalist development 33, 99, 100 Capitalocene 103 Caras y Caretas 117, 118, 119 carceral imperialism 250, 256–8 Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from the Twilight Zones (Davies) 220 Cariou, W. 217 Carlson, A. 61, 62 Carnation Revolution 92 Carrere, E. 162 Casa de Alvernaria (Jesus) 179, 180 Casa de Lava (Costa) 90 Cassou, J. 118 Castro, E. 72 Celarent, B. 205 Centeno, C.C. 267, 269 Césaire, A. 18n64, 279; Et les chiens se taisaient 17n17; Notebook of a return to the native land 17n17 Chakraborty, A. 115; Cien poemas de Kabir (One Hundred Poems of Kabir) 114, 115, 116 Chakravarty, S.C. 143 Chakravorty, G. 202n1 Chan, A. 271 Chandler, D. 101

“Chasnala mine” (Pandey) 57–8 chattel slavery 59, 128 Chattopadhyay, S. 191, 192 Chatwin, B. 88, 90, 91; In Patagonia 87; The Songlines 89; The Viceroy of Ouidah 87 Chaucer, G. 191 chemosynthesis 138 Chernov, C. 107; El sistema de las estrellas 107 The Child of the Cavern (Verne) 54–5 Child of the Dark (Jesus) 180 China 27; activities of cultural diplomacy 22; borderland war India 24; cultural exchange with India 22; decolonization 19; India alignment with 34; pan-Asianist writing 21 China-India: Cold War between 21; cultural diplomacy 22; cultural exchange between 22; decolonization in 19, 22; diplomatic relations 19, 21, 24, 27; “two thousand years of friendship” 20–4 Choudhury, M. R. 191, 201; ‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar’ (‘Stark Electric Jesus’) 192 Chowdhury, S. 57 the chronotope 240, 247; Kappappāṭṭu and 239–45; of ship in Mappila literary culture 236–7 Chthulucene 135 Cien poemas de Kabir (One Hundred Poems of Kabir) (Tagore and Chakraborty) 114, 115, 116 cinema 87–95; art 87, 90, 147, 151n8; colonialism in 87; depiction of haunting stories in 88; European representation of aboriginal culture in 90; First Tashkent Festival of African and Asian 147–8; history of national 144; horror in 94; representation of the Other in 88; role in political activism 149; transnational 144, 151n5; use of chiaroscuro in 91; see also Indian cinema Cinémathèque Québécoise 151n10 Circle of Reason (Ghosh) 59–60 Clara, M. 186, 208 Clerkin, P. 141n1 climate collapse 106–8 climate science 105 climate theories 105 coal energies 54–8 coal mining: labor 56; private entrepreneurships during the Raj 55; violence 57 The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India (Dutta-Lahiri) 55 coastal thought analytics 236 Cobra Verde (Herzog) 87, 89 co-constitutive relationship 32–5 Colanzi, L.: Our Dead World 108 colonialism/colonial 53; capitalism and 34; Caribbean 122; European 23; extractivism 55; hegemon 19; temporal relation 23; violence 57 Colossal Youth (Costa) 91 Columbus 111

289

Index computer 169, 171, 173; archives and 270; backstory of 177n4; economy and 170; extractivism and 176; internet and 172; role in Global South 170; technosocial aspect of 175 Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) 79 Conrad, J.: Heart of Darkness 44, 45 contemporary literary radicalism 177n11 Coole, D. 102 COP 21 52 Cordeiro, E. 92 Cosmopolitan Desires (Siskind) 174 Costa, P. 87, 91, 94; Casa de Lava 90; Colossal Youth 91; Horse Money 91, 92, 93; Vitalina Varela 93 Cova, A. 81 COVID-19 103 Crane, H. 196 “Creation” (Hippolyte) 219, 222 Creole 118, 123, 205, 207, 208; in Arabic script 128–9 The Crescent Moon (Tagore) 115 Crítica (newspaper) 117 The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind (Le Bon) 156 Crutzen, P. J. 53, 215 Cruz, O. 264, 266, 267, 269 Cuarón, A.: Sólo con tu pareja 94 cultural history 154–62; cultural operations and sens effects 158–9; historiography 155–7; lettered culture 154–5; mass media 156–7; politics and historiography 159–61; popular culture 155–8; reconceptualization 157–8 cultural operation 158–9 Curtis, E.E. 131n15 “Cyber-proletariado” (Sálazar) 107 Dalit 56 Damaso, P. 208 Dangarembga, T.: This Mournable Body 105 Dantas, A. 179 Darío, R. 115 Darwin, C. 83, 84 Darwish, M. 199 Das, J. 55, 192, 193 David Mogo, Godhunter (Okongbowa) 105–6 Davidson, N.: “La hermandad de la luna” 107 Davies, C.B.: Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from the Twilight Zones 220 Davis, J. 53 Davis, M. 49, 255 Day, G. 100 de Ayala, Perez 113 debt 34, 76, 81, 233 de Carril, A. 117, 119 de Certeau, M. 156, 157, 159, 160, 161; The Practice of Everyday Life 156, 163n21

Deckard, S. 34–5 decolonial/decolonization 6, 19, 22, 28, 32; books on 85n5; gender and sexual difference 64; geopolitic 67; Global South and 77–80, 84; improprieties 69; political solidarity and 88; politics of sexuality and gender 66; sexual and gender dissidence 73; Third World discourse 24 deepsea fishing 136, 138, 140 deepsea mining 137–8, 141n2 deepsea submarines 139 Deep South 43–9 dehumanization 251–4 de la Base, G.C. 148 de la Cuadra, J.: Los monos enloquecidos [“The Mad Monkeys”] 76, 79, 82–4 De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Mandrou) 156 de la Torre, C. M. 207 del Carril, A. 113 Delchi, A.M. 118, 119 Deleuze, G. 191, 196 de L.J. Rosso, T.G.A. 116 DeLoughrey, E. M. 223n3 del Pan, J. F. 211 del Pan, R.: La Oceania Espanola 211 del Pilar, M.H.: Monastic Supremacy in the Philippines 211 del Pilar Blanco, M. 90 Denis, C. 95; 35 Shots of Rum 94 de Noailles, A. 118 Derrida, J. 90 Desai, G. 48 Desani, G.V.: All About H. Hatterr 201 de Sousa Santos, B. 49, 104 Dhar, P. 57–8 Dhasal, N. 201 The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Bakhtin) 240 Díaz, E.S. 265 digital archives 260–72; in conversation 261–3; Vieques struggle 260, 263–70; Yabureibo 263–72 Dimock, W.C. 49, 76, 79 Diop, M. 87; Atlantics 94, 95 Dirlik, A. 31, 88, 277 discourses 12, 50n4, 80, 106, 255, 263; of China-India diplomacy 21; colonial 219; counterinsurgency 266; decentralization of global neoliberalism 32; decolonial 24; of diplomacy 21; of distant lands and climes 174; gay respectability politics homogenizing 12, 50n4; of The Global South journal 78; Latin American modernity 80, 85n6; neocolonial 83; political 20; of solidarity 23 disobedient poetics 195–8 dissensus 40n1 dissident bodies 67; see also body

290

Index distress 11–12 Djagalov, R. 148 Domínguez-Ruvalcaba, H. 65 Donlan, E. see al-Ṣiddīq, A.B. ‘The Door’ (Kolatkar) 202 The Drowning Eye (Fanon) 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13 dualism 216 Dubai Dreams (Puri) 59 Dubai on Wheels (Puri) 59 Du Bois, W. E. B. 45; The Souls of Black Folk 44 Duchamp, M. 195 Duiker, W.S.: Thirteen Cents 108 Dunlavy, M. 258 Dutta, S. 55 Dutta-Lahiri, K.: The Coal Nation: Histories, Ecologies and Politics of Coal in India 55 Ebert, R. 47 Echeverría, B. 76, 81 ecofeminism 216, 220; see also ecopoetry ecopoetry 215–23 Edwards, S. 100 Ehsani, K. 59 Eisenman, S.: The Abu Ghraib Effect 251 Elementary Aspects of the Political: Histories from the Global South (Banerjee) 39 El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) (Rizal) 204 El gaucho Martín Fierro (Hernandez) 116 Elkins, J.: The Object Stares Back 219 El manantial (telenovela) 115 Elmhirst, L.K. 117–19 El nuevo Vieques (newspaper) 266 El Plata Científico y Literario (periodical) 113 El sistema de las estrellas (Chernov) 107 Eḻuttacchan, T.: Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇam 242 El vampiro (Molloy) 72 Emeric, O. L. C. 264 Emmelhainz, I. 88 empire capitalism 53; see also capitalism En breve cárcel (Molloy) 72 energy-consumption 52 energy humanities, India 52–62; coal energies 54–8; narrative of modernity 53; petro-labor 58–61; petroleum 58–61; renewables/renewable energy resources 58–61 England, L. 257 entrepreneurial/entrepreneurship 55, 174; achievement 36; knowledge from urban elite 169; masculinity 173, 175; scripting 169; subjectivity 171, 173–5 Escobar, A. 78 Espinosa, J.G. 148 Et les chiens se taisaient (Césaire) 17n17 Europe 34, 94, 95; aboriginal culture 90; cannibalization of territories 33; cinema of mobility 93; cinematography relationships

with colonial heritage 87; civilization 112; coal import in 55; colonialism in 23; colonization representation through art 89; fall of imperialism in 31; language 123; liberalism in 210; Otherization of the colonized in 88; racism in 80 Exciting Tales of the Exotic East (Adiga) 174 Exit West (Hamid) 35 extractivism, computing of 169–77, 177n8; being and belonging in technosocial 171–3; entrepreneurial subjectivity 173–5; objectedoriented literature of extraction 175–7 Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India (Sukthankar) 199 Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (Sarmiento) 112 Fagundes, P. 186 fakīru 131n12 al-Fakīru, S.B. 127 Falconí, D. 69 Fallon, M. 253, 254, 257 Fanon, F. 279; Alienation and Freedom 3; Black Skin, White Masks 3, 5, 7, 8, 11, 15; on co-constitutive relationship between the South and the North 33; The Drowning Eye 4, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13; experiences of actor bodies on stage 7; internal debates of 15–16; Joby on memorising prefaces written by Racine 3; joining the Free French Forces 4; L’an V de la révolution algérienne 3; lectures published by Anders 5; Parallel Hands 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15; PreChristian Intuitions 4; stage instructions and performances 7; studying rituals of exorcisms 5; tragic theatre of concepts 6; The Wretched of the Earth 6, 15, 16n14, 33 Fanon, J. 3, 17n19 Fansuri, H. 241 Fault Lines (Hippolyte) 215, 222, 223–4n6 Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood) 221 Fidel y la Religion (Betto) 163n17 Fili (Rizal) 205, 210, 212, 213n3 financialization 31, 33, 39, 103 Finnegans Wake (Joyce) 195 Fire (Mehta) 199 First Tashkent Festival of African and Asian cinema 147–8 first-world 55, 111, 174, 229 first-world-third world 174 Fishermen Struggle (1978–1983) 262, 263 Fitzcarraldo (Herzog) 89 Florentino, P. 209 Folha da Noite (newspaper) 179 Forgione, J.D.: Ideario de la Escuela Nueva 119 fossil capitalism 53, 58; see also capitalism Foucault, M. 40n4, 156, 157, 159

291

Index Franc, A.: Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani (GK) 250, 251, 256 freedom ontologically, definition of 5 Freire, P. 268 Freud, S.: “The Uncanny” 228 From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Global Solidarity (Garland Mahler) 76, 272n21 Frost, S. 102 Fuentes, C. 275 Gaddama (movie) 60 Gajic, T. 16 Galeano, E. 33 Gámez-Fernández, C.: Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World 215 García, A. 72 Garland, A. 266 Garland Mahler, A.: From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Global Solidarity 76, 272n21 Gasquet, A. 112 Gay Cubal Nation (Bejel) 70 gay/gayness 65, 66, 69–73, 73n4; poet 198, 199; writing in Yaraana 199; see also queer/queerness gender dissidence: homosexuality 69; in LatinAmerican literature 70–3; protests and riots by marginalized communities 68 Georgia Tech: Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) 261 Gerbault, A.: All Blossoms Again 91 Gerbner, K. 123 Getino, O. 151n12; La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) 149–50, 151n9 Al Gharani, Y.A.S. 251 Ghashiram Kotwal (movie) 149 Ghosal, T. 252 Ghosh, A. 140; Circle of Reason 59–60 ghosting 251–4 Giard, L. 163n21, 163n24 Gide, A. 112, 118 Giedion, S.: Mechanization takes command. A contribution to anonymous history 154 Gilbert, É. 85n1 Gilroy, P. 34; The Black Atlantic 240 Ginsberg, A. 192 Gitanjali (Tagore) 112–13, 115, 119, 120n1 Gitanjali: Song Offerings 113, 115, 120n1 Glendinning, C. 177n5 Gleyzer, R.: Los Traidores (The Traitors) 150 Glissant, É. 236 globalization: economic liberalization and 150; film festival and 89; neoliberalism and 32–3, 38, 88, 94; study by the Warwick Research Collective 35; world cinema and 89

Global South, defined 35, 42, 99, 101, 103–4 The Global South (journal) 77–8 “The Global South and World/Disorder” (Levander and Mingolo) 78 Go, J. 211 Godard, J.-L. 88 Gomez, M. 122 González, J.A. 112, 114, 116 González, J.V. 118, 119 Gora (Tagore) 112 Gordon, A. 253 Gosson, R. K. 223n3 Gowda, R. 113 Goyal, Y. 36 Graber, D. 34 Gramsci, A. 230 graphic novels 250–9; carceral imperialism 256–8; dehumanization 251–4; ghosting 251–4; waiting, stuckness, and stuckedness 254–6 Grau, J.M.: We Are What We Are 94 Green, F. 129 Grusin, R.: Anthropocene Feminism 221 Guadalupe, I. 261, 262, 264 Guantánamo Kid: The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani (GK) (Franc) 250, 251, 256 Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison (GV) (Mirk) 250, 251, 252, 254, 256, 257 Guha, R. 155–6, 267; Varieties of Environmentalism 53 Güiraldes, R. 113, 116, 118 Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) 59 Gurnah, A.: By the Sea 238 Guzmán, P. 150 Hage, H. 256 Hamaguchi, R.: Asako I & II 94 Hamid, M.: Exit West 35; The Reluctant Fundamentalist 35–9 Hamilton, J. 52 Handley, G.B. 223n3 Haraway, D. 135; on naturecultures 222 Harbus, A. 241 Harvey, D. 34; A Brief History of Neoliberalism 31 Haspatale Lekha Kobitaguchchho (Poems Written in a Hospital) (Majumdar) 194 Hau’ofa, E.: “Old Wine in New Bottles” 227; “The Second Coming” 228; “The Seventh and Other Days” 227; Tales of the Tikongs 226–34; “The Wages of Sin” 233 Hauser, K. 59 Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 44, 45 Hennebelle, G. 148 hermeticism 5 Hernández, G. 83, 84 Hernandez, J.: El gaucho Martín Fierro 116

292

Index Herzog, W. 91, 93, 94; Cobra Verde 87, 89; Fitzcarraldo 89; Nomad 87, 88, 89; Queen of the Desert 89; Salt and Fire 89 He Zongyu 137 Hickey, D. 46 Hidayat al-adhkiya ila tariq al-awliya (“Guide for the Intelligent to the Path of the Friends of God”) (ibn Ali) 241, 242, 245, 246 Hippolyte, K. 215–23; about 215; “Avocado” 218, 219, 220, 221, 222; Birthright 215; “Creation” 219, 222; ecopoetry of 215, 216, 223; Fault Lines 215, 222, 223–4n6; Night Vision 215, 218; nonhuman world 215–16; poetics of intra-action 216–22; So Many Islands 218; subject beyond the Cartesian belief in poetry of 215 Historia da linguagem (Kristeva) 162n10 historiography 175, 246, 275; mass media and 156–7; politics and 159–61; popular culture and 155–6 Hobsworth-Smith, E. 228–30 Hofmeyr, I. 134 Holland, J. 46 Hollywood 145, 146 Holquist, M. 240 Homo economicus 35–8, 39, 40n4 homosexuality 69, 71–2, 200 Honik, J. 151n7 hooding 251 horizontality 32, 35, 37, 218 Horse Money (Costa) 91, 92, 93 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Rodney) 33 How Green Was My Valley (Llewellyn) 55 How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (Hamid) 32, 35, 40 Hoyos, H. 176, 177n4 Hughes, S.P. 146 Hugo, V. 6, 17n19 Hungryalists 191–2 Huraira, A. 131 Ibao, Y. 119 Ibarra, C. 208 ibn Ali, S. Z.: Hidayat al-adhkiya ila tariq al-awliya (“Guide for the Intelligent to the Path of the Friends of God”) 241, 242, 245, 246 ideal slaves 124–5 Ideario de la Escuela Nueva (Forgione) 119 imperialism: capitalism and 237; carceral 250, 256–8; colonialism and 104, 277; cultural 174; European 31; India violent intimacy with British 190; Japanese 21; military 269, 270; resistance to Hollywood 146; Western 99 Incomplete Solutions (Talabi) 105 In Darkest Africa (Stanley) 44–5 India 111; alignment with China 34; cultural exchange with China 22; decolonization 19; deep

sea prospecting 137; disobedient poetics 195; literary traditions of 115; neoliberal 169, 177n10; pan-Asianist writing 21; restrictive measures of British for indigenous cinema in 146; see also coal mining; energy humanities Indian cinema 143–50; in 1960s 147–9; British Empire and 144–6; Cinematograph Films Act (Quota Act) 145; collectives of 149; Dramatic Performances Act 1876 145; Indian Cinematograph Bill 145; Indian Press Act 1910 145; mythological narratives in 151n1; Newspaper (Incitement to Offences) Act 1908 145; reception of 151n3; role in political activism 149; spatial and exhibitional histories 146–7; Third Cinema 149–50; unlocatedness and exceptionalism of 143; see also cinema Indian New Wave 149 Indian Ocean 134–40, 247; bathymetry 135; deepsea fishing in 138; depth and length of 134, 141; Dragon Vent (Qiu) 137–8; gold and dragons 137–8; littoral societies 236; orange roughy 135–7; Southern Indian Ocean Deepsea Fishers Association (SIODFA) 135–7; spice trade in 237–8; Submergence (Ledgard) 138–40; submersive reading 135 The India Society 113–14 indigenism 88 Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, Colombia (CRIC) 79 inequality: capitalism and 31; digital divide 270; economic inequality underdeveloped world 33–4; protest against injustice and 58; of races 100; social 187 interculturality 79 International Monetary Fund 34 International Seabed Authority (ISA) 137–8, 141n2 intra-action, poetics of 216–22 Inventario de naves (Iparraguire) 106 Iovino, S. 218 Iparraguirre, A. 109; Inventario de naves 106; La realidad no existe 103 Islam, K. N. 55 Isla Nena (newspaper) 266 isomorphism 176 It Follows (Mitchell) 94 Jackson, P.A. 131n15 Jaikumar, P. 143, 145, 147 Jamaica 122–30; English/Creole in Arabic script 128–9; ideal slaves and Arabic literacy 124–5; Kabā and slaves in 125–8; language literacy in 123 Jameel, S.A. 60 James, C.L.R.: The Black Jacobins 34 James, M. 218 Jeanson, F. 7

293

Index Jefferson, A. 255 Jejuri (Kolatkar) 196, 197, 198 Jesus, C. M. de 179–87; Antologia Pessoal 185, 186; Casa de Alvernaria 179, 180; Child of the Dark 180; favela 179–87; Onde estaes Felicidade 185; Pedaços da Fome [Pieces of Hunger] 179, 185, 187; Provérbios 179, 185, 186, 187; Quarto de despejo 179–80, 182–5, 187 Jiaolong (exploration submersible) 137–8 al-Jīlāni, S.M.A.Q. 242; Nūlmadh 239, 240 Jiménez, J.R. 117 Jñanappāna (Nampūtiri) 242 Johns-Putra, A. 216 Jones, C. 54, 59 Jorge, N.B.: ReFocus 90 Joyce, J. 197; Finnegans Wake 195 Julia, D. 156 Jussawalla, A. 199 Kabā, M. 125–8 Kabir, A.J. 114–15, 237 kafala system 59 Kallol (periodical) 192 Kallol Yug 55–6 Kant, I.: Observaciones sobre el sentimiento de lo bello y lo sublime 163n18 Kappappāṭṭu (ship song) (Musliyār) 237, 239–47 Kareem, K.K.M.A. 239, 247n3 Kattupāṭṭukaḷ 239 Kaul, A. 149 “Kerala’s own Petrofiction” (Menon) 60 Khadama (movie) 60 Khaiyam, O.: Rubaiyat 114, 115 Khatua, S. 202n2 Kidwai, S.: Same-Sex Love in India 199 King. E. 46 Kinski, K. 89 Kipping, H. 207 The Kiss of the Spider Woman [ El Beso de la Mujer Araña] (Puig) 71 Kitāb al-Ṣalāt (Peart) 126–7, 130 Kolatkar, A. 195–8; ‘The Door’ 202; Jejuri 196, 197, 198 “Koyla Kuthi” (Mukhopadhyay) 56 Kraniauskas, J. 155 Kristeva, J.: Historia da linguagem 162n10 Krittibas (periodical) 192 labor 53; in coal mining 55, 56; cross-racism 49; exploitation in petroleum industry 59; petro-labor 58–61; precarious 54; transnational supply 61; unpaid 56 La Cruzada Informa 266 La era de las multitudes. Un tratado histórico de la psicología de masas (Moscovici) 156 “La hermandad de la luna” (Davidson) 107

La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (Solanas and Getino) 149–50, 151n9 Lam, W. 16 La Nación 116, 117, 119 language 192, 217, 228, 230; Arabi Malayalam 239; Bengali 114, 117; impact on marginalized communities 66; in India 190; literacy in Jamaica 123; of philosophy 101; poetic 71; queer theory 64; social relations 159 Lanuza, E.G. 120 L’an V de la révolution algérienne (Fanon) 3 La Oceania Espanola (del Pan) 211 La Prensa (news daily) 113 La Razón 119 La realidad no existe (Iparraguirre) 103 La Revista de Buenos Aires 113 Las biuty queens (Ojeda) 73 Latin America 33, 64, 111, 113, 149, 150; dissidence before queerness 68–70; filmmakers in 150; literary challenges regarding Eurocentric capitalist accumulation 104–5; literature on gender and sexual dissidence in 70–3; nonconformity history 69; novels on national and social concerns 82; queer or not to queer in 65–8; study on gendersex diversity in 66 La vorágine [The Vortex] (Rivera) 76, 79, 80–2 La Voz de Vieques 266 Lazarsfeld, P. 212 Lazarus, N. 54 Le Bon, G. 157; The Crowd. A Study of the Popular Mind 156 Ledgard, J.M.: Submergence 138–40 Lefebvre, H. 279 Leguía, A.B. 116 LeMenager, S. 53, 59 Lemes, P. 186 Leon, R. J. 253 LeRoy, J. A. 211 Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse (Varda) 161 lettered culture 154–5 Levander, C.: “The Global South and World/ Disorder” 78 Liang Qichao: on shared temporality 21; on speech delivered on occasion of Tagore’s visit to China 20–1 Liberator (journal) 129 Lispector, C. 179 Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (Mills) 212 literacy 130n4, 158; anti-literacy laws 123; Arabic 122, 124–5, 126, 129, 130; defined 123; digital 171; slaves 130n4 literary transduction 112, 115 Littín, M. 148 littoral societies 236–8, 245 Liz, M. 93 Llewellyn, R.: How Green Was My Valley 55

294

Index London, I. 16 The Long Revolution of The Global South (Amin) 99–100 López, A.J. 31, 109, 260 López, A.L. 78 López, L.V. 113 Los monos enloquecidos [“The Mad Monkeys”] (de la Cuadra) 76, 79, 82–4 Los poemas de Kabir (Sanez-Peña) 114–15 Los Traidores (The Traitors) (Gleyzer) 150, 151n11 Lovejoy, P. 122, 126, 127, 131n13 Lowe, L. 33 Lugones, M. 79 Luzzatti, L. 112 Macdonald, G. 58 Madden, R.R. 124–5; A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship 124–5, 131n8 Madhavan, K. 60 Mahajan, K.K. 152 Mahler, A.G. 82; From the Tricontinental to the Global South 76 Majumdar, B. 192–5, 202n1; Haspatale Lekha Kobitaguchchho (Poems Written in a Hospital) 194; Phire Esho, Chaka (Come Back, Chaka) 193, 202n1 Majumdar, S. 151n4 Malabar Coast 237–9 Mālappāṭṭukaḷ 239 Maldonado-Torres, N. 79 Malm, A. 53–4, 58 Mambéty, D.D.: Touki Bouki 94 Mandingos 130n5 Mandrou, R.: De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles 156 Mann, P. 190 Mansilla, L. V. 111, 113 Manuel, S. 182 Manuellan, M.-J. 3 Manusamhita 115 Mao Zedong 279 Mappilas 237–9, 245–7 Marque, G. G. 163n17 Martin, J. 129 Martin, S. 129 Martinez-Aliers, J.: Varieties of Environmentalism 53 Martín Fierro (periodical) 116 Marx, U. 175–6 Maspero, F. 3–16 mass media 156–7, 161 mass songs (“gonosangeet”) 57 materiality: capitalism and 106; concerns in literature 109; corporal 68; energy transitions

and 53; political dimension of 102; of racial capitalism 33 matter: literature and speculation 104–6; meaning and 102; “minds” 101; new materialism 104–6; unevenness and 103 matter-ing 102 Mazza-Coates, I. 16 Mbembe, A. 34 McKee, K. 43 Mechanization takes command. A contribution to anonymous history (Giedion) 154 Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglements of Matter and Meaning (Barad) 217 Mehta, D.: Fire 199 “Memories of a Personal Computer” (Zambra) 169, 171 Menon, P.: “Kerala’s own Petrofiction” 60 Merchant, H. 198–202; My Sunset Marriage 200; Paradise isn’t Artificial: Les paradis ne sont pas artificiels 200; Secret Writings 199; Yaraana 199 Mester, A. 92 metaphysics 7, 217, 241 Micciché, L. 148 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie) 201, 275–84; “Alpha and Omega” 281–3; Kerala crisis, depiction in 281–3; Midnight’s Children’s Conference (M.C.C.) 275, 276, 280, 283; narrative logic in 276–8; Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 275, 277, 280, 282, 283; telepathy in 276–81; Third World and postcolonialism in 283–4 Mignolo, W. 66, 67, 78, 80, 84 Migrant Report (Rajakumar) 60 Miguel Street (Naipaul) 226 Miller, G. 256 Mills, C.W. 205, 206, 212; Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba 212 Mingolo, W.D. 79; “The Global South and World/ Disorder” 78 Mirk, S.: Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison (GV) 250, 251, 252, 254, 256, 257 Mirza, S.: Arvind Desai ki Ajeeb Dastan 149; La hora de los hornos 149 Mirzoeff, N. 219, 259n1 Mishra, S. 31, 33 Mishra, V. 275 Mississippi Masala (Nair) 47–8 Mitchell, D.R.: It Follows 94 Mitra, P. 55 Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World (Serrano and GámezFernández) 215 Modernismo (literary movement) 112 Mogo, D. 106 Molloy, S.: El vampiro 72; En breve cárcel 72

295

Index monastic corporations 211 Monastic Supremacy in the Philippines (del Pilar) 211 Monsiváis, C. 65 Moore, J. W. 54, 104 Morrison, T. 46 Moulavi, P.T.B. 246 Movimiento de Liberación Homosexual [Homosexual Liberation Movement] (MLH) 68 Movimiento Viequenses Pro Fiestas Patronales Sin Marina (Viequenses Movement Pro Patron Saint Festivities without the Navy) 261 Moxyland (Buekes) 107 Muhammad, Q.: Muhyiddīn Māla 239, 242 Muhyiddīn Māla (Muhammad) 239, 242 Mukherjee, A. 177n7 Mukhopadhyay, S.: “Koyla Kuthi” 56 Murphey, R. 238 Murthy, P. 32 Museveni, Y. 48 Musil, R. 161, 162 Musliyār, K.: about 239–40; Kappappāṭṭu (ship song) 237, 239–47 My Documents (Zambra) 171 My Reminiscences (Vedia) 19 My Sunset Marriage (Merchant) 200 Naipaul, V.S. 44, 45, 219; Miguel Street 226 Nair, M.: Mississippi Masala 47–8 Nampūtiri, P.: Jñanappāna 242 Nārāyaṇīyam (Bhaṭṭatiri) 242 Narmada Bachao Andolan 62 Nasser, G.A. 277 national cinema: history of 144; paradigm of 143, 144; research 151n5 Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) 52 NATO 261, 263, 264 Needham, A.D. 275 Nehru, J. 19, 21, 276, 277; visit to Srinagar after 1931 uprising in Kashmir 26 Nelson, D.: “Violence, the Body and ‘The South,’” 42 neoliberalism/neoliberal 31, 94; capitalism and 34, 172, 175; globalization and 32–3, 34, 38, 88, 94; individualism 37, 38; planetary spread toward horizontality 35; self-formation 39; as selfpoietic foundation 38 Nerlekar, A. 202n3 Nervo, A. 115 Nethery, D. 17n19 Nevares, R.: One Hundred Poems of Kabir 114, 115, 119; Sadhana 115, 119 new materialism 99–108; definition of 101–3; Global South as materialist 103–6; literature, speculation, and matter 104–6; narratives of climate collapse and 106–8

new mestiza 65, 69 New Southern Studies (NSS) 43 New World 80, 117, 128 Niblett, M. 56 Nietzsche, F. 156; formulation of the principle 229; The Wanderer and His Shadow 154 Night Vision (Hippolyte) 215, 218 nihilism 5, 15, 105 Nin, A. 199 Nobel Prize in literature 113 Nolan, S.: Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry 222 Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer) (Rizal) 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213n3 Nomad (Herzog) 87, 88, 89 non-conformity 64–73, 226 non-fossil energy 52; see also renewables/renewable energy resources nonhuman: agencies 217, 218, 221, 222; environment 219; inhabitants 219; world 215–16 North-South (report) 77 Nosotros (journal) 113, 116, 118 Notebook of a return to the native land (Césaire) 17n17 Notun Reeti (periodical) 192 Nouvelle Revue Française 279 Nuruddin (Shaikh) 239 objected-oriented literature of extraction 175–7 The Object Stares Back (Elkins) 219 Observaciones sobre el sentimiento de lo bello y lo sublime (Kant) 163n18 Ocampo, V. 112, 116–20 oceanic South 135 O’Connor, S.D. 252 Al Oda, F. 254 Ojeda, I.M.: Las biuty queens 73 Okogu, E. 108; Proposition 23 107 Okongbowa, D.: David Mogo, Godhunter 105–6 Okorafor, N.: Akata Witch 105 Oldendorp, C.G.A. 123 Onde estaes Felicidade (Jesus) 185 One Hundred Poems of Kabir (Nevares) 114, 115, 119 Ong, W. 161 ontology 102, 105; on equality between humans and nonhumans 222; relational 217 Oppermann, S. 218 organic public sociology 212 Orientalism 88, 112 Orlovsky, P. 192 Otherization 88 Our Dead World (Colanzi) 108 Owen, H. 90 Ozoliņa-Fitzgerald, L. 254 Ozu, Y. 95

296

Index Padatik (Guerilla Fighter) (Sen) 150 Padilla, Z. 162n1 Página de Cheo (newspaper) 266 Palacio, P. 70–1 pan-Asianism 21, 277 Pandey, A.: “Chasnala mine” 57–8 Paradise isn’t Artificial: Les paradis ne sont pas artificiels (Merchant) 200 Parallel Hands (Fanon) 4, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 15 Parichay (periodical) 192 Parry, B. 54 Parsons, T.: The Social System 205 pathologies of identification 5 pathology of freedom 5 Patkar, M. 62 Peacock, J.L. 43 Pearson, M. 238 Peart, R. 125–8, 131n13; Kitāb al-Ṣalāt 126–7, 130 Pedaços da Fome [Pieces of Hunger] (Jesus) 179, 185, 187 Peeren, E. 90, 92 Penangke, S.A. 90 Penedo, S.L. 65 Pereira, G.: Queer in the Tropics 66–8 peripheral irrealism 106–9 Perón, J.D. 148, 151n12 Perumal, C. 245 Petersen, A. 90 ptero-labor 58–61 petroleum 58–61 petro-myopia 54 Phalke, D.G. 145 Phire Esho, Chaka (Come Back, Chaka) (Majumdar) 22n1, 193 Pirelli, G. 3, 5 Plan Drácula 263 Planes, J. 118 Plumwood, V. 216; Feminism and the Mastery of Nature 221 Poemas (Tagore) 114 poetics: amphibious 237, 240, 246; avant-garde 196; disobedient 195–8; of intra-action 216–22; micropoetics 195 politics 93, 270; body 102; of climatological and material crises maps 108; Cold War 148; color in identity 79; curatorial 147; historiography and 159–61; respectability 66; of sexuality and gender 66 popular culture 162n10; in the age of science and technology 154; historiography and 155–6; reconceptualization and 157–8 Pordzik, R. 88 postcolonial 78, 80, 151n4, 284n1; anglophone literature 173; democracies 150; interventions 23, 227; literary studies 54; societies 79

postcolonizing energy humanities 53–62; see also energy humanities, India post-crisis fiction 107–8 postmodernity: queer theory of 65–6 Pound, E. 199, 201 power asymmetry 31 ‘Prachanda Boidyutik Chhutar’ (‘Stark Electric Jesus’) (Choudhury) 192 The Practice of Everyday Life (de Certeau) 156, 163n21 Pradhan, A. 250, 253–4, 258 Prado, I.S. 101 Prado, S.: Screening Neoliberalism 94 Prasad, M.M. 143 Prashad, V. 31 Pratt, M.L. 237; on travel writing 88–9 Pre-Christian Intuitions (Fanon) 4 Problèmes de linguistique générale (Benveniste) 73 Prometheus (Aeschylus) 4 Prophet Muhammad 127, 131n13, 239, 245 Proposition 23 (Okogu) 107 Provérbios (Jesus) 179, 185, 186, 187 public sociology 212 Puig, M.: The Kiss of the Spider Woman [ El Beso de la Mujer Araña] 71 Puranas 114 Puri, S.: Dubai Dreams 59; Dubai on Wheels 59 Al-Qahtani 257, 258 Quarto de despejo (Jesus) 179–80, 182–5, 187 Queen of the Desert (Herzog) 89 Queer in the Tropics (Pereira) 66–8 queer/queerness 64–73, 73n4, 199; activism and 65; dissidence 68–70; monolithic 66; queer or not to queer in Latin America 65–8; sexual and gender dissidence in Latin-American literature 70–3; see also gay/gayness queer theory 64, 65; of postmodernity 65–6 Quesada, E. 113 Quijano, A. 76, 79 Rabin, R. 262 race/racism 76–85; Global South and decolonial turn 77–80; racial resonances 82–4; whiteness 80–2; white supremacy and 83 racial capitalism 33; see also capital racialization 76, 79, 80, 81, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106 racial resonances 82–4 Racine, J.: Bérénice 3; Britannicus 3 Rajagopalan, S. 146 Rajakumar, M.: Migrant Report 60 Ramanujan, A.K. 245 The Ramayana (Valmiki) 113 Ramírez, O. 71 Ramteke, N.: 365 Days 60

297

Index Rancière, J. 40n1, 91, 93 Ray, D. 191 Ray, S. 148 Reagan, R. 31 reconceptualization 24, 157–8 Reddy, V. 49 ReFocus (Jorge) 90 Reiner, R.: When Harry Met Sally 94 relational ontology 217 relationship 87, 102, 171, 174, 175, 217; co-constitutive 32–5; dialectical 106; of domination into horizontality 37; between materialism and local knowledges/literatures 105; strategic 176; between US Navy and the people of Vieques 262 The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Hamid) 35–9 renewables/renewable energy resources 58–61 Renoir, J.: The River 147 Renouard, S.G. 124 respectability politics 66; see also politics Revel, J. 156 Reynolds, D. 247 Ribas-Casasayas, A. 90 Rigveda 115 Riley, R. 16 Ring, N. 44 Rios, N. 262 The River (Renoir) 147 Rivera, J.E.: La vorágine [The Vortex] 76, 79, 80–2 Rivera, L. 207 Rizal, J.: about 207; El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) 204; Fili 205, 210, 212, 213n3; Noli Me Tangere (The Social Cancer) 204, 205, 207, 208, 210, 212, 213n3; private troubles and public issues of 207–9; sociological imagination 209–12 Robinson, C.J. 33 Robles, H. 83 Rocha, G. 150; Antonio Das Môrtes 149 Rodenburg, P. 16 Rodney, W.: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa 33 Rojas, R. 117 Romero, M.H.G. 68–9 Rooney, C.: African Literature: Animism and Politics 217 Roqué, E.H. 113 Roth, D. M. 211 Rothenstein 113, 114 Rothermund, D. 279 Rothman, A. 43 Roy, A. 34 Roychoudhury, G. 56 Rubaiyat (Khaiyam) 114, 115 Rushdie, S.: Midnight’s Children 201 Saderman, A.y.N. 112 Sadhana (Nevares) 115, 119

Saenz-Peña, C.M. 114, 118 Sáez, J. 66 Sahni, B.: “Wang Chu” 24–5, 27, 29 Said, E. 176, 255 Salau, B. 126 Sálazar, C.R.: “Cyber-proletariado” 107 Salazkina, M. 148 Saleh, Y.A. 251 Salman Rushdie and the Third World (Brennan) 275 Salt and Fire (Herzog) 89 Salvi, P. 29 Same-Sex Love in India (Kidwai and Vanita) 199 Samuelson, M. 135, 236–7 al-Sanaussi, S.: The Bamboo Trunk 60 Sandoval, C. 79 Sanes, D. 263 Sanez-Peña, C.M. 119; Los poemas de Kabir 114–15 Sanjinés, J. 150 Sarmiento, D.: Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism 112 Sartre, J.-P. 4 Sassen, S. 34 Schoenfeld, B.N. 282 Schwartz, M.J. 123 Schwarz, R. 180 Schweiger, B.B. 123 Screening Neoliberalism (Prado) 94 Secret Writings (Merchant) 199 self-help 36 Sembène, O. 94 Sen, K. 115 Sen, M. 149; Calcutta 71 150, 151–2n13; Padatik (Guerilla Fighter) 150 Senghor, L. 279 Sengupta, A. 55, 56 Serrano, L. M.: Modern Ecopoetry: Reading the Palimpsest of the More-Than-Human World 215 Seshagiri, U. 49 sexual dissidence 70–3 shackling 251 Shakespeare, N. 89–90 Shankaracharya 25 Shapiro, S. 35 shared temporality 19, 21 The Shipwreck (Vedia) 19 al-Ṣiddīq, A.B. 124–6, 127, 130, 131n15 Silva, M. 267, 268, 272n22 Sinha, T. 148; Apanjan 151n8 Siskind, M.: Cosmopolitan Desires 174 Sitrin, M. 32 Skutsch, C. 59 slavery: anti-slavery movement 34; chattel 59, 128; trans-Atlantic 59; in West Indies 123 slaves: anti-literacy laws for 123; ideal 124–5; in Jamaica 125–8; in Muslims society 122

298

Index Slobodian, Q. 32 sly naivety 226–34 Smith, L. 128 The Social System (Parsons) 205 sociological imagination 212; in historical fiction 209–11 Solanas, F. 148; La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces) 149–50, 151n9 solidarity see South-South solidarity Sólo con tu pareja (Cuarón) 94 So Many Islands (Hippolyte) 218 The Songlines (Chatwin) 89 Soto, M.C. 265 Soto, P. J.: Usmaíl 264, 266 The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois) 44 South Commission: The Challenge to the South 77 The Southern Mystique (Zinn) 44 South–South solidarity 19–29; discourses of 19; “two thousand years of friendship” 20–4 Specimens of South Indian Dialects (Burnell) 246 spectrality 89, 91, 93, 94, 109 speculation 52, 104–6, 108, 109 speculative fiction 105 Spivak, G. C. 193 Srinivas, S.V. 151n2 stage, corellation with body 13–14 Stanley, H. M. 46; In Darkest Africa 44–5; Through the Dark Continent 44 Stein, G. 197; Tender Buttons 195 Stoermer, E. 215 structural-functionalism 205 stuckedness 254–6 stuckness 254–6 Sufi 131n12, 131n14, 243–6; love poetry 37; philosophies 113, 115; “ship songs” or “boat poems” 241; spiritual needs 128; tradition 241 al-Suhrawardi, S. al-D. U. 242 Sukthankar, A.: Facing the Mirror: Lesbian Writing from India 199 Sunda Deep of the Java Trench 134 Susman, B. 148, 151n11 Szeman, I. 52, 53, 54, 61, 62 Tagore, R. 20–1; Cien poemas de Kabir (One Hundred Poems of Kabir) 114, 115, 116; The Crescent Moon 115; death information of 119; entry into the Chinese literary sphere 21; Gitanjali 112–13, 115, 119, 120n1; Gora 112; literary transduction 112; melancholic tragic resignation 55; Poemas 114; reception in Argentina 111–20; translation of books 112 Talabi, W. 107; Incomplete Solutions 105 Tales of the Tikongs (Hau’ofa) 226–34 Tamblyn, N. 213n1 Tan Yunshan 25 Temporary People (Unnikrishnan) 60

Tender Buttons (Stein) 195 Thatcher, M. 31 The Mahabharata 114 The Ramayana 114 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 228 Third Cinema 148, 149–50 Third World 19, 23, 88, 275 Thirteen Cents (Duiker) 108 35 Shots of Rum (Denis) 94 This Mournable Body (Dangarembga) 105 365 Days (Ramteke) 60 Through the Dark Continent (Stanley) 44 tidalectic analytics 236 The Times of India 137 Tito, J.B. 277 Tiwo, F. 16 Torres, C.R. 265; Veinte siglos después del homicidio 264, 266 Toscano, A. 108–9 Touki Bouki (Mambéty) 94 transnational cinema 144, 151n5; see also cinema; Indian cinema travestis 67, 68 travestismo 69 Trefzer, A. 43 Trier, J.: The Worst Person in the World 94 triple subversion 72 A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, During the Transition from Slavery to Apprenticeship (Madden) 124–5, 131n8 Tyree, J.M. 88, 90 Una vuelta al mundo (Journey Around the World) 113 “The Uncanny” (Freud) 228 underdevelopment/underdeveloped 33–4, 77, 78, 100, 107, 227 Underwood Samson 35 United Nations: International Seabed Authority (ISA) 137–8 United Nations Department of Economic Affairs (UNDESA) 59 University of Puerto Rico: Diasporas Caribeñas Project 262 Unnatural Ecopoetics: Unlikely Spaces in Contemporary Poetry (Nolan) 222 Unnikrishnan, D.: Temporary People 60 Upanishads 114 US Fish and Wildlife Service 263, 264 Usmaíl (Soto) 264, 266 US Marine Corps 260 US Navy 260, 262; Atlantic Fleet Weapon Training Facility 260; occupying Vieques’s territory 263; protest by Fiestas Patronales (Patron Saint festivities) in Vieques against 261; Vieques victory against 270

299

Index U.S. South 42, 43, 44; boundaries of 43–6 USSR 146–8, 150 Valéry, P. 118 Valmiki: The Ramayana 113 The Vampire of Colonia Roma [El vampiro de la colonia Roma] (Zapata) 71 Vanita, R.: Same-Sex Love in India 199 Varda, A.: Les Glaneurs et La Glaneuse 161 Varieties of Environmentalism (Guha and MartinezAliers) 53 Vedia, A.M. y: My Reminiscences 19; The Shipwreck 19 Veinte siglos después del homicidio (Torres) 264, 266 Verne, J.: The Child of the Cavern 54–5 The Viceroy of Ouidah (Chatwin) 87 Vieques, Puerto Rico: digital representations 260; Fiestas Patronales 264, 266, 269; Fishermen Struggle 261–9; Yabureibo 263–70 Vieques Struggle: A Digital Video Archive (documentary) 261–3 The Vieques Times (newspaper) 266 Vink, M.P.M. 237 “Violence, the Body and ‘The South,’” (Baker and Nelson) 42 The Visva-Bharati Quarterly 117 Vitalina Varela (Costa) 93 von Clausewitz, C. 156, 161 waiting (condition of being in ‘limbo’) 254–6 Wallerstein, I. 34, 37 Walsh, C. 79 The Wanderer and His Shadow (Nietzsche) 154 Wang Chu 24–8 “Wang Chu” (Sahni) 24–5, 27, 29 Warwick Research Collective 35, 108 We Are What We Are (Grau) 94 Weil, S. 4 Weinrich, I. 247 Weltz, C.: A Better Life 91 West-Pavlov, R. 42, 77, 88, 222 When Harry Met Sally (Reiner) 94 White, S. 49, 102 whiteness (blancura) 80, 81–2, 85n7 “whiteness” (blanquitud) 76, 80–2, 84, 85n7

white supremacy: heteromasculinity and 99; racism and 83 The White Tiger (Adiga) 169, 171, 173, 175 Wilde, O. 279 Wilks, I. 124 Williams, J.S. 94 Williams, R. 99 Wilner, T. 253 Wilson, M.: Zombie 107 Wilson, S. 61, 62 words: connection with the body 8–13, 14; euphemisms 71; as objects 7 Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil (Atabaki) 59 World Bank 34 world-making dialectical relationship 33 world-systems theory 34; core-periphery paradigm in 35 World Trade Organization 34 The Worst Person in the World (Trier) 94 The Wretched of the Earth (Fanon) 6, 15, 16n14, 33 Wright, R. 277–8 Wylie, K. C. 46 Xue (Ba Jin) 55 Yabureibo 263–72 Yala, A. 79 Yaraana (Merchant) 199 Yeats, W.B. 115, 201, 228 Zambra, A. 172, 175; “Memories of a Personal Computer” 169, 171; My Documents 171 Zapata, L.: The Vampire of Colonia Roma [El vampiro de la colonia Roma] 71 Zaydah, A. 255 Zecchini, L. 196 Zhdanov, A. 279 Zhou Enlai 19, 21; Indian Home Minister discussion on border issue with 24 Zinn, H. 45; The Southern Mystique 44 Zombie (Wilson) 107 Zoo City (Buekes) 107 Zubaydah, A. 254 Zubieta, A.M. 156

300